Det sägs att den katolska kyrkan, ställd inför utmaningen från dessa empiriska rationalister, slutligen slöt fred genom att frånhända sig tolkningsföreträdet för ena halvan av Guds rike för att kunna rädda den andra. (Update: det var Descartes som ogärna ville bli bränd på bål, framhöll distinktionen mellan medvetande och kropp – vilket skapat en hel del problem för vår förståelse av världen.  Den del fritänkarna hädanefter kunde rikta sina teleskop och mikroskop mot var den fysiskt påtagliga delen – människans, naturens och rymdens stoft, sken och skeenden. Den del man behöll tolkningsföreträdet om var den för sinnena direkt onåbara delen, den immateriella sidan av detsamma. Om så nu var fallet, höll det inte mer än några hundra år, tills de vetenskapliga verktygen i modern tid blivit så förfinade att de färdats in över gränsen. Även sådant som osynliga neutriner, radiovågor och bilderna och orden vi skapar inne i våra huvuden har som bekant blivit tillgängliga för empiriska studier.

Telekomindustrins digitalisering, de sociala nätverken och de nya beteenden de snabbt lett till över planeten i form av att allt fler människor börjat kommunicera och tänka publikt accelererar utbredningen från data-drivna undersökningar inom naturvetenskapen till lika data-drivna undersökningar även inom den samhällsvetenskapliga och humanistiska arenan. Gamla hederliga ekonomi, statsvetenskap, sociologi, psykologi, antropologi, likväl som helt nya forskningsområden som kulturomik är redan inne och nosar på den oändligt stora empiriska datamängd som plötsligt blivit tillgänglig för empiriska studier. De gamla metoderna att studera mänskligt beteende har nämligen alltid dragits med problemet med att de kostar mycket i förhållande till typen av frågor de svarar på. Endast de riktigt angelägna frågorna för vårt samhälle (ledtråd: inte filosofi) har kunnat motivera utgifter för lön till deltagande observatörer, eller kostnaderna för omfattande enkätundersökningar eller fokusgrupper. Den nya digitala datan om samma sak är både rik på innehåll och billig att samla in och sortera.

Naturvetenskapen förändrade samhället när vi formade sand till slipat glas som förstärkte vår syn. När nu sanden formats till datorkretsar som förstärker vår hjärna tycks den naturvetenskapliga kunskapsexplosionen bli så kraftfull att den drar med sig såväl samhällsvetenskapen som humaniora. En oväntad biprodukt av sand i form av kiselchips är digitala sociala nätverk som förstärker vår röst och vår förmåga att förmedla idéer, tankar och sociala signaler mellan varandra. Det i sin tur leder för fullt till en explosion i tanke- och kunskapsutbyte, sociala relationer och kreativitet. Och en oerhörd mängd data om oss människors göranden och låtanden, tyckanden och reflektioner om allt mellan våra tankars högsta rymder till våra hjärtans innersta vrår. Ibland till och med båda två i samma andetag.

Från data-driven syn på kosmos och naturliv, till data-driven syn på människa och själsliv. Det kan alltså vara klokt att hålla i hatten framöver. Kanske får vi en lika överraskande ny syn på vad det är att vara människa, som vi fick om hur naturen fungerar?

Parallellt med denna psykologiska och mellanmänskliga reduktion har vi en minst sagt förunderlig förstärkning av våra kroppsliga och mentala förmågor. Om man ser på människan som en verktygsskapande varelse primärt håller vi nu historiskt (?) på att överträffa oss själva. Från Arkimedes hävstång till en iPad är steget kanske inte så långt i år för den historiskt sinnade, men i kvalitativa termer innebär det ett viktigt skifte. Från en förlängning av våra fysiska förmåga till en förlängning av vår mentala förmåga, vilket kanske bäst uttrycktes av Marshall McLuhan.

