Shared experience, shared concerns, shared aspirations

I’ve just spent some time skimming through my fellow student’s lifestream blogs, trawling for nuggets of information, such as how to better automate some of the data aggregation for this blog,  and for reassurance that what I’m doing bears some resemblance to what they’re doing.

Helen Murphy’s thoughts in particular chime with my own and I recognise the overarching need to impose some order on the randomness of the format, as well as to make it look nice.  

At some level perhaps that desire to make data aesthetically pleasing is a peculiarly human trait.  Having read Sian’s paper I’m reluctant to use the phrase “isn’t that what set’s us apart from machines?”.  A machines may need its data to be in a format it can deal with, but to me there a difference between that and rejoicing in data’s beauty, symmetry, asymmetry or some other aspect beyond the individual ones or zeros.

3 thoughts on “Shared experience, shared concerns, shared aspirations”

  1. This is really interesting, Nigel; I wonder if you think aesthetics and order are both strikingly subjective issues?

    Do you think there are any other underlying concerns, issues or even paranoias that are having an impact on how we develop our lifestream, and our initial reactions to it? For example, I think on some level I’m trying with my blog to give the impression that my ideas are developing in a linear, constructivist way (which, truthfully, they are not).

    1. >I wonder if you think aesthetics and order are both strikingly subjective issues?
      Aesthetics yes, although no doubt someone could write an algorithm that enabled AI to rank artefacts in an order that the majority of humans find most appealing (the difference being in the ‘majority’ element perhaps. At the very least preferences are likely to vary between cultures and, one would hope, between individuals, although I’m aware that big data often shows that we’re less individual than we might think!

      >I think on some level I’m trying with my blog to give the impression that my ideas are developing in a linear, constructivist way
      To be honest I haven’t got as far as thinking too strategically about it yet, I’m still coming to terms with what I want it to do and trying to avoid posting Tweets just for the sake of it. Quite apart from anything else I’ve not been a big user of Twitter and those who follow me will wonder why on Earth I’ve suddenly started bombarding them with links to AI related content. 🙂
      At some level I’m starting to see the lifestream as a natural extension of my note taking, almost as if it’s showing how I got to the stuff I want to keep, an expansion of my search history that includes the conversations I’ve had, the TV and radio programmes that have sparked an idea or a need to follow up, the ideas that have come to me when I’ve not expected them. I guess all that will start to show where my thinking has come from and is going but probably not without some active curation (and yes, making it look attractive!)

Leave a Reply