After the last few months, I’m seeing how the web itself is beginning to shift – there’s a stasis developing between twitter and facebook I can almost make out – and a good deal of users are finding their own level of interaction based on the devices they have closest to hand.
I anticipate that online social optimization is the end-point for most of these ongoing processes, and eventually I expect there’s going to be an integration of consciously and unconsciously driven technological touch-points across these networks.
Sites like Plurk, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed have been on my list of experimental places to be working within, while qik, justin.tv and ustream are all kicking around as well – there’s a way for all of this to merge, become the ubiquitous ‘Computer’ one directs as depicted back in the first episode of Star Trek.
That’s where I’d like to see us evolve towards – replicators, energizers, phasers set on stun, and energy fields – and I really don’t see what’s stopping us – except for the rate of innovation… of course, my friend Freeman knows that this use of social media does – in many respects – feed data into an ongoing spy network.
Edward, my co-author of The Art of Memetics, pointed out on a teleconference long ago that the internet is made for spying – which is intelligence gathering. The act of growing intelligence, of intelligence increase, is dependent on intelligence gathering devices, which is what the internet has become – it is the digital accretion of an interzone.
Social optimization offline or online is the same – it’s the tools which change. At the baseline, though, the tool is the ‘Word’ – in which ever ”Text” you may be representing. This becomes a narrative to those around you, which evolves your story onward.
