Some nights I wonder: How did I become a D-Bo?

Twenty years ago, I would have been sat at my desk in a big corporation, dictating memos. (Do you use your Dictaphone much? No, I use my finger – this was a joke of the time.) Dictating copy for the marketing department to spend a small fortune on printing it somewhere on a dead tree and wonder who the hell would read it. I come from a time where we had someone to do our typing for us. In Tapscott terms this makes me a digital immigrant – I moved on-line in my lifetime. I wasn’t (like my children for example) born here.

Now, in fact, I’m a digital nomad – I work where I sleep and several times a month, I sleep where I work. When the big corporation was swallowed by a mega-corporation, they might have let me go because my function was a duplicate of an existing one. Actually, I had already left of my own volition. Now I type my own copy to be turned into electronic pulses by Twitter and transmitted to whomever of my followers can be curious enough to tap a key and see them. Fortunately, because I still oil some communication wheels at mega-corp (in fact several mega-corps) I can afford to dick around like this. I guess there’s a lot of us out there and if we can handle the uncertainty we should appreciate the freedom.

Anyway, that’s enough about me – let’s talk about you. What kind of “work” do you do? Whether you work for a corporation, a small-to-medium enterprise or you operate as a sole-trader (or “bed-ender” as they used to be known, after their bedroom office) your work might fall into one or two of these categories:

• You develop content-free IT and attend the care and maintenance of the information superhighway (remember that one?) You are like Wallace & Gromit in “The Wrong Trousers”, laying the train-track as we run on it
• You trade in knowledge, products or services. This might be straight on-line commerce (like e-bay, Amazon etc), e-learning (web-enabled training) or face-to-face events marketed and/or disseminated on the web (conferences, workshops, webinars and the like). Your design skills might be the best. You make games. You may be charismatic in a commercial way (or vice-versa)
• You work creatively in the areas of autobiography, photography, music, poetry, writing and similar artistic endeavours. You are a digital bohemian (D-Bo!)

Wherever you sit or stand on this Science – Commerce – Art continuum, you can choose to use some of the resulting time and money from the first or second category to fund your activities in the third. To a greater or lesser extent this simply defines you as being civilised – “having instincts other than survival.” So bit by bit, byte by byte, you might say that we are all becoming more “civilised” through our activities as digital bohemians. It’s 2.0, it’s unmediated (and might benefit from some editing), but it’s all about our lives and loves in the 21st Century.

Wikipedia defines Bohemianism as the “practice of an unconventional lifestyle”. Compared to what went before, swopping a suit and a tie and a desk 9 to 5 in exchange for pyjamas and a laptop all hours of the day and night. “…Often in the company of like-minded people, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits”. Hello Tweeps! “…With few permanent ties. Bohemians can be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds.” Or just a bit random, eh?

Are D-Bo’s creating the cave paintings of the Digilithic era – made in the dark winters by people using stone tools and berries? Maybe it’s potentially something as long-lasting as that. Will you be remembered for the last few elegant lines of code you wrote in ASP or PHP? No. Or the instructional design you did on that Health & Safety training? Not likely. Did I write history with that teambuild I ran for 60 senior managers in Manchester last week? No, but maybe that blog you wrote, that picture I took, that clip she stuck on YouTube (35 million views and rising…) – it’s a long shot but any one of our little digital boho-doodles might just go global, or failing that, simply show what it means to be human in the 21st Century. Civilised, despite what goes on all around us.

Maybe in the future everyone will be famous for 15 million bits. Maybe not. Either way – immigrants, natives, nomads – all hail the civilising influence of the D-Bo.

