dive into mark/June 26, 2002
On daypop, how useful! And no wonder this is a popular link. How and why not to use javascript links and how to work around it! – makes sense.
Networks – Bound by Love
Backlinks — Love
Jon Udell using a biological analogy to look at blogspace
O’Reilly Network: Blogspace Under the Microscope [May. 03, 2002] I said in an earlier column that blogspace is a laboratory for group-forming experiments. As we conduct and observe those experiments, it seems useful to reflect on how life itself uses information loops to sustain multicellular collaboration.
The analogies are compelling — though also, let’s admit, fashionable and subject to abuse. Happily, biologists and information scientists are now talking to one another more and more. Having that conversation in blogspace might be a good way to get to the root of what blogspace is becoming, and how, and why.
“It’s hard to avoid the sense that there’s some biological force at work here.” This reminds me of the physical analogy that Moreno uses with the notion of “social atom”. There really is a pattern to seemingly random behaviour, chaos theory works with that, social net-work theory does too. However Moreno enabled the psychological work as an integral inescapable part of that investigation. Social net-works are patterns of what he called tele, feelings projected into… space. What is that space! Now it is blogspace! Moreno called it the sociometric matrix. (Hence the movie? 🙂
By going for the biological analogies it becomes easy to avoid the psychological. How about this: Patterns of linking – new norms and technology for doing so – are expressions of archetypal forces. That leads us to examine them as stories, myths, gods.
So what is the backlinking an expression of psychologically? On the net we tend to keep strict control of how public we make our choices and also our chosen-ness. We reveal our popularity, say being in the top 40 of daypop, or showing off the hit counter, but keep access to the logs private. Biologically, technologically there are reasons for that… from a marketing perspective there are economic reasons. Psychologically? Our chosen-ness, our choices are both the stuff of cyberspace, and the stuff of who we really are. What we click and what we link reveals a lot and who clicks and who links us does too. What are these forces of attraction? Forces of attraction on a physical plane… are magnetism, gravity. But see where it leads when we look through that psychological eye: Love. Eros. We want to control Love. It can’t be done. There must be a story there.
How about this passage by Stanley Richards: Eros, Master od Perversity
It comes about like this: Eros draws us to what is opposite because he is the desire for union. Giving way to Eros means permitting yourself to be attracted, not merely to what you like – but towards what is different from you, even radically different, even to what repulses you. For Eros is the great joiner. He reaches out to join you to what is unlike you: the opposite sex, the opposite idea, the opposite way of life, the opposite goal, the opposite course, the opposite god and, heaven help us, the opposite morality.
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The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
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From the books web page:
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“… the European witchhunts followed closely in the heels of the printing press.” I have been reading with interest the Playboy McLuhan interview and the same printing press is just prior to nationalism and industrialisation. Makes sense to me that they are all linked. Good reviews on Amazon.
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Good design is not only pretty graphics or a good user experience, good design communicates.
Less is more – YES. This is more from Brig mentioned in my last post. What has Jung got to do with it?
Cybertime
Cybertime
Meg Hourinan in O’Reilly Network: What We’re Doing When We Blog [Jun. 13, 2002]:
What distinguishes a collection of posts from a traditional home page or Web page? Primarily it’s the reverse-chronological order in which posts appear. When a reader visits a weblog, she is always confronted with the newest information at the top of the page.Having the freshest information at the top of the page does a few things: as readers, it gives a sense of immediacy with no effort on our part. We don’t have to scan the page, looking for what’s new or what’s been changed. If content has been added since our last visit, it’s easy to see as soon as the page loads.
Additionally, the newest information at the top (coupled with its time stamps and sense of immediacy) sets the expectation of updates, an expectation reinforced by our return visits to see if there’s something new. Weblogs demonstrate that time is important by the very nature in which they present their information. As weblog readers, we respond with frequent visits, and we are rewarded with fresh content.
Cyberspace is what we called it but cybertime might have fitted as easily. Space is shrunk so we have a global village (perhaps) and time has altered the notion of now. It has altered it to the extent that we have to use words like “real-time”, synchronous, asynchronous. The passage by Meg Hourinan draws attention to this simple phenomena, the use of time… not unexpectedly in web logs. Yes the content is “fresh” or stale… but a strange thing happens, by logging it old content becomes fresh. I think so anyway. I often log old items here, because I think they are still fresh. Sometimes because they are particularly old, like my notes on Huxley’s Crome Yellow. The asynchronous nature of email and web groups is a way that the now has stretched. But for it to be experienced as a stretch we need to see the date. This dating of items is needed so we can get the timing right on the wave we are surfing. Dating items on the web was there from the early days with the conventional Last Updated line at the bottom of the page. With weblogs it has promoted itself to the top. Hmmm, as in newspapers, hence the weblog is more like journalism. Journals too have dates. Rebecca Blood mentions
In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig’s inclusive definition prevailed.
All this is of particular interest in that it echoes what happens in the psyche. From the outside it looks as if people in therapy are examining the past, but that is not so. What they bring to a session is “fresh” — because they brought it! And why? Because the pattern of the past will be repeating in the present and the pattern is the interesting thing. Patterns of the soul – archetypes – are worth catching. To be fully there – the ‘past’ also needs to be time-stamped — it is impossible to imagine a specific feeling without a specific moment (or span of them). The underlying pattern is outside of time. Fits with the idea that the soul is eternal. e-ternal, not a reference to the e words but just wondering if it means outside of time?
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Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold
Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing – inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.
Just how will the networking advances actually aid the intelligence of a group? I wonder.
Immediast Manifesto
Seizing The Media
The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series – Spring 1992 – Immediast International – New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle – Version 1.1 N © Copyright; 1992. Public Domain.
Towards An Ecology Of Information – The Immediast Approach
0. Participating in the proliferation, crosspollination, and consolidation of counter-commercial print, audio, visual, modem, activist, and correspondence media.
1. Documenting the basic sources, dynamics, and effects of corporate and State media control. Exposing methods of mind control, behavior modification, and image embedding.
2. Openly discussing tools and methods that strengthen immunization and freedom from deceptive, disinforming, and subliminal media exposures.
Upgrading public media literacy to decode, produce, and broadcast in all communications media.3. Open cultural expressions, education, networking and resistance.
4. Reclaiming public sovereignty of the airwaves.
5. The liberation of all public space from government, corporate, and business messages.
6. Public takeover of all airborne commercial broadcast media and the creation of public production libraries.
7. Liberation as glasnost: the emergence of democratic public communications and media networks.
What a noble manifesto.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
added a copy of the whole page for posterity:
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eatonweb portal :: the original weblog directory
Just added this weblog to Brigitte Eaton’s weblog Portal.
Book: The New Science of Networks
Amazon.com: Linked: The New Science of Networks
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From a review on Amazon:
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Looks good. Yes one of many on the same theme, but each adding a new slant. Hubs and nodes – reminds me a little of the classic article: The Strength of Weak Ties ?
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weblogs: a history and perspective
Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important.
Thorough history and insight into personal weblogging.