Welcome to Holons 2.0 - A Blog About Everthing!

We are extremely excited to announce the rebirth of Holons as an ongoing web log!  

Holons will serve many functions for the integral community, the first being your premier source of information around all that is happening at Integral Life, Integral Institute, KenWilber.com, and the rest of the Integral World at-large. Stay tuned for these bi-weekly announcements, which will be posted by Robb Smith himself (CEO of Integral Life.)

Secondly, Holons intends to help add just a little bit of depth to the saran-wrap world of the World Wide Web.  We are currently amidst the "Web 2.0 revolution," which is ushering in an unprecedented amount of sharing, collaboration, and content generation amongst millions of internet users around the world.  We now have way more information (and perspectives) available to us than we have ever thought possible—and yet it seems that the more data that is at our fingertips, the more fragmented our knowledge becomes.  For every bit of span that's added, a byte of depth is obscured.

The internet can be seen as a planetary-scale amplifier of consciousness—just as the web helps facilitate "conscious communities" like Zaadz, it also helps mobilize the Ku Klux Klan in ways never before possible.  The web is also the great meta-neutralizer of perspectives, in that Zaadz potentially carries just as much "weight" as the KKK, depending purely on web traffic, and the only ranking that really matters is where a particular site turns up in a Google search.

So, what can a simple blog like Holons do about this current state of the internet?  More importantly, what can YOU do about it?  In the end, it's really the same question—Holons is a place for you, your voices, your analyses, your perspectives on pretty much anything you can find on the web.  Here's the line of thought, originally man-birthed by former Holons editor Marco Morelli:

- Anything you can link to on the web is a "holon" (website, news item, blog post, book/movie review, etc.)
- The Integral community can then add their perspectives on any "holon" (1p x 3p, for the real AQAL geeks out there)...
- ...as well as on each other's perspectives! (1p x 1p x 3p)
- This gives us a sum total of 2p x 3p, or in lay terms, a we-space!

So we invite you to submit brief 1-2 paragraph reviews about anything that might tickle your integral fancy to holons@integrallife.com. For example, these reviews could be about:

- Perspectives: People who shape our thoughts
  (brief articles about teachers, writers, practitioners, etc. who inspire you)   
- Culture: Events and artifacts that shape our meaning
   (art, books, music, cinema, video games, etc.)
- Technology: Systems that shape our world
   (social networking sites, gadget reviews, web innovations, etc.)
- Practice: Injunctions that shape our lives
   (practice blogs, tools for transformation, etc.)
- Miscellaneous: Random digitalia that shapes our attention spans
   (interesting websites, viral memes, the latest DIGG stories, etc.)

The idea here is that, while it may be too strong to make a statement like "the internet is already integral," it is certainly true that everything on the web fits together somehow—everything has it's own "Kosmic IP Address."  That is, the very same connecting patterns we find in the "real world" can also be found in the virtual world, and by recognizing those patterns we can more easily see how the entire internet hangs together—an internet which, while always partial, is truly already whole.

Corey W. deVos
Robert A. MacNaughton
Managing Editors, Holons