I wish I had a thousand-yen note for every journalist who, over the past decade, has asked me whether Japan is still as futurologically sexy as it seemed to be in the '80s. If I did, I'd take one of these spotlessly lace-upholstered taxis over to the Ginza and buy my wife a small box of the most expensive Belgian chocolates in the universe. I'm back to Tokyo tonight to refresh my sense of place, check out the post-Bubble city, professionally resharpen that handy Japanese edge. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technology-driven, you pay attention to Japan. There are reasons for that, and they run deep.

Dining late, in a plastic-draped gypsy noodle stall in Shinjuku, the classic cliché better-than-Blade Runner Tokyo street set, I scope my neighbor's phone as he checks his text messages. Wafer-thin, Kandy Kolor pearlescent white, complexly curvilinear, totally ephemeral looking, its screen seethes with a miniature version of Shinjuku's neon light show. He's got the rosary-like anticancer charm attached; most people here do, believing it deflects microwaves, grounding them away from the brain. It looks great, in terms of a novelist's need for props, but it may not actually be that next-generation in terms of what I'm used to back home.

Tokyo has been my handiest prop shop for as long as I've been writing: sheer eye candy. You can see more chronological strata of futuristic design in a Tokyo streetscape than anywhere else in the world. Like successive layers of Tomorrowlands, older ones showing through when the newer ones start to peel. (William Gibson)

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Brain candy |  » article quote

Kevin Warwick is a Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, UK. His book In the Mind of the Machine gives a warning of a future in which machines are more intelligent than humans. In 1998 and 2002 he received surgical implants which shocked the scientific community. The second of these linked his nervous system to the internet. His experiments are reported on in his autobiography I, Cyborg. Here is the start of a controversial article of his, one that should make us stop and ponder the nature of things to come (you can read the entire article clicking on the link below):

"Is The Matrix merely a science fiction scenario, or is it, rather, a philosophical exercise? Alternatively, is it a realistic possible future world? The number of respected scientists predicting the advent of intelligent machines is growing exponentially. Steven Hawking, perhaps the most highly regarded theoretical scientist in the world and the holder of the Cambridge University chair that once belonged to Isaac Newton, said recently, "In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months. So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world." He added, "We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it." The important message to take from this is that the danger—that we will see machines with an intellect that outperforms that of humans—is real." (Kevin Warwick) » More...

Net |  » article quote

It was about time Cyberhe@d 2010 found its way back online after a year's low-profile period due to my pressing webmastering commitments on the school website. I'd long been thinking of attempting something new in the way of graphic design and CSS implementation.

Graphicwise, the new website is much more streamlined and, if I may say so, reflects all the cutting-edge improvements in terms of formatting and design that I've been able to implement in recent times. The old one, I'm afraid, had got out of hand lately and bloated up to a number of pages far above my initial expectations. That's why I do sincerely hope that Cyberhe@d 2010 may be now easier to navigate and slim enough to be visited without visitors getting lost in a maze of pages.

General |  » introductory

With increasing frequency, cultural representations of Internet call on us to conceive of computer mediated communication in terms of space: more precisely, "cyberspace." This spatiality writes place and distance onto the medium, creating, as it were, a topography that becomes more salient to the user than the underlying configuration of technology. Topography serves as a highly appropriate word within a discussion of how these metaphors "write" space. Two metaphors, I would argue, have received considerable amount of currency and describe two very different topographies, found even in the banal expressions "Surf the 'Net" and "Cruise the Information Superhighway." These terms reveal two very different figurations of virtual topography: one that is fluid, plane-oriented, and unbounded; the other that is linear, point-oriented, and Cartesian.1 These two figurations of space correspond to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's description of smooth and striated space. The highway metaphor calls to mind a system that facilitates and regulates the flow of traffic from destination to destination. In other words, it striates space by setting up a system where "lines and trajectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). In "surfing" smooth space, however, "the points are subordinated to the trajectory" (Deleuze and Guattari 478). (Mark Nunes) » More...

Net |  » article quote

The novel is a work of art not so much because of its inevitable resemblance with life but because of the insuperable differences that distinguish it from life.

- Stevenson

And so is thought! Thought is not so much prized for its inevitable convergences with truth as it is for the insuperable divergences that Octarate the two.

It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence. There is no necessity to that. No matter what, our consciousness is never the echo of our own reality, of an existence set in "real time." But rather it is its echo in "delayed time," the screen of the dispersion of the subject and of its identity - only in our sleep, our unconscious, and our death are we identical to ourselves. Consciousness, which is totally different from belief, is more spontaneously the result of a challenge to reality, the result of accepting objective illusion rather than objective reality. This challenge is more vital to our survival and to that of the human species than the belief in reality and in existence, which always refers to spiritual consolations pertaining to another world. Our world is such as it is, but that does not make it more real in any respect. "The most powerful instinct of man is to be in conflict with truth, and with the real."

