NetDynam 2.0

I turned off Google Buzz for several reasons. The most important reason is that social apps such as Buzz and Facebook aren’t compelling in any awesome way for me. It could be said that I indulge Facebook. I spend less than an hour ‘there’ in a given week. It is not the best way, using the internet, to communicate with me. Basically, I can take it or leave it. Although reconnecting with old friends has been rewarding, real connection makes demands Facebook doesn’t support.

On the other hand, I like Facebook’s gallery feature, and, I like the feature that allows for publicizing blog posts, (where the feed automatically posts slugs from blog postings across my two personal blogs, and netdynam. Facebook would add more value if I leveraged it more in that direction. But, I do not.

So, Google Buzz, doesn’t trip my undeveloped social app triggers at all. It’s more intrusive in being tied into gmail, and, as it happened, I was forced to deprecate gmail its HTML interface because–in the aftermath of Buzz’s rollout, I discovered add-on java broke Gmail’s java as far as its advanced interface goes on OSX Tiger. between Tiger’s awful java implementation and Google’s hellish support, I was stuck.

I’m on Myspace-Musicians too. (Kamelmauz) Ugh.

A netydnam colleague emailed an interesting article from The New York Review of Books,

In the World of Facebook, by Charles Petersen; reviewing two books, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (by Ben Mezrich) Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (by Julia Angwin).

The article’s second paragraph:

What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

If I wanted to look up the author, Charles Peterson, on Facebook, I would be unable to do so. His name is too common. It’s interesting: if you have a unique name you’re much more accessible on Facebook.

The article is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety. Still, here’s a Netdynamics-worthy clip:

But Facebook doesn’t want to simply branch out onto a few more Web pages; the site hopes, in a somewhat sinister but potentially very useful (and profitable) way, to begin following us around the entire Web. This is the ambition of “Facebook Connect,” a special service that members may activate, and that has enabled many popular Web sites, such as Netflix, YouTube, and the Huffington Post, to tie activity elsewhere on the Internet back to Facebook profiles. If you leave a response on a Huffington Post story, for instance, it can, via Facebook Connect, automatically be shared with your friends on Facebook; subsequent responses by Facebook friends could eventually appear both on your Facebook page and on the original Huffington Post story.

If Facebook Connect is widely adopted—and the service has been quite successful so far, with Yahoo and even MySpace signing up—we may begin to see changes to many of our basic assumptions about the Internet. Once a commenter knows that a vitriolic statement will be shared with a large and personal social circle—appearing more like a letter to a small-town newspaper than an anonymous outburst—the typically venomous atmosphere of online comments, for example, may well diminish.

‘Aggression‘ mitigation? Sure. It would be hard to conceptualize a Facebook driven by users identified by handles or nicks. Meanwhile, Buzz uses your address book–at the least. I haven’t investigated Buzz of course, yet I recognize it’s a slightly different experiment.

Jeff Han – touchscreen demo – 2006!

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Jaron Lanier faces the tail. (His home page on The Well.) Wikipedia ‘brochure‘

The Geek Freaks – Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become.

By Michael Agger SLATE Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010

In Lanier’s eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn’t expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That’s not a crazy idea, but it’s just Lanier’s hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today’s theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.

There’s also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn’t found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: “We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it’s accessed.” Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don’t see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.

Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn’t want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It’s time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.

Lanier appeared on PBS’s News Hour this week. My immediate impression was that he doesn’t have very developed television chops. In fact, I could personally relate to his rambling style and to his brave attempt to dare being expansive in the old medium. Lanier strikes a paradoxical position. On one hand he achieved one of the most public profiles of all those who could be said to represent the first wave of post-Mosaic web celebrity. (Howard Rheingold, Larry Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Meg Whitman, Sherry Turkle, and many many others achieved his kind of celebrity.) On the other hand, his pushing back against the ‘wild west’ of the internet is reactionary, is maybe even naive.

Mass behavior may be the most difficult-to-grasp impetus for internet trends. Being a social psychological phenomena, such behavior may especially befuddle the code warriors and technologists. That the behavioral and monetary costs have tended to depart from each other, with the former typified by how much time a user invests, while the latter in many examples approaches zero, do not constitute anything able to be put back in the box.

Take the example of music. The biggest challenge for the “sociopathic” consumer is managing their time, whereas the cost of content–in the world’s biggest record store–is already realized to be zero, free. Yet, at the same time, advertising space is utilized by, for example, global Fortune 100 companies in the form of pop-up and widgetized ads splashed at the very sites where the sociopathic takings are occurring.

MU Researchers Find Internet Search Process Affects Cognition, Emotion
Readers’ physiological responses to online content provides new insight for advertisers

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Nearly 73 percent of all American adults use the Internet on a daily basis, according to a 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey. Half of these adults use the Web to find information via search engines, while 38 percent use it to pass the time. In a recent study, University of Missouri researchers found that readers were better able to understand, remember and emotionally respond to material found through “searching” compared to content found while “surfing.”

“If, as these data suggest, the cognitive and emotional impact of online content is greatest when acquired by searching, then Web site sponsors might consider increasing their advertising on pages that tend to be accessed via search engines,” said Kevin Wise, assistant professor of strategic communication and co-director of the Psychological Research on Information and Media Effects (PRIME) Lab at the University of Missouri.

