Other Realities

Virtual Conference - Life 2.0

I'll occasionally be re-posting, with permission, bits of Ana Herzog's reports and her images from the in-world Second Life venue for the Life 2.0 conference over the next few days.   The conference sessions actually started Saturday so I won't waste too much time with repetition -- you can read about the sessions she attends at her "My Life as an Avatar" blog at http://secondana.blogspot.com.   

Many Blogs in One

I have too many identities.   I didn't intend to create different identities but at one point in my naive past I thought that the different subjects that intrigued me deserved distinct treatment via distinct blogs.  Most human beings worth their salt are so diverse that to maintain a compartment for each aspect of self would take up all of an individual's time.   I blog about peace, politics, and attitude.    I blog about  meaning, identity, reality and semiotics.   I blog about munchausen by proxy abuse & medical abuse, I blog about virtual worlds and the metaverse such as Second Life® and Open Life® grids.  I blog about human culture.  I blog about living happily with depression.  I blog about green and blue - ness, about environmental processes such as wetlands and arid lands.  I blog about blogging.  I blog about the original Generation X that is the latter portion of what is termed The Baby Boom Generation.  I blog about feminism and other "isms." I blog about Gene Stratton-Porter.   I blog about Indiana.   I blog about Arizona.   I blog about CODEPINK.   I blog about roles assigned to me by culture such as mother, daughter, sister, wife, woman and roles I have actively assumed such as iconoclast and activist.     And I blog about many other things.   

My favorite quote in the whole world is Walt Whitman's, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."

What to do about what is happening.

The Virtual Knowledge Group (VKG)  is a concept as much as a company.   Nancy, the founder and director, jokes that in the small mid-western town closest to the farm where she grew up she was described through statements such as, "Oh, her?  She's always been different." 

Different times require different thoughts and actions.   Friends, as I am sure you know, we are headed into very different times. Many say we are headed toward very difficult times as we face: global warming.  fundamentalist frictions,  a world wide health crisis,  over exploitation of dwindling resources, economic clashes between the very few rich and the massive numbers of the poor. 

Gregory Bateson a visionary thinker of the 20th Century defined information as "any difference that makes a difference."    

We are awash in difference.   How we handle the information embedded in those differences will determine whether these coming constraints limit or enable.

We are at a point of punctuation in the process understood as evolution.   All this means is that we are at a time of rapid change and can expect rapid expression of emergent properties activated by novel contextual triggers.   The concept is understood as punctuated equilibrium.   The gist of the theory was that "significant evolutionary change arises in coincidence with events of branching speciation, and not primarily through the transformation of lineages."