social monitoring and network analysis

Ultraintelligent Machines, Transparency and Progress

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. ~Statistician I.J. Good, 1965

All it takes is one technology – Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or perhaps something unforeseen – that advances to the point of creating smarter-than-human minds. That one technological advance is the equivalent of the first self-replicating chemical that gave rise to life on Earth.~AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2001

TECH IS A HAIR BREADTH AWAY FROM SELF-AWARENESS: Technology is within a hair’s breadth of becoming self-aware. The social networks and properties may be seen as a mass effort by humanity to train our tech to first mimic and then evolve our actions. The intimacy of human-tech relationship has become a red-hot love affair.

I can forget my wallet at home but woe is me if my cell phone remains on the bedside table! With mobile now fully poised to take over as THE access point to all my information and action, that iPhone or Android becomes THE lover in my pocket, my EVERYTHING. I can dock my phone and access all of my content with a wireless keyboard and mouse and my 55″ 3D 1080p screen. And I can store 60 GB of my information in the cloud for $10 per month, giving me the power to link in to my info from anywhere at anytime.

And ALL of this information is scanned and makes up the ever-expanding global mind, which systems like the Chinese-made Tianhe-1A can perfect at rate of 2,507 petaflops (a petaflop is one million billion floating point operations per second). Soon all of this computing tech will occupy a transhuman body, like the hospice cyborgs in Asia.

I do agree that we may be closer than one realizes to the Singularity and that AI has advanced to truly FANTASTIC heights. One need only begin at the Singularity Summit, Singularity University and Humanity+ web pages to get thrown in the deep end of this information AND to realize that humans in the know are keeping long hours preparing for this imminent reality!

WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN IN THE NEAR-FUTURE? So what happens when many more human duties are done by robots? What happens when the Transhumanists reign supreme? How does one look upon this: as an average consumer, as a corporate leader, as a major VC, as a nation-state concerned about security, as a parent raising children, as the leader of a global religion? For some, there is no action to be taken and submission is the only option due to NO TIME. For others, like the leaders mentioned, the conversation becomes philosophical and nostalgic: the good ol’ days of being human are now over.

Now we also, as leaders, have to understand what it really means to be led by our technology. It presents us with possibilities and solutions we may never have considered: Like finding the cure to cancer OR receiving a fully charted investment strategy yielding 125% growth per annum for 7 generations on your desktop OR just plain old peace of mind. We truly have more possibilities before us as humans now than ever YET at the same time we are in an economic crisis. Or are we?

Hear the following quote from the philosopher Aleister Crowley:

“We are in the middle of a world crisis. It is a very good world crisis — better than any crisis we have had before — and there is no man alive with an intellect big enough to grasp the threads of the problems which confront the world today. There are two ways out of that. Either consult a superior intelligence, which Magick shows you the way of doing, or you can develop your own mind, for it has a faculty which is as superior to the intellect as the intellect is superior to the emotions.

All magical operations require a very elaborate training of one kind or another, but I think the only way out is that we have got to put men in charge of this planet who are really more than men. We must get back to the times of the prophets or we must make ourselves prophets. And we must look at world problems from a standpoint which is entirely alien to that existing at present.”

TECH LEADERS GUIDE GOVERNMENTS AND SIT AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE: Just a few weeks ago, Michael Dell said, “Our report contains straightforward, proven ways to pare back $1 trillion from the deficit while increasing productivity and enabling sustainable competitiveness. We’re serious about helping to provide solutions for the mounting debt crisis, and we’re optimistic that changes today will help lay the foundation for future job growth and innovation for our country.” And the TCC report, entitled One Trillion Reasons, stated: “A $500bn savings opportunity exists by consolidating the government’s myriad supply chains. This would also render the government’s procurement process far more transparent, helping to strengthen public trust.”

