Wenger states that practice is a process that we engage and experience the world which includes the negotiation of meaning through participation and reification.
Online social networks are an interesting example of the interplay between participation and reification, and embody at their core the negotiation that happens between the two to produce meaning for their users. Clearly, there is a strong element of participation in social networks. In Facebook, participation can come in many forms: wall posts, tagging pictures of friends, playing multiplayer games. In fact, the process of “friending” someone, of negotiating that relationship and making a decision about whether or not it meets some threshold of meaningfulness to you such that you reify the relationship in a friend request or confirmation. This process of friending, or of building ones social graph, is indeed a perfect example of reification. It is the quintessential representation of participation in the social networking world. The social graph illustrates, in stark visual terms, all the relationships that constitute one’s socially situated identity, of the community one chooses to identify with.
Profile on MySpace would be another example of a representation of identity including photos, background, music, description of background and so on. This is an example of reification that we can assume a person’s identity from the profile page and it is often the source we start reading one’s blog or sending out our friend request.
However, Wenger points out that a reification is often an imperfect codification of participation, and that is certainly the case with the social graph in Facebook and also with the profile page on MySpace. There might be a discrepancy between identities once you read more tweets and blog entries, start chatting, making comments and receiving responses back, and so on.
In case of social graph in Facebook, complex relationships which at some level might involve rich emotional interaction are reduced to lists and numbers. In some online environments, you can even rank order your friends, or pick “top friends”. This short list is no doubt hotly negotiated, with its four or five lucky members changing at the moment by moment whim of its owner. Wenger also points out how meaning can become distorted if there is too much focus on either participation or reification. Again, the social graph illustrates an example of how reification, the process of representing one’s participation in a community, can become so oversimplified that it exists almost independently of participation, or at least such that actual participation is an afterthought in the formation of the graph. This can be seen when members of a social networking site like Facebook compete for the largest number of “friends”. The state of being popular, which once reflected at least some superficial qualities of one’s personality, can be reduced to a hyper-focus on building one’s social graph by obsessively clicking friend invites. Another example of this can be seen in the site “LinkdIn” which consist almost entirely of build one’s professional graph and often seems devoid of any participation at all.
<95 Theses>
* Theses 6,12, 34,35,66
-The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
-There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
-To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities. But first, they must belong to a community.
– As markets, as workers, both of us are sick to death of getting our information by remote control. Why do we need faceless annual reports and third-hand market research studies to introduce us to each other?
The Clutrain Maifesto focuses on the rising need for businesses to communicate with other businesses, communities, and individuals who invest in their products and services. The Internet has made this communication much more accessible. The smart businesses will find a way to utilize this communication tool to make their businesses better.
* Theses 34-40:
– To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
– But first, they must belong to a community.
– Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
– If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.
– Human communities are based on discourse–on human speech about human concerns.
– The community of discourse is the market.
– Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die.
Market is a place where people communicate, exchange and negotiate. Essentially, any company that denies that it is part of a community, or does not attempt to be part of a community will be unsuccessful. People value interaction and genuine discourse, so a successful company must both belong to a community, but actively participate in a way that the community acknowledges and values that company as a part of the community. What can we do to belong to a community, then? It goes without a question that our social activities and productions need meanings, negotiated ones because it represents our human engagement in the world (p.53). However, if we do not belong to a community, I refer this as to not participating, how we can negotiate meanings with people, artifacts, symbols, social norms, and etc in the community and probably, there’s no social practice we can thus experience. No engagement, no meaning. Under this circumstance, a company cannot speak to its market and thus there is no market. It’s applicable to the educational setting. If there is no community or we pre set up a classroom culture, students probably cannot participate and thus negotiate meanings to themselves.
As stated in the introduction to the 95 theses, “learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf. While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.”
*Theses 51-52:
– Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
– Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.
These two are interesting to think about in that social networking and Web 2.0 have made these points even more evident. The flattening of organizations, and inter-connectedness of employees (whether facilitated by the organization, or due to employees’ personal social networks external to the organization) means that people will interact and converse with each other. And if they are not provided information, and do not feel as though the company is conversing openly, it’s human nature to use what’s available to them to explain things. So, if a company doesn’t provide information, they effectively tell employees and customers that there’s something that the company is hiding… something that the company is not willing to discuss with “outsiders”. This not only creates an “in” group and an “outsider” group, but it also leaves the “outsider” group with no other option than to invent their own information and explanations based on what is available. Lack of conversation breeds distrust, and people don’t want to work for or do business with an entity that they don’t trust.
