Momentum by Alison Fine

Momentum; Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, by Alison Fine is available! Visit http://afine.us to learn more about Momentum. I'm ordering my copy.

Comments

[tom]

I like her point about getting past proprietorship to something else, which she calls participation. Proprietary organizations suffer from master narratives that put them at the center; the story tends to shift, over time, from the original goal to their own success/struggle in meeting it. The rhetorical focus changes. Danger is latent in the very thing she says we must have more of: self-determination. How to get that sense of self and empowerment, without being trapped into yet another stale story of a silo?

[Phil]

Master narratives are good at mastering the situation - right? And mastery is what upwardly mobile execs and entrepreneurs crave. The language of social ventures is that of Ayn Rand. The "for benefit" sector, lends itself to hero and heroine stories right out of Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship." But those who produce these stories have in their heads as templates and archetypes not Virgil and Milton, but brand narratives, Fortune puff pieces, Star Wars, and videogames.

Doing a literary or deconstructive analysis of social venture discourse would be a public service.

If you look at the About Me section on Alison's site, and read it as a hero story, it does not improve much on Horatio Alger or Ayn Rand. She is not writing tragedy, comedy, satire, epigram, parable, pastoral. She is writing a straight up self-promotional piece about how I got mine. What makes me great. The intended reader response is admiration, maybe envy.

This is America, this the result of our educational system and our society of the spectacle. You can't blame Alison, she is a pawn in the game, trying to sound like a Queen. No more or less so than the rest of us strivers.

I find it sad too, Tom, but we have not been engaged to teach the liberal arts here, and if we do, we will end up with your friend the Happy Tutor in the Dumpster. A lesson he is to us all, but in a negative way. "There but for fortune go I."

Better to applaud when people read out their hero stories and ask for an autograph.

[tom]

There is an impenetrability to the marketing groupthink that defies being spoken to. Witness this chapbook of ways to bother people with messages about something they don't have any desire to hear about but it's ok because it's for a good cause. It's communicating. Why is it that these communicators cannot be communicated to? How is it that they have not learned that the world is not altogether about the velleities of mini-me ids crawling through dunghills of consumer goods; that the pathetic slogans of rambunctious selfhood are bubbles in burning teflon; that our illusory grasp of human experience is slipping into the recycling bin. These people cannot be taught.

[Phil]

Can't be taught, can be bought, and often for not much money.