June 11 2008 / by Alvis
Category: The Web Year: General Rating: 5 Hot
Jamais Cascio at Open the Future is on to
something big with a new concept he calls the
Participatory Decepticon, the yang to the yin that is the
Participatory
Panopticon. The general idea is that we’re beginning to see
instances of modified/corrupted video content that can greatly
benefit the deceiver via a spike of monetizable attention.
“Such a deception wouldn’t stand for very long, but would almost
certainly last long enough set off a wave of furious blog posts and
mainstream media attention,” argues Cascio, citing political videos
as an example.
Having been burned by fake news like the
iphone face-to-face talk photos and having seen many a critical
thinker hoodwinked by
April Fool’s blog posts I certainly agree that this Decepticon
is in its nascency. The corruption, camoflaging, variation seems to
indicate a new type of evolutionary internet-based
memetic/temetic/content mechanism at work. The fact that deliberate
content “mutation” has economic upside, as seen in the increase of
April Fool’s spoofs, indicates that more brains will take advantage
of the opportunity, especially as the value of human attention
continues to rise. Thus, certain deceptive content packets will
replicate and proliferate much more quickly thanks to the fluid
content economy enable by the internet .
One might call this “accelerating deception”, which seems like a
logical counterpart to the
exponential information growth.
If we view memes and temes as more or less alive, as
Susan Blackmore (one of the most important minds in information
theory right now) argues and I tend to concur, then what’s
happening is these little virtual organisms (in concert with
humans, for now) are developing new survival and reproduction
strategies.
At the same time, humans are benefiting from the increasingly
rapid release of content variations. – Yes, there is a silver
lining. (cont.)
Cascio provides a nice example related to political
campaigns:
“I suspect that, once we see a faked video score a hit on a
candidate, that we’ll see myriad counter-attacks and
follow-ups.”
What’s fascinating about such a scenario, and all the
conceivable permutations, is that it’s likely to result in an array
of possibilities (meme market) that generates not just stickier
content, but potentially flat-out better content.
For instance, I’ve often encountered ideas that I though needed
just a little boost or modification to get better. This type of
normalized cultural behavior would allow myself and thousands of
others to do just that (create a funnier joke, better campaign
slogan, etc.), garner both credit and credits, and avoiding looking
like a jerk (probably).
Just imagine the industries that such content
modification/mutation can, and will, be applied to: movies (create
a better ending), news (create a better broadcast or write a better
summary – already happening), songs (write a more viral version of
a tune, benefit both the artist and yourself), etc.
We’ve already seen the basic principle at work in moveon.org’s
user-submitted Obmama commercial
campaign, but now it looks as though its escaping top-down
structure as people begin to grock the potantial of the online
attention market.
In other words, as deception proliferates we should also expect
to see a wide range of value-generating mutation variations, aka
stronger memes.
This will be a fascinating dynamic to observe over the coming
years, particularly from an info theory POV.
Accelerating memetic (and temetic) evolution.
Hunch: This is yet another phase of the web mimicking
natural human behavior (ultimately quantifying it) and making
it faster.
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