This talk begins from the premise that today’s social computing environments--their interfaces, data structures, and overall designs--have been enormously, if latently, influenced by philosophy. Machine learning strategies for computer vision and automatic classification owe a conceptual debt to Humean empiricism, for example. Embodied interaction design is deeply indebted to the insights of Heideggerean phenomenology. And the ideas of American pragmatist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce serve as an important formalizing basis for networked data structures.

Acknowledging these influences in thumbnail, the main question turned over in the talk is whether networked knowledge structures supplement the social, or effectively constitute it. Favouring the latter, the talk turns to an as-yet under-explored philosophical resource--differential ontology--in order to spark discussion around alternative future systems.

Neal Thomas: http://hivemedia.ca

Our Networks: https://ournetworks.ca