“Is the tacit model that of a museum with a catalogue raisonné?”—Phil

My reference to Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ was not to evoke or advocate a museographical model, but to point out that even a urinal (which is what ‘Fountain’ is) can be ‘serious’, and that serious can be ‘kitsch’, and that it is all just a question of point of view.

• The tacit model is that of a café.
• The tacit model is that of “sprezzatura” and the art of conversation at the court of Urbino in 1507.
• The tacit model is that of the French literary and philosophical salons of the 17th and 18th centuries.
• And the symbolist salons of the 19th century.
• The tacit model is that of the Spanish “tertulia”.
• The tacit model is that of the coffeehouse of 18th century England which Habermas credits with the emergence of the “public sphere”.
• And the coffeehouse of the 1960’s where folksingers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performed.
• The tacit model is the fine old Irish tradition of boasting as an art form.
• And “playing the dozens” in the African-American oral tradition.
• The tacit model is Burning Man, book groups, Karaoke, amateur theatricals, and breakdancing.
• The tacit model is all those occasions where “self-consciousness” is experienced as opportunity rather than anxiety.

At the same time, the tacit model is also Wikipedia, and the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, and all round-robin storytelling, and Linux, and Lascaux, and graffiti, and the shrines and grottos of the French countryside. The tacit model is a coral reef.

But as Michael observed, there can be such a thing as too much meta-discussion, especially if there’s not much “there” there.

“Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock? ... Let me tell you, Sir, it was a very unseasonable question at least, — because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.” — Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne

I happened across an interesting article by Howard Rheingold entitled The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online. It’s worth taking a look at if you have any interest at all in the subject. He is a veteran of The Well and wrote a book about it. He’s talking specifically about “online communities” and I’ve been trying to figure out what the differences might be (if any) between what he’s talking about and what we’re trying to do at Handmeon.

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, Jean-Claude Planchet/Pompidou Center

Phil asks “The host is supposed to be creating something of lasting value, a monument of some sort? Is that a burden? Seems that would produce self-consciousness and anxiety… Here we are socializing the presence of an unsolicited, kitschy knickknack. How serious can it be?”

There are several good questions and issues wrapped up together in this comment and so it invites a couple of distinct responses. (Michael has already offered some answers of his own in a previous post.)

As far as the Burns Supper Problem goes, we think the best solution is to make the system “opt-in”. I have come to believe that a Handmeon should probably never be handed on “unsolicited”, lest the recipient find the gift more of a burden than a treat. Essentially this would mean that you could only hand an object on to another registered member who has ‘coveted’ the object. This is an issue that we plan to address directly in the very near future. In the meantime, it might not be a bad idea to test the waters before offering a friend a Handmeon. For instance, you might send them a link to the object (there’s a handy “share this page with your friends” link in the sidebar of every sojourn) and invite them to register and covet the object, so you will know they are interested.

The question of “lasting value” is fascinating. I do think that lots of Americans feel a certain level of anxiety and self-conscious about certain categories of social performance, especially anything that might seem affected or elitist. It probably depends on what you are used to. There are people who like book groups, Karaoke, 10K foot races, amateur theatricals, or spelling bees. Some people form quartets and give free concerts at the local hospital, just for the fun of it. Other people put their photos up on Flickr, post their own YouTube videos, or even write blogs, all of which are little attempts do do something performative that is a little bit more special (dare I say worthwhile?) than watching television. I actually ended up enjoying the Burns Supper that I went to, though I’ll admit that I was a bit grouchy on the way there in the car. How serious is it? It’s all just a form of play. Some games are serious, some are fun, some are hard, some are funny, some are all those things at once. At Handmeon, everyone is the host of their own sojourns and is free to try to set whatever tone they feel is appropriate within the bounds of civility set out in the user agreement. Though, of course, they will have to talk their guests into it. We aim to provide tools to facilitate creativity and neighborliness. Seriousness is optional. “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

How serious can a kitschy knickknack be? In December 2004, Duchamp’s Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British artworld professionals. Jerry Saltz wrote in The Village Voice in 2006: “Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.”

“Politics in a postindustrial society must be mainly concerned with the development of design criteria for tools rather than as now with the choice of production goals. These politics would mean a structural inversion of the institutions now providing and defining new manmade essentials.”

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 1973

Phil asked whether Handmeon members are allowed to created anonymous or pseudonymous online identities. THe short answer is, “It depends.”

The posts in Macklemoyle’s sojourn with Handmeons Hints provide some guidelines, but there was room for a lot of discussion in one of the comment threads raised some interesting questions about identity, authenticity, civility, and the uses and misuses of anonymity.

