It seems there is a debate about tags vs folders. They are not mutually exclusive. Here is a principle I adhered to for years:
Folders for browsing, tags for search.
So what really is the difference between the two?
Physical libraries have shelves and things are grouped (like folders). Tags are really not possible. So it might be good to brows the theatre section if you are into theatre.
Digitally the same applies you can’t browse one big pile, so put stuff into folders, but not too many (at least at the top level). Folders are there to facilitate browsing. The Dewey decimal classification has 10 top levels, and that is about right. They are rather beautiful:
000 – Computer science, information & general works
100 – Philosophy & psychology
200 – Religion
300 – Social sciences
400 – Language
500 – Pure Science
600 – Technology
700 – Arts & recreation
800 – Literature
900 – History & geography
But what about ‘Karl Marx’? Browse in Social sciences. But there would be stuff about him or by him in probably everyone of those groups! Hard for librarians who are forced to chose one shelf for something like: Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society, An Approach to a New Political Orientation by J.L. Moreno, which also has a chapter on Marx. Digitally it could be in many at once i.e. in three folders: Moreno, social science and politics. That is worth doing. Some one browsing might like finding it there. But consider the power of tags.
Tagging that book with: Moreno, politics, social science would be useful, but imagine adding sociometry, Marx, psychodrama group work, philosophy, religion.
It would come up in a fairly short list with any two of those tags. Also be easy to see what other books come up with a search on any two of those tags.
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But what the hell! Functionality for tags is lousy in most apps. They take time to add. Maybe search has outsmarted tags. Google does it all.
In Google Drive a file can be in many folders, that’s an an aid to browsing. No tags, and search works well.
Tim O’Reilly: Let me go back to George Simon because a lot of what he taught was a kind of mental discipline that was rooted in a model of how consciousness happens. It was framed somewhat in the language of Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics. Korzybski drew this wonderful diagram – it was actually a tool he used to train people – that he called the structural differential.
Korzybski’s fundamental idea was that people are stuck in language, but language is about something. And so, he represented what he called the process of abstraction so that people could ask themselves, “Where am I in that process?” So, the first part of the structural differential was a parabola, and the reason why it was a parabola is because reality is infinite, but we can’t take in all of reality.
And so, hanging from the parabola was a circle, and the circle was our experience, which is our first abstraction from reality. And then, hanging from the circle are a bunch of label-shaped tags – multiple strings of them – and these are the words that we use to describe our experience.
Korzybski’s training was for people to recognize when they were in the words, when they were in the experience, and when they were open to the reality. George mixed that in with this work of Sri Aurobindo, who was an Indian sage, and had come up with a model that integrated a spiritual view of this, and a practice which was just listening and being open to the unknown.
Hmm I saved the post then clicked on my saved posts and then again on this one and copied the url.
I might like to have some posts here as I can give them tags! Find them later.
Click the F top right to go to the post. Unfortunately the permanence is entirely up to Facebook. There is no actual data on this page other than the link.
OK — Here it is for as long as I maintain this blog. Copied from the post on Facebook
Sherry Turkle has been a thorough investigator of the media – and I like her experiential – ethnographic approach in her first book Life on the screen – Amazon
We are in the early days of technology. Can we develop etiquette – a new norm in the way we have about things like eating with your mouth full. Will parents say, “Don’t put your phone on the table while we are eating.” ? It could happen. We changed norms around smoking. Around sexism. This interview begins to articulate new norms without being anti tech,
I would love it – for one thing: Drawing. iPads have never really done that well. But maybe this one, with its Pencil, beats the Wacom tablets.
BUT
Its not a computer. It drives me crazy on the iPad to add items to a calendar – to edit anything, it is such a pain to try to get the curser to go to the right place! I can’t see it replacing a Mac where the input options include a trackpad and a mouse. Touch screens that flop around laptop-style are so wrong – as Steve Jobs said “ergonomically terrible”!
But a Mac is no good for drawing.
I had a Toshiba M200 that was ok, it converted quite well – back in 2002! (Images) It went from vertical to horizontal.
