Over the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook’s IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We’ve been living on them and in them for decades. What’s changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools. +Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets. This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques: On a more general basis, our results highlight that *the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web*. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend is likely to become more and more evident in the future years. Although the success of the prediction isn’t itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not only surprising but fundamentally revolutionary for […]

The Networked Paradigm volume one Over the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook’s IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We’ve been living on them and in them for decades. What’s changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools. +Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/aSUDwAggmgz This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques: “On a more general basis, our results highlight that the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend is likely to become more and more evident in the future years.” Although the success of the prediction isn’t itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not […]

Spreading good memes is good. CogSai originally shared this post: Which are deadlier: sharks or horses? Find out now on the debut of +CogSai! Easy share link: http://bit.ly/cogsai1 Cognitive science is a combo of psych, AI, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthro, sociology, and lots more. CogSai includes short illustrated explanations, live interviews with researchers, and group discussions. Coming soon: LIVE interview with a scientist researching how analytical and heuristic thinking compete in the brain. Subscribe & follow to participate live! Go to cogsai.com/q to contribute your questions on this episode & suggestions for future episodes. See you there. 🙂 – +Sai

The hybrid ideal Today it is clear that the independence of social value and commercial revenue creation is a myth. In reality, the vectors of social value and commercial revenue creation can reinforce and undermine each other. The social consequences of the recent financial crisis demonstrated with great clarity the danger of “negative externalities”—social costs resulting from corporate profit-seeking activities. But in some cases, “positive externalities” may also exist. It is this possibility that integrated hybrid models seek to exploit. When we talk to entrepreneurs and students about hybrid organizations, a common theme that emerges is what we call the “hybrid ideal.” This hypothetical organization is fully integrated—everything it does produces both social value and commercial revenue.4 This vision has at least two powerful features. In the hybrid ideal, managers do not face a choice between mission and profit, because these aims are integrated in the same strategy. More important, the integration of social and commercial value creation enables a virtuous cycle of profit and reinvestment in the social mission that builds large-scale solutions to social problems. http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/in_search_of_the_hybrid_ideal via +Gregory Esau _______________ It is wonderful to see so many people waking up simultaneously to the same basic unified frameworks. People are catching on to it from so many diverse perspective it is very humbling. The overlap and diversity of perspectives is interesting for many reasons. “The Hybrid Ideal”, for instance, is a very clearly transhumanist value, but I imagine that the number of people involved in producing or sharing this content that explicitly recognize it as such is vanishingly small. I personally get this content through the small-but-growing network of businessmen and entrepreneurship whose interesting organizational strategies have been filling my stream. This amuses me somewhat, because I’m an anarchist looking to seize the means of production, yet somehow we’ve […]

Matt Uebel originally shared this post: “How is it possible to have any informed democratic debate over a policy about which the U.S. media relentlessly propagandizes this way? If drone strikes kill nobody other than “militants,” then very few people will even think about opposing them (and that’s independent of the fact that the word “militant” is a wildly ambiguous term — militant about what? — though it is clearly designed (when combined with “Pakistan”) to evoke images of those who attacked the World Trade Center). Debate-suppression is not just the effect but the intent of this propaganda: like all propaganda, it is designed to deceive the citizenry in order to compel acquiescence to government conduct.” Deliberate media propaganda The media now knows that “militant” is a term of official propaganda, yet still use it for America’s drone victims

vis +James Wood. Pasting his comment below: “An effect of the constant advances in technology is a complete restructuring of the way we think about the division of labor and citizens’ roles in a future society. As our lives become ever more digitalized, we realize many real concerns–namely the fear that a handful of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful individuals will take over the world, leaving the rest of us to fight over the few “real” jobs remaining. However, in an #attentioneconomy , such disparity can not exist. First of all, the Internet in future forms can reach the point that it itself functions as an economy–one of attention and attenders. Imagine that machines have evolved to the point at which manual human labor is truly obsolete; they become in a way our “digital” infrastructure. then whatever frontier remains unconquered will become the platform for our human interaction (the Internet). This network will still be just as competitive as any free market system to date, only it will be wholly self-organized, meaning that the behavior of the network as a whole will be more or less equally influenced by each individual node. The main obstruction to this practically in the future is that in this vast digital infrastructure, you might ask, who controls that? Who owns it? Who makes sure it is functioning properly? If a few people do own it, then wouldn’t the very phenomenon we are trying to avoid still happen in an attention economy (other-organized network)? The answer is that no one owns the infrastructure (or anything). The infrastructure will become advanced enough that it becomes essentially self-improving, self-organizing, self-replicating, etc. The technology will become intelligent, or I daresay, alive (oooh). It will become integrated into our very consciousness–it will become us, or rather extensions of us. […]

