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Science

The Collective Voice of the Internet 96

Posted by michael from the sorta-like-homer-simpson dept.
nycheetah submits a story about the collective voice of the internet. There's also a Bell Labs webpage with some more technical information about the project.
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The Collective Voice of the Internet More

The Collective Voice of the Internet

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  • Pr0n ... (Score:1, Funny)

    by KecCu ( 614885 )
    Countless others are with you when you browse the web, some reading the same words at the same time, and yet you have no way of sensing their presence.

    One particular, very succesful internet-industry will surely like the opportunity :-)

    • Oh dear me, think of all the flames...

      Silent? Who says it's silent? I mean, if it were silent the RIAA wouldn't be so upset!

  • It's Inaccurate. (Score:5, Funny)

    by cioxx ( 456323 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @07:16AM (#4959849) Homepage
    There was no moaning in the background. The collective voice of the internet would have lots and lots of lustful outcries. Afterall, the majority of the internet is populated with porn.
    • Nope its not inaccurate. Actually all the moans cancel out. This has actually proved that number of moanings is even. This is kind of logical becoz normally there are 2 people moaning ;-).....

      On further research I found out that since right now the server is pounded by slashdot, the sounds are slowly approaching cries of help....

      Better keep listning, soon you will hear the dying gasp too ;-)
    • The collective voice of the internet would have lots and lots of lustful outcries. Afterall, the majority of the internet is populated with porn.

      Mostly I do a lot of cussing while swatting down all the pop-ups.

    • Given the quality of porn on the Internet, it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't much moaning.

  • What the collective voice says ? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Gyan ( 6853 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @07:16AM (#4959850)

    More p0rn !

  • Upon hearing the collective voice of AOL, (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...we suddenly realized it just said "Duh!?" over and over again ;-)

  • Hrmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by acehole ( 174372 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @07:21AM (#4959855) Homepage
    Well that's all and good, but I really would like to meet the 'internet' on the street. Could you imagine what sort of person it would be?

    I'd be expecting a cross dressing mental patient complete with tinfoil hat dribbling nonsense at a mind boggling rate only allowing you to catch a few words here and there like "faked moon landing", "brittney spears nude", "you camping fag!" and "you're transmitting an IP address!".

    Of course I wouldnt have to give it any money, It would have already taken my credit card numbers for it's own penis enlargement addiction.

  • A 7.9Mb .mov file started downloading... i bet it will not finish

    • Re:Asking to be slashdotted? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're not missing much. The artists have essentially invented a wind-chime which assumes that everyone on the internet is a british male.

  • Bell's page appears Slashdotted, already?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by tgrotvedt ( 542393 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @07:22AM (#4959859) Journal
    It looks like Bell's servers have gone down after only a couple of minutes!

    WARNING: The collective voice of Bell's admins will not be suitable for young children.

  • IT's getting louder (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    sounds like IT's saying: IT's ALL about trust. IT has NOTHING to do with fuddle's Godless ill eagle payper liesense stock markup hostage ransom scams.

    almost everything's gnu now. that's what the "collective" appears to be saying to US. does anyone get the notion that their opinion is worth less, to their electdead 'represeNTatives', than the opinion/kneads of, say, the sillycon felon of the day?

  • Probably (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Lolaine ( 262966 )
    millions of mouse-clicks on close-window widgets for closing popups ... at least until PopUp blocking browsers like Mozilla/Galeon get mainstream :D

    • Re:Probably (Score:2, Funny)

      by Mathness ( 145187 )
      at least until PopUp blocking browsers like Mozilla/Galeon get mainstream

      The rest will just keep clicking and clicking and clicking...

      Wait a minut, does that means popups are powered by Duracell? =:O

  • Useless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord Puppet ( 300347 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @07:52AM (#4959885)
    "There's also a Bell Labs webpage with some more technical information about the project."

    Great, but so far, you haven't provided any information. I thought that the purpose of the summary was to summarise. How is anyone supposed to know whether this article is worth reading if you don't tell us what it's about?
    • Simply mentioning "Bell Labs webpage" along with "technical information" indicates that it's probably worth reading.


      Just MHO, of course...

  • Forget about art. This is a weapon! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ArcSecond ( 534786 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @07:53AM (#4959886)
    Maybe they can use this principle for security, too... have some "Rain Man"-type sit in a chair and monitor the composite sounds of the internet, scanning for a particular pattern.