Dristar man sig till att lyfta blicken ytterligare ett snäpp anas det jesuitprästen och paleontologen Teilhard de Chardin kallade Noosfären, men teknologiskt förstärkt. Detta i sin tur har inspirerat till andliga perspektiv på Internet vid sidan av kommersiella, tekniska och sociologiska. Idén om att människans mentala förmågor, vare sig de tolkas som kognitiv kapacitet, förmåga att empatisera med och relatera till andra eller som själslig/andlig mogenhet, kan utvecklas rimmar väl med vad vi ser teknologiskt nu. Samtidigt är påfrestningarna på våra mentala förmågor i direkt proportion till den mellanmänskliga och teknologiska utvecklingen. I en värld av oändligt många mentala intryck i ett allt högre tempo och med allt fler sätt att nå dem är filtrering den stora utmaningen.

Historiskt sett filtrerade vi de få mentala intryck gemene man fick till livs genom trosföreställningar (syndigt/fromt?), stam- eller på senare år klasskulturella filter (vi/dem?) eller med modernismens lika tydliga och enkla uppdelning mellan lönsamt/olönsamt, effektivt eller ineffektivt. När så ytterligare ett lager lagts till och individen är vägledd av inga andra ramar än vad som för stunden och i sammanhanget anses eller uppfattas som produktivt/nyttigt i den roll du för stunden intagit utmanas  såväl individen som systemet. Så länge dessa postmoderna förhållningssätt höll sig inom universitetens och kulturetablissemangens väggar kunde problemet åtminstonde negligeras av det stora flertalet. När andan (!) sluppit ur flaskan och dyker upp även i näringslivet (läs Harvard Business Review, särskilt bloggarna) och på dagis, skolor och annan offentlig verksamhet blir problematiken plötsligt något som märks även för människor som annars har annat att tänka på än kulturella mönster och sociala spelregler.

Mitt i denna kulturella och samhälleliga återbesök i det sena 60- och tidiga 70-talet föds dock en helt annan tid i det tysta. Medans våra ögon är riktade mot det sena industrisamhällets ifrågasättande av hierarkier, normer och maktstrukturer dras det i utkanten av scenen nya kaniner ur hattar som förändrar spelplanen djupare än flytten från landsbygd till städer, från adelns privilegier till köpmännens kapital eller för all del från muskelkraft till maskiner. Med informationsteknologins prylar, processorer och peer-to-peer som nu är snubblande nära sitt vardagliga genombrott handlar det snarare om ett skifte från allenarådande människa till ett samspel mellan människa och maskin, både på mikro- (produktivitet, kreativitet och hälsa etc) och makronivå (värdeskapande, social organisation, ekonomiska system etc).  Och med digitala eller fysiska robotar i vår vardag blir frågan om huruvida hen är ett lämpligt pronomen förmodligen både tydligare och mer  allmänt ansett som relevant.

With a little help from my friends (and former enemies)

You are faced with a new situation, you need to get some new skills or have gotten stuck with a problem you cannot solve. And you don´t want to cause unnesseary commotion amongst your superiors who most probably have less ability to even grasp the problem anyhow. You would need a peer to discuss the problem with or someone to learn from. Yo reeally have got three options depending on your company´s situation: either you´ve got colleagues to team up with, get the appropriate people to see the need to hire such (and wait patiently) or you reach out to the peripheral networks with friends, unknowns and probably even some competitors. You find them at meetup groups where you really get to know them face-to-face, but that isn´t very effective when it comes to just exhanging knowledge

Millions of developers use online places like Github (repository for code) and Stackoverflow (forum for geek-related questions and answers). What if your documents, presentations and spread sheets will end up in a Github-like place in the near future? Unthinkable that your consulting reports and strategy documents that  you consider your most valuable product of your work would go that way? Maybe, but that´s probably what most developers working on proprietary software companies  would have said a decade or so ago. And what the media and record industries is right in the middle of experiencing right now. So, maybe just for little intellectual exercise – think about it for a while.

