Month: July 2011

m3 Introduced us to the concept of collaboration. We’ve all collaborated on projects with different groups of people in different settings, but I think that few of us have had the opportunity to collaborate the way we did in this class, using the variety of social media tools available to us.

I will give you my interpretation of the experience from this past week. I began the week with excitement because I was envisioning Dick Tracy watches connecting group members on the fly, wherever we were, providing quick check-ins and updates. I envisioned myself in a flying car with 3d images projected in space with a disembodied voice saying “Mr. Ferguson, your group would like to meet for a quick mash-up.” as my car flew itself in a laser-guided queue. This is the future, after all. Shouldn’t this communication stuff be all worked out by now?

Sigh, no. Briefly, I’ll say that the ooVoo video chat wasn’t compatible with some devices, Google+ Hangouts doesn’t work on the iPhone and I don’t have a webcam at work, and Skype mobile got garbled quickly the first meeting we used it on, and completely dumped me on the second meeting. We had to go to Vista group chat, and when the other three members of the group were in there, I wasn’t allowed in. I was only able to chat on the Skype mobile app with the other members in the Vista chat.

Now, it would be tempting to say that the technology is not up to snuff, it was a bad experience, etc., but it was really the opposite, and I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna. One of the most interesting and exciting experiences for me is dealing with problems as they arise. Once, when I was giving a presentation to about a hundred people consisting of faculty, students and their friends and families, one of my guest speaker’s slide presentation wouldn’t project on the screen behind us. This was the central part of the presentation. I felt strangely calm. All the nerves and fear had presented itself when I was anticipating the event before it began. Once the event started and the fiasco occurred, I was fine. I went into the room behind the panel of faculty on the elevated stage, messed with the projector, and stayed back there manually changing the slides as the speaker presented. When he referred to something on a slide, I pointed it out with my finger which showed up as a giant shadow appendage to the audience. They burst into laughter, and the tension was relieved. It was a big hit.

Mistakes happen, technical problems are always lurking. But these are just opportunities to create something new out of a situation. You have to be flexible. I apologize for waxing poetic, but there it is. Collaboration is about creating something together that you could never have created alone. In architecture design classes we always looked for the happy accidents. Sometimes we even created opportunities for them. You head down one road, and then you take your artifact from that exploration and literally turn it upside down and break chunks of it off and reassemble it. A large part of what we do as information professionals is learn how to navigate the ever-shifting landscape and dodge the grenades as they explode before us. Beauty comes out of the destruction and resurrection.

I’m just glad that the people that I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with in this class are up to the challenge and willing to negotiate the terrain with a spirit of cooperation.

In Vermont and Maine, people pass laws in assemblies called “floor meetings”. They make binding decisions in face-to-face deliberations. Cornell biologist Tom Seeley (http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/seeley.shtml) says that people in these floor meetings display behavior similar to the “animal democracy” behavior displayed by honeybees.

Similarities between town meetings and honey bee behavior:

• Scout bees report on the surrounding countryside; Townspeople report on their community.

• Bees recruit others to support their opinions; Townspeople try to sway opinion with spirited debate.

• A swarm chooses a nest site by establishing a quorum of supporters; Townspeople shout ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ or cast ballots to vote on community actions.

The main character of the interactions are that they establish a decision making process that is characterized by:

• Seeking a diversity of knowledge.

• Encouraging a friendly competition of ideas.

• Using an effective mechanism to narrow the choices.

Hallmarks of Swarm intelligence include (Seeley):

• Diversity of knowledge about the available options.

• Open and honest sharing of information about the options.

• Independence in the members’ evaluations of the options.

• Unbiased aggregation of the members’ opinions on the options.

• Leadership that fosters but does not dominate the discussion.

Twitter has a Digital Townsquare, but it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with people coming together to make decisions or with swarm intelligence:

Digital Townsquare

@digitaltownsqua

http://www.digitaltownsquare.coms

The Twitter space gives you the opportunity to “Find information about movie times, parks, things to do & events including nightlife, outdoor recreation, sports in your city in USA.”

After a little thought, I’m wondering if it is even possible to make group decisions in a digital environment. How could you tell who’s voting, how many times they’ve voted, which groups have been excluded because of the digital divide and other socio-economic issues?

Recently, I was thinking that it would be very nice if politicians could actually get accurate opinions from their constituents to back up their assurances that they know what the people want. Instead of a poll with a sample group, you ask everyone, and everyone instantly answers. Impossible!? I’m not so sure. I think the idea has to at least first be articulated before it can be refined or shot down. The more people who have phones because the price keeps going down; the more everyone has instant mobile access, the closer we can get to such a thing. All we need is some mechanism to easily register people (one tap technology), and some way to make sure that each person only gets one vote, and a way to aggregate and display the data in real time. Oh, and a boat load of band width. Then the president/prime minister/queen/king, etc. announces an important topic with a simple question in unambiguous terms, and BANG! Instant reliable opinions from the real “people”. I know, the formation of the questions would always be attacked, and all of the typical problems with surveys would still be there. But a conversation could be established where unclear items get ironed out.

