Friday, June 18, 2010
Update on Updates
Yes, I know that I have not updated he blog for quite some time. Mostly that is because I have stopped thinking. Thats not actually the case, but I have been using a more Authentic medium for "journaling". its something that many of you may have read about, or heard your parents talk about. Generally we refer to these legacy tools as "Pen" and "Paper". you can find the definitions on Wiki. Unforunately my Scribe has carpel tunnel syndrome, and consequently my most recent scibblings are only available in my analogue "blog", which is actually a stack of notebooks in my office. but please, have a look at my my recent postings, you will find then listed below because this blogging tool insists on conforming to traditional "string theory" when recording postings. Its a challenge for me because most of what I conceptualize actually happens at the same time, and you, as readers, are only able to observe this quantum state after is has completely decohered. But, that is the reality of reality. Sorry about that.....
Cognitve Time Shares - The Paradox of: Scarcity, Commodity, Land Grab
Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task — we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch -- we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive. To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information
Some have even speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999). Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention
"Attention economics" today is primarily concerned with the problem of getting consumers to consume advertising. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Attention is therefore a major and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers is now sufficiently low that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated.
many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information
Some have even speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999). Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention
"Attention economics" today is primarily concerned with the problem of getting consumers to consume advertising. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Attention is therefore a major and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers is now sufficiently low that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated.
Key Definitions
Flawed Anachronistic Innovation Citation(FAIC)
- Manipulation of technological history to create a perception that a previously existing instance of something was the predecessor to a fundamentally new concept
Perceptually Anachronistic Communications Paradox(PACP)
- when a collective of people agree in a current state that a concept was derived at an earlier point in time, when in fact it was not conceived, manifested, or otherise communicated prior to current state
Generationally out-of-phase communications Protocols(GOOP)
- i think this one explains itself
- Manipulation of technological history to create a perception that a previously existing instance of something was the predecessor to a fundamentally new concept
Perceptually Anachronistic Communications Paradox(PACP)
- when a collective of people agree in a current state that a concept was derived at an earlier point in time, when in fact it was not conceived, manifested, or otherise communicated prior to current state
Generationally out-of-phase communications Protocols(GOOP)
- i think this one explains itself
Cognitive UGC
I will argue that “cognitively perceived” UGC is at least equally, if not more important than “sensory perceived” UGC. Eg. A virtual chair is sensory, a virtual discussion or thought, induced from VR-based activity is cognitive. The true objective of course is to leverage the combination of cognitive and sensory perception to yield something that is greater than the simple sum of the parts. i.e. if 2 users sit immersed in a virtual room in 2 virtual chairs and have a discussion concerning the virtual model that they are seeing(and interacting with), do we suppose that the yield from this immersive experience(sensory + cognitive) might be greater than if the discussion took place via Webex? In this scenario of immersion-based collaboration, what are the 3 examples of UGC?
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Paradox of Studying the Modern Erosion of Attention
If I am concurrently reading 3 books on the modern erosion of our ability to focus on singular topics, does the commonality of the books subject matter provide focus, or provide proof that i am unable to focus?
Attention as an Organ System
if we consider the concept proposed by Michael posner, that "Attention is an Organ System", does the benefit of being able to think about concentration is pure physiological terms assist us in any way? is long term attention to something the same thing as Persistence? can we enable our attention to function as subconsiously as our liver, or heart?
Concentration as Cognitive Wave Form Collapse
A reduction of all possibilities to a single reality based on the singularity of observation, and the ability to focus on that singularity, yields wave form collapse
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Synthetically Induced Emotional Needs Fulfillment: Denying the boundaries of Real vs Manufactured Life Necessities
Synthetically Induced Emotional Needs Fulfillment: Denying the boundaries of Real vs Manufactured Life Necessities - How the forthcoming generations will derive social consciousness from non-traditional-faith-based intangibles, and the impending obfuscation of societal bindings: is this socio-psychological evolution? or the irreversible decay of mankind as a corporally relevant entity?
Who should we believe: Mr. Dunbar, or Mr. Ning? a social network for the connection of everyone? or the acceptance of that fact that our "tiny" brains cannot viably manage more than 150 "meaningful" relationships?
Think of social media as if it were a virus sent to earth by space aliens to gradually decay the historical underpinnings of society....its a very clever "sleeper agent strategy" that creeps up on you the way grass grows - you wake up one day and "suddenly" your world is different…..
Anyone see the Movie Avatar? What was the difference between the Tree of Life and the Floating Mountains? I'll leave that one with you all for a moment....
