Surplus
Georges Bataille wrote "On the whole a society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it. The surplus is the cause of agitation, of the structural changes and of the entire history of society."
Footnote: page 17 of "What we Want is Free" book. Essay by Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen
Competing Visions
"a vision has been described as a 'pre-analytic cognitive act.' It is what we sense or feel before we have constructed an systematic reasoning that could be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as hypotheses to be tested against evidence. A vision is our sense of how the world works"
"Reality is far too complex to be comprehended by any given mind. Visions are like maps that guide us through a tangle of bewildering complexities. Like maps, visions have to leave out many concrete features in order to enable us to focus on a few key paths to our goals. Visions are indispensible-but dangerous, precisely to the extent that we confuse them with reality itself. . ."
from "A Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell pg. 4
Viral Marketing
"Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions."
from "The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing" by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
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There are then three core components to any viral campaign:
Creative material: the viral agent that embodies the message you want to spread in a digital format (image, video, text, etc.).
Seeding: distributing and placing the agent online in places that provide the greatest potential spread
Tracking: Measuring the spread of the campaign to provide accountability and prove success
In our experience, viral material from businesses should take the form of �advertainment� rather than overt advertising if it is to appeal to viral audiences - the more 'tainment' than 'ad', the better. [Thus Silent Advertising]
from: http://www.nmk.co.uk/article/2003/04/02/viral-marketing
Operating System (OS)
"an operating system (OS) is the "interpreter" between you and all of the software and hardware on your computer's system. Just as an interpreter helps communication among foreign diplomats, your OS translates your commands ("open file") into the 1s and 0s the computer can understand."
What is an Operating System?
"But more than merely interpreting, the OS becomes a traffic cop. If you're running two applications on your PC at the same time, the OS juggles the computer's resources, such as the "thinking time" that each application demands from the main processor, so that your spreadsheet can keep crunching numbers in the background while you clean-up an image in Photoshop. The OS also controls internal components, such as memory, external devices-monitors, modems, storage devices-and the look and feel of the user interface."
from: http://www.darwinmag.com/learn/curve/column.html?ArticleID=40
Open Source
. . "[with] Open Source, the key idea is that one person (or group) writes software code, which can be then modified by another user; the result can be subsequently modified by a new user, and so on. "
"There are. . .two aspects of Open Source movement that make it interesting. One is the idea of license. There are approximately 30 different types of licenses in the Open Source movement. The licenses specify the rights and responsibilities of a person modifying the code. For instance, one licence (called the GNU Pulic License) specifies that the programmer have to provide the copy of the new code to the community; another stipulates that the programmer can sell the new code and he does not have to share with the community, but he can’t do things to damage the community."
from "Models of Authorship in New Media" by Lev Manovich
: http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?artc=65
LOCAL: also see "kernel" keyword
GLOBAL: also see "Open Source Definition" at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Kernel
"At the 'heart' of Linux operating system is its kernel - the code essential to the functioning of the system. While users add and modify different parts of Linux system, they are careful not to change the kernel in fundamental ways. Thus all dialects of Linux share the common core."
"From Models of Authorship in New Media" by Lev Manovich
full text at: http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?artc=65
Non Zero Sum Game
aka "Mutually Beneficial" or "Win-Win" situation. each person receives something (however small) from the connection/meeting/game . . no one person involved in the interaction gets zero or 'loses'.
5{ f social dilemmas (experimental economics) the studies are divided into 2 player games and N-person games (more than two people). This is important because the interactions and dilemmas are different, ostensibly, depending on which it is.