8 Mar 2010

The Usefulness (or not) of Debating What Things Are

I had an email exchange with a friend recently who was involved in an online discussion about "social learning" conducted by and for practitioners (people in business who are involved in workplace learning).  As i popped in and out of the discussion, there seemed to be a lot of debate about what social learning is.  As a result, i wrote my friend the following email (really it is two emails mashed into one).  

Since I wrote this as an informal email, composed in one sitting, i hope that you the reader will offer comments and criticisms appropriate to that level of writing:

-------------- the email --------------

I recently realized that i and a lot of other people tend to slip into ontological discussions about what things like media, social learning, design, organizations, systems etc. etc. are (stating what something "is" is an ontological claim) which seems to send us all down endless, unproductive philosophical rabbit trails, especially when those involved in the discussion are a) less interested, for the purposes of those discussions, in the philosophical claims than we are in the practical implications of the outcome, and b) aren't fully trained in philosophical discourse, and are therefore prone to chase endless, impractical philosophical rabbit trails.  

Moreover, even if we were able to make an ontological claim that design, social media, etc. is this or that, it may not be helpful at all in fashioning our approach to bettering the world.  In other words, whether i call the activities of sketching, prototyping, thinking about stakeholders, for example, "design" or "gobbledygook," the most useful outcome of our discussing this together is that you know what i am talking about and can make sense of it, not whether my definition is "correct."  So when we argue about whether sketching is or is not part of gobbledygook, we aren't really so much arguing about what design is (ontological) so much as arguing about how you and i define it (normative is, i think the best word to describe this).

The field of cybernetics has gone through this very shift over the course of its history.  For the first decades, cyberneticians feuded, fussed and fought do discover what a system is. This first movement has since been called first-order cybernetics, since it attempted to deal with the nature of the system itself.   After a while, though, some cyberneticians began to realize that fighting over ontological claims that systems exist was at least unproductive and at worst impossible (i'm grossly simplifying here), because, though my mom, dad and i form what most of us would consider to be a social system, it is very very very difficult to argue that the social relations between us can be subject to ontological claims (notice i said social, because the material relations, in the form of genetics, etc. are more easily subject to these sorts of claims). As a result, many cyberneticians began to realize that the more interesting and productive endeavor was to understand how people constructed models of these systems.  Thus was born the movement that has since been dubbed second-order cybernetics.

My current thinking is that the long debates that are going on right now all over the web, between practitioners, about the definitions of "social media," and "social learning" etc. etc. etc. are probably going to continue to be endless because the unit of analysis is moving, without us knowing it, to a far more fundamental level than that which is useful to us, and which is deeper than that with which we are equipped to deal. Having presented, as a surprisingly warmly welcomed interloper at a conference of philosophers who are equipped to deal with such things and who care about the deep philosophical implications of such definitions, i can say for sure that most practitioners and even academics who are not full-on philosophers (i will include myself in this group, though i am working right now to edge toward philosophical proficiency) are not yet ready to debate whether media does or does not exist, nor whether design is different from, subsumed by, or subsumes innovation.  
So instead of going round and round about such things, it seems to me that it will be far more productive for practitioners to leave the ontological debates to the philosophers (i believe these things should be debated!) and instead spend their precious time focusing on how learning can be effected in groups of highly-connected people, how new, productive situations can be created in the world, etc. whether they are called "social learning", "design thinking", "zip-a-dee-doo-da" or "gobbledygook."  

-------------- end of email --------------
what do you think?