{"id":2741,"date":"2014-10-19T15:10:38","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T15:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/?p=2741"},"modified":"2014-10-19T15:10:38","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T15:10:38","slug":"the-four-burners-the-quandary-of-connection-and-attention-in-work-health-family-and-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/blog\/2014\/10\/19\/the-four-burners-the-quandary-of-connection-and-attention-in-work-health-family-and-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"The Four Burners: the Quandary of Connection and Attention in Work, Health, Family, and Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"allworkandnoplay\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jennifer England put up this webinar as a Soundcloud file<\/a>. \u00a0One of the real value added features of Soundcloud is the ability to annotate the sound file and to comment on others’ annotations. \u00a0Beautiful tool. \u00a0I put up three responses to seed it. Crickets. \u00a0Hmmm.<\/a><\/p>\n

I put up a Vialogue of the same webinar<\/a>, thinking perhaps that it was the video that folks needed to engage with. \u00a0I made a few comments and included a table of contents in case folks wanted to skip around and only comment \u00a0on a portion of the video. \u00a0More crickets.<\/a> \u00a0Double hmmmmmm.<\/p>\n

I organized a film evening using the easy video IRC tool Synchtu.be<\/a>. \u00a0I knew when I put up The Internet’s Own Boy to watch that the time I chose might not be suitable for our European and points east folk to watch. \u00a0Mira Vogel<\/a> and Susan Watson<\/a> both came. \u00a0The ability to watch and comment synchronously was a revelation for me. \u00a0I thought more folks would come although the ones who did gave a tremendous gift to me. \u00a0I am grateful. \u00a0 Not crickets, but perhaps ‘golf clap’ <\/a>might be the phrase I am looking for.<\/p>\n

I also created a Hackpad <\/a>for folks to add educational movies\/documentaries\/shorts\/etc. so that we might find a way to find more content for the Synchtu.be Channel. I sometimes just turn on Synchtu.be and let it cycle through the playlist of videos already there. It would be nice for folks to be able to randomly dip in and watch what\u00a0they wished as they wished. How nice to be able to add others’ choices to the playlist.<\/p>\n

Not even crickets. \u00a0I look in the void<\/p>\n

\"tumblr_n2i0or30kr1rv7dt8o1_250\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and the void sounds back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I am left mostly confused by the week. \u00a0What is happening here? \u00a0Some tentative conclusions:<\/p>\n

1. I am not good at marketing. My marketing channels are not working. \u00a0No surprise there. \u00a0Like many teachers, getting attention tends to be a local skill-in the classroom, with your tribe on Twitter, your Facebook friends. \u00a0I always feel uncomfortable even pimping my own posts. I will feel uncomfortable tweeting this post out. Likely, I will not even place this on the #Ccourses blog \u00a0And if folks don’t respond then it means they are not buying what I am selling. Or it simply didn’t get through their attention filter.<\/p>\n

2. Others in my various circles are not attending. \u00a0Some are busy and say so. \u00a0That is one’s absolute imperative. \u00a0I have no problems.\u00a0The others who are in my Google+ circles, my Twitter feeds, my Facebook friends–there has to be a reason for no uptake. \u00a0Of course, I am not blaming them. Jeez, you can’t have it all. \u00a0Where would you put it? I think it is the same problem I have in attending. \u00a0There is too much and time and attention are too thin.<\/p>\n

3. In the end we have to decide for ourselves what to do and where to go online. \u00a0But we also have to decide what to make and who to engage with. \u00a0I am thinking that for those of us who have not reached and (at least for my case) are unlikely at this point to ever reach the tipping point where one’s\u00a0channel is already peopled enough to\u00a0give one sufficient\u00a0attention bandwidth, this becomes a true quandary. \u00a0What is worth my connection time? \u00a0What has been proven to ‘not connect’ and should I continue activities like Vialogues, Soundcloud, Synchtu.be, Hackpad? \u00a0Life is an infinite game, but its length is a zero sum one. What to do? \u00a0Should I keep throwing manna on the water in the hope of connection? \u00a0Isn’t that the definition of mental illness, doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result? \u00a0Should I pull in the boundaries of connections to the tribe however one defines that. \u00a0A G+ circle, a twitter hashtag, the blessed 150 of Dunbar’s Number<\/a>? \u00a0Or will that just be happy echo chamber? \u00a0 I could live with that if it actually existed.<\/p>\n

