Maybe I'd See More Clearly if I Was a True Visionary

I spent some time last week at Vidfest on Granville Island in Vancouver last Thursday and Friday.  I always feel so out of my league there.  A veritable herd of creative digital artists operating on the vanguard of new media.  There I am. The lonely mathematician come computer scientist geek who couldn't feel more out of place had I sported a pocket protector and duct-taped eyeglasses.  Some might say the latter part of the last century belonged to the nerds, but I'm convinced the first part of the 21st shall be owned by the artists.

In any event, I wanted to talk about the session presented by Mark Pesce.  Now by all accounts, Mark is a thought leader in the domain of social networks and the impact of technology on those networks.  And in truth, I thought he was really interesting and dynamic speaker to listen to.  I was fascinated about what he had to say about the Dunbar Number for example.  But I've got to confess, I just couldn't fathom some of the things he was talking about.

To start with, he sort of talked about this social network with two degrees of separation.  By way of example, he says the most people can handle in mentally modelling people is around 150 people.  So if each of your 150 people you know also has their own network of 150 people (with some overlap undoubtedly), he discovered in his own world that there are about 1 million people withing two degrees of separation from him.  As such, why wasn't spamming using such data to do spam filtering?

Being an engineer by nature, I just saw a plethora of problems with using this data as such.  Spoofing source e-mail addresses is one of the easiest techniques for spamming, so I'm not entirely sure how effective that model would be.  Never mind how e-mail addresses actually track and map to actual people - without some sort of pervasive true identity tracking mechanism (SXIP anyone?).  Maybe if I gave this some more serious thought I could begin to see the merit of his point in practice, but at first blush I couldn't quite get it.

But the point that really escaped me was his discussion about using ones own phone to "just listen".  Now he meant that in a rather abstract way, but he did seem quite enthralled by a recent Sony Ericsson model that seems to sport enough battery life such that in can indeed record your entire day.  Mark was particular excited about this capability and proceeded to show how he could mashup (in principle) his day's recordings, with his day's conversations, with his day's calendar, and indeed by using bluetooth snooping, even bluetooth identities of people he has been in proximity to.

Now this is where I completely fell off the cliff as I attempted to peer into the future.  Particulary with respect to social networking, I could think of no practical application of recording my daily conversations and mashing them with anything.  I even had a hard time convincing myself there was a business need for such a capability let alone a social networking angle to the whole concept.  I have trouble matching up my handwritten notes to anything of relevance in my life.  I'm just not sure what I would do if my day-to-day aural life were available in archive format.  In short I could see the propensity for more data, but I really failed to see the resultant information that could be derived from that data.

So I sat charmed, but perplexed by Mark.  I felt as deep a disconnect with Mark as I had when I first discovered the magic of computers.  My very first computer program was one that solved matrix equations.  When I finally got it running I was bursting with excitement and tried to demonstrate the brilliance of the idea to my father.  Alas my dad came from another generation and coulld see neither the need nor the value of such a program - but was genuinely happy that the creation of such a program appeared to bring his mathematically inclined son such joy.

So Mark:  I'm happy that you have these ideas.  I can even understand how you must feel about some of these ideas.  But I'm afraid I lack the vision to see where I can go with them.  I invite readers out there to help me cross that chasm.  What do you see as the value - particularly with respect to social networking - of some of the technologies Mark was talking about?  Comments please!