Chris Brogan: Programming for the Masses- Social Computing
Road Hacker
· 1 year ago
Great post. I was reading an article in WIRED on my plane trip home this weekend. It really sparked a lot of thoughts for me and your thoughts here back it up.. Have a read, its short
Fave Line by Carr in this interview: "The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us."
Noah David Simon
· 1 year ago
and if that is so... who has rights to use the code? ASSKISSERS!
Miguel Rodriguez
· 1 year ago
I think you are onto something here Chris. and Roadhacker as well. There is some sort of social transformation occurring here, that is both organic, biological AND digital.
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
@Road Hacker- I think that article's what spurred me to read the book. I've listened to Carr in some podcasts, but hadn't gone the distance. The article, plus the data wars one, got me going.
@Noah - we own the code. We are the code. It's portable. More so than ever before.
@Miguel - now you're talking!
Dr.Mani
· 1 year ago
Last night, I listened to a podcast on BBC (thanks, Hugh MacLeod) interviewing Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service.
= = = = "3. Content Has No Boundaries. Or: By Expanding, the Web Disappears. Content will be provisioned to every device, making the “Web” seem an outdated idea, like “multimedia.” = = = =
Will 'programming language' really matter in an 'invisible' seamless Web?
Audience - especially 'permission assets' - will likely matter more.
And social media technologies (like Twitter for publishing a TwitZine) will become valuable for aggregating such audiences.
All success Dr.Mani
whitney
· 1 year ago
What fascinates me is how all of this applies to basic learning theory- how much information people can process at one; what the buffer limits are; what the keys to motivation are; How can we help motivate other people, when part of that calculus always requires understanding their personal payoff.
The learning curve is one of the cornerstones for understanding what will and will not work in this space, and I think if you don't really get how the brain processes information, it's going to be hard to design a conference, a website, or a business, for that matter, that is going to have long term success.
Digital can make acquiring information easier, but what happens once it enters the biological soup between our ears is where magic can happen.
Luke Razzell
· 1 year ago
Chris,
If you consider people the "databases" that we "programme", aren't you actually construing social media as a kind of brainwashing?
Surely social media is all about fostering authentic conversations with quintessentially *unpredictable* human beings? After all, if we could "programme" one another to respond in pre-determined ways, what joy or learning would there be for us?
For me, the discovery of truth is the highest goal of social media (and indeed life), and while it very well may be possible and perfectly ethical to identify strategies that yield "success" (e.g. stimulating conversation on Twitter to increase blog page views), that should not be our end goal. Else we would all be just chasing influence and celebrity for its own sake.
Jim Hathaway
· 1 year ago
While "programming" is a useful term "literacy" also comes to mind.
Jerica Janus
· 1 year ago
I've been learning programming and code while using e-bay and the Craiglist? Dude! I could be making so much more money!!
Okay. My tongue is out of my cheek now.
Seriously, Chris, you make me want to broaden my technological knowledge with these posts. I have to thank you for presenting me with new, challenging ideas to sink my teeth into. Thank you for sharing your research and knowledge. Psychology is my field, and you've always got me thinking of how technology impacts the social climate. You rock!
Luke Razzell
· 1 year ago
...I do agree, however, that the shift towards utility computing (EC2 etc.) is a great enabler of the social web's evolution. It's just when you talk of the "content" that we create online being a form of programming that I got worried!
Sorry if I was overly negative in my previous. : )
vicequeenmaria
· 1 year ago
Communicating electronically is just one manifestation of the energy humans and all living things share anyway. I agree, it is a new and much needed phase for humanity, because it has the potential to make it easier to pave paths for understanding.
People talk about the "computer" but the truth is, one's body is already an organic machine that works with nodes, messages, etc; And so does every social organism on the planet.
It's a beautiful thing.
Chris Brogan...
· 1 year ago
@Luke- in my example, humans were the programmers, not the database. Brainwashing is not synonymous to programming. Programming is synonymous with making a recipe. Do you feel brainwashed when you make cookies?
The point is that we have tools we can use in varied ways. YouTube is an expression system. What if you used YouTube to embed a series of 6 disparate videos to tell a story *you* want to tell. That's a program.
@Whitney- with learning everything, we must learn in the best possible human means and methods, just as we learn other skills. Thank *.deity you're in the game. You get the methods of education *and* the subject matter. :)
Luke Razzell
· 1 year ago
@Chris- My point (clumsily made, for which apologies) is that the programming metaphor only goes so far in encapsulating our activity on the social web, because we are (hopefully) not just using the social web as a "machine" to achieve a particular, pre-planned outcome that we desire (a blog in the Technorati Top 100, a new consultancy contract etc.), but rather are embedded in a complex and quite mysterious world of cybernetically-extended human relationship.
It's only when we give up "knowing" where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn't seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.
All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need "programming" skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.
Let's just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )
Paisano
· 1 year ago
I agree. Just look at what we're doing with mashups alone on popfly, pipes and dapper. We're building the apps and languages of tomorrow today. Every new programming language is a derivative of another existing langauge. It is just the natural evolution of technology to change and mutate into new forms that (hopefully) take us to the next level.
This is why I am excited about OpenSocial whereas many are skeptical of Google's intentions. I think it's a good thing to have an open standard platform for development on the web. It will only help innovation and development time.
Pai
Michael Bailey
· 1 year ago
Nope - nothing to see here.
I'm sure that they were saying the same thing when the Dewey Decimal System was introduced and people started using it.
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
@Michael- You're saying that the way people interact with information and these systems isn't news and isn't forward? What have you written code for over the last several months, if not to support a similar premise? You've built software that people use to extend the conversation. What if the systems and how we use them are now so abstracted from "computing" such that we derive value without having to know as much as we did before?
