For some time now, my buddy Dave has been sifting through notions of rhizomes in his blog, in a recent journal article, with colleagues, and on various webcasts at EdTechTalk.com. While he certainly isn’t the first to consider the concept or term "rhizome", he has spent a good deal of time and effort extending the rhizome metaphor to knowledge creation and negotiation within the connected networks where we now learn, play, and work.
Central to my internalization of his use of the rhizome metaphor is the conception of socially negotiated knowledge creation which is fostered and extended through and across vast connected networks. When people in the network connect with others, knowledge threads are shared, considered, negotiated, extended, modified, and spun back out into the network. These connections in the network offer a messy crisscross of knowledge threads and a magical never ending supply of shared "aha" moments. In my opinion, these messy connected knowledge threads and the socially negotiated "aha" moments are what make networks special and important.
But … what are the implications when a knowledge thread is snapped off and begun anew without a nod or historical connection to the thoughts and ideas that came before? It is certainly no longer messy when those historical threads and connections are lopped off. Instead, it projects to the uninitiated a fresh and novel perspective. However, doesn’t the network lose what makes it special and important when it fails to maintain and embrace its history and connections? Beyond the arguable violations of commonly held codes of attribution, what does the new knowledge thread and network lose by not embedding the history and past connections within the new social negotiations? Aren’t new participants mislead or shortchanged by losing the connection to past ideas and the historical evolution of the knowledge thread?
There seems to be some misconception here that rhizome is a concept that is owned by certain individuals. It is not. The historical threads (that can be traced back before Deleuze and Guatarri) are acknowledged, and here are used as Deleuze might call it to create a new ‘line of flight’. For the sake of having to repeat the words so that they are actually read and digested:
Why use the word rhizome? This is project about digital identities and addresses the issue of the fractured nature of the self when our online identities become distributed across multiple sites and services. Rhizome is a Deleuzian concept that has been used and taken by many active in the field of art, science and philosophy. It is used in this project as a cipher for understandings of digital identity as:
From this we are also using the metaphor of cartography, the map, a space which has no privileged entry point and is always open to change.
The references we use for this conceptual entry into understandings of digital identity are at present:
Deleuze & Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Sermijn, Devlieger and Loots (2008). The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as a Rhizomatic Story. Qualitative Inquiry, (14)4:632–650.
I would also add that if you want to engage with the project then please feel free to come to the project space. Picking up posts through ping-back is a poor way of creating a constructive dialog and merely serves to obsure this particular historical thread.
Dear Jennifer,
It seems that George’s last post has spread like a virus! So please let me clarify some of your points here as I did before in George’s blog: Dave is our colleague and fellow researcher in the Open Habitat project. He is not an stranger. And we know pretty well his work. Well enough to credit him when we build our research on his findings, or published work. The Rhizome project, is called Rhizome not because of Dave, who used, as we use, the well known and not so new concept of rhizome! The main reference we use and publicly acknowledge has another weight: is Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome we are referring to, in A Thousand Plateaus.
Unfortunately, Deleuze and Guattari didn’t have a blog. Their work is in books, I agree, of difficult access. But they are outstanding pieces of thinking of our time.
You may want to reconsider calling multiple blog posts on the same topic "a virus", especially when you are launching a project to study online communication and discourse. While I respect George and his work, I was not motivated to dust off my blog and make this post because of him, but rather because of something deep inside me that said, "This is creepy."
Dave is my friend and you claim he is your colleague, too. However, if he and I had discussed a project or article he was working on and then I decided to start a different project under a similar thesis (or similar title, frame of reference, original source) to what he had been using in his work, whether (a) I had studied the concept for 20 years before I met him, (b) it was his original idea, or (c) he had extended the work of others and I was planning on taking a different twist than him, I would say something like, "Hey, Dave, my colleague, I’m starting this project that may or may not end up having overlap with your recent work and I’m going to call it the ‘ABC’ project which has a similar thesis (title, frame of reference, original source) to your recent paper … and then I’d make certain to reference his work on the topic (and the work of others that I was aware of) at the outset in my "About" page or somewhere else in the early launch material so others could see the threads of knowledge on the topic that may (or may not) inform the ensuing discourse in the network.
By the way, I’m done defending Dave (he is a big boy) and I’m done defending my conception of how network discourse (and friendships) should function. I just wanted to clarify why Dave’s buddies were compelled to make certain his contributions to the knowledge thread were acknowledged. We aren’t all lemmings following George’s lead. We saw something that didn’t sit right with us and voiced our opinions. In my experience, that is how informal network discourse generally works, by the way.