The Golden Flow of Boundary Objects

After watching the movie Crash (Lions Gate Films, 2004) in class this past week, I started thinking about how people affect one another and how we’re all linked through our various interactions and communities of practice. We affect other people every day. Individuals flow in and out of our lives, some having more of an impact than others. Our choices and actions affect others and sometimes we impact them by imparting part of our community of practice into theirs with a boundary object. These boundary objects will often cause a ripple effect, with boundary object after boundary object being shared with different community of practices.

How many ripple effects in transmitting boundary objects have you caused?

As Etienne Wenger explains in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca), boundary objects can be described as “objects that serve to coordinate the perspectives of various constituencies for some purpose” (p. 106). He further explains that these items are developed through the reification process in communities of practice so they provide a shared meaning, understanding, and use for those members. As you recall from Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca) being human allows us to share meaning of items (like boundary objects) with others in our community of practice or to act as brokers to those in other communities of practice in order to pass along the meaning of that object.

How then, do we impact other humans in communities of practice outside of our own through the transmission of boundary objects? As members of certain communities of practice, we often relate to those in our immediate community more than those who belong to a different community. As Tomasello would tell us, this is primarily related to the fact that as primates we relate to and look out for those in our in group and opposed to those in out groups. As such, we tend to think of individuals who are different from us and in different communities of practice as objects as opposed to people. We don’t relate to them as one of our own since we haven’t established a sense of belonging or any negotiated meaning with them so we place less value on their contributions to our lives. Since we don’t value them as much, we don’t tend to dwell on the impact our mundane day-to-day interactions with those people may have on their lives.


To further illustrate the notion of how our actions affect others, remember the movie that Gwyneth Paltrow starred in called Sliding Doors (Paramount Pictures, 1998)? At the beginning of the movie, we see Paltrow’s character Helen rushing to catch a subway train. She’s rushing down the stairs into the station and has to momentarily pause to dodge a child walking up the stairs who tries to show Helen a doll she is holding in her hand. As a result Helen misses the train. The film then rewinds and we see Helen rushing down the steps again. This time, however, an adult (presumably the child’s parent) pulls the child out of Helen’s way before she can block her with the doll and Helen is able to just catch the train.  From there on, we see the two divergent paths that Helen’s life would take if she caught the train versus if she missed the train. Here’s the opening scene of the movie:

As you then witness in the movie, the little girl’s actions could have started a ripple effect of boundary objects being transmitted which would have had a huge impact on Helen’s life. When you start to think about life in terms of how your actions and transmission of boundary objects affect others, you can see just how much impact we all have on each other’s lives, in both a negative and positive ways. I realize that this is all part of “real life” and is “how the world works” but it is interesting to examine nonetheless.

On a larger scale, we briefly discussed how the ripple effect or “golden flow of boundary objects” is present in government and with those in positions of power in this past week’s class. To illustrate this idea, Dr. Plumb explained how the leader of a country’s order to go to war acts as a boundary object that is handed down through the various levels of government and military (ie. communities of practice within the overall city of practices in a government), which acts as a catalyst for other boundary objects to be transmitted to other communities of practice with that “city” and beyond. As a result, soldiers at the bottom of the pyramid of command go to war carrying out orders of the person at the top of the pyramid. This not only affects the people in their close communities of practice like their family and friends, but will also affect those they may injure in war and those people’s family and friends, their family and friends, and so on.

In many government structures, the golden flow of boundary objects starts with one person at the top of the pyramid of power. 

Although we easily get swept up in our own lives and within our own city of communities of practice, it’s also important for us to understand how our interactions through transmitting boundary objects to others affect them and those beyond them. When you realize you have power to influence others’ lives, perhaps you’ll think twice before jumping in front of someone when you’re in a rush or beeping at someone in traffic for example, and think about ways you can use that power to positively influence those within your city and beyond instead.

Are Communities of Practice Stressing Us Out?

