ECO/HOL = Hypernet of Sems / Nested levels of higher Organization.
Other than books, have we abandoned any attempt to represent holarchical organization? Has our fixation with exchange technology flattened our semiotic reality?

How is our “Knowledge of  Worlds” organized, and is that organizational pattern changing significantly?  Or, might we be talking about our “Worlds of Knowledge”?

I compose in rather long docs, as it is a “pattern of ideas” I wish to share, not just an “idea as thing”. Of course, with our sloppy language, we will call a “pattern of ideas” an “idea”, generating confusion.  Good and intelligent persons report “looking” at a post (or even a whole website) and respond as if the “whole thing” was but a “thing” without detail or structure. Others ask “What is the POINT you are trying to make?”, as if there was but ONE idea, a singular “meme”.  Persons are more and more attempting to reduce knowledge to information.  A bit of info is like an object to be perceived, identified , and evaluated at a single glance. It is like looking at each item in a rich landscape, one at a time, and never noticing even the existence of the landscape. Instead, each attentive percept is categorized and boxed away in the perceiver’s inner worldview.

•     Propaganda (paraphrasing Jacques Ellul) is when a categorical organizing system is imposed (conditioned) by external forces and the person also blocked from learning-to-learn to create by experimentation their own organizing system.  Ellul also hypothesized that experts and the already educated are most prone to propaganda.  Disciplines employ “discipline” (following Michel Foucault) where the organizational structure of the discipline is the core of instruction, which become solidified through practice leading to expertise. Then, in collective arrogance that they created their expertise assume that they “know” what goes on in other domains outside their own narrow discipline.
•     I wonder whether those who have NOT benefited from the discipline of formal education and practice-to-expertise are any less “propagandized”. Enculturation  accomplishes the same, and may be just another name for the same process.  Indeed, as a theme in this whole collection of sems, I speculate that we grossly overestimate our own agency/conbribution into the making-of-ourselves and grossly underestimate the influence of encounters with others (places and persons). I am not positing Nurture over Nature, but calling for a deep reexamination of both the “nature” of Nature and Nurture AND of their interaction in the emergence of our unique phenotypes from our personal genotype.

I don’t read, let alone study, every doc that I encounter. Who can, we must be selective – but what are the appropriate competencies for practicing selectivity. What I have learned to be sensitive to is the complexity, scope, and potential relevance of what is behind the brief images I explore. I continually seek gateways to doc-systems that are either more comprehensive than mine, or which will be “cousins” rather than “components” of my own emergent reality. For most I recognize the significance of the detail behind what I view and sometimes sense what potentials are there – but those details are not relevant to the “larger” schemes I am working with. I am pleased to see that this detail is being attended to, as neither I nor anyone else can attend to everything relevant.  This contributes to my IGNORANCE [positive knowing OF what I don’t yet know or comprehend, or can’t yet do or appreciate.], the context of my knowledge.  I will also explore deeper if I sense a useful analog or metaphor.

Recently I am faced with the reality that I need to learn to be far more selective.  Too many hours are being devoted to exploring and even commenting on posts that are interesting but don’t really contribute to what I feel I must be doing.

I realize that this must be how many of my longer docs are viewed by those who encounter my docs. Most people are selective to information and knowledge that will be useful for them in working on their demanding and time-consuming projects.  To accomplish what they have they have already learned to be selective to attend to only what they sense will be useful.  They will deliberately avoid any deep engagement with ideas that may expand the contexts of their projects and which may lead them to re-examine details of their project – possibly even to reform their objectives.

Unfortunately, this is what my work intends to inform: none of us IMHO are now doing, even collectively and distributively, what needs doing. The sad “fact” is that time and attention, with a new attitude towards self and change, are required to anyone to divert valuable time and effort to explore what appears to be a “fantasy pipe dream”. Nor do I pretend to provide a clear and compressive path of action; although I am very concrete (if one digs down) making suggestions for many new types of actions – including the action of renewed, significant learning and development.

The shift of media preference to short bits organized only in a network of categories or tags makes sharing of larger organizational schemes and scenarios extremely difficult.  Searching involves  hopping from sem to sem (or collecting too many sems linked to a common term) – seldom revealing the PATTERNS woven among the sems.  As I have discussed elsewhere, the almost total abandonment of outliner apps for both creation and study; replaced by the network structures of hypertext, structurally excludes holarchical organization of conceptual schemes.

In spite of the talented action of many in seeking a way out of this problem by use of VISUAL MAPS, I find that effort insufficient – at least for myself. I don’t find the pattern in visual displays usefully representative of the deeper pattern that connects the concepts represented by the different icon/nodes in the displays.  I speculate that the pattern I desire to share can’t be represented by a static visual.  The utility I find in these visual maps is that of a map – being explicit about all the sites to visit and some of the better recommended paths to take between sites.  Some relationships between sites can be indicated by the maps.

•         If the core patterns of useful conceptual schemes and scenarios is temporal, how can they be shared and collaboratively enjoined?  The non-linear relationships between the nodes implies that the temporal pattern can’t be represented by any single set of static patterns.
•         What I sense, in a crude way, as to how teams might function in this situation.  With multiple maps, and structured systems of sems (beyond the network) persons interact with each other in depth, as they explore all of the initial structured system of sems (modifying and expanding it) until they co-produce a “scheme of action” that cannot be directly deduced from the prior semiotic structure.  Their collective new direction will be truly emergent.

•             This is analogous to the trend of symbolic systems to go AfterMath – large computer systems process mega-data and produce “solutions” which CANNOT BE LOGICALLY DEDUCED from the computational procedure  This trend is causing great consternation among those who cut their teeth on explicit mathematical functional expressions representing reality, with those functional expressions incapable of being consistently deduced from basics.

•         I deeply believe we will need many more visualization tools and techniques, but not in the belief that visualization will be a sufficient process.  Indeed, we need to be open to investigate how a dependency of visualization may be a handicap and a barrier to advancement that would better integrate visuals and visualization with other processes and modalities.
  •             This is NOT an attack or criticism of visualization. ALL tools and techniques, ALL modes of activity have their pros and cons.