The history of mankind's social evolution was something like:
1. we were migratory nomads without fixed roots "tweeting" and "writing on face book walls" as we drew cave paintings and left rock cairns
2. after awhile, we settled down and joined communities based on common cultures, and socialized amongst ourselves. It was like "medieval Ning".
a. as this happened, we formalized portions of our culture to form a sort of glue. the recipe of this glue was primary based on a unifying concept of "faith in something or someone"
3. after awhile, more advanced social networks attacked our Ning villages and rode off with our prized possessions and people: we saw this happen with the migration from MySpace/Friendster/Jdate to Face book.
4. then, because we now had the ability to travel freely, and obtains sustenance at every stop along the way, we decided that while we still "wanted" to maintain a "home" of some sort, it was more important to keep moving, and keep increasing our social networks.
5. But we maintained "our faith in something" and returned to homes to reunite with "special relationships"
6. but over time, we found new tools that no longer required that we "return home". we found ways to remain connected to our homes without actually being there, and we realized that we did not need to spend nearly as much time at home as we had once thought
7. Social aggregation made our tools even "better" - RSS feeds, retweets, etc. Now, not only could I get "messages from home", I could get messages from anywhere.
8. information and messaging became the umbilical cord that provided our source of emotional nutrition.
9. Our basic needs fulfillment shifted from co-located procurement, to crowd-sourcing
10. we began living in the digital Mall, rather than visiting the Mall and then returning home. and why not? the Mall has everything we need: People, food, and most importantly, enough sensory stimulation that we are cognitively saturated
11. and now, we "thrive" because we are "aware" of everything, all at the same time. we are omni-present - thinking, seeing, and communicating with our entire world(" I see you")
12. and like a universal donor, hyper-connectivity binds itself to the "instinctual synapsis" that once were bridged by physically co-located contacts
13. but we don't mind, in fact we "like it". digital sustenance is soooo much easier to obtain then "the real thing". we don't notice that like a pharmacological opiate, our social synapsis our now bridged by a synthetic substitute
14. our needs, our motivation to find "what is missing", our desire to belong, our longing to connect and be comforted? all have been satiated through our new synthetic "social binder"
15. and what of the faith that was the earliest glue(and dissolvent!) of society? Faith as we once knew it has been replaced in the same way that checks displaced gold coins. we have faith that this bit of paper is just as good and useful as the "authentic original". and most of the time it is....
16. Faith2.0 is ineffable, at least for most people. Why? because they are so immersed in it that they cannot see the forest for the trees. But when will Faith2.0 come into focus....?
17. when it begins to fracture society with a force of passion - the way Faith always has. but there is a difference now!
18. our "emotional homes" are now Floating Mountains....so where do we run to when the factions of Faith2.0 begin raiding our new homes "built on foundations of digitally aggregated connectivity"....
19. we regress to a life before digital needs-fulfillment was as comforting "as mom"
20. we return to "core values" and whole foods.....but wait! a generation or 2 has transpired since we became a digital culture, synthetic is real! Grape Jolly Ranchers are "real grape" - my Face book friends are my "real friends"
21. you are in pain. you are suffering emotional distress. you are trying to feed your craving for hyper connectivity but you can't possibly supply enough stimulation when all you've got is "outdated physical life tools". you are withdrawing, but to what? you are of an age when you never ate a "real" grape. movies stars? synthetic, real? is there a difference? they all look the same on the screen. so what?
22. but the pain is so bad. your synthetic needs fulfillment, your emotional binders are gone....
23. "there is no God!!!!" what does that mean? your faith is entrusted in the "fact" that when you send an IM, you get an immediate response. your questions about life(and death) are just a few short "crowd-sourced" moments away. your need to understand your place in life is easily explained to you by your "friends" on face book.
24. the space aliens have blown apart society simply by unplugging the "faith generator" that fueled a couple of generations. you and all of your friends, who merrily bobbed along "high on hyper-connectivity" are now huddled in the corner waiting for the nightmare to end.
25. but it will never end....because to "end" is to suggest that things might go back to the way they were. but what was the "way things were?". what was that exactly? I mean - take a moment to articulate exactly what you thought you knew?
26. what was a dream, and what was a nightmare? are you awake or are you sleeping? is it night or day? is Bob your friend or enemy?
27. but now there is a something in the horizon. you see it in the distance....getting closer...like the sun coming up at daybreak. you feel the warmth as the glowing rays first hit you. it surrounds you like an embrace. you begin to feel hope. you begin to feel "like everything is going to be ok" YES! I feel good. the nightmare is over! I am feeling a new sense of well being and "life"
28. you do not question the source of this new, all consuming glow of "wellness". it is too good. and everyone else feels it to. the masses emerge from the dark corners of their psyches where they have been denying their dis-connectivity. they emerge squinting, and emotionally pasty-faced. there is laughter and merriment
29. people gather to talk about their ordeals, and how they are so relieved that "things are back to normal"- no one ever ponders the source of this new found sense of well-being.
