Writing in the Network

I'm reading a new book: Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, second edition (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Originally published in 1996, this book makes a strong case for the monumental shift caused by the emergence of electronic networks. Though I'm just beginning the book, clearly Castells provides exhaustive, well-researched evidence that networks have changed every sphere of life: political, social, economic, religious, educational, criminal, and mental. I'm thinking, then, that he may provide a useful context for exploring how composition and rhetoric have changed.

In the Prologue, Castells introduces the general problem for anyone wanting to write in a networked world. In speaking of how global networks switch on and off individuals and groups according to their perceived relevance to the global network, Castells notes that:

There follows a fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self. [Thus], in this condition of structural schizophrenia between function and meaning, patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress. … The information society, in its global manifestation, is also the world of Shinrikyo, of the American militia, of Islamic/Christian theocratic ambitions, and of Hutu/Tutsi reciprocal genocide. … Postmodern culture, and theory, indulge in celebrating the end of history, and, to some extent, the end of reason, giving up on our capacity to understand and make sense, even of nonsense. (3, 4)

As I understand him, then, Castells is saying that the complexity and irresistible momentum of the global networks is overwhelming individuals and groups who seek refuge in chauvinistic creeds and identities to provide the meaning and values that they need. As one might suspect from the sheer length of Castell's book and the amount of energy that has gone into writing it, Manuel Castells does not accept the end of history and reason. Rather, he affirms his faith that the world has pattern and that human reason can make sense of that pattern. His book is one attempt to discern and describe that pattern.

This is, perhaps, the heart of modern rhetoric: the use of reason (the regular and sharable heuristics of thought and communication) to explore and explain the world and to inform human activity in that world. But I wonder if Castell accepts an essentialist view of reason that posits one standard of reason applicable to all people, at all times, in all situations, or if he accepts a complex view of reason that posits a relative standard of reason negotiated by a group of people, at a given time, in a given situation. I suppose I will find out.

Whichever way he goes, he poses an interesting challenge for rhetoric: how do we communicate in a world that is polarized, on one hand, by global processes that can subsume and crush individuals and groups with an economic logic and, on the other hand, by the fragmentation of individuals and groups into discrete, antagonistic identities that not only resist communication with other groups, but deny that communication is possible? This is a tough challenge, if indeed, it is real.


P.S.— It happened that just an hour after writing this post, I came across a NYTimes article Does Your Language Shape How You Think? by Guy Deutscher. Mr. Deutscher argues that we have recovered enough from the excesses of Benjamin Whorf to look more clearly at the influence of language on the way we think, including the way we reason.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

I accept that we do not all think the same. I think common experience tells us this is so, and I think research is beginning to confirm that it is so. The challenge of academic rhetoric for me, then, is to reason about the world and our activities in the world, while at the same time being conscious of the thought structures we are employing and being explicit about them. Finally, we must employ strategies of engagement with our audiences that allow for those who, through willfulness or ignorance, disregard our own impeccable and exemplary reason. I must think more about those strategies.

The Extension of Neural Complexity

In the last chapter of his book Networks of the Brain, Olaf Sporns extends his neural processing and, thus, cognition beyond the brain and to the body and the body's environment. This is the feature of neurophysiology that finally destroys all my old ideas about cognition, thought, and knowledge, for no longer can I think of thoughts as belonging only to the brain. Thoughts and emotions – all forms of cognition – flash through the brain, through the body, into the environment, and then back through the body and into the brain. I have only to think of some of the lively and spirited conversations that I have had over the years to see how my thoughts at any given time were not my brain's alone, not even mine alone, but the reiterative, feedback process of patterns flashing through the conversational space from my brain to my colleague's brain and back to me and back to them, over and over. Sporns, of course, says it more scientifically precise:

By acting on the environment, the brain generates perturbations that lead to new inputs and transitions between network states. Environmental interactions thus further expand the available repertoire of functional brain networks. … The body forms a dynamic interface between brain and environment, enabling neural activity to generate actions that in turn lead to new sensory inputs. As a result of this interaction, patterns of functional connectivity in the brain are shaped not only by internal dynamics and processing but also by sensorimotor activity that occurs as a result of brain-body-environment interactions [which] can be conceptualized as an extension of functional connectivity beyond the boundaries of the physical nervous system. (306)

Sporns follows the argument of Andy Clark to say that

the minds of highly evolved cognitive agents extend into their environments and include tools, symbols, and other artifacts that serve as external substrates for representing, structuring, and performing mental operations. If this view of cognition as extending into body and world is correct, then cognition is not "brain bound" but depends on a web of interactions involving both neural and nonneural elements. The networks of the brain fundamentally build on this extended web that binds together perception and action and that grounds internal neural states in the external physical world. (309)

Those who are familiar with Stephen Downes' thoughts on this issue (for example, here) will quickly recognize his ideas about the extension of knowledge through a social network, so that anyone person's – say, Susan's – knowledge of the French capital Paris is a network of flashes across Susan's brain, body, and interaction within the general, historical discussion about Paris as well as with the actual city of Paris. For Susan, then, cognition of Paris is the interplay of patterns in her head, in her body, in her conversations with others (mediated by voice, text, image, networks, and other media) and with Paris itself. Indeed, the more sophisticated Susan's Paris network becomes, the richer is her repertoire of ways to think Paris. At any one time, Susan will likely never use the entire network of meaning available to her, but because she has such an extensive, rich network, then she can think significantly about Paris in almost any situation for any reason.

