streams:
Notes on Universal Feedback
One of the best ways to see universal feedback at work is through the activity of self-organizing groups. A self-organizing group is one that comes together without the hierarchy of a top-down command. Its members are motivated by their own desire to gather—not by paycheck, leader or religion. It’s non-corporate—grassroots in the truest, organic sense. The group exists because of deep, hidden connections that go beyond the everyday. The sheer number of self-organizing groups around today are only possible because of the flourishing of the social web. Applications such as Twitter and Facebook allow people to gather virtually—as one would at a gigantic cocktail party—complete with overheard conversations and the big names that are crowded by admirers and social climbers. The self-organized groups that have resulted are like groups of friends—the connections are fluid—at time tempestuous and at other times rigid and stuck in old models.
Unlike its social media cousin, Evolver.net, which was built with the intention of fostering not one but several self-organizing groups, the group on Reality Sandwich sprung up unplanned like a rhizome—a philosophical concept by Deleuze and Guattari which likens de-centralized, non-hierarchical systems to opportunistic plants such as ginger that use a horizontal stem in order to grow in-between trees. The trees were the old model—the top-down world in which authority came on high. The rhizomes weren’t bent on taking and replacing the trees as plant kings of the forest—they revealed a way of existing not as an either/or of systems but of an either and or. The botanical and conceptual rhizomes were about an expansion of possibilities—it wasn’t about doing away with the old—it was about coming up with that which was the least expected, like living life as a gathering of decentralized multiplicities in a world of towering, top/down metaphysical ideals.
The RS rhizome sprung up in damp shadows of the comment boxes. The posts themselves were submission only—their closed system based on approval factors formed the forest of trees while the comments became the twisting brambles and moss below where anyone who registered for the site could join in.
An old cohort from back in the blog 1.0 days used to say—sometimes comments are the best part. I don’t know if this was often the case given the generally high quality of the writing on RS, but what I did find to be the case was that the RS comment boxes were ripe for synchronicity—there were always connections being made through links or obscure references that would be mind-blowing with epic levels of uncanniness. I’d think—isn’t it crazy, I was just thinking the same exact thing!…or, wow, that’s the same book I was drawn to on my friend’s bookshelf yesterday—a friend who has the same initials as this commenter, making it not only about the connection of the book but about the friend, and the timing of having been over their place when I was, with the spine of the book sticking out from the shelf, just as the light in the room turned into long strands—the afternoon undoing its golden locks and letting them fall over us…
My research has shown that the grounds for telepathy increase in proportion to the amount of recognition that self-organized group members have of their status as members. It wasn’t enough to all happen to fall into a certain category in which they shared certain things in common—it was the group’s awareness of being a group that made the self-organized group truly dynamic. Not only were the commenters on RS technically members of a group by virtue of having a log-in and password, they were also members by virtue of an assumed curiosity towards RS’s subject matter. That said the group had no real rules—no membership dues or meetings to attend.
What was real was that you had the feeling you were in the middle of something. A way of thinking and being that was happening NOW.
Magical things happen in places where people feel compelled to gather without being coerced into doing so. Wanting to do something makes a huge difference in the experience of doing it—whatever it is. The feedback loops created in the comment boxes effects the entire site—from the writing to the graphics and layout—everything feels like it’s coming together according to remote control powers—there is the nagging sensation of a larger significance, the sensation of being one part of a bigger story.
(via peachme)
Since the summer I’ve been getting deep in the philosophical mud trying to sculpt a theory of Universal Feedback and Flow. A combination of things—including a Nassim Haramein lecture I attended at Collective Hardware, my experiences DJing vinyl records, and a mystical vision I had on a Florida beach coalesced into the insight that everything that exists is a feedback loop both created by and creating an exchange of energy. What’s more this exchange is constantly happening—on the level of atoms all the way to galaxies and black holes, the universe IS a fractal flux falling apart at the same time that it comes together. It’s a snake eating it’s own tail. I’m learning how to see through the veil of the everyday and experience the constant back and forth just behind it. This exchange can take many different forms (perhaps an infinite number of them) but it is always a give and take of energy. By focusing on that which appears solid and true it is revealed to be mostly empty space with flashes of static appearing and disappearing according to a web of criss-crossed signals. Like the inhale and exhale that form a breath—or the hyper-awareness of one hand touching the other—or the journey inwards that is embarked upon by focusing on the myriad detail radiating in the single NOW of the present. It’s not a matter of cause and effect—that’s the tricky part, getting past the long held belief that one thing causes another. Everything that appears is the result of it being simultaneously discovered and created by our perception. The exchange happens all at once—it’s not that one part comes first and allows for the other, but that one part doesn’t exist without the other—like how the ying and yang is only a ying and yang. Similarly, the insight of universal feedback teaches us that we only exist as individuals because we exist as networks. You can’t have one without the other.