30. but there is a source of this wellbeing. there always is. and even when we ask about things we cannot see or feel, we often accept explanations that are based on "trust" or "faith". so why should it be any different this time? who cares. I feel great!!!!
31. And the cycle begins anew. But you are not starting from the beginning of mankind. These cycles are iterative.
32. Quantum Consciousness is your new source of multiple realities – but the paradox is that you never decohere. You can’t. because you are not at a fixed point such that you are capable of making an observation of yourself relative to your own awareness.
33. Multiple Realities or All realities at the same time? this has nothing to do with “endless possibilities” and everything to do with your inability to focus your awareness on a single instance, such that you can derive and therefore articulate a single conscious reality.
34. You are not “mentally ill” at least as long as we might define Ill as something other than the common norm.
35. The irreconcilable paradox of human evolution is that our desire to evolve our cognitive perceptibility is driven by our ability for meta-cognition, but that yields the subsequent consequence that we believe that we have become something that we are not.
36. Only extremely impactful and highly focused jolts of agony or joy seem capable of bringing so degree of focus too our otherwise(and our unknowing) state of bewilderment.
37. Are you really lost if everyone is lost with you?
38. Are you “lost” if there is no purpose, destination or objective?
39. Untethered consciousnesses are not specifically ripe for Faith(as it has been historically considered)
40. Untethered consciousness will accept the first universal donor that produces the desired effect within us.
Who should we believe: Mr. Dunbar, or Mr. Ning? a social network for the connection of everyone? or the acceptance of that fact that our "tiny" brains cannot viably manage more than 150 "meaningful" relationships?
Think of social media as if it were a virus sent to earth by space aliens to gradually decay the historical underpinnings of society....its a very clever "sleeper agent strategy" that creeps up on you the way grass grows - you wake up one day and "suddenly" your world is different…..
Anyone see the Movie Avatar? What was the difference between the Tree of Life and the Floating Mountains? I'll leave that one with you all for a moment....
The history of mankind's social evolution was something like:
1. we were migratory nomads without fixed roots "tweeting" and "writing on face book walls" as we drew cave paintings and left rock cairns
2. after awhile, we settled down and joined communities based on common cultures, and socialized amongst ourselves. It was like "medieval Ning".
a. as this happened, we formalized portions of our culture to form a sort of glue. the recipe of this glue was primary based on a unifying concept of "faith in something or someone"
3. after awhile, more advanced social networks attacked our Ning villages and rode off with our prized possessions and people: we saw this happen with the migration from MySpace/Friendster/Jdate to Face book.
4. then, because we now had the ability to travel freely, and obtains sustenance at every stop along the way, we decided that while we still "wanted" to maintain a "home" of some sort, it was more important to keep moving, and keep increasing our social networks.
5. But we maintained "our faith in something" and returned to homes to reunite with "special relationships"
6. but over time, we found new tools that no longer required that we "return home". we found ways to remain connected to our homes without actually being there, and we realized that we did not need to spend nearly as much time at home as we had once thought
7. Social aggregation made our tools even "better" - RSS feeds, retweets, etc. Now, not only could I get "messages from home", I could get messages from anywhere.
8. information and messaging became the umbilical cord that provided our source of emotional nutrition.
9. Our basic needs fulfillment shifted from co-located procurement, to crowd-sourcing
10. we began living in the digital Mall, rather than visiting the Mall and then returning home. and why not? the Mall has everything we need: People, food, and most importantly, enough sensory stimulation that we are cognitively saturated
11. and now, we "thrive" because we are "aware" of everything, all at the same time. we are omni-present - thinking, seeing, and communicating with our entire world(" I see you")
12. and like a universal donor, hyper-connectivity binds itself to the "instinctual synapsis" that once were bridged by physically co-located contacts
13. but we don't mind, in fact we "like it". digital sustenance is soooo much easier to obtain then "the real thing". we don't notice that like a pharmacological opiate, our social synapsis our now bridged by a synthetic substitute
14. our needs, our motivation to find "what is missing", our desire to belong, our longing to connect and be comforted? all have been satiated through our new synthetic "social binder"
15. and what of the faith that was the earliest glue(and dissolvent!) of society? Faith as we once knew it has been replaced in the same way that checks displaced gold coins. we have faith that this bit of paper is just as good and useful as the "authentic original". and most of the time it is....
16. Faith2.0 is ineffable, at least for most people. Why? because they are so immersed in it that they cannot see the forest for the trees. But when will Faith2.0 come into focus....?
17. when it begins to fracture society with a force of passion - the way Faith always has. but there is a difference now!
18. our "emotional homes" are now Floating Mountains....so where do we run to when the factions of Faith2.0 begin raiding our new homes "built on foundations of digitally aggregated connectivity"....
