text–script–machine

Half a year, already?

2010-10-05T13:14:00.000-05:00

My last blog post was immediately after the birth of our son, Gus. That was just over six months ago. Clearly the timing of my return to blogging couldn’t have been worse.

I am still interested in keeping a blog to collect my media and technology studies thoughts. But it will have to wait until the always-on madness of being a guy in his early 30s—with an infant son, a challenging job, and a house in constant need of repair and upgrade—calms down a little. I’ll leave you with a link to a new media studies syllabus written by Christina Dunbar-Hester and published in the Atlantic. There’s a fantastic reading list attached:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/beyond-mcluhan-your-new-media-studies-syllabus/63061/

Until next time!

Myths and big pictures

2010-04-04T19:34:00.000-05:00

I recently finished Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Early in “Myth Today,” the meaty text that comprises the last third of the book, Barthes gives a rigorous and brilliant semiotic analysis of the unique, multi-layered form of representation that he calls myth.

Mythologies is a thin book at just 159 pages, but it took me five years to read. For most of that time, I had it lying around the house or stuffed in my backpack. If I was bored, I might read one of the book’s numerous short essays, in which Barthes makes all sorts of clever observations about the contemporary world. A couple of months ago, I resolved to work my way through “Myth Today,” where he makes explicit the theory underpinning his critique of culture.

After carefully disassembling the mechanisms of our everyday myths, Barthes does away with restraint in order to make a series of far-reaching Marxist claims about French culture. In the age after Popper, this kind of analysis—presented without so much as an acknowledgment of controversy—comes off as poorly justified, even naïve.

Extravagance is a weakness of Continental philosophy in general. The genius of Hegel was in recognizing that logic is historical: the negation of an idea is a time-bound act that results in a new form of consciousness; it can no more be reversed than the shattering of a glass. The madness of Hegel was in positing that history is logical, that the events of the French Revolution, for instance, were a priori inevitable.

The reaction of the analytic philosophers to Continental philosophy—and to the excesses of Hegel in particular—was to cut to the bone, stripping away speculative reasoning in favor of a rigor and clarity that pretends to the accuracy of mathematics. But if they got rid of the fat, they also git rid of the meat. Analytics write with extraordinary precision but very little consequence.

We must find a way to take the better insights of our philosophers and apply them to broader concerns in ways that don’t come off as silly. I see an opportunity here for naturalistic philosophy. For instance, is there a way to operationalize Barthes’ claim that late-20th century France was a bourgeois society? Or that left-wing political speech tends to be a poor vehicle for mythological linguistic structures?

Barthes the sociologist seems to recognize this potential himself when he laments, near the end of “Myth Today,” the lack of an “analytical sociology of the press” as a basis for exploring the spread of myth.

CHAT 2010: The Art of Gaming

2010-02-20T00:40:00.001-05:00

A giant banner of Fruit Fucker greets you as you enter the gallery, setting the tone. This is fun stuff. There are many pieces that fall into the illustration category, including several examples of game concept art and a large mixed media sculpture entitled Snot Rocket. A pair of paintings by Andy Foltz celebrate the LMAOness of online gaming chat.

There are a few contemplative pieces, too. 30 Years of Disappointment by Plastic Flame Press has a “seven ages of man” feel to it: a comic-strip lithograph features a young man maturing alongside his video game systems, before finally returning to Pong in middle age. (Jesper Juul, in his talk this afternoon, mentioned a “standard video game model” by which games were sold on the basis of increased complexity and improved graphics, from around 1980 until the explosion of casual games circa 2005).

The art:

Penny Landing by Penny Arcade

Environmental Concepts by Adam Capps for Spark Plug Games

The Gorgon by Adam Capps

Love the One You’re With by Jessica Fielhauer

Snot Rocket by Lee Williamson

The Eyes Have It by Lee Williamson

Donkey Kong NYC by Paul Frederick

Game Dogs by Jessica Fielhauer and George Palmer for The Escapist

Bare Druids by Andy Foltz

Caterday Nite is All Rite for Fite by Andy Foltz

Make it Rain by Sean Kernick

Concept Images from Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time by Insomniac

Choose Your Avatar by Marc Russo

Points by Adam Capps

30 Years of Disappointment by Plastic Flame Press

CHAT 2010: Transforming Narratives

2010-02-18T14:10:00.006-05:00

I’ll refer you, first, to a great piece of commentary that has emerged from this talk: Whitney Trettien’s Digital Storytelling, Zola, Experimentalism, and the Scientific Method. Trettien knows literature, and places Michael Young’s work and Katherine Hayles’ thoughts in a historical and theoretical context.

The only thought that I might add is somewhat techno-utopian. Our lives are not intrinsically meaningful or teleological; we don’t have purposes, per se, except insofar as we create our own—a state of affairs that may be satisfactory to the existentialists among us, but one which many people will never successfully come to terms with. One of the many ways in which literature has functioned has been to create the relief of structured narrative: an immersive world where purposeful events take place. Sometimes, we create such narratives by selective remembrance of actual events, creating histories and myths.

Young’s games are designed to anticipate possible user actions and find ways to incorporate these actions while still moving the story to its predetermined narrative conclusion. As people spend more of their lives online, intersubjectively transforming virtual worlds into real ones, I can imagine a future where such systems, augmented with tremendous computing power, will allow people to carry out much of their lives within teleological narrative structures—meaningful existence, delivered by technology.

The accompanying dystopian thought: who will be the meaning-makers for these anti-existentialists, and how can we be sure that these narrative storytellers will have everyone’s best interests at heart?

CHAT 2010: The Bathysphere

2010-02-17T17:16:00.004-05:00

Perhaps I would not have been as underwhelmed by the Bathysphere if I had not seen Robert Bach’s demonstration of Project Natal yesterday. The two projects invite comparison: each attempts to translate real-world motion into virtual motion. While Natal uses the body itself, the Bathysphere tracks the motion of three objects—a geodesic “beach ball,” a fishing rod, and a multicolored umbrella—and translates the user’s interactions with these objects into the movements of computer-generated sea life projected onto the walls of the exhibit.

