Contextualism: A journey through bifurcated fractals at the edge of chaos and complexity and a genuine search for simplicity through it all!

As I have tried to navigate social media sites that I have participated or continue to participate in over time (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, beBee, etc….), I am constantly amazed at the somewhat surreal complexity of life as it is portrayed on any one of these social media venues. How easy it is to start my day long journey with a new and refreshed sense of commitment, only to find myself constantly being herded to the edges of chaos.

Why, one may or may not ask? I can only surmise that in each of these venues, in our emerging world of globalization, it may be that for many it is a result or consequence of the influencing factors of digital disruption and a disengaged connectedness.  It may be because of the ease that we all find in using the world’s landscape of social media.  In a sense we have created a world devoid of real personalization. A world where, because of the ease of and unaccountability of sound biting and despite the power we feel in expressing a view on any given topic, true communication in context has become a lost art in light of short blurb texting and blogging-as a result we have lost the art of civility, common sense, and true conversation.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are many out there that understand the art of conversation and discourse and do a great job at conveying their thoughts about any issue, any topic, and any hot button item out there and in the moment, any moment in time. Unfortunately, there are far too many who hide behind the cloak of fire and forget digital anonymity and just wax eloquently with caustic rhetoric, acerbic/abrasive and vitriolic prose, derisive statements and baited comment.

So a couple thoughts on the choice of the title and the art or philosophy of contextualism.

Contextualism :  Wikipedia describes it as “…a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context ."

To bifurcate :  A quick “Google Search” indicates that it is “to divide into parts or forks.”

Fractals : Webster's defines a fractal as “any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape to a given larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size.”

Chaos: Also found in Wikipedia: as a theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Where the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

Complexity: And Webster defines it as: the quality or state of not being simple, the quality or state of being complex; a part of something that is complicated or hard to understand.

Genuine :  Again Webster defines genuine as being:  “actual, real, or true; not false or fake; sincere and honest.”

Simplicity: Jean-Louis Dessalles identifies Simplicity Theory (ST) as a cognitive theory based on the following observation: human individuals are highly sensitive to any discrepancy in complexity. Their interest is aroused by any situation which appears "too simple" to them. 

As a digital immigrant, I remember days gone by where folks used to sit around and talk. We would send letters that actually meant something because they were written in the hand of the being, not just a digital shot in the winds that holds no sense of ownership, accountability or true reflectance of the individual. We could look at and interact with people. We did so in a civil manner, even if we didn’t agree with everything the other person had to say, a position they took on a topic, or god forbid a particular stance on a political candidate or an individual or collective social challenge confronting us or society. 

In some respects, the advent of social media has created an environment where context that once served as a means to keep things in perspective now serves as a venue for those who are driving any particular topic, any particular piece of information as a means to distract, or obfuscate any form of contextualism behind any dialogue. We seemingly have entered a world where dividing and conquering seems to have become the acceptable status quo of navigating the forks along our journeys.

Despite this, might we be able to use our noodle juice to conceptually navigate the irregularity and subtleties of all the pieces and parts, large or small and realize that maybe somewhere in the middle we may just be the same size? Daily we are presented with a variety of initial conditions and sometimes the effects of some butterfly wing flapping that makes us ultra-sensitive to and drive a myriad of conversation. No issue is beyond reproach when that dog gone butterfly flips its wings in China and low and behold as a result somehow a hurricane unfolds in the Atlantic. The fact that our world is a complex, sometimes hard to understand landscape of inputs and outputs and cause and effect it is understandable.  Change is never easy, and as humans we are in fact sensitive to any discrepancy in complexity. Might we just try a little harder to put things into context and simply make the most out of our world view(s) across the landscape of context, perspective, orientation and civil discussion?

And on a positive bee buzzing note, that is what I find refreshing so far about beBee.  All the best my fellow bees, keep buzzing and make a difference; one person--one step at a time.