The distribution of ideas and knowledge is where the Internet shines. Believe me, there IS a network where you will find the right people to ask. Not necessarily the right information, yet – but definately thhe right people to ask. Because, it seems like people that care or take an interest  in what they do a) are mostly happy to share their knowledge and b) flock together with other people both online and offline. The proverbial network society is really just nerds from all corners of society let loose and empowered by new technologies to be nerds together. It´s not communism, mind you – business and commerce will keep on being the engine and rationale for society just like it has been since clever  guy got the idea to put a fence around a piece of land and claimed ownership and special rights to use it. This paradigm shift isn´t about the abandonment of commerce, it´s an evolution of it – just like when industrialism changed the playing field and marginalised feudalism. The trick now, just like then is to see what´s coming and adapt to the change.

We´ll be putting dams on rivers for quite a while

I, from time to time, come back to the creation and control of value works in this emerging playing field slash society. Look at what has happened to the creation and control of value in the IT industry. The old logic of control over the value in the form of immaterial property in the form of patents and code created huge fortunes for companies such as Microsoft. And along came the new paradigm logic of collaboration between networks of people and organisations and the code was left “out there” for no-one to control completely. This new form of organisation of resources speeded up innovation and the diffusion of ideas enourmously. For those who thinks and acts according to this new logic

A developer can build a new application in months or even weeks picking snippets of code frrom different places – assemblying into something unique and valuable. By sharing the code and the lessons learned from the project with others the collective capacity to create even more is further strengtened. The true value that can be controlled isn´t really neither the code neither the new knowledge produced. They´re both easily tapped and spread to every corner of the earth with a connected computer.

What will you bring to the innovation table?

What tools you use to produce the products and services you sell will be not only transparent to others, but probably something you teach to others outside the organisational network in order to foster open innovation spaces and attract the best talent  to hire. Not even how you´re planning to use the tools to create new stuff will probably be possible to keep a secret since that will be one of your best comptitive advantages – to be thee place where the really interesting and meaningful challenges are taken on – and you willl need to communicate that in order for the magic to work (talent, capital, early adopter customers etc).

So what´s the real resource left, when other knowledge based industries get tempted or forced into applying the same logic (that speeds up both your own and the competitions capacity for innovation)? The people that are able to manuever in the complex and high-velocity environment of open innovation networks will definately do fine. Just as those who comfortable with taking the risk of allowing their businesses be in a constant flux of small and often failing development projects parallell with the hopefully cash-bringing production and sales of yesterdays and this mornings market-matches. One thing is for sure. It will be about the people. And a flock of black swans.

The fairly newborn social web, that has already become a mainstream phenomenon over vast areas of the globe, is really vibrating with archetypal voices – jests are joking, kings and queens are reporting from court life and wise old men and women are explaining the now and prophesizing about the future. Tribes have since long settled their grounds in different parts of the Internet, the eggheads and adventurers even have started their own dark Internet. From there they are sometimes raiding the surrounding areas, but mostly they are just celebrating their own beliefs, heroes and traditions – uninterrupted from the neighbouring tribes as long as they stay logged on. Filter bubbles are swelling.

The mental and emotional side of reality seems to be swelling at the expense of the physical, at least for hundreds of millions of office workers all over the globe. The influx of news, gossip and far-away events that until just recently was portioned out at regular intervals over the course of day by mass media has almost without us reflecting upon it become an immersive strem from our mobile devices. We hear about a global industry now wiretapping our conversations and harvesting our digital footprints not only for the benefit of the good old marketing and consumer goods industries, but also for governments far off and at home.

Still, life goes on more or less like last year, and the year before, and the year before that here in Sweden. Another manufacturing company bit the dust and another web startup closed another multi-million dollar investment round.

