Rhythm

I wake up in a Pavlov state of anticipation ..wondering what news my iPad will bring. Says: My laptop’s been declared a relic and Paramore’s new album’s a phenomenon. Now I’m sitting back and wondering what information I’m missing but don’t know I’m missing because it’s not in-scope of my RSS feeds. I get into the rhythm of the Internet. Cycles of information ..each one triggering a cycle of reactions. Another wave of anticipation. I take my hands off the keyboard and back away from the computer ..the cycles dissolve. Sometimes I go a week and I don’t even miss it. When I return ..it’s like I never left.

Unfettered and alive

“Mothers and fathers throughout the land / Don't criticize what you can’t understand / Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command / The old road is rapidly aging / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand / For the times they are a-changing.” 

The way I see it, I have every reason to feel optimistic. Young people are revitalizing the land. Men and women in equal measure. And they’re not doing it the same way as before. I see something different. More like a fusion of local culture with global ideas. Using modern technology. Bringing together communities of like-minded people faster and less fettered than before. Whether or not this is sustainable is too soon to tell. At present I’d say it’s inexplicable. More like life according to Lao Tzu: “The way that can be spoken is not the way / Nameless is the origin of heaven and earth.” Even in Tijuana, young entrepreneurs and artists are reclaiming the streets ..giving wide berth to the adverse conditions bestowed by prior generations. They have more in common with their counterparts in Mexico City, Los Angeles and other metropolises. In L.A, tech firms founded by women are replenishing the city. Unimpeded by the Bay Area’s male-dominated programmer culture, they’re using their expertise in retail, entertainment, advertising and media to build digital companies whose products and services are aimed at other women. I suppose if you’re stuck in prior ways of doing things you won’t have as much reason to feel optimistic.

New frontier

I’m here at a bar where computing people meet. Angela says she’s a Cloud Computing Specialist ..Daniel is a User Experience Analyst. I tell them I used to be a Software Engineer and they’re like “..how quaint.” That won’t fly in this crowd.  I sit back for a moment and think. “OK ..I’m a Fulfillment Specialist.” Now we’re drinking like old buddies. What used to be known as ‘software’ has been blown to smithereens. Apps did that.  These days in order to service requests from mobile customers  ..you need apps that mimic exchanges in cyber-space. I’m talking apps that simulate buyers ..apps that simulate sellers and apps that simulate order-takers ..as well as apps that allow other apps to communicate (usually referred to as API’s). You also need apps to determine the best cyber-channel to take for fulfillment. Each transaction requires a host of delegates to ensure what goes in one end ..persists and comes out the other. A single piece of software just can’t do that.  Now I’m feeling better equipped to hold my own in this crowd.

Peer-mediated buzz

   James Fowler, a professor of psychology at UCSD, found that messages from our peers are more likely to initiate action than messages delivered by a political committee [ link ]. Last year, Obama’s reelection committee learned the same thing. They developed a system that leverages database technology and social-media to deliver their messages. In an instant, this system allows them to:

1. mobilize grassroots support for White House concerns 
2. provide White House support for local concerns

Apparently they took an extra step, conducted surveys ..and learned that nothing energizes participation better than ‘reciprocity’. Brilliant use of technology combined with Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Politically I’m independent and pretty damn naïve ..but I can see why this might give Republicans cause for alarm.

Closed feedback loop

“What shows up on the Internet and cable television today is shaped by what we choose to click on and watch in the past” [link] 

I’m an information analyst. I study both computer and human information. Two systems that frequently dovetail on the Internet. That’s why I feel like my Internet experience is becoming increasingly shallow. Far from opening up possibilities, or sending me down information superhighways ..I’m being lead down increasingly narrow avenues that present me with only the most superficial hype. All I can figure is that I’ve entered a ‘closed feedback loop’. Simply put, a closed feedback loop narrows-down a range of activity based on feedback it receives about prior activity. On the Internet, activity means information. In other words, what rises to the foreground is determined by the things I paid attention to in the past while everything else recedes into the background. Robert Lewis Stevenson said it best “Attention to one thing is sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.” The Internet narrows it down beautifully. 

