Trudy Lane's List: collaboration & dialogue

• TS: Earlier we spoke about Martin Buber's influence on your work and how you mobilize his ideas of dialogical space.

    

  JH: I use the term dialogue", borrowed from Buber -- which I define as an energized exchange between the self and the other. A bi-directional exchange, not just verbal but a full exchange of human energies. This is what dialogue is about.
   Starting from this concept -- talking about distributed exchanges. Martin Buber's essay "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace" deeply struck me as it promotes dialogue as the pathway to a more democratic, caring, just, and sustainable world. He proposes that societal changes are made on a granular human to human level and not on a world political scale. Otherwise, he claims, we are just playing around with social systems. My personal idea of an energized encounter is a full-spectrum dialogue between the self and the other. It requires a shifting into a space modeled by quantum physics, Taoism, and Tibetan Buddhism: the universe as a field of energies. When two people meet and they walk away with more energy than they had prior to this encounter then something has happened. When we engage with the other and an excess energy remains after we part-- that is inspiration. My teaching is a facilitation of open frameworks, of platforms in which these inspirations can grow. I am of course also sympathetic with Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone."
• Fortunately, I let go of the idea that I am the only source of knowledge and energy, which is a great feeling.
• This merely describes the
   excess of energy that arises when two or three people are in focused engagement. Interaction between self and the other is fundamental -- it is a fact of everyday life. I start all my courses with the task for students to pair up and connect with each for two full hours in a focused and concentrated way. I see this as an anchor with the topic being absolutely open, it is an encounter with a stranger. It is simply two human beings engaging with each other.
• I found that dropping a reliance on those terms and boxes is necessary to crack situations open.

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• “It’s turning into what Julian Bleecker calls a “Theory Object,“* which is an idea which is not just a mental idea or a word, but a cloud of associated commentary and data, that can be passed around from mouse to mouse, and linked-to. Every time I go to an event like this, the word “spime” grows as a Theory Object. A Theory Object is a concept that’s accreting attention, and generating visible, searchable, rankable, trackable trails of attention.”

• 1. In a way there's some characteristic that seems to resonate with the Blogject design concepts and that's the way they embody social practice. So the "flickr camera" tries to capture the ways in which the media sharing practices that Flickr seems to encourage become part of the designed object when we're thinking about networked objects. That's great, I think, in that the emphasis on the intersection of social practices and digital networks yields more than bland designed scenarios.

• Related is this idea of the theory object as my colleague Tara McPherson has taught me — an object through which one can come to understand what the object is here for, how it works, how it can work differently. This is much like Rich Gold's Evocative Knowledge Objects. So, not only is the finished, designed object of interest, but so too is the process of its construction, which you must ruthlessly capture and document because every step of the process has something important to say that's part of the critical voice of the design — from the initial sketches, to choosing parts, to accidentally bricking an expensive component.

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• our A-list political bloggers, like mainstream journalists (and like most of us) support their positions by criticizing those of the political figures they dislike

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• Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this. 
  In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society.

• to the broader world of political activism.
• link the debates about web-based, cooperation-enhancing technologies

• If there are no SELFs, how can we think of (self-) organisation?
    It will turn out that we have to understand Deleuze’s term of the   »dividuum« as a derivate form of the modern homogenized self   of the »individuum«. The veil of the buzzword »multitude«,   which masks the theoretical nudity of the intended prostitution of the   wrong »radical marxists«, is devided in thousands of discoursive   threads and textures which are woven of the terms interests, priorities   and intentions waving around the body of free will, offered by »VENDETTA   The Academic Supermodel« as a projection screen for a cooperation

• Knowledge is created among us, laterally.
• But then, soon, once a solid number of users is established, the wealth of social life will be the attraction. Good design cannot have much to with it: just look at MySpace and its disastrous interface.
• Yochai Benkler correctly suggests that "peer production is as efficient and significant for the 21 century as the assembly line was for the 20th century."
• the pleasures of online sociality are exploited. Communities are often deceived and commodified. They are unfairly used as a resource, often without their consent and knowledge.
• The Indian social networking site Sulekha kicked off in 1999.

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• Actor-network theory, often abbreviated as ANT, is a distinctive approach to social theory and research which originated in the field of science studies. Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the agency of nonhumans, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology.
• Developed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, the British sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a 'material-semiotic' method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and 'semiotic' (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and 'semiotic' (e.g. the interactions in a bank involve both people and their ideas, and technologies. Together these form a single network).
• The approach is related to other versions of material-semiotics (and notably the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and feminist scholar Donna Haraway). It can also be seen as a way of being faithful to the insights of ethnomethodology. There are also obvious links to symbolic interactionist approaches such as the newer forms of grounded theory like situational analysis that seek to frame social circumstances as various forms of relationships associated with situations.

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• In psychology, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a fundamental cognitive drive to reduce this dissonance by modifying an existing belief, or rejecting one of the contradictory ideas.