Social Cybernetics is my coinage. Social Cybernetics means:
Social Cybernetics: is the ecology given in interpersonal engagement for the purpose of two persons intending to know each other. This ecology intermixes two enactive systems, each broadly characterized as constituting separate systems of awareness able to be at once self-knowing and other-knowing.
The basic dispositional elements of a social cybernetic system are:
(1) FIRST ORDER: Automatic, ‘just so’ awareness
(2) SECOND ORDER: Habitual, normative awareness
(3) THIRD ORDER: Creative, transformative awareness
Combinations of the different orders of social cybernetic awareness suppose an optimal combination of two aware person-systems. This optimal social cybernetic ‘meta-order’ is instantiated when the two aware person-systems both are in Third Order relations, and, so, the interpersonal ecology is of the Third Order.
Furthermore, the sensemaking capacity of this ecology produces knowledge which can only be mainly referenced to Third Order, creative, repertorial(*), operations of awareness.
Transformative: the kinds of intentional awareness that are: not automatic, not normative, and, at the same time, are kinds that afford knowledge or sensemaking.
Transformative sensemaking is outside the boundedness of automatic awareness, and, its kinds are either coupled to normative awareness, or are uncoupled. Non-normative, counter-normative kinds of interpersonal awareness would likely strike a habitually aware person-system as being strange or alien.
(Various successful deployments of transformative awareness builds up a ‘Third Order repertoire.’)
If person-system A hopes to draw person-system B into Third Order Social Cybernetic ecology of mutual relations and mutual knowledge-making, then it would be the case that some sort of transitive and transformational negotiation or exploration of the (class of) dialectical polarities, NormativeNon-Normative, would be deployed by person-system A.
People’s experience of being drawn from the habitual ecology of relating and mutual knowledge-making/sense-making into Third Orders expresses a narrative about: sudden shifts, or surprising emergent productions of knowledge, or coaxing another or one another into novel modes of relating, or intuitive leaps and probative hunches, etc..
Third Order interpersonal knowledge-making supposes intentional, adventurous operations of co-construal.
FIRST ORDER: “Hi, how are you doing?”
SECOND ORDER: “What do you do for a living?”
THIRD ORDER: “Have you had any big dreams lately?”
(*) repertorial, from repertoire – having the sense of a collection of approaches, lenses, heuristic devices. In the Third Order, in the sense of having a repertoire, the means and method, or way of being, of approach ‘in awareness’ to knowledge-making, is chosen from this repertoire; as if choosing from a menu of possible ways of being.
There are also menu items in a Second Order repertoire. Those items are anchored to normative, or typical, ways of being, means, methods, approaches.
