As of this writing, you can walk the streets of New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami–maybe more. The automated stitching of panoramas from different days and times makes for some high-tech surrealist photography. Continuing the twisted translation of reality into the Googleverse…. Just wait until these are fed by realtime surveillance/web cameras and the most-recent geotagged Flickr photos.

Youthful disclaimer: Apart from being grandiose, I take creative license with biology, genetics and computer science to serve my own save-the-world agenda.

Late morning sun is warm and bright, here at the June edge of a Santa Cruz summer. A fabulous condition. The 2000+ crowd of moms, dads, grandparents, professors, friends and lovers fills the Porter College quad to overflowing. They churn in happy cacophany. In the middle of it all: the black-robed block of soon-to-be-graduates, sweating in the sun. And up above, the great oak trees sway, their music inaudible above the crowd sound.

I am sitting behind the provost, faculty and fellows on stage, eyes closed in meditation. I listen to the sentimental speeches: a dance professor who urges us to be passionate people; a fellow student who bears to us her honeycomb heart; the provost who commends our achievements and foretells our great works. Meanwhile, the breath goes in and out, and with it goes all fear, anxiety, pride, hesitation. The provost calls my name and I rise, black robes flowing toward the heavy podium and an ocean of faces. With palms laid face-up on the wood I speak:

“This is dedicated to the one I love…..”

An eruption of smiles and laughter as I pause before completing the invocation:

“….You.”

I look into the crowd before me and begin a slow scan of the faces. Trying, to the limit of my ability, to make eye contact with each and every person. As I do, they slowly catch on to the meaning of my words. Now the smiles are ten-fold wider, the laughter ten-fold louder. There are a lot of people in the audience. It takes a long time. I make a complete circle, turning to include the faculty and administrators sitting behind me, until once again I am facing the ocean, now totally silent but vibrating with glee. Up above, I hear the wind blowing through the oak trees like a great, invisible breath. I begin.

I come before you in this moment, not as a bearer of words, but of a Word.

The human genome is a single, glorious Word three billion letters in length. And though spelled from an alphabet of only four characters, this one Word is more profound than all the words uttered by all our poets. For the sound of its articulation is the human being, and, by extension: all the poetry, the cave paintings, and the atom bombs that have sprung from our hands, mouths and minds.

Human creativity is Nature’s creativity, expressing through us.

Now science races to transcribe the text of our genome. When UC Santa Cruz became the first institution to share this text freely on the Internet for all to see, our species took one more step in a great Initiation. For with the deciphering of DNA’s code, the flesh will be made Word. We will step back to contemplate the very bodies in which we are clothed.

Through the vehicle of human cognition, Nature is striving to understand itself. And the arrival of this understanding will serve as The Great Reminder: that we and every species of plant, animal and microbe are branches on a Tree of Life that has been growing on this planet for three and a half billion years. Each branch is a unique expression of Nature’s endless creativity; humanity is but the most recent branchlet, straining up toward the Sun.

Did you know? You share half your genetic code with common yeast. You are 90% genetically identical to the field mouse, and only 1% separates you from the chimpanzee.

I pause as the graduates break out in wild monkey hoots and screeches (a Porter College tradition frowned upon by the administration).

And the difference between you and everyone else in this audience? A mere tenth of a percent.

What makes humankind unique among all the branches in the Tree of Life? It is our Creative Intellect, reflecting in microcosm Nature’s own creative power to fashion novel forms out of our environment. So our own creations, artistic and technological, are themselves yet further branchings in Nature’s Tree.

Thus it’s no wonder that the most advanced developments of our Information Age bear such close resemblance to Nature’s own forms: the World Wide Web, extending our collective memory in a global embrace, bears an ever-increasing resemblance to the brain’s own network organization. Computer scientists design search algorithms based on the foraging patterns of ants. Digital information storage, massively parallel computation, nanotechnology–these are all basic functions of DNA’s double helix. To call these concepts “new” is like the chicken claiming to have invented the egg.

On the Tree of Life, humanity’s Creative Mind is the one and only fruit, nurturing within it the seed — invention! — the vessel by which DNA’s message will be carried to the stars. To plant new gardens before ours is consumed in the fire of our dying Sun.

H.G. Wells wrote, “History is a race between education and disaster.”

