No Man’s Blog

About a week ago David wrote a rich and compelling post about the social psychological implications of “life 2.0”:

“We are discovering each other….We are finding out that we are not alone, there are scores of others just like us scattered throughout the globe.  We can now do more than merely correspond as pen pals.  We can meet virtually, leave each other notes, share and spread our ideas.  We can challenge and inspire each other.  We have found purpose in this evolution of life.  And we have found comfort in the idea that others like us exist. ….Life 2.0 is about discovering our purpose through finding each other—and ourselves”.

These words got stuck in my head for more than a week now not only because of the humane energy that pour out of them (how about ‘humanity 2.0’?) but also because it took me back to my life prior to all this digital pond and brands and marketing and viral gardens etc (MyLife 1.0…), and to the 4 years I spent trying to make sense of smart people like Mead and Bakhtin and to study, in depth, the concept of ‘Taking the Perspective of the Other’, that is, our ability to step out of our own shoes and into another, or to view the world through the eyes of an ‘other’.

This concept is applicable not only to the interpersonal level (such as empathy, as indicated above) but also as the core and essence of meaningful communication, what make us humans, that is. It is the mechanism by which we humans construct our shared realities as well as our identities. In that sense both our perception of the world and of ourselves is predicated on common experience, dialogue and interaction.  Perspective taking of this type is what we ‘do’ habitually in any communicative or interactive setting as we wave our hands, nod our heads, speak, listen, write, read, blog – from a wordless sigh to a rejoinder in dialogue, to a multi-volume philosophical investigation – in short, in any verbal or non-verbal communicative practice that involves self and other.

So then I went and dug out some things I once wrote in a completely different context on how we are coming to be ourselves through dialogue and interactions with others. I was really happy to find that psycho-bubble extremely relevant in relation to David’s musings on blogging, life 2.0 and the significance of dialogue and open communications in synthesising ideas and making this world a better place: 

Mead has a vision of the ideal human society that he envisages as the ultimate goal of human social progress. The ideal of human society “is one which does bring people so closely together in their interrelationships, so fully develops the necessary system of communication, that the individuals who exercise their own peculiar functions can take the attitude of those who they affect” (1934, p.327). In this utopian society, social reciprocity and cooperation will govern; opposing communities will appreciate each other’s needs in order to be able to find a new social practice that is acceptable to all and beneficial to a reconstructed, better social order.

From the perspective of the individual, “Human thought”, writes Bakhtin “becomes genuine thought…only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice consciousnesses the idea is born and lives” (1984, pp. 87-88).

Bakhtin would have think of participation in the blogosphere as a superior form of communicative practice, as a multi-participants dialogue and debate and as a process in which the blogger’s ideas in the form of posts and links, dialogically implicate the words and voices of others. As he argues “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organised chain of other utterances” (1986, p.69). This is extremely relevant to blogging as the posts and comments we write are always inhabited and interlaced by the voices of others.

We challenge, dispute, reaffirm, validate, contradict, influenced by, elaborate, expand…the words and thoughts of others and by that we find our own voice, our own self. Blogging as a communicative practice is therefore a socially and linguistically constituted process. It is a knowledge and identity-search activity, and the knowledge of the world is for Bakhtin something “born between people collectively searching for the truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (1984, p.110). Good bloggers can emerge only through ongoing interactions with other bloggers and in response to other selves in a symbolic blogosphere of intersubjective relations.

In short, human individuality is grounded in human sociality and as David concluded: “Life 2.0 is about discovering our purpose through finding each other—and ourselves.

Thanks ever so much David for this amazing visual.