I found Clay Shirky’s address at the Web2.0 Expo today and found an intriguing argument for Web2.0 technologies (there’s an edited transcript version of it too). It’s similar to what I’ve said about my haphazard and occasional attempts over the years to write novels: “It’s better than watching TV.” Shirky suggests that, even if kids are playing World of Warcraft or some other silly video game, they are at least not passively consuming the shows that he and I consumed as kids (for him–”Gilligan’s Island”, and I did watch my fair share of that as well!). He suggests that it takes a while to figure out what to do with the “cognitive surplus” that results from economic changes that leave people with leisure time, and until we do, we waste our time getting drunk or watching mindless television (his blog post is titled “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”):
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
I mentioned in a previous post the work of positive psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, who speaks of those historical moments when “surplus attention” (a different way of conceiving “cognitive surplus”) allowed for explosive creativity in the culture (5th century Greece, 15th century Florence, 19th century Paris). Fusing Shirky and Mihaly with my concept of energonomics, we see the way that this excess psychic energy is being channeled now into experimental communicative practices of collective intelligence.
Just a note about how I came upon the Shirky speech: I “twitter” now and follow a number of educational technologists. One of them mentioned this speech in a “tweet” and so I pursued the link. In my presentation on “mnemonomics,” I suggest that by connecting in this way to other people via social networking I have linked to their minds which have become an extension of my own: “social networking as collective intelligence.”
2 May 2008
In reading Deleuzian Interrogations I was happy to see an acknowledgment of how difficult Deleuze’s writing is. DeLanda writes/says the following:
I think the main obstacle to engaging with Deleuze directly is the style. He writes as if he deliberately wanted to be misunderstood, or at least that’s the way it impacts someone who, like me, is trained mostly in Anglo-American analytical philosophy. (I suppose that if one is used to struggle with Continental authors one may get a different impression). He changes terminology in every book (so that the virtual dimension becomes a ‘plane of consistency’ in one, a ‘body without organs’ in another, a ‘machinic phylum’ in another and so on) and never ever gives explicit definitions (or hides them well). I suppose that was an attempt on his part of preventing a given terminology to solidify too soon, to keep things fluid and heterogeneous. Fine. But I cannot deal with that and hardly expect complexity theorists to put up with it either. (19-20)
Wow! DeLanda can’t deal with it. I don’t feel so alone anymore! I always found it difficult but never wrote him off as so many others do (as they do with Lacan and Derrida as well). After struggling for 15 years or so with all of these difficult, shifting concepts, I have had the benefit of recent books that help a great deal with putting Deleuze into plain English: Peter Hallward’s Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, Todd May’s Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, and everything by DeLanda has been incredibly helpful, and I highly recommend these to those struggling with the primary texts of Deleuze.
In the same interview, Protevi also comments:
Once you get past their style (and yes, it is less daunting for someone like me who came up through the ranks reading Heidegger and Derrida, but the ontological shift, from post-phenomenology to materialism, is wrenching!), there are indeed lots of reasons why the Deleuze and complexity theory connection is so interesting. (21)
I have had the same experience as he has, having cracked my theoretical teeth on deconstruction as presented through many of the professors I had while working toward my M.A. & Ph.D. degrees at the University of Florida from 1986-1994 (including one of Derrida’s translators, John Leavey)–though I have to say that some of Deleuze’s work is the most challenging reading I’ve ever done. Even Derrida strives to make sense–and does most of the time, despite his resorting to “puncepts.” One thing is for sure: it makes reading anything else a piece of cake…
I have also experienced this “wrenching ontological shift” that Protevi speaks of as well, and didn’t realize it until I read some of the explanatory works listed above.
26 April 2008
I was reading Deleuzian Interrogations: A Conversation with Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi, and Torkild Thanem and bumped into this interesting quote:
Delanda: “I cannot imagine a materialist philosophy which is not also realist. On the other hand, someone who believes that god and the devil exist independently of our minds is also a realist but clearly not a materialist. The only problem with the term ‘materialism’ is that not only matter but also energy and physical information are needed to account for self-organizing phenomena and the processes which fabricate physical entities” (3).