19. we regress to a life before digital needs-fulfillment was as comforting "as mom"
20. we return to "core values" and whole foods.....but wait! a generation or 2 has transpired since we became a digital culture, synthetic is real! Grape Jolly Ranchers are "real grape" - my Face book friends are my "real friends"
21. you are in pain. you are suffering emotional distress. you are trying to feed your craving for hyper connectivity but you can't possibly supply enough stimulation when all you've got is "outdated physical life tools". you are withdrawing, but to what? you are of an age when you never ate a "real" grape. movies stars? synthetic, real? is there a difference? they all look the same on the screen. so what?
22. but the pain is so bad. your synthetic needs fulfillment, your emotional binders are gone....
23. "there is no God!!!!" what does that mean? your faith is entrusted in the "fact" that when you send an IM, you get an immediate response. your questions about life(and death) are just a few short "crowd-sourced" moments away. your need to understand your place in life is easily explained to you by your "friends" on face book.
24. the space aliens have blown apart society simply by unplugging the "faith generator" that fueled a couple of generations. you and all of your friends, who merrily bobbed along "high on hyper-connectivity" are now huddled in the corner waiting for the nightmare to end.
25. but it will never end....because to "end" is to suggest that things might go back to the way they were. but what was the "way things were?". what was that exactly? I mean - take a moment to articulate exactly what you thought you knew?
26. what was a dream, and what was a nightmare? are you awake or are you sleeping? is it night or day? is Bob your friend or enemy?
27. but now there is a something in the horizon. you see it in the distance....getting closer...like the sun coming up at daybreak. you feel the warmth as the glowing rays first hit you. it surrounds you like an embrace. you begin to feel hope. you begin to feel "like everything is going to be ok" YES! I feel good. the nightmare is over! I am feeling a new sense of well being and "life"
28. you do not question the source of this new, all consuming glow of "wellness". it is too good. and everyone else feels it to. the masses emerge from the dark corners of their psyches where they have been denying their dis-connectivity. they emerge squinting, and emotionally pasty-faced. there is laughter and merriment
29. people gather to talk about their ordeals, and how they are so relieved that "things are back to normal"- no one ever ponders the source of this new found sense of well-being.
30. but there is a source of this wellbeing. there always is. and even when we ask about things we cannot see or feel, we often accept explanations that are based on "trust" or "faith". so why should it be any different this time? who cares. I feel great!!!!
31. And the cycle begins anew. But you are not starting from the beginning of mankind. These cycles are iterative.
32. Quantum Consciousness is your new source of multiple realities – but the paradox is that you never decohere. You can’t. because you are not at a fixed point such that you are capable of making an observation of yourself relative to your own awareness.
33. Multiple Realities or All realities at the same time? this has nothing to do with “endless possibilities” and everything to do with your inability to focus your awareness on a single instance, such that you can derive and therefore articulate a single conscious reality.
34. You are not “mentally ill” at least as long as we might define Ill as something other than the common norm.
35. The irreconcilable paradox of human evolution is that our desire to evolve our cognitive perceptibility is driven by our ability for meta-cognition, but that yields the subsequent consequence that we believe that we have become something that we are not.
36. Only extremely impactful and highly focused jolts of agony or joy seem capable of bringing so degree of focus too our otherwise(and our unknowing) state of bewilderment.
37. Are you really lost if everyone is lost with you?
38. Are you “lost” if there is no purpose, destination or objective?
39. Untethered consciousnesses are not specifically ripe for Faith(as it has been historically considered)
40. Untethered consciousness will accept the first universal donor that produces the desired effect within us.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Augmented Diorality Deception(ADD)
Augmented Diorality Deception(ADD)– When a dioramic scene is used to create a backdrop for a superimposed user interface designed to aggregate an assortment of pre-existing functionality
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Dunbar’s Number vs. Ning: How big is your brain?
Sure you can fit 1,000,000 people into your Ning network, but don’t expect them to fit in your head, even if you do look like that little kid on Family Guy. Your cognitive reality, is that all these “relationships” just don’t fit into your brain. So the question becomes: in order to make way for an exponential number of relationships, do we:
1. Create a definition of “friend” or “acquaintance” that vastly reduces the amount of cognitive resource required to maintain the definition of friend across absurd numbers of people?
