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A Reflection on Anne Frances Wysock’s English 202

Current archeological theory puts the origins of writing in Mesopotamia over six thousand years age. It is hypothesized that the first symbols where clay tokens used to account for products used in agricultural trade. Somewhere along the line an entrepreneur started using a reed stylus to mark inventory down on a piece of clay. From these mundane origins as a primitive spreadsheet, cuneiform writing evolved. A surprising number of cuneiform writings have transition themselves to the digital age. The Internet is a hungry information beast, devouring Cuneiform, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, Mayan, Latin, Greek, Demonic … any text from any era, be it on clay tablets, stone, papyrus, bamboo, frescos, or paper. An insatiable cavernous void in mind of humanity demands to be filled with knowledge. Reading transforms writing into knowledge that fills the void. What is writing? Writing is a noun that is a verb. Writing is an act of transmitting thought through an intermediate media. What parts do
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Jane McGonigal - I love Bees

What was surprising, new, or unexpected was the conceptual framework of collective intelligence. Hence Bees. The idea of the hive, but then this is also the same concept mixed into a neural network concept. The potential outcomes CI (Collective Intelligence) games, could be a whole new collaborative framework. In some ways this is happening now. The Internet is slowly tearing down the linear and regularly scheduled world of the industrial era. Twitter is immediacy that supersedes the time frame of news at 11:00. Perhaps it is vanity and hubris also. The electronic social networks become self promoting MEs, screaming into the network. How are stories worked into this new CI world? In an abstract since stories are models for behavioral interaction. Stories are snippets of social code. CI ... creating virtual collective models of the world, or alternate world ... these can be fantastic tool of analysis. Games and modeling are bedfellows. The attempt to make predictive models of the world

thoughts on network play

I remember years ago working with Northwestern Mutual Life on their first web page deployment. They developed a simple "game" which would lead the play through a set of question and then determine the players life expectancy. It was a perfect game for a life insurance company, since it was driven by actuarial tables. One of the most interesting aspects of the Internet is the capability to create ad hoc collectives in order to create computer programs, literature and art. The very underlying structure of the Internet, that is the protocols that make it all work, are the product of collaborative work perform by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Take the IETF as an example of a collective endeavor. The IETF develops standards through working groups. The working groups do most of their discussion via e-mail discussion groups. The IETF befuddled traditional standards organizations such as the venerable IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the ISO (Inte