1

Personal Psycho-Social Web-Derived DNA

And
Socio-cybernetic Decision-Making

Noam Lemelshtrich Latar, PhD

Senior Burda Scholar
Hubert Burda Center for Innovative Communications
Ben-Gurion University
February 2004
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Table of Contents

- Abstract…………………………………………………..…………3

- Introduction…………………………………………………………5
.
- Information Flow Model - from Digitization to Data Mining to
Cybernetic Decision-Making ………………..…………………..10

- Digital Coding of Every Aspect of Human Activity…………….14

- Digital convergence
- Digitization of Music
- Digitization of Visual Images
- Total Information Awareness

- Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery ………………………..17

-Data Mining Tools
- Neural Networks
- Data Mining in Retail -an example
- Social Consequences of data mining………………………20
- Data Bases traded as Commodities

- Social Cybernetic Decision Making………………………………24

- The Principles of Cybernetics
- Cybernetic Theory of Social Development
- The Social System Model……………………………………26
- Cybernetic Assumptions Regarding Human Behavior

- The Need to Rethink Social Indicators…………………………..27

- Classic Indicators versus New Indicators
- Education Example…………………………………………..29
- Cognitive Enhancement Example…………………………..31

- The Need for Continuous Social Monitoring of the Cybernetic

Process……………………………………………………………..32
- Major Issues
- Kahneman-Tversky Revisited
- Weblining Stereotypes
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Abstract
A new convergence process is taking place that will
dramatically affect every aspect of human life. This
convergence process results from the adoption of digitization in
almost every form of human activity. Digitization creates a
‘unified language’ of human behavior that allows phenomena to
be examined on an unprecedented scale using computers.
When advanced data mining procedures are applied to these
activities as a whole using cutting edge technologies that
enable analysis of huge quantities of information, behavioral
patterns emerge from a myriad of mundane activities. Such
patterns will allow monitors – be they social scientists,
marketing experts or political leaders – to arrive at an
individualized form of what this paper labels personal ‘psycho-
social DNA’ that will allow those who possess this knowledge to
scientifically predict human behavior with a high degree of
accuracy – down to the level of the individual, based on
personal cognitive and other psychological traits expressed in
the ‘digital footprints’ we leave behind with every purchase we
make, every website we visit, every event we attend, every
group we belong to. The prospect of our psycho-social DNA
being manipulated with the ‘right stimuli’ to express desired
behavior threatens to usher in a new era of behavioral control,
one already observes in attempts to use subliminal messages
planted in TV programs…only on a much more effective and
focused level.

The integration of three technologies – mass digitization, mass

data mining and automated mass data processing – holds the
potential to revolutionize social science and psychological
research with unlimited ‘sample groups’ that in essence can
monitor and ‘test’ human behavior in the field on an unheard of
scale by ‘plugging into our behavior’, testing almost unlimited
variables, without our consent. While these capabilities serve to
deepen our knowledge and understanding of the human
psyche, they also carry the frightening prospect of vested
interests – be they political groups or commercial interests –
galvanizing this knowledge to control behavior by ‘manipulating’
our individual psycho-social DNA (or shared components of it)
much in the manner that scientists now engage in gene
therapy. Google’s report of the ‘public mood’ based on
analyzing the focus of 200 million Google ‘search’ queries per
day in 97 languages (and its value for stock brokers and
others), and Amazon’s ‘personal data bases’ (which seeks to
stimulate sales with custom tailored pop-up ads by monitoring
surfers’ previous behavior) only hint of what is in store. In fact,
the potential is not ‘more of the same’ but ‘an entirely new ball
game’.
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The synergy of mass digitization, mass data mining and

automatic mass data processing are creating a new field of
endeavor: cybernetic decision-making in the social realm.
Because the volume of information flow is too great for the
human brain to handle, new information systems almost dictate
the introduction of ‘cybernetic decision-making’ in the social
sphere. This is occurring in the operation of countless human
organizations and associations – public or private, who due to
their own growing complexity and information overload, will
allow their systems to govern themselves much in the way an
air conditioner ‘behaves’ or industrial chemical processes
works.

Cybernetic decision-making raises not only the issue of

behavior control but also how societies as a whole will be
shaped by the growing empowerment of machines to ‘make
decisions for us’?

The prospect of decoding of our psycho-social DNA and the

growing use of cybernetic decision-making in the social realm
raise serious social, political, legal and ethical issues, which it is
imperative to identify and discuss. While many others have
written about the ramifications of each of the three technologies
(digitations, data mining automation of decision-making)
separately, this paper seeks to examine the ramifications to the
social system when the three are harnessed together. It also
calls for taking the debate out of the hands of the technical
community and putting it on the public agenda.

It is already clear that the power and potential created is far

greater than its composite parts. One of the fundamental
questions that needs to be addressed is -- What is the price of
enhanced efficiency when one takes cybernetics out of the
natural sciences where phenomena are rigid replicable laws
and apply them to the provinces of the ‘softer’ social sciences?
Machines by their very structure are committed to the ‘status
quo’ by which they are programmed, and will tend to ignore or
block demands for social change.

The paper at hand presents a series of theoretical visual

paradigms of this emerging process (the “3-D Process,
henceforth) and how it operates – the flow of information, the
creation of psycho-social DNA through data mining and its
conversion into knowledge in the form of a myriad of new social
indicators that make analysis possible and cybernetic decision-
making necessary. The presentation is supported by concrete
examples of how each of these technologies operates today
and what can be expected in the foreseeable future.
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The 3-D Process model is designed to serve as the foundation

and as a catalyst for much-needed debate of this trend and how
it should be handled by enlightened societies.

Introduction

The proliferation of digital coding of all aspects of human

behavior is a watershed event. Beyond the enhanced
performance digital systems bring – from the sharpness of TV
images and exquisite audio quality of CDs to electronic banking
and e-commerce, instant access and sharing of information
anywhere-anytime – digitization is creating a ‘universal
language’ of almost all phenomena that can be observed and
analyzed on an entirely new level, thanks to technological
progress: the first – connectivity and conductivity of
communication networks; the second – the exponential growth
of data bases; the third – the constantly growing computing
capacity of computers to store and ‘mine’ unlimited amounts of
data. When combined, these developments are making it
possible to pinpoint patterns and predict behavior on an
unprecedented scale. The new economic and social forces
unleashed could revolutionize our lives.

This trend is paralleled (even amplified) by growing dependence

on ‘new information systems’ designed to prevent organizations
from collapse due to information overload by allocating more
and more decision-making to cybernetic or automated computer
systems. Fear of information overload is widespread, and
because it is shared by social, economic and government
organizations, the trend towards automation of information flow
is fast creating decision-making networks that work
autonomously – cybernetic decision-making systems.

The ‘three-Ds – Digitization, Data minding, and cybernetic

Decision making (or 3-D Process, henceforth) -- not only
threaten to compromise our privacy and undermine our
autonomy as human beings. They may drain society of its most
creative powers.

In some case, the 3-D Process is augmented and accelerated

by other objectives: For instance, attempts to reduce
paperwork: The Government Paperwork Elimination Act
(GPEA), enacted in 1998 requires all US governmental
authorities to develop and acquire “information technology to
include alternative information technologies that provide for
electronic submission, maintenance or disclosure of information
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as a substitute for paper … within five years.”1 Most public

agencies in the US and the UK will be online by the year 2005.
While designed to enhance efficiency and customer service,
paperwork elimination has a ‘hidden’ consequence: huge
amounts of information on almost every aspect of human
activity – down to the level of the individual, are being collected
in digital form and archived.

