 I'm sitting here with Marilyn Emery, a keynote speaker at the European Meeting of Cybernetics and System Research. The field of study of research is open system theory. Marilyn, since 1972 the European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research has been taking place here in Austria. Have you joined before or is this your first time meeting? No, this is my first time. What are your first impressions after the first two days? Absolutely fascinating. I've never met such a diverse field in my life before. How did you get to come to this meeting? I was invited. You were invited. So your research topic is open system theory. Could you just briefly describe open system theory, what that is? Yes, basically what it means is that you treat all systems, organizations, communities, what have you. It's having boundaries which are open to an external social field. We don't treat people or organizations as close systems. We don't just look inside them. We look at them in relationship to know that big field of ideas and values and whatever we get surrounding. So does constant exchange from one system to the environment between systems? Absolutely. I mean system and environment are constantly changing each other. So if you only look within the system, you miss most of the huge influences actually being forced on people. And I think this is what our society makes. So how would you see the world's today's society from an open system with quite a few? How would I see today's society? Well it depends where you look. But I mean when you look at the social field that's out there, you see a whole range of things in conflict going in different directions and people are subject to that field of forces. I mean it's not the healthiest environment that we live in at the moment. It's characterised basically by high levels of real living uncertainty. And that makes it very unhealthy and very unhealthy. Because people don't like living with high levels of real living uncertainty. So I mean one of the things that we're actually trying to do is to stabilise that environment and bring it back. So it's a much more stable and healthy environment for people living. To bring it back to stability to make more happy. And what does indicate this unhappiness of our society? Or do you see it as a global problem? We've got global problems running everywhere. I mean the biggest one we're facing is climate change. And we're not even getting on top of it yet. It's a huge amount of global problems. And from your point of view we can use open system theory to get ahead of the problems of environmental change? Absolutely. In fact some of my colleagues in Australia are working on that right now. And what can people, what can one person do about it? How can we apply open system theory in our lives to make this change? Get together with other people. That's the first thing you have to do. The basic idea behind it? I mean I don't think we should think in terms of isolated individuals. We should really start thinking now about how do we get communities organised? Because at the moment they're just aggregates to individuals and families. They're not really communities anymore. So that's the first thing we have to do. And we also have to, if you're talking about climate change. I mean a lot of organisations are just ignoring it. And that's got to change as well. Organisations have got to start working with the communities in which they're embedded. When they come together they can be extremely powerful. There are always people out there that don't really care about the environment. I think this is... Oh they're going to care pretty soon. They're going to care pretty soon. This should be the motivation behind it I guess to activate those people. Because I think it's only working if everyone participates in discussions in communities. Oh absolutely, but I mean the first thing we have to do is start building inclusive communities. Because as I said they pretty well disappear at the place they're from. So certainly in industrialised countries like Australia. And there's an urgent need to bring communities together and stay. What are you going to do about the future? Get on with it. As we're speaking about communities. What's your opinion about social networking services on the internet? Is community building there more? Are communities building faster on the internet? Are the systems still more adaptive? Is adoption going faster in social networking communities? On the internet? I would hesitate to call them communities. Okay. I'm still into minds about this because these phenomena are very, very new. I feel as though as you've been speaking. And we really don't know yet what the long-term effects are going to be. I mean I know that they're brilliant for some forms of organising. But I doubt that having 530 friends is really a sign of help. Because I mean I know a lot of really isolated individuals. Tapping to their computers. And where is the real human support and contact? They're isolated in their social environments. But they're active on the social networks and the internet. Yeah, I know that we don't know what the real effects are going to be. Okay. Marilyn, you lived in an Aboriginal camp when you were a child? I did. Yeah. That's pretty interesting. And how has that influenced you in your research? What has that influenced you? Oh yeah, it changes everything. You just look at things very differently. So it changes everything you do. Is there probably something we could, from the Aborigines, to apply to our society that's possible to apply to our society? Absolutely. I mean they were highly cooperative societies. And I mean if you look at Australia for example, they kept a place in good shape for over 60,000 years. We're just about ready to join in 200 years. That's a good point of view. So now we have a huge amount of us and all of our Indigenous people. Yeah, pretty interesting. So Marilyn, thank you for joining our interview session. Hey, how are you? Yeah, we're very happy to have you here. Your keynote was pretty interesting. Let's listen to it. Thank you.