Knowmads as Aesthetic Curators of information (Hybrid Futures & Knowmads pt 4)
Project: Polytopia

This is part 7 in the series: The Rise of the Cyber Unified Civilization

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.
Josef Albers


We are multidimensional minds, multisensory systems presently embodied in simple materiality. But that is changing.
Our presence as embodied cognition increases in scope and extent, range and span, delineating a new contour to our beingness in time. This increase in presence is presently mediated via the net and its mobile derivatives, augmented, auric and virtual realities, which deconstruct our age-old location based awareness and reconstruct it into an ambient awareness pervading all facets of our lives.
The new ambient awareness we are evolving into will in time define a new mindset, a fresh collection of sensations and an original kind of perception.

This fact changes us; slowly, almost imperceptibly, but change it does.

“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world justified.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

As we evolve individually, as culture, as civilization and as specie, increasing our technological know-how and scientific understanding it is becoming clearer and clearer that long held habits of thought though still prevalent no longer fit the state of affairs we exist in.
The new state of affairs is a world in which information of geo-location of an individual is a common public knowledge (see: Is location where it’s at in social networking?) and in which objects will talk to each other as spime ; a world in which hyperconnectivity rules the social sphere of human intersubjectivity, eliminating or transcending space and time coordinates is no longer fictional but a reality we all need come to terms with.
This hyperconnected reality implies on our options and availability, implications that are often overlooked and indeed to my eyes misrepresented, at least in so far as the subject in question is a Knowmad and a Polytopian.

In this respect I do not think that all hyperconnected minds operate the same or indeed that generalizations should be the case. Do note for example the latest research maintaining that : “U.S. Students Addicted To The Internet” and yet on the same token but arriving to a different conclusion in the latest Pew research published : “In an online survey of 895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of social, political and economic change by 2020, fielded by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center:
» Google won’t make us stupid: 76% of these experts agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices.”- (The full report on the future of the internet is well worth reading ).



In my previous post: ‘Knowmads as metabolic reactors’ I have proposed that Knowmads are developing an inherent capacity to distinguish between different kinds of information, namely toxic and nutritious.
Moreover Knowmads were presented as : “.. metabolic reactors of information, intermediate junctions of innovation and creativity, catalysts of emergent phase spaces.”
As this line of clarity unfolds I am moving now into the exploration of Knowmads as aesthetic curators as I see in this motion the natural evolution of the metabolic reactors.
I have written before that Knowmads, as metabolic reactors are particular kind of beings who thrive in situations of ambiguity and develop perceptions that allow the new sense of cyber-intuition to come forth.
It is my view that certain Knowmads are developing a particular set of skills that will in time become the normative expression of extra ordinary cognition, I refer specifically to minds that are developing an exceptional capability of enhancing the health and wealth of an infocology by their choices.

These choices of what to publish and what to point, what to prune and what to emphasize are the key parameters of these intersectionists (hyperconnected individuals locating themselves at the intersection of feeds of information in advanced infocologies).

These individuals are not necessarily bloggers of fame or journalists of note, artists or editors, though of course they may be; what makes them particularly interesting and especially good indicators to our hybrid futures is their curatorial capabilities and cyber intuitions.
They do something extremely interesting; they juxtapose art and science, technology and philosophy in such a fashion as to increase our collective aestheticism. And if, as I believe, and the Pew repost shows, the hyperconnected state of affairs is making us more intelligent and more capable of information retrieval, in the process changing and evolving our brains, what we will need more of is this very curatorial capability.



"Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again. "

Ben Shneiderman

What is an aesthetic curator of information?

