The rise and fragmentation of the Bon Mot intellectual

Summer 2012

I'm working my way through the collective thoughts of those who responded to John Brockman's question: How is the Internet changing the way you think? For many the answer to the question isn't so much about new ways of thinking but what is thought about.

The question of course takes us back to the beginning of this roadtrip. So we are left once again to reflect on James Burke's opening remarks...

“Your world is a reflection of what you know today. Changed the way you think, by introducing new ideas, and you will change your world”.

And of course my opening observations...

Today we live in a world where we can navigate our way through unimaginable treasuries of online knowledge and change the way we think by simply clicking on yet another hyperlink.

Today your Universe can change in the time it takes to load a new web page or receive an SMS on your phone.

We are no longer thinking in terms of the The Day the Universe Changed. Our world view is in flux. If we are not already, then we soon will be awash with “Moments When Our Universe Changed”.

This I think is both the wonder and the challenge of our age...

Machines eat economies only when people lack the imagination to discover, and the go on to build, new worlds with the machines and the tools they have to work and play with.

Clearly our habits are changing but they are behavioural rather than cognitive. We still think the same way. It's just we appear to be more eclectic in our choice of brain candy these days. Having said that it would appear that those who are addicted to the Internet acquire the unnerving habit of confusing their virtual life with their real life. After all, what is the measure of a man (or women) if he (or she) is little more than the sum of his retweets, likes, pins, links, page views and followers?

One of the things that originally piqued my interest in hyper media was simply the question what happens to the linear narrative once the narrative fragments into non-linear forms. The answer is of course the narrative signal becomes noise - a chaotic collection of message fragments. The audience is tasked with gathering a signal from the fragments. The illusion of the pattern mantra being that the task is for the author to create puzzles that the audience pieces together. The puzzlemiester as auteur.

Perhaps this is why we live in a world where it is de rigour for quasi and pseudo intellectuals to expend 300+ pages on a book designed purely to illustrate a specific idea. An intellectual Bon Mot. Endlessly repeated seemingly to ensure that the thickest of readers can grasp an insight that less than 100 years ago would have been conveyed in a sentence, a pithy phrase or at worst a paragraph. An Edwardian Bon Mot of the Wilder conversational moment rather than the Post Modern Blink of the Gladwellian infotainment consumer.

And we do this I suspect for the same reason we created vast quantities of digital dust. Simply because our technology facilitates this practice. They make it easy to produce garbage. The verbose. The minutia. The drivel . The endless parade of words.

These tools. Our technology. They define us in so many ways. But more than we would appreciate it shapes the way we think and act.

What I have attempted to do here over the past three years is invert the Bon Mot publishing template. Manufacturing thousands of pages in the seemingly chaotic and endless to fragment the bottomless Bon Mot that is the networked economy.

The comparative effect of course is to explore the extremities of a single line of thought. The endless reinforcement of the Bon Mot vs. the endless fragmentation of the Bon Mot. Both in the end a little more than proof that the tools of our age shape the way we think. They make it easy to produce garbage. The verbose. The minutia. The drivel . The endless parade of words. The digital dust. The grinding noise.

And it is not just in the gamut of the Bon Mot game that we see this trend. For isn't what we call the convergence, this disruption by fragmentation by start-ups and this coalescence by the established players in reality nothing more than the extremities of the same continuous line of thought? Around the world strategy departments in Financial Services, Media, Telcos and IT are scheming up ways to increase their share of wallet by providing their clientèle with cloud based services. Digital list engines and nests. Each indistinguishable from the other except for Branding and Reputation. Meanwhile start-ups scramble to disrupt the market leaders with fragments and crumbs of pre-existing functionality offered for free..

Paid subscription services for those not prepared to wait. Free for those with time on their hands.

In the end though the convergence proves to be little more than a blage of beige. Your bank offers you a digital safety deposit box, a dropbox in the clouds, not because it adds value to the relationship but simply because just like everybody else with a server on the web, they can.

And the same can be said of the tools. These blank slabs of glass that come in all shapes and sizes. There is a sameness about the experience. Where once the atmosphere was alive with electricity and expectation today an electronic beige pervades the air.

Again we need to surface and lift ourselves above this Facebook moment. This Groundhog Day of the Dot Com and recognise just how limiting this technology, this life lived as a list, has become and move on.

Of course this will not happen while we continue to let our technology do the thinking. While we limit our imaginations and expectations to the limitations of the tools we have built for ourselves. While we continue to talk of how health and education will be revolutionised by Big Data.

The future comes when we once again talk excitedly of how health and education will revolutionise not only big data but also the technologies we use everyday. I say that because, as anyone with any semblance of knowledge about the history of the technology will know the roots of the big data revolution we have today are to be found in the revolutionary statistical methods developed in the early 19th Century to solve the health issues in the cities and townships created by the industrial revolution. The problem drove the discovery of the solution. Today, as we have seen with much of the investment in information and telecommunications technology over the past two decades, it is the solution that drives the market to discover problems worthy of the technology. Which perhaps explains why so much of what was been created by this Information Revolution has proven to be so frivolous and ephemeral.

