Opening and Closing | Reflections on living in times of uncertainty and change
Way back in 1987, I was getting a Master’s Degree in Communication and was writing one of the many papers that formed a part of the education. Often I found myself in the library exploring stacks written about whatever subject I was researching. I loved going down those physical rabbit holes looking through card catalogs, and microfiche in dark corners of the university library, not knowing what I was going to find.
It was while I was doing this that I came across a book called Opening and Closing: Strategies of Information Adaptation in Society. The book “views society as a series of opening and closing.” The book asserts that there are It hypothesizes that — in modern societies — the view of progress is biased in favor of opening,” which includes going beyond social norms and boundaries between groups, and what is expanding the idea of belonging to include ever larger groups. This bias devalues the equally important movement of“closing — coalescing around established definitions of identity, and holding to traditional norms. Another way of putting this was that there is a necessity to acknowledge both the loosening and moving beyond established norms, as well as the need for keeping in place what people have.” At the time (in 1978) the author argued that “because of bias in the concept of progress, modern…