The octopus, ray, and school of fish mimic the movements of their respective controlling objects, but do not allow the user to interact any more deeply with the virtual environment. Effectively, they are cursors, with the ball, rod, and umbrella functioning as novelty trackballs. Building this system must have been a tremendous technical challenge; hopefully, more will be done with it with time.

Edit: HASTACer Adam Rogers has a more positive take, including a video of the Bathysphere here.

CHAT 2010: User Driven: Does Size Matter?

2010-02-17T16:07:00.004-05:00

Panelist Paul Jones took control of the discussion early, and didn’t let go. Seizing on moderator Paolo Mangiafico’s contrast between “lean back” (large screen: broadcast consumption) and “lean forward” (small screen: conversation participation) modes of media interaction, Jones pointed out the awkward middle space that the panel discussion itself occupied: a simulation of a small conversation being shown to a large audience. Jones stepped down from the stage in order to address the audience more directly.

Two of the panelists, Russ Pitts and Ross White, followed him down. Panelist William Shaw and Mangiafico stayed behind on stage, creating a visual contrast that corresponded roughly to the positions that the panelists took on new media. Jones, Pitts, and White all seemed open to the value of audience participation and social media; Shaw emphasized that the William Blake Archives, the project on which he works, is a “large screen” project designed to provide high-resolution tools to the lone scholar, whether professional or amateur.

Here are a few of the many points Jones made in his near-total domination of the talk:

The paradox of the mobile internet is that it doesn’t matter where you are, but it matters more where you are. The Internet closes distance and levels geographical distinctions, but because you’re accessing the Internet on a mobile device, the people you’re communicating with can’t assume that your physical body is tethered to your office or home. People on the mobile Internet spend a lot of time talking about where they are and what’s going on around them.

Print has a reputation for stability when compared to online media, but in fact print is highly unstable—multiple revisions, versions, and translations of most texts exist. [As I’m interested in text as a visual medium, I would add printings, layouts, type settings, etc.]

There are three populations happy with Kindle: 1. people who need large print books; 2. people who travel a lot; 3. people who do a lot of book editing and reviewing (so they don’t have to carry a bunch of books and manuscripts around). These are not necessary the audiences that Amazon imagined. We don’t know what people will do with the iPad until they’ve had a chance to do it.

Small-screen talk is more important than large-screen talk. People listen to their friends rather than to authorities; studies have shown that intimate settings and peer status create trustworthiness. By being aware of these tendencies, we will be able to make the truth stick in a world with too much information and no recognized experts.

Editor's note: I was unable to find an online presence to link to for William Shaw.

CHAT 2010: The Future of Entertainment

2010-02-16T20:44:00.006-05:00

Robert Bach, Microsoft President of Entertainment and Devices, started his talk with a bounding run up the steps to the stage (must be a Microsoft thing). We found out that his favorite movie is the Shawshank Redemption. He likes Star Wars, too, but didn’t seem to want to talk about Avatar. He came bearing commercials for Microsoft, which he described as “not commercials for Microsoft.”

That’s okay. One of his commercials, for a new Xbox add-on called Project Natal, was jaw-dropping. Microsoft’s crimes against the creativity of humanity are legion. They include plague after plague of poorly designed fonts, the quashing of non-Microsoft technological innovation, and software interface styling that feels like the electronic equivalent of a blue ballpoint Bic writing on a manila envelope, forever. But in the last few years, Microsoft has been turning out some truly forward-thinking products. The Surface table was one such head-turning moment; Project Natal is sure to be the next.

Natal, the result of what Bach calls “deep research” in interface design, combines a camera and microphone with motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition technology. The device tracks points on the player’s body and translates this into on-screen motion. Stand in front of your television and kick; your on-screen avatar will kick. Motion through the virtual space of a video game—historically, heavily mediated through the pushing of arbitrarily meaningful buttons—is about to become much more like moving through real space. You will move your arm to move your arm.

Natal also recognizes voice commands, and it can identify individual players from session to session, using facial recognition software. Lots of smart guys with PhDs and James Dysonesque British accents worked on it.

I can’t help but see this as an answer to the Wii. Natal turns it up a notch on Nintendo, finally delivering a completely unencumbered, gesture-based gaming interface. Bach hinted that this technology may be under development for PC and mobile platforms as well. While it’s harder to imagine using something like this with a phone, putting Natal on the PC could open up a whole new world of software interaction.

Bach was bullish on the future of the entertainment industry, and sees a future populated with hybrid multimedia objects: books, movies, music, and games combined into one. This will come about through changes on three fronts: consumers, who increasingly have multiple screens and expect content to be available everywhere; creators, who will conceive of and develop new kinds of content; and the “canvas” itself, as new technologies afford new opportunities for creation.

Notably, he predicted that the artistic creative process will adopt characteristics of the software development cycle as a new generation of digital artists emerge. Would-be creatives were advised to learn as much math and science as possible to take advantage of the opportunities this new entertainment landscape provides.

CHAT 2010: Entrepreneurship & Collaboration

2010-02-16T16:58:00.003-05:00

Two of the major themes of this year’s CHAT—gaming and electronic music—were presented as business interests. The talk’s raison d’être seemed to be demonstrating, for the sake of those who might find these subjects insufficiently serious, the existence of corporations that can and do make money in these spaces. The subject matter was to be the role of collaborations in entrepreneurship, but that topic gave way to general entrepreneurial advice as the ninety minutes went on. All of the companies were founded on innovative premises, and the panelists were intelligent and well-spoken:

Steven Aldrich (the geek: plaid shirt, Carolina blue jacket), President/CEO of Posit Science. Posit creates software to encourage brain fitness. Brain performance begins to decline after the 20s and drops sharply after the 60s. Aldrich’s company uses established science to develop games to help people improve their memory, focus, and mental agility. He emphasized the importance of using customer narratives, not just facts, to promote your brand.

Kip Frey (the suit: tasteful purple shirt, navy jacket), President/CEO of Zenph Sound Innovations. Of the three, Zenph is the easiest company to Google, but the hardest to describe. Their software can analyze a musical piece recorded in any time period and translate it—including, supposedly, every nuance of performance—into a data profile. That profile can then be used to exactly reproduce the performance, or it can become a starting point for re-interpreting the piece by manipulating performance style, instrumentation, or any of a number of other variables.

