Emergent memory

More from Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind:

The discovery that a single brain lesion can erase all knowledge of, say, man-made artefacts while another may take away all knowledge of animals suggests that these categories are somehow hard-wired into the human brain.

[...]

The currently favoured explanation for category-specific recognition failure arises from the idea that the brain sorts and stores things according to the relationship we have with them rather than how they look or what they do.

Our relationships with things—even quite simple objects—are multifaceted. Food, for example, is something to be seen, smelt, handled and purchased, as well as eaten. An animal may be seen, touched, loved, feared, pursued—or eaten. A musical instrument may be heard, manipulated, seen and played. Some of them even get placed in the mouth.

Each facet of these memories of things may be stored in a separate, appropriate area of the brain. Let's call each fragment a "recognition unit" (RU). A flute probably has a shape RU in the visual cortex, a word RU in the temporal cortex, a sound RU in the auditory cortex, and a tactile RU—the feeling of something smooth and cylindrical requiring fine hand manipulation—in the somatosensory and premotor cortices.

Each area of the brain is packed with RUs of disparate objects brought together not because the objects they relate to are similar to one another in any overall way, but because they are similar in the particular aspect that concerns that part of the brain

So it seems that each cortex stores a particular facet of an object's memory, and that the organisation of memory elements within each cortex may evolve through habitual conceptual patterns. Emergent taxonomies within a diverse yet integrated network—how intriguing.

Phase behaviour in human communities and the evolving social internet (part 3)

[continued from parts one and two; abstract]

Foundations of digital identity

How will identity in an integrated social net be tangibly defined and described? What will be the mechanisms that facilitate the flow of attributes* of that identity across the net? And how might these factors promote a strong yet fluid phase-patterned evolution of human communities** within the net?

*I use "attributes" to mean any digital artifact within the net that is attributable to an identity (of an individual or community), including digital media, personal information and other descriptive meta-data.

**See part one for a discussion of phase behaviour in human communities.

These are the questions with which I ended part two of this essay. Perhaps a useful starting point for their discussion is to explore the aptitudes and limitations of existing technologies and services with regards to the definition, description and federation of identity attributes across the social net, and the implications of those attributes as regards the promotion or inhibition of healthy phase behaviour in online community structures. Four main topics spring to mind here: RSS syndication, open APIs, web search and free-tagging. Each of these technologies or services provides at least a partial counter-balance to the ad hoc and fragmentary tendency in social applications' ontologies discussed in part two, serving as identity "glue" with which those applications and the identities of their users may be provisionally patched together.

RSS

RSS (and, to a lesser extent, its sibling syndication format Atom), has become a de facto standard for the open syndication of net-based content [explanation here], providing a simple "mould" with which blocks of data may be built, then shared and combined across diverse applications, much like Lego bricks may be built into an infinite number of models. This modular re-usability has led to RSS becoming the content syndication format of choice for a swathe of social net applications such as blogs, newsreaders, photo sharing services and social bookmarking services. One of the biggest single shifts in the way people consume web content is being facilitated by RSS: within the rapidly-expanding sphere of RSS-enabled web sites, people no longer have to surf to each one to manually check for updates, but can aggregate their favourite content streams in one or several places of their choice. The personalised newspaper really has arrived.

However, two drawbacks to RSS as a medium for identity attributes are evident. Firstly RSS data is public data, accessible by anyone via a URL, like an HTML web page. RSS therefore doesn't support identity-based access filtering—you can't syndicate your digital creations with RSS and be selective about who can see or hear those creations (as you might want to do with family photos or a personal message, for example).

Secondly, one of RSS's biggest strengths is also its weakness: the descriptive (meta-data) fields within standard RSS formats (there are actually four versions of RSS in use—0.91, 0.92, 1.0 and 2.0) have been arbitrarily limited within the standards to a few simple items such as creator's name and date of publication. This simplicity is a great advantage in the sense that it precludes conflict between its users over which descriptive fields should be included in the format—in other words, over how to describe the identity of data. But, conversely, the lack of an integration of a rich ontology within RSS effectively hobbles it as a medium for the communication of identity attributes. To be human is surely to be in a state of constantly constructing and communicating meaning for one's life and the people and things which flow through it. A medium for identity attributes must allow people to codify the meaning—for them—of their creations.

RSS excels at dissolving the geo-specific metaphor of traditional web surfing, where we have to visit a particular place on the web each time we wish to know what is new there. With RSS, we can participate as observers at least in the public aspect of multiple communities' and individuals' spaces from the comfort of our own newsreader. Perhaps RSS's key contribution to the social net's evolution is in facilitating this fundamental shift of its governing spacial metaphor. However, RSS's lack of privacy controls or semantic depth would seem to limit its role in shaping net communities in and of itself.

