Conrtol Points on the Internet

Google has declared its mission 'to organize the World's information'. How is this relate its movement into 'commerce brokering'? Google's attempt to capture commerce as an internet control point is, however, a common business model strategy. The strategy is to own a critical nexus of the internet complex through which internetting behavior must pass. Google earth is a similar control point. Perhaps there are a set of control points which users rely upon to use the net. Commerce, 3-D backplanes, media exchanges, social backplanes, and other nexuses will become the control structure of the internet as it moves beyond Web 1.5 into a true 3-D internet that moves from centralized control points to value-based control points.

Vectored Thought

Our educational system is inherently sequential. One page follows another, chapters follow each other, classes follow each other, and so it goes. This is a bad template for understanding the natural world. By our system for inculcating information into children we decieve, not purposely, them into believing that one thing usually follows another. One thing is usually inside another. Teaching a fair amount of pedagogical skepticism is probably the best innoculation against this bad thought template.

Likewise, I am not sure that the Euclidian 3-space alternative is any better. I suppose it's not worse, but something nags me about it. Perhaps "linear" algebra was the best 'user exit' from these. Interestingly enough, Wikipedia has this to say about the Euclidian method of describing space: "An implication of Einstein's theory of general relativity is that Euclidean geometry is only a good approximation to the properties of physical space if the gravitational field is not too strong." Maybe that's the answer, teach our children that each description is just 'a good approximation'.

Advancing Reality, at the Expense of its Distinctions

Computer technology is growing new appendages, e.g., 3-D, haptics, sound, collaborative, high trust, time-based. Each of these enriches the capability of automation to model the real world and interact with it. With these computer capabilities we come closer to making the computer disappear into the landscape. Computers took our world and first made it 1-space (command line), then moved us into 2-space (motif, OS2, windows), now we are moving beyond flatland. Virtual Reality, High Fidelity Simulations, Gaming & Virtual Worlds are creating hi touch computed environments. These environments will take us beyond 3-D and cause us to blur the boundaries among concepts normally separate, like media vs education, or work & play, or advertising vs eduction. A feeling of immersion, in a computer-based environment, entails mastering the combination of these recently enablable factors to recreate our real world experience.

A Tolerance For Ambiguity

As the shift happens an interesting personal litmus test takes place. Some will pass through the shift, while others will be asked to stay. In a conversation with a friend recently an idea occurred to me. He has had a number of successful careers, first as a guitarist, then as a designer of spacecraft, and now as a software avante garde. He was wondering why he made it through paradigm shifts that trapped others. I noticed a theme running through the variety of solutions he had developed - a tolerance for ambiguity. Others were deeply engrossed in their point of view, but he explored multiple points of view. The more deeply invested, involved, or otherwise glued to a framework on is, the more difficult to see outside it. A healthy skepticism for whatever paradigm in which one sits will make it easier to escape it when its limits are found. This skepticism of complete solutions and tolerance for the ambiguity it assumes both appear as mileposts on the journey through a breakneck cognitive evolution. Given the complexity of the natural world, it is likely that the limitations we see in our explanations for it are indicative of the cognitive limitations we own. As we develop cognitive tooling, like computers, we are able to decomplexify the natural landscape. Innovation of those tools and mastery of them will be the guiding principles as we surf the n-space that is the natural world with its constantly reconfiguring set of factors.

Shift Happens

I believe we are in the middle of a technology perterbation. While most technorati consume themselves with Web 2.0 muse, the technology continues to be nothing but a set of tools for improving the 'expression of the crowd'. A more fundamental shift is occuring...technology is being parted out and recovered in ways that we can never anticipate. Web 2.0 is a pluralistic parting & reassembly method. To that end it accellerates the shift from a system being defined by its physical boundaries to ephemeral systems. The new e-systems are more akin to carbon-based, rather than iron or silicon-based. As these whole systems are parsed and reassembled, there will be mistakes. But as the parse becomes right, the reassembly will happen more naturally. It will look & operate more like a biological entity.