Intimate Innovation

I want to think about information – since information seems is a part of what gets exchanged in intimate exchange, and intimate innovation. We live in an information age; information – especially words and images – flood back and forth, ranked, valued and sorted by how much they mean to us – how much evidence of connection is embedded in their code eg. Google’s system of ranking ‘relevance’ is based on the principles of ‘citation’ – how many times academics have each referred to each other in what they write, as if association were the currency.

And yet I have been visualising a version of innovation in which emotions, the inflexions of relating and our mutual ‘freedom of speech’ (as opposed to mutual gagging orders, or censorship), our capacity for ‘free association’ all generate data. Data is a by product and side effect of experience, together. Experience is a data rich data base which intimacy transforms into information. In the transformation of this data into information, some subtle things seem to happen; some points of view get privileged. Assumption and inference – conjecture, indeed – become critical. What does the data tell us about…

… their assumptions about you, and …

….your involvement in them, your involvement with them….and

….the extent to which you are available….can be expected to consent…and

….the extent to which they can know things about you, can know you…

….and show that they know you…

….can use what they know about you to innovate further…to accelerate the rate of change to which you have consented….and

….provide you with a sense of belonging…with a sense of sharing….

….a sense that they too have made themselves available to you…?

As part of this intimate contract between you and I, we are involved with the object of the innovation; we are involved in an experience that we are shaped by; we are in-formed – something within us takes a different form because of the intimacy of the innovation. We relate differently to the data of our experience; and in doing so generate potentially fresh information. And in order to get to this form of relationship with – and within – me, new attitudes and expectations are developed – these innovations in values and relationships precede and facilitate the innovations in products, services, social structures etc It’s as if a ‘polis’ is developed in which it is more likely and more feasible for you to innovate intimately in your relationship with me…we develop a narrative community between us, in which we con-figure, put in order what needs to be continually regulated between us. Some of the changes this involves, include some very important things about information, the type of information you have about me and what you know about me:

Google can infer that I live wherever my phone is stationary at night – on the assumption that so closely involved are me and my Android phone, I will sleep with it nearby. As I sleep, conclusions are being drawn, inferences are being made about my relationships. There is a nanotechnology to some of this intimate use of information – as if something were released into me and could go where it will. This nano technology is often expresses in a matey tone. You know what touches me – it is called ‘nudge’. According to their www site, Larry Page, … co-founder and CEO, once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”[1] 

On the one hand this sounds like an idealised relationship; on the other hand, it carries the risk that I am being groomed for what will happen next to me – Eric Schmidt talks about people wanting Google to tell them what to do next. This a notion of search that risks containing nothing searching; something soothing when we need something (more) subversive. The perfect – indeed only feasible – search engine for me is you; and vice versa