Society Building as Collaborative Selection of Information-Processing Dimensions?

The perspective we are developing here is that all human societal and environmental interaction is shaped by the information-processing structures of the societies concerned. Its point of departure is an attempt to look in detail at the collaborative process by which societies’ collective information-processing structures (comprising beliefs, institutions, technologies, etc.) are developed and the members of the society are aligned to it. We see this process as an instance of convergent collaboration among a group of individuals. In the process, we are asking, and attempting to provide at least partial answers to, the following three questions: “How do collaborations emerge?”; “How do their results perdure?”; and “How might collaborations end?” To do so, we have chosen a perspective that does not follow the common, and traditional, perspective that separates and opposes “subject” and “object,” arguing that there is a reality “out there” independent of the observer. Instead, we have assumed a fundamental dependency between the nature, position, and culture of both the observer and the observed in the outcome of the observation.