Metaversal Mining

Part Four – Homo Interneticus sees the good Doctor approaching some of the more interesting questions regarding the internet, though she still doesn’t really do any digging into the whole shared cognition/nature of reality connundrum which is one of my current favorites.

So just to go through some of the points raised;
Has Facebook change the nature of friendship ? It turns out that no, its just re-branded it.
Your friends and social group are still the same number and mostly the same people that they would have been without the software.
Which begs the question; why is it so successful if it offers no new reach to your social circle ?
Prof Robin Dunbar casually dropped the bomb that apart from the 150-ish people that you can claim as your clan/social circle/address book everyone else on your friends list is probably just a voyeur. So has Facebook replaced the soap opera as the acceptable face of curtain twitching ? Find your own surrogate family to watch out of interest, only now its not the Duckworths or the Fowlers. In the UK we’ve seen soap opera viewing figures decline by 50% over the last 10 years or so, it’d be interesting to know how much is direct replacement activity.
Update – No, not soap operas, reality TV shows. Those surplus friends are our own personalised Big Brothers.

We had Sherry Turkle (great name !) talking about the consumption of the private person as a result of the action of ubiquitous sharing of thought and activity, and about feeling obliged to openness in the networked society.
I’m not sure what to think about that comment. I’m not sure if that is simply a misunderstanding of the type of openness that the net engenders or an attempt to big up the profession of the psychologist (of which she is one) as professional listeners, or am I confusing them with psychiatrists ?
For myself I’m only open to the degree that I want to be. I feel no compunction about not answering personal questions if asked on the web. I don’t volunteer my deepest and darkest secrets. I treat this form of mediated interaction as I would a conversation in a pub, and assume that the interested will continue to read and the rest will slope off to the bar and find a more apposite conversation.

Information overload and associative vs linear data storage/retrieval was the next big topic. One that is close to my heart. Here the programme missed a big opportunity in not addressing one of the fastest moving sectors of quantitative neuroscience and its philosophical implications for fields as diverse as democracy & law and the nature of the mind. I’m not going to delve into all that right here right now, that’s for a later date. Suffice it to say that the Obama web campaign is small fry if a mathematical model of mind can be shared.
I’m going to follow up with a bit of reading around Vannevar Bush and Prof David Nichols because I don’t know their work.

In her summary the doctor passed two comments that I’ll paraphrase as;
At its best the internet may be an equivalent to the serendipity of the city – meaning that the melting pot of ideas and beliefs that has produced most of modern world’s innovation in science, technology, art and commerce is there to be had in a free and open web. I agree utterly and completely, its just a shame that in its efforts for global reach it has become fragmented and balkanised, as subsumed by commercial and political interests as any piece of prime real estate.
And second; the the web has the power to liberate humanity. I’m not sure what from though, presumably the commercial and political interests, but it might be more interesting if it were to free us from the constraints of our own inhibitions and provide an opportunity to evolve our thoughts past division and towards unity. The global mind as it was suggested.