Online Social Optimization
January 31st, 2010

TL;DR: The Future of Attention for #AOIR11

# Has mediated culture changed to fit new regimes of attention?

# With an infinite number of channels, is it still possible to get citizens to talk about the same topic?

# How do marketers get attention when technologies, from TiVo to pop-up blockers, allow for filtering?

# Does the ability to work anywhere, thanks to mobile devices, break down the idea of attending to home or family within particular temporal and spatial blocks?

# How does a new disciplining of attention (or a lack of such disciplining?) affect learning inside and outside of schools and universities?

# Are “Lifehacker” and “Four Hour Work Week” just continuations of a long interest in efficiency, or do they mark a move beyond the workplace for such efforts?

# Is there a consensus regarding “multi-tasking” and “continuous partial attention” vs. task focus in terms of effectiveness?

# How do individuals create their own “situational awareness”? To what degree is our attention locationally based?

# How have technologies of social networking affected who we attend to and how we attend to them?

via TL;DR: The Future of Attention – a thaumaturgical compendium.

by unruh | Posted in Group Mind Dynamics, Recognition Economy | Comments Off | Tags: ,
January 14th, 2009

Narratives and Meta-Narratives


One of the sigilization techniques which has arisen online in recent years is the Hyperstition, a virtual or abstract form that realizes itself though the actions of those who hold that idea-set and who leverage discourse about that idea-set.

We can ‘place’ things into media in exactly the same way as traditional producers of media generate content, and this fact, coupled with the legitimating functors arising through the morass of social media (i saw it on youtube, it was totally a cellphone video of a dude getting jacked, etc.) creates an unbelievably virulent moment of paradigmatic instability. The instability is a tectonic shift between two or more power elites, but in the upheaval all political assumptions are relegated to concern about efficient use of resources, agile marketing, image branding, and chaos management. Catastrophe modeling and exponential growth planning, coupled with the tensions of technological adaptation and monocultural interpellation coming from the top down, restructuring with little or no long-term goals for productive growth.

“..a culture that gives precedence to the narrative form doubtless has no more of a need for special procedures to authorize its narratives than it has to remember its past.. In a sense, the people are only that which actualizes the narratives… by assigning themselves the posts of narratee and diegesis as well as the post of narrator.
“There is, then, an incommensurability between popular narrative pragmatics, which provides immediate legitimation, and the landuage game known to the West as the question of legitimacy–or rather, legitimacy as a referent in the game of inquiry. Narratives, as we have seen, determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate how they are to be applied. They thus define what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple fact that they do what they do.(emphasis added) – J. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

In this breakdown of the grand narrative against which the Apophenion engenders disruptive transformation, where subaltern bubbles up into counterpublic before colonialist systems can even be fully implemented, all us wireheads wetwebbed together in synchronic telepathy, military grade psychics using black market radionics like some doktor sleepless comic… against this black future perfect come present tense the meta-narrative left is T.S. Eliot waves across an economic wasteland downturn… Terror marketing was for punters, the shit coming down the pike is direct emotional control of shoppers.

December 23rd, 2008

#5: Can I show you…

where the traditional story went out the window in favor of non-linear hushed sequencing?

BONUS: Avinash Kaushik explains how you can gain important insights into visitor intent by analyzing how your visitors use your site search capability.

November 17th, 2008

Interstitial Standards

On a personal note, when Edward and I were first writing The Art of Memetics, we’d imagined that QR Code would remain the primary basis for any scan technology transfered to cell phones. Now there are two competing applications seeking market share, one with EZ Code at ScanLife, and another at NeoReader. Of the two, scanlife’s mobile app is a delight to use and I highly recommend pointing your phone to http://getscanlife.com if you haven’t already. NeoReader – not so much. and the NeoReader codes are aesthetically displeasing. However, Scanlife.com could disappear overnight and you would be left with countless photographs of meaningless squares.

This leads to the next logical question: What will be around in four years? What can be leveraged to deepen the information you could pack into a single space? What are the standards by which data is interacted with in real time, right now? And of that technology, what is most directly accessible?

  • RFID
  • Barcodes
  • Audio/Video Recording
  • Audio/Video Projection
  • Standards through which a space can either be filled by our mediating force, or standards through which an implicit meaning can be distributed through a space, where only those attuned through branding techniques would be able to unpack the transmission.

    by unruh | Posted in Interstitial Spaces | Comments Off | Tags: ,













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