    I wonder what the sound of a DDOS would be? A waterfall? Maybe a port scan would be a rising set of tones? And some cop in a LOLITA chat room would sound like (what else?) the theme from Jaws.
    • You mean like in this episode of dark angel? [darkangelfan.com]

      MAX: Then what are you?

      BRAIN: What am I?

      ALEC: Yeah, she means you don't exactly look like a soldier there, big guy.

      BRAIN: Oh, and you two do? I'm an I.T. concentrate. A battle processor. I'm basically a general, his staff, two database groups, and five logistical support teams, all rolled into one stealth package.

      ALEC (laughing disbelievingly): Stealth. Yeah.

      BRAIN: People look away. They don't remember me. There, are you happy?

      ALEC: Yeah, that still doesn't explain your psychic ability.

      BRAIN: Psychic? Please. I combine near-absolute data knowledge with fast Fourier neural nets for heuristics.

      ALEC: Heuristics?

      BRAIN: Predictions using probability algorithms that are stored in my--Look, are you sure you want to hear this?

      MAX: Whatever you call it, you can tell the future.

  • Can the web become conscious? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Xavier000 ( 449480 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @08:13AM (#4959910)
    People may think this is a ridiculous question, but perhaps one that needs to be asked. First to put it in context. Inside most human brains are about a billion connections that communicate to a greater and lesser extent to those synapses directly in contact with them. The collective 'noise' from the electrical charges between the synapses somehow gives form to human consciousness. The electrical energy helps store memories and a bunch of other things, too.
    I read an article once by an Australian author Peter Goldsworthhy (if anyone is interested it is in his book Navel Gazing) that pondered whether or not China could collectively gain a consciousness, based on the same principle. (A billion people, all in contact with those around them, much as synapses are). I don't know how many people are connected to the web, but using a healthy dose of hope and suspending disbelief, does anyone have any ideas on whether or not the web can gain a consciousness?
    • I think you should cut back on the Matrix and go get laid.
    • the problem i see with this line of thinking is that while there are billions, trillions, whatever-illions of connections going on inside your brain at any one time, you still only have one body to act with, one mouth to speak with, etc. the internet is many individual people, each of them complex and intelligent (it could be argued that neurons are complex and intelligent but from what we know, i dont think they are), but the internet does not have one point of actualization. it's just a bumbling mess of interconnected people, most of them just reading their email or chatting or reading yahoo news or *whatever* it is that most people do on the internet.

      sure sounds neat though :)

      replies encouraged :)
      • I wasn't trying to suggest the web would start talking to us, but I wonder whether it could have a collective vibe that trickles from any part of the WWW to any other part. An understanding among all web users that this vibe exists. A form of consciousness, that is different to what we already utilise.
        I would also dispute your single point of actualisation. Some people cannot talk, but still have full consciousness. Some people have almost no working senses at all, but are still conscious. I don't think the point of actualisation is the point, it is the element of understanding. I am no philosopher though, any input from anyone else would sure be welcomed, especially someone with a philosophy major.
      • Well now there is the idea that it is an ant colony that is a living being and not an individual ant etc. etc.
        I really have'nt read up enough to authoritatively comment on it, but IF that is the case there is nothing stopping the net from getting a consciousness (dont know no spelling) , maybe?
      • the internet does not have one point of actualization

        Except for that huge floating wet ball in space.
      • --but the internet does not have one point of actualization. it's just a bumbling mess of interconnected people,--

        It's time for your connective implants. Resistance is futile.
      • >>the internet is many individual people, each of them complex and intelligent

        Are you sure about the complex and intelligent part of that statement?

    • I've often thought there might be at least two types of this "emergent consciousness" on the Net. One is, as you say, collective consciousness on the part of a large number of people. This already happens, I think, in large groups (much smaller than the population of China) -- any group of people, be it a business, a government, a church, a social group, whatever, develops some characteristics of a conscious being, with its human members as the cells. This is why people do things in groups that they never would as individuals. Some of the muscle cells in your arm may be pacifists who would never harm a soul ;) -- but when you decide to punch someone on the face, they pretty much have to go along with it. The analogies to the actions of the large groups I mentioned above should be obvious.

