Thriving at Failure

Clay Shirky, in HERE COMES EVERYBODY, makes the point that the "logicof publish-then-filter means that new social systems have to tolerateenormous amounts of failure."  That's not a bad thing.

In fact, the next line is that the "only way to uncover and promote the rare successes is to rely, yet again, on social structure supported by social tools."

And, I would argue, the only other way is to promote failure as a better model of mind.

In "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," we are connecting cognition and digitality, the mind and social behaviors in the Information Age.    For me, the most important connection is that our current model of mind is linear, evolutionary in a teleological sense (as if middle-class American life is the end of human evolution and not simply part of a continuum leading, for all we know it, back to cockroaches able to survive the eco-apocalypse of the future earth:  the point is we don't know where evolution goes from here).  Once you realize it is all trial and error, that evolution is multiple and continuous, that the brain is not hierarchical, that the localization of functionality in the brain is highly exaggerated in that most complex behaviors are processed simultaneously in many parts of the brain--not left or right, not neocortex only, not only in Broca's Area or the amygdala but some complex combination of all of these), once you realize that there are multiple skills and insights necessary for any operation and trial-and-error is intrinsic to collaboration and failure is definitionally what "trial-and-error" is:  well, once you assume all that, then we are in the "everybody" world of the Internet.    That's "Your Brain on the Internet."

In looking for images of failure on Flickr, I came across this photograph of a poster posted by Flickr community member Will Lion.  It includes the quote, "We take responsibility for our successes and attribute our failures to external causes."  The utopic world I imagine does precisely the opposite.  "We take responsibility for our failures and attribute our success to external causes."   That is, failure is a source of realistic pride.  We not only should fail but need to learn far, far more from failure (witness Wall Street and the AIG uproar this week:  we have lots of failures to learn from, big and small).   We need an educational system that is not about right answers checked in boxes so "no child is left behind" (a terrible euphemism masking the fact that the U.S., the most powerful nation on earth and the one that spends the most per capita on education, ranks only 17 in the world in the educational attainment of its populace).  We need one where learning from trial-and-error is the norm and the goal. 

And we should, per Malcolm Gladwell, be "attributing our success to external causes" precisely because we are constantly drawing in from external causes and that is a good thing.  The myth of individualism is a sorry, lonely, and inaccurate story that negates how much everyone--family, friends, society--contribute to all of us.  I would even say that the myth of individualism sets us up for an isolated form of success that makes us fear failure and leads,of course, to failure.  That logic is circular; if failure is defined by clear path to a certain and successful outcome, failure will happen a lot.  If failure is defined as an ability to sort through multiple circumstances with others in order to come up with an answer that works for now, that you try, that you try again if it doesn't work as well as you hoped, and so forth, then failure is success.  

How to teach that model of "everybody success/everybody failure" that is basic to Internet collaborative culture?  That is the challenge of education today.