“I guess the larger meta question is, What is the role of the know-it-all generalist in today’s specialized world where there is really no more room for Rennaissance men?”
Depends who you ask. I think the concept of “Rennaissance men” has evolved into “Rennaissance networks”, they range from the generalists (like Matt), the interested citizens (you, being a politically active, informed citizen, in this case ex-navy), to the specialists whom take various forms and disseminate through various mediums. Believe it or not, in the new media model, you are one of the Rennaissance men calipygian.
Posted by Galrahn | July 15, 2008 12:30 PM at http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/
07/no_more_ddg1000.php
Honestly, I find the concept of “Renaissance networks” fascinating for quite a few reasons. First, as a discipline, Anthropology is inherently “generalist”, at least in the old 4 Square model (archeology, biological/physical, cultural and linguistic Anthropology). As a self-defined “pre-modernist”, I have usually used Wilson’s definition of Anthropology as the Science of Man (Ανθρωπος) which assumes theat four square model.
A second reason why I find the concept so interesting is that for the past 20 years or so I have been researching how our (Canadian/North American) society has been evolving into a “networked” society away from the Taylorist, bureaucratic organizational model that Weber defined as the characteristic of “modernity”. I’ve explored this interest in several publications, as well as a lot of conference papers and research reports.
In most of my work, I’ve argued in one way or another, that this “shift” to a network society is not “new” by any stretch of the imagination. It is, in fact, a shifting to a form of social relations that was dominant throughout our species history, probably as early as Australopithicines (if not earlier), and not replaced by another form until circa 10-12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revoltion (aka the Neolithic Revolution). I find it exceedingly unlikely that any species would evolve for several millions of years without developing specialized neural circuitry to handle the problems and opportunities inherent in their social environment (along with mechanisms to detect cheaters). As Cosmides and Tooby have noted, “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind”.
Inherent in much of the discussion over this “shift” is a concept of linear time that I find exceedingly frustrating. The implication is that this shift is either an evolution (or revolution… take your pick) that is following along some pre-determined teleological vector. What is lost in the discussion, mainly because the linearity of time is assumed, is the recognition that this is not a “radical” change but, rather, a “phase change” - a shift between different forms of social relations, all of which are inherent in the human species (see Alan Fiske’s Structures of Social Life
I believe that if we want to get a better understanding of what is actually going on, then we need to restructure our discussions along the basis of cyclical time. There’s an old truism that “those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. I, for one, believe that we have to dump [secular] theological pre-occupations with temporal linearity and start trying to figure out the probabilities of what will happen as a result of this phase change. This means that we really have to start looking at history and treating the concept of social and cultural evolution (actually, phase shifting) seriously. We need to identify key variables in demography, technology, economics (both production and distribution), communications media, psychology, etc. to figure out which of them serve to trigger social and cultural phase changes. In other words, we need to change the questions that are being asked.
Starts towards such shifts are apparent in a number of areas. For example, Stewart Clegg and his associates at the Innovation, Collaboration, Alliances and Networks (ICAN) Research Centre at UTS are looking at phase changing in the world of management (although they don’t use that term). In another area, the intense debate around counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is starting to produce phase change models of asymmetric warfare related to differing battlespace environments (see Raphaël Baeriswyls’ recent article in Anthropoetics for example). There are numerous other examples as well.
