Category: social graph

The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld

Published January 4, 2010 by cgerrish

As we consider ourselves in the flow of the day, we pause, once again, to consider identity. During the rush of the day we move through a thousand states. We flow from this to that as a result of our actions. Our many identities spring from the scenes we string together: the moment when we stop to shield our eyes from the sun; the quick turn of our heads when we think someone has called our name; the curse under our breath as the bus we’ve been waiting for arrives full and passes without stopping. They’re signifiers and contexts that circulate, they flow around us— around the things we do. They assign us a role within the never-ending series of stories that collect around us as we move through the world.

As we attempt to understand identity on the Network, we seem to crave a unified identity— a single container to hold all of our masks. And while we are beginning to transition from the static file to the real-time stream, we still want to draw a solid line around identity. The objects of the Network have been injected with time; we place the cursor here in the stream, a bread crumb to mark the spot, to provide reference for the next time we dip in. The artifacts of Internet identity are, of course, the outerworld of our innerworld— snapshots along the way.

In the book by the same name, there’s a poem entitled: “The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld.” This phrase is a condensation of the style of Peter Handke’s early writing. We can plainly see the outerworld of the innerworld, these are the external artifacts of our internal stream of consciousness. But those objects of the outerworld have their own innerworld (a flux of time). Handke effects a change of perspective, a change of context— from the inside out to the outside in, and then to the inside of that outside. But it’s a poem with a different title in this volume that clarifies this complex perspective: “Changes during the Course of the Day.”

Changes during the Course of the Day
by Peter Handke

As long as I am still alone, I am still alone.
As long as I am still among acquaintances, I am still an acquaintance.
But as soon as I am among strangers—

As soon as I step out on the street— a pedestrian steps out on the street.
As soon as I enter the subway— a subway rider enters the subway
A soon as I enter the jewelry shop— a gentleman enters the jewelry shop.
As soon as I push the shopping cart through the supermarket— a customer pushes the cart through the supermarket.
As soon as I enter the department store— someone on a shopping spree enters the department store.

Then I walk past some children— and the the children see an adult walking past. Then I enter the off-limits zone— and the guards see a trespasser enter the off-limits zone. Then I see children running away from me in the off-limits zone— and I become a guard whom the children flee because they are unauthorized persons in an off-limits zone.

Then I sit in the waiting room as an applicant. Then I write my name on the back of the envelope as a sender. Then I fill out the lottery ticket as a winner.

As soon as I am asked how one gets to BLACK ROAD— I become someone who knows his way around town.
As soon as I see the incredible— I become a witness.
As soon as I enter the church— I become a layman.
As soon as I don’t ignore an accident— I become a busy-body.
As soon as I don’t know how to get to BLACK ROAD— I am again someone who doesn’t know his way to BLACK ROAD.

I have just consumed the meal— already I can say: We consumers!
I have just had something stolen from me— already I can say: We proprietors!
I have just placed the obituary— already I can say: We mourners!
I have just begun to contemplate the universe— already I can say: We human beings!

I read the novel in the mass publication— and become one among millions.
I don’t fulfill my duties toward the authorities— and am no longer a dutiful citizen of the state.
I don’t run away during the riot— and I’m an inciter of riots.
I look up from the novel I’m reading and observe the beauty opposite me— and we become two among millions.

Then someone does not leave the moving train— someone? — A traveler.
Then someone speaks without an accent— someone? — A native.
Then someone has a vis-à-vis— and becoma a vis-à-vis.
Then someone no longer only plays by himself— and becomes an opponent.

Then someone crawls out from under a thicket in the park and becomes a suspicious subject.
Then someone who is being discussed becomes an object of discussion.
Then someone is recognized on a photo— and becomes an X.
Then someone takes a walk in the country— someone? A wanderer.

And then the car makes a sudden stop in front of me— I become an obstacle.
Then I am seen by a figure in the dark— and become a figure in the dark.
And when I am then observed through binoculars— I am an object.
Then someone stumbles over me— and I become a body.
And when I am then stepped upon— I become something soft.
Then I am wrapped up in something— and become a content.

Then one notices that someone has run barefoot over the dirt road and that a right-hander has fired the shot and that someone whose blood group is O has lain there and that I, judging by the my shabby looks, must be a foreigner.

As soon as someone challenges me then— the one who’s been challenged doesn’t stop when challenged.
As soon as I am then far enough away from the observers— the object is nothing but a dot.
As soon as I, as an observer, challenge someone— I give the one who has been challenged quite a fright.

