Brand Human

Identity in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

 

Something we need to be aware of is that the bigger issue of social media overall is simply that when given the ability to freely share our lives, we are quick to share our lives. That may sound like an oxymoron or counter-intuitive as a statement, but it means in the digital world we have a bad habit of over sharing.

Remember, a social graph is literally designed to infer who you are at all levels through your interactions, preferences and relationships. The more you share, the more you should care - since companies like Google, Facebook, etc wind up knowing more about you than you may ever realize, and more than you may even know about yourself through relational inference.

 

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Digital Identification

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

If you've never heard about this initiative, you really should read up on it (link below). Essentially it's a government initiative to further online identity and secure interaction through participation of third party private sector efforts.

In short, think of it like a manner by which to identify a person online reasonably. The solution to make that happen is a trusted social graph which strengthens as you use it, and eventually can become verified by the third party (or collaborating third parties), creating a trusted identity online for situations when an elevated level of trust is required.

The best way to accomplish that, then, is to implement systems like Google Plus, Facebook, etc wherein your "social graph" creates that unique online identity and eventually gets verified. Compelling people to use these systems isn't exactly hard, either. Just add a dose of gameification element to it all and viola!

People click "Like" or "+1" on stuff and build their social graph all over the Internet, which in turn strengthens their "trusted identity". The problem is that, while you are compelled to share with your friends online all those details about yourself, there is a third party that is also looking in on you and your friends - namely Google, Facebook, etc which in turn has an open channel to the NSA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security who are privy to the raw information you are submitting.

It's a double edged sword, and we need to keep it in mind as we go bravely (or stupidly) into the future.

The Real Issue

For now it's all fine and well that we're getting all of these online services for "free" and sites are integrating the social graph into their own systems for authentication, etc... It is not uncommon to see sites these days that encourage you to log-in using Twitter, Facebook, etc as a one click step. Ease of use makes it really compelling, but in the long run you are giving up just a bit more than you realize through doing so.

The price you pay for these services is not measured because you are paying with a currency that is completely invaluable - which is to say, namely yourself. As +Gary Vaynerchuk says - Brand Human is the most underrated brand there is. The most important brand in the future and today is not Nike, Coca-Cola, or Pringles - it's you.

As you use those social graphs to log into other sites, you are adding those sites to your social graph as part of your "online identity system". It's still a double edged sword but one that can easily be abused by third parties and government if not careful.

For instance, I'm sure being branded a terrorist for clicking "Like" on #Occupy streams or sites seems far fetched, but if you're not careful that's exactly what happens in your social graph. The same could be said about people who show a public interest in things like #Anonymous or whatever other non-sanctioned and fringe outlets exist such as #Wikileaks or #BradleyManning

What's more, the further these services become collective, the more likely there is a single choking point for access online. Sure, you could just use another service, but as they start implementing social graph log-in methods over their own, those sites become part of the Google and Facebook extension as well, even if they are run by parties outside of Google and Facebook. So if Google and Facebook decide to shut off access to your account and services - those sites outside of them shut down your access as well by default.

Even more interesting is the implementation of cloud storage and applications into this ecosystem, whereby you are perpetually renting access to your own data and the programs that allow you to manipulate it. We see this with Tablets recently, whereby the on-board storage is myopic by default and the App-stores compel you to rent cloud storage to offload your files to. Google already does this with Google Drive, giving you a preset "entry" storage account and then setting “reasonable” rental prices for more.

As computing moves in that direction, I get a little nervous at the implications. Do something a third party doesn't like or disagrees with, and in a single request you're essentially cut off from anything meaningful online as a result, losing a majority of your data as well.

Email, videos, documents, social media, calendar, pictures, music, blogs, and (over time) the rest of the useful Internet itself that uses those social graphs to let you log in.

Something to mull over in our race to ubiquitous computing.

 

 

External Links

 

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf

Image by:

Ragaru | deviantArt - http://ragaru.deviantart.com/art/Cyber-Eye-111574083

 

Synapse

To the outsider, the Singularity looks like madness | #SecondLife

 

In a recent Newsweek cover story, it is asserted that technology in general and (more precisely) access to the Internet and mass communication is somehow driving us insane.

 

 

Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness.

 

 

Let’s start the ball rolling by stating this is absolute hogwash. What we are seeing are the effects of an accelerated mind adapting to ubiquitous presence and access.

