At Play in the (fractal) Fields of NCN 11 comments

28 Jul 2002 @ 19:54, by Quidnovi Hail to you NCN… "Hail to you...for you perceive sensibility in the insensibility of the world, uncertainty in its certainty. For you are often conscious of others as of yourself. For you feel the anxiety of the world, its limits and its false unlimited assurance. For your obsessive need to wash your hands from the dirt of the world, for your fear of the absurdity of existence. For your subtlety which prevents you from telling others what you see in them. For your awkwardness, for your transcendental realism and your lack of daily realism, for your exclusiveness and your fear of losing your great friends. For your creativity and your ecstasy, for your maladjustment to what is and your adjustment to what ought to be, for your immense possibilities not yet actualized... Because your celestial might have been crushed by earthly brutality. For what is unique, original, intuitive and infinite in you. For the solicitude and the oddness of your paths. Hail to you!"---G. R. de Grace I feel so much strength and yet so much vulnerability, here at NCN, so much grace and yet so much clumsiness, such guileless simplicity and so much confusion, such cheerful conviviality and yet so much loneliness. We listen, and we work things out carefully in our heads and lay them down in our newslogs and comments, through words and images so people will understand, and though we all aspire to the universal, we can't help but write and paint in the languages of Babel. Shakti_ma is right, I do worry too much. So much is said and so little made clear. "Please Understand Me" and Keirsey's portraits of temperament and character types easily come to mind. And I do love the quote from Henry Thoreau that Keirsey uses as a foreword in the second edition of his book: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Isn't that what all who join NCN have ever claimed from themselves? And isn't that what NCN is all about: "hearing different drummers"??? All I am trying to say is that THERE ARE DRUMMERS OUT THERE THAT WE CANNOT HEAR!!! Goodness gracious, I am not trying to introduce "fundamental changes" to NCN or to "take over" as might have been unwittingly implied by Richard on his post in his reply to mine. He was only talking about himself and his own past unfortunate personal experience when he first joined NCN, of course, but the implication was there. All I've been asking is this---a very simple question: There is a STRONG New Age presence in NCN. I am comfortable with it (my brother-in-law is a New Age music distributor and sells meditational pyramids---he makes them himself, too.) There are however, people who are not comfortable with such things. (Read "Please Understand Me" and you will understand why.) There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with them. And there is nothing wrong with us, or the New Age movement. Let's all take a deep breath and relax. The question is this, are we unwittingly excluding some group of people who could contribute to NCN and who feel---wrongly so---that they do not belong here? Are we depriving ourselves of some drummers out there "however measured or far away" who step to another music than the New Age music? Now, I realize of course that NCN DOES want to encourage diversity and that there are people here who are part of the New Age movement and people who do not specifically identify with it or who would be surprised to think that they have been labeled as belonging to any movement at all, new age or otherwise. Labeling is a terrible thing and many people can be concerned about that, and sometimes rightly so, depending on the social or professional circles in which they evolve. ALL are welcome at NCN, but do ALL know it? And can they do it without the stigma of being labeled? Can ALL who change the world or are interested in such an endeavor join and feel comfortable here, like we would like them to be? It is not a deep philosophical question I am asking, nor am I trying to annoy people who are just happy with the way things are, I just know for a fact that NCN is not attracting all the creative minds that it could. I had to bring it up! Do we care? And how do we address that, if we do? Talking of NCN, Richard used a beautiful image. He said that "NCN seems set up like a fractal, beginning and ending nowhere, and spiraling along various corridors, blossoming out and collapsing into itself, destroying or creating nothing, but augmenting and decorating what is already here." I love this image, it says so much about NCN. I don't think that NCN is a tool of indoctrination (or counter-indoctrination) or about "simplifying diversity" and though I thoroughly enjoyed Scott's powerful piece on that theme (a lot of interesting things there---I liked the bit about the Sun), I do not believe that it's about "demystifying" NCN's language either (I don't think it's enforceable on this Network, nor would all people care about that). NCN is essentially about what Shakti_ma referred to as FREEFLOW. Which means to me that EVERYTHING GOES! And with that inherently comes a great deal of complexity. I see NCN as an ECHO CHAMBER into which resonates that multi-layered fractal experiment, Richard was talking about, and through which we sometimes almost can glance, fugitively, an image of the UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (i.e. the