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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Stream

The Stream is composed by streams which are real time, rapidly changing, flowing, dynamic streams of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

Borthwich on streams
"They start with this stream of data getting published, republished, annotated and co-opt’d across a myriad of sites and tools. The social component is complex — consider where its happening. The facile view is to say its Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed — pick your favorite service. But its much more than that because all these sites are, to varying degrees, becoming open and distributed. Its blogs, storage sites, boards or moderation tools (ie: disqus) — a whole site can emerge around an issue — become relevant for a week and then drawn in the flow. This web Is still under construction but we are back in the dark room trying to understand the dimensions and contours of something new, or even how to map and outline its borders".

Spivak on streams
"If the Internet is our collective nervous system, and the Web is our collective brain, then the Stream is our collective mind. The nervous system and the brain are like the underlying hardware and software, but the mind is what the system is actually thinking in real-time. These three layers are interconnected, yet are distinctly different aspects, of our emerging and increasingly awakened planetary intelligence. The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It's our collective stream of consciousness".

Thoughts
-I don't think a stream has a uni dimensional sequence structure filled with pieces of information that people share and use to interact with each other, I think it is more complex than that. Maybe streams have a two dimensional structure with a spiral-shape. This structure starts at the information located farthest from the spiral center. As the stream evolves its contents are located in sequential order starting from the outer layers and moving toward the inner ones. The stream evolves towards better communication and interaction among it's participants. The closer the stream content is to the center the closer people are to truly understand each other and to increased interaction quality.

-An fMRI scanner should be developed for the new "collective brain". It should be able to measure the activity in the brain or spinal cord (the nervous system is formed by both of them).

-Maybe having an online identity used for participating in social bookmarking, blogs, streams and other kinds of social networks is an attempt to stop being an anonymous web user and become a famous one. Streams are new but humans have still the same nature which demands most of them to be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities including, being famous.

-The stream content appears to be coherent information, because it is contained and generated in a unique and particular stream; but usually a stream is filled with a bunch of unrelated information inserted there by loosely related people with very few interest in common and that rarely communicate with each other. Nevertheless it is possible that we still do not understand the 'global mind' deep enough and don't have enough context information to understand the coherence contained in most of these streams.

-It seems we are mainly passive consumers of information. Why not search for the Buddhist/Hinduist understanding of human existence? Therefore choose the streams that fit our desires, needs and wants in life. It's not a question of being able to consume an ever increasing amount of stream chatter. It's a question about being able to create and recreate reality together with other individual minds that are beneficial to all humans.

-Since the new kind of being called "collective mind" should be taking care of it needs to be tought to practice meditation in order to be balanced, compassionate, and wise.

30 comments:

Mayer Spivack said...

Bravo Mariana!
See my e-mail to you and to Nova Spivack. Your posting deserves several readings.
Mayer Spivack

Mariana Soffer said...

Than you very much mayer. It makes me happier to talk to you (or read from you).

Mariana Soffer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jane Bryce said...

Have you red what car said today?

"Yesterday, it was the New York Times that took the realtime plunge with the launch of Times Wire, a jittery twittery service that the paper describes as "a continuously updated stream of the latest stories and blog posts." The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out.". Another steam.

Anonymous said...

We are evolving spiritually and telepathy via the internet is all part of the collective unconscious. New vistas are being explored or perhaps rediscovered, remembered? Sometimes I feel we are inventing every tool possible to elevate ourselves from the physical world. Why, I don't know. I had to reread this post a few times to fully appreciate each point of view. Thank you again mariana for an astute thinker with a breadth of knowledge.

Mariana Soffer said...

Valrussell: Very intresting points you mentioned, I have to thank you for helping me think about the nature of things.

I liked the idea of them being rediscovered or remembered, I never thought about that option.

So you said that you have the feeling we want to elevate from the phisical word, well it seems to me that we certainly want to take distance from it. But my feeling is that we want to become robots ourselves, performing our tasks without errors having no frustrations neither satisfactions.

Mariana Soffer said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ines said...

This post is thought-provoking. I still can't comment on it, I need more time, besides I need to understands some of the concepts that you mention cause they are new for me.

By the way i was woundering if you know any other stream-like social networking website besides the ones I know which which are twitter and facebook.

Mariana Soffer said...

Ines:Right now only 2 come to mind, friendfeed (which a use pretty often) and Popego, that I haven not been using lately.

Rob Bryanton said...