That's the rough premise.
Oscar Antonio Moralí Torres
· 1 year ago
I agree. The machine is us...definitely
LaurenMarie - Creative Curio
· 1 year ago
Chris, you make what could be presented in a boring, matter-of-fact way so facinating and exciting! I like learning from people like you; you've really found your passion here. It will be interesting to see how things shape up in the next year in terms of social media.
I like what Dr Mani shared about the predictions: "the 'Web' seem an outdated idea, like 'multimedia.'" That really struck something with me, although it does make me slightly worried about the role of professional designers in the future :\
Justin
· 1 year ago
Interesting ideas. But more to the point: I think that, as much as anything else, the "social media" programming language (and programming language in general) is moving closer to our language.
What I mean by that is that with each iteration of a new programming language - the language itself, while it does become slightly more complicated, tends to move closer to a human language.
So, for example, binary leads to assembly leads to fortran leads to lisp etc, etc.
The "social media" language (# signs that represent tags in twitter, the @ sign, etc) are closer to human language than "00011100".
Maybe I'm fooling myself but I like to think that the future of computers - their place in our social world - is an invisible one, where there are no learning boundaries for people. There are no walls to keep people out.
I think, while we certainly are making up the language as we go, that the language is moving closer and closer to being our spoken language; and therefore an open door to anyone that may want to contribute.
In the short term you're absolutely correct: an understanding of the social network language makes us stronger and more capable of living in this new world; but in the long term, I hate the idea of boundaries.
I would hope that we will advance to a point beyond specific "computer languages," where the tools that we have surrounded ourselves with understand what we want and help us to achieve our goals and most importantly understand our language.
All Comments
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16...
Fave Line by Carr in this interview: "The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us."
ASSKISSERS!
@Noah - we own the code. We are the code. It's portable. More so than ever before.
@Miguel - now you're talking!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/gl...
His 3rd of 10 predictions for 2008 was:
= = = =
"3. Content Has No Boundaries. Or: By Expanding, the Web Disappears. Content will be provisioned to every device, making the “Web” seem an outdated idea, like “multimedia.”
= = = =
Will 'programming language' really matter in an 'invisible' seamless Web?
Audience - especially 'permission assets' - will likely matter more.
And social media technologies (like Twitter for publishing a TwitZine) will become valuable for aggregating such audiences.
All success
Dr.Mani
The learning curve is one of the cornerstones for understanding what will and will not work in this space, and I think if you don't really get how the brain processes information, it's going to be hard to design a conference, a website, or a business, for that matter, that is going to have long term success.
Digital can make acquiring information easier, but what happens once it enters the biological soup between our ears is where magic can happen.
If you consider people the "databases" that we "programme", aren't you actually construing social media as a kind of brainwashing?
Surely social media is all about fostering authentic conversations with quintessentially *unpredictable* human beings? After all, if we could "programme" one another to respond in pre-determined ways, what joy or learning would there be for us?
For me, the discovery of truth is the highest goal of social media (and indeed life), and while it very well may be possible and perfectly ethical to identify strategies that yield "success" (e.g. stimulating conversation on Twitter to increase blog page views), that should not be our end goal. Else we would all be just chasing influence and celebrity for its own sake.
Okay. My tongue is out of my cheek now.
Seriously, Chris, you make me want to broaden my technological knowledge with these posts. I have to thank you for presenting me with new, challenging ideas to sink my teeth into. Thank you for sharing your research and knowledge. Psychology is my field, and you've always got me thinking of how technology impacts the social climate. You rock!
Sorry if I was overly negative in my previous. : )
People talk about the "computer" but the truth is, one's body is already an organic machine that works with nodes, messages, etc; And so does every social organism on the planet.
It's a beautiful thing.
The point is that we have tools we can use in varied ways. YouTube is an expression system. What if you used YouTube to embed a series of 6 disparate videos to tell a story *you* want to tell. That's a program.
@Whitney- with learning everything, we must learn in the best possible human means and methods, just as we learn other skills. Thank *.deity you're in the game. You get the methods of education *and* the subject matter. :)
It's only when we give up "knowing" where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn't seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.
All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need "programming" skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.
Let's just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )
We're building the apps and languages of tomorrow today. Every new programming language is a derivative of another existing langauge. It is just the natural evolution of technology to change and mutate into new forms that (hopefully) take us to the next level.
This is why I am excited about OpenSocial whereas many are skeptical of Google's intentions. I think it's a good thing to have an open standard platform for development on the web. It will only help innovation and development time.
Pai
I'm sure that they were saying the same thing when the Dewey Decimal System was introduced and people started using it.
That's the rough premise.
I like what Dr Mani shared about the predictions: "the 'Web' seem an outdated idea, like 'multimedia.'" That really struck something with me, although it does make me slightly worried about the role of professional designers in the future :\
What I mean by that is that with each iteration of a new programming language - the language itself, while it does become slightly more complicated, tends to move closer to a human language.
So, for example, binary leads to assembly leads to fortran leads to lisp etc, etc.
The "social media" language (# signs that represent tags in twitter, the @ sign, etc) are closer to human language than "00011100".
Maybe I'm fooling myself but I like to think that the future of computers - their place in our social world - is an invisible one, where there are no learning boundaries for people. There are no walls to keep people out.
I think, while we certainly are making up the language as we go, that the language is moving closer and closer to being our spoken language; and therefore an open door to anyone that may want to contribute.
In the short term you're absolutely correct: an understanding of the social network language makes us stronger and more capable of living in this new world; but in the long term, I hate the idea of boundaries.
I would hope that we will advance to a point beyond specific "computer languages," where the tools that we have surrounded ourselves with understand what we want and help us to achieve our goals and most importantly understand our language.