The Web2.0 Prophecy: An Adventure

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Web2.0 Prophecy: An Adventure
Styled somewhat on the book The Celestine Prophecy (which I haven't read, so I can't say whether it's a faithful rendition nor even whether that would be a good thing) this post leads us through an unveiling of Web 2.0, identifying the "point where we are stuck" as "the seventh insight - engaging the flow." Truss asks, "When we are stuck, when things aren't coming together, when our universe is not unfolding as it should, how do we make things flow?" And in keeping with the spirit of the question, I would say that we don't make things flow, rather, the matter is one of finding things that are already flowing and flowing along with them. Douglas Rushkoff observed web users "surfing". We don't create the wave, we don't tell it where to go - that is, if you will, the "management fallacy" (yes I've coining a phrase here, live with it), the idea that we can, through management, direct the outcome of a complex process, where in fact, the outcome is an emergent property, dependent on the autonomous and willful actions of a large number of people. Seeing this - reading the patterns, watching the wave grow, this is not leading, this is not following, this is being the flow, being the web. More...