Sunday, December 18, 2005

Web Agora

I have mentioned in past posts about the work of French systems thinker and biologist Joel de Rosnay - especially in regard to his thoughts upon the 'symbiotic man' relationship between a networked humanity and technology. De Rosnay talks of new processes of coevolution that are emerging between the biological world and the mechanical, and between the biological world and the electronic.

De Rosnay sees a marriage between the technosphere and the noosphere: coevolving the biological and mechanical revolutions - thus blurring the lines of classical evolutionary theory: 'This traditional approach to the future is linear, analytical, and sequential. We should instead view communications systems globally and look for the principles of self-organization, self-selection, and emergence.'

De Rosnay has also talked of collective intelligence, of an agora, or meeting-place for a global mind (in a similar fashion to fellow french philosopher Pierre Levy). In this respect de Rosnay has established a website for citizen journalism called the Agoravox which at present only exists as a French site yet soon has a sister English site coming out. If anyone is interested in getting involved and participating with the english site, please note your details at the site here.

The future of this cyber-agora looks interesting, and I shall be keen to follow it.

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