Then, finally, I meet an acquaintance— and a single person remains behind alone.
Then, finally, I am left aone— and a single person remains behind alone.
Then, finally, I sit down next to someone in the grass— and am finally someone else.

From The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld by Peter Handke, translated by Michael Roloff

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Feeding on a Collection of Channels (57 Channels and Nothin’ On)

Published December 14, 2009 by cgerrish

It’s slipping into time out of mind, that knob with 13 positions that lined up with the VHF broadcast television channels. The first time I really understood it, there was only signal available at four of the dial positions. The other channels broadcast a static pattern that was called ‘snow.’ One had the sense that there could be signal coming through these channels and through the extended set of numbers available through the UHF dial as well. The reality was the vast majority of the channels provided only snow. In Sweden, Denmark and Hungary snow is called ‘the war of the ants.’

The channel is a very powerful metaphor. When cable-based replaced over-the-air broadcast as a means of delivering video signal to a television the number of channels carrying signal exploded. The increase in the number of channels fundamentally changed the distribution of programming. Where in the past, three or four channels bore the responsibility for the whole range of human endeavor from news and public affairs to sports, to comedy and drama— now each of these domains could have their own channel. And so we see a sports channel, a news channel, a cooking channel, a movie channel, a comedy channel, etc.

One effect of this expansion mirrors that of professional sports leagues. When a league goes from 12 teams to 24 teams, the talent pool is diluted. Now imagine the quality of play if Major League Baseball were to expand to 500 teams. On the one hand, we might talk about the economics of abundance and how in this new democratized environment, anyone can have a professional baseball team. But there would be a fundamental shift in how we valued viewing baseball games and the importance of baseball in general.

Baseball has a method of dealing with this problem. The teams and players are assigned to leagues, and the leagues roughly approximate levels of talent. League size is collared by the relationship between the availability of talent and the quality of the on-field product. There’s the major leagues, triple A, double A and single A. And then there are the various international leagues. Talent rises within a league until it moves to the next level. Vaudeville worked in the same way, there are many interconnected networks that have this kind of relationship. Economies of talent form within these pools, when talent reaches a certain level it is pulled up to the next level.

The proliferation of cable television channels has changed the value of a channel. When there are 500 channels to choose from, the channel itself ceases to be important. Even with 500 channels, it’s often the case that there’s nothing on. In the early days of cable televsion, 57 channels seemed like a huge number— this may have been the first time that we noticed that even with 57 distinct channels, there was rarely anything worth watching. René Giesbertz takes inspiration from Bruce Springsteen’s song ’57 Channels and Nothin’ On’ to explore what the experience of layering the sound of 57 television channels one on top of the other.

As cable television begins to migrate into the Network, the channel begins to merge into the feed. We move from having too many cable channels to an infinite number of data feeds. The dial is expanded to an infinite number of positions and the cost of broadcasting on one of these channels is minimal. The breakdown into finer and finer categories of broadcasting continues. Bathroom scales broadcast weighing events by user, shoes collect and broadcast running data, Twitter captures and broadcasts a whole range of miscellany. When the cost goes low enough, there’s no reason that everything that can emit state and event data shouldn’t be equipped to broadcast via a unique feed.

Just as the channel is meaningless when there are 500 of them, feeds are meaningless when there’s an infinite number of them. Aggregating data at the feed level doesn’t amount to much in an abundant feed economy. It’s the equivalent of aggregating cable television at the channel level. We don’t watch channels or read feeds, we’re interested in specific items. We surf from item to item, looking for signals along the way to tell us what’s important, what’s valuable. The channel, or feed, encasing the item in a sequence is a low-value clue in a rich information environment. The dial is no longer an adequate navigation interface where we have instant, direct random access to each and every item/program.

While the new metaphor hasn’t come completely into focus yet, the real-time web begins to point the way. There are two primary modes of interaction with items: now and later. We either interact now in real-time, or we defer until a later real-time. The third mode is elimination of an item from the consideration set. Rather than endlessly switching channels, we need an environment rich with signals and pointers to tell us whether or not something is going on. And perhaps even more important, we need to be able to tell when there’s nothing happening. Whether there are 4 channels, 57 channels, 500 channels or an infinite number of channels— it’s still quite possible that, in this real-time moment, there’s nothin’ on.

