4. Cybersocial systems are forms of socio-material life where, at different scales, meaning of the parts is configured by the whole of the system: schools, workplaces, economies, epistemologies and such like. Today, these relationships are pervasively mediated by Binary Computing.
4.1. For persons, being in a cybersocial system involves all of: sensorimotor engagement; affective attachment; and cognitive figuring.
4.2. Brains are isolated by their biophysical separation, but mind is distributed in the meaning-making resources that are both a species-wide and historically-specific inheritance: social meanings represented in text, image, space, object, body, sound and speech.
4.3. Meanings are immanent in the material world, and we acquire these meanings through embodied and mindful experience. To the extent that meanings are in the world, the world, in a sense, is itself minded.
4.4. Meanings are not just there; they are made according to our interests, but only within the scope of possible play between the ideal and the material.
4.5. Cybersocial systems are recursive, complex, and emerging. Control is distributed, occurring via and adaptable protocols more frequently and more effectively than by command. Synergistic feedback and hypercomplexity cause indeterminacy more often than predictable causality. Cybersocial systems have a dialectical and historically contingent rather than straightforwardly directional logic.
4.6. Cybersocial systems are never stable, notwithstanding their tendency at times to Homeostasis, or self-correcting balance. But at other times they become less stable, to the point where they break or demand of themselves transformative reinvention.
4.7. A cybersocial systems perspective may be ‘posthumanist’ in the sense that it will decry Enlightenment hubris: mind over matter; homo sapiens insensitively exerting dominance over nature; or humans who believe they are in control of machines rather than in a cybernetic relation. But the claim to be ‘posthuman’ (Hayles, 1999) – if human is what you are – takes false modesty to an extreme that stretches credulity. Our meanings are inevitably matters of human interest, albeit never capriciously subjective because they are dialectically connected to the material world through our embodied sensorium.
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COPE, Bill and KALANTZIS, Mary, 2022. The cybernetics of learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 6 December 2022. Vol. 54, no. 14, p. 2352–2388. DOI 10.1080/00131857.2022.2033213, p. 2383–2384.