Preamble
About 15 years ago I spent a couple years writing a thesis about the emergence of multimedia representation from the 18th to the 20th centuries as a force of cultural change. Put simply – the fact that when creators mixed imagery with language, meaning became more accessible to the educated and (importantly) the illiterate, and opened new avenues of thought to create more opportunity – or in many cases, to fight oppression. I didn’t know it would be that relevant to whatever I did next as I left academia, but fate led me to creating the next generation of connected products on the web, and as I have recently learned, representational theory and case studies from former centuries demonstrating the effect of representational technique on society, is more relevant to what we are experiencing today, than I ever would have expected. Much like the “Human Condition” – it doesn’t change, it just repeats and adapts itself to present conditions…
At this point I’m hung up on two things that would seem dichotomous: the future, and the immediate now.
The “immediate now” is more than the concept of moments fleeting every moment. At this point, the concept of “NOW” has been popularized by connected devices to mean access to immediate information, as it happens. This access is not ubiquitous, but the principle is demonstrated, and more and more, culture is adapting to wanting “nowness” in many contexts.
On the other side of the dichotomy I am focused on the future because I want to predict how these dynamics will trend into future opportunity. I’d like to create a business in providing the vehicles wherein businesses flourish in the future economies of data exchange, spanning many dimensions of relevance, whether they be semantic, geospatial, social, temporal, or some other dimension I haven’t thought of yet.
The Global Brain
At this point, the people of Earth are sufficiently connected and communicating in real-time that the Earth begins to resemble a global brain, creating new inferences by the pulses of information we pass to each other, actively and passively, and the results that ensue in real life. Each person a neuron, each connection, a synapse.
We can see that in the past centuries certain tools and technologies have activated communication patterns, let’s call them “thought patterns”, when they enabled connections or synapses between motivated peoples, communities. concepts or prospects. This has increased in velocity, at orders of magnitude, from the 18th century to the 19th, and from the 19th, to the 20th. This adaptation/corruption of Moore’s law, or the approximation toward vertical asymptote, looks probable also in this case, for the 21st. At some point on reaching vertical, profound change may happen (this is where I go scifi, the rest is all logical).
What have we been doing to actuate this increased pace of development & capability? Regardless of the century, we have been using available toolsets to iterate on the current extensible connections, which can further grow, branch, and reconnect. As human brains grow and develop, so do cultures eventually follow at one order greater, and where cultures and empirical forces prevail, organisms also adapt. At various degrees of magnification, the rebranching and growth of possibility happens in child development, in community growth, in cultural development, and it happens ultimately in the evolution of species.
If you haven’t seen this video, it illustrates the concept, somewhat spiritual, of our place in a spatial cosmos, and infinitely extensible, even without reference to the time dimension necessarily. It’s 70s Nova stuff, never gets old, just like The Miracle of Life, which moved me in the Expecting Parents class 7 years ago.
Powers of Ten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY
Let’s try to get practical, if possible.
So, we are now at a place where the availability of connected data makes a global brain, or a semantic web, an actual and tangible prospect. However, many, in fact I would guess most, areas of global consciousness (datasets) are willfully disconnected – they are “dark”. Those dark areas are not subconscious, they are just unconnected, unharnessed regions. Why are they dark? In most cases, I think, because owners of connectable data are not ready to connect them. They fear the loss of advantage by making their advantagous data available for connection. These are dark, but high-potential areas of the global brain.
My thesis is that creating an environment wherein owners of tight-held data become encouraged to open up their data with some, perhaps flexible, assurance of reciprocity, will yield a greater benefit to all via a larger potential in the global brain.
My suggestion to accomplish such willingness to open up datasets, is to create an open specification and platform for data exchange, which rationalizes all contributing datasets where possible, and allows undefined data elements to be added and where possible subsequently rationalized as well, against the specification. It would then create a controlled marketplace for exchange of proprietary data, which would be metered not on a one-to-one basis, but on a one-to-many, creating a mutually-beneficial collective.