With tech leaders applying the power of computing to human inefficiency, we know who the REAL kings of this planet are and will increasingly be. It’s no wonder that men like Michael Bloomberg and Silvio Berlusconi are corporate leaders, political leaders and multi-billionaires. They are the model of the world-king, the Zeus archetype. And men like these have the power and resources to orient tech around cleaning up 20th century messes. Those who have erected Kingdoms of Opacity around the these cesspools are doomed, as we already have seen, while those who embrace Transparency as a route TO greater discovery and engagement with mystery and innovation will rule. The simple mathematical and scientific rule concerning this is Pareto’s Law or Occam’s Razor and Leonardo da Vinci has captured this when he says, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

HUMAN INTERACTION NO LONGER SLOWS DOWN TECH ADAVANCEMENT: Our technology’s solutions are so beautiful now and are being packaged to accentuate this elegance. Solutions on the social intelligence front are just one example of this. With Flowtown, I can upload all of my email addresses and see exactly which social properties these entities currently occupy. With another tool just about to launch I can upload my email addresses and know the exact time of day a Facebook ad campaign should run to reach the maximum online users. With another tool also on the verge of launching, I can determine which tweets and FB statuses have the highest chances of being re-tweeted and passed along AND which ad copy will achieve the highest percentage of click-through rate.

Again, with well-priced and effective solutions, we hurdle opaque entities that shroud previously complex processes in secrecy AND end up with BETTER solutions at BETTER pricing. This principle is horizontally applicable across industries AND is the metaphorical basis for human-tech relationship to leap-frog into a new paradigm of leadership, democracy and independence.

Of course, in the context of all this left-brain, progress-oriented talk, there is the question as to whether cyborgs dream of electric sheep or can enjoy the most human of experiences.

Spreading the news of your offering to the World

A BEST-PRACTICE PROCESS in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING is the following:

1. IDENTIFY your customer by doing a writing/drawing/brainstorming project wherein you describe 5 DIFFERENT members of that audience.

2. CREATE THE SOCIAL GRAPH: Generate keywords from those descriptions and use the Google External Keyword Search + any number of paid/free social monitoring tools to create an initial social graph of where these 5 members locate. Buy these posters, laminate them and put them on your wall as MAPS of INFLUENCE in the social web! http://www.theconversationprism.com/

3. OBSERVE and STUDY: Go to the locations on these maps and study the behaviors and likes of YOUR AUDIENCE there!

4. DESIGN: Design your offering in a way that matches OR exceeds what ATTRACTS those individuals. CREATE CONTENT THAT WILL FIT IN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR AUDIENCE!

5. GO LIVE: Take the microsite (blog) and social footprint live. Use WordPress, Posterous, Blogger or Drupal as the platform for your microsite (each has their benefit depending on your technical skill level and time available). In terms of social properties, set up in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr and Slideshare. Add to these from your research project above and through studying the maps from The Conversation Prism, basing your decision upon contexts populated by YOUR key influencers, customers and community.

6. SOCIALIZE: Use the following sequence as a model for populating the microsite AND social footprint WITH content: http://bit.ly/the_cycle_of_social_spread

7. GET INTIMATE AND GIVE POWER AWAY TO YOUR AUDIENCE! BRING THEM ONSTAGE: Respond to all comments AND build content from your feedback. Create a virtuous cycle by LISTENING and then creating content from what you hear…crowdsourcing a percentage of your content WILL reap HUGE rewards in terms of buzz because your audience wants to get up on stage WITH you! Imagine one man on stage at the outset and then see more and more people JOINING you on stage. This is an image of how crowdsourcing works. Find a great resource on current crowdsourcing examples here: http://bit.ly/THE_crowdsourcing_LIST

IN A NUTSHELL:

LISTENING, STRATEGY, ACTION

LEARN MORE by following this trail meme on social media monitoring and brand creation: http://trailmeme.com/trails/social_media_monitoring or use this Rollyo Targeted Search Window that focuses solely on social media monitoring. Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World is an EXCELLENT book on Archetypes and very helpful in terms of identifying HOW your key influencers may accelerate your audience’s awareness of your offering to the extent that a REAL contribution is made to the world.

The World Behind the World

Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it. ~Nikos Kazantzakis

There is a world behind the world. The best social monitoring tools help one to peer into the vast realm of the unconscious, a place populated by archetypal entities created by sub-cultures. The voices of the unconscious realm become starkly visible in the patterns moving across and through social networks. Within these complex and varied fabrics there ripple millions of vibrations, which ultimately collate to form the deities worshipped by the various tribes roving cyberspace. It has been said that all words find their root in a god somewhere in some mythology. The collective is forming a series of complex, subtly balanced life support systems in the form of social networks populated by living cells!

theunconscious

Carl Jung writes, “…psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended.” It could be said that humanity is poised on the brink of such phenomenon becoming widespread in social networks. It would not be too outlandish for a single voice to catalyze OR motivate the whole. Jung writes, “When someone is able to perform the art of touching on the archetypal, he can play on the souls of people like on the strings of a piano.” With multiple crowdsourcing sites and campaigns emerging, the mechanism is in place to reach those with an affinity to particular messagings AND swiftly guide these groups toward attractive events, products, services and causes. The collective acts like an individual and influences ALL within its own body! Jung says, “The world powers that rule over all mankind, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors…We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.”

