Category Archives: Complexity

To speak a true word is to transform the world

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Just read the interview with guy who coined the term ‘virtual reality’, Jaron Lanier. In my humble opinion:

(1) He’s got it wrong about Wikipedia lacking in personality, it covers subjects I don’t expect to find in a more officious publication; it has a discussions section; it’s an encyclopedia for christ’s sake!

(2) I agree with his criticisms of the so-called ‘wisdom of the crowds’, not because crowds don’t have wisdom (oh god forbid I am too stupid to see that..) but because there is a tendency to aggregate, aggregate and aggregate. And then spin that as some kind of golden moment for the individual. Well it is and it isn’t. The danger is kidding ourselves that social software is some how pushing the frontiers of radical individualism. People do that. Technology doesn’t, but I guess what Lanier is getting at (I’m slow but catching up..) is that its the wider embedded culture of nerdism which doesn’t help.

(3) But that nerd culture itself is rooted in the underlying psychology we all unconsciously adopt – that we are essentially the same (and here I’m stealing from radical humanist critique in the manner of Eric Fromm etc). Capitalism won the war because it is expert at giving the superficial impression that we can all express ourselves through our consumer choices, our democratic system, our lifestyles for god sake. But underlying that is an unspoken agreement between people that that is as good as it gets, that we are deep down too scared to really be human, to really express ourselves. What Fromm calls ‘fear of freedom’ if my memory serves me right. And I can see the current nerd culture supposedly and idealistically making us all individuals when in practice its challenging very little in terms of mainstream culture, if not actually ‘updating’ the culture in the trend of giving us the tools to all be individuals, when deep down (god I am repeating myself) we all feel and act on the assumption we are the same. Well, that’s the ‘totalist thinking’ that for me is at the root of it. Kind of funny really when you see if for what it is. Hey.

OK, rant over, I’ve got better things to do.

Does network size matter?

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I happened to catch CSI Miami on TV last night when one of the characters in a class on 1990 reunion boosted that he wasn’t intimidated by the school star quarterback as his ‘network was bigger’. So does size matter with networks? Is it the person with the largest RSS aggregation, the longest blogroll the winner? The common assumption appears to be a resounding yes, though looking at it through complexity eyes maybe there’s another way of looking at connection. One which puts the emphasis on the potential to connect rather than the accumulation of nodes on a network. Less is more with networks? Well, I guess in simple elite terms the rich have always know that. But that’s not what I mean. I mean the ability to focus on the potential for networking, rather than the size of the network whether large or small.