On Mar 12, 2006, at 12:37 PM, Les Schaffer wrote:
what do you make of this?:
Doyle, Precisely what drives my view. If you look at the big corporations they want to manage 'knowledge' because there are many social network issues in production. Frankly, they have to build tools socialist need to construct a very large scale socialist society. They have to solve the bottleneck of face to face social structure networks. On a large scale Bush attacks Iraq irregardless of social structure built up on face to face social networks. The Bushies are happy with the social chaos, and the fight back from Iraqis uses traditional social network production against the occupation. And despite the enormous technological advantage the social networks prevail. Which actively demonstrates the U.S. tools don't function to produce social network knowledge. And also how genuinely powerful social network knowledge can be. It's the irreversible element between socialism and capitalism. In general I agree with the thrust of the article about these business tools, social software is not well developed. We are a long ways from having 'matured' the tools. But these all seems exactly what we need in the long run for a renewed socialism. When I look at the cultural revolution in China, they were trying to break down party connections that seemed to lead toward capitalist style relationships. I think they were trying to understand the limitations of face to face social networks. They needed a culture that wouldn't slide back into the gatekeeper paradigm about knowledge production. The way they approached things as 'ideological' tells us they were deeply concerned with how knowledge was produced. Big business has to address social networks because they are starting to understand that 'silos' hide knowledge from the whole business that makes the corporate body function on the large scale. There is a tension there in management where the low levels of management with distributed staff need to manage attention structure in the employees but don't have the tools to do it. The traditional gatekeeper process of the foreman or supe once it lifts off face to face connection is helpless at managing social networks. They have to automate the process. Whereas social networks can't be linearized in the sense traditional capitalism has always kept control over the working class. The British perfected the process of kicking groups off their resources. Fragmenting and isolating people. They were not concerned with the value of knowledge produced by social networks. thanks, Doyle Saylor
