INTRODUCTION to Fractal Book

Wikia Fractal Story

The Wikia 'fractal story' is an example of what Boje (2001, 2011, 2008, 2014) calls the web of 'living stories.' "Wikia faced the problem of how to tell their story as a pioneer in a new media landscape. Gold developed the metaphor of the fractal as a storytelling device to describe Wikia as a living organism, constantly changing, morphing, growing as pages are created and the Wikia community participates" (source).

Figure 1: Fractal Story of Wikia

Fractal-story-webs is defined here as self-similar and regular-irregular, iterating multi-fractal paths (trajectories) across sclales (micro to macro, & vice versa).

Zooming We can zoom in and out to change the reolution of the fractality. The Fractal-story-webbing also has a 'quantum scalability' that is not Euclidean geometry, nor Newtonian physics. Rather the quantum field of fractal-story-webs has fractal-waveforms in a non-differentiatable spacetimemattering.

Infinitesimals The work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the Amercian Pragmatist fits here because of his work on the theory of infinitesimals (see Boje, 2014). The intervals of spatial distance, and the intervals of time observations, can be scalled up to the cosmos or down in resolution to the boson. In quantum storytelling, there is a field phenomenon of quantum scalability, scalte-iterations, and scale-infinitesimals, such that fractal paths become observable (with observation apparatuses) at various zomming resolutions, dialaitons, and displacements. Motion comes into play since, motion intersects the multi-scale-field, its reolutions of inter-scale relations, and scale-forces.

The Lorenz attrator fractal motion is neither a point-event nor a cycle of events. Rather, it is a set ofpoints whose dimensionality is fractal (Gossin in Encyclopediate of Literature and Social Science, 2002: 448).

Fractal length is an observer-appratus distinction, since invenitesimals are potentially infinite in either macro or micro quantum calculations and are nondifferentiable. Linear measures do not apply.

Fractal storytelling crosses scales of micro to macro, and vice versa. Our book is about the relation of fractals of sociomateriality and socioecology. Fractal storytelling is all about attunement. How are we attuned through our storytelling to the fractal universe?

Fractal storytelling is polyphonic-dialogism (see Boje, 2008 for definition). The poloyphonic-fractal organizing is in the spacetimemattering of our Being-in-the-world. We live in attunement to fractal rhythms, and we choose fractal spacetime to adapt our behavior to. At the same time, our fractal behavior rhythms have changed the envrionment. Our ecosystem awareness is related to our sense of Self and our awareness of Others.

Has there ever been a society that has lived in fractal-scale harmony with its ecosystems? There is no single set of norms where social, institution, and species-environment relations align. For example, Murray Bookchin (1982, 1993) advocates social ecology norms, rather than the 'whatever works' pragmatic norms of globalizaiton economics:

"The domination of nature by man stems form the very real dominatin of huamn by human (Bookchin, Murray 1982 in The Ecology of Freedom)

"The root causes of environmental probles are such trade for profict, and industrial expansion, and the ideentificaiton of 'progress' with corporate self interest" (Bookshin 1993 in What is Social Ecology?)

"The idea of domination nature has its primary source in the domination of human by human and the structuring of the natual world in a hierachic chain of Being" (Bookshin 1993 in What is Social Ecology?)

My paths are fractal! My paths are across multple fractal scales! My Google map is not my only fractal scalaiblity of choosing between street map and satallite map. I exist in cosmic scale that is non-Euclidean. My mechanical clocktime is not my only time-scale. I exist in seasonal-time, in quantum time that is rhizomatic rather than linear, progressive, sequential. My living story web of fractal-stories is in-the-middle, unfolding as future arrives and pasts are redilated. 

A grander narrative extracting events (both social & materiality) from the world, and modeling their relations into a plot, does not produce a full description. Spacetime holism accords with David Bohm’s concept of ‘undivided wholeness.’ “an observer cuts out of an irreducible and infinitely complex whole” but is doomed to failure in terms of ontological order of the world (Winkler, 2008: p. 51). Spacetime holism is a pragmatic way to deal with virtually infinite ontology of the "material world of spacetime holism” (p. 51).

In relativity theory spacetime is treated as a kind of unity of the whole (holism). In Bohm’s quantum mechanics, time is given priority over space (“flowing movement”, "nondetrerminism”, “unpredictable emergence” in “self-organization”) (Winkler, 2008: p. 52).

“To assume the fundamental incompleteness of any description of the whole in terms of perfectly definable parts is tantamount to assuming that the spacetime whole is infinitely complex” (p. 52). Accepting this it can be assumed that the whole is in each ‘part.’

Fractal Storytelling Complexity We can assume the infinite complexity of fractal-storytelling, that in each event-ness, the observer-audience, and the author(s) can create intertextual infinitesimal diffractions of self-sameness and discontinuities, to their own lived event horizon. This characterizes the multiple-fractal waves of continuity and discontinuing in all levels of space-time (Winkler, 2008:p. 54). Do we intend the standing wave or a propagating one? “the so-called collapse of the weave function shows the postulated properties of spatial non-locality (a simultaneous link between distant parts) and temporal locality (non-predictability, at least from local parameters)” (p. 54, footnote ‘e’). Boje (2008a) refers to this a holographic storytelling that has multi-dimensionality. Spacetime holism is counter to the standard classical theory of self-organizaiton. Self-organizing lacks free will and choice, and the important aspect of the whole being in each part.