Conclusion

Communication with Whom, about What, Where and Why? (Part #6)

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The challenge for the future remains one of engendering a new kind of "space" of discourse for essentially estranged perspectives. This goes beyond the simplistic conventional preoccupation of "facilitators" and therapists to create a "safe place". The estrangement is "charged" with an historical memory of abuse that appropriately recalls the abuse of archetypal "others". These have typically been betrayed by the development of conventional communication processes -- "successful" at their expense. It is the "success" of these processes that is now in question as evident in the degree of alienation and the violence which it is engendering, whether in the form of domestic violence, urban violence, ethnic violence, or the "clash of civilizations" -- all of which may be variously framed as "terrorism".

An interesting concrete initiative that has the potential of responding in many ways to the above challenges is web-enhanced crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business, 2008) -- through which insights are systematically gathered from society as a whole. Whereas this is currently envisaged to enable new commercial opportunities, it also has the potential of responding to the systemic inadequacies of the feedback processes identified above, especially if the primary focus is placed on insights and possibilities rather than on factual information. One global endeavour in this direction was the compilation of profiles of problems and remedial strategies, as conceived and proposed by international bodies of every kind, incorporated into an Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential.

A contrast might be usefully made with the preoccupations of security and intelligence-focused information systems (purportedly in response to potential terrorism) -- seeking, in their most extreme forms, total control of communication processes and the internet. Whereas this framing implicitly assumes that creative insight in society should be effectively restricted to those under contract to such authorities -- in a curious perversion of the Precautionary Principle -- as yet to be explored is the gathering and integration of insight in an open-source mode. Pointers in that direction are tagging systems (such as the social bookmarking of Delicious) and the capacity of search engines (such as Dogpile) to gather information via other search engines. The technical challenges lie in how best to gather, filter, interrelate and highlight disparate insights from the effectively marginalized, without further marginalizing them -- a realistic test being the future possibility of detecting the insights of those such as Srinivasa Ramanujan (Minding the Future: a thought experiment on presenting new information, 1980). Ironically the approach is analogous to that of a hypothetical transformation of the epitome of questionable intelligence gathering (From ECHELON to NOLEHCE: enabling a strategic conversion to a faith-based global brain, 2007).

The space -- however it may be articulated with mathematical insight into hyper-reality -- is the formal context for the postformal pattern of relationships required for the emerging knowledge society. What is now understood as "violence" will presumably be integrated into the fabric of this space as a necessarily "unusual" or "extraordinary" mode of existential relationship -- however "terrifying". A fruitful metaphor descriptive of this global communication space might be found in present familiarity with daily portrayals of "global weather"and the supporting infrastructure through which it is updated -- reframed however (through the pun) as "global whether", indicative of the dynamics of the psychosocial decision-making conflicts that are currently only evident through their local symptoms.

In this light, the above articulation therefore constitutes one reflection of current inadequacy: a relatively lengthy text, conventionally structured with bullet points. This very structure fails to reflect the clues noted -- which point onward -- therefore rendering the articulation suspect according to its own terms. Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the communication issues highlighted intimate the existence of a more comprehensive framework. This might indeed be understood as some paradoxical topology like the Klein bottle -- where the paradox exemplifies the challenge to conventional simplistic thinking. However, through failure to comprehend the pattern that connects the communication issues will continue to be engendered and sustained. It can only be surmised that, from a future perspective, present communication styles will be seen as analogous to the cumbersomeness deprecated in prehistoric fauna.

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