Thursday, March 8, 2018

Electricity, Atomism, Organicism

Like much of contemporary society, the Internet is unthinkable without the harnessing of Electricity over the past two centuries.  Electricity is usually conceived as founded on two particles--one the 'positive-charged' Proton, the other the 'negative-charged' Electron.  But, these are heuristic derivative concepts.  For, the fundamental phenomena which they represent are, rather, processes of Attraction and Repulsion, which require two distinct terms.  From them, the concept of 'charge' attributable to each particle is abstracted from the concrete processes, and the further differentiation into 'positive' and 'negative' is a legacy of an earlier stage of study, corresponding to no actual quantities.  Now, the traditional concept of the political 'Individual' can be similarly re-conceived on a Holistic basis--as an abstraction from a more fundamental relation of Differentiation of one member of a society from another.  Likewise, the ongoing transformation of Politics into Cosmopolitics being effected by the Internet, previously discussed here, entails a transformation of the traditional Atomist concept of Humankind to an Organicist one.  Thus, the ultimate message of this medium is:  Electricity.

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