Thanks to @LordPancreas aka n00bh4×0r for this post which I have shamelssly clipped. I will attend to some of his other comments on the This Is Me project website, as I feel they have important issues about Digital Identity.
A brain too far?
I have a couple of areas where I would disagree with LordPancreas’ analysis regarding my idea of thinking of Twitter as a brain. The first is that I include the people who use Twitter as being part of the system. In much the same way as neurons can die off and be replaced, they are not, individually, essential components of the system, but they are the primary force which enables the Twitter ‘entity’ to receive, analyse, and disseminate information. The system software, I would agree, is more like the synaptic mechanism, a message passing system enabling information to be passed between neurons (or, in this case people - although the information is passed to the people’s neurons, so the terminology seems reasonable).
Hebbian
It seems, although I haven’t tested it, that a greater strength of response can be seen from other Twitterers if you Tweet a lot. They may like or dislike your tweets, giving positive or negative responses, but the more you tweet the more the connection is strengthened - as with any form of social connectivity. Neurons (people) which fire (tweet) together, grow (or separate!) together.
Blogs, cultures, politicians… organs?
If you can stomach thinking of Twitter (the whole system) as the brain, you can think of the things it influences as the organs, as LordPancreas suggests. The loose connections built up through social grooming and information sharing on Twitter allow, in theory, for a greater degree of synchronisation between these autonomous systems. As a very tiny example, the n00bh4×0r blog and this clog now have threads about this topic, as a result of both ‘neurons’ firing in recognition of the idea of the Twitbrain (whether in total agreement or not) and @Yishaym on Twitter has also contributed to the ‘discussion’.
Evolution
I am not entirely convinced that we have finished biological evolution. What we have done is mitigate the environmental factors that would force an extinction event (well… ok, we have probably exacerbated them too, and we will discover just how well evolution has served us sometime in the next 2 centuries, I suspect), and connected the geographical zones of the planet so tightly that speciation is unlikely to happen. But for the time being, we are at a stage where we can generate a wide diversity and have (nearly) all the genotypes survive - when some form of catastrophe occurs, this should serve humans in good stead for survival, although it may result in speciation.
Free time
I would agee whole heartedly that free time has been a major impact on us. This in itself probably provides sufficient cost benefit to warrant the crazily large brains we support, because free time allows us to do a couple of really nifty things. We get to spend time speculating - which means we can act proactively instead of reactively. This, in turn, means that we can find ourselves more free time and also allows us to specialise. Whilst we are now reaching a phase where I believe it is more important to have people who can generalise instead of specialise, we would not have reached this point without specialism. Twitter, and the internet in general, provides us with access to specialist knowledge on a range of topics that were unimaginable even two decades ago. What we need to do now is to be able to see how these ideas fit together, to synthesise new ways of doing things.
Time waster?
People refer to wasting time on Twitter and Facebook. Whilst it is certainly possible to waste it, it is also possible to use these tools to build relationships with others and to use them as crowdsourcing resources which can rival your favourite search engines. Indeed, if you happen to mix with the ‘right crowd’ on these systems, you can save significant amounts of time by utilising your connections.
Utility?
I would consider the tools we create now as still being utilitarian. Whilst they are not necessary for day to day biological survival, I would regard them as being important for long term digital survival. To be able to act effectively in the digital world, we need to have tools and literacies which enable us to communicate, acquire, process and disseminate information (and opinion). There is certainly something to be said regarding the notion of Twitter as a sort of cybernetic system. I feel as though it is a bit too early to use “brain” as its proper analogy, however, for the simple fact that unlike a biological brain, it is not Twitter that makes governing use of the information it receives, but rather the larger human creature that exists simultaneously throughout and outside of it. In this regard, it could be considered as more along the lines of synapses, providing a conduit through with neurons (people) can talk to each other. This, in turn, allows coordination of otherwise-disconnected systems (social, political, and geographic structures could adorn an abundance of metaphors such as muscular, skeletal, digestive, etc. but that is territory onto which I needn’t venture). |
In this light, Twitter as much as its users compose Ross’s “social nervous system”, albeit a very rudimentary one. At present, it is confined only to those initiated into its culture sector and constrained in function by the “DNA” (server technology) that defines it. I think that it is merely the caveman step in an evolution that will become evermore apparent in the coming decades. I see this new evolution as picking up where Nature left off. Because let’s face it: humans are done evolving Darwin’s way. We have plateaued biologically; our resources are abundant and survival is no longer an overbearing concern for us as a species. The gift of “free time” is what has allowed us to come as far as we have. Though we have always been craftsmen, our development has recently shifted focus from utilitarian tools to supererogatory ones. Read more at www.n00bh4×0r.com |
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simon eaton April 5, 2009 7:08 pm
Let’s hope so. Google’s limitations seem more apparent in the context of Web 2. It’s a good search engine, but now compromised by commercial interests IMO - after all it’s not an Open company! - but it can’t provide what collaborative intelligence can.