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My first reactions to Google Wave are in this post, written earlier today, Google Wave: The next big thing looks like too much information, and too little, and this will make more sense if you read that first.

While gardening later, I realized that I hadn't handled part two of the headline I wrote first -- why it looks like too little information: because it's not the information I want. It's mildly interesting to read how someone else lives their life, a la Facebook, but I think an intelligent communication system should do more than broadcast status bulletins and micropersonal news.

It's important for machine culture to compute that humans shift among different perspectives after processing input from nature, from their bodies, from other people, circumstances and the running voice in our heads we call our selves.

There are some very interesting technical leaps made here in several directions: Google Wave depends on html5, whose specs are still being hammered out, but it describes the information (including new audio and video tags), rather than simply format it; Wave is a platform of its own, on the Web, challenging Microsoft's control of the desktop again. This first app will be familiar to those hooked on Twitter and Facebook. Wave is likely to be adopted by business collaborators who currently have no open-source (free) way to gather a a working group. Echoing keystorkes in realtime may be a tour de force, but it's also spooky. These things are important progress in developing this prosthesis for telepathy and collaboration with machine intelligence. Gamers and porn fans seem really pleased about it

But I am a somewhat private person, and don't presume to think you care about the details of my mundane life, and I don't really care to share my business. The people I know -- whom social networkng calls "friends" -- are not necessarily the tribe of my deepest or most interesting thoughts. Robert Henri, early 20th-century painter and teacher wrote,

"Through art mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men. They are the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them. The Brotherhood is powerful. It has many members. They are of all places and of all times. The members do not die. One is member to the degree that he can be member, no more, no less. And that part of him that is of the Brotherhood does not die." (p. 19, The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, Icon Editions, Harper & Row, 1984)

Heady stuff, but there are many possible brother/sisterhoods, tribes of consciousness, kindred spirits, serendipitous information exchanges, gardeners and coders, people with a question, others with an answer or a key piece of your puzzle: Ad hoc teams coming together to create something entirely new. Can you switch the paradigm from whiteboarding with acquaintances and correspondents to the strangers with harmonious consciousnesses or the knowledge you need right now?

Quantify that with measuring tools not yet invented.

You go, Google...

 Tags  Google Wave Robert Henri Web 2.0

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