I am reminded of one of the wisest of David Sedaris stories, “Laugh, Kookabura”. <\/a>\u00a0In it, Sedaris is in the middle of a hilarious Australian travel piece when he quotes his Ozzie friend,Pat, as they pass by\u00a0a billboard with four stove burners pictured. \u00a0Pat remarks<\/p>\n

\u201cOne burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.\u201d The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really<\/em> successful you have to cut off two.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The hypothetical game that happens in the piece asks the questions: how successful do you want to be and which burners will you cut off in order to be so?<\/p>\n

\"4BURNERS\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I played this game with a student the other day in a conference about her research paper on\u00a0workaholism. \u00a0She resisted. \u00a0Wanted to change the rules. \u00a0Finally, she decided what was really important in her life. \u00a0She decided that she really wasn’t a workaholic, just someone who needed to work to pay for school.<\/p>\n

When I have a week like this I have to ask myself which burners? \u00a0I have characterized what I do here on #CCourses as one of these elements. \u00a0It isn’t the health burner (unless you are burning the candle at both ends in order to stay ‘connected’). \u00a0It isn’t the family burner unless you have decided that someone online is your family. It’s either work or friends. \u00a0So…if you want to be successful online and you characterize this as work, \u00a0then you have to give up one of the other burners. \u00a0If you want to be really successful then you have to shut down two of them. This is the quandary of connection. \u00a0What price will I pay for the attention needed to actually connect online?<\/p>\n

I know some will immediately say that they don’t buy the premise. I can only argue that it’s a thought experiment. You have to buy the premise to play the game. \u00a0It’s like Monopoly,. You don’t have to be a blood sucking \u00a0derivatives trader to play. \u00a0You just have to hold\u00a0your other rules and assumptions in abeyance in order to consider another stance. \u00a0(Peter Elbow called it the believing game.) \u00a0For me, I decided about Thursday of last week that the connection game as I was playing it wasn’t worth the burner\u00a0\u00a0I lit in order to play it. \u00a0I dropped the work of connection and turned up my friends and my family and my health. Today I return to connection to ask you what you might do or what you might have done to balance these burners. \u00a0(It certainly is a funny question considering the little (but very appreciated) focus\u00a0that these posts engender. )<\/p>\n

Personally, I am not thinking of the four burners as a thought experiment anymore. I \u00a0have seen its wisdom over and over in my own life so often that this week may have been the tipping point. It is now my credo for wise action. \u00a0Like most credos, it is a personal one arrived at through the idiosyncratic process Nikos Kazantzakis\u00a0 calls\u00a0the “full catastrophe”, life. Your mileage, as always, may vary.<\/p>\n

This means that while my flame\u00a0isn’t\u00a0going to flickr and die, my connection\u00a0burner is going to go way down. \u00a0Just as I think multitasking is a chimera,\u00a0 there can only be one priority at a time\u00a0in my life. \u00a0Let’s just leave it that my #CCourses Food Truck hours are going to be drastically reduced by popular non-demand.<\/p>\n

\"#CCOURSES<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Jennifer England put up this webinar as a Soundcloud file. \u00a0One of the real value added features of Soundcloud is the ability to annotate the sound file and to comment on others’ annotations. \u00a0Beautiful tool. \u00a0I put up three responses to seed it. Crickets. \u00a0Hmmm. I put up a Vialogue of the same webinar,
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-tellio","post-2741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-good-questions","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2741"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2746,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions\/2746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/impedagogy.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}