Eric Peterson (the hipster: green/gray argyle sweater, soul patch), President/CEO Vicious Cycle Software. Vicious Cycle is a major video game publishing house, one of many headquartered in the Triangle. They create console games for adults and for children, under their imprint Monkeybar Games. Peterson emphasized the importance of networking and forming well-rounded teams to succeeding in the games industry.

The subject matter of the talks fell back too frequently onto business advice platitudes: the importance of managing risk, having a well-researched business plan to attract capital, allowing time and fostering internal competitiveness to encourage innovation, being passionate about what your company does. But I can see the talk being helpful to a person from an arts, humanities, or technology background who is interested in capitalizing on their ideas.

CHAT 2010: Electro-Acoustic Sound Exhibition

2010-02-16T11:56:00.002-05:00

My ability to enjoy this piece was diminished by what must be a frequent hazard of public ambient music consumption: a couple conversing loudly in the exhibition space. But I was able to listen for several minutes to “Dance of Fire,” a composition by Erdem Helvacioglu made up entirely of samples of fire whooshing, crackling, and sparking.

My knowledge of electro-acoustic music is limited, so I’ll just observe that the piece reminded me of listening to Curtis Roads’ Point-Line-Cloud, an album created by entirely synthetic means. Despite the electronic origins of the pieces, the effect of listening to either feels deeply primitive, even organic—inducing a feeling of excitement verging on foreboding.

Blogging from C.H.A.T. 2010

2010-02-13T20:09:00.003-05:00

This week I’ll be attending the C.H.A.T. Festival (Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology) at UNC-Chapel Hill and blogging on what I see. Serious gaming will figure prominently in the festival this year. A few of the events I plan to attend, with descriptions from the C.H.A.T. site:

User Driven: Does Size Matter? Audience expectations are driving trends in technology, and size is one area feeling the impact: What is the ideal screen size for a device, for content, for literature, and more? Wednesday, 11 a.m.

Scientific Method and Narrative Form. What happens when you combine an electronic literature expert with a computer scientist who uses algorithms to generate narrative? This conversation will explore the intersections and the opportunities. Wednesday, 1:00 p.m.

Serious Teaching and Learning in Serious Games. Gaming has taken a serious turn in many classrooms as educators discover the effectiveness of games as teaching tools. In this discussion, experts in K-12, higher education and industry discuss how pedagogy is embedded in serious games. Thursday, 2:00 p.m.

Changing Forms of Publication. New technologies have made possible mass publication on a scale never before encountered in our culture, breeding new possibilities for—and questions about—authorship and form. This panel examines how technology has transformed the practices of publication. Friday, 11:00 a.m.

Game as Medium. Game engines, the software systems designed for the creation and development of video games, have made their way into a variety of uses and fields. This panel will discuss some alternative uses of game engines, as panelists present their current game engine research in art, art history and mobile computing. Keynote speaker Jesper Juul will join the discussion, offering his theoretical perspective. Friday, 4:30 p.m.

There’s nothing we’ve all been waiting for, and the iPad isn’t it

2010-01-29T11:32:00.007-05:00

Why not resume my tech commentary blog in the days after a major Apple product announcement?

Collectively, we seem to be in the midst of inventing something. We know that it will be portable and electronic, and that it will do a lot of stuff. Other details remain in a state of flux as emerging device classes appear, multiply, and set about consuming each other like amœbæ. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we’re breeding something: producing a proliferation of gadgets with varying traits, mating the successes to each other and consigning the failures to oblivion. For now, r-selection seems to be the rule.

We began this process with the multifunction desktop computer on one side of a divide, and an array of single-function portable devices—music players, communicators, cameras—on the other. In the 80s and 90s these two worlds took their first tentative steps toward each other, with the laptop computer and the PDA respectively.

Then, suddenly, there was a frenzy. As electronic components grew smaller and cheaper, portable devices merged one-by-one, hinting at a future with a single, pocket-sized device to rival the power of the desktop computer. Meanwhile, laptops grew smaller in an effort to satisfy the demand for ubiquitous computing (but also larger, as if to fill every possible niche in the power–portability continuum).

It becomes tempting to take this mælstrom of invention—seemingly moving toward an inevitable telos—as evidence of technological determinism. As we near the apparent endpoint, we’ve even taken to describing our devices with logocentric language: the iPhone becomes the “Jesus Phone” and the iPad the “Moses Tablet.” (A Google search on the second phrase returns iPad-related sites among the top 10 hits, intermingled with results related to the other well-known tablets that might be associated with Moses.)

At the current moment in the dialectic, we have had two devices facing each other in a state of uneasy tension. The netbook is a fully functioning computer that, despite its advantages in portability over larger machines, is still too bulky to carry with you at all times. The smartphone fits in your pocket but is just too small to provide the full computing experience we desire. The first is awkward in space, agile in cyberspace; the second is ready-to-hand but proves to be a tiny window onto a sprawling world.

So we’ve begun the next round of our breeding experiment. The goal is to create a device with the portability of a smartphone and the versatility of a netbook. It is this space that the iPad tries to negotiate, but fails:

Just yesterday I was looking at my iPhone thinking “Hmmm, I wish this thing didn’t fit in my pocket and couldn’t make phone calls.” Then I looked over to my netbook and couldn’t help but feel it would benefit from losing the keyboard and being made of 50% glass. —Reddit user Frankeh

It is difficult to see how the tension between smartphone and netbook can ever be resolved. Any device larger than an iPhone will require a bag to tote around; any device smaller than an EEE PC will prove inconvenient for web browsing or word processing. There is no “God device,” no sweet spot where portability and power can both be maximized. Technological determinism is shown, once again, to rest on an oversimplification.

Instead of a single device, there will continue to be a range of devices covering the power–portability continuum, each appropriate within a certain context of use. Perhaps your particular needs call for a smartphone and a desktop machine; perhaps a netbook and a larger laptop fit the bill. Individual and social needs will always confound the tyranny of the one-gadget-fits-all final solution.

Rebooting

2010-01-07T19:23:00.002-05:00

Well, the home renovations have never really settled down, and probably never will, but this blog has laid dormant long enough. Perhaps I'll even get around to creating an original design for it someday, but for now I'm using one of the standard Blogger templates so that I can focus on the writing.

