{"id":983,"date":"2009-06-04T20:19:49","date_gmt":"2009-06-05T00:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=983"},"modified":"2009-06-04T14:56:49","modified_gmt":"2009-06-04T18:56:49","slug":"the-weekend-synchrony-and-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2009\/06\/04\/the-weekend-synchrony-and-collaboration\/","title":{"rendered":"The weekend, synchrony, and collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me amplify a bit the aside<\/strong> in my last post, because it is important.\u00a0 To pull back from the week[end] for a moment, there are many universal<\/strong> elements to modern human culture which we take for granted, and even sometimes rail against, but rarely appreciate as one-time innovations.\u00a0 Roughly in order of adoption:<\/p>\n

apprenticeship, language, engineering, drawing, storytelling, astronomy, religion, music & art, holidays, government, law, agriculture, geometry, biology, architecture, education, currency, written language, geography,\u00a0calendars, numerals, abstract mathematics, books, history, universities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of these innovations have given rise to entire fields<\/strong> of study, so much so that I can more readily name the field than its founding innovation.\u00a0 The ordering is just a guess in many cases, and of course the timeline varies by culture even after<\/strong> distinct societies meet.\u00a0 I included some very specific innovations which seem so natural today that it is easy to forget how recently they were adopted by our civilization.<\/p>\n

Privately, holidays and later calendars help to organize<\/strong> regular reflection and pause.\u00a0 They improve the mindfulness<\/strong> of individual life, amplifying the impact of new discoveries and the capacity to change individual habits.\u00a0 But the distributed effect of sharing this practice with others are more profound.
\nLocally, a day when everyone in a community can reliably be called on to gather free of oblgations for shared discussion and experiences is valuable for socializing new community-wide ideas and movements<\/strong>.\u00a0 It naturally gives rise to reliable scheduled mass communication, as well as a forum in which to air one’s own ideas, concerns, complaints.\u00a0\u00a0 The ability to reflect and balance one’s own life is important to realizing individual potential<\/strong>, and the local social impact of making it inappropriate to work constantly limits the capacity for superiors to overwhelm the lives of those they support\/command.<\/p>\n

Regionally, sharing a calendar – including holidays and weekends, and more recently time of day – facilitates shared work across those regions.\u00a0 People today recall the importance of accurate timekeeping<\/strong> to railroad optimization, but the basic principle works on scales of days as well.\u00a0 War has often been a driving force behind innovation – the desire to rule larger empires inspiring formalization of things such as calendars that had been casual before.<\/p>\n

As for global collaboration, specialization and productivity – the improvements possible are hard to calculate.\u00a0 For a long time calendars were not synchronized across neighboring societies [consider the origins of the word Olympiad<\/a>].\u00a0 Lacking the societal architecture to support an Invisible Equilibrium covers more than just a certain type of Hand<\/a>, as we do today, it is difficult to estimate what we do not have.\u00a0 But try starting with the institutions above, include some more recent innovations such as asynchronous revision-preserving editing of global namespaces.. \u00a0 Treat them as points in a conceptual space, and generalize.\u00a0 Your results will be as interesting as mine…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me amplify a bit the aside in my last post, because it is important.\u00a0 To pull back from the week[end] for a moment, there are many universal elements to modern human culture which we take for granted, and even sometimes rail against, but rarely appreciate as one-time innovations.\u00a0 Roughly in order of adoption: apprenticeship, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-fR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":985,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions\/985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}