Greetings Economists,
The subject line refers to jargon in computing. Affect comes from
psychology, meaning emotions. Conversation implies interactivity as opposed
to speeches uttered by a politician to a large crowd. In any case both
terms refer to automation of computing that is occurring. I will raise
organizational implications involved in these computing issues of
communications.
Affect is not well carried by writing alone. We see that in e-mails.
Affect is not a fine grained form of communication. When we see someone
smile that only tells us they feel friendly. Affect indicates long term
stable states of feeling. You love someone that is a lasting state of
feeling. Someone might counter that love comes and goes, but the feelings
take considerable time to come and go. Infatuation or a crush lasts weeks
and months. In computing affect shows stabilization features in
communications. Measuring these qualities tells us that long term features
of the communication data are robust and stable. Data can be structured in
this way, so that we are not just talking about how human beings feel.
Conversation is typically a small group or pair exchange process between
human beings. In other words interactive. The word interactive has long
been used in computing to characterize the power of computing. You do
something and the machine processes it and you do something else (in real
time as the slogan goes). From the earliest days of computing in the
fifties there were efforts on many levels to encompass human like exchange
of words. For example the defense department funded efforts to make machine
language translation happen. The outcome of these early efforts were such
products as speech output and dictation software. Typically the development
of these areas starts in two parts of the economy, the military and amongst
disabled people. The military has the money to fund projects, and disabled
people offer the cheap testing environment.
Conversation in computing jargon now refers to tools being built to
address language-like human-like methods of communicating back and forth.
To understand this concept I will use an Intel promotional assertion:
Intel (paraphrased),
'The third generation deployment of computing requires viewing events as
data, machine to machine communication, in a fully distributed economy.'
Doyle
Moving away from traditional concepts of brain work which a desk top
computer illustrates, toward wearable computing, Networked computing of
people requires conversation between machines at a distance (a fully
distributed economy) where events are meaningful parts of the information
being transmitted. So for example, traditionally we look at a typical sheet
of paper with writing on it as a static piece of paper. The static quality
of what to use data for dominates our thinking about brain work.
Conversations are dynamical two way small network processes. We converse
about events. We can talk in the midst of battle to gather information in
how to bayonet the capitalist enemy.
Emerging from these remarks we can see certain features of traditional
organizing in socialist groups which are being dissolved in Affective
Conversational Computing.
Traditional views:
A social network is a local human to human conversation. Shop floor
organization, party cells. Primarily person to person contact.
Party communications, the newspaper, communiqués are static forms of brain
work produced to transmit to the whole organizational unit, albeit party
cell, or various stages up to whole party, or a whole party in national
power, the equivalent unit to larger structure civil authority.
Conversational computing implies that broadcast of static data in a
dynamical environment is to be replaced by affective measures of stable
networked conversations.
I will add here how to understand a computing environment that is
conversational. This e-mail is being sent in a narrow bandwidth
environment. The larger the file being sent the slower the process goes.
Something like writing on pieces of paper to be sent in letters, when we
send for example a movie file via e-mail the download time could be minutes
to hours. This partitions the movie data from real time events. Therefore
what Intel refers to above through such technologies as "Blue Tooth"
wireless data transmissions is wide band transmission of data that allows
attachment of movies for example to events. Thus making conversational
computing event driven because whatever the data it is in real time, not
partitioned into a static object to be manipulated apart from the events.
For example, To understand this in the current environment video
transmission for business conferences or perhaps some web site view cam, are
delayed and transmitted at a herky jerky rate. When we view these
transmissions the content of the conversation is rendered unintelligible by
even a seconds difference in synchronization of the speech to picture.
These are features of the narrow bandwidth being used. Wide band
communications mean the rapid deployment of real time uses of primarily
movies as a form of conversation that people use to communicate with.
Machine to machine means that conversation is a hybrid object of human
language coupled to pictures (motion and still). That means we cannot
ourselves produce what the machines enable. Conversation alone in human to
human format is not able to produce the data quality and quantity of the
machine to machine flow. Hence this forces upon everyone the need to carry
the machine to be part of the networked conversational system, and that
words are coupled to pictures because visual transmission is many times
wider bandwidth and the necessity to synchronize everything in real time
forces the standard upon the system.
Affective conversation implies that events are the key structure binding
together the network. An event is a shared structure happening in parallel
to many people. To best understand this we need to understand how the
network feels, that is measure the emergence of stability (how the network
feels in human terms) in the data structures. A feel good touchy feelie
world of the Marxist organizational norm might be a good way to summarize
that, but I am really only implying that what makes a social network feel
good is stabilization of the network. Within that network, society at large
many people for various reasons don't feel good. This is a complex issue
which introducing affect into communications will raise and make a serious
component of the future society. That implies the death of rationalism.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