Caught up in the dizzying spell that is modern culture, humanity has forgotten its connection to the Tree of Life.

We have forgotten our kinship with every plant and animal.

Forgotten how to live in equilibrium with our environment.

Forgotten the Word, that binds all people as one human family.

Forgotten the true source of our creativity: Nature.

And we have forgotten the stars, though they shine on us every night.

Yet this state of affairs is not tragedy! It is opportunity: for each one of us to apply the creative mind. Whether to design high-technology, adopt ecologically sustainable ways of living, or simply to extend the smile of friendship to strangers you pass in the street. We are all acting out The Great Reminder.

Remember: the stars.

Remember: imagination–the inside of our heads–is the greatest frontier.

Remember: You are the Tree of Life, branches reaching upward for the Sun, ever-seeking new possibilities for being.

And what is, perhaps, closest to being, is beginning.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

To echo Roy Pea, who sent me the link, this is perhaps the best example of using a YouTube video to educate that I’ve ever seen. The video is a work-in-progress and you can give your feedback directly to the creators at their blog.

When an architect designs a physical community space, she considers how the architecture will shape social interactions. A long hallway of offices creates an utterly different dynamic than desks with arranged in an open space. One might foster individuality, privacy, propriety; the other: collaboration, distraction, communalism.

Still, physical spaces can be flexibly repurposed and worked around if the inhabitants desire a social dynamic not instantly afforded by the space. Office doors can be left open to invite easier interaction. Partitions can be raised between adjacent desks to limit distraction and increase privacy.

That’s physical architecture. The information architectures of online communities are far more deterministic and far less flexible. They literally define the social architecture by pre-specifying in immutable computer code what information you have access to, who you can talk to, where you can go. In the online world, information architecture = social architecture.

In one sense, I’m echoing Marshall McLuhan: the form and constraints of a medium shape the thoughts and behaviors of those who use them. Every user interface and information architecture is a different medium that has a fundamental influence on its users’ thoughts.

This is true at a gross scale: how is the social architecture of Flickr different from that of Shutterfly? For one, Flickr invites the world into the community to share photos with each other. Shutterfly only lets its users share with specific friends and family members. The first is a commons. The second is the suburbs.

It’s also true at the level of the finest details, which bears on an online community design project I’m engaged in now with Howard Rheingold and a group of professional and student journalists. Our goal is to design the next-generation platform for digital journalism. As an example of how the finest of details can profoundly alter the social architecture of a community: do we show the photograph of a news story’s author in their by-line? Doing so would create a more personal connection to the writer. It would also invite reader bias based on race, gender or good looks. It’s a small detail with large implications.

I think this is an issue which can and should influence our design process. If we build a platform piecemeal, by sticking together “features” which, in isolation, seem useful, we’re not aware of the larger social architecture being created. The features may be contradictory in the social dynamics they engender.

Better would be to start at the broadest level — not the details — by designing the social architecture we’d like to create and find the pieces that will work harmoniously to manifest it.

Edward Tufte at Stanford

Edward Tufte spoke at Stanford this afternoon and I had the pleasure of being in attendance. It was an unconventional talk, as far as academic lectures go, for Tufte was speaking “in the first person” about his own life: his origins in rural Nebraska, his education and formative years, his mentors who influenced his thinking, and the turning points that signaled moments of profound reorientation. As Tufte noted, for a sample size of N=1, the estimated variance is infinite; so other sources should be consulted.

Tufte has had a remarkable career and speaks as someone who appears to have found the courage to follow his bliss, leaving a tenured professorship at Yale to self-publish his famous books on visual information, go on speaking tours, and make large-scale landscape art in his Connecticut backyard.

There were three big lessons I took away from his talk.

Contribute to forever knowledge.

The most important decision a researcher makes is choosing what problem to focus on. One should choose problems that are not only profoundly important, but ones for which good progress is possible. It’s worth nothing to work on grand problems and make no progress. Tufte’s own compass for this decision: contribute to Forever Knowledge. That is, create knowledge that will be universally useful to humankind in any time or place in human history. Tufte ditched his career as a political economy theorist because he found he was working on only temporarily important problems, things he decided were not worth his “time, energy, passion and mind.”

Be self-exemplifying.