But if we are going to take the concept of phase shift seriously, then one of the key changes examined must be in the area of social communications. In Canada, there is a long history of looking at the effects of communications technology on social relations. The names that come immediately to mind are Marshall McLuhan (especially The Medium is the Massage
Within the Canadian Communications Tradition (CCT), “media” are viewed as technological extensions and “warpings” (in the sense of creating biases in time, space and perception) of humanity’s natural form of communications, i.e. face-to-face communications. Each type of communicative medium enhances or restricts human perceptions of time, space and sensory input such that it “massages” both the message being communicated and the audiences’ perceptions. There is also a fairly strong political economy root to the tradition, mainly from Innis, that brings issues of access and power into the entire discussion. As a general theoretical tradition, it inherently uses a cyclical model of time and draws heavily on history (Heather Menzies works such as Whose Brave New World? The Information Highway and the New Economy
One of the central analytic methodologies of the CCT is to examine the shape, cost and accessibility of various communicative media. Accessibility is also usually broken down into a number of areas such as encoding, decoding (for example, one may be able to read some writing, but learning to write something like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Babylonian Cuneiform may take a lot of resources) and accessing media distribution channels (e.g. everyone can afford a radio, at least in Canada, but not a broadcast station). This type of analysis identifies what Stewart Clegg calls “circuits of power (see Frameworks of Power
Back in the 1970’s, personal networks arose to deal with problems of employment in Canada. After the adoption of the WWW by many Human Resources departments in 1995-1996, there was a dynamic interplay between what Fiske calls an “Authority Ranking” form of social relations (classic, Weberian bureaucratic modernity) and the newer form of network/community social relations (Fisk calls this Equality Matching ). The interplay between the two social forms (see here and here for a description up to 1999) might almost be described as an “arms race” between job seekers and HR departments; a form of asymmetric, French bedroom-esque farce “conflict” where the desired endstate was a “win-win” situation that no one knew how to achieve (I’m certain readers can deduce their own current parallel situations…).
Today, we find that the “new” social media is starting to dominate our lives. It is not only blogs and online communities, but also cell phones, texting, ‘net based research practices, etc. ad nauseum. The current problem in today’s communications media marketplace is not “how do I get information?’ but “how do I triage information?”. It isn’t “How can I possibly get in touch with X?” but “Which way do I get in touch with X?”. We are, to use McLuhan’s rather hackneyed phrase, living in a global village with everyone yelling their heads off! This isn’t a neat and sanitary “information overload”, it’s an ever worsening tsunami.
The solution that is being increasingly adopted is the same one our ancestors chose when they wanted to get away from the maddening crowds (of several thousand): we head out with a few friends or, in short, we build our own social networks and communities whose members are selected both by chance, choice and mutual affinity. We are, in short, re-adopting a hunter-gatherer mode of social organization for many of the tasks in our lives, a point I argued in my chapter in the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate
So let’s take the idea of Renaissance networks one step further. Back in the Renaissance, the exemplars of the Renaissance Man such as Da Vinci and Botticelli were at the centre of networks of similar people; networks that were supported and encouraged by the feudal elites such as the Medici and the Barberini. Art, architecture, medicine and literature along with, I might observe, military technology, flourished under a system that provided the Renaissance Men with access to resources. The products stemming from this patronage system led directly to our current civil society and modern science while, at the same time, having an immediate, positive effect on many of the general population. Maybe it is time to rethink how we, as a society, organize and finance our Renaissance networks.
9 users commented in " “Renaissance networks”: social media and reciprocity systems "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHey Dr. Marc,
A conceptually rich post. A worthy build-on to Galrahn’s.
“In most of my work, I’ve argued in one way or another, that this “shift” to a network society is not “new” by any stretch of the imagination. It is, in fact, a shifting to a form of social relations that was dominant throughout our species history, probably as early as Australopithicines (if not earlier), and not replaced by another form until circa 10-12,000 years ago”
Have you read Ronfeldt’s RAND paper on Tribes the “Firstand Forever Form” ?
http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2007/RAND_WR433.pdf
After reading this entry, you might appreciate this story.
I am not college educated, I went straight from High School into the workforce as a nerd riding the tech wave of the 90s, where I began as a programmer who specializes in virtual world development and artificial intelligence.
This was before “Half Life” existed.
In the early days of virtual world gaming, particularly UO but also when Lineage 2 exploded in Korea, the very hard core powergamers who are usually programmers, run scripts, and profit heavily in RMT, would form “Renaissance Networks” in virtual worlds to dominate the activity of the masses to their advantage. The masses rarely knew they were being exploited.
Those early virtual worlds had poor rule sets that left control up to the player communities in player vs player competition (PvP). The renaissance networks term was how we described the way the renaissance men on particular servers would manipulate the game activity of hundreds, sometimes thousands in a virtual world to their advantage, ultimately towards a RMT conclusion.
