From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking

The web has become a dominant epistemic environment, influencing people's beliefs at a global scale. However, online epistemic environments are increasingly polluted, impairing societies' ability to coordinate effectively in the face of global crises. We argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution, and that healthier environments require redesigning how we collectively govern attention. Inspired by decentralization and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a socio-technical framework for "freeing" human attention from control by platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.

Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021

Although social media has become a primary news platform, the effects of social media features on users’ information processing remains under-explored. This stu...

The Fair Share Clause

A thought experiment for sustainable open source.

Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies - Cosmik Labs

Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy

The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...

Day Two

What I've learned in 48 hours of public sensemaking

Directing the Herd

Social media platforms don’t produce a common public; they produce competing sub-publics, each with its own sense of what everyone knows.

Tyranny of Permissionlessness

open source’s narrow focus further empowers those with other ways to exclude

An attention economic perspective on the future of the information age

In this paper, we apply an attention economic perspective to explain current and predict future trends in our society. We first describe the rise of the attention economy, and we highlight one important mechanism of this economy: a spiral of attention scarcity. Second, we show that an attention economic perspective provides glimpses of a potential future. In particular, we predict an information environment that increasingly targets citizens with attention-grabbing content, form, and technology; a continuing trend toward excessive media consumption levels; and a continuing trend toward inattentive uses of information. We also predict increasing problems of public misinformation and misconceptions; an increased prevalence of certain mental and physical health issues; and an increased reliance on technology to perform mental tasks. At the end of this paper, we show why and how despite these predictions, alternative futures are conceivable. These alternatives largely depend on the behavior of various social actors. We discuss resistance to the attention economy by consumers and producers, a laissez-faire policy toward the attention economy, a policy of taxing attention-seeking efforts, and the promotion of public values in regulatory policies toward the internet.

Open Source Explained — Open Indie

Musings on the concept of ‘open source’, in the broadest possible definition of the term. Also an invitation to become a participant in ...

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem