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economies, internet, language, and culture

Small World Theory: 6 Degrees of Micro-CommunitiesAugust 25

Just a short thought experiment: picture, if you will, the kind of network graph you’d draw to represent traditional broadcast and print media. Initially a very small set of one to many one-way relationships. All downstream, very little upstream– perhaps the letters to the editor section. Desktop publishing changed the look of that graph, as did the personal video camera, lighting up more broadcast nodes on the network,  but distribution remained a challenge.

Blogs, Podcasting, YouTube and RSS changed the shape of the picture even more substantially. Distribution moved to the common platform of the web and the economics supporting a publishing node changed radically. More publishers light up on the network, but more importantly the means for two-way traffic is established as publishers talk to each other. Two-way traffic expands to a many-to-many relationships and micro-communities begin to form. All of this built on the back of HTTP.

Now think about who has real time broadcasting capability and draw a mental picture of that network graph. Think of the shape of the network, it seems to me the traditional model still dominates. Facebook, MySpace, Dogster, LinkedIn and others concentrated and increased the speed of communication transactions within communities– but they don’t generally achieve real time continuous message flow. Twitter, and more recently, Identi.ca have achieved message flow liquidity and have established themselves as primary markets.  As the XMPP protocol starts capturing the imagination and islands of Laconica instances begin appearing, more real time nodes light up on the network. It’s early days and there aren’t a lot of dots to connect.

Whether or not those dots will be allowed to be connected is currently in question. Our ability to track those XMPP streams is even more fragile still. There’s a real time web emerging and we’ve yet to imagine how it will manifest. It’s something we’ll have to talk to each other about.

These Are No Ordinary Times: Time Becomes RealAugust 24

As we may think about the real time web, the image goes in and out of focus. Pieces of the dream materialize for a moment and then are withdrawn. The solid experience of Track and IM on Twitter start to reveal the contours of the possibility of discovery on the real time web– and then in the blink of an eye, they dissolve into nothingness. Twitter pulls the experience back into the darkness, and we set out as a band of gypsies attempting to recreate it from the resources we find in the commons.

“Real time” puts time itself into the frame. In a simple sense, real time means what’s happening right now. It’s the conscious moment that cleaves the past from the future. It’s the thread of our lives being pulled through the eye of a needle.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

We see the past through the future, as it comes rushing toward us, asking us to make a judgment about this present moment. David Byrne and Brian Eno have released some recordings called “Everything that happens will happen today.” I’d go further and say that everything that happens, happens right now. Your only opportunity to act is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to do the right thing is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to connect with another person is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to pick up the thread of the conversation is in the present moment.

As we stand at the crossroads between the past and the future, we must act, and through our actions express a judgement. Do we act in the present moment only for the present moment? Or do we think both of ourselves and our posterity as we make this gesture or that one? There’s a sense in which a person acting in the present moment for the sake of an unknown future is the essence of morality.

Digital Identity: Ceremonies of the MaskAugust 22

Part of the ceremony of digital identity is binding identity artifacts to the person. There’s a sense in which these artifacts become real extensions of a person. They are augmentations, but the binding is very real. Think about how it feels to lose your keys, your wallet, your favorite pen. The human factors around digital identity remain an undiscovered country.

While listening to Dick Hardt talk about his Firefox plugin Sxipper to Phil Windley on Technometria, I began to think about anonymizers. These services are used to obscure a person entry point into the Network. I can see a future point where our relationship with identity becomes more sophisticated, we could use Sxipper to do three things.

• Jack into the Network anonymously
• Manage our personas and roles as we interact with various digital agents on the Network
• Keep track of common interactions and compile them into macros

Sxipper, or some similar tool, will be on your phone, on your USB fob, a key on your keychain�

Micro-Objects: I have no mouth and I must screamAugust 19

The analogy to Harlan Ellison’s classic story isn’t there at all. But somehow the phrase fits anyway. As I think about Jessie Stay’s post about the implementation of the “in_reply_to_status_id” parameter in Twitter, and the matching of the metadata element by Identi.ca, I keep coming back to J.L. Austin’s idea of the speech act. This new parameter is a connector that enables a network of conversation. The elements of a conversation are not objects, but rather speech acts of the subject.

“What does it matter who is speaking,” someone said. “What does it matter who is speaking.”

Samuel Beckett
Stories and Texts for Nothing

The 140 character limit of the Tweet and the Dent ties the form to the SMS. The SMS is t

Root Identity: Mesh IdentityAugust 19

I blame the terrorists. The movement to create national identity cards was given fuel by the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent formation of the Department of Homeland Security. The “concept” is that by issuing government sponsored official identity documentation we would introduce a control point in the process of differentiating “us” from “them.” There is a lively debate about whether such a system could be spoofed to somehow allow “them” to acquire identity cards and pass themselves off as authentically one of “us.” There’s no question that such an identity card would create a glaring single point of failure– the program meant to get the ball rolling is called the Real ID Act.

Personal identity is the sameness of a same person in different moments in time.

A simple frame for understanding the potential problems with the proposal requires focusing on the idea of the One and the Many. (those seeking extra credit can explore Hegel vs. Locke and review the STI’s white paper on Digital identity.) Can one national root identity be made strong and authoritative enough to be the foundation for all digital identity instances? In the future, will you have a single root identity provisioned by your government? Will you co-own your identity with your government, or will they have a 51% controlling interest when it comes to anything important?

Digital Identity is a man-made thing, an artifact, that refers to a person, and is different from a person.

An alternative vision is based on user-centric ownership and assertion of identity. The claims an individual makes to establish her identity and reputation are validated by many different sources, both strong and weak. Rather than a single root, the foundation is rhizomatic, or a mesh of validated relationships and reputation. A government issued identity card can, and does, have a role in the mesh — the question is whether it should be authoritative or simply continue to contribute to the whole.