Ethics and soft boundaries between Facebook groups and other web services | ... - 0 views
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This is rhetoric, perhaps even rhizorhetoric, at it’s best
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I want to frame my comments in the distinction between reductionist thought and complexity thought, a habit of mind I attribute to Edgar Morin’s book On Complexity
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tension between a reductionist understanding of power and a complexity understanding
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Steven Luke’s short article about power
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I find the fourth view, the one from Foucault, to be the most engaging, as it approaches a complex view of power
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first three views of power assume a Classical, simple (not simplistic, but not complex, either) epistemology
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“‘Power’ in its most generic sense simply means the capacity to bring about significant effects: to effect changes or prevent them.”
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The One-dimensional View posits two agents disjoined from one another, and power occurs when one agent prevails in some way over the other agent
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too simple, too explicit and over
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The Two-dimensional view adds agenda control by the more powerful agent, and finally, the Three-dimensional view adds social influence
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it also encompasses being able to secure their dependence, deference, allegiance or compliance, even without needing to act and in the absence of conflict.
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the successive views move in the direction of complexity, but they are always limited by a Classical epistemology that posits disjoined, discrete agents interacting in deterministic ways across or through clear boundaries, either in accordance with or in violation of some social contract or rules.
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its affordances are outweighed by its limitations
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This is where Foucault’s view of power comes into play, and note that it’s the only unnamed view
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complexity is often nameless, even unnameable
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power is the flow of energy, matter, information, and organization throughout a complex, multi-scale system
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an agent is formed and informed by the flows of energy, information, and organizational structures of the systems within which the agent lives and functions
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we are not discrete entities, independent of an enclosing ecosystem
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those flows all implicate power
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Power is the weave of the fabric we are all woven into, and it is difficult, often impossible, to isolate any single thread of power and to trace it back to a single cause.
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what does this mean for how we should decide who is in Rhizo14 and how we should behave there?
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the more open the use and sharing of information, the more important it is to clarify how we expect that information to be used
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Clarity has great affordances, but it also has its blindness
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This is a fine example of a clear, classical social contract. Independent agents agree on boundaries and behaviors between themselves
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This assumes discrete agents with clear boundaries, a simple view of power and reality
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A complex view of power and reality—my view—says, however, that Frances is already part of the Rhizo14 group and the document
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Likewise, I suspect that Frances has herself been in/formed by the Rhizo14 discussion
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circular causality, a core mechanism of complex systems with their complex flows of power
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Power as flows of energy, information, and organization have already woven us together in ways that I do not know how to disentangle.
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really only a very small part
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request not to be part of the group leaves me with some sticky issues
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most views of plagiarism are based on the simple view of relationships among agents and social contracts
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ole authorship is a reductionist’s fiction, a useful fiction perhaps, but perhaps becoming less useful as online, open spaces emerge
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How to behave in an open community, then, where flows of power are unavoidable and many are uncontrollable, even unknowable
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if we don’t confront this problem, then we will continue to apply the old social contracts. I don’t think those social contracts alone can address the issue
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interested in learning how this group will write this document. Like all good ethnographers, I think I can learn most by living and functioning within the group, by helping to write it. I want to define the process from the inside
