Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Are we not 1984 Sheep? We are Brave New World Rats!

rat and sheep 01
 Pervasive computing is like a giant Skinner Box.

I've been working all week on a post about the shift from mass-media-fueled propaganda to the operant conditioning environment of pervasive social computing. It's taking a lot longer than expected, so for now, here's one of the images I've been working with as I VizThink my way through.

The spark for this idea came from the following video:

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Looking forward to your thought-provoking post. Just don't get arrested for thoughtcrime.

Mary Lia said...

Wow! That was a great video. Criminologists have known for a long time that positive social control works better than negative social control, yet it has been largely ignored by rulemakers. Running society via a system of rewards rather than through fear and punishment sounds good to me. The danger, though, lies in who will hand out the rewards and what we will be rewarded for.