Thoughts on the essay by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis.

I agree with some of the points made in the essay 'Social Capital and Community Governance':

They mark social Capital (or Community governance as they prefer to call it) as a compliment to government and markets rather than an alternative. 

' ...the basis for the rise, fall, and transformation of communities, if we are correct, is to be sought not in the survival of vestigial values of an earlier age, but in the capacity of communities, like that of markets and states, to provide successful solutions to assist in solving contemporary problems of social coordination.'

If I understand this correctly, they are talking about the reasons why small social groups seems, perhaps to be irrelevant in the contemporary arena of mass user and mass communication. I will try to use the family unit as an example:

100 years ago it was necessary for a family member to be geographically close to other members in order to truly know how they were fairing. It was also more difficult to engage with the world outside this unit, especially when they were all together.

Today both of these restrictions are gone, and this may seem to suggest that family members are not as close as they used to be.

The truth is (at least in my family's case) that we use trade off constant communication when we're physically near each other with more immediate forms of communication when separate. We can potentially confer on wether or not we need to meet (my nuclear family alone is dispersed over 4 different countries) at any given time.

Because this style of connection is ubiquitous today, amongst rising number of communities. It is not anchored in geographical proximity and makes 'Community Governance' relevant on a scale unparalleled in our history.

Literacy affecting physiology as well

Marshall McLuhan. the Gutenberg Galaxy.

McLuhan states that African children exposed to literacy become more active than non-literate children Born in Madagascar, who are more lethargic and are less likely to want to seek play. Those Madagascar children have a very long attention span and can sit listening to say, a story, for a considerable amount of time. 

If this cause and effect theory is true,  Maybe our shortening attention spans are indicative of our becoming even more intelligent. If true, I wonder if this increased smartness happens at the individual level, or do we merely adjust and align to be able to collect and share our intelligence with a bigger crowd. After all, it's suggested that the sharing of information is what causes this phenomena of shortening attention – when we know there will be others to deal with the information we can gather, do we 'push' more information than we can handle consciously into our subconscious?

The Internet offers information in such a quantity that we accept our inability to make sense of it alone. In the words of Homer Simpson 'can't someone else do it?'. Look at Wikipedia for answer - someone else could do it and there's a good chance they did it before you knew you needed it. 

You and me both contribute to the internet's content simply by browsing like some superorganism. But it's hard to make a true correlation between us and an ant colony. Maybe that's because we believe that ants are not intelligent as individuals, and that lacking intelligence and free will is a necessity for colony-like superorganisms to function. What  if ants just don't seem intelligent to us because they rely so heavily on their fellow ants. If the colony's collective intelligence reached a point where all of it's needs are met then maybe there is no need for the further development of the individual unit. Or maybe, as with evolution, the individual development is too slow to observe.

New structure for the work

I have a research q which I am happy with:

New social tools are rapidly changing the way groups communicate, plan and execute actions. How is this affecting us personally?

I am not sure if the second sentence is absolutely perfect, I chose it because I have an answer for it. The answer is that we are becoming more aware to the true differences and similarities between us. We get to see how fellow humans really behave and think with diminishing amounts of mediation and biased interpretations. Whereas in the past such data would have been too vast to make sense of, today - together we are beginning to do just that. Millions of connected minds have a better chance of analysing seemingly infinite amounts of information. We no longer have to rely on a few 'go to persons' when we are struggling with a problem / question, we have search engines - aggregates of the vast ocean of data.

Not relying on select individuals means we need less and less management, and that despite having flaws (which I am yet to research well enough to include here) new modes of social interaction are wholly beneficial to us.

"...the older world of roles had lingered on as a ghost just as after a century of electricity the West still feels the presence of the older values of literacy and privacy and separateness." p.14 The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan

I believe that we may end up sharing all of our information in this way, in order to better deal with it. Instead of putting a machine in charge of making sense of all of our produced data, we could 'open source' everything. This mean phasing out privacy (which I believe is already happening), with the trade-off being a sharply heighten sensitivity to what is happening around us (globally and locally, social and geographical). 
If there's no privacy, one has to wonder how certain aspects of day to day life will be affected. Sexual practices for once, how will they be affected? I do not know, but maybe it is like having to be naked around other people, it's very disconcerting at first and it made me feel very self conscious. The funny thing is that most people feel the same way, and that similarity suggests that we are not so different. And indeed we get used to these situations and become more comfortable with them the more we found ourselves in them. This is based on my own experience, and I think it is these situations that made me more comfortable in my own skin.

This leads me to conclude that honesty is the best way forward. I wish to avoid being caught in the wrong, and if everyone can see all that I am doing (and are together smart enough to call any of my bluffs), being genuine seems to be my best choice. Because my history of actions is also visible, accumulating a positive track record is important, So I will be honest and make sure I am truly nice to others. I don't think I should actively seek causes and act to show my selflessness - this is a false drive. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), we at our most genuine when we have selfish motives but bare those out for all to see.

Another thing I did today, just before writing the above post was to build a skeleton for my dissertation. Hope it helps - I feel positive about it. Despite anticipating that once my different tutors read and feed back on the resulting work I will be singing a different tune of desperation, today I am more relaxed about it.

refined version of the diagram (typeface: calibri)

Can we all be potential Borg queens?