The illusion that one thing causes another has morphed into an entire metaphysics, in which meaning stands outside of a thing as an ideal that infuses it with its essence. We believe that things happen because of other things—taking it to the extreme of interpreting that which happens as being what we deserve, based on whether we are “good” or “bad” people.
Nothing is inherent good or bad. There is only the perception and misperception of individual events—and only from the vantage point of an all-seeing God could anyone know which was which.
It may be too early to tell, but it seems that what I’m creating is a philosophy of collective relativism by which instead of qualities what exists is the infinite quantity of possibilities present in each and every instant. In addition to facts and figures and all that is true and definite the masses learn to focus their attention upon that which overlaps and gets fuzzy, vacancies, null sets and static. These in-between places are where new myths and legends are born. We look for openings in time—wrinkles by which to stretch out an ordinary collection of charmed moments into an infinity of infinities—an epic tale like a necklace with a never-ending string of jeweled stones that forever cast their light in the darkest places.
“SPIT IT OUT”
By: THEmeanMRmustard
In the same way that scientists can’t accurately measure the hyper-lightning movements of quantum particles, it is impossible for marketers to put a fixed value on the tweets that make up the millions of rushing, constantly changing Twitter streams. The movements of Tweets don’t follow a strict set of rules—and yet, like the particles, they aren’t completely chaotic either. Their worth can be understood according to context and probability—visible not as points or bars on a graph but as waves of undetermined length reaching out in multiple directions. When the send button is pressed, a tweet appears in many places at once (i.e. on individual feeds via various devices) and contains the possibility of being retweeted in many others. A tweet can simultaneously create new connections and dissemble old ones—it can both inspire and disgust, cause followers to be gained or lost. Instead of prescribing rules for how to tweet, it makes more sense to communicate the impossibility of prescribing rules, and instead encourage users to open up to the free flow of the streams—as opposed to clamping down extra-hard with filters and search tools.
The marketers and business people and so-called social media experts will point to this and that as the right and wrong way to Tweet—not realizing that the more exacting they try to be the more the TRUE essence of Twitter slips through their fingers—similar to another aspect of quantum physics called The Observer Effect—which refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed.
As long as Twitter continues to be conceptualized as an online version of the existing physical world, many users will miss out on its power as a tool for revealing the invisible interdependent connections between us all. (Remember: just because something is invisible or doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it isn’t real.) The particle-dance movements of tweets provide flashes of fractal multi-verses bursting forth like fireworks before fading just as fast. The goal should not be to freeze-frame and dissect it—but to enjoy its fleeting nature for what it is in a shared awareness of the beauty of NOW.
"Getting" Twitter at the NYC 140 Characters Conference
(picture courtesy of Brian Solis)
The Twitter 140 Characters Conference in NYC this week was for, by and about those who “get” Twitter. There were many different types of people in attendance—from bonafide celebrities and prominent business leaders to music critics, marketers and unemployed artists/internet philosophers such as myself. Yet as varied as our individual bios might be we all represent a growing community of power-users: early adopters and next level thinkers united by our passion and enthusiasm for the possibilities created by a new way of communicating.
What’s interesting is that while “getting it” was referred to in nearly every panel and presentation, there seemed to be little consensus about what “getting” Twitter actually means. For some, it was about using Twitter primarily as a conversation tool. For others, “getting it” was about listening. For still others it was about “broadsharing”—a term coined by Vincent Hunt that I quite like—and the power of retweeted links. During the spirited and already infamous panel, “The Effects of Twitter on News Gathering”, Ann Curry claimed to “get” Twitter by embracing it as journalistic tool for finding out the factual truth, while Tim O’Reilly referred to it in his presentation as a way to create “ambient intimacy”. Throughout the two days there were many mentions of the need to be authentic while tweeting, with warnings given to those who attempted to Tweet in a disingenuous way for the purpose of selling things or self-promotion—yet there were also discussions about the fun of Tweeting as a made-up character and using the medium to create a rich fictional universe.