Open APIs

Whereas RSS requires people and social applications to make their content available for syndication by all comers, APIs allow social applications to open up their data store more selectively, via information-processing services, to third-party developers, who can then build added-value applications on top of these "web services". The API-facilitated data-sharing ecosystems amongst and around Flickr, del.icio.us and blog services such as Blogger (amongst other examples) demonstrate the value of open APIs in extending the reach and functionality of social applications. I can post entries to all the main blog services and also links to del.icio.us from my desktop blog application, Ecto; I can have my entries in 43 Things (a social goal-setting application) piped into my blog if I choose; I pull my latest Flickr photos into my blog sidebar with a few lines of JavaScript that call the appropriate Flickr web service via their API.

Moreover, the integration facilitated by open APIs works nicely in tandem with RSS syndication: for instance, I can take an RSS feed from my del.icio.us bookmarks, or a topic-defined subset (see the section on "Free-tagging" below) of those bookmarks, and display it in my blog sidebar by using JavaScript to call the Feed2JS API (see "about Japan" and "del.icio.us bookmarks" in the sidebar of my main blog page for examples). The combination of RSS and open APIs is going quite some way to giving me control over my data: control over from where and to where I process and publish it and control over how I aggregate it.

So does RSS plus open APIs equal an organically-integrated social net? Well, no—at least, not in the way the two are currently being utilised. We have already seen how RSS is mostly agnostic to identity, and completely so as regards the consumers of RSS data. When data enters an RSS channel, it is effectively stripped of all but the bare bones of its identity context. The open APIs discussed above, in contrast, all impose upon the data-exchange process the data schema (structure) of the application that sits behind them. Ecto must know Blogger's schema and how to map that schema onto Ecto's own schema so as to understand how to request relevant data and then how to process it when it is transmitted.

But as one data schema can be mapped onto another, is a situation of ontological fragmentation across social applications really so problematic? If we consider the issue with regard to phase behaviour, it becomes clear that the phase-lock between the schemas of social applications exchanging data via APIs is strong but very brittle: the map that expresses the data transformation between the two schemas must be manually updated every time the schema on either side of the connection changes if it is to remain useful. This might be feasible for a single relationship, but would rapidly become unmanageable in the complex webs of application interconnectivity that an integrated social net will require. Moreover, each application requires a separate login, so if I want to have Ecto (for example) exchange my data with Blogger, Amazon and del.icio.us via their APIs, I must entrust Ecto with the logins to all three. This makes seamless data-sharing across applications problematic from a security point of view. It seems that we must find ways to supplement openness in APIs with some kind of semantic flexibility and a way of federating identity authentification if APIs are to facilitate a truly organic evolution of the social net.

Web search

Web search services such as Google allow their users to search for web pages containing a particular keyword or phrase. Such services deploy a great deal of computing power to index web pages and the hyperlinks that join them, abstracting a ranking for each page based on criteria such as how many inbound links it receives and the page rank of the linking pages. What emerges, in theory at least, is a picture of which subset of the pages containing a given keyword or phrase the global online populace as a whole rate most highly.

Google's massive popularity attests to both its utility and its simplicity: I type a natural language phrase, press a button, and within microseconds Google serves up several million authority-ranked results from across the web. In many cases I find an acceptable match to what I'm looking for within the first page of results. Technorati, a specialist search service for blogs, similarly indexes the authority of blogs and blog posts according to which and how many other blogs are linking to them, and utilises the RSS output of many blogs to do this in a far more timely way than Google (Technorati's index is updated every few minutes rather than every few weeks). This effectively allows me to track discussions by topic as they leap across the Blogosphere (especially as I can subscribe to an RSS feed of the search results).

So how might web search services facilitate organic integration in the social net, and what might their limitations be in this regard? Just as RSS transcends the limitations of place within the web (by allowing us to aggregate and view content from diverse sources in our applications of choice), so web search does for the process of content discovery, granting us one-pointed access to information from across the web. And in ranking the authority of a web page according to the predominantly human-generated hyperlinks that reference it (albeit along with the machine-generated spam links that are a constant threat to these services' integrity), web search services are able to put search results in at least a provisional social context. This social aspect to web search is particularly evident with Technorati, in that the links between blogs that it tracks are often the connections between individuals' voices within conversations that are distributed between their blogs.