Parallel to this, civilian, non-government institutions of all kinds -

- from commercial enterprises – big and small, to political
organizations and pressure groups, non-profit organizations
and social networks are creating data banks of their own
customers/clients/supporters/members. The declared objective
is to expand their outreach, enhance their effectiveness, and/or
improve their customer relations management with personalized
services based on assembly of user profile files.

Beyond the immediate objectives or utility of such systems,

inside and outside government, this phenomenon is wittingly or
unwittingly compiling a digital database on every individual at a
multiple of levels, recording almost every move we make. In
fact, the rush to squirrel away information has become a kind of
21st century ‘gold rush’: Organizations are asking for and
recording information at times without knowing when, how or for
what purpose, but with a clear sense that ‘down the road’ the
input they posses will be worth its weight in gold. If ‘knowledge
is power’ has become the mantra of the Information Age, the
‘alchemy’ that will allow such organizations to transform piles of
data into new knowledge with a market value is the advent of
data mining techniques.

Data bases of every kind have already become traded

commodities. What is particularly worrisome is new capabilities
to combine and integrate such data bases using artificial
intelligence and advanced data mining techniques. In the past
statistical profiles were limited to a handful of demographic
variables such as age, gender, religion, income, education and
geographical location. Tomorrow’s data mining techniques will
soon be able to sift through thousands and thousands of
variables to find significant correlations that reveal ‘how we tick’
psychologically. Constantly updated, such personal dossiers
will accompany people throughout their lives like a shadow,
often irrespective of the utility of the profile, but accessible
through technology to more and more interested parties. As
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman – but one sideline
observer of the 3-D Process noted:

1
GPEA. XVII of P.L. 105-277 [http://Thomas.loc.gov.]
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“Instead of Big Brother, there are a lot of Little Brothers…constantly watching

2
and interpret our daily lives.”

While this ‘shadowing’ process is already afoot in data bases

that track our marketing behavior or record our web activity, as
more and more areas of our lives are ‘digitized’, more and more
the elements that make up our lives and our mindsets become
transparent once they are ‘processed’ using advanced
technology that reveal patterns of which even we the subjects
may not be cognizant.

Proliferation of data-gathering into our private lives and psyches

stand to increase significantly, even take a quantum-leap
forward, once developers are able to further miniaturize, power
and lower the price of tiny sensors called ‘smart dust’ – a
development that is just around the corner.

Once these almost microscopic wireless sensor devices can be

reduced to the size of a grain of rice rather than ten on a face of
a penny, and their price lowered from $100 per unit to $1 per
unit, sensors can be implanted or attached to anything –
people, animals, plants and inanimate objects likes tables and
walls and household appliances in alarming numbers.
Originally designed to improve quality of life by reporting a drop
in blood sugar for a diabetic or disconnecting an appliance at
the first signs of an electrical fire, miniature sensors will lead to
integrated wireless sensor networks that will not only be able to
monitor and report our behavior in a myriad of ways in our
homes, at work and in our leisure time activities. When this data
is compiled and examined as a whole, thanks to a universal
digital language upon which all the input is based, repetitive
behavior patterns and what stimulates them can be accurately
calculated.

David Tennenhouse, director of research at Intel Research told

MIT Technology Review at an October 2003 conference on
“Where Technology is Heading?” that he can imagine:

“...a global computer network with ‘fingers’ reaching everywhere, sensors

scattered around the world, and embedded processors in various devices.
‘We need new sensors and actuators, new ways of connecting our
computers to the physical world. [N.L. Italics mine]. Information technology
has barely scratched the surface of where it can be used.”

The possibility of a small army of sensor-actuators who

collaborate with and compensate for one another and report
what’s going on – turning on the irrigation system based on the
readings of humidity sensors in the soil – are already in the late
stages of development. A senior NASA engineer

2
Thomas L. Friedman “Little Brother, New York Times, September 26, 1999
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enthusiastically described the potential as “synthesizing global

knowledge from raw data on the fly.”3 The existence of
universal sensor in every crack and cranny not only ushers in
what the engineer’s interviewer preferred to label “pervasive’
computing” – “creeping into every home, building, office,
factory, car, street, and farm”. It also sets the stage for ‘the tail
wagging the dog’. Neil Savage in a Technology Review
conference predicted:

“These sensors will monitor all sorts of human and environmental activities
…Instead of just responding to our requests… computers could start
anticipating human needs and in some cases it could take actions on our
4
behalf.”

As data bases have expanded and information systems

become more complex, data management has become one of
the hottest majors at business schools. The world’s foremost
leaders in technology, such as Microsoft, and research
institutions at leading academic centers are eagerly taking an
active role in developing sophisticated information management
systems designed to enable organizations to maximize the
utility of their knowledge base. The faster personal digital
profiles are created by government agencies, educational
systems and commercial enterprises, the greater the
enticement to tie these dossiers together in the name of
efficiency and good management.

At the same time, the increase in the size and complexity of

such information systems compels organizations to adopt
automated decision-making procedures ‘made by the system
itself’ in order to take full advantage of the data at their disposal
and to prevent the system’s collapse due to information
overload.

At the heart of this process is the introduction of cybernetic

systems. Everything from complex industrial processes down to
the performance of the air conditioner and the kitchen toaster
are based on cybernetics – that is, autonomous decision-
making operations that manage processes within a ‘closed
system’ – from the flow of information from sensors to the stage
of ‘policy implementation’, based on analysis of the data being
received about the ‘state of the system’. In other words, specific
bits of information are translated into indicators of the ‘state of
the system’ which are compared with indicators predefined in
accordance with the system’s objectives. The cybernetic system

3
Gregory Haung, “Casting the Wireless Sensor Net”, MIT Technology Review, July/August
2003, at http://www.cens.ucla.edu/News/TechReview.pdf
4
Neil Savage, MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference October 1, 2003,
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identifies gaps between the actual state of affairs at any given

moment and desired ones, prompting the system to make
decisions for remedial treatment designed to reduce or
eliminate the gaps. This is all done without human intervention
in a totally automated manner.

In social systems the indicators are indexes that reflect ‘the

state of the organization’. The quality of the decision-making
process will hinge on the comprehensiveness and validity of the
indicators. Can cybernetic systems be applied to social
systems? Is it a good idea?

When Chou En Lai was asked for his opinion on the social
effects of the French Revolution, he answered “it is too early to
say” – a quip that reflected the limitations of social science to
forecast behavior. Up until now, political scientists, sociologists
and social psychologists have been unable to monitor,
measure, analyze and integrate or understand the full scope of
factors that underlay human behavior and social phenomena.
Yet, emerging new information management systems, coupled
with unprecedented progress in data mining and artificial
intelligence herald a quantum-leap forward in the research tools
available to the social sciences.

New data mining techniques that enable scholars to create new

smart ‘composite’ social indicators that link many dimensions of
human activity or personality mesh well with what one might
best term the ‘mechanization’ of the social sciences: The
primacy of technology in so many fields of human endeavor had
given a ‘systematic’ bent to a host of professional fields in the
social sciences, from learning theory to personal therapy.
Almost every phenomenon is now conceptually framed as a
‘process’ waiting to be understood, ‘worked through’ or
‘readjusted’ by social engineers.

One of the outgrowths of this fashion is the emergence of social

theories that view automation as a “mandatory basis” for social
growth and prevention of social collapse. Automation is
considered a ‘universal law of social development’ – that is,
growing complexity requires automation to simplify the system
and prevent its collapse, thus ‘accelerated complexity’ and
‘simplicity’ run hand-in-hand if society is to survive. The
character and ramifications of this trend in social thinking will be
discussed in depth later in this paper.

