Skip to main content

Home/ Mindamp/ Group items tagged ties

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
David McGavock

Interpersonal ties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Interpersonal_ties

ties Interpersonal PLN social learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 27 Jun 11 - Cached
  • more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties.
  • Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.[1]
  • the fact that two people may know each other by name does not necessarily qualify the existence of a weak tie. If their interaction is negligible the tie may be absent. The "strength" of an interpersonal tie is a linear combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (or mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize each tie.[2]
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In 1954, the Russian mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport commented on the "well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals." This argument became one of the cornerstones of social network theory.
  • In a related line of research in 1969, anthropologist Bruce Kapferer, published "Norms and the Manipulation of Relationships in a Work Context" after doing field work in Africa. In the document, he postulated the existence of multiplex ties, characterized by multiple contexts in a relationship.[4][5]
  • Social networks In social network theory, social relationships are viewed in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied.
  • David McGavock on 27 Jun 11
     
    "Interpersonal ties From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nodes (individuals) and ties (connections) in social networks. In mathematical sociology, interpersonal ties are defined as information-carrying connections between people. Interpersonal ties, generally, come in three varieties: strong, weak, or absent. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. "
Antonio Lopez

Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a 'Rights of the Internet' declaration - Opinion - Al J... - 1 views

www.aljazeera.com/...201228715322807.html

internet cultural citizenship proflopez digital media decolonize media decolonize the media

shared by Antonio Lopez on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • bitroots politics
  • For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be
  • A perfect storm of counterintuitive grey ethical areas, the internet is metal, code and flesh looking for harmony. This harmony will only come as the full potential of the assemblage is realised, as (and if) it overcomes the enclosures that contain it: capitalist mandates of profit and accumulation, modern human fear and pettiness, and the artificial territorial boundaries imposed by the concept of the Westphalian nation-state.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The corporate legislation project to gradually asphyxiate life in the web follows a twofold strategy: first, to gain terrain inch by inch by crafting ridiculously crippling legislation only to "tone it down" - making legislators look cooperative and magnanimous - while still advancing petty agendas
  • As Shirky notes, what is constantly in play is always how deep the "next turn of the screw" will go.
  • Code and hardware change us as much as we change them. Because we can’t uninvent the internet, we need to make sure it is the healthiest possible web.
  • Healthier code and healthier computers are critical for a society shaped by code and computers. As the recently deceased German philosopher Friedrich Kittler put it: "Codes - by name and by matter - are what determine us today, and what we must articulate if only to avoid disappearing under them completely."
  • Codes now reside in brains and bodies as much as in processors and hard drives. These particular individuals are there in representation of those who could not attend, but also in representation of the thick wilderness of codes and machines that bind them together.
  • an assemblage
  • Humans, encompassing their biological selves and their cultures and institutions. Hardware, including computers, mobile devices, mass storage facilities, transmission equipment, transoceanic cables, and so on. Code, including a vast wilderness of ever evolving protocols and software.
  • The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming
  • that life itself is, in ultimate analysis, a series of information streams that bind diverse entities through feedback: "Any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information."
  • The ultimate political challenge that defenders of the internet must face today is to secure lasting health for this hybrid life-form made of metal, code and flesh.
  • It is still relatively uncontroversial to attack a network protocol because everything about it seems morally trivial: Isn't it all artificial in the end? Seen as just a result of human cultural, economic and political forces, machinic life seems enslavable.
  • Ethics in this realm, it must be stressed, are not about what good the machine can do for us, and not even about how we can use the machine to do good - for we are in fact part of the machine, part of the life-form. It means making the whole assemblage healthier for all its parts by fostering "the means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information", within and among its three actors.
  • For example, by noting that the list of corporations co-writing and lobbying SOPA, PIPA and ACTA include not only entertainment but also pharmaceutical corporations, it is evident how human health is tied to the network's health in very real ways.
  • "the internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer
  • With the decline of state colonialism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.
  • The internet is not territory to be conquered, but life to be preserved and allowed to evolve freely.
  • Thinking of the web in terms of machinic life is important in practice for three powerful reasons: First, it guides us through the building of political models that encompass the human and the non-human, a politics for radical yet peaceful diversity needed now more than ever. Second, it unveils the ethical dimensions beneath seemingly neutral issues, allowing stronger defence for issues such as sharing and peer-to-peer practices that depend on healthy protocols and healthy hardware. Third, it is an approach that operates at any scale, allowing us to have nuanced and yet consistent positions regardless of whether we are debating the microscopic labyrinths of a computer chip (metal), the intangible nature of the BitTorrent or Bitcoin protocols (code), or the global impact of WikiLeaks (flesh).
  • Antonio Lopez on 21 Feb 12
     
    This is a very provocative essay, worth lots of discussion.
David McGavock

The Evolution of Cooperation* - 1 views

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search

evolution cooperation Axelrod prisoners dilemma defection

shared by David McGavock on 31 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.
  • the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub- mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit for Tat.
  • face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.
  • ...13 more annotations...
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      These conditions are core.
  • data from these tournaments reveals four properties which tend to make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary con- flict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the
  • What made this mutual restraint possible was the static nature of trench warfare, where the same small units faced each other for extended periods of time. The soldiers of these opposing small units actually violated orders from their own high commands in order to achieve tacit cooperation with each other
  • the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commit- ments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing
  • An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under which cooperation can emerge
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      This condition is especially important in the case of egoists. Relationship over time.
  • So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: The strategy cooperates on the first move, and discriminates between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      The check for reciprocation is a bit of evidence that the other side knows the value of the move of cooperation; that they won't be abandoned.
  • Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other
  • It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled-for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      Immediate feedback appears to be important in many domains.
  • The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.
  • Waiting for probes to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      I have found that testing limits is a factor in working with children and adults. We are alert to the boundaries.
  • For this reason, the only arms control agreements which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate
  • Therefore, the advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: Don’t be envious, don’t be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don’t be too clever.
  • We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      Herein lies another key... that we have a cooperative (win-win) attitude and understanding of the "game". We see our survival as tied with not exclusive of the fate of the "other".
  • David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
     
    We are used to thinkingabout competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such asfootball or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range ofsituations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutualdefection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but ineliciting their cooperation
David McGavock

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...306868

Nicholas Carr Scientific Management Information distracted

shared by David McGavock on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      Unlikely. He hasn't lost the ability but the desire.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
  • we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
  • “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
  • the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
  • In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
  • The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
  • even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
  • The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
  • In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
  • their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
  • there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
  • we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page