The simplest way to put it is that an aesthetic curator is a hyperconnected mind that has developed the basic skill of, for lack of a better definition; I will call here, increasing the beauty of an infocology.
Let us define the beauty of an infocology as the set of characteristics that make an infocology inspiring and exciting, smoothly conjoining diverse streams of impressions and information

The aesthetic curation of information and knowledge in hyperconnected infoflows is a manner of managing an invisible yet palpable infrastructure. The fashion by which this infrastructure is positioning diverse elements of information in a given infocology is what makes it an Art in itself, a unique point of reference and an observational front line. As I see it, Knowmads as travelers in infostreams, surfers of exceptional insight and minds that carry a cyber intuition that bypasses the apparent limitations of information transmissions, are particularly well suited to the task of infocology aesthetic curator.

There are of course, some websites that already try and to a very large extent produce infocologies of exceptional beauty and interest. Of particular note is space collective very own Folkert : “But Does It float”: But does it float : an ongoing visual conversation between Folkert and Atley taking place inside a browser window. Or look at the amazing feed of @BrainPicker from Brain Pickings defined in their ‘about’ as: “This is Brain Pickings. It’s a modest exercise in vision- and mind-expansion. Curated bits of culture that will, at the very least, introduce you to new ideas and perspectives and, at their very best, help you think more, laugh more, create more. Be a better person. Because a better person conceives of better, stronger, smarter, richer, deep, more impactful ideas — culturally, commercially and socially. “

Exceptional mentioning need take into consideration the work of Seed Magazine and Environmental Graffiti and the fantastic curation of Escape into Life and Synaptic Stimuli.

All of the examples above , and there are many more out there in the vast infosphere, are models and illustrations of fantastic curatorial capabilities and though being beautiful examples of curated infocologies, and by extension enriching the aesthetic experiences of their beholders, I think it is only the tip of the iceberg.
The iceberg I refer to is the extended cyber experience of beauty, increasing intelligence and a new form of cognition, the co-opted aestheticism of accentuated collaboration. The co-opted intersubjective interest produced in advanced infocologies aiming to better both the involved Knowmad and the cultural health and wealth of the infocology at play is a paradigm shift in infocognition.



The necessity of art in science and poetry in understanding is beyond doubt the most pressing issue at our doorstep; it may not appear as such in front of the tremendous problems we are facing as a civilization on the brink of a probable technological singularity, yet if we are to advance a mind rooted in the Neolithic into a post human future of beauty, aesthetic curators of information are the beacons we need look to.
Space Collective itself is a very good pointer to where the shift in infocognition is taking us as indeed is the Polytopia project, both aiming to bring the emotional intelligence of aesthetics into the discourse of the evolution of civilization and hyperconnected minds in particular.
Knowmads I see as aesthetic curators of information in as much as the function they provide is one of enhanced awareness to knowledge transmission and the ensuing transformation of the minds in question.

Our hybrid futures and the rise of the cyber unified civilization, imply that we are moving at a pace of transformation to which we are little aware on a moment by moment basis. The possible beauty of our future lies in our hands, in our very own capability to transform ourselves into curators of interest and aesthetic intelligence, a transmutation in the manner we understand the world and cohere a complexity that unfolds before us.

Alfred North Whitehead once said that: ”Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” Taking this statement as a cue I believe that by becoming aesthetic curators of information we can increase our understanding of the infosphere, define a new kind of intelligence based on the cyber-intuition demanded by curatorial skills, and concurrently design the beauty of the pattern of our hybrid futures as well as rise above the apparent meaninglessness of old recurrences.
Knowmads as aesthetic curators of information in infocologies may provide a fresh vision of thought, an insight into the possible beauty born of intersubjective cross-pollinating info-streams, in the process creating a striking version of an evolved specie, a human ready to be an aesthetic phenomenon.




shortly to be continued..

