Meeting 1 Notes

Co-ordinator = Patrick Humphreys

PARTICIPANTS

• To begin with we can ask if we have an example of any emerging form that we could identify.
• Hierarchical relationships that emerge in some organisations as an outcome of people recurrent interactions mediated through power differences could be an example.
• In a sense the form could be the ambiguity that is built into a system. It is about the interactions and different types of communicating which have certain forms in it. 
• These forms we are taking about, whenever they emerge do produce certain properties that are not in the components themselves, some emergent properties. 
• This syntegration process for instance is based on the assumption that by enabling and sustaining certain forms of communication supported by ICT people may achieve better results. This is new; we do not have something similar to syntegration in the 50s.
• It is clear that if we gather a group of people in interaction most of the time we will not observe an emergent pattern. We can envisage that only under certain very specific conditions this emergence happens, so we can ask ourselves how can we recognise those forms of interactions that may produce emergent properties.
• It is also interesting to see which forms generate those interactions.
• Showing and telling is a good example of a way to generate different forms of interaction. We can enhance these forms of interaction with ICT as we did in the case of the project carried out in Peru with adolescents. The emergence of synergy in that case depended much of the quality of the communications produced. This quality includes having appropriate things to communicate, having the appropriate resources to do it and having the skills to master these resources. Finding the appropriate technology may include cost and effect analysis and we could start the process with some technology trying to anticipate that in the near future people will move to using a different technology. In the case of the project in Peru, for instance, moving from the use of videos to the use of Internet.
• Can we recognise in that particular example a co-evolution between the particular technological infrastructure being in placed and the social processes developed?
• Can we predict (anticipate) the emergent properties that may come up from introducing a particular technology in the communications of a community? Is it possible that we can anticipate some of these consequences but other just may happen unintentionally?

CRITICS

• I like the difference you mentioned between the patterns of the Irish dancing and the bumping of the British dancing.
• I think it could be worth to explore more the example of hierarchical patterns because nowadays with the use of technology (like the Internet) is very difficult that those forms of interaction can be maintained; they have been eroded. Today there are many more forms of communication through the use of ICT than before.
• There is a clear difficulty in identifying the forms you are talking about and perhaps one of the questions to be considered is if those forms have identity in the first place.
• I think you are seeing a connection between the social structure of a community and its communications structure enable by ICT. Can you explore more on this?
• One final question, do those forms you are looking for have something to do with the construction of meanings or is a sense of senseless that is emerging. 
• I think that any social organisation is a co-evolution of the social processes and the ways they communicate. What is changing now is the democratisation of information. I have the feeling that you are putting too much attention to the detail in the discussion and missing the broader picture.
• May I suggest as a method for approaching your topic first to recognised what emergence forms are, then make conjunctions about them, then try to identified them, then to measure it and then see if you were right.

PARTICIPANTS

• I think that because identifying these emergent forms is so difficult it is a better methodological approach to start by identifying particular issues in communities, probably based on strong stories, instead of starting at a more general abstract level.
• We should be thinking of the two processes at the same time: ICT processes and social processes. To take one of the examples mentioned by the critics, it is not the tribe that is actually providing a form, an ICT form. I think there is a special form to be considered here and it is the stepping out of the Tribe because you have access to the ICT. A question that arises is then the following: do we need rich forms of stepping out or we need multiple poor forms.
• To expand of the idea of rich and poor form of communication we can see that usually girls use rich forms of language while boys use multiple poor forms. For instance, when boys are taking about fishing they are taking just about fishing and nothing else. When girls are taking about fishing they are also taking about having births, chasing husbands, etc.
• We have a circular process here. It is these components interactions that create some forms and these forms generate some emergent properties which feedback onto the components that respond by creating new forms of interaction or preserving the previous ones.
• In hierarchical organisations, the relationships formed depend on the way individuals in that organisation accept to interact with each other. It is in these day to day relations that possible new organisational forms could emerge. Therefore, it is interesting to explore the role of ICT in these two-way interactions. Can new ICT allow new forms of interaction that increases the chances to have new forms of organisations? If that is the case we can use ICT in a more purposeful way to generate new forms of social collectives.
• Notice, however that ICT and hierarchical organisations are opposed because ICT induces multiple poor languages, which are opposed to this kind of organisation. A hierarchy uses a single language.
• What do we have to do to identify these forms? One procedure we can follow is to look for particular instances, rather than definitions, and then improve on the informativeness of the instances such that becomes infinitely informative.