But how useful is web search as a tool for community building? A hyperlink connects two web pages in a purely mechanical sense, not as an integral aspect of a mutually-agreed relationship between the pages' creators. This means that anyone can express a relationship (albeit a unidirectional relationship) to anyone else's page on the web at any time. Web search services allow people to reduce this highly fluid ecosystem of public relationship to a set of keyphrase-indexed, linear rankings of global popularity. These rankings in turn tend to amplify the popularity of the top results, whose ranking then further increases. This feedback cycle of hyperlinks and web search has been statistically shown to lead to a power-law governed, "winner-takes-most" distribution pattern in both the blogosphere and the wider web—a powerful phase-locking behaviour that emerges from the web's radical fluidity. This pattern of social interaction as redolent of the vicarious relationship between Hollywood stars and their fans around the globe as it is of healthy communities of mutual value and respect (although the radically-lower barrier to entry allows the web to greatly ameliorate its inherent inequities).

Another limitation of web search is its exclusive reliance on algorithmic analysis of unstructured data in indexing web pages. Web search works on the presumption that it can deduce the topics of a web page simply by indexing the occurence of single words and their combinations anywhere within that page. Yet we have all experienced the frustration of Google failing to intuit our meaning from the search phrase we type. Human language takes its meaning from its rich structure, both internal (grammar and syntax) and external (culturally-specific association), and can surely only be properly understood through the medium of these structures.

Web search excels at tracking the aspects of our identities that are both public and predominantly independent of structured semantic or community context. If I am looking for good ideas on a particular topic or information about certain mass-produced products, for example, I use web search, confident that I will find something at least half useful. But what if I want to find out all the photos that my family have uploaded to the net over the last year? The video rental shops in my local area that locals rate highest? Or which Classical composers my friends like, taking a precise meaning of "Classical" as music composed after the Baroque and before the Romantic era? I need to somehow limit the scope of my search to the content that is attributable to people who participate within the relevant community, be it my friends, my family or my neighbours. Or, to put it another way, I need to be able to search within and through the context of the communities in which I myself participate—and have that search include all the potentially diverse manifestations of that community across locations and applications on the net.

If web search is to evolve to facilitate semantic and community-contextualised search functionalities, it seems that it must learn to traverse the semantic and community structures that people express within the net; it must adapt to peoples' personal ontologies (see also the section on APIs above); it must respect the boundaries of privacy communities place around themselves, providing a view of the network dependent as much on the identity of the searcher as that of the searched.

Free-tagging

One of the hottest topics in current social software discussions across the blogosphere is free-tagging (additionally known as tagsonomy and folksonomy, the suffix deriving from "taxonomy"). Flickr, del.icio.us and now a rapidly-increasing number of social net applications are allowing people to categorise web content with multiple, freely-chosen keywords. Technorati has also begun tracking special tag hyperlinks, effectively allowing people to have their own web pages show up in the appropriate tag space within Technorati.

Free-tagging sidesteps the issue of ontological fragmentation inherent in a structured approach to data management by avoiding structure altogether: each tag has an existence independent of other tags, yet it may be combined with those other tags in infinite permutations. Unlike with a traditional directory such as Meetup.com's where information is shoehorned into a rigid one-shape-fits-all (which may be altered only by the site's administrator), the fluidity of free-tagging allows each person to assemble the keyword "particles" of their personal descriptive ontology according to their individual point of view on a given content element (a photo, for example). This flexibility of free-tagging proves to be extremely useful when it comes to retrieving the information—say a web bookmark—I have stored previously, as I only need to remember one of the keywords that I categorised that information with to relocate it, rather than having to remember a complex route through a directory tree structure.

The purely personal benefits of free-tagging are valuable, but it is as a social tool that it really shines. As any given tag can be used by anyone, it acts as a social pivot-point for the topic or topics it points to. So, for example, I can find all the photos posted to Flickr and tagged as "London", then, if I like one in particular, leave a comment for its author. And my own choice of tags may be influenced by others' tagging behaviour—so I might tag my photo of my local area as "rotherhithe" rather than "canadawater"—even though I think of myself living in both Rotherhithe and Canada Water—because the former clearly has a stronger community following within Flickr and so would be more likely to help me connect with other local people. Free-tagging allows each person their ontological freedom, yet simultaneously incentivises community convergence—or phase lock—onto common ground.

Free-tagging also facilitates the integration of related content across social net applications: Technorati tag pages, for example, aggregate content from Flickr (photos), del.icio.us and Furl (web bookmarks) and web pages with tag hyperlinks into a single location. While this content integration is analogous in some ways to that facilitated by web search, it differs from the latter in two important ways. Firstly, free-tagging is active and explicit semantic categorisation, whereas web search aims to derive web pages' implicit semantic meaning, a process in which the page's author remains passive. Free-tagging would seem the more likely to reflect an author's real opinion. Secondly, free-tagging has the potential to integrate the view points of both audience and author across a single semantic strata (tags), whereas web search construes topic according to the content of the web page, relegating the audience's role to that of arbitrator of the page's relative authority.

