the sensory web

I know I keep talking about the next web and everyone is getting a little bored I am sure. But it is beginning to make sense to me, really. For a long time I have been talking about a very specific Wired article about augmenting human senses. Basically, some German researchers thought it would be interesting to give humans a sense of true north. Birds have this sense built in (maybe from magnetite in their stomachs?) and it helps them to migrate thousands of miles and know where they are going. But humans don't have magnetite in our stomachs (unless you are a cyborg. Its why men get lost and need to ask for directions.

So the Germans made a belt. And the northern most part of the belt would vibrate just a little. After a month, the bird-people had molded their brains enough to expect this. The researchers found that the people had an incredibly good sense o direction. In fact, when the experiment was over and the belts were taken away most of the people freaked out and bought GPS devices.

This is why people freak out when Twitter goes down. Twitter is a new human sense. Throughout history some people have been really good in social situations. They had an innate sense to say or do the right thing, or to better understand the people they were talking to. Clearly these people had a distinct advantage and we evolved into a social species.

The Futurists all wrote about how computers will think for us. And I they were probably very close. The computers will add senses to us. 6th senses. 7th senses. People will become more and more intuitive based on these enhanced senses. Mike tells me I should be reading Kurzweil and he is probably right.

The "Social Sense" that twitter adds is like the true-north belt. When you receive status updates it is like a little buzz telling you what is happening in your chosen social sphere. If this just happened once it would be helpful. Instead it happens constantly and your brain adapts to expect this information. For people who don't use Twitter (or Facebook status updates) it is difficult to understand this. It seems like exhibitionism and voyeurism.

But suppose you did it. Suppose you got status updates on your phone and you could tell from the latest updates that a particular friend was feeling down. This might cause you to call or see the friend to cheer them up. Critics of Twitter are always saying that you should call your friend to ask how they are doing. Sure. But what if you just knew?

More than once I have stopped myself from making an ill-timed joke or recognized the dynamic of a room of friends at a party simply because I follow their status updates. I admit it isn't perfect, but I feel it gives me a distinct advantage in social situations compared to those who do not understand the context.

This is why the notification web is important. This is why twitter is a platform. The interesting thing about sensory perception is that it is a series of notifications you sense things by letting your brain respond to incoming streams of sensation. Smells, lights, touch... anything. Notification applications (like Twitter) will tend toward success if they cultivate "senses".

Twitter focuses on social senses, but there are a lot of other lesser known senses that could be enhanced. When someone says "he has good business sense" it is a figure of speech. What they mean is, he has an intuitive ability to do the right thing in business situations. Suppose you can train the brain to respond better by using an enhanced set of notifications. Something more fundamental than just having good data. Something targeted and constant. Can you imagine if you had the same sensation about a business deal as you had standing on the edge of a cliff? We see the height of the cliff and know not to walk off of it, mainly because we have trained our minds by walking off of smaller things. People understood this before understanding gravity. Maybe it is possible to give someone good business sense without them understanding the dynamics of market forces and economics as well.

It is fairly amazing to watch the rate at which the internet is going through massive iterations.