My predictions for next year is that even more people will become active on the social web and act out even more of our human nature. When things happen in the offline world (and boy, things will happen the coming years) the mental and emotional online shockwave will increase even further. Not only the big stuff in our lives will continue to move online as we continue our migration there, but even more of our small stuff in life. What just a few years ago was experiments with new devices and online media made by a bunch of people obsessed by what´s next will surprisingly rapid become mainstream human behaviour. As it becomes easier and ever cheaper to micro-cast our lifestreams and thus project our personal identities and relate to our friends, families and increasing circles of aquaintances we will do so. If, or when, the economy and job market takes a serious dive entertainment, new opportunities and anxiety-killers will be readily available in our pockets and laptops putting is not in the end of a one-way communication channel serving us content, but in the middle of a vast and ever-moving web of real people serving us company.

It´s not the usual talking heads in the media we will be meeting. Rather, it will be our heads talking fuelled by the media. I believe it will be a very volatile experience, as the memes keep speeding up their massage of our electronically enhanced brains.

PS. In case I don´t make myself clear – it´s gonna be all about the mind from a technological point of view from now on.

As the old assumption that managers can “oversee” the quality of people’s work and pay more to motivate more falls away, the role of leadership shifts from adopting and enforcing best practices to crafting unique experiences that reinforce the organization’s values…. By strengthening meaning and increasing engagement, firms can connect with and motivate employees whenever and wherever they work.

The thing is that you can look at meaning at different depth levels. The depth, in turn, can be examplified with how many times you ask the (oh, so subvertive) question why. From a shallow perspective meaning is answering a single step of why, such as why choose brand X or employer Y? The answer might be that it is strongly associated with a physical (not very likely) or emotional (most likely) need or desire. This is where most intellectual work that I´ve seen dwells. By mastering the art of triggering such needs and desires brands and employers have a lot to gain.

What might not be so obvious, though, is that by opening up for questions about meaning, some people might start to questions the things that cannot be questioned to keep the wheels turning. It´s just like with Christmas traditions. A recent survey by the Swedish Church shows that people have started to question celebrating Christmas. Not questioning the religious content, mind you, that was over 50 years ago in Sweden, but getting all stressed out by cooking, preparing, buying presents and meeting annoying relatives at all. And, that is bad news for business. What business people, that adapt these new crazy ideas about meaningful brands and workplaces, have to look out for is that they eventually get marginalized in people´s pursuit to fulfill their needs and desires.

The funny thing is that when you ask yourself about the meaning of something, you often find that you can´t really remember what you where looking for in the first place.  The more the marketing industry opens up for discussions about meaning, the likelier it is that people both within and outside the corporations will peek into that confusing void of realizing that you no longer remember why the heck you run around doing and buying all that stuff for. Off course, there already is a large market in self-help and spiritual litterature, courses and other consumer goods directed to that large and, because of this trend, growing market, but when people even get tired of consuming Christmas, they might grow tired of consuming remedies for too much consumption society also – and then what?

Either we´ll have to remember what we where looking for in the first place and start directing our efforts at creating that directly ourselves or we´ll have to do it all over again, but this time buying books, courses and consumer goods aimed at giving solace about the fact that not even an all-inclusive Yoga-vacation in India while our sourdough bread got taken care of at a sourdough hotel made us more… whatever it was now that we spent our hard earned money to chase after.

As, ususal, it will not be a choice based on the folk-loristic, but strong-lived, idea of free will. It will be based on the dominant pictures in our heads, put there by the communications we choose to pay attention to. And, which is much more spooky, the world economy. As long as the wheels keep turning the way we´re used to, I bet my money on that next years Christmas gift will be a golden ticket away from traditional Christmas – the mountains of plastic toys will be replaced by an almost-real experience of community and peace at a resort somehere. An extra 4-8 % up in Christmas consumer spending, as always…

Merry Meaningful Christmas!

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed a fusion between the naturalistic evolutionary perspective and the (in his case Christian) religious creationist perspective. Since then, such integral perspectives on what is and how it all fits together have taken a hard beating by rationalist-materialistic thinkers like Richard Dawkins. The sad funny thing is that mr Dawkins brought memethics into being, less derived from scientific empirical data, than from humanistic speculation. I believe memetics to be the best conceptual framework for data-driven humanism ever.  And humanism actually needs a little bit of magical-animism to propel forward. The spark of human genius, I believe, is childish in it´s best sense and thus closely related to believing in things. The quest for empirical data is best applied afterwards the visions and fantastic ideas are conceived. Visions without data is self-deception. Data without visions is boring at best and the seeds for inhuman disasters at worst.

