Each year I visit the village of Cong to attend www.Congregation.ie. The 'entry fee' to this unusual and inspiring un-conference is simply to write a blog post size piece of work on the given one-word-theme for that year.
I am always down to the wire to get mine in on time. I love to think about writing but as you can see from this long neglected (blank!) blog section, I rarely make the time to actually do it. So to kick start my efforts and make a mark on this blank canvas I am going to paste in some of my favourite former Cong pieces. Last year the one word theme was Society 3.0. I wrote a poem. This is it.
Society 3.0
Society? Anxiety
Dis-ease, Unease
Social Media
Retweet Please
A bot, a troll
A Russian spy
Machine Learning
Smart AI
Nothing’s real
All fake news
Hack my profile
Walk my shoes
Sometimes high
Extreme polite
Thin veneer
Shine the light
Underbellies
Darker sides
Live in hope
Of turning tides
Fabrics ripped
Colours worn
All a cover
Now its blown
Just a word
Do what’s right
All can change
Voters might
Crowds roar
Placards care
Rocking boats
Who would dare?
Such decorum
Tidy, neat
Agree with all
Safest seat
Powers shift
Sands too
Time’s up
Society’s you!
Undecided?
Still at sea?
Now your time’s up
Society’s me!
Takeaways:
1. I was struck by the idea thatsociety is everything and nothing. It’s an artificial collective, a human construct of an idealised movement by thepowerful. The very word is laden witharch last century terms like ‘polite society’ and ‘high society’. Theorigin of the poem is in the countless word associations of society adjectives, synonyms and metaphors – each grappling to make sense of it.
2. Society allows for abdicationof responsibility. Society should dothis, society must do that, its society’s fault…who is society? Is it everyone or no one or just everyoneelse? (Hence, “Society’s you…, society’s me”. I couldn’t bring myself to write the manifesto of the new normal societywhen I can’t decide if it’s occurs by accident or by design. Are we the masters of society’s destiny ordoes society master us, are we caught in its current?
3. In this most uncertain chaoticyear when the tendency is to grasp for certainty and grab at order, I wasunable to get to grips with this Society “design” challenge. We’vetalked all year about how we are ‘together apart’. Maybe I’ve bypassed together and movedstraight to apart, detached from society and social engagement and for now it feels too far away to discern its shape.
It’s a stream of consciousness of my fragmented thoughts on a dispersed and fragmentedsociety. As for what Society 3.0 will be, the poem reflects my uncertainties of what society is at all, how it changes, who changes it and the forces within it; technology, politics, the masses, the minorities, the individual.