Mnemonomics

Mnemonomics: Social Networking as Collaborative Memory Richard Smyth, Ph.D. EDCO Collaborative 11 April 2008

Purpose/Objectives
Theory
Propose a way to conceptualize new technologies as aides de memoire
Practice
Offer practical way of managing information overload

Part I: Theory A New Concept for Communications Technology
Mneme: “memory”
Nomos: “management”
Mnemonomics: “managing memory”

A Brief History of Memory
Orality
f2f communication (storytellers)
memories/history stored in human brains
Literacy (alphabetic and print)
memory stored in books, libraries
Electracy (“secondary orality”)
memory stored electronically/digitally
“ Pixels are the movable type of the future” (Stafford 288).

Technology as Prosthesis
Think of communications technologies as expanding functions of the human mindbrain:
memory
reason
emotion
social networking

Technology as Amplication
“ The knowledge and technologies that triggered the jump from clan to tribe to nation to market to network all shared one characteristic: They each amplified the way individual humans think and communicate, and magnified their ability to share what they know.”
(Rheingold, Smart Mobs 181)

Technology as Augmentation
“ What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: a prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential. Alphabetic writing is an artificial memory that supports long complex chains of reasoning impossible to sustain within the organic mind. Digital imaging similarly supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity.”
(Ulmer “Electracy and Pedagogy”)

Web2.0 as Mnemonic Prosthetic
How are new technologies changing the nature of memory?
How do they supplement our memory?
How do they free up our minds from having to remember?

del.icio.us as public memory
“ The actual database represents crystallized attention--what people are looking at, and what they're trying to remember.”
--Joshua Schacter
(founder of del.icio.us, quoted in Wikinomics p. 42)

Searching Other People’s Memory
Searching Google = searching robot memory
Searching del.icio.us = searching (expanded, technologically enhanced) human memory
“ Google knows the words on the pages but doesn’t know what the pages are about.”
(Weinberger, “Tagging Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet”)

On following tags in del.icio.us
“ It’s like having the world of people who care about a topic tell you everything they found of interest and, unlike at Google, you’ll find the pages the people have decided are about your topic.”
(Weinberger, “Tagging Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet”)

Collective Intelligence: Epistemology as Community
If del.icio.us is a way to publicly remember personal websites, then networking with others on del.icio.us is a way of adding other people’s memories to your own .
Who you know becomes how you know: epistemology as community.
(Smyth “Memory in the Age of Electracy”)

Part II: Practice How to Manage Information Overload
Check news aggregator daily!
Subscribe to relevant sources
“ Memorize” immediately: scan, select, and organize

How to “Memorize” a Blogline
Check to “Keep New”
200 headlines max! [first (#)]
Feedlist tells how many kept “new” [second (#)]

“ Clip” the blogline
Save to clippings folder
Create folders!

Save to bookmarking site (e.g. del.icio.us)

Warnings!
If you don’t “Keep New” or “Clip,” the headline will disappear!!
When (not if ) you fall behind, don’t be afraid to make them all disappear! (You would have been missing them anyway….)

Suggestions
Spend some time experiencing news!
think of bloglines as “storage”
think of listening/reading as “retrieval”
Don’t keep duplicates
if you clip a blog, don’t keep it new
after experiencing an item, bookmark it
if you bookmark it, delete from clippings

del.icio.us -- Mnemonomic Practices
use multiple tags to increase access during searches and be part of emergent folksonomic paradigms
e.g. informationliteracy, information_literacy, infolit
research tag labels before using
search for the tags you think to use
use what appear to be the most common

del.icio.us -- Mnemonomic Practices
bundle all tags
immediately categorize newly created tags to avoid buildup
put “uncategorized” into a miscellaneous bundle
create new bundles as patterns emerge among miscellaneous
bundles categorize & express interests

Network with those who share your foci in del.icio.us
Mnemonomic Social Networking: Social Bookmarking

Mnemonomic Social Networking: Social Bookmarking
Watch who’s watching you!
you might want to establish a “mutual connection” in del.icio.us (like the one between informationgoddess29 and me), depending on their interests as expressed in their bundles and tags

Mnemonomic Social Networking: Microblogging
www.twitter.com -- who are you following?

Mnemonomic Social Networking: Slidesharing
www.slideshare.net -- who’s in your group?

Mnemonomic Social Networking: Epistemology as Community
Collective intelligence: communities of individuals who publicly map their skills so that everybody else in the community is aware of who has what available skills (Levy)
the above social networking sites are nascent forms of collective intelligence and collaborative mnemonics

Works Cited/Resources
Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Levy, Pierre. “Trees of Knowledge.” Connected Magazine. 7 July 1997. Viewed 10 April 2008. http://www.connected.org/learn/levy.html .
Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution . Cambridge, MA: Pegasus Publishing, 2002.
Smyth, Richard. “Memory in the Age of Electracy.” Scholaris Erratus (blog). 11 October 2007. Viewed 10 April 2008. http://rsmyth.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/memory-in-the-age-of-electracy/ .
Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio, 2006.
Ulmer, Gregory. L. “Electracy and Pedagogy.” Viewed 10 April 2008. http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/longman/pedagogy/electracy.html .
Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman, 2003.
Weinberger, David. “Tagging Lets Ordinary Users Organize the Internet.” NPR (20 September 2005). Viewed 10 April 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4856924 .

Contact
Richard Smyth, Ph.D.
[email_address]
http://www.anabiosispress.org/rsmyth
http://del.icio.us/rsmyth
http://twitter.com/rsmyth
http://slideshare.net/rsmyth

Mnemonomics

by Richard Smyth on Apr 10, 2008

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