mapping the self:
new social/search maps cluster the clutter
online (everywhere, really)

The Firefox experience keeps getting better. For every add-on that encroaches on my browsing space, the world it opens is ten times more mind expanding--or 10x fun, at least. Greasemonkey smiles, Firefox does real-time spell check. Twitter tweets. My latest addition is the StumbleUpon toolbar. The Mozilla people recommended it as a kind of channel surfing tool that tracks your browsing and makes recommendations for you. It recommended the TouchGraph site, which maps your Facebook contacts and (with only 12 nodes in the free online version) google searches.

Facebook contacts:

Here are all my 155 facebook contacts, as mapped by touchgraph. IR/PS classmates are in pink. UCSD conocidos are in purple. High school classmates in baby blue. Umich associates in lime green. Umich co-opers in salmon pink. And then there are the many, many outliers.

This mapping project thread at work, trying to find a way to represent visually the many connections in my the CSR world. This led us to TheyRule.net, a sinister, conspiratorial take on power relations.

Meta and Visual Search Tools

Visimo on the left provides a no-frills cluster search. It's unfortunately owned by the "clusty" search engine, a name which makes me shiver.

A more interesting display comes from the campy KartOO site, which has a little elfish dude wave his flash wand over your connections. See screen capture below. You can click on individual nodes for closer peeks at your digital footprints.

Toward a Self-Reflective Topography of Self?

I'm all about computers learning our behavior, provided I can interface with them on an equal footing ("consult on the basis of equality" as one Chinese dictionary phrase keeps running through my head).

Eventual enhancement of our mammalian brains will probably be necessary to keep up. I suppose by that point, the self will just be a network anyway.

Perhaps this is the beginning of the visual language system McKenna articulated into being.

Until then--since my sense of self is scattered among my hundreds of contacts on all continents--it's nice that our silicon nervous system puts Humpty back together again.

Or, ultimately, does this exercise just betrays my onanistic penchant for googling myself? I have such a different opinion on digital littering than I do analogue littering. =) Time for work.

Kartoo's map of the self:


For further mapping, check out my del.icio.us entries for "selfmapping" and see where the thoughts lead from there. I'm waiting for a del.icio.us tool to see what my self-selected web interests look like visually.

Labels: cluster, mapping, self, visual language, web