Enormous resources are being put toward designing online spaces that could potentially form large communities that will regularly log on to interact, exchange ideas, or spend cybercash. What seems to be neglected in the development of these spaces are the personalities that form these very communities and the issues of privacy and freedom of expression being integrated into the technologies allowing these exchanges. The author proposes development of an Information Personae that incorporates disembodied information on the Web and reembodies it through the data, links, and community it becomes connected to.

Agents, Avatars, Identity, Cybercash, Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Networking, Privacy, Encryption, Search, Data Bodies, Corporate Bodies, Information Personae

Introduction

According to James Hillman, economics is the only effective syncretistic cult remaining in the world today, our world's only ecumenical faith. It provides the daily ritual, uniting Christian, Hindu, Mormon, atheist, Buddhist, Sikh, Adventist, animist, evangelist, Muslim, Jew, fundamentalist and New Ager in one common temple, admitting all alike. (Hillman, 1995) As information replaces working capital, so intellectual assets replace physical ones--the World Wide Web becomes the electronic marketplace where ideas are shared, exchanged, bought and sold. It is an ideal environment for two most very different participants--conceptual artists and multinational corporations. At the core of conceptualist aspirations is a move away from the object toward establishing the primacy of the idea, while multinational corporations always defied borders and have moved from physical product to intellectual capital.

Intellectual capital, as defined by Thomas Stewart, is--knowledge, information, intellectual property and experience--that can be put to use to create wealth. It is collective brainpower. Knowledge has become the preeminent economic resource--more important than raw material; more important, often, than money. (Stewart, 1997) With this in mind, I propose development of an Information Personae, a mixture of agent and avatar technologies, engineered to address the following questions: If knowledge and communication are fast becoming a primary economic asset, what are the implications for creative communities working on the World Wide Web? How does collective knowledge manifest itself when not directly related to corporate structure, specifically in relation to creative communities? Can we become conscious of how information that represents us travels? If artwork is no longer constrained by physical space, objecthood and gallery systems, what forms may creative knowledge assume? How is creative knowledge positioned in the world of electronic commerce? And finally, building on the heritage of conceptual artists and contemporary philosophers who question authorship, institutions and the role of commerce in the arts, how do creative concepts figure in electronic economies?

The Intangible Web

What is still commonly referred to as an "intangible" realm becomes very tangible and real when we invest vast mental energies into it. This seems to have been the downfall of conceptual artists who claimed to have shunned the "object". By declaring the physical object tangible and expecting "pure concept" to be somehow removed from commerce, conceptualists further reinforced the body/machine duality the West just can't seem to shake. Just as traditional economics based on management of physical ownership are challenged by intellectual capitalists, so are the art world's notions of the art and object. The world of ubiquitous computing is final proof that these are not separate realities, and soon the same issues that seem to be somehow relevant only for "cyberspace" will be equally important in the physical realm. After all, the "virtual" needs a very physical box (hardware) to run through as well as a flesh and blood human to maintain and operate the system. What may move this process forward is the work being done with "intelligent" software agents on the Web.

The push towards more "human-like" avatars [1] and developing intelligent ways of information storage and retrieval has moved developers to give research on artificial life renewed importance. Software agents are computational systems that inhabit the world of computer networks. This technology is being used in research and development of intelligent systems that help us manage the overwhelming information overload on the Internet. Software agents are made possible by a machine that is the pinnacle of 'rationalist' engineering, yet aspects of Artificial Life and related studies such as fractal geometry, non-linear dynamics and complexity theory challenge basic premises of the scientific method so related to the rationalist approach.(Penny, 1996) Some of the most advanced work in this area is pursued by Pattie Maes and her team at MIT Media Lab. She believes that agents radically change the current user experience, and talks about this through the metaphor that an agent can act as a "personal assistant." The agent acquires its competence by learning from the user as well as from agents assisting other users. Several prototypes have been built, including agents that provide personalized assistance with meeting scheduling, electronic mail handling, electronic news filtering and selection of entertainment. (Maes, 1994)

Enormous resources are being put toward designing online spaces that successfully utilize, text, visuals and sound while being commercially profitable. Digital libraries, sponsored by large companies and government agencies, online trading, soap operas, and role playing games are examples of how information is being constructed into intellectual capital. In other words, attention by investors is placed on any space that could potentially form large communities that will regularly log on to communicate, exchange ideas or spend cybercash. What seems to be neglected in the development of these spaces are the personalities that form these very communities.

The I_Personae incorporates the disembodied information on the Web and defines itself by the data, links, and community it is connected to. The I-Personae searches for data bodies who have similar interests, and functions as an extension of our physical "selves" while participating in member's collective brain power. In other words, information is collected, stored and defined public or private by the I-Personae, while community is formed by like-minded individuals connecting and further extending their space on the Web. As an extension, the I_Personae functions while we are sleeping and busy doing other tasks. It is designed to behave autonomously--sitting in front of a screen for endless hours will no longer be necessary. We are updated and notified of conversations, contacts, events and any information we have asked for through a number of devices.