2. Do we accept that each peep-node in our network is not actually significant?
3. Do we rank our peep-nodes to enable an allocation of brain-sustenance based on personal importance?
Or possibly none of the above. I maintain that people are not nearly as good at being social as pop-social media would like us to believe. I further maintain(and I’ve said this plenty of times) that the dynamic personal value of an increasingly large relationship-network actually trends downward, rather than upward the diluting effect of Dunbar’s Number begins to erode the quality of individual peep-nodes. That is unless we can hold constant the Dunbar Cognitive Plateau, while at the same increasing the number of peep-nodes that we connect to. So how is this possible? As follows:
Peep-Node = Sum(a,b,c,d………n)
Dunbars Number = 150
Cognitive Plateau = 150(Peep Node)
If a Peep-Node in our relationship network is comprised of N number of variables, lets say 10(name, birthday, sex, favorite color, etc), then our Cognitive Plateau equals 150 multiplied by N., or in this case: 150 x 10 = 1500.
We can therefore say that we socially saturated when we are required to maintain fluency in 1500 pieces of data regarding our social network.
But let say that we were willing to forego all 10 pieces of information about each peep-node. And that we were more interested in simply remembering each person’s first name. it would follow that we could then increase our number of viable peep-nodes from 150 to 1500, but of course nothing comes for free. We have not made our brains bigger, we have simply filtered our cognitive database. And for sure, there are lots of good reasons to know lots of names, at the sacrifice of knowing lots of names + favorite color.
Take for example the Office Manager with 150 employees. Is he perceived as a better or worse manager if he knows all 150 first names? Or if he knows 50 first names + dog’s name + shoe size? It’s a bit of a downer for the 100 people who did not make the Top 50 list.
Taken to another level, and moving beyond the personal/social aspects of a human network, what if we were more interested in maintaining stable relationships with only people who’s favorite candy bar is Snickers? This is more to the point of Ning, but it is a trap!! Great! We have the Snicker-Lover network. Chat with global Snicker-files everywhere. Chat about what? You’re bumping up against the Dunbar Plateau constantly. There are 1500 Snicker-groupies in the network, and you can’t possible know anything about them except how they get their sugar fix……But wait, since they are in the network, can’t I just stop thinking about Snickers, and use that brain-space for something else? Cool. They wouldn’t be here unless they liked Snickers right? Now I can learn their names. See, this really is a stable network of relationships. I learned the names of “snicker2000”, “snixnosher”, and “DJ ReSnix”. I knew this network was powerful……
The bottom line is this: there is no evidence that suggests that we can derive personal relationship value from a multitude of bloated social networks. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that much smaller personal relationship networks are the only ones that are viable. So is the answer for all of us to simple reduce the size of our networks? Of course not. We simply need tools. Tools that can help us glue these oversized networks together by socializing on our behalf, and reminding us of all the things that we have forgotten, or never had the time to learn in the first place. So hey, wouldn’t it be great if an analytical tool came along that could autonomously discover, and then notify us of all the cool things that we had in common with lots of other people? That’s the ticket: Relationship Outsourcing. We outsource our math. Why should be remember long division any more than we should remember what kind of candy bar Brad Pitt likes. There’s an App for that!
Next Up: Brian’s Number – the maximum number of digital tools that an individual can maintain fluency in concurrently. (but don’t worry, we will find a way to aggregate tools before there is some sort of social-real relationship Armageddon)
1. Create a definition of “friend” or “acquaintance” that vastly reduces the amount of cognitive resource required to maintain the definition of friend across absurd numbers of people?
2. Do we accept that each peep-node in our network is not actually significant?
3. Do we rank our peep-nodes to enable an allocation of brain-sustenance based on personal importance?
Or possibly none of the above. I maintain that people are not nearly as good at being social as pop-social media would like us to believe. I further maintain(and I’ve said this plenty of times) that the dynamic personal value of an increasingly large relationship-network actually trends downward, rather than upward the diluting effect of Dunbar’s Number begins to erode the quality of individual peep-nodes. That is unless we can hold constant the Dunbar Cognitive Plateau, while at the same increasing the number of peep-nodes that we connect to. So how is this possible? As follows:
Peep-Node = Sum(a,b,c,d………n)
Dunbars Number = 150
Cognitive Plateau = 150(Peep Node)
If a Peep-Node in our relationship network is comprised of N number of variables, lets say 10(name, birthday, sex, favorite color, etc), then our Cognitive Plateau equals 150 multiplied by N., or in this case: 150 x 10 = 1500.
We can therefore say that we socially saturated when we are required to maintain fluency in 1500 pieces of data regarding our social network.
But let say that we were willing to forego all 10 pieces of information about each peep-node. And that we were more interested in simply remembering each person’s first name. it would follow that we could then increase our number of viable peep-nodes from 150 to 1500, but of course nothing comes for free. We have not made our brains bigger, we have simply filtered our cognitive database. And for sure, there are lots of good reasons to know lots of names, at the sacrifice of knowing lots of names + favorite color.
Take for example the Office Manager with 150 employees. Is he perceived as a better or worse manager if he knows all 150 first names? Or if he knows 50 first names + dog’s name + shoe size? It’s a bit of a downer for the 100 people who did not make the Top 50 list.
