Anti-hierarchical culture in media-based creative collectives : sketching originary analyses

In this paper I employ originary thinking in the analysis of the Enspiral Network, a novel collective 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 grew over time to become an intentionally "horizontally" structured, decentralised organisation governed by its more than 300 participants, working primarily in a variety of social enterprise and creative industries. The organisation is interesting for its capacity to maintain stability in the absence of strong hierarchy by using socio-technical systems that are constructed around digital communication technologies; and in particular, the infrastructure of the internet. The digitally altered scene of culture that has fostered this organisation is a secular one, and as Gans has argued, on the secular scene of culture the sacred centre is implicit:In what might be called the "default scenicity" of modern communities, the sacred center is merely implicit. The degree of this implicitness may be said to measure the community's secularity, which even in the most extreme case allows us to distinguish between ritual or simply cultural phenomena and the interactions of daily life. ("The Last Celebrity") This essay will draw on the proposition that under the conditions of the "default scenicity" of modern communities the sacred centre is not formally designated by artifice or structure, in order to engage with the impacts of digital communication technology on the "degree of implicitness" Gans discusses. It will use the context of the Enspiral Network as a case study in the dynamics of secular, digitally mediated interaction.