NetDynam 2.0

Having read resources offered by Frank, I’d like to elevate one. Clay Shirkey: Gin, Television and Social Surplus. April 23, 2008.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

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And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Questions about how people use time, these days, may be framed (and analyzed,) within the rubric of behavioral economics. (I can’t do this myself, like Mr. Shirkey, I’m only able to offer phenomenological intuitions.) Still, I bring the frame of ‘time investment’ up because I suppose a finely differentiated analysis of how people actually deploy their time, with various internet utilities comprising part of the picture, would enrich intuitions.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, a music fan can acquire more music (mp3s) than this fan can expect to deal with in the old sense of ‘dealing.’ This is true for other resources, such as ebooks, articles, movies, software; is true for any ‘object of potential interest’ discovered in the web, (or candy shop,) of intended and unintended distribution.

Time deployment exists in various contexts. These contexts can be described too. (I’m fairly sure Shirkey’s idealization doesn’t wash, were it to be suffer the details.) I wonder if cognitive surplus is accompanied in specific cases with its own surplus-derived stress?

What would constitute a robust conceptual ecology with respect to the factors of time investment and anticipation of benefit? Each of these is a very broad brush. For example how would time spent commenting on blog posts be accounted for were some benefit to figure into the account?

Another feature–these days–I term, truncation. Twitter exemplifies this, yet, also there are the short form messages tacked to Facebook walls, terse emails, blog and forum comments, abbreviated annotations of various sorts, and, of course, text messages.

I reckon truncation is not the result of having too much time.

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.

announced on a sociology of computing mailing list recently, a comprehensive report on the implications of social networking. have only scanned through the report as yet, but it looks of interest.

The European Commission JRC, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies released a comprehensive report on social and economic implications of Social Computing [aka Web2.0, social media].

‘The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy’
(Eds.) Yves Punie, Wainer Lusoli, Clara Centeno, Gianluca Misuraca and David Broster Authors: Kirsti Ala-Mutka, David Broster, Romina Cachia, Clara Centeno, Claudio Feijóo, Alexandra Haché, Stefano Kluzer, Sven Lindmark, Wainer Lusoli, Gianluca Misuraca, Corina Pascu, Yves Punie and José A. Valverde

Report (a large .pdf document also avaliable from…)
News release

This wide report covers different thematic areas. In addition to a cross-cutting analysis across areas in
Ch1: Key findings, Future Prospects and Policy Implications

It contains thematic analysis:
Ch2: The adoption and Use of Social Computing
Ch3: Social Computing from a Business Perspective
Ch4: Social Computing and the Mobile Ecosystem
Ch5: Social Computing and Identity
Ch6: Social Computing and Learning
Ch7: Social Computing and Social Inclusion
Ch8: Social Computing and Health
Ch9: Social Computing and Governance

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…