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Article Specs
Article ID: 13509
VoxAcct: 379356
Section: words
Age Group: Adult
Days Up: 341
Times Read: 2,251
RSS Views: 24,996
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Twittermancy and Open Sourcery
Author: John Daniels
Posted: September 27th. 2009
Times Viewed: 2,251
At times, Technopaganism can seem like an almost invisible niche of Paganism. Mainstream books and online resources nearly always have a very heavy pastoral or rural slant and it can be very difficult to find real examples of everyday Technopagan practices. To help counter this, I am going to present both the use and source code of one tool I've developed - Twittermancy, available at http://twittermancy.com.
Twittermancy is a form of divination, which is somewhat akin to traditional bibliomancy. The idea is to generate a bunch of text, which you can then interpret according to the situation. In bibliomancy you might open up a book to a random page and pick a random line to start reading from. With Twittermancy you give the site a focus word and it generates a few lines of text based on what people have posted to the Twitter microblogging service. Twitter has hundreds of thousands of users posting a total of over three million messages per day, so this provides an excellent source of fresh text to pick from.
The ease with which we can generate 'randomness' - or 'entropy', as it's known in cryptography jargon - is one of the strengths of using modern methods for producing material to interpret for divination. The key to divination is to have a suitably random source that your brain can use to see a connection between the seemingly disparate elements. Producing non-repeating randomness quickly can be difficult using traditional means.
A common example of real-world randomness, clouds, are a great source of randomness but they change relatively slowly. This makes it difficult to do multiple readings from the same source of randomness. In turn this makes it difficult to 'ask' follow-up questions or explore other lines of thinking.
Systems that do allow for a high degree of non-repeating randomness have tended to come with a well-defined stock of interpretations. For instance, I learned to use tarot cards from a book and have found that between the learnt interpretations and the overly-specific imagery it is very difficult to move to a more fluid interpretation. A system that produces just free text leaves me able to interpret the results using all my experience of language and meaning, which is much broader than the relatively static interpretations available through tarot cards.
Generating random free-form text quickly and without repeating elements is extremely difficult using traditional means. Bibliomancy is effective, but using the same text too frequently will bias the results and not every book is really suitable.
However, using a computer for this is easy, because there is a huge amount of text available through social networking services like Facebook, blogging/microblogging services like Twitter, and text search engines such as Google.
Beyond this the study of entropy is a vital part of cryptography (the use of encryption to protect data) . Cryptography is vital for the existence of the commercial Internet, so there are many good sources of randomness available on every computer. They can be harnessed to feed into different kinds of output, such as generating random pictures or text.
In addition to being available for use at http://twittermancy.com, I've also made the source code to the Twittermancy site available on GitHub - a service which hosts computer source code. It can be accessed at http://github.com/johnd/Twittermancy/tree/master.
Twittermancy is written in Ruby, a programming language that is quite easy to pick up and is growing in popularity as a web development language. Making the source code available allows other people to make their own customized - and improved! - versions of Twittermancy, or to take parts of the base idea and adapt them to other services or purposes.
The use of open source is absolutely essential for the growth and health of the Technopagan community. People drawn to Technopaganism are more likely to already be familiar with the concepts behind open source development. Primarily this means the idea of 'viral' licenses that allow you to reuse and modify code, but only if you release your new version under the same terms as the original code. This ensures that people who benefit from open source code contribute back to the community by publishing their improvements and alterations.
At its best, this can create a 'virtuous cycle' where the improvements to a project cause it to become more popular, which in turn causes more people to work on and improve the project. When this happens a project can undergo rapid evolution and can produce some really excellent tools.
If this were to happen with Technopagan tools, we could create new techniques and methods which Technopagan developers can adapt and customize to their specific needs but which could also be deployed more widely in more generic forms so that the entire community can benefit. This includes more traditional Pagan and Witchcraft communities, as Twittermancy can prove useful to anyone who is interested in divination!
I hope that Twittermancy can represent a new generation of Technopagan tools - tools which are easily usable by the entire Pagan community, but which can be adapted by the Technopagan community to produce new and interesting tools, which themselves will be available for use and further adaptation. By having a working tool to start from, I hope to make it easier for people new to Technopaganism and software development to start to create their own tools.
Programming a computer can be an incredibly empowering experience. Computers are the most complex machines we interact with and for most people they represent an unknowable 'black box'. However, for me an important part of Technopaganism is being able to open the box and understand how it works. Being able to make your ideas reality can give you a huge sense of accomplishment and personal power - programming is not an unreachable goal!
An example of a community that has done this is the Organisation for Transformative Works. Their project to create a fanwork archive (http://transformativeworks.org/projects/archive) brought together many people who were interested in seeing the project succeed, but did not have any experience in creating this kind of software. Their developer community largely learned from each other and, almost uniquely for an open source project, have a majority of female participants.
The OTW are an excellent example of how people who traditionally would not have attempted to take control over the 'black box' were able to crack it open and learn to control it. They also chose Ruby to base their system on, and I believe that the accessibility of the Ruby programming language has been a major contributing factor to their success.
The Pagan community at large tends to have experience with cracking open things that are supposed to be 'unknowable'. I see no reason why the wider Pagan community, which has a similar demographic make up to the OTW's supporters, could not learn to take control over the unknowable artifact on their desks.
I hope that open sourcery will over time be able to provide new tools for all Pagans to use, provide multiple easy entry points into Technopaganism, and help people gain a better understanding of how they can create their own tools and express their own ideas and concepts through computer software.
Copyright: Copyright 2009 John Daniels
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John Daniels
Location: Inverkeithing, Scotland
Website: http://twittermancy.com
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