“Companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities—key findings of our fifth annual survey on these tools and technologies, in which we asked more than 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy them and the benefits they confer. When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, respondents say, confirming last year’s survey results.”

Some of the findings are very interesting, for instance, “We found statistically significant correlations between self-reported corporate performance metrics and certain business processes that networked enterprises use (Exhibit 5),” as well as, “Another key performance measure, self-reported operating-margin improvements, correlated positively with the reported percentage of employees whose use of social technologies was integrated into their day-to-day work.”

All in all, I found it an interesting, if brief, report that offered some interesting and quantified insights into how enterprises using social tools are gaining competitive advantage.

Benefits remain consistent over time

Download report here.

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others, whether that need is great or small in any given individual, violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not jusy a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear. Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.

- Alan Moore

“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”

- Venessa Miemis

From: Sharing social experience is key to better teams and awareness

Social search has the potential to improve search practices beyond what is possible with traditional informational retrieval algorithms. Two different models of social search should be incorporated into enterprise and conventional search systems today. Collective Search involves aggregating social metadata, trends, and previous tags, bookmarks, or information shared by social networks. Collaborative Search, or question-answering, occurs when two or more participants actively engage in an information seeking task. Interactions include everything from replying to a one-time question to dually negotiating the query formation and relevancy of specific results to arrive at a shared consensus of best fit.

This talk will frame the relevant models of social search in the context of Brynn’s research, and discuss the potential benefits for both users as well as organizations. We will extend these trends and findings to concrete design considerations that we encourage system designers to consider in order to leverage social search capabilities within the enterprise.

Complete notes and citations were done by Brynn and everything can be found here.

Just got a nice review in EContent Magazine.

Fittingly, the ESS West track ended on Thursday with “Designing for Sociality in Enterprise Search,” presented by Will Evans, director of experience design, Semantic Foundry and researcher and author Brynn Evans (no relation. The duo delivered a highly conversational presentation about social interaction design, or what they call “SxD,” in a truly interactive way. As a team, they explored the various stages or manifestations of social search and provided a graphic look into its potential impact in the enterprise, revealing ideas about a potential engine and how it might work; incorporating things like “friend filtered search,” “social scents,” and even a suggestion box that says something like “You seem to be having trouble, would you like to ask your network for help?”

“Pray like a martyr dusk til dawn
Beg like a hooker all night long
Jested the devil with my song
And got what I wanted all along”

Camus said, “To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.” Which was also, interestingly enough, reminiscent of this quote I found on Chris Marker:

“Travel between the extremes.” – Daedelus to Icarus [Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book VIII]

So, and, I just had another one of those dreams, and there was no sun. They are coming back . . . faster now. I don’t know why they are back, but it does not bode well. I am neither sleeping more nor less that usual. Iago. Bleating. Refract. You’ll see me try and wrap an analysts’ mind around zero-time, and slowly descend into hell. At least Virgil is here to keep me company. God, it’s cold in here, but not so cold as to warrant turning on the heat, besides which it might reach seventy-five degrees here in PA today, but I am traveling with the sun to San Francisco, hoping my wings don’t melt.

“History is essentially longitudinal, memory essentially vertical. History essentially consists of passing along the event. Being inside the event, memory essentially and above all consists of not leaving it, staying in it and going back through it from within.”
– Gilles Deleuze, (as quoted in Wounded Time; Chris Marker)

I have just poured the third cup of coffee down my throat, and you know things are completely f00-b@red when my cough still lingers and haunts me like Hamlet’s father, I just can’t read his purpose, so I was thinking that if the technological annihilation of space-time was something that Marx and others had flagged|flogged in the 19th century, its late 20th-century manifestation differed in the degree to which the intertwining of the global and the local would now completely saturate every aspect of my so-called life. Since the mid-1980s, my 2nd degree understanding of McLuhan’s understanding of technology as sensory extension (of nervous system):

“During the mechanical ages we had
extended our bodies in space. Today, after
more than a century of electronic technology,
we have extended our central nervous
system itself in a global embrace,
abolishing space and time as far as our
planet is concerned….As electronically
contracted, the globe is no more than a
village.” [McLuhan, 1974:11,12-13]

This has been reprised by Paul Virilio (a great burning sphincter, but more later on that), but this time as catastrophe. This is what I wanted to say weeks ago when I first mentioned in fits and starts the nervous system metaphor and reference to McLuhan in the context of Reichelt‘s Ambient Intimacy as it relates to Twitter’s Networked Publics. For Virilio, every new technology necessarily presumes a new ‘accident’. The initially confined rise of the dynamic, given that the communication technologies which are at first mobile, then automotive, ‘vehicle’ is succeeding the transportation technologies of the [suddenly] followed by the generalized rise 19th century have now reached ‘light-speed’ forecast, of pictures and sounds in the static technological accident can no longer be localized in “place”; the vehicles of the audio-visual. . . . From about the time I was born, the generalized accident of ubiquitous ‘real time’ on everything has happened without us, communication produces nothing less than the moving, without us even having to set out. Exhaustion of the spatio-temporal dimensions of the (Virilio, 1989a: 112) world. This abolition of the distance and perspective, which was once the frame for proper ‘human’ experience, erodes memory, and now, with what Virilio calls the ‘third revolution’ of nanotechnologies, ubicomp and transplants, results in an (endo)-colonization of the body – in essence, through Twitter, “friends” co-colonize one other self-similarly in memespace and perhaps that “discovery of self,” that Chan talks about is by reading the subject’s (read:me) reflection in the Twitterstream. Animating Virilio’s understanding of technology is it’s intimate connection to militarization: the dromo-politics inaugurated by the breakdown of feudal society analyzed in Speed and Politics (1986) leads directly to the vision machine of War and Cinema (1989), which in turn spreads implacably to become The Vision Machine (1994) inhabiting modern culture. But I’m losing interest in this topic now.

I’m still in the old place in Cambridge, in my dream, and in front of the School Street Borders; this person of my height, my build, simil(air) enough to be Aaron, walks up along side me, as I am walking. He leans in close, winks at me. Winks at me a second time before I ask: “who are you?” He replies, as if it meant nothing “Your brother.” and hands me a piece of paper. I don’t have time to read the piece of paper. He in quick succession explains he’s been across the country 10 times since 2001, when he died. He winks. He had to, He’s sorry. He sees Zach; Zach is there too, and he says the same thing to Zach he said to me. I don’t know whether to believe him, I am so torn between the want to believe him and the unequivocal fact that Aaron died. Aaron is dead. The non-Aaron has to go, he will call though. He’s gone now, I un-crumple the paper, it is a long, wicked, wry smile,drawn in sharp black lines, and a picture of a rose. It is not Aaron’s hand. I know throughout every cell of my body. John arrives and asks who that was. Zach doesn’t miss a beat, says “I don’t know. Fucking broke my heart, though.”

