fisharepeopletoo

whatsinanametwo

interesting content though

what's in a name

Reading Emergence by Steven Johnson and Understanding Social Behaviour with the Help of Complexity Science by Charlotte Hemelrijk made me wonder if this should be called Antsarepeopletoo.

The reason it's not is because of the word "shoal", which is the least weighed down word I could think of for behaviour in a group that includes a sense of cohesion and purpose, and also has that explicit comparison with animals.

Everything else - "herd" "swarm" "mob" - brings other kinds of echoes with it, either too stupid, too clever or too nasty.

I didn't want to prejudge anything with a name, and one of the things I've consciously been trying to avoid is going straight down that "always on panopticon" road.

It's not that I don't think that's going to happen, it's just that it's almost too obvious. Maybe if we don't go for those kinds of names straight away, we might spot something else interesting.

The other possible word is "flock", but that just makes me think of chickens.

muddy waters

I've been going around with the idea in the back of my head (without really thinking about it properly) that for the purposes of fisharepeopletoo (whatever they may turn out to be) computers are different from phones, because with computers what you do "in" them doesn't really count until you take it "outside", when you almost have to start again with a whole new set of rules, where-as with phones, you're already outside anyway.

When I say "outside" I don't think I mean anything cleverer than out of the house.

I guess "fisharepeopletoo" implies that it's the to and fro of people's bodies in the "outside" world that is what counts (for the purposes of fisharepeopletoo), and that phones are more bound up with that, as tools, than computers.

sympathy for the devil

This is the third reference to Paradise Lost I've seen recently.