It Began With a Story: Precursors to an Auto-reflexive, User-centered & Decentralized

Mythology

Copyright © 2010 Justin M. Woodum

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

“Aggregator refers to a web site or computer software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources.” (Wikipedia.org)

Web surfing can be seen as an act of digital content aggregation by humans.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

• Philosophy• Spirituality (“New Age”)• Buddhism• Buddhism & Environmentalism• Buddhism & Fascism• Taoism• Nature worship• African spirituality• African drumming• Mythology• Cyber-mythology• Globalization

• Tech. in Humanities Education• Technocracy movement• Political science• Linguistics• Futuristic technologies• Information science• Computer science• Intertextuality in literature• Digital storytelling• Post-modern education• Action research• Humanities

Aggregated topics…

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

“Real-time scholarship”

New technologies are changing how we learn, communicate and create.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

“By 2020…the very idea of a “smart phone” will begin to change. Rather than looking at a tiny screen, our glasses will beam images directly to our retinas, creating a high resolution virtual display that hovers in air…we’ll routinely have pop ups in our visual field of view that give us background about the people and places that we’re looking at. In other words, your memory will be constantly, instantaneously aided by the information available on the Internet. The two will begin to become indistinguishable.” -- Ray Kurzweil

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Steve Man’s “wearable computer” now looks like a pair of ordinary sunglasses!

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Wearable computers...Steve Mann shares his daughters's birthday

Augmented reality…Augmented reality in the everyday world

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Ubiquitous technologies extend human influence and awareness.

Shopping Cooking Remembering Communicating Entertainment Decision-making

Socializing Exercising Working Expressing Caretaking Learning

Digital communications is causing language to become increasingly

consolidated.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Two factors that affect online language…

Authority ModularityNet-speak

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Authority...

Speech-to-text capabilities Auto-editing software (i.e. spell check) Predictive text software on cell phones Shorthand phrases in texts and e-mails Search engines and aggregator sites The “crowd” (i.e. social networks) The Semantic Web & technical interfaces

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

English is currently the most used language on the Internet.

English’s verbose-ness makes it useful in technology and science.

The economic position of the United States encourages people to use it in business around the world.

American pop-culture has been popular for many decades and continues to be.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

TOP TEN LANGUAGESIN THE INTERNET

Internet Usersby Language

Growthin Internet

(2000 - 2010)

Internet Users% of Total

World Populationfor this Language(2010 Estimate)

English 536,564,837 281.2 % 27.3 % 1,277,528,133

Chinese 444,948,013 1,277.4 % 22.6 % 1,365,524,982

Will “Chinese” become the next language of the Net?

Will this “dual-Internet” persist far into the future?

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Modularity...

On social networks… Viral videos and content Physical analog in “plug and play hardware” Computer-related technical language is often

modular because computer software interfaces and architecture are modular.

Verbal and visual languageis becoming consolidated and quantified.

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Toward a personal lexicon…

A crowd-sourced lexicon: WordCount.org. When all words known to a person are documented in a database, computational manipulations intended to grasp understanding about the person’s context may be applied.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

100 most-used nouns 50 most-used verbs names of nations proper nouns emotive words

value words pop-culture words religious words cultural words political words

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

The personal lexicon “database” is not actually a database, it’s an archive of expression. Thus, a word’s statistics may be computed on-the-fly by digging through everything in the archive. If a broader context is desired, the beginning and end of the sample may be adjusted to display more or less of the surrounding conversation.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

Show top 10 value words in medium context with time of day and who I was talking to.

Show pop-culture words expressed as text in narrow context with Websites.

Multi-dimensional queries to a personal lexicon:

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

What about visual content?

Visual imagery is beginning to have computational analysis applied to it on a broad scale. Patterns and variance are mined for useful insights into culture.

Lev Manovich and cultural analytics.

What would anauto-reflexive, user-centered & decentralized

mythology be like?!

Deciding on a mythology framework…

“Myth is a way of making meaning within a particular culture”.

“Typically, myth provides symbolic representations of cultural priorities, beliefs and prejudices.”

Myths are narrative, poetic, and performative.

“…many present-day myth appropriations are narcissistic and individualized at an extreme so that they ignore the ways myths have operated traditionally.

(source: William G. Doty , from “Myth: A Handbook”)

Mythologies in constant flux: auto-reflexivity

“…every time men and women took a major step forward, they reviewed their mythology and made it speak to the new conditions.”

(source: Karen Armstrong, from A Short History of Myth)

Symbols and context are mined from multiple sources: the “personal lexicon”, the individual’s social network profiles and activities, the activities of online peers, related “sub-cultural” Web sites representative of the individuals interests, aggregation Web sites of other kinds (like news sites) that reflect the individual’s socio-historical context, etc. This increases the potency of the myth to the specific individual.

Mythologies that personalized: user-centered

Rather than mythologies being imposed from above by a dominant social class or institution, mythologies are [at-least partially] built “from the ground up” and reflect the values of the individual.

Global culture transmits and enforces values in an increasingly ubiquitous fashion (the variance of values per individual is reduced). Mass media!!

Type Source

Emergent Created unconsciously by individuals.

Exclusive Created consciously by individuals.

Authoritarian Created externally by a human or group of humans.

Technologically-derived

Created externally by AI software (huge technological leap necessary).

Synthetic-reflective Created synthetically by individuals consciously interacting with AI software and/or other humans.

Synthetic-reflexive Created synthetically by individuals unconsciously interacting with AI software and/or other humans.

Mythology mash-ups: decentralization

Open questions:A mythos of memes?

A degraded-information society?

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Memes = modular!

Meme: a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures. [source: Wikipedia.org]

( lolcat + troll caption = trollcat! )

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Context is vital to meaning.“Nostalgia loss”: psychological and emotional responses differ from person to person and [currently] from [pop-]culture to [pop-]culture.(Chris Keefe)

an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

"We inherit a language used by others before us, a language blended from many sources and echoing many voices...and as we learn to speak and write that language, as we try to make it do our bidding, we discover that it often resists our best efforts to bend it to our will…that we wind up meaning what our language allows us.

- David W. Smit

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

The Hidden Traps in Decision Making*

Anchoring "Our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find."

Confirmation "...we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence."

Memorability"...overly influenced by recent or dramatic events. Repetition...can also influence beliefs, memory, and judgment."

Status quo"...a strong bias toward conservatism, inertia, and alternatives that perpetuate the status quo. We look for reasons to do nothing."

Sunk cost "unwilling, unconsciously or not, to admit past mistakes, we make decisions in a way that justifies past choices.”

* “The Hidden Traps in Decision Making” by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. Harvard Business Rewiew, September/October 1998.

Some example queries to a personal lexicon:

LinguisticsSemanticsPragmaticsPoststructuralism

Epistemology Internal / external origin of knowledgeFoundherentism – the crossword puzzle Constructivism

Philosophy Wittgenstein Ontologies

Related topics for further investigation

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”

- Joseph Campbell

"I drag my myth around with me."- Orson Welles

E-mail: justin.woodum@gmail.com

Website: www.infogardens.net/mythology.html