Steve Jobs would not have succumbed to the vertical iPad. There has to be a better solution. An OSX device that incorporates touch, something like the new Surface Book (Images) is one possibility. I can’t bear the thought of going back to Windows & Microsoft, Surface Book reviews mention the crashes, the lack of attention to detail in the hardware design. Will convergence that allows conversion in hardware and software functions come to Apple?
In the meantime – and for a long time I imagine – in the Apple world we are stuck with the need for two devices, a Macbook and an iPad Pro. Probably three devices, I’d still want my iPad Mini for curling up with, the iPad Pro seems too big for that.
I hate seeing the iPad Pro used like a laptop, copying the ergonomically terrible Microsoft devices. As a horizontal drawing tool they look great.
Best advice for Apple: Create a touch/non-touch convertable OSX beta for the iPad pro. Maybe they are working on this?
This book is on my list because I’m exploring the relational paradigm. Archetypes of Relational Space? What comes up is that marriage is a medium. This might be relevant?
I had to get the book, it is a sort of meditation on the nature of the relational space. It focusses on therapy, but this would be so relevant for those of us who consider that the marriage is the therapy.
Been posting a few items about books here. Very casual. Hardly posted a thing this year, and see post on Evernote below re that. Feel some motivation coming on.
The motivation is to post book covers and snippets because I am loving my ebooks – have for years. I don’t really want the paper books anymore. But I miss the affordance of the stacks of books lying around unread. They are now just a line of links on a screen and sometimes I can’t even recall why I have the book sample or who recommended it. There are so many samples, just a list! So I’ll post unread books here, awaiting reviews.
Once paper books are read they can go on a shelf somewhere. Even the pile in the garage. I can look at them when I tidy up, and think, oh yes I remember that.
OK, so there is a purpose for the blog, to notice what I have in my ebook library in some sort of meaningful way. So out with Evernote for books – and onto the blog with them. Expect more flimsy post with cover pictures.
I will update posts too, I often do that here, they need edits and additions as they go up very rough.
I tried Goodreads for this purpose, however for some reason I am more attracted to my own blog, at least first. Social media can come later, if at all.
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There is already plenty here in the blog to stir reminiscences. There are references to books back to 1999. As I went back to look I found a dead link to this item
Malcolm Gladwell on Blockbusters and books. Collaborative filtering!
Just six authors–John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel–account for sixty-three of the books on the list. In a world more dependent on collaborative filtering, Grisham, Clancy, King, and Steel would still sell a lot of books. But you’d expect to see many more books like “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”–many more new writers–make their way onto the best- seller list. And the gap between the very best selling books and those in the middle would narrow. Collaborative filtering, Hagel says, “favors the smaller, the more talented, more quality products that may have a hard time getting visibility because they are not particularly good at marketing.”
It seems he was wrong though.
Must revisit, interesting. What has happened 15 years later to those lists?
I used to write more in this blog than I do now. I always said I was just writing for myself, that it was a sort of note taking.
I have become an avid user of Evernote – and it is all private. Notes to myself. This has taken the driving force out of my motivation, which, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, was not to inform or please you but more about me.
Of course blogging has lost its pride of place as a form of communication with the advent of social media. I don’t do much of that, but some, and that will have had an impact as well.
The other thing that never worked well in this blog is that I am a multiple personality. I have six.
Which one is writing this blog? The psychophile, the technophile… those two do ok here, after all the blog is on the cusp of these two interests, but I also do art, and I am a bushwalker and then there is a passion for specifically psychodrama and imago. And movies and books! And I used to be a communist so there is that whole interest in politics. I use the tag World for that.
No unified focus. Does that matter?
My Evernote account is more than capable of containing wild diversity. Tags.
There are tags here too. And “notebooks” This one has the notebook Journal. And a bunch of tags, but who would ever use them? I do, Psyberspace is a resource with all my ramblings for a couple of decades.
It occurred to me that before Imago therapists came up with the idea of the relationship paradigm there were earlier attempts at the formulation.
I’ve mentioned Moreno and ‘tele’, Martin Buber and I-Thou today it occurred to me that Jung also had a concept for something similar: participation mystique. [Turns out I’ve written on this earlier in this post.]
