INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE! (?)
Editor's Note in 7/22/02 InformationWeek:
"Indeed, blogs have great potential for personal productivity in the workplace as well as idea sharing and collaboration across boundaries."
Of course, the term, "cooptation," comes easily to mind in this context. (My old organizational sociology professor, Phillip Selznick, first dramatized this term for me --in its meaning of "To neutralize or win over (an independent minority, for example) through assimilation into an established group or culture: co-opt rebels by giving them positions of authority. "--in his book, "TVA And The Grassroots".) "Expropriation" might be a more apt term for what's going on. Or, evaluating the process most neutrally, simply "appropriation".
The "underground", or the "outsiders", have always been a major source of both cultural energy and formal variety for societies under environmental (either internal or external) pressures to change.
The Western institutional order is in a vast disarray; its major institutions --the economy, the family, religion, the political order-- are all suffering the iterated effects of the industrial revolution (science, technology, private property, the cult of the individual) that reached lift-off with Adam Smith's invention of economics and James Watt's invention of the steam engine. (The so-called generation gap is sign of rapid socio-cultural change; no such gap exists in stable societies.)
This disarray, this pervasive breakdown --of values, of established ways of doing things, of settled expectations regarding interpersonal relations-- results in a "search for the new," a search for solutions, an attenuation of boundaries.
It would be marvelous, a realization of enlightenment ideals in a way, if this openness itself could stabilize as the dominant theme of 21st-century global society. The chaos of post-modernism could then be read as a sort of realization on the level of culture of Jung's concept of individuation.
Editor's Note in 7/22/02 InformationWeek:
"Indeed, blogs have great potential for personal productivity in the workplace as well as idea sharing and collaboration across boundaries."
Of course, the term, "cooptation," comes easily to mind in this context. (My old organizational sociology professor, Phillip Selznick, first dramatized this term for me --in its meaning of "To neutralize or win over (an independent minority, for example) through assimilation into an established group or culture: co-opt rebels by giving them positions of authority. "--in his book, "TVA And The Grassroots".) "Expropriation" might be a more apt term for what's going on. Or, evaluating the process most neutrally, simply "appropriation".
The "underground", or the "outsiders", have always been a major source of both cultural energy and formal variety for societies under environmental (either internal or external) pressures to change.
The Western institutional order is in a vast disarray; its major institutions --the economy, the family, religion, the political order-- are all suffering the iterated effects of the industrial revolution (science, technology, private property, the cult of the individual) that reached lift-off with Adam Smith's invention of economics and James Watt's invention of the steam engine. (The so-called generation gap is sign of rapid socio-cultural change; no such gap exists in stable societies.)
This disarray, this pervasive breakdown --of values, of established ways of doing things, of settled expectations regarding interpersonal relations-- results in a "search for the new," a search for solutions, an attenuation of boundaries.
It would be marvelous, a realization of enlightenment ideals in a way, if this openness itself could stabilize as the dominant theme of 21st-century global society. The chaos of post-modernism could then be read as a sort of realization on the level of culture of Jung's concept of individuation.
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