P2P and Psychological Differentiation
The following is not a finished encyclopedic entry but a series of experimental thoughts on the topic:
Thesis 1: Individuals engaged in P2P social processes are not just merely equals, but differentiated individuals or singularities. In a metaphor inspired by current technological developments, we might argue that individuals consists of fragment-processes (microchunks) that can be recombined into new wholes represented by the common projects.
Michel Bauwens expands on this argument in the following blog entries, http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=117 and http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=143
See the first Citations which illustrate such a position.
Thesis 2: if individuals in common projects are differentiated, do we need a specialized psychology for it? Chris Cowan suggests that the Gravesian model of Levels of Existence might be useful in this regard.
Chris Cowan suggests that:
âthat an understanding of the variability within both âpâ?s helps the â2â³ align and work better, and that the Gravesian approach can assist with that tailoring and matching.â?
Citations
The following three citations set the stage for an understanding of psychology that is based on the differentiation within the individual; and how its different elements can be recombined in peer to peer based social processes:
Jimmy Wales: âAnd if a personâs really smart and theyâre doing fantastic work I donât care if theyâre a high school kid or a Harvard professor, itâs the work that matters. And you canât coast on your credentials on Wikipedia. You have to â you have to enter the marketplace of ideas and engage with people.â?
Jorge Ferrer: âequals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal.â?
Argument on the Great Cosmic Mash-up
URL = http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=117
Excerpt from Michel Bauwens: Postmodernism was all about deconstructing oppressive mental structures that we inherited from modernity. Amongst other things the Cartesian subject/object split and the alienating effects of Kantianâs impossibility of knowing true reality; it was a necessary destructive passage, a cleaning out process, but it didnât, as its names âpostâ?- indicate, construct anything. So in my view, if modernity was about constructing the individual (along subject/object divisions), and postmodernity about deconstructing this, then this new era, which Iâld like to call the era of participation, is about constructing relationality or participation. We are not going back to the premodern wholistic era and feelings, but just as modernity was about rigorously individualising everything, eventually reaching the current dead-end of hyper-individualism, we are now just as rigorously ârelationisingâ everything. If in premodernity we thought, we are parts of a whole that is one and above us, and in modernity we thought we are separate and unified individuals, a world onto ourselves, and in postmodernity saw ourselves fragmenting, and pretty much lamented this, then this is the mash-up era. We now know that all this fragments can be reconstructed with the zillions of fragment of the others, into zillions of commonalities, into temporary wholes that are so many new creative projects, but all united in a ever-moving Commons that is open to all of us.. So the fragmentation of postmodernity is a given for us now, but we are no longer lamenting, we are discovering the technologies (infrastructural, collaborative-software-ish, political, but above all the mental and epistemological) that allow us to use this fragmentation to create the Great Cosmic Mash-Up. That is the historical task of the emerging Peer to Peer Era.
=More Information on Gravesian Levels of Existence
Key websites:
Clare Gaves website, http://www.clarewgraves.com/
Spiral Dynamics, http://www.spiraldynamics.org/
The powerful and charismatic voice of Clare W. Graves, pioneer of the Gravesian levels of existence psychology, which denies that psychological maturity is anything that can be achieved 'for ever', that it is rather, a function of how humans adapt to evolving social conditions. Listen to the following lecture in MP3 format.