Sites like Google and Facebook are tuned to deliver information based on popular choice .. not credibility or merit. On the other hand, humans are hard-wired to receive and share information ..but not necessarily weigh its validity or merit. What we come away with is a feeling of familiarity based on prior experience. The Internet assures me I’ll get few surprises. That’s why the music I’m most likely to hear right now is from Rihanna or Jay Z ..when I know there’s so much more talent out there, it just doesn’t rise to the surface of ‘what’s trending’.

Presence of mind

“A sign of the end of time is when people can no longer tell the difference between the work of man and the work of nature ..” Hopi prophecy

I’ve never met anyone with a healthy mental outlook who didn’t also have great presence of mind. They can be totally immersed in virtual space then quickly disconnect and be completely present for you. They skillfully navigate technical networks as well as the ‘here and now’. Don’t get me wrong, I am also enamored with technology. Social networks enable people to expand their outlook, collaborate and see things from totally different perspectives. That’s what the designers of the Internet originally had in mind. There’s a recent example I like to share. Scientists at the University of Washington were trying to figure out the way enzymes act to allow AIDS to reproduce ..and they couldn’t solve it. So, they put it on the Internet and made it into a game and these gamers from all over the world solved it in three weeks. The brainpower of the world is at our disposal. That’s a good thing. However, with any technology ..I can tell you some really good things about it as well as some not-so-good things about it. People get so engaged in the technological world that they often don’t seem to be present in the real one. I’m not sure mental health is possible without being able to refresh the mind periodically and be completely present with people. I recently spent two weeks at Esalen in Big Sur where I was totally immersed with people in the moment. It was a technology break for me. I’m not so sure about my mental health, but I did return feeling a renewed appreciation for technology as well as a greater sense of what is going on here in the present.

Network communication theory

I have a theory that says whenever messages are transmitted between people in different locations; the accuracy of communication drops by 60%. I call it the ‘displacement theory of communication’ and it's an extension of findings in the field of human information-processing [link].

This drop in communication is wide-scale and can occur anywhere from cell phones to air traffic control systems. Messages are by nature incomplete and often assume knowledge of local conditions that aren’t available to the receiver. Without exacting protocols, like those developed in the air traffic control industry, incomplete messages are at best probabilistic and rely on the receiver to supply the most likely meaning intended. Since this is an innate function of human information-processing; it can happen quickly and imperceptibly. When it does, we are prone to making overconfident and faulty decisions about the most likely meaning intended. It has long been know that the most frequent decision we make during conversation is about the intention of others .. it’s also the one we get wrong most often. So, facebook users and text messagers ..beware! We are making the rules up as we go.

Steve Jobs

It’s not a new management technique suitable for indoctrination. He was an old-school authoritarian. His message was simply to stay open, receptive and enthusiastic about new ideas in whatever field is closest to your heart. He chose to promote the right idea for software engineering. He invested in Mitch Kapor’s open architecture, which is component-based and extendable. Qualities that got it on the net (as apps) ..then on mobile platforms (as smartphones). Component-based software development is more toy-like and fun ..and it adapts easily to different platforms. The idea is, you don’t change components that already work, you pull them out of a library then adopt them to do whatever you want by creating an interface-component. Kind of like tinker-toys. Component-based software runs simulator-like (as it does at Pixar) - simulating things like an exchange floor with buyers, sellers, transactions and shipping methods (think Amazon). His message was to be open-minded, observe how things work in nature and real-world systems ..then double-down on technology that mimics those observations. That’s the best bet for future innovation.

Cyber space junkies

The Internet extends the information-processing capability of the brain. Like having remote sensors, we’re presented with images of events and people streaming-in from all corners of the globe at a much faster clip. The Internet puts previews of coming attractions in front of you like never before with a wider range of unfiltered choices to select from. If you want freedom of choice ..you got it in spades. If making choices is difficult, it’s like drinking water from a fire-hose. But if you’re an information-junkie like me ..you feel like a kid in a candy store. Cyberspace is a simulation of our social sphere ..it portrays an exchange of people, information and ideas. It is also an extension of the ego ..it reflects our efforts at impression-formation. It has the ability to re-enact prior exchanges .. like the ruminating part of the brain. However, when it performs this act ..it does so in front of a large audience. Helps not to be squeamish about getting your lines wrong.

