From iShaman:
This has been on my mind a lot lately...
I discovered "the underground matrix" in about 1993. No, not that kind of underground and not that kind of matrix! This all started when I joined the Lake Hodges Native Plant Society at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park shortly after my wife and I bought a home in North San Diego County.. I was then and remain keen to learn how to go about replacing the mainly exotic, nitrogen and water hungry plants on my property with beautiful, tough, ideal native Californian flora. Long story short, I noticed that when first planted, the California native plants we were placing in a demonstration garden would look puny and listless for a long time -- sometimes for as long as a year. And then, BOOM! They'd "catch" and begin to flourish. My now departed mentor there explained to me that because the soil structure had been disturbed many years ago by having been graded and tilled, the soil was damaged. He went on to explain that once damaged the first things that would grow there were these terribly invasive weeds from other parts of the world. "Look where that road's been cut." he said pointing a dirt road that bisected our then sad space. "What do you see?" I told him it was a dirt road lined on both sides by the worst weeds out here. "This is what happens when we disturb the matrix." he said and then he walked over to our shed and grabbed a book that describes mycorrhiza. Loving gardens and growing things as much as I do it's only natural that the metaphors this avocation provides would wend their way into my speaking and writing. As I read the book and learned how these magnificent filaments of fungi interconnect slowly to form systems where one plats success is the success of another and another and another I realized I'd found the "the one". Worth mentioning is that this experience took place on the same month the first Matrix film came out.
I think it's a matrix worth sharing but there is a little effort required to get up on top of it so I'm sharing something smart from John Millner's blog that I think will help the metaphor to catch and hold.
...According to Finnish activity system theorist Yrjo Engestrom the relationship between the network infrastructure and the collaborative communities that arise from it is analogous to the symbiosis between plant root systems and underground fungal filaments known as a mycorrhiza.
"Like power-law networks, mycorrhizae exhibit very rapid and massive growth, like online social networks they exhibit intertwining mutualism, and like other complex networks they exhibit a kind of clustering – when a filament encounters a food source the whole fungal colony mobilises itself to concentrate resources on exploiting the source. I really love this metaphor, which like all good rhetorical figures is intriguing and beautiful as well as extremely functional. Thinking about these giant underground fungal organisms is a powerful aid to understanding the structuration of online networks:
Mycorrhizae are difficult if not impossible to bound and close, yet not indefinite or elusive.. They are made up of heterogeneous participants working symbiotically, thriving on mutually beneficial .. partnerships.. A mychorrhizal formation is simultaneously a living, expanding process (or bundle of developing connections) and a relatively durable, stabilized structure; both a mental landscape and a material infrastructure." (Engestrom, 2007, p48)
Excerpted from John Millner's MAODE blog
https://johnmill.wordpress.com/...
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Fri May 08, 2015 at 5:26 PM PT: I'm pleased this prompted some dialog about the fungus among us. I realized after rereading this that I buried ... heck, I omitted my lead thesis: at it's best, The Daily Koz functions very much like Mycorrhizae. Linking us, enriching and strengthening our causes.