Taken to another level, and moving beyond the personal/social aspects of a human network, what if we were more interested in maintaining stable relationships with only people who’s favorite candy bar is Snickers? This is more to the point of Ning, but it is a trap!! Great! We have the Snicker-Lover network. Chat with global Snicker-files everywhere. Chat about what? You’re bumping up against the Dunbar Plateau constantly. There are 1500 Snicker-groupies in the network, and you can’t possible know anything about them except how they get their sugar fix……But wait, since they are in the network, can’t I just stop thinking about Snickers, and use that brain-space for something else? Cool. They wouldn’t be here unless they liked Snickers right? Now I can learn their names. See, this really is a stable network of relationships. I learned the names of “snicker2000”, “snixnosher”, and “DJ ReSnix”. I knew this network was powerful……
The bottom line is this: there is no evidence that suggests that we can derive personal relationship value from a multitude of bloated social networks. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that much smaller personal relationship networks are the only ones that are viable. So is the answer for all of us to simple reduce the size of our networks? Of course not. We simply need tools. Tools that can help us glue these oversized networks together by socializing on our behalf, and reminding us of all the things that we have forgotten, or never had the time to learn in the first place. So hey, wouldn’t it be great if an analytical tool came along that could autonomously discover, and then notify us of all the cool things that we had in common with lots of other people? That’s the ticket: Relationship Outsourcing. We outsource our math. Why should be remember long division any more than we should remember what kind of candy bar Brad Pitt likes. There’s an App for that!
Next Up: Brian’s Number – the maximum number of digital tools that an individual can maintain fluency in concurrently. (but don’t worry, we will find a way to aggregate tools before there is some sort of social-real relationship Armageddon)
The Forbidden Decision: Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts in Innovation
“Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about”
But if we can bypass the hardwired opponency, we can access a perceptual filling-in mechanism that will yield the Forbidden Decision…
We should not be able to see yellowish-blue, or reddish-green. We are hardwired perceptually to attempt to amalgamate these colors to produce a singular hue that can be simplified. Ie. Our perception + cognition attempts to render a swift and simple conclusion that satisfies our need to understand what we are seeing. The resulting conclusion is generally accepted by ourselves because it is largely the result of our own rationalized conditioning.
Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about….
But under the right condition, we can induce the “Forbidden Conclusion”. Perceptually, we can create a color palette such that a viewer will in fact see opponent colors flowing together(Scientific American, Feb 2010, pg 75). Thereby rendering a perception of what should in fact be incomprehensible. It presents a challenge to the viewer because it is something that has never been encountered, and can lead to momentary confusion, but importantly, the perception is not rejected.
In the color experiments, the “forbidden colors” were perceived only when the opponent colors were represented with identical luminance. Luminance is essentially “brightness”, and the inducement of forbidden-perception requires that the luminance be identical. It has been determined that by mirroring the luminance, the flickering effect of changing opponent colors is minimized, thereby making the transition between opponencies as transparent as possible. i.e the transition is less “startling” and therefore leaves a smaller cognitive disintermediation footprint.
So, how does this apply to innovation in the workplace?
1. Change is often capable of being defined as set of opponent concepts.
a. Just as Red vs Green are opponent colors, some may perceive that:
i. Casual and Business are opponent
ii. Distance and Intimacy are opponent
iii. Games and Work are opponent
iv. Service Quality and “face-face alternatives” are opponent
2. As with colors, our a priori hard-wired perceptions can be defeated if we are precise in our presentation of the opponent pairings. With colors, this is luminance. So what is the equivalent of Luminance in the context of business?
3. Contextual Change Opponency in Business
a. As with opponent color-swapping, the reduction of flickering when 2 opponent colors are rapidly alternated was the means by which forbidden colors were perceived. The brightness of the colors needed to be massaged such that the luminance was identical
b. The concept is: hold as many variables as possible constant, such that the cognitive-sensory disruption is tightly focused on a precise variable.
4. Organizationally, it might present as:
a. Face-Face vs 3D Immersive meeting spaces
b. The context, and variability between the 2 concepts must be contained, such that only the target variable is perceived as changing, and not the entire universe of variables
i. Therefore, if we consider *only*: face-face images, vs Avatar-Avatar images, we can contain the spectrum of sensory-cognitive change parameters
5. How to neutralize the luminance of face-face and avatar-avatar?
a. Take a Point-of-View photograph of 1-1 meeting in a real meeting room
b. Render a photo-realistic head from a photograph
c. Swap the Avatar head onto the 1-1 meeting counterparty.
d. Rapidly alternate between real-real, and real-avatar.
e. Additionally, create a POV photograph in which the viewer is meeting 1-2(eg. Viewer is meeting with 2 people)
i. Swap an Avatar head onto a single counterparty, and rapidly alternate between Real-real-real, and Real-real-avatar.