Yet it is important to clarify at this point: The introduction of

automation into the process of social decision-making may
harbor dire consequences for social systems. Proponents for
introducing cybernetics into the social domain assume that
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human beings are rational beings, perpetually searching for

ways to reduce costs and improve their efficiency. They
presume that democratic institutions can adapt to the structural
changes of introducing cybernetic systems without losing their
vitality. This optimism ignores the fact that automatic system for
social decision-making will, by nature, seek to keep a system in
equilibrium with its predetermined objectives and therefore will
identify agents for societal change as undesirable, promoting
only agents whose behavior is compatible with the vested-
interests of the system – a characteristic that has serious
ramifications for society.

It may be that turning decision-making over to machines will

threaten the vitality of human development by robbing
‘progress’ of its dynamic element. After all, ‘new information
systems’ cannot be programmed to recognize singular genius
or even bright innovation and separate them from hair-brained
schemes; by their nature, machine-generated decisions will
ignore and if allowed – actively repress change processes that
lies ‘outside conventional patterns’. This could be disastrous to
human progress, ‘programming’ humankind’s most
technologically--advanced and sophisticated societies for
mediocrity and maintenance of the status quo. Yet outside the
techie community there is little serious discussion of ‘where
technology is taking us’. Hopefully, putting these technological
trends into graphic form can help ‘non-techies’ – from scientists
in the social sciences to members of the media and the general
public – better grasp where technology is moving the social
sciences, and society as a whole.

From Data – Mined Digitized Behavior to Cybernetic

Decision-Making: An Information Flow Model of the ‘3-D
Process’

Understanding how input from digitized human behavior could

affect – even erode social progress, can be enhanced by
graphic illustration of ‘information flow’ within the social system.
The schema presented in Figure 1 is a visual presentation of
the basic ’architecture’ of information flow. (It is designed to
provide an ‘overview’ of the 3-D Process, which will be followed
by a more detailed discussion of the ‘state-of-the-art’, stage by
stage.)

Figure 1 illustrates the four ‘stages’ of information flow: the

digitization process; data mining procedures; conversion of the
data into social, personal indicators; and cybernetic decision-
making and policy implementation.
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Digitization of Human Activity:

The Internet is not the only source of input on human activity
that can be mined, but it is the ‘granddaddy’ of them all. More
and more aspects of human physical and psychological
activities are expressed or channeled through the Web. The
Internet has become the site for more and more human activity
not only for accessing information from a host of data bases, e-
libraries, print media and so forth, and conducting business and
social communication and academic collaboration. So much
information on business entities is available that company
websites have become a highly profitable source of business
intelligence. Parallel to the growth of e-commerce and financial
transactions, the variety of professional-occupational, leisure-
time recreational and artistic pursuits on the Web are growing
all the time. The Internet has also become a popular platform
not only for ‘traditional’ e-learning but also other forms of
cognitive enhancement, and health monitoring and
maintenance. Of late, one witnesses more and more actual

political activity on the Web, not just a plethora of political

websites: political forums, organization of write-in campaigns,
dissemination of petitions, public opinion polls, straw votes on
public issues to mention but a few. In May 2004 the British
Labor Party introduced a bill that would lower the voting age to
16 and allow voters to cast their ballots by e-mail or SMS and
pilots of this sort are already operative in the UK. The vast
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majority of this activity, whether in the privacy of one’s home or

out in society, is in the public domain – making our lives more
and more akin to living in a virtual goldfish bowl.

Data Mining to Uncover Psycho-Social DNA:

‘Data mining’ is special strategies and techniques for extracting
useful information from volumes of digital data. Data mining is
a key step in a broader process of information management
techies call Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD) – a
process that includes not only extracting possibly relevant data
from the Web, but also ‘refinement steps’ where such data is
‘cleaned’, processed, integrated and interpreted to produce new
knowledge/insights.5 While data mining techniques currently
focus on specific input on a particular subject, the sheer scale of
human activity in digital form going on over the Internet and
deposited in other data bases presents a ‘window of
opportunity’ to gain new insights into how human beings tick –
on both an individual and collective level. For social scientists,
this possibility is like finding the Holy Grail… To date, the
closest social scientists have come to cracking our mindsets is
to categorize people into groups – Type A vs. Type B, People-
oriented vs. Object-oriented, right-brain vs. left-brain, and so
forth. Data mining holds the potential to examine the mindset of
the individual on an entirely different level. Quantitative
research will never be the same.

An individual’s psycho-social DNA will contain discrete personal

biographic parameters regarding interrelationships between an
individual’s various personality traits and his or her behavior
patterns. Psycho-social DNA will be derived using the KDD
process that will be able to establish statistically significant
correlations between personal traits (e.g. cognitive traits,) and
behavior (media consumption, commercial activity, etc).
Knowing a person’s psycho-social DNA will be a powerful tool
for predicting human behavior in various situations, based on
past performance.

Figure 2 presents in graphic form the kind of ‘strands’ that make

up an individual’s psycho-social DNA.

5
(Footnote: Piatetsky-Shapiro, “Knowledge Discover from Real Databases”,
Artificial Intelligence, 11 (5), 1991, at
http://www.kdnuggets.com/gpspubs/aimag-kdd-overview-1996-Fayyad.pdf
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Figure 2
Virtual Psycho-Social DNA

Each of us ‘carries’ personal psychological – virtual 'genes' –

where each strand of psycho-social DNA represents or reflects
a distinct attribute of the human psyche, part of one’s cognitive
profile or other personal attributes that impact on our behavior.
The application of KDD procedures to the huge amount of data
in digital form available on each individual’s behavior will enable
data miners to define such virtual behavior 'genes' and create a
social ‘behavior genome’ of sorts. It is entirely possible in the
future many aspects of behavior will be linked to real human
genes – just as some scientists have already postulated that
there is a genetic basis to those prone to risk-taking and thrill
seeking.6 Artificial intelligence, sophisticated data-mining
algorithms and the new grid computing strategies that reveal
patterns hidden in huge quantities of data and other goodies in
the ‘KDD toolbox’ up scale the entire field of psychological
profiling to encompass all of society. They make the mapping of
our overall psycho-social DNA on an individual level – en mass,

6
Judy Seigel, “Israeli, US Scientists Find Risk Gene”, Jerusalem Post News Service,
January 5, 1996, at http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-
/module/displaystory/story_id/2692/format/html/displaystory.html
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a distinct possibility in the not-so-distant future. These individual

profiles can then be batched and examined to create social
indicators that are relevant for society as a whole, just as the
state of the economy is reflected in various economic indicators
such as standard of living index, rate of unemployment, new
jobs, etc. Social indicators, constantly monitored and ‘refreshed’
by the flow of ‘DNA data’ will be able to describe the state of the
social system at any given point in time – however, the
complexity of such data has a catch: It requires that
benchmarking it against pre-set social indicators will have to be
handled by programmed information management systems.
The dilemma is – How much interpretation and formulation of
policy can safely be left to cybernetic decision-making?

Cybernetic Decision-Making:
Cybernetic systems are autonomous systems that self-regulate
processes though the interaction of goals, predictions, actions,
feedback and response, without human intervention in the
decision making-process. Originally applied to physical systems
from aiming artillery to complex industrial processes,
cybernetics is now being applied to information because data
has become too voluminous to be handled by the human brain.

