Category: Psyber

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Facebook vs forums?

http://andrewdouch.wordpress.com

  • When students (or I) find a youtube video that we want to share with the group, this can be simply done directly from Youtube by clicking the “share” button under the video as it plays.
  • The group can be accessed easily using a mobile device… for example from the iPhone Facebook app (picture right).  On the other hand checking my discussion forum in Safari on an iPhone is nowhere near as elegant.
  • Videos and Podcasts on the Facebook group wall play right there in the wall… rather than simply being a link that leads you to another page.  It’s a better user experience.
  • When someone posts on the Facebook group wall, all the members of the group get a notification, and since many of them are in Facebook at the time anyway, they get it immediately!  (In contrast, my discussion forum can be set up to send email notifications… but many students don’t check their email very often.)

 

 

Howard Rheingold  posted this comment on the article in Facebook:

I require students to post in forums. Twice, when students have created Facebook groups for my social media class, the action there outstripped the action in the forums. The forum discussions were deeper, and older conversations did not disappear when they had not been updated for a few days, and it was easier to index a growing list of threads — students acknowledged that the forums had these superior affordances — but Facebook is where students live. I’m working with a developer to add Facebook features, most notably the badge that
indicates new activity, into the forum software. But I’m also going to create a parallel Facebook group and bounce between the group and the
forums and ask students to compare and contrast. In other words, I’m inclined to agree with this link: http://wp.me/pic58-ls

I am thinking we can’t avoid Facebook – and it is a way of paving the cow paths (desire paths) – the trouble is that the desire paths are a toll road. Sad.

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Republic of Letters

http://www.readwriteweb.com

The 18th century, more than many, may remind us of our own time. That period was the culmination of what had become known as the “Republic of Letters,” a shared domain of imagination that lasted from 1500 to 1800.

I love the phrase “republic of letters” and I’m surprised I have not head of it before. In the next iteration of my article: Archetypes of Cyberspace I’ll do some more research and add it in.

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The Group and its Protagonist – Archetypes of Cyberspace

I completed this psychodrama thesis in 1999 after working on it one way and another since about 1984. One feature of this paper is the discussion about the sociometric matrix, a notion that influences my ideas about cyberspace as well and were at the root of another essay I wrote – Archetypes of Cyberspace

I stumbled across this better pdf version of the The Group and its Protagonist – linked to it on my Writing page.

I’m wonering if there is some way to publish something based on these papers?

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Exaptation – copy & paste in the evolution of tech and culture

Just got a name for something I have grasped for a long time. I used to call it accidental by products of evolution, and had this idea when I was doing biology aged 15. EG the piano is a by product of the evolution of fingers. We as humans have gone beyond what was biologically fittest, accidental by-products just heaped upon themselves and interacted with each other to enable creativity and consciousness.

From What Technology wants by Kevin Kelly page 50: “These inadvertent anticipatory inventions are called exaptations in biology.”

“Exaptation is a term used in evolutionary biology to describe a trait that has been co-opted for a use other than the one for which natural selection has built it.”

“It is a relatively new term, proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba in 1982 to make the point that a trait’s current use does not necessarily explain its historical origin. They proposed exaptation as a counterpart to the concept of adaptation.

For example, the earliest feathers belonged to dinosaurs not capable of flight. So, they must have first evolved for something else. Researchers have speculated early feathers may have been used for attracting mates or keeping warm. But later on, feathers became essential for modern birds’ flight.

It is a relatively new term, proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba in 1982 to make the point that a trait’s current use does not necessarily explain its historical origin. They proposed exaptation as a counterpart to the concept of adaptation.

For example, the earliest feathers belonged to dinosaurs not capable of flight. So, they must have first evolved for something else. Researchers have speculated early feathers may have been used for attracting mates or keeping warm. But later on, feathers became essential for modern birds’ flight.

(Perry, 2013)

In the evolution of technology and culture it is all exaptation. The reason is that the basis of tech and cultural evolution are not genetic, the information is carried by social means. Thus nothing goes extinct, and all innovations can be resurrected. In other words we can cut and paste to make new things, that process is far faster and more efficient than evolution in the biological sphere. Sexual reproduction is a form of cut & paste, but still far more primitive than what we can do with our inventions.

For example: Id love to graft the Graffiti handwriting system from the dead Palm onto a current smartphone.

References

Parry, Wynne. (2013, September 16). Exaptation: How evolution uses what’s available. Retrieved February 8, 2016, from http://www.livescience.com/39688-exaptation.html

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Jesus the man, Jobs the man

To make sense of this post you may need to read my last entry.

Also you may need to know who Barnum was:

And read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html?src=dayp that my friend Amy just sent me.

Jobs may well be a Barnum, and like Barnum he creates a new medium for communication, but it is not just the man. It is as if humanity is ready for a jump and it finds a vehicle to make it happen. Unfortunately it has to make in the capitalist context, given the failure of the German revolution after World War one. While Jobs is a creative guy, no doubt, and while he is enough of a Barnum to pull it all off in the world as it is, the world was ripe for a new leap in communication, to go beyond printing presses and beyond tele type machines. It took someone to make the next leap actual. Zuckerberg is another such. These steps in the evolution of the psyche are all distorted by the fucked up relations of production. The agony is to live in a sick social system, the actual agony of children in chinese factories and the agony of collusion, alienation and powerlessness for many others of us.

The leap in relations of production that we were on the edge of in capitalist countries at the start of the last century did not happen, history missed its natural turning. If we were in an era of new social relations of production the miserable state of psychological developments would not be the context for these technical innovations leading to huge cultural global shifts sweeping the world. However Rosa Luxembourg was assassinated, the social democrats subverted the revolution, industrial revolutions happens in the name of socialism and distorted the history of possible new relations of production. But that is how it is.

So what of new developments? Everything we create or do is in a backward social system. Creativity is social and public, but ownership lags behind, it is private and coercive and seeks out Dickensian situations such as china to maximize profits and to avoid failure in the market. I don’t think Jobs sold out on his vision, I imagine there was agony in making it happen.

Should he not have made the mouse, the first personal pc? Should we not use the technology? It is tempting as every object contains the labour power of the poor and exploited. I don’t think it it’s the answer to smash the tools, unless there was a mass movement of boycott. Even then the much needed jump is nothing to do with the tools, but in the relations of production, and this not because “we” collude with Chinese fascism, as Mike Daisey implies in the NYT interview. It is more that capitalism went global, that it is alive and well as a system. Not so well actually, perhaps in its vicious death trows. Who will lead that transition we are now on the edge of? We are ripe for another leap.

The revolution, innovation, the next big thing will not be technological but social and political. People who lead this next leap forward won’t be just great writers like Marx or orators like Lenin and Trotsky but people able to lead using the new orality of the Internet, even though its built with an unjust system of production. The screens are not the same thing as the humans who communicate via those screens. Revolution won’t be be because of the the Internet, but it can’t happen if people throw away their telephones and everything made in China, we live in this world.

The reflection I’m making, if it is not obvious, is that there are mighty forces at work, and that no one man Jesus or Jobs is really the cause of them. There is always someone who gives expression most fully and effectively to a collective urge. The power of leaders is not only because of what they do or say, but because of the ripeness of the culture they speak to. The culture chooses leaders.

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Psyberspace

What is this blog about? It might be all over the place but this picture shows how my filter works.

At the heart is a patch where there is a psychological, or soulful aesthetic, cyberspace phenomena that makes the world a better place.

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