Bad News, Richard Posner and New Media (2)

One of the ironies of modern mainstream media is their belief, loudly trumpeted, that they have a major influence on the opinions and outlook of readers. Clearly, there is some influence. But, overall, if the media are all liberal (another myth), then one would assume that everyone watching would also be liberal. In general, if processes of communication were as direct as the media themselves suggest, we as a society would be buffetted by an endless storm of changing opinions and beliefs.
Rather, as is evident in the US., the reverse is true with conservative values firmly dominant in the society as a whole. This suggest that the influence of the media is more diffuse and that in order to understand that influence new models of critical analysis are needed.
These models would make no claims on the effect of the media and would instead examine the plethora of influences that impact on the daily lives of everyone in Western societies. This would include the now complex and multi-layered infuences of the Blogosphere.
[Ze Frank](http://www.zefrank.com) at has created a site that amplifies the effects of the blogosphere and provides us with some insight into what he calls the AUTHORSHIP society. With a new Blog being created every second, traditional notions of authorship do not apply. In fact, the spread of authors across many realms means that the vast majority of Blogs are, as I mentioned in the previous entry, small and for a specific community. This extension of the bulletin board in your local community hall provides those who are interested with an insight into the everyday life of a large number of communities.
The questin is, is that a usful and productive outcome of the creation of the Blogosphere.

Reflections on New Media (4)

Chris recently emailed the following response to the discussion on New Media.

It is just possible that the combined influences of an abundance of multimedia input to the very young - impacts their ability to more fully develop effective interpersonal communication skills.

This behavioural process does certainly enhance the speed of developing certain eye - hand - brain coordination to be sure.

Today, military recruiters loiter about video arcades - searching to find the next young 'starfighter' exhibiting the very same skill sets which in turn will set an enemy desert tank ablaze in nanoseconds.
But, we in essence are spending less actual physical time together - as both children and adults.

It's not a fluke that the video game industry now far exceeds the combined revenues of the television and motion picture industries - combined.

As a result, we begin to 'search' for emotional clues to help us establish an effective common ground - in actual, physical 'face to face' meetings - more slowly - and less effectively.
It's rather awkward to 'hug' a computer screen - and get any 'real' emotional feedback..

Perhaps New Media designers and engineers need to now refocus a little more on this human need component to grow more effectively - and ultimately, less dangerously.

Part Five…

Social Networks and Virtual Communities

Virtual Communities as social networks

There are some basic characteristics of virtual communities:

* Virtual communities need to know that they can multi-task and stay connected at all times;
* They need to know that they have something in common with each other and that even though identities can be played with and distorted, the foundations of communications are based on common understandings and truth;
* And that commonality has to significantly distinguish them from other groups;
* Virtual communities are about relations of an internal and external nature similar in form and substance to conventional communities;
* They are also about the establishment and maintenance of boundaries;
* Nevertheless, there is tremendous elasticity to the process of boundary creation and maintenance;
* Virtual communities break down conventional social and economic barriers.

Can machines dream? (Part 4)

Ronny Siebes of the Free University of Amsterdam continues the debate
* I think that we are both convinced about the limitations of the current way of doing science and especially the reductionistic approach.
* Also I agree with you that the mind is more than the physical brain itself. Now I remember again an insight that I had some time ago. In my viewpoint (I read it somewhere but do not remember the reference) the individual brain without communication is only a bunch of meat and blood. The brain *needs* input, and that input is culture (and nature).
Also culture *needs* humans and can be seen (metaphorically) as a collective mind. Therefore I would like to see our individual minds as the individual brains fed by collective input, and the collective mind is the collective input plus all the individual brains. Therefore only looking at the biological brain does not allow us to understand the way our individual 'minds'work.
If you want to do that, one needs to combine the insights from not only neuro-physiologists, but also sociologists, psychologists, antropologists and artists (and probably many more).
To make my point and to come back to your original question "Can machines dream", I can now, given the insight during our discussions, say the following:
* Dreams are events that happen in the physical brain, but can only occur when the brain is also a mind (meaning that it had input from outside itself). Therefore to understand dreams, it is not enough to understand the brain, but one also needs to understand culture.

* Currently machines are brains without (or with very limited) input, so therefore at the moment a machine cannot dream because its culture is not rich enough (or it is still not able to see/hear/feel human culture). The Internet (and especially the Semantic Web) will be the collective mind of the individual machines and also provide input to them. So, when the Internet becomes culturally rich enough, machines will be able to dream too.

Ron Burnett responds

Networks are representations of collective engagement and of community in all of its variations. Whether they are a collective mind is an intriguing question. Is a family with six members a collective mind? How would that collective mind be represented? Perhaps this discussion needs to move to questions of networks and what they mean.

Part Five… 

Can machines dream? (Part 3)

Quoting Ron Burnett
One of the metaphors we have been discussin is that the brain is like a computer and that human memory stores information much like a hard disk. There is simply not enough evidence to suggest that the metaphor works. So, machines cannot dream because among many other things, we don’t have an adequate definition of what the mind does when it dreams. All we have is the language of metaphor and description, a semantically rich space that cannot be reduced to any single or singular process.

Response from Ronny Siebes, Free University of Amsterdam
I agree with your statement that there is simply not enough evidence to suggest that the metaphor works. But that does not 'prove' that machines cannot dream. I would like to turn your argumentation into my favor. We are limited in two ways which has one cause namely we humans can only understand complexity by breaking events up into simpler things (reductionism) and we pay the price by losing an overview of the big picture (holism): first we do not know what dreaming is (complex event), second, we do not know what kinds of events can emerge from complex structures like the Internet. This limitation is the reason that we still don't know if dreaming can physically be expained and we still cannot find out whether complex structures like computer networks (e.g. the Internet) can dream.

Ron Burnett
I think that we are agreed that there is very little evidence, in the scientific sense for dreaming (although we all dream). Don't misunderstand me, I support and am excited by research into the brain. I do think that the Internet is one of the best examples that we have of complex networks that far exceed their original design in scale and effect. I am not sure given what you have said, how we can overcome the opposition between holistic approaches and reductionism.

Part Four…