Sure enough, I’m not the first to notice this.
Bridge to Unity – By MD Wilford W. Spradlin, Susan Renee Amazon
The connection between I-Thou and participation mystique is mentioned at least twice in this novel. I’ve also found thesis and other comments I’ll add in later posts.
I’ve been using Pocketcasts on the iPhone. First one I’ve liked in all these years. The iTunes one never satisfied and the way I used to do it – was clumsy. But it worked and was essentially what did on the Palm.
Casts (as it also gets called) has a sharing function so I can easily pop them inhere from time to time. — though not the full audio. So the links might no work. When there is one I really want I’ll post the whole thing. The pocket cast links work only on the iPhone (or Android?) if you have the app.
I liked this show. Why dpi these AI programs never use the Internet, Wolfram Alpgha etc? Siri creates its own search … I think the big breakthrough will come when they link all of these things – the music – art and writing and all search through some higher entity.
I just noticed the words “higher entity” I just mean a meta engine. Ha.
This article in the Psychotherapy Networker makes some useful points. I found some useful, but I don’t think of myself as an immigrant in the digital world! That is who he addresses.
The revolution in communication technology has created a new set of ethical dilemmas, which—given the pervasiveness of Internet culture—are invading our sessions, whether we know it or not.
The question that got me thinking is When to Google a client?
I’m reading the CBZ file in Comic zeal on the iPad. Nice. I’m about 50 pages into the 250.
Finding the free graphic novel, is interesting as it sort of ties in with his other themes. It is si-fi and the links back to the science are fascinating. I learned about Roger Penrose who I’d never heard of. There is a big debate obviously about consciousness, but from the wikipedia article I tend to go with Penrose. Thee is something weird about consciousness. I have an instinctive disdain for the value of neuroscience for psychotherapy – not for neuroscience but for the value people see in it for psychotherapy. However quantum science could change everything once we get the hang of it.
Its well done, a big collaborative production – with an interesting Kick-starter project for volume two.
Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose proposes the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he calls correct quantum gravity). Penrose uses a variant of Turing’s halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. (E.g., imagine a system with only two states, ON and OFF. The system’s state is ON if a given Turing machine halts, and OFF if the Turing machine does not halt, then the system’s state is completely determined by the Turing machine, however there is no algorithmic way to determine whether the Turing machine stops.)
Amy Goodman from Democracy Now hosts this debate between Julian Assange and Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek — From the Troxy Theatre in London, July 2 2011. Also streaming in HQ from Democracy Now for those with faster lines. Brilliant debate!
I wish I’d got hold of this a year ago when it came out, but it is worth watching any time!
“Capitalism will have trouble with intellectual property” – Slavoj Žižek In the Amy Goodman interview with Julian Assange
Stimulating interview!
I’ve come away thinking that if property is theft then intellectual property is the most obscene form of theft, as it steals from us what is most human, our creativity and spontaneity.
Are we in an information age, or is this still the industrial age where the workers will create socialism? What is Slavoj Žižek saying here? If capitalism can’t cope with intellectual property then it can’t cope because of some new relationship of production?
If that is the case who is the new revolutionary class? Is it still the industrial proletariat?
What clout does any other class have?
Or is it that as the information sector becomes the most consumed sector of the total produce – eg Amazon can afford not to make a profit on hardware as it sells intellectual property – as does Google – then these companies – like newspaper and music companies will falter as consumers protest about the punishments metered out to people who share!
Not only that but people who create – lets not call it property but intellectual goods and services – are the most advanced producers of social production (recall Marx ‘s point that the contradiction in capitalism is that production is social and ownership is private). Look at the credits in a movie, while that creation is tied to hardware there is a way to pay the creators and for the middle men to cream most of that off. Even solitary creation like a novel or science is mostly people standing on the shoulders of giants. All creation is a mash up.
Capitalism inhibits creation.
Capitalism inhibits sharing.
Capitalism inhibits the distribution of culture.
But information, creation that is not thwarted by capitalism has already been co-opted by capitalism.
