Mnemonomics: Social Networking as Collaborative Memory

Richard Smyth, Ph.D.

EDCO Collaborative

11 April 2008

Purpose/Objectives

Theory– Propose a way to conceptualize new

technologies as aides de memoire Practice

– Offer practical way of managing information overload

Part I: TheoryA New Concept for Communications Technology

Mneme: “memory”

Nomos: “management”

Mnemonomics: “managing memory”

A Brief History of Memory

Orality– f2f communication (storytellers)– memories/history stored in human brains

Literacy (alphabetic and print)– memory stored in books, libraries

Electracy (“secondary orality”)– memory stored electronically/digitally– “Pixels are the movable type of the future”

(Stafford 288).

Technology as Prosthesis

Think of communications technologies as expanding functions of the human mindbrain:– memory– reason– emotion– social networking

Technology as Amplication

“The knowledge and technologies that triggered the jump from clan to tribe to nation to market to network all shared one characteristic: They each amplified the way individual humans think and communicate, and magnified their ability to share what they know.”

(Rheingold, Smart Mobs 181)

Technology as Augmentation

“What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential. Alphabetic writing is an artificial memory that supports long complex chains of reasoning impossible to sustain within the organic mind. Digital imaging similarly supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity.”

(Ulmer “Electracy and Pedagogy”)

Web2.0 as Mnemonic Prosthetic

How are new technologies changing the nature of memory?

How do they supplement our memory? How do they free up our minds from

having to remember?

del.icio.us as public memory

“The actual database represents crystallized attention--what people are looking at, and what they're trying to remember.”

--Joshua Schacter(founder of del.icio.us, quoted in Wikinomics p.

42)

Searching Other People’s Memory

Searching Google = searching robot memory

Searching del.icio.us = searching (expanded, technologically enhanced) human memory

“Google knows the words on the pages but doesn’t know what the pages are about.”

(Weinberger, “Tagging Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet”)

On following tags in del.icio.us

“It’s like having the world of people who care about a topic tell you everything they found of interest and, unlike at Google, you’ll find the pages the people have decided are about your topic.”

(Weinberger, “Tagging Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet”)

Collective Intelligence: Epistemology as Community

If del.icio.us is a way to publicly remember personal websites, then networking with others on del.icio.us is a way of adding other people’s memories to your own. 

Who you know becomes how you know:  epistemology as community.

(Smyth “Memory in the Age of Electracy”)

Part II: PracticeHow to Manage Information Overload

Check news aggregator daily!

Subscribe to relevant sources

“Memorize” immediately: scan, select, and organize

How to “Memorize” a Blogline Check to “Keep New”

200 headlines max! [first (#)]

Feedlist tells how many kept “new” [second (#)]

How to “Memorize” a Blogline “Clip” the blogline

Save to clippings folder

Create folders!

How to “Memorize” a Blogline

Save to bookmarking site (e.g. del.icio.us)

Warnings!

If you don’t “Keep New” or “Clip,” the headline will disappear!!

When (not if) you fall behind, don’t be afraid to make them all disappear! (You would have been missing them anyway….)

Suggestions

Spend some time experiencing news!– think of bloglines as “storage”– think of listening/reading as “retrieval”

Don’t keep duplicates– if you clip a blog, don’t keep it new – after experiencing an item, bookmark it– if you bookmark it, delete from clippings

del.icio.us -- Mnemonomic Practices

use multiple tags to increase access during searches and be part of emergent folksonomic paradigms– e.g. informationliteracy, information_literacy,

infolit research tag labels before using

– search for the tags you think to use– use what appear to be the most common

del.icio.us -- Mnemonomic Practices

bundle all tags– immediately categorize

newly created tags to avoid buildup

– put “uncategorized” into a miscellaneous bundle

– create new bundles as patterns emerge among miscellaneous

bundles categorize & express interests

Network with those who share your foci in del.icio.us

Mnemonomic Social Networking:Social Bookmarking

Mnemonomic Social Networking:Social Bookmarking

Watch who’s watching you!– you might want to establish a

“mutual connection” in del.icio.us (like the one between informationgoddess29 and me), depending on their interests as expressed in their bundles and tags

Mnemonomic Social Networking:Microblogging

www.twitter.com -- who are you following?

Mnemonomic Social Networking:Slidesharing

www.slideshare.net -- who’s in your group?

Mnemonomic Social Networking:Epistemology as Community

Collective intelligence: communities of individuals who publicly map their skills so that everybody else in the community is aware of who has what available skills (Levy)

the above social networking sites are nascent forms of collective intelligence and collaborative mnemonics

Works Cited/Resources

Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Levy, Pierre. “Trees of Knowledge.” Connected Magazine. 7 July 1997. Viewed 10 April 2008. http://www.connected.org/learn/levy.html.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Pegasus Publishing, 2002.

Smyth, Richard. “Memory in the Age of Electracy.” Scholaris Erratus (blog). 11 October 2007. Viewed 10 April 2008. http://rsmyth.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/memory-in-the-age-of-electracy/.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio, 2006.

Ulmer, Gregory. L. “Electracy and Pedagogy.” Viewed 10 April 2008. http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/longman/pedagogy/electracy.html.

Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman, 2003.Weinberger, David. “Tagging Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet.” NPR (20 September

2005). Viewed 10 April 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4856924.

Contact

Richard Smyth, Ph.D.rsmyth64@yahoo.com

http://www.anabiosispress.org/rsmyth

http://del.icio.us/rsmyth

http://twitter.com/rsmyth

http://slideshare.net/rsmyth