The loop

The Internet is not an open system. It is warped by the focus of its participants. Anyone can skip from blog to facebook to youtube to talk radio and back without encountering a single thought to challenge their own. This turns the Internet into a closed feedback loop. A closed feedback loop reinforces beliefs that may have started out as a figment of someone’s imagination. The Internet makes it possible for such insubstantial phenomena to gain widespread popularity. Without the benefit of open dialogue, insubstantial phenomena can become ‘counter-factual narrative’ bordering on delusion and paranoia. Take for instance the notion that Osama Bin Laden death was a ‘hoax’ ..or that President Obama’s birthplace was a ‘deception’. Look at where Bush’s axis-of-evil designation has led. Back in the 1960’s, historian Richard Hofstadter examined “the paranoia in American politics” and describes it as a self-perpetuating cycle. “Since the enemy is thought of as evil ..it must be totally eliminated” he says. But when the enemy is a figment of the imagination ..the bubble bursts. Instead of finding peace with that ..a new focus of attack must be found to appease the wrathful deities of discrimination ..and the cycle goes on through perpetuity. Reminds me of a Buddhist parable I once heard [link]. Anyway, I do believe the Internet has sped-up the process.

Future shock

During a 70’s era college course in social psychology, we were each given the assignment of predicting possible future events in society and presenting them next time we met. I predicted technology would make fixed workplaces obsolete. I’d be able to do my job while at the beach or in a coffee shop and transmit it over telephone lines to an employer at another beach or coffee shop anywhere around the world. I predicted fixed residences would also become obsolete. I figured if I weren’t tied to a workplace I would become geographically un-tethered. I could travel on motorcycle, or recumbent bicycle across the US and either camp or stay at youth hostels along the way. I predicted the same would be true of relationships ..I would form them as I went. Everyone would. The idea of marriage or monogamy wasn’t in the cards ..and I considered the possibility that they may not even be compatible with who we are as a species. I admit, I got a lot of my ideas from the book ‘future shock’, the ‘whole earth catalog’ and a broken home. I remember the girl sitting beside me going “Man, ain’t no way you got a girlfriend, cuz if you do I sure feel sorry for her..!” However, the guy sitting on the other side was in shock. He looked like ‘preppie’ from the movie Love Story. He started out by saying his forecast was definitely more reality-based than mine ..and went on to talk about marrying his high school sweetheart and making partner at a precedent-setting law firm. Senator Edward Kennedy would be president. Decency and Christianity would prevail ..student protest wouldn’t be tolerated ..we’d win the war in Vietnam ..and defeat communism wherever it appeared. The standard of living would soar in the US ..Monsanto would make life better through advances in chemistry (making me think of Tomorrowland at Disneyland). And they’d live in a Mediterranean-style house in Benedict Canyon where his wife would stay home raising their two and a half children. He got a laugh out of that and for a moment I thought I had misunderstood the assignment. Looking back, I admit ..my ideas may have been offbeat ..but I was only eighteen years old. Now I’m not so sure they were any more or less ‘reality-based’ than preppie’s.

Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Part two

Continued from [part one]  Now I want to talk about ‘discourse analysis’ and what it reveals about communication over social networks. Discourse analysis is the branch of psychology dealing the way people process information from what they hear and read. I think it’s telling. Face to face communication is a probabilistic event. Language is a relatively narrow band of communication that can only suggest what the speaker has in mind. This presents the listener with a range of possibilities. Communication is successful only when the listener infers the most likely meaning intended by the speaker. Ordinary conversation is generally successful because we have context to help guide us along. We rely on facial expressions, intonation, emphasis, location and other visual and auditory cues. However, where ordinary communication is probabilistic, text messaging is a crapshoot. Text is cryptic. Context is lost and we rely on memory to supply the missing cues. However, memory is fallible. Research in discourse processing has shown that the biggest piece of missing information we supply is the intention of the speaker ..and it’s their intention that we most often get wrong. We perceive threat where none was intended. Offense at what may have only been sarcasm. By nature, the flow of conscious experience is displaced over social networks. This simply means it occurs outside the context of our immediate situation. That’s the beauty of the Internet. It allows us to share experiences that are ‘displaced’ in time and space with users from all over the world. It also places a heavy burden on text comprehension, which is much less developed than speech comprehension in the language centers of the brain. I believe this will provide a rich source of field-observation for the study of human consciousness for years.

