During the first year of Twitter, we talked about the inevitable emergence of competing attention frameworks: #Egosphere vs. #Cognosphere. Personalities more inclined to use this technology to feed the ego, versus those who would use it to feed, augment, and extend the mind.

The emergence of Twitter Jumbotrons is like a second or third order derivative of the egosphere. At it’s core, Twitter coaxes many people into feeling as if hundreds, thousands, or millions are listening and hanging on our every word. People aren’t, even in the millions-of-followers category, but it can feel that way.

What’s amusing is that these vain hopes — born of a deep cultural starvation for positive recognition, affirmation — are further amplified in this context. The Jumbotwittertron beckons that YOUR fleeting thought “may be being seen by tens of thousands of people” and that people should therefore employ even more of their already scarce attention into “brainstorming” the composition of that fleeting tweet.

Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame has dwindled to less than 15 seconds. There are deeply provocative implications to all this, but we’ll need to save that for another time because I’ve already pressed the boundaries of average attention available for thoughts like this one. I’m grateful for the investment.Clipped from http://www.mediabistro.comKaty Perry (@Katy Perry) is using her Twitter fame in her offline life now, too: she’s bringing out giant “Twitter jumbotrons” during her live concerts to display tweets and twitpics from her fans to get them amped up about the show. So if you’ve got tickets to see Perry any time soon, start brainstorming an ultra-witty tweet or two – they just might be seen by tens of thousands of people.

Perry’s California Dreams 2011 will be the first live concert tour to feature Twitter this prominently. Each show will have its own unique hashtag that fans can add to their tweets, and those selected will appear on the massive on-stage screens before the show starts.Read more at http://www.mediabistro.com 

As we've been saying here for some time, these issues of Integrity, Autonomy, Portability, and Security of Individual and Team Lifestreams are going to become increasingly obvious and pressing.

Yesterday, NextWeb supplied yet another interesting way to "Create your own version of Twitter with REAL status updates" wherein Zee specifies the following goals:

1. Have something you can update from anywhere and as many devices as possible.

2. Make it possible to share only specific updates with the world (i.e. on other social sites).

3. Make it possible for people to comment/respond from other social sites or from your site itself.

4. Embed photos/video easily.

5. Make it searchable. So you can see updates (thoughts, images, video) that happened between two specific dates.

Originally posted at Spaced Out (Again): We are going to try to Twitter a planning cycle for the HiRISE (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu) experiment. The idea is to give people a feeling of all the work we have to do to get images from Mars out of a very special piece of equipment. Here are a couple of things you need to know to follow what is going on. The scientist in charge of the scientific support for the cycle is called the CIPP. For cycle 75, that is @nick_space. Nick will be assisted by his Post-Doc., Anya, who is @mozhetbyt The targeting specialist ensures that the plan produced can be implemented and keeps the CIPP from doing anything stupid. The targeting specialist is called the HiTS and for cycle 75 that is @laughingrid. The HiRISE project has its own Twitter account (@HiRISE) which can also be followed. We will try to use #hitwycle as a search hashtag for tweets. We are attempting to run the cycle remotely. In the early stages of the mission, people had to travel to Tucson when they were CIPP. But now we can use special computers at our home institute. In this case, the CIPP is working from the University of Bern while the HiTS is sitting in Tucson, Arizona. This is the biggest time zone difference we have in the HiRISE project for this type of activity but it is not the only one. The HiTS interacts with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (JPL) and we have a lot of contact with the CRISM team (the infrared spectrometer system which is an instrument used to determine surface mineralogy) at the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins Uni on the US East Coast. They have their own web-site (http://crism.jhuapl.edu) which you can also look at. We use a planning tool called HiPlan (developed by @HiCommander who is unfortunately on vacation this week) and entering targets into the system involves working with HiPlan. We have some short-cut names for things such as

IO (interactive observation where we point the spacecraft at a specific target) NIO (non-interactive obs where we let the camera view an interesting area the spacecraft is already passing over) RA (ridealongs where CRISM or CTX asks the spacecraft to point and we take a look along with them) MHs (must-have are targets we really need to get this cycle – normally because of the lighting conditions) WTHs (wanna-have are targets which scientists need quickly to confirm a paper result or to fill in something they are really interested in)

We will talk sometimes about specific areas on Mars. You can follow that by using the Mars plug-in for Google Earth. It’s easy to download and run if you have a reasonably fast internet connection. (Google maps on Mars is also good if you can’t install a program: http://www.google.com/mars/) We will try to remember to send coordinates on Mars to help you find what we are looking at. We will tweet when we can to tell you what is going on. I will try to answer questions you send about the planning process, what we are doing, and Mars science (if I can). Note that if there is a major incident (e.g. we find a dinosaur-bone or the spacecraft explodes) I will not be able to tweet that because items of that sort need to be officially released by NASA. These events are however very, very, unlikely. The cycle plans two weeks of HiRISE operations and is split into week 1 and week 2. The planning process began on August 20th (although the first few days of the process are very light in terms of what’s going on). The cycle procedure actually lasts around 4 weeks in total because planning must be followed up by reviewing the results. Please note that we can’t accept requests for images through Twitter right now, although we will be accepting public image requests in the near future (stay tuned!). Also I reserve the right to block you if you become a pain in the butt! (Examples of pain in the butt behavior are: constantly hassling me about the face on Mars, repeated tweets about aliens, discussions about whether we have actually been on the Moon, etc…..) If you are a regular follower of @nick_space but not interested in this stuff, I will not complain/be upset/etc. if you stop following me for the next few weeks. After that though…… Hope you find it interesting. @nick_space

Who started this whole bruhaha, anyway?