Do we need a water-tight policy or are guidelines good enough?

I’ve moved this topic over from a comment thread on Handmeon Hints where Phil asked:

Could a thread be toggled to invitation only? “Ask for admittance”? With the sojourn host approving?

The social dynamics of building something more open than a list serv and more closed that a blog seems to be very important. You want the chance encounter, the serendiptious new comer, but you don’t want trolls, lonely hearts, complainers, spammers, or bullies. Asking to be allowed in seems a low barrier to entry. I would not allow just anyone to drop into my home for dinner party. “Tender and acceptance” again. Tender your request to join, explain why, tell us a little about yourself, and we will respectfully reach a decision.” On line bios would help, so established members could “tender” their bio. “Here I am, this is me, may I come over?”

We could have some sort of ‘restricted comment’ capability, I guess, if it seems necessary. On the other hand, you could just throw any unwanted comments away unceremoniously. There is kind of a taboo against that in blogging circles, but handmeon isn’t a blogging site. Handmeon is more of a collaborative accretive content site. In this sense, it is quite different from a blog.

A blog is an ephemeral content publishing site. In a blog, the content scrolls off the bottom of the screen and disappears. The good and the bad are equally ephemeral. It’s like the old joke about the weather: if you don’t like it, wait a minute. A blog, like a newspaper, privileges the recent. It is unusual to go back and peruse last years blog entries. Blog writers are forced to pander to their public’s continuing appetite for the new. There is no lasting product. Or rather, the process is the product. This is also true of many discussion forums, and is true in spades of online ‘chat’, the ripe banana of the internet.

This is very different from, say, Wikipedia. Who goes to Wikipedia and wants to see a list of the most recently added articles? Not me. It doesn’t really matter when a Wikipedia entry was written. And in fact, it wasn’t written at any particular time. Wikipedia is a collaborative accretive content site.

Handmeon is a peculiar hybrid of process and product. The process is important but the time scale on which the process unfolds is one of months or years rather than days or hours. Or at least is intended to be. Currently, the comment to post ratio far exceeds what any of us had imagined. I’m not quite sure why – or whether I think it is a good thing.

One of the design challenges we are struggling with right now is how to address the tradeoff between the natural desire to socialize, and the host’s creative urge to produce a satisfying product. (Which corresponds also to an opposition between the ‘long’ time frame of creativity, and the ‘short’ time frame of socializing.) We don’t want to discourage or hinder either impulse. What we are thinking of doing is to permit the sojourn host to ‘promote’ selected comments to the status of ‘contribution’. (You might say, from the anarchy of conversation to the order of creation.) The standard view of a sojourn might then consist of the posts and the ‘contributions’. The conversation could happily burble along in the comment thread without anyone feeling bad about ‘littering’. But at the same time, commenters with aspirations to immortality might be motivated to put a little extra creative juice into their comments. But it would always be possible to choose to view any lionized ‘contribution’ in the context of the original comment stream – as a way of emphasizing the eternal interdependence of product and process. Order and anarchy are both good things – but they need to be sufficiently insulated from each other so that they both can thrive. (Even though the distinction is, at the bottom, artificial.)

Of course we don’t need to present it quite that way, in consideration of the user who may justly find the philosophical underpinnings tedious and pretentious.

The blog’s been pretty quiet. We’ve been far from slacking off, but it doesn’t show here. Sorry about that. It’s going to change. This post outlines the topics you’ll see addressed in the next few weeks.

We’ve done a number of product updates, which I’ll detail in another post.

We’ve been thinking about how organizational structures influence online opportunities and costs, for both developers and the customers. You can expect to hear some “thinking out loud” on that topic very soon.

We’re starting to think about our second product, building on what we’re learning from Handmeon. At some point this may turn into a blog for Toliwaga, the company, rather than Handmeon, the product.

Mostly, we’re learning an awful lot about online interaction, and the intersection with mental models about online tools, particularly as they relate to the real-world. We’re right on track in the learning department.

Handmeon is about to get some fairly major structural changes. It’s not much in coding, but in presentation, education, and behavior modeling. A fancy way to say: We made a mistake in the original concept, and we’re going to address it, and it primarily involves asking our users to do things differently than we’ve been promoting to date.

Finally, there has been some great conversation about some of these topics inside Handmeon itself, and I’m going to promote some of those to the blog. We nearly installed forum software this week, but at the last minute decided to start with the blog. I see a need for forums at some point, but not yet. We want the blog to become a fairly public, and fairly transparent, window into our thinking about Handmeon and “the second product.” We’d like our fans to help us think out loud about these topics. We want to challenge your thinking, and have you challenge ours.

