sábado, 22 de junho de 2013

Social network, noosphere and new “mycro-revolutions”

Before the French Revolution, the meaning of the word “revolution” was a kind of “mechanical movement” like that of the Galilean Mechanics.
After the French Revolution, this word got the social and political meaning that everyone knows.
In the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, children, teens and young people learned a new way of communication among them with and into the internet, mainly by social networks. That communication worked like a “neuronal network”. Each person made a new kind of exercise with fingers and muscles, with a new language that operated new “neuronal networks” inside each brain. At same time, all those brains, and fingers and screenings were connected by this new language.
At some point, all of those things started to work as a “big brain”, an “earth brain”, a “noosphere”. As any brain, this new “collective brain” activated “social muscles” to produce “movements”. So, through all the world appeared a new kind of “revolution”, maybe a “mycro-revolution”...
To understand “mycro-revolution” we need to find new tools…
Experts of politics and sociology try to apply old foundations to study new phenomena that are configured in new and unknown paradigms.
We cannot apply the word “revolution” to explain some social phenomena that happened before French Revolution, because that sense of the word did not exist. It could be an anachronism. Maybe we could say that “it seemed like a revolution”, but it was not quite the same thing. In that way, the “Scientific Revolution” of the 17th century was invented after that new meaning of the word. Was it a true revolution?  
Maybe the meaning of the word revolution used in the last two centuries is changing, or going to be more complex, adding new meanings…

In after-postmodern era we must apply new concepts and tools to read the signals of “mycro-revolutions” coming from the noosphere of the earth brain…      

domingo, 2 de junho de 2013

Big Data and Teilhard de Chardin

Big Data is, at same time, chaos and organized system. Apparently it is a paradox, but in a transdisciplinary vision it can be the both. The three pillars of transdisciplinarity can embrace that possibility: multiple levels of Reality, the logic of the included middle and complexity. The cyberspace has several “layers of Reality”, or we can even think that there are people behind machines and so we have the level of Reality of the machines and the level of Reality of people. In this way, each person can be a level of Reality. The logic of the included middle is logic beyond the traditional Aristotelian logic, and can embrace things that apparently don’t match, because the Reality is not reduced to just one level, the level where contradiction is present. Complexity implies that Big Data happens in an open field among disciplines and knowledges.

Teilhard de Chardin thought that evolution of humanity would achieve a level that he nominated as “noosphere”. At that level each human being could be like a kind of neuron and all mankind could be like a kind of brain; so they could be all connected in a new kind of link. The coming of the cyberspace could be the first step of something like noosphere. People, machines and Big Data can compound a new net, maybe a new collective thinking. The human mind is also at same time chaotic and organized, even continuing to be human mind. Big Data can be the current step for some kind of noosphere, even it is not quite the same as established by the French philosopher.