Amplify Amplify your take on things.  Join Pat Parslow on Amplify

Pat Parslow | My Amplog
« Amplog Home   Posts tagged: Twitbrain
512108

Pat Parslow is following

Ed Webb
Terry Wassall

Pat Parslow's Recent Activity

commented on Ed Webb's clip
Turning Education Up to 11?
recommended Ed Webb's clip
@timbuckteeth's credo
recommended Fast T Friend's clip
Why does the gunslinger who draws first always get shot?
commented on Ed Webb's clip
The Pedagogy of Fun
commented on Ed Webb's clip
The Pedagogy of Fun

Categories

Twitbrain - Mind-body problem?

Amplify’d from www.n00bh4×0r.com

Re: Continuing the Twitbrain strand of thought

I would be willing to accept Twitter as a brain in the circumstance where it acts as the “head” of the organism. I think that, if you consider the Twitter community as the start and end of the being, it could in fact act as both brain and nervous system. Our analogies really only differ in the placement of the neurons. And, in the context of this metaorganism, perhaps there is no distinction between the two structures; that may very well be a chiefly-biological phenomenon.

However, when one includes those outside of the Twitter community as part of the system, then it seems more peripheral than central in nature, to me at least, because many groups of people/body regions remain relatively unaffected by it. This would be those whose lives have yet to intertwine with the Internet on the same level as the rest of us, be it by choice or incidence.

Read more at www.n00bh4×0r.com
 

In reply to the clip above:

System boundaries

To be honest I despite O’Reilly’s post, I hadn’t considered the Twitbrain as involving more people than actually use Twitter.  I also don’t really consider them as being part of the brain, when I drill down more deeply.

Unintentional signals

Consider the analogy of individual Twitterers as being Start Trek spaceships undertaking their own journey.  I choose Star Trek because they sometimes made use of their drive signatures as a means of communication.  Tweets, although more intentional than the noise of a starship engine, are rather like the background radiation generated - they have a degree of regularity, will tend to be produced when the vessel is changing direction and convey information, but are not the primary motivation of the vessel.
Set in a Twitbrain context, people lead their lives but produce this ancillary ‘noise’ which drives the Twitbrain analogue.  Of course, the users are also acting as the ‘neurons’, which complicates the picture slightly, but I think it is OK for them to have multiple distinct roles.

Brain and nervous system

I would agree that it may be better to consider the central nervous system as the analogue here, certainly when considering other SNS as well.  But I would not want to convey my modeling of Twitter as a brain as implying a hierarchy or control function.  I think of the Twitbrain as an emergent property of the interaction of many highly connected processing units.

Metaorganism

As n00bh4×0r suggests, this Twitbrain is a metaorganism - or at least, part of one.  I am not sure yet whether it has other organs.  It appears to be enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the host-humans which provide it with processing power.  It would be interesting to try to define some tests to see how well it works as a cognitive system.

As @Yishaym suggested, with the biological mind we are fairly sure that individual neurons cannot be aware (possibly at all, but especially) of the whole structure - they do not seem to us to have any purpose or goals other than to act as parts of the brain.  We, on the other hand, have separate existences and are aware (if this model is right) of the Twitbrain.  It would be interesting to work out whether the Twitbrain as a whole (not the individuals within it) is in some way aware of its neurons, and whether it is aware that they have their own unique identities and motivations.  If it doesn’t (and I cannot imagine how to work out how to test this at the moment) then it begs the question of whether our view of neurons being (relatively) simple processing units (in the sense of hugely complex components which we don’t actually understand all that well!)  is right.

Twitter and communities

Of course, there is nothing particularly special about Twitter.  The same model could equally well apply to other communities.  One of the differences about Twitter is that it has global reach, and that the computer mediated communications mean that signals are conveyed quickly.  Also, because it is not geographically bounded, it has the ability to continue background processing when individual neurons (people) are in a resting state.

Continuing the Twitbrain strand of thought

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).

Amplify’d from www.n00bh4×0r.com

n00bh4×0r

On Twitter and the Social Nervous System

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