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Now that you have seen what I'm looking at, here is where I stand:When one is among ones peers, things can be said and done which are not possible otherwise, as even the most dedicated military or corporate commander will admit, and as the development of 'open-source' software confirms. It may be that 'there are no bugs that cant be found -- with enough eyeballs,' but the eyeballs must be attached -- not to an ego, but to an idea. They must have a larger vision, if you like, than one body can provide, and this requires context (7): multiple points of view and multiple perspectives from each and multiple threads tying everything together in an organic, chaotic, inefficient, 'blooming, buzzing confusion.' Knowing that one is not alone with a problem is often sufficent to reveal the solution -- because it lowers the stress level, and enables one to not merely stand and look at 'the facts,' but to move around and comment on what appears. Communicating a vision is not to be achieved through a manual of operations, for manuals only record what had been seen, and report on what had been 'organized' in response.
But I should have said, "When one believes one is among peers," because all the parity in the world is useless to one who demeans oneself. Now, no one has been born online -- we each bring some dirt-based predilections and prejudices to this disembodied forum -- so the first implication is that attachment to ideas is downright scarce out there, and I would love to be proven wrong on that. The second implication is that the task of online communication is not to 'find' or 'bring' trust, but to build it -- and not from scratch, but from a considerable residue of distrust.
As it happens, dialogue is well suited to the situation; it's very hard to keep a conversation going between people who agree with one another -- who not only are looking at the same things but realize they are standing in the same place. It is much more interesting (to aim for a midline between 'profitable' and 'enlightening') to practice one's communication skills with one who disagrees, because there is so much more space to explore where the 'bone of contention' hides. If I could just find one person who was prepared to defend hyr distrust -- to produce examples, cite the literature, refute my position, even dispute my terminology -- I wouldn't be standing here now. On the contrary, I should have to rethink things considerably. But as the record attests, my questions have gone unanswered, my hypotheses unexamined, and the basic decencies of conversation -- for instance, replying when one is addressed -- ignored. I am left to construct a dialogue, to imagine a protagonist, to guess what might be a plausible point of beginning and yet not to anticipate absolutely every riposte (or there would be no conversation to go on!) in order to demonstrate what it could be and how it might work.
But construction is no bad thing. The point is not to 'fake' a contest of wills ('Yes you will!' 'No, I won't!') between One and Nil, but a conversation; not to change the other's mind (as if there is not a universe of others left to go), but to demonstrate a real spectrum of possibility to someone neither of us may ever meet, that she may make up her own mind. That is the beauty of dialogue, and of course the practical difficulty. ("It just takes forever to look at possibility, when if she would only listen to me, we could save so much time! I've been there and done that, it's so easy to save her having to reinvent the wheel!")
Isnt it an interesting metaphor? For a 2-D stander-and-looker, of course, wheels represent the missing dimension. Get away from the boredom of a p.o.v.; see the sights from all directions -- and the decline in civilized discourse directly parallels the transition of a society from pedestrianism to 'mobility.' Do we trade an infinitely renewable source of creativity for 150 years (say 7 generations) of hydrocarbons? You bet -- let somebody else learn wheelmaking as long as we can use/abuse them! Does it mean all excess context has to be be jettisoned in the name of efficient process/ progress -- and thus also increasing stress on an (otherwise healthy) individual/ culture/ ecosystem? Yes, it's called 'linearizing the system.' (If you've ever seen the way some Himalayan farmers coppice (torture?) the trees for goat fodder, you'll get the eco-picture.)
There is also a word for the stultification of a psychical landscape: stress. Under stress, the individual psyche retreats more and more determinedly to 'protect' the threatened sense of self. (What the ecosystem does, we are in the early days of finding out, but one might easily read global warming as Gaia's running a fever.) When it works, the effect is called 'competitiveness' and is aggrandized beyond all comparison --just as if there is a 'war on values' in the world which only one can survive, and despite the growing evidence that monoculture of any sort is a fool's game. (When it fails, one speaks (kindly) of the deceased.) And even when it 'works,' it does so by steadily raising the level of sensibility, so that its victim no longer responds to a 'slight,' but only a 'jibe'; or not a jibe but a clip in the jaw; or not a clip but a full length drag-out behind a pickup. Violence escalates -- but doesn't income, too? Privacy erodes -- but don't we have fun? Power corrupts -- but hey, get it while you can. Accentuate the positive, dont you know? (See Interiority)
What the list manifests by its loss of context is, in short, an increase in stress. More seriously, its obdurate refusal to build context reflects a widespread ignorance of what to do about stress -- that is, sharing the burden by talking one another through it, learning and teaching and living it into manageability. But most alarming of all is that this ignorance is manifested by 1400 subscribers who claim to be interested in international development -- some of whom are doubtless here to learn of 'situations' where they may have to work under yet more stress, while others eagerly await news that their country is to host such entrepreneurs. (8) I sincerely hope that some official memorandum will soon be circulated, advising these subscribers to immediately undertake communication as a (respectively remedial or prophylactic) treatment, because I really would like to see this list (hosted by the American University, archived by St Louis U and moderated by Volunteeers for International Technical Assistance, all free of charge) serve some useful purpose, like telling the story of free trade. If it can't rise even to this, then I shall in due course recommend that it be put out of its abject misery, and the disk space used for a discussion about Typologies of Online Merchant Banks, say.