1. I am part of a vast active living information system (Valis)

2. I write tracts (Our Friends from Frolix 8 )

3. I am a crap artist (Confessions of a Crap Artist)

• Taking a limo in from the airport and watching the glass-skyscrapers get closer
• Eating sushi on Davie
• Hiring bikes at the edge of Stanley Park to ride to Beaver Lake then going to Second Beach for a swim and booing Steve Balmer’s yacht in the bay
• Playing volleyball at Sunset Beach as like, er, the sun sets
• Evening drinks in our apartment, watching the Vancouver cats walk along the balcony rails, eleven floors up
• Chilling in Van Dusen Gardens with hot-dogs and a beer
• Heading out to the University of British Columbia to see the Museum of Anthropology and use the outdoor pool with the 7-metre diving board
• Stopping off at the beach on the way back (see above)
• Driving a 4×4 up to Whistler so the lads can don body armour and take the adapted ski-lifts then hurtle downhill on mid-range mountain bikes
• Hurtling back down south to Vancouver in-and-out of the road-works preparing the highway for the Winter Olympics
• Missing out on buying rare 7” vinyl such as Toddla T’s remix of Roisin Murphy’s “You know me better” and Mozza’s “First of the gang to die”. Damn
• Waiting for the man by the juke-box in that pub…
• Dining at the Tapas-tree, the last restaurant as you head west on Robson
• Riding round Stanley Park at 4am in a Mustang with the top down, still deaf from going to that club in Gastown where everyone communicated by sign-language
• Buying jeans, t-shirts and boxers on Robson
• Wondering when that enormous pile of yellow sulphur across the bay will go down
• Wishing we didn’t have to go home

Im passing this txt on2 u because it worked for me. I have found inner peace. The way 2do this is 2finish the things u start. I looked around yesterday afternoon at the house & saw the things I had started but not finished…. So I finished them…… The vodka, the Baileys, some rose wine, the ice cream, crisps & the valium. U have no fuckin idea how peaceful I feel now!! Pass this on2 anyone u think might need a bit of peace in their life!!

My last post about Irony reminded me of a list of nine different types of joke that I got from a comedy scriptwriting book. They are:

• Exaggeration – I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate. Some people have a stream of consciousness, mine’s more of a puddle
• Word Play – He had engine trouble – he was hit by a train. The footballer had car trouble – on the way to the ground a fan belted him
• Pun – In the event of fire, inform any ember of the staff
• Twisted Cliché – People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones
• Reverse Gag – My garage told me to keep the oil but change the car
• Illogical Logic – I tried to put a Euro in the parking-meter for my German car
• Insult – If your suggestion was a light-bulb you might have the faintest idea. You’re so un-hip – why doesn’t your bum fall off?
• Sex Gag – Save your breath for blowing up your girlfriend
• Topical – Home secretary Alan Johnson is reducing police paperwork by making the forms smaller.

If you want to apply these you simply make a list of words and phrases relating to your chosen subject. Here’s mine about “the Brits”:

Hooligans, Irony, Beer, Stiff Upper Lip, Mrs Thatcher, Cross of St George, Island Race, Tea-drinking, Bad Food

Then try each one with each joke type:

In England, they order their food, pay and then run off without eating it (Bad Food/Reverse Gag).

You can hear some more like these in my radio play “The Archie and Cilla Show”.

Have funny!

Some years ago, I was trying to explain the British (or more specifically, the English) sense of irony to a German. Because he was an engineer and much given to scientific method, we created the grid shown above to set the concept within the general context of “jokes.”

We decided that, whatever our nationality, we can make jokes about ourselves and about others. These jokes can be about a permanent or a temporary condition. This gave us three different joke types:

• Two stereotypical types of joke, where the “permanent condition” is indicative of a national or cultural characteristic. For example, on seeing the proverbial glass, an optimist says it’s half-full. The pessimist says it’s half-empty. But the German says its 50% over-engineered. Regardless of who makes this joke (self or others, a German or me) its still about one of their national characteristics, the stereotype of reliable (see VW ad ) engineering
• What I call “clowning” where the joke is about myself and concerns a temporary condition. Once, whilst running a session, I had to pause part way through an explanation because I was unable to pull the top off my flip-chart pen. I announced that the pen was the Excalibur of felt-tips and I would never be King… Despite the pre-requisite knowledge of Arthurian legend and a tone more tragic than comic, my remark showed a willingness to let others have a little fun at my expense
• The delightfully named “Schadenfreude” – or joy from others’ sadness. A man walks into a bar. Ouch! It was an iron bar. Includes fart jokes (embarrassment), banana skins and other physical comedy scenes.

To illustrate the concept of irony, my German colleague and I chose the topical subject of Iraq. Having spent the spring and summer of 2003 defending UK foreign policy to my colleagues from the rest of Europe, I’d arrived at a stock response:

The British are an island race. Tony Blair says: “I land troops wherever George Bush tells me to.”

Taking one definition of verbal irony – that speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves – I suggested setting this joke up with an opening assertion:

The British attitude to European unity can be understood by the fact that we are an island race. (This implies that there are geographical and historical reasons for our permanent condition of separateness.) Tony Blair says: “I land troops wherever George Bush tells me to.” (The punchline contradicts the original meaning by showing that our permanent condition is in fact to be in thrall to the US.)