On hiatus for home renovations

2008-06-30T20:11:00.003-05:00

Around the time of my last blog post, my wife and I bought a “fixer-upper.” Blogging to resume after fixer-upping.

One more step on the road to the mirror world

2008-05-15T19:01:00.002-05:00

When the Street View component of Google Maps debuted, I was amazed. More than anything else, I was shocked at what must be the extraordinary expense and effort of gathering and stitching together that much photographic data.

I was not optimistic about the prospects that the project could be maintained. Could even a corporation as well-heeled as Google afford the upkeep on a fleet of cars equipped with 360° cameras and hard drives, sending them out frequently enough to keep the imagery from falling terribly behind the times—and then give it away for free?

This week, a new component of Google Maps debuted. Along the top of the Google Maps window is a row of buttons offering alternate views: “Traffic”, “Satellite”, “Terrain”, and so on. A new button, “More”, appeared a couple of days ago. Roll over the button and you have the option of adding Wikipedia entries or geotagged photos.

The addition of photography is the most interesting to me, because I expect the availability of geotagged photos to balloon in the years to come. With the boom in sites that allow photos to be indexed and searched by location, how long before we see cameras with built-in GPS that automatically adds latitude and longitude in the photo file metadata?

And with the explosion in the availability of these photos, how hard would it be to use a Photosynth-like program to stitch them into existing Street View photos, updating the view whenever someone, anywhere, takes a picture and uploads it?

Eventually, I expect that products like Street View will morph into a fully immersive 3D model of the world, with heavily-trafficked areas of the real world being updated in something close to real time. Wouldn’t it be great if all the security cameras in the typical urban space could feed into that model? We would be just as watched-over, and could even participate in the watching.

Virtual money: first across the divide

2008-04-24T18:26:00.004-05:00

Kant once wrote that “A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers.” (Critique of Pure Reason, A599)

These words might have been true in 1781, but at the time I’m writing this, a US dollar is worth 264 Linden dollars. Something unprecedented is going on with virtual currencies.

Kant’s point was to claim that, given a concept, to claim that the object posited by the concept exists is to add nothing to the concept itself. It just describes a particular relationship between the concept and the real world. This seems like a rather academic argument—and it is—but it points out the futility of trying to prove that something exists by armchair reasoning. Kant was specifically targeting Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.

If we were to set about looking for 100 thalers, we wouldn’t have to specify that we’re looking for 100 thalers that exist. The last bit would be taken for granted. So trying to add existence as an additional predicate to the concept of our 100 thalers is pointless, according to Kant.

That would indisputably be the case, if we only ever approached concepts as necessarily referring to objects in the real world. But that’s not true; make-believe is another way that we engage with concepts. A child at play could indeed be searching for 100 thalers that do not exist. I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to rustle up Gil while playing Final Fantasy XII.

In Kant’s time, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction was clear. But during the twentieth century, mass media allowed fiction to become the jumping-off point for new social realities. Fan communities made the production of entire fictional universes profitable. People began speaking Klingon and invested themselves in social role-playing games.

The social element is key to explaining how virtual currency has broken through to the real world. If I like something, it has value to me, whether it’s real or fictional. If the pool of people who value something is large enough, and trade can occur, than economic forces will come into play. Online role-playing games has allowed the creation of fictional goods that can be traded among massive numbers of people.

It cannot go unremarked that while fictional money has become real, our real money long ago became fictional. With the abolishment of the gold standard and the adoption of fiat currency, our money became nothing but a function of intersubjective perception of value—a move that prepared us to accept the possibility of virtual currencies.

New feature

2008-04-06T19:20:00.003-05:00

Instead of link roundup posts, I’ve decided to stream my most recent tech-related links on the sidebar to the right.

This should see quite a bit more activity than the mainbar. Given the subject matter and my actual posting frequency, I’m beginning to think that my initial goal of three posts a week was too optimistic. I can see to it that the links list is updated more or less every workday, and I will continue with my roughly once-per-week posting frequency.

R.I.P., Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-19T06:58:00.002-05:00

Clarke passed away today in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

His three laws of prediction, as stated on Wikipedia:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Life on the Jumbotron

2008-03-07T21:00:00.003-05:00

I went to a Carolina Hurricanes game with my wife and a couple from her office last night, and it gave me an occasion to make a few observations.

The modern professional sporting event is a hyperreal spectacle on a grand scale, in which reality and representation are reflected endlessly, back and forth onto one another, until they are impossible to disentangle.

The constructedness of pro hockey is relentless, and shows up in everything from the idea of professional sport itself—the salaries of men tied to their performance in a series of events with seemingly arbitrary rules—to the indoor climate control that severs hockey from its situatedness as a game of the North and of winter.

Yet the assembled audience gives the game the weight of intersubjectively verified reality, and the reporters on Press Row immediately elevate that verifiability from the level of shared anecdote to the level of published fact.

The game itself is only a fraction of the spectacle. The action below is reflected on the Jumbotron above, where it is given the malleability of media and becomes one element of a hyperkinetic multimedia collage. Live game footage, instant replays, movie clips, player interviews, commercials, celebratory graphics, and audience shots all tumble by at a frenzied pace.

I have sat on Press Row as a reporter, armed with a wifi connection, a television monitor, and a thick press packet full of statistics and news clippings. From that vantage the event becomes a hypertextual artifact, full of references to the communities which sustain it, to past and future games, and to the present game as both live and mediated spectacle.

For the ordinary spectator, the audience shots are one of the most important elements of the experience. We go to the game not so much to watch an event as to be a part of an audience, with all of its attendant rituals. By playing the role of the fan well, you might be rewarded with a moment on the Jumbotron, to see yourself being seen, to become as undeniably real as the game itself, if only for an instant.

Links: Web 2.0 freedom, VR interfaces, soft luddites

2008-03-05T17:18:00.008-05:00

The Web democratized media for the technologically adept. Web 2.0 is democratizing it for everyone else. But what happens when the regime notices?

A couple of new devices chip away at the wall between cyber- and meatspace:

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a pair of goggles that recognizes and stores references to objects that you look at.
Meanwhile, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created an electromagnetic device that allows you to feel virtual objects.

