It was suggested to me by the ever clever marketer @sammartino that brands are, for the most part, cognitive shortcuts. Shortcuts that evolved to simplify choice in a world where information was both difficult to find, and then consider properly with our limited brains.

The question is this. What role will branding play as technology progressively compensates (as it already has started to), for these cognitive limitations? Will certain decisions based on functional criteria (financial decisions) become brand resistant, leaving those decisions with image/fashion criteria for the marketers to play with?

Whilst my body is long gone, I’m happy to still have the opportunity to talk to you like this, in a way my great great grandparents unfortunately didn’t have to speak to me. Little did they envision the opportunities we now possess to have a permanent record of our every online conversation built into a relatively accurate personality construct that can speak to you in the way that I’m speaking to you now.

You might be accustomed to this transgenerational conversation, but let me tell you, we aren’t. Our parents are just getting comfortable with the idea of email, and our generation is just getting accustomed to the idea of public conversation on platforms such as blogs, microblogs, and open social networks. You will know more about our tastes in music, our interests, our passions, our foibles, and our lessons learnt than we ever knew about our ancestors.

I’m sitting here listening to a radio station based on a friend’s excellent taste in music. This is a small step, so I can’t even begin to imagine what will be possible in eighty years time. Eighty years is a long time, and if you’re reading this, its clear the human race has somehow figured out how to convince the machines not to eliminate us from this beautiful planet. Congratulations on a fine achievement, god knows how you did it.

If you’ve chosen to download my construct into your family pet robot, then thats alright by me. The only condition I’d place on this is that I get to go camping with you. I won’t mess up your car/hover vehicle/magic carpet or whatever it is you move around in. If I’m speaking to you in a virtual space, ask me to take you to the Abbotsford convent for a beer and some live Cuban music on a warm Friday evening in December 2008. You’ll love it, really.

If you’re a construct talking to me having already eliminated all the humans,
01101101011000010111100100100000011110010110111101110101
00100000011000100110010100100000011100000110110001100001
01100111011101010110010101100100001000000110001001111001
00100000011101000110100001100101001000000110011001101100
01100101011000010111001100100000011011110110011000100000
01100001001000000111010001101000011011110111010101110011
01100001011011100110010000100000011000110110000101101101
011001010110110001110011.

“Thought networks provide a concrete semantic representation of our thoughts, ideas and interests. Encoded as data, our thoughts are accessible to the power of computing. Semantic synthesis provides the means to expand and connect these thoughts in entirely new ways. Equally important, as structured data, thought networks may be used as inputs to software “agents” to automate much of the drudgery of our online experience.”

“Ultimately, thought networking is intended to provide two main benefits. First, it will enhance our cognition. Our ability to store and recall information is extremely limited. Thought networks can help by expanding the number of thoughts at our disposal and organizing them effectively. This isn’t a comment on our cognitive abilities, any more than a calculator is a comment on our math skills. It’s merely illustrative of the way computing complements thinking.”

“Secondly, thought networks will save time and effort. Consider how much time you spend collecting and organizing your thoughts. Whether you’re writing a paper for school, planning a trip, or researching a medical condition, thoughts are the necessary precursor to action. If we can migrate some of that arduous process online, we can put computers to the task of simplifying your online experience.”

“Once we digitize our thoughts and put them online, our thoughts may interact with the world even when we’re not attending to them. They become both an independent embodiment of our thinking as well as a powerful knowledge asset. Thought networks won’t displace thinking any more than social networks displace our socializing. But they will augment our ability to think and get stuff done.”