Beyond the Scientific Revolution — by John Brockman
An interesting series of chapters – discussed by interesting people.
Collaborative Design
The Road to Natural Digital Collaboration
By Elliott Masie, The MASIE Center
Just as there is a process of Instructional Design for developing instructional experiences, we believe that there is a parallel process of Collaborative Design to create the best uses of digital collaboration technology. We need to learn how to assess the needs of the groups involved and select media that is appropriate to the outcome objectives. And, we envision the development of collaboration templates that will embody a design for ideal use of tools in a given situation (e.g. A template that walks the group through a highly interactive video conference for an employment interview, including application sharing of resume and job description documents.)
Finally, there are new roles that we must invent and perfect to make Digital Collaboration really soar. Facilitators, community builders, virtual coaches and other roles will evolve that will make Digital Collaboration work effectively and naturally.
This is a great time to start the experimentation process. We should find teams within our organizations to lead pilots for leveraging existing and new technologies for effective collaboration. It would be great if the “owners” of collaboration technology were not techies but rather process-oriented folks in the HR, Training or Business areas.
Dreaming in Cyberspace
Walter Logeman – ASD Dream Time – Dreaming in Cyberspace
A description of an online group approach to dream work that can give deep insight into the unconscious. Use of the Internet can add a dimension to dream work that was not possible without it. The Internet presents us with features that enhance and reveal the psychological depth of the work. The DreamEvents are private and confidential so publicly available and generalised material are used in this article.
This is a reference to an article I wrote earlier this year. I needed ready access to the link!
I have become the world
CTHEORY: Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio
Virilio: The body has a dimension of simulation. The learning process, for instance: when one learns how to drive a car or a van, once in the van, one feels completely lost. But then, once you have learnt how to drive, the whole van is in your body. It is integrated into your body. Another example: a man who pilots a Jumbo Jet will ultimately feel that the Boeing is entering his body. But what is going on now, or should happen in one or two generations, is the disintegration of the world. Real time ‘live’ technologies, cyberreality, will permit the incorporation of the world within oneself. One will be able to read the entire world, just like during the Gulf War. And I will have become the world. The body of the world and my body will be one. Once again, this is a divine vision; and this is what the military are looking for. Earth is already being integrated into the Pentagon, and the man in the Pentagon is already piloting the world war – or the Gulf War – as if he were a captain whose huge boat would have become his own body. Thus the body simulates the relationship to the world.
That is isnteresting on the connection between the body and the virtual world!
Big Stage
Asclepius
Character Glossary (Updated link the old one below does not work – Monday, 26 June, 2006 )
Classical Mythology Online – Character Glossary
Asclepius [as-klee'pi-us] (Aesculapius) or Asklepios, "cut up," or "turn round and round"(?)
The son of Apollo and Coronis, he was god of medicine and healing, but was raised by the centaur Chiron, who taught him medicine (Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.5-7). He could restore the dead to life, for which offense Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt (Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.54-58; Euripides, Alcestis 3-6; Apollodorus 3.10.4; Hyginus, Fabulae 49; Diodorus Siculus 4.71.2-3). The most famous temple of Asclepius was at Epidaurus. His children included Machaon, Podalirius (Diodorus Siculus 4.71.4), Hygeia (Health), and Panacea (Cure-all). Family Tree 21.
The original Psychodrama stage? This site is great – the family tree thing is very useful.
Wolfgang Giegerich: The Soul’s Logical Life
Wolfgang Giegerich: The Soul’s Logical Life
Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology
A preface here and link to where the book can be bought, Amazon seem to be sold out. Here us the amazon blurb:
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
C.G. Jung’s psychology was based on an authentic notion of soul, but this notion was only intuitive, implicit, not conceptually worked out. His followers forfeit his heritage, often turning psychology either into pop psychology or into a scientific, clinical enterprise. It is the merit of James Hillman’s archetypal psychology to have brought back the question of soul to psychology. But as ‘imaginal’ psychology it cannot truly overcome psychology’s positivistic, personalistic bias that it set out to overcome. Its “Gods” can be shown to be virtual-reality type gods because it avoids the question of Truth. Through what logically is the movement of an “absolute-negative interiorization”, alchemically a “fermenting corruption”, and mythologically a Dionysian dismemberment, one has to go beyond the imaginal to a notion of soul as logical life, logical movement. Only then can psychology be freed from its positivism and cease being a subdivision of anthropology, and can the notion of soul be logically released from its attachment to the notion of the human being.
