TechYob

Every since reading Illusions by Richard Bach (of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame) as a wide-eyed teenager I have always been intrigued by the concept that “Believing is seeing”.  It always seamed logical that what you believe is truth for you. 

The meaning of anything, by definition, is the meaning we give it. 

Therefore, is the Pollyanna Glad Game just a naive child’s folly, or does positive thinking impact actually have the power to shape our reality?     

We’ve known for a long time that Physics supports the view that time and space are not absolute concepts - rather they are inextricably tied to the observer.  Einstein proved that the length and time of an object or event is entirely dependant on your frame of reference.  

In recent times I was also fascinated to discover that computer scientists have also been using this concept of “seeing is believing” to construct new and powerful computational models of the human brain.  Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing and Handspring has recently turned his attention to a new startup Numenta which is developing a new memory architecture for modeling the mammalian cortex.  In this excellent presentation caught on video at IBM’s Almaden research lab, he describes his Hierarchical Temporal Model (HTM) which uses a form of expectation maximisation to propagate beliefs between concept hierarchies.  That is to say, expectation is as much to do with perception as cause.  Many thanks to Bernhard Hengst from NICTA’s Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition lab for pointing out Jeff’s work to me. 

I previously wrote about the impact that Internet-enabled collaboration and communities on democracy.  How the fulcrum of power will increasingly move away from the sanitised, centralised mass media towards decentralised communities of influence.  

That was why I was more than a little interested to read recent articles appearing in the Australian press about the use of the Internet by activists to try to disrupt the G20 meeting in Melbourne this week.  The Group of Twenty, attended by finance ministers from countries representing 85% of the world’s gross domestic product,  was established in 1999 as a forum for discussing key issues in the global economy.  Websites such as stopg20.org dramatically improve the ability of activists to self-organise around key events.  People participate, stay informed, keep connected.  They are increasingly self-informing and therefore self-forming.  There is less reliance on charismatic leaders.  Mobilization is instead around creating the infrastructure and channel for members to self-serve and participate. 

Other websites, such as Syndey Indy Media, demonstrate the ability for user-generated media to be proactive in covering issues that are relevant on a profoundly local level.  Rather than coming across as left-wing reactionaries, I think more and more people who are disenfranchised with the lack of bandwidth paid to their issues and concerns in main stream media will find refuge in such sites.  Their catch cry “don’t hate the media, be the media” tells me they get new-media in a way their less tech-savvy counterparts have yet to grasp.

On the weekend I got to talking about the The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, with a good friend of mine Tim Mortimer (also known as a founder and Director of the real-time B2B integration company RedWahoo).  One of Friedman’s most remarkable assertions got me thinking about the power of social networks and Web 2.0 that stands poised to be unleashed on Democracy as we know it

There is an iron law in U.S. politics: The party that most quickly absorbs and adopts the latest technology, dominates politics.  FDR dominated the radio and the fireside chat, JFK televised debates, Republicans talk radio and Karl Rove direct mail and computerized databases

If you think that mySpace, Facebook and youtube will be looked back on as the defining achievements of Web 2.0 then surely you are mistaken.  Future elections will be won and lost based on the ability of parties and candidates to understand and harness the latent power of online communities and social networks, united by shared interests and values.