A discussion on freedom and regulation always comes down to coordination of power/influence in order to attain optimal morality of a system. Let me illustrated this with an economic market example.
Given the accumulation of power in central nodes in an economic market, the need for counterbalancing mechanisms, such as democracy become bigger. On the economic market one dollar is one vote and the central nodes (big companies) represent many votes. Democracy on the other hand, balances the market by giving each individual one vote and having the power to limit the set of behaviors in the economc market. The political ideas on what is good and wrong counterbalance the powerful companies behaviors by limiting their freedom. The freedom of companies to form laborcontracts with children for example has been restricted in the western world, even though both companies and children were willing to form these workrelations. The moral view that childlabor is wrong resulted in political laws limiting possible behaviour in the economic market. In this view a discussions on opening economic markets mean a shift of power from votes to dollars. This might be good when the restrictions imposed upon markets reduce the functioning (allowed behaviours) of a market too much. So in economic markets politics forms a mechanism which balances powers and coordinates morality and freedoms.
Given the way the web nowadays shifts towards fewer, increasingly more powerfull centres (Google, Facebook), the need for a counterbalancing mechanism becomes clearer. In the normal world politics exist where the power of money is controled by voters. On the web we also would like to limit the set of possible behaviors (phishing, spam). We nowadays use national politics to do so, but given the global nature of the web this hardly suffices. A better coordinationmechanism is needed by which we nettizens can control unwanted behavior of powerful parties on the web. We need a way to reach a common moral ground restricting the behavior of everybody, including the powerful players. The voting with your feet principle is just not good enough (if people don't like googles policy in China, they still keep using their gmail/search). Another coordination mechanism is needed. I hope the e-G8 will adress these kinds of topics.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Friday, February 20, 2009
The future will be Tasty for the Brain
The human brain is a funny thing. Both its structure and content make it easy or hard for information to enter. An expert fireman for example has a different perception of a fire from an accidental passer by. His experiences enable a much richer perception and will make him notice much more details. So the content in his brain influence his perception.
The structure of the brain has a more problematic influence: it is hard to see whether phenomena in the outside world are there as we see them, or that the patterns we observe are the result of a combination of perception and the computational properties of our brain (and sensors). Interesting in this respect is mathematics. Is it a universal language which can be used to describe all in nature, or is it a language that expresses a large part of the computational faculties of the human brain which is very useful only for humans to describe and model natural phenomena.
Illusions and Biases
This structure of the brain makes it susceptible for illusions and biases. With these it is clear we percieve the world non objectively. We see things which are not there or judge situations incorrect due to the wiring in our brain. I for one have been victim of my own planning falacy (the tendency to underestimate task-completion times) and we all know the band-wagon effect.
Memes
In this light I am very much enjoying the idea of memes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme). Although these have been described as virusses of the mind, they may be quite harmless or enjoyable. For example, religion as a meme, makes its carriers on average happier than non carriers. The concept of meme helps in thinking about the combination of the structure of the human mind and the sum of all human knowledge which we call culture. Some ideas are just on average very tasty for human brains given their structures and contents. These tasty ideas do not need to have a bigger connection to the truth than their non tasty counterparts.
Future of the web
If we keep this in mind its is interesting to look at the present and think about the future. With respect to media, the human brain prefers newspapers with images over the ones without them. It prefers radio over news papers and it prefers video over radio. From this we can make an educated guess about the future of the web: it will be much more about video than about text because video tastes better for the brain. This will have implications for hyperlinks: we will want a clear way to put a link into a video that makes clear it is a link (giving text a blue colour or underlining it does the trick for text). What will we do in a video, draw small blue lines around objects to make it clear that clicking it will open another document with information related to the highlighted object? And what will this kind of linking mean for our search engines. At the moment they are text based. If the web will become video instead of text, how will we be able to search the web and find the interesting stuff? I for one would be very happy when I could upload a picture or movie frame and hit the go button in Google. In this manner I would be able to discover the name of the car I like in a movievideo or find pictures or movies with the car in it. This agains asks for a common video interaction language with which I can both highlight a part of a video and add different kinds of semantics to the highlighting which together formulates my search query.
What determines the future of Society?
The future of the web is one thing, but the future of the world will also be influenced by this tastyness for the brain. We see that advertising maximises its impact by pushing the right tastebuds in our brains. We manipulate human photos on a large scale to make advertisements maximally atractive, even if this makes the pictures unhuman. We like our brains to trick ourselves.
