A Conversation Across Space And Time
World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?
Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:
The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.
I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.
Coincidence or…?
The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.
While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.
The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.
Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.
And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.
I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.
The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.
How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?
Tags: Adam Smith Problem, blogging, Brad Neuberg, capitalism, citizen media, co occurance, collective unconscious, conversation, decolonization, experience design, findability, hyperlinks, Islam, permalink, tagging, Technorati, The Cluetrain Manifesto, World 2.0.
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Nicely put and glad to make the connection.
I think you’re on to something and I also think that capitalism (and all the other economic organizing systems) fall short when it comes to representing or offering a valid framework for the modern condition.
In any case, in terms of conversation visualization, it seems that Edward Tufte’s day is finally upon us — as we begin to abstract conversations from person-to-person discourse to worldwide metamemes.
This is where Art in its original sense and purpose will prove invaluable, cutting through time, space and language.
In fact, I would posit that we have not yet developed art forms capable of expressing the myriad facets of fractal conversations that exist today but are sliced into… domain-name-enforced silos. After all, trackbacks only get you so far… we need to move away from the concept of a “page” and into something equally tangible but less walled in. Wikis are a start but are almost too fluid… No, I don’t have an answer but am excited about what it means to be engaged in its pursuit.
well, capitalism seems to fit the modern condition quite well, it’s the post-modern condition that exposes its weaknesses… but i get your point.
i don’t know about us not being able to express multi-facets of fractal conversations with flat, singular dimension surfaces and construcs like “pages”… i mean, look at what cubism did to the flat canvas, exposing multiple perspectives of expression as if the painted object were twirling in the paint itself.
what we’ve come to rest with in information retrieval and is a non-visual, visual display, formed entirely in the language of searchable, scannable text. if we can remove ourselves from the constraints of believing that this is the only way to present information objects or clusters of objects based on variant attributes, we might be able to revolutionize the connecting of said dots.
and possibly save other shuttle type disasters in the future… instead of just researching for accountability.
Hi, thanks for the conversation!
In terms of visualizing information in other dimensions, this has always been Douglas Engelbart’s thesis: that we need to move beyond the limitating constraints of “paper” based metaphors, and create tools that, when learned, can augment your intelligence. Check out the HyperScope project when we are done, a browser-based implementation of part’s of Engelbart’s legendary Augment system. Engelbart got an NSF grant to rebuild his system in the browser, which we are hacking on now.
sweet, i’ll definitely check it out. nice to pseudo-meet you, man.
Know better about what you call “fundamentalist” through my link.