Free-tagging combines nicely with RSS, allowing people to lock into semantically-filtered content streams: del.icio.us and Flickr both provide RSS feeds of content categorised with individual tags and tag combinations, and allow further filtering by author. So I can feed my interest in emergent democracy, for instance, by following in my newsreader the RSS feed of the "emergent_democracy"-tagged del.cio.us bookmarks of Joi Ito, arguably one of the best-informed people in this field. And unlike web search, free-tags allow me to follow a topic from the point of view of an expert single person or group: Joi may divine in a web page—such as this one—a relevance to emergent democracy, even if the author himself doesn't explicitly make that connection. Free-tagging can also be used by the author to channel a subset of their content to another person, simply by using that person's name as a tag. Finally, applications that utilise free-tagging, such as del.icio.us and Flickr, contextualise the user-generated tags within the application's formalised schema (see Open APIs). This allows the applications to combine (though not integrate) the advantages of fluid and structured approaches to data management—to append a structured context (creator, date of creation, content referenced etc.) to unstructured tags.

So what limitations might free-tagging have in its potential to facilitate healthy phase processes in online communities? As with RSS, flat-tagging's strength—it's flatness!—is arguably its greatest weakness. While flat-tagging's avoidance of taxonomical structure makes it an excellent tool for integrating approximate semantic meaning across diverse contexts within the social net, this radical fluidity also prevents flat-tagging from acting as a vehicle for information about the structured social and semantic context of each keyword "particle". And without the possibility of structured context, tags can only ever tell a partial story about the meaning, to their author, of the content they describe—about that content's position within its author's world relative to all the other things, people and communities with which they have a relationship. And while social net applications that utilise flat-tagging contextualise free-form tag data within the application's structured data schema, the formal rigidity of such schemas severely limits their usefulness for facilitating integrated data exchange between ontologically-diverse applications (as I demonstrated in my discussion of Open APIs). Much as we saw with web search's lack of structural granularity, free-tagging's radical fluidity would seem to limit its utility as a tool for community evolution.

Conclusion

There remains a dichotomy between the formalised data schemas of social net applications (exposed through their open APIs) and RSS on one hand and the fluid, globally-emergent data patterning of web search and free-form tagging on the other. Functional combinations of fluid and structured modalities (APIs with RSS, web search with RSS, free-tagging with APIs and so on) can provide provisionally useful solutions. However, the lack of organic integration between these mutually-polarised approaches prevents even their combination from facilitating an exchange between and within individuals and communities that shifts seamlessly between phase-lock and phase-shift—between strong structural stability and free-form fluidity.

This final part of my essay has focused on applications and technologies that are becoming or have already become mainstream components of the social net. It seems to me that in order to understand the best ways forward, a clear understanding of the potential and limitations of current approaches will be very useful. However, there are already a number of initiatives in the Digital Identity space that are taking practical steps to address many of the issues this essay has explored—persistent identity, social data-exchange and federated authentification. Amongst them are Liberty Alliance, Sxip, Shibboleth, FOAF, Ping ID, Social Physics, LID and Identity Commons. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss their relative merits, but it is heartening to see that the vigorous conversation that has sprung up between the blogs of some of the most prominent players (in a network-wide sense!) is exhibiting the very quality of integrated diversity that is crucial for the development of an integrated social net that can support organic community phase processes.

In a way, I have posited a set of problems for the integration of the social net in the second and third parts of this essay, and done no more than hint at their possible solutions. What might an integration of fluid and structured approaches to data and identity management actually look like, after all? Perhaps if we can first clearly define these problems, their solutions will emerge. Above all, it seems self-evident to me that discussion of the social net must penetrate to the heart of human identity if it is to give rise to strategies that will enable us to develop that social net in a way that supports the organic phase processes that seem to govern our interactions with each other and the world around us.


topics: identity community phase_behaviour RSS API tags

Technorati Tags: API, community, identity, phase_behaviour, RSS, tags, technorati-tags-introduction.html

Odd behaviour

I'm reading a fascinating book called Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter at the moment. One section deals with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Rita quotes from Richard Restak's Brainscapes). The bold emphasis is mine:

"[One] OCD patient has a fixation with the number four. Everything has to be done four times: four foldings back of the duvet in the morning before getting out of bed; four steps to the door, teeth-scrubbing movements in groups of four and so on. He has a particular horror of being left on an uneven number. Once his girlfriend told him that she loved him. He wasn't too sure if he reciprocated this feeling but the words 'sort of hung about in the air... like a big number one,' so he told her he loved her, too. His tone of voice was not, perhaps, convincing enough for the girl to feel satisfied with this exchange, and she said it again: 'I love you.' Now, of course, the words hung like a huge number three, so he had to repeat them again, to make it up to four. Satsfied by this, the girl then said she wanted to marry him—a proposition that brought about a further cascade of reciprocal pledges."

