I have a nagging interest in intelligence. The first adjective I thought of to use in that sentence was “flirtatious,” and I suppose it’s both. “Nagging” fits when I’m bedeviled with insecurity about many facets of my own intellect. The flirtatious side of my interest is borne from genuine curiosity, when I fleetingly wonder if I should have studied psychology instead of literature. My inspiration for this composition derives from both sources, I think.

Over the course of this summer of 2011, it’s gradually occurred to me that having what I’ll call an “intellectual personality” is not mutually exclusive with being intelligent. The intellectual personality is made up of at least two parts; I say “at least” because I reckon there may be more, but I haven’t yet realized them. The two parts are intellectual curiosity, and intellectual honesty. These are fairly self-explanatory, especially intellectual curiosity. By this, I simply mean the inquisitive nature shared to an extent by all of us, the desire to know and understand things. I deem intellectual honesty slightly more complicated since I’d place within it a subheading called, “desire for accuracy”. Intellectual honesty, as we all know, is the desire to be sound in our reasoning. I think most if not all people share this desire as well, although many apply spurious reasoning in ignorance, (willful or not) of orthodox, a priori Reason as it’s taught in schools. Included in intellectual honesty is the desire to be accurate, a trait that always endears someone to me when it manifests as those little refrains in speech and writing that briefly explore counter-views. Another sure sign of intellectual honesty is a persistent unwillingness to fully commit to an idea if it falls outside the realm of reasonable empirical certainty. Ultimately, intellectual “curiosity” and “honesty” may be two ways of expressing almost the same thing.

Here are two OED definitions that I probably should have sought long ago so that I might have worked out this “revelation” much earlier:

intellect:

[mass noun]

the faculty of reasoning and understanding objectively, especially with regard to abstract matters: he was a man of action rather than of intellect

 
intelligence:

[mass noun]

1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills: an eminent man of great intelligence

[count noun]

a person or being with the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills: extraterrestrial intelligences

 
I think, up until now, I didn’t fully know the difference. The defining struggle of my life for the past several years since starting university has been realizing that I have an “intellectual personality” while simultaneously not being especially intelligent. I hasten to add that I know what a brutal and perhaps unwarranted self-criticism that sounds like, and the reader probably now thinks I need to work on my self-esteem. While that may be true, I want to be very clear that I don’t mean to say I’m “not intelligent overall”, but rather that I’m not a genius overall. As I’ve become cognizant of my intellectual personality, and assumed it indicative of high intelligence as well, my apparent run-of-the-mill intelligence quotient was a logical hole, and thus very troublesome.

Perhaps my revelation is a well-understood fact of life by those in the know, and I intend to research this. (I’ll have to squeeze it in somewhere between my ongoing reading list whose topics include biology, astronomy, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience, among others.)

On an unrelated note, I may continue making posts here, occasionally or with regularity, or I might disappear again. If I start posting again, even if it’s not very regular, I’d love to find a way to amalgamate my blogs without painstakingly copy/pasting the contents of each post. I’ve done it before, from blogger to wordpress, so I’m betting it’s possible, I’ll just have to track down the method.

I’ve got plenty in the works, but here’s a quickie for now:

Earlier today I flipped on the TV and watched a few minutes of the ill-fated G4 show The Lab with Leo, (RIP). The episode (#146) featured the couple that owns Bongo Beat Records, and explained the unique way they use Second Life to promote their artists. From the show notes:

Ralph Alfonso and Alison Rogers, owners of Bongo Beat Records, started the Second Life Bongo Beat store to target a new audience and reach people who wouldn’t normally discover a label like Bongo Beat, treating this virtual community as a new territory (like England, or Spain, etc) and adapting strategies in communicating with a population/demographic that isn’t necessarily human.

They started integrating virtual appearances by some of their artists – performing live within the Bongo Beat Second Life area.

They created weekly club nights with virtual DJs to build traffic and familiarize them with our area and the online store and Bongo Beat’s music (DJs play whatever they want and integrate Bongo Beat tracks into their DJ sets).

