How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence

This article is part of a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch.

Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter

How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence (you are here)

A New Window Into the Collective Consciousness

Bottlenose offers a new window into what the world is paying attention to right now, globally and locally.

We show you a live streaming view of what the crowd is thinking, sharing and talking about. We bring you trends, as they happen. That means the photos, videos and messages that matter most. That means suggested reading, and visualizations that cut through the clutter.

The center of online attention and gravity has shifted from the Web to social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Bottlenose operates across all them, in one place, and provides an integrated view of what’s happening.

The media also attempts to provide a reflection of what’s happening in the world, but the media is slow, and it’s not always objective. Bottlenose doesn’t replace the media — at least not the role of the writer. But it might do a better job of editing or curating in some cases, because it objectively measures the crowd — we don’t decide what to feature, we don’t decide what leads. The crowd does.

Other services in the past, like Digg for example, have helped pioneer this approach. But we’ve taken it further — in Digg people had to manually vote. In Bottlenose we simply measure what people say, and what they share, on public social networks.

Bottlenose is the best tool for people who want to be in the know, and the first to know. Bottlenose brings a new awareness of what’s trending online, and in the world, and how those trends impact us all.

We’ve made the Bottlenose home page into a simple Google-like query field, and nothing more. Results pages drop you into the app itself for further exploration and filtration. Except you don’t just get a long list of results, the way you get on Google.

Instead, you get an at-a-glance start page, a full-fledged newspaper, a beautiful photo gallery, a lean-back home theater, a visual map of the surrounding terrain, a police scanner, and Sonar — an off-road vehicle so that you can drive around and see what’s trending in networks as you please. We’ve made the conversation visual.

Each of these individual experiences is an app on top of the Bottlenose StreamOS platform, and each is a unique way of looking at sets and subsets of streams. You can switch between views effortlessly, and you can save anything for persistent use.

Discovery, we’ve found from user behavior, has been the entry point and the connective tissue for the rest of the Bottlenose experience all along. Our users have been asking for a better discovery experience, just as Twitter users have been asking for the same.

The new stuff you’ll see today has been one of the most difficult pieces for us to build computer-science-wise. It is a true technical achievement by our engineering team.

In many ways it’s also what we’ve been working towards all along. We’re really close now to the vision we held for Bottlenose at the very beginning, and the product we knew we’d achieve over time.

The Theory Behind It: How to Build a Smarter Global Brain

If Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks are the conduits for what the planet is thinking, then Bottlenose is a map of what the planet is actually paying attention to right now. Our mission is to “organize the world’s attention.” And ultimately I think by doing this we can help make the world a smarter place. At at the end of the day that’s what gets me excited in life.

After many years of thinking about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that the key to higher levels of collective intelligence is not making each person smarter, and it’s not some kind of Queen Bee machine up in the sky that tells us all what to do and runs the human hive. It’s not some fancy kind of groupware either. And it’s not the total loss of individuality into a Borg-like collective either.

I think that better collective intelligence really comes down to enabling better collective consciousness. The more conscious we can be of who we are collectively, and what we think, and what we are doing, the smarter we can actually be together, of our own free will, as individuals. This is a bottom-up approach to collective consciousness.

So how might we make this happen?

For the moment, let’s not try to figure out what consciousness really is, because we don’t know, and we probably never will, but regardless, for this adventure, we don’t need to. And we don’t even need to synthesize it either.

Collective consciousness is not a new form of consciousness, rather, it’s a new way to channel the consciousness that’s already there — in us. All we need to do is find a better way to organize it… or rather, to enable it to self-organize emergently.

What does consciousness actually do anyway?

Consciousness senses the internal and external world, and maintains a model of what it finds — a model of the state of the internal and external world that also contains a very rich model of “self” within it.

This self construct has an identity, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, feelings, goals, priorities, and a focus of attention.

If you look for it, it turns out there isn’t actually anything there you can find except information — the “self” is really just a complex information construct.

