Another identity-related blog

I just discovered Ryan Lanham's blog, Identity Unknown, which is about "mashup, theory and opinion on ecologies, cultures, societies and individuals coping with identity in an Age of Unintended Consequences."

The blog's "topics" page gives a more detailed description of its remit:

What is the tie that binds across this admittedly eclectic blog?

In a word, it’s identity–but that word is vague at best. What I am about here is studying and reporting on the melting I see (that is, theorize) going on in various institutional and organizational forms during the current time of extensive global and technological interaction. My wife hears a lot about melting chocolate…melting shaving foam and the like.

I am also interested in the moral issues this institutional melting raises, particularly for realizing public action. That is, I worry about fading government institutions, proliferating jurisdictions, complex public networks of action, and public-private sorts of partnerships and their inadequacies.

Unlike many public administration scholars, I don’t seek to revitalize old institutions. Rather, I’d like to see them through to transformations that are sustainable and productively dynamic. You might say that I am trying to make sure that no one gets burned in the melting process however it may go.

Structures create borders. So I also worry about border disputes of various sorts such as those between “sectors” and other “imagined” categories. This takes me into conflicts and their resolvers of all sorts. As such, I study nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurship and a strange type of quasi-organization that eschews identity for action–I call these “post-organizations.” They include forms like community foundations, which is my dissertation topic. These post-organizations operate so as to downplay identity in favor of innovation–a very new concept, I think. I am big on enabling versus solving–I see them as points on a continuum of sorts.

I view innovation as approximately an inverse to social structure. Following actor-network-theory, I refer to the relationships that hold in a given situation for a given person (or an actant or group), as an ontology. That is a key term on this blog. Strong ontologies make innovation difficult. Strong ontologies=structure.

Overall, I think in terms of many co-operational and conflicting ontologies being in play all at the same time. We live in an ontology soup. It can either mesh gently or like a bunch of unsynchronized bits of steel.

In my theory, when an ontology fails to support a situation for the one applying a given version, the person/actant/group who thought they had it all together is thrust into dissonance–a sense of psychological unease. That cognitive dissonance leads to innovations. Innovation is thus the attempt to make ontologies more inclusive to absorb new situations.

Structure works in the opposite way but toward the same end. It prevents dissonance by enacting the same rules over and over again. While very efficient when things are relatively stable, structure doesn’t work very well in a time of uncertainty and interaction. Classic structure, in this sense of the term, is a bureaucracy in a corporation or government. But it is also as much found in the strict religious teachings of a fundamentalist sect. Anything that locks thinking is structure.

Surrounding an ontology are borders of boundary objects–another key term in this blog. A boundary object is something that is contested between ontologies. Thus, any ontological relationship or fact held by a person could be a boundary object with someone else’s ontology in any given situation–that is, everything can be contested by someone. Such contests also cause dissonance and thus also contribute to innovations when the conflicts arise in different situations.

“Strong ontologies,” e.g. orthodox faiths, reiterate certain key ontological boundary objects that underscore how that strong ontology is expected to be applied in various situations by its masters. Strong ontologies tend to isolate themselves and those who apply them. Consequently, they don’t work well in ages such as ours. Weak ontologies tend to be exploratory, but they have a tough time surviving very long. It is almost like the cell walls of plant cells versus animal cells. One is forceful, the other mobile. Both can find niches and thrive under various circumstances–a reason I am interested in ecology and evolution.

As I have already suggested, we are in an age where there is, in general, much greater interaction (e.g. globalization and Web 2.0). This age is causing much friction between various ontologies and the identities they support. As such, there are many identity-related crises and counter-crises of nationalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, classism, racism, etc.

I take no specific position regarding most ontologies. But I do tend to hold very weak boundary objects myself. I also respect, or try to respect, those with deep beliefs of one sort or another. I am generally inclined toward a pragmatic tolerance. I have my biases and boundaries, too.

The topics I treat in Identity Unknown relate to the milieu of all these considerations. I’d be happy to have your comments or, if you are truly engaged, your contributions.

This all sounds most interesting, and the focus on ontologies is right up my street. However, when I subscribed to the blog's feed, I found that very many of the posts (of which there are very many) make no explicit mention of identity itself. This seems to be mainly a link blog, with content very loosely constellated around "identity", with the occasional bit of commentary from Ryan. I shall give it a good try out in my aggregator and report back on anything of particular interest to identity truth seekers.