Category: social graph

Cluetrain: Any Dream That Ships Without A Mouse, Ships Broken

Published May 2, 2009 by cgerrish

On the tenth anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls had some thoughts about clue number 71. Click the link and read them yourself, it’s worth the effort. My takeaway was that we have lived in a world where we have to subscribe to vendors, but vendors don’t have to subscribe to us.

71. Your tired notions of “the market�? make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere.

In prehistoric times, there were three networks that locked down the channels of attention. These focused audiences provided a large target to whom they could sell the equipment required to enact the American dream. It was a dream pre-dreamed for us by professionals experienced in the business of dreaming dreams.

When the audiences began wandering off, spending their attention on dreams not listed in the handbook– the new imagery was incorporated. The channel had one direction so it seemed as though the dream manufacturers had tuned in to the spirit of the times. New images appeared in the dreams, although something wasn’t quite right.

When you control a uni-directional channel, you can overplay your hand. But, of course, the channel doesn’t really only go one way. And what can be co-opted by one set of players, can result in subliminal blow back on another frequency.

Tw*tter has distracted a sizable section of the audience from the crumbling remnants of the prehistoric attention focusing machines. The new channels are now being flooded with celebrities to refocus the audience’s attention. The analysts and consultants are conspiring to brew up a formula that can painlessly transport the brands to the new medium with their self-dreamed power and status intact. It doesn’t do to tell the powerful that the basis of their power is dissolving without providing an escape route to the next peak poking through the clouds.

The brands have sent their robots to follow me on Tw*tter. They’ve analyzed my tweets and have determined that I’m a customer– or potentially could be one. They’re listening to my broadcasts and sifting through them to build a profile to create an automated relationship. The polarity of the channel has been reversed. The brand subscribes to me– but I’ve yet to set the terms of that subscription. I can choose to reciprocate and subscribe– or I can block a brand that gets out of hand. The brand has its legacy communications channel that can be correlated with the new channel. They’re hoping this new combination will be more powerful than ever.

We are what we do with our attention.
– John Ciardi

The cognitive surplus of our attention has been held spellbound for decades. Ten years ago, when Doc Searls said “we know we’re already elsewhere,” he paired that with the reaction “our eyes glaze over.” In other words, we withdraw from the world with which we’re confronted. In the ten years since, we now listen to Clay Shirky say, “any dream that ships without a mouse, ships broken.”

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Adam Smith, Power Laws and the Social Networks of the Ant Colony

Published April 29, 2009 by cgerrish

To support a conjecture in the world of humans, we often point to the natural world as some kind of final arbiter. “You see, this is the way it works in nature, therefore this is the way it is.” Aesop’s fable about the Ant and the Grasshopper has been used in this way in political circles for years. The social behavior of ants and bees has also been of particular interest to those of us thinking about the complex digital social networks emerging all around us. We take the folk wisdom of Aesop as gospel, and using that tool, we make an attempt at interpretation. Ants are industrious, collective and coordinated. If only people could join together in such a natural kind of cooperation. It’s only our human foibles that prevent this return to Eden.

Meanwhile, Anna Dornhaus, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has been painting ants. She does this so that she can track the individual behavior of a particular ant. Despite the anthropomorphism of Aesop’s fable, we tend to think of ants as a swarm of ants– as a collective. In a fascinating profile of Dornhaus by Adele Conover in the NY Times, we discover that:

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,�? said Dornhaus. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.�?

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

A few days ago I was re-reading Clay Shirky’s blog post on Power Laws and Blogging which describes the distribution of popularity within the blogosphere. In his book, Here Comes Everybody, he expands this idea of self-organizing systems and power law distributions to describe how things generally get done in social networks like Wikipedia. Aspects of the process have also been described by Yochai Benkler and called commons-based peer production.

Shirky’s work combined with Dornhaus’s gives you a view into the distribution of labor within the commons of a social network. Benkler’s “book” The Wealth of Networks is a play on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and in Dornhaus’s experiments we find some interesting contrary data to Smith’s conjecture:

My results indicate that at least in this species (ants), a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.

As Mark Thoma notes, Adam Smith cites three benefits from specialization:

The worker would become more adept at the task.

The time saved from not changing tasks.

With specialization, tasks can be isolated and identified, and machinery can be built to do the job in place of labor.

As we begin to think about the characteristics of “swarming behavior” within digital networks, we can now start to “paint the ants” and look much more closely at how things get done within the swarm. Digital ants may all behave identically, but ants as we find them in nature behave unpredictably. Rilke notes that “we are the bees of the invisible,” but is a bee simply a bee?

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Names, Spaces, Name Spaces

Published April 19, 2009 by cgerrish

Language is coarse, filled with misunderstandings, hidden meanings, used by anybody for any purpose whatsoever. Language provides transit for information, misinformation, thoughts, images, vague feelings, strong emotion and indications of a vague direction. Many different signifiers can point to the same signified. And the signified is a use, a way of life, that assembles itself variously under different contexts.

