archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Now that the web is clearly social, what hap­pens when the web becomes emo­tional?

Streams are already under pres­sure from the tech­no­rati as expired. What will fol­low the stream (which is a liq­uid, really) as a metaphor for the state of the infor­ma­tion layer? Gases, or plas­mas? What will gases and plas­mas made of infor­ma­tion feel like expe­ri­en­tially? How will they behave?

Does it even make sense to think about this in terms of the states of mat­ter, or will infor­ma­tion exhibit dif­fer­ent states and take dif­fer­ent forms?

Jung posited the idea of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious (later refined, but a good point of depar­ture). Do Daylife and sim­i­lar stream aggre­ga­tors / visu­al­iz­ers (I’m reach­ing for a han­dle to describe these enti­ties) like Uni­verse, point at what a col­lec­tive con­scious could be?

Uni­verse

Some pre­cur­sors might be Yahoo’s Taglines and TagMaps, Google Zeit­geist / Trends, and the var­i­ous cloud style visu­al­iza­tions like clouda­li­cious, etc.

Plainly, the num­ber and vari­ety of tools and des­ti­na­tions for visu­al­iz­ing what’s on the mind of groups is grow­ing rapidly.
If the par­al­lelism holds, mean­ing Daylife and kin are them­selves points of depar­ture, where is this going? I’m not think­ing of col­lec­tive intel­li­gence — just the visu­al­iza­tion aspect, and how that may evolve.