If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry.

[The] mental and behavioural ticks [of OCD] are, like the physical jerks of Tourettes Syndrome sufferers, fragments of pre-programmed skills. But in this case the memories are not personal ones picked up during the person's lifetime [as with Tourettes] but those that are built into the species as instincts. The instinct to keep clean, to check the environment constantly for signs of anything untoward, the need to keep order and balance—all these things have a basis in survival. In OCD they have simply come adrift from the survival super-structure and appear as isolated, inappropriate and exaggerated habits. [...] [OCD sufferers'] error-detection mechanism has somehow become stuck on alert, and no matter how often the appropriate turn-off action is carried out it continues to shriek its warning.

This seems like a great example of the havoc that fragmentation amongst components of a network—in this case, the neural network of the human brain—can wreak with that network's overall functionality.


Topics: neurology OCD network_fragmentation

Phase behaviour in human communities and the evolving social internet (part 2)

[continued from part one; abstract]

The evolving social net

To say that the "virtual" world of the net transcends certain limitations of physical reality is not to say that it is intrinsically separate from that reality. Ever since the Enlightenment, the community of the Developed world has made a determined and sustained bid to separate Body from Mind, Heart from Head—and to live primarily through its intellect. Yet our heads and bodies are both parts of our physical organism and, however scary it might sometimes seem to our Ego selves, integrating the two is the only way to have that organism function properly. And the net is effectively a physical manifestation of humanity's global mind. If it is to serve us as a wisely guiding intelligence, it must be integrated with the global body of humanity—our own physicalities and that of the Earth that nourishes us.

Our planet and our species seem to be entering a phase-shift of awe-inspiring magnitude. Global warming is accelerating, and may be irreversable within a decade; its destabilising effects on civilisation will surely be massive. Traditional community structures continue to disintegrate around us: the old ways are not working any more. But phase-shift does not inevitably entail annihilation. We lay comfortable in our mother's womb for nine months, then—wah!—it was time to emerge, through chaotic and intense labour contractions that we quite possibly experienced as life-threatening. But we made it through into a new life. Who is to say we won't make it through a global shakeup too (or even if we don't that we can't have some fun and learn something along the way)?

It seems clear that if humanity and the global ecosystem are going to come through the challenges ahead of us, we will do so by evolving ways of living that honour the identity and integrity of ourselves, each other and our planet. This idea is hardly new. Yet practical means by which that behavioural evolution might be facilitated and informed by an integrated communications network such as the net are as yet only embryonically and fragmentarily evident. Our physical "global mind" is is not yet fully functional.

So what attributes might enable the net to best serve humanity and the world? Well, perhaps the concept of service is itself a key to this puzzle. The net may be mediated by machines, but it exists for the sake of its users. The net can best serve its users if it is optimally transparent to the identity of those users. The dialectic play of structure and fluidity, of phase-lock and phase-shift (discussed in part one of this essay), in the online dimension of human community can take place in a completely organic and integrated way only if the net embodies the possibilities of freedom and integrity for the identity each individual and community expresses within it.

The net has already come so far in its evolutionary journey: email, discussion boards, instant messaging (IM), and more recently blogs, wikis and a plethora of related social net applications have facilitated the evolution of a compellingly social dimension in the net. These applications have helped individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other and to publish and share an amazing wealth of creativity through writing, still images, music, animation and video. And RSS content syndication, open APIs, search services and social tagging services (all of which I will discuss in part three of this essay) are providing various forms of informational "glue" to applications and their users with which to bind together their social net experiences into a provisionally cohesive whole.

However, one of the hallmarks of the existing social net is the predominantly ad hoc and often fragmented nature of the community structures it facilitates. Each social net technology (RSS notwithstanding) and social application genre (blog tool, wiki etc.)—and to a lesser extent each application within a given genre—imposes its own hard-wired ontology onto its users through the data structures it employs and the metaphors of its user interface. It follows that the formation of relationships and community groupings within each application must take place within the limitations of that application's ontology. And as each application type's ontology tends to differ significantly from the others, and so the data-sharing interoperability between social applications tends to be limited, people have to create anew the online dimension of their relationships and communities each time they sign up to use a new application.