So what does it really mean to “get” Twitter? I think it’s simple—getting Twitter isn’t about using it in a specific “right” way. Getting Twitter means being aware of being a part of a large, interconnected flow made up of millions of smaller conversational streams. The garnering of this awareness is the real power of Twitter. It has the effect of doing away with the dualistic, either/or thinking that most of the world still runs on and expanding it to an either AND or. This is to say that while there are proven best practices about how to make the most of your Twitter experience, there’s also an inbuilt flexibility to the application that can’t be whittled down to a single set of rules or facts about how to use the service. The awareness of this flexibility can translate into real life lessons as well. In a world fixated on results and returns, Twitter is a reminder to stay loose, open and free in your thinking.
Instead of thinking of it as either/or I think of Twitter as being simultaneously a means for disruption and engagement. It’s a tool for amplifying valuable information and a squawk box of incessant inanities. It’s a platform for being “real” by discovering that there isn’t a single “real” you: Twitter teaches us that we are all a million different people from one day to the next, just like in that Verve song, “Bittersweet Symphony”. In fact, we’re a million different people from one tweet to the next—there’s the business me and the personal me, the relaxing, goofy me and the serious, impassioned debater. There’s no need to whittle these selves down on Twitter just like there’s no need to whittle them down in real life—what is needed, however, is the awareness that this multiplicity is the case, as being aware will allow for better implementation of the crowd of characters in each one of us.
This awareness should extend to the management of the various streams we each dip in and out of all day long. There is certainly a value to using tools such as Tweetdeck and the new and improved Peoplebrowsr to keep track of trends and people that are important to us, but I would argue that getting too wrapped up in mining Twitter for “meaningful” data will eventually result in losing the awareness of the Twitter flow that connects everyone and everything. A looser approach to Twitter will allow for the kinds of happy accidents and discoveries that enables one to move beyond their current sphere of influence. Twitter is about expanding your connections—not limiting them. It’s about sometimes going “off script” and embracing the mistakes that are often the result of powerful passions. As its creator Jack Dorsey said on Tuesday at the conference, “Expect the unexpected, and whenever possible BE the unexpected.”
Special thanks to Jeff Pulver for inviting me to be a part of this spectacular spectacular!
us (twitter together time mix)
(note the infinity tat and ties)
I realized that due to their infinite nature, I’d been thinking of Twitter streams as being timeless—but this is not the case. Time matters on Twitter. Not all of the same people who are on early in the morning are on late at night. There are waves of users—one after another the continents wake up, drink coffee, go to work, go out, eat dinner, drink coffee, etc…
This doesn’t mean that the members of a Twitter stream are bound by geography or time zones—all that matters is that they are “on” at the same Twitter stream time—regardless if it’s real world quitting time for one and breakfast time for another. For instance, I know it’s getting near lunch when my west coast peeps start popping up, still sweetly half-asleep. We communicate on Twitter together (as an us) in a shared time that hovers over and in-between “real life” schedules.
Despite the fun of stretching out a Twitter conversation over many hours and many days (I’ve had extremely spirited exchanges with peeps in Australia that occur with over 12 hour intervals in between responses) there are also certain advantages to coordinating your Twitter time with the Twitter time of someone else. For instance, you’re free to “@” reply any public account on Twitter—even a famous person—and the reply will be waiting for them, which they may or may not read. But if you send the @ shout when you’re both online at the same time then there’s the chance that person might actually see your tweet flash across the screen and feel moved to engage you in a “real time” back and forth.
As a group of people who discovered each other through their mutual following of someone else (or something else, in the case of a trending topic), a Twitter stream is strong if it has a far reach, meaning the content of its users keeps reaching new people. One of the ways this happens is if the stream has amplification activity going on at many different times. People are retweeting and replying to one another about the content of someone they both follow regardless of whether that person is even online.
For those who are using # signs and other microsyntax for the purposes of propaganda they would do well to chart the times of the day in which their stream is the strongest—and then work from there to get others to tweet during the off hours.
One thing I wouldn’t recommend is using software to auto-tweet your content in intervals spaced out through 24 hours. That’s because I don’t recommend any auto-tweet software or software that “automatically” increases your number of followers or anything like that. Twitter is about being there, whenever you can make it—live and direct, in Twitter time. It could be once a day or a thousand—at 3AM eternal or 24/7…whatever works for you.
If you Tweet what’s real, when it’s real, you’ll never go wrong.
