Convergence08.Silverton.Palo-Alto.CA.us

Observation: to the degree that participants tweet consciously with intent, their most salient observations and reflections of proceedings, a crude form of "manual analog neuropresence" may be increasingly emulated. There is an opportunity -- attenuated by awareness of this experiment, interest, willingness, and individual abilities -- to experience this emulated neuropresence as if attending multiple sessions at once. To degree that attending and comprehending a session PLUS tweeting exceeds individual cognitive capacities, Social Cognition data loss is incurred.

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About Connie

An improvisational experiment in Augmented Social Cognition taking place during Convergence 08. This "talk" will take place for the full duration of the conference.

Why Connie?

As audiences have begun using Twitter to share their thoughts during events, we all began accidentally participating in a qualitatively different kind of collective thinking which crudely emulates -- under conditions marked by sufficiently high message volumes -- a rudimentory sort of hive mind experience. An archivable cognition space.

Perhaps due to my slow reading speed, as the event-specific #hashtagged tweets at these events accelerated (due to the sheer number of participants) I could eventually not easily keep up with the accounting function of ascribing individual tweets to distinct "others." Therefore, I consciously suspended that function and began skipping the names, reading and processing only the thoughts (tweets) themselves; momentarily suspending disbelief, as if they were emanating from remote portions of my own mind. Following along with hashtag streams at the Singularity Summit and Web 2.0 Summit in this manner provided an unexpected and unique kind of realtime "neuro-presence," as unexpected new "OBSERVATIONS" arose from the audience in a manner vaguely reminiscent of individual cognition.

This was the surprise. My mind began sloppily accepting the tweets not just as the thoughts of others, but as valid OBSERVATIONS. I decided to indulge this entertaining illusion of direct perception.

I was not physically located at either of those events; yet, I was able to comprehend and contemplate many of the central theses of the events. I do not know how many, if any of my fellow collective cognitioners, realize that I was dozens of miles away, richly experiencing the proceedings through the highly granular, succinct, collective salient reflections of the Singularity Audience Mind; wistfully dubbed "SAM" or the Web2Summit Mind, "WES."

I therefore propose that Convergence08 attendees who would like to participate in "Connie" -- a twitter-mediated Convergence08 collective cognition space -- agree upon a single twitter hashtag as early as possible, perhaps even voting here http://poll.fm/nlis/ prior to the opening of the conference. I will monitor the Twitter streams and update the grids above to reflect the group's decision; ideally converging on a single hashtag. This is a 100% self-guided, opt-in, improvisational experiment.

While the ASC Group at PARC is best known for its WikiDashboard; perhaps the group will consider expanding its reach to include this emergent human behavior. SIAI may also find the research useful in training up an AI. One could readily imagine experiments in this "remote viewing" by having physically present attendees and twitter-only attendees take the same quiz about the content of a given lecture or event and comparing comprehension.

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