How to help readers click through to content is an ongoing challenge for communicators across all disciplines. Particularly with this P2 format of blogging, a new method of composition may evolve, as we finally have the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds: the immediacy of status updates and the deeper meaning of context. The decoupling of these has been a complaint from the very birth of Twitter and Facebook. In 2010, with the interdependent infrastructure of wordpress, rssCloud, wave federation protocol, status.net, and others, we may finally begin to see the emergence of open, integrated network fabric of free agents and collaborators. This is an absolute prerequisite for achieving the next steps in improving the global cognition grid. While there is no single solution or plan for the grid, it does continue to evolve organically, as a result of this exciting era in the evolution of human communication.
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
How to help readers click through to content
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Cognition-Hacking The Grid: Full Twitter Reboot Inevitable
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.
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Personal Firehose Management
Yes, I will need to get more serious about offering MEANINGFUL tags and then maybe ask @yongfook for some way for people to subscribe to tag channels (assuming it isn't already in the API, which I haven't completely parsed just yet). It won't surprise me to find his foresight at least that comprehensive and thorough.
In other news, maybe once people see an @scobleizer equivalent firehose -- just @scobleizer, across all services, in one firehose feed beholden to no one but himself -- they will begin to understand just what one of our most extraordinary colleagues has been attempting to communicate with us mortals. I know he's been trying to do that with Friendfeed, but unfortunately, even that great service is one among many.
Ultimately, the only one true aggregation point for humans is The Individual; aka, The Node in context of global cognition grid.
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Global Cognition Grid: Today's Attention Budget
Approximately 4 of the next 24 hours are available for realtime collective cognition. It appears that the meatspace attention monopoly still holds a powerful 99.999% dominance over the total attention of humanity. It's a damned-if-you-don't-damned-if-you-do enterprise to make the transition: A.) tend to the meatspace monopoly first, or lose access to the interfaces to The Grid, vs. B.) allocate sufficient resources to The Grid to become of increasing relative value, or lose relevance and effectiveness within The Grid.
I will try to make it the best four hours that I can and let the chips fall where they may.
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