Outcome Resolve

Co-ordinator = Roger Harnden

The development of ICT changes our understanding of the nature of nature. This is part of an inexorable historical trend related to the braiding of humanity and the natural order, mediated by the ongoing development of language, culture and technology.

A working assumption of the group is that ICT's might have an intrinsic tendency to alter such a trend in a particular direction.

For studying nature (constructing a narrative, developing the tools and technologies that realise the narrative in recurrent co-ordinations of actions, leading to new narratives, the development of new tools and technologies that realise...), we might describe two extremes of approach:

1. the historical approach - a study of the history of some identified phenomenon;
2. the systemic approach - a study of the interaction of a phenomenon with other related phenomena.

We have decided to take a concrete example, the element iron (Fe), and consider it in the light of these two extremes.

Our initial hypothesis is that the emergence of ICT's might have a tendency to move understanding in the systemic direction.

We expect various issues to surface that echo some of the concerns expressed by other streams during this event: 

• the western over-reliance on the observational and textual
• the dominance of the historical and causal at the expense of the systemic

It is suggested that an intrinsic potential of ICT's is for bringing forth a new 'space of expression', with the particular properties of:

• incorporating sense data other than text, and 
• 'widening the here and now' (in terms of making the dimension of interactivity more visible).

It is further proposed to generalise the concrete example of the element Fe, in reflecting upon the paradigm shift from an industrial to information age that is characterised by the emergence of a 'technosphere' - a global, universally accessed digital communication infrastructure.

Once more, in line with some of the other discussions in this forum, we suggest that such a development not only changes our understanding of the nature of nature, but has the interesting property of supporting and perhaps encouraging differentiation of individual actors.