Oral history and social computing

February 18, 2008

One of the really interesting things when you start to deal with fragmented narrative (of which blogs are a subset) is the realisation that you are returning to an older oral tradition in which stories evolved in their retelling. In the western tradition by allowing Andersen and the Brothers Grim to formalise our stories we froze them at a point in time and terminated their evolution. They are of course strong stories so the remerge all the time in novels and films, but the oral tradition faded.

In part that was because we no longer lived in environments where telling stories was the only form of entertainment and knowledge transfer. I grew up with radio and conversation before the television arrived at the age of 11 (I am not so old, but my parents resisted getting one for years). That increased social isolation and one to many communication. With the growth of the blogosphere we return to many-to-many interactions, and as those interactions increase in a virtual world patterns emerge and stabilise. Our community is no longer the extended family around the camp fire, it is anyone with access to a computer.

Its no surprise that the forms of the oral tradition tend to re-emerge in this space. I am looking forward to returning to South Africa in a few weeks time to run an accreditation programme and do some other work. Africa has never forgotten the oral tradition, and the growth of scalable computing allows a new way of working, which is not constrained by the codification and process strategies of anglo-saxon thinking.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

more on Cynefin

The memories continued today. I got a bus from Cardiff Airport into the centre to ...

More posts

Next >

Surveys

Why, oh why do students keep asking me to fill out meaningless surveys about knowledge ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram