What This Post Is About

(1) Literature, art and history tell us that humans have always been connected.

(2) Social media give us new and evolving ways to connect, discover and inspire.

Evidence From The Middle Ages

I am currently reading Roads To Santiago: detours & riddles in the lands and history of Spain by Cees Noteboom. He describes a book he sees in the museum attached to the cathedral in El Burgo de Osma. He specifically describes a map of what they thought the world looked like in 1086. Noteboom says:

“This Codex Beato is Carolingian in its colouristic treatment and ornamentation, Arabic in the application of yellow and ivory and geometric patterns, Lombardian in the interlaced arabesques and animal motifs, Irish in the spiralled braiding, Islamic in the predominance of red and black, while eastern influences manifest themselves in the Mozarabic stylisation…

But we know how profound the pollinating influence in those days was, that the world was already a world, that people communicated and saw each other’s art, that artists and craftsmen travelled and inspired one another.”

Evolution Of Social Media

I was alerted to Om Malik’s post about the evolution of blogs through a Twitter micro-message, a Tweet, by Jon Husband. Om says:

“Today most of us walk around with newfangled smartphones that are nothing short of multitasking computers, essentially content creation points.

And they’re networked, which means creating and sharing content is becoming absurdly simple to do. With the increased number of content creation points –- phones, camera, Flip video cameras, Twitter -– we are publishing more and more content.”

Applications like AudioBoo and VideoBoo allow us to “capture information at the point of inspiration”, as Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish proposed three years ago in their book Mobile Web 2.0. The iPhone and applications being developed for it now given us a glimpse of what is possible to do, create and share using smart phones.

Discovery And Inspiration

I wrote a post a while back called Thinking About Discovery. I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Until recently, my dominant feelings have been frustration and incomprehension that we know about effective, smart working and managing and yet so much of this knowledge is overlooked in businesses. Talent, skills, knowledge and willingness to contribute are going to waste.

The view I am choosing to take now is, “Great that means a journey of discovery for businesses and enterprises stuck in old attitudes, ways of managing and working”.

Like the medieval artists who travelled, discovered and were inspired by each other, we now have amazing tools and technologies that let us discover and inspire each other. What an opportunity businesses now have to create learning architectures and social collaborative environments where people can experiment with insights gleaned from beyond their organistional boundaries, learning and being inspired from different practices and cultural influences.

Trying to explain and describe new ways of working doesn’t work. Like trying to explain the business value of social media, you just have to explore, discover, experiment – and experience.