Interlude: Static Visualized, Conceptualized

My old sparks …

Previously on my blog Phatic Communion, I took a look at what has been called ‘social networks’, through the lens of the OODA loop in two posts: Social OODA Loops / Networks & Some Words on Determining Social ‘Network’.  In general, I posited an interaction based on individual OODA loops, such that individuals formed the basis of social systems and their personalized OODA loops determined the type and method of interaction in such systems.  Whereas network theorists often begin with the assumption that definite pathing can be observed, assessed, and defined when studying social systems, I began with a look at the way individuals operate and interact and the resulting emergent systems.

Network theorists may believe definitive ‘networks’ exist connecting these individuals, but in so doing they often make the mistake of believing that what they have discerned to be stable routes and routings — i.e., networks — can be understood to exist regardless of the individuals using those paths.  I.e., to define a network is to believe that such interaction between individuals is prefigured by the available routes of data transmission.

Furthermore, a corresponding faith in perpetual and definable concrete connection often lies behind the frameworks posited by network theorists.  Connectivity is assumed to exist between persons who interact, yes, but such connectivity is thought to be resilient, perpetual, and largely unchanging (at least for a short duration, but often assumed to last for longer durations.)

In the first of those posts, I included an image to represent the way I think such interaction actually occurs:





Imagine that each of those black dots is an individual; then picture the acts committed by those individuals — whether verbal or not — sending out waves of physical change within the world.  At the point of activity in the individual OODA, whatever concrete phenomena have been observed by the individual, past or present, are reconfigured into an act that originates at the point of the individual, and the repercussions of such acts move outward from the individual — represented here in the arrows moving outward.

The changes wrought in the world by these acts may cross paths, are confluential — in the image, where the emanating lines cross — so that whatever effects the individual may have intended for the world may not result in a change exactly as he intended.  The activities of other individuals are also affecting the world.

On the other side of the OODA loop, we have observation.  I do not have a diagram representing generalized observation, coming from ‘the World’ from every direction, although perhaps I ought to have one given the current subject of static!  Imagine the above image, except with enough arrows drawn from the area external to each dot to those dots, filling in all or most of the white space!  Clearly, when viewing the changed and changing world, determining the origins of such inward-bound arrows would be difficult if not impossible, given

• The fact that such origins might actually be at points of confluence rather than from other individuals; i.e., changed realities might be more the result of a confluence of forces rather than the result entirely of unique and individual data streams emanating from definite individuals;
  


• The fact that non-human origins of data would also be operative;


• The fact that non-human and human origins alike could be occluded by the confluential process, i.e., their data streams could be confluential, giving rise to the question of whether human acts or non-human realities (acts, occurrences) are responsible for the changed environment. [Hint: look at the debate over global warming.]

However, through that post I tried to represent the individual’s OODA process as well as groups of individual OODA processes considered together, for showing how shared awarenesses and understandings may occur despite the unique perspectives of individuals in a complex system:




The large squares in the above diagram represent the Abstract OODA process, whereas the stages leading from the central ‘World’ represent the Concrete OODA process (of which the Abstract OODA process is only part, i.e., the human Orient phase of the Concrete OODA.)  For this diagram, I only included the first two O’s of the Concrete OODA.

No single person is ever capable of observing the entire world, and all of humanity considered together will nevertheless also share gaps in observation.  The colored swirls representing each person’s observational niche in the World therefore do not cover the entire world, and white space in the world represents the shared ignorances of these individuals, or the shared gaps in observation.

Importantly, however, the smaller ‘world’ in each person’s Abstract OODA process is entirely filled with colors (called here the Mental Constructs).  This is because a world view held by any individual can only be formed from actual observations.  In this particular iteration of the diagram, the colorful swirling in each person’s mental construct is intended to show how overlapping observations of the World, between individuals, may result in a development of shared or very similar mental constructs for those individuals.

At the end of that post I simplified the complex OODA representations to the level of groups operating from a shared or similar world view — not really an entire world view, but aligned abstracts:



Here, the swirls of each individual set of mental constructs are represented simply by the smaller pentagon’s overlapping triangles, to show where similar abstracts held by the five particular individuals may exist; this is isolated further in the smallest pentagon colored an olive green.  From such a shared or similar understanding of the world, decisions and acts may flow which are themselves very similar, and such acts may have a common effect on the larger world.

In terms of recent discussion of 5GW:  these various individuals may be affecting the larger world from multiple directions but in common ways, resulting in a larger general influence of that similar mental construct (meme) and similar concrete effects (concrete data); or, have a larger effect on the general confluence of forces.  However, as in this diagram, other manipulations of the world not founded on such a shared mental construct may also be affecting the world, leading to multifarious changes / confluences.  (Represented here by the other arrows leading to the World.)

Sparks from others …

   All Out for the Fight

This post exists not because of my old sparks, which have been lying relatively peacefully and unactivated in my consciousness, but because of a few sources from elsewhere in the Blogosphere.  I.e., this post exists because I’ve observed a confluence; my separation of sparks is merely one attempt at understanding that confluence by looking at what origins of data streams I can discern (whether or not they are the actual Prime Origins!)

The first sign of a confluence of some sort came as a result of my tracking a recent link to Phatic Communion from a blog called All Out for the Fight.  This link actually resulted from a year-end review and included a diagram I had seen much earlier in the year on that site, this time in a post title, “Summation of the Revolutionary Blogosphere in 2006 & Thoughts for 2007.”  The diagram is a representation of Blogospheric connectivity and is quite interesting.  The neatest aspect of the diagram is this: each dot, representing each blog that has been included in the diagram, is linked to that blog.  That’s how the new link to Phatic Communion showed up on Google Blog Search.  You’ll have to visit the post to see exactly what this looks like; but here’s a reduced copy of the image to show you what I mean by spark, in this case.


