Of Onions and Infocologies- Thriving in the age of hyperconnectivity
Project: Polytopia

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and goodbyes. The ride does not require an explanation, just occupants.

Boat Man, Waking Life


Fluid Intelligence is Sexy

In a recent conversation with a very good friend, a person which until recently was not hyperconnected, he said:” what I have found so tantalizing since I started connecting and being exposed to all this (apparently infinite) flow of information is that my old convictions are being destabilized one by one. It’s as if I am being taken on a ride, a particular program that aims to transform me into something else. I am at present totally uncertain as to the old views I once held, moreover, I find that I like it and I want more of it. It’s a breath of fresh air blowing with very high intensity into my mind, propelling me into directions I never thought of.”

I think that what my friend reflected upon is a sensation carried by many and is very difficult to articulate, for even though the scope and amount of information available to us is disturbing many cherished beliefs and long held assumptions, at base this sensation is pleasurable, hence we want more of it.

There’s a lot of talk recently about the disruptive effect of modern technologies on our mind states, on our conceptualizations, on our minds and brains, on our very nature indeed. More than any disruption the Internet is held as the main culprit in making us modernly stupid and indifferent.

Witness what the Times Online has to say about this:

“Every day, just to keep up to date, that grey lump between your ears has to shovel ever bigger piles of infotainment — tottering jumbles of global-warming updates, web gossip, refugee crises, e-mails, fashion alerts, Twitters and advertisements. Now research suggests that we may have reached an historic point in human evolution, where the digital world we have created has begun to outpace our neurons’ processing abilities.”

(Warning: brain overload-Scientists fear that a digital flood of 24-hour rolling news and infotainment is putting our primitive grey matter under such stress that we can no longer think wisely or empathize with others)

It goes without saying that I do not agree with the main theme of this article namely that:

“The faster the tech, the slower the speed of thought . . . the more accelerated the culture, the slower the rate of social change . . . the quicker the digital composition, the slower the political reflection: accelerating digital effects are neutralized by decelerating special human effects.”

(From the same article quoting Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in their 1997 book Digital Delirium) .

Au contraire, it is my view that we are entering, and actually are already in, a deterritorialized age of transformation, an age unlike any other in that the speed and overload of information is transforming us, and yes destabilizing us, disrupting us in such a fashion as to allow a new kind of mind to emerge, the hyperconnected mind.
The problem, as I see it, is that most if not all of this new research and studies take the base benchmark to be the monolithicNeolithic mind as their foundational approach.
Of course it is true that hyperconnectivity overwhelms us, disturbs us and disrupts us, but I see this as a good thing, a very high good indeed, and it is good in more ways than one. It is good primarily because it is high time we relinquish the idea that we are one (as individuals) and have the same “Telos” as a collective. It is good because we have evolved to be a fluid intelligence, an intelligence for which disruption is not a bug but a feature. The modern hyperconnected mind is thus a reflection of our innate mind fluidity. Disrupting our age-old Neolithic traditional fictions is nothing less than a total conceptual revolution and the hyperstream of infodata is the main conduit by which this conceptual revolution happens.

It so happens that Hyperconnectivity leads to fluid intelligence.

“Fluid intelligence is the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems. It is the ability to draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge”

(wiki)

By allowing the disruptive power of the hyperconnected reality to enter our mind flows, we are actually allowing ourselves to be changed and challenged, modified and altered, we are factually evolving a new kind of mind, an intellect that can actually solve problems and “find meaning in confusion”.
The hyperflow of information is destroying the idea that we are the same, that our brains are the same or that culture is the same as it was yesterday. What is happening is that we are shifting our inner virtuality, our mind conceptualizations, from a centric point of view to a multiplied encultured reality, a hyperconnected reality. A reality that is as fresh as it is exciting, as challenging as it is transformative; no longer are we to believe that we are alone, or that issues that are ‘far’ are of no interest to us. We are at present in a transitional period of rapid advancement, an era of supreme importance in the history of humanity, a phase in our concatenated evolution in which new forms of literacy are being invented, new methods of inter-subjective enhancement are at play and we evolve because of it.

I believe that fluid intelligence is the hallmark of our present era, an intelligence that is fundamentally autopoietic and multidimensional; moreover I think that same intelligence is in the process of adaptation, adapting itself to accommodate information overload not as a negative so called ‘distraction’ but as an attention enhancer, an explorative measure of our intellects. The rising of fluid intelligence is the new pleasure we take in being hyperconnected fierce individuals, it correlates information and social life, data and sensation, and allows us the self-guided evolutionary strategy we collectively seek.

“When the centaur of classical metaphysics is mated with the cheetah of actor-network theory, their offspring is not some hellish monstrosity, but a thoroughbred colt able to carry us for half a century and more."

(Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics Graham Harman(pdf)


Externalizing our Inner Virtuality

Meaning, the great mystery studied by semantics is being revolutionized as we speak, it is being revolutionized by neuroscience and philosophy, but outside the academic circles, in our hyperconnected slipstream the very transient nature of meaning is being amplified.
Meaning was never fixed and never an absolute notwithstanding the belief of some. However, our meaning creating apparatus, our minds, are hard at work at present creating meaning from the practically infinite availability of infodata. The meaning we are currently implying is born in a continuous and uninterrupted flow of sense impressions, a never-ending bombardment of relevancy and irrelevancy.
As some would have it this vastness of availability (called distraction) countermands our capacity for depth, for attention and for empathy.

“Our society right now is filled with lovely distractions — we have so much portable escapism and mediated fantasy — but that’s just one issue. The other is interruption — multitasking, the fragmentation of thought and time. We’re living in highly interrupted ways. Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. Of course that’s what we have to do to live in this complicated world.”

Maggie Jackson at Wired - Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains

or

“Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information.”

Seeking- How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous (Slate).

Notwithstanding the latest plethora of articles, studies and research on the topic of attention and multitasking (see the list at bottom) implying a deterioration of attention, literacy and wisdom, I remain convinced that the apparent fragmentation we are witnessing (including the lowering of performance in certain tests and test subjects) is part of a larger narrative. The larger picture we need to look at without fear is the evolution of our civilization and our minds, a narrative of our times in which we are actually changing the very modes of comprehension and meaning extraction and creation.
For though it is probably true for some that hyperconnectivity and multitasking are lowering their capability of concentration and in-depth analysis it is also highly probable that for others (myself included) the proliferation of tasks and interruptions are a boon and actually increase our capability of attentiveness and focus. Moreover, it is also probable that our brains are being rewired so as to accentuate the advantage of multiple and simultaneous realities interplaying in our minds.
It is obvious that the actual shift that is demanded of us so as to join gracefully the InfoTech revolution and the infoflow in particular is a mind shift, a perceptual change of paradigm.
The perceptual shift we need perform is one of descriptive virtualization, or a re-description of our reflexive nature; by consciously extending the reach of our mind state we may be able to hasten the plasticity of our virtual contextualization.

“Therefore our question is simply, given an environment in which events happen faster, objects move more quickly, peripheral processing is placed at a premium, and the number of items that need to be kept track of far exceeds the circumstances experienced in normal life, is it possible to extend the normal processing power of the human nervous system?”

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games
C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier (pdf)



I am not a neuroscientist but a writer, and I haven’t taken part in the Stanford experiment and thus have no clue as to how I would perform on the kind of tests they have carried out.

What I do know however is that my mind has changed noticeably in the last few years, due in large part to my Internet multitasking.
In the last few days I had the opportunity to see a 3D fractal image, read about life extension new therapies, explored the writings of W.S.Burroughs, learned that placebos are getting more effective and also listened to the amazing presentation of Bruce Sterling about augmented reality, I understood how we try to keep our beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary. I also listened to my favorite group nowadays (Archive) and wrote a few mails, communicated via twitter and friendfeed (liking some, disliking others opening some links for later read). I have in front of me more than fifty tabs opened in four different browsers, I listen to music, I am reading a few pdf’s and simultaneously writing these words, I am practically swimming in an ocean of information and I love it.

Few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to do that, and though I am an avid reader I could not possibly have read at the same time so many books, simultaneously also writing and having meaningful, productive and occasionally creative conversations.
I have become more intelligent, clearer, more focused, faster and more appreciative of others. In fact I am more than pleased with my multitasking, multithreaded polylogue on practically every level of my existence.
But more than that I carry the (very subjective) feeling that I have developed a new filtering system concerning relevancy and irrelevancy, I am now able to discard or admit at a glance, if something is worthy of note to me or not, if it pertains to my (very extensive) list of interests or not.
Furthermore, I have a more than reasonable and highly efficient (for my own purposes of course) capability to access the reliability and trustworthiness of a source of information.

To some of us multitaskers the new world of hyperconnectivity is a boon. The benefit multitaskers find in hyperconnectivity is nothing less than astonishing. We are developing a radical shift in our literacy, a mind-changing paradigm of ingesting, digesting and critically appraising information, in ways that until not long ago were simply not available.

We need a good narrative for that, so here is one

A standalone object, no matter how well designed, has limited potential for new weirdness. A connected object, one that is a node in a network that interacts in some way with other nodes, can give birth to a hundred unique relationships that it never could do while unconnected. Out of this tangle of possible links come myriad new niches for innovations and interactions.