Wake up.

Tears are rolling down my face even before I wake; I am shaking, my whole body feels cold. Seeing ghosts is supposed to leave you cold. The atomic bomb realization of Aaron’s death begets the ‘information bomb’; in Ellulian manner, Virilio (1995) declares that ‘Totalitarianism is latent in technology.’ And now I wonder about this in the context of this habitus and Twitter and how, by participating, I have created my own panopticon of control through the surveillance by my “friends.” So we are not at all surprised by the heat, speed and intensity of modern conflict. Information bombs, less nuclear and more like strings of fireworks going off rapid fire on a Chinese New year Celebration. What about the totalitarianism of death? Fuck you for taking him away. Fuck you fuck you fuck you, oh shit I’m fucking crying again, and I need to fucking scream at someone, need to break someone, need the ocean to roar against; the elements to accuse; to blame; to hurl insult after insult against. I’m being driven mad by this raging animosity, but I refuse to pacify myself. I am the motherfucking negative sub-lime. Iago – Iago. Fuck all.

Reinferenced: I think I continue with this Iago rapture (we know why of course, and don’t be disturbed by my recursivity this morning, blame fucking Tool), capture and cleave a conceptual model of my beingness-in-time dreams amid chartered sufferings. They submerge my canceled heritage, which must needs empties itself of carbon horizons and kaleidoscopic deposits (Yeah – I ripped that sentence structure from Marcuse but violently interrogated the intersubtextuality of it at the same time).  My heroes also outline the mechanics of our movie picture presence (but straight lo-rez: not HD, not yet.), as though “to see” could possibly improve the pixels an impregnated clock defends within its waxing invisibility, returning me back to this ghost of Aaron.

Time marches over erosion even wearing my round. Stones fall from my cliff-thoughts and ears until I can’t even recognize the DETONATION. I once saw rain become water in mid-air, forgetting its falling habit (AND, for the briefest second saw my own wilted reflection blowed in the drop before it burst into vapour).  Today’s no doubt another day remiss or pasture encloaked stillness, but still expansive, I feel, another outer foil parlayed within her presence but held aside looming in within my souls compiled chants.  I’d no other in my heart, but hearing is made another specific instance of what becalms me, you, or holds the distant waves within my own shimmering.  It’s a fathom and instance for clinging vines no distance reams the door, your own hesitation diminishing here and there, but history is still a room away, and the open forums your imagined calling out for recognition are made aside no more retreat the flame returns and hears your names and dates remove themselves from the outer framer.   I waved around.  The further reaches of doubt are clearly explored but with a newer chance, with specific details made different, operating with success and fortressed out from the healer’s claims.  The cars and others are not moving any more but are enfolded like my hourly substances calling out for their own recognition.  Here’s the day again, and mine own name is still a flamer en retard, my own airs so far from removal that the reminiscence of vocabulary is still intense.  The more fortunate of the remaining peasants still their own voices to secure the safety of an imminent future.  What is held aside, hope for instance, is the residue of history encrypted within the being of a prophet’s vision.  No hourly fortunes are welcomed here.  There are far more empty cans than sacks to contain them, and in the sentence itself there are suggestions about where the true energies might lie and ignore refusal.  The benign doubters stall around, marking out their own rhythms with word-choice inhabitants in their own collars, but the fuller gaps are made of light itself, satiated like a claim for espousal.  I’d make these rotations claim their own space.   Here the faster scores recall; in less random alluvials, mine own matter forges a leaner score than you might imagine.  The definitions themselves are cloudy but intense, in tents or otherwise, sensations heaved from one room to another; but the mediatron, furniture and home-security system and so forth, have their own placement within the imagination of my walls, the house itself a Forger of Latent Claims, a denied multi-frame, but bleating light-hearted flips and balances from the tinder-board within its own shell. Fucking Bleating, man.

Why is this happening now? Two weeks ago I had that Despite-All-Probability-Aaron-is-Still-Alive dream. I hadn’t had one for months before that (and no, writing the seven year Kaddish was not meant to end the dreams and his return). Before that, maybe years. They are accelerating “the quickening,” up now. I don’t know if I am able to take this systematic destabilization of my soul from sources within or without. Speeding up now. Woke up crying. Fuck all. Wanna know the really fucked up part? Fucker didn’t even look like Aaron. He did enough to scare me, to remind me, and all I needed was the push, but I so easily could mistake a face for his. Winking? Aaron would never do that. The rose may have gotten in there, but never that mocking, wry smile, like it knew it’s power over me, like [insert nuevo goddess here] like everything that seduces, eludes, conceives and anoints me, draws me away from narcissism, captured completely in the mirrow-image. A lasting piece of delighted scrims; these are the days before the Harvest, John, these are the days we plant our seed.  But what of the expectations that there might be something to all of this?  It’s a question mark we don’t decide, but hear the echoes of our own streaming æthers invoking sigils, scoring the days aside and outer.  I’d no other, but cast them quickly in the morning or mid-day, a delight for all to see, but scheduled like a microwave emitting satellite weapon pointed directly back at us.  Bleating. Self-satisfied, that damn smile. I couldn’t not have a mental picture of Aaron in my dream, how could there be such a difference? He was the best of us, the shining vitalist amongst these shadows, John, and our hopes held up high, and shake our fucking fists at the gates and the Book and the Word, and I am a poor reproduction who since my self-imagined death, would have leaned more into Analyst mode of being to compensate for our loss, for the loss of everyone, in losing Aaron. I feel that now. But nothing can compare to those Aaron’=s I demand the world give me back. And this is where storming the ramparts comes in. So, then, I am these frames aside from what was there before, and contain within me these reminders of mine own schedule fleeting in the mists. Where does this leave us? How about a poem to get this party started. Might as well, since i have to get moving, and anyway I’m a selfish shit, it’s the reason I write this crap. This one goes out to the affection-addicts in the crowd. One Luv, Baby.

And Alex just wrote something dedicated to me, but I haven’t nearly the brain power to read it yet – but you should. It’s no doubt better than reading my masturbatory madness. Seriously.

