scholarly journals Harnessing the Complexity of Children's Consumer Culture

Author(s):  
Steven K. Khan

In this paper I argue that consumption is a common matrix of childhood experience that children bring to curriculum, schooling and learning. Next I describe how children’s consumer culture (CCC) can be seen to share some important characteristics of complex systems. Finally, I address the question of how the emergent potential of children’s consumer culture could be utilized by educators to assist in the project of forming lifelong ethical relationships with and between peoples, places, things, and thoughts. Unprecedented changes on a global scale have revealed our traditional notions of citizenship as being deficient, partial, and incomplete. These changes prompt us, then, to examine what it might mean to be a citizen in a truly globalized and technologically connected world. Schools and curriculum have an important role to play in an unfolding political project to craft new social, natural, cultural and ethical contracts. The context through which such a project could emerge, I suggest, is from within the complex system that is children’s commercial culture. Neither school and its curriculum nor CCC and its curriculum by themselves have served as effective sites for a successful pedagogy of citizenship. However, both reveal only partial aspects of different cultures of power necessary for citizenship. Both powers exist in a schizophrenic tension. The space created between such tensions might be appropriated to foster a pedagogy for citizenship that emerges from a common curriculum of consumption. A complex systems perspective opens windows of possibilities that might offer a view of how such tensions could be harnessed for this project.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (11) ◽  
pp. 27-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Klein ◽  
Hiroki Sayama ◽  
Peyman Faratin ◽  
Yaneer Bar-Yam

2005 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarissa Ribeiro Pereira de Almeida ◽  
Anja Pratschke ◽  
Renata La Rocca

This paper draws on current research on complexity and design process in architecture and offers a proposal for how architects might bring complex thought to bear on the understanding of design process as a complex system, to understand architecture as a way of organizing events, and of organizing interaction. Our intention is to explore the hypothesis that the basic characteristics of complex systems – emergence, nonlinearity, self-organization, hologramaticity, and so forth – can function as effective tools for conceptualization that can usefully extend the understanding of the way architects think and act throughout the design process. To illustrate the discussions, we show how architects might bring complex thought inside a transdisciplinary design process by using models such as software engineering diagrams, and three-dimensional modeling network environments such as media to integrate, connect and ‘trans–act’.


Author(s):  
Marisa Faggini ◽  
Bruna Bruno ◽  
Anna Parziale

AbstractFollowing the reverse engineering (RE) approach to analyse an economic complex system is to infer how its underlying mechanism works. The main factors that condition the difficulty of RE are the number of variable components in the system and, most importantly, the interdependence of components on one another and nonlinear dynamics. All those aspects characterize the economic complex systems within which economic agents make their choices. Economic complex systems are adopted in RE science, and they could be used to understand, predict and model the dynamics of the complex systems that enable to define and to control the economic environment. With the RE approach, economic data could be used to peek into the internal workings of the economic complex system, providing information about its underling nonlinear dynamics. The idea of this paper arises from the aim to deepen the comprehension of this approach and to highlight the potential implementation of tools and methodologies based on it to treat economic complex systems. An overview of the literature about the RE is presented, by focusing on the definition and on the state of the art of the research, and then we consider two potential tools that could translate the methodological issues of RE by evidencing advantages and disadvantages for economic analysis: the recurrence analysis and the agent-based model (ABM).


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 014002 ◽  
Author(s):  
K Wiesner ◽  
A Birdi ◽  
T Eliassi-Rad ◽  
H Farrell ◽  
D Garcia ◽  
...  

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson

Questions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.


MENDEL ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiri Bila ◽  
Martin Novak

The paper introduces complete description of the detection method that uses structural invariant Matroid and its Bases (MB, M). There are recapitulated essential concepts from the used knowledge field as “complex system, emergent situations (A, B, C)”, Ramsey theorem and principal computation variables “power” and “complexity” of emergence phenomenon. The method is explained in details and the demonstration of its application is done by the detection of emergent situation – violation of Short Water Cycle in an ecosystem.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Fowler ◽  
Keith Joiner ◽  
Elena Sitnikova

<div>Cyber-worthiness as it is termed in Australian Defence, or cyber-maturity more broadly, is a necessary feature of modern complex systems which are required to operate in a hostile cyber environment. To evaluate the cyber-worthiness of complex systems, an assessment methodology is required to examine a complex system’s or system-of-system’s vulnerability to and risk of cyber-attacks that can compromise such systems. This assessment methodology should address the cyber-attack surface and threat kill chains, including supply chains and supporting infrastructure. A cyber-worthiness capability assessment methodology has been developed based on model-based systems engineering concepts to analyse the cyber-worthiness of complex systems and present a risk assessment of various cyber threats to the complex system. This methodology incorporates modelling and simulation methods that provide organisations greater visibility and consistency across diverse systems, especially to drive cybersecurity controls, investment and operational decisions involving aggregated systems. In this paper, the developed methodology will be presented in detail and hypothesised outcomes will be discussed.</div>


2020 ◽  
pp. 575-599
Author(s):  
Vladimír Bureš

Systems engineering focuses on design, development, and implementation of complex systems. Not only does the Industry 4.0 concept consist of various technical components that need to be properly set and interconnected, but it is also tied to various managerial aspects. Thus, systems engineering approach can be used for its successful deployment. Overemphasis of technological aspects of Industry 4.0 represents the main starting point of this chapter. Then, collocation analysis, word clusters identification, selection and exemplification of selected domain in the business management realm, and frequency analysis are used in order to develop a holistic framework of Industry 4.0. This framework comprises six levels – physical, activity, outcome, content, triggers, and context. Moreover, the information and control level is integrated. The new holistic framework helps to consider Industry 4.0 from the complex systems engineering perspective – design and deployment of a complex system with required parameters and functionality.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document