Psyberspace

It is still hard for me to accept that the Net has a history. It feels like a very new thing. I am on it all the time, but I am still getting used to it. I still find it magical. It has gone very fast for me. I was here early by some standards, and had a sense of its potential, but then it passed me by somewhat. That “book” about Psyberspace is still a dream. Not a dead dream, mind you. The Wayback Machine (which I have linked to before) has a Web Pioneers feature. And yes, it all looks like the past. Pioneer websites.

What attracted me to the pioneer item was stumbling upon (not with the software agent, but by reading my zine linked earlier) an item we had on the old BBS by Bruce Stirling. This is pioneering work I enjoy, and it reads well now 11 years? later. Nice easy style. I think I’ll quote from it often.

Here’s the President of the United States speaking at a library in 1890.

“The boy who greedily devours the vicious tales of imaginary daring and blood-curdling adventure which in these days are far too accessible will have his brain filled with notions of life and standards of manliness which, if they do not make him a menace to peace and good order, will certainly not make him a useful member of society.” Grover Cleveland hit the nail on the head. I feel very strongly, I feel instinctively, I feel passionately that I am one of those nails. Not only did I start out in libraries as that greedy devouring boy, but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature, I have become a menace to Grover Cleveland’s idea of peace and good order.

Far too accessible, eh Mr President? Too much access. By all means let’s not provide our electronic networks with too much access. That might get dangerous. The networks might rot people’s minds and corrupt their family values. They might create bad taste. Think this electrical network thing is a new problem? Think again. Listen to prominent litterateur James Russell Lowell speaking in 1885. “We diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with speaking wires…. we are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthly impertinences… we… are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip.”

The stagnant goosepond of the global village. Marshall MacLuhan’s stagnant goosepond. Who are the geese in the stagnant pond? Whoever they are, I’m one of them. You’ll find me with the pulp magazines and the bloodcurdling comics and the yellow-covered works of imaginary daring. In the future you’ll find me, or my successors, in the electronic pulps. In the electronic zines, in the fanzines, in the digital genres, the digital underground. In whatever medium it is that really bugs Grover Cleveland. He can’t make up his mind whether I’m the scum from the gutter or the “cultural elite” — but in either case he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like cyberpunks.

He doesn’t like cyberpunks. That’s not big news to you people I’m sure. But he’s not going to like cyberpunk librarians either. I hope you won’t deceive yourselves on that score.

The article, Understanding Internet – Extension of Media is interesting for the idea in its title, which it explains well on a practical level, e.g. Net phone extends the phone. However, the authors do not appreciate the fullness of their insight. Media is the extension of man, and the Internet is the extension of media! That is powerful if we think of the potency of McLuhans insight in the first place.

Media = extension of our senses

Internet = an extension of Media

The implications (which the article does not explore) of McLuhan’s insight included the way media impacted our sense ratios and how, as it extended, it also amputated.

As media extends it amputates old media. The music recording industry for example is running around like a wounded bull. And what happens to the sense ratios in “man” under this exponential eruption!

It has been noted by a more than a few who try to place the Net in McLuhans sensory schema that the Internet is an extension of the nervous system. Well, it has stopped making sense. We have moved into a realm where this exponential leap has finished off the senses and is now working on the psyche, cyberspace is an extension of the soul.

It is for this reason that simply looking for a metaphor that will fit in the way metaphors have worked for other phenomena will not satisfy. How does Psyche in the story of Eros and Psyche relate to the psyche? Could she be the goddess of cyberspace? How is Psyche extended? What is amuptated?

More sites on this theme:

http://www.hans-hass.de/Englisch/Energon/6_Appendix_3.html
http://www.hoboes.com/html/NetLife/Children/Addicted.html
http://www.peak.sfu.ca/cmass/issue2/july.html

Item last updated Monday, 26 August 2002.

Understanding Internet – Extension of Media

Log — David Chess writes and links about it. Makes the same point I just made about weblogs and zines etc., that is how I found his site.

I came to the net in 1993 when online zines were the equivalent of weblogs. Slower, less native to the web, morphed from fan-zines on paper. Here is a swag of them. e-zine-list: John Labovitz’s e-zine-list There was a Psybernet one, came out twice. Here is the second one, mostly all my snippets. John has discontinued maintaining the list, replaced by blogdex?

This will be the last time I say stumbleupon found this for me. But it did. This is not after hundreds of results. I have listed all my results here bar one or two, hiking and another on Stevie Wonder. They were OK for me but not this weblog. I love this one from Marvin Minsky Because it is from 1982, because it is part of the history of psyberspace, because it is in text and because it is a little self-reflective right now. Here, after the title stuff is the final paragraph of the essay.