This “self” is not really who we are, it’s just a construct, a thought really — and it’s not consciousness either. Whatever is aware is aware of the self, so the self is just a construct like any other object of thought.

So given that this “self” is a conceptual object, not some mystical thing that we can’t ever understand, we should be able to model it, and make something that simulates it. And in fact we can.

We can already do this for artificially intelligent computer programs and robots in a primitive way in fact.

But what’s really interesting to me is that we can also do it for large groups of people too. This is a big paradigm shift – a leap. Something revolutionary really. If we can do it.

But how could we provide something like a self for groups, or for the planet as a whole? What would it be like?

Actually, there is already a pretty good proxy for this and it’s been around for a long time. It’s the media.

The Media is a Mirror

The media senses who we are and what we’re doing and it builds a representation — a mirror – in the form of reports, photos, articles, and stats about the state of the world. The media reflects who we are back to us. Or at least it reflects who it thinks we are…

It turns out it’s not a very accurate mirror. But since we don’t have anything better, most of us believe what we see in the media and internalize it as truth.

Even if we try not to, it’s just impossible to avoid the media that bombards us from everywhere all the time. Nobody is really separate from this, we’re all kind of stewing a media soup, whether we like it or not.

And when we look at the media and we see stories – stories about the world, about people we know, people we don’t know, places we live in, and other places, and events — we can’t help but absorb them. We don’t have first hand knowledge of those things, and so we take on faith what the media shows us.

We form our own internal stories that correspond to the stories we see in the media. And then, based on all these stories, we form beliefs about the world, ourselves and other people – and then those beliefs shape our behavior.

And there’s the rub. If the media gives us an inaccurate picture of reality, or a partially accurate one, and then we internalize it, it then conditions our actions. And so our actions are based on incomplete or incorrect information. How can we make good decisions if we don’t have good information to base them on?

The media used to be about objective reporting, and there are still those in the business who continue that tradition. But real journalists — the kind who would literally give their lives for the truth — are fewer and fewer. The noble art of journalism is falling prey, like everything else, to commercial interests.

There are still lots of great journalists and editors, but there are fewer and fewer great media companies. And fewer rules and standards too. To compete in today’s media mix it seems they have to stoop to the level of the lowest common denominator and there’s always a new low to achieve when you take that path.

Because the media is driven by profit, stories that get eyeballs get prioritized, and the less sensational but often more statistically representative stories don’t get written, or don’t make it onto the front page. There is even a saying in the TV news biz that “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Look at the news — it’s just filled with horrors. But that’s not an accurate depiction of the world. For example crimes don’t happen all the time, everywhere, to everyone – they are statistically quite unlikely and rare — yet so much news is devoted to crimes for example. It’s not an accurate portrayal of what’s really happening for most people, most of the time.

I’m not saying the news shouldn’t report crime, or show scary bad things. I’m just pointing out that the news is increasingly about sensationalism, fear, doubt, uncertainty, violence, hatred, crime, and that is not the whole truth. But it sells.

The problem is not that these things are reported — I am not advocating for censorship in any way. The problem is about the media game, and the profit motives that drive it. Media companies just have to compete to survive, and that means they have to play hard ball and get dirty.

Unfortunately the result is that the media shows us stories that do not really reflect the world we live in, or who we are, or what we think, accurately – these stories increasingly reflect the extremes, not the enormous middle of the bell curve.

But since the media functions as our de facto collective consciousness, and it’s filled with these images and stories, we cannot help but absorb them and believe them, and become like them.

But what if we could provide a new form of media, a more accurate reflection of the world, of who we are and what we are doing and thinking? A more democratic process, where anyone could participate and report on what they see.

What if in this new form of media ALL the stories are there, not just some of them, and they compete for attention on a level playing field?

And what if all the stories can compete and spread on their merits, not because some professional editor, or publisher, or advertiser says they should or should not be published?

Yes this is possible.

It’s happening now.

It’s social media in fact.

But for social media to really do a better job than the mainstream media, we need a way to organize and reflect it back to people at a higher level.