      The other, potentially more interesting kind is purely machine-based. I think all those old science fiction stories about a single giant computer or worldwide network that one day "wakes up" (and invariably decides to elminate its human creators) are a little bit off. The Net isn't a being; it's an environment, an ecosystem. There's a lot of semi-autonomous logic running around right now -- everything from search engine bots to viruses -- and it's subject to tremendous selective pressure. Some of it may be smarter than we know ...
    • Well, the thing I see with *your* line of thinking is that, at least from your description and from the description and the video of this project, that this project could be considered as the start of one such 'point of actualization'. It's a single place from where the myriad bits and pieces and connections of the Internet all pop out. Of course, they're only sampling a limited amount of the internet's resources to produce this project, probably not nearly a complex enough system for something like consciousness to 'emerge' (and I'll rant about 'emergent phenomena' and their relation to life as we know it another time :), but, then again, there's that old truism that humans only use a fraction of their brains..

      To sum up, wouldn't it be spooky if they kept adding nodes and sources to feed this project until they reached a minimum critical mass and all of a sudden the clatter of individual voices and tones coalesced into a single voice going 'Hello. My name is Bob. Bob Internet. Nice to meet you.'
    • No. Possibly unconscious, though. :})||

    • What silliness! Why do you suppose that the Internet/Web hasn't already become concious? Why do you think that China isn't already a self-aware entity? Do you honestly have the arrogance to suppose that it was your choice whether or not you clicked on the links in the story?

      Why do you think that humans would be able to recognize whether or not this has happened, is happening, or will happen? Hehe, silly slashdot, philosophy is for the web-uber-mind!

    • for all of you interested in this line of thought, i strongly recommend to check out:

      goedel, escher, bach by hofstaedter
      serial experiments lain by Chiaki Konaka

      if anyone knows more sources which deal with this subject scientifically or artistically, i would very much like to hear your recommendations.

      --strangeloop
    • see Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". A revolution takes place on the penal colony formerly known as the moon (who said Australia ?). The leaders are, amongst others, a sentient computer known as Mike.
    • I think that if more people think about this kind of stuff, the world will become a better place at a faster pace.

      I believe that consciousness is ubiquitous. Everything is conscious. The question is then how conscious is any given collection of particles?

      That, I think, depends on how readily signals travel through it. The Internet is very connected, but the components that decide what signals to propagate (that would be us) do not do a very good job of propagating useful signals, so I would say the Internet is not very conscious.

      Here are some other things that are probably more conscious:
      Ant hills.
      Forests.
      Groups of people (as mentioned earlier).
      Bee hives.
      Schools of fish.
      SlashDot and other servers that run slash.

  • wow (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When i listened to that I thought i2pi.

    Hook that up to some visualisation code and it would be a great way to chill/freak out.

    For something similar, check out Elran [i2pi.com] by i2pi. Turn up the sound, turn off the lights and get hypnotised.

  • Countless others... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by archeopterix ( 594938 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @08:23AM (#4959931) Journal
    From the article:
    Countless others are with you when you browse the web, some reading the same words at the same time, and yet you have no way of sensing their presence.
    I remember a project that addressed this issue more directly - namely providing you with a client that allowed you to chat with folks visiting the same website. Cool idea, except for the privacy issues - the client of course had to report what websites you are visiting. The project was called 'gooey' or something similar. I guess it never took off. Well, they didn't have a Linux client, serves them right :-)

    • Re:Countless others... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, it's easy to sense presences on the 'net.

      Just go to random slights. If the site your visiting starts getting slow, then finally just stops, check Slashdot.org.

      Whenever there's a great disturbance in the Latency, no doubt that the evil Slashdot Empire is behind it.
    • Yes, I believe gooey is the right name. I tried the software and it was an interesting idea, but the biggest problem with it is it never took off. The only sites that had a reasonable chat room size were big generic portal sites like yahoo, download.com, etc. So how do get a decent discussion with 30 people from yahoo.com? You can't. %3 of internet browsers wouldn't have made much of a difference.
      • I tried the software and it was an interesting idea, but the biggest problem with it is it never took off.
        Well, perhaps a company with an established user base (one of instant messengers comes to mind) should try that. Of course, the privacy issues still remain valid. I would feel uneasy knowing that my client transmits the site URL to a central server.

  • Shhhh.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by plaxion ( 98397 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @08:45AM (#4959957)
    Keep it down out there! Someone could be viewing this from a library.
  • Hey, the page gives no info on how the whole thing was done... and the more info link to bell labs is down (when i tried) .Did anyone at /. get enough info out before it went down?

  • Why not make it useful? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ethank ( 443757 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @08:55AM (#4959976) Homepage
    I've explored the concept of proximity and simultaneity of presence within my own work, but do it on a website instead of within an installation.

    On my site we basically track where people are, but limit you knowing WHO those people are by using affinity relationships gleaned by your buddy list.