I have a couple of quick observations to make about this view of knowledge as a kind of cognition. First, we can only have personal knowledge. By that I mean that Susan must always view Paris from the center of her meaning network. With lots of training and hard mental work, she can perhaps learn to look at Paris from other points of view than her own, but she can never not think of Paris from her own point of view (I think that's the correct combination of negatives. Count'em). Even if she changes her mind about Paris, she is simply knowing Paris from a different center, but still her own.

Second, knowledge can never be merely personal. Yes, this contradicts my first observation, but there it is. Susan's knowledge of Paris always extends throughout her ecosystem to include shared language, shared social groups, shared experiences, and so forth. Susan must form her knowledge from the center, but she must also form it in dialog with others who are likewise working from their own centers. Any attempt by Susan to look at Paris from another's center is a sometimes useful exercise in fiction. It's a God's view that Susan can sustain for only a short time. Any attempt by Susan to look at Paris only from her own center is a fatal entrapment in fiction. Knowledge depends on what Morin terms the dialogic principle: the constant interaction of any entity from its own center with its environment and the other entities in that environment interacting from their own centers. Knowledge is that zone of tension between loss of self in its own center and loss of self in the centers of others. Susan interacts with her world – sometimes skillfully, sometimes not so skillfully – and that's what makes Susan who she is. Education is the attempt to help Susan interact more skillfully.

CCK11: Complex Networks and Knowledge

I think that the concepts of complex networks that I've gleaned so far from Morin and Sporns and of decalcomania that I've taken from Deleuze and Guattari lay two cornerstones for my emerging view of knowledge and learning.

First, complex networks suggest that knowledge is not a single thing, or single think (sorry, I couldn't resist, and I may yet edit this awful wordplay); rather, knowledge is a network of patterns enclosed by larger patterns and enclosing smaller patterns. Any given knowledge pattern is constantly open to the dynamic interactions of all those other various patterns on their various levels. This reinforces Morin's admonition that we define any entity—a cell or a word, say—not from its boundaries inward, but from its center outward. Or better yet, we should define a cell from its center both inward and outward. The center of the cell is not an endpoint of definition; rather, it is the starting point of definition, and to understand the cell, we must move from that center both outward to larger patterns and inward to smaller patterns. The cell must be understood as itself and as a part of an enclosing ecosystem and as an ecosystem for other entities, all dynamically interacting with each other, affecting each other and being affected by each other. Any given knowledge is like this cell: recognizable and addressable as itself, and yet not completely understood without consideration of its constituent parts and its ecosystem and of the ways that it interacts with both those micro and macro scales.

Thus, my knowledge of Connectivism is in fact a pattern of neurons, but that is just a starting point. Moving inward, that pattern of neurons encloses various patterns in different regions of the brain. Each of those patterns encloses individual neurons and individual electro-chemical processes, which enclose individual cells and electrical charges, which enclose other things, and other things, and other things, all the way down to quarks and strings, and maybe beyond that if we ever develop instruments that can see that far in. Back to our starting point and moving outward, the pattern of neurons that is my knowledge of Connectivism is enclosed by my conversation in MOOC CCK11 (among numerous other conversations I'm having—for instance, this blog), which is enclosed by an ecosystem of larger thought about education, which is enclosed by a larger system, and then a larger system, and then the entire Universe, and maybe beyond that if we ever develop instruments that can see that far out. To understand completely my knowledge of Connectivism, then, I must understand everything else.

This, of course, is absurd silliness. It is also our hope for the future. There is no end to learning anything, so we should never be bored. However, in the everyday discourse of common day, we simply can't let a single cell or bit of knowledge bleed into everything else in the Universe, even though it is quite literally connected to everything else in the Universe. A cell or an idea must in some useful way be recognizable and describable and must have potency in and of itself. How do we get out of this predicament?

Perhaps Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler have an answer for us in their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (2009). In describing how social networks work, they note that the influence of people extends out to about three degrees of separation. In other words, the patterns of our own lives influence our friends, our friends' friends, and our friends' friends' friends. After that, the potency of our patterns of behavior and belief fade and lose their efficacy. Perhaps some mechanism similar to this is at work among the various levels of patterns of any given entity. What do I mean?

Well, consider my knowledge of Connectivism as a single cell. My knowledge is still a recognizable entity with some potency within the context of this blog, though this blog also discusses other things. My knowledge is still recognizable and potent within the context of MOOC CCK11 and the larger discussion about Connectivism, but I think you an begin to see that my unique knowledge is beginning to fade in this larger conversation as it joins to and is overwhelmed by more voices and stronger voices. As my voice moves into a choir, my own unique tone and tenor becomes blended and a different voice emerges, a group voice. Connectivism means something different at this scale. Though my own meaning may still be recognizable, at two or three degrees removed from my single voice—my single understanding—the unique pattern of my knowledge begins to fade into the wider pattern of the general conversation about Connectivism. When we move up to a larger choir—the discussion of education in general—then my voice is quite lost, its identity and potency subsumed by and faded into the cacophony of voices. There are still a few voices potent and identifiable at this scale—Dewey, Piaget, Bloom, etc.—but most voices have long since drowned.

Thus, while I can trace the connections of my single knowledge about Connectivism to infinity and back (assuming I have the time, patience, focus, tools, and skill set), it makes great sense day-to-day to speak of my knowledge of Connectivism as a unique, identifiable entity with its own potency and contours and center. Being an English scholar, I think this entity is something of a convenient fiction, but it makes life much easier to manage.

I'll talk next post about decalcomania.