Je suis simulé. Ought-Nine

re-contextualized,

suffisamment,

l’individu,

conscience,

not transcendent, indiqué,

accessible, conforme,

efficacement censée pour l’examen émergent constant,

pour différer, envisagé, vérifié,

TiVo je!

circonspect, insinué, confirmé,

géré en réseau, established, foreseeable,

interpretable, _extensible_, apparent,

clearly                comprehensible,

drawn in pixels,

consumed by doubt,

harmonious,

several, composed,

ordered,

dis-ordered & prone to seizure,

well-reasoned
comprehensible,

in-

bound one the other, actively located,

pattern recognizable,

limited integer, de-finite, provable,

conformed, remotely controlled

authorized, semantic, complex, specific,

reasonable, regulated, indicated,

solitary, given, improvable, implied,

maintained, up-datable, logical, splayed out,

eviscerated, streamed as packets,

and rendered by diods for consumption.

Broadcast me.

To discuss social media strategy in the context of design choices affecting application design, functions, as well as user-centricity in social media design, the unique attributes of online communication which can only steer individual and aggregate engagement within the social network through cues, incentives and community enforced social norms must be well understood. Further, to discuss strategy and design patterns in social media site architecture/design and their impact on human behavior requires at the very least a general understanding of the writing on topics concerning sociology, social networking theory, anthropology and marketing. Taken one step further — to adequately advise companies seeking to leverage social media effectively as part of their customer communications and marketing strategy requires a rigorous, and not haphazard understanding of these new channels – attributes unique to them, because they are social in nature.

Until now, at least, I have not seen a list compiled of essential reading. Many people herald themselves and promote others as ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ when it comes to social software, social media, and the design of strategies, platforms and solutions around these topics for enterprises and government entitites. I thought to myself that this expertise must be born of something more significant and tangible than simply writing a blog about the topic, or having a vast number of connections (friends?) on Facebook or Twitter. I needed some metric, some standard by which I could discern charlatans from strategists. This is my measuring stick. When I rant/rage/ruminate about social media douchebags, I should define my terms and set my standards. This list is an effort to do so. You certainly don’t need to read these – but these are how I measure. To toss around social media douchebag with no standard by which to hurl such an accusation would be as intellectually bankrupt as those that would seek to raid the coffers of well-meaning companies without the skill, passion, or empathy required to deliver real results. This is my list. This is my yard stick.

Needless to say, I just included the Amazon.com reviews or descriptions for lack of time, but all these come highly recommended. These are definite (actually – not quite, but this is all I have read) – these are the shit!

If you have recommendations to add to this list – please chime in, because it’s important. This list is a living organism that must be fed.

13 Books You Must Read – Social Software, Social Networks and Social Media Primer

Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Joshua Porter

Designing for the Social Web

Description: Josh is a web designer, researcher, and writer living in Newburyport, MA, USA. He run a web design and consulting company called Bokardo Design. From Amazon: No matter what type of web site or application you’re building, social interaction among the people who use it will be key to its success. They will talk about it, invite their friends, complain, sing its high praises, and dissect it in countless ways. With the right design strategy you can use this social interaction to get people signing up, coming back regularly, and bringing others into the fold. With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

——

Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers

by Tyrone L. Adams (Editor), Stephen A. Smith (Editor)

Electronic Tribes

Review: The major contribution of this book is that the idea of ‘tribe’ is fully and robustly explicated in ways that challenge existing wisdom, particularly the idea that Internet users are best understood as communities. . . . The richness of diverse research resources is evident in every chapter. I particularly commend the editors on the international perspective and the inclusion of such a surprising array of subcultures. (H. L. Goodall Jr., Director, Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University )

——

First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game

by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

First Person

Review: “You have entered the rotunda of a gleaming, new conference center. Above you hangs a banner: ‘Welcome to First Person.’ In front of you, you see doors leading into separate conference rooms, each of which is marked with a sign in large, Futura Bold letters: ‘Cyberdrama, ‘ ‘Ludology, ‘ ‘Simulation, ‘ ‘Hypertext and Interactives, ‘ and so on. You soon discover that every room in this virtual conference called First Person is filled with informed discussion and lively controversy from major figures in the emerging field of Game Studies. Some are arguing that digital games (as the heirs of the novel and of film) constitute the next great arena for storytelling; others respond that games are not narratives at all and require a different theoretical framework and a new discipline. Still others are describing their own exciting contributions to interactive fiction, poetry, or visual/verbal art. By the time you return from this virtual tour of the world of Game Studies, you realize that all of these rooms (and all these topics) are connected in an intricate and compelling architecture of ideas. You begin to understand the rich possibilities that computer games offer . . . as drama, narrative, and simulation. You come to appreciate the great theoretical task that lies before us in exploring both the formal properties and the cultural significance of computer games.” –Jay David Bolter, Wesley Professor of New Media, Georgia Institute of Technology

——

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

Groundswell

Description: Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.
When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

——

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means

by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Linked

Review: How is the human brain like the AIDS epidemic? Ask physicist Albert-László Barabási and he’ll explain them both in terms of networks of individual nodes connected via complex but understandable relationships. Linked: The New Science of Networks is his bright, accessible guide to the fundamentals underlying neurology, epidemiology, Internet traffic, and many other fields united by complexity. Barabási’s gift for concrete, non-mathematical explanations and penchant for eccentric humor would make the book thoroughly enjoyable even if the content weren’t engaging. But the results of Barabási’s research into the behavior of networks are deeply compelling. Not all networks are created equal, he says, and he shows how even fairly robust systems like the Internet could be crippled by taking out a few super-connected nodes, or hubs. His mathematical descriptions of this behavior are helping doctors, programmers, and security professionals design systems better suited to their needs. Linked presents the next step in complexity theory–from understanding chaos to practical applications.

