How the Cognitive Social Web can foster an Internet of better contents

Current web 3.0-oriented products tend to concentrate on how to better organize and develop the flow of information (how to share more content more easily, how to reach a larger crowd, how to get more of the content you already spend the most time on, etc), while mostly ignoring the psychological aspects of content sharing and content creation.

This results in awesome communication tools that are used mostly in dynamics of collective stupidity. Don’t see what I mean? Check out the current trending topics on Twitter –a fantastic product as far as sharing is concerned. That’s what the web of the future could be about: sharing more mediocrity, more easily. Incredible technology at the service of your mind farts. Is this what we really need?

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Identity, Contact, Creation: the Process of the Cognitive Web

 Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation, profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.

—Ansel Adams

On the Creative Process

The creative process is a loop. It all starts with individuals. It all starts with your own Identity.

Your identity is both your framework for understanding the world and your guideline for action —that is the core thesis of the Identity Reinforcement Theory. Identity can be defined through many ways, and our conception of identity has known dramatic changes in the past. In a world based on industrial consumption and production, a large chunk of your identity is delineated by what you own. In a world that would give a huge importance to politics, and where you would have freedom of expression, your political opinion would be a big part of who you are. Who you are and who you become is defined by what you and others choose to give importance to. By the rules we choose for ourselves to regulate our interactions with others and with the world. And those rules are in turn utterly conditioned by what we can do, by our technology —that’s why everything has been changing so fast since the arrival of the Internet. Our communication technologies, if used well, have the power to dramatically change everything we thought we knew about creation, about education, about who we are —for the better. And that’s what the Cognitive Social Web is about.

Here’s how the loop of creativity goes. It’s what the Cognitive Social Web has been designed around.

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