Correlation isn't causation; but finally, new memes can be traced back through the streams. Just wait until you see the changes Google Wave shall yet unleash into the cognospheres.

OMG! Twitter is down! Twitter is DOWN! Whatever will we do now? How will I know what to pay attention to next??? I'm soooo confused and disoriented! ROTFLMAO!

My #lifestream is just fine. How's yours doin'? See what we're talkin' about, here, maybe? Hmmm?

Click here: IsTwitterDown

and here: WhenTwitterIsDown

and here: DownOrNot

Definitely brings issues we’ve been talking about to light. A Google Wave like service run as a P2P network would be infinitely more robust and configurable for keeping the Global Cognition Grid online.

Nice time to revisit the classics; surely you didn't think I meant Voltaire by that suggestion, did you?

An open-ended, free-form collective cognition experiment, simultaneously published here and here.

Today we postulate that, due to dabbling too much with "everyday normal crap," we've lost several key symmetric links with minds that significantly enhanced our interactions within the #cognosphere. Therefore, some version of an individual Full Twitter Reboot has become inevitable. Yes, yes, rumors abound about service-wide quantum changes ahead; we're not talking about that here. Rather, I'm going to take some time to reflect upon the process and perhaps consult with some of the more aggressive experimenters in this domain before executing the reboot. If you consider yourself such an expert, I'd very much appreciate learning your thoughts and experiences in rebooting connections to the #cognosphere by deleting twitter id's (TID's), deleting all Followers/Following, using multiple TID's, or other techniques of which I'm not yet aware.

Disclaimer and Courtesy Notice to the reader: if you believe that Twitter is merely a "micro-blogging service" -- and possibly a fairly pointless and stupid one, at that -- then by all means please let me save you some time. Don't even bother reading any further. Go watch your local news for alerts about lost puppies or something, because this confusing thought Blip will only waste your, um valuable time or worse, possibly disrupt a comfortable existential equilibrium, or crack open the mind to something you formerly considered extremely unlikely, impossible, or just plain crazy. We wouldn't want any of that on our conscience, so please leave now.

In constructing one's interconnection with the Global Cognition Grid (GCG, or just The Grid), and when utilizing that interconnection to explore specific topics, one simply can't think clearly -- or not completely, at least -- without certain linkages intact. I understand that we are each still standard humans, for now; however, we can surely scan the horizon for what collective cognition might be like, moving forward. Even if we can't specifically predict the future, we can always forecast scenarios.

My early explorations in Google Wave developer sandbox further validate impressions about the nature and emergence of this global cognition grid. Right now, there's still a ton of #egosphere pollution and due to lack of Addressable Human Attention in standard human beings, it's going to be persistently important in the short to mid term to NOT FUCK AROUND TOO MUCH or risk losing access to MINDS that dramatically enhance one's own extended cognition.

The Global Cognition Grid is a 100% and 360-degree opt-in construct. By looking over the statistics at FriendorFollow, I've been able to see where I've done well and where I've not done so well in building the most effective #cognosphere possible for exploring the fields of inquiry that most interest me.

As a footnote, I may need to also keep in mind that as specific veins of research are explored, these configurations may change, over time; including different sets and subsets of minds, given the work at hand. The double edge of that sword is the fact that a standard human configuration tends to NOT re-establish a link, once dropped. What signals can be changed to suggest that a dropped connection would now become of mutual benefit once again? Do neurons do this? If so, how? Are there practical analogies or lessons that could be applied from nature to help understand how minds-as-individual-neurons in a GCG might accomplish a similar function (restorative, alternate, optimized interconnection)?

Asking the same questions within the context of an #egosphere (I've offended someone) render entirely different responses than asking within the context of a #cognosphere (I've bored the hell out of someone). In the former, I need to make amends, offer an apology and hope for acceptance of said apology. In the latter, I probably need to accomplish something, synthesize or contribute something new, create an artifact of some kind that regains the lost connection's interest. In the former, I'm repairing a relationship, the latter I'm renewing curiosity.

For now, through such tenuous low-bandwidth #cognosphere connections such as afforded by the likes of Twitter, these two spheres of standard configuration human interaction are still hopelessly entangled. The concept of a binary ON/OFF ... FOLLOW/NOTFOLLOW has been essential to enabling our collective discovery of the next possibilities for The Grid; yet, wholly inadequate to its continued evolution. Friendfeed's ability to keep an open channel to Friends of Friends (including dropped and never-established connections) is surely a step in the right direction, and Google Wave definitely places our presently trailing foot once again in front of the other, helping us to take one step closer toward our pragmatic, imperfect, yet increasingly impressive and capable Global Cognition Grid.

Why should any of this matter? For starters, a fundamental first requirement of The Grid is to help us fix this transitional, increasingly malignant inefficiency:

The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. - Gibson

Let's figure out how to correct that.