That’s where curation comes in. But manual curation is just not scalable to the vast number of messages flowing through social networks. It has to be automated, yet not lose its human element.

That’s what Bottlenose is doing, essentially.

Making a Better Mirror

To provide a better form of collective consciousness, you need a measurement system that can measure and reflect what people are REALLY thinking about and paying attention to in real-time.

It has to take a big data approach – it has to be about measurement. Let the opinions come from the people, not editors.

This new media has to be as free of bias as possible. It should simply measure and reflect collective attention. It should report the sentiment that is actually there, in people’s messages and posts.

Before the Internet and social networks, this was just not possible. But today we can actually attempt it. And that is what we’re doing with Bottlenose.

But this is just a first step. We’re dipping our toe in the water here. What we’re doing with Bottlenose today is only the beginning of this process. And I think it will look primitive compared to what we may evolve in years to come. Still it’s a start.

You can call this approach mass-scale social media listening and analytics, or trend detection, or social search and discovery. But it’s also a new form of media, or rather a new form of curating the media and reflecting the world back to people.

Bottlenose measures what the crowd is thinking, reading, looking at, feeling and doing in real-time, and coalesces what’s happening across social networks into a living map of the collective consciousness that anyone can understand. It’s a living map of the global brain.

Bottlenose wants to be the closest you can get to the Now, to being in the zone, in the moment. The Now is where everything actually happens. It’s the most important time period in fact. And our civilization is increasingly now-centric, for better or for worse.

Web search feels too much like research. It’s about the past, not the present. You’re looking for something lost, or old, or already finished — fleeting.  Web search only finds Web pages, and the Web is slow… it takes time to make pages, and time for them to be found by search engines.

On the other hand, discovery in Bottlenose is about the present — it’s not research, it’s discovery. It’s not about memory, it’s about consciousness.

It’s more like media — a live, flowing view of what the world is actually paying attention to now, around any topic.

Collective intelligence is theoretically made more possible by real-time protocols like Twitter. But in practice, keeping up with existing social networks has become a chore, and not drowning is a real concern. Raw data is not consciousness. It’s noise. And that’s why we so often feel overwhelmed by social media, instead of emboldened by it.

But what if you could flip the signal-to-noise ratio? What if social media could be more like actual media … meaning it would be more digestible, curated, organized, consumable?

What if you could have an experience that is built on following your intuition, and living this large-scale world to the fullest?

What if this could make groups smarter as they get larger, instead of dumber?

Why does group IQ so often seem inversely proportional to group size? The larger groups get, the dumber and more dysfunctional they become. This has been a fundamental obstacle for humanity for millennia.

Why can’t groups (including communities, enterprises, even whole societies) get smarter as they get larger instead of dumber? Isn’t it time we evolve past this problem? Isn’t this really what the promise of the Internet and social media is all about? I think so.

And what if there was a form of media that could help you react faster, and smarter, to what is going on around you as it happens, just like in real life?

And what if it could even deliver on the compelling original vision of the cyberspace as a place you could see and travel through?

What about getting back to the visceral, the physical?

Consciousness is interpretive, dynamic, and self-reflective. Social media should be too.

This is the fundamental idea I have been working on in various ways for almost a decade. As I have written many times, the global brain is about to wake up and I want to help.

By giving the world a better self-representation of what it is paying attention to right now, we are trying to increase the clock rate and resolution of collective consciousness.

By making this reflection more accurate, richer, and faster, and then making it available to everyone, we may help catalyze the evolution of higher levels of collective intelligence.

All you really need is a better mirror. A mirror big enough for large groups of people to look into and see what they are collectively paying attention to in it, together. By providing groups with a clearer picture of their own state and activity, they can adapt to themselves more intelligently.

Everyone looks in the collective mirror and adjusts their own behavior independently — there is no top-down control — but you get emergent self-organizing intelligent collective behavior as a result. The system as a whole gets smarter. So the better the mirror, the smarter we become, individually and collectively.

