[ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online

[Natasha Vita-More]

Beautiful!!  I'll have to sit down with a glass of wine and explore this
fully. (later tonight!)

Extrope!
Natasha

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 8:14 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanism: Knowledge Source & Media Center Online

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.

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