5 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. Instead, he lauds the figure of themarket as a knowing entity, envisioning it as a kind of processor of socialinformation that, through the mechanism of price, continuously calcu-lates and communicates current economic conditions to individuals inthe market.

      Is it possible that in this paper we'll see the beginning of a shift from Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (of Divine Providence, or God) to a somewhat more scientifically based mechanism based on information theory?

      Could communication described here be similar to that of a fungal colony seeking out food across gradients? It's based in statistical mechanics of exploring a space, but looks like divine providence or even magic to those lacking the mechanism?

  2. May 2020
    1. Insight through making suggests that you’ll need to make simultaneous progress in theory-space and system-space to spot the new implications in their conjoined space. Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use: you must constantly instantiate new theoretical ideas in new systems, then observe their impact in some serious context of use.

      Very powerful way of wording the implications of Insights through making and the need for serious contexts of use.

      You need to advance in theory-space as well as in system-space to spot the implications for their conjoined space.

      Pragmatically, you must constantly instantiate new theoretical ideas in the system, then observe the effects in some serious context of use.

  3. Aug 2018
    1. Action is but the constant intervention of humans into the natural and social world of events. Giddens adds that he would also like to make clear the constitutive relation between time and action. 'I do not' he says, 'equate action with intentionality, but action starts always from an intentionally-oriented actor, who orients him/herself just as much in the past, as he/she tries to realize plans for the future. In this sense, I believe, action can only be analyzed, if one recognizes its embeddedness in the temporal dimension' (Kiessling, 1988:289).

      Giddens' structuration theory accounts for how social action/practices over time and space.

      Structuration theory = "the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based in the analysis of both structure and agents"

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuration_theory

      Both Adam and Nowotny engage quite a bit with Gidden's structuration theory/time-space distanciation concept, though sociologists are quite critical of the theory. Why?

    2. To show 'how the positioning of actors in contexts of interaction and the interlacing of those contexts themselves' relate to broader aspects of social systems, Giddens proposes that social theory should confront 'in a concrete rather than an abstractly philosophical way' the situatedness of interaction in time and space (Giddens, 1984:110)

      further description of time-space distanciation

    3. The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

      Space-time distanciation theory.

      See also: Adam - 1990 - Time for Social Theory