Anti-Hierarchical Culture in Media-Based Creative Collectives: Sketching Originary Analyses

摘要

In this paper I employ originary thinking in the analysis of the Enspiral Network, a novelcollective organisation, made possible only by virtue of digital communication technology.Its origin was a small group of coworkers in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2010 that grewover time to become an intentionally “horizontally” structured, decentralised organisationgoverned by its more than 300 participants, working primarily in a variety of socialenterprise and creative industries. The organisation is interesting for its capacity tomaintain stability in the absence of strong hierarchy by using socio-technical systems thatare constructed around digital communication technologies; and in particular, theinfrastructure of the internet. The digitally altered scene of culture that has fostered thisorganisation is a secular one, and as Gans has argued, on the secular scene of culture thesacred centre is implicit:In what might be called the “default scenicity” of modern communities, the sacredcenter is merely implicit. The degree of this implicitness may be said to measure thecommunity’s secularity, which even in the most extreme case allows us to distinguishbetween ritual or simply cultural phenomena and the interactions of daily life. (“TheLast Celebrity”)