lessons in human failings.

The main thing I learned in the last month is that no matter what I am dependent on a mixture of my memory and my hearing.  This is one of the reasons my preference is for email, or another form of written communication.

I am addicted to having a paper trail.

The problem is, that having a paper trail in many cases demands repetition.  And people (myself included) have very little tolerance for repetition, especially in cases where technology is involved.

The solution is fairly simple - I would pay through the nose for a service that delivered automated transcripts of my phone conversations, or even of face to face conversations, to my email inbox.  Being able to point to the exact moment of communication breakdown would be essential, especially since it has become unavoidable that I conduct fairly important conversations over several media.

An increased dependence on technology means an increased demand for accuracy.  unfortunately, the rust between the gears is always human falliability.  Plan accordingly.

burst / pack culture.

Burst Culture is Pack Culture. Pack Culture is Burst Culture.

Let me back up a bit.

Warren Ellis (Internet Jesus, Genius Comic Author, thank fucking god he's got a novel coming out in a month) wrote a little missive on 'Burst Culture', what it does, and what it's good for. Burst culture is twitter, it's fast fiction, it's aligned with out current reality, which is to say, it's designed for value with minimal instance-based interaction time. Burst culture gives people something they think is of use, without crossing the ever narrowing threshold of not-worth-my-time. Burst culture is, in short, the way to think when building ideas for the internet, at least the current version of web2.0 social networking insert buzzword here internet that I have trouble thinking outside of.

Pack culture, as I've been rambling for about a week, is in many ways something obsolete that the internet makes viable again. You can see it in 'My Five' cellphone plans, and you can see it in the Facebook option to hear more news about certain people. To anyone still on livejournal, it's the best example I can think of. Pack culture today is about integrating information on the lives of select people into yours in such a way as to know them without it seemingly requiring effort. Pack culture is why conversations I have with friends who live in other cities inevitably have the sentence 'yeah, i read that on your blog' repeated ad-nauseum. Pack culture is a small version of crowd sourcing. Ideas are sent en masse to a select few, and using the information they help you to synthesise concepts into theory. As opposed to having people all over the world interact with smaller units of information and suggest direction, you have a small group getting to know the entire framework, and then becoming integral in it's expansion.

Pack culture is about marking out your tribe, your collective, and them understanding that people who know you that well are often the only ones worth collaborating with.

Burst culture is tiny blasts of information, and Pack culture is the collection of those blasts, imperceptibly and without irritation, into a comprehensive understanding of another person, or group of people. So you can help them think, tear them apart, etc.

And the only reason I'm considering this something different than friendship is that it operates without a time bias, space bias, or even a particular affinity for the person. It's just a mixture of interest in their ideas, access to their bursts, and desire to benefit from mutual innovation.

one more rant on privacy.

These are showerthoughts (ideas that occur randomly while showering) so I ask that you bear with me.

I've written in the past about the generation gap, and it's relation to privacy and technology use, and I stumbled onto an explanation so simple that I am almost certain I've just forgotten that I read it somewhere else. Privacy, for the older generation is a matter of permission. The issue isn't whether or not information is available, it's a matter of being able to set your own terms for the amount of people, and the specific people, who know that information. Privacy, in this traditional definition, is a matter of having a life that is only open to those with your approval.

Privacy as it seems to be desired no operates on an opposite basis. Instead of information being given only to a select few 'cleared' entities, information is made readily available, for everyone to see. What privacy means in this paradigm is instead the ability to secure the information from a select few, whether it be family, certain friends, a boss, etc. This inversion makes sense on the grounds that privacy is (barring extreme situations such as stalking) only really important in relation to people you interact with. While my grandparents may not have wanted anyone else to know their business, the list of people who would actually care about the average private citizen's business is miniscule, usually less than 100 people, and a large number of corporations. Functionally, a desire for privacy is really just a desire to keep certain facts about your life away from certain people who are also in it, and away from corporate and governmental entities that will misuse that information.

The generation I'm living in seems, more or less, to have decided that a blocking approach works better. A permission system is great, if you only want a very select group to interact with your experiences and ideas. This is an example of pack level thinking, which I've been rambling about lately. However, a permission system is also the antithesis of the internet age. Closed information is dead, and can't be repurposed, reinterpreted, and reborn into something useful. Many people get excited about the idea of telling everyone they know what countries they have visited, movies they have seen, etc, as demonstrated in the latest round of facebook applications and invitations to install them I have been getting. There's value in the idea that anyone in the world can read your writing, or see your pictures or drawings. There's even more value in the details of your life being available to everyone BUT your boss, your mother, the government.

