At 22:47 09-11-99 -0500, Jay wrote:
>The fantasies do fall prey to Elite Group versions of the Great Man
>fallacy; you cannot make up in time for lack of mass.
My questions were perhaps rhetorical to some degree, but unconsciously so.
Innis's (1950 1951) insights into the space-time dialectic in social change
and rupture suggest that the character of specific media (eg clay tablets,
papyrus, codex, paper, telegraph, bits and bytes) have 'specific
implications for the nature of knowledge', and for 'knowledge monopolies'
peculiar to those media. Clearly, the "Great Man" is no more than a
theological hangover, a not so modern mythology that is undoubtedly still
alive and as unhealthy as ever. The "Great Man (Men)" always follow in the
wake of new media, I think.
Back to time and space. Certain media have lent themselves to control over
the _meaning_ of time (eg clay in Sumeria - for keeping intergenerational
accounts of flood times, etc) but they were hard to transport; whereas
others, such as the telegraph and internet, are more effective at
maintaining control over _meanings_ of space (eg in defining nations,
congregations, interest groups, financial interests etc), but at the cost
of time (memory?). Paper seems to manage a balance between both space and
time, but then language and transport again become issues. The internet
seems to redefine perceptions of space really well, but at the expense of
time (anyone remember Matt Drudge?).
So what I was trying to get at was not whether "N" was in the nature of a
specific "category" of socio-historic variable, but that variables inserted
for N might yield entirely incommensurable or confusing results depending
on the "order of abstraction" that N might take: for example, if the
category of, say, "main medium of official social organisation" were
inserted as =N.
Does that make sense ?
More than likely, "main medium" would be an unsuitable "N". It might,
though, be a suitable N+1, with N-1 being utterances and gestures made over
the period of a "board" or "cabinet" meeting, or over the length of a
building process (I wonder why we use furniture metaphors for such official
gatherings). N in this case would be the minutes of the meeting or plans
(or whatever the developmental object of the meeting was), and all the
various social-historical phenomena that pertain to these (my example is
drawn from Rick Iedema's "Resemiotisation" paper which illustrates these
phenomena very nicely).
>There is of course also another kind of answer to Phil' s question about
>minimal-mass methods for social change. Take away all the paper (prior to
>electronic memory) and the scale of organization collapses radically.
This was also what I was getting at, I suppose. The sacred texts of the
church are not like the contracts that brought the likes of the Umbrella
Group into existence: the former is generative in nature, whereas the
latter is constitutive. The former category are more likely to accumulate
meaning and therefore value, whereas the latter are likely to be contingent
on constitutive successes (and thus much shorter in effectiveness). I'll
bet anybody six million dollars that the Umbrella Group won't be around for
2000 years.
Distribution, whichever way you look at it (N-1; N; N+1), is of primary
importance, as is the meaning of the medium. The fractal mosaic metaphor is
very useful in this respect. However, when I said "what is N?" I meant that
N would, in any case, be a really tricky choice, subject to some fairly
hefty practical constraints once you decided what it was you wanted to
study. The object of study in the first instance would probably not be N,
but something else that bore upon N in the most unobvious ways. I think
Bourdieu might be helpful here, but I'm not sure why. Again, this is
intuitive and thus not to be taken as a hard statement. Thinking out loud
mostly.
>All power to the Griots!
What's the Griots?
Phil
Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html