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Minding the Planet: What's After the Real Time Web?

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Minding the Planet: What's After the Real Time Web?
Description

In typical Web-industry style we're all focused minutely on the leading trend-of-the-year, the real-time Web. But in this obsession we have become a bit myopic. The real-time Web, or what some of us call "The Stream," is not an end in itself, it's a means to an end. So what will it enable, where is it headed, and what's it going to look like when we look back at this trend in 10 or 20 years?

The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it's simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.

Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It's not just difficult to get people to notice something, it's even more difficult to get them to do something. Attending to something is simply noticing it. Intending to do something is actually taking action, expending some energy or effort to do something. Intending is a lot more expensive, cognitively speaking, than merely attending. The power of collective intention is literally what changes the world, but we don't yet have the tools to direct it yet. One big enabler of this will be an ...

Original URL
http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2009/10/whats-after-the-real-time-web.html

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  • Public Comments

    • Bryan Vartabedian Bryan Vartabedian
      4 weeks ago


      This blew me away.
      Web 3.0 - Semantic Web

    • Bonnie DeVarco Bonnie DeVarco
      4 weeks ago


      Nova, you covered ample ground in your futurist projections in your blog post - feels spot on regarding the technology. But how it impacts or augments the evolution of humanity's ethos, cultural sensibilities and a more expansive worldview is what I wonder will happen as part of this scaling out. What about the synthetic aspect of the emotional connective/collective distributed intelligence? How does the evolution of the realtime linked data web and ubiquitous augmentation allow us to recast our understanding of history itself so we can deal with the multidimensional realities of nested time cycles? We are augmenting our ability to cast our nets into the macrocosm and microcosm at the same time that we are ourselves become mobile sensors harvesting and seeding data for the mirror of the superorganism. But how do we speak the language? How do we read it, what does IT look like? This is the part of discussion that seems to get short shrift in the singularity-informed tech visions of futurists. I believe these are the issues that will take us to a new universal language, like quorum sensing or efficiency sensing, that could be the centerpiece to reading the global mind. There is a place beyond ontologies and memespace where it all comes together before another thousand years and on our home organism, Earth.
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First Posted By

Nova Spivack

First Comment By

Bryan Vartabedian

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