NetDynam 2.0

anyone come by this guy’s site yet? some good links along the side, and some nice graphic representations of speeches and twitter #words. also can insert text of one’s own and see the results – dont see any way of taking them away with us yet… but i have asked. (thanks to michele zappagvigna for the pointer)

Jill Nemiro was recently interviewed by Vern Burkhardt on the topic of  “Virtual Teams” for IdeaConnection.com, a virtual worker’s marketplace.

Dr. Nemiro is the author of “Creativity in Virtual Teams: Key Components for Success”, and “The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams”, and co-editor of “The Collaborative Work Systems Fieldbook”.  She is also Assistant Professor in Psychology and Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research interests are in organizational team creativity, and the virtual workplace.

She offers several insights in the following excerpt:

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I’m a member of two other mailing lists which both address the same academic topics: SysFunc and SysFling. One is based in Sydney and was conceived of as being a more local venue for announcing Sydney and even Australia-based meetings, conferences, articles and so on, as well as for fielding the usual questions regarding the analysis of curly clauses. The other is based in Europe and is said to be more formal in its approach to similar concerns for systemicists. However, it is probably fair to say that most subscribers belong to both lists, and that most threads if they get going, get CCed to both lists, thus providing for a lot of overlapping.

Occasionally the beginnings of discussions are limited to one list, and then someone posts a CC to the other list as well. Those who are not members of both lists begin to wonder what is going on, but, as I say, these people are in the minority anyway.

After a recent spate of twin list activity, one of the moderators and keepers of one of these two lists, commented that amalgamation might not be a bad idea – especially in view of the fact that he was hoping to retire from list maintenance activities at the end of the year. Thereafter a slew of posts were made approving of the amalgamation – to the extent that a cry went up to the effect that perhaps any further messages on the topic be limited to those who were nay, rather than yea-sayers on the matter. A short period of silence thereafter seemed to suggest that the vote might be carried unanimously until one lone voice spoke up in favour of keeping both lists – aka nay-saying – providing affiliatory and affinity-related reasons for doing so. In other words, he cited boundary issues of the sub-grouping kind, arguing that each list has evolved their own separate identities. Thereafter, another one or two more timid types also ventured to add their nay against the groundswell of yea-sayers – but no doubt to little avail.

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One of our crowd, Jay Lemke (see links on ‘online articles’ page) has recently come up with a neologism to describe the hypertext way we now view the world: traversals. Inspirations in his work come from systems theory and eco-social dynamics.

Here’s a taste of the argument he makes, and a link to the complete version on his site:

“I wish to propose here a new class of theoretical object, which I am calling traversals. Traversals are temporal-experiential linkings, sequences, and catenations of meaningful elements that deliberately or accidentally, but radically, cross genre boundaries. A traversal is a traversal across standardized genres, themes, types, practices, or activities that nevertheless creates at least an ephemeral or idiotypical meaning for its human participants, and represents at least a temporarily functional connection or relationship among all its constituent processes and their (human or nonhuman) participants (i.e. actants).

[...]

“The contemporary impulse toward life-by-traversals comes from sources at many levels of social organization. We may speculate that part of our biological survival repertory is a disposition toward new experiential combinations under conditions of severe repetition. When too much of our life simply repeats the same sequences of action, with small variations, again and again, something in our phylogenetic wisdom may impel us not to follow action A with action B yet again, but at least now and then to see how it feels if we follow A with Q or V. This could be a source at the infra-organismic scale of organization. At the organism level, where we define ourselves as whole social beings by our interactions with others and with things (the human and nonhuman partners of our ecosocial being), we value the security and predictability of standardized patterns of inter-activity, but only up to the point of boredom. We are curious and perverse primates. Put us together and we are likely to goad one another to dangerous and improbable forms of behavior; link our diverse individual interests and perversions, and combinatorially, which is to say socially, we create for one another a much larger space of possibilities for action. Each step outside our familiar routines leads us into unknown territory where we cannot know even what we will want next, much less what we will get by acting. We move out into the unpredictable spaces of our relations to our companions, and we move also into spaces mediated by artifacts which bear the traces of others’ choices in other times and places.

“Definitions belong to the end days of theory-building; they are never truly starting points….

Examples are more helpful.”

link to complete essay

In reflecting on the Web 3.0 presentation by Kevin Kelly mentioned by Frank and the posting of the Hans Rosling presentation (courtesy of eldon) on data as visualized by his (then) new software, I came across this presentation by Tim Berners-Lee at this years TED discussing “The Next Web”:



Together, the three presentations focus our attention on where the web has been, where it is today, and where current development efforts around the world look to take it.

But it is the very pace of change that seems to overwhelm any individual effort to come to terms with it, resulting in what Michael Wesch has called Context Collapse.   The emergence of participatory culture as documented in his “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” is an organic response, a humanizing response, to the crisis of individual significance.



This signaling of the changing nature of the web and the tools it puts at each of our fingertips coalesces into a larger picture – the ecosocial environment in which we find ourselves, in which we carry on our discourse, and ultimately, in which to acknowledge the group impetus to carpe diem.

This is why I consider Hoon’s posting of the excerpt from Paul Thibault’s book  Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Body particularly significant in understanding what links the various individual efforts comprising this eclectic NetDynam group.

this excerpt from a norwegian comedy show feels very familiar to me… something like my relationship with mike and hoon feels recently wrt the blog operation…..

hugh’s earlier post of this ‘ted talk’ to the list now bears a new watching i think – not only for the content, but for the ideas re modelling data.