Re: nettime: Re: Nettime:organizing diversity

[Jon Lebkowsky <jonl@well.com>]

At 10:06 PM 9/27/96 -0700, Hank Bull wrote:

>The message of this example -- that healthy margins lead to healthy 
>mainstreams -- can be carried over to the cultural domain. The metaphor of 
>the "littoral", or tidal beach, has been used by Projects Environment 
>(Salford, England) to describe the process of transformation and evolution 
>that exists in the zone between art and society. This is similar to the 
>evolutionary and mathemaical language adopted by Stark and Grabher. It is an 
>interdisciplinary approach that I find aesthetically quite appealing. 
>Thank-you Diane McCarty.

I've worked with this concept before, even started a business based on 
fringe memetics, but the cultural ethos fairly swarms with strange
attractors such that it's difficult to predict how the cultural margins
will feed the 'health' of the mainstream.

>I have a question, however, regarding the title: Organizing Diversity. Who 
>will do the organizing? Is the inherent contradiction (like organizing 
>chaos) intended? Is it not one of the essential qualities, and advantages, 
>of diversity that it cannot be organized?

Not necessarily: an organized system is not inherently monocultural, however
it's
more *difficult* to organize diverse elements because their edges don't quite
meet.  How ya do it is that you change your expectations that edges must all
meet
for organizations to work. Rewrite the specs, so to speak.

jonl

--
Jon Lebkowsky <jonl@hotwired.com>  FAX (512)444-2693  http://www.well.com/~jonl
Electronic Frontiers Forum, 6PM PDT Thursdays     <http://www.hotwired.com/eff>
"No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."--Saul Alinsky

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