The potentially revolutionary class then is the creators, and that is all of us. As Clay Shirkey put it so beautifully following Marshall McLuhan The fundamental shift in the electronic world is that consumers become creators. Just pressing a Like button is on the lowest end of the spectrum of creativity, with great art and science at the other end, but it is on the continuum! There is a qualitative shift that was made with the Internet.
Perhaps the early slogan – Information wants to be free – is a forerunner of a class of creators becoming a class that is conscious. Releasing information is a crime, Bradley Manning, Kim Dotcom, the latter has become a local hero, because he is fighting the superpower and exposing New Zealand’s subservience.
For people to move fully into a world where information is the dominant item of consumption, and we are probably a long way off that, then a new relationship of production is called for. New relationships of creation. New ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Think of what that might mean, no copyright, new forms of socialized payment for creativity, no advertising to pay for content. Most of all education, news and culture in the hands of the creators would change everything. Intelligence in the CIA sense would be free, releasing information would be heroic. Secreting publicly beneficial information wld be a crime.
Where does the money come from to pay for all this…
Wait… Money is information, it is currently owned by the ruling class, they create laws (also information) to control all information, about the flow of money, and the creation of money,
This does require a new relationship for the means of production of physical goods. The same dynamics apply, (material) goods too want to be free, and goods too are created by the very people who use them (could the but afford them) Its is not about the nature of the goods we are dealing with here. It is labour power, let think of it all as creativity power. Imagine the force of an alliance of all people who create, but who do not own or share equitably in what they create.
Marx said little about the future – but he did say we could all have the leisure to be philosophers. Sounds like he had an inkling there of the implications of his perspective related to creating ideas.
I found this on the WayBack machine & thought I already had it in this blog, but it seems not. I will change the creation date so it show up as an old archive… sometime/maybe.
When I finished my ThousandSketches project I wanted to continue making sketches and blogging them. I created In this moment… My art blog In addition to my sketches I added thoughts about art, and a lot of links to art I like and bits of info about artists.
But really it is all Psyberspace! I may as well put it all here. Maybe I could just use ifttt to create links here when I post something on In this moment…. I’ll try that.
Noam Chomsky: that the April 6 movement in Egypt began as a group of tech savvy people working with workers on strike. They were squashed by the regime.
A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West’s structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That’s the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week’s guests on Julian Assange’s show on RT.
If you’ve missed the previous episodes, you can always watch them online athttp://assange.RT.com
Another phenomena that struck me is the speed of the spread of the consciousness of change tips from hidden to visible.
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Note industrialization that traditional Marxism addresses is perhaps more prevalent in China than in the USA. Design, IT development is separated from the material production. Perhaps the real motivation is that if all forms of creativity are integrated and work together the capitalist control can’t be maintained.
Chomsky: China is the assembly plant for the advanced state capitalist counties.
The soul, or psyche requires a medium. Without medium the soul is nonexistent. The psychodrama stage, the psychotherapeutic hour, the poem, and so on are psyber-media. Cyberspace is the ultimate medium for the soul, the realm where the gods live. Without adequate media for soul the gods are dead, there is no numinosity. The soul is evolving in cyberspace. Viewed in this way psyberspace is not a bad name for it.
That the soul is eternal, outside space and time, makes sense when viewed as a manifestation through this media. The power of the psyche is also manifest, in that media transforms the world. The invention of the printing press unconsciously transforming the world into its image, conveyor belts, moveable type pre-cursing all manufacturing and assembly of pars. Visualise the effect of the invention of paper, drawing boards etc. on the shape of buildings. The electronic manifestation of soul is right now soaking its influence into the world, restructuring organizations, theories of personal development, publishing, money, into a form analogous to its its digitally mediated life.
The future of digital culture—yours, mine, and ours—depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives. How you employ a search engine, stream video from your phonecam, or update your Facebook status matters to you and everyone, because the ways people use new media in the first years of an emerging communication regime can influence the way those media end up being used and misused for decades to come. Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices all good questions, Ive been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what Ive learned.
Amazon
Psyberspace (old site) 
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