Social Weavers - How Do You Define Attention?
We interweave every day, application to application, to web page, etc. Yet we don’t just VISIT something, we DO something, we have intent, purpose, machinations even.
We can track certain aspects of this weaving, we can try to label that tracking as “attention”, but it’s not really. Attention involves more than the process of weaving our lives together, we have a mind with synapses that form on new concepts and apply thought to determine a desired outcome.
Interestingly, attention can be defined as a courteous act indicating affection; “she tried to win his heart with her many attentions”
In many ways this applies to the landscape created by the disparate parts of our online social interaction.
We try to influence the external world of people places and things by our presence; when online our digital ghost provides an influencing framework through a continually contextual presence interacting with our social wake and bow wave. Our acts of attempted influence is our attention, just as much as our attention, when speaking in the language of quantum physics, creates our reality.
Filed under Diatribe | Comment (1)un-voiced rants, do they make a noise?
The IM stream started out fairly peaceful, if a bit, umm.. I dunno, antagonistic maybe.
THE RANT
there should be a law that says that no consumer should be held accountable in a contract in which the consumer cannot be expected to understand the language of the contract.
I said:
“lol
I might twitter that if I were you
some of the twitter ranters have quite a following”
Then he went on to say:
speaking of having a following, don’t you think you are more likely to fall into domestic wiretapping if you have followers in social networking with links to al quida?
what do you think the chances are you are literally 2 degrees away from a terrorist?
you early adopters are like the cavemen who tried the new berries. i’m watching you to find out what happens.\
i want to delete my facebook account because there are people adding me as a friend that i don’t want the world to confuse as an actual friend.
i now report all linkedin emails as spam. the only thing linked in ever sends me is spam.
i get requests to link into people i’ve never heard of. and i get 3 reminder emails every time i try to ignore it, so it’s in fact 3x worse than spam.
i am hiding my connections list on linkedin.
recruiters have been able to use me to get to my network without my consent and without going through reasonable channels. i was a zombie social spam node.
facebook is very scary to me. you tell facebook about your personal relationships, and facebook will notify all of your friends when you break up with your girlfriend. all your friends at once. you no longer are empowered to pick and choose how you communicate sensitive information. social networking is like 21st centry nudism.
it all hangs out where everybody can see.
IF NOBODY HEARS YOU
In my opinion my friend has a very good point here and there. He speaks with force and conviction. Shows his passion well. Problem is, of course, I’m the only person that hears his “voice”. And I’ve heard the general concept before. He does continue to come up with relevant points, but I expect that.
That which he is against is that which can make his point heard by more people, who might qualify and maybe modify his point of view. A catch-22 situation. What to do?
If anyone reads this, I’ll let comments speak for themselves.
Filed under Diatribe, Jumped The Shark, social spam | Comments (2)Why the socially networked are simply a crowd of noticers
we organize
we track
we recognize patterns,
we aggregate
we correlate
we disseminate,
we seek channels
we create channels,
we generate a bow wave
we surf in the search wake,
we curve space time with topical focus
we frame drag with our observation of the observations,
we plan, strategize, accumulate and postulate
and we say
Filed under Diatribe, Web 2.0 | Comment (0)It’s a Me, Me, Me, Meme World
The “me, me, me, meme.” What is it?
Cool tech geeks start something online. We jump on the bandwagon. Our friends see what’s going on. A crowd forms, asks questions, then follows our lead. Lifestreams form.
In the video game Final Fantasy VII, the Lifestream is a river of Mako energy coursing through the Planet. The Lifestream is considered the blood of the Planet, which in turn is considered a collective conscience similar to the Oversoul of transcendentalist philosophy, but not quite the same as the type of entity proposed in the Gaia theory.
Our own personal lifestreams, or “public timeline’s” if you prefer, are slightly more mundane that the one from Final Fantasy, however it can still be pondered in an analogous manner. Our lifestream threads together everything that we are. Where we go, what we say, who we interact with, how we express ourselves, concepts inside artwork that we create, symbolism that we identify. All can be considered “us” or “me” in some, hopefully non-banal, way.
We say “me” a lot in our lifestreams. Not always directly. Indirectly also. Off the top of our heads. Well thought out over hours of writing and editing. At the snap of the shutter on our iPhone. While visiting at parties and gatherings. By connecting/friending/following through social nets. Generating our APML wake and bow waves through the public timestream. We are the social seed for our downstream online and offline, everyone has a built-in personal wetware network and many people let this stream filter back online, forming a personal lifestream wake.
When we say “me” we say “we” a lot as well. The “we” message is buried in context of the “me” and provides the rich matrices upon which our lifestreams thrive. “ Frank is watching the Chicago Bears and blogging <link> - #twitter” tells me what Frank Gruber is up to, but the link was meant for his followers -”we”.
