Keystones in the Hive

(The mind is always making connections between disparate things... by the time I have arrived at a certain idea... I forget its trajectory... these days I have to take time off every now and then to find out which memes my mind has become receptive too... .the subconscious has suddenly gained prominence as I am inundated with ideas from all over my expanded world... Perhaps we all need to be our own analysts..)

That was just the prelude!

I have been thinking about how Social Technologies impact our social lives, a phenomenon I like to use the world "Sociality" for. I am not sure of the appropriateness of its usage, but it captures for me the essence of the multitudinous facets of the phenomenon we are all trying to make sense of.

Sometime back I wrote about 'Communities of Passion'. Then, as I was reading something about the use of Social Technologies for addressing customer complaints or improving customer service, it occurred to me, there might be a whole bunch more of "Communities of Pain" then there are those of 'Passion'. Well perhaps they are in the same number, that is not in itself important. However, it leads the systems thinker in me on the quest for an underlying theme, something more universal than the two archetypes of Passion and Pain.

They are both emotions, and therefore maybe we are talking about 'Communities of Emotion' in general. But yet again, that leaves out a lot of other things that the mind is individually and collectively involved in.

It then occurred to me, in these expanded social spaces, we are actually dealing with Ecosystems of minds, with all their thoughts and emotions and aspects I might not know. And, in those ecosystems are all these attractors, of Passion and Pain, and milder things like interests and so on. Passion and Pain are just the two types of plateaus on this landscape. There are thousands more which we could occupy.

That leads to the thought of 'keystones', and how influencing the ecosystem, is essentially about either being a keystone yourself, or influencing a well formed keystone in some way.

So there you are - "Keystones in the Collective Hive".

The systems thinker breathes a sigh of relief. For the moment, here then is one of the levers for the Social Universe that Archimedes would have looked for.