In cybernetic decision-making in the social domain, social

indicators serve as the bases for comparison of the existing
state of the system with the social system pre-determined
objectives. These objectives are also expressed in terms of
social indicators stored in the system's memory. When a gap
between the desired state and the actual state of the social
system becomes too great, the cybernetic decision-making
apparatuses formulate a policy for corrective action to
reestablish equilibrium – that is, to re-align the social system
with its objectives, much in the way climate control systems are
programmed to automatically respond and maintain a certain
temperature and humidity in our physical environment.

Thus information freely flowing from storage of input from

human activity to behavioral control of human behavior is fast
becoming reality. It is trend that mass ‘digitally-challenged’
communications scholars simply can no longer afford to ignore.
A closer look inside each of the ‘three big Ds’ in the above
schema – the digitization, the data-mining and the decision-
making – and where they are leading, are called for.

Digital Coding of Every Respect of Human Activity

Binary ‘coding’ in-and-of-itself itself is not new. What is new is

its universal usage: Binary coding is an integral part of the
patterns of African tom-tom drums. It was used by Francis
 15

Bacon in his first forays into cryptography when he produced a

binary code for the 26-letters of the English alphabet (A =
aaaaa, B= aaaab, C= aaaba, D = aaabb, etc.) Morse Code’s
use of ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ -- the first mass commercial use of
binary code was debuted in 1836 – is over 150 years old. But,
never before have so many aspects of human behavior in so
many forms been expressed in binary digital code.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the MIT Media

Lab and columnist for Wired magazine was the first to grasp
that bits of data have become so widespread that they have
become analogous to atoms of matter. In a landmark book –
Being Digital – published in 1996, Negroponte labeled bits of
data “the smallest element of the DNA of information”.7 Indeed,
for the first time in human history, life – sound, visual images,
texts, biological phenomenon and human ‘comings and goings’
are all being coded into a common binary electronic language,
a digital Esperanto if you wish. This transformation of all human
physical and mental activity, mundane and sublime, into a
universal form will dramatically change life and social
organization as we know it. As Howard Rheingold noted in The
Smart Mobs8:

“We leave digital traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and with
web browsers today…Tomorrow mobile devices will broadcast clouds of
personal data to invisible monitors all around us, as we move from place to
place…The virtual social and physical worlds are colliding, merging and
coordinating”.

Once coded into digital form, electronic ‘material’ can be stored,

processed and analyzed – combined or compared – by new
intelligent simulation models (algorithms) of almost unlimited
size, with an almost unlimited number of variables and
attributes.

This transformation of all phenomena into the common digital

language was labeled in a November 2000 article in Scientific
American – “Digital Convergence”.9 Because it is hard to grasp
the sheer scope of this watershed event, the ‘convergence
process’ has been converted into graphic form in Figure 3 which
displays how all content (audio, video, data, graphics),
information display platforms (TV, internet, game machines) all

7
N. Negnoponte, “Being Digital”, Vintage Books, 1995.
8
H. Rheingolg, "Smart Mobs", Perseus Publishing, 2003
9
Peter Forman et al., Creating Convergence, Scientific American Journal, Nov. 19, 2000, at
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000A1852-12CF-1C73-
9B81809EC588EF21#print
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distribution systems (optical fibers, wireless, DSL lines), and

analytical tools (data mining – KDD) are converging.

Figure 3
Total Digital Convergence

This awesome revolution not only enriches our lives with

integrated content or multimedia. More important, it opens up
new means for extracting integrated knowledge about all
aspects of human behavior, physiology and psychology,
spurring the creation of new ways to merge these unlimited
resources - cybernetic tools.

A few examples of how digitization affects different areas of

human activity – from music to cognitive activity will illustrates
the revolution in store. Music is a good example.

Digitization of music not only brings unparalleled quality to our

listening pleasure. It opens up new horizons for composers:
Describing the new ‘fluid’ quality of music in an article in the
New York Times, Kevin Kelly wrote:10
]
“Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be molded and
mitigated and flexed and linked…You can filter it, bend it, archive it, and

10
Kevin Kelly, Where Music Will Be Coming From, The NYT, March 17, 2002
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rearrange it…Once music is digitized new behaviors emerge…to surgically

morph a sound until it is suitable for a new use…to X-ray the guts of the
music and outline its structure and alter it, to rearrange a piece so that its
parts yield a different voice…to mold and marry music together into hybrid
seeds…Music is becoming a commodity that is traded, co-created and co-
produced by a network audience…” .

Digitization not only affects the people who make music; it

makes it possible to examine music’s ‘innards’ to discover
unique digitized patterns ‘behind’ musical works. Philips
Electronics has already developed a music search engine that
can identify a symphony composer just by humming a tune,
based on the work’s unique ‘audio fingerprint’. In the future,
harnessing data-mining and data-analysis techniques to a
composer’s composite works is likely to reveal hidden links
between the composer’s personality and his or her music.

Sight is undergoing the same revolution as sound: El-Op

Electro-optical Industries has developed a digital movie-editing
console (“Matchmaker”) that can match and synchronize
different versions of the same film for simultaneous multiple-
language broadcasting using the unique digital ‘fingerprint’ of
each frame. Tomorrow, when pixels of works of art will be
examined with intelligent algorithms, new insights about art and
human aesthetics based on the secrets of their inner structure
and content which the human eye cannot perceive may appear.
Such examination may reveal hidden links between visual
images and artists’ personal traits. New insights on visual
stimuli may open up a whole new dimension to graphic arts and
advertising.

One of the most ambitious patterning projects is a seven year

project dreamed up by astronomers. The Digitized Sky
11
Survey” systematically digitized photos of the entire sky with
the aid of a Hubble telescope. The database will be scanned to
seek unseen patterns in the cosmos among the half a billion
stars in the digital photograph series.

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery from Data (KDD)

Digitzation in-and-of-itself goes nowhere – not until it is

harnessed to a new way of looking at things. The key is data
mining – a new way of investigating phenomena which is often
described as one of the ten most important emerging
technologies that will change the world.12

Data mining is based on applying automated statistical analysis

and artificial intelligence to reveal hidden patterns and

11
Space Telescope Science Institute, www.stsci.edu/resources/
12
Rachel Konard,"Data Mining:Digging User Info for Gold" ZDnet, February 8, 2001
 18

relationships within huge batches of random data. Because of

their enormous commercial potential, countless high-tech
companies are engaged in using these techniques for a
growing number of applications.

Two well-known examples are Google’s personalized banners

and Amazon’s personalized book offers which use our web
behavior for more focused marketing. Not all applications,
however, involve focused marketing. The potential of data
mining to pick up patterns is enormous: The American NBA is
using data mining to analyze videos of basketball games from a
situational standpoint. Advanced Scout software13 reviews and
analyses the layout of rival teams on the court at critical
junctures of previous games to reveal winning moves when
specific players face one another in a similar situation.14

Cognifit (www.cognifit.com) computer software designed to

enhance users’ cognitive abilities is based on digital coding,
analyses and storage of the movements of the mouse to create
a customized digital profile of the subject’s cognitive attributes.

From a scientific viewpoint, the main objective of data mining

(DM) is to convert bits of random information into knowledge in
all fields of scientific endeavor – from the natural sciences such

as biology and medicine to the social sciences. Data mining is

often mistakenly used as a synonym for KDD – Knowledge
Discovery from Databases: Data minding is the application of a
specific algorithm for extracting patterns from data – only a
step, albeit a key step, in the KDD process. Osama Fayyad,15 a
senior researcher at Microsoft explains: Data mining will only
produce a mélange of meaningful-and-meaningless valid-and-

invalid patterns; additional steps must be taken before patterns

or relationships can be converted into knowledge:

“Data preparation, data selection, data cleaning, incorporations of

appropriate prior knowledge and proper interpretation of the results, are
essential to ensure that useful knowledge is derived from data”.