Again we are left to ponder the question. Now that everybody has a web page and is a news feed (i.e. a digital nest and a list engine) what's next? Everybody as a Mobile App or a Game? Me the API? Or, do we take the fragmentation of transactional memory to its logical conclusion and create a virtual economy where everybody is money? A world where everybody issues and manages their own personal currency to be traded openly on the exchange of mobile life? If hotels and airlines can have loyalty cards and bonus points why not friendships? It is merely an expression of the logical extremities of a single line of thought. Money fragmented to the point where it is meaningless vs. money endlessly reinforced to the point where it becomes meaningless.

This then is the power of the technology to disrupt and bring into question the very narratives by which we choose to live our lives. To render transactional memory (i.e. digital money) as meaningless in a digital world as newspapers and magazines.

The root of the idea can be found here in this essay by Stephen Marche published by the LA Review of Books and in particular this quote that leads the article.

"Data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow. They transcend the capacity of each of their users. They are "nature" for postmodern man." - Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Below is a chart. It maps how knowledge, or more accurately the collective memory, as initially expressed as the written word evolves through the use of information technology to become something very different... the "big data".

In the chart we see how the evolution in the technology results in the deconstruction of not only the historical record but also the historical methodology into information primitives and ultimately from information primitives into binary. Complex words (i.e. stories) morph into numerical primitives.

From here the primitives and the binary elements are reconstructed from the "big data" to create new meaning on demand.

Ultimately, and this is important, complex meaning is now repackaged as visual knowledge that can be navigated (i.e. Knowledge maps) non linearly as opposed to the traditional linear narrative - (i.e. story telling) - which the "Big Data" revolution is now disrupting.

The subtext to the "Big Data" revolution being the profession of the storytellers is being deconstructed and ultimately disrupted by the very technology these storytellers are employing to construct and distribute their stories.

The technology is driving the fragmentation of the message package to the point where, in the absence of an analytical reconstruction the "big data", the message meaningless.

Today knowledge, or more accurately the collective memory, is no longer recalled it is reconstructed on demand, or more accurately redesigned, by the questions we ask of it. So where as the past the collective memory was curated by the academics and the librarians today it is created on demand by the tools we choose to use to explore the "meaningless soup" that is the "big data".

Today meaning - i.e. truth - is merely a function of the the tools you choose to use to create it. A reconstruction of a network of programmable "irreducibles". Or put another way, programmable truth. The logical expression of truth as a function of the network economy where the collective knowledge is measured as a collection of events.

If you doubt that idea then consider how "Trending Topics" popular social media sites like Twitter can be over run with information created by fake accounts.

And so to the pivot.

You see the problem with "big data" - the idea, as with the idea of the network economy, this global Internet, this world wide web of ours - is it is as much an expression of faith, as a science.

The big data evangelists, as with the web and the Business Intelligence evangelists before them, assume truth is the ghost that inhabits in the machine. The insight buried in the network. It is in there somewhere. We just have to keep looking because one day. Yes, one day, we'll find it. We just have to keep searching through the patterns confident in the knowledge that one day, the truth will be revealed.

The same logic can be applied to the notion the Internet is a tool for the promotion of democracy and the catalyst of the Arab Spring movement. If everybody has access to the word. The net. The truth will be revealed.

This is the revelation of the big data. The glory of the network. The gospel of the valley. The blessing of the real time feed and the rapture of the wirelessly connected.

But blink, look again, and I suspect that you will see the network and the data it curates is merely a tool. Morally inert. An empty vessel into which we can pour our own "illusion of life".

The problems arise when we choose to be the empty vessel and go in search of the "illusion of life" that is hidden in the big data. When we go in search of the wisdom provided by the ghost in the machine.

In the end the truth, the glorious insight to be found in the big data. It isn't in the patterns it reveals but what it reveals about us and the questions we choose to ask of it.

You see, as with the Boeing 757 and 767 employed in the 9/11 attacks over a decade ago, the morality expressed by the machine is in reality the application of the ideas and beliefs embraced by the minds that pull the levers, toggle the joysticks, swipe the touch screens, type in the searches, share the tweets and click on the likes.

There is no ghost in the machine. Its just you staring into the data. The binary abyss.

And so, if you let your machine do the thinking, or at the very least, shape your thinking, then understand why your journey will inevitably lead you into the void. Deep into the heart of darkness. For the fantasy of the meaning machine is that it is sadly anything but.

So let me reiterate again. This is the power of the technology to disrupt and bring into question the very narratives by which we choose to live our lives.

And today, yes today, begins the discussion we must have. What will life be like in a post digital world? What do we want to achieve with all this data? What are we looking for when we gather up all these bits. What will be fruits of the harvest? Because without it all this investment in a digital future is, well, let's face it, fundamentally meaningless. For what use is it to be able to endlessly measure, monitor, manage, mine and replicate all this digital dust. This endless stream of big data. If in the end it doesn't take us somewhere we really want to be? Tomorrow...

Till next time...