In my work, inside the part about the wisdom of crowds I would like to bring up the point that in a successful hive mind (wise crowd) individuals must retain their independence.
It could stand in contrast to how we imagine 'all knowing' collective life form (i.e. Matrix, Borg, Voldemort and Sauron from lord of the rings films) who are often portrayed as evil and menacing.
It will be complicated, and beyond our comprehension, for a machine to track us so effectively, but we have created tools, like the #HashTag that enable anyone to know when anyone expresses anything in a particular way.
And it doesn't feel like pure evil to me. It is not like just because of twitter's 'Trends' my experience there is governed by the majority. However, because I have that information available I can potentially see what is very popular at the moment. Moreover, I know that I can do this, and that makes me feel like part of something, which makes me feel comfortable and included.

I have never used this feature of twitter, but one day maybe it will become relevant to me. So I am happy it is there.

Maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but take those freedoms away from me, and even if I find it interesting, chances are that to a lot of others this will be boring, and the positive incentive for participation can be lost.
So being a part of a group can make you feel like you have power, just like everyone else. Just because you do not write the code or have administrative permissions, doesn't make you a powerless user. You could even argue that those with that power trade off some of their freedom to say whatever they wish because they are under growing scrutiny by you and everyone else. Simply being the party which does the majority of the work in the background, creating the platform (the 'queens'), doesn't mean you have more say in how the group acts. Remember that the group contains millions of users, their collective intelligent is vast, but it is not necessarily in the hands of the admins to guide based on their whims. With Such intelligence, the group should be able to spot when the queen is doing something which is against the group's best interest, and render her action meaningless or make her stop.
In Star Trek, when the Borg Queen wants something that defies the interest of the drones (Season 6 Ep 26 "Unimatrix Zero"), she must disconnect them from the hive mind. I may be overlooking aspects of the particular storyline, but I like the fact that once we delve into the working of the Borg we discover that the queen is not all powerful, she is in fact an admin. as powerful as any other drone, after a fashion, and helps making up the collective.
It is not the case with the Borg, but realistically all the parts of such crowds could have a positive reasons and incentives to be a part. The scrutiny of that happiness is also a powerful tool in the hands of the crowd. The group can be stronger if individuals truly wish to stay.

Why is it going to become very important to be nice.

This is the working title I have at the moment, it expresses my conclusions, which I came to after these last two weeks. I think my dissertation is going to be about the inescapable fact that more and more of our information is available online. What I'm really interested in is the possibility that with increasing social capabilities and tools online, basic and fundamental qualities of human interaction are tapped into on an unprecedented scale. The main facilitator of these phenomena is of course the Internet. I'm sure there are many more potentials to our societies, but I would like to focus on Social Capital and the wisdom of crowds.

Social capital is essentially that which attracts us to groups. Apparently there are two kinds of social capital ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’. The first kind brings us closer together to members of groups we belong to, and the second expands the borders of existing groups. The Internet makes such connections possible on an international scale, but more importantly near instantaneously. Our race did not have this capability little over a decade ago. So the potential and the implication of this is unmapped, uncharted and impossible to predict.

The Wisdom of crowds is a social potential, which is misunderstood; admittedly I am not sure if I understand it completely if at all. However, I am aware of it and the more I look into it the more undeniable it seems. It is odd because certain aspects of it sound too fantastic to be real. The Wisdom of crowds is normally ‘shown’ in classroom and isolated experiments, such as a group consistently guessing how many jellybeans are in a jar or how much will livestock weigh after it's been slaughtered. It also seems to me that those who are aware of it, strive to use it to make things better. I am more interested in observing it 'in the wild '. The Internet is like the Savannah, it is man-made and it enables its inhabitants to do almost whatever they please, alone and in groups. Instead of collectively guessing the right answer, the Wisdom of crowds’ most prolific use on the web  (insofar as I could observe) is as a human filter mechanism. It is what I like to think of as a bullshit meter. Like other great things on the web, it is non-orchestrated and loosely if at all managed. It is what happens when someone, most notably corporate bodies and governments try to fold the public, or whoever their actions are aimed at.

The biggest problem I face when I go online and look at say, in article, is establishing its credibility. And I think it is an understatement to say that I'm not alone. Thus, a simple mechanism such as a comments area turns into the feeding ground relating to the earlier metaphor of the Savannah. In the comments, even though we are driven by self-interest, we can aggregate our knowledge and together establish the validity of the said article. I want to argue that what we are proving here is whether or not the original poster (OP) is being genuine. And I don't think it's only limited to high visibility court cases and government scandals. I feel that this public scrutiny coupled with increasing visibility of our actions means that we would have to adapt our behaviour to what others think. So when I use the word ‘nice’ it's not in the ‘have a nice day’ meaning, nice in that sense feels hypocritical. The kind of nice I am talking about is the compromising kind, how you are when you know you can't get away with taking the p***.

I'm still not sure how to connect all the dots but I think I may have a ‘case’.

Wish me luck, hopefully I will be writing a lot more about this in the near future