In other words, the blog is going to get more bloggy. Thanks for playing along.

Pamela Polston wrote a great article about Handmeon in Seven Days, Burlington VT’s alternative newsweekly. She coined the title phrase of this post, which made me laugh out loud. Thanks!

Src: East Carolina University

Handmeon is not an entirely new idea. The concepts behind it, it turns out, have been around for centuries. One of our main inspirations comes from the tradition of Kula, practiced by the island peoples of the Massim archipelago in the South Pacific, and documented by Bronislaw Malinowski in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In Kula, participants travel up to hundreds of miles by canoe in order to exchange valuables such as shell necklaces and armbands. Kula articles never remain long with one recipient; rather they move from one hand to the next throughout a vast network of islands. The tradition serves to build and strengthen relationships between tribe members.

We found this attitude towards gifts to be refreshing. Ours is a society where giving seems to have been largely co-opted by commercial interests and turned into an act of shopping and consumption. Who was it, exactly, who decided that gifts start with person A and end with person B? Why shouldn’t person C, D, and so on enjoy the gift as well? How was it that re-gifting got a bad rap? Why is accumulation such a worthwhile thing to do?

Handmeon, like Kula, puts the emphasis on the experiences we have with gifts and the stories that are passed along with them. Kula valuables are not just shells; they’ve become something greater by virtue of their journey and the people with whom they’ve sojourned. Some of them have names and dates carved on them which are hundreds of years old. Like Kula, Handmeon objects are passed from hand to hand (or by post if you must). The canoe is optional.

Unlike Kula, which relies on the oral tradition to recount history, Handmeon borrows from the blogging world, letting you tell stories in words, pictures, audio, or video. While Kula valuables circumnavigate the Massim archipelago in prescribed clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion, Handmeon articles are free to travel throughout the world. The site keeps track of where, when, and with whom a gift has sojourned, with the help of Google maps. The result is an online history of the gift’s relationship to the community, a sort of digital provenance.

In Kula, only two type of things are used as gifts. Soulava (shell necklaces) travel in a clockwise direction around the archipelago, while mwali (shell armbands) travel counter-clockwise. Here again, Handmeon is less constrained; examples are quite diverse. Brass Flamingo started its journey in Vermont and now resides in Texas. It’s a metaphor for unchecked human desire, with posts that explore the possibilities of post-consumer consciousness. Other examples include an Ovation guitar, several pieces of artwork, a stuffed Doberman that raps Jingle Bells, a rock from Mt. Washington, and a votive candle from the Watergate complex. A Handmeon gift can be anything you can attach an ID sticker to, but it’s best for beautiful, peculiar, or one-of-a-kind cultural artifacts—in other words, something that can carry a story.

Over the weekend, while describing Handmeon to a new friend, he soon exclaimed, “Wow, there’s so much trust involved! I’d have to trust myself to pass it on. Amazing.”

It occurs to me that giving somebody a Handmeon is a little bit like inviting them to a Burns Night Supper.

Maureen wrote a post on the Heritance.org blog entitled Handmeon: a new relationship to museum objects? It’s about Handmeon, the meaning of objects, and possible applications in the world of museums.

Heritance is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates a network of museum professionals who provide skills, knowledge, and services free of charge to museums in some of the poorest and most remote regions of the globe. Full disclosure: Maureen, the Executive Director of Heritance, is my wife.

Maureen writes:

Imagine a museum where in addition to viewing the collections on display, you could access a website associated with each object. Furthermore, imagine that you could gain this access on or off site and participate in the “writing” of the object’s story yourself whenever you felt like it.

It probably sounds iconoclastic to speak of a visitor “writing” the story of a museum object. But why not? The art you encounter in museums are “merely” objects. Their meaning is imparted by all of their appreciators, regardless of their credentials. Just like the meaning of any number of things in the world.

The idea behind Handmeon is that the content and history and social network associated with the object is the primary source of value and interest in the object. That is why each successive owner is invited to participate in bringing the gift into existence. You might say that the object is, in a variety of senses, a pretext.

Maureen has turned this notion on its head by extending the concept of shared ownership to include sharing the right to interpret the object, even if the physical object remains shackled to the pedestal in the rotunda. Sharing the act of interpretation opens the object by embracing difference. Over the last few years, we have seen the blogosphere whittle away at the effective monopoly of mass-market broadcast journalism. Maureen observes that the same process could be brought to bear on the interpretation of the past. This is particularly significant because Heritance believes it matters who owns the past:

Museums are generally thought of as stewards of culture and heritage. But history is not a simple mirror of the past. Our perception and interpretation of history, and our place in it, is constantly reconstructed through a social process of collective recollection. This continuous reinvention of the past is part of the process by which communities define and shape their present and their future.