This reminded me of a book I read titled The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory–The New Physics of Information which left me with the same impression that DeLanda emphasizes here. As author Tom Siegfried writes, “Many scientists now conceive of information as something real, as real as space, time, energy, and matter” (7). Siegfried speaks of how the study of biology benefits from this perspective as one example of how this new field is changing the sciences:
Information’s reality has reshaped the way biologists study and understand cells, the brain, and the mind. Cells are not merely vats of chemicals that turn food into energy, but sophisticated computers, translating messages from the outside world into the proper biological responses. True, the brain runs on currents of electrical energy through circuits of cellular wires. But the messages in those currents can be appreciated only by understanding the information they represent” (9)
This notion that “information is the foundation of reality” (59) made me consider creating a new neologism to capture this new sense of reality: “infonomics” — the “management of information.” Whatever word we use–whether it’s infonomics or energonomics–this book suggests that information must become part of what we consider when we speak of managing energy.
DeLanda points to how the term “materialism” falls short of capturing all that comes into play in the triad of energy-matter-information flows. He draws attention to this phenomenon in his own book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History when he concludes that
the flows of materials whose history we described involved more than just matter-energy. They also included *information*, understood not in static terms as mere physical patterns (measured in bits) but in dynamic terms, as patterns capable of self-replication and catalysis (259-60).
25 April 2008
While developing a presentation for a group of librarians about social bookmarking as public memory, this neologism “mnemonomics” occurred to me as a way to organize my presentation. What I have been trying to do with bloglines and del.icio.us is to “manage my mnemonic prosthetics”: if we think of technology as a prosthesis or extension of our memories, then scanning headlines from the WALL STREET JOURNAL, NEW YORK TIMES, NPR, etc. and adding ones I want to keep into my delicious account become a way of laying down my cyborg memories.
Mnemonomics: a fusion of mneme (”memory”) and nomos (”management”). A bit tricky on the tongue, however. Try saying mnemonomician, for example!
8 April 2008
Read Montague’s 5th chapter of Why Choose This Book? is about “The Value Machine” and discusses the brain as a system that assigns value. For Montague, “Once life has started, valuation mechanisms were an inevitable consequence. . .” and every decision becomes an economic decision. He traces such valuation even back to E. coli, which he uses as a simplified example of the human capacity to care.
Even single-celled E. coli are capitalists; they follow the money. They follow the asparate, a source of energy and raw materials. . . .E coli has committed a large number of its internal resources to build, value, and respond to a model of the “aspartate world” around it. (120-21)
He then posits a hypothetical dumber version of E. coli (playfully called D. coli) that just consumes aspartate whenever it comes upon it. Which would survive?
If aspartate were always available in excess, D. coli might well be more adaptive than E. coli, since it doesn’t waste energy trying to build “aspartate models” and control its behavior to run toward gradients of this energy source. However, D. coli is “dumb” because the real world is simply not that accommodating. External energy sources aren’t uniformly distributed, nor are they always plentiful. E. coli’s energetic investment into model-building is sensible, and amounts to splitting the net energy from each aspartate molecule consumed into two separate streams: one for fuel and one for information to be used to build a better model of its “aspartate world”–a modeling stream. (121-22)
Now if a little single-celled creature is doing all that, imagine the energy that big-brained humans are expending! In fact, I recall reading that the complexity of human brains emerged as a result of the complexity of surviving among a social species.
The challenge in studying human decision-making is in understanding how the economic decisions we make “follow the energy” in the same way that E. coli does. A further challenge–the ultimate challenge?–is in getting people to make the right decisions, ones that lead to optimal physical and mental health. An article in today’s Boston Globe addresses this challenge among the poor.
30 March 2008
I have picked up Why Choose This Book? again (which I first mentioned in “Energonomics of the Brain“). Chapter 4, titled “Sharks Don’t Go On Hunger Strikes,” speaks of the power of memes, of abstract ideas, to circumvent our instincts for survival. He starts with the Heaven’s Gate cult tragedy as a way to introduce the chapter:
The amazing part of the Heaven’s Gate story is that the cult members used an abstract idea–going to the “next level”–to veto their powerful instincts to survive. This act defines a behavioral superpower–the capacity to veto survival instincts to the point of death. . . . A mere idea hijacked the controls of these people’s brains and drove their bodies off a cliff (88-89).
