[PEN-L:29424] Re: Max Elbaum To Speak In Sacramento On SocialMovement...

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
Well Melvin, I thought you had some interesting things to add about your
history as well as your understanding of what sectarianism is.   I picked up
on one single little sentence to hang my thoughts on,

Melvin

Rather, I have encountered the group dynamic from the standpoint of an art
form riveted to mediation. In this sense a moderator is one who have
developed the art (and probably science) of mediation.

...

Doyle

Well a moderator can mediate between people, but I wouldn't say the same
thing with online moderators as I would in flesh and blood moderators that I
don't see online moderators mediating between disputants much.  On the whole
they seem to uphold rules about how to contribute to the lists and seldom
enforce agreement.

What I would tend to wonder is how online methods of organizing people
really differs from how we do things face to face.  When you organize on the
shop floor in a factory, you have contact with other people in that space,
but not with outside people.  Organizing on line allows one to be in contact
with people very far away (anyone anywhere).  One could access information
from all over the world which suggests we have the means to internationalize
our workers social structures.

We have the opportunity to add information like photographs to the flow of
electronic information into our minds and perhaps adding other qualities
like emotional content (though emotions are still quite speculative as
content for communications tools).  This shaping of information to enhance
the meaning and content of what is being communicated tends to give
advantages to online means of communicating that people can't produce by
talking to each other.  We then would become dependent upon online tools for
communicating and creating social structure.  At the same time organizing
like this is not limited by space considerations.  Over time people will get
used to being never out of contact with whatever social group they are part
of.   That drastically alters the present atomized social framework.

If we are never out of contact then it would be much more important that our
social groups function better for us.  I mean that the anonymity of cities
will decline and so we would be compelled to have better solutions to the
frictions of contact between human beings.  I see this is as a left issue of
arguing for the social structure and quality of what Information Technology
can produce.

I'll give as an example a big peace march we had in our area a few months
back.  The march was in April. Everyone assembled in a local park and
listened to speakers from a platform.  In essence the crowd member is an
atom in a sea (20 to 30 thousand) of people.  But I could imagine with
suitable portable communications device that people might not tune in to the
central platform but into their group via their portable communications
tool.  That the group could be coordinating itself internally to the crowd
and acting as a group to interact with the whole crowd.  This could be done
by multiple groups facilitated by real contact and on line resources.  This
sort of choreographed interaction is not something I think anybody has
attempted before.  Social practices freely invented in such circumstances
could have profound impact upon many people at once.  There are obviously
many ways to think about such means of organizing.
thanks,

Doyle