 

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I know, the kids these days with their iPhones, MP3 players, and computers. Tablets and other electronic cocaine addictions up the wazoo only compound the issue, right? I’m not so certain about that assertion.

 

What I’ve noticed is that these studies clearly take the situation out of context and make half-witted assertions about what they feel is going on with the participants. Yes, they are more apt to multitask and become irritable when disconnected from the Internet. Of course their attention span is lower and not able to concentrate on a single thing… or maybe they really can focus on a single thing but only if they truly are interested in it?

 

That’s something I’ve noticed more than anything.

 

In a world of endless information at our fingertips, we’re mentally adapting to the situation by becoming exceedingly quick at deciding what is important and what isn’t. So when we’re talking to our teenagers and they’re staring at their smart phones in a text messaging conversation, maybe they are deciding in a moment that what you are saying is really not as important as you are making it out to be? More to the point is that in an overwhelming onslaught of ubiquitous information and interaction, it’s not so much what you are saying but how you are choosing to convey that information that counts? Generally speaking, we’re simply not choosing the most efficient manner to convey information, nor is that information worth the sustained attention of the person you are trying to convey it to.

 

I wouldn’t say this is an unhealthy addiction. If anything, this is promising because what I see from my end is a population quickly adapting to the singularity context. Accelerating returns essentially mandates that progress will quicken, information will continue to expand and time will compress. In short, it’ll take less time to do more when compared to the same task in a prior generation.

 

So our population is adapting to this time compression. On the surface, I suppose it looks like a sort of mental illness or addiction. We’re already in a multiplicity of persona through or digital interactions, and we refer to ourselves in many differing contexts. A generation ago that notion would have immediately been characterized as a mental instability, but by today’s standards we are expected to engage the world as a multiplicity.

 

However, that isn’t to say that everyone is actually capable of this transition.

 

There are the digital natives and the digital immigrants, the prior are the younger generation that were born into the digital context and had access to these devices and technologies from birth, while the latter generation is not so lucky to have been a native and must retrain their minds to adapt to the technology and implications it brings.

 

Digital natives are most likely to handle this singularity transition without much of an issue, while the ones who will see the adverse effects are likely the digital immigrants who aren’t mentally prepared for this accelerated time shifting and ubiquity.

 

From a medical standpoint, we term this issue Reactive Psychosis, which essentially boils down to a sudden and overwhelming shift in engagement from relative quiet to an onslaught of information overload. To put it more precisely, we’re back to the notion of the monkey sphere (or Dunbar’s Number if you will) and how the mind is adapting to handle the inner-sphere and the outer-sphere. In the case of digital natives, they are already adapting to handle both inner and outer-sphere through highly adaptive prioritization of importance. To a digital immigrant, however, they have a predisposition to believe that all interactions hold relatively the same attention weight in order to remain courteous, and that mentality is the precursory to a mental breakdown when all things seemingly require full attention to be polite but the sheer number of interactions is overwhelming.

 

When we look at this more in-depth, I suppose we can assert that the recent generation has a much higher affliction of A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. but I’m wary to say that is really a bad thing. I’m sure in an analog context, those things are bad, but instead of diagnosing the individual with an attention problem, maybe we should be diagnosing our means of information stream myopic instead?

 

I’d like to hypothesize that those with attention deficit disorder really have nothing wrong with them at all, but instead they are adapted to handle a hyper-contextual environment which the standard methodologies today aren’t capable of delivering. A single mode of communication and, more importantly, a single thread of interaction is not appropriate in a ubiquitous environment. These digital natives are adapting to handle many things at once and actually perform better when able to interact with many things in shorter bursts.

 

In an education aspect, and I know many reading this are keen to perk up their ears, this means that the textbook approach to learning is dying a quick death. What education needs is a multi-sensory and immersive context in order for our digital natives to focus. Not only that, but there needs to be an open-ended context in which exploration of that immersion and many paths can lead to not just a predetermined outcome but the possibility of different outcomes.

 

If you’re an educator and into virtual worlds, then this is a perfect justification for integrating virtual environments into your classroom context. That doesn’t mean a linear environment that walks students through a lesson plan is appropriate, however. What it means is that the students literally thrive and focus on multi-faceted immersive contexts.

 

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Now, I know Rupert Murdoch isn’t exactly the most trustworthy person to quote concerning all of this, but if you put aside the unsavory actions what you have is at least a man who understood this situation from his own perspective and what would need to be done in order to move forward.

