Smart Technologies, MirrorWorlds

Neue, web-basierte "Smart Technologies" sind zunehmend nicht mehr rein
abstrakte, quasi-physikalische Maschinerien, die klar getrennt sind von
der "Anwendung" durch die "User". Die vernetzten digitalen Medien sind
nicht mehr bloße Werkzeuge. Sie konstituieren einen komplexen Arbeits-
und Kommunikationsraum, in dem menschliche Handlungen und Inhalte in
Datenereignissen "gespiegelt" werden (> David Gelernter, Mirror
World).

(Das entspricht dem Unterscheid zwischen dem Microsoft Office und der Google Galaxy: zwischen Software, die es ermöglicht, digitale Dokumente zu erzeugen, die dann als geschlossene Objekte "versandt" und "publiziert" werden, und Software, die eine Umgebung für die Produktion, Zirkulation, Anreicherung und laufende Transformation von Microcontent herstellt.)

Die Aufgabe innovativer IT-Applikationen ist es, mit diesen
Repräsentationen menschlicher Aktionen und "Inhalte" zu rechnen, und
zwar so, dass sich dadurch neue Möglichkeiten für Anschlusshandlungen
für "Wissensarbeiter" und "Digital Beings" eröffnen: neue Typen und
Ströme von Information, neue Arten der Kommunikation und Kollaboration,
neue Chancen für Wissensaufbau und Lernen, neue Dimensionen der
Produktivität.

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The CloudBook

(#) In fact the Microcontent Radio Client is a sort of virtual machine: an instance of "The CloudBook", but running on devices parallely with the more traditional "virtual machines": the Typewriter, the Desktop, the Database, the Phone, the MailClient, the InstantMessenger ...:

Nick Carr, who has just written a book alerting the world to "The Big Switch" (a title so appropriate I wrote a blurb for the book) from PC to the cloud, has also coined a neat term for this gadget: the CloudBook. On his blog he lists the attributes he imagines for the CloudBook, which he fantasies could be designed by Apple and run on Google's servers. The device is primarily a well-designed screen with powerful batteries and an embedded wifi card ...

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down: Circulation goes beyond

_
Kevin Kelly, The Bottom is not Enough, is a good discussion: bottom-up vs. top-down vs. intelligent mix 2.0. but where exactly IS the intelligence? the metaphors are still wrong, because they follow the old idea of creating and processing original "content" (or ideas, or ...). the most fundamental thing is not processing content matter (neither bottom-up nor top-down).

smart creators, smart crowds, smart filters, smart editors > technologically enhanced (1) smart creation, (2) smart crowdsourcing, (3) smart filtering, (4) smart editing.
human smartness, cultural smartness, technologically enhanced smartness.

It is the CIRCULATION of memes, semes and chunked "microcontent", which is dynamic and atomized micro-texts from one perspective, but from the other perspective TEXT-SHAPED STATEMENTS that are un-original by default.

there always has to be a PERSONAL dimension to each step, and an ORGANIZATIONAL dimension.
(what are these? how can they be implemented and designed? There is the *metaphor* of CONVERSATION and the *metaphor* of COMMUNITIES of PRACTICE ...)

perpetual motion machine

So here’s my approach: the Web as movement.

Some of the words associated with this metaphor… flow, experience, trajectory, cycle, feedback, ecosystem, dynamics.

But pragmatically, what does this mean? Let’s take Flickr, which is
exceptionally good at doing this. It’s a useful website, sure, and it
is sure of its place among a constellation of people – the social world
of sharing and identity – and a world of other products like cameras,
and screensavers, and toys based on the pictures.

But also it’s structured to bend the trajectory of users
back into itself. External widgets capture users and send them into
Flickr from blogs and other services. Internal groups, discussions, and
the “recent activity” feature keep users cycling round. A way of
sending temporary invites by email to show pictures to friends who
aren’t yet members – guess passes – turn ever user into a pusher, and
every photo into a gateway drug that will end in Flickr membership.

Flickr is a perpetual motion machine that puffs out beautiful photographs.

So we can have a bit of a breather, I want to have a look at a few
other systems which are self-contained or a series of movements.

[Facebook is another great example. Read about viral loops and widgets for more.

And, just incidentally, I’m reminded of the Greg Egan short
story in Axiomatic: “Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies”. Highly
recommended!

Oh, the image: I’ve been playing with solutions to Laplace flow equations, and this is some of the output.]

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Bush #2

"Finally, all but buried in his conclusion, he offers up the critical
insight on which a man named Mark Weiser would build the doctrine of
computational ubiquity some forty years downstream: work with
information-processing devices is both more effective and more
enjoyable if the user “can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the
manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”"

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Adam Greenfield on Vannevar Bush

"By contrast, decades before hypertext, HTML or the World Wide Web,
Bush’s memex proposed to allow its user to organize bodies of knowledge
along individualized “trails,” each permanent and immediately available
for lookup in exactly the same way that we might use a Web browser’s
bookmarks. Moreover, any one item could belong to an arbitrary number
of different contextual trails - trails that could be stored
side-by-side in one’s own memex, or passed entire to friends and
colleagues for them to explore at their leisure, like an analogue
del.icio.us."
(see Matthew Chalmers' RECER path model here too, he explicitly did relate this to Bush.)

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Vorstellend das Microcontent Auftraggeber Gerät

Ziel ist es, einen "Microcontent Radio Client" zu bauen:
d.h eine (1) personalisierte und kollaborative (2) Attention Management (3) Client-Server Applikation, die (4) Microcontent verarbeitet -- als (5) Player/Recorder und als (6) Empfänger/Sender. Damit wird (7) innerhalb von Organisationen und verteilten Teams ein (8) neuartiger ökologischer Informations-Kreislauf geschaffen (auch eine neue Schnittstelle), in dem laufend (9) Mikro-Wissen (Semantik) gefiltert, aggregiert und angereichert wird, was (10) die Produktivität und Innovationskraft Information/Knowledge Workers fördert.

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