The term was used both at the gamer level, and the GM level. Many considered it cheating, and in many ways it was, but the number of subscriptions a game had in those early days defined the business model, and thanks to the emergence of gamer driven renaissance networks the GMs were able to focus on bug fixes and game specific development, not driving content in the game. Left to do their work, renaissance networks thrived. Ultimately, we (the GMs) called it gamer driven governance, while we (the gamers) called it gamer driven dominance.
As an anthropologist, I thought you might appreciate that story, which is the history of the term.
I appreciate your thoughts a lot, as someone who never had the formal education in a meta topic, although always interested (particularly as a relatively new blogger building a community in a new social medium), I find your insights very enlightening.
Hi Mark,
No, I hadn’t read Ronfeldt’s piece - thanks for the link! I just downloaded it and gave it a quick scan - it’s amazing how many of the same sources we are using :).
Most of my PhD dissertation research in the area concentrated on one particular analog, which was the shift from a redistributive / authority ranking (hierarchical) system to a reciprocity (network) system. Since I was actually looking at the rise of the career transition industry in Canada, the parallels I was using for insight were the shift from Big Companies to agile organizations and the destruction of the Temple States in early Mesopotamia and, especially, the rise of ritual systems to deal with the “collapse” of total organizatons.
Galrahn, thanks for the story and the origins of the term; I appreciate it!
Honestly, I haven’t had much time for the online gaming world since the mid-late 80’s. I used to play in a MUD over in Sweden which, pre-web, was a real pain to get to ;).
While I hadn’t heard the term “Renaissance network” before, I was certainly familiar with the reality of them. Back in my previous life (before I went back to school), I used to run a gaming company and was part of the Game Designers Guild. Now that was a Renaissance network (the annual banquet being true to the renaissance,… well, beer instead of wine )!
“was the shift from a redistributive / authority ranking (hierarchical) system to a reciprocity (network) system”
Boy, did you ever time that topic well! Talk about being ahead of the curve.
“Honestly, I haven’t had much time for the online gaming world since the mid-late 80’s. I used to play in a MUD over in Sweden which, pre-web, was a real pain to get to ;).”
Do either of you recall the pre-internet “Play by mail” services of the early 80’s that were spawned in the wake of Gygax’s D&D phenomenon? I wonder how many of the older designers who ramped up the first MMORPG’s had that experience?
“Boy, did you ever time that topic well! Talk about being ahead of the curve.”
Not in terms of economic restructuring . In Canada, that started in about December, 1968, and the network phenomenon was being commodified by about 1975. What was neat, however, was the rise of rituals and belief systems (meaning systems) that had the same social form as AQ and other groups. As a sidenote, a similar shift happened in the mid-late 1980’s (again in Canada) relating to integration of immigrant populations and, especially, foreign trained professionals (I’m doing a fair bit of work in that area right now).
PBM games? Oh, yeah, I remember them . I suspect that many of the early online designers drew on either the PBM or the Pick your own path adventure novels - early MUDs showed a lot of similarities.
“Do either of you recall the pre-internet “Play by mail” services of the early 80’s?”
Yep. Ever heard of VGAPLANETS? That is the only game I ever played that I truly miss as I get older. Many of the older folks I worked with were into PBEM stuff before they moved to virtual worlds. Most younger folks did not know about that stuff though.
As an IRCop PBEM was how we passed the time between netsplits.
I rarely talk about that part of my past though, most people see “gamer” and think “loser”, fail to see the relationship between gaming engines and artificial intelligence, and one is sure to lose the attention of the audience highlighting how the emerging sophistication of botnets is essentially the same pattern of causality seen developed in early interactive AIs.
I once posted a MUD story on the blog, actually it was a talker, if you remember those…
“You walk into a smoke filled room…”
I may have lost my audience on the blog that day.
Whoops! We didn’t know it at the time, but I titled my new Mashable.com article “Intelligence Renaissance Networks” - looks like we were thinking very much along the same lines!!
http://mashable.com/2008/09/22/government-intelligence-renaissance-networks/
Interesting article, Mark! Thanks for the link. Yes, I think we are thinking along very similar lines. For me, I see it as an inevitable outgrowth of changes in communications technology along with a more general adoption of a “project team” concept (with matrix authority and expertise). I’ve also been using that as an aspect of a much broader model of socio-cultural “evolution” (in the neo-Darwinian sense).
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