Walking to work Thursday morning, my mind was filled with numerous details from the myriad of communities of practice I’m a part of. My psyche was swirling with thoughts of tasks that I had to complete at work that day, I was processing the ideas and discussions in our class the evening prior, reminiscing about my conversation with a close friend two nights prior and thinking that I should call my other long-distance friends more. All while dodging other pedestrians on the sidewalk and obeying traffic signals at crosswalks. By the time I was half-way to work I knew that my stress levels were rising from just thinking about everything I needed to get done. Then it donned on me: Are our primate brains wired to withstand the demands and details of multiple communities of practice in a “city”? Have diverse communities of practice evolved faster than our primate brains?

As we have learned through reading Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca) and through our discussions in class, we know that human society has evolved faster than the human species and as a primate species, humans are fairly young. So have our brains evolved quickly enough to keep up with the multiple demands we place on it in modern day society or are we becoming more stressed as we introduce more communities of practice to our lives?

As we read in Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca) we don’t necessarily have to physically be “in” a community of practice in order to be a part of one. This can be problematic for the over-analysers and thinkers out there like me. At any given time I have multiple details about multiple items swirling around in my brain, largely unrelated to each other. We know that our human brains are robust enough to accommodate complex thinking and provide us with the capacity to recall important details, lessons, and events in our lives.  But how much is too much? Are we trying to accommodate so much that we’re putting undue stress on ourselves?

What's on your mind?

Workplace stress is a leading cause of stress in North America.  According to a 2010 Statistics Canada study (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2011002/article/11562-eng.htm), “slightly more than 1 in 4 Canadian workers described their day-to-day lives as highly stressful”. The majority of the people identified work as their main stressor. As Dr. Plumb discussed in class, people didn’t jobs that required them to work for money until a few hundred years ago; meaning that there was a huge community of practice with many sub-communities of practice that humans didn’t have to deal with. According to an article published in Biological Psychiatry by J. Douglas Bremner (Vol. 45, Issue 7, pages 797-805, 1 April 1999), an excess of stress can “result in damage to the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory, with associated memory deficits.” This could also explain why I only have the capacity to deal with a few stressful events at a time, easily forgetting details of non-related items when I’m experiencing stress.

Stressors of highly stressed employed population aged 20 to 64. Statistics Canada, 2010.

A second major contributing factor to human stress in North America is finances http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/06/02/10637.aspx). People are worried about accumulating debt and how they’ll pay back the money they owe. Enter in the communities of practice within banks, loaning agencies, credit card companies, and so on. As I mentioned above, humans didn’t always work for money. Since currency wasn’t always used as a means of obtaining goods, people wouldn’t have had to worry about incurring monetary debt. As we know, there is a debt crisis in the Western world affecting millions of people. Humans are accruing more debt than ever before, which would lead me to conclude that humans are also experiencing more stress about finances than ever before, putting even more strain on our primate brains when we have to deal with our financial situations in banks or on the phone with customer service representatives.

Other causes of stress can include family and relationships, and major life changes such as career change or birth of a baby (http://www.heretohelp.bc.ca/publications/factsheets/stress). Although our ancestors would have had similar communities of practice with their families and others, and of course experience childbirth, I believe their communities of practice would have been much less detailed and layered. Hundreds of years ago, humans’ families all lived in the same place at the same time. They didn’t have to worry about keeping tabs on what they were doing from afar or figure out how to post pictures on Facebook for their relatives to see. Nor did they get thrust into the pressures of ensuring their children kept up with the latest styles and fads so that they fit in with their peers.

Although communities of practice provide humans with a sense of belonging and shared understanding, I do believe that the multi-layered “cities” or “multimembership nexus of perspectives” (Wenger, p. 105) we create in our lives is getting too intense for our primate brains. If people are becoming more stressed due to multiple demands of their overlapping communities of practice, causing damage to the hippocampus and memory loss, worst case scenario is that our transmission of culture would start to break down as a result of less communication and information sharing with each other. Perhaps our brains will evolve to withstand the added stress of complex cities of communities of practice one day. Until then, it’s up to us as members of the human species to take care of ourselves and deal with our stressors so we can stay healthy and transmit culture for generations to come.

We need to transmit culture to ensure viable communities of practice for generations to come.