As far as the back-and-forth communication necessary for swarm intelligence? Not sure, maybe follow-up debates for mobile devices with proxy debaters representing each side of the issues as they get fleshed out by the votes and ranked by number of people who hold that opinion. Or a combination of multiple push questions administered in a responsible manner.

The biggest threat to this kind of thing working is the problem of participation. Maybe people just don’t give a damn! Also, I wonder if politicians would actually want to know what people think. If the system was widely seen to be successful and representative of peoples’ opinions, then politicians might have to abandon their ideologies when they are seen to actually not be representative of those whom they claim to represent.

This discussion seems very apropos given the goofy squabbling in the U.S. over whether or not we will give a hearty stomp to the world economy this week.

So, that’s what’s on my mind this evening. Collaboration starts tomorrow!

Have a good week everyone!

Well, we made it to the end of module 2, and I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some of the thoughts that have been swimming around in my head.

Affinity Spaces:Inevitable / Not Sufficient

Regarding “affinity spaces” as described in one of our readings: Children in a participatory culture are described as gung-ho little multi-taskers, adept at transmedia navigation, expanding their consciousness by leveraging collective intelligence and distributed cognition.

When reading this, I kept wondering when the first toddler CEO would hit the world stage. All of the examples were of very young kids out there acting like little corporate celebrities. The message seems to be “you’re very special, you’re too smart for traditional education, drop out and get rich”.

I won’t bore everyone with my dissection of the paper, but I will just say that these affinity spaces seem to be necessary (or at least inevitable), but not sufficient for the cognitive development of children.

What about critical analysis? What about critical literacy? I don’t feel that the participatory culture satisfies these developmental needs.

The Fourth and Fifth Walls: Spatial Metaphors and Performance

When reading about the glass-walled bedroom where people come in and out, watch and creep around as a metaphor for these online interactive environments, I started thinking about a spatial metaphor from traditional theater.

I copied this from Wikipedia: The fourth wall is the imaginary “wall” at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box set in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. The term “fifth wall” has been used as an extension of the fourth wall concept to refer to the “invisible wall between critics or readers and theatre practitioners. The acceptance of the transparency of the fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events. Speaking directly to, or otherwise acknowledging, the audience through the camera, in a film, play or television program, is referred to as “breaking the fourth wall.”

Violating the boundary: With social media boundaries, there’s no wall to violate because there’s no widely accepted social norm defining behavior at the boundary. And the boundary itself is fragmented, nondescript, difficult to locate and define. The glass-walled bedroom metaphor is effective in describing participation, but I think it needs to be developed a little more to include the ways that information is communicated. The boundary of social media is more like a membrane.

I think it would be helpful to spend a lot of time developing new metaphors. We live our lives and shape our perceptions through our mental maps, and these are formed by metaphors.

Participation: Death of the Transmissionist

What I came to realize this past week was that participation in online environments kills the transmissionist teaching model. The idea that a teacher has to prepare a regimented lesson and deliver it to students who sit in chairs and take notes is a little outdated and in need of reconsideration.

I have heard this sentiment in several classes by teachers who stood before a class of students sitting in chairs taking notes. This is the first class that I’ve had where we practice what we preach.

Also, I very much enjoyed thinking about and interacting with different levels of understanding of participation such as lurking, snooping and furtively gumshoeing. What I came to realize is that I change roles and behaviors in online environments about as often as I do in physical environments given the context of the situation and the role that I embody at the moment.

I wonder if it would be helpful to create classes for new methods of filter reconstruction? Shirky says that information glut is caused by obsolete filters that have failed. The book publishing industry was a content filter. Internet publishing destroyed that filter. This could be classified as a “Resurrection” filter. It’s about death and rebirth.

What are some other classes that we could create to stimulate the process of identifying obsolete filters? Are there micro-melodramas that we could assign to the process of filter identification/creation?

What made me think of this was an article I was reading about the pneumatic post of Paris.

http://www.capsu.org/library/documents/0003.html

 In 1853, to speed up communication to the stock exchange, a pneumatic postal system was installed under the city to send messages to the financial market directly. The telegraph existed at that time, but messages had to be routed through a field office and then delivered to the recipient, and this slowed down the process.

The pneumatic system used air pressure and tubes to deliver little notes, much like bank drive-throughs use to carry deposit slips and cash back and forth between the driver and teller. The tubes were routed through the existing sewer system to speed construction and keep costs down.

This could be interpreted as a “reappropriation” or “parasite” class of data transfer infrastructure. Instead of heading down one “resurrection” branch looking for dead filters to resurrect in different contexts as a way of reducing information overload, we could create new categories, based on micro-dramas, that spawn multiple branches.