——

Networked Publics

by Kazys Varnelis

Networked Publics

Review: “Networked Publics is a lucid, timely, and broadly interdisciplinary look at the most important technological and social change of our time: the sudden wiring and un-wiring of the planet into a broadband network, with communication devices in the pockets of a significant proportion of the world’s population. There is very little that is more important, more discussed, and less widely understood than the meaning of the emerging technosocial networks that are adopting digital media for a wide range of social, cultural, political, and economic ends. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, economists, educators, designers, political scientists, computer scientists, legal and policy experts—the Networked Publics group—was the only way to try to capture the meaning of a phenomenon that is interdisciplinary by its nature. The team project blog was a beacon of clear thinking while the project was in progress, and the book is a sound foundation for debates about what networked publics mean, how they can be encouraged, how they should be regulated, how to protect against their dangerous aspects.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of Smartbombs: The Next Social Revolution

——

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

by Erving Goffman

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Description: A study of human behavior in social situations and the way we appear to others. Dr. Goffman has employed as a framework the metaphor of theatrical performance. Discussions of social techniques are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

——

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition)

by Duncan J. Watts

Six Degrees

Review: You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they’re being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest.

——

Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton Studies in Complexity)

by Duncan J. Watts

Small Worlds

Review: An engaging and informative introduction. Science Playfully and clearly written… [Watts] uses examples adroitly, and mixes abstract theory with real-world anecdotes with superb skill… I have not enjoyed reading a book this much in a long time. — Peter Kareiva Quarterly Review of Biology [Small Worlds] will be seized on by those seeking a first rough map of this fascinating new mathematical land. Those entering can expect to find some amazing connections between areas of research with apparently nothing in common, such as neurology to business studies. But then, it’s a small world. — Robert Matthews New Scientist Informally written and aimed at a wide audience, this book shows how mathematics yields new vistas on ubiquitous and seemingly familiar aspects of our world

——

The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You

by Mark Buchanan

The Social Atom

Description: Buchanan (Ubiquity: The Science of History) reaches out to the audience for pop social science like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics with the concept of “social physics,” a scientific model for the patterns that emerge from the interactions among large groups of people. Though his observations that people excel at imitating the successful behavior of others and will often form collective bonds over such fundamental pretenses as shared ethnic heritage aren’t startling, Buchanan leans on his background in theoretical physics and treats these ideas as “a quantum revolution in the social sciences.” His presentation is muted by a tendency to talk around the subject, recapping prior discussions and promising future developments instead of establishing a clear, compelling thread. Though the real-life scenarios he uses to illustrate his theories—such as the unexpected revival of Times Square or the outbreak of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia—are engaging, some sections draw upon computer simulations of arbitrary behavior that illustrate his thesis but don’t command equal interest. This is a great idea for a magazine article, but awkward at book length. (June)

——

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

by Seth Godin

Tribes

Description: A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have joined tribes, be they religious, ethnic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger and enabling new tribes to be born – groups of ten or ten million who care about a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.

——

The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki

The Wisdom of Crowds

Description: While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” To support this almost counter-intuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we’re all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people’s errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are “smarter” than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki’s style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

Cluetrain Manifesto

Description: The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; thesis no. 20: “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them”; thesis no. 62: “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall”; thesis no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! –Harry C. Edwards –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

——–

Soundtrack: Koyaanisquatsi, “Prophesies”

This is another article exploring Identity, Self & Social Networks within the context of various western philosophers. A previous article entitled “Heidegger 2 Twitter, Technology, Self and Social Networks,” was written previously and exists antecedent to this article. The goal of these blog postings is to find placement of our current circumstances within the traditions of modern philosophical thought, as it were.

“Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.”

—Tom Wolfe (The Painted Word. Stated in regard to Andy Warhol.)

Esse Is Percipi

George Berkeley is probably the philosopher in the Western tradition who most fully anticipates our current ideas about our experience of reality on social networks. He notoriously argues that esse is percipi: to be is to be perceived. In his own time, Berkeley was merely taking the doctrine of empiricism to its logical extreme. If our minds contain nothing but atomistic perceptions – which is to say, ideas or representations-then it is superfluous to posit, in addition, a material world out there that would be independent of these ideas, although supposedly giving rise to them. Mental representations themselves are enough, says Berkeley, especially since — according to our initial assumptions — we can never get beyond them in any case. Berkeley’s argument reads like an unintended reductio ad absurdum of what Richard Rorty calls “the ‘idea’ idea”: the Cartesian notion that the mind is like a theater in which consciousness is a detached spectator that contemplates and manipulates special objects of inner sense (ideas or representations). The major philosophical question then becomes that of how our mental representations relate to their corresponding objects in the material world.

The genius of Berkeley is to simply short-circuit this whole dilemma, by negating the material world altogether. His radical conclusions follow logically and powerfully from his dubious initial premises. Now, nearly all of the important twentieth-century philosophers reject “the ‘idea’ idea” in the first place. But the representationalist approach remains alive and well in other fields, most notably in AI (artificial intelligence) research and in cognitive science. Cognitive scientists start from the assumption — not that computers should be understood by comparison to human minds, but rather that human minds themselves can already be understood in terms of computers. This is more than just “some rough analogy,” says Andy Clark; “it is not that the brain is somehow like a computer,” but that it “actually is some such device”. This means that cognitive scientists conceive minds, on the model of digital computers, as information processors that work by performing logical operations upon internal representations of external phenomena. This is why Berkeley is still relevant today. In twenty-first century terms, his argument may be rephrased as the claim that our experience of existence is already virtual. And that is indeed what the cognitive scientists say. They claim that the “real world” of our perceptions is in fact largely a construction of our own inner cognitive processes. “You and I, we humans, we mammals, we animals, inhabit a virtual world…the brain works as a sophisticated virtual reality computer” wrote Dawkins in “Unweaving the Rainbow.” Our sense of reality is the product of simulation. It only remains for the cognitive scientists to follow Berkeley all the way down that road and jettison the “outer world” altogether as an extravagant, unnecessary hypothesis. I have become my Twitter personality @semanticwill and there is no need for Will Evans in meat-space.There will then be no escaping the control of the social network.

Eyes Wide Fucking Shut.

Berkeley is surprisingly unperturbed by the obvious objection that, if his theory were correct, then objects would cease to exist whenever we stopped looking at them. He dismisses this worry on a number of grounds, all of which apply just as well to our current conceptions of reality in social networks. First of all, Berkeley says, if things exist only as perceptions or representations in the mind, then that tree yonder just as surely exists when i am thinking of it with my eyes closed as it does when I am looking at it directly. In either case, the tree is being perceived as an idea by my inner sense. Berkeley brackets the whole question of the cause of perception; what matters is only its effect within my mind. But this is the very principle of virtual reality; as Deleuze puts it, “simulation designates the power of producing an effect” even in the absence of anything that is supposed to be  a cause. In the second place, Berkeley says, the fact that I may only perceive a given object intermittently doesn’t impugn the consistency of the object. There is no reason why the object shouldn’t have the same features and appear in the same place whenever I do happen to perceive it or think of it. There is no more reason for me to worry that the tree will be uprooted because I took away from it than there is for me to worry that the objects of a virtual world, or the icons on my desktop, will dissipate because I turn off my computer. In either case– when I look back at the tree, or when I turn the computer on again–I will find that everything is exactly the way I left it. In the third place, and most importantly for Berkeley, just because a given idea is no longer present in my mind does not mean that it is likewise absent from all other minds just as when I turn off Tweetdeck, most of my virtual connections still exist — and many continue to converse even in my absence.