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The Source: Algorithmic Authority and Unsupervised Systems of Record

Published November 23, 2009 by cgerrish

At the recent Real-Time Crunch Up, a number of interfaces presented themselves; many of them worth reading and writing into. But, I’d like to explore a turn of phrase that slipped out causally in the last panel. The other members of the panel simply nodded and moved with the flow of the thought, it was understood to reflect the state of affairs. Dan’l Lewin, of Microsoft, while discussing which of the companies we’d seen during the day might become dominant players in the real-time environment of the Network, used the phrase: “system of record.” Lewin was referring to Twitter and Facebook as new systems of record on the Network.

Wikipedia is a little light on its definition of systems of record:

A system of record (SOR) is an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system), which is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for a new business use.

The key here is the phrase: “authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information.” The data element Lewin was referring to is the public social graph in its unfolding as real-time, tick-by-tick, context data. If you look at Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, the financial and medical institutions, etc. — none of the current big players on the Network have the social contract that allows them to serve as the system of record for the real-time social context data set.

Each has a system of record with some essential piece of the picture; they serve as the source of some authoritative piece of data. None of them can be authoritative for every aspect of a person. And generally, we like to be able to choose among a minimum of two providers (SORs) for each piece of our represented selves. Companies like Acxiom, Mint/Yodlee, and Equifax have begun the process of aggregating identity across key authoritative data silos, creating connections and drawing the broad outlines. In order for there to be an aggregation point, there has to be a set of authoritative systems of record.

As I began to think about the authority of these interconnected data elements — another connection placed itself in the frame. We sometimes speak of the newspaper of record. Another kind of authority presents itself:

The first type of newspaper of record (or newspaper of public record) is often formally defined by a statute or other official action of a governing body. Such a newspaper is supposed to be available to the public, and publication of notices in that newspaper is considered sufficient to comply with legal requirements for public notice.

The second type of “newspaper of record” is not defined by any formal criteria. The use of the term implies that a newspaper is a reliable institution that publishes trustworthy descriptions of events, but this assessment may be disputed. Major newspapers of record may be expected to have independent editorial policies, and to publish statements of opinion that are distinct from those of their proprietor or their government. They are more likely than other newspapers to be sold abroad and to be cited in scholarly publications.

Clay Shirky has become enmeshed in the discussions around the endgame for newspapers. I wouldn’t exactly call it a debate, because only mainstream journalists are interested in debating the point. Everyone else seems to have moved on. In his post, On the Idea of Algorithmic Authority, he explores what we mean when we talk about authoritative sources. In essence, he’s exploring the pragmatism of a kind of anarchy.

When we use the phrases “system of record” and “newspaper of record,” we’re trying to get to a similar level of authority. Newspapers of record supply the day-to-day transcription of important events. It’s the “availability to the public” of the newspaper and its broad distribution that makes up the public record. The authority of the newspaper rests in an editorial process that outputs “trustworthy descriptions of events.”

Shirky, in his book Here Comes Everybody, looks at organizing without organizations— and this idea is extended here to explore the level of authority that can be achieved by an unsupervised process. Typically we look for some kind of certification, an institutional process guaranteed by a professional in charge. The change that Shirky chronicles is the expansion of the kinds of processes that can produce authoritative output. When an unsupervised algorithmic process can produce an output that people respect as authoritative, the economics of supervised certified processes are disrupted. The ecosystem is enlarged and the economics irrevocably changed. In this case authority isn’t replaced, rather its sources are multiplied.

As our view of the ecosystems of record on the Network begins to come into focus, an emerging landscape starts to take shape. And what looked like a field with thousands of players is quickly reduced to a small number of authoritative systems.

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The Twittering Machine: A Network of Accelerants & Silences

Published November 3, 2009 by cgerrish

In 1922, the Artist Paul Klee completed a work entitled Die Zwitscher-Maschine, which has been translated into English as The Twittering Machine. The work is part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The catalog description delves beneath the surface interpretation of a machine for making pleasant bird sounds:

Upon closer inspection, however, an uneasy sensation of looming menace begins to manifest itself. Composed of a wiry, nervous line, these creatures bear a resemblance to birds only in their beaks and feathered silhouettes; they appear closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this “machine” is a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused.

I’d like to take a moment to delve beneath the surface of the machinery that makes up the micro-messaging ecosystem. The micro-messaging service Twitter approaches a kind of frictionless channel for messaging. Everything about it seems to be built for growth and speed. After the substantial speed bump of signing up and orienting yourself in the system, both listening for, and creating messages are very simple. Select the other people (and pseudo-people) you’d like to follow, type fewer than 140 characters of hypertext into a text field and press update.

