Scott Rosenberg—author of the fascinating Dreaming in Code and the always-interesting Wordyard blog—has a new book out that looks even more interesting than his first: Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

There’s an excerpt up at Salon which doesn’t diminish my interest, but does rub me the wrong way just a little bit. Either Rosenberg actually believes what I am about to quote, or he doesn’t see the conflation he uses to make it plausible, or he doesn’t care to make a more nuanced argument. He writes:

According to this perspective, talent is a resource of fixed supply. The existing institutions of the publishing and broadcast world are already doing an efficient and thorough job of finding all that talent and giving it a platform. And all this other stuff that’s spewing forth from the Web’s profusion of blogs and podcasts and videos? It’s just dross that obscures the real talent’s output.

Beyond the obvious arrogance, this view misreads and underestimates the Web in several ways. It’s a mistake to think of human creativity as a kind of limited natural resource, like an ore waiting for society to mine; it is more like a gene that will turn on given the right cues.

I can’t disagree with where Rosenberg is going, but not only is the idea of talent as a limitless resource wrong on its face, but it’s not “obvious arrogance” to keep that fact in mind when considering the media and artistic landscapes that the web is part of.

The idea that there is limitless talent is just another take on that warm, particularly American, and ultimately harmful mythos that anyone is capable of doing everything if they just (gosh darn it!) work hard enough. But there’s no evidence that this happy fiction has any truth to it… and plenty of evidence, in the shape of the world of art and media around us, that it’s untrue. It’s easy—and it feels good!–to maintain this illusion as often as we can, despite it’s harmful consequences (just look at our train-wreck of an educational system to see some of them). But put yourself or a loved one in a situation where their life or livelihood depends on the skill of another—undergoing delicate brain surgery, say—and you know as well as I do that you’re going to want the surgeon that has not just trained and worked to become the best, but who did so with the most generous helping of talent to capitalize on.

But Rosenberg’s second paragraph above is true, thanks to a conflation of talent and creativity. Talent is clearly a limited resource. Creativity is not. Anyone can, and should, create. That is a fundamentally fantastic characteristic of the read/write web. They might not have any talent at writing in general or the specific forms they choose to utilize. But in most of the important ways that’s not the point.

A more nuanced argument could go along a few different lines. You could say that, since everything is news to someone, there’s no need for the traditional focus on that kind of creation which will appeal to the most people. You could argue from the perspective of the positive aspects of self-expression and creative activities regardless of the talent one has (or doesn’t have). You could argue that while talent is limited, it’s very difficult to know where those limits are—and impossible to know in advance—so there’s no harm in acting as if there’s no practical limit. You could argue that limits on talent aren’t important because it isn’t really about how much talent there is, but how many talents, because each person must find theirs (this isn’t a philosophy that can be proven, but at least it takes into account the very obvious condition of individuals having little or no talent for particular activities, despite their effort). The last sentence quoted above goes in this direction, but because an important change has been made—from talent to creativity, which are not synonymous—it doesn’t quite get there.

The important point being made by Rosenberg still stands, of course: the old rules don’t apply. But it’s not because there’s no such thing as talent and it’s not because there’s a limitless supply of talent to be had… it’s because in one important operative, functional sense, one reason that talent mattered—as a way to determine prioritization of access to limited resources for publication and sharing—has become relatively unimportant. That’s a huge, fundamental change, the importance of which can’t be overstated… but let’s not use it to perpetuate a myth of endless talent and absolute equality which, ironically, serves to undermine our culture’s support for that already beleaguered natural resource.

shift our thinking away from the simple digital/analogue distinction of technology towards a less divisive and more nuanced context for work; a human context that focuses on the essence of our work rather than the appearance.

I suspect that the ideas in this paper inspired @injenuity’s question for Howard Rheingold:

Ask him what ed tech folks and "integrators" are going to do for a living when technology is assumed and invisible.

I pushed back a little on this concept because it seems to me that “technology” never becomes assumed and invisible… specific instances of it do. So the question is either irrelevant—because there will never be an “after”—or the definition of “technology” needs to be narrowed. My relentless prodding (it’s my lot to be the skeptic, which nets a lot of conversation but very few friends) lead to Jen’s clarification that poses a much more interesting question:

Not questioning advancement of tech. Hoping for age when ppl are curious, engaged and aware to explore without help from specialists.

Setting aside that the term “specialist” doesn’t feel like a good fit with many of the “ed tech folks” and “integrators” I know (perhaps they should be excluded anyway since most of them would love to work themselves out of that particular job, not only to open the door for richer activities, but because they know as well as anyone that the changes which demand their services just keep on coming), I can’t think of a technology that hasn’t involved specialists when it was new… and the more active and participatory a technology is, the more valuable such specialists are. For a while, anyway.

The biggest question might be what happens in a “postdigital” age, but the more productive question is smaller: what happens in a post-current-technology age, when those few technologies and applications (literally and functionally) that survive have become common and commonly-understood enough that specialists aren’t needed (for that set of technologies at least)? To circle back to the reason Dave’s paper is important: nothing. Or at least nothing good. Not unless the actions and states of mind that allow one to be engaged and aware are actively and consciously promoted and reinforced. The lack of curiosity, engagement and awareness that typifies our environment (not just in the single sphere of education) has nothing to do with the complexity of technology. Quite the opposite: it’s reinforced by the affordances of that technology which make it easier than ever to satisfy our need for engagement with the equivalent of junk food.

By analogy: no one really disputes that modern agricultural methods and food production techniques, which have resulted in a greatly higher caloric availability to the average instinctually survival-minded human being, has resulted in an increase in those humans’ average weight. In some countries– like the US– obesity is commonly considered an epidemic and it’s clear from research over the past decade that, in fact, this increase in consumption is directly at odds with our natural instinct to live a longer life. For we lucky ones who live in this environment of plenty rather than scarcity, survival instinct– to eat what you can when you can because you can’t be sure when you will have the opportunity to eat as much (or at all) again– is, in fact, working against our survival.

This doesn’t make me a caloric determinist… in the end we are what we choose to eat. But the effect of the affordances of the technological apparatus that is our food industry does have an effect and it is decidedly not neutral (in any useful sense of the term). In the same way, while we can choose sustained engagement and deep attention, more and more we choose not to. The technology doesn’t make us that way, but the functional result isn’t much different than it would be if it did.

For the most part, people don’t exhibit a lack of curiosity because their natural curiosity is being thwarted by technology any more than they eat poorly because their desire to eat healthy is thwarted by difficulty in finding, obtaining or preparing healthy food.

Dave’s paper is, I think, going in the right direction, reframing the picture in terms of personal, authentic experience—and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the details later—but it doesn’t go far enough in examining the same assumption that inquisitive activity and exploration are natural activities that informs Jen’s question and the damage that has resulted from those assumptions. If anything, I’d guess that biologically it’s the opposite, and culturally our institutions of education and the edifice of many families and peer groups don’t go very far in instantiation/facilitating that mindset when they don’t outright punish people who go in that direction.

Discussion, sources, and reactions can be found at the ShiftHappens wikispace.