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+Reality Mapping: Navigating the Social-Nodes+

Web 2.0 is based on a collusive tapestry of adjoining social nodes. Social Networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Liveleak, Identi.ca, Twitter and Friendfeed aren't prefaced on pre-set connotative connections maintained through historicized emotional depth or mandated through biological drives. Friends aren't friends as we have come to know them: there is minimal establishment of shared geophysical experiences and cathartic or chronologically defined friendship markers. What's important is (inter)action and the quantity of it - the residual volume of contact and the fact of shared synthetic connection minus a meatbody context. Identity is constructed in these friendship pathways via the idea of notations; of naming labels, of icon attribution, and of clustered info-snippets streamlined through interfaces designed for momentary persona snapshots.

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+Distributed Identity Compensation+

In digitized social networks there is no place for psychologically defined notions of personality as a cohesive, definable whole. Identity manifests through notational distributions found in multiple profiles across various platforms. Ego-mediated variables are replaced with actuated identity markers defined by the ability to establish links to others likewise only marginally defined by traditional geophysical baggage. For these articulated identities (now known as +Versionals+), synthetic connection is the vital point of communication; not the content, not the geophysical inflection, not the biologically-saturated ties linked to survival, competition, and traditional concrete community building. This method of clustered distribution provokes a type of culture lag found in capitalistic and ideologically framed nations - those devoted to maintaining established notions of individuals definable by consumerism and Darwinian drives, monetary wealth, institution-adherence, and paranoid-inducing security.

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+Versional Space-Walking+

Mobile technologies such as phones and other wireless tech-detritus have likewise altered the nature of individualised space with unwitting proximal listeners/participants switching to collectively-mediated communication channels. Private data can now be dispersed publically, infiltrating into gated spheres and rewriting them as open-ended versional noise. There is no definitive narrative stream or beginning/middle/end but clusters of +incomplete+ identity snippets. These snippets augment + alter the very idea of what constitutes a primary or +Alpha+ Reality.

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+Social Infowork: Versionals Don't Do Hollywood+

Contemporary entertainment models are significantly threatened by a distributed identity ethos. The proscribed linearities of passive, individuated entertainment experiences (ie television, cinema and literature) are currently being eroded via clustered peer2peer, gamer-defined, transliteral, mashedup copyright-left content. Information and traditional WASP-work boundaries are collapsing. Pop-cultural lexicons are moving towards a type of modulated system based on versional directed traffic. Hollywood's kneejerk reaction is epitomized in their rush to remake outmoded movie sequels and for TV networks to rehash content dependent on narrative rite-of-passage tropes. The viewer investment in following a progressive plot and/or seeking a concrete meaning (ie art/entertainment viewed as a purveyor of ritualised morality lessons) has morphed via social + synthetic networking into a focus on connective experientiality.

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+Doubling the Virtual: Decay of Real Reality+

Notions of a primary reality defined by a grounded geophysical state are altering. Base biological data is being mined and mapped as a potential infostream to harvest and alter (think: the potential FLOSS utilization of the mapping of the human genome). Google Earth/Maps/Streetview software exposes geography as an infowork entertainment stream. Augmented social platforms and widespread avatar adoption in synthetic environments [think: Second Life, World of Warcraft] also contribute to this change.

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+Project Augmentology: Versionals Hitting the Channel_Waves+

+Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1+ coalesced in April 2008 with an aim to create an aggregational online discipline via blogged concepts. This discipline stems from discussions concerning the formation of synthetic environments. Augmentology is not interested in replacing phenomenological definitions of what constitutes +Reality+. It instead offers a spectrum along which various manifestations of +Reality+ occur. In these manifestations, ego-stitched/physical reality and identity concepts are bifurcated through multiple projections. +Reality+ is now an increasingly elastic concept. A +Reality Spectrum+ encompasses the shifting bases of attentional focus required to navigate layered states of technological-reliant consciousness. This spectrum is (as discussed at Augmentology.com) reads as:

"(Geophysical) --- (Cartesian) --- (Mixed) --- (Synthetic)

…with each mode spawning distinct “swarmic variables” or “notional massing”. Conditional examples of such masses/variables are:

*(Synthetic) = Avatar Fluctuations/Non-Player Character Annexing/Auxiliary Proprieception/Networked Socialisation.

*(Mixed) = Layered Attention/Identity Extensions/Augmented States of Consciousness/Multiple Theories-of-Mind(s).

*(Cartesian) = Euclidian/Non-Euclidian/Human Area Networks/Dimensional Consciousness.

*(Geophysical) = Primary Consciousness/Ego-Mediation/Geospecificity/Geolocation."

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+Credibility Busting: Augmentology For The Win+

Canonized distributions embodying previously established credibility markers (such as scientific methodology + evidence + history-as-truth) are redrawn to encourage variations of present non-credible information sources like Wikipedia, who draw on constantly changing data sources. Versionals (being post-singular identities) act to obfuscate regular information hierarchies and rewrite "credible" information via blogging, wiki + addon + mashup creation, p2p file sharing, textual + video moment-capture and info-flagging (microblogging, instant messaging, tagging, social bookmarking). Augmentologists are excellent +Versionals+: they seek to reference information sources drawn from online synthetic sources rather than top-loaded academic structures. Augmentology's acknowledgement/referential system lies outside a Canonistic framework. The documentation + rewriting of such shifting reality concepts + referential signifiers is now here. To participate, please contact netwurker@gmail.com.

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