The integral world view still inspires a range of people ranging from the transhumanists often spotted in high tech circles to the integral movement commonly encountered in spiritual venues. Encompassing both the material and the immaterial explanations might seem like wanting to eat the cake and have it too.

I, for one, believe that such a holistic perspective is sound and, if ever implemented in this resourceful world of ours will have many positive effects on everything from the economy to individual well-being. Lacking such framework for our thought a lot of potential will be untapped. It makes me sad when brilliant engineers build and enable things that from an immaterial perspective sucks. And the same goes for when brilliant humanistic thinkers, if not fully engaged banging their heads into the postmodern dead-end, join in and adds the script writing, copy and design to things that from an immaterial perspective is still nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing.

When art and science meet (Think Apple and Steve Jobs), when human aspirations (a.k.a. “spirituality”) are allowed to fuel and guide what we spend time and resources on – things start to take off. Like the wonderful project Symphony of Science by John Boswell from which this movie is fetched. There are in total 12 music videos to enjoy in the series.

My Blog etc: “express yourself – pontential for recognition” – ego-centricism
Facebook etc“stay connected with family and friends – potential for reinforced culture” – traditionalism
Digital Media:”cheap distribution media channel – potential for one-to-one marketing” – modernism
Social Web:”global oneness manifested – potential for human liberation” – postmodernism
Semantic Web:”machine-readable information – potential for research and optimization” – post-postmodernism
Noosphere: “manifest collective mind – potential for self-understanding” – holism
and so on…

All this data at the fingertips of engineers controlling massive computing power and the money to hire people competent in the field of data mining at the intersection of psychology and linguistics which has become so popular these days…

Google´s quest for artificial intelligence and the fact that they co-founded Singularity University are kinda what you would expect from brilliant engineers coming from the materialistic world view of science into the realm of immaterialistic humanism. Humanists entering the magical world of ginourmous data sets and computing power have created the very interesting Google nGram Viewer. Maybe all those brilliant people are secretly answering less technical and more eternal questions like who we are and how ideas spread behind the scenes. Maybe they´re afraid talking about such agendas openly would scare people away from providing the research material (i.e. user data). In any case I hope they´re doing that and will eventually share the findings with the rest of us openly and freely on the web. (update: another, perhaps more wise, argument for not disclosing the data publicly can be found at Nicklas Noterar)

At least that´s what I would do if I had my own Google to play around with. What would you do?

The thing is that beauty, of course, lies in the eyes of the beholder – what makes one person thrilled makes another one angry. The underlaying mechanism is the belief system. So, in order to be more flexible in reporting sentiment across different audiences you need to start with analyzing the belief systems of different audiences. With that data available, sentiment analysis would come closer to being useful for people interested in measuring, evaluating and predicting the spread of ideas. Which is kinda what everyone from well-funded counterterrorism intelligence analysts to individual power bloggers are really interested in, in this medialized society.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/

I korthet handlar den om hur vi successivt evolverat från en samhällsekonomi förankrad i den trögrörliga verkligheten i jordbrukssamhället till den snabbt skiftande drömbaserade förväntningsekonomin. Ett konkret exempel på det sistnämnda är det nu så skakiga globala kreditsystemet som baserar sig på förväntningar. Eller varumärkesvärden som överstiger värdet av produktionskapacitet och vinst i företag. Men också allt entreprenörskap som människor ägnar sig åt. Och med den ofta galna och högst irrationella mänskliga verksamheten att starta företag börjar vi närma oss drömmandets och visionernas egentliga hemvist – de konstnärliga, andliga och filosofiska domänerna. Anledningen till att Apple säljer som smör till småföretagare och innovatörer genom att kalla dem galna. Har Bodil Jönsson rätt (tillsammans med Micael Dahlén, författare till boken Nextopia) har Apple och alla andra som säljer verktyg för drömmare framtiden för sig.