Fayyad adds that KDD processes are currently being expanded

in an “attempt to automate the entire process of data analysis
and the statistician art of hypothesis, selection”16 Automatic
selection and detection of new hypothesis is a dramatic
13
“Advanced Scout: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in NBA Data”, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Boston, 1997, at
http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~guvenir/courses/CS558/SeminarPapers/nba.pdf.
14
See www.anderson.ucla.edu "Data Mining: What is Data Mining?" p. 2
15
Usama Fayyad, et al, From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery in Databases, American
Association for Artificial Intelligence, Fall 1966 p.3
16
Ibid
 19

expansion of data mining that holds great promise for social

scientists – extending the ability of the human brain to ‘see
order’ amidst chaos, as intelligence was once defined.

How does KDD work? All data processing tools seek one of
four types of relationships17:

● Classes: Data is located by predetermined groups – such

as defining consumer groups, then tailoring specials to
customer preferences;
● Clusters: Data items grouped according to logical
relationships – such as the behavior of browsers;
● Associations: Data with a high confidence level that two
things will appear together – such as seemingly unrelated
purchases – beer and diapers that appear in tandem in male
shopping carts as the weekend approaches;
● Sequential patterns: Data reflects associations or tendencies
where there is a time factor involved in the link between data –
such as the likelihood that a person who purchased a backpack
will be shopping for a sleeping bag within a given period of time.

To seek these relationships data miners employ a host of

analytical software tools, including statistical algorithms,
machine learning, neural networks, decision trees and others
strategies.

One example can help illustrate how they operate. One of the
most popular data mining tools is neural network or artificial
intelligence. It is a non-linear predictive model that purports to
resemble the way the brain works – that is, its architecture is
layered in such a way that the path taken at each fork hinges on
an ‘activation function’ determined by the weights or value of
the relationship between all the variables. VISA International is
currently using neural networks to create elaborate behavioral
profiles which can track individual clients’ behavior online or
offline and match it to similar personality and behavior types in
an effort to predict future behavior.

A growing use of neural networks to study social systems can

be expected because of their ability to deal with complexity, yet
the model has its drawbacks: Although neural systems lend
themselves to predicting behavior in the commercial sphere –
such as who is likely to respond to direct mailing, the model
does not necessarily provide the reasoning behind its
predictions – a serious disadvantage when the objective is to
understand social relations. There are some other methods –

17
www.anderson.ucla.edu "Data Mining: What is Data Mining?"
 20

such as decision-trees – that can address reasoning, but only

with a very limited number of variables.

Some of the latest state-of-the-art software is more far-reaching

– Sagramatha, for instance: While the company’s software
(www.sag121.com) is designed to provide credit card
companies with the input on consumer behavior to produce
‘personalized coupons’ that reflect our buying patterns, thus
increasing coupon redemption, Sagramatha boasts that it is
able to take a huge database and ‘drill down to individual
consumers’ by:

“…analyses consumer loyalty or credit/debit transaction data in thousands of

dimensions simultaneously [N.L. Italics mine].”

Sagramatha is a harbinger of a coming revolution that can not

only manipulate how we shop, but how we behavior in other
domains. When these techniques are ultimately applied to
social engineering objectives instead of merely increasing
market share what will be the ramifications?

Social Consequences of the 3-D Process

Data mining will undoubtedly have dramatic influence on social

and political science research. As shown in Figure 1, the 3-D
Process pushes social organizations in the direction of total
cybernetic decision-making processes. The benefits and the
risks are enormous.

There are major social issues that arise from growing

penetration of the 3-D Process into all walks of life .Much has
been written about personal composite electronic profile
violating personal freedoms, but little has been written about the
effect on society as a whole.

Another serious issue is the high probability that ‘individual

customization’ will arbitrarily limit the social and economic
opportunities open to individuals based on ‘electronic profiling’.
Business Week labeled this phenomenon “Weblining”18 as the
Information Age’s equivalent of red-lining – a practice where
“leaders and businesses marked whole neighborhoods off
limit…based on geographic stereotypes, not concrete
evidence." Information management companies gather and sell
information on individuals under the innocuous name
‘knowledge-based customer recognition systems’. In fact,
customer recognition systems arbitrarily govern the type, the
quality and the cost of services offered, based on an individual’s
assets and past behavior, automatically compiled and analyzed
18
Marcia Stepanek, "weblining", Businessweek Online, April 3 2000
 21

by cybernetic systems. Einstein – a Web-aided computer

system used by the First Union Bank produces a customized
customer profile on a teller’s monitor in less than 15 seconds
flat.

In his book, The Naked Consumers19 Eric Larson, a Wall Street

Journal columnist, warns not only of the invasion of privacy; he
speaks of the prospect that profiling will ultimately sap the
vitality of the business sector by encouraging businesspersons
and entrepreneurs to “…pay more attention to manipulation of
our needs and values through surveillance rather than risk and
innovation.” It should be added: The technology not only
threatens to reduce customers to dehumanized individual ‘profit
and loss’ statements; the more widely it is used, the more equal
opportunity and social mobility – one of the pillars of western
democratic society – are likely to be eroded.

The major social concerns regarding personalization of data

mining will continue to grow due to the great economic benefits
that it provides to government and the private sector. The real
issue is access to data bases and the fact that such information
is being turned into commodities that are being traded ‘as is’ or
in partnership and made accessible to more and more
interested parties in the open market.

According to the white paper Data and What We’re Doing with
It20 published by ACXION – a leading information broker, lack of
restrictions on collection and use of data is driving the
establishment of “databases…in all shapes and sizes.” The
trend towards amalgamation of data bases is marked…and
growing exponentially. Thus in one documented case 100 small
consumer databases of consumers of outdoor sporting items,
each with 50,000 names, joined forces to create a 3.5 million
consumer database of outdoor sports enthusiasts which was
then overlaid with additional information from other data bases
that revealed a host of information about the individual
customers – from age and telephone number to vehicle owned
and type of dwelling. Such dossiers are sold in digital form that
seamlessly interface with mass marketing software or other
uses. Politics, for instance.

Prediction of voting behavior based on past political behavior

and personal traits is nothing new. It was first introduced in the
1965 presidential race when I De Sola Pool21 served as a

19
Eric Larson, " The Naked Consumers: How Our Private Lives Become Public
Commodities", Henry Holt, 1992
20
Jennifer Barret, "Data and What We're Doing With It", ACXIOM CORP. 2002, at
http://www.acxiom.com/subimages/130200322809data_and_what_we.doc
21
I De Sola Pool, "candidates, Issues And Strategies", 1965, M.I.T Press
 22

consultant to JFK on which campaign topics to talk about and

which to avoid. Since then, campaign management based on
what the voter wants to hear – the ‘making of a president’,
based on applying techniques used by the social sciences to
examine human behavior to advertising ploys has become an
integral part of political campaigns. Data mining techniques
may soon offer the kind of input now extracted from focus
groups, only on a grand scale – further focusing campaigning
on manipulation rather than genuine discussion of policy
positions. Tomorrow, campaigning techniques will be able to
plug into our psyches with customized messages, just as
personalized banners on the Web now plug into our consumer
habits. The ACXION white paper reveals, for instance, that ads
and even editorial content printed mainstream publications like
Newsweek vary from customer to customer -- ‘customized’ to
the subscriber’s personal profile! The profit of applying similar
techniques in mass mailings to voters from campaign
headquarters is probably too good to be ignored.

