Post(s) tagged with "engines of meaning"

In many ways, algorithms remain outside our grasp, and they are designed to be. This is not to say that we should not aspire to illuminate their workings and impact. We should. But we may also need to prepare ourselves for more and more encounters with the unexpected and ineffable associations they will sometimes draw for us, the fundamental uncertainty about who we are speaking to or hearing, and the palpable but opaque undercurrents that move quietly beneath knowledge when it is managed by algorithms.

Honor Harger quotes from Tarleton Gillespie essay The Relevance of Algorithms.

An accommodation with and accounting for “fundamental uncertainty” is one of the core qualities of the new literacy.

(via new-aesthetic)

Source: decelerator.blogspot.co.uk

28 November 2012 40 gordonr Permalink
algorithmsengines of meaninguncertainty
A Vast Wasteland, Five Decades Later - Ethan Zuckerman ⇢

Ethan Zuckerman cites Terry Fisher in a long post about a recent retrospective at the Berkman Center about Newton Minow’s (in)famous ‘vast wasteland’ speech 50 years ago. Fisher got to bat clean-up, and departs from TV and stretches out:

New technologies, and some of the practices that surround them (though are not dictated by them) are eroding some existing, long-standing dichotomies: public/private, professional/amateur, speaker/audience, news/entertainment, university/society. There are huge benefits and costs to this corrosion. We see the collapse of oligarchies, address of systematic biases, democratization of processes. But we also have fragmentation, loss of a coherent single culture, the rise of a tower of pundit babel, and the superficiality of much programming. This move, he [Fisher] argues, is impossible to stop. Instead, we need to think through the new opportunities the shift presents: the ability to change who contributes to this process. And we need to figure out how to ameliorate the costs we suffer. That means creating distributed models for sifting, curating, organizing, like Wikipedia, Slashdot and academic projects like Jeffrey Schapp’s Digital Humanities project. In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover – the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage.

The web is slowly being converted to a giant mall (see The Stripmalling Of Social Media: Media Sprawl And The New Urbanism), and TV is made into just another pile of ‘content’ for it’s yawning maw. Google and other private companies wire their policies into the plumbing of the social web, and the FCC is hopelessly out of date, focused on channels and spectrum instead of the global agora we are constructing, and living in.

Fisher is right in the particulars: a fragmentation of culture, and the dissolution of public/private, to name just a few of his points. Like Fisher, I am caught up in the quest for a distributed ‘engine of meaning’ to make sense of the streaming world through a combination of human and algorithmic curation, and it will have to be based on social structures we aren’t mining yet, I guess.

14 September 2011 4 Permalink
social curationterry fisherengines of meaningcurationsocial media sprawl

Trawling With Engines Of Meaning

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.

via -@bruces (Bruce Sterling)

I love the poetry of the words, but I believe we will depend on social networks to act as our ‘engines of meaning’ — and they may involve 30,000 steps. Meaning is the new search.

9 December 2009 Permalink
bruce sterlingengines of meaning

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Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. (More.)

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Socialogy

  • Brian Solis | Brian and I debunk big data, and Brian makes the case for empathy.

  • Deb Lavoy | Deb is dubious about management's inclinations, and says, 'Just because you are networked doesn’t mean it necessarily helps you understand, or realize your needs more effectively.'

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

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  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

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  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

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