Running the gauntlet

I’ve finally consolidated my Disqus profile after living with several rather randomly developed and deployed personae from over the years. I suffer from the early adopter syndrome of getting into things relatively early then dropping them almost immediately, then having to go back and dust off the survivors once they’ve taken hold. Same for Disqus, for which I had a profile that was at least 4 years old, and only today managed to finally consolidate and solidify.

I approach these efforts with a kind of wariness — now I can add my Facebook profile; yes it is good to connect Twitter and WordPress, and to disconnect that defunct Blogger account. It’s spring cleaning, but it must be done with intent.

Kevin Kelly’s 6 Verbs For Connected World, and a suggested 7th

Kevin Kelly is a deep thinker. His “Out of Control” spun my head around back in the 90’s, as he really synthesized developments at the forefront of computer science and evolutionary biology and complexity theory. He’s now writing and thinking about “what technology wants from us” and really flips the equation as he sees that the overall emergence of global forces is what drives human evolution, and although humans have an impact, it’s a much richer universe of forces in which our interactions with the world are shaped.

Kelly proposes The 6 Verbs For The Next 20 Years Of The Connected World. I would suggest a seventh, borrowing Ted Nelson’s wonderful neologism intertwingling. The challenge will be to open up our cognitive frame to include other dimensionality in order to adopt the other terms in a more useful context.

Dashboarding

Working my way through Howard Rheingold’s wonderful curriculum on network and social literacy. In it, he recommends using Netvibes as an organizing post for information flow; for me it would entail replacing iGoogle. The net result is an information process flow that truly enables one to surf atop a dense informational substrate.
Using the dashboard still leaves me constrained; our brain and sensory system are not designed to deal strictly in and x by y matrix. Current “dashboards”, relying on current technology, omit the z and t. They deny the physical semantics that convey so much of the depth and presence of our understanding. They really fail in terms of serving as an interface for semantic intelligence and agent design