Context Will Be King

Leading to Self-Organized Learning

Technological progress is rapidly changing our world, this we know.  As Professor Sugata Mitra asserts, university students in the near future will be able to make educational progress at a distance and as suits them.    Degree granting institutions will become places of assessment and research.  Put in other terms, all curricula will be local and unique to the interests of the individual learner.  It is media technology in particular that is making such learning possible. 

Our information age can be characterized by the democratizing of information and the ever lower cost of accessibility to knowledge.  With relatively cheap access to knowledge of high levels, education’s self-organizing principle is becoming more easily revealed through the work of Dr. Mitra and others.  Perhaps self-organized learning has always been the way of true education only technology is making organizing information easier.  How long it will take for traditions in education or any other societal institution to adapt to this new actuality depends on market realities and institutional specific forces of inertia.   

What is clear is Fielding Graduate University has pioneered in this new edge of technology-facilitated education.  Its professors have studied the issues and implications of distributed learning with the goal of maintaining the highest rigor, experimented with curriculum delivery, and thought deeply about the myriad impacts of this change on learning. The media psychology faculty clearly conclude the key skills of refined critical thinking and determining media bias inform cornerstone abilities for a discerning media psychologist.   They also desire students understand that this current wave of technological integration in our lives is a live-linked social matrix of hyper-connectivity which leaves data exhaust of personal and preferential nature.

Time Marches Digitally On

As this Time Magazine cover mash up spanning almost forty years illustrates, there is no turning back from this forward march of the merging of the digital data driven world with the material, energy driven, atom-based world.  So what is the next iteration of the Web shaping up to look like as this fusion continues?

The Semantics of Web 3.0

 

Tools for filtering and linking of data within documents and delivering those few key links to a mobile device will be custom managed by curator technologies.  These technologies and methods, according to Wikipedia, “allow machines to understand the meaning - or “semantics” - of information on the World Wide Web.”   Instead of the current Google search shotgun philosophy of ‘more is better’ a more specific, useful and unique customized information bullet (Hare, 2010) will present itself in the most opportune manner.

Data Visualization: A Better Way of Assimilation

David McCandless argues that the best way to see new connections and unseen patterns in complex data sets is through clean, relatively simple designs as exemplified in the diagram about the Twitter community below.  Here color and proportional scale surprisingly reveal the data fact at-a-glance that only five percent of Twitter members have more than 100 followers.  We would do well to note, however, that there are over 120, 000, 000 registered members of Twitter according to a recent TechCrunch article and this number is growing at 300,000 per day.

Tor Nørretranders a Danish author of popular science converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms.    In the following diagram McCandless illustrates this bandwidth. 

The sense of sight (blue) is the fastest and has the same relative bandwidth as a computer network.    Then comes touch (pink), which shares data flow capacity with a USB port.   Hearing and smell (yellow) have the throughput of a hard disc.  Following is taste (majenta) with a relatively small process capacity of a pocket calculator.    The small white square in the lower corner that the (red) arrow is pointing to is 0.7% of total bandwidth of our sensory input.  It also happens to be are active awareness at any particular moment according to Nørretranders.

Thus, the majority of information that comes into our system is unconscious and enters via the eye.    This led McCandless to suggest that the eye and optical processing in the brain has it’s own language.   The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns, shapes and colors so tremendous amounts of information can be conveyed almost instantaneously via visual media.  When combined with the language of the mind, which is about words, numbers and concepts, “you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other.”  (McCandless, 2010).  This new enhanced dual-language thinking of vision and concepts, he continues, more readily alters our perspective and changes our views to a broader and more subtle angle of perception.

What this means is absolute figures in a connected world are not as revealing as contextualized data.   When this interrelated data is connected to other significant and associated data and depicted visually with scale, meaningful color, concepts and words, new understanding emerges.  Technology is allowing us to more readily come to ‘see’ what others think.  To see visually conflicting ideas beautifully rendered is a non-threatening, non-overwhelming experience that allows one to quickly move to a clarity and insight that persuades and changes viewpoints.

Dr. Hans Rosling's brief video The Joy of Stats superbly demonstrates how this kind of data visualization does just this.

The One Machine

“Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.”
- Alan Kay

Kevin Kelly (2007) suggests, all these computers, laptops, mobile devices, and all servers are leading through this vast quantity of connections to one machine.   The world's most reliable machine ever built.  So far in the World Wide Web’s brief history this networked machine has never failed running 6000 days without interruption to date (Kelly, 2007).    

Using the scale of web activity today, Kelly associates 100 billion clicks per day to our average daily sensory input in a single human brain.  55 trillion links almost matches the average number of synapses in a human brain, 1 quintillion transistors relates well to neurons per brain and a massive memory capacity of 255 exabytes on a scale relative with human memory capacity.    The human brain metaphor is an apt approximation for the scale of this Web machine and the size and complex network of how the Web works (Kelly, 2007).   So if this networked forming single machine is currently two Human Brains (2HB), in thirty years time it will be as large as 6 billion human brains.   By the year 2040 it is estimated that the total processing power of this machine in raw bits will exceed the total processing capacity of humanity (2007).

2010 2HB Machine

Convergence of the Atomic and Digital
As media psychologists we need to understand this fundamental shift is fast arriving.  As pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay (2010) notes:

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come.
The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled
by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards
for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.  

Atom meet Byte

Recognizing that every screen in the world is becoming a portal into this machine or cloud is a fundamental insight with complex implications and a vast subject for inquiry.   The Machine will be doing the computing as more quotidian objects will connect to the Web and be freed from requiring a CPU in situ.  Phones, cars, cameras, documents, almost everything, each artifact will be in some sense connected to or mirror rendered in the cloud - the Machine.  As Kelly (2007) puts it, “A shoe will be a chip with heels while a car will be a chip with wheels.”

Laws of Media Will Apply

According to Kelly the laws of media as he defines them will apply in this new reality:  Copies will have no value; value will reside in the non-replicable - things like authenticity, originality, and immediacy as well as things made of matter of course; media wants to be liquid, that is things are free so they can be manipulated and recombined in new ways.  This kind of mixing is already occurring in the world of popular music (mashup) but will expand throughout human knowledge domains.  Network effects rule, meaning the more media we have the more we will get.  Finally, attention is a currency (Kelly, 2007) for which advertisers will pay a premium and other issues of attention will impinge upon society as ADD and ADHD have to date. 

So the price of total personalization will be almost total transparency with massive and often unintended amounts of personal information on the net.  Just as we are dependent on the alphabet and writing we will become co-dependent on this Machine.   While content will always be an important part of life, in the near future, with so much information available to each human in such ubiquity, context itself will be the source from which we derive meaning in this evermore interconnected world.

To predict specifically about the future is notoriously difficult.   As media psychologists we are well placed to engage in shaping the dialogue and analyzing media implications around many traditional issues long studied in the domain of the social sciences.

Capstone Word Cloud

The Word Cloud image above is another new way of displaying the written information in this blog post.   It visually connects words based on a scale of meaning, repetition and emphasis.   What this word cloud blog post displays - issues of media, language, attention, social relationships, human-machine interaction, data-information processing, learning and memory - are the province of psychology today.  Media psychologists are uniquely qualified to analyze and draw meaning from these realms for the purpose of living well and mindfully in this emerging world of augmented digital overlay on our more familiar earth of atoms.

Most creativity is a transition from one context 

into another where things are more surprising…

Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in

- the one that we think is reality.

Alan Kay (2004)