The proper logical conclusion from the intermittency of my ideas is “not that [sensible objects] have no real existence,” but rather that “there must be some other mind wherein they exist”. Ultimately, for Berkeley, this other mind is God. Today, we are more likely to say that it is the computer, or better, the network, on which the virtual reality simulation is being run , or even, in the case of the ‘other’ instantiated through their Profile on a social network – I am because my profile exists on the social network. Perhaps this is the reason for the proliferation of home pages, blogs, and profiles on social networking sites. To be online is already to be perceived. Even if no one ever visits your website, you are still visible to the network itself. Your Profile is still on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or MySpace. [You] still exist. For the network is the modern instantiation and understanding of G-d, the unsleeping omni-voyeur. The cogito of simulated reality therefore reads: I am connected, therefore I exist.

Long before the internet, Warhol already understood this logic. His film Empire (1964) shows the Empire State Building in a single continuous stationary shot that lasts for over eight hours. Warhol’s stated purpose in making this film was to turn the building into “a star!”. And we must say that he succeeded, just by virtue of having made the film. Nobody actually has to watch Empire in order for the movie to have its effect. As long as the film is rolling through the projector, the virtual, simulacra image is perceived, as it were, by the cinematic apparatus itself; and so the Empire State Building actually is a star.

Appearances, Profiles & Self

Perhaps the oddest thing about Berkeley’s argument is his claim that, in fact, the argument has no pragmatic consequences. “After having wandered through the wild mazes of philosophy,” he writes, we “return to the simple dictates of nature,” and “come to think like other men”. Berkeley indulges in metaphysical speculation, the better to put an end to such speculation. He denies the existence of matter, he says, only in order to refute skepticism and vindicate the assumptions of common sense. This may seem like a crazy, and outrageously backward, way to proceed, but Berkeley’s point is that the best way of “saving the appearances” is to show that there is nothing besides appearances, no real world behind this apparent one. In an immaterial world — or what is the same, a virtual world–nothing is hidden, and everything is precisely what it seems.

In a certain way, then, Berkeley anticipates Nietzsche‘s polemic against those metaphysicians who distrust the senses. Berkeley could easily say, along with Nietzsche, that the senses “do not lie at all…The ‘apparent’ world is the only one; the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added…”. Berkeley’s critique of skepticism is oddly congruent with Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. For Berkeley, skepticism arises when we posit the existence of an external, material world, only to discover that we can know nothing about such a world and that we can have no access to it. For Nietzsche, similarly, nihilism arises when we posit the existence of a transcendent “real world,” only to discover that such a world is empty and that we can have no access to it. Of course, it is crucial that Berkeley denies the existence of the transcendent materiality, while Nietzsche denies the existence of transcendent ideality. The radical conclusion Nietzsche draws form his arguments could not be further from the pious conclusions Berkeley draws from his. For Nietzsche, everything changes when we learn to accept appearances – that My Profile == Me; traditional conceptions of self crumble, and everything must be created anew. For Berkeley, in contrast, nothing changes; the order of the world is confirmed, once we realize that everything is just an appearance – My Profile != Me – it is just a projection of self. We can read Nietzsche and Berkeley, therefore, as rival science fiction writers, offering alternative visions of what Michael Heim calls “the metaphysics of simulated instantiations of self,” on social networks.

I stalked and captured Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, style guides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are leading a workshop on design patterns at this year’s Interaction’09 in Vancouver; and, Erin and Christian are writing a book on patterns for designing social spaces for O’Reilly.

“An interaction design pattern is not a step-by-step recipe or a specification. It’s a set of things we’ve learned that tend to work in clearly defined situations as well as some known issues that need to be balanced or sorted out or otherwise addressed. A pattern is closer to a checklist than to a mock or a wireframe.”

How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?

Christian Crumlish (Xian): I came from book publishing where I wore many hats over the years (editor, author, agent). I ended up in technical publishing (“computer books”), an aftermarket made possible by shoddy user interfaces. This piqued my interest and the Web democratized information architecture, interaction and interface design.

Erin Malone: I actually started out as a print designer and Art Director. I went to grad school at RIT around the peak of CD ROMs. I did a project in Hypercard (in 1993). I thought I was going to do interactive education CDroms when I graduated but then the web happened. I taught myself HTML and came out to California to build Adobe’s first website, and I’ve been doing web applications and interactive work ever since.

Lucas Pettinati: I studied Architecture in college after realizing that one doesn’t learn how to design GUIs in a Computer Science program. My first job out of college was at an internet startup where I did general design work but it wasn’t until I created a user flow diagram that I fell in love with the principles of IA and Interaction Design.

Read the whole interview on Boxes & Arrows. »

“Designing and Building with Patterns and Pattern Libraries” workshop at Interaction‘09

Erin, Xian, and Lucas are leading a patterns workshop at Interaction‘09 in Vancouver. “Designing and Building with Patterns and Pattern Libraries” is a hands on workshop where participants will come away with some practical experience spotting patterns, describing them, and thinking about how to apply them to design work.

You can find out more about the workshop on the Interaction ‘09 website: http://interaction09.crowdvine.com/talks/show/2574

Interaction Design Pattern Libraries

Christian and Erin’s book, Designing Social Interfaces, has a website where you can contribute to, refine, and discuss social design patterns: http://designingsocialinterfaces.com/

Designing Interfaces
by Jenifer Tidwell

Yahoo Design Pattern Library
by Yahoo

UI patterns
by Anders Toxboe

Interaction Design patterns for games
by Eelke Folmer

Mobile User Interface Design Patterns
by Little Springs Design

Web Patterns
by UC Berkeley

[W]e will sing of the nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy raiIway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts. (Marinetti, 1909)

F.T. Marinetti, ‘Les mots en liberte futuristes’, 1919

Heidegger wrote one of the most important philosophical critiques of technology in his “The Question Concerning Technology.” He describes technology not simply as a collection of artifacts but as an all encompassing world view “the technological understanding of being.” A culture’s assembled tools and practices define for them a particular way of both seeing and interacting with the world. This has changed through a series of epochs in the western world: from a model of man amongst wild nature, to the religious world view of the middle ages, through to the modern world where technology was designed to stand against nature and satisfy desires of autonomous subjects, into an age of information, and now one of manifest networks of communities. In this new epoch, networks of social communities completely “enframes” the world, fitting everything into a grand unified ecosystem, and treating everything as a potential node to be used and exploited, friended and followed. Both object and subject are converted to a “standing-reserve”, to be disaggregated, redistributed, recontextualized, and reaggregated.