This increasing ability to manipulate our human brain is uncanny. Where will it lead us and society. Will we still be able to resist on a large enough scale to the bombardment of information by companies which might have good intentions for their customers, but even better intentions for themselves? Will humans still determine the course of humanity or will large for profit organizations seal our destiny? If this would happen, would it be bad? And if it is possible that we will pass this border, do we know we did not yet pass it?
The structure of the brain has a more problematic influence: it is hard to see whether phenomena in the outside world are there as we see them, or that the patterns we observe are the result of a combination of perception and the computational properties of our brain (and sensors). Interesting in this respect is mathematics. Is it a universal language which can be used to describe all in nature, or is it a language that expresses a large part of the computational faculties of the human brain which is very useful only for humans to describe and model natural phenomena.
Illusions and Biases
This structure of the brain makes it susceptible for illusions and biases. With these it is clear we percieve the world non objectively. We see things which are not there or judge situations incorrect due to the wiring in our brain. I for one have been victim of my own planning falacy (the tendency to underestimate task-completion times) and we all know the band-wagon effect.
Memes
In this light I am very much enjoying the idea of memes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme). Although these have been described as virusses of the mind, they may be quite harmless or enjoyable. For example, religion as a meme, makes its carriers on average happier than non carriers. The concept of meme helps in thinking about the combination of the structure of the human mind and the sum of all human knowledge which we call culture. Some ideas are just on average very tasty for human brains given their structures and contents. These tasty ideas do not need to have a bigger connection to the truth than their non tasty counterparts.
Future of the web
If we keep this in mind its is interesting to look at the present and think about the future. With respect to media, the human brain prefers newspapers with images over the ones without them. It prefers radio over news papers and it prefers video over radio. From this we can make an educated guess about the future of the web: it will be much more about video than about text because video tastes better for the brain. This will have implications for hyperlinks: we will want a clear way to put a link into a video that makes clear it is a link (giving text a blue colour or underlining it does the trick for text). What will we do in a video, draw small blue lines around objects to make it clear that clicking it will open another document with information related to the highlighted object? And what will this kind of linking mean for our search engines. At the moment they are text based. If the web will become video instead of text, how will we be able to search the web and find the interesting stuff? I for one would be very happy when I could upload a picture or movie frame and hit the go button in Google. In this manner I would be able to discover the name of the car I like in a movievideo or find pictures or movies with the car in it. This agains asks for a common video interaction language with which I can both highlight a part of a video and add different kinds of semantics to the highlighting which together formulates my search query.
What determines the future of Society?
The future of the web is one thing, but the future of the world will also be influenced by this tastyness for the brain. We see that advertising maximises its impact by pushing the right tastebuds in our brains. We manipulate human photos on a large scale to make advertisements maximally atractive, even if this makes the pictures unhuman. We like our brains to trick ourselves.
This increasing ability to manipulate our human brain is uncanny. Where will it lead us and society. Will we still be able to resist on a large enough scale to the bombardment of information by companies which might have good intentions for their customers, but even better intentions for themselves? Will humans still determine the course of humanity or will large for profit organizations seal our destiny? If this would happen, would it be bad? And if it is possible that we will pass this border, do we know we did not yet pass it?
Welcome to my blog
Dear reader,
I am moving backwards in time. Apparently I am getting old or I am old of mind. Instead of moving form a Blog towards Twitter. I move from Twitter to a blog. The space and time span of a blog better fit my personality: slower, longer, less frequent, well-advised and more in depth. I know that on average a blog has five followers, unfortunately a few very well read blogs create this average, so probably I am writing this blog only for myself. In it I hope to store my more wild ideas which are unfeasible as topic for my research. These topics will range form
Luit
I am moving backwards in time. Apparently I am getting old or I am old of mind. Instead of moving form a Blog towards Twitter. I move from Twitter to a blog. The space and time span of a blog better fit my personality: slower, longer, less frequent, well-advised and more in depth. I know that on average a blog has five followers, unfortunately a few very well read blogs create this average, so probably I am writing this blog only for myself. In it I hope to store my more wild ideas which are unfeasible as topic for my research. These topics will range form
- new media
- evolution
- memes
- the web society and post modernism
- digital culture
- digital libraries
- digital museums
- web science
- semantic web
- web 3.0
- mediatization
- information landscape interaction
- facetted browsing
- human cognition, search and retrieval
- cognitive and cultural attractorpoints
Luit
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