Psyberspace

The conference in the previous post is very well written up here by Adam Rifkin: Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Web 2.0 Love that word: Intertwingled. Ah yes, that is what is defining this era, the way we can now see and work with the intertwingled sphere. Of course to a few of us this sphere is known as the Sociometric Matrix, the virtual mother of friendship, to liberally update and translate the Latin.

The recent post about the new phase in the web, and what to call it. Perhaps it is Web-two-dot-oh, there has been the conference Web as Platform, and I have listened to IT converdations about it. What does Wikapedia say? “No page with that title exists”, but there is a Dot-com page.

I have a few more links coming up on Web 2.0

I am going to take my Google ads off this weblog. I put them there as part of my “exploring the psyche of cyberspace” and have made a few – very few – dollars. I am not really against them, it is just not what this blog is about or for. I have learnt about them though – learning by doing is my way!

I guess I was inspired by Jason Kottke though of course not that I intend to seek payment in any way for this blog, it was more the sense of pure freedom from commercial temptation or even beeing seen as having commercially biassed posts.

OK then just to do a bit of commercial bias before I get around to pulling them: how lucrative are these keywords: asbestos, spears, tagging, tags, web 2.0, George Bush, The Incredibles, hot sex orgasm.

There, end of commercialism.

I am meditating on the word apophenia.

I learnt it while reading “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. Amazon

The Wikipedia puts it well.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the
distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mental illness.

As Gibson says in his interview [clip]with Moyra Gunn, pattern recognition means everything.

Seeing patterns is science. It is law, it is language.

I suffered a bit of apophenia myself today while searching for the word on the net I found quite a lot of info. Now that is not apophenia, but in addition to that I saw the word twice in places where I had not searched: this podcast and this entry in John Perry Barlow’s blog.

I am interested in how close the mad version of apophenia is to the sane one. I know people who see strange coordination between events which makes them clearly psychotic. But then the cure in psychotherapy is often to notice how those twisted perceptions actually reveal and echo other patterns in the clients developmental stages.

Seeing patterns comes on so many forms… science and law of course all rely on patterns. In psychotherapy it is our bread & butter: synchronicity, complexes, role systems, archetypes, projection and transference all involve apophenia.

Even in supervision we achieve a sense of satisfaction when we notice a parallel process in the supervision that echoes the dynamics of the client session being discussed.

From the NYT:

For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: February 25, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24 – The primarily amateur Internet audio medium known as podcasting will take a small, hopeful step on Friday toward becoming the commercial Web’s next big thing.

That step is planned by Odeo, a five-person start-up that is based in a walk-up apartment in this city’s Mission District and was co-founded by a Google alumnus. The company plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting – the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.

Audio files on the Internet are nothing new, of course. But the recent proliferation of portable iPods and other devices for storing and playing files in the MP3 audio format has created a mobile audience in this country – more than 11 million and growing – on whom podcasters are counting to listen to much more than downloaded songs and the occasional audio book.

I have been listening to dozens of IT conversations and other podcasts …

I want to post about them all, but there is an overriding theme coming through:

We are on a new wave of Net development – there is a lot of movement and a big wave about to break.

The Net is the Computer (that is an old idea but the implcations have just begun)

Smart Dust – the millions of users make a quatitative difference – esp as the data is all interwoven and even the processes of use (without the content) provide … light up the images of the noosphere as they are mapped by such things as delicious (add your own dots) Bloglines technorati & flikr (no need for links just search on them).

The Net is multiplying – almost like a cell division into two new halves of one new whole. The division is from the desktop to the mobile pods – phones, cameras all sorts of connected devices – it does not really matter if that connection is a hot sync or a wifi or a phone link… we move around while we are in cyberspace. Our bodies will have rrs…

Audio has a new role in cyberspace – thanks to broadband and phones and mp3 players etc.

Images do too but they have been there for a while – but will also come alive in a new way.

Atoms shrinking relative to the sexiness of bits.

So… in front of our eyes quantity is tansforming into new quality.

What should we call it … this eruption? This transformation that is so evident in 2005 – I bet it gets a label soon …

What are the ‘eras’?

dot.com is one.

The second bubble? Crossing the chasm?

The second Psybernet podcast. Walter continues to tell the story of Psybernet – the experiential exploration of cyberspace or psyberspace. THe chronological thread continues taking us to about 1996. Diversions along the way.
Show notes coming some time.
Psybernet 002

Here is the podcast as promised but more than a week after we made it.

Psybernet Podcast 001

The next is on its way.

Shownotes are coming.

The iPodder feed is coming…

What has taken priority is my four day Lewis Pass Sound-Seeing tramp – at some point that too will be up and running.

Please leave comments – send audio to incude in the next show.

AND,

if you have not already done so, check out the other Podcast Kate & Walter make, the Kate Tapley Horse Whisper Podcast: www.katetapley.co.nz/news