What’s in a name? A twist of the mouse

One of the most powerful learning experiences I had in the early 1980s was a book called A Twist of the Wrist – The Motorcycle Racers Handbook. What it did was take you off the pages of the book onto the saddle of the motorcycle.

The measure of its success was on a late June Saturday during the final race of the day. I was headed up the main straight at 150 odd km per hour. The sun was setting and as I reached the end of the the straight I realised that the track was in total darkness, while my visor was filled with light. I had to switch off my eyes and let the nerves in my hands feel where the front wheel was tracking, let my knee tell me where I was in relation to the edge of the track and my bum gauge how much traction the back wheel had.

I made it around the corner barely a whisper off my normal racing times. By the time I came around for the next lap the sun had sucnk below the hill and my head and the bike were in the same shadow.

What the book at taught me was to evaluate all my senses and programme them to respond to the challenges of the tarmac and the physics of riding a bike (or car). Even today as I came down the N3 and took the off-ramp to the N12/R24 I went through a sequence that the book had allowed me to concretise. I allowed the car drift wide on the negative camber of the outside lane, there where there are always skid marks and tracks leading of the the freeway to attest to the drivers that got it wrong. I let it drift to the edge of the tarmac to a point where there is a slight indentation in the tarmac. As the car got to the edge of the dip and starts to rise – this allows it to turn in and you regain control and can continue at the same speed you were travelling at. If you were to panic and lift off at that point you would ride over the edge and keep on going until you hit the grass.

When I read the Cluetrain Manifesto I had the same sense of being reprogrammed, of having a new operating paradigm. As the twist of the wrist forces you to engae with leanring the art of managing a motorcycle, so the Cluetrain forces you to rething you notion of how knowledge is generated and shared. As we learned with Karen and AI. You can hear the lecture but until you do it it makes little sense. So with Web 2.o, unless we participate in the the process it has little value.