Twitter Telepathy is in the Streams
Last week I posted an article on Reality Sandwich about an experiment by Richard Wiseman that tested Twitter out as a tool for remote viewing. I’m excited by new avenues of research such as this that examine the potential of open social media platforms for being possible tools for non-causal, ESP-like communication. Wiseman wrote an article for New Scientist magazine about the results of a four day trial in which he asked participants to pick the secret location that he spent 30 minutes at out of several randomly chosen alternatives:
In the judging phase, participants were presented with five photographs, one showing the location and four decoys, and asked to select the target. The photograph that received the most votes was taken as the group’s decision.
If the group were psychic, the majority would vote for the correct target. In the first trial I was looking up at a striking, modern-looking building. Unfortunately, the group voted for some woods.
On trial two I was sitting in the middle of a playground, but the group thought I was standing at the foot of a long stairway. The third trial found me under an unusual-looking canopy; the group voted for a graveyard.
On the final trial I stared intently at a red postbox. The group believed that I was standing at the side of a canal. In short, all four trials were misses.
When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups.
So what did we learn? Well, the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing and suggests that those who believe in the paranormal are simply good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target – which is, maybe, why they believe in the first place. No surprises there. So perhaps the most important outcome was to demonstrate that thousands of people are happy to take part in an instant Twitter study. Now it is up to scientists to find other interesting ways of harnessing this new research tool.
My own take on these results is that the participants were too random and unconnected to make the chances for Twitter telepathy likely. As I’ve written here on this blog, Twitter telepathy is more likely between people who are a part of the same stream, which is to say, people who found and followed each other through their mutual following of someone else and don’t know each other in real life or through other Twitter connections. It’s not magic but the adaptation of parallel association processes between these ostensible strangers (who have in common their shared following of someone else) that allows for uncanny occurrences such as tweeting the same thing at the same time, or reading a tweet that was nearly exactly the same to one you were about to write—or how it more than occasionally is the case that someone in one of your streams will tweet a link to an article or blog post that is exactly what you were looking for at that exact moment—moreover, the answer comes before you can even fully formulate the question or the search term to Google.
Whether these “coincidences” supply practical information or spiritual salvation, the connections that create them are so interwoven and invisible so as to make it seem like magic—or like the group think of a flock of birds, or the way it will happen that people from different parts of the world come up with the same idea at the same time—or how once one person breaks a world record in sports there are suddenly many people who are able to do it, one after another.
I think it would be interesting to do another version of this same remote viewing experiment within streams—for example, all of those who are members of the Scoblelizer stream, or the #P2 peeps. I predict that the results would be an above average number of correct responses in picking out the correct location.
“A {Twitter stream} may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines… Every {Twitter stream} contain lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified attributed, as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.”
—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Page 9, in which I’ve substituted the words “Twitter stream” for “rhizome”.
Generation FLoW(er)!
(“Night Vanity” by Evan Gruzis )
Life on open social media platforms flows continuously without beginning or end. There are no season finales, sequels or prequels. The streams are in a constant state of flux. They consist of users who are both helping to define it and being defined by it as they oscillate in and out of the various streams of which they are members. There is a refusal to stay in one place—a nomadic sense of being at home by not being at home (i.e., the call of The Road). That’s usually one of the first Twitter epiphanies that a new user has—the realization that hey, I can be in several places at once! In real life I might be someone stuck inside a coffin-like cubicle, but on the internet I can mix worlds with the effortless beauty of a painter mixing paint. I can exist at the intersections between Silicon Valley and next level Evolvers—I can follow DJs and politicians and poets—I can tweet something interesting and go viral like a youtube video. In real life I might be quiet and calm and outwardly accepting of all that happens but online I’m a moving, surfing force, straddling the space between subject and verb—I’m blooming a million ways at once—bursting forth in the extravagance of NOW until I’m no longer me and yr no longer u.
