Meeting 3 Notes

Co-ordinator = Roger Harnden

PARTICIPANTS

• The development of ICT has changed the nature of what we consider nature. If you want to study the nature of nature you have two extremes: You can summarise on each of the elements of nature, its history; or you can only identify its interactions with other elements. This second approach has been reinforced by the development of ICT.
• In this sense we can say that the original nature of nature is disappearing (deconstructing).

CRITICS

• I wonder if you give this same topic about nature to a group of artist, what would they come up with? Probably en exhibition of artefacts representing their understanding of nature?
• Where is the variety in your approach?
• At some point you have as a starting point of nature a reflection of previous technologies, has this been lost in your discussion?
• What are you going to do as a group? Where are you going? It doesn't have to be a single output.

PARTICIPANTS

• We are talking about nature as it is seen by ("taking") scientists.
• If we consider natural scientists at one extreme and artificial intelligence-type people at the other we can say that sociologists lie in between. For me sociology is the linking pin between, on the one hand, the communicative environment which can be informed by the ICT and on the other hand the human environment which can be informed, for example, by verbal experiences. 
• We are interesting in the development of the science of society and not in the science of ICT and the science of society based on the human elements in their environment including their bodies.
• Why reality is important? If people are real (which they are) living in an environment, which is there, then I care about their lives. That to me is reality.
  Instead of taking about the nature of nature we could talk about the nature of reality.
• I think that if we want to study the influence of ICT we have to see that it is mediated through communication and in these communications the people participate as interactors and the domain in which we are interested is not how they themselves function but how they function as interactors. How they function is the domain of psychology.
• We have bracketed the whole philosophical question about whether or not ICT reconstruct the natural world. But giving this as a premise, we are asking now in what possible ways new technologies can reconstruct our natural world, so we are searching for a concrete, coherent story of how this take place. 
• We have said that what nature provides is a relatively stable informer of a more aesthetic sense in the human beings. This could be the backdrop to our project.