When Heidegger wrote in the middle part of the last century, the paradigm he had in mind for demonstrating the ‘enframement of being’ was the electrical grid. Hydroelectric dams convert rivers into a resource for energy, that energy is distributed across the population, and everyone in the population is reliant upon the distribution system. But the new era of networked computers fits Heidegger’s model even better. Information and our relationships in the context of social networks is the ultimate resource. It can be endlessly disaggregated, remixed and redistributed. The network ‘enframes’ our entire world, because information about anything can be sent over the network. And human individuals, who were once reduced to resources (Frederick Taylor, and the authoritarianism of Human Resource departments), or “eyeballs” in the terminology of internet marketing executives; are now the creative engines of growth, innovation, and creativity.

Albert Borgmann builds upon Heidegger’s work in his books “Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life” and ” Crossing the Postmodern Divide” (Borgmann, 1984 and 1992). Borgmann sees technology as providing the promise of a better, easier life, but it seduces us into substituting the collection of material objects for a focus on what makes the good life (family, friends, sex and food). He distinguishes two types of technological artifacts: focal things and devices. Focal Things form the loci for a set of activities that defines a form of living, places such as the kitchen provided a setting for much of family life. Devices, on the other hand, tended to be hidden and so encourage us to think of the good they produce as a commodity whose utility is to be maximized within the constraints of time and money. The device paradigm replacement for the kitchen/hearth might be a central heating unit or furnace. It provides heat, but its operation is usually hidden, so we think of the heat merely as a commodity, not as the central organizing focus for the family (Borgmann, 1984, pp. 41-42). This becomes even more interesting when we wonder about the context and meaning of start-ups intentionally exposing their office space’s ductwork – as if the open office with exposed pipes re-instantiates a manifestation of the hearth, or at least ‘un-hides’ the circulatory system of commerce.

In his later book, Borgmann sees fit to differentiate between “modern, hard” technology, which through rigidity and control overcame the resistance of nature to fabricate durable devices, and “postmodern, soft” technology, which through flexibility and adaptiveness produces a diverse array of goods for specialized activities. Postmodern technology uses the hyper-reality of simulations to get rid of the limitations imposed by reality. The limit of postmodern reality is not the total objectification of nature, but the replacement of reality by virtual reality totally under our control. The objects of reality disappear to the extent that we as subjects gain control over them, but we are similarly reduced to “a point of arbitrary desires.” (Borgmann, 1992, p. 108) Modern computing devices allows us the freedom to do many things, but in so doing we risk our intelligence becoming diffuse, our memory lost without our electronic aids — my iPhone is my memory, contact list, communication device, assistant and extension of my central nervous system – I don’t even know my best friends phone numbers, email or meat-space addresses any longer.

Borgmann’s antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities. Focal activities are practices which center our attention on the richness of life. For example, the preparation of a well cooked meal calls upon our skill, focuses our attention on the necessities of life, and can be an aesthetic or sacramental communal activity, where as frozen dinners commodify the process of eating. Technology can assist in the performance of focal activities – witness the wide array of kitchen implements available – as long as the technology does not become the focus instead of the activity. It takes commitment on our part to engage in focal activities, but the effort affords us a chance to maintain some sense of self in the technological world. (Borgmann, 1992, p. 116-122)

Marcuse and the critical theorists harshly criticize the technological way of life. Technological thinking, by measuring everything in quantifiable terms, leads us to think in abstract and de-contextulized ways. By quantifying everything we separate the ethical from the true, and values are relegated to the subjective. Thus technological rationality can claim that technologies are value neutral, and only uses are good or evil, despite the fact that the uses are shaped by the technologies. And technology leads to new forms of domination. For the critical theorists history has always had domination, but in our time domination has changed from master over slave or lord over serf to the domination of humanity by economics and the market. We are given the illusion of liberty, but that is simply the freedom to choose between brands of mass-produced products. Computer technology further de-contextualizes human experience by emphasizing information over understanding. And computers further domination by providing new means of tracking the productivity of workers to the corporation and depersonalizing supervision; very much a modern panopticon envisioned by Jeremy Bentham.

Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham

While Marcuse concentrates on the domination of technology, it is not clear who is dominating whom; we are all caught up in the web of technological society. Foucault speaks of power instead of domination. Power is evident in all human activities, whether they are oppressive or benign. Power can be used to dominate, but it can also be used to transform. Technologies, social institutions and practices are all interconnected in the applications of power, and so new technologies can bring about a change in the power structure within society. Foucault’s view allows for the possibility that information technology could be used to put people in more direct communication with each other and spread the concentration of power over society. (Coyne, 1995, pp. 90-98)

How Do I Interact With Digital Technology?

The development of widespread digital technology, from laptops to iPhones, has changed many of our daily practices. Borgmann describes the evolution of writing equipment. The fountain pen encouraged us to write to someone to whom the quality of our handwriting mattered, carefully composing our thoughts on serious personal matters. The typewriter was better suited for the rapid recording of business matters or factual reports. Now, MS Word and freely available blogging software encourages us to constantly revise, so a work becomes a series of drafts, none of which is final (just like this post). And when the computer is connected to the internet the drafts can be circulated to many people for input (using co-author technologies like Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword), so that authorship becomes diffuse. I post this article, you comment, I revise – in a constant, evolutionary strange loop. So devices are not neutral, they affect the possibilities available to us, as well as ‘enframe’ our relationships with both the objects (which are now collaborative-with the ontology to organize them – which is collective) and the people’s acting upon those objects.

As the nature of writing changed from fountain pen, to typewriter, to word processor and now to blogs and Twitter, so has changed interpersonal communications from letters, to telephone, to e-mail, instant messaging, blogging with comments, to my twitter stream. So too has the nature of work changed from crafts, to factory production, to the information economy and now to the “creative/collaborative/crowdsourced/collective economy”. Our relationship to information has changed from the library model of careful selection, classification within strict taxonomies, and permanent collections to the information retrieval model of access to everything, diversification, dynamic collections and bottom-up folksonomies. All of these changes are disruptive, they foreclose old practices and provide new opportunities. Some people are always hurt by these shifts, while others find unseen chances to thrive.

The new technologies have brought new opportunities to affect social change. In the manner of Foucault‘s philosophy we have the chance to redistribute the power within society. E-mail was used by students during the Russian coup; by relaying messages through an intermediary in the U.S. the students were able to respond to changes faster than the Army and recently the most up to the minute information about the terrorist attack in India, or the plane crash in New York, was distributed through Twitter – instantly, and around the globe. Blogging and the web offer the possibility for marginalized voices to reach a wide audience – but big brands still hold control. Basic xhtml code is easy to learn and use, and web authoring tools like Dreamweaver make the process even easier. So anyone can post information to the web with a small amount of effort. Such self broadcasting was not practical with television, where larger amounts of investment and knowledge are necessary. Of course, it is up to us to avail ourselves of these opportunities. The entrenched power structures are also trying to control as much of the new media as possible to maintain their positions of power. The issue has not been decided yet, but the internet is not as free as it was just a few years ago. One place the larger, more powerful brands can’t control is social media. As explained over Twitter by Thomas Vander Wal (who coined the term “folksonomy,”) it’s the velocity of communication that brands still have difficulty managing and controlling. The ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and connectivity finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture from mashups to Twitter to distopic visions in Minority Report.

“The cry of rebellion which we utter associates our ideals with those of the Futurist poets. These ideas were not invented by some aesthetic clique. They are an expression of a violent desire, which burns in the veins of every creative artist today. … We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.”
(Marinetti, 1909)

Computer technology can assist us in pursuit of Borgmann’s focal activities, despite Borgmann’s reservations. If writing is a focal activity for us, word processors can make the job easier even though we have seen that they alter the process. Maintaining contact with friends is facilitated by e-mail, IM, SMS, etc. Even if it predisposes us to short note rather than long heartfelt letters, e-mail is useful for organizing face-to-face meetings. Cooking, Borgmann’s exemplary focal activity, can be aided by accessing new recipes online from places like epicurious.com and allrecipes.com. And all sorts of activities have online interest groups where people around the world can meet to discuss their common passions. Some activities were solitary activities, pursued by lone individuals as their individual means of artistic expression, until the internet allowed them to realize that others shared their interest — they were no longer freaks!

Often the overwhelming experience when dealing with computer technology is one of frustration. Computer interfaces are often confusing and arbitrary. Simple, routine tasks take great effort to do. Programs crash causing the loss of laboriously produced work. Incompatible versions will not read old data. And rapidly advancing technology leaves our equipment outdated in a short time, leading to feelings of inadequacy as the manufacturers try to convince us we need the latest models. Any benefits to our practices can be lost through frustration over difficulty using the technology to accomplish the tasks. The computer becomes the focus of our attention rather than the focal practice we my be trying to pursue through it.

Design Can Soften the Disruptive Force of Technology

The creators of computer technology can lessen the disruptive force of the technology by embracing good design. Well designed systems and devices should be useful, usable, easily learned, and perform functions that let people do the things they want to do (Gould, 1988). Good design can lessen the frustration users feel when they use computers. The sum of all the small frustrations with everyday life add up to the feelings of powerlessness and despair felt by many in the modern world. Alleviating those frustrations leads to an improved quality of life. By making the system easier to use and more reliable, designers help users get on with the tasks they wish to accomplish rather than worrying about the computer. When systems help users realize their goals and intentions they promote the human value of autonomy.

User Experience Honeycomb

Things that are easy to learn reduce the disruption caused by new technologies. Technological society may force new methods and practices upon us, but if they are easier to learn, then at least the people adept at the old practices can learn to operate in the new manner. While the philosophical issues remain, the impact of new technology on individuals can be softened by design. Technology can be made easier to learn by making the choices of acts you can perform obvious and by providing appropriate mental maps of the operation to the user. Computer technology, by virtue of its interface being flexible, could be made very easy to learn. But, alas, most systems are not designed to realize this possibility (Norman, 1990).

Good designs make possible the benefits of computing technology. Use of a computer as an instrument in pursuit of a focal practice is only possible if the computer does not crowd one’s focus of attention. The computer interface should fade into the background so that we may concentrate on our human-affirming activities – and example being the LG Internet Refrigerator appliance.

LG Internet Refridgerator

If the difficulties experienced mount, then any benefit is canceled out by the trouble with the instrument. In such a case it would be better to do without the new technology. In order for technology to fade from our focus while we use it to perform a task, it should operate reliably and consistently so that after a brief learning period we can form habits of use and then use the technology without thought. Computers, once again by virtue of their flexible structure, could be designed to operate consistently and appropriately, more so than material technology which must obey mechanical constraints, but, once again, it often is not so designed. (Norman, 1990)

So we see the importance of good interface design, and we know from experience that technology often fails to meet standards of good design. But what constitutes good design? Donald Norman examined the qualities of good and bad design of common technologies in his book “The Design of Everyday Things” (Norman, 1990). His advice boils down to: make sure the user can figure out what to do, and that the user can can tell what is going on. Good design should use the natural properties of people and the world to produce systems whose operation is obvious. Different features offer different affordances, or operations that they suggest to the user. For example, buttons are made for pushing, and knobs are made for turning; we naturally know what to do, unless they are built to work in some other way which will be hard to use. If everything in the design has its proper place and obvious function, then only a short amount of instruction is necessary to begin use. If the design is made such that common activities have a simple and intuitive action to perform, then users will quickly become habituated and can perform the tasks rapidly and comfortably. If the instructions are so complicated or non-intuitive to prompt the user to wonder “How am I going to remember that?” or if simple actions can lead to catastrophic failures then the design has failed and should be re-worked.

