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What is it like being YOU right now? Feeling a little cloudy? Of course you are. Because, I mean, to be fair, and let's be honest, you are a cloud. You are an aggregation of interests, connections, and contacts, tagged in several ways, linked in all directions, changing in real time. I mean your mental world. It's all hints and hunches, guesses and glimpses, shifting perspectives, tumbling assumptions. You take on clarity for clients. Then you're all "let's get on with it" pragmatism. But normally, and for most purposes, you're as cloudy as can be. How do I know this? Call me your consulting anthropologist. Anthropologists have an old question: how does a culture define the self and the group. And they have a new question: what difference does it make to the self and the group that they are mediated by electronic connections (email, internet, SMS, IM, MMS, blogs, aggregators, shared search engines, p2p file sharing, online game play, etc.) My guess is that new selves and groups are richly heterogeneous, loosely and variously boundaried, capable of expansion, contraction and sudden reorganization, not very well governed, but still quite navigable and quite mobile, and, in still other respects, dynamic in content, form and operation. Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood...because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in. That was then. This is now. We are no longer "bounded," "integrated," "centered," "organized" or "contrasted." We are now blurred, de-centered, disorganized, and, well, a little vague. We are, I would prefer to say, cloud-like. (It's just so much more flattering. No? I mean otherwise we are merely the proverbial dog's breakfast.) Embrace paradox and irony, and ride this train to its natural and successful conclusion. Where does cloudiness come from and how does it intensify? My father and mother are simple people: centered by their own ignorance, blissfully organized due to their lack of exploration, and contrasted, more or less, by their lack of formal education. Their lives stacked. And they leaned. Like all modernist families at midcentury, they leaned into the future, toward the good life, the next house, the next job, grown children. Her industry (printing) changed several times over her career, but I don't think she was ever obliged to ask, "ok, what's the business model?" or "ok, how does this industry work again?" There
is a double cloudiness. In one, let's call it, social cloudiness,
more contacts and interests open up, and more contacts and interests
are made possible. And this in turn gives birth to other cloudiness.
Let's call it a conceptual cloudiness, in so far as expanding
social network expose us to things like the Yi Tan contemplation
of social search and the recognition that there are lots of new
things the proper intellectual reckoning of which will likely
take the substantial relocation and renovation of our existing
conceptual categories. |