Psychology of facebook

Presented to the Santa Barbara Institute
for Consciousness Studies

Part one

Anthropology:   I’m going to start with what I know about anthropology, which isn’t much but I feel it’s relevant. In my view, facebook is a fairly tame and nontoxic community – unlike others I’ve been in (such as high school, workplaces, dinner tables, neighborhoods, yahoo chat rooms). Without a constitution or written protocol, congeniality prevails. I think this says something about human nature.  Social networks are tuned to the way we are wired.  Like taking the first step out of a cave and into a larger community where there’s no anonymity – it’s best not to offend anyone. Privacy is a recent development. Tribal villages are more typical of human existence. Just look at the indigenous people of the Amazon. They live in circular settlements with one wall surrounding the perimeter, but no walls on the inside. They’re never alone and everyone can see what everyone else is doing. It pays to be on-guard and congenial otherwise you risk offending others and being banished from the tribe. In the Amazon, that means certain death. I believe that’s where the fear of abandonment comes from. I’m not talking about some trendy catch-phrase from pop psychology. It’s built into our constitution because it was essential for our survival. The threat of death-by-banishment is no longer real but the feelings certainly are. So, on facebook ..we tread carefully.

Behavioral science:   Psychologists have known for a long time now that there are few things more rewarding in life than validation from our peers. It beats television and ice cream and it’s the motivation underlying most communication. That’s why Twitter is so widely popular. Without let-up, it provides a constant stream of validation for every thought that crosses our brain. Buddhist practice is aimed at countering a very active function of the human ego: impression management. We put a lot of effort into presenting the right ‘persona’ .. or the way we want others to see and remember us. There’s nothing spontaneous going on there. The messages we broadcast are anxiously crafted to make us look the way we want to be perceived. Don’t believe me ..? Look no further than politicians approaching an election year. Newt Gingrich recently found religion because it sends the right message to Christian conservatives. Mitt Romney has ‘reinvented’ himself to look stupid and appeal to the average voter. What people choose to share on facebook in no way presents the whole picture. It’s not our nature.

Part two continued here ~>[part two]

Egypt

“In a way previous generations could never have imagined, young protesters have brought down a dictatorship. If previous revolutions had been hatched in mosques and smoky cafes, this one was hatched online by computer geeks” [link].

I do believe the prophesy of the Electronic Frontier has been fulfilled [link]. Information technology can be used as a force for political change and democracy. In 1991, Soviet youths brought down the USSR using camcorders with satellite uplinks. Now an educated generation of Egyptians has brought down Mubarak using laptops connected to the Internet. That’s brilliant. They were able to bypass traditional lines of communication, which were shutdown by the government, and quickly deliver their message to a cross-section of the population. I admire Wael Ghonim, the young Google exec who helped organize the protest. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time in history that a revolution, overthrowing a long-standing government, has been spread over the Internet ..successfully!

Big time

There are fewer ‘big acts’ in music out there these days. The Internet has freed the airwaves and given our ears access to a much larger pool of talent. So what we have now is a greater number of acts connecting with smaller audiences. I’d say the music market has definitely become ‘differentiated’. Fine with me ..I’ve gotten weary of going to the LA Coliseum. For concert promoters however, this means a lot of empty seats. Last year headliners such as Rihanna and the Jonas Brothers canceled stadium gigs due to lower than expected ticket sales. So, big concert promoters such as Nederlander responded by raising ticket prices to make up for the difference. Online start-up ‘ScoreBig’ responded by discounting tickets to fill the empty seats. I think that’s brilliant! Definitely a more compelling reason to see a show. Like the record industry, I think the old-style concert venue is doomed. Artists are aware of this. I see them playing in places like the House of Blues more often now. And as far as promotion is concerned ..I see artists taking that bull by the horns as well and posting events over the Internet. Make friends with any of them on myspace or facebook and you’ll see what I mean.