If the mirror is really fast, really good, really high res, and really accurate and objective – it can give groups an extremely important, missing piece: Collective consciousness that everyone can share.

We need collective consciousness that exists outside of any one person, and outside of any one perspective or organization’s agenda, and is not merely just in the parts (the individuals) either. Instead, this new level of collective consciousness should be something that is coalesced into a new place, a new layer, where it exists independently of the parts.

It’s not merely the sum of the parts, it’s actually greater than the sum – it’s a new level, a new layer, with new information in it. It’s a new whole that transcends just the parts on their own.  That’s the big missing piece that will make this planet smarter, I think.

We need this yesterday. Why? Because in fact collectives — groups, communities, organizations, nations — are the units of change on this planet. Not individuals.

Collectives make decisions, and usually these decisions are sub-optimal. That’s dangerous. Most of the problems we’ve faced and continue to face as a species come down to large groups doing stupid things, mainly due not having accurate information about the world or themselves. This is, ultimately, an engineering problem.

We should fix this, if we can.

I believe that the Internet is an evolving planetary nervous system, and it’s here to to make us smarter. But it’s going to take time. Today it’s not very smart. But it’s evolving fast.

Higher layers of knowledge, and intelligence are emerging in this medium, like higher layers of the cerebral cortex, connecting everything together ever more intelligently.

And we want to help make it even smarter, even faster, by providing something that functions like self-consciousness to it.

Now I don’t claim that what we’re making with Bottlenose is the same as actual consciousness — real consciousness is, in my opinion a cosmic mystery like the origin of space and time. We’ll probably never understand it. I hope we never do. Because I want there to be mystery and wonder in life. I’m confident there always will be.

But I think we can enable something on a collective scale, that is at least similar, functionally, to the role of self-consciousness in the brain — something that reflects our own state back to us as a whole all the time.

After all, the brain is a massive collective of hundreds of billions of neurons and trillions of connections that themselves are not conscious or even intelligent – and yet it forms a collective self and reacts to itself intelligently.

And this feedback loop – and the quality of the reflection it is based on – is really the key to collective intelligence, in the brain, and for organizations and the planet.

Collective intelligence is an emergent phenomena, it’s not something to program or control. All you need to do to enable it and make it smarter, is give groups and communities better quality feedback about themselves. Then they get smarter on their own, simply by reacting to that feedback.

Collective intelligence and collective consciousness, are at the end of the day, a feedback loop. And we’re trying to make that feedback loop better.

Bottlenose is a new way to curate the media, a new form of media in which anyone can participate but the crowd is the editor. It’s truly social media.

This is an exciting idea to me. It’s what I think social media is for and how it could really help us.

Until now people have had only the mainstream, top-down, profit-driven media to look to. But by simply measuring everything that flows through social networks in real time, and reflecting a high-level view of that back to everyone, it’s possible to evolve a better form of media.

It’s time for a bottom-up, collectively written and curated form of media that more accurately and inclusively reflects us to ourselves.

Concluding Thoughts

I think Bottlenose has the potential to become the giant cultural mirror we need.

Instead of editors and media empires sourcing and deciding what leads, the crowd is the editor, the crowd is the camera crew, and the crowd decides what’s important. Bottlenose simply measures the crowd and reflects it back to itself.

When you look into this real-time cultural mirror that is Bottlenose, you can see what the community around any topic is actually paying attention to right now. And I believe that as we improve it, and if it becomes widely used, it could facilitate smarter collective intelligence on a broader scale.

The world now operates at a ferocious pace and search engines are not keeping up. We’re proud to be launching a truly present-tense experience. Social messages are the best indicators today of what’s actually important, on the Web, and in the world.

We hope to show you an endlessly interesting, live train of global thought. The first evolution of the Stream has run its course and now it’s time to start making sense of it on a higher level. It’s time to start making it smart.

With the new Bottlenose, you can see, and be a part of, the world’s collective mind in a new and smarter way. That is ultimately why Bottlenose is worth participating in.

Keep Reading

Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter

How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence (you are here)