Un comentario sobre el planeta Connecton

—planeta sobre el cual puede leerse en Connectivism. Un planeta inventado por George Siemens en el que se ve, en una nube sobre la cabeza de los habitantes, en qué están pensando, y los ingredientes de los que se hace ese pensamiento, conectados a otras nubes o extraídos de ellas. Es una metáfora sobre el conocimiento como algo consistente en conexiones mentales entre individuos. Me ha recordado a mis reflexiones (y las de Bickerton) sobre el lenguaje como realidad virtual en la que habitamos. Y le he puesto este comentario:

I agree this is a suggestive metaphor for knowledge-making and analysis. This Cloud of connections makes me think of what ancient idealist philosophers called the Collective Soul of the world, or Logos - the Word. Actually, one way to approach this connecting is through language. Language is, in a way, that cloud of ideas hanging over our heads, and linking to similar clouds in other heads. Hence I think this issue has been profitable dealt with within from the point of view of linguistics, of semiotics, of discourse studies... 

What is a discourse formation, a discipline, if not that aggregated cloud of connections congealed from many individual acts of communication, which draw from it and refer to it in a back-and-forth hermeneutic feedback? In my own cloud, this Connection dream connects with the Conversations and Discourses theorized by such analysts as James Paul Gee, in AN INTRODUCTION TO DISCOURSE ANALYSIS. You might want to check that one out to pursue some directions of your idea, or perhaps of mine. 

I insist your allegory of a connected world is plastic and suggestive, one can't keep it from generating ideas in other clouds. Since we are at it, it makes me think as well in the direction of other connections —always connect— such as the connection between INTERTEXTUALITY and HYPERTEXTUALITY, both of them connective concepts in their own right. I wrote a paper on that which might interest you, "Linkterature: From Word to Web", http://ssrn.com/abstract=1025231 - And your SF fantasy of a hyper-connected world brought to mind another paper on the utopia, or dystopia, of universal connectiveness, in "An Apocalypse of Total Communication", here: http://unizar.academia.edu/Jos%C3%A9AngelGarc%C3%ADaLanda/Papers/296963/An-Apocalypse-of-Total-Communication  - And the brain. The brain is a great maker of connections, most connections in the world are connections in the brain. 

Which reminds me-- I'm writing from the Ramón y Cajal mansion at Zaragoza -- since we're freely associating about neural connectivity. This one's about connections in the brain, but it's in Spanish, another connective universe: "Internalized interaction: The Specular Development of Language and the Symbolic Order" http://ssrn.com/abstract=1073782 -  Believe it or not, they are all connected to your Cloud of Knowing!

Análisis del discurso: Gramáticas, contextos, conversaciones, estilos

 

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