 Here are a few ideas for categories and their constituent micro-melodramas:

Resurrection:                         Life – Death – Rebirth

Parasite / Reappropriation:  Serve – Attach – Codepend

Cyborg:                                  Biological Entity – mech./tech. graft – hybrid functionality

 Once the classes are established, they would have to be correlated with actual filters and their constituent elements. This is just a brainstorming method that might help us determine what those filters might be because it begins with a description of an actual process. Once that process is sought for in the context of an information filter, the doors of perception might open for us.

The classes I’ve started to think of tend to have mythological themes. I think that this is valuable because it leverages the power of creativity and uses symbolism to provide opportunities for alternate interpretations that resonate at a deep emotional level.

If this leads to a technological form of magical thinking, all the better.

The emergence of the concept of ‘Filter Failure’ is the result of Web 2.0 concepts. In an on-line social media class, someone tweets their dismay with the new tools they are using. Another person tweets condolences and suggests limiting time in the new environment to prevent cognitive overload. Another person commiserates with the first person and wonders if our brains are geared for such environments. Are we geared for the sensory overload? Another person suggests that it is Filter Failure that’s the problem. Another agrees.

All of these interactions happen within a short time, within a non-physical space between people who don’t know each other except through a temporary social commons. Though the term popped into existence and fluttered around, it needed to be snatched out of the data stream and mashed up with other peoples’ contributions in order to be useful. The description of the term and its emergence described in the previous post entitled ‘Filter Failure’ is the first step in the development of the term. I invite others to poke at it and transform it with their insights.

Filter Failure:

When a person first begins to use social media, the experience can be overwhelming. There are so many tools and virtual information exchange environments available, and each one offers affordances for connecting the person to other people and groups of people. It is difficult to keep track of where a particular unit of information came from, who it came from, and how to find the way back to the source. It is difficult to know which members of a group have seen which units of information and to know what they might be reacting to in a post. It is difficult to know where information that you broadcast is going and who is seeing it. Does it last forever? Will it linger around forever? Am I offending people? What did that person mean when they said that? What are they trying to imply?

Interactions with people can be difficult. Suddenly, instantly interacting with thousands of people that you hardly know can be frightening. But what is the cause of the anxiety, the cognitive overload, the dissonance and feeling of being overwhelmed? Are our brains geared to handle the proliferation and speed and sporadic mysteriousness of social media?

Maybe the problem is not with the processing capability of the brain, but rather the effectiveness of the barriers that we set up to filter the information that we interact with. We probably can’t use every available tool to access every available information source and see every posted item and link. We have to make choices. We have to decide which conduits we will use and create some kind of communal commons to temporarily consolidate the information streams for each particular social environment. When that event comes to an end, the commons dissolves, and each little conduit tendril is released to make new synaptic connections in other individuals and groups. Each thread was never really captured to begin with.

So, back to the original question: Are our brains geared for dealing with the maelstrom of social media? Yes. The cognitive overload that new users experience is not a result of a failure of our brains to accommodate new people and information. The number of people, conduits and units of information is infinite. Instead, it is a failure of our ability to set boundaries; a failure to control the parameters by which we determine which avenues we will allow in. It is a failure of our filters. A filter failure.

Web 2.0 is often used as a meaningless buzzword. It seems to be surrounded by a vast array of gobbledygook terms that may or may not have any deeper significance than an edgy name. Here are a few juxtapositions between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 that I found intriguing: directories:taxonomy —- tagging:folksonomy; stickiness—-syndication. These terms have more resonance to me than “gravitational core” (something I found on the definitive description site of Web 2.0, “definitive” because they created it, O’Reilly tech manuals).

http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Here’s O’Reilly’s wonderful meme map that offers much more:

It shows us the basic principles of 2.0:

crowdsourced, right to remix, decentralized, participatory, user-contributor mashup.

The underlying theme, I think, is the death of the gatekeeper. No entity or individual creates the sacred content, and everything is shared and transformed in an active conflagration of information. Perpetual beta… collective intelligence. An idea perpetuates because it goes viral, not because its promoted (in the traditional sense). One of the core principles of 2.0: cooperate, don’t control… So what’s left? From what do we create value? Capitalism created the concept of ‘commodity’ and now we’re stuck with it. So what is the new commodity? It’s the data, not the superstructure. From O’Reilly: “The race is on to own certain classes of core data.” Regardless of the fact that everyone’s involved in the act of creation (and distortion) now, I think that the most important aspect of Web 2.0 is this race to own core data. Data, novelty, dirt is the new commodity. I heard a great quote on the radio today: “Data on mobile devices is becoming digital currency.” If data now trumps platform, and everyone is swiping it from everyone else, and major media all draw from the same font, then where does the value come from? How can you possibly control your “unique” data core? You can’t. You have to steal it. A hacker paradigm has emerged. The prime minister of the UK just got hacked. Why? Dirt; currency, something to sell. The new uber-commodity. Once you spend it, then its gone, and you have to get much more, very quickly. Maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture, but at this moment I feel that the current rise of criminal infiltration of information resources is largely due to the transformation of personal information into the supreme commodity that was practically mandated by Web 2.0.