A Thousand Streams (each one in the middle)
Twitter is made up of steady streams of in-between moments—the “little” times like car trips and slow escalator rides and waiting in line that connect together the supposedly “big” life events. The connector times are the perfect time to dash off a tweet or two. This rushing river of brevities is always “in the middle”, which is to say, you can’t see the beginning or the end by looking at it-it’s like a play that you’re always logging in to media res. This is part of why it is so difficult to explain Twitter to someone who hasn’t used it. As the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri pointed out in their prophetic late 20th Century Masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus, “It’s not easy to see things in the middle.” They go on to explain:
The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. —TP 28
The uninterrupted FLOW(s) of Twitter form a “collective assemblage of enunciation” and an “assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside” (TP 26) D&G preferred the word assemblage to describe A Thousand Plateaus instead of “book” which implied a false unity of the book as an image of the world. To them bound books represented old-fashioned closed-off, linear thought. An assemblage was an enity that bridged the gap between nomadic writing and the writing of the state. D&G would have been excited about open platforms like Twitter and Tumblr—the way the individual tweets are created with the awareness of the openings between them—they are collected together on a single feed but not closed off to being joined, borrowed from or added to—they’re ready to be mashed up and to go viral, like the best blog posts. Their immediate NOWness fufills the criteria that D&G layed out for the “ideal book”:
The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject. —TP 10
The creation of “open rings” is what social media is all about. Had the technology been available, I wonder if D&G would have tweeted A Thousand Plateaus instead of published it as a book? Or maybe they would have started a Tumblr blog instead—perhaps in the same spirit that I started this one—treating it like a rock n’ roll rhizome—a place in which to fit everything that doesn’t fit.
The Scobleizer Twitter Stream
(Robert Scoble makes it about him by making it about US)
I’m using the example of The Scobleizer Twitter stream in order to better elucidate the fundamentals of how Twitter streams work. People who meet and follow each other through their mutual following of the popular tech writer, Robert Scoble, (@Scobleizer) are likely to have a set of specific things in common—an interest in emerging technology and insider Silicon Valley news as well as a desire to be among the early adaptors and cutting edge people who are a part of that world. These interests help form the brand of the Scobleizer Twitter stream, which is the subset of users who found and follow one another through their shared following of Scobleizer. The Twitter stream can be thought of as the subset of Scoble’s followers who form the main current of conversation about and in direct response to his tweets. They communicate with one another through “@” replies and retweets in a similar way that the readers of a blog have conversations and debates between themselves in the comments section. Even if the blog author isn’t directly involved in an exchange, his or her thoughts are still being amplified.
There’s a threshold, however, in which the specificity of the Twitter stream brand gets watered down and looses whatever it is that made it unique. This would happen if the people following Scobleizer have a large number of other people in common with one another that they found and followed outside of the Scoble Stream. If these other Twitter streams are also about emerging technology, then the overlap of streams forms a larger stream (AKA a fluid machine) within the larger Twitter river. But if the other shared Twitter streams are about a wide variety of subjects then the Twitter stream changes from a large group of people who found each other through their specific shared interests into a large group of people who found each other through a myriad of interests. What was once a strong current expands into a tepid bay.
Just because you attract a huge amount of followers doesn’t automatically mean your stream will be watered down—it does, however, make it more likely than if you have only a small group of followers. The reason I choose Scoble as an example is because he has made the workings of the Twitter streams work for him so that he has retained a sense of intimacy between himself and his followers. Even his online name, “Scobleizer”, seems to acknowledge his Twitter stream existence as neither noun nor verb. He is a person but what he has created with his online presence is a way of being. The “Scobleizer Twitter stream is not identical to Scoblizer’s follow list. A stream is about a multiplicity of connections in many directions. It’s the difference between broadcasting at a loud volume and creating a positive feedback loop. For instance, there are plenty of celebrities on Twitter who have huge follower counts but who follow back very few people in return and almost never engage in conversation. Oprah has a large number of Twitter followers, but a completely weak Twitter stream, as there’s little or no interaction or recognition between these followers as her followers. Part of what makes Scoble’s Twitter stream so strong is that he interacts with his followers who in turn interact with one another. He often closes the circuit by retweeting these interactions: ensuring that their interaction is branded AS members of the Scobleizer Twitter stream and not just conversation between people who happen to be followers of Scoble as well as lots of other people. By putting your thoughts, ideas and blog posts out there in such a way that encourages discussion with EVERYONE who follows you is the easiest and best way to keep your stream strong. There are plenty of Twitterers out there who have loads of followers but will only deign to reply to a chosen few. Even if this discussion is rich and interesting, the fact that there is an unspoken follower hierarchy discourages other followers not only from replying to the Big Fish twitterer, but it also precludes them from finding and getting to know one another AS followers of the Big Fish.
Instead of aiming for a high number of followers, I would argue that a Twitterer’s IDEAS reach a greater number of people if they instead focus on cultivating a smaller, yet more engaged group of followers. You should cap off your followers at a number that still enables you to interact with them. Despite his huge following, Scoble is an example of someone who has made the fluiditiy of his stream work for him. He’s kept it “about him” precisely by not always making it about him.
