Connective Hypothesis
Description
Eyal Sivan:
"The Connective Hypothesis is as follows:
- The key organizing pattern of our global culture is shifting from a top-down hierarchical pyramid to a distributed, self-organizing network.
Structures that embody the existing dominant pattern, the pyramid, are often referred to as organizational hierarchies. Irrespective of politics, virtually all of our principal institutions are bureaucratic products of the industrial age. Even those structures that strive to empower individuals, such as democracy or education, still have their parameters defined by committee and demand adherence to a set of absolutes. In this general sense, these prevalent structures can be referred to as collectives.
I refer to structures that embody the new emerging pattern, the network, as connectives, and offer the following definitions: The Connective refers to the global culture emerging as a result of the proliferation of information technology.
A connective refers to a distributed network made up of voluntary participants, organized around a specific interest or context, with each member seeking to achieve an individual goal.
To be connective is to be expressly designed or predisposed to take advantage of voluntary loose associations, or the resulting efficiencies, in order to gain personal value.
Connectivism is the philosophy that agile network systems are essential to balance individual man, mankind, and nature as a whole.
This new structure is neither individualistic (i.e. libertarian; capitalist; Objectivist) nor socialist (i.e. communist; Marxist; Kantian). It is something that is an intricate mixture of the two; a third way. Rather than trying to capture and freeze absolutes, connectives bend and flex, and acknowledge that the world around them bends and flexes as well." (http://theconnective.org/what-is-the-connective/)
More Information
- Defining the connective, blog items at http://theconnective.org/what-is-the-connective/