Comments on: Cloudiness: of selves, groups, networks and ideas

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 22:24:46 +0000

As a fellow anthropology grad and life-long student, this series of blogs fascinated me. It reminds me of that old sci-fi story about lifeforms that wre electrical clouds containing consciousness. I agree in general with the characterization of cloudiness, but think a membrane would be a better metaphor as reflective of the personality conglomeration that information explosion has intensified. It seems that the trend of human growth has been towards abstraction, one occurence being something like transcendence. This might be due to the effects of symbolic media in general, but it fits in with the cloudiness concept. I think the most explicit representations of this "trend" is in technology. Externalizing the symbolic representations of who we are through technology and then spreading these symbols throughout our environment while absorbing any novel information that fits in with our personality conglomeration. Tools are now synthesizing with being. Of course this is just one way to look at it, but a fun and insightful one I think.

By: steve

steve — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:01:15 +0000

I don't feel cloudy at all. Information sources and other people (however our interactions are mediated) are other, not self. Admittedly, I'm not a user of social networking tools, just blogs, but i don't see how my sense of selfhood could ever be altered by contact with other people.

Perhaps I present a slightly different face to different audiences, but hasn't everybody always done that in Western society? You act differently with your family than your friends, etc. But I don't see how that makes you cloudy in the sense of having a vague boundary between self and other.

By: jens

jens — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:49:53 +0000

when i think about my own explorer's experience with the internet the story goes like this: the fist thing i saw in the mid 90s was a netscape browser and through this we (design consultants) gathered information about prospective clients. then came all kinds of portals, rudimentary search machines packed with stupid advertisements, job search sites, discussion forums on an aesthetical level that made them impossible to read, and a vast amount of bizarre and obscure material. the message i got was clear: this is not my world.
this all changed around the turn of the millennium when i started to use google. still after 9/11 i bought my first tv set, because i felt that there was so much crucial (visual) information out there that may not be missed. – the tv set did not stay. – the internet did.
2004 was the year that i got social on the net. a friend of mine invited me to a gated internet community called asmallworld – somebody else told me that tom peters would have an online discussion forum where they also talk about design and the impact on management. that was it for me. – from there i followed so-called blogrolls and engaged in numerous of inspiring and fruitful conversations.
did my self become cloudy? well occasionally – and it is definitely cloudier than my father's – but that is how it is in our individualized world with all its given possibilities.
how do you find yourself in all these possibilities? you clearly stick to the things that you like – to the things and people that are like you.
having been a connector, traveller and communicator most of my life i found that people that you like mostly like you too. and that the people whose work you truly like are mostly a lot like yourself.
long talk…
is this the house that jack build? – no, it is my house. – maybe a little cloudy around the fringes but pretty clear in the center.

and – to pull this back to the sociological aspect of the conversation: something that i noticed about myself with all the extended possibilities of connecting – i tend to get a little more blasé towards people and things that have nothing to do with me.

By: Jonathan Steele, RN CBMC

Jonathan Steele, RN CBMC — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:32:57 +0000

You know, every so often the cosmic gears all mesh with resulting rhyme and harmony happening.

It is ironic that I was responding to a post in a forum on (1) Using Google Alerts and (2)what is SMO or Social Media Optimization. To give an example of the first I pulled the first Google Alet and your posting was it.

I only read it after putting together the posting to make sure it would be appropriate for all ages.

Even more ironic, your posting is perhaps a thought collage of what Social Media has or is becoming to each of us.

Or is it how we reflect the Socialization of Media.

Anyway, I had to let you know. As an Artist, a nurse and a professional Public Speaker (who used to be a general contractor and stone mason) your thoughts certainly touched me.

Perhaps the question for the next generation is no longer ‘who am I and where am I going.’ It is ‘What is my manifestation and where will destiny take me.”

You wrote...”Our culture is changing selves, groups, and the groupings of groups at light speed.”

I for one believe that rather than the proverbial 15 minutes we each are entitled to will be only a moment. The cultural change is creating a future that is the past in a blink of an eye. We can only hope that we will be, in the thoughts of Max Headroom, famous for 27 seconds into the future.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:28:29 +0000

Not being an anthropologist, I was not familiar with Geertz's western concept of a person. I find the definition you quote, Grant, to be fascinating:

"bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background."

The non-western society I know best -- maShona society in Zimbabwe -- would have a very different definition. First, the boundary of the conceptual person would not be around the physical person but around his or her extended family. A physical person is, first, foremost and last, a representative of his/her wider family, and a physical person is in some sense not considered an autonomous entity. Depending on his/her position within it, a person may have greater or lesser ability to speak on behalf or to commit the family, but at all times he/she will be perceived by others as bringing credit or discredit upon the family as a whole. And the family includes the dead as well as the living, so that one's bad behaviour may readily dishonour one's dead ancestors (who will exact punishment in consequence). Shona personhood is like wearing at all times a tie which publicly identifies the school you went to.

Not sure of the relevance to your post, although I think the idea of a wide boundary of personhood is certainly relevant to understanding the social dynamics of open source software development.