[ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online

[Mike Dougherty]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Natasha Vita-More <natasha at natasha.cc> wrote:
> I don’t see why this would be about segregation. That seems like an odd way
> to look at this. But maybe I don’t understand what you mean.
>
> Wikis can go awry. Take a look at Wikipedia.  I use it a heck of a lot, but
> I am never quite sure its reliability.

I wasn't sure exactly what level of tech investment you were
expecting.  In the interest of brainstorming, here's my thoughts on
the idea seed from "...the central knowledge and media center for
transhumanism – where anyone can go to learn, contact, connect, etc."
(sketching as best as I can using mere text)

printed books might have a page dedicated to a "playbill",
"billboard", or "pamphlet"  that contains the url, QR tag, etc.  Other
forms of traditional marketing uses this same link; people's email
sig, twitter, etc.  gets people TO the site.  This is just marketing
the particular "brand"

the site would be intended to bridge between the physical world of
printed (including e-readers, etc) materials, the various introduction
channels (above), etc -- and the first steps explaining the
concept(s).  Towards that end, I imagined a narrative user experience:
 the left half of a page gives simple instruction how to use the
"book" that appears closed in the right half of the page.  Clicking on
the book "opens" it in the traditional sense of starting a story.  My
thought here is to provide a metaphor that is highly understandable
since most people have encountered (and are not threatened by) books.
  The story they read/experience describes (in a broad sense) the
evolution of books from their 'humble' beginning all the way through
the transcendent forms of content management that the Internet
represents.  The "pages" of a book still exist in the "pages" of the
WWW even if only in essence rather than material form.  I imagine this
analogy would be easily followed by anyone in a modern enough world to
follow a link TO the Internet in the first place.  The suggestion is
that the knowledge and adventure that was once bound into a book has
been liberated - the Internet being the current manifestation of the
transcendent state of a book's essence.  The Internet continues to
evolve content management to include pictures, video, virtual worlds,
and whatever novelty they engender.  The human audience is also
participating in evolving and transcending the limits of yesterday's
human being.
  This motif would continue to be a learning experience that describes
and explains transhumanism in the way a museum describes people in
history and also illustrates our modern relationship to/with that
history.  Following the museum concept as the living/interactive
version of the book's library, I propose a virtual world in which an
active community might participate and engage among each other as well
as welcome new seekers for this "store of knowledge."  This list is
one exhibit, the ongoing activity of transhumanist blogs is another
collection (for example).  So much more might be crafted as user
experience if the virtual world museum could be a navigational tool
(portal) as much as the artifact itself.

Well, I think that's the best I'm going to do capturing in
paragraph-form the flash of visualization I had on this concept.