Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in Ecosocial Systems

Abstract

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEWHow do moments add up to lives?How do our shared moments together add up to social life as such?Every human action, all human activity takes place on one or more characteristic timescales. A heartbeat, a breath, a step, a spoken word takes but a moment; a stroll, a conversation extends over many such moments; and an education or a relationship may be a lifetime project. The great cathedrals of Europe were built over many human lifetimes, and the languages and discourse patterns of our communities have developed over still longer times. And yet a conversation consists of many momentary utterances; a relationship may be built of many strolls and conversations together; a building or a social institution is erected by the sum of many individual actions in a community.How? How do actions or events on one timescale come to add up to more than just a series of isolated happenings? How does a language emerge from many utterances? How does a community emerge from many people-in-action? On how many different timescales is our social life organized? How does persistent organization on longer timescales constrain the likelihood of events on shorter timescales? How do organizational units and processes on shorter timescales make possible the emergent patternings we recognize on longer timescales?Why time? Our material world is organized on many scales: space, time, matter, energy, and information transfer. In many natural systems there is a strong correlation among these scales: the quick is also small and light and weak and simple; however, in more complex systems, especially those in which signs and meaning play a role in behavior and system dynamics, these simple correlations break down.Classical systems theory is rooted in spatial metaphors and the reductionist project: large systems are to be understood by analyzing them in terms of interactions among smaller component MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 7(4),[273][274][275][276][277][278][279][280][281][282][283][284][285][286][287][288][289][290]

Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment

“…Lemke presents the important principle of heterochrony, variations in the parameters of temporal change associated with different parts of a system (Lemke, 2000). Understanding cyberinfrastructure building requires understanding the timescales for operation of its different components and how they are articulated so that processes have an apparent continuity across time.…”

Ecologies of participation in school classrooms

“…Actor Network Theory 22 and connected perspectives also offer much in this regard. Ecological metaphors developed in this and related framings of social relations and forms such as filaments (Latour, 2005) or the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) may be helpful to develop an understanding of participation taking place in different but interrelated timescales (Lemke, 2000). This approach allows for concepts such as peripheral participation to be used as a means to understand specific moments of learning, for example in individual teacher-student encounters, even in contexts where over longer time periods participation is marginal.…”

Language and biosemiosis: Towards unity?

“…Taking a systemic-functional view, Thibault avoids form-function debate by stressing that these arise in dynamic cross-coupling. Building on Lemke's (2000) ecosocial model, speech genres as well as language-systems are said to mediate between interaction and the social world. Contextualizing, while using brains, belongs to social practice.…”

“…Rather than appeal to psychological reifications, he suggests that we display genre-based sensitivity to perceived events. With Lemke (2000), talk uses topological-continuous signs together with typological-discrete counterparts. Modes of semiosis depend -not on competence -but 'meaning potential' immanent to a community (40).…”

“…Without understanding what we are doing, humans find their 'vibrating vocal chords self-organize into patterned behavior' (137). In Lemke's (2000) terms, we 're-scale' social semiosis as 'symbolic modes of interaction make possible the maximal intersection of different time-scales' (145). Emphasizing crosscoupling makes contextualization cues into arrays of expression whose meaning emerges thanks to constraining systems of oppositions.…”