Daimon
Spring Journal, begun in 1941 by the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, is the oldest Jungian journal. Twice a year we bring you writings from the likes of James Hillman, Ginette Paris, David L. Miller, Sonu Shamdasani, Charles Boer, Nor Hall, Michael Vannoy Adams, Jay Livernois, and many more of the hottest writers in the field. It is edited by Charles Boer and Jay Livernois.
I could not get into Spring Publications site the other day, finished up ordering an old copy of Spring here – 53 the reality issue. It was here within about 10 days. Service was good!
Unfreezing the Corporate Mind
Unfreezing the Corporate Mind
John Seely Brown
If you want to change a corporation, you need to change the conversations happening within it. That was the recommendation from John Seely Brown in his address to Real Time participants.
In a good conversation, the whole is more important than the parts, Brown said. A focused conversation is a self-scaffolding structure that has a dynamic aspect to it . Therefore, if you change the conversations of a corporation, you change the corporation.
“All learning starts with focused conversations,” Brown says. “The only kind of learning you want to think about is collaborative learning. But how do you structure conversations to become self-scaffolding conversations?”Expertise lies as much in the social mind as in the individual mind, Brown said. Knowledge is distributed across people and across artifacts. So the ability to interpret each other — read what is really happening — is tacit knowledge possessed by the group as a whole. That knowledge is brought together when groups share tasks over a substantial period of time, he said.
This of course is from the author of The Social Life of Information interesting to discover that he wrote that key article (see below) in the first issue of The Fast Company back in 1995.
Privacy vs the need for connection – to live & learn.
The Psychological Meaning of Internet Privacy
Some news clips and then some musings from me.
Groups Criticize Amazon Policy
By D. IAN HOPPER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP)
“Consumer groups say a change in Amazon.com’s privacy policy could leave customers of the Internet retailing giant no recourse if they don’t want personal information such as credit card numbers and home addresses passed on to some other company.
Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc., which sells a wide range of products, including books, toys and hardware, posted a revised privacy policy on its Web site Thursday telling customers the information they give is considered a company asset that can be sold. A company spokeswoman, Patty Smith, said the new policy is actually more restrictive in some cases, and better explains what Amazon can and cannot do with customer data.
“As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy stores or assets,” the new policy reads. “In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets.”
No. 3.6 . The Filter. 9.08.00 from Harvard at has a section on this… they say:
“Now, in the wake of a decision by the Massachusetts Bankruptcy Court overseeing the ToysMart case not to consider its agreement with the FTC in the absence of a buyer for ToysMart’s assets, leading e-tailer Amazon.com has introduced modifications to its privacy policy making it clear that Amazon customers’ personal data is considered a company asset and can therefore legitimately be shared with Amazon’s growing cadre of corporate partners�or, if need be,sold.”
The question of privacy is and will be debated from a legal, political and social perspective. From a psychological perspective what is happening as Amazon changes policy? A lot.
First Some thoughts about Amazon . This is a super Alexandria – and an Amazon customer is a scholar in the greatest library ever, so what happens as we access this database of books in print? It is not only a library it is a huge many-to-many discussion about books. Yet the networks of people here is not social – “I learn that people who bought this also bought this” – that is a psychometric or psychological revelation. I can look at reviewers and their profiles, meet them, see what is on their wish list and in their “purchase circle” and move to the website of fan clubs and authors. This is not like meeting people in a physical bookstore – here we read their minds – we enter into a mind-space. We find books without the help of librarians, but with each other in systems of automated and non-automated collaboration that runs deep. Because this library will work best if there is only *one* people flock to the biggest, where they find the most. Perhaps it is sad that this is a store, and a commercial, corporate, capitalist place – that is not unlike many universities – there is no class neutrality when it comes to learning. With immunity to the Orwellian nightmare inherent in the inherent impact of the words: knowledge about the customers is called an asset.
That knowledge of the scholars in this modern Alexandria is the very thing that is used to tune the scholars into the information using automated collaborative filtering or psychometry as Moreno would have called it. It would seem a marvelous virtue if it was *one librarian* who had the knowledge about the scholars. This virtue becomes scary in the panopticon.
As individuals we are not able to learn, learning is in relationship with others, always. These relationships are so vital that we will seek them out wherever they work best – even if we have to be humiliated by being seen as a “user, a customer, and an asset”. Can the impulse to seek the purest collaborative knowing be stronger than any companies ability to exploit that need for its own greed? Can our collective spirit and soul transcend the ugliness of some of the culture invading the Net?