I've posted this draft of my next entry to my blog. It's not refined, I've used this space to get the ideas out. Now, I'll rearrange, edit and repost. If you've got feedback, let me know either here or via e-mail, facebook, etc...
There is a fragile and fiendishly complex system for governing human interaction. Every exchange is so loaded with years of accumulated experience and emotional weight that it's a miracle that we can communicate at all. Yet, despite all the odds, we have conquered this system and done so wholly unconsciously. In fact, we've developed even more layers of complexity on top of those, with the telephone, television and the Internet.
Humans are an analogue system, information is clouded by interference on all sides and in between. I mean to say A, which gets garbled into B because I'm tired and misspeak. The person on the other end of the phone that I'm speaking with hears C, because my connection is bad. They interpret it as D, because they're angry with their landlord.
Put this mess into a group setting and you have your very own social experiment. You can find models of these kind of things around, but because of our relatively poor understanding of how the mind actually operates, I suspect that they remain rudimentary compared to what they will be. The increasing on-line "presences" of people have begun to spawn early renditions of what will become a powerful tool in this respect. The individual components are already there, but no one has found a way to merge the data into coherence yet.
Sites like Digg and Reddit, Youtube, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace, Windows Live, and Wikipedia all hold bits of a cohesive personality, pieces of conciousness strewn across the internet.
Every time a person posts a response to a Youtube video or upmods a Digg story, puts a picture on Flickr or writes a status message in Facebook, they are revealing just a bit more about their psyche and how they use their experiences in communication within themselves and with others.
Now, this derives a bit into esoteric stuff, but suppose for a moment that someone had recordings of every second of your life. If that information could be distilled and made into something coherent and digital for a computer, a convincing amalgam of yourself could theoretically be generated and pass a Turing Test. It's not out of the realm of realistic supposition that if a computer had access to the complete set of information that you had percieved during your lifetime and could observe your output in the form of external action (actual action, emotion, etc) that patterns good enough to approximate yourself could be found and used to make a virtual clone of your personality.
The reason I say this with such confidence is because humans can do this innately with almost no information at all. We can usually make accurate general inferences on someone's personality based on only a few moments of observation and interaction (barring the Fundamental Error of Attribution and other flaws in judgement. We're working with theory. Conditions are optimal.) Given more time, we get close and closer to specificity. This is why you can tell if someone you meet is an asshole based on a few moments of interaction and why you can tell if a friend of several years is sad without even speaking to them.
This has digressed (necessarily) from my main points, however. This is all weird and interesting to think about, but does it have anything to do with social theory and human interaction?
Assuming the above is true, we then turn to our online presences. This is a bit of a warning and a suggestion. With the increasing use of the internet, we are transporting indirect but almost completely accurate (the internet clears a lot of interference problems up) slices of our conciousness and personality onto the web. I would say it isn't unusual for someone to have accounts on every one of those sites that I listed above. Personally, I've got accounts on all of those sites and those don't even form a meaningful percentage of the whole. At the very least, you've registered and even that says something. Imagine if there was a way to track that, to combine the whole of your internet usage into one place. Every site you ever visited, every file downloaded, everything. That kind of information combined with personality algorithms or even a semi sentinent AI like the kind being developed now, could make a pretty good guess at what's going on inside of your head.
On one hand, it's every marketer/advertiser's dream. Demographic nirvana. Half of the industry is dedicated to getting inside of the consumer's brain, figuring out what they want. How fantastic would it be to have a population-in-a-box that can give you answers whenever you please.
The obvious applications, however, are much darker. Government spies. Minority Report-esque criminal justice systems, control over the population that even Orwell couldn't imagine. I can't wait to see the first person convicted by testimony from the digital representation of themselves. It's a good angle for a lawyer to use, really. "Computers don't lie."
This seems like paranoia and granted, it is incredibly unlikely. However, I'm doing this as more a thought experiment than anything else. Take an idea and see where it leads. None of the things that I've suggested are far fetched in their individual realms. AIML, JOONE and SILVA are all AI languages that could in theory be used in part to develop an algorithm that could output a workable set of responses based on a set of patterns (a personality). There are also more aggregate sites and increased monitoring by ISP's (and some say the government) that bring the various elements of your online presence closer together. Try searching for your most-used username on Google to get a rough idea of this. Using a combination of IP addresses, MAC addresses and usernames, you could theoretically almost track everyone now if you had the right infrastructure.