ACXIOM knows what it is talking about: According to Business

Week22 ACXIOM has stockpiled names, addresses, income,
race, religious affiliation and other data on 95 million American
households! There are only approximately 110 million
households in the entire United States. The ‘gold rush’ for data
mining has not escaped government.

The fashion of government viewing their citizens as customers

may enhance efficiency and service quality, but this may come
at a price. Andrew Pinder, head of the UK’s drive to put all
government services in Great Britain online by 2005 noted
recently in a BBC interview that putting ministries online is not
enough. Governments, he said, must determine “what people
want and are willing to use.” In the same breath, Pinder speaks
of the public sector “borrow[ing] techniques from successful
businesses like Amazon, which builds --- around the
customer.”23 Creation of personalized dossiers of government’s
‘customers’ and offering services to citizens accordingly, in the
name of ‘personalized service’ would seem to be only a matter
of time.

In the early 1950’s, the FBI visited homes of those holding high
security clearance, furtively scanning the books in their libraries
for radical material, while asking questions; now it is possible to
track the reading habits of every American digitally. Our
magazine subscriptions, book purchases and library traffic – all
sitting in databases and waiting to be combined, can reveal a

22
Marcia Stepanek, "weblining", Businessweek Online, April 3 2000
23
Andrew Pinder, BBC news, 25.9.2003, at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3139816.stm
 23

host of information about us – from our political persuasions to

our sexual orientation.

The above example is focused, but the potential for ‘digital net
casting’ is much much broader: A now-defunct DoD project,
sparked by 9/11 called the Total Information Awareness,
conceived by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) – the founding father of the internet, had broader
aspirations than learning whether we subscribe to fringe
publications. The TIA project’s objective was to monitor all the
digitized aspects of human behavior – including all transactional
activity and biometric information regarding individual members
of society. Among the stated objectives of the project were the
following24:

“Technically, the TIA program is focusing on the development of 1)

architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database… and for
integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools. 2) novel methods
for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new
sources and invent new algorithms for mining, combining and refining
information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and 3) revolutionary
new models, algorithms, methods, tools and techniques for analyzing and
correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.”

For example, The DARPA Total Information Awareness Project

proposed to use patterning technology to monitor phone calls of
persons associated with nuclear power plants to uncover latent
multi-tiered ties among individuals within and outside the
system that reveal the existence of social groupings that might
constitute a security risk to the plant.

In September 2003 the funding for the project was cut off by the
Congress out of fear that Total Information Awareness would
undermine the right to privacy (although the project was said to
be designed to monitor foreigners, not American citizens.) The
importance of the DARPA project is that it proves that
integration of the digitization of all aspects of human life
stripping us of our privacy is no longer science fiction.

While the above examples of activity and attitudes in both the

private and public sector hardly exhaust the potential to take
advantage of digitization to create psycho-social DNA and apply
it to monitor or manipulate our lives in countless domains, the
potential dangers of the synergy of digitization and data mining
is magnified when decision-making is turned over to cybernetic
systems – a natural outcome of the limitations of the human
brain.

24
See http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm.
 24

The convergence of digitization, data-mining and social

cybernetic decision-making may be planting the seeds of
destruction – undermining the very elements that make
technologically advanced societies so strong. It is important for
the community-at-large beyond the hi-tech sector to be
cognizant of where automated data management is taking us.

Social Cybernetic Decision-Making:

Everyone uses buzz words like ‘cyberspace’ – and more

recently…cyberia, but what exactly is cybernetics?

The word “cybernetics” is derives from the Greek word

kybernotes which means a 'steerman'. In 1948, Norbert Wiener,
professor of mathematics at MIT, became the founding father of
modern cybernetics – a breakthrough concept that ‘control and
communication’ are at the heart of the operation of biological,
mechanical and social entities, alike. The idea emerged from
discussion among a group of physicists, electrical engineers,
biologists and mathematicians. One of the first examples of an
‘interdisciplinary’ exchange in an age when specialization in
isolated communities dominated academe, the participants’
discovered that there were shared cybernetic principles in their
respective fields of expertise. By logic, they could be interfaced,
sparking endeavors to develop man - machine self-regulating
systems.

Wiener was cognizant from the start of the promise and the peril
of cybernetics. In his classic book Cybernetics25 published in
1948, Norbert Wiener cited that there would be attempts to
introduce cybernetic principles into social systems, expressing
concern that “the new science....embraces technical
developments with great possibilities for good and for evil”.

While this paper is not designed to serve as an introduction to

cybernetics, it is important to understand the basic assumptions
about phenomena that underlie cybernetics. Three of the key
ones are as follows:
Regulation and control are the most important processes in
nature. Understanding these processes is fundamental to the
continuous existence of all organizations – biological,
mechanical and social.
The existence of any organization directly depends on the
ability to transfer and correctly process information.
All biological, mechanical and social systems transfer and
process information in a similar manner.

25
Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics", MIT Press, 1948, p. 38
 25

These principles view information networks as the ‘central

nervous systems’ of all organizations. Moreover, it follows by
logic that inferences can be made from the study of one system
vis-à-vis understandings about other systems, and that
simulation of one system’s behavior can shed light and help
predict future developments in other systems.

A classical cybernetic system operates in the following way:

Sensors collect raw feedback from the relevant environment.
The raw feedback is processed and converted to pre-defined
indicators.
These indicators, describing the system at a given time, are
transmitted to a ‘control function’ which is also fed by the
system’s goals from the system’s memory. The ‘control function’
identifies the gaps between the objectives and the current
status of the system.
The gaps are then transferred to a ‘decision-making
apparatus’ responsible for making new decisions designed to
change the environment to bring the system closer to its
objectives.
The decisions are transmitted to system ‘effectors’ that take
actions to change the environment.

What is important for our discussion is that the whole process is

expected to operate autonomously, even when applied to social
systems, not just physical systems like plastic extrusion
production lines, as if human beings behave like and can be
governed like a collection of $3 stackable lawn chairs.

The operation of cybernetic decision-making within the social

system is illustrated in Figure 4.
 26

Figure 4
The Operation of a Social Cybernetic System (1)

The advent of cybernetic concepts was a catalyst for some

social scientists to develop new theories about social
development26 that view society as social systems and sub-

systems with their own self-regulatory mechanisms that ‘steer’

human development and assign communication a key role in
the structuring of society. Among the core assumptions shared
by sociological systems theorists:
1. The world is not ‘striving towards chaos and disorder’, kept in
check by social structure. Rather, the predominant direction of
organisms is “…toward systemization, towards increased levels
of organization.”27

26
C.R. Dechert, “The Social Impact of Cybernetics”. Clarion Books, Simon and Schuster, 1966
27
J. J. Ford, “the Soviet Cybernetics and International Development” in Dechert, The Social
Impact of Cybernetics, p. 171
 27

2. Organizations move towards complexity and simplification at

the same time: Increasing complexity is driven by increased
accumulation of information; increasing simplification is the
product of automatic processes made necessary to handle the
information overload.
3. Systems which can not adapt to environmental changes or to
establish dynamic equilibrium with their surroundings are in
danger of disappearing. Survival requires development of tools
which absorb feedback, process it and makes correct decisions
to reestablish dynamic equilibrium (e.g. homeostasis process).
4. Social systems must develop tools to transform the external
environment to conform to human needs, while changing
internal behavior to reach dynamic equilibrium with changing
external environments.
5. There is no upper limit to levels of complexity: An effective
system is one that parallels increasing complexity with
development of mechanisms that automate the system’s
complexity. Thus, automation is viewed as a ‘universal law of
development’ without which further development would be
impossible. In other words, automation is at the heart of a
cybernetic perspective.

