Now playing: “On Being Radical” by Stephen Downes.
From Sharing Your Brain: Making Your Hard Drive into a Wiki (via Weblogg-ed). I haven’t had time to read it yet, because I’m writing a paper, but this looks interesting:
When technologies reach a tipping point, they can suddenly lead to dramatic changes in human behaviour, at least among those who are comfortable with technology. When bandwidth becomes almost unlimited, and hence essentially free, it means everyone can have her own phone number (which in turn means we can soon expect global 12-digit numbers to replace the current 10-digit ones), and cell phones can essentially replace land lines. It also means that the cost of calling becomes essentially free, as Skype users have discovered. This means you can essentially be in touch 24 hours per day with anyone anywhere in the world, for next to no cost — if you have the hardware and the (free) software to do it. With cost no longer being a constraint to voice communication, the onus shifts to the recipient of calls to filter those calls to a manageable number — and deal with disgruntled callers who don’t make it through the filter.
Google G-mail essentially reduced the cost of storage of e-mail messages to zero. That means you no longer need to keep messages on your hard drive, which in turn means that you can manage your e-mail from any computer. For some, that means smaller portable devices will become their major communication and information tool, replacing the PC. But in the future, if it becomes possible to keep your whole hard drive on a secure central server, it may also mean that stripped-down inexpensive PCs with almost no memory and all-free software may pop up everywhere, built into every desk and table wherever you go — so the idea of a ‘personal’ computer may become obsolete. Why lug around an appliance when the content and functionality you need can be accessed from every flat surface on the planet?
The simplicity and near-zero cost of blogging software has allowed millions of people to become instant publishers — producing everything from private newspapers to influential journals to travelogues of their vacations for the folks back home. Why write anything by hand, and why put your journal entries in a place where no one can see them, when it’s just as easy to blog them so you can get Google to index them for you, and so that you can share them with the world?
I think the next tipping point will be focused on wikis. We are close to the point where we will no longer have to pick an ‘application’ to create, open or change a document, any more than we have to pick a particular type of writing implement to do so in the physical world. What that will allow us to do is convert our entire hard drive — every document — and all the content we maintain on central servers — every message and blog post, into a single ‘virtual’ wiki, a kind of giant tableau of all our stuff, everything we have created or contributed to, and everything created by others we have filed away or bookmarked or otherwise ‘taken as our own’.
This would be useful, first of all, for personal navigation. Google Desktop is a big help, but it’s still a hunt-and-peck kind of personal content management. A wiki of our ‘universe of knowledge’ with a mind-map-type navigator would allow us to explore and amplify what we know and share with others in a more holistic, powerful way than anything we can do now. It would allow us to ‘get our head around’ everything we know, and care about, everything that has meaning for us. It could literally allow us to ‘expand our minds’.
But — and here’s the really exciting part — it could also allow us to ‘share our brain’ with someone else, to allow someone else to see how we think, and what we think about, and get an idea of the frame of mind that organizes, filters and colours our thoughts. And, if memory becomes cheap enough, we could even ‘subscribe to’ the wikis of those whose thoughts, for whatever personal or professional reason, we care about, and we could then annotate that other person’s ‘brain’, shared consciousness, with our own interpretations, understandings and amplifications, and, if we and that other person were so inclined, we could then share that ‘feedback’ with the person whose thoughts provoked it. A kind of digital, brain-to-brain, dialogue or conversation. What could come of all of this might be some shared spaces, some collective intelligence that two or more people agreed was a synthesis of information, agreement or shared understanding, that they owned in common. So your wiki would then have three ‘flavours’ of content:
stuff that you created (more or less) yourself
stuff that others created that you have taken for your own, your ‘accepted wisdom’
stuff that is ‘shared wisdom’ that you and others have inseparably created in common
We are presumably close to the point where transcriptions of conversations could also be indexed and added to this repository.One of the challenges would be one that those of us who spend much of our lives online are already grappling with: How to integrate e-mails and conversations into our organization of more ‘formal’ documents. I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts on this subject. How do we integrate the results of conversations and e-mail ‘discussions’ into our own brains, our ‘frames of thinking’? My sense is that these context-rich exchanges and searches for common understanding are very important to us, and get distilled tacitly by our brains, in ways different from how we internalize either analytical writing or stories. How might we represent this in a wiki-brain tableau?
Cross-posted on the presence of others and sisyphean task.
