NetDynam 2.0

without sound, this slideshow seems somehow lacking in depth.. and, well, lacking in the use of the affordances of the web wrt availablity of recorded sound as well, i have to admit.

at the same time, the slides are to some degree self-explanatory and an enjoyable way to think on the notion of ‘affordances’ and what it might mean for web design.

and then this one is packed with so much information, you need to have your finger ready on the *pause* button to take it all in adequately.

Extracting meaning and coherence from diverse streams of information on noisy channels is a challenge that has been examined in detail.

Heuer emphasizes both the value and the dangers of mental models, or mind-sets. In the book’s opening chapter, entitled “Thinking About Thinking,” he notes that:

[Analysts] construct their own version of “reality” on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

This process may be visualized as perceiving the world through a lens or screen that channels and focuses and thereby may distort the images that are seen.  To achieve the clearest possible image . . . analysts need more than information . . . They also need to understand the lenses through which this information passes. These lenses are known by many terms— mental models, mind-sets, biases, or analytic assumptions.

In essence, Heuer sees reliance on mental models to simplify and interpret reality as an unavoidable conceptual mechanism for intelligence analysts—often useful, but at times hazardous. What is required of analysts, in his view, is a commitment to challenge, refine, and challenge again their own working mental models, precisely because these steps are central to sound interpretation of complex and ambiguous issues.

This quote is from the introduction to the  book “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” by Richards J. Heuer, Jr.,  available in it’s entirety from the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence Library.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of our crowd, Jay Lemke (see links on ‘online articles’ page) has recently come up with a neologism to describe the hypertext way we now view the world: traversals. Inspirations in his work come from systems theory and eco-social dynamics.

Here’s a taste of the argument he makes, and a link to the complete version on his site:

“I wish to propose here a new class of theoretical object, which I am calling traversals. Traversals are temporal-experiential linkings, sequences, and catenations of meaningful elements that deliberately or accidentally, but radically, cross genre boundaries. A traversal is a traversal across standardized genres, themes, types, practices, or activities that nevertheless creates at least an ephemeral or idiotypical meaning for its human participants, and represents at least a temporarily functional connection or relationship among all its constituent processes and their (human or nonhuman) participants (i.e. actants).

[...]

“The contemporary impulse toward life-by-traversals comes from sources at many levels of social organization. We may speculate that part of our biological survival repertory is a disposition toward new experiential combinations under conditions of severe repetition. When too much of our life simply repeats the same sequences of action, with small variations, again and again, something in our phylogenetic wisdom may impel us not to follow action A with action B yet again, but at least now and then to see how it feels if we follow A with Q or V. This could be a source at the infra-organismic scale of organization. At the organism level, where we define ourselves as whole social beings by our interactions with others and with things (the human and nonhuman partners of our ecosocial being), we value the security and predictability of standardized patterns of inter-activity, but only up to the point of boredom. We are curious and perverse primates. Put us together and we are likely to goad one another to dangerous and improbable forms of behavior; link our diverse individual interests and perversions, and combinatorially, which is to say socially, we create for one another a much larger space of possibilities for action. Each step outside our familiar routines leads us into unknown territory where we cannot know even what we will want next, much less what we will get by acting. We move out into the unpredictable spaces of our relations to our companions, and we move also into spaces mediated by artifacts which bear the traces of others’ choices in other times and places.

“Definitions belong to the end days of theory-building; they are never truly starting points….

Examples are more helpful.”

link to complete essay

In reflecting on the Web 3.0 presentation by Kevin Kelly mentioned by Frank and the posting of the Hans Rosling presentation (courtesy of eldon) on data as visualized by his (then) new software, I came across this presentation by Tim Berners-Lee at this years TED discussing “The Next Web”:



Together, the three presentations focus our attention on where the web has been, where it is today, and where current development efforts around the world look to take it.

But it is the very pace of change that seems to overwhelm any individual effort to come to terms with it, resulting in what Michael Wesch has called Context Collapse.   The emergence of participatory culture as documented in his “An anthropological introduction to YouTube” is an organic response, a humanizing response, to the crisis of individual significance.



This signaling of the changing nature of the web and the tools it puts at each of our fingertips coalesces into a larger picture – the ecosocial environment in which we find ourselves, in which we carry on our discourse, and ultimately, in which to acknowledge the group impetus to carpe diem.

This is why I consider Hoon’s posting of the excerpt from Paul Thibault’s book  Brain, Mind, and the Signifying Body particularly significant in understanding what links the various individual efforts comprising this eclectic NetDynam group.