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creativity commons

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A few of articles related to this topic are:
  • "Ethnographies of Co-Creation and Collaboration as Models of Creativity" by Penny Travlou
  • "Distributed Authorship and Creative Communities" by Simon Biggs and Penny Travlou
  • "Rizomatic Ethnographies", by Penny Travlou, in Remediating the Social
  • "Towards a Creativity Commons", by me
I will just briefly comment on what I think the ideas in the 3rd paper on the list above have to do with phatics.  Penny Travlou writes here about "processes of social formation" which I think speaks to our interests here while also restoring a "process" perspective; more on that below.  The research focuses on communities "assembling between physical and online spaces", or "in-between (and across) virtual and physical space."  To think about this in a Meadian way, the very idea of sociality is something that is always in between.  And to think in a Deleuze/Bergson way, maybe this virtual can be understood not just as "online" but as real-but-not-actualized, like attractors in chaos theory.   How far can we go with this sort of thinking?  Could we find creativity within text, within communities of symbols rather than people?  Is thinking this way necessarily de-humanizing, or is it merely "post-social" -- a word from Knorr Cetina that should suggest an expanded view on sociality, not its foreclosure.

The idea of emergent sprouting is what Deleuze and Guattari call "rhizome", often recycling Deleuze's earlier writings about "multiplicity."  I'm not sure how much they think of the rhizome as social in Mead's sense.  Ingold writes about a "meshwork" in, I think, a similar spirit.
As a (cultural) geographer, I am intrigued by the ways in which both rhizomes and meshworks open up new ways to conceptualise spatiality as bodily practice. --"Rizomatic Ethnographies"
This reminds me of the issue of process that I mentioned above.  Bateson talks about how language tends to speak in terms of objects, while necessarily-processual relationships are handled by non-language methods, between humans anyway.

Penny Travlou quotes five things that can be "followed" in such spaces, from George Marcus 1995: the artefact, the metaphor, the story, the life, and the conflict.  And she adds a sixth: "the rhizome [itself] wherein artefacts, metaphors, stories, lives and conflicts nest."  This is similar to the interpretation from Rasmus of the phatic-x layers.  The idea of following the rhizome as a "succession of detours" reminds me of Tristam Shandy, which is a spun yarn if ever there was one.

A couple example sites are discussed in the paper, not in a lot of detail but enough to make me interested: www.netbehaviour.org and www.make-shift.net.  The most intriguing example, I think is AOS [Art is Open Source] which emphasised "temporary community" rather than emphasizing building a longer-lasting network.  The evanescence is interesting.  Also intrigued by the theoretical ideas from Ingold, whose book Against Space: place, movement, knowledge I haven't read.

Comments

  1. SemiophrenicOctober 10, 2014 at 1:03 AM

    [quote]The research focuses on communities "assembling between physical and online spaces", or "in-between (and across) virtual and physical space." To think about this in a Meadian way, the very idea of sociality is something that is always in between. [/quote]
    // This is also how I think of phatics: the channel is "between persons", while the code is "inside persons" and message "outside persons". I wonder how this connection holds up in comparison between physical and online spaces. Computer mediated communication messes up my distinction between parachannel and metachannel, because almost all computer mediated communication is distinct or different from the speech-circuit (for instance, instead of a continuous stream of communication you have a discontinuous feed of messages (texts and hypertexts) with irregular intervals; and there is a constant possibility of a "backdoor" metachannel for Big Brother to check up on your computer mediated activities. But that's what digital culture studies is for (should look into that more).

    The good news is that there are a lot of phatic studies on social media and other online spaces. I'm considering reading some of these:
    * Wang, Victoria; John V. Tucker and Tracey E. Rihll 2011. On phatic technologies for creating and maintaining human relationships. Technology in Society 33(1): 44-51.
    * Lomborg, Stine 2012. Negotiating Privacy Through Phatic Communication: A Case Study of the Blogging Self. Philosophy & Technology 25(3): 415-434.
    * Schandorf, Michael 2013. Mediated gesture: Paralinguistic communication and phatic text. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19(3): 319-344.

    [quote]This reminds me of the issue of process that I mentioned above. Bateson talks about how language tends to speak in terms of objects, while necessarily-processual relationships are handled by non-language methods, between humans anyway. [/quote]
    // One lead which I haven't taken because it necessitates getting to know an old, rare and extremely complex books, like Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929). That stuff inspired nuggets like this:

    [quote]If this is the case an important question - perhaps the most important we have to face - is the exact location of sign. Precisely where is the event that is named when the name "sign" is applied? Sign is process that takes place only when organism and environment are in behavioral transaction. Its locus is the organism and the environment, inclusive of connecting air, electrical and light-wave processes, taken all together. It is these in the duration that is required for the event, and not in any fictive isolation apart from space, or from time, or from both. (Dewey, John & Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known, 1949: 146)[/quote]
    // Envorganism, right? I'm sure this stuff can be applied on phatics, which is all about interactions and transactions that connect persons with their own little circle of society (or group) and the rest of the larger society (or culture).

    [quote]And she adds a sixth: "the rhizome [itself] wherein artefacts, metaphors, stories, lives and conflicts nest." This is similar to the interpretation from Rasmus of the phatic-x layers.[/quote]
    // How so? What do you mean by "the phatic-x layers"?

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