Endnotes:
Images in text:
1. André Kertész, Untitled (Eye and Lips), 1970
2. Brain Maze by Istvan Orosz
3. Fake Heroes, Fake Idols by Hector Pineda

Sun, May 2, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: culture, collective intelligence, Futures, Evolution,Knowmad,, Polytopia,Aesthetics
Sent to project: Polytopia

RSS for this post

Knowmads as metabolic reactors of information (Hybrid Future and Knowmads (pt 3)
Project: Polytopia

Part 6 in the series : The Rise of the Cyber Unified Civilization


The peculiar ‘liquidity’ of our times may be less the consequence of structural change than intellectual exhaustion, the failure of the great ideologies of the twentieth century to bring about change on a scale that really would transform what it means to be human. Bauman rightly warns against attempts to seek refuge in the identities of the past, but in his lament at the passing of lasting values, he perhaps underestimates the possibilities for self-assured human beings unencumbered by the past, and brave enough to face the future.
—
The trouble with being human these days
Identity
Zygmunt Bauman (by Dolan Cummings)



Intro

The proliferation of visions of our futures in the last decades has created a kind of black hole situation, a situation which, to say the least, and that is why I use the black hole metaphor, has not allowed the light of virtuality to come forth and shine.

The tone of most visions we have come across was either of the apocalyptic kind or of the surrealistic utopian variety. Indeed there are as many visions out there as there are researchers and dreamers, visionaries and thinkers, philosophers and experts. In fact from the visions of B.Fuller and Habermas, to the more recent realities expounded by M.McLuhan and G.Deleuze the crucial point defining the core of the visions was and is increasingly developing as such, the technological ability of the human.

However correct or implicitly insightful those thinkers are it is my view that in one fundamental respect at least we need a different perspective. I refer specifically to the commonly held view about the information society we live in that information produces more information or alternatively that information reproduces as information. The information explosion indeed breeds more information but to focus on this aspect is to my eyes erroneous, not because it is untrue, but because the focus of our vision and the locus of our insights should be on a different plane, the plane of intersubjective meaning.

Meaningfulness is not something born of the void, there is no inherent meaning to life as such, what makes life interesting, and in certain respects important and valuable, is the intersubjective crosspollination of our localized perception, sensations and mindfulness with another.




Old others, new others

Taking this perspective as the basis of our visions, what the technological postindustrial reality has brought to our doorstep, our perceptual doorstep, is the factuality of the other, the new other.
This new other is not the same as the old other. The commonly accepted view that the other is my next-door neighbor no longer holds sway for the simple reason that my neighborhood is not physical but virtual and is not called a district or a region or city but an infocology.

Of course my physical neighbor still exists and we still greet each other in the morning or when we meet in the material world, shopping at the local grocer or walking the dog. However the issue standing in front of us is that my electronically mediated neighborhood, my infosphere at large and my infocology in particular is increasingly more pertinent to my mind and indeed to my intersubjective meaningfulness.

In other words, I do not see us as a technological society, nor as an information society but as a civilization outgrowing its localization into an intersubjective meaningfulness, a/spatial and a/temporal, progressing into a unified cyber civilization.

Notwithstanding Mcluhan and Fuller, Shanon and Wiener, the real prophets of the 20th century, we need a new manner of understanding ourselves, new myths to satisfy our ever-increasing hyperconnectivity and by consequence intersubjective appetite for meaning.

Old myths, new myths

Myths abound around us, but not all myths are created equal, some myths serve their functions better than others, whilst other myths exhaust their meaningfulness long before they exhaust their memetic longevity. A good example of a fatigued myth is the myth of the happy consumer, basically implying that the more the consumption the more the happiness, a fundamental fallacy promulgated for profit and actually believed by many until recently, fortunately finally proved wrong. (as an aside please note that I do not think that consumption in itself is wrong or bad, the joy of sharing in the market of goods and artifacts, services and trade is as old as the agora, the issue here is the equation of increased consumption with increased happiness).


The myth of the happy consumer of goods is a construct that has evolved, and some say mutated, into the myth of the happy consumer of information. And thus, just as the first was annihilated will this new myth be obliterated into the meaninglessness that it stands for, namely the belief that the more information consumed the more the happiness. In this regard, it is my understanding that the problem with this new myth concerns also, and maybe primarily, the usage of the terminology of consumption. In our current situation we need question critically if what we do with information is consumption, I for one do not think so, appearances notwithstanding.

