Doc's written a piece in which he proposes using the word, "authorating" to capture the nature of the co-creativity that take place in bloggy conversations. He has a couple of lines of thinking going on in the piece. One I know a little about, the other I don't.
First, I don't know anything about the issues of online "identity" except to know that they're very important to helping us get better at controlling our positions as independent agents in the new connected marketplace. Doc and Dave and lots of other smart people do know a lot about those issues and I'll be following their conversations so I can learn more.
But I do know something about "thinking out loud together." Doc uses this phrase and it's one that I've used for years to capture the kind of dialogue that characterizes highly creative, highly productive groups. It means ideas are put into a collective center when they are less than fully formed for the purpose of having others participate in the process of making those ideas stronger. It is one of the backbones of David Bohm's approach to dialogue.
When a group gets good at dialogue, at thinking aloud together, it moves beyond the kind of ego-focused, point-making, "critical thinking"-oriented conversations that dominate much of our work (and often, sadly, pesonal) lives. It moves into a way of conversation in which people listen to understand rather than to refute; listen for ways to build upon one another's insights rather than to argue them down; respect differences as paths to new insights rather than as challenges to be fought off. This doesn't mean these conversations are "prissy." They're often anything but: emotional commitment to the goal of finding a collective vision that we can agree to is one of the major engines of progress. It just means that the group is committed to co-creating that vision in a way that recognizes the full implications of our collective identity.
This is certainly my experience of what is going on in the blogosphere at its best. Thinking out loud together and through those conversations influencing one another to collectively create new futures. Sounds a little high-falutin', but if that's what we come to by mean "authorating," that's fine with me.
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