Den siste blir kanhända inte den förste och den siste den förste, i betydelsen att andelen excentriska och drömmande individer med makt och tillgång till härligheterna kommer att öka. Eller ens att toleransen skulle öka. Glöm inte att lilla jämställda Sverige agerar alltmer jämställt även med lååångt mindre toleranta värderingar i den globala byn. Det är just den globala byn som profeten McLuhan siade om som kan sägas utgöra själva Den Nya Drömtiden där idéer och information sprids blixtsnabbt över klotet. Precis som vår individuella upplevelse av lycka, sedd inifrån, är fundamentalt kopplad till våra förväntningar blir därmed vår kollektiva upplevelse av välfärd, sedd utifrån, kortvarig, styckevis och delt. Det är kruxet.

Den enskilda människans tillvaro har väl knappast förändrats så mycket över historien. De fler val vi fått i välfärdsländerna har inte stillat vår oro, kanske snarare förvärrat den. Den kollektiva tillvaron har dock förändrats radikalt sedan det cykliska, statiska och jordnära jordbrukssamhället övergick i industrisamhällets jämlika, snabba och produktivitetsfokuserade samhällsrytm. Och nu påstås vi alltså, enligt kloka människor, stå inför dörren till ett skifte (eller skiften?) som ytterligare snabbar upp samhällssystemet. Vår kollektiva värld förandligas, inte i religiös bemärkelse, även om vi kommer att få se mer av sånt i en globalt hopkopplad värld, utan i betydelsen frikopplar och förstärker tanken på bekostnad av tingen. Tanken är det inre, tingen är det yttre. Rörelsen är alltså från det yttre till det inre.

Vårt inre är, vid närmare påseende, alltid mer galet och irrationellt än vad vi vill tro. Till och med den mest ihopkrympta själ drömmer och fantiserar, om inte annat på natten. Drömmar kännetecknas av att allt är möjligt. Tid, rum och kausalitet upphör. En ko kan segla in genom ett fönster och förvandlas till en gammal vän. Ju galnare desto mer typiskt en dröm. Och kanske är det, tillsammans med skrattet, en av våra mest fundamentala mänskliga egenskaper. Vi är alla i grunden galna och skrattande djur.

De senaste åren har orden innovation, det vill säga drömmar och fantasier riktade mot den yttre produktiva världen, liksom kreativitet, som kan sägas vara drömmar och fantasier riktade mot den inre upplevelseorienterade världen, blivit allt vanligare. Intresset för drömmar, såsom hos till exempel Jung och Freud tycks sjunka, medan gamla hederliga andliga sysslor som visioner istället är på uppgång. Kanske är samhället trots allt på väg in i en galnare, mer skrattande och därmed mer fundamentalt mänsklig fas. I så fall kan vi nog räkna med att ett ett sådant karaktärsskifte föregås av en period av kris där det gamla sjunker undan och det nya kommer på plats. Det är väl en trösterik tanke när du förläst dig på SvD´s ypperlige ekonomiske analytiker Andreas Cervanka? Det bästa botemedlet (beroendeframkallande, men utan skadliga biverkningar) mot förgrämdhet är för övrigt den oöverträffade svenske beatnik-författaren Sture Dahlström som summerar det hela bra.

Våren kom som en iskall grön pust från Treriksröset och jazzen hade tagit slut i världen och författardrömmarna existerade bara som en flämtande låga i mitt medvetande. Jag lät dem flämta. En dag skulle jag få spela min musik igen och skrivlusten skulle börja knastra i mig som en småländsk skogsbrand.

Ur Han log i D-moll, 2007

Facebook’s distinctive form of display advertising is increasingly attracting advertisers. These are mainly smaller companies, and some of them have a strong direct-response focus.

