måndag 1 augusti 2011

Decision Management and Human Freedom

Excellent texts, Dino!!!
The really really weird thing is that Zoroastrians haven't understood that this whole line of thinking was PIONEERED by a certain Zarathushtra 3,700 years ago. We are all more or less becoming Zoroastrians. And because Zoroastrians live within the ethics of Zarathushtra (albeit with all kinds of metaphysical mumbojumbo added, it is still the pathos of Zarathushtra which drive their lives) they are so smartly adapted for the contemporary age. No wonder they do so well now.
What we need to do is to educate Zoroastrianism on how smart Zarathushtra actually was. They seem to believe any story about Zarathushtra except the real one, as if they are scared of having lived closest of all to reality for centuries. He was an early Nietzsche or Habermas, he was however NOT en early Jesus or Muhammed. And we need to educate soicologists that Pragmatism was not invented in the West in the 19th century but actually has a history dating back 3,700 years.
It's just so weird that people haven't seen this connection before. Zoroastrianism is tragically the blind spot of the history of ideas.

Ushta
Alexander

2011/7/31 Special Kain
What we can see now is that there is no closure: we are never 100% in control over our social identities. With every new player and with every change in our social environment our current identities may undergo a dramatic change, such as other people who do not assess our identities as we do or a dramatic shift in information flows. Change one factor, and the whole picture will change.

Starting from modern sociology, we can see that Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist were right when they predicted that the new social environment as created through new media technologies will foster new social identities. Smartphones, the internet, apps and webstreaming services are not mere additions to the social environment, but rather co-create a new environment in which people live and with which we now interact. This new environment comes with new resources, opportunities and restraints. And it is our uses of these new technologies that will greatly shape our social environment and our future identities.

DECISION management entails INFORMATION management as well as FREEDOM management. Larger amounts of information and new information flows through new channels allow for a larger number of resources and opportunities. But it also means that we have to cope with a larger number of choices. The smarter we manage information and choices, and the better our chances at co-creating the new environment, the more freedom we have.

--- Special Kain schrieb am So, 31.7.2011:

We become the choices we make. The thoughts we choose to think foster the words we will speak which in turn foster the actions we will undertake. Decision management is therefore the art of managing and assessing choices. And freedom is something we provide ourselves with.

What we can learn from social philosophers like Jürgen Habermas is that subjectivity and intersubjectivity presuppose each other.
Technically speaking, it is COMMUNICATIONS that create and foster social communities as well as social identities. It is people who gather and interact with each other in order to build communities, and it is this communicative environment that provides the resources for identity production.
They will then interact and further influence their social environment based on their social identities (acceptance, defiance, creative adaptations and deviations thereof etc.).
We have to see the FEEDBACK LOOP at work here. It is a sequence of re-actions embedded within environments and their resources, opportunities and restraints.

The choices we make and the identities we therefore co-create cannot be separated from their social environments. With larger amounts of information comes greater responsibility for WHO WE CHOOSE TO BECOME. Simply because identities and the ecology of choice have become increasingly CONTINGENT in our global internet environment where we're requested to manage, assess, sort and manipulate information.

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