Currently The Firestarters in organizations are inspiring LISTENING programs AND finding ways to involve the WHOLE organization. These are the ones who understand the value of listening to the WHOLE, divining the “world behind the world” and gleaning emerging trends. Out of this, a Creative has the data to craft more finely-honed FUTURE RAGES. Jung writes, “…any autonomous complex not subject to the conscious will exerts a possessive effect on consciousness proportional to its strength and limits the latter’s freedom.” He goes on to say, “It gets you below the belt and not in your mind, your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped. It is a power that fascinates people from within, it is the collective unconscious which is activated, it is an archetype which is common to them all that has come to life.” This phenomenon is occurring countless times a day in the social networks as viral elements feed on Likes and Tweets, rolling millions into seemingly irresistible currents.

Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart. But the body stands between us and separates us. The mind stands between us and separates us.” In the coming 12 months, I predict this sense of separation will diminish as Transparency becomes the fashionable “way to be” and world behind the world injects itself directly into daily experience through a kind of spiritual tech, fusing humanity’s hunger for piercing mystery WITH financial return. The real VALUE of transparency IS that we are introduced to MORE MYSTERY, having transcended the secrets that acted as blockades to progress. Jung writes, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” To be conscious of ANYTHING is to be free of its influence FOR THEN we have power of choice related to its activities. Humanity yearns to open itself to possibility. Exploring the unknown through social monitoring is a FANTASTIC action for facilitating such an evolutionary process.

The fittest node: Who will "grab all the links" and "shape the network into a star"?

“The explosive success of “new kid on the block” Google could not be explained by the scale-free model until a measure of a node’s ability to stay in front of the competition produced a “fitness model.” Examining the fitness model data, Ginestra Bianconi was startled to find that the calculations used were very similar to those found in the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The math describing the behavior of “Bose gases” (a unique creature of sub-atomic quantum mechanics) turned out to be identical to those in the network fitness model. This similarity means, according to Barabasi, that in certain circumstances, particularly fit nodes in a network did not merely get richer … the winner could take all.

In an ordinary “fit-get-rich” network, the fittest node gets biggest, but other fit nodes are close behind, so that “the power laws and the fight for links are not antagonistic but can coexist peacefully.” Id. 102. In a “winner-takes-all” system, the fittest node grabs all the links, shaping the network into a “star” or “hub and spoke” topology which is not scale free … there is a single hub and many tiny nodes. These findings have obvious relevancy to those studying antitrust law and policy and the ongoing case of Microsoft.” (Source)

Body, Heart and Mind divide the lead, developing Context and Content

Everyone has destinations AND concepts of journeys to those destinations in Body, Heart and Mind. Body, Heart and Mind divide the lead, developing Context and Content. ~Nathaniel Hansen

With useage of social networks surging and relationship connections occuring at the speed of firing brain neurons, individuals face the freedom of search windows and countless rabbit holes of discovery. We are all in study hall these days, analyzing and synthesizing conversations, images, videos, music and ideas. The individual AND group mind is evolving at light-speed, particularly for those tapped into the global mind called THE SOCIAL FABRIC OF THE INTERNET.

Humanity now needs the power of ancient wisdom to inform the WHY of its collective and individual search. The phenomenon of quotes, scriptures, fables, wise sayings, anecdotes and fantastic new theories circulating at the speed of light from one mind to another EVIDENCES that this is, in fact, occuring. Humanity IS weaving ancient wisdom into this tapestry we are all weaving together. And there is no doubt that this is affecting the quality of our interaction with one another.

Is it possible humans are actually becoming better, wiser and more benevolent THROUGH the rapid dissemination of ancient wisdom through social networks. As our bodies, hearts and minds divide the experience of this truly etheric environment, a tactile spiritual sensibility MUST be growing among its participants. We are all interacting with intangible, highly subjective environments, driven by emotion, thought and image. And this REQUIRES the development of skills like “felt-sense”, intuition and discernment. Again, the social fabric of the internet becomes tactile as one develops narrative and nurtures its growth through a succession of writing, photos and video.

How do you experience social networking: physically, emotionally, intellectually….which dominates for you?