In the study, the researchers examined how methods for acquiring news — searching for specific content versus surfing a news Web site — affected readers’ emotional responses while reading news stories. They monitored participants’ heart rate, skin conductance and facial musculature to gauge their emotional responses to unpleasant news. The researchers found that unpleasant content triggered greater emotional responses when readers sought the information by searching rather than surfing. In future studies, Wise will study the effects of acquiring pleasant content on readers’ emotional responses.

“How readers acquire messages online has ramifications for their cognitive and emotional response to those messages,” Wise said. “Messages that meet readers’ existing informational needs elicit stronger emotional reactions.”

The researchers also found that information was better understood and remembered when individuals conducted specific searches for information. In a previous study, Wise tested the effects of searching and surfing on readers’ responses to images and found similar results.

Univ.Mo.Bulletin November 4, 2009 Emily Smith

Pew Internet and American Life Project

Daily Internet Activity Survey – source

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COINs 2009: Reflections on the first-ever conference on Colaborative Innovation Networks
Posted by Dustin Larimer | 1 Nov 2009

We are a collaborative species. No single perspective could possibly cover every aspect of an issue, but together through the collage of our collective experience we wage war on the challenges of our reality. This is collective intelligence, an emergent characteristic of life that we see in many other social species like honeybees, ants, and migratory birds. At every level of complexity an individual’s best efforts could never compare to the magnitude of the seemingly intelligent behavior of the swarm.

I’ve been listening to Taleb’s The Black Swan. It presents counterfactuals to counter any blunt elevation of the mob, smart or otherwise.

The financial implosion of the last year was the most dramatic storm to emerge out of a bad weather pattern that only a few lonely experts predicted, and did so going back ten years. It’s worth noting: financial product development is very collaborative, very tied into computer processing power, and very much given to forming its own epistemologies.

This recap (of COINs) is, nevertheless, very interesting. My own contact with social network analysts sometime ago was amusing. I asked the dude about how a social network map might develop to capture the various psychological dimensions.

Without more dimensionality, such a map at least serves several secondary purposes. One is that people project upon them.

I’m observing a development project here in Cleveland. It has a considerable virtual social infrastructure.

Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?’

From: The Center For Collective Intelligence @MIT ) / added to the link roll.

“Our basic research question is” huh? Don’t you mean: Our basic area of developmental interest is…?

One of the most fascinating features of the social environs of the internet, and of our times, is how two features come together: (what I call,) “social instruments,” with “progressivism.”

I hold the idea: post-modern progressivism. But, my intuition and to some extent my experience, and to large extent my tentative interpretation, is that what jumps out is the revival of instrumentalism. So, there is evocation of the non-linear in the talk, but the walk is about how to do together this task of “saving,” salvation, and, waging war on the challenges of reality.

I would endorse jumbling together techno nerds with anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, literary critics, and others.

Hopefully the mob’s echo chamber can come under the kinds of pressure which implements and concentrates a more robust critical culture.

excerpt

Facebook Tries to Monitor Happiness
By Chris Crum – Tue, 10/06/2009 – 16:31

Reveals Data Regarding the Moods of Users

Facebook has revealed the United States “Gross National Happiness,” the results of a study on the collective mood of Facebook users. Facebook “data scientists” started a project earlier in the year to measure the overall mood of people from the US on the social network, based on what they said in status updates.

The measurements come from the numbers of “positive” and “negative” words used in updates. It is unclear what words are considered positive and which ones are taken into account as negative.

“When people in their status updates use more positive words—or fewer negative words—then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual,” says Adam D. I. Kramer, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at the University of Oregon and an intern on Facebook’s data team.

A context for: synthesis of happiness



Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

here’s the link to that…

Happened across this again while assembling links for one of the articles resource pages on the sidebar.

from:
Robert M. Young, Primitive Processes On the Internet

excerpt I.

But there is another level of primitive anxiety. Many people fear that they will be taken over, overwhelmed, invaded, flooded. They experience an email mailbox in their computer (actually the mailbox is at the internet provider, and you control when it is opened or whether or not to open any letter onto your screen) as a junk-mail salt mill grinding perpetually at the bottom of their unconscious or a sorcerer’s apprentice’s water well, endlessly overflowing. The fear is that it is inside your house, in your study, inside your private places, utterly invasive. I have been told this by a number of friends and colleagues who hate the very thought of email. It is as if all of the nearly forty million people thought to be on-line (no one knows how many there really are) will crawl straight into their orifices and along their neurones. I suppose I am omnivorous or perhaps greedy. Yet I don’t feel that way. If I don’t like the look of something or a whole string of things, I can just highlight and delete them without opening them, like throwing away unwanted brown envelopes. I have a form of software, Eudora Pro (whose manufacturer and dealers do not, in my experience, provide good back-up, but there is a friendly user email forum), which can automatically file things into different mailboxes inside my Mac. I don’t let it do it automatically. I let the titles come up and then select the ones to file away after opening the ones which look interesting or urgent or personally addressed to me.

What I am saying is that the technology is at my service, and I have mastered it enough to feel in control of the several hundred postings I receive every day and of the 327 megabytes of email information on my hard discs. Before you roll your eyes, I should say that I am the moderator of two email forums and am involved with several web sites and electronic journals and that by far the bulk of the messages sent to me are about administrative and software matters and don’t even get a glance unless I happen to be interested in the subject. Even so, I have friends and colleagues who will have nothing to do with computers or, if they have one, absolutely do not want to get onto the internet. I think that’s a pity and that they will change their minds just as people did about radio, telephone, tape recorders, video recorders and are doing so with respect to portable phones. The sheer convenience and utility and cultural benefits eventually outweigh the disinclination.

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