Fragments

• microworlds - spaces an audience can inhabit, in which they can explore, test and discover (Papert)
• indwelling - sharing tacit knowledge and awareness, adaptive and embodied practices (Polanyi)
• field configuring event - bounded interactions as temporary arenas for innovation/learning, with outsize effect on the fields or environments in which the events are embedded (Lampel/Meyer)
• emplotment - making sense of something through a process of contextualization and editing; connecting information in narrative structure to explain not the "what" but the "why" behind your work
• embedded intelligence - quality that can make objects, spaces, creations (etc.) generative, responsive, and built around systems that are able to adapt and learn
• distant reading - analyzing large databases/archives from a wide perspective (Moretti)
• antifragility - term for things that go beyond resilience and actually have the capacity to grow stronger in the face of unknowns, chance variations, etc... (Taleb)
• ambient social networking - TK
• autopoiesis - term that refers to a closed system capable of creating itself (has to do with the nature of reflexive feedback mechanisms in living systems)…created to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells
• "neurodiversity" - way of rethinking so-called disorders like autism, ADHD, etc. - cool idea
• hyperemployment - accumulation of tacit unpaid jobs technology foists upon us, many tiny things every day...:
• pataphysics - a philosophy or media theory dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics; "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments"
• technium - the society or ecosystem of many individual technologies taken together; an ecology of technological species...a superorganism of technology...the 7th kingdom of life? (Kevin Kelly)

Bohm dialogue

A freely-flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone's point of view fully, equally and nonjudgementally...aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively

Principles of Dialogue:

1. The group agrees that no group-level decisions will be made in the conversation
2. Each individual agrees to suspend judgement in the conversation
3. As these individuals "suspend judgement" they also simultaneously are as honest and transparent as possible
4. Individuals in the conversation try to build on other individuals' ideas in the conversation

Experience:

Twenty to forty participants sit in a circle and engage in free-flowing conversation. A dialogue typically goes on for a few hours (or for a few days in a workshop environment)...

In such a dialogue, when one person says something, the other person does not, in general, respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the 2nd person replies, the 1st person sees a Difference between what he meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, he may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to his own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together. (from On Dialogue)

From David Bohm's Dialogue Proposal:

Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring. It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise.

Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning - not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.

Dialogue is concerned with providing a space within which such attention can be given. It allows a display of thought and meaning that makespossible a kind of collective proprioception or immediate mirroring back of both the content of thought and the less apparent, dynamic structures that govern it. In Dialogue this can be experienced both individually and collectively. Each listener is able to reflect back to each speaker, and to the rest of the group, a view of some of the assumptions and unspoken implications of what is being expressed along with that which is being avoided. It creates the opportunity for each participant to examine the preconceptions, prejudices and the characteristic patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs and feelings, along with the roles he or she tends habitually to play. And it offers an opportunity to share these insights.

As a microcosm of the large culture, Dialogue allows a wide spectrum of possible relationships to be revealed. It can disclose the impact of society on the individual and the individual's impact on society. It can display how power is assumed or given away and how pervasive are the generally unnoticed rules of the system that constitutes our culture. But it is most deeply concerned with understanding the dynamics of how thought conceives such connections.

It is not concerned with deliberately trying to alter or change behavior nor to get the participants to move toward a predetermined goal. Any such attempt would distort and obscure the processes that the Dialogue has set out to explore. Nevertheless, changes do occur because observed thought behaves differently from unobserved thought. Dialogue can thus become an opportunity for thought and feeling to play freely in a continuously of deeper or more general meaning. Any subject can be included and no content is excluded. Such an activity is very rare in our culture.

Participants find that they are involved in an ever changing and developing pool of common meaning. A shared content of consciousness emerges which allows a level of creativity and insight that is not generally available to individuals or to groups that interact in more familiar ways. This reveals an aspect of Dialogue that Patrick de Mare has called koinonia, a word meaning "impersonal fellowship", which was originally used to describe the early form of Athenian democracy in which all the free men of the city gathered to govern themselves.

So far we have been primarily discussing Dialogues that bring together individuals from a variety of backgrounds rather than from existing organizations. But its value may also be perceived by members of an organization as a way of increasing and enriching their own corporate creativity.

In this case the process of Dialogue will change considerably. Members of an existing organization will have already developed a number of different sorts of relationship between one another and with their organization as a whole. here may be a pre-existing hierarchy or a felt need to protect one's colleagues, team or department. There may be a fear of expressing thoughts that might be seen as critical of those who are higher in the organization or of norms within the organizational culture. Careers or the social acceptance of individual members might appear to be threatened by participation in a process that emphasizes transparency, openness, honesty, spontaneity, and the sort of deep interest in others that can draw out areas of vulnerability that may long have been kept hidden.

The creative potential of Dialogue is great enough to allow a temporary suspension of any of the structures and relationships that go to make up an organization.

