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A thread messes with chronological serialization of a stream by forking off a logical serialization. “Reserializing” the global stream is a trade off between following events in logical order locally on the thread vs following events in chronological order in the stream.
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A document can have an internal clock too. The history of “track changes” or the commit log of a git repo represent internal clocks driven by local state changes. But this time is object-relations time. I-it time. Confined to process rates inside a frame boundary.
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In general, this closed process is too impoverished to be a “headspace” a human can inhabit for long. You can get your head “wrapped around” a complex bit of code or a challenging essay, but it’s stressful, like being underwater. You’ll have to come up for air (richer headspace).
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Social streams, and open natural environments are not I-it time, contained within the closed internal state dynamics of a finite and bounded object. They contain potential for unpredictable stimuli and novel inputs. They create an I-you headspace you can fully inhabit.
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Note that even non-human cpunterparties like a cat or a natural space can create I-you type time (test, if you can anthropomorpize it, it can create I-you time and an indefinitely inhabitable headspace for you). Very rarely, “document” like objects rise to this level.
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So what does this have to do with social media design? Well, it explains why document protocols will always have a minimum necessary jankiness to them. The switching shock from “headspace” and “I-you time” to “head-wrapped around” and “I-it time” is fundamental.
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Second, it offers the VR vs AR question in a very interesting perspective. VR is default document-like while AR is default stream-like. VR time is I-it time by default, AR time is I-you time by default? Can this be changed? Somewhat.
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Even when a VR is multi-player, you’re interacting through a finite avatar that’s in most ways impoverished relative to your full persona. That’s why you need text/audio side channels to complete the experience. Even the richest single-player VR so far can not generate I-you time
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Can AI characters get sophisticated enough to sustain single-player I-you time in VR worlds? That’s basically the same Turing test you’d apply to a simple text chat bot. The sensory richness of VR is a red herring for that question. We’ve not gone too far beyond ELIZA.
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