From networked individualism to “we” blogs

Posted on May 19, 2003 by George Pór

The blogging paradigm is barely 10 years old and its narcistic “beauty contest” tendency can be explained with what Shelley Powers in Tying Communication Threads Togethe compared to “our teen years with our fixation on popularity. S/he with the most links, wins.” Using the faster-learning in “internet time,” we can move into adulthood–tn regard to that phenomenon–without having to wait another 8 oir 10years. Let’s see how.

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Concept vehicles

Posted on May 12, 2003 by George Pór

George Por just wrote in the Blog
of Collective Intelligence: Being “hypertinent”

Hypertinence keeps gaining momentum through the emergence of the current
crop of social software (blogs, wikis, p2p forums, free co-authoring and translation
tools and services, etc.) that has all the signs of true communication revolution.
That should be the subject of another entry. So is the the role that co-creative
dialogues between social software makers and practitioners can play in the
democratization of the means of boosting our intelligence, individual and
collective.

I think this word "hypertinent" is a great concept, one that
can be called vehicle concept because it vehicles itself easily through
the minds and it "speaks by itself". George, you were right
to make it a category.

As we are exploring new worlds and contributing to a new science, I believe
that a whole corpus of concept vehicles will emerge. It’s important to point
them, use them in our vocabulary and collect them somewhere. Why don’t we create
a lexicography? George, I believe this is what you began by creating the definition
category? Shouldn’t we make a special lexicographic blog?

Posted in Hypertinence | Leave a comment

Social thermodynamics and mapping the world

Posted on May 12, 2003 by George Pór

Today most intranets and information systems rely on administrator-oriented
tools: you must fill in pre-defined forms, upload reports, update databases,
provide complete profile information, etc. Such predesigned tools and interfaces
are built upon "mass market" rules, i.e. one same item for everyone.
Another concomitent aspect of current corporate I.S. is that they rely on the
sum of each individual duties. In other words they don’t work.

Assumption 1: I.S. should rely on natural
and free energies that flow in human environments. The best natural
energy, free and inexhaustible, is the permanent need to be in relation
with one another. This need generates ongoing streams of actions, reactions
and conversations that blow up the whole activity in the information systems
and provide exploitable data.

Assumption 2: "Mapping the world"
will become a leitmotiv, an obsession for hoisting CI as a science.
Modelizing CI theories will to be built upon the analysis of IS layers (there
are more than one – see a few
thoughts about them here). The IS layer can be considered as a map of part
of the human interactions, and we know that maps should not be confused with
the ground (they just provide a certain representation of it). Thus Information
Systems are destined to serve as observation tools, as harvesters of information
drawn from the elusive reality. So it is in any science: it’s theoretical corpus
gets built from the string of reality collectors.

This leads to an important question: a big part of CI takes place
in close geographical spaces where people can directly interact. Of course current
tools help them to lever their CI by providing powerful asynchronous conversation
extensions. How will the theory be able to collect and count such IC nests?
Will these nests be artificialy estimated from their indirect expression, just
like the theory allow to "rebuild" astral objects only by watching
their attraction on other masses in the neighborhood?

Posted in Academic Research in CI | 1 Comment

Being “hypertinent”

Posted on May 11, 2003 by George Pór

I’ve just picked up an interview that Derrick De Kerckhove gave a year ago in TheFeature :: It’s All About The Mobile Internet. Here’s why I blog it.
I’m in the process of trying to organize my thoughts about the impact of social software on creative networks and evolution. Typically, when I have an intriguing, novel thought, I google it and find out that there’s at least dozen other web-connected minds that have already thought of it. Their perspectives about the same enhances mine and taking them in, comparing them with mine, accelerates my learning, helps me finding the niche for the baby thought.
A small step in our individual discovery processes, such as refining a meme in tele-collaboration with colleagues and strangers, is a huge step for humankind. It means that the inter-penetration and co-specialization of our individual and collective intelligence aren’t a stuff of futurist dreams, they’re happening here and now, as we speak.
My googling of “creative networks” and “evolution” led me to the May-June 2002 aechive of Eccentric Eclectica, a blog, in which “Todd Suomela meets the web and tries to come out ahead… .” I have no idea who Todd Suomela is but am tremendously grateful to him for putting in his blog a quote from and a link to the interview, in which De Kerckhove said:
Ever more efficient search engines are making that access not just merely pertinent but “hypertinent” which is the logic of the memory in our brains. Every time we think, we summon the most pertinent information available in our mind. Imagine having the same kind of access to the contents of everybody else’s mind at once. It’s quite literally mind-boggling.
Hypertinence keeps gaining momentum through the emergence of the current crop of social software (blogs, wikis, p2p forums, free co-authoring and translation tools and services, etc.) that has all the signs of true communication revolution. That should be the subject of another entry. So is the the role that co-creative dialogues between social software makers and practitioners can play in the democratization of the means of boosting our intelligence, individual and collective.