The larger image at AOFTF is much clearer.*  Two things struck me when I saw the image.

• First, visually it actually reminded me of the first image above, my original envisioning of the interactions of individuals (labeled for this post, “Static Activity — simple”.)


• Second, it kinda looked like static, which with the first point, caused me to realize that my own diagram looked a bit like static.

The first difference between this image and my own is simply that this image was designed by looking at whatever stable connections could be discerned between blogs; i.e., at links between blogs.

The second difference between the images is this:  AOFTF’s image represents an architecture irrespective of the actual activities of individuals.  One might even use a satellite image of the U.S. highway system to create a similar image; but this would not necessarily mean that anyone uses those interconnecting highways, or that at any given moment all those highways are being used.   In a way, this means that the ‘interconnectivity’ represented by AOFTF’s diagram is a fossilized account of past activities combined here together — the links were formed over an expanded time frame as a result of past visits between bloggers and their sites — and a potential prediction of future activity — who knows who will utilize those links, and when?

And so as we see with much network theory, a conflation of architecture with actual activity may occlude social realities.  These perceived ‘connections’ are only fossilized accounts of past connection or haphazard predictions of future connection.  In terms of something addressed in my last D5GW post, on static, the theory of stable networks is like the theory of open source:  an architecture may in fact allow connectivity or even have an effect on directing it, but this does not mean that individual actors will necessarily utilize, or that they actually are utilizing, that architecture.  (Open-source may describe the environment without describing the actors or the activity.)

If I were to take a different approach with AOFTF’s diagram — and, I have — I would point out also the large hubs that form from the mish-mash of interconnecting paths.  These in fact represent a greater concentration of past activities and may be more reliable for predicting future activity, although perhaps no greater reliability for prediction exists vis-a-vis any given individual with access to the Internet.  Individuals who have in the past utilized these pathways may be more likely to utilize them in the future, and in particular the bloggers who operate the included blogs will probably be the most likely to utilize the linear connections with their own blogs represented by this diagram.  So for a generalized look at activity — i.e., one that does not concern itself overmuch with real individuals but only with abstract ‘individuals’ and abstract ‘groups’ of ‘individuals’ — the hubs represented in this diagram may in fact appear to have real meaning for network theorists.

The second bulleted item, the comparison of the diagram with an appearance of static, should be understood in terms of selective viewing!  I.e., the hubs represented in the diagram would seem to represent the emergence of definition within a field of static.  Indeed, the imposition of a network architecture onto a static field of activity — even the smaller hubs, or individual dots and the paths leading between them — may seem to limit the truth of static reality.  In the second part of my series, I will probably reintroduce this ‘hubbing effect’ when I consider the subject of transparency.

   ZenPundit and Bar-Yam

The other major recent spark for this post came from a review of a review of a paper (pdf) co-written by Bar-Yam on the blog ZenPundit:

”Bar-Yam’s Shifting Hub:  But Are Memes a Critical Factor in New Links in the Blogosphere?”


Fittingly perhaps, we return to Bar-Yam, who along with others addressing his ideas inspired those posts on the OODA and social networks at Phatic Communion introduced above.  So I will quote from the same review by Sam Rose at The Cooperation Blog:

If you’re one of sixty million or so monthly visitors to social networking websites like MySpace or Facebook, you’ve probably noticed them— “network hubs,” people who have many more contacts than everybody else. While most users have a few or a few hundred connections, a tiny percentage of users have thousands upon thousands. Maybe, with a twinge of jealousy, you’ve wondered what makes them so special. Is it about coolness? Influence? Popularity?  How about “none of the above”? Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the New England Complex Systems Institute have discovered that social networks and the roles of the individuals that make them up vary drastically from day to day. Until now, scientists have largely thought of networks as fairly stable, changing only slightly over time-say, when someone makes a new contact.

The reality of networks isn’t as simple as that. Dan Braha and Yaneer Bar-Yam studied the e-mails sent among thousands of users over the course of four months. When they looked at the e-mail traffic on any given day, they found that some people were hubs just as they expected. The surprise was that the identity of the hubs changed from day to day. An individual who sent and received relatively few e-mails on one day could become a hub of the network the next. Hubs rarely stayed hubs for any length of time.

“The results were astounding,” Braha says. “How important someone is changes so fast we might be better off saying it is like ‘15 minutes of fame’.”

“The most influential people are not the ones with the biggest address books,” says Bar-Yam. “What really matters is who is talking to whom. By looking only at who knows whom you lose a lot of important details about when people actually talk to each other.”

[quoted in “The Shifting Hub”, with emphasis added]

These network theorists may finally be realizing that so-called networks do not lead to the emergence of activity so much as that activity leads to the emergence of networks — and that these actual connections are transitory, ephemeral, constantly changing.  Any established ‘network’ may in fact be merely a fossilized account of activity rather than an ongoing account of real activity. We must not equate the architecture with the activity, because they are separate things.  Most importantly, in a world of static, and particularly in a future world in which larger numbers of sources exist (many of them more empowered through the effects of globalization and the fluidity of the architecture they are using) — i.e., in a world with increasing levels of static — the imposition of a definitive network architecture onto the world for the express purpose of channeling activities will become increasingly difficult.

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*Update: Thanks to Modern Pitung for correcting my faulty memory in the comments section!  The image is the result of Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization, and Social Media by Matthew Hurst, where I first saw it. However, the link to All Out for the Fight is worth visiting for the many included observations which could not be included in the scope of this post (and due to my ever-present need to limit, best I can, the verbosity of my posts!)