The skill in using irony, we concluded, lies in how well the speaker subverts stereotypical expectations. A criticism of “us Brits” is that it’s often hard to know when we are being serious – we say one thing and then immediately go on to imply the opposite. This may explain the stereotype about our notorious “sense of humour.” No one gets irony the way we do…

This gave us a fourth category to add to our grid:
• The ironic stereotype where a permanent condition of self or others changes meaning in the telling.

Take the ever-popular subject of beer. It’s an old stereotype in the rest of the world that our beer is inferior to other nations’ products:

English beer tastes so bad its best to pour it straight down the toilet and cut out the middle-man.

By incorporating another stereotype – the notion of British inefficiency – we can mean the opposite of what we say:

English beer is a wonderful example of British efficiency – it tastes so bad its best to pour it down the toilet and cut out the middle-man.

So now you know. How to make funny jokes and both use or fully appreciate irony. Handy, eh?

“Homes and Gardens” is a cornucopia of DIY and horticulture in our little village on the edge of the city, last stop before the manicured lawns give way to rough moorland grasses. The shop’s proximity to Bizlike Mansions means that five-mile, 55-minute round trips to B&Q, for a picture hook or a pot of weed-killer, are rarely necessary. Recently, John the owner and I were discussing his recent form on the bowling green, it being high season. He bemoaned a run of losses that had led him to question how he could play the game for 40 years and still produce such poor results. I had just read something on Twitter about NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) coaching so I asked if he had a pack of playing cards. They sell everything so he produced one.

I asked him to pick out some cards and write a word or phrase connected with his game on each one. He produced a magic-marker and this was the result:
* Joker – “X” (he emphasised that this did not mean he didn’t take the game seriously!)
* Jack of Clubs – “No 1”
* King of Hearts – “Best”
* Ace of Spades – “Choice”
* 2 of Diamonds – “Line”

With hindsight, I could have asked him to elaborate about the “X” factor to see exactly what it meant to his bowling.

I explained the exercise and how he should look through his five cards before that evening’s match and use them to “call up” the qualities that they represented. The NLP term for this is “anchoring” which I understand to mean a way of imbuing inanimate objects with abstract concepts. In this case the cards would anchor the 5 key aspects of his “bowling mojo”. John seemed unfazed by this mumbo-jumbo and explained that he had studied Sports Psychology at the local university and he knew very well that at the top of any game “it was 80% mental and 20% technical.” I could have asked him how studying sports psychology had led him to own a DIY/Garden store but that wasn’t the object of my immediate curiosity. He explained his belief that bowls was about “rolling” and that “the moment you try to push, you’ve got trouble” before expressing his concern that that evening’s weather conditions would not “suit his game.”

Some days passed before I was able to ask him how he had got on. He was unimpressed by his performance which I was half expecting given his get-out clause of “weather conditions.” The cards didn’t work, was his conclusion. We left it there and I quickly shelved my latest blog on NLP in sports psychology.

Some weeks later I saw him again in his lair (pictured). He was a changed bowler and proudly announced his break-though. He had been failing to account for how quickly the greens were drying out, despite the wet summer, and so had been pushing, not rolling, the bowls in the expectation of more resistance. It seemed a no-brainer to me, and I don’t even play bowls, but maybe the cards and John’s explanations had given me some insight. In any case, he was genuinely excited about his discovery so perhaps I was in on the genesis of some understanding that had previously eluded him.

You could say that the cards were merely incidental in his technical revelation and that John would have reached this conclusion anyway, sooner or later, in dealing with his run of bad form. But why not try it for yourself? Think about one of your primary skill-sets – can you select five or six images and symbols and use the qualities you associate to access them, develop them further or correct some fault?

