Re: <documenta X><blast> jeopardy surface (fwd)
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Fri, 18 Jul 1997 17:20:44 -0400
behavioral topologies ? probability surfaces on the social landscape ?
Imagine a further development of this technique, which could model and
track the dissemination of ideas, or the adoption of innovations,
throughout a culture, nation, or world.
Some studies were done, I believe, on the rapidity with which a good
joke could progress by word of mouth... it could be assigned a speed of
travel, almost like a physical thing.
Now ideas, other than the most local and personal, can saturate the world
so quickly that we don't need to consider dissemination rates; this is
speaking of the more concrete type of idea. Attitudes and universalizing
perspectives might be another matter altogether, and these could be mapped
across human space.
These might be compared and contrasted to show zones of high opportunity
for the acceptance of an idea or the lack of it. It might be possible to
discern that an idea "x", if promoted in Australia first, might have a
higher probability of going global and becoming an operational concept on a
global scale, than if it were promoted in Italy, or its acceptance might be
more rapid and have less resistance....
Profiling gets rather eerie, because one can place a cluster of traits
into a neural net program, and in some cases have a good expectation of
what someone is likely to do in the future, although they haven't done an
instance of it yet.
An A