I was thinking today about the relationship of individuals social network site profiles to other individual profiles and I could not shake off the Hofstadter’s term “implicasphere.” I know that other ideas such as Habermas’ public sphere or people such as Barry Wellman could better illustrate the structure of a social network in different ways, but for some reason I really wanted to see if I could inject another model.

When Douglas Hofstadter coined the term “implicasphere” in Metamagical Themas, he was referring to the radii of associations which encircle each ‘word’ passing through the imagination. Therefore, if I was to speak to you the word ‘green’, you might readily think of money, or envy, or trees. Each of these associations closely encircle the word green within it’s implicasphere. Common adjectives such as colors have enormous implicaspheres mainly because the number corresponding associations. More specifically, nouns such as ‘parrot’ usually have smaller implicaspheres due to the lack of close idea associations. Hence in an implicasphere, the word, idea, or speech act, represent the focus, and the distance the associated word, idea, or speech act away from the focus represents the closeness of association. Thinking about Barthes and Semiotics, it almost seems like one could derive an equation for the length of the radius based on the number of common signifiers in both of the ‘words’.

Interestingly enough, it seems to become a common practice for an artist to reach for a specific speech acts with have few associative signifiers, yet remain within the same implicasphere when composing a work. less common associative signifiers in their visual arrangement of speech acts. It is here where an artist’s creativity reaches into the hyper-implicasphere to find workable solutions.

Comedians also seem to practice the same exploration of the hyper-implicasphere. Why are riddles funny?? Because the punch lines are barely associated with the set-up, riding on the threshold in-between making sense and not making sense!! Why do ducks have webbed feet?? To stamp out forest fires!! What’s the difference between Picasso and Smurfette?? They both have blue periods!!

But I’ve digressed…

If we look at individual profile within a social network and if we look at the links, sub-networks, etc. present on the profile, a different type of implicasphere emerges. This cultural implicasphere, centered around the individual contains multiple spheres of associations. From the readily accessible direct links from the profile to discriminating and cultural terms which requires an external search engine to find links, the cultural implicasphere starts to accumulate strange associative complexities. So in this sense, social networking profiles can be seen a conglomerate of associated cultural terms, hyperlinks, and keywords.

Anyway during today’s internet derive I came across something quite interesting: an implicasphere ‘game’ named Human Brain Cloud. Basically what it is…here, I will directly quota Kyle Gabler, the creator of the game: “The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game” or experiment … or something. The idea is that given a word, a player types in the first thing that comes to mind and the results are combined into a giant network.” Personally, I think the links between word association webs (implicaspheres) and social networks are interesting and speak directly about the culture in which they are associated.