This is obviously confusing for people who grew up keeping things private in the old sense. At the same time, going back to the old approach looks from here like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

pack humanity (2)

I'm wondering why social networks now are constantly trying to promote the idea of mass friend accumulation, a la facebook, myspace, etc. Not that that I don't understand the potential for associations as a social currency (I went to high school, after all) but that they seem so perfectly designed for smaller groups, whether it be a social circle, or a creative collective. So that's what I've been thinking about lately, the role that software and social networking can play in relation to creative work in groups.

The core of the idea is that working creatively with other is unavoidably personal, and usually gets better the more personal it is. When I write with / for someone I know well, I can tailor my work to what I now they will like, can get behind, etc. More importantly than that, I know what not to write. I know what I can just leave empty, because the interpretation of the other party overcomes some failing in either my skills or my understanding. Similarly, friends know when it's a good idea to override my work, and when I'll flip out over the order of temporally irrelevant sentences.

This is, to me, a method of creating value in social networking (because, honestly, value is needed). The internet has been fostering this for years, and one of the best examples of creative collective endeavours is the Webcomic subculture. I can think of at least a few fairly successful partnerships that began and grew before the principals ever met in person. The kind of personal understanding that aids the development of creative works in a small group is facilitated greatly by the internet - it's cheaper than long distance phone calls, it supplements memory, and relationships can be maintained without a time or space bias, and often without effort. There are many people I know well, mostly though web-based media, regardless of how often I see them face to face. This in no way makes me less able to read them in real life, but it does mean that I can maintain relationships with long silences.

Creative collectives can exist, and do, without any intimacy between the stakeholders. At the same time, a focused experience where you, somewhat passively, learn about those you work with, not just in a work setting, but in life altogether, has clear benefits. Making it easy is as simple as repurposing currently available tools; when the Ontario government banned facebook from it's offices, they not only cut themselves off from a means of contacting voters, they re-instituted the distance between people working in offices. Learning about co-workers is not simple or pleasant. Doing it unthinkingly, using a tool like facebook, is a clear solution.

I'm scribbling out ideas on how to create a social networking suite aimed not at individuals, but at members of creative collectives, with an eye to working within that social structure, reinforcing it, while still increasing knowledge and understanding about the actual (non-corporate) personalities around you. Right now I'm beating my head against the wall figuring out the mechanics of profiles being built over time, the possibility of recommendation of compatible collectives with needed skill sets, and different administrative systems (long story, but the difference between the Smashing Pumpkins and a freestyle Jazz ensemble has to be taken into account).

We were tribe people long before we were anything else. Logically there should be value to exploit there.

thinking in fiction.

I was talking to a friend a while ago about the concept of human civilisation as a virus, of sorts, leading us on a destructive path, leading us to oblivion. He responded by asking how a civilisation could mature in any other way, while still becoming a credible threat (i.e., enough of a threat that another civilisation would introduce said virus). All I could come up with is that there could have been a positive effect on human social convention, or on our understanding of the world we occupy, etc, before we reached the point of changing the world to our needs, rather than bending to it. Of course, this got me imagining the effects of another million years of humans living in a hunter-gatherer mode, or the comparative benefits of a pack society.

As such, I've been toying with the idea of pack humanity as experienced through the current media paradigm; would people travel only in groups? Would packs live in an enmeshed world of pack-only blog posts, twitter updates, photosets, social networks and unlimited calling plans? Packs would undoubtedly grow, and how would the necessary division of unwieldy groups into sub-units play out? Part of me can't help but run to a primal idea of physical combat, but I can also see customs evolving until leadership is dealt with by non-violent mental and physical tasks. I'd even consider in-pack elections or genetic, mental and physical testing on an individual level as a credible option. How would politics work, would each pack align itself with a meta-pack? Or would everything operate on the basis of personal ownership, where packs tend to all of their own needs, bartering with other small groups for essentials?

This is obviously an interesting concept, but lately it has me thinking about the pack mentality that has entered my own social happenings. The people I am friends with in real life are the ones I interact with most through technological means. Blogging, in general, operates on the same basis; most blogs aren't written for the entire world to read, they are intended for a specific pack, whether it be family, friends, or even just one specific social subgroup. This is actually a large part of why I haven't deleted my livejournal account; the friend's page design is more than just a proto-rss concept, it's digital pack mentality put into practice. The vast majority of people who read anything I post on livejournal do so after aligning themselves with me publicly, as a friend.

While these concepts have been introduced to facebook, I think it facebook itself functions on more of an observation level. People read where I went to school, my status, my likes and dislikes, and look at pictures of me. I rarely get messages, and wall posts, though pleasant, are far from engrossing as a form of contact. This is the level I imagine twitter works on (though I have yet to sign up), a small list of updates which, even collectively, give little to no information about the actual characteristics of the user.

I'd argue that this is because it isn't directed at a pack, it's directed at the long chain of acquaintances that I'm happy to indicate I know, but not necessarily particularly interested in the day-to-day lives of.