We believe that museums can serve a vital role in community evolution, both as catalysts in the process of self-definition and self-determination, and as role models in the transparent and inclusive processes essential to open democratic societies.

_Heritance Mission and Objectives executive summary

Our little startup broke into the public eye today, at least locally, with a great story in the Valley News, Creating a ‘Gift Ecology’.

I couldn’t be happier with how Alex Hanson told the story, and the aspects he highlighted. James Patterson shot a bunch of artsy photos, and we don’t look too dorky. The printed version (page C-1, the top story in the Close Up section) has a second photo of Jeff at the computer, with my face poking into the upper right corner.

It’s a fun start to spreading the word on something that clearly rings true for a lot of people.

Not exactly.

As I understand it, the War on Christmas is part of the larger secular progressive agenda that includes the legalization of narcotics, prostitution, euthanasia, abortion, and gay marriage. According to Bill O’Reilly, who uncovered the plot, the anti-Christmas insurgency aims to replace all allusions to Christmas with non-denominational equivalents offensive to Christians and corrosive to the social fabric of America.

In short, the War on Christmas is more of a war about what to call Christmas than a war on the institution itself. Bill O’Reilly thinks Christmas™ belongs to the Christians. The Season’s Greetings folks want to bundle it together with Hanukah and Kwanzaa and reposition it as a more inclusive holiday. In that respect, it isn’t all that different from the debate about whether gays should be allowed to call their relationships Marriage™.

For reasons I don’t fully grasp, the Sanctity-of-Marriage crowd doesn’t seem as worried about non-Christian marriage as they are about non-Christian winter holidays. Why should homosexuals be allowed to celebrate Christmas but not Marriage? Why should heathens be allowed to celebrate Marriage but not Christmas? I am sure I am missing something. But, to be honest, this is not really an issue that we worry about a whole lot here at Handmeon.

Personally, I rather admire Santa, both for his generosity, and his logistical genius. Consider, for example, the brilliance and poetic justice in the policy of only bringing presents to the people who actually believe in him. I know a number of adults who buy presents for their own children and pretend that they are from Santa Claus. That certainly saves Santa a lot of trouble. And what’s more, the grownups don’t even appear to mind. They probably think everybody else is doing the same thing. Wouldn’t it be ironic if it turned out that Bill O’Reilly secretly doesn’t believe in Santa either, and he’s just been fibbing about it! He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who believes in Santa Claus.

That being said, I think some justifiable criticism could be made of the way giving Christmas presents has come to be something of an obligation in our society. The whole tit for tat of reciprocal giving can sometimes seem more like a peculiar form of barter than a free and heartfelt expression of generosity. I guess you might say that our concept of open-ended giving as a gift ecology is implicitly critical of the exchange paradigm of the gift economy that governs Christmas and birthday giving.

At Handmeon, we encourage people to give for the joy of it, not because they ‘owe’ somebody a present. If you think about, everything we have, even our own bodies, are just on loan to us. We are going to end up letting go of everything, sooner or later. (Unless you are planning to be buried with your Rolex and your Viking cookware, like an Egyptian Pharaoh.) Maybe there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with holding on to ‘stuff’, but there probably isn’t anything intrinsically right about it either. Nothing compels us to experience eternal flux as a catastrophe. Maybe learning to let go of things gracefully and joyfully can make us better able to appreciate life as it’s happening, just as birthdays or vacations are sometimes improved by setting aside the camera.

I recently got my nerve up to Handmeonify two of my favorite pieces of art (this and that). I’m fond of these, so it was tough to open the door of the cage so to speak.

But maybe giving needs to hurt a little bit to be real. If it hurts you know you’ve parted with a piece of yourself. You’ve taken a leap of faith. It’s the faith that you’ll be okay. My favorite children’s book The Quiltmaker’s Gift takes this notion to the extreme.

I’m not suggesting that we part with everything like the king in the book. But what would it be like if a few thousand people put a couple of their favorite pieces of art on Handmeon? Not the art you want to get rid of (there are plenty of places for that), but stuff you really care about. Art to be shared among appreciative people, then moved along, like so many one-piece museums on wheels. Roving ambassadors of expression, history, and goodwill. The collective treasures of our culture, all shared for free.

Each of us stands to lose a little and gain a lot.