    The presentation of this information is in the form of a line similar to this:

    "There are 3 people here with you and 5 people near you.
    BUDDIES: Ethank, Ethank2"

    The site is broken down into a series of interconnected and hierarchically laid out "rooms." Rooms don't necessarily correspond directly to a page, but roughly they do. Within the discussion board for instance, a forum is a room and every thread within that forum a room under that room (so the forum is its parent).

    The way that the "here/near" works is by looking at not only who is in your current room (page) but also who is in rooms one level below in the hierarchy. Some places on the site have indicators on links showing how many people are currently in the room it leads to (to instigate flocking behavior in things like news stories).

    We implemented the system 6 months ago and I'm surprised on how willingly people adapted to it. If you look at an overhead view of the site, its shown that the proximity to other users in many tangible ways dictates usage patterns, as well as makes the site feel less like a ghost town.

    So where does this lead us? I want to explore more into this notion of reified third-space that this brings up, collapsing space/time into singularity and exploring the notion not of client-server individual experiential models but more of a shared one.

    But, instead of in an installation that distills numerous ingress points into an aural landscape, why not actually make this proximity and user awareness transparent on existing sites?

    I'm all for good installations (am doing one in April kind of similar to this, but dealing with the physical layer of the Internet), but as a student am more drawn toward subtle almost performative art within the context of Internet participation.
    • Looked at your site, liked what I saw, very interesting concept, the whole 'x people here, x people near you, x people looking at this other thing'. I noticed you apparently do it through php? I'm a semi-decent php coder, my own sites run on php, and I'd love to play around with something like this, as a learning experience if nothing else (ie. integrating it into existing CMS's like phpNuke and the like). I suppose could conceivably code something up similar to this given enough time and a lot more experience, but this being slashdot and all, I just have to ask if you're making the source code for that system open source (this is not a troll or an accusation, I'm just genuinely curious because I'd love to see the code), or if you'd be willing to share the code at least. It's perfectly okay if you're keeping it private, but I figure it doesn't hurt to ask, since, again, I'd love to play around with a system like this on a couple of my personal sites and see what I could create with it. Let me know, and don't worry, I won't hate you if you'd rather not share. :)
      • The technical backend is such:

        The discussion board runs vbulletin, and I build proximity awareness on top of it using a headerinclude.php file.

        The main site runs a component system of my design, where a page is an object that has various components, each of which returns results.

        The problem with this is PHP is not suited to this kind of object orientation.

        As for releasing source, its not really ready for any primetime release, as a lot of stuff is hardcoded for the site specifically. I would share (that isn't the issue) but the current codebase is not suitable for sharing, really.

        My aim is to redo the site using Java, because it is stateful (which lends it to programming autonomy into individual objects) and it is more robust in terms of object orientation. PHP has problems passing objects by reference for instance.

        The Java release should be more "open" and I might even do a sourceforge page for it. Not sure yet, still in planning stages.

        To handle the discussion board I'd basically wrap vBulletin 3.0 with a Java API.

        You can IM me at EthanKap if you want any more info.

        Ethan

  • When I watch TV there are even more. . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @08:58AM (#4959982)
    people watching it at the same time. When I wash my car, read a book, eat dinner or just take a leak there are perhaps millions engaging in the same activity at the same time.

    Big deal. It isn't some mystical fact. Just a fact. It conveys no information other than the fact that there are billions of people who at any given time are doing one of a fairly limited set of things.

    We read greater things into it primarily because we are wired to seek acceptence from the tribal unit by behaving in similar fashions to the group. Geeks are nonconformists, although they tend to be nonconformist in the same sense that hippies and Japanese teens are "nonconformist." i.e., conform the same as me or you are "out."

    The idea of someone surfing the same page as you at the same time gives the illusion of "group membership" with that person even though no such "group" actually exists.

    It's a literal "feel good" idea of no actual signifigance. Your "group" membership is actually far closer with the guy that stocked the shelves at the supermarket where you buy your food or that damned cop who wouldn't let you off with a warning.

    This is not to say that real groups aren't forged over the internet. Just that they aren't any more "golly gee" than any other such tenuous groups, like everyone who watched Friends last night.

    KFG
    • Turning that argument on its head: what exactly are 'real groups' then? I mean, is the fact that you just happen live in the same general geographical location as the other people in your town and are therefore part of the group 'citizen of town X' merely by being there any more 'golly gee' than the fact that you just happen to be surfing Yahoo at the same time as x amount of other people, therefore becoming part of the group 'Yahoo surfers'? How exactly is the group 'my family' more real than the group 'people who are surfing Porn.com', since in both cases it's purely random chance that you were born into your family, or that you are writing down how hot 'Porn Star X' in the forums at Pron.com at the same time as others browse the same site? Just something to think of, our definition of which groups are more 'real' than others.

