Narremes

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Preferential attachment from wikipedia.org via Findings.

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Net Smart by Anthony Weeks and Howard Rheingold via Findings.

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Crowd is Untruth

There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there is also the truth, and that in truth itself there is need of having the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth, so that (to consider for a moment the extreme case), even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all to get together in a crowd—a crowd to which any decisive significance is attributed, a voting, noisy, audible crowd—untruth would at once be in evidence.

- Soren Kierkegaard, The Single Individual, p. 110

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Charges and springs

To draw an analogy from classical physics, one may say that websites are electrically charged bodies, while links between them are springs. Springs pull similar websites together, and the charge does not let the bodies adjoin and pushes websites apart if there is no link between them. Originally, all such electrified bodies (websites) are randomly scattered on the surface of the map. Springs are stretched, repulsion energy is high – the system is far from being at equilibrium. Then the websites start moving under the influence of the forces exerted and in a while come to a halt – forces of attraction now become equal to forces of repulsion, the system has reached its equilibrium. It is exactly that state that is shown on The Internet map.

Also, an analogy can be drawn from quantum physics. In this case, a website is a physical body with a finite mass, a single user is the mass quantum – the much-spoken-about, yet-to-be-found Higgs’ boson, whereas the act of user’s switching between sites is the gravitational quantum – the graviton, another hypothetical particle.

via The Internet map

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People are making fun of Cecilia Giménez' restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco, while Amadeo Modigliani is hailed as a genius for his Portrait of Mrs. Hastings (1915). Beatrice Hastings, it must be noted, was the object of Modi's drunken wrath. We hail a violent alcoholic and drug addict as a genius, and we make fun of an amateur restorer who was well-intentioned and acted in good faith.

Related articles

Botched Restoration of Ecce Homo Fresco Shocks Spain (nytimes.com)

The world's worst art restoration or 'street art by seniors'? (smh.com.au)

Christ: what a mess (theage.com.au)

Campaign to fix granny's fresco fail (nzherald.co.nz)

Amateur restorer 'very sad' after fresco restoration fiasco (itv.com)

VIDEO: Restoration amateur ruins fresco (bbc.co.uk)

Well-meaning elderly woman ruins priceless fresco in restoration attempt (kdvr.com)

Christ fresco ruined by amateur restorer in Spain (euronews.com)

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In the end, the message is the message, and the message transmitted over virtually all modern media, the Internet included, is this: buy something. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way things are in our world. It’s time to face it—the Internet changes nothing.

History News Network

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A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.

Identify sameness, explore difference

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Emergent Properties

Knowing the breed well, he also understood its power. The interpreter creates the illusion of a meaningful script, as well as a coherent self. Working on the fly, it furiously reconstructs not only what happened but why, inserting motives here, intentions there — based on limited, sometimes flawed information. One implication of this is a familiar staple of psychotherapy and literature: We are not who we think we are. We narrate our lives, shading every last detail, and even changing the script retrospectively, depending on the event, most of the time subconsciously. The storyteller never stops, except perhaps during deep sleep.

via Decoding The Brain's Cacophony

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Beware The New Third Way Narrative

But as good as this new secular narrative may sound to Western ears, O’Rourke explains the outcome is unlikely to be one that accepts Western “hypocrisy and condescension”:

One critical reality is that this revolution is not only a revolution against Arab dictators, but a revolution against the humiliation Muslims have been facing in the post-9/11 global landscape. The Arab/Muslim people are not just enraged with political, social, and economic oppression, they are also angry with their rulers’ complicity with imperialism, particularly American and Israeli. In short, the revolution has erupted from Muslim societies as a result of internal oppression and as a response to political, economic, and cultural imperialism, with which the post-9/11 youth are intricately familiar. In this regard, the international community must get the message that this revolution is as much against its hypocritical and condescending manner of dealing with Muslim societies as it is against Mubarak, Ben Ali, or Qadaffi.

- via New Third Way Narrative Poses Challenge to U.S. Strategic Communication

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The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies. I have decided to use the word postmodern to describe that condition. The word is in current use on the American continent among sociologists and critics; it designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts. The present study will place these transformations in the context of the crisis of narratives.

Jean-François Lyotard: Introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

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As for why the high tech, youth driven narrative holds such sway in Western media: To a degree it reflects a kind of vanity we hold about ourselves. In the United States, in particular, it is hard for us to imagine political sophistication in parts of the world we do not know well, or what it looks like. So we imagine revolutions in the image of ourselves we like best: as an eternally young (vis-a-vis Europe) country whose technologies have enabled and inspired the rest of the world. In one version of the Egyptian uprising, we see a satisfying reflection of the kind of revolution we would have liked to inspire.

Egypt Uprising Narrative as Youth, New Media Driven: Wrong | Strategic Narratives