Towards an imaginative reframing of blame game dynamics through animation

Collective Mea Culpa? You Must be Joking! (Part #6)

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Although there are numerous images depicting the blame game most focus only on aspects of finger-pointing between two individuals. This is surprising in that the blame game can readily be understood as a feature of a network society enabled by social media. Although relatively little effort is made to analyze and depict social networks, despite the insights of social network analysis, much connectivity is of course registered in the individual and collective profiles held by such media -- notably Facebook and Linkedin. Typically however, as with Twitter, these focus only on "following" with its implications for an "appreciation-game".

Missing is the connectivity associated with deprecation and blame, as evident in traces on the web of "Arsebook", indicated to be "an anti-social network that connects you with the people you hate". Such connectivity would hold the finger-pointing of the blame game. As with the current capacity to provide maps of social networks, this connectivity could provide a complementary "shadow map" which would enable the ambiguity of the "appreciation-blame game" to be better understood in systemic terms -- especially that relating to collectivities. Rather than being limited to "following" links, this would include "deprecating" links or "blaming" links. In opinion survey and political terms these effectively correspond to negative appreciation and what may well remain dangerously unsaid (Global Strategic Implications of the "Unsaid", 2003).

The following animation is an experiment in imagining how "blame-game" dynamics might be depicted in relation to "appreciation-game" dynamics. The purpose of the animation is to highlight the emergence of underlying patterns in the complementary networks which might offer insights into a higher order level of coherence transcending the dynamics of mutual blame and appreciation. It follows from previous arguments (Polyhedral Empowerment of Networks through Symmetry: psycho-social implications for organization and global governance, 2008).

Experimental animation reframing global blame game dynamics (inviting interpretation of contrasting colours and emergent patterns)

Using alternative colours, rather than directional arrows, the animation includes a sense of rings of mutual appreciation and deprecation. The animation suggests the possibility that, once recognized, vicious cycles of blame might be fruitfully "encycled" in relation to the so-called wicked problems evoking blame -- most notably for the inadequacy of remedial action.

In the quest for new metaphors through which to reframe the blame game, there is a case for considering the errors and problems by which it is engendered as being planetary "diseases" (Cognitive Implications of Lifestyle Diseases of Rich and Poor, 2010). The blame game could then be understood as a form of planetary epidemic -- even a pandemic. This metaphor draws attention to the strange correspondence between the icosahedral ordering of both psychosocial mega-problems and of the micro-problems constituted by viruses.

Inspired by biomimicry, this suggests the value of exploring virology as offering a "pattern language" with regard to antigens and antibodies as these might apply to the operation of possible "viral antigens"that could be developed to constrain wicked problems, as discussed separately (Encycling Wickidity in the Light of Polyhedral Viruses and their Mutation, 2015). Curiously, as noted there, the emerging discipline of mathematical virology may offer a new approach to exploring the problematic network dynamics of the blame game.

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