MONADOLOGY

"Real-time democracy is both a special case and the crowning glory of the economy of human qualities. As a result it effectively participates in the enhancement and organization of individual qualities. Because it can account for the subjective detail of every monad, every individual soul, an intelligent community, like the God of Leibniz, calculates the best of all possible worlds."

– Pierre Lévy

"Each monad represented a distinct point of view. Every point of view had to be taken up, otherwise an opportunity for greater variety would have been missed."

– G. MacDonald Ross

Nomadic or Monadic:
Are we Lost or Found in Dataspace?

Is the Net leading us into nomadic behavior in which interactions are executed by isolated individuals scavenging for substance in electronic space, or, is networked communication encouraging cultural transformation influenced by the interconnectedness of the collective experience?

Consider these reflections on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's (1646 - 1716) theory of monadology reinterpreted for the information age:

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Networks form an assemblage of monads, dematerialized bodies that unite collectively.

A monadic sphere implies a disembodied universe with individuals connected in non-space and non-time.

Telematics advances the possibilities for many-to-many intercommunication, the dissolution of hierarchies, point-to-point connections.

With telematics all parts affect the whole.

The whole gains from this collectivity through the multiplicity of individual perspectives. The vision of the whole, by nature of this multiplicity, is a collective vision.

The Net is a repository for collective memory, a shared database, a universal language.

"Now, this interconnection, relationship, or this adoption of all things to each particular one, and of each one to all the rest, brings it about that every simple substance has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe."

– Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Monadology #56

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"... not only is every body affected by those which are in contact with it, and responds in some way to whatever happens to them, but also by means of them the body responds to those bodies adjoining them, and their intercommunication can be continued to any distance at will."

– Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology #61

"... all matter is connected; and in a plenum or filled space every movement has an effect upon bodies in proportion to their distance, so that not only is every body affected by those which are in contact with it..."