Month: October 2024

#Emergence – Lesson number 2

Collection vs System? 

From todays lesson words like an interrelatedness, interdependency and purpose stuck with me. Concretely i learned about the symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and tree roots but on a more philosophical note, my mind kept wanting to categorize what the differences between a collection and a system is. If we assume that a bus with its wheels, motor and fuel are all part of a system that fulfills a common purpose of making the bus drive, is the busdriver then a part of the system? But then, wouldn’t the bussdriver classify as his own individual biomechanical system, that has a body, a mind, a brain that with its different cognititions is able to drive the bus correctly. 

During the lesson we spend a lot of time dwelling on whether you could classify different things as a system or not. At all times i think it is a bit unhelpful to approach a term or a theory with the intention of making it “true” or not. Maybe you cannot make a yes/no answer to whether something is a system or not, but the important thing is to ask yourself that if we were to see this phenomenon in the analytical frame of systems theory – what kind of relationships would i then see? What would the limitations be? What doors would it open? Because inargueably, most organisms are connected and depend on each other somehow. But zooming in on actually representing the relationship itself, can really reveal some of the internalised interconnections in our everyday lives. But i hope to get some more tools to classify what systems theory really opens up to, because it still feels a bit messy to me.

The introduction #Emergence

What did I learn?

From the introduction class what seemed to stick with me the most, is the fact that even a howl of a wolf can interconnect with how a river forms. I have been familiar with the term “ecosystems” for many years, but in class it struck me that everything is interconnected, even unconsciously, and therefore somehow an ecosystem.  

How did it make me feel?

First and foremost that made me feel small and that i am part of a constant cycle. But also it made me feel that there are things in my surroundings that I can’t nor should try to control. 

How can I use this in my life? 

Studying anthropology, the ability to alienate myself from the context i am surrounded by in order to understand other human ways of living, experiencing and thinking is crucial. But after class it struck me that taking other “non-human” ecosystems into consideration as an agent themselves, such as the wolf or the river, also interconnect and co-creates human experiences. It seems banal maybe, especially since many first year anthropology students go through the theories of Bruno Latour and his actor-network theory, which is exactly about understanding the network of interconnecting relationships between human and non-human agents. But nonetheless I have never given much thought to this in a neuropsychological perspective. That is how the ecosystems in out society and nature actually wire and rewire our brains.

What do I wan’t to ask?

So taking into consideration that this class has “social media” in the course title, I am really curious about how one can explore the relationship between human and social media as a symbiotic/co-creation of everyday life. What kind of “taken for granted”/internalized thinking patterns and behaviour relates to social media, and does the digital then have agency on it’s own?