NetDynam 2.0

This post starts a series aimed to point to a conception of Web 3.0 drawn from the deployment of the so-called semantic web for the purpose of having so-called machines read and interpret the data.

Amongst the inner circle here, it goes without saying that this has already been raised as a concept and direction, and it has been supposed this require text/lexical analytical tools.

For my own part, I assume lots of people and teams are working to build robust analytic tools. Also, it is most interesting to me personally to consider what are the ramifications of Web 3.0 for users who don’t give a whit about what is happening inside these machines; nor care much about the purposes implicit in the human direction prior to (and thus ‘behind,’) machine activities; nor are aware of the long history of efforts to realize effective and efficient data-mining/analysis tools for all sorts of commercial, security, law enforcement, research, purposes.


via Readwriteweb The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information

via Twine: The Web of Identities: Making Machine-Accessible People Data

footnote found here: Cybernetick Inkwell

So what, then, are all the technologies like mashups, XML, Java and the rest, if not 2.0? I actually see them as web 3.0 technologies–not for the casual user or faint of heart. 1.0 was the early web, with its need for knowledge of code and servers; 2.0 is easy entry, democratization, and increased participation; 3.0 is about more complex connections being made.

via Social Computing Journal: Web 3.0: The Web Goes Industrial

Web 2.0 is social: many hands make light work. In stark contrast, Web 3.0 is industrial: the automation of tasks displaces human work. But trite definitions won’t prepare us for change. Whatever you call it, our information economy is in the midst of an Industrial Revolution. And if you don’t place the Web within the frame of industrial manufacturing, you won’t see the real disruptive change coming.

This story reads much like the first Industrial Revolution. Artisans and skilled tradesman used to create everything by hand. Then, through the emergence of a handful of technical innovations, came the age of mass production. It was a profound turning point in human history, affecting every aspect of daily life.

Today, most content is still created by hand, the best of it by highly skilled artisans drawing on centuries of scholarship and experience. Recently, we’ve seen significant innovations in social approaches to content creation. But Web 3.0 industrialization takes content manufacturing to an entirely different level. Instead of users manually creating content, machines automate the heavy lifting. Consumers simply push the buttons and get stuff done. Think spinning wheels versus textile mills.

I note in this excerpt the facile leap from content manufacturing to consumers simply push buttons.

The middle man is not expressed. Hmmm. Is Web 3.0 partly about the industrialization of mediation?

Some argue that Web 3.0 will be a leveling force, and proceed to speak of more democratization. Others make wolf-in-sheep-clothing counter arguments. I would tend to wonder how leveling works in the context of the march of capital, and its aims. (But, then, I’ve read too much Ivan Illich.)

thoughts?

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.

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The notion of the meaning-making (semiogenetic) trajectory thus provides a way of conceptualizing how body-brains contextually integrate information deriving from different perceptual modalities (e.g. seeing, hearing, moving) in the here-now of their own and others’ bodily activities to events, activities, and so on, on other space-time scales, both in the actual past and in the anticipated future, involving either the same or other participants (see Thibault 2000a: 303-6; 2003b). It is in this way that infants are integrated, through their active participation in such events, to the higher-scalar ecosocial processes and dynamics where semiotic entities such as, for example, ‘wants’, ‘beliefs’, ‘intentions’ and ‘desires’ are recognized and used as the basis both for adjusting to and accounting for the behaviour of others qua selves to whom we attribute such things as wants, beliefs, intentions, and desires (see Matthiessen 1993; Thibault 1993; see also Zelazo 1999).

On this view, intentions are not, as I pointed out above, epistemically private mental states that belong to an ontologically distinct domain of ‘mind’ with independent causal powers. Instead, they are meaning-making resources that belong to the higher~scalar system of interpretance of some ecosocial semiotic system. As such, agents use them for the purposes of interpreting and orienting to each other in discourse, in the process adjusting their own activity on the basis of the belief in our culture in the notion that persons are in possession of intentions qua epistemically private mental states that can be read of behaviour as evidence for the existence of a private mental realm that language simply serves to reveal. This account is essentially a realist one: intentions have a separate existence in the mind with respect to the signs that refer to them. In my account, intentions, desires, wants, and so on are semiotic categories that agents appropriate from the interpersonal moral orders in which their actions are recognized, understood, and accounted for (Harre 1983). As such, they are not independent of the semiotic resources that we use in discourse to construe and enact them. They function in meaning-making activity to interpret and orient our own and others’ activities.

excerpted from the Introduction; Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body. Paul Thibault. Continuum 2004

Description from Continuum Books

Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body is an exploration of a multimodal theory of cognitive science. Using linguistic theories first developed by Saussure and more latterly by M. A. K. Halliday, Paul Thibault analyses how social and biological systems interact to produce meaning. This fascinating study will be of interest to undergraduates and academics researching cognitive linguistics and advanced semiotics.

The book engages with the current dialogue between the human and life sciences to ask questions about the relationship between the physical, biological aspects of a human being, and the sociocultural framework in which a human being exists. Paul J. Thibault argues that we need to understand both the semiotic, discursive nature of meaning making, and the physical context in which this activity takes place. The two are inseparable, and hence the only way we can understand our subjective experience of our environment and our perceptions of our inner states of mind is by giving equal weight to both frameworks. This ‘ecosocial semiotic’ theory engages with linguistics, semiotics, activity theory, biology and psychology. In so doing, the book produces a new way of looking at how a human being makes sense of his or her environment, but also how this environment shapes such meanings

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