But isn't this just to say that each social application quite naturally provides its users with an experience focused on the application's particular specialism(s)? Well, yes and no. In some respects, specialisation of social applications seems useful and justified, in the sense of "pick the tool for the job"—for instance, I probably wouldn't want to write a lengthy blog post like this one in the fast-moving and fragmentary flow of an IM chat, but rather would paste into the IM chat a link to the post on my blog.

On the surface of it, blogs and wikis fill similarly different niches. Blogs are optimized for "one with many" publishing and archiving of media (especially writing); the date of publication is the primary indexing principal, and others' responses to each piece of media are formed in counterpoint to the original (by means of inline Comments or linked pieces on their blog). Wikis, by contrast, are optimized for radically-democratic "many to many" publishing; their primary indexing principals are topic and revision history (revision by articles' often-numerous co-creators).

But, unlike in the case of the blogs and IM comparison, the "raw materials" of blogs and wikis are strikingly similar. The media is (normatively) prose text and the interactive metaphor is something like: "you can write or edit something which others may enrich with their own writing" (wikis allow direct editing of existing pieces and the addition of new pieces branching from the original's topic).

Sometimes I may wish to collaborate with others over time in evolving a piece of writing on a particular topic; but at other times I prefer to write from an individual point of view and allow others to add their own views in blog-like counterpoint, rather than wiki-like harmony. And I'd like to have both these options within an integrated spectrum of choice regarding people, things and functionalities, within one or several applications that combine aspects* of both blog and wiki (and further possibilities for application integration are surely endless).

In other words, I would like simply to be able to vary "who can do what"—the permissions settings—for each of the things I create.

*There are in fact already some emerging applications, notably Drupal, which are beginning to address the issue of integrating blog and wiki functionality—but it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the relative merits of specific applications.

In a scenario where my identity and that of my creations is at the centre of my own social net experience (albeit existing within a respect for the integrity of others' identities), applications may be understood as "windows" onto the social net, which have value to the extent that they are transparent to the identities that form that net (of myself, others and our creations). Different applications would still specialise in offering different perspectives and fields of vision (to pursue the window metaphor)—topic- rather than time-based content ordering, perhaps, or a specialism in photos to the exclusion of other media—but the identities of the people and things would be primary, and flow seamlessly between the diverse services in which they participate.

As the social net becomes transparent to the identities of people and things within it, the communities we form there will be freed to grow through organic and multidimensional relationship across the whole network. It is my supposition that such conditions are also those conducive to the optimum efficiency of the phase behaviours that seem to be inherent in all human communities: community structures will thrive and dissolve according to the continuous feedback cycle of the free yet mutually-respectful choices of those participating in them at each "granular" level of scale.

The cycle of life and death is all around us. Our parents come together to give us life; the Earth resources us; when we die, our molecules are re-integrated into the Earth, from which life springs anew. Similarly, communities in the social net will come together through common purpose; a community's purpose may resonate with other individuals or communities from across the network, who will be magnetised to it and it will flourish; when it's purpose is served, it will naturally fade away, and the people participating in it will move on to make something new.

All is this sounds great to me! But there remain some interesting challenges to overcome before such an organically integrated social net can become a reality. How will identity be tangibly defined and described? What will be the mechanisms that facilitate the flow of attributes of that identity across the net? And how might these mechanisms promote the emergence of strong yet fluid human communities within the net? In the third part of this essay, I will look for answers to those questions in existing and emerging social net technologies and intiatives.

[Continues with part three...]


topics: identity community phase_behaviour

Technorati Tags: community, identity, phase-behaviour-in-human-communities.html, phase-behaviour-in-human-communities_25.html, phase_behaviour

anonymity and responsibility in the Japanese blogosphere

Here is a very interesting piece by Hiroko Nagano on anonymity and responsibility in the Japanese blogosphere. The original Japanese article is followed by my translation and comments.

Original:

Ben & Menaの来日、「素晴らしき世界」と「しがない記者日記」を巡る議論

先週は、ブログの飲み会3つと、米シックス・アパート社の共同創設者であるベン＆ミナ・トロット夫妻、バラック・バーコヴィッツCEOの来日などが重なり、改めてブログに関して考えさせられる機会が多かった。そのなかで、ベンとミナ、バラックの取材でも話題になったブログの記事をめぐるトラブルの問題について考えてみた。

最近は日本でも匿名ブログに書き込んだ内容に批判が集中して、実名を晒されるという事件が立て続けに起こっている。その代表的なものは、「素晴らしき世界」の運営者ミッドナイトパックス氏の「自己責任論」をめぐる議論（詳細はカレーとご飯の神隠しのまとめサイト参照）、okuma氏の「しがない記者日記」騒動（幻影随想のまとめサイト参照）だろう。

