Serendipity35

Venessa asks in a post: Is Twitter a Complex Adaptive System?



My first reaction on this idea is horror. Twitter as collective intelligence? But, I read on.



I am a Twitter user, but not very seriously. I only follow 60 people and, even dividing them into groups, it's more posts than I have the time or interest in following/reading.



I hear people say that they get their "news" via Twitter. That's scary. If you look at Twitter's "Trending Topics" you would have to assume that news = celebrities.



Still, she links to Ray Kurzweil’s The Third-Generation Web is Coming about that more intelligent next web “which emphasizes machine-facilitated understanding of  information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”

And what will bring us this new Net version? Broadband, mobile internet, software as a service (SaaS), P2P, cloud computing, open APIs, open-source software, open everything.



I don't even have a Web 3.0 category on this blog yet!

Her post also led me to an article by Dean Pomerleau called "Twitter and the Global Brain." Leadng off with some neuroscience on a new model for understanding how the brain is altered during learning, leads the author to connect that model with how the real-time web of things like Twitter functions. "Imagine a twitter user as a neuron. He/she makes the equivalent of a synapse with each of his/her followers. When a twitter user sends out a tweet, it is the equivalent of a neuron firing. Followers who receive the tweet decide whether to propagate the activity by retweeting the message, in a sense by deciding whether they too should fire in response to the tweet."

And from the U.K, Peter Theil asks and tries to answer "After social networks, what’s next?" The takeaway from that article for me agreeing that the implications of what we’re seeing happening in social media isn't clear even when it’s staring us right in the face.

“Collective Intelligence (CI) is the capacity of human collectives to engage in intellectual cooperation in order to create, innovate, and invent.” - Pierre Levy, James Surowiecki and Mark Tovey