It seems that the same thing could be said for a classroom. While the age of students in some cases requires command and authority, the teacher is also responsible for communicating genuinely with the learners. Students who feel that the teacher is hiding something or is telling them to do something based purely on power or authority will not trust the teacher, and by extension, will be uncomfortable in the learning environment.
In terms of “open conversation”, participation is necessary to be included if a conversation is open. If access to participation is limited, it is hard to have negotiated meaning. As a teacher, I explained to my students about assignments and sometimes they came to me and asking why this is a “good” assignments. Of course, I explained my rationals and concerns. Convinced or not, I cared more on why they came to me to ask about the meaning of doing such assignments. What’s lack of? I expected that after completing several lessons, they could see the meaning of doing those assignments. Apparently, it did not happen all the time. The idea of new conversation made me think about conversations between teachers and students. Can we have open conversations? In what ways?
* Theses 57-62
– Smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.
– If willingness to get out of the way is taken as a measure of IQ, then very few companies have yet wised up.
– However subliminally at the moment, millions of people now online perceive companies as little more than quaint legal fictions that are actively preventing these conversations from intersecting.
– This is suicidal. Markets want to talk to companies.
– Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smokescreen of hucksterism, of language that rings false–and often is.
– Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.
In these points, the company can be seen as the educational institution and the market as students collectively. The smokescreen is the ineffective instructional methods that many instructors implement, perhaps through lack of understanding of a better approach, or perhaps through anxiety about allowing their students to take the drivers seat in the classroom. Instructors want their students to learn, and students want to engage, but there’s a wall that separates those to desires and prevents them from coming to fruition. Instructors need to “wise up” and re-situate themselves as classroom facilitators, and get away from the “sage on the stage” or dominant authority figure in the classroom. To tie this back to Wenger, meaningful experience in the classroom must come from a negotiation between the instructor and the student to establish a place where participation results in learning, and where learning is reified through instructional practice and the outcomes of student participation.
*Theses 82-83
– Your product broke. Why? We’d like to ask the guy who made it. Your corporate strategy makes no sense. We’d like to have a chat with your CEO. What do you mean she’s not in?
– We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
These two echoes several other theses and some sentences in the Forward, speaking in a human voice and the metaphor of tearing down the Berlin Wall. Being a customer, we all hope to talk to “real people” instead of polite but distant statements. If companies continue to lock themselves behind corporation walls, we’ll never have new conversation, a conversation with human voice. This fits to any communities that if we want to negotiate meanings we may have to hear human voice from each other.
Mark Brian Baker says
Great stuff here. I feel almost guilty for only commenting on a small portion of it, but I wish to further elaborate upon the dangers of reification that Wenger alluded to. In my undergraduate education in psychology, we were often reminded that most of the “mental illnesses” found in the DSM weren’t really illnesses at all, at least not like those of the physical nature, which are caused by some observable pathogen. Most often they are, rather, simply common behaviors and emotions that we group together into one reified term, such as “depression” or “anxiety disorder,” etc.
As educators, we frequently work with students who exhibit difficulties with learning or paying attention. Too often we either do the reification ourselves or have some outside tester come in and tell us the child “has a learning disorder.” It is at that point that we too readily stop attending to that specific child’s needs and just push him off as a member of a reified, really non-existent community. Instead, let us compensate with participation. Let us break down the barriers and help students grow in the way they need to. I realize this is a tall order for teachers who are already overworked and underpaid. But if we don’t consider these issues as educators, who will?
NICOLE ROSE OLCESE says
I enjoyed the relationship you established between the company and institutionalized schooling using Theses 57-62: “The smokescreen is the ineffective instructional methods that many instructors implement, perhaps through lack of understanding of a better approach, or perhaps through anxiety about allowing their students to take the drivers seat in the classroom.”
This connects to an excerpt from Wenger’s practice section that particularly stood out to me, especially in terms of standardized testing. When describing the policies enforced by Alinsu and the realities of the employees of the company, Wenger states: “It is the collective construction of a local practice that, among other things, makes it possible to meet the demands of the institution.” The contradictions between what a company demands and the realities that the individuals within the company face seems to mirror what is happening in schools concerning standardized testing.
While educators understand that there are preferable ways of learning that don’t include rote memorization and other ways of recall that are assessed via state testing, the institutionalized enforced practice of standardized testing as a measure of school success (AYP…etc) directly undermines those preferred methods. This is the conflict between ‘company’ and ‘workers’. Progressive educators have the added challenge of operating in ways that fulfill those institutionalized expectations while trying not to compromise what they believe is good for the students. How does a thoughtful educator reconcile this? In a worst case scenario basis: which is worse, compromising what you believe as an educator and ‘teaching to the test’ or manipulating the data, of which some schools have been accused?
