The Nervous System’s Emerging Stream

By Joshua Chalifour, 13 May 2009

In a recent post, Nova Spivack considers “the stream” as the Internet’s next evolutionary stage. I think he makes a lot of compelling points and I’m clearly partial to stream terminology (like it says above, I’m trying to mind the current). It builds on McLuhan’s notion of the nervous system, which is neat. Spivack’s conceptualization [...]

Acquiring Knowledge: Computer-Assisted Shallow Atom Assembly (2)

By Joshua Chalifour, 27 April 2009

In a previous post, I said that search engines essentially accomplished their jobs but created a big problem. Search engines initially answered our question of “How or where can I find the information I want?” but in indexing the content of the Internet and providing access, they created a much more troubling problem. That question [...]

Acquiring Knowledge: A Great Shallow Breadth Over Depth (1)

By Joshua Chalifour, 21 April 2009

Has our approach to acquiring knowledge moved from the deep end of a continuum to the broad but shallow end? The Internet medium and associated technologies used to develop, contribute, and distribute knowledge with it, call out for knowledge acquisition through breadth. I think, in general, we’re using it to acquire knowledge via a great [...]

What Would Happen if You De-occupy the Cognitive Surplus?

By Joshua Chalifour, 27 April 2008

The “West” is known for its consumers. Much of the rest of the world is trying its best to head in that direction too. Reading Clay Shirky’s recent blog post, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, got me thinking about the stance of the passive consumer. I’m wondering if the new consumer will be a producer… [...]