 

I’m not one to agree with Rupert Murdoch, but on this he is absolutely correct.

 

So far our solution has been to diagnose our kids with a disorder and pump them full of drugs to slow them down. I find this disturbing and amusing simultaneously because we’re approaching the situation in the same manner as the scientists in the game Portal where GladOS was becoming too smart and too fast, so the solution was to attach other cores to her in order to add noise and slow her down.

 

It’s disturbing because we’re addressing a symptom and not the problem, and amusing because instead of evolving our own methodologies, the digital immigrants immediately see this behavioral change as bad because it is very different than their own, and so they have to “solve” it by diagnosing it as a problem and prescribing drugs to handle it.

 

The problem isn’t the kids, and the problem isn’t technology. The problem is now that the digital natives aren’t being spoon fed information and context in a trickle that is an analog or singular context scenario, they simply aren’t tolerant of the old methodologies any longer. Yet our classrooms and digital immigrant society is still rooted in analog methodologies and contexts, so they decide that something is wrong with the new generation for not acting like they did at their age.

 

The problem is the methodologies and approach to interaction and learning. It’s no longer a world of single stream context, but instead we’re in a world of ubiquitous and hyper-threading context. Short bursts and high impact.

 

I suspect this is also the reason why my own blog is considered “hard to parse” or read for the average person. We’re used to a single graphic and a burst of text, 30 seconds of context and then we move on. However when we’re faced with long reads and deeper context, many people refer to the Cliff Notes version.

 

That being said, I’m still a digital native myself. I can get on with a smart phone and short burst conversations, but sometimes there are things which need to be given due diligence and time in a discussion. I think when we begin to cultivate a balance between the two, we’ll get along just fine. For those that are full-tilt digital natives; These are the people who are the future. Don’t treat it as a disorder or negative addiction. We’re addicted to information and the world. We’re soaking up all things of interest at a hyper-active pace. We’re retraining our minds to learn like we did when we were children…

 

Think about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down With The Sickness

We live in a very sick world. Here’s how we fix it for real. #Zeitgeist #OWS

 

Usually I’m the sort of person who writes exceedingly lengthy articles about complex ideals or viewpoints, much of which I am fully aware the average person (aside from the most technically devout) essentially tune out in an age of Attention Deficit Media.

 

 

 

 

However, this post concerns something entirely different, and is my official position concerning Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide protests in solidarity. It includes a full video lecture that is likely one of the most important that you could ever watch on the subject, and I highly recommend, just this once, that you put aside your attention deficit and take the time to digest the information that will be presented in this post.

 

I’m an avid supporter of Occupy Wall Street but for entirely different reasons than the #OWS crowd are supporting it for. While the people are protesting inequality, corruption and greed, they are still at a phase of understanding where they believe working within a system that is inherently corrupt will bring them a solution.

 

There is literally no way to pay the mounting debts of this nation, or the world. Period. End of story. Every bank note in your hand is a representation of debt, with interest that can never be repaid. It is the representation for everything that is absolutely wrong in this world today.

 

Take a good look at it.

 

We cannot fix a system inherently designed by nature to deprive a majority of people on this planet in order to provide an excess for a few. A system designed for cyclical consumption and consumerism, infinite growth, in a world of very finite resource. It is a logical impossibility.

 

Nobody, not you nor I, will ever be able to vote these facts out of existence. There are no laws that we can possibly write and enact that will change these immutable laws of nature, or of the nature of this parasite we call money.

 

I support Occupy Wall Street because they are a catalyst to realization, if not still premature. They know something is terribly wrong with the world and this country, and have a vague idea what the root of that problem is. However the solutions they propose at this time are nothing more than addressing the symptoms of the problem, and are doomed to failure on the whole.

 

I still support them, because they are a much needed catalyst, and I am patient enough to wait for those protesters to truly have a revelation as to what the root of the problem is and how we can truly fix it. They, and you, will inevitably realize this immutable fact sooner or later.

 

If you realize this immutable fact later, you will likely be fighting for water, food and basic resources. Wars, famine and disease running rampant in what used to be a 1st World Country.

 

The choice is ours.

 

You can take an hour and forty-five minutes of your day to change your mind and help change the world through education, or you can spend that time looking for pictures of cats on the internet.

 

Weigh it out for yourself. Life is short, use it wisely.

 

 

 

Social Pathology – Full Lecture | The Zeitgeist Movement