Information Personae and Freedom of Expression

How and where our information travels from banks, credit cards and social security offices is mostly a mystery to us. Every time we buy something, subscribe to a magazine or pay our taxes, the information goes somewhere. All these documents could be linked into life dossiers with our entire financial and medical history, with details of what we buy and who we communicate with. Rather then encouraging unprecedented scrutiny and control, the Information Personae aspires towards a secure parity between individuals and organizations. It will automatically record who has accessed it's body and for what purpose. This is not only in service of paranoid thoughts of invisible control, but also for active participation in building like-minded communities. For this reason, developments in encryption technologies such as the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) [2] program developed by Phil Zimmerman, are an important piece of the puzzle.

Zimmerman, an anti-authoritarian agitator and academic, designed an affordable military strength encryption program and made it available publicly. He was motivated by the belief that intelligence agencies, big arms and drug traffickers, the defense companies, oil companies and other corporate giants have access to good cryptographic technology while ordinary people, and grassroots political organizations don't. Soon after the release of the software, the federal prosecutors threatened him with possible 52 months of imprisonment for export of "munitions." Zimmerman fought a widely publicized battle with the US government and rallied a large segment of the Internet community along with the civil rights advocates who came to his aid. Three years later, the case was dropped while the software remains publicly available. To impose physical borders on the Internet is an impossible task, and it is just as difficult to stop the spread of an idea on the net. The government had to come to terms with the fact that the meme, a contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed from mind to mind, is impossible to pin down and control. Our ability to lock or unlock the door to our information body is critical in the development of the I_Personae society.

Standardized Avatars and Information Overload

Research and development into online social spaces would not be taking place with such dizzying speed if the WWW were a text only environment. Although text based MOOs and MUDs [3] are still very active communities, and there will probably always be a place for them, investment in Web based communities really only started with the introduction of graphical user interfaces. Avatar filled chat rooms seem to be where most entrepreneurs are placing their bets. By the year 2000, chats are expected to generate 7.9 billion hours of online use, with $1 billion in advertising revenue. (Clelan, 1996) Makers of virtual environments predict that scrolling text for chat rooms will soon be entirely replaced with 2-D and 3-D graphical environments, while marketers are busily exploring ways to exploit new technology for advertising.

For quite awhile now, online interactive games have been the first testbeds for formation of online communities that spend cybercash for use of a collaborative space. Most recently, Rocket Science Games, a maker of interactive entertainment software, and CyberCash, a company that handles payment transactions on the Internet, are forming a partnership to develop a virtual video game arcade on the World Wide Web. Payments will come out of an "electronic wallet" that users could replenish by transferring money from their bank accounts. (Einstein, 1996)

Most recent software developments center around two major problems--creating community and management of information overload. The entertainment industry is putting enormous resources into development of more "human-like" avatars, and the business and research communities are investing equally large resources into management of databases. The problem is that identity, and its representation is being addressed separately from organization of information into knowledge. A somewhat disturbing trend is the effort to create standards, in service of information management or better ability to profile or track down the "users." This, of course is in service of electronic commerce which is hindered by the decentralized and diverse nature of the present state of the Internet.

In October '96, at the Earth to Avatar Conference in San Francisco, architects of 3D graphical interfaces on the Web met to discuss the lack of avatar standards. When former Apple Computer Chairman John Sculley gave his analysis of the future of cyberspace at the conference, he said that once the technology is shown to work and standards are agreed, the big league players will move into cyberspace. As avatars become members of self-organizing groups, Sculley sees them as "a driving force shaping the economics of this industry." (Wilcox, 1997) The software industry's debate on avatars is really about object interactions passing between a variety of servers in real-time. Talking about avatars personalizes the discussion and brings up issues having to do with the nature of identity, security, interpersonal relations, and societies of the Internet.

Universal Avatar Standards (UAS) group's aim is to focus on the nature of avatars with regard to such issues as gender representation, ID authentication, personal expression versus social constraints, and communication of emotion. The proposal provides an architecture for managing thousands of geographically distant users simultaneously, with interactive behaviors, voice, 3-D graphics and localized audio. The proposal discusses creation of a link to a user profile, coded in HTML and containing data the user wishes to be known about the fantasy or true identity and the user's history of actions on the net. Avatar history could be with reference to games, for example, wizard status in a Role Playing Game (RPG), or it could hold marketing information about purchases made by credit card. The issue raised with the concept of the avatar in cyberspace, as it stands now, is that it stops at the idea of visual (or descriptive) representation of a "self" on the net. No thought is given to the "user's" ability to access their own online history and make decisions of what is made public or private. The Information Personae essentially utilizes similar technologies, with one important difference--the representation is aware of the information (content) of the body. In other words, it does not perpetuate the machine/body dichotomy and allows a conscious connection to the collective brain.

The problem with the current trend of development in avatar technology is that it is designed to chat, meet people, attend events and purchase products. It is conceived as an empty shell and serves as a throughput of simple communication exchange. The graphic representation is what we are supposed to be concerned with, while the embedded database remains hidden from us and we are given very little flexibility for customized self-programming. The Information Personae reverses this by foregrounding the information it carries and our awareness of how it moves as meme. Representation of ourselves on the net is indeed connected to the information we collect, and it is especially compelling to think of ourselves as "embodying" the links we make on and offline. While the avatar is primarily seen as a "puppet", and the agent as a "servant"--the Information Personae is neither --- it is a malleable extension of our "selves"--diverse and decentralized.

Thanks to Lorne Falk who gave me excellent editorial critique as well as generating inspiring discussion regarding the Information Personae.

NOTES:

REFERENCES: