blog diagram

This diagram represents the structure/menu of this blog.

The net Economy is the ‘bulls eye’ of this blog. The ‘currency’ of the economy is knowledge as the central economic resource. A short definition of this category (as with all other blog-categories) is given in the column to the right after you have clicked the net Economy category in the main menu.

The two other main categories in this blog are net Work and net Organization. To clarify the economic production relationships between people, the net Work offers an understanding of interpersonal media. Through this media, data and information are beeing exchanged interactively in order to produce knowledge. Therefore, the production processes of knowledge is described in the sub-category of media/communication. (Other topics are described in other sub-categories under the three key headings of net Economy, net Work and net Organization.)

In addition to media/communication, I am measuring people’s work in order to create knowledge through other dimensions like (work) time, the understanding of people’s roles in the net and the meaning of (work) space in it. Beside this interpersonal communication level in the net Economy, there is a social one that has to be considered. Through social media, a profile of a net Organization is visible. The question that I want to answer in the blog is how an organization made up of self-determined individuals can form a unit/entity, share an aim and cooperative value creation through the exchange of data, information and knowledge.

Any form of organization in a net Economy has to consider an unfamiliar cultural environment today in order to operate successfully. This culture is called the net Culture. The outer circle (in the diagram) symbolizes this net Culture and influences the individuals in different net Works and net Organizations. People in the net Culture (in)form themselves through diverse, new media. But, in addition to how people (in)form themselves through technical media, the net Culture (as other forms of culture before) always includes natural assets and all sorts of societal activities/environments as media for (in)formation. To symbolize how people find access to all kind of (in)formation, there are three arrows in the diagram that show people´s connectivity through media like technical systems (e.g.laptop, smartphone), natural assets (e.g. forest, fish) and society (e.g.parties, beachhouses). This process of (in)formation between people and culture has to be understood interactively.

the (in)formation of a culture

Which kind of information are we able to perceive? This question is largely dependent on the quality of the information-mediums we use in specific cultures. Mediums are decisive elements for people to be able to ‘sense’ and gather information about the environment they live in, in order to generate knowledge themselves. When we go back into the history of media, ancient Mayans for example, used stars intensively as information-mediums for their calendar to build social and economic activities upon it. Therefore, stars – as the dominant medium in their culture – and the knowledge about their constellation, guided their lives in many major aspects. Generally speaking we can say that the disproportional, accentuated use of specific mediums in a cultural era characterizes the (in)formation of cultural life. This (in)formation builds up the social and economic activities in the considered time from the considered people, in a profound way. But at the same time medium are used to gain important knowledge through information, they also restrict the perception of people by the limited bandwith of datas they are able to carry.

To stay with the example of the Mayans, their focus of the cosmos made them totally unaware and incapable of dealing with the disastrous impact of the Spanish emperors which as history shows, would later lead to their doom. Their information-system was not available to better understand the influence of European culture brought by the emperors. People like Michael Giesecke says, that the dominance from the old world over the new world in the 16th century was due to the rise of letterpress printing in Europe. While the information-system in Middle America at that time was widely built on interactive, oral communication, Europe spread their dominant knowledge over by mass-media such as books. Findings over the new world were gathered accurately and put together into a clear, but very European centered point of view. Therefore, the resulting picture of the new world was a deeply European one. Natives and their culture were transformed into abstract, euro-centered mission statements. Indigenous people were perceived and treated under the dominant norms and role models we imposed over them. If people in Middle America would have been able to gather information about our world at the same time they succeed creating a stronger awareness of their own cultural values, they would have been much clearer about themselves and been able to resist much stronger our influence.

But people don´t stay being sensors of the world around them. At the same time as they are processing the information they perceive, they act as communicators of their ideas in a net Work together with other systems. The quality of communication (the scale of broadcast the idea, the understanding of the idea) in this network is highly dependent on the quality of communication-mediums through which the network is connected. Any fundamental change in the disposition and availability of the dominant communication-medium has an impact on the culture as a whole. It changes the quality of relation between the centre of communicators and the peripheries of systems that are excluded from the communicators and their communication processes. Problems to overcome the exclusion could be a lack of media-competence to deal with new communication structures. Dependent on that proportion of in- and exclusion, cultures negotiate only ideas and knowledge of systems in the centre, while they exclude the ones in the periphery.

Therefore, when I talk about the net Culture in this blog, I want to create an understanding about the (in)formation of an upcoming cultural era that is fundamentally different to the one, that has been built up on mass media communication from the 15th/16th century on, when Gutenberg invented the book printing. What is the medium of that culture that makes the difference by its disproportional, accentuated use today?

I describe a new cultural (in)formation built on this medium and describe the social and economic structures which it represents. These structures change fundamentally the relation between the centre of communicators and people in the periphery of (social) systems. To know about this relation shows me the net Work which is adequate for the culture today.