But before I present a polytopian stance towards information, a few words about myths.
I realize that for many nowadays myths are legends to be dismissed, an easy and quite quotidian colloquialism referring to false stories or traditional, and for some, sacred, symbolic descriptions of the origins of reality. However, my take on the issue is that myths serve a purpose in the evolution of civilization, they serve as ideation containers, contours of hard to describe sense impressions, pointers to sense-thoughts that centralize a notion before it is clarified or dismissed as either insubstantial or irrelevant. In other words, myths are contextual operators of our collective minds, given birth to serve a purpose of meaning, in time to be re-appraised and upgraded, or rejected as the case may be.
Many myths have served us in the past, they serve us no longer, let them rest in peace in the historical dustbin museum of past human ingenuity, to be admired and researched, but not to be used anymore.
Instead let us create new myths, transitory working contexts, that will permit us new operational attitudes, fresh pathways into possible futures, upgraded understandings and realizations on the nature of our minds, the nature of reality and the directions we wish to pursue as a specie.

As our minds are evolving into a new kind of state, that of the Knowmad, a specie in a polytopian informational metaverse, we need accordingly a new story, a new myth, to cater for the transit period in the evolution of human civilization we find ourselves in.




"It is not so much that digital technology recapitulates the language of classical mythology as the story of a fateful struggle between closed versus open systems — Scylla versus Charybdis — but that contemporary technoculture now approaches its apogee as a universe in drift. "

CTheory.net

A new myth – Infocological Metabolism

In the new myth, Knowmads are not consumers of information; we are metabolic reactors of information, intermediate junctions of innovation and creativity, catalysts of emergent phase spaces.
Using the metaphor of biological metabolism let us propose that the new kind of mind that is emerging in front of us is a mind that is inherently able to distinguish that which is nutritious from that which is poisonous, a critical mind, implicitly committed to the advancement of knowledge of life, the universe, and everything.

The metabolic process of an infocology depends on a few but major points; it must be inherently transparent, open and evolutive. It needs become (and is increasingly becoming) a universe of discourse in which semantic representations are inherently transformable, transmutable and ultimately correlative.
The topology of the knowmadic infosphere if so can be said to be a multiplicity of interacting stories, joining and splitting, merging and detaching. The flow of such infocologies allows for a continuous upgrade of both understanding and critical thought.
Allowing the metabolic process of an infocology to flourish is amongst the prime goals of a Knowmad mind. The creation of circumstances of infoflows (infocologies) in which and by which self-editing becomes the ambient event is the possible promise of a polytopia.




"Liberated from the plodding world of materiality by networked regimes of relational processing and ubiquitous computing, the neural mechanisms of the human mind demonstrate unexpected plasticity and openness to heterogeneity. "

Code Drift- Arthur & Marilouise Kroker at Ctheory

A knowmadic mind

It is a Knowmad in as much as the principle of actuation it operates is one of critical self-examination especially with regards to the biases involved in its information processing. And just as there are many kinds of metabolic systems (and by consequence different criteria are applied and different results are arrived at in different organisms) so it is the case that different minds will process information differently and will present different results as to what is considered nutritious and what is considered poisonous. Moreover, even for a particular knowmadic mind, given that evolution is inherent, the metabolic process of information will not remain the same, creating a new state of affairs in which toxic information can become nutritious and vice versa.

The process I am trying to describe here is a highly complex one and demands a certain poetic license, which I take with both hands. The transformation and at times sheer annihilation of old myths and casual conceptions into new modes of thoughts and fresh fashions of emoting is a difficult one and I do not for a moment fall prey to the idea that the transition will be an easy or simple one. But if we are to thrive into a future humanism, in which compassion and empathy do not find their origins in a Neolithic mindset but on a true posthuman ethics of abstraction and an aesthetic of engagement not based on the material, the transition is inevitable.