Michelle Pasterick says
I find your discussion of open conversation between teachers and students to be really interesting (“Can we have open conversations? In what ways?”). It is key to note that both teachers and students participate in communities in school. Some of those communities intersect (as in the classroom) and some don’t. In places where the teachers and students are in the same community, I think that open conversation can be extremely valuable. I would argue, however, that it is not always necessary for students to know exactly why teachers assign a certain task, present a certain topic or why something is a “good” assignment. I think this is a touchy area. There certainly is value in teachers explaining their thoughts/reasons in terms of the big picture of the class or the unit, but trying to convince students that assignments are good or useful seems like it would take too much time and energy away from activities that could be more fruitful/productive. There really does seem to be a fine line to walk between openness with students regarding why you make certain choices in the classroom and justification for something that students don’t seem to want to do.
AARON D BILBY says
I like your discussion about Theses 82 and 83. Both theses remind me of a problem we had in my local school district back home where a series of problems developed in the school district, parents of students in the district were not happy and demanded answers from the superintendent of the district. However, it seemed like each time my mother would call the district (as she was one of the upset parents), the superintendent would be conveniently “out to lunch” or “out of the office for the day”. Messages to the superintendent would go unanswered and it felt like a breakdown of the community relationship between the district and the parents of the students was happening. If felt like the superintendent did not want to answer any of the questions the parents had. In my eyes the superintendent wasn’t taking the parents’ questions seriously but the minute someone from the media placed a camera and microphone in the superintendent’s face he was as serious as he can be.
I still feel that when it comes to school districts, large companies, even politics (which if I brought that into the picture would cause me to write 10 pages of blog posts), there is a “wall” in the community. I believe that this wall is partially due to a David vs. Goliath attitide where one has much power and the other doesn’t, but we should all work together to break down the walls to keep the sense of community fluid between both parties.
Brad Kozlek says
In your discussion of theses 57-62 you say “In these points, the company can be seen as the educational institution and the market as students collectively. The smokescreen is the ineffective instructional methods that many instructors implement, perhaps through lack of understanding of a better approach, or perhaps through anxiety about allowing their students to take the drivers seat in the classroom. ”
I see this as related to the concept of wegner’s organic communities of practice. Communities of practice are not something that can be constructed or designed by someone on top. It is something that happens organically. I am struggling trying to figure out how this organic approach relates to the classroom as we know it. Everyone has the same classmates for a year or semester. Where are the opportunities for communities to form organically and naturally. Do we need to rethink the definition of a classroom, or am being too unimaginative?
These theses also relate to the open ed discussion we have been having on this blog for the past several weeks. Educational institutions make these pretty packages of educational materials that are collected and published as part of some initiative from on-high. In reality, though, true open education can happen by allowing the people at the institution to talk to people that are not at the institution, a la cluetrain.
LI-HUAI CHANG says
Wegner states,(p.70)”Participation is a social process but also a personal experience. Reification is a collective character but also shapes the perception of the world and ourselves.” “They are reflection of each other but they have their own existence, in their own realms.”
Relate to business field, we see a company as a community, employers, workers, employees are participants; products, policies, marketing strategies are reification by participants interaction via technological communication. There are different departments, taking care of different tasks, yet they have the same goal.
According to Theses95, the economy system now is a larger marketing community,a communication platform, which consists of numerous companies. Workers are not simply inside the company, but they cross out to outside market, or even join other compony’s community. It means no one/company belongs to only one community. #42″As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.” A company should have a new identity in this society, proved by the article preface, “Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them.” #1″Markets are conversations.” and #72″We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.” It proves the shifting identity of individual/company within the whole marketing community.
MEGAN KOHLER says
I think there was something particularly interesting in your discussion of Theses 51-52, which is the reality that communities can exist within communities. Each perspective or concern must be addressed in order to maintain trust and strong connections or the company will fail.
In reading this I remembered a story I once read about a factory owner who had to close his business just before the holidays. Understanding that things were going to be tight for his former employees, he used his own money to purchase full Christmas dinners for every single family. He understood his employees concerns and did his best to help them through a difficult time. He didn’t allow his higher status within the company to dictate his priorities. He stayed focused on the concerns of the people who formed the overall community. However, that is not something we typically see any longer.