Reflections: Changing worldviews
Reflections: Changing worldviews
This week I was lucky to catch Tessy Britton and Laura Billings of Social Spaces for a chat about their work. In their own words they “surface new emergent knowledge from successful community practise around the world, use a trans-disciplinary approach to analyse and extract learning, and develop innovative approaches to spread these new ideas and methods”. In this process they create some really exciting outputs (see for example the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe) and gather important insights into the new kinds of community organising that are emerging with networked and decentralised social platforms. At one point Tessy said something that I immediately related to because I have been thinking about it for a recently: being submerged in work and thoughts about new social ways of doing affects how we look at people and becomes a part of our worldview. This is really noticeable when I have one of those conversations which start from scratch in the normal-everyday reality of the average pub goer.
One way of seeing it is that we are at the edge of the formation of a new collective worldview and that being engulfed in these new ways of doing and being presents a microcosm of a process that takes longer time to come around on a wider societal scale. As a researcher who is looking at the transformation of worldviews I immerse myself into a process of personal change and maybe this is a condensed or compressed version of what other people go through on longer time scales. Of course intra-personal transformation will not be mirrored directly in inter-personal change but there may nevertheless be important lessons here – it is clearly not a linear process and often one step forward is followed by two steps backward. This is not to say that I have any particular insight into the what comes next but that I might – unconsciously mostly – know something about the change process itself.
Right now it feels mostly like a process of letting go of control, looking for emergence and not worrying about outcomes – being open to what's coming at you yet discerning about what's important. Conditions, attitudes, and rules matter. This diary seems to be important to tracking my own change – comparing some of the first entries with later ones and examining the style of thinking involved may prove useful later. This also anticipates the issue of objectivity and overcoming the old subject/object distinction. Stepping back to get the broader perspective or taking time to let thoughts settle will be more useful than creating elaborate arguments for supposed objectivity.
Bringing together reflections on personal transformations in worldview seems really important – the only other thing I can think of that is more important right now is the form that interaction takes. Recent discussions around dialogue, proprioception and learning are already bringing more light to this. This is an order of learning that we have to get good at if we are to change at all.
25/05/2012