Cognitive Democracy “This points, we think, to a very clear constructive agenda. To exaggerate a little, it is to see how far the Internet enables modern democracies to make as much use of their citizens’ minds as did Ober’s Athens. We want to learn from existing online ventures in collective cognition and decision-making. We want to treat these ventures are, more or less, spontaneous experiments10, and compare the success and failures (including partial successes and failures) to learn about institutional mechanisms which work well at harnessing the cognitive diversity of large numbers of people who do not know each other well (or at all), and meet under conditions of relative equality, not hierarchy. If this succeeds, what we learn from this will provide the basis for experimenting with the re-design of democratic institutions themselves.” ______ This is absolutely wonderful. Via +Michael Chui Xavier Marquez originally shared this post: Cosma Shalizi and +Henry Farrell make an epistemic argument for democracy (vis a vis markets and hierarchies). I suspect at this level of generality the question is a bit too abstract – the more interesting questions remain below this level, concerning the scope of each mechanism and the mediation of conflicts at the edges between markets, participatory discussion fora, and hierarchies. Nevertheless, a very interesting piece. Cognitive Democracy But the economical advantages of commerce are surpassed in importance by those of its effects which are intellectual and moral. It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of…

+dilan tory and +Steven Wagner raise some interesting questions regarding the complaint in the linked article. Any thoughts from the stream? Quoting dilan’s question below. “Dan, I thought you might be interested in the legal/conceptual issues here. Steve wonders what you think about the following: What counts as a database/what does intent mean in this context? As for myself, I’m just wondering how often someone in France has to search for “Jew” after a name to cause google’s algorithmic whizgizmos to suggest it as a prompt. And I want to know whether French people do this more than, say, Germans or Americans-is French pop culture becoming obsessively anti-semitic? I can’t help but find this menacing–I’m in the middle of reading the postwar correspondance between Jaspers and Hannah Arendt…” _____ One interesting thing to consider is that Google already shapes your search results according to personalized metrics. In other words, if my communities are heavily involved and influential in, say, antisemetic circles, that would tend to raise the number of antisemetic results I’d get in a search. Presumably, this is what I’d want, given my online communities. Consequently, laws like this seem like ways of restricting which communities one might engage with. This might seem like an acceptable result when dealing with so-called “hate-based” communities, but of course when state institutions have this kind of authority it tends to over step its bounds. More generally, I think a lot of issues with online censorship are traditionally understood in terms of “free speech”, and so issues like this become difficult because it isn’t exactly clear what speech is getting suppressed when you silence autocomplete results. I’d personally suggest that +Google (as an artificially intelligent computing agent, not the corporation) is having its speech suppressed, but since I don’t think Google yet has […]

The Logic of Diversity The Complexity of a Controversial Concept By +Cosma Shalizi … The division of labor is, in part, an adaptation for handling complex problems, but only those which are complex in the straightforward sense of being very large. It relies on finding a way of decomposing the large problem into nearly-separate parts, so that it can be attacked through a strategy of divide-and-conquer, with different people specializing in conquering the various divisions. (This topic, and its relation to hierarchical structure, was explored by Herbert Simon in his classic Sciences of the Artificial.) Diversity, in the sense Page is talking about, is another way of adapting to complexity, and specifically to complex problems which are not decomposable into neat hierarchies. Put strategically, the idea is like this: Agents have only a limited capacity to represent, learn about, and predict their world, and so solve their problems. When the problem or environment is too complex for any one agent, then you should have many weak agents make partial, incomplete, overlapping representations. You’ll be better off by doing this, and then learning a way to combine them, than by trying to find a single, globally accurate representation, such as a single super-genius agent which can handle the problem all by itself. Collectively, the combined representations of the group of agents are equivalent to a single high-capacity representation. But nobody, individually, has anything like the complete picture; in fact, everybody’s individual picture is pretty much wrong, or at best drastically incomplete. Powerful, high-level capacities which emerge from the interplay of low-level components are a common feature of complex systems, but here as elsewhere, just having the components and letting them interact is not enough. The organization of the interactions is crucial. In the brain, for instance, this is the difference between […]

+Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues have put together attention-based models looking at Twitter activity in the run up to the #americanidol decisions. They were able to predict the winner with a pretty high degree of confidence using an extremely simplified model of the Twitter activity. They posted the model to the arXiv a few days ago, and then updated with results from the big vote yesterday. Their updated paper is linked below. This is both a validation and benchmarking case for quantifying and modeling the #attentioneconomy . They conclude: ” We have shown that the open source data available on the web can be used to make educated guesses on the outcome of societal events. Speci?cally, we have shown that extremely simple measures quantifying the popularity of the American Idol participants on Twitter strongly correlate with their performances in terms of votes. A post-event analysis shows that the less voted competitors can be identi?ed with reasonable accuracy (Table II) looking at the Twitter data collected during the airing of the show and in the immediately following hours.” Bruno Gonçalves originally shared this post: Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol. (arXiv:1205.4467v2 [physics.soc-ph] UPDATED) We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each week draws millions of votes in the USA. We provide evidence that Twitter activity during the time span defined by the TV show airing and the voting period following it, correlates with the contestants ranking and allows the anticipation of the voting outc…