The formation of tribes dates back over 3 million years. I think their modern equivalent may be one of the key structural missing pieces that link intention and behavior across our most basic modern organisms - individuals, families, corporations and NGO's - to generate human and ecosystem well-being.In particular I am interested in these structures as embodied in social networks. Marshal McLuhan the infamous media philosopher predicted tribes would surface in electronic media as the distance between us evaporated:
"The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing--rather than enlarging--the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence--violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial." (http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm)
Sound familiar?
Commentary by Samuel Rose: "So, McLuhan also used the metaphor of "tribal" to describe what he saw emerging in our time. He was really accurate on his prediction of the direction of technology. But he saw new types of tribes. his tribes were "electronic culture" tribes. McLuhan knew, even before there was anything like the internet, that the direction of technology as an "extension of man" was going towards what he called a "global village". What he meant by a global village was that people in our time were going to become highly connected to the point that distance between us would eventually be largely erased. We are now headed towards that direction. So, McLuhan guessed that people connected in this global village would start to "retribalize" into new groups.
But these new types of "tribes" will not be like the tribes of pre-history.
They will instead be "Global-local" tribes. Some of them will organize around a place, or around concepts or ideas or technology. Some people will be part of many of these groups."
Compare this to Buckminster Fuller's thinking on the great migration of peoples across the Bering Strait and throughout the world which, he said, has resulted in millions of years of disperse, isolated experiments in how to survive, how to process information and how to get along. Because these experiments were isolated, they were preserved in diverse cultures around the globe. The construction of our advanced transportation and communication systems, he thought, were now acting to integrate this disperse knowledge."Ever evolutionary universe, has contrived first to conserve by isolation all the lessons learned regarding humanity's artifact inventing ingenuity in coping with the most extreme conditions experienced around our planet and secondly to synergetically integrate all knowledge for the mutual advantage of all humanity."
Bucky thought the natural purpose and pursuit of man was to be information harvestors and local problem solvers for the benefit of all. If indeed as McLuhan suggested our technologies are extensions of man, in a global-local village, then perhaps we should more consciously build for the use of tribe-like structures in our social networks. Such structures may indeed be for humanity what the nest is to a bird, or hive to a bee - the optimal structure for aligning with purpose.
I can think of many tribes I belong to: Halloran Tribe, BeDo Tribe, Hub Oaxaca Tribe, Bucky Fuller Tribe, Social Capital Tribe (These are project related with lots of crossover between them); Art-Tech Tribe, San Francisco Tribe, Oaxaca Tribe, Hollyhock Tribe (Geography & Interest based). Within these tribes there are people from every different disciplines, geographies, interests etc. Through them I am my own local information harvestor, while being able to compare notes with others. Like bees pollinating, from tribe to tribe rather than hive to hive. Perhaps that is one of the great functions of these structures. They blend the edges - or are the core at the edges. They are sources of verification, validation, and new unstructured information/innovation.
Tribes straddle all major categories of social structure - from individuals and families to corporations and NGO's. Because they are self-organizing they potentially provide great analytic demographic/sociographic data around who and why people connect.
In the same way that Google search inquiries are generating early flu epidemic warnings - (triggered by sudden outburst of searches around flu topics in defined geographic areas, BeDo may generate early warnings (market feedback) on shifts in cultural behavior. Autonomous group formation (tribes) could provide great information about the cohesion of local problem solvers related to goal sharing and resource sharing for example. This could be correlated with news media and important local events like tsunamis and hurricanes (and much more) to understand the correlation and perhaps the healing function of these structures.
Here is more recommend reading from the P2P Foundation on Neo-Tribalism.
I think this is rich material for the digital platform BeDo.com is now building
How can we facilitate this natural inclination to form tribes? How does our autonomous "group-forming" nature get expressed in today's social networks? Where can the semantic analysis of tribes take us? These are some of the questions I am currently asking myself,
Just thinking out loud...
Mark