Adrian has been tugging at my subconscious of late with his initial exploration of whether you write your blog or it writes you in this non-spatial (actual object?) network:
“your identity is the sum of those connections that you are a participant in, but, you have little or no say about.”
And now he really screws my head up by saying, quite simply:
“The blogosphere, all the tools we have to map this, recognise that it is only about the connections between parts. The connecting parts are of more significance than the parts themselves.”
You see, I very much wanted to have a nice little ‘centred’… ‘individuals’.. who are then able to form networks based upon their very centrality through blogs in semilattices etc. and all of that… i.e. present my bloody paper at Blogtalk… and now I’m confused.
I guess my argument is / was about personal presence, the concrete reality of an individual as a necessity for a network and how blogs do that, but in fact, perhaps it’s more about the spaces between individuals, the objects that form the nexus of the networks and really what I’m arguing is the kinda unrevolutionary ‘hypertext changes everything’. After all, there are many many successful online communities not based on blogging… as I was thinking about the other days in hard communities.
Bugger, I’m even having trouble fitting in my little organic / artificial city metaphor with this stuff… spatially… gah.
John Smith from http://www.CPSquare.org recently suggested that the group ( a community of practice, for example) has primacy over the individual. In otherwords, the group comes first.
I screwed up my brows and furrowed my lips because I can’t see that as the exclusive view. There is no group without the individual(s) but there is always the individual. Yet the view, the experience within the group is beyond just the individual.
Its a lovely conundrum. It is fun to see you thinking it out loud.
Thanks for the link and the comment Nancy, you’re quite right of course… you can have an object but without individuals it’s useless… but whether that object breeds individuals regardless or whether environments / communuties can be designed (and if at all) to assist is the question… ouch my head… still thinking…
It turns out that time frame (which is easy to ignore in the immediate eternalism of the web) matters a lot. Individuals are not eternal. Nor are groups, of course. But their life-spans interact in ways that regularly surprpise us.
Interesting, John! Time is a great, different lense through which to look at this question.
Nancy,
you wrote: “There is no group without the individual(s) but there is always the individual.”… REALLY???
According to constructivism (which by the way CoP theory is based onto), there is no individual without a group… one can’t even learn without interactions.
John is right.
John is right, Nancy is right and Rosanna feeds and fertilizes both to move in unisson.
This current conversation touches on the essece of human’s spiritual reality and/or non-reality.
That is where I understand the word community to either be synthetic or organic. Community is from communion and communion is from common with union leading the way.
I am born of two. The group of two is there before my coming on the scene. From my conception on, the group is first. The nature of this group is the dynamic of two who come together to satisfy one another’s personal need of intimacy in a fusion of the parts and of the whole, creating mutuality and possibly life.
Once life is created out of the two, it is the degree of steady connectivity in clarity that determines the quality of togetherness and this mutuality of daily grind determines the depth of actual life practice or as I call it The Faculty of Living, which each one’s “I am” draws and gives, like the flow of our blood pressure. We receive-we give, we receive-we give.
When the flow gets obstruted, it then becomes “I have to take in order to make it” and who I have to take from, has to defend her/himself; so then resistance begins to accumulate immediatly and changes high-trust flow into stress and destablelisation that calls for artificial measures to be implemented from the outside.
If each of the group of two are united in the adaptation of the growing process of each part, then who I am is being hosted where to grow into what I have from who I am and what I do will be nourrished by the degree of maturity of fuctionality of the individual’s environment. Authenticity and integrity form the common ground where is rooted the adaptation’s capacity for self-determination that feeds and leads both, the individual and the group.
The question that each home faces is how each one remains healthy in our ongoing apprenticeship in our ongoing passage from stranger to family so that familiarity gets no time to breed contempt?
That is true between spouses and everywhere that human life seeks to live as opposed to just surviving in quiet desperation. Adaptation and reconciliation are the spirit and the heartbeat of CoPs short and long term life.
The organic experience of spiritual unity is what feeds the parts and the whole with the essence of all in all. The Aboriginal People of Canada call this the Inner Circle of Life and Christians call it eternal life. Liberty of the individual is how nicely and comfortably enslaved I can be to justice, love, peace, joy, wisdom…
It is me in the onenes and the oneness in us all. Presidents of United States refer to it as The State of the Union.
Flowcalization is the prescription needed for the healthy deployment of globalization out of the oil addiction in which President Bush declared the State of the Union to be in!
Earlier thoughts on Flowcalization at: http://www.openleader.com/index.php/LovingGod/Flowcalization