Postmodern theory |  » article quote

Why be nostalgic? The old body type was always OK, but the wired body with its micro-flesh, multi-media channeled ports, cybernetic fingers, and bubbling neuro-brain finely interfaced to the "standard operating system" of the Internet is infinitely better. Not really the wired body of sci-fi with its mutant designer look, or body flesh with its ghostly reminders of nineteenth-century philosophy, but the hyper-texted body as both: a wired nervous system embedded in living (dedicated) flesh. (Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein).

Postmodern theory |  » article quote

From the book - The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation.

According to the authors Nonaka and Takeuchi, Organizational knowledge-creation is a four step process viz. Socialization, Externilization, Combination, Internalization. It is a four step process where the first step, called socialization is a process in itself where the team members share of their experiences. That way they create a joint platform of tacit knowledge. It is, in the authors' own words, a transfer of tacit knowledge between the team members. The next step in the process is for the team to externailize their joint platform of tacit knowledge. This is called externilization, and is a process where the team transform the tacit knowledge shared in the previous step into explicit knowledge through dialogue and collective reflection. The third step of the process is called combination. This step consists of combiniong explicit knowledge from several sources. The team members exchange and combines their knowledge through medias like documentation, meetings, phone calls, and communication across computer networks. This is a process where explicit knowledge is combined with other explicit knowledge. The fourth and final step of the model, internalization, is a process where the knowledge that has been externalized in the two preceeding steps are turned into tacit knowledge with the individual team member. This process is closely related to learning-by-doing, as it is knowledge acquired through each individual member's own experiences. Once done with this fourth step, the entire cycle repeats itself in a spiral-like fashion. Through iterations and through sharing knowledge and working together to combine it, the organization created new knowledge. . » More ...

 Knowledge theory |  » article quote

I suppose the new electronic culture could be thought of as a fourth culture. Where as in the past only a small number of people did the serious thinking for everybody else, in present day the notion of who gets to do the serious thinking and how that thinking gets done is changing. As the previous sentence suggests, we can look at this change in two ways. First, the notion of who gets to do the serious thinking has clearly shifted over the last few decades. We discussed this in a previous post—this whole idea of a third culture made up of a group of intellectuals whose ideas are more in tune with what is really happening in our world, and thus whose audience is ever widening. This notion of the ever-widening audience is key for it speaks to the second part of the change described above. The number of people who have a taste for science’s new ideas is expanding and as a result, so to is the understanding and thought that’s going into these concepts. The result is that the so-called big questions in society are no longer relegated to the knowledge and minds that reside in the dusty attics of our so-called intellectual institutions. This empowering shift sets the stage for a more efficient and relevant synthesis of knowledge in society. We can think of this as knowledge that bubbles up as opposed to knowledge that trickles down. »

 E culture |  » article quote 

Because of networked technologies such as bloggs, we can finally collaborate as thinkers. Couple this with an intellectual climate that tolerates divergent intellectual pursuits and we have a platform for synthesizing knowledge in a whole different way. There is certainly no denying the fact that society is a complex system, and there is also no denying that we are an increasingly intellectually specialized group. Access to information is no longer an issue. The third culture is making that information easier to assimilate into knowledge. We the people are getting smarter, and the mechanisms of controlling what we do with that knowledge are eroding rapidly. There is no doubt about it folks, we live in exciting times. »

 Information |  » article quote 

Informed participation is less dangerous then the uniformed participation. Is ignorance useful? Maybe at the lower level. We need guys to pick up the garbage. I prefer to word this another way however. Ditch the ignorance and focus on growth rather then friction. How about “specialization is useful”. Breading ignorance is like breading apathy—see below. Ignorance with a little knowledge can be dangerous. The better approach is to promote diversity and specialization while at the same time creating empowering communication channels for those who choose to participate. We need strong feedback mechanisims to ensure high level perspectives are shared through out the system. We need a metric that encourages informed participation. The more you visit your neighbor the more in tune you are to their mind space. The more in touch you are with their mind space the more likely you will be able to speak to their experience. Once you can speak to their experience, and them to yours, you are in a position to collaborate. As pockets of collaboration build through out the system you get closer to a phase change. So, in an effort to move the system toward a phase shift, bridges between Local knowledge (especially specialized knowledge) need to happen on a regular basis. From a design perspective, this means the system should require agents to participate in some form of random yet meaningful “street level” knowledge exchange. This knowledge exchange requirement should not be expedited from the top down, but rather worked into the participation model itself, so that it occurs from the bottom up. »

 Knowledge theory |  » article quote 

Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes points out that "Every popular art form - the novel, the circus, Punch 'n Judy shows, comic strips, movies, rock 'n roll, video games, now the Internet - starts out condemned as trash. One generation's trash is the next generation's art form." I started thinking about the fear of the new -- visceral reactions of disgust and revulsion which are often moral judgements or conservative fear of the old ways disappearing. Like, say, living in your body, or being a single person rather than many. Or watching TV.

Popular |  » article quote 

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." (William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984, page 51).

"Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old parks ringing the old core of Atlanta." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984, page 57).

 Cyberspace according to W. Gibson |  » book quote