      Of course, the argument can be made that certain groups, such as citizenship and family, are more 'real' because there is greater interaction among its members, while in the case of people surfing the same site, they're barely, if at all, aware of each other. But when you factor in a project like this one, where suddenly people are being made aware of the others on the websites they're on, then those groups start gaining a real legitimacy that's intriguing to watch.

    • Geeks are nonconformists, although they tend to be nonconformist in the same sense that hippies and Japanese teens are "nonconformist." i.e., conform the same as me or you are "out."

      Hippies and Japanese teens? That's a rather odd pairing. The same thing applies to teens/twenties in North America today. I was forced to ride the bus a couple of weeks ago and was stunned to realize that I was completely surrounded by Eminems.

    • is that you get very isolated, very fast to the point where there is no one around you to listen but your computer.

      this makes the computer geeks(some of them, anyways) different than the hippies, and more like hermits or the like - those of us who are truly disconnected, and who have nothing but technology (and no internet helps)...become *changed* somehow...~

  • depressing at best (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shymon ( 624690 ) on Thursday December 26, 2002 @09:00AM (#4959986)
    God, just what i need. a vocalization of the collective stupidity of the average web user.

    now if they did a vocaliztion of the slashdot crowd....

    err wait...i don't know how many times i can hear "M$ sucks" over and over without cracking.

    • depressing at best (Score:2, Insightful)
      by Shymon (624690) on Thursday December 26, @07:00AM (#4959986) ...

      err wait...i don't know how many times i can hear "M$ sucks" over and over without cracking.

      Well, 4,959,986 times and counting, here.

  • No way of sensing? (Score:3, Funny)

    by MoreDruid ( 584251 ) <moredruid&gmail,com> on Thursday December 26, 2002 @09:01AM (#4959987) Journal
    Countless others are with you when you browse the web, some reading the same words at the same time, and yet you have no way of sensing their presence.
    How about the /. effect? Seems one way to sense the presence of a lot of people.
  • Looks like Bell's servers got hit by the collective voice of Slashdot :)
  • So, when a major power outtage occurs do you hear the collective screams of a million rejected packets, and then silenced?


  • It would be really nice if article postings referenced the video format involved. That way, us Linux folks wouldn't waste our time visiting a site with Quicktime content.
  • I'm reading _Common Sense_ on the palm right now, and find this quote interesting in relation to this story:

    Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for the wise and able men to improve into useful matter

    M@
    • I sent the following email to the two senators of California, but never got any answers: I'm trying to establish the real link between elected officials and their constituents. So here are a few questions:

      Suppose that for some bill, only 100 constituents care what the senator votes, and 90 of them want her to vote "YES".

      1. Does the senator find out about the 100 caring constituents, and, if so, how?
      2. Will she definitely vote yes, or might she vote NO because of her personal beliefs? In other words, does she sacrifice her own reason to be democratic, or does she sacrifice democracy in favor of reason?
      3. Do the answers for 1 and 2 change if the numbers are 1,000,000 caring constituents, of which 900,000 wanted the YES vote? If the answers do change, what would the new answers be?
      4. Suppose that the senator makes a logical error while analyzing the issue, and one or several constituents would be able to correct it. Is there any system set up through which the senators logical error could be corrected by the constituent or constituents?


      I believe that these questions highlight some of the fundamental issues in our country and the whole world. If we could examine the answers, we would either vastly improve the system, or we would use it far more effectively.
  • I know its cool and all to put in a post with a lot of witty utterances, but did anyone actually go and *listen* to the damned thing?

    Conceptually, its a very interesting way to relate the data and make it listenable at the same time. You can get a feel for the intensity and the general subject matter from the snippets being thrown at you.

    Granted, its mostly artsy-fartsy and of no "real" value, but stuff like this is good for clearing out the old noodle...
  • The voices had just the right tone for :

    Captain : What happen?
    Mechanic : Someone set us up the bomb!
    Operator : We get signal.
    Captain : What!
    Operator : Main screen turn on.
    Captain : Its you!!
    Cats : How are you gentlemen!!
    Cats : All your base are belong to us.
    Cats : You are on the way to destruction.
    Captain : What you say!!
    Cats : You have no chance to survive, make your time.
    Cats : Ha ha ha ha ...

    Sorry.. :)

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