Semiotic domains

Domains that recruit one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, and so forth) to communicate distinctive types of messages

Examples of semiotic domains: cellular biology, postmodern literary criticism, first-person shooter video games, advertisements, Roman Catholic theology, modernist painting, midwifery...

Multimodality

An inter-disciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to be more than about language... Multimodal approaches have provided concepts, methods and a framework for the collection and analysis of visual, aural, embodied, and spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and the relationships between these.

Three interconnected theoretical assumptions underpin multimodality.

First, multimodality assumes that representation and communication always draw on a multiplicity of modes, all of which contribute to meaning. It focuses on analyzing and describing the full repertoire of meaning-making resources that people use (visual, spoken, gestural, written, three-dimensional, and others, depending on the domain of representation) in different contexts, and on developing means that show how these are organized to make meaning.

Second, multimodality assumes that resources are socially shaped over time to become meaning making resources that articulate the (social, individual/affective) meanings demanded by the requirements of different communities. These organized sets of semiotic resources for making meaning are referred to as modes which realize communicative work in distinct ways – making the choice of mode a central aspect of interaction and meaning. The more a set of resources has been used in the social life of a particular community, the more fully and finely articulated it will have become. In order for something to ‘be a mode’ there needs to be a shared cultural sense within a community of a set of resources and how these can be organized to realize meaning.

Third, people orchestrate meaning through their selection and configuration of modes, foregrounding the significance of the interaction between modes. Thus all communicational acts are shaped by the norms and rules operating at the moment of sign making, and influenced by the motivations and interests of people in a specific social context.

In its most basic sense, multimodality is the mixture of textual, audio, and visual modes in combination with media and materiality to create meaning.[1] Where media are concerned, multimodality is the use of several modes (media) to create a single artifact. The collection of these modes, or elements, contributes to how multimodality affects different rhetorical situations, or opportunities for increasing an audience's reception of an idea or concept. Everything from the placement of images to the organization of the content creates meaning. This is the result of a shift from isolated text being relied on as the primary source of communication, to the image being utilized more frequently in the digital age.[2] While multimodality as an area of academic study did not gain traction until the twentieth century, all communication, literacy, and composing practices are and always have been multimodal. [3]

Although discussions of multimodality involve medium and mode, these two terms are not synonymous.

Mode

Gunther Kress's scholarship on multimodality is canonical in writing studies, and he defines mode in two ways. In the first, a mode “is a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning. Image, writing, layout, speech, moving images are examples of different modes.”[4] In the second, “semiotic modes, similarly, are shaped by both the intrinsic characteristics and potentialities of the medium and by the requirements, histories and values of societies and their cultures.” [5] Thus, every mode has a different modal resource, which is historically and culturally situated and which breaks it down into its parts, because “each has distinct potentials [and limitations] for meaning.”[6] For example, breaking down writing into its modal resources would be syntactic, grammatical, lexical resources and graphic resources. Graphic resources can be broken down into font size, type, etc. These resources are not deterministic, however. In Kress’s theory, “mode is meaningful: it is shaped by and carries the ‘deep’ ontological and historical/social orientations of a society and its cultures with it into every sign. Mode names the material resources shaped in often long histories of social endeavor.”[7] Modes shape and are shaped by the systems in which they participate.

Medium

A medium is the substance in which meaning is realized and through which it becomes available to others. Mediums include video, image, text, audio, etc. Socially, medium includes semiotic, sociocultural, and technological practices such as film, newspaper, a billboard, radio, television, theater, a classroom, etc. Multimodality makes use of the electronic medium by creating digital modes with the interlacing of image, writing, layout, speech, and video. Mediums have become modes of delivery that take the current and future contexts into consideration.

Because multimodality is continually evolving from a solely print-based to a screen-based presentation, the speaker and audience relationship evolves as well. Due to the growing presence of digital media over the last decade, the central mode of representation is no longer just text; recently, the use of imagery has become more prominent. In its current use for Internet and network-based composition, the term “multimodality” has become even more prevalent, applying to various forms of text such as fine art, literature, social media and advertising. An important related term to multimodality is multiliteracy, which is the comprehension of different modes in communication – not only to read text, but also to read other modes such as sound and image. Whether and how a message is understood is accredited to multiliteracy.

Spime

A neologism for a currently theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout its lifetime

Six facets of spimes:

1. Small, inexpensive means of remotely and uniquely identifying objects over short ranges; for example radio-frequency identification.
2. A mechanism to precisely locate something on Earth, such as a global-positioning system.
3. A way to mine large amounts of data for things that match some given criteria, like internet search engines.
4. Tools to virtually construct nearly any kind of object; computer-aided design.
5. Ways to rapidly prototype virtual objects into real ones. Sophisticated, automated fabrication of a specification for an object, through “three-dimensional printers.”
6. "Cradle-to-cradle" life-spans for objects. Cheap, effective recycling.

Hypergame

Cliodynamics