As the new story of our species and civilization evolves, the story of individualism progresses into and as, the hyperconnected node, in given infocologies. These infocologies, nested fractally within the larger hyper sphere of information, the infosphere, evolve metabolic reactors of information. Metabolic reactors of information are collective mindsets evolving criteria for distinguishing wholesome or nutritious information from toxic or poisonous information. These in turn react and interact with and within flows of other infocologies, increasing in the process both the health and wealth of the infosphere and that of the Knowmad.

The wisdom that results from the transformation and transmutation of data into facts, facts into information and information into knowledge, is not one but many, a multiple kind of wisdom, perforating the very idea of uniqueness and centralization, hierarchy and conformity.

The revolutions and rapid advancements in Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and maybe more importantly Neurotechnology and Cognitive sciences combined with the globalization of the private and public discourse via the internet will potentially and quite possibly permit us a fresh undertaking in our conceptualization of that which we already are : embodied minds, metabolizing information.

The Knowmad Polytopian mind is particularly well suited to this new state of affairs since its very exploratory characteristic and experimental inclination relay the importance of keeping all the avenues of our aesthetic engagement, open.

Our hybrid futures depict a lovely panorama, shining the light of virtuality into our present retinal configuration, changing our insight vessels in the process.


shortly to be continued..

Mon, Apr 26, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: culture, polytopia, collective intelligence, Futures, Evolution,Knowmad,
Sent to project: Polytopia

RSS for this post

Hybrid futures, Knowmads and the Notion state
Project: Polytopia

or The rise of the Cyber Unified Civilization (part 4)

“Today, after over fifteen years of planning, construction, delays and drama, the Large Hadron Collider began doing what it was built to do: colliding particles.
Just before 13:00 Geneva time, physicists guided two beams of protons moving at 3.5 TeV into collision points around the machine's 27 km ring. Moments later, cheers erupted from the control rooms of the machine's four main experiments, as shrapnel from the collisions flooded into the detectors.” Nature"

Going live:
“How is the LHC performing?”
“ Amazingly well.. I am almost speechless, it is the start of a great adventure”



As I am writing the last lines of this post I am simultaneously listening to the amazing live webcast of the most formidable experiment in human history, the collision of 7TV beams at Cern LHC, a project which outcome may very well revolutionize our understanding of the basic laws of physics. Mimicking the big bang , the systematic exploration of nature, is nothing less than a total revolution in our penetration into the very fabric of matter, of time, of space, and as I am listening to the words of the scientists, the engineers and the huge array of a diverse population all working together I cannot but be emotionally moved in hearing the exclamations of the speakers, the celebration, the bottles of wines and champagne being opened and the cheers of success.
However the important issue here from my standpoint is that it is broadcasted live, to millions of people all over the planet, simultaneously, we are all together watching and listening when a small percentage of our specie provides for us a possible explanation of mass, of bosons, of super symmetry, as one of the interviewees said:
‘it’s a new physics, a new model, a new beauty.. we are mapping the unknown, and waiting for the unexpected, stay tuned..”



It is in fact a:

A collective overcoming of tribal inhibition mechanisms

This is nothing short of the most difficult project for humanity for it pushes us to the limits and urges us to overcome our old prejudices, it is a competition as well as a collaboration, a truly fundamental step in shedding light not only on the first moments of the universe but probably on the first moments of our hybrid futures, our knowmadic being and our future notion states.

"Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience”

Deleuze and Guattari (What is Philosophy?)

1. The Knowmad

The Knowmad casts aside the commonly held monumental and hierarchical order of higher and lower and transmutes said order into the possible flow of events; and if indeed, as I assume, the bogus cosmic order is finally being cast aside for a flow of events, the old status conferred by the no-longer holding-sway command is no longer valid and in consequence a new method of status and value appreciation need be resolved.
For a Knowmad in this case there is no rightful place as was held by the ancients, a fact which in itself allows for a fresh undertaking of the concepts of liberty and democracy.
In fact it will not be untrue to state that the old questions of “how one should live his life?” or indeed “how one should act” are being transformed in the Knowmad state into a new set of questions, fundamentally resolving the two issues of knowledge and hyperconnectivity.