The Need to Re-think Social Indicators

The use of social indicators to measure social progress has

been around well before the emergence of cybernetics in the
mid-20th century, however, rigid and woefully limited socio-
economic indexes upon which policy formulation has been
based no longer suffice when more and more decision-making
is being made automatically.

Cybernetic social systems need to be made more reliable by

taking into account the complexities of the human personality
when they evaluate input and feedback to determine gaps
between ‘the state of the system (i.e. society) and ‘desired
societal objectives’ and need to decide what steps to take to
bring the two more into synch when the gap is too wide. That is,
the social indicators that serve as ‘sensors’ or ‘regulators’ for
measuring the ‘wellbeing’ of the social system at any given time
need to be re-thought.

There is room for new innovative social indicators that can

measure positive objectives of the social system – such as
effective socialization processes, social integration, social
cohesiveness, and environments supportive of pluralism,
tolerance, and so forth. From a functional standpoint, data
mining tools that are now able to handle composite multi-
dimensional data can now handle a host of other indicators,
thus providing a much broader palate for evaluating human
wellbeing, feelings and opinions. These indicators are
 28

‘embedded’ in our daily activity, which because they are now in

digital form can be accessed, compiled, weighed and analyzed
just like traditional indicators such as infant mortality levels.

Table 1 of Figure 5 provides a brief description of the social

indicators currently used by international organizations to
measure socio-economic wellbeing in different societies –
indexes such as age, income, divorce rates and literacy levels.
The levels of these indicators reflect the outcome of past
decision-making processes by ‘society’ – both government
institutions and private organizations. These indicators,
however, cannot explain the reasons for poor health conditions,
low work motivation, poverty, high suicide rates or poor
performance of educational systems. To date, attempts to
explain such phenomenon have been based on social science
research whose focus and number of variables are severely
limited.

Table 1 – Social Indicators – Traditional and Web-Based

Table 1 Table 2
Example of Traditional Social Examples of New Personal Web
Indicators Inputs as the Basis for New
Social Personal Indicators
- Age-related ratios (old, young) - Cultural activities
- National income - Educational activities
- Fertility rates - Cognitive activities
- Divorce rates - Browsing behavior
- Single parent rates - Search engine choices
- Rates of unemployment - E-training
- Educational attainment - Participation in forms of virtual
communities
- Student performance - Media feedback
- Self-sufficing indicators - Media consumption
- Literacy - E-commerce
- Old age income - Workplace activity
- Child poverty - Book selection
- Public social expenditure - Creative arts events
- Relative poverty - Innovation
- Income inequality - Health activities
- Gender wage gap - Risk decisions
- Minimum wage - Risk behavior
- Health care expenditures
- Life expectancy and infant mortality
- Accident rate
- Strikes
- Suicide
 29

Integration of data mining processes with the growing

availability of almost unlimited personal feedback from society
in digital form create new opportunities to design
multidimensional social indicators that will provide better
understanding and monitoring of social processes than current
social research can achieve. These indicators will allow
cybernetic social systems to anticipate or predict – by
simulations, the performance of policy decisions. Some of the
new digital feedback personal dimensions that can be tapped
into are outlined in Table 2 of Figure 5.

Data mining will, for example, help reveal the relationship

between personal cognitive parameters, cultural activity,
personal social activity and motivation. It will uncover, based on
an unprecedented large-scale ‘sample’, what elements enhance
self-esteem in a pluralistic society, or how low self-esteem
motivates people to be socially active in positive or negative
ways. Most important, the dynamics of continuous information
flow will provide constant feedback of social processes and the
effectiveness of policy implementation, on an individual and
societal level. The time perspective provided by continuous
information flow will be an essential element in refinement of
Knowledge Discovery from Data procedures.

The potential benefit of new social indicators now possible, can

be illustrated by two examples: one – research from the realm
of e-learning on the benefits of feedback in the classroom via
SMS input , the other – a small data mining product that uses
personal cognitive traits to predict weak points in driving
behavior safety. While both are limited in scope, they
demonstrate the benefits data mining for new social indicators
can bring.

Example #1: An experiment in the value of electronic

feedback in the classroom

The educational system can serve as a good example how 3-D

Processes can be integrated to improve the output of traditional
school systems.

E-learning uses the Internet as a platform, but has yet to

mobilize the flow of information to make decisions about ‘how to
teach’ – that is, evaluate the student’s learning, examine how
personal parameters affect a person’s learning processes and
set information loads, add visual aids, pace the speed of
exercises and so forth accordingly. True integration of data
mining and cybernetics in e-learning systems will make it
possible to create built-in ‘Virtual Personal Instructors’ who
 30

examine the students’ personal traits and monitor feedback,

adjusting instruction so it will be ‘tailor-made’ to the student
needs.

At present, conventional schools lack the ability to monitor the

individual student’s online performance – whether the student
understands the teacher or is even listening. As in traditional
classroom teaching, only periodic testing reveal poor results,
without any ongoing ‘sensors’ to measure motivation or
understanding and take remedial action, although all the
students’ performance in online courses is in digital form.

A study conducted at MIT’s Dialogue Media Lab in the 1970s in

anticipation of the coming cybernetic age – the author’s doctoral
research28 – demonstrated the benefits of continual digital
feedback. A hand-held electronic ‘voting system’ was
constructed that allowed each student to provide the teacher
(and the entire class) with anonymous feedback in the course of
the lessons – a primitive form of SMS-based questions/requests
now being introduced into some classrooms. (See Figure 6)

Figure 6
Hand-held voting device

The experiment was designed to

study group decision-making and
response as a pilot for testing the
suitability of public involvement in
decision-making via Internet or
interactive television. A course
class was viewed as a microcosm
of society. Both the option to be

asked and the ability to respond anonymously (i.e. to ‘Yes-or-

No’ questions) were welcomed by most students. The existence
of a channel for feedback enhanced involvement. Many
students, nearly half, reported that they were inhibited by the
lack of meaningful feedback channels within the existing school
system. Personal parameters had a direct affect, as expected,
on the benefits derived by the students from the presence of an
electronic channel. For instance, approximately half the
students in the class expressed – electronically and
anonymously – that they would not participate in the classroom
discussions because of peer pressures, lack of self-confidence
or shyness. The instructor learned to use the electronic voting
device to provide feedback regarding level of student interest
and understanding as the teacher progressed, making it
possible to re-explain material if and when feedback indicated

28
Conducted under the guidance of Professor T.B. Sheridan.
 31

this was ‘called for’ – literally and figuratively… At the time, the
amount of personal data on the participants was meager, and
lack of modern data mining tools in the 1970s in any case
blocked any attempt to further examine the role of cultural,
personal or socio-economical factors in ‘ongoing feedback-
enhanced learning’. This capability is now readily available with
SMS which could make psycho-social input on self-esteem,
motivation, group cohesiveness, social acceptance, articulacy,
and peer pressure factors a part of a student’s profile, using
these parameters and others to develop customized teaching
programs.

In the larger perspective, the experiment clearly demonstrated,

despite its small scale, the tremendous potential of electronic
feedback, which with today’s technology can be ‘up scaled’ to
provide feedback from society-at-large.

