21:09, Monday 21 Apr., 2003 Link

Recently I read somewhere, I'm not sure where but that's not important, about the early vocoders, and about how they would not record the voice, but write out symbols that represented the phonemes of the speech. So playing back the symbols would not be the voice, but be recognisable. A stream of modulated sound, yet speech.

Then I was asleep in the park a couple of days ago (and got sunburned, yes, enough of that) and I dreamed of social networks but from the inside/ locally/ embedded in the network, with the perspective of a node: what would my environment look like? I saw a kind of coloured globe, the surface of which represented my surroundings.

The next day, after a few drinks, I saw that social networks - nodes and arcs - were a lossy compression of how people actually formed networks: that groups, interactions, etc were multileaved; that the data recorded was just the stuff most easily recorded, and that what was really important was how people move and think together [like flurries of snowflakes]. But so much is obvious.

In the same bar, the phonemes being captured by the vocoder and the social features of the rhizome became similar. Institial agents could filter my personal input/output streams and bind to certain patterns of interaction; customised for important structures (loosely bound stable groups; couples; tightly bound short-lived groups; adversaries) my social life could be constructed as a series of symbols. A recombinant grammar that would still lose the truthly complexity of my actual life, but would replace it with a map/ a toy social life, one that could be analysed.

[The local life is all that matters. Why should I care about conversations three degrees away from me? If I want information, timely or otherwise, I'm not interested in personalities (although I am interested in what they would give me: reputation, etc); if I want conversation I want it to be local, and then I won't demand the high correspondance to my interests. I'll pursue serendipity.]

In my head: a brightly coloured sphere, its surface a symbolic map reflecting the important features of the social landscape in which I live, cartographically captured from the inside; like a large room with a sphere at the middle, where you can't tell whether it's the sphere that is a mirror reflecting the room about it, or lit from the inside, projecting its surface pattern all around.