Being Integral can get downright technical, but on its simplest level correlates to the notion of “balance.”

This post is just a beginning, and I’ll endeavor to keep it brief.  It is also intended to be shared with people who are interested expanding upon the emerging wave of social/community media and networking.

First a very brief history.  The Integral phenomenon has its roots in the oddly phrased “human potential movement” which emerged in the 1960s, but has been made most widely known and expanded upon by Ken WIlber and his affiliates who are banded together under the umbrella of the organization Wilber formed, the Integral Institute.

It aim is noble, and can perhaps be best understood by starting in terms of a model that attempts to reconcile the pluralism of truth across the diverse (and, indeed, often dissociated) branches of human knowledge, and encompassing the diversity of personal truth inherent to individuals both in their own right and in the way such truths play out in the communal and social spheres.

As you might infer from the preceding paragraph, the model delves into both the interior (subjective) domains of experience as well as the exterior (objective) ones.  The model makes another important distinction, however, between the individual and collective aspects of experience.  These two pairs of distinctions are as far as I’ll traverse in this posting.

This aspect of the model is normally visualized as an area (typically a circle or square) divided up with “cross-hairs” into four quadrants, as depicted in the following diagram, and the four quadrants correspond directly in terms of how we perceive them in everyday life to the four personal pronouns, “I,” “It,” “We,” and “Its”.

(Image Credit: ~C4Chaos on Flickr.  Original image here)

In terms of social/community media and networking (or interrelatedness), the social dimension exists in the Fourth Quadrant, or Lower-Right (LR/”Its”), which is a group related to from its exterior (not a part of, bit an outside observer), whereas the community dimension corresponds the the Third Quadrant, or Lower-Left (LL/”We”), which is a group related from a perspective of one “inside” the group.

The distinction between social and community is critical.  If you are not part of a community, you are outside of it, and can observe and study it only as an outsider.  I could move to Paris, for example, as an American (the community I was raised in), and even if I lived there for many years, I would never share the same perspective as a born-and-bred Parisian.  At best, I might share part of their experience, but it would never be foremost in my experience.

The emergence of the global commons of the Internet and global media in unique in the history of the world in that new communities are being born in which we can participate as insiders, whatever our upbringing.  The emergent phase of community media and networking is one of pure facilitation.  The intricacies of what such communities might involve and require remain, I would suggest, to be explored.

The goal of this posting is, then, to promote a consideration of what these intricacies might be, and to encourage their exploration.

We are only now even waking up to the reality of the Internet and the global commons.  Vast possibilities remain untapped and even unrecognized in the dizzying technicalities of simply making them possible.