Example #2: State-of-the-Art Cognitive Enhancement

Software

The Israeli company Cognifit29 is developing innovative

computer software that allows people of all ages to enhance
their cognitive ability by exercising daily in the software’s
‘mental gym’, online or offline. The company’s first product,
Drivefit, allows young drivers to improve their driving skills and
enhance the probably of passing their driving test on the first
try. The user participates in 18 computer-aided exercises. The
computer studies the participant’s cognitive behavior and
establishes a cognitive profile for each enrollee. Hands-on
driver training is subsequently adjusted to the student’s profile.
Data mining procedures of Cognifit’s accumulated data base
revealed that it is possible to predict driving behavior of people

based on cognitive profiles even before their first driving lesson

– demonstrating that behavior can, indeed, be predicted based
on cognitive profiles compiled by KDD processes.

Cognifit’s Mindfit software – now under development, is

designed to strengthen the cognitive abilities of the elderly
population. The user will be accompanied by a virtual Individual
Training Assistant (ITA) who adapts Mindfit’s training regime to
the individual’s cognitive skills and other parameters – such as
awareness and fatigue. The ITA is based on cybernetic
concepts, programmed to automatically monitor and discover
the participant’s personality attributes and apply them to chart
the most suitable training programs. The developers expect that
data mining capabilities within the Mindfit system will be able to
use personal feedback along a time scale - analyze mouse
29
Developed under the guidance of Prof S. Breznitz. See, www.cognifit.com
 32

movements in the performance of the tasks – to find early signs

of cognitive degeneration due to Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

In both the education and cognitive examples above, despite

the differences in the sophistication of the systems, information
flow is similar to information flow illustrated in Figure 1: Human
input is digitized, Then, it is subjected to data mining
procedures to produce KDD. The knowledge obtained from
data mining analysis is translated into personal indicators which
are then fed into the cybernetic decision-making systems, which
subsequently adjusts training or teaching based on the
feedback. The use of data mining procedures in both examples
enables extraction of new knowledge-understanding about how
personal attributes are interrelated.

The Need for Continuous Social Monitoring of

Sociocybernetic Processes

Despite the promise inherent in the 3-D Process, there are

dangers when this process is applied to social systems that
should not be taken lightly.

The cybernetic decision process if uninterrupted, like any other

automatic process – just like a room air conditioner, will strive to
arrive at equilibrium with pre-determined objectives. While in
manufacturing or biological systems this may be desirable, in a
social system this attribute could lead to social stagnation, even
social collapse.

In social organizations objectives are determined by those in

power. A cybernetic system, due to its automatic nature will
resist any changes in the definition of the social objectives and
will automatically strive to inhibit any gap due to dissonant
activity. It will be much more difficult for groups who seek social

change to operate and achieve their goals the more cybernetic

decision-making comes into the fore. This can lead to
heightened social tensions and unrest. The system may not be
designed to be receptive to such tensions.

This problem has not escaped social scientists. In a 1991 article

in Kybernetics30, Felix Geyer, a scholar of social research
methodology at Vrje University in Amsterdam, made a
differentiation between ‘first-order cybernetics’, used in
mechanical-physical systems to maintain stability where “all
forms of changer are inherently viewed as disturbances or

30
Felix Geyer, “Cybernetics and Social Science: Theories and Research in
Sociocybernetics”, Kybernetes, 10 (6): 81-92, 1991, pp. 81-92, at .
http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics/chen/pfge3.html
 33

deviations,” and ‘second-order cybernetics’ – deemed more

suitable for the social systems. Second-order sociocybernetics
should and could be applied to change and growth rather than
stability because social systems exhibit a high degree of self-
steering and self-reference that keep them ‘on track’, Geyer
reasoned. But the problem of applying cybernetics to social
systems does not end here.

Cybernetic assumptions regarding human behavior

A far more fundamental problem with cybernetics concerns the

basic assumptions cybernetics holds regarding human
behavior: Cybernetic planners view human being as rational
decision-makers, who strive for efficiency. Most people,
however, do not fit this description as was well demonstrated in
the work of Nobel Prize laureate in economics (2000) Daniel
Kahneman, and his colleague, the late professor of psychology
Amos Tversky, in their important ground-breaking paper
“Judgment Under Uncertainty Heuristic and Biases”31.

Kahnaman-Tversky demonstrated that people are not always

rational decision-makers whose choices reflect careful
calculation of self-interest. Integrating insights from
psychological research into economic science – particularly in
regard to human judgment and decision-making under
uncertainty, Kehnaman-Tversky found that human judgment
may take ‘short cuts’ based on personal biases that depart from
basic principles of probability. A rigid “rational actor model” is no
more suitable to other areas of human endeavor than it is to
economics in the wake of Kahneman-Tversky’s work. The
existence of such irrational/biased human behavior is
equivalent to ‘throwing a monkey wrench into the works’ for
cybernetics…

Cybernetic systems will tend to discount ‘irrational’ data

stemming from factors other than purely logical and rational
thinking – from bias to other emotional factors, viewing them all
as ‘noise’ from an illegitimate or unreliable source that should
be ignored, although this input is very much part of the human
condition, and may be a sign of distress and disequilibrium
within the social system. The ability of the cyber system to learn
from past errors and the ability to process huge amounts of data
may, in the course of time, help reduce such error in reading the
data, but it will not eliminate this entirely.

31
Daniel Kahneman et al. “Judgment Under Uncertainty Heuristic and Biases”, 1982. For a
short description of his work, see the October 2002 Princeton University news release on
receipt of the Nobel Prize, at http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/02/q4/1009-kahneman-b.htm
 34

The application of data mining techniques to Kahneman-

Tversky’s studies could lead to a whole new understanding as
to what in people’s backgrounds or personal profiles leads them
to make decisions under uncertainty the way they do. It is
possible that such research could lead to new knowledge that
will enable prediction of human decisions in advance, based on
their psycho-social DNA. Whether this knowledge is desirable
merits a philosophical discussion. But whether desirable or not -
once the tools are available…and they are available, the
knowledge will be created and used in any case.

Another major issue of concern is the inevitable stereotyping

that surely will be a by-product of the creation of psycho-social
DNA profiles. It will become more and more difficult to limit
access to these profiles. Besides the threat to privacy,
stereotyping will lead to inequalities in opportunities and
unequal distribution of public wealth. Controversy has already
been raised by banks tagging people as credit risks according
to background parameters, without reference to past behavior.
Psycho-social DNA, whether valid or not, may heighten
discrimination and let it spread to even more social domains.
The use of psycho-social DNA will grow in any case, despite its
drawbacks.

Lastly, being void of imagination, cybernetic decision-making

systems are likely not only to be unduly loyal to the status quo;
they are likely to suppress innovation and weed out sparks of
genus as mere ‘background noise’ that appears no different
from the wackiest scatter-brained notion on earth – perhaps
leaving us all the poorer in terms of human development, and
charting a course for social stagnation…all the more ironic,
because such a repressive spirit will strike the most complex
and technologically-advanced segments of humankind.

Thus, it is imperative that social cybernetic decision systems not

be allowed to become fully automatic. There must be social
intervention on all levels of the decision process. Such social
intervention must be interdisciplinary – in the hands of non-
technological social groups including journalists, writers,
philosophers, artists and legal experts to name just a few. Thus
it is imperative that members of the media and scholars of mass
communications – first and foremost, fully understand what
convergence of digitization, data-mining and cybernetic
decision-making has in store for us and put debate of the issue
on the public agenda.

There must be a law of transparency that will insure full access

not to people’s psycho-social profiles, but to the processes
themselves. Each person must be allowed full access to their
‘electronic identities’, and all organizations must make their use
 35

of such profiles fully transparent. This will not happen unless

non-technological groups will intervene and set some ‘rules of
the game’.

I hope that this paper will contribute to social intervention in the

direction and use of these technologies – a move that is crucial
to the social wellbeing of all of us.