It’s on the cards.

http://bit.ly/2WJbz8 Yay! Employment suited to my particular talents. Celebs – its only $10 a character – all killer no filler! 8:15 PM Mar 27th from web

Help! We are a group of media-studies students held captive by Mr Bizlike and forced to write the cool stuff he is too drunk to do himself! 8:29 PM Mar 27th from web

We answered an ad for “hip young word-slingers happy to work at home in their pyjamas”. We’re chained to a radiator and living on Coco-Pops! 8:36 PM Mar 27th from web

We’re at 157 K- Does Stephen Fry write all his own tweets? Teams of eruditionists labour night and day to produce pearls he casts before us 8:43 PM Mar 27th from web

That was close, he’s gone to the off-licence again. Rescue us! Wait – look at our twitter-grade. Awesome let’s stay and see if we can 100 it 8:50 PM Mar 27th from web

Malicious hackers (try saying that when you’re drunk) have infiltrated my Tweetbunker. I cannot be held responsible for the views expressed. 8:54 PM Mar 27th from web

Question: Why should you use the I-Twing, up-to-the-minute oracle of social change?

Let me answer that question with a question of my own that the I-Twing answered for me: How to take my work forward?

The answer came in the first three tweets in my Twitter timeline at 21.59 on the 21st May 2009 as I sat, holed up in a Midlands hotel with just my Mac, some room-service fajitas and a cold beer for company:

# GarryParkes RT @Alex_Jeffreys: @minxywitch @deanholland @gazzman @danbriffa any of you gonna do a bungy jump with me in vegas ? [I'll do the video!] less than 20 seconds ago from TweetDeck

# Brian Clark copyblogger Want to contribute a story to an updated version of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow? – http://is.gd/C2mW half a minute ago from web

# Charl Pearce simchabe Yahoo eyeing social networking acquisitions’ http://bit.ly/auZkR **Wouldn’t it be funny if they bought fb or T & made a big come backhalf a minute ago from TweetDeck

Three themes I identified were:

• Daring (and recording it)
• Transforming business (with Seth’s Cow)
• Big comeback (in traffic terms)

I took this to mean I could be successful if I used social media to develop my work.

The concept was adapted from an original idea by Shannonseek, who had found an intertwining poetry earlier when reading the first three tweets in her timeline, sort of like a Twaiku. This inspired me to develop the concept of I-Twing.

Flawnt, another tweeter, was enthusiastic about this new addition to the divination scene:

flawntRT @bizlike: @flawnt: Try the I-Twing – read first three tweets in the timeline as a reply to your question. / RT brilliant – LOL – works too

The thing was, at that point I hadn’t even tried it myself! But I took flawnt’s validation (and the time seemed right) and the above is what I found…

Some exciting record of my life will transform my work into heavy traffic.

It reminded me of a similar incident about 25 years ago when I bought our first home computer – a Dragon32. There were other new home PCs on the market but I was attracted by the Welsh manufacture (Celts & Computers!), the 32K of memory and the ludicrous feature that the full-size keyboard was “guaranteed for one million depressions.”

Anyway – you could either load up programmes from a cassette recorder that played it analogue code through a wire or you could learn dragon basic and write your own. I decided to write a routine that reproduced the three coins method of divination from the I-Ching. Maybe a dozen lines by the time I’d finished.

My very first use of my program was to ask the three thousand year old book of wisdom what it thought of my efforts. My program produced hexagram 50 – the Cauldron, one of only two out of the entire sixty-four that represent concrete, man-made objects. I laughed out loud at the sudden thought that this ancient work had instantly surmised what I’d done, and told me so. A moving line gave the answer to my question:

“Thus the work finds favour in the eyes of the Deity, who dispenses great good fortune, and becomes pleasing to men, wherefore all goes well.”

Well 25 years later, I’m here now with the time and inclination to write this, so maybe my work did find favour with the Deity. I’ve just now read the only other hexagram that’s represents some concrete man-made object. Of The Well, hexagram 48, the I-Ching says:

“Thus the Well is the symbol of that social structure which, evolved by mankind in meeting its most primitive needs, is independent of all political forms”.

Sounds vaguely social media, web 2.0 stuff, eh?

But I’m not one to rest on my laurels, you know? So: introducing the I-Twing. I like to think its a more poetic, less traditional method of divination.

And I gave the I-Twing another go to see what it said about all this:

AlohaArleen You can find the entire Tweet Limit MicroBlog at http://gol.ly/NewTweetLImits PLUS comments! @PheasantPhun

1txsage1957 Wheatless Wednesday: 6 Alternatives to 87,000 Slices of Bread http://snipr.com/iodzo

KikiValdes Taoism, Confucianism, Cults, Mormonism and Atheism http://bit.ly/j3fGO

Enough talk. Enough bread. Open your minds.

Why not try it yourself and let me know?

Rex 11/6/09