The Ignite talk I gave at WPPStream Athens in September 2012 (pdf with notes). It explains the role of General Semantics and the work of George Simon in shaping my approach to the world.

1. The skill of writing is to create a
context in which other people can
think.
Edwin Schlossberg
Sunday, October 28, 12
I open many of my talks with a quote from Edwin Schlossberg. This talk explains why this quote captures so much of my approach to what I do
and how I do it. I think it’s also very relevant to folks in advertising and media.

2. Language is a map that can help us
see more deeply
Alfalfa
Oat Grass
Orchard
Grass
Sunday, October 28, 12
When I first moved to Sebastopol, before I had horses, I’d look out at a meadow, and all I’d see was grass. But eventually, I got a language for
what I was looking at, and could distinguish between alfalfa, oat grass, orchard grass, rye grass, and many more. Language is a map that lets you
see, and think, things that you couldn’t see without it.

3. George Simon
Sunday, October 28, 12
I first got this idea in 1973, when I worked with a man named George Simon. He was
originally a scout leader, but he ended up teaching workshops at the Esalen Institute, at
the heart of California’s “human potential movement” in the 70’s.

4. Alfred Korzybski: General Semantics
Sunday, October 28, 12
His work began with some of the notions of Alfred Korzybski, a writer and thinker from
the 1930s who created a movement that he called “General Semantics.” Korzybski’s
central notion was that language is a map that helps us to see the world more clearly.

5. “The map is not the territory.”
Sunday, October 28, 12
One of Korzybski’s best-known statements - “the map is not the territory” - is echoed in
this famous painting by Magritte. Korzybski focused on aberrations in thinking - racism
- for example, as the result of “bad maps” that guide us astray because we mix up the
word with the thing, and don’t go back to what’s real. He used to feed people dog
biscuits from a tin whose label was covered up and not showing them till people had said
how tasty they were, as a way of illustrating how labels preconceive and bias experience.

6. Korzybski’s
“Structural
Differential”
was a training
device to help
recognize the
process of
abstraction
Sunday, October 28, 12

7. The real world is
represented by a
parabola because it’s
open ended and
effectively infinite
Sunday, October 28, 12

8. Our individual
experiences leave
out much detail of
the events that
triggered them.
And none of those
experiences are
identical.
Sunday, October 28, 12

9. We label our
experiences.
The problem
is that many of
us get lost in
labels and forget
they aren’t the
underlying reality
Sunday, October 28, 12

10. We become the sum of our experiences and
the stories we’ve told abut them
A C
“Beingness” “Identity”
B D
“Experience” “Map”
Sunday, October 28, 12
My friend George noted that this was a good description of the process of cognition, and added
another element, that we make what we take in (including the map), part of who we are.

11. Knowing where you are in the process
helps you to correct your map
A C
“Beingness” “Identity”
B D
“Experience” “Map”
Sunday, October 28, 12
Korzybski used to have people finger the structural differential when they were talking to
understand when they were going back to look at reality, and when they were just in the
labels. George led workshops at Esalen in the 1970s teaching people how to sense where
they were in the process. That had a huge influence on my ability to see things freshly.

12. Positive Reframing
• Free Software --> Open Source
• dot com bust --> Web 2.0
Sunday, October 28, 12
So, for example, in 1998, I played a big role in reframing how people thought about free
software,, and helped give it a new name, “open source.”
In around 2002, I wrote a paper called “Remaking the Peer to Peer Meme.” In that paper, I
used a diagram I called a “meme map” to show how I’d transformed the storytelling about
free software

13. Sunday, October 28, 12
into the storytelling about open source software. I know these are eye charts from here,
and there’s no way you can read them now, but I’ll put the slides up on slideshare, and
even better, you can go read the original paper.

14. Sunday, October 28, 12
When you look at any of our events, there’s ultimately some rewriting of the meme map
in each of them. Web 2.0 was about distinguishing companies that survived the dotcom
bust from those that didn’t. Strata is about defining the new field of data science. Velocity
is about making clear that the applications of the web depend on people to keep them
running, unlike past generations of software that were simply software artifacts.

15. ACCRS
Sunday, October 28, 12
And a big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of
people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go. A
fantastic example of this is Maker Faire, started by my colleague Dale Dougherty. He
showed the common threads that ran through things as disparate as [logos on the
screen]
So, don’t just think about storytelling, think about mapmaking.