どちらも、現役の新聞記者が運営する匿名ブログであるという点、反論に対していい加減な返答しか行わなかったという点で共通しており、それが波紋を広げた大きな原因になっている。匿名であれば気軽に本音を書けるような気がするが、匿名であっても自分の意見を表明するという点では同じなので、慎重に書く必要がある。レベッカ・ブラッドは、ココログのインタビューで「記事を掲載する前にもう一度よく読み直すことです。思ったことをすぐに掲載するのもブログの面白さのひとつですが、話題のニュースや物議をかもした事件について書く場合は、少し慎重になったほうがいいでしょうね。もう一度よく考えて、一晩、いや二晩は待ったほうがいいと思います」と述べている。

一方、読む側も、実名ブログより匿名ブログに対してのほうが批判的なコメントを書き込みやすいのかもしれない。誰が書いているのか分からないので、実名や所属機関を知りたいと思うのも、自然な流れだろう。

また、ミッドナイトパックス氏とokuma氏に共通しているのは、批判的なコメントやトラックバックに対して、あまり誠実な対応を取らなかったいう点だ。言論を職業にしている新聞記者なのに、いや、だからこそ対等な議論を避けてしまったのだろうか。ここでも、もし匿名でなかったら少しは遠慮が出て、ここまで険悪な議論にならなかったのかもしれないという疑問が残る。いずれにしても、ブログのコミュニケーションは、相手を言い負かす必要はないものの、ある程度筋が通ったものでないと納得し難いという性質があるので、対応次第で結果は大きく変わっていただろうと思う。

こうした話を6Aのバラックにしたところ、「電話やメール、IM、掲示板などはそれぞれコミュニケーションの種類が異なっており、それをうまく使い分けて私たちはやり取りをしている。それと同様、私たちは試行錯誤を繰り返しながらブログという新しいメディアのコミュニケーションを学ぶ必要がある」と語った。6Aがライヴ・ジャーナルを買収したのも、誰に向かって話すのかというプライバシー・レベルを細かく設定できる技術を同社が持っていることが大きい。ミナ氏は「将来的には完全にオープンではなく家族や友人だけが読むことのできるブログなど、プライバシー・レベルを制御したブログが主流になるだろう」と述べた。公私のブログの使い分けなども、今後は増えていくような気がする。

Translation:

Ben and Mena's visit to Japan, and the "Wonderful World" and "Wretched Journalist Diary" dispute

Last week, I had plenty of chances to ponder blogs anew: I went to three blogger drinks gatherings, and Ben and Mena Trott, the couple who co-founded Six Apart, and the company's CEO, Barak Berkowitz, visited Japan. Amongst the various topics that arose, I gave some particular thought to the trouble that has been stirring around [Japanese] blog articles covering Ben, Mena and Barak's visit.

Recently in Japan, anonymous blogs have been drawing criticism, and there have been a succession of incidents where the real names of their authors have been exposed. Good examples of this are the discussion around "Responsibility" by Midnight Pax of Wonderful World (refer to Kare- to gohan no kami-gakushi for details) and the uproar over Okuma's "Wretched Journalist Diary" (refer to Collected Ramblings).

In both cases, jobbing journalists are writing anonymous blogs on which they give only cursory responses to others' rebuttals of their arguments. This combination of anonymity with a lack of responsibility is a big cause of the ripples that are spreading from these blogs. Anonymity encourages us to freely express our true feelings, but anonymous or not, our opinions remain our own opinions. For this reason, it is necessary to exercise prudence in our writing. In an interview with Cocolog, Rebecca Blood said the following: "Before publishing a piece we must read it over again carefully. One of the appealing aspects of blogs is the way they allow us to publish our thoughts in a timely way, but when we are writing about events that have made the news and stirred up public debate, it is surely advisable for us to act with discretion. Let's give ourselves time to think things over, waiting one or even two nights before pressing the "publish" button."

On the other hand, readers also perhaps find it easier to post critical comments on anonymous blogs than on named-author blogs. The desire to know the true name and organisational affiliation of an anonymous blog's author is also probably a natural tendency.

Another point that Midnight Pax and Okuma have in common is their rather insincere responses to critical comments and trackbacks on their blogs. Despite being newspaper reporters who make freedom of speech their career—or rather, for that very reason—they seem to be avoiding a fair debate. Here too, the suspicion remains that were these blogs not anonymous, a little more moderation would have been evident and the debate might not have ended up being so unpleasant. In any case, as participating in blog communication does not necessitate putting others down, and as, to a certain degree, writing that lacks coherence lacks persuasiveness, the responses of the blogs' authors surely have a big effect on the outcome of the discussion.

When I talked about this matter to 6A's Barak, he said this: "The various communication tools we use—telephone, email, bulletin boards and so on—all differ from one another, and we choose which one to use to converse with at any given time according to our communication needs. In the same way, we need to study the optimum modes of communication for this new blog media through a process of trial and error." A big factor in 6A's purchase of Live Journal was LJ's comprehensive functionality for controlling privacy levels to determine who one communicates with. Mina stated "In the future, blogs that are not completely open but are rather just for family or friends—blogs where privacy levels are controlled—will probably become mainstream." I have a feeling that the differences in the usage of public and private blogs, too, will only grow larger.

It seems to me that the structure of Japanese society has traditionally encouraged a rather different performance of individuality than in the West. Our stereotype of Japanese people in the West is that they are all very conformist, but my experience of Japanese people in Japan points to a much more varied picture. In public situations, Japanese people tend to refrain from drawing attention to themselves, but put them in a more intimate social setting, amongst a group of friends, family or workmates, and individuals' voices seem to really come to the fore—yet somehow within a sense of a strong group identity. So in a way, it is perhaps not so surprising that issues are coming up around the strong and public voicing of individual identity on blogs in Japan: this is relatively unchartered territory for Japanese culture.

topics: japan japanese>english blogs ethics

Laws, Axioms and Generative Principles of Identity

Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity (to be completed with Law Seven anytime now...):

1. The Law of Control:

Technical identity systems MUST only reveal information identifying a user with the user's consent.

2. The Law of Minimal Disclosure

The solution which discloses the least identifying information is the most stable, long-term solution.

3. The Law of Fewest Parties

Technical identity systems MUST be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.

4. The Law of Directed Identity

A universal identity system MUST support both "omnidirectional" identifiers for use by public entities and "unidirectional" identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.

5. The Law of Pluralism:

A universal identity system MUST channel and enable the interworking of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.

6. The Law of Human Integration:

The universal identity system MUST define the human user to be a component of the distributed system, integrated through unambiguous human-machine communications mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks.

Scott Lemon's Axioms of Identity:

The First Axiom of Identity:

I posit that we humans do not have any inherent identity.

The Second Axiom of Identity:

I posit that identity does not exist outside the context of a community.

And now, to add to that roster, my Generative Principles of Identity. I use the word "people" to denote individuals and communities of all kinds (businesses, interest groups, social groups, family etc.):

1. People must be able to determine who may do what with which of the data attributable to them (their "digital possessions").

2. People must be able to nominate proxies to negotiate and manage interactions with their digital possessions by others.

3. People must only be able to interact with the digital possessions of other people according to those others' wishes with regards to Principles 1 and 2.

Hmm... I wonder how these Laws, Axioms and Generative Principles might resonate with one another?

Tags: identity

Oxfam's response to my Costa and Fairtrade piece

This just in from Oxfam in response to my email to them about the Costa and Fairtrade issue I blogged about a few weeks back:

Dear Luke,

Thanks for the email. I'm sorry we have taken so long in replying , as you can imagine we have been very busy responding to the generosity of the British public over the Tsunami appeal.

It was very interesting to read your experiences. You're right , it is a process to get Fairtrade on the menu, then on to the menu at the same price, then into the script the Barrista uses and it is only customer pressure and demand that will drive the corporate chains down this path.

You have probably seen the fairtrade foundation website which details where you can get fairtrade coffee in cafes:

http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/products_coffee.htm

You may also be interested to know we have just started a new joint venture of coffee bars Progreso which will also sell 100% fairtrade coffee:

http://www.progreso.org.uk/

There are currently two Progreso shops in central London , one in Earlham St near Covent Garden and one in Portobello Road , but we hope to expand nationwide as we can.

You can see and take part in our current coffee campaign here:

http://www.maketradefair.com/en/index.php?file=action11.htm&cat=1&subcat=5&select=5&special=yes

This is targeted at coffee manufacturers but you're also right to consider that the volumes of coffee purchased in outlets like Costa etc are becoming more and more important in overall coffee sales.

With best wishes,
Ken Smith
Supporter Relations
Oxfam
Direct tel: +44 (0)870 333 2700
Switchboard tel: +44 (0)1865 311311
Fax: +44 (0)1865 312452
E-mail: campaigning@oxfam.org.uk
Website: http://www.oxfam.org.uk

Nice email. : )

Incidentally, an update on Costa: I talked to another barista in the King's Road branch yesterday, and he said they typically sell less than a cup a day of Fairtrade—so they ended up throwing away the beans, and didn't have any to serve me with. I thought the cup I had last time tasted really stale, and now I know why. The beans were old, old, old!