MariaD’s blog

This is a very early brainstorm to help me make sense of a feeling. The internet communications are feeling richer than before, and I am trying to figure out why. Researchers say that if you measure the information exchange in face to face conversations, word content accounts for 30-40% of it. The rest of information is in gestures, intonations, body positioning and so on. I will use the word “gestures” to denote all these powerful nonverbal ways to convey tons of information quickly. The places I frequent on the web still mostly use text, with static avatars and occasional photo or video illustrations. But people feel much more real than they did in the early days of blogging.

I think “semantic web” features such as history and trace aggregation, and the ability to “meet” the same person in many web contexts, may serve as an adequate analogy for gestures. Emoticons were designed for something similar, but there is no way they will carry more information than the text they accompany, so they fail as “gesture substitutes.” Say, when I first meet a person on Twitter, I check out the web site: this is like quickly glancing at the person’s clothes and the general appearance and style while meeting face to face. The analogy breaks for people without web sites: I don’t see such a person as naked, but rather as less of an entity. Such people aren’t quite as real!

Quickly checking out the person’s last few blog entries is like getting acquainted with their voice’s inflictions and tone. It takes a bit of time, but it tells you a lot about the person. LinkedIn, Facebook, wikis, nings behaviors - made visible because there is history - allow to accumulate more and more ideas of the person’s pace, style, position.

Moreover, running into the same person on a few of your networks invokes the rather pleasant feeling your are neighbors. Here is that colleague in your ning, in your mailing list, and you microblog reader - it feels like seeing the same familiar face as you jog in the park, shop at the local grocery store, and visit the post office. The general rule of number psychology: “Three is many.” Interacting with the same person on three or more different networks, you will probably feel neighborly.

My conclusion is that it’s important to leave multiple traces as you engage in your web activities, to help people perceive you more fully. It’s probably a good idea to use many different networks together while building online communities, to promote that feeling of strong neighborhood.

I am in the process of interviewing some of my heroes. These are people who help others create their own mathematics. I’d like to introduce Natural Math visitors to these wonderful people and their work. Stay tuned.

In the book - I did not know it got a Nobel - games consist of “playing a bead” symbolizing an entity of culture - a chemical formula, a theorem, a music or art element. The leader of the game is called Magister Ludi, translated as “game master” or “elementary school teacher.” After Magister Ludi played each bead, the group meditated on its meaning and its role in the game up to it.

Here is a seminar I’d like to run. Each bead is a cultural entity, captured as a rich media web object. After the Magister Ludi plays a bead, there is a pause for participants to do their web searches about the bead and share interesting links. Shared object format: the new object you found; your interpretation/feeling/thought on it (meditation made visible); your link from the last bead to this next one. Magister Ludi plays after all the participants, in the same format.

I think it can run on existing software (suggestions are appreciated), but maybe we’ll have to write a module for it. I’d like it to be shiny, like glass beads - those are among my top five favorite objects in the universe.

Of course, we should webcast games live, to open participation to the world. The result of the webcast can be captured, as well. Thinking Elluminate.