Relatedness and Connectivism
While it may seem like semantics I feel it would be useful to draw out what might be meant by each term, partly to help develop my own understanding of connectivism, but also to explain why I think the term relatedness is equally useful when describing our online experience.
I like to describe relatedness as an aspect of Eros, which requires I explain what I mean by Eros. Jung referred to Eros as a feminine principle (not so much as eroticism – though that can be a part of it as well). It refers to a preference for feeling, reflection, creativity, spontaneity and relatedness – like a propensity to seek connection with others. Logos on the other hand is a more masculine principle of logic, thinking, discrimination and rationality. Eros and Logos work as opposites or polarities of a continuum and there is a need for balance (and at times mixing) of the two. When one is ignored at the expense of the other then what is ignored tends to force its way into the situation. And what we ignore tends to start “growing in our front yard.” (I have written elsewhere how this rebalancing also occurs with the polarities of introversion and extroversion). In an individual, particularly men, we see this in midlife crises, where compensation for the over emphasis on Logos (as career, ambition, overly goal directed behaviour) emerges as fascinations for younger women, and the consequent relationship challenges that follow. Often it becomes a creative change, literally through an interest in arts, or a more related career change such as becoming a counsellor. Sometimes we see it when in midlife when the man moves to a hobby farm in the country where the Eros is expressed as a kind of procreating with the land through the activities of farming or gardening.
The rebalancing between these polarities also occurs at a collective level and over greater time spans than a lifetime. It could be argued that in western culture we have had hundreds of years of cultural dominance of Logos (and patriarchy) and that we can see the rebalancing of Eros in a number of ways.
Logos itself is not necessarily a bad thing and we have our technological age to thank it for. But as Sir Ken Robinson in his famous Ted talk describes, we may have been “strip mining” our youth for increased logos and rationality at the expense of creativity.
George Siemens in a blog post says it is often suggested that technololgy creates separation (I would suggest that Robert Romanyshyn’s book Technology as Symptom and Dream is a fine example); and argues that his experience suggests that he feels more connected because of technology, through the social media available today. I would suggest that it is not the technology but our necessity of using too much Logos to create it, that leads us away from connectedness to seperateness. This is not usually a conscious process; and what has happened over recent years is an unprecedented (and necessary compensatory) fascination with the emerging social media. Danah boyd attributes this fascination amongst our youth for social networking to a history of increasingly restrictive opportunities of young people to relate or learn how to socialise ( for example increasing the age of legally working to project employment of older people in the depression of the 1930s, or in having a higher than necessary limit on drinking age). The result according to Dana is the explosion of popularity of MSN, MySpace, Facebook and other online fascinations.
I would go further and say that these fascinations for online socialising amongst youth are also the releasing of a compensation from the historical overuse of Logos, towards a new balance of Eros.
From another angle, I have 2 daughters who are fascinated with the new reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance? This show seems to be immensely popular (in the US and Australia) for young people of both sexes, as another compensation towards Eros (this time as physical expression of creativity – with the new dimension of being able to vote for it via SMS). I wonder if Sir Ken is laughing at this re-emergence of dance, which he described as modern education’s lowest priority.
So back to Relatedness and Connectivism. From what I understand of connectivism so far is that we learn because we are connected or related with someone. I experience it (alon with others) as something more as a sociological idea in that the term applies to a situation of our society, while relatedness I think is a better term for our individual experience within contexts of connectivism. Connectivism, rather than being a theory (and I would not want to discount it’s status as such) is perhaps a contemporary phenomena of the collective need for more relatedness, as part of our collective and cultural recovery from excess Logos and patriarchy. We now operate in a context where there is so much more to learn through our relateness with others. And the new technologies are providing the perfect context for this new type of learning to occur.
