Psyberspace

Here is more on the chaordic principle that I sensed was missing from the firstmondy item linked below. I still don’t really get how Visa works, but I love the line ”Visa has been called “a corporation whose product is coordination.” Hock calls it “an enabling organization.” Here is the item: The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock

This is one of Dee Hock’s favorite tricks to play on an audience. “How many of you recognize this?” he asks, holding out his own Visa card.

Every hand in the room goes up.

“Now,” Hock says, “how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it’s headquartered, how it’s governed, or where to buy shares?”

Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it.

And that, says Hock, is exactly how it ought to be. “The better an organization is, the less obvious it is,” he says. “In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It’s the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.” Today the Visa organization that Hock founded is not only performing brilliantly, it is also almost mythic, one of only two examples that experts regularly cite to illustrate how the dynamic principles of chaos theory can be applied to business.

OtherWise Dee Hock – The Birth of the Chaordic Century: Out of Control and Into Order (Part 1 of 2)

Commentary by Melanie McBride on a book about McLuhan by Donald F. Theall.

Plenty of it here. Items on McLuhan. Rushkoff, Jon Lebkowsky items. A weblog, with posts from Bryan Alexander.

Here is a page of links. Collected by Roger Bourn. I have looked at one or two with interest, but can extrapolate that at least some will be to my taste from this one by Jerry Pournelli, on writing – especially paragraphs, which I am sure I have linked in the past, and which I need right now! This is the blurb on Roger’s site:

Welcome! Here is a collection of the best writing to be found concerning Critical Thought, and the Paradigm (and Ethics) of computing in our daily lives, with a list of the best writers who exhibit Critical Thinking in their work. Refresh this page often, as this site is growing. You are welcome to send additions.

I transferred the Psyber-L mailing list to Yahoo the other day and had to put it in a category. There never is one for what I want. Soul does not fit under Health, or Computers, or Hobbies or Religion for that matter. Psychology might be ok, except that it has been corrupted – that means it would be filed in among advertising, PR, HR and CBT and so on, not always good company for the soul. This article from First Monday by Marcia J. Bates explores the problem: After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time

Succumbing to the “ontology” fallacy
The hot new term in information organization is “ontology.” Everybody’s inventing, and writing about, ontologies, which are classifications, lists of indexing terms, or concept term clusters (Communications of the ACM, 2002). But here’s the problem: “Ontology” is a term taken from philosophy; it refers to the philosophical issues surrounding the nature of being. If you name a classification or vocabulary an “ontology” then that says to the world that you believe that you are describing the world as it truly is, in its essence, that you have found the universe’s one true nature and organization. But, in fact, we do not actually know how things “really” are. Put ten classificationists (people who devise classifications) in a room together and you will have ten views on how the world is organized.

Got this from Cory in boing boing, he liked it. I noticed that in a discussion, Cory with Justin the topic comes up again, and Justin makes it very clear:

Nice rant about categorization. Talking about the universe and washing machines, you nail a problem I’ve had writing on the web about my life. For example, I’m in love with a woman and I want to write about her on my site. Where do I file her in my hierarchical life-cum-directory structure? Under San Francisco, where we met? Or Oakland, more precisely, which was somehow created as a subdirectory of San Francisco? Or maybe Japan/Tokyo where we had the first date of the rest of our lives. Maybe I’ll marry this woman and so maybe she should be her own subdirectory! Or a subdomain off Justin.org. I link to her site in the meantime; but wouldn’t it be nice to say a few tender words as I pass a web surfer from my site to hers?

I think the answer is in the direction of better conversations, and automated mass conversations via collaborative filtering, like in our project that never eventuated I like this!

Update:I have read Marcia J. Bates’ article with interest. It has some great ideas and information, SDI = ”push” technology which has a long history. faceted classification would be worth studying up, the Bradford Distribution is a concept that made immediate sense. HOWEVER, the overall thesis, that some sort of rationality of classification could prevail and actually be useful I have doubts about. I remain positive about the idea of groping through a tangle of information. Not information, relationships, conversations. No where in the article does she really mention *self organising information* emails stored on my computer are self organising. I can search them by title, or test date, author etc. And no where does she mention the word chaordic, or collaborative filtering.

My hunch is that there is great value in the work Marcia does in specific niche areas. BUT. Just as she says linguists are not much good at thinking systemically about information retrieval, I am now thinking that information researchers do not grasp the nature of… surfing the noosphere. God, there is hardly a way to speak about the soup we are in, but I bet that someone right in there well netted-in could find anything on the net, by hunches, by surfing through the links on likely pages, by blogging, by Googling through usenet and asking the odd guru. That way we’d not only find the information, but learn that we did not actually need it, or that there was a new paradigm, or what to do with it once we had it, or that it was not actually cataloged anywhere, but in my grand mothers drawer.

I’ll sprinkle hyperlinks through all of the above in good time as I think on this one I am with Justin – it is a rhizome like beast. I also want to follow up on Cory’s piece about cataloging.

The article is worth reading. Here is an email I sent to Tony in response:

Hi Tony,

Your item makes good sense to me, as I am back here in XP
*unable* to do what I want in GNU/Linux.

One thing you do not mention that will take me back as soon as I
am able... the *values* implicit in the GPL.

Human knowledge is built on the shoulders of those before us for
a long time, that tradition is under severe threat, and the GPL
is one of the more hopeful phenomena of this era.

I like it when RMS says thing like "I don't care!" to many of
your valid points. Freedom is more important, the freedom to
build knowledge for the use of us all.

I will pop this on my weblog, and if in the millions of emails
you will get, you manage to respond to this in some way, I will
link to that too.

Thanks,

Walter

From my post to the mailing list:

It turns out that it works fine in IE but not Mozilla (at least
1.00 release candidate 3 - I will try an upgrade).

What I had done to create the corruption was to omit a closing
quote around a url in a link. Easily fixed in safe mode in IE.

My IE was crashing, but that is another story, reinstall,
reactivation 24 hours later...

Now IE is working, Blogger is working, Yay! I will keep you
posted re latest version of Mozilla, as it would be good to have
that functionality there too. Can others use Safe Mode to fix
such things in Mozilla?

Walter

Here is the test post I mentioned, click safe mode, and then edit this to see for yourself how easy it is to fix.