For centuries our social and psychic fabric has been organized around the linear pressures of the printed word. Now an electronic environment of simultaneity is enveloping the entire planet and all of the tidy straight lines of our previous culture are unravelling.

Wed, Sep 8, 2010  Permanent link

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defining p2p

I've been exploring the meaning of p2p with @notthisbody, and along the way trying to distill the concept down to a simple definition. The logic of p2p has long transcended file sharing and is beginning to transform everything from politics to our economy. 'peer-to-peer' only scratches the surface of what we mean by p2p.

There are lots of wonderful explorations on the meaning and implications of p2p over at p2pfoundation.net which have served as a launch pad for my discussions with @nothtisbody.

Hoping to tap into the wisdom of the spacecollective ...
What's your definition of p2p?

Wed, Jul 14, 2010  Permanent link

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the circuitry of crowds

There are radical new patterns of power and response-ability emerging around the 21st century citizen. But we are also experiencing a strange kind of political impotence. We are powerful in new ways, yet often incapable of applying any kind of meaningful political force to the most crucial issues of our time ...

I think there's a vital yet transparent element to the city that helps fuel citizenship but is missing from our electronic environment ...

the circuitry of crowds - the spontaneous exchange of emotion between strangers that is vital for exciting larger and more powerful social and political patterns.

In fact, the circuitry of crowds is missing from much of modern life. Cars and suburbs obliterate it. Shopping malls, which have replaced most of our public spaces, only offer a ghastly imitation.

But, even in its infancy, the real time web is creating a new kind of crowd circuitry that has the power to fuel 21st century hypercitizenship.

These ideas are explored in more depth in my original post over at headmine ...
The Circuitry of Crowds [and the rise of the 21st century hypercitizen]


.*.*.*

Your thoughts?

Wed, Jun 16, 2010  Permanent link

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...

Eat when you are hungry.
Sleep when you are tired.
- old Zen saying

These streams of hyperlinks
are turning us into possibility addicts.
To stay sober is to stay fully present with a single idea.
But I doubt even a zen master
could resist the temptation
of the endless electronic more.


A net is just a bunch of holes tied together with string.

The web is just a bunch of possibilities tied together with hyperlinks.

Mon, Mar 29, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: Religion, web, Zen, presence, more, net, awarenesshyperlink

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roots

The ‘all-at-oncess’ of the network penetrates our psyche.

Unconsciously, we want to be in tune with the immediacy of the grid.

A lack of presence is incompatible with our electronic environment.

Detachment is the highest value in a literate culture.
Detachment is absurd when you are connected to everyone and everything.

Our electronic media simultaneously push us towards and tear us away from the roots of presence.

We are torn between two seemingly incompatible sources of now: the ‘here and now’ of the real world, and the ‘real-time now’ of the virtual.

Sitting in front of a computer, staring at a monitor we lose our tenuous link to the here and now all around us.

Trapped in a chair, our body is numb, frozen, disconnected from our thinking and experiencing. Our peripheral vision is turned off. Our sensual landscape narrows and becomes all figure no ground. The crucial mind, body, world circuit - which is the source of all presence - is broken.

But we’re at a turning point.
The tablet is the first baby step towards reawakening our bodies from a long slumber.

Gesture is becoming an interface and a language.

“When a medium is coincident with life, the last refuge for humanism is gone. The long story of humanism — by which I mean the emergence of individual consciousness as a byproduct of our language and literature — comes to an end when we return, futuristically, to doing everything by hand.” - Gary Wolf

The next generation of ambient, tangible, and biological interfaces will begin to truly merge the real and the virtual into a single reality.

The roots of presence will once again flow from a single source.

Physics and metaphysics will become one.

Tue, Mar 23, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: real time web, presence, time, now, body, real, virtual

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finding yourself in the flow

“[The net] makes the measurement of the self nearly inescapable, and makes the archive the model for the self rather than engaged presence.” —Rob Horning

This was true in the past but
as the dominant metaphor of the web shifts from pages to streams
from objects to flows
our model of the self is also shifting.
When the web was slower and made up of mostly static pages
our identity could be found in our archives.
But now our archives are being buried under a flood of nowness.
Our identity emerges not from the collections of our past
but from the many ways in which we touch the present.
It’s a new kind of presence ...
One that stretches beyond the here and now
and bridges the gap between our real and virtual lives.
Now has become the membrane between us and the network.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody retweets it does it make a sound?

Mon, Mar 22, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: real time web, presence, identity, self

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curator

You and I are not curators. We ”just sort through rubbish“. We are ”just a makeshift step before a more advanced algorithm is invented.“ If the term ”curator is devalued cheapened“ ... ”then museums could lose all respect as cultural bastions.“

“When an old culture is dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure.” - Rudolf Bahro

Apparently the 'real' curators don't like us co-opting their title.
But you and I aren’t just filters or list makers
we recontextualize
we create as we collide ideas and artifacts that have not been seen together
we expose each other to new parts of our culture
while at the same time helping to preserve them
(although the meaning of preservation is turned inside out by electric media)
we uncover new paths to new insights and new understandings
we promote
we interpret
we help make the hidden visible.

At our best, we are curators in every sense of the word.

Mon, Mar 15, 2010  Permanent link

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the future of storytelling

not an author and a reader … a collision of co-creators
not reading or watching … playing and procreating
not a product … a process
not a tidy straight line … a mosaic
… a pattern that you can view from any perspective
not a beginning and an end … the end of the beginning, middle and end
not a frozen narrative … a collective imagination in constant motion
… a dream of a dream we are dreaming together
not fiction but not fact … the elastic middle where real and not real meet
not a work of art that you pause your life to take in
…a stream within a stream of your own lifestream.

Sun, Mar 14, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: narrative, art, storytelling, mosaic

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"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them." Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935, from A Cyber Soaring Humanity by wildcat

Wed, Feb 24, 2010  Permanent link

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At the speed of light, perception is truth.

When we are bombarded with information from every direction simultaneously, critical thinking is pushed aside out of necessity by faster, more holistic forms of awareness. Emotion and image take center stage.

We are learning to use our digital media as a form of ESP.
We don’t read, we scan.
We jump around quickly searching for patterns,
flashes of relevance
and the instant gratification of icons and images.
Our arguments and ideas no longer sit in tidy, straight lines,
they explode in clusters and constellations.


(from the cult of perception)

Wed, Feb 24, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: perception, awareness, logic, truth, emotion, image

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