Nice blog entry, Mariana! I love how you pulled so many threads together here. My blog entry on The Stream from a few days ago also attempted a similar synthesis of diverse ideas:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/05/stream.html

My compliments!

Rob

Uncle Tree said...

We are stuck in the dream of this wet~n~wild stream. With no way out and no paddle, it's difficult to get an objective grasp of the fast-moving situation.

Haven't we met?

Anonymous or famous, they are both just another drop in the ocean, being but a bit of a bite. I'd be content with familiar, if you'll just have me. Uncle Tree is quite fond of sum collection.

Mariana Soffer said...

rob bryanon:
Thank you very much rob, I aprecciate the compliment.
I thought we are kind of searching for the same thing. I also googled you on internet and noticed you have a video show, I did not have time to check it that much but I must tell you that I really enjoyed the way you tell things. Hope we stay in touch, I am
going to be doing some more research on what you wrote, curiosiy is killing me

Congrats to you
Mariana

Mariana Soffer said...

Uncle Tee:
Loved your first paragraph, I thougt of your words and I can refer to so many things that apply
to actual society, for example that infants wet themselves while they dream, that when you are
underwater is like being in a dream. You can not get out of the car when its going at 75 mph,
you perspective is from a fast moving positon making impossible to notice details.
Everything seems to be moving except things that move at your same speed (and you have docens
of fish going along wih you)
I like familiar, familiar feels calm almost safe, sometimes with a longing for it. Like the one
I had last week for your poem.

Uncle Tree said...

The act of hanging on, or clinging to the familiar can turn into a virtue or a vice, Mariana. Comfort seeking creatures are we, and a feeling of security relieves us of the surrounding stressful pressures put on us by the world and it's demands. But it's not expansive, and eventually one must leave the home to search for new horizons.

Might it be a question of maturity? We must learn to let go in order for us to get a handle on this thing that is called freedom. Then it's sink or swim, and if you are strong enough to speed along upstream, you can always go back home to visit, just like the salmon do.

For others, the adventurous spirit plays the child's game of "All ye, all ye in free". At least, that's what we called it in our neighborhood. It's kind of like tag, but there's always a safe 'home base', usually a big tree. Someone is 'it', and everyone else runs and hides. One must stay out until the signal is given. The trick is to make it back home before you become 'it', the loser. The more you play, the more you learn to get far away in the very beginning, thus improving your chances for success. Although, in the dark, it also becomes possible for one to get lost in the process,
especially if a mean ol' dog starts chasing you.

srw said...

Nice to see a deep article instead of another stream copywriting!

Sadly streams are being converted into the TV of Internet. And right now we are seeing just a lot of retranmission of [fractal] mainstream content while many of the smart stream longtail is never read because their smart bits takes more than 1/10 sec to understand or act.

In the positive side, the stream population is rather new and in the next few months/years surely we'll see a more efficient [self] organization structure.

girlontape said...

hola marian,
leí la nota q me dejaste (math v. art)...
bueno parts of it... still knitting myself a brain capable of following your geniusness jajaj
"beauty is truth, truth beauty"
besos, stef

Vokat said...

Happy TOWEL Day.

Mariana Soffer said...

Uncle: Very insightful reflection, thank you very much for your great collaboration to the post.
-You remind me of a saying that says that there is almost no distance from the absurd to the sublime.
-Maybe we have become mainly comfort seekers and forgotten of several other important things we should seek for, like in the example you give using a child's game.
I see you ended up thinking about evolution as well as I did, it is hard to avoid that perspective for me, but I am trying to acquire new viewpoints.
Thank care of all you branches

Mariana Soffer said...

SRW: Thanks!I like the idea of fractal content. It might be a mix of fractal, among other kind of structures the way content flows or is transmitted. Lets hope for better organizational mechanisms
and structures to appear.

Mariana Soffer said...

Girlontape: Thank you, you brain is not bad at all came on, you probably have my same problem which
is that is not hard to keep focused and to trust one particular thoughts.


Vokat:I am not wet from being in the stream cause I did not came out yet, but as soon as I do I want to see the movie!
cheers

Anonymous said...

Mariana!

What an interesting post. I've thought about this dimension in reality that the internet has created, I think my views are close to valbrussels on his one: this is all one way that we are evolving together, our collective mind, I think there's a lot to consider about this angle. I blog under a pseudonym because I can freely express myself- heaven forbid I ever become famous under the pseudonym of harmonie22- If I ever became a famous poet I would never admit it was me, lol.

