The Digital Story of the Nativity

via: The Thin Veil

Guy Debord and the Return to Normalcy

A not-so-recent article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson (Web Ushers in an Age of Ambient Intimacy) discusses how new media like Facebook and Twitter have given us an “ambient awareness.” The multiple and often mundane updates we publish online provide us with “a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of our friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” It is remarkable that we can be so intimately aware of the daily lives of any of hundreds of friends, family, and acquaintances that may be scattered over the globe, and it is very reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's observation that electric technology involves "the family of man in the cohesive state of village living."

In fact, one of Thompson’s sources for his article described Facebook in this same way:

It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."

So, in the broad sweep of history, we are finally returning to normalcy. Yet clearly, we are living in an entirely different environment. There is a qualitative difference between meeting your fellow village-folk at the well and discussing the events of the day and sitting in front of your computer or on your handheld of choice and being confronted with a list of updates. Twitter and the Facebook news feed both embody an evolution of our news media more than any other medium (it’s called a news feed). From the village herald to the newspaper to television news networks to electronic newspapers to Twitter, news has reversed from its pattern of broader and broader coverage to about as personal as it can get.

Yet is this really a return to normalcy? Guy Debord, a noted French social critic, wrote his esoteric critique of the technological society in The Society of the Spectacle. He claimed that the Spectacle—described variously as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” “a worldview transformed into an objective force,” and the “chief product of modern day society”—is the preeminent factor organizing society today. It manifests itself in the content of news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, and in the forms of the mass media and technology. Debord noted that though our technology may unite us, it “unites only in its separateness,” as he saw it reinforcing the isolation of the lonely crowd.

The question is then, does his critique stand? Tufekci says that we are returning to normalcy in our social interactions while Debord says that everywhere he looks he sees the same intent: “to restructure society without community.” There seems to be truth in the fact that our online personas require a little more personal consistency in as much as they disallow us from really leaving behind any social group. On the other hand, though our news media have reversed into the personal village gossip, we are involved in the village only as long as we sit in front of our computers.


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Required Reading

Excellent essay in the NY Times this weekend. I'd quote it, but it should be read in its entirety.

Only Disconnect

By GARY SHTEYNGART

Internet Factoids

Via: Medical Coding Certification

Consider the Following: Twitter and Collective Consciousness

"Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums  among the other organs and extensions of the body."

"With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."
    
                    -- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Twitter and the Global Brain

© 2009 Dean Pomerleau

View the original document

The prevailing model for many years of how synapses between neurons in the brain are altered during learning has been Hebbian learning, which can be summarized as "neurons that fire together, wire together".  In other words, in two neurons fire at the same time, the connection(s) between them will strengthened.

But recent evidence in neuroscience shows the truth is actually an interested twist on this idea - a twist that could have important implications as a model of how global consciousness could emerge from real-time social media like Twitter.

In reality, synapses are modified according to a rule called Spike Time Dependent Plasticity(STDP).   In a nutshell, STDP says that if two neurons fire (= spike) in rapid succession, the  connection from the one that fires first to the one that fires second will be strengthened.

In other words, if neuron A reliably fires shortly before neuron B, the connection from A to B will get stronger, so that next time when neuron A fires, neuron B will be more likely to fire too.  And the opposite holds as well.  In this example, since the firing of neuron B lags behind neuron A, the strength of the connection in that direction (from B to A), will be weakened.  You could think of it as the neural equivalent of the old saying 'the early bird catches the worm' - a neuron that fires first gains increasing influence on its downstream neighbors.

STDP is a simple idea, but it has been shown to be a surprisingly powerful way that the brain uses for rapid pattern recognition and classification [1][2].  It turns out that using STDP, neurons naturally learn to specialize in detecting certain patterns in their inputs, even in the presence of lots of noise.

So what in the world does this have to do with social networks?  There is an intriguing analogy between networks of neurons operating by the STDP rule and the emerging structure and functioning of real-time social networks like Twitter.

Imagine a twitter user as a neuron.  He/she makes the equivalent of a synapse with each of his/her followers.  When a twitter user sends out a tweet, it is the equivalent of a neuron firing.  Followers who receive the tweet decide whether to propagate the activity by retweeting the message, in a sense by deciding whether they too should fire in response to the tweet.

It isn't happening exactly this way yet, but STDP would enter the picture in the following way.  Suppose Bill is a follower of an influential person on Twitter like Guy Kawasaki and Bill decides one of Guy's tweets is interesting enough to retweet.  This is a clear indication that Bill finds Guy's tweets interesting and valuable.  Based on this 'vote of confidence' for Guy's tweets, a yet-to-be-implemented mechanism could automatically increase the weight that Guy's tweets are given for Bill, making Guy's tweets more likely to show up high on Bill's Twitter 'dashboard'.

