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Subject: RE: [huml] pdf document: The Semiotic Body in its Environment
That's a good read, James. Thanks! It is interesting to me that once again, someone in a different field is drawing on the ecological metaphor to explain how communication systems and communication behaviors self-organize using feedback-mediated adaptation. The behavioral cyberneticists would approve. Something to note about social systems as differentiated from other complex or non-linear dynamic systems is that social systems are aware of their rules and can therefore, behave opportunistically. The relative strengths of the negative and positive feedback loops determine the selection of the behaviors exhibited. I suspect that some of the projects team members are interested in should watch for the boundaries of stable and unstable behaviors that emerge and try to determine where the chaos begins. Note that not all nonlinear systems exhibit chaotic behavior. This depends, again, on the strengths of the negative and positive feedback loops. 1. What conditions, tests, selections return the behavior to stability, in other words, what attractors will reliably return the behavior to a predictable pattern if perturbed? 2. Are any attractors "strange"? That is, do the behaviors exhibit a pattern in which one cannot predict the next behavior but over time, a pattern emerges and the actor stays with it although from point to point, it appears to be random? 3. What signs in the feedback loop can evoke stable and unstable behaviors and is there a strength (intensity) variation such that small differences in the intensity lead to very large differences behaviorally? Do these recurse, that is, are there self-similar patterns at higher/lower levels of organization, say, cultural vs individual? Is there a detectable coupler, that is, if a behavior is exhibited by a 'leader' or 'follower', does that behavior emerge in the culture and by what channel is the sign/signal propagated? len From: James Landrum [mailto:james.landrum@ndsu.nodak.edu] for the Semiotic folk amongst us, as well as others, this is an interesting book chapter (35 pages) that uses behavior of two people engaged in archaeological excavation as basis for discussion. Unfortunately, I don't have the supplementary video tapes of the archaeologists in action, but I suspect most of us can easily visualize and thus "get the picture." http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/clic/cgoodwin/03sem_body.pdf
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