Google

The Internet is like an anarchist state. No one is in charge and everyone can contribute. That’s how it should be. It puts everyone in charge of what comes and goes by a democratic process of selection. What is of interest to the most rises in visibility and what is of interest to the fewest decreases in visibility. It’s still available but mostly to the interested ‘niche’. What has no niche, or is offensive, fades into obscurity and may vanish altogether. That’s how it should be. Since there’s an open-door policy for entry, the ‘gateway’ needs to reside at the point-of-retrieval. This has been the protocol for nearly every database system I’ve installed ..the successful ones anyway. The gatekeeper to the Internet has been the role of portals such as AOL and Yahoo, or search-engines like Google. The most successful being the one that allows the most clear and manageable handle on chaos. That would be Google I believe. They have an equitable and consistent method for delivering Internet content. They call it ‘PageRank’ and it allows viewers to determine what comes to the foreground and what recedes to the background of our collective Internet experience. Rankings are based on factors such as the amount of attention a site receives or the aggregate number of links or ‘signposts’ directing traffic there. It is a most democratic point-of-retrieval system, provided they stay away from paid-ranking practices. Now they’re turning their attention to making Internet services available over the greatest number of devices and locations with their Android operating system. This has made the selection process even more democratic. In addition, it has put the Internet in our back pocket. Browser-based touch-screen phones have created a virtual ‘wallet’ ..containing a marketplace with virtual ‘catalogs’, ‘order-takers’, ‘currency’, ‘transaction-handlers’ and ‘record-keepers’. The number of services they can deliver to the palm of your hand is virtually endless. I don’t see the role of Google diminishing anytime soon [link].

Academic freedom

The other day students asked me why we waste money on research that doesn’t have immediate medical or commercial value. It was a fair question. I told them I thought it was because progress often depends on research that was originally done for non-commercial purposes ..like scientific advancement. The Internet came to mind. The Internet and all the social networking and businesses it hosts ..did not start out as a texting or commercial enterprise. It was an experiment that relied on research coming out of fields such as cybernetics and neuropsychology. The head of the project was a psychologist from MIT named Joseph Licklider [link]. He was a leading expert on the nature of the auditory system. His research involved understanding the way signals travel across the nervous system and get converted to sound by the auditory centers in the brain. His findings became the basis for ‘packet switching’ in computer networks, without which the Internet would have never progressed much farther than the telephone [link]. These studies were not originally intended for use by the computer industry ..nor were they funded by drug companies. The Internet would have never come about through corporate sponsorship alone. That’s the reason why scientific inquiry needs to be conducted in a neutral setting.

Iconic discourse

I can see a day when text-based communication becomes obsolete. Sentences take too long to process. Images and video clips are more suited to the task. Graphemes will replace phonemes. Graphemes are like logos ..they convey concepts more quickly. All that’s required is a brief sensory flash, which decays rapidly so that the next impression can follow. This allows greater throughput and more rapid exchange of ideas. I believe that the mind of the future will be shaped more by images than words. Mental imagery will occur spontaneously among those who are “tuned-in” ..and will spread through the population like a virus. Viral marketing is already the buzz in advertising. Nobody reads a movie review anymore. They’ve got a buddy, with an iPhone, sitting in the front row at opening night. That way they’re already tuned-in ..receiving the look and feel of a film along with an emoticon that gives it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, before the end of the first scene.

Microsoft's grip

In response to an article in the LA Times ~~>Microsoft’s grip

I don’t think dispensing with “backward compatibility” will do Microsoft any harm; these days you don't find many vendors releasing software that runs on anything earlier than Windows 2000. They (the Times) got it right though, cloud computing will loosen Microsoft’s grip. Microsoft doesn't have a record of success developing applications for the Internet. They tried to be a player with the Vista operating system, but people are sufficiently dissatisfied with it that they’d rather reload Windows XP even if it means losing all the bogus Internet features of Vista. Then, on top of that , they generally switch from Microsoft’s Internet explorer to the more reliable Firefox browser by Mozilla (formerly Netscape ..which they thought they'd buried). I’m not sure Microsoft with ever have the Internet presence of companies like Google or Yahoo.

Payroll

Click on image to enlarge ..