Kevin Kelly


The Hyperconnected narrative

We need start by re-appraising the context of our worldviews, re-assessing our fundamental prejudices and conceptual virtualization. Narratives is what we are made of, our states of mind are narratives, stories within stories, and notwithstanding the very real and factual neural correlates of these states, the fact remains that we virtually live in and within, and as, the story that we tell.
The story that we are, and the narrative we are evolving.

The story that we told (and were told), until not long ago implied limitations and scarcity, separation and hierarchy, given realities and normalizing factors. In that old story we were at best, an atomized unit of individuality struggling to rise out of the dreary and monotonic daily life into a semblance of presumed well-being, a myth no longer in force and though memetically still vital, showing signs of decay and deterioration.

The monolithic thought procedure of old has lost credibility precisely because via the advent of the net (this week celebrating its 40th anniversary-link) we became hyperconnected beings, a phenomenon that puts literally everything in a new context.

The new context is the paradigmatic shift in perception both of self and of others, and more importantly yet a shift in perception of interactive subjectivity or intersubjectivity. The paradigmatic shift is fully correlated to the practically infinite flow of information, the infoflow.
Moreover, the very act of being hyperconnected in an infoflow is delineating a new contour to the narrative of our times; the story of our current minds is the story of our newly arising correlative meaning creation, the enmeshing of all in all and to all, all the time.
Is it disruptive? Of course!
But why?

It is disruptive because it is erasing the boundaries of old, the now obsolete confines between the real and the virtual, between the authentic and that which supposedly is not. The paradigmatic shift is disruptive because it heralds a new story, the story of superabundance, and the superabundance starts with the wealth of information at our immediate accessibility.

This changes us.

The paradigmatic shift we are experiencing is changing the way we are wired. Our virtuality, our mind, once thought to be a unitary whole, now accepted as a self-organizing dynamic system is adapting to the hyperconnected reality. We are in fact projecting our own virtual conceptualizations unto the world just as the world is projecting itself into our minds. This enmeshing of realities, admittedly in its infancy, is the subject matter of our current human theme.
Enmeshing of realities can be said to be the process of smoothening the contextual contour of our self-description. It enlarges us, making our minds more flexible, more critical and more relevant.
In the process we are becoming both more robust as well as more able to deal with an increasingly large number of impressions, capable of dealing with huge amounts of data, incorporating it into our worldviews.

In other words the narrative of our hyperconnected state of affairs is one of enmeshed realities. And enmeshed realities, intertwining states of mind and virtualities are heralding a new kind of freedom, the freedom embedded in hyperconnectivity. This is not a freedom to do (though eventually it will translate into such) but a freedom to change our minds.
In an enmeshed reality, the dynamics of intersubjectivity allows us to flow uninterrupted into a combined interactive intelligence, a hyper-intelligence that combines autonomous critical thinking within a larger framework of co-adaptive consensual adhocracies.
The more hyperconnected we are the more externalized our inner representations; the more these inner representations are enmeshed the more flexible and pliable our contextual worldview; more hyperconnectivity equal more augmentation and amplification to our self-reflexivity, more capacity and by implication more intelligence.

The hyperconnected mind redefines the ethos of its own flow space, in the process developing a fresh form of empathy. This form of intelligent empathy denies the rigidity of the Neolithic mind system, and translates itself into an integrated flow space of coherence.
The dynamism of the hyperconnected flow space, seen through the lens of collectiveness embeds a variability of goals and manners of being extended in space and in time.
It is this very variability of multiple realities enmeshed as a coherent whole that re-describes the theme of being a hyperconnected mind.

Finally

It is my view that the ever-increasing speed of the hyper-stream of information has given (and is continuously giving) rise to a new form of mindfulness. A variety of mindfulness unlike any we knew, a fresh state of mind that finds its wisdom and cognitive efficiency in direct insights that are predominantly invisible but nevertheless inform our actions and influence our understandings.
Moreover, I see the modern formless hypermind evolving in front of our eyes as the precursor of a posthuman mind that is not only better at ‘everything’ but eventually will adapt old and outdated philosophical and cognitive concepts into fresh modes of being.
These new modes of being will in turn revolutionize the very meaning of being human, the nature of our emotional lives and the manner of our intentionality.
Our conscious awareness will eventually become a form of mentation that is as far from the Neolithic mindset as warp speed is from walking.

We are evolving- this is good.

You are waiting for the revolution? Let it be! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready (god, what an endless wait!) I won’t mind going with you for a while. But when you stop, I shall continue on my way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing!

Towards the creative nothing
Renzo Novatore


notes:

Of onions: because our minds are multilayered and multidimensional
Of infocologies (information ecologies): because the information in our hyperconnected reality is ambient and all pervasive, creating infospheres streaming into each other.


images in text via Anthony Mattox, new media art design

Mon, Aug 31, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: superorganism, collective intelligence,Rhizomatics, polytopia,Intelligence, Hyperconnectivity
Sent to project: Polytopia

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