When Dave Winer snaps an iPhone photo in the Palo Alto Apple store, I see his Twitter/image post and also note, based on her earlier Tweet, that @StephAgresta is in the store at the same time. @SamHarrelson then notices that Dave might have captured @StephAgresta in his iPhone shot of the Apple store. I then see Stephanie twitter about a happenstance meeting in the Apple store with Dave, Robert Scoble and son. I know all these people, but am I watching a personal version of my own external life unfolding in a Twitter stream? Am I watching Dave’s? Robert’s & Patrick’s? Sam’s? Stephanie’s? Later on I notice (from his Twitter wake) that Robert and wife had their new baby and he might have been in the Apple store in connection with that wonderful event!
Now imagine a person walking up to you, whom you may not recognize immediately, saying “hi Dave/Steph, I just noticed from your twitter stream that you were in the PA Apple store and wanted to say ‘hi’ because we were in the same place at the same time. Our twitter streams crossed in time.”
Wow, new types of meetings are happening in today’s silicon valley technology stores … a new dimension to social meshing is occurring based on bridges being created between online and offline lifestreams.
Me. I’m in this place. I’m in this photo. I’m live video streaming you at this moment. I’m playing pool. I’m waiting at the airport. I’m on AirforceOne. I’m pondering my navel. I invented a new drug. I’m at a funeral. I participated in a Senate hearing. I’m blogging. When saying “me” we don’t like saying it into a vacuum, but that’s the way all lifestreams begin. Erupting from a birth-point in time. The spot upon which we first create a social persona and declare “I am me, and you shall learn more”, like some holy writ dug from the sands of ancient lands. In a world of 6 Billion people we are standing up to say “hello world - I am an individual.”
Now lot’s of folks are saying, “ya, but what about ‘them’, all of you ‘me’ focused people. “Them” - those outside our personal sphere, our socio-economic plateau, our comfort zone. “When you focus so much on yourself you ignore all those people around you.” It seems that if you place your thoughts out into the public consciousness one can be labeled “narcissistic” Who knew this would be the response from people who don’t do it, so can’t “get it?” Duh.
I say create a Twitter wake - drop your social seed and watch it sprout. “Me” “We” “Them” will intermingle. This is the power of connected networks of people.
Of course the solution to the “starting in a vacuum” problem above is simply to participate in life offline as well as online. The wetware networks feed your online social existence. Groupings, micro-crowds, followers, friends, whatever you want to call it, the systems of social interaction which we participate in will subsume our individuality to a greater good if we give at least as much as we receive. However, perhaps when we network in person, face-to-face we can talk about something other than “me” or “we”, I’m so tired of hearing “so, what do you ‘do’?”, perhaps we might re-focus a bit and put ourselves into the shoes of “them” and see what that feels like as a community after the “them” concepts we discuss filter back into our online “we” stream.
Filed under Diatribe, Geo-temporal, Microcrowds, Tagclouds, Web Marketing | Comments (7)The Inverted Mountain of Tech
This post was initially written several months ago… - eX
I’m certain that much has been written on the concept of younger generations learning higher technologies faster and earlier than older generations can keep up. This must be classic generational dynamics. i dunno, i didn’t bother to search.
However…I was considering the topic after watching my 4 year old nephew navigate Google the other day, doing things with children’s software which made no sense to me. As any parent knows, I was glimpsing a more pristine mind like I’d left far in my own past. Then NPR had a great piece which featured John Battelle discussing the government order for Google to release very private data.
The two ideas synthesized a disturbing perspective. The pace of technology has long reached the point where older generations can’t manage to stay anywhere near cutting edge ideas en mass, but the younger generations are not wise enough to comprehend the softly wrapped dangers of the Internet. This drives fear in the populace which (tightly wrung wires named politicians) see as a lever for which the public will vote.
The fundamental point? That older generations, without the skills to properly perceive online activity, disallowing the correct response to the minor, will simply be in a powerless position to protect their heritage.
So when you add the attempts of the government to gain access to virtually every shred of statistical online activity of ANYONE who has ever used the Google servers, this does cause me to pause. I understand Google’s motive to profit, but I fail to see the true agenda and reason for needing terrabytes of data, when the potential for abuse is so obvious.
It’s somewhat heroic of Google to stand up to the US government, especially one that imposes dramatic curbs on privacy in the service of a mythical agenda. The governments private agenda is another matter.
Bringing this back to what it means for parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, extended family members, social community and more, it’s very disturbing. generational gaps can be measured in processor speeds and core counts, and the gap in understanding of technology between generations is providing substantial risk to parent and child alike. But the risk is not ACCESS to information. The risk is subtle, because the fact is that the older generations will not even be aware that the risk exists. New technologies make this a fact which is irresistible. this fact drives the american economy.
This fact drives tech companies to innovate and it also propels fanatics. Many times the only difference is a lack of political je ne sais quoi.
The inverted mountain of tech is balanced on a point of history. A realization that the same innovation driving our economy and our fears is the same thing that is cracking our historical social structures, can only lead to something better.
Filed under Diatribe, Web 2.0 | Comment (0)