In whatever one’s work, be not only a great communicator of ideas and practices, be an exemplar of those same practices and this will communicate the value of what you are saying far better than anything else. Tufte’s books are not only superb treatises on the visual display of information, they are also exemplary demonstrations of clear visual communication. I call them the Kama Sutra of information graphics.

Strive for personal utopia.

Here again, Tufte is, as he presents it, self-exemplifying. While utopian cultures may be unattainable, you can pretty well approximate an ideal life through clarity of purpose, courage to act on that purpose, and, most importantly, doing what you love.

The poem Tufte opened his talk with was excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, fitting for a self-reflection.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

This is a 1728 Geometry text.

Geometry was the network science of its day, with its richly visual mathematical aesthetic. This is the sort of beautiful abstraction that would drive someone to spend years of life teasing out the endless permutations of a set of axioms. 1728 was the height of the Age of Enlightenment, long before Godel came and tread on the dreams of the humble mathematical ascetic.

Today, researchers of all stripes learn an unspoken rule: beautiful visualization of data makes for “sexy” science. In other words, cool information graphics lead to tenure. It’s partly because visual communication is simply more compelling and has a wider mass appeal. That’s why networks research shows up in the New York times: because it has sexy graphics, not because it’s going to catch terrorists.

It’s no wonder that someone like Edward Tufte, an authority on the visual display of quantitative information, is a kind of cult hero. His books are the Kama Sutra of information graphics.

“Americans have one third fewer close friends and confidants than two decades ago, and the number of people who have none has more than doubled.”

Are Americans more disconnected now than they were twenty years ago? Have they retreated into their selves? (or their cells? (or their cell ph.s?)) Has the connection dwindled? We know people can and do form intense and authentic emotional bonds over digital media like IRC, the web and World of Warcrack. Have the close confidants of a large segment of the population (teens and younger, mostly) moved to a “virtual” category that didn’t have a bubble on the General Social Survey?

Probably.

While the data showed a drop in confidants who are friends or who are family members, there was a far greater drop-off in friends. So close friendships are dwindling — or is it consolidating? All we know is: networks of trust and kinship have grown more sparse.

What are the ramifications of such dramatic social change? Bradley Heinz suggests

We’re becoming more self-referential by relying more on family. In our growing isolation, I see a genetic analogy: our waning social exposure is like inbreeding…

To take the analogy further, fewer social contacts equal a reduced mutation rate of family belief and value systems. Children more closely resemble their parents sociologically. Back into the family fold.

But if the real reason for this anomaly in the GSS data is due to the rise of virtual confidantes, then the mutation rate might actually be on the rise due to globally expanded social exposure. Children raised from birth with internet access whisper secrets into ears thousands of miles away.

So where do you fall? Who and where are your confidants?

Tonight I attended what I consider to be an historic meeting of minds: several rockstars in the long, strange and entangled common history of 60s counterculture and commune life, mind-expanding chemicals, personal computing, virtual communities and Web 2.0.

Stewart Brand: founder of the Whole Earth Catalog — a series of books that single-handedly educated a generation of countercultural do-it-yerselfers — and the WELL — arguably the first virtual community.

Kevin Kelly: founding executive editor of Wired magazine and CoEvolution Quarterly, journalist and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World — which told a better tale about emergence and complexity science than the Santa Fe Institute ever could.

Howard Rheingold: the great tech-culture journalist and “freelance instigator”, educator on participatory media in journalism and learning, author of Smart Mobs: the next social revolution, the Virtual Community, and several other works. Howard is also lately becoming my collaborator around the idea of using participatory media in the classroom.

Fred Turner: Stanford professor of Communications and Digital Media, one of my mentors, and now celebrated author of the superb work of scholarship and story-telling that brought all these free-thinking intellectuals together tonight: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

I have much to share with you about what these folks shared with me tonight, but it’s 4:42am and will have to wait.

The tag cloud displayed on my name tag at Stanford University’s H-STAR faculty retreat.

I created tag clouds for every professor’s name tag to visualize their research interests based on research statements and resumes. It was such a treat to watch these great minds interacting and using the tag clouds as launching points for conversations.

I made the tag clouds at TagCrowd. Check it out and play with creating your own clouds from your papers, resume, poetry, chat logs, or whatever suits your fancy.