IBU News (Germany) Edition 0.9.9

ExoDus Challenge

I long (very long) hesitated about developing concepts for general search. Lets face it the static Web page paradigm that underlies the models of most engines has been more or less obsolete for years and the kind of search, it seems, demanded ("Give me something about") was more than questionable but I'm also no longer certain that these are the constraints but rather the "ist" state. People are increasingly, as they get more savvy of Internet sociology, less satisfied with the Volksempfänger offered by Google and Co. Exodus sets to re-cast the the whole "problem" as one of information discovery, search and retrieval of information dialogs rather than specific documents. Exodus does not set out to "re-draw" the borders of Internet page visibility but recast them as obsolete.

The imperative

The internet makes censorship really work since it can become transparent as air. No need to burn books when there are none. All you have to do is see to it that the books are invisible. While technically, unless it blocked explicitly (and in many parts of the world technology is coming into place to block content while in other countries just being caught with the intent to post content that has not "approved" one can and will land in prison or worse), technically something might be accessible BUT if one does not know where it is--- if its not visible--- it does not exist. This is Internet Metaphysics 2008 (and has been the case for some years now) and part of the Raison d'être of ExoDus: Changing the visibility.

Post-1984 its not not: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever." but Prozac.

The optimistic view of the Internet follows a naive consideration of Mander's thesis on television and power. Back in the late 1960s/early 1970s there was that romantic vision of guerilla media through technology. This was born in the belief that bringing technology into other people's hands breaks down the ownership of media. Mander's view was that the control of TV was implicitly defined by its restricted channel space and costly technology. In the Internet, by contrast, nearly anyone can "broadcast" and theoretically be heard. The original optimism of many to the Internet was that one is finally liberated from the control of few towards a seemingly endless number of channels. That's why I wrote in the early 1990s in Focus (a major German news weekly similar to U.S. News) that the central glue of the future internet is search and retrieval. The new controllers, so the view of the Internet optimists, are the masses and not the TV bosses. This has shown itself not to be true. Media power is more concentrated today than even during the "golden eras" of radio or TV. There used to be laws in the US to restrict media control. A TV station in a city meant that you could not own a newspaper. Today? And its no longer networks built by a system of associates but ownership. And behind the new names are hidden incestious cross-ownerships.. hyping their own funded ventures and selling them in trade for stock amongst others in their own stalls to assure the market of the airs of "innovation" and "growth" as long as the card house stays tall.

Mainstream services such as Google, Microsoft Live or Yahoo can but only deploy this strategy since their financial models of advertising are built among a model of exclusion and "the will through payments" to become included. Any conscious differences between the historical "pay to be listed" model of Yahoo, AltaVista's model of "pay for higher ranking" or the "ad-words" model of Google is technology, smoke and mirrors.

Visibility

What you see of the Internet is from where you are standing. Its like looking at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. You see the skyline from the perspective of where you are standing. Current search engines force everyone to stand in the same place.

"Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web"

New Paradigm

We have a new, remarkably powerful yet simple, model. I've called it "semantic revelation".

The basic idea is that clusters of associations define their own implicit semantics for terms.

Folksonomies (the current fashion of social tagging) assume everyone is speaking the same language with the same shared background. They don't. Everything is NOT Miscellaneous (as David Weinberger suggests).

Words derive their commonality in meaning from those that associate with one another. We don't know what the words mean but might assume that if people are talking to one another that they have shared semantics. That's the basics of normative communication.

John Searle introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act' as a kind of indirect 'illocutionary' act: "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer."

Our model goes backwards.. It first asks.. "Who is talking to each other". And "who do I want to talk with". Its guilt by association.

The point is: We don't care what a word or sentence means. We just "assume" that when people talk they understand, more or less, each other but neither is everyone talking with each another nor do they even want to..

When there is no dialogue between listeners, the same words and phrases as spoken by a speaker can mean different things.

Search is also searching for dialogue. Its all, of course, not de-coupled from ranking..

See also: the collaborative works on Multipolar Search: EXODVS