6. In this example, the luminance is perceptually defined as a combination of contextual visualization parameters
a. Contrast, color, shading – must remain precise
b. Avatar head must be of extreme quality(no goofy hair)
c. While this is a “photoshop” experiment, the avatar head must be expertly pasted into the photograph to appear seamless
The purpose of this exercise is simple: to advance a tiny step towards overcoming a common condition of hardwired opponency in business that conditions decision makers away from accepting that Virtual can be a “good enough” approximation of reality. The defeating of this perception is results in the “Forbidden Decision” that VR can be effective in the workplace.
Next steps include the one-by-one introduction of virtual elements into the photograph flip book. By Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts, we are able to minimize cognitive disintermediation(i.e. we are not startling) and are able to tightly focus our audience on a single, discrete change variable, without incurring a rapid retreat to a more comfortable hard-wired opponent reaction(i.e. it will never work).
But if we can bypass the hardwired opponency, we can access a perceptual filling-in mechanism that will yield the Forbidden Decision…
We should not be able to see yellowish-blue, or reddish-green. We are hardwired perceptually to attempt to amalgamate these colors to produce a singular hue that can be simplified. Ie. Our perception + cognition attempts to render a swift and simple conclusion that satisfies our need to understand what we are seeing. The resulting conclusion is generally accepted by ourselves because it is largely the result of our own rationalized conditioning.
Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about….
But under the right condition, we can induce the “Forbidden Conclusion”. Perceptually, we can create a color palette such that a viewer will in fact see opponent colors flowing together(Scientific American, Feb 2010, pg 75). Thereby rendering a perception of what should in fact be incomprehensible. It presents a challenge to the viewer because it is something that has never been encountered, and can lead to momentary confusion, but importantly, the perception is not rejected.
In the color experiments, the “forbidden colors” were perceived only when the opponent colors were represented with identical luminance. Luminance is essentially “brightness”, and the inducement of forbidden-perception requires that the luminance be identical. It has been determined that by mirroring the luminance, the flickering effect of changing opponent colors is minimized, thereby making the transition between opponencies as transparent as possible. i.e the transition is less “startling” and therefore leaves a smaller cognitive disintermediation footprint.
So, how does this apply to innovation in the workplace?
1. Change is often capable of being defined as set of opponent concepts.
a. Just as Red vs Green are opponent colors, some may perceive that:
i. Casual and Business are opponent
ii. Distance and Intimacy are opponent
iii. Games and Work are opponent
iv. Service Quality and “face-face alternatives” are opponent
2. As with colors, our a priori hard-wired perceptions can be defeated if we are precise in our presentation of the opponent pairings. With colors, this is luminance. So what is the equivalent of Luminance in the context of business?
3. Contextual Change Opponency in Business
a. As with opponent color-swapping, the reduction of flickering when 2 opponent colors are rapidly alternated was the means by which forbidden colors were perceived. The brightness of the colors needed to be massaged such that the luminance was identical
b. The concept is: hold as many variables as possible constant, such that the cognitive-sensory disruption is tightly focused on a precise variable.
4. Organizationally, it might present as:
a. Face-Face vs 3D Immersive meeting spaces
b. The context, and variability between the 2 concepts must be contained, such that only the target variable is perceived as changing, and not the entire universe of variables
i. Therefore, if we consider *only*: face-face images, vs Avatar-Avatar images, we can contain the spectrum of sensory-cognitive change parameters
5. How to neutralize the luminance of face-face and avatar-avatar?
a. Take a Point-of-View photograph of 1-1 meeting in a real meeting room
b. Render a photo-realistic head from a photograph
c. Swap the Avatar head onto the 1-1 meeting counterparty.
d. Rapidly alternate between real-real, and real-avatar.
e. Additionally, create a POV photograph in which the viewer is meeting 1-2(eg. Viewer is meeting with 2 people)
i. Swap an Avatar head onto a single counterparty, and rapidly alternate between Real-real-real, and Real-real-avatar.
6. In this example, the luminance is perceptually defined as a combination of contextual visualization parameters
a. Contrast, color, shading – must remain precise
b. Avatar head must be of extreme quality(no goofy hair)
c. While this is a “photoshop” experiment, the avatar head must be expertly pasted into the photograph to appear seamless
The purpose of this exercise is simple: to advance a tiny step towards overcoming a common condition of hardwired opponency in business that conditions decision makers away from accepting that Virtual can be a “good enough” approximation of reality. The defeating of this perception is results in the “Forbidden Decision” that VR can be effective in the workplace.