Our craving for clarity gives rise to second-order languages, controlled vocabularies that attempt to rule out all ambiguity. A single signifier unequivocally bound to a single signified is an extension of Euclidean geometry to the properties of physical space.

An implication of Einstein‘s theory of general relativity is that Euclidean geometry is a good approximation to the properties of physical space only if the gravitational field is not too strong.

Unique spacial coordinates describe a single location. Names are substituted for numbers, or letters, in the Name Space. In the spheres of mathematics, logic, physics and computer programming unique objects are a requirement. To the extent that the system is without friction, noise or ambiguity, it will operate outside of time– a perfect perpetual motion machine. By definition the system must be closed, new elements would upset the delicate balance.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

120.

When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and material for what we want to say? Then how is another one to be constructed? –And how strange that we should be able to do anything at all with the one we have!

In giving explanations I already have to use language full-blown (not some sort of preparatory, provisional one); this by itself shows that I can adduce only exterior facts about language.

Yes, but then how can these explanations satisfy us? –Well, your very questions were framed in this language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask!

And your scruples are misunderstandings.

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.

You say: the point isn’t the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning. The money, and the cow that you can buy with it. (But contrast: money, and its use.)

121.

One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word “philosophy” there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word “orthography” among others without then being second-order.

The question of Internet Identity ends up being a tussle about binding organic and synthetic agents to a name space with the force of law. (Local law must submit to Federal law.) This intersection of human forms of life and unambiguous computing systems surfaces in the rise of social networks and the attempts of the semantic web movement to sanctify a second-order language. The most common example of this is the issue of claiming a username within the namespace of a particular service.

“You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.” — Bob Dylan

Every John Smith cannot be John Smith within a namespace. In point of fact, the user with the username John Smith need not even be called John Smith. She might be Jane Doe. The “words” or “names” in the username are not actually words, they have an orthogonal relationship to language, they only need to function within the context of a particular computer program and its data schemas.

Oprah Winfrey recently joined the Twitter network. One of her first questions to Ev Williams was about how someone else could twitter as Oprah without actually being Oprah. Oprah’s name is a brand that is protected by the force of law.

In addition, Oprah is a member of Actor’s Equity which requires that each member have a unique professional name. Archibald Leach, Betty Joan Perske, Caryn Johnson, Frances Gumm and many others invented new identities for the unique namespace/brandspace of show business.

Remember: your professional name is your identity in a complex and ever-changing industry, and you may use it for 70 years – choose wisely!

The power of a username isn’t its value as a unique identifier within a computing system, it’s the value it has within a system of signifiers in our language as we speak it– in the rough and tumble world of everyday language. The value of the username “Oprah” was established through years of hard work outside of the communications system in which it was claimed. In Oprah’s case, a path was cleared for her by system admins to claim a particular name that matched her brand. Ashton Kutcher made a different choice with his username– his brand gave a unique string of letters a special value. (Username as code name, or nickname.)

As real life becomes entwined ever more deeply with the Network, it must accomodate– as Wittgenstein would call it, language full-blown, and life full-blown. A provisional or preparatory life that places arbitrary restrictions over its full depth starts out as comedy, but quickly becomes much more serious.

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Continuous Orientation in the Land of the Midnight Sun

Published April 18, 2009 by cgerrish

I remember there times when I was younger that I could stay up very late watching television. Everyone else had gone to bed, and I was by myself, bathed in the blue glow surrounded by darkness. It was a guilty pleasure. Usually it was some late night movie from the 1940s. I consider these experiences as part of my visual and cultural education.

When the movie was over, the broadcast day ended. To cap things off there were some announcements and then the ceremonial showing of the film “High Flight.” I remember the images of a jet plane flying, dancing through the clouds, while an overwrought poem was read in an earnest, solemn voice. It was the marker, the ceremony at the end of night. Then perhaps, a brief test pattern– and the oblivion of snow blending with my oncoming dreams.

Static on your television is random emissions of electrons from the cathode of your CRT onto the phosphor screen. Cosmic rays, (not really rays but protons or alpha particles), penetrate our atmosphere with extreme uniformity and the density is fairly well known. There is a statistical probability, then, that some of the dots on your screen are caused by them. But you can never know which ones.

That sort of ending has been pushed to the edges. In the center, the city never sleeps, the eye is unblinking, the sun shines brightly at midnight. Consciousness, or a form of it, no longer flashes its wakefulness as dawn breaks across the spinning time zones, receding as the night grows dark. The waking life and dreaming life blend in a Network that is always lit up– sleeping with the lights on.

“sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled”
-George Santayana

While you slept, the storytellers continued unwinding their threads. The story continued to unfold– and as you awake you find yourself walking into a program already in progress. But is it really any different than any other day? Didn’t the world always already spin millions of different stories outside of your earshot? It’s the points of connection, the spots where your story connects with the stories of others– that’s the bit that matters. That’s the web of connections now visible in real time.

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