As Social Constructionists we are interested in making sense of the way relational processes and practices are at work in fixing meaning, pre-scribing action, and bestowing social positioning and possibility – in the interests of change (….supply your own motive). We have been noticing that the burgeoning technological development and ready accessibility of ‘new media*’ is supporting and extending relational practices in new ways. What, from the Constructionist frame, are we witnessing?

• Does the distribution of power and increasingly diverse socialisation afforded by the internet [esp. Web 2.0], digital media and global-personal telephony provide us with more scope for shuffling off the worst constraints of social conditioning or is it all leading, as some suggest, to the amplification of noise rather than voice? (too much information, a crisis of validity, fading of traditional social conventions – what shapes our meaning now?).

• Are the prevailing modernist-hierarchical understandings of communities, particularly organisations, at long last dissolving in the flowing tide of ‘many to many’, networked, active participation or is the power that organisations can assert becoming more potent as political systems become less coherent and multinationals collude with more oppressive regimes to control citizens by limiting access to the internet?

• Are we on a speeding train to social fragmentation or creating more active citizens – taking more local-personal-relational responsibility for our health, education, income capacity, leisure, sense of order and meaning making?

Does any of this lead us to re-enforce or re-frame our trusty relational methods and styles ……and aspirations?

*New Media – mobile phones, interactive TV, digital video, podcasts, vodcasts, Web 2.0 – more and more people can make an distribute video/film, anyone can subscribe to and upload information to Wikipedia, anyone can publish their journal and seek attention from the whole on-line world. ‘Anyone’ can ‘talk’ to ‘anyone’ pretty much ‘anytime’.