I like how you end on a note of spiritual speculation. I have a teacher who is a Buddhist, apparently he is considered to be a highly evolved Buddhist among the Buddhists (don't ask me how that is defined because I don't know). He does not surf the net, use any social networks, he doesn't even check his email he lets an assistant do that. why? Again I am not sure, but it has something to do with wasting your personal energy and focusing your attention.

Mariana Soffer said...

Thank you very much perception Mr.

You know I thought about having a parallel personality myself but too much effort for me, so I end up never saying anything too personal, or doing any kind of poetry, which I want to eventually. It's smart of you I am not sure people are still completely ready to accept that we are all human beings who make awful mistakes, emit stupid opinions and have amazing ideas almost at the same time.

Collective mind should do:Consensus decision-making, a form
of collective intelligence, that uses information from multiple
sources to generally reach the correct conclusion. will it be able to?

Regarding your teacher, I am not sure I like him doing that, somehow he is cheating by making others believe he wrote what other guy did. I think an elevated spiritual person shouldn't have anything to hide.

Take care

Jane Bryce said...

Regarding the idea of consciousness you where talking here are some Lacan thoughts:

The main difference between metaphor and metonymy, is that metaphor functions to suppress, while metonymy functions to combine. He writes: "it is in the word-to-word connection that metonymy is based," and then: "one word for another: that is the formula of metaphor."

Metaphor, insofar as it functions through similarities and substitutions, coincides with the psychic trope of repression, and metonymy, insofar as it functions through contiguity and difference, coincides with the psychic trope of displacement,

Metaphor and metonymy serve to ‘present’ ideas in forms greatly different from their original content, in the psychic realm they offer the same function, thus rendering certain 'objects’ of the mind (thoughts, feelings, signifiers, etc.) unrecognizable to ‘consciousness’. In other words, ‘language’ and ‘psyche’ share the curious propensity towards and capacity for using structure to present (known) content in unknowable form.

Mariana Soffer said...

Jane: Excelent information, exactly what we where talking about.

It seems that you describe the idea of how the mechanism works, so I am going to try to close it and derive some conclusions.

The previously stated implies that when a speaker wants to ‘produce’ meaning in order to communicate, he or she will have to employ the two modes of ‘combination’ and ‘selection’, while mobilizing relationships across both dimensions.

Since I could not infer anything else I started searching for information, and here is what I found:
"Lacan's use of these two concepts in his formulation of the unconscious lends itself to locating the political within the psychological, or in other words, to the understanding of political subjectivity."
My work is done down this path, given that I am not interested in Lacan related Politics. But to conclude with I would like to highlight that the mechanism proposed by the Psychriatrist and the elements that compose it appear to be very promising to start a new investigation with.

Anonymous said...

Hi Mariana


Let's say that the Stream is the Steam that keeps Mankind moving on.

In a classical way, it's the "ciber Zeitgeist"

Anonymous said...

The stream
The steam
Self esteem

A string
Of links
Of events
Of things
Happening
In here

Mariana Soffer said...

AnonymusI: Pretty intresting idea, but I do not understand the concept of zeigest very good,I have to research about it and then incorporate it to my own concept bag

Anonymus II:Thanks a lot for your colaboration, I really liked it.

Paul said...

Internet - no time since everything exists all the time (like your first post)
-no space since everything is adjacent to everything else (links)

-grand ballet beyond space time where everything yours
is also mine.

Mariana Soffer said...

Paul:Very intresting no time, no space, no ownership. It's the information dimension

Mariana Soffer said...

Tripp:
I like your text, I know it is the same as in your post, but I dont care.

You need audiobooks if you live in LA, the problem is that is hard to stay focused on them.

I like when you say " as computer power increseas exponentially ...." regarding that
Increases like the moore law says it does and budhist is getting everywhere and nowhere

The problem now is that everything is an unethical lie, but preteds not to be, big pharma, petroleum, war.
charity, and a millon things more

Let me add some phd resources

Book: comming what you get for

and dont forget the ever current cliff notes


and of course the cheat sheats (that cheat legally), guess we are having a
paradox here, maybe we can do a meta rule and fix it, so the systems remain coherent.

web 2.0:nonody understood what it was about, they even had to change their name, best resources:_
freebase and calais.

read my articles about
copyright, social networks and whatever you want.

Who are you? phd? own a company? madman?