Wesley Fryer’s excellent Moving at the speed of creativity blog has an interesting post today on “Measuring Engagement“. Engagement is, I think, a key quality of a healthy life. But what does it mean exactly?
I think of it as being in active exchange with your environment – both consciously and unconsciously; physically, emotionally and spiritually. There are three elements to this –
- the environment
We are embedded in multiple environments. By that I mean you can’t see who you are in isolation. Nobody exists out of all context. Our environments are multiple – the physical environment of air, light, heat, noise and so on; the relationship environment of our place in our own personal networks of people (family, friends, colleagues, society etc); the semantic environment of meaning – the sense we make of the signals and symbols around us; and so on…multiple life contexts. - being in exchange
Within our environments we are continually receiving and responding to signals – detecting changes and adapting to them. - active
By active I especially mean conscious – the greater our awareness, the greater our ability to choose between possible responses to the changes in our environments. In addition, by active, I mean creatively active, because when well we don’t just respond to changes in our environments, we initiate changes too.
Wesley Fryer’s area of interest is education. I’m primarily a physician but a significant part of my job is education so that perspective interests me too. I share his interest in web technologies and it’s a Facebook development that seems to have stimulated this particular post. Facebook has measured applications on the basis of numbers of users but is now changing that to measure “engagement” instead – by this they really mean they are measuring a number of ways users interact with an application. Jeremiah Owyang argues that this is not really “engagement” but just “interaction”. Whatever you think about the Facebook model, Wesley goes on to consider how teachers measure engagement in the classroom (as opposed to just participation).
So, all this got me thinking. If I believe that engagement is a key quality in health, how do I know how well that is functioning in a particular patient’s life? Let me explain a little further…….
When someone has chronic suffering, be it pain, breathlessness, depression, whatever, their lives can become much smaller. They can retreat from work, from social interaction, and even from the basics of life – not noticing the world around them, collapsing further and further into a deep, black, hole. As they start to become well again they begin to notice more and respond to more around them, become more active socially and their lives gradually expand. This expansion is one of greater engagement (in illness, the contraction of life is a loss of engagement).
So, here’s my query – how do you know you are more or less engaged in life? Are you aware, when your world is either shrinking or expanding, of what it is that’s changing? What does “engagement” mean to you?
To learn more about social media measurement, check out this white paper I co-wrote with Dow .
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/08/20/social-media-white-paper-tracking-the-influence-factiva-of-dow-jones/
Thank you Jeremiah. Coming from a health care perspective this debate on engagement in relation to social media is very interesting, and I think it’s really relevant to education too. How do even know how “engaged” somebody is? I particularly liked your comment about how the metrics inform the story, cos at the end of the day I think what matters to us is actually the story!
I like your description of engagement and withdrawal. But I don’t think this is necessarily along a health – sick continuum. There is a natural ebb and flow to any growth process, a sort of peristaltic movement. I’m sure you’ve seen how, in cell division, the cell pulls back before it pushes outward.
Keith Sawyer (http://www.blog.slowdownnow.org/2007/08/29/creativity-the-slow-way/) makes a good point about insights come during down time.
But he thinks they only come after periods of effort. You can look at this as engagement/disengagement.
When we get ‘stuck’ writing, it makes sense to do something else to let ideas percolate.
I got some advice the other day about my twelfth revision of a short story I am writing. The advice was to put the thing away for a while, and that Horace suggested putting a poem in a drawer for nine years. Clearly they were slower times.
By the way, I just started an additional blog Creativity? (http://www.blog.christopherrichards.com) you might be interested in the Sir Ken Robinson video there.
Oh yes I totally agree with the ebb and flow analogy. Guess you’ve highlighted something I wasn’t clear about here. I don’t think that when someone disengages its in itself “a bad thing” or even that pain is “a bad thing”. I think what we do in life is cope with change and, hopefully, through the process of coping we grow.
So there are absolutely times for pulling back, for quietness, for repose, from separating from the continuous thrum and beat of busy life. But with every strategy of coping, you push it beyond a certain point and it becomes something that is more negative for you than positive. For example, sometimes we just need to separate ourselves and be alone, but if you are alone ALL the time, it’s not so great because we all need to connect and to belong as well as being separate.
So, thank you, as always, Christopher for your thoughtful (can I say “engaged”?) comments?
I’ll go check out your Creativity blog now!
[…] intimate ties” and “Embrace society”. Both of these emphasise the importance of engagement – along with adaptation, one of the key characteristics of a healthy […]