Always On
Mark Zorro has written a brief essay on the way that technology fundamentally shifts our worldviews, bringing people and ideas together more often, and in more combinations, than ever before.
It may also change who we are, or who we become.
Part hyperbole, part moral treatise, but still - an interesting piece.
2 comments:
"Mark Zorro" is a process I use, and a part of that process is the links it generates, so thankyou for providing me the opportunity to explore a part of your world at the University of Maryland through this connection. I have reviewed some of your work and ideas and they are quite fascinating. I just wanted to leave you a few thoughts Ken from having observed a brief glimpse of your various blog sites. Treat this as a think piece, because this is all it is meant to be, hence why I created "Mark Zorro" and "Ma.rk 7:24" as a simple process acknowleding the existence of left and right, the two hemispheres of the human mind.
A brief but inconsequential musing about political science by a non-political science onlooker:
===============================================================================================
We get the politics we deserve when we are demonstrating the negative as much as the political process that feeds off negative nutrition. Every student of political science will embrace existing political relationships because in complaint and critique we become masters of what we learn, and if what we learn is based on the negative, it is the astute politician who finishes the graduation process with reality.
To untie the impossible knot of politics, political science has to be more than just a mirror but also a measure of those who deliver great politics, a measure of what works in the system, a measure of who makes it work. The most difficult calculation of political science is to measure how the inputs of humanity can flow through without disruption or bottleneck and if we have the courage and the discipline to establish a political flow where humanity and politics cease to be in conflict.
We assume conflict therefore we do not capture all the solutions that are effective and thus we celebrate gridlock because we begin the political value chain from the voter and process map to the political system. We have to reverse this study and begin with the best of the political process and work backwards to the voter – this political value chain then becomes a process of continuous learning where the costs of the process are dealt with upstream rather than downstream.
The point of this musing is that relationships are only as good as we give and it is governed by how open minded we remain and how we talk about people in a process not as "politicians" as I have just done, but as fellow people with names, which is the hallmark of the great student of political science. In that regard, the process I have undertaken here and elsewhere on the web is simply to become a better person from my interaction and leave a tiny mark of that hope whereever those connections appear. I am just a wanderer through cyberspace and this was but a brief stop, thank you Ken for your connection.
Best Regards
M.
Thanks Mark. I agree that too often political scientists focus on those factors that are merely sufficient to destroy positive action, rather than those which are necessary to ensure cooperation.
My guess is that the quasi-universality of sufficient causes is more appealing in a scientific sense, whereas the universe of necessary causes is either too particularistic, or too complex, for us to comprehend as transcendent truths.
But that's just my guess.
Post a Comment