Posted in Collective Intellect Augments Individual, Hypertinence | 3 Comments

Collective Consciousness

Posted on May 7, 2003 by George Pór

Collective Intelligence (CI), Collective Wisdom (CW), and Collective Consciousness (CC) are all very different phenomena. All of them have many definitions and descriptions, through the lens of various disciplines. To use them effectively, in ways that enable coherent discourse and action, we need to develop an understanding which reflects those differences. Here’s my small contribution to that.
The concept of CI is most elaborated in the work of Pierre Lévy and referred to here:
CW is primarily a group dynamics, group pscyhology meme that has a good book exploring it, referenced here. I contributed to that research, but that’s not the main merit of the book 🙂 There are additional comments about CW here.
CC too has lots of web sites and I am in particular resonance with this one. However, my perspective on CC is more sociological. From that perspective, CC exists in the context of a community or social movement and it reflects the evolutionary stage of that community or social movement. Here the Hegelian pair of terms of “thing-in-itself” and “thing-for-itself” apply. The “thing-in-itself” refers to the objective existence of a movement that doesn’t have an awareness of itself as such; thus, its members don’t realize that they are members in it. The “thing-for-itself” refers to the shared awareness of a movement or a culture with members realizing that they are part of it.

Posted in Definitions | 2 Comments

Knowledge <- Intelligence <- Wisdom

Posted on May 1, 2003 by George Pór

A glitch in the operating system of my computer has cut me from the Web for two days, which was challenging in many ways, but also giving me some interesting insights. I was not away from the Web for two consecutive days, since my last meditation retreat, 8 months ago. I an average day, I am jacked in and exchange messages, working documents, news and views with friends and colleagues, for 12 to 14 hours. The Web became an extension of my mind, and I became a neural node in its.
The challenges of coping with the “withdrawal symptoms” of the last two days brought me also the opportunity to look into deeper questions, for which I rarely have time, in the business of daily action. One of them is this:
What is the most valuable and unique contribution that I can make to our Emerging Planetary Reality? What is my place in the ecosystem of life-enhancing memes and services pointing to the possibility of a better world?
Is it creating more performing tools and methods for collaborative learning, work, and the self-organizing shared intelligence of communities? That’s how I’ve been seeing the nature of what I need to bring to my company’s stakeholders, for many years. But now, the emergence of the “social software” and “social networking” movements, and the many very talented people in and around them, make me think that the mightiest productive force of our times humankind’s collective intellect is already taking care of equipping itself with the right tools.
But will those tools and methods be sufficient to meet the Engelbartian challenge of increasing “complexity multiplied by urgency?” I don’t think so.

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Posted in Collective Wisdom | 7 Comments

What are Blogs for

Posted on April 20, 2003 by George Pór

I have had a hard time understanding why blogs were so different from usual forums. George helped me build my own answers (in words and concept I understand).
Forums are made for building and following conversations under a defined topic or issue. It’s the ideal tool for showing the thread of what’s going on so that everyone can get in very easily.
The purpose of the blogs is different. I would say they are made to connect people through their published thoughts and content, and help them interact. Blogs are people linkers.

Posted in Blogging for Emergence | 3 Comments

Towards an attention economy of CI

Posted on April 20, 2003 by George Pór

“I didn’t adequately address ‘…the bipolarity opposition between the Net and the Self.’  Note to self, need another framework to explain how self-serving utility pursuits result in emergent value.  Note to Net, feel free to chime in.” from
Ross Mayfield’s Weblog
Ross, I don’t have a framework but am happy to contribute to its emergence through the dialogue that your reply to Tim’ Oren’s comments on Ecosystem of Networks, I hope will trigger in blogosphere and beyond.
I think you’re at the heart of attention economics’ core issues, and your conversation with Tim has the potential to build momentum for an “attention economy” framework to “explain how self-serving utility pursuits result in emergent value.” Here’s my 2 cents to it.
My favorite self-serving pursuits is to learn getting smarter about the increasingly complex range of possibilities I/we have for creating value. The complexity of match between opportunities and capabilities ti meet them is fueled by the concurrent differentiation of both. In this context, increasing my evolutionary fitness to benefit from our collective evolutionary fitness–or collective intelligence (CI)–seems a good personal strategy for maximizing utility.

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Posted in Collective Intellect Augments Individual, Towards an attention economy of CI | Leave a comment

Collective intellect augments individual

Posted on April 19, 2003 by George Pór

Scott Leslie wrote in his EdTechPost blog:
“Don’t you just love when, in the process of thinking about an issue, you come to a question that you know others are looking at and that is more than you could handle yourself, and then the next minute you turn around and – lo and behold – you find exactly what you were looking for. I expect there’s a name for this phenomenon, and I also expect someone will soon develop an explanation of why this phenomenon seems so applified within the blogosphere.”
Well, a couple of years ago, I developed an explanation that I believe touches Scott’s expectations. Here it is:

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Posted in Collective Intellect Augments Individual, Visualizing Our Ecosystem | Leave a comment

“Shared-attention” & attention ecology

Posted on April 15, 2003 by George Pór

Professor Pierre Levy wrote:
> Dear coach, I will be very interested by your advice about expanding attention bandwidth and – therefore – time. 🙂
Let me start with the model that I developed a few years ago to help myself understanding what I’m talking about. The diagram below shows two perspectives on attention, that we could label as
Attention Managemnet on the left and Attention Ecology on the right.
attn.management _vs_ecology.jpg
(Click on the “Continue reading…” link below the diagram, if you want to get the rest of the story.)

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Posted in Time, attention, bandwidth & CI | 1 Comment