The use of Second Life to advertise real world products and services is nothing new, but the way they go about it is what intrigued me, as I’ve never heard of anyone doing something quite like this. On camera they talked about playing a “concert” from the comfort of one’s own home to an audience of about 60, (and not more for game-mechanic reasons) in Second Life. There are a bunch of interesting factors at work here, such as the immediacy of having new entertainment-oriented music thrown at you during your gaming experience, and the hypermediacy of these art forms sharing one space. I’m sure I’d be right in saying that remediation is at work here, but at the present moment I’m not sure how exactly. Your thoughts?

Whenever I “report” on something like this, my instinct is to throw out some vague inquiry like, “what are the implications if this trend continues?? will it impact our precious world for good or ill??” But McLuhan says that when we’re examining something, rather than asking if what’s happening is good or bad, we should focus on the question, “What’s going on?” I’m trying to do this by pointing out when I see remediation possibly happening, but so far my observations haven’t led me to construct any grand meanings. My gut feeling is that that’s ok, at least for now.

Those of you who watch Lost will be quite familiar with protagonist Jack Shephard. I actually would not have been until recently, since I just took the plunge this summer starting from the first season. (I haven’t really watched TV through my satellite provider in a planned out way, as in knowing something was going to be on and arranging to be home to watch it, in years and years.) Anyway, Jack Shephard. Yes. And then we have good old Mass Effect, the FPS-RPG that’s loved by so many, starring none other than…well, a customized character. But the default guy is John Shephard – he’s the dude on the box’s cover art.

TOP: Jack Shephard of Lost.  BOTTOM: John Shepard of Mass Effect

I mean…c’mon now, Bioware. Didya think no one would notice? And yes, I’m aware that the default player character of Mass Effect is based on a male model that is not actor Matthew Fox, but the inspiration is still fairly obvious. Not that it matters much. Most players create their own “shep” – for all custom characters have the surname Shepard in common – and so the generic John Shepard isn’t even a part of the game for many people. Kind of amusing though. (Then again, I’m easily amused.)

Subsequent thoughts: What is it about these similar characters that their creators hope will make them appealing? Can we infer anything about ourselves from analyzing trends in character design across multiple media?

In Canada, five and a half million people (17 percent of the population) were born after Netscape launched its first web browser in 1994. While these Canadians are not yet eligible to vote, there is another very large cohort that is – the additional seven million Canadians (20.5 percent of the population) who were under the age of 15 when Netscape debuted. Putting this into perspective, it is no exaggeration to say that nearly 40 percent of the Canadian population can scarcely recall a world without the Internet and that this group unsurprisingly views digital issues as important.

The rest of the post I lifted this from talks about a recent Net Neutrality rally at Parliament Hill, and how social networks like Facebook and Twitter are playing a central roll in organizing offline events for the advocacy of online rights.

SILENT DANCE PARTY

Tonight at Midnight in Yonge-Dundas Square!

Bring your favorite MP3 player. Arrive in Yonge-Dundas Square at midnight sharp for the countdown and press play! Over 200 individually controlled LED lights hung over Yonge-Dundas Square will interact with the music, transforming the space into a silent dance party like never before. Right-click here to download the set.

I wish I could be there to see it – and/or participate! At first I was going to label this an example of hypermediacy, until I remembered Jenkins’ definition of media as the raw material, such as music, and not the device(s) used to produce it. Yet, perhaps we could consider this a remediation of the dance party. Right now the idea of a silent dance party with everyone plugged in to their iPods seems pretty gimmicky, but wouldn’t it be interesting if this manner of partying were to take off? I mean, it has its advantages: you set your own volume, and there’s a lot smaller chance of making your neighbours want to kill you. And I don’t think I need to argue that more ability to customize is a growing trend in other media, do I?

For my own Luminato experience, several of my friends and I went to check out the Count Basie orchestra playing for free at Dundas Square on Friday night. Excellent events all around from the creative arts festival this year.