WHY PEOPLE THINK COMPUTERS CAN'T

Marvin Minsky, MIT

First published in AI Magazine, vol. 3 no. 4, Fall 1982. Reprinted in
Technology Review, Nov/Dec 1983, and in The Computer Culture,
(Donnelly, Ed.) Associated Univ. Presses, Cranbury NJ, 1985

Just as Evolution changed man's view of Life, Al will change mind's view
of Mind. As we find more ways to make machines behave more sensibly,
we'll also learn more about our mental processes. In its course, we will
find new ways to think about "thinking" and about "feeling". Our view of
them will change from opaque mysteries to complex yet still
comprehensible webs of ways to represent and use ideas. Then those
ideas, in turn, will lead to new machines, and those, in turn, will give us
new ideas. No one can tell where that will lead and only one thing's sure
right now: there's something wrong with any claim to know, today, of
any basic differences between the minds of men and those of possible
machines.

More from stumbleupon – The William P. Gottlieb Collection, comprising over sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists. Burrow down to hi-res photos.

Before I have even rated pages in stumbleupon the third link they returned was this one. The whole of Clamor Magazine is interesting.

“While the Enron scandal currently unfolds, another Bush family business scandal lurks beneath the shadows of history that may dwarf it.”

But while President Bush publicly embraced the community of holocaust survivors in Washington last spring, he and his family have been keeping a secret from them for over 50 years about Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.

English words are connected by just three degrees of separation. Writes Phillip Ball, on the Nature site. 2 July 2002

The researchers traced the links between 30,000 English words in an online thesaurus. For example, the word ‘actor’ can be connected to ‘universe’ through two intermediaries. The thesaurus lists ‘character’ as a synonym for ‘actor’; ‘character’ is also equated with ‘nature’; and ‘nature’ with ‘universe’.

Moving from ‘actor’ to ‘universe’ in the network of words therefore takes three steps. To the surprise of Motter and colleagues, they found that the same was true of just about any randomly chosen pair of words in the thesaurus. The English language, in other words, enjoys just three degrees of separation.

Word Association has long been standard fare in psychotherapy, not just as formal tests but as a way of seeing into dreams or noticing themes and archetypes. Given this new research some might think that anyone can link anything, making nonsense of the lot. My hunch is no, making links is not nonsense. The art of seeing these links is profound. Also consider this: if linking like this is so prevalent then there must be a choice of conduit words (my word for the linking theme word) and thus highlighting one over another will have some impact. I doubt a computer could do that, though a computer could be a great aid here. I bet that there are some words that are stronger, more prevalent than others as conduits – eye. ear, head, arm, etc. earth, air, fire, and water? At last there might be a clearer reason why Tarot, astrology and alchemy can be so profound; they channel the immediate through “star” words that make archetypal sense of experience.

Thanks Josh for the link! Love to see a visual map of this!

It looks good, about to investigate this! It could be I Like This! The project Dan I did not quite do in about 1995?

Update: Hmmm, I filled it all in. It works technically. I got some OK recommendations. Is it “feature” based or “collaborative filtering”?

The name is wrong IMO, as is the choice of rating: Bad, Good, Great. This sounds like a popularity quest which is what we DON’T need more of. Bad good great… Match for me. would be better or even better ”I Like This”.

Still it is delivering OK! For example I got this in the first go: Biblioteca Arcana That is quite me.

The paper by Vicente Rafael, Professor, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego states ”This is a work in progress; please do not quote from this draft or cite without the author’s permission. I welcome feedback; please feel free to e-mail me at vrafael@weber.ucsd.edu.” I have emailed and asked permission to link and quote – will remove if not granted. I link this because I have the question on my mind about the class nature of info tech generally, about its impact as part of the forces of production, but also about the use of communications, does it impact what actually happens in a qualitative way. Does a better linked crowd become more revolutionary or just more potent? How does the flatness of the net impact on leadership? Does the group have a life of its own and can we trust it? Vicente L Cell Phone and the Crowd

From the perspective of Generation Txt, a certain kind of crowd comes about in response to texting. It is one that bears, in both senses of that word, the hegemony of middle class intentions. Texting in its apolitical mode, sought to evade the crowd. But in its reformist mode, it is credited with converting the crowd into the concerted movement of an aggrieved people. In the latter case, the middle class invests the crowd with a power analogous to their cell phones: that of transmitting their wish for a moral community, whereby the act of transmission itself amounts to the realization of such a community. Such a notion assumes the possibility of endowing the crowd with an identity continuous with that of middle class texters. However, this assumption had another aspect. Not only did it lead to the fantasy of ordering of the masses under bourgeois direction. As I demonstrate below, the middle class interest in ordering the crowd also tended to give way to a different development. At certain moments, we also see the materialization of another kind of desire this time for the dissolution of class hierarchy altogether. How so?