Quite a day of connecting in meatspace with cyber colleagues.

This morning it was a conversation with Marcelo Vieta at Bojangles on Denman Street in Vancouver. Marcelo is putting together a Master’s thesis on blogging using a phenomenological framework to look at the role of users and technology in the creation of online community. He’s doing research on bloggers and if you’re in Vancouver and you think about this stuff, you should get in touch with him so he can include you in his research. The conversations alone are worth it.

We talked for an hour about truth and why blogging allows us to finally embody the connections that the internet infrastructure promises. And most excitingly, we talked about why blogging is a healthy practice because, like journal writing, it causes us to be reflective of our experience, but unlike journal writing it also causes us to be attentive towards the intersubjective space in which we are projecting our thoughts. This is a rich vein of practice, it seems to me, for developing the capacity to engage in “living in truth” because it extends this practice of discerning truth within ourselves to creating shared understandings in community.

I was reflecting on the fact that my training for this happened in my community radio days at Trent Radio in Peterborough, Ontario. There, when one is putting together a late night improvisational jazz show, one is never sure if there is anyone actually listening to the broadcast. The act of radio then becomes a private performance in a potentially public space, and causes one to think carefully about what is being put out on the airwaves, even if absolutely no one is listening. It can be hairy (not to mention confusing) and was a good training ground for the kind of play between the individual and collective spheres that blogging encourages.

Following my conversation with Marcelo, I walked up the street and met Jon “Wirearchy” Husband for sushi. I haven’t seen him in a while and we talked at length about the process of making meaning in the world. It was a beautiful conversation. It made me realize that living in truth is actually an act of courage and it is so hard because we must differentiate ourselves from the culture that tries to interpret the world for us…the news anchors that cry, the pop musicians that embody emotion and trick us into believeing their version of coporate sanctioned dissent, the sports commentators that tell us how it feels to be a fan. All of this stuff is the current we swim against as we head upstream to find our own truth in the world.

Sometimes, as in the case of indigenous communities this struggle to legitimate one’s own take in the colonial world is fraught with the danger of actually bucking the power. To think that an Aboriginal story, an indigenous meaning, can actually have currency against the powers that be is a brave thought. To put it into action is even braver.

Today’s conversations brought me back to another Vaclav Havel quote, where he is describing what it feels like to suddenly have the experience of knowing your own truth:

This palpable sense of immediate transformation: it’s feeling a little like that these days.

Michael Herman at GlobalChicago.NET has spruced up his collection of invitation resources, in support of Open Space Technology meetings. Michael is my own invitation inspiration.