A few links on the “soft luddite” front:

Readers report an emotional attachment to physical books. I wonder if this is simply a matter of familiarity, as the article implies. I doubt it. I suspect that the cultural mythos surrounding the book is adding a quasi-moral dimension here. Could you really bring yourself to abandon the good, true, trusty book, emblem of the learned and vehicle of the Word?
BuzzFeed gently mocks the technology-fasting that seems to be all the rage lately, while providing several links to examples of the phenomenon.

Gaming goes hyperdimensional

2008-02-26T13:40:00.002-05:00

My wife likes to make fun of my spatial reasoning skills. She’s an intern architect and a master closet packer, able to maximize the use of space in any situation. In contrast, whenever I try to imagine any but the simplest, most static of three-dimensional spaces, my brain starts moving very, very slowly. I mostly navigate the world by thinking about space in either the plan or elevation view.

As a kid, I always failed those tests where you had to imagine rotating a solid object and then pick it out from a list of similar solids. I never solved my Rubik’s cube, despite wasting man-months of my life in the attempt.

My condition couldn’t have been helped by the amount of time I spent racing around in the two-dimensional Nintendo dungeons of my formative years.

I’ve grown comfortable with the 3D interfaces that have become standard console game fare in the last decade or so. But it was not an easy transition. I remember one nauseous dream that consisted of being trapped in a sped-up Super Mario 64 level. I gave up after less than an hour of playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, declaring that no 3D Zelda could ever be as good as 2D A Link to the Past (now that I think about it, I’m not sure that this prediction was actually wrong).

But why stop with straightforward three-dimensional gameplay? One of the great things about virtual worlds is the possibility of bending even our most basic physical rules. Super Paper Mario for the Wii, and more recently the indy game Fez, have experimented with gameplay where the same virtual space can be 3D one minute, 2D the next, as if your in-game persona were the sphere from Abbott’s Flatland. One of last year’s biggest sleeper hits, Portal, throws you into a world where you can create wormholes that flatten distances and bend gravity around corners. 4D Tetris, anyone?

I’m in no position to review these games, since I haven’t played any of them. If I did, I think I would have smoke coming out of my ears. But I’m interested to see if games like this catch on, and what advances in science and mathematics might come from a generation that grew up playing them.

There’s been quite a bit of evidence that video games can teach the brain new tricks. Will the kids of tomorrow be as comfortable working in Hilbert space as the rest of us are on a Cartesian graph? Quantum mechanics, cosmology, systems analysis, topology, and game theory, among countless others, are fields that could benefit from minds that are natively hyperdimensional.

Then again, all those hours with the Rubik’s cube didn’t teach me anything.

New issue of Information, Communication & Society

2008-02-18T19:18:00.003-05:00

I’m trying to familiarize myself with the world of STS journals. Information, Communication & Society 11:1 is out, with a few articles that seem interesting:

In “Software defaults as de facto regulation”, Rajiv Shah and Christian Sandvig argue that software defaults may be seen as imposing something like the rule of law upon non-technical users who lack the sophistication to change them. Security and privacy experts must therefore recognize the ineffectiveness of recommendations that target the end-user.

In “Effects of Internet use and social resources on changes in depression”, Bessière et al. study how various types of Internet use affect depression sufferers. The not-too-surprising results: using the Internet for communicating with loved ones is more likely to improve your depression than using it for solitary web surfing.

David Beer looks at the personal MP3 player and its transformative effects on personal and social music experiences in “The iconic interface and the veneer of simplicity”.

Unfortunately, I can't get at any of these through my soon-to-expire university library proxy. Your mileage may vary. Beer’s article in particular, I think, may have me hoofing it down to D.H. Hill for the dead tree version.

Reflections on a haircut

2008-02-01T18:26:00.000-05:00

When I arrived at the philosophy program at Boston College, I noticed that an unusual number of men associated with the department—both graduate students and professors—groomed themselves in one of two distinct styles, both of which struck me as somehow more “philosophical.”

The first was to allow one’s beard to grow long and unkempt. Unlike the unkempt beards I had seen on undergraduates at NCSU, this was not a token of laziness or disregard for one’s personal appearance. The individuals wearing beards were otherwise impeccably well-groomed, and oftentimes found in class wearing suits. I came to call this look “The Socrates.”

The second look was to be completely clean-shaven, and wear one’s hair gelled back and up, in order to create the illusion that one’s head was several inches taller than it really was. I called this “The Derrida.” My hair was kind of already going in that direction, and I thought it looked like a good, modern look for a man in a philosophy program, so this is the style I adopted.

(After finishing up at BC, I wore my hair down with a loose part for several months. I never really liked it, so I’m back to The Derrida, or the “Wall Street hair” as one of my coworkers calls it.)

Having formulated these observations, I recently enjoyed reading Barthes’ “The Iconography of the Abbé Pierre” in his Mythologies collection:

The Abbé Pierre’s haircut, obviously devised so as to reach a neutral equilibrium between short hair (an indispensable convention if one does not want to be noticed) and unkempt hair (a state suitable to express contempt for other conventions), thus becomes the capillary archetype of saintliness...

For among priests, it is no due to chance whether one is bearded or not; beards are chiefly the attribute of missionaries or Capuchins, they cannot but signify apostleship and poverty... Shaven priests are supposed to be more temporal, bearded ones more evangelical...

Barthes worries about the overconsumption of these signs, in place of true justice and charity. I think this is a legitimate concern. But I have also noticed that in our socially constructed world, truth must come with a little bit of rhetoric in order to find a foothold.

What does all this have to do with technology? Consider the industrial design explosion of the last decade. There are quite a lot of individuals who find it all a lot of fuss with no substance. If your box works well, who cares what it looks like? These are the folks who would never buy an iPod, because you would have to be an idiot to shell out for one when you can get a player that has more storage space for less.

But the market disagrees with the theory that an iPod is worth less than a SanDisk. The iPod signals to others, among other things, an appreciation for Apple products, for fashion, and for modern design. Your choice of mp3 player may not play a role in determining your identity, but it does play a considerable role in communicating your identity. It has value, in short, as a Barthesian myth.