Facebook sits on a vastly more interesting asset for targeting their ads than the profile data that their users fill in though – the gazillions of status updates that people publish on the network without thinking too much about it. The tricky part here is the privacy concerns of people express in regards to Facebook – can they be trusted with the data we put in there? How much do they know about us and how do they use it? Who else gets to peek?

To go from good to great always involves standardization. That Facebook and media measurement behemoth Nielsen struck an exclusive partnership deal in 2010 and launched an online campaign tracking product this year paves the way for more money in the online ad market. Users will be anonymized in the measurement process, storing only the profile data which will probably avoid a lot of public outcry.

Psychographic signals in a status update

However, my guess is that the words in the status updates will provide the really disruptive value, not too far away in time, and overshadow age data and self-reported interest. The big firms buying ads will probably not be the ones pushing the development towards text analysis based psychographics. Facebook is already doing research on it, so the only thing missing is how to do it without upsetting users.

However, it might not be ads that will be the most lucrative source of income for Facebook. The research mentioned above shows that psychographics based on word usage correlates with number of friends and also what friends take an interest in. That makes the data useful for predicting and optimzing viral spread which would be what viral-thinking, rather than display-thinking campaigners would be willing to pay for. And since it can be fully automated, but still anonymized, like Google´s Gmail ads people might not be that upset after all.

So, betting that psychographic text analysis for displaying ads isn´t very far out. Next step after that would, in my view, probably be selling “viral distribution optimization” based on the psychographics data. And finally, when the psychographic word patterns have been found by applying some serious statistical number crunching machine to all that data – the time might even come when psychographic segmentation based on personality will step in from the cold and be standardized. And jeeez what insight we will have gained into the human psyche as a side-affect of that when and if that happens.

Not everyone will be happy with this development - in some cases for good reason I believe. Foto: Flickr/futureatlas.com

There is of course lots of innovation going on in the area since especially Google and Facebook target ads based on characteristics that fall into the domain of psychographics (interests), rather than good old demographics. Their approaches are, for what I can judge, not based on any a priori model, but instead based on large amounts of data points. The difference from a scientific point-of-view is whether you use an inductive or a deductive methodology. Inductive methods require lots of indata and lots of statistical computing power, something Google and Facebook excel at. They´re so good at it that some people even think they will put an end to deductive methodology in science.

Deductive methodology requires insightful imagination first – and then lot´s of indata and statistical computing power to validate the theory. The inductive methodology might end up with a model if the data shows consistent patterns, but doesn´t really need to bother with that. The deductive methodology, however, stands and falls with the predictive capacity of the model choosen.

I´ve chosen a model of the mind inspired by philosopher Ken Wilber to form the basis for my deductive approach to predict interest (or attention) online. The upside is that it allows for multiple models to form a coherent whole and that there is some research about how language reflects parts of the model. The rest I have to invent myself, which of course is the downside – it will need lot´s of more people with more knowledge and resources than me to develop and validate the methodology. I find it very interesting a project however, so I´ll carry on towards at least a large scale test of my hypothesis that interest can be predicted by the value words used online.

My methodology involves three psychographic levels of detail (and complexity) and my guess is that they will be of public interest progressively over the coming years. All of the three levels of psychographic text analysis will be researched and applied within psychology (individual profiling, health monitoring, intelligence profiling etc), cultural studies (culturomics, social network analysis etc), social sciences (financial prognostication, public opinion research etc) and in micro-level interest prediction (ad and content targeting etc).

1. Mood – where we are today. Lots of more applications to come, especially if the financial analysis Derwernt Capital and AmalgaMood is doing turns out to work.

2. Values – “serious society” is not there yet, but with the foundation laid out by small and sometimes far-out research initiatives such as the Human Memome Project.

3. Personality type – personality type or temperament doesn´t seem to be very popular in academia today due to the shift of focus towards the succesfull neuroscientific explanation models. My guess is that at the end of that line of study personality types will emerge again – and then those will be used to segment people psychographically online for the same reasons as above.

Time will tell if I´m guessing right.