But what if Guy wasn't the first to tweet the news that Bill found so interesting?  The same automated mechanism could suggest to Bill that instead of (or in addition to) following Guy, Bill might like to follow another sharp Twitter personality (perhaps Nova Spivack) who beat Guy to the punch by being the first to post the content Bill found interesting.

In this way, users could be automatically steered towards following folks who are the first to post content that will interest them - towards those who are considered the 'thought leaders' you might say.  And content creators who work hard to be the first to find and tweet interesting content will be rewarded automatically with a growing list of followers, and eventually with monetary reward if/when Scobleizer 'attention economy', or some other way to monetize eyeballs, emerges on Twitter.

As an added benefit, the tweets Bill receives could be automatically sorted based on how interesting they are likely to be for him.  As a simple example, imagine that several of the people Bill follows and has demonstrated an affinity for in the past (by retweeting their posts) tweet about the same story. This convergence of matching input from sources that Bill weights highly suggests that Bill will find this to be very interesting content, so it should be automatically bubbled to the top of Bill's prioritized list of tweets to read.

In this model, content generators on Twitter will compete to be the first to create good content or break important news, just as neurons in the brain compete via the STDP update rule to be the first to detect patterns in their input and shout out about it by spiking.  In both systems, 'the early bird catches the worm'.

Eventually, tools may even emerge that automatically retweet messages based on a user's previously expressed preferences, to alert his followers of content he, and therefore they, will likely consider interesting.  At that point, the virtual neurons formed by the combination of people and their automated agents on Twitter will be influencing each other and firing automatically based on the inputs they receive.  On a macro scale, this will represent the equivalent of thoughts emerging in the Global Brain, in the form of rapid, coordinated firing of millions of these virtual neurons.  These thoughts will propagate and potentially trigger other thoughts in the network.  This massive semi-autonomous reverberation in the twittersphere could signal the emergence of a true global consciousness.

[1] Masquelier T, Guyonneau R, Thorpe SJ. Spike timing dependent plasticity finds the start of repeating patterns in continuous spike trains. PloS one. 2008;3(1):e1377. Available at:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18167538.

[2] 1. Masquelier T, Hugues E, Deco G, Thorpe SJ. Oscillations, Phase-of-Firing Coding, and Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity: An Efficient Learning Scheme. Journal of Neuroscience. 2009;29(43):13484-13493. Available at:http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/doi/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2207-09.2009

Twitter Studies--The New Science

Interested in Twitter? So is the Library of Congress. So much so, in fact, that they are acquiring the microblogging service's complete archives: every single tweet from the very beginning. Scott McLemee has an enlightening article on the acquisition and the reasoning behind it over at Inside Higher Ed. Here are some of the highlights:

Why does the Library of Congress want the archives? To give scholars a chance at studying it. The librarians hope to process the material to make it more readily available to researchers, but that's not to say that research has waited until completion.

"The research, so far, tends to fall into two broad categories. One body focuses on the properties of Twitter as a medium. (Or, what amounts to a variation on the same thing, as one part of an emerging new-media ecosystem.) The other approach involves analyzing gigantic masses of Twitter data to find evidence concerning public opinion or mood."


"A recent paper by Mor Naaman and others from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University uses a significant variation on this concept, the “social awareness stream,” to label Twitter and Facebook, among other formats. Social awareness streams, according to Naaman et al., “are typified by three factors distinguishing them from other communication: a) the public (or personal-public) nature of the communication and conversation; b) the brevity of posted content; and, c) a highly connected social space, where most of the information consumption is enabled and driven by articulated online contact networks.”"


"A different methodology was used in “Modeling Public Mood and Emotion: Twitter Sentiment and Socio-Economic Phenomena” by John Bollen of Indiana University and two other authors. They collected all public tweets from August 1 to December 20, 2008 and harvested from them data about the content that could be plugged into “a well-established psychometric instrument, the Profile of Mood States” which “measures six individual dimensions of mood, namely Tension,Depression, Anger, Vigor, Fatigue, and Confusion.” This sounds like something from one of Woody Allen’s better movies."


"“Tweets may be regarded,” write Bollen and colleagues, “as microscopic instantiations of mood.” And they speculate that the microblogging system may do more than reflect shifts of public temper: “The social network of Twitter may highly affect the dynamics of public sentiment…[O]ur results are suggestive of escalating bursts of mood activity, suggesting that sentiment spreads across network ties.”"


See the full article:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee296?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter