Identity web as mirror

Joshua Porter writes:

Over time, we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how people interact socially with one another because we can record things on the Web. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had lately with designers that ended up like “well, we’re doing design, too, but we’re really doing a ton of psychology”. The amount of effort and design energy being focused on the social interactions of people around a service is growing.

I have often observed on this blog that networked technology is a tool that allows us to extend our innate ways of relating to one another and expressing our identity. Interesting, then, to be reminded that it can also provide us with insights about how we do these things by reflecting our behaviours back to us.

So the Identity Web could be a hologram, superstring universe and mirror all at once? Well, I guess if we could contain it within a single metaphor, it would lose its mystery!

Is music the universal language?

Laura-Lee Balkwill asks of a neurologist, a psychologist and an anthropologist, in a most wonderful All in the Mind podcast (30'):

Is music the universal language?

One person's spoken language might sound like gobbledy gook to another - but when it comes to music do we beat to a common evolutionary drum? Could music be the universal language - linking minds across cultures and ancestral time? And, which came first - music or language? Don your headphones and climb aboard for an acoustic adventure. Does music lie at the heart...and brain...of what it means to be human?

An excerpt from the podcast transcript that summarises the interests of each speaker:

Laura-Lee Balkwill [interviewer]: So why is music interesting – that's a complex question with a lot of different answers depending on who you talk to.

Catherine Falk [ethnomusicologist]: Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own specific, very culturally specific ways.

Laura-Lee Balkwill [psychologist] : I find music interesting because of its power to evoke emotion, to express emotion, to make people feel. And that's how I got into studying music and emotion to begin with because I wanted to explore how that worked and whether that worked the same across cultures.

Ani Patel [neurologist]: And it presents science with opportunity to study the relationship between brain function and complex cognition, which is one of the big topics in neuroscience today: how does brain circuitry give rise to the mental experiences that we have of the world? And music is a wonderful domain to explore that because of its complexity and its reducibility, I would say.

A summary of some other points that fascinated me:

• Cathy Falk: archeological evidence of Neanderthal dwellings suggests music may pre-date language;
• Ani Patel: alternatively, we may not have evolved a capacity for making music so much as creatively adapted other cognitive mechanisms such as those responsible for language;
• Ani Patel: "modern neuro-imaging has shown us that both sides of the brain are very much involved in processing music. Language as well – but language does have a strong left hemisphere bias whereas music seems to draw on both sides of the brain – and does importantly, integrate different aspects of brain function in [...] waves of integration as opposed to simple processing chains";
• Laura-Lee Balkwill: Some aspects of music, such as certain fundamental characteristics' evocation of particular emotional responses, seem to be universal;
• Patel & Falk: whereas many others are culturally-specific;
• Ani Patel: "Some very deep and evolutionarily ancient reward centres of the brain [are] activated by [...] music. And these are areas that are typically activated by biologically significant behaviour such as eating, or reproducing or so on, and yet they [are] activated by this abstract acoustic stimulus with no obvious survival value";
• Cathy Falk: "Music is not an universal language any more than language itself is an universal language. I don't understand Swahili; it is a language. People construct the syntax of music very much in tandem with the way they construct themselves socially in their own very culturally specific ways."

I very much recommend listening to the podcast itself, which is interspersed with some great audio illustrations of diverse musics.

Music taps into our richest, deepest selves: our emotions, our language skills, our imagination, our universal humanity and the culturally-contextualised aspects of our identity. To understand music (and, in many ways, we are only just beginning to) really would be to go a long way to understanding what it is to be human.

Sexuality, violence and vunerability

Seamus McCauley points out the illogicality of the media's conflation of real and virtual paedophillia in their discussion of recent disturbing happenings in Second Life. He also contrasts this reaction to virtual sexual abuse with the widespread tolerance of extreme virtual violence. I recommend a reading of the post in full, too long and integrated to reproduce here.

My thoughts: Sexuality can be one of the most vunerable and emotive aspects of human identity, so it's perhaps no surprise that people often switch off their higher brains when thinking and talking about its abuses. By contrast, violence numbs and brutalises us, and it seems we find it far easier to distance ourselves emotionally from its virtual depiction.

"Human 2.0"—unfounded techno-optimism

Nick Carr reports, with seeming credulity:

"The age of Human 2.0 is here," proclaims the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in launching a new Media Lab initiative to create an improved human being.

Sounds like these guys could do with reading up a little on the subtle verities of evolutionary psychology. Oh, but acknowledging the culturally and biologically-embedded nature of our evolution wouldn't make for such a techno-optimistic strapline, I guess. ; )

Self and Identity as Memory

"Self and Identity as Memory", by John F. Kihlstrom, Jennifer S. Beer and Stanley B. Klein of University of California, is a fascinating (albeit densely condensed) survey of philosophical, cognitive and behavioural psychological and neurological research findings that establish the basis of our sense of self and identity in our memory (as the paper's title suggests).

The authors do an admirable job in pulling together myriad strands of narrative (their diverse research sources) into a coherent whole, and there are many intriguing insights along the way—for instance, on the mutually-discrete nature of semantic and episodic memory, and on the possible existence of a separate brain module for self-awareness (as opposed to awareness of others). All the same, I couldn't help feeling that the authors were having to work pretty hard to get all their material to hang together—as if they were trying to facilitate a discussion by a hundred blind men groping their way around an elephant towards a consensus on what the elephant actually is.

Such is the slippery beast of identity... ; )

Value and identity

I increasingly feel that understanding value is key to understanding identity. Value is a concept that faces into our psychological and economic worlds. We value things and people emotionally; but things and people can also be of value to us in a concrete, material sense. And in "identifying" something or someone, are we not effectively assigning a complex set of values to them, whereby, for example, {entity type = human}, {eye colour = green} {relationship status with me = colleague} {name = Andrew}? Moreover, this kind of variable/value pairing is something that every geek understands—suggesting the possibility of a seamless extension of the values in our head to those in our computers if we could only understand how the heck our brain, and beyond it our consciousness, ticks.

My brilliant friend and white paper ("Towards the Identity Society"—pdf) co-author John Madelin talks about a three-dimensional business context of value, risk and convenience for information transactions; recasting this concept purely in terms of value, we might understand the dimensions of John's model as positive value potential ("value"), negative value potential ("risk") and the friction involved in realising the positive or negative potential value. An example: I buy a coffee grinder on eBay. The positive potential value for me is making a good-value purchase; the negative potential value (risk) is that I will be ripped off; the friction (convenience level) is how easy or hard my computer's software, eBay's web service, my bank and the seller make the whole process for me. And, of course, I value convenience highly.

Zoom out a little and look at the blue-green jewel of our planet from space. Value that? And the little creatures scuttling around on it? Thought so.

Value. It's a valuable concept.

Leda Cosmides on Transhumanism

Yesterday, I listened (twice!) to an absoluting mind-blowing podcast (30 minutes) from All in the Mind of a lecture on Transhumanism by evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides.

From the podcast notes:

Transhumanists are hell-bent on extending their lives beyond the current limits of the flesh, by exploiting cutting-edge genomics, stem-cell research, robotics and nanotechnology. Engineering evolution is their goal. But can they re-engineer our Darwinian mind? Leda Cosmides, renowned pioneer of the controversial field evolutionary psychology, asks, 'Are We Already Transhuman?'

Lena demonstrates how our minds and behaviours have co-evolved with our environment over millenia; that we are not and cannot ever be separate from that environment—or from our own human identity. Woven around this central theme are a wealth of telling observations on the nature of memory, cognition and identity.

A must-listen for all identity truth-seekers.