Next steps include the one-by-one introduction of virtual elements into the photograph flip book. By Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts, we are able to minimize cognitive disintermediation(i.e. we are not startling) and are able to tightly focus our audience on a single, discrete change variable, without incurring a rapid retreat to a more comfortable hard-wired opponent reaction(i.e. it will never work).
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
"Avatar" the movie, vs Quantum Darwinism
In Viral Loop, Adam Penenburg does a nice job of describing a few people(who are representative of 1000’s more) who have made a conscious decision to lives their lives as much as possible online. These folks stalk Wifi hot-spots like predators seeking prey(or maybe more like Vegans seeking whole grains?). They feel incomplete unless they are jacked-in to their digital counter-world. It is suggested by Penenburg that for these types of people, digital-only experiences, including music and relationships, have displaced “live” encounters as that person’s “new reality”. Or in my words “Preferred Reality”. So is the sign of things to come? Will the human race rapidly become “avatar like” with a perfect system of digital connectedness closing the gap between everyone and everything? Will augmented reality + Ning + Google + Twitter et all form the digitized neural-net that will forever bind us all together into an inseparable and unionized collective of assimilated consciousness? Mmmm, probably not.
I could now talk about things like Quantum Darwinism, but seems that I can get in trouble when I mention how biology tends to drive sociology, and that reality is formed via long strings of probabilities and decision trees. My point is this: sure the movie Avatar looks cool. Tron and the Matrix were cool too. “1984” was also cool. So, raise your hand if you believe that information/communication aggregation as manifested in today’s social media/devices is the beginning of an avatar-like existence…I see a lot of hands out there. So let me ask you this: Pick an example from human history that provides evidence of the indelible evolution of our social consciousness. Great, Everybody have an example? Now ask yourself this: In your example, does this example of “social consciousness evolution” require active administration by the person, or has it become reflexive/instinctually “programmed such that this evolutionary example could not be rapidly reversed by an event that happens to the person? What happened to your example?
Why should be care? In the same way that humans are able to construct technology that could cause our complete physical destruction, we are also able to construct technology that presents itself as Faux Evolution, or Fauvolution. What the heck is that? It’s a thin veneer of human-produced advancement that from 50,000 feet makes it appear that we have evolved ourselves as a race of humans. Trouble is, our social consciousness has not evolved(in the hard-wired sense) in any discernable way for an awfully long time. Take a human, put them in adverse conditions, and you will see social regression in effect like a freight train until we are once again “nasty, brutish, and short”.
The concept of an Avatar-like neural net scares me more than the Google phone. Why? Because we mistakenly believe that total connectedness is what we want. Where in fact, we need disconnectedness in the same way that we need sleep. Why have we not figured this out yet? Because no one has enabled scalable and sustainable “immersive connectedness”.
Avatar presents as just another probabilistic outcome of our social evolution, which in my opinion, would require a few thousand(million?) more years to become an indelible(as in irreversible) part of human nature. And before that happens, we will continue to do what we have always done….
I could now talk about things like Quantum Darwinism, but seems that I can get in trouble when I mention how biology tends to drive sociology, and that reality is formed via long strings of probabilities and decision trees. My point is this: sure the movie Avatar looks cool. Tron and the Matrix were cool too. “1984” was also cool. So, raise your hand if you believe that information/communication aggregation as manifested in today’s social media/devices is the beginning of an avatar-like existence…I see a lot of hands out there. So let me ask you this: Pick an example from human history that provides evidence of the indelible evolution of our social consciousness. Great, Everybody have an example? Now ask yourself this: In your example, does this example of “social consciousness evolution” require active administration by the person, or has it become reflexive/instinctually “programmed such that this evolutionary example could not be rapidly reversed by an event that happens to the person? What happened to your example?
Why should be care? In the same way that humans are able to construct technology that could cause our complete physical destruction, we are also able to construct technology that presents itself as Faux Evolution, or Fauvolution. What the heck is that? It’s a thin veneer of human-produced advancement that from 50,000 feet makes it appear that we have evolved ourselves as a race of humans. Trouble is, our social consciousness has not evolved(in the hard-wired sense) in any discernable way for an awfully long time. Take a human, put them in adverse conditions, and you will see social regression in effect like a freight train until we are once again “nasty, brutish, and short”.
The concept of an Avatar-like neural net scares me more than the Google phone. Why? Because we mistakenly believe that total connectedness is what we want. Where in fact, we need disconnectedness in the same way that we need sleep. Why have we not figured this out yet? Because no one has enabled scalable and sustainable “immersive connectedness”.
Avatar presents as just another probabilistic outcome of our social evolution, which in my opinion, would require a few thousand(million?) more years to become an indelible(as in irreversible) part of human nature. And before that happens, we will continue to do what we have always done….
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