future or what we could make it). I think that phenomenon could be and should be amplified. We could read a better and more complex image. It all depends on the multiplicity and the quality of the people who join NCN and will be joining NCN in the future. Perception is all. One suggestion I made was that we try to reinforce the META-PARADIGMATIC nature of NCN. It would include making it CLEAR, right off the bat, on NCN's greeting page, that there is a proliferating variety of terminologies, concepts, models, theories, and disciplines going on here, and that they are all part of NCN and that all are welcome!!! Let's acknowledge our intellectual divergences and the weirdness and the quirkiness too (it comes with the territory) and publicly recognize them as part of what NCN is all about (creativity and open mindedness.) Anything that reinforces the idea that not all fruits are oranges and makes it clear that joining NCN is not necessarily an endorsement of any particular movement or school of thought. Not all fruit are oranges, nor does joining NCN make an orange out of anyone. Sometimes the best way to fight labeling (or the fear of being labeled) is to allow people to choose their own label. This is why I suggested, in an earlier comment, the possible introduction of a subdivision into both the Newslog and the Member News on NCN's greeting page. It could be done in a cute way. i.e.: a picture of a room with a spiraling series of doors. Each door a different entryway. Like "here we all are rationalist-objectivists" (or whatever) or "here we believe in magic" or "here we don't believe in magic" or "here we don't care what we believe in", or (my favorite) "here we don't know what we are talking about." Each door would open to different sub-groupings of the Newslog in which would only be listed the posts of people who share the same paradigms (and with a possibility for crossover for those who feel they belong to more than one school of thoughts.) For people who do not share such concerns they still could all just list their journal in the Newslog such as it exists now and which would be accessible through the door that says, of course, "Here we don't care what we believe in." Myself, I would probably feel at home behind the door that says, "here we don't know what we are talking about" but then again I can understand the so-called rationalist-objectivist who would feel more comfortable introducing friends and colleagues to NCN and would be more at ease referring them to his/her journal if it belonged to a Newslog where there is no talk of magic. Conversely, the magic believers (of which, I fear, I am) might occasionally enjoy the possibility of just stepping from time to time through a door where they know the rationalist-objectivists fear to tread and won't come and bug them. Furthermore, this typology would serve to stress that NCN recognizes the existence of distinct orientations or predispositions in human thoughts, while at the same time emphasizing NCN's purpose to pull together and juxtapose diverse views and strands of thoughts into a wider meta-paradigmatic approach to our world and its problems. Aknowledgement: This post is the result of a series of related questions that appeared within the comment sections of two other journals. Those comments are accessible in the News Log section and can be found on the following posts: - "Communicationism" in Ming the Mechanic (formerly known as Fractal Funch) - Richard Little" in jazzoLOG (Note: Richard has closed his NCN Newslog and this article is no longer accessible.) Shatki_ma, Scott, Richard, Emily, Istvan, thank you all, for your contribution to this exchange. My thanks, too, to all those who, though they didn't join this discussion directly, do influence our vision through just simply who they are and some of the things they do here on this Network. And of course, thank you to NCN for making any of this possible.

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Category: Communication 

29 Jul 2002 @ 02:32 by jazzolog : Reading Comprehension
Nice entry, Quidnovi. Thank you for it.

Let us read and write carefully and with respect. Implication is a filmy, foggy entity. Sometimes, in person, a considerate acquaintance might ask, "Did you mean to imply such-and-such in your remark?" If I remain calm and look within, sometimes I truly can't tell if I did or not, and I need to take time to think about it. I know myself as well as I can, and am learning all the time. Maybe there is an area I don't know about---and I imply something without realizing it. Would that still be implication if I don't know about it? Mostly, when I imply, I know I'm doing it---I think. But in these shadowy areas of implication, where we still may be learning about ourselves, great sensitivity and delicacy might be applied.
In my experience on the Internet, I've noticed people find implication often. And many go running off with it---and construct theories and attacks and great horrors that they see in the other person. Right off the top of my head, I might assert that replying to implication creates more trouble than any other form of attempted communication in this medium. I think it might be good manners and wise strategy to approach a person one thinks is implying something about one and just respectfully ask. It could be a careful and quiet exercise in self-control and maturity for both people.