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Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

Small World Theory: 6 Degrees of Micro-Communities

Published August 25, 2008 by cgerrish

Six degrees of separation

Just a short thought experiment: picture, if you will, the kind of network graph you’d draw to represent traditional broadcast and print media. Initially a very small set of one to many one-way relationships. All downstream, very little upstream– perhaps the letters to the editor section. Desktop publishing changed the look of that graph, as did the personal video camera, lighting up more broadcast nodes on the network,  but distribution remained a challenge.

Blogs, Podcasting, YouTube and RSS changed the shape of the picture even more substantially. Distribution moved to the common platform of the web and the economics supporting a publishing node changed radically. More publishers light up on the network, but more importantly the means for two-way traffic is established as publishers talk to each other. Two-way traffic expands to a many-to-many relationships and micro-communities begin to form. All of this built on the back of HTTP.

Now think about who has real time broadcasting capability and draw a mental picture of that network graph. Think of the shape of the network, it seems to me the traditional model still dominates. Facebook, MySpace, Dogster, LinkedIn and others concentrated and increased the speed of communication transactions within communities– but they don’t generally achieve real time continuous message flow. Twitter, and more recently, Identi.ca have achieved message flow liquidity and have established themselves as primary markets.  As the XMPP protocol starts capturing the imagination and islands of Laconica instances begin appearing, more real time nodes light up on the network. It’s early days and there aren’t a lot of dots to connect.

Whether or not those dots will be allowed to be connected is currently in question. Our ability to track those XMPP streams is even more fragile still. There’s a real time web emerging and we’ve yet to imagine how it will manifest. It’s something we’ll have to talk to each other about.

The power of real time micro-communities is broader than common wisdom would suggest. Each broadcaster in a real time micro-community is connected and messages to a different circle. We misunderstand the nature and power of micro-communities if we focus on the number of connections in a particular circle. Each circle is embedded in a network of circles, but the network of circles occupies a small world. And you already know this: the whole world is connected through six degrees of separation. 

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These Are No Ordinary Times: Time Becomes Real

Published August 24, 2008 by cgerrish

Bunuel: Chien Andalou

As we may think about the real time web, the image goes in and out of focus. Pieces of the dream materialize for a moment and then are withdrawn. The solid experience of Track and IM on Twitter start to reveal the contours of the possibility of discovery on the real time web– and then in the blink of an eye, they dissolve into nothingness. Twitter pulls the experience back into the darkness, and we set out as a band of gypsies attempting to recreate it from the resources we find in the commons.

“Real time” puts time itself into the frame. In a simple sense, real time means what’s happening right now. It’s the conscious moment that cleaves the past from the future. It’s the thread of our lives being pulled through the eye of a needle.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

We see the past through the future, as it comes rushing toward us, asking us to make a judgment about this present moment. David Byrne and Brian Eno have released some recordings called “Everything that happens will happen today.” I’d go further and say that everything that happens, happens right now. Your only opportunity to act is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to do the right thing is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to connect with another person is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to pick up the thread of the conversation is in the present moment.

As we stand at the crossroads between the past and the future, we must act, and through our actions express a judgement. Do we act in the present moment only for the present moment? Or do we think both of ourselves and our posterity as we make this gesture or that one? There’s a sense in which a person acting in the present moment for the sake of an unknown future is the essence of morality.

As we deepen the questions about the real time web, we uncover the startling fact that underneath all the layers of technology and specialized lingo, we find only ourselves. Human beings, mortals, gathering together to share our joys and sorrows, our dreams and aspirations, our humanity. As we pound out, hammer and tongs, the basic shape of our experience through the real time Network, we would do well to heed the words of that guy who said, “what if all this stuff really matters?”

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Digital Identity: Ceremonies of the Mask

Published August 23, 2008 by cgerrish

African Masks

Part of the ceremony of digital identity is binding identity artifacts to the person. There’s a sense in which these artifacts become real extensions of a person. They are augmentations, but the binding is very real. Think about how it feels to lose your keys, your wallet, your favorite pen. The human factors around digital identity remain an undiscovered country.

While listening to Dick Hardt talk about his Firefox plugin Sxipper to Phil Windley on Technometria, I began to think about anonymizers. These services are used to obscure a person entry point into the Network. I can see a future point where our relationship with identity becomes more sophisticated, we could use Sxipper to do three things.

  • Jack into the Network anonymously
  • Manage our personas and roles as we interact with various digital agents on the Network
  • Keep track of common interactions and compile them into macros

Sxipper, or some similar tool, will be on your phone, on your USB fob, a key on your keychain– it becomes your entry point to the Network. There’s a sense in which this relationship is more sophisticated, but at the same time more primitive. We will be consciously donning masks to present ourselves in the social space of the Network. The Network was largely populated by publications and transaction scripts; it’s starting to be populated by people.

Imagine that world, and then imagine losing your keys. The feeling of absence, a part of you gone missing, unmasked. The vows taken in the binding ceremony have been broken.

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Micro-Objects: I have no mouth and I must scream

Published August 19, 2008 by cgerrish

I have no mouth and I must scream

The analogy to Harlan Ellison’s classic story isn’t there at all. But somehow the phrase fits anyway. As I think about Jessie Stay’s post about the implementation of the “in_reply_to_status_id” parameter in Twitter, and the matching of the metadata element by Identi.ca, I keep coming back to J.L. Austin’s idea of the speech act. This new parameter is a connector that enables a network of conversation. The elements of a conversation are not objects, but rather speech acts of the subject.

“What does it matter who is speaking,” someone said. “What does it matter who is speaking.”

Samuel Beckett
Stories and Texts for Nothing

The 140 character limit of the Tweet and the Dent ties the form to the SMS. The SMS is tied to the phone and the transmission of voice. It’s the writing that’s closest to speech and the performative utterance. The Tweet/Dent is the combination of the speaker and the spoken. Identity is implied. When a micro-object speaks, does it remain an object like any other object?

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