gentleridevan

I’m presently participating in Jeff Howe’s international Twitter book club, better known as #1B1T (One Book One Twitter). If you missed the 1B1T NPR broadcast produced by Laura Sydell (including my one minute of fame), it can be heard here.

The tweeters have spoken, and they want to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. At the moment, readers *should* all be on Chapters 4-6, marking our tweets #1b1t_4c (and so on for each chapter) to prevent spoilers, and wearing our official book club badge. I think membership is in the 6,000+ range now, so good governance is a must to maintain a cohesive conversation. I’m having a hard time keeping up, but like all online social groups, the best part is the offline outcomes, like the geek-out conversations I’m now having with Houston readers, Grant McManus, and Carlos Lama (a.k.a. father of my Lamas). American Gods was a good choice for comic book, fantasy or sci-fi enthusiasts, like us.

I adore projects that extend the social web beyond its known capacity, and often wonder what an artist like Andy Warhol would have done with his Twitter account? Would he have had one? Of course. Warhol tackled new technology–from the first consumer video camera to the first computer with a drawing application–the minute it was unveiled. Would he have tweeted live before an audience at Lincoln Center?

One of the 1B1T logistical problems thus far has been keeping pace with the volume of conversations on twitter. As I’ve been writing this entry, no fewer than 25 #1b1t tweets have been posted, and most are just observations or non-starters. The conversations online aren’t especially reciprocal or enduring as of now. Another issue is *some readers* clearly subscribe to the Evelyn Wood school of speed reading, and have completed the entire book. They’re already smoking a cigarette, and I’m still getting undressed.

According to R.A. Hill and R.I.M. Dunbar in the paper “Social Network Size in Humans,” the average person has capacity (in his/her neocortex) to remember 153.5 different individuals. What do I do with 6000+ instant new friends?

Even in contemporary western societies, where individuals are operating egocentric networks within a virtually infinite array of social possibilities, social network size and differentiation reflect the sociocentric networks observed in traditional societies, suggesting that the cognitive constraints on network size may apply universally to all modern humans.–R.A. Hill and R.I.M. Dunbar

I’m reading two books with opposing philosophies simultaneously: You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier and Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson. The former argues that technology is reducing humanity to bits of information, and the latter argues that technology is contributing to mental evolution. As my reading progresses, I’ll post some highlights from both books (provided my brain doesn’t explode).

Let’s start with Mr. Lanier, who presents the following themes in the Preface and Chapter 1: Missing Persons.

Lock-in
Technology (software, file formats, web platforms, etc.) that is inflexible in design and isn’t adaptive to a range of future possibilities can lock-in patterns of human behavior that are reductive rather than expansive and can stunt the overall course of social evolution. (Lanier uses MIDI as an example of a pervasive standard format that has unintentionally limited the potential for digital music because it is too hard to change.)

Fragmentation
Digital technologies stimulate different potentials in human nature, and current Web 2.0 designs are trending toward the reduction of users (people) to fragments. The way people engage with platforms like Twitter and wikis, by providing bits of succinct information, is ultimately toying with social engineering and changing how humans express meaning.

And the counterpoint, Mr. Johnson’s Introduction.

The Sleeper Curve
Despite the assumption that culture is being dumbed down, today’s video games, television shows, and movies are far more nuanced and advanced than those previous, and they ultimately encourage cognitive complexity that is causing culture to grow more sophisticated, not less.

Games vs. Books
Reading books is not necessarily more cognitively complex than playing video games. Video games have open ended narratives that require probing and telescoping (probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink), which is a basic procedure of scientific inquiry.

RELATED LINKS GALORE:
• An excellent story, Text without Context by Michiko Kakutani in the 3/17/10 issue of NY Times.
• The forthcoming book by Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, explores how the Internet is affecting our brains.
• A transcript of Caleb Crain’s talk on How the Internet is Changing Literary Style.

Travis Whitfield (left) with "The Porch Crew," 1973

One of the potential hazards of moving to a small town is that you may end up the Mayor. Such is the case with Travis Whitfield, an artist who was so enamored with the rural town of Keachi, Louisiana (pronounced Kee-chi), that he settled there, and inadvertently became the town’s appointed archivist, preservationist, historian and finally, Mayor. In the late 1960s, Keachi caught Travis’s attention during his regular drives between Shreveport and Houston (where he was an art student at U of H). If you recall the episode of The Twilight Zone, “A Stop at Willoughby,” Travis was like the commuter on that train who longed to get off at Willoughby, “a peaceful, restful place, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure.” Fortunately for Travis, stopping at Keachi was just the beginning of his adventure, unlike the fate of the poor sap on The Twilight Zone. Read the rest of this post on We Have The Technology, Glasstire.com.

The TEDxHouston website is officially live, and on Twitter, and on Facebook, and on Flickr, and so on.

Yesterday I received a curious message from artist Lee Walton.

“At this very moment, a man is locked up to a park bench at Union Square Park in San Francisco. To unlock him, find the woman in the red scarf at the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She is the only one who has the combination to the lock. She will give it to you. Can you find a way to set this man free? He is hungry and wants to go home.” Read the rest of this post on Indirect Collaboration: Collective Creativity on the Web.

Oh my. I’m going to be on a panel at SXSW with MIT Physicist, Riley Crane. He and his team at MIT found 10 red balloons, hidden around the US by DARPA, in 8 hours and 52 minutes. I’m gonna have to start rereading the “Tao of Physics” and listening to reruns of Michio Kaku’s “Explorations”… Here’s Riley holding his own on The Colbert Report.