He is the son of the late Emmy Award-winning director Ralph Nelson and the Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm.
His parents' marriage was brief, and he was mostly raised by his grandparents in Greenwich Village, with relatively little contact with his parents. He is partly of Norwegian descent.
The anime "Serial Experiments Lain" cites Project Xanadu as a precursor to The Wired (a fictional internet-like communications network and augmented reality system) and mentions Nelson as the originator of hypertext.
"Populitism" ("pop-u-leet-ism") is another neologism coined by Nelson, as a combination of the word "populism" with "elite". It refers to treating the general populace with the privileges of elitism. The word suggests the society-of-text envisioned by theorists like Shoshana Zuboff and Jay David Bolter, a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function. A "populite" culture might mark the first step toward realization of Jean-Francois Lyotard's "game of perfect information" where all have equal access to the world of data, and where "[g]iven equal competence (no longer in the acquisition of knowledge, but in its production), what extra performativity depends on in the final analysis is 'imagination,' which allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game." This is the utopia of information-in-process, the ultimate wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100 percent efficiency into capital, the mechanism of that magical process being nomology or rule-making—admittedly a rather specialized form of "imagination."
Gunnysacking
Gunnysacking is a metaphor, used in conflict resolution, which involves the act of "storing up" grievances acquired in the course of a relationship, rather than resolve them when they first occurred. The word is based on the idea of using a gunny sack (burlap bag) storing a number of items.
A typical example might occur in a marriage facing occasional difficulty. Partners may have small grievances or annoyances, which by themselves are not critical. However, over time one partner gets less happy and more annoyed. Then some incident occurs, and a full-blown argument follows. By analogy, this is the gunny sack bursting, with an 'overblown reaction'.
The term may also refer to bringing up past grievances when trying to resolve some present problem in a relationship. In which case, gunnysacking (as a tactic) has the dual effect of raising additional problems (in what is typically already a volatile, difficult situation) and presents a side-track obstacle to dealing with the current issues. Additionally, once the practice becomes a familiar pattern used by one person in a relationship, other persons may avoid reporting new issues or problems for the sake of avoiding a repeat of the gunnysacking behavior.
Conflict resolution
Conflict resolution is a set of ideas and ways to reduce sources of conflict. The term "conflict resolution" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "dispute resolution". The terms "conflict" and "dispute" overlap. As a term, conflict is broader than dispute, more concerned with physical action, and less concerned with verbal arguments.
Processes of conflict resolution generally include negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy. The processes of arbitration, litigation, and formal complaint processes such as ombudsman processes, are usually described with the term dispute resolution, although some refer to them as "conflict resolution".
Conflict resolution as both a professional practice and academic field is highly sensitive to cultural background. In Western cultural contexts, such as Canada and the United States, successful conflict resolution usually involves fostering communication among disputants and problem solving that meet their underlying needs. In these situations, conflict resolvers often talk about finding the "win-win" solution, or mutually satisfying scenario, for everyone involved (see Fisher and Ury (1981), "Getting to Yes").
In many non-Western cultural contexts, such as Afghanistan, Vietnam, and China, it is also important to find "win-win" solutions; however, getting there can be very different. In these contexts, direct communication between disputants that explicitly addresses the issues at stake in the conflict can be perceived as very rude, making the conflict worse and delaying resolution. Rather, it can make sense to involve religious, tribal or community leaders, communicate difficult truths indirectly through a third party, and make suggestions through stories (see David Augsberger (1992), "Conflict Mediation Across Cultures"). Intercultural conflicts are often the most difficult to resolve because the expectations of the disputants can be very different, and there is much occasion for misunderstanding.
Conflict resolution has also been studied in non-humans, like dogs, cats, monkeys, snakes, elephants, and primates (see Frans de Waal, 2000). Aggression is more common among animal relatives and within a group, than between groups. Instead of creating a distance between the individuals, however, the primates were more intimate in the period after the aggressive incident. These intimacies consisted of grooming and various forms of body contact. Stress responses, like an increased heart rate, usually decrease after these reconciliatory signals. Different types of primates, as well as many other species who are living in groups, show different types of conciliatory behaviour. Resolving conflicts that threaten the interaction between individuals in a group is necessary for survival, hence has a strong evolutionary value. These findings contradicted previous existing theories about the general function of aggression, i.e. creating space between individuals (first proposed by Konrad Lorenz), which seems to be more the case in conflicts between groups than it is within groups.
In addition to research in primates, biologists are beginning to explore reconciliation in other animals. Up until recently, the literature dealing with reconciliation in non-primates have consisted of anecdotal observations and very little quantitative data. Although peaceful, post-conflict behavior had been documented going back to the 1960s, it was not until 1993 that Rowell made the first explicit mention of reconciliation in feral sheep. Reconciliation has since been documented in spotted hyenas, lions, dolphins, dwarf mongooses, domestic goats, and domestic dogs.
Conflict resolution is an expanding field of professional practice, both in the U.S. and around the world. The escalating costs of conflict have increased use of third parties who may serve as arbitrators, mediators, facilitators, and ombudsmen or conflict specialists to resolve conflicts. In fact, relief and development organizations have added peace-building specialists to their teams. Also, many of the major international NGOs have seen a growing need to hire practitioners trained in conflict analysis and resolution. Furthermore, this expansion of the field has resulted in the need for conflict resolution practitioners to work in a variety of settings such as in businesses, court systems, government agencies nonprofit organizations, government agencies and educational institutions serving throughout the world.