The Knowmad in this sense not only sees herself dissociated from the old tradition but realizes that the potentiality embedded in the hyperconnected reality holds a new set of truisms for which a different mindset is required. The new set of paradigms such as the factuality of hyperconnectivity, mobile communications and virtual or augmented realities, imply a fluid mindset that sees at any given point not equivalence of times but the superiority of elegant futures.

These futures are potential scenarios to which the Knowmad will claim no credit nor belief but simply experimentation and exploration.
It is my view that the state of the Knowmad could not have been anticipated by past philosophers for the simple reason that certain critical and necessary parameters of the Knowmad state could not have been predicted.
Chief amongst these parameters are the Internet hyperconnected reality and the newly emergent technologies of reality augmentation, these in tandem create a new existential situation for which no philosophy was prepared and anticipated.

When Nietzsche obliterated god and eliminated our transcendent morality basis he did not anticipate that the hyperconnected reality would in a very special sense come to our rescue. Instead of getting lost in a chaotic abyss of non-restraint we are founding right now a fresh transcendence, which is nothing short than a virtuality of non-transcendence .
Of what substance is this virtuality made that it may allow us to answer the basic questions of life?

Fundamentally it is made of an emergent property (and no it is not the wisdom of the crowds- a concept to which I am not attracted) of the hyperconnected reality, the emergent phenomena of multiple co-dependent personas each carrying a set of knowledge characteristics pertinent to the appropriate virtuality in which it resides. (See Topos- a topos in a polytopia, what is)
The main point to look at here is the fact that a topos does not hold a judging function and thus does not demand a justification for its perceptual virtuality. What this implies is that the new questions and the new mindset do not have, or perhaps do not carry the metrics of outsidedeness; in other words there is no universal mechanisms (or truths or values ) to judge the trustworthiness say, of a given persona in a given virtuality at a given time, the mechanism for value realization is thus inherent in the topos itself and is not automatically transferable to other nets (or other topos). However if the value cannot be transferred to other topos how is a polytopia to operate a large-scale multidimensional value assessment?



The answer to that may be found in understanding the real life happenings of networks and cross network pollination and eventual cross-fertilization. A system developing on its own, and though based on the provided technology of the platform results in the rise of the Knowmad state.

2. The Knowmad State

note: Bullets are marked 1 to 6 - the quotes before each and every bullet point are for reflection and emphasize- adding what I believe is a hypertextual backbone to the concept of the Knowmadic state.

"There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. The cyber-prophets were wrong here. The virtual is becoming more real. It wants to penetrate and map out our real lives and social relationships. We are no longer encouraged to act out some role, but forced to be “ourselves” (which is no less theatrical or artificial)."

(Geert Lovink- MyBrain.net -The colonization of real-time and other trends in Web 2.0)

1. For a Knowmad confines are observational tools, to be upgraded, smoothened, changed or indeed virtualized and redesigned at will according to the needs of the infocology the Knowmad partakes in and co-depends upon.

"Changing our way of thinking about the world is a necessary first step, but it is by no means sufficient: we will need to destratify reality itself, and we must do so without the guarantee of a golden age ahead, knowing full well the dangers and possible restratifications we may face."

(DeLanda (2005: 274))

2. The knowmadic state embodies the dynamical symbolism of radical digital Darwinism, in practice this implies the freedom to resist quick assimilations and challenge broken perspectives. The knowmadic state is soaking in a flowing multitude of objects and sensations, info visuals and knowledge dimensions.

"For Deleuze, a nomad does not have to move… a nomad can practice nomadology whilst being in one place. It is the nomadology of thought - the journey to new territories through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. "

(Vikki Hill: What is Nomadic thought in Gilles Deleuze & Rosi Braidotti)

3.The Knowmad can be said to be both a-temporal in the sense that the belonging of said mind couldn’t be implied upon a particular time, and a-spatial in the sense that the belonging of aforesaid mind cannot be implied upon a particular space or location.
The Knowmad state thus is the embodiment of an infocology and a manifestation of a Topos.