Montague then explains how abstract goals become substituted for fundamental instincts like eating and procreating:
Ideas gain the power of rewards and become instantly meaningful to the rest of the brain. . . . Now, this kind of trick provides for an extremely creative learning machine. It can choose to ignore its instincts momentarily and pursue a thought to the exclusion of everything else. It is easy to see how such a power could be useful for generating cognitive innovations. An idea with the beckoning power of ice cream can control a succession of thoughts for some time. The effect is just like foraging for food hidden under rocks and behind bushes in a field. . . . Cool trick. Redeploy foraging in the pursuit of cognitive innovation. Foraging fields for food becomes foraging a mental storehouse for new ideas. (111)
Now anyone associated with academia will recognize this process: how one can go for hours without eating and without thinking about it as one pursues an idea to its limits. Here, ideas become equivalent to the goals of basic instincts: finding food, or having sex.
Memes, then, become a way of channeling brain energy toward particular goals which may or may not be in the best interests of one’s survival, as in the case of the Heaven’s Gate cult members. Montague’s work goes a long way toward understanding the process of how such a system can evolve, as well as what makes us as humans so different from other animals.
29 March 2008
The March/April 2008 issue of Psychology Today had a number of stimulating articles, many of which might fall under this sub-category of energonomics I’m calling “psychoenergonomics.” (See my previous posts on this meme under a new tag by the same name). One titled “Second Nature” is about how we can change habits of personality (i.e. manage the energy in our brains) to make us more optimistic, passionate, joyful and courageous. I recently posted on this emergent field of “Eudaimonics.” There is the act of what Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant calls in his new book (Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience) “savoring”: “the art of managing positive feelings. Whereas coping well means dealing successfully with problems and setbacks, savoring–glorying in what goes right–is an equally crucial emotional competence” (78).
A different article, titled “The Making of a Perfectionist,” is about how the way children are praised can affect their emotional stability, their ability to be satisfied. As a reformed perfectionist (haven’t quite got the reform part down perfectly just yet, though…), I recognize myself in this article and the kind of familial dynamics that produces a perfectionist. We have to learn how to be parents, learn what to say and how to say to our children, to avoid causing major problems in the way energy flows through their brains.
A third article, titled “Consuming Passions,” is also about managing mental energy–the evolutionary tendency to overeat and binge. The ultimate form of energonomics for each of us is managing caloric intake–how much energy do we take into our bodies? Is there a balance between what we take in and what we burn off? Evolution has also pre-disposed us to enjoy and reward gluttonous behavior with the use of dopamine such that “obesity, eating disorders, and even the ordinary urges of appetite might resemble addiction” (100). In fact, “brain hunger” (when we want food but don’t need food) has some of the same neural pathways as orgasm! One doctor says, “Now we’re not just talking about energy balance… We’re talking about human psychology” (100).
So the ultimate point here is that personal energonomics becomes psychoenergonomics: in order to manage the influx of calories, we have to learn how to manage the energy in our minds.
12 March 2008
I read an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe today titled “The Power of Charisma” which introduces the work of Joseph Nye, who invented the concept of “soft power” and has a new book out called The Powers to Lead This is an area that I wish to investigate further. It is a question of where the manifestations of physical energy (that trajectory from our sun to plants to calories to human brain) go after entering the brain. I have suggested in previous posts that concepts or memes are transmitted via language, which acts as a form of energy storage (in the case of written language) or serves as a kind of catalyst (in the case of spoken language) to concentrate the brain-energy in the mind-brain of another on a certain subject or meme. I have wondered about the sociology of mass movements, whether for the good (MLK) or for evil (Hitler) and how it is that leaders are able to focus the energies of many to make things happen in the world.
And so I wonder: what is the psychology of charisma? How does one become charismatic (assuming they have the “good looks” required of the charismatic)? Perhaps Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” could point the way to answering this.
I bet there was an evolutionary advantage to certain people being leaders and most others being followers. Obviously, the well-organized band of pre-humans was able to get more work done more effectively; they were able to manage the collective energy of the group so as to maximize its potential.
11 March 2008