It’s been noted many times that the follow social structure – the directed social graph – allows for the rapid expansion of social linking. A participant is able to follow many others without the requirement of reciprocity. I follow you, you don’t have to follow me. And the retweet has emerged as a method of transmitting messages across multiple overlapping social graphs. Hash tags have become a conventional method of indicating a message tied to a particular event. All of these tools are dedicated to the acceleration of the growth of the Twitter network. Twitter’s trending topics and search functionality allow users to find high-velocity memes as they begin to achieve broad circulation through the social mesh.

Examples of the benefits of the speed of the Twitter network abound – news about the earthquake in China, the plane landing on the Hudson River, reports on wild fires in Southern California, etc. The news media, feeling somewhat usurped here, has also brought the negative aspects of this lack of friction in the system. Usually this kind of story is meant to point to the filtering role of their own editorial facility. The New York Times put a Twitter contretemps involving Stephen Fry in the first section of their newspaper.

…that little tweet set off a frenzy of vitriolic attacks and counterattacks on Twitter, drawing an untold number of people into an increasingly charged debate and thrusting brumplum — in reality a man from Birmingham, England, named Richard — unhappily into the public’s angry glare. It was an example once again of the extraordinary power of Twitter to distribute information and to sway the opinions of vast groups of people in tiny amounts of time.

While the frictionless micro-messaging environment can accelerate important, or amusing, messages (news, stories, jokes, musings), it can also assemble and ignite an angry mob at lightning speed. And if we look at the tool set we’re offered, everything is oriented toward accelerating people, memes and the growth of the Twitter network. In this frame, value is equated with high velocity and numbers of retweets, likes, mentions, @replies, followers and now, list memberships. We’re looking for what, or who, is going viral.

But if we examine the often banal items that achieve virality, we have to question the value = virality equation. Often the high numbers are a result of lowest-common denominator dynamics, it’s not the cream rising to the top. There are certain kinds of viral items that we’d prefer to be vaccinated against. We’d like a micro-messaging Center for Disease Control warning us about time-wasting viral memes spreading through the Network. Where are the tools to retard the spread of a meme? Where’s the don’t like, or the visible gesture of hiding something from your messaging stream. It’s as though we’ve put a poll in the field that only asks for a positive response and excludes all negative reaction. Feedback loops require both positive and negative inputs.

Feedback is a mechanism, process or signal that is looped back to control a system within itself. Such a loop is called a feedback loop. Intuitively many systems have an obvious input and output; feeding back part of the output so as to increase the input is positive feedback; feeding back part of the output in such a way as to partially oppose the input is negative feedback.

Negative feedback helps to maintain stability in a system in spite of external changes. It is related to homeostasis. For example, in a population of foxes (predators) and rabbits (prey), an increase in the number of foxes will cause a reduction in the number of rabbits; the smaller rabbit population will sustain fewer foxes, and the fox population will fall back. In an electronic amplifier feeding back a negative copy of the output to the input will tend to cancel distortion, making the output a more accurate replica of the input signal.

Positive feedback amplifies possibilities of divergences (evolution, change of goals); it is the condition to change, evolution, growth; it gives the system the ability to access new points of equilibrium.

One method of judging the relative merit of the memes circulating through the stream is to pay close attention to the silences, the negative gestures. While the wisdom of crowds may have crowned an item the real-time meme of the moment, there’s a simple way to filter for value. Using a small portfolio (lists, if you will) of people who’s opinion you respect – look to see if they remain silent on a topic. In the task of discovering value, this kind of silence is golden.

In the early stages of growth, accelerants are essential. As a Network matures, unless it develops a deeper tool set, it simply becomes a twittering machine. The value it appears to create is illusory, and so the commons begins its descent to knee-jerk reactions to the high numbers generated by the lowest common denominator. Perhaps the inevitable result is that overlapping publics contract and the social space becomes a much more private circulatory system. The crucible of dispute, debate and dialogue that produces real value may only emerge away from the public network of accelerants where the social contract allows such differences (both positive and negative feedback). One of the better statements of this kind of contract was for the Nettime mailing list:

Nettime was vector for experimenting with net critique that would confront it with the possibility of inventing new forms of discourse and dialogue in a new medium. Consensus is not the goal. There’s no governing fantasy according to which the differences within this ‘group’ will on some ever-deferred day be resolved. the differences are Nettime; they might be dialectical, implying each other, or they might be differential, making absolutely no reference whatsoever to each others’ terms. Net critique, if understood as a shared practice in and against a never pre-defined techno-local environment, contains many modes of possible participation.

In navigating the electrical storms and fires of the micro-messaging Network, we’d do well to have some tools in our kit in addition to that can of gasoline.

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