"Decoding and interpreting signals, packets, gestures etc. is what we call communication. Since the birth of the computer, that viral mechanism has established a symbiotic relationship with their creators, to the point where humans cannot longer function as a society without them. As we merge and augment our senses, our machinic self takes over a majority of functions that we once considered essential for survival, including memory, the control of vital organs and appendices. Carbon and silicon, en route to the next evolutionary stage, collaborate to bring about the inevitable transformation. Telecommunications and the internet have become mobile. We are the nodes, the packets and the modems. We are still the storytellers, and we wish to share the magic around the digital fire. As we pull the curtain we discover that the Wizard is Us."

(Arturo Sinclair: The Wizard is Us: Symbiogenesis by Networking Part 1)

4. The Knowmad state is the ultimate knowledge Shaman, a modern day techno actuator, and a polytopian in action; embedding and embodying a multi-sensorial modality of thought and act, a living virtual manifestation of mind. Knowmads recount the story of the freedom of information and knowledge as manifested in matter and immediacy.

"A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of social networks — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free."

(Brendan I. Koerner: How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive)

5. The Knowmad state epitomizes the serendipity of knowledge and random fluctuations in infocologies. The embodiment of motion and flow, within a given asymmetrical infocology is the primary activity of self-mapping Knowmads. (for an extended view see: self-mapping in complex infocologies)

"In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things."

(Kazys Varnelis: The meaning of network culture)

6. For the Knowmad the state of affairs of existence is a networked flow of events. The mind of Knowmads does not attach importance to the possession of an idea, or to the particular manner in which embodiment is produced and manifested. Knowmads travel in and upon information seas, creating temporary habitats as infocologies, without bias and no denomination. Knowmads are evolutionary agents, creating, designing, partaking and co-depending on infoflows.

post update Apr 15:

7.To be a Knowmad is to be a different kind of being, a different way of being, a facilitator of cultures, against monoculture and mono-linguistics, we need creative templates for the next kind of freedom to come forth.

8. Knowmads are different in as much as they are an embodiment of the progress of the evolutionary principle in culture. Knowmads are inclusive beings, ordering chaotic flows of information into cultural phenomena.

9. The Knowmad is the proactive stance of the hyperconnected player in the infosphere, she moves, he surfs, we collaborate, we actively engage and indeed pattern new potentials into new forms of existence.

10. Knowmads excel in ambiguous situations, demystifying mythologies, enhancing syntax and semantics conversion into actual adaptation of new forms of meaning, these in turn change the very meaning of enmeshed existence.

Interlude

Knowmads are substantial agents of change, who drastically alter the infocologies they interact with. The level of freedom implied by the knowmadic state is a new existential virtuality that pushes into the real, in the process transforming and meshing the different dimensions in which our minds operate. Existing as non-localized behaviors of information processing, Knowmads are not consumers and cannot be looked upon as capital. Knowmads are the innovators of thought and vision, using an insight mechanism based on correlated data-spheres of complex infocologies.
Knowmads do not care for labels of old style paradigms, such as gender ,creed, race or indeed status, what Knowmads care about are the pleasures derived in forming new connections, mash-ups and provisional options, innovative solutions for the next step in human evolution.
Our complex neuro-mesh firing in tandem, has produced this amazing property we call conscious awareness, with the advent of 21st century tech, augmented reality apps, visually stunning info-graphics, virtualities at our finger tips, p2p technologies availability and the like we are becoming Knowmads. The value of the Knowmad state is thus in providing a fresh framework and a new narrative to fill our old storytelling needs in our ever-increasing process of self-description.


shortly to be continued.. (with notion states and hybrid futures)


endnotes:
# this is part 1 of part 4
image 1, 2 from Cern
image 3 from Wayne Levin Images

Wed, Mar 31, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: culture, polytopia, collective intelligence, Futures, Evolution,Knowmad,
Sent to project: Polytopia

RSS for this post