Meeting 2 Notes

Co-ordinator = Roger Harnden

PARTICIPANTS

• Can we start now by taking ICT to understand the new technologies and their relation with nature?
• What I think is most important about ICT is that it make us reflexively aware that there is always culture between ICT and nature. Although we have always being transforming nature using culture we have never being so directly confronted with doing this than now with the use of ICT.
• I think that ICT transform nature in making it more complex. Nature used to be very simple but nowadays with all this atoms, molecules, forces and so on has become extremely complex.
• In terms of complexity, however, it seems important to differentiate different layers of explanation regarding nature. We could identify a cosmological layer, a physical layer, a communication layer and so on.
• ICT makes more clear that in social sciences we always have this room to maneuver in some parameters (e.g., the number of people, the speed of communication) which we did not have in the natural sciences. In social sciences it matters how we correctly communicate its findings and ideas whereas in natural sciences this really doesn't matter. 
• In natural sciences we always have this idea of progress of movement forward but in social sciences we have a sense of feeding back. We are not "moving forward", we are "feeding back". Therefore we have at the same time an arrow moving forward (in the natural sciences) and an arrow moving backwards (in the social sciences) and all kinds of interactions can happen. The arrow moving backwards is the arrow of communications giving meaning to our world. The arrow that moves forward also gives meaning to the worlds but it can be assessed only at a meta-level. In this moving space we expect to reach some sort of stability.

CRITICS

• I think you have to distinguish in your discussion between natural and inevitable.
• You mentioned that nature is becoming more complex, could be not the case that we are becoming more aware of nature's complexity and so the problem is with our cognitive capacity? Complexity comes from us being overwhelmed by information.
• Could you reflect more precisely on how the "new" technologies "reconstruct" our natural world?
• Two quotes come to my mind from your discussion. One is Beer's saying that peer ignorance is one of our greatest variety attenuators, so to what extend ICT is helping us to be less ignorant in what happen in the world. The other one is from Luhmann that say that we cannot communicate with the environment but we can only communicate about it.
• I go to nature as a way to escape from the ICT world. It gives me something at the physical level that I cannot find through technology. Perhaps this is an issue that you may want to consider into your discussion.

PARTICIPANTS

• Regarding the second comment from the critiques, let us notice that we are saying here that complexity is not the outcome of overloading information that comes from outside. Instead, we are saying that is the outcome of a mutual dance between us an the world around us. ICT is helping us to realise this dance.
• I think that the comments from the critics actually imply that there is something out there which is not human and that we perceive it. In Beer´s quotation the emphasis used was on ignorance, my emphasis is on attenuation, in other words, I know how to ignore and that is precisely my constructive possibility. ICTs allow me to make constructions of nature. When I am IN nature it is my construction and therefore I can change it.
• There is no question in my mind whether or not we simply have perceptions OF something but we have also the possibility of constructing backwards and forwards all the time what we include in our perceptions and what we don't.
• We do have different vocabularies, different languages of discussion, and one of them is always trying to make the meaning of what we are saying in communication unique. We live in communications but also in a sense that we can always step out and ICT facilitates that this stepping out can happen.
• When we are in nature, we do not communicate with it. Whereas when we are in cities and with other people we live in communications with them. It seems that ICT comes into play only in the second type of relations.
• ICT has a tendency to concentrate on that which we can observe, even if it is in a textual form it is our observational reports which we present. We do not transmit yet in ICT smell and touch and many other things that have been discussed in one of the other groups.
• This is, of course, changing. Nowadays we are being able to communicate values and do economical exchanges through ICT that could not being done before and that is why the role of ICT is so important now. The point is that until now ICT had being regarded as similar to the first motorcars. Now we see that ICT is proliferating and functionally differentiating itself and creating a different wealth of the senses.
• It seems important to note the difference between what we experience as a human being and what we can actually culturally communicate. This difference is still in place even with modern ICT. We still cannot fully sense, for instance, by looking at images of a war battle in a TV set what we may experience if we were observers being physically present on the same actions. Giving us control over that differentiation could be a good point for ICT development.
• We have move forward to see that there are different types of discourses. We are in a transient from one type of discourse to the other, from the modernist to the postmodernist one. ICT is much on the track of the postmodernist discourse by giving us much information to reconstruct the modernist discourse.