However, tonight I stumbled across this relatively recent post over on Paul S’s blog talking about Summize: a search tool for public tweets. My understanding is that a key way Summize is better than other Twitter searchers is its ability to let you subscribe to custom search query feeds. In other words, you can use it to keep up to speed on what people are saying about a certain topic. Paul Stamatiou uses Summize to track tweets about the web startup he’s involved with, called Skribit:

“I subscribe to that in Safari, which passively notifies me of new results with the number of results next to the bookmark. It fits seamlessly into my daily workflow. When I spot someone having trouble with Skribit, I’ll drop them a message on Twitter to see if I can help.”

So, clearly this tool has potential in the realm of product management. I also wonder about its potential for regular research. I think I’ll suggest it to my friend who is looking for suggestions on a good CMS for one of his clients at work.

Inspired by my shiny new copy of Convergence Culture, I plunked “Henry Jenkins” into Summize and was informed that he didn’t give a keynote presentation at a conference in NYC on June 2nd as advertised, due to illness. I feel better about not being able to go to that now. As a little experiment, I checked out the first page of Google search results for Jenkins’ name. You get his personal website, his CV, some Amazon pages for ordering his books, but nothing about his recent cancellation of a speaking engagement. This illustrates how searching Twitter exclusively can turn up more relevant data, depending on what you’re looking for.

The prospect of being auto-provided with micro-blog posts, on particular topics, as they’re updated in real-time, reminds me of the whole point of the semantic web: machines reading web content for us. It’s an interesting bit of progression, because we’re talking about a utility that caters to a very human need to be social, which is a departure from traditional applications of computing power, such as crunching numbers.

Now, if I could just get my Twitterfeed in my sidebar working.

David is working for another hour. David is drinking cranberry juice. David is clipping his finger nails.

Big deal. I think I started to change my tune when I read the popular story about the grad student who twittered his way out of an Egyptian prison. Then, for the first time, I realized how people are using Twitter to share valuable information in a most efficient way – in 140 characters or less. I’m still learning what all the little features are, and I’ll probably get a Tweet feed going here soon – or perhaps in my personal blog, if it seems more fitting.

I’m “dbeatty”, by the way.

random update: In an excellent post entitled Twitter-me this, Melissa Sconyers has written the best explanation of Twitter’s usefulness I’ve read to date.

The subject(s) Jon and I blogged about recently have been floating around in the back of my head since then. Instead of repeating myself, check out those posts for details. Then, I made a connection with the mainstream media’s latest hoopla. It really hit me when I read an article (that I can’t find online sadly) in The Hamilton Spectator, by Jeff Mahoney. He speculated about how the ever-increasing cost of personal transportation might be a catalyst for societal changes like less commuting, less Costco-like places in power plazas located out in the boonies, and more local small businesses cropping up to cater to the growing number of walkers and bikers. Needless to say, being discouraged from driving is a convenient effect in regard to global warming. You might not be much of an environmentalist, but the desire to save money might have you being more Green anyhow.

Here is the bottom line:

If our futuristic communication technology has an effect on us, emotionally and socially, that is parallel to that of our long-standing physical mobility, then could our expanded knowledge/community replace receding physical mobility?

In other words, can our instinct to explore and be independently mobile in a physical world be quelled, if only a little bit, by expanded knowledge and communication faculties?

I think this is a pretty interesting question. I’m fairly tired while writing this, so hopefully it makes sense. I may be taking things to an extreme by suggesting “replacement” – I think we’re a long way from a world where there won’t be any desire to go from place to place, by bus or train or what have you. Still, I was stricken by how conveniently one kind of “reach” is just coming along as the other (might be) starting to fade away.

Your thoughts, readers?

I also went out and bought an Xbox 360 (Elite) yesterday, in a deal that got me Assassin’s Creed for free, courtesy of EB games. I also bought Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Note: While perusing that wikipedia entry I just linked, I saw this interesting tidbit which I wasn’t aware of:

“XNA Community

XNA Community is a future feature where Xbox 360 owners can receive community created XNA Creators Club developed games made with Microsoft XNA Game Studio. The games are written, published, and distributed through a community managed portal. XNA Community will be a channel for console videogame delivery over Xbox Live that can be free of royalties, paid-software development kits, publishers or licenses.“

Cool!