If you need confirmation of this theory, just count how many times in a day your friends and coworkers emote—either in disgust or appreciation—at the personal appearances, affections, and possessions of people they don’t know, or know only marginally. The things we surround ourselves with have utility not merely in pursuing our individual tele, but in pursuing our goals as social actors, as well. This is common sense, but too often disappears from discussions of an artifact’s utility as such.

from the paper to the cloud

2008-01-30T20:34:00.000-05:00

For some time, I’ve noticed that what constitutes the “real” copy of a text has been slowly drifting into cyberspace and Platonic abstraction. Back in the early 90s, when I discovered computing, it was understood that you had to have a printer in order to take what was on the screen and make a real document out of it. Word processing was just moving the words around on-screen in preparation for printing. In high school and into my early undergraduate years, I seldom bothered to save a word processing document that had already been printed out and turned in.

It was the ubiquity of Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and email that changed all of this. We became accustomed to shuttling documents around, reading them onscreen, inserting our edits and then shuttling them back. Increasingly, you seldom printed a document out unless you wanted something handy to mark up. Once you were done marking it up, it went in the white paper recycling bin, because what else could you do with it? Type it back in? It was no longer a living, editable, emailable text. It was just dead paper.

Next up: the document moves from our individual hard drives and inboxes, where multiple copies of the same document in different drafts might exist in confusion, to online storage with versioning. Our one-off electronic copies are being pushed away from the center by group-editable, online-only master texts, just as they themselves once pushed off the paper copies.

In the post-cyberspace world, paper will be redeemed. Ubiquitous cameras combined with advanced OCR will pull in the static printed text and transform it again into a living document, and electronic ink displays will put the text back in our hands. But it will remain the case that any copy is just a shadow of the Form; destroy it and the text will live on.

Simulating cities from the Republic to Micropolis

2008-01-15T21:07:00.001-05:00

Last week, the source code of the original SimCity video game was opened under the GPL license as “Micropolis.” SimCity is the prototypical simulation-as-entertainment game, but constructing imaginary cities to see how things turn out has a long history:

If we could watch a city coming to be in theory, would we also see its justice coming to be, and its injustice as well? (Plato’s Republic, 369a)

SimCity was also one of the first “god games,” strategy games where a player is given a bird’s eye view of a city, social group, or ecosystem and allowed god-like power in managing its development. The idea transfers well to political philosophy as state-simulation, for who is ultimately the ruler of the Republic? It is not the guardians but the theorist, Plato himself. The guardians were not free to imagine, for instance, that the best thing for their city might be to set up a representative democracy.

Indeed, so it is with all of the socities imagined by the political theorists. How could their utopias come about except through the single-party rule of ideologues? Every attempt to create a civilization that followed the blueprint of some singular political theorist has resulted in tyranny—at least, every attempt that was not checked by the actions of some other party equally bent on seeing their theory of government brought to fruition.

This is also why I have become wary of strict constructionalist interpretations of the Constitution, for instance. I recognize the need for stability, particularly in the day-to-day operations of government and the guarantee of individual rights. But such a document also serves to give power to the intellectuals who drafted it, far in excess of what is fitting for a democratic society. The Constitution is, among other things, a tool for the long-departed to exert their political will on the people.

It would be interesting to see a SimCity which places you not in the role of a God-like mayor, but of a citizen. The player could have various means at their disposal to steer the direction of the city through persuasion and politicking.

from .txt to text

2008-01-07T16:43:00.000-05:00

As an online news producer, I have often found myself using software tools that seem clumsily suited to working with journalistic content. It’s becoming somewhat cliché in the industry to say that all content management systems are bad, and I believe I have an idea why that is.

The problem is that there are a number of words that are shared between the humanistic disciplines and computer science—words which are deceptive in that they appear to be simple and straightforward in meaning, but which in fact have evolved different, if overlapping, meanings in each of those two traditions. I refer to words like “graphic” and “music” but especially to “text.”

To the writer, the word “text” can mean any number of things—a handwritten note, an article from a journal, a book. A text may include illustrations, photographs, snippets from other languages, unusual formatting choices, whatever is necessary to express the intent of the author. These are not add-ons to the content, but integral to it.

In contrast, to the computer scientist, “text” is what a text editor edits. The word refers to a binary representation of a typewritten text. There is a limited character palette, as each character must be assigned a number. These are then arranged in sequence, allowing for display only in rigid rows, left-to-right, top-to-bottom (some latitude is allowed for non-Latin alphabets, but that is a relatively recent development), with no other formatting allowed.

Any additional presentational features of the text—including hard line breaks, character formatting, kerning and leading, mathematical typesetting, included images—must be added through any of a number of conventions allowing metadata to be introduced into the flow of the text. Examples include LaTeX, HTML, and the Microsoft Word document format. The text then splits into code and WYSIWYG views, and your opinion as to which of these constitutes the “real” text is likely to be a function of whether you work as a writer or a computer programmer. The people who use the software want to manipulate the WYSIWYG text, but the people who create the software are concerned with manipulating the code text.

The theory behind WYSIWYG word processing is that this should make no difference, since the two forms are simply different expressions of the same structure. In reality, however, the code text represents the structure directly, and the WYSIWYG text is a translation. The situation is better with well-crafted software, but writing texts that differ markedly in structure from typewritten or “plain” texts is often impossible or extremely difficult without learning how to work directly in the code.

I’m not sure this situation can ever be fixed as long as WYSIWYG texts are coded as “plain” texts with embedded metadata. The writer will require a new model of textual representation that deals with characters and formatting information at the same level of abstraction.

No sunlight, no motivation

2007-12-27T16:46:00.000-05:00

Blogging to resume after the New Year.

The two Microsofts

2007-12-12T21:58:00.000-05:00

By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive

In the recent series of “Get a Mac” ads from Apple, John Hodgman personifies the PC as a boring, gray-suited middle-management type, and few of us care strongly enough to protest. Many of us appreciate Microsoft products for their familiarity or utility, but no one ever really gets excited about them. At least, that was the case until a little over a year ago, when Microsoft began unveiling a series of flashy new products. Suddenly they were eliciting the kind of gasps that techies usually reserve for companies like Apple or Google.

On the hardware side, consider Surface, Microsoft’s tabletop computing project. Imagine a multitouch display—like Apple’s iPhone, but much bigger—set into the form factor of a coffee table. The result is a truly novel computing platform, as different from desktop machines and mobile devices as they are from each other. Multiple users can simultaneously manipulate photos, maps and music using just their fingertips. The device can also interact with objects placed on its surface, including bluetooth-enabled phones.

On the software side, Microsoft has been generating a lot of buzz with a pair of projects from its Live Labs division. Photosynth can stitch together snapshots to build a three-dimensional model of a place. Photos of popular tourist destinations—already available on the web in large numbers—could be scooped up and used to create photo collages that could be “walked” through as if they were virtual worlds.

Meanwhile, Seadragon aims to create an infinitely zoomable graphical user interface. Imagine your collection of photo files arranged as a set of thumbnails on your desktop. Instead of opening a photo by clicking, you could just zoom in to view the photo in full resolution. When you’re done, zoom out, and keep zooming, until your entire collection of files becomes visible as if viewed from miles high.

These forward-looking initiatives will take real risks in being brought to the marketplace, which makes it all the more amazing that they’re being produced by Microsoft. The company has a well-earned reputation for waiting on the sidelines of an emerging market, letting smaller, nimbler companies absorb the risks of development, before hopping in and throwing its weight around to become a dominant player in the space.

Critics of the company refer to its “embrace-extend-extinguish” strategy: Microsoft adopts an established technology, produces a proprietary version that’s only partially compatible with existing standards, and then leverages its near-monopoly on the desktop to establish its own version as the new, de facto standard. The result is that companies which previously dominated the market find themselves marginalized.

Examples?

Novell, which produced the WordPerfect word processor in the mid-90s, claims that Microsoft’s Office suite made use of undocumented features of Windows which allowed it to out-perform competing office products. WordPerfect, the industry-standard word processor of the DOS era, faded into obscurity as Microsoft Word ascended.

Netscape claimed in Microsoft’s U.S. antitrust trial that the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows amounted to unfair competition. Netscape’s browser, released earlier and at one time the most popular, has gone the way of WordPerfect.

The products underlying Microsoft’s other core businesses—Windows, Windows Mobile, MSN, the XBox—were late entries to the worlds of graphical operating systems, mobile operating systems, web portals and gaming consoles.

So how does one explain the two faces of Microsoft? With nearly 79,000 employees and a diverse product line, Microsoft is a galaxy of a corporation that can, at times, seem to lack a unified corporate voice. One thing is for certain: unless a project wins the support of the larger corporate culture, it will wither on the vine, regardless of the plaudits it receives from outsiders.

Consider the fate of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. When version 5 was released in 2000, it was widely praised as one of the best web browsers on any platform—the rare example of a Microsoft product for Macs that exceeded the Windows version. Then as now, the kind of people who usually take digs at Microsoft were giving the company a second look. But after the initial release, developers were diverted from the project, and the browser quickly began to lag behind the competition. Only minor updates and bug fixes followed until 2003, when Microsoft axed it.

The forces driving the new, radical innovation within Microsoft are swimming upstream against a culture deeply invested in the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy. It’s too soon to tell whether we’re seeing a new Microsoft or just a flash in the pan.

© 2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.

A conservative prediction

2007-12-04T17:33:00.000-05:00

I’m just going to come out and say what we all know to be true. Let’s call it the Manifest Destiny of the Internet.

The Manifest Destiny of the Internet is this: Every bit of media in existence¹ will be digitized and made available to the world in a form that is instantly accessible from anywhere and free to use.²

The “pirates” will win, and win so completely that we will forget what the fuss was ever about. Grabbing media without impediment of any kind will come to seem as natural as breathing.

As Cory Doctorow likes to say, there is no future in which bits will get harder to copy. There was a brief period of time, starting with Gutenberg in the case of printed matter and Edison in the case of audio recordings, when mechanical reproduction was possible but difficult—hence, scarce and centrally controllable. That period of time is ending.

I chose the term “Manifest Destiny,” with all of its connotations both dark and bright, for a reason. The transition to this world will be ugly. It will take a long time, and won’t happen without a fight. A lot of good people will lose their livelihoods. The quality of media may suffer, at least in the short term, while new methods of quality control are worked out.

The old business models will survive for a generation on the back of consumer habit; they may survive for a generation more under the umbrella of government protection. In the end, though, as the efficiencies of the black and gray markets triumph, Big Media will run out of lobbying dollars. Intellectual property as we know it will be no more.

Massive efforts are already underway to digitize the world’s media and make it accessible online. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are working with the world’s libraries to digitize books. Virtually every audio recording ever released can be found online—a project realized without any centrally organized effort.

Many of these projects are not sanctioned by rights holders, but increasingly, copyright holders themselves are making their catalogs available, reasoning that traffic can be monetized in any number of ways—see the New York Times archive and NBC/Fox’s Hulu, for instance. Scarcities will arise in the post-copyright world, along with ways to leverage those scarcities for gain. In a world where the viewer has unlimited choice, eyeballs and attention spans will become the new commodities to be brokered.

Edit: Anthony Grafton presents a contrary view in the New Yorker.

1. I’ll limit this to media which has been published and survived long enough to be digitized.

2. Also: high-quality, searchable, and fully hypertextualized.

Surf to it, click on it, wait for it to appear on your doorstep

2007-11-26T13:03:00.000-05:00

You survived Black Friday—welcome to Cyber Monday!

Taking the left turn at Uncanny Valley

2007-11-19T18:30:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I went with some friends to see Beowulf in IMAX 3-D. It was a very satisfying visual experience, but there was quite a bit of talk afterward about the failure of the computer-generated graphics to appear completely lifelike.

There was quite a bit of talk on this subject in the press, as well. The same conversation seems to happen every time someone makes a CGI movie that aspires to photorealism rather than falling back on the graphical tropes of the cartoon—the 2001 Final Fantasy movie got the same treatment.

It’s dangerous territory. Between depictions of life that we accept because we find them clearly artificial, and therefore harmless, and those that we accept because they fool us into thinking they are real, lie those depictions which we reject because they seem real, but somehow off. Robotics researchers use the term “uncanny valley” to describe this hypothetical space, whose occupants inspire in us a sense of mild to extreme revulsion.

We haven’t been able to cross the uncanny valley yet, with either our robots or our computer graphics. There will be a lot to think about when we succeed—science fictions authors have been preparing us since the mid-twentieth century. But I’m more interested, at least for the moment, about the prospects for computer-generated art once crossing the valley ceases to be an interesting challenge.

Consider, in broad strokes, the development of painting. The pursuit of realism occupied painters during the Renaissance. But once the techniques for realistic depiction had been developed and became widespread, realist painting ceased to be a fine art and became a craft—or the favored style of conservative and anti-intellectual regimes. The arrival of the camera freed painting from the requirements of a practical art, and modern painting became abstract or non-representational, a fitting vehicle for theory.

I think that the recent explosion of visually innovative video games is a good sign that a similar maturation of computer graphics is just around the corner.

Link roundup: surface computing

2007-11-13T22:14:00.000-05:00

In the interest of posting more frequently, I've decided to start posting link roundups. On any given day I run through 50+ rss feeds and news sites, and compile lists of links that I think might be of use in writing future columns or blog posts.

Here’s the first batch: links dealing with the recent explosion in surface computing and multi-touch interfaces. I think there’s a widespread sense that this represents the first viable update to the basic computing interface since the popularization of the mouse.

Like that device, multi-touch interfaces allow us to interact with simulated space in the same way we interact with real space: by moving our bodies. Surface computing, however, represents a much more elegant way of doing so. By combining the point of physical contact and the point of visual representation, simulated objects become more phenomenologically material.

Jeff Han’s early (Feb. 2006) multi-touch table is now available in expanded form at Neiman Marcus for a cool $100,000 (found at Techdirt). Throughout his demo, Han emphasizes the intuitiveness of the interface, going so far as to claim that the interface has disappeared. Multi-touch computing is the rare example of a technology that seems to have arrived fully naturalized: it has appeared in our world as a new and fascinating species of cultural object, instantly graspable.

This effect may help explain why it’s already showing up in the toolkits of the barkeeper and the musician.

Invocations of the computing interface from “Minority Report” are becoming cliché, as in this examination of Microsoft's Surface table.

A couple more: Sharp combines multi-touch with optical scanning and, of course, Apple's iPhone—the most commercially successful implementation of multi-touch to date.

Edit: Somehow I missed this massive history of multi-touch computing from Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton.

This space intentionally left blank

2007-11-07T07:34:00.000-05:00

I’ve just got too much going on. Blogging will resume next week.

One to keep an eye on

2007-10-29T17:29:00.000-05:00

Writer and comedian Stephen Fry has a new technology column at the Guardian. In his first outing, “Welcome to dork talk”, he objects to the distinctions so often made between between humanists and technologists...

Well, people can be dippy about all things digital and still read books, they can go to the opera and watch a cricket match and apply for Led Zeppelin tickets without splitting themselves asunder. Very little is as mutually exclusive as we seem to find it convenient to imagine. ... So, believe me, a love of gizmos doesn’t make me averse to paper, leather and wood, old-fashioned Christmases, Preston Sturges films and country walks.

... and between design and engineering.

What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly.

There is, I think, a growing consciousness of this last point. The “utility” and “efficiency” of a technological solution are often touted as if these were virtues unto themselves, and not a means to a greater end. The engineer who cannot appreciate aesthetics is like a miser who dies with millions but without having ever known a single earthly decadence.

There are some who would justify design by tying it to the bottom line. While it is true that beauty can grease the wheels of functionality, and that pretty things sell, I think this approach has it backward. Aesthetics is the end; functionality is the means. There is no objective reason why we should bother to go on living at all—we do so out of sheer preference, out of our aesthetic appreciation for living over dying.

Utility cannot be divorced from fancy. As we have struggled for decades now with poorly designed, nearly unusable, “utilitarian” computer technology, we have gradually come around to acknowledging the importance of taking pleasure in design.

A harder look at the soft luddite

2007-10-24T20:13:00.000-05:00

I introduced the idea of “soft luddism” in a recent post, and attempted to define it by alluding to a genre of writing that I assume to be widely recognizable. I should have worked harder to give a more explicit definition, because the soft luddite is too easily confused for a number of similar characters.

The old-fashioned, “hard” luddite dislikes a specific technology or class of technologies for the enumerable disadvantages they deal him. The soft luddite, however, is uneasy about “technology” as an abstract category, because of the affront to humanistic values that it is perceived to represent. His error is diametrically opposed to that of the gadget fetishist or other bleeding-edge enthusiast, who loves this abstract category, “technology,” without regard to what use a given technology may be put.

This “technology” never includes familiar or naturalized technologies, but only the bleeding edge, technology in the most obvious sense. The humanistic values that the soft luddite defends are almost always underdefined, since to define them explicitly would be to make them available for fair comparison with the advantages offered by the technology under critique.

There is almost always an unconscious element of classism in this refusal. The soft luddite is usually a member of the upper-middle class. He mingles with the wealthy and knows their ways. He is thus acutely self-conscious of his need to live by the working-class values of utility and efficiency, but romanticizes the inefficiency that is the leisure of the wealthy. That same inefficiency is also the prison of the down-and-out, which gives us what is perhaps the most common criticism of the “voluntary simplicity” movement: that most of the world’s people are already practicing simplicity of the involuntary kind!

Rebecca Solnit has an article called “Finding Time” in the present issue of Orion magazine. It’s more honest than most soft luddite pieces you’ll read, in that it actually offers up some of the values that must be compared in making a rational technological choice:

The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties—epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures—that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell.

You’ll notice, however, that the comparison is handicapped. On Solnit’s telling, convenience, efficiency, and the rest of the first list are not human values but machine values. We’re back to the bogeyman of a looming technological essence.

To compare these two lists is not to compare machines with humans, but to compare two different tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. People who are struggling to feed themselves can’t worry, just yet, about epiphanies, meanings, and pleasures. Solnit explicitly rejects the accusation of elitism, but her “nomadic and remote tribal peoples” and “cash-poor, culture-rich people in places like Louisiana” (and other flyover states, presumably) are acting out of necessity, not free choice.

Both the gadget enthusiast and the soft luddite are to be contrasted with the rational actor who does not recognize one category of technology as more “technological” than another. This person first defines his individual and social ends—including, perhaps, values from both of Solnit’s lists. He then chooses technologies—new and old—which