Just over four years ago I wrote my first article about Twitter and not long after that I created my first Twitter ‘program’ – a single line unix curl command placed in cron. The command executed at the top of every hour, posting the same tweet.
Things have come a long way since then. Twitter is still king of search engine placement and it’s a requirement for issue advocacy, but as a digital commons its subject to the same troubles as Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Park, directly north of the White House. There are crowds of tourists, constant low level protests, occasional large attendance events, and some nut with a bullhorn periodically turns up and shrieks “JESUS! JESUS! JESUS!” for hours on end. There are pickpockets, purse snatchers, and street mumblers, all of whom may accost others.
LinkedIn, as a professional identity network, is more like a visit to a convention. False personas are fairly rare, generally easy to spot, and the management will eject them if they do anything out of line. There is an access gradient that allows users to show as little or as much as they wish. The site’s revenue model is based on people finding value in the contents and paying for a subscription, so any griefing gets dealt with quickly.
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I am exploring explicit hive minds like Wikistrat and OpenIDEO. I am interested in implicit and ephemeral hive minds that can be found via Twitter hashtag usage. Connected humans naturally form these “tribes of mind” – they begin when any communication at a distance is possible, and packet data to mobile devices has supercharged innovation in this space.
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There are opportunities to learn and to profit for those who understand both the human and technology factors involved in this rapidly shifting landscape. We’ve proven we can react more quickly when even a portion of a population is connected, the next puzzle is how to improve our long term decision making using a similar set of tools.
R D Laing came up with an amazingly creative way to express complex cognitive processes in a very simple and concrete way, so that the truth beneath them is revealed.
We understand so many different social constructs and their cognitive basis. But I suspect that if we could convert them into the same kind of format that R D Laing used in “Knots,” we could explain our insights in far fewer words and at the same time be far more clear. So I hope we will experiment with converting our knowledge of complex, cognitive social dynamics into brief “poems” like R D Laing did. They are not poems, exactly, but they are written in that form. But that's what makes the complex cognitive dynamics to clear.
Cognitive psychology is the most influential and productive branch of contemporary psychology by far.
The point of this post is that all of the negative social dynamics that humankind suffers from are the result of skewed and irrational thinking. They can rightly be called cognitive knots. And that's what R. D. Laing's book “Knots” was all about. We have internal “knots” because we have the world inside us. Inside each of us is a representation of our known universe filtered through the lens of our subjective experience, which of course alter our “reality.”
Amazon Page
Some of our knots are conflicts within ourselves (our subjective self and objective self), but they're all tangled up in we, because we are inextricable from society because we are a social species. So some of these knots are both internal arguments between aspects of ourselves and arguments between us and other individuals, or between our group and their group. But the dynamics are the same at every level, just like a fractal.
It may seem like a pain in the ass to negotiate, at first, but it becomes simple if you look at the little square with the page number. All you have to do is keep typing the next page number. It's easier than scrolling.
Laing made a study of schizophrenics and their families. It was a long term study and he interviewed these families over a long period of time. What he found was that most of the families of schizophrenics engaged in double-bind communication. The most common example is, “You don't love me; you only pretend to.” The reason it's a double bind communication is that it's a demand for a demonstration of love, but at the same in makes it clear that no demonstration of love will ever be sufficient.
The central feature of cognitive psychology is the idea that most of our thought processes are below our conscious awareness. And it is because they are below our awareness that they have such control over us. It is only when they are unearthed that we can gain control over them. These cognitive “knots” come from his journals. In other words, he didn't invent them. They are schematics that he drew up to represent actual cases.
The reason I think they are important is because I have never seen a technique that can make complex cognitive knots so vivid and understandable. And that was exactly why he developed them, as a tool that he could use to untangle the cognitive knots he encountered so that he could understand them. In other words, this book is the expression of a teaching technique that he used to teach himself, so that he could untangle otherwise impenetrable social, cognitive knots.
And I think this technique could be used as a great tool for making complex social dynamics vivid and graspable. For example, I think I could work one up for the conflict dynamics between Palestinians and Israelis. And I think I could make the self-destructiveness (on both sides and interactively) clear to everyone.
That's why I think there is such genius in this book.
Do click on below to read the full, encouraging ad inspiring report…relevant for fracking, shale gas, factory farming, sludge dumping, large scale water withdrawals and industrial scale energy projects.
Dear Friends,
Last week, a Pennsylvania county court declared that corporations are not ³persons² under the Pennsylvania Constitution, and therefore, that corporations cannot elevate their ³private rights² above the rights of people. In a landmark ruling, President Judge Debbie O¹Dell-Seneca of the Washington County Court of Common Pleas denied the corporation¹s request on the basis that the Pennsylvania Constitution only protects the rights of people, not business entities. This same decision must be made in thousands of other courts across our country to lay the fallacy of “corporate personhood” to rest for good, but I am so grateful to this person of integrity for standing in the “jaws of the beast” and declaring the truth. And I am also grateful to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) for their generous work in helping communities across the country adopt Community Bills of Rights that ban such projects as fracking, sludge dumping and other as violations of the community¹s right to a sustainable energy and farming future. Please take the time to read the language of Judge Debbie O'Dell-Seneca's decision. It is beautiful and inspiring and true.
World is unprepared for changes that will see parts of Africa turned into disaster areas, say food experts
John Vidal, The Observer, 13 April 2013
Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.
As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.
Frank Rijsberman, head of the world's 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: “Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.”
This is the 1st of a 3 part series by Silvia Garcia Alonso on P2P responses to the water and energy crisis. The text is also available in Spanish on her website.
Energy is the engine of our economy. An economy based on growth that permanently demands larger amounts of energy. During the 20th century, especially during the second half of it, economic growth has come hand in hand with the easy access to fossil fuel resources, something that at that time seemed to be virtually inexhaustible.
This is the 2nd of a 3 part series by Silvia Garcia Alonso on P2P responses to the water and energy crisis. Click here for Part 1.
We have already talked about the energy crisis and the need to achieve energy independence through self-generation and the birth of P2P energy networks. At that point we were always talking about communities or households, but the logic applies equally to the distribution and generation of energy in every single country.
Oh Google, you love to draw me in only to drop my favorite services. I have come to rely on Google Alterts to deliver relevant, timely content into my inbox on a broad array of subjects. Google Alerts may already be dead, and you don’t even know it. Especially, as I’ve been talking about content curation so much recently, Google Alerts is one of the top entry points into my content funnel.
The frequency and depth of my Google Alerts began to wane in December 2012, but in late January I noticed that the lag in reporting was far from “as it happens.” Ego alerts were taking 3-4 days to hit my inbox where they took minutes only months ago. So, when I saw Danny Sullivan’s post Dear Google Alerts: Why Aren’t You Working? I knew that I wasn’t alone:
One of Google’s oldest features is Google Alerts, where you can enter keywords you want to monitor and get an email report each day about any new search results that match those terms. It was awesome; but for several weeks, it’s become nearly useless. –
While Danny figures out the problem with Google, I thought I would do a quick roundup of Google Alerts Alternatives. Specifically, I am looking for the following criteria.
Price
Comprehensiveness – What networks does the service search?
Timeliness – How quickly does the service provide results after publication?
Email – Does the service deliver results by email?
RSS – Does the service provide an RSS feed of results?
Accuracy – Are the results that are being delivered accurate?
AI – Does the service learn from your input and improve results over time?