Methods and Metaphors

In order to design good computer systems that support people in their endeavors, designers must observe how real people use their computers and design accordingly. Too many programmers are trained in the logic of computer languages, but not in the needs of computer users. While in some computer projects the user interface is the last part of the program to be designed, it should be the first. For most users the interface is what they see as the computer. Some designers of computer interfaces have come to realize this. John Gould wrote an important paper “How to Design Usable Systems” to explain simple but important design principles to other programmers. He sought to have programmers focus on the needs of users from the very start of the project. He offers four simple principles to be followed:

• an early and continuous focus on users,
• early and continual testing,
• iterative design revising for the results of testing, and
• integrated design where all the elements develop constantly and in coordination

Gould suggests that these principles are easy to implement, even by those not trained in psychological or human factors studies, it just takes a commitment on the part of the programmers and managers to create a good, useful product.

Gould’s attitude towards design finds philosophical support in pragmatism. Pragmatism recognizes that everyone is socially situated. Dewey taught that scientific theories or methods of logic are tools used in a certain social practice. Attention to the practices surrounding an object are important to understanding it. Since he viewed knowledge as participatory he argued that learning must come about by doing. Coyne argues that Dewey’s attitudes resonates with the methods of computer system designers such as Gould (Coyne, 1995, pp. 36-51). Dewey’s pragmatism provides a better philosophical basis for computer science education than the rationalism that underlies most training. The rationalist attitudes are responsible for a concentration on logic and theory in the education of programmers rather than attention to the needs of computer users. However, projects to produce user centered design, like Gould’s, reflect the same concern for practice that is the bases of Dewey’s philosophy. Gould even suggests programmers learn through doing by actually spending time at the job sites where the programs will be used, following exactly Dewey’s prescriptions for education (Gould, 1988). This, of course, was well before the ‘golden-age’ of user-centered design, activity centered design and all the myriad bastard children that seems to have sprung up recently.

More recently, over the past five or six years, metaphor has become an important concept in website, web application and system design as well as in language. Metaphor is more than just a literary device used for poetic effect, it is an integral part of our language and thought. Lakoff and Johnson showed in their book “Metaphors We Live By” the ubiquity of metaphor in our language, often being used without our even noticing (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Metaphors provide us a way of understanding the world, by associating one thing with another. Powerful metaphors are like magic, and inform how we think of the objects described, revealing hidden aspects of the thing described. New metaphors for the forces in our lives will suggest new ways of living. Metaphors interact with technology in several ways: technology serves as a source of metaphors, new technologies are understood metaphorically, and our metaphors in life pose problems to be solved technologically (See Dan Saffer’s presentation, “The role of Metaphor in Interaction Design“).

For devices that work in an abstract language like computers, metaphors provide a way for the user to understand the operation of the machine. The Apple Mac desktop metaphor is famous. It provides a way of understanding the file structure of the machine in terms of a physical space that most people understand. By developing new metaphors, interface designers can suggest new ways of working with computers. If these metaphors are carefully chosen then they will provide a natural model which makes operation of the machine easy.

“In that Empire, the Art of cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Disproportionated Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds built a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided accurately with it.”
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Del rigor en la ciencia’, 1960

Just as metaphors can help us understand computers, computers can provide new metaphors for life. Postmodern theories of psychology suggest that there is no single unified “ego”, but that each of us is made up of a multiplicity of parts, while Minsky discusses the “agencies of mind” in his book “The Society of Mind.” Philip Bromberg claims that a healthy personality is one in which different aspects of the self can come to know one another and reflect upon each other. This fluid multiplicity of personality is what gives us our flexibility and resilience. With the rise of MySpace, Facebook, personal blogs, IM and Twitter, a popular activity on the internet is participation in these consensual hallicinations of community in social networks. In these social networks, we create a persona within a distrbuted ecosystem. We interact with ‘the other,’ — folks through their online persona initially their projects of self which, over time, tend towards some mean around a distrubution of ‘self-hood’. People are not restricted by their biological gender, or in the case of World of Warcraft, even their race or species. Social networks allow participants to explore different aspects of their personality, to manufacture and evolve aspects of their personality depending on context and mood. Many regulars sometimes play several characters in different social networks at the same time, cycling through their online personalities. While some observers might see this activity as evidence of Heidegger’s disaggregation of the subject by technology, it can also be seen as a model for Bromberg’s self as being one while being many. This is just one way in which computer technology, the internet, and connected social networks can show us a new way of understanding ourselves.

This seems to be the only place where someone is thinking about the meta-abstraction of self in virtual worlds – I continue my discussion of identity and self – might as well since everyone seems asleep at the wheel .

—————-

Fantasies of downloading the mind into a computer seem to depend on a  top down and overly simplisitc extrapolation from the idea that the same sequence of code can run on many different machines. In fact, this scenario of mind transfer is about as plausible as the claim, made in a television commercial by IBM in 2001, that you can “download an entire warehouse” over the Internet. Such operation siwll only be possible when nanotechnology allows for the “nanofaxing,” or precise replication over distance, of complex physical objects, as in William Gibson’s All Tomorrows Parties (268-269).

All Tomorrow's Parties

To duplicate my consciousness, or to transfer it to another location, I will need to know how to reproduce the biological hardware of my brain and spinal cord, as well as the mental software containing my memores, sensations, experiences, emotions and thoughts as well as the virtual cartographies of connections my mind has modeled of the real world. In the meantime, it might be best to forget about running the same software on many pieces of hardware and focus instead upon the converse idea of running multiple software program at once on a single piece of hardware. Why worry about transporting myself into another body when I still haven’t realized how many different selves are porsent in this body that I already have.

I explored a bit of this in a much earlier piece on fractal spirals of selves evolving and replicating in multidimentions of space-time. People with multiple personality syndrome are said to display different physiological patterns – different voices, different pulse rates, even t different levels of cholesterol – depending on which personality is in the forefront at a given moment. Thus the same actual body can support many different virtual selves. I would argue that elsewhere that the phenomenon of multiple personalities, along with Pierre Klossowski’s notion of demonic position, gives us a better paradigma for a concept of pre-Sim subjectivity than anything we can get from psychoanalysis. You cannot be one without being at least two. We are all at least potentially multiple, even if most of us do not suffer from the oppressive consciousness of being so. In recent years, increasing numbers of multiple “households” themselves have come to reject the idea that their multiplicity should be regarded as a medical “disorder.”

In particular, they resist the received psychiatric dogma that the experience of multiple personality syndrome either can or should be “cured” by integrating all the personalities into a single construct of self. More is lost than gained from such a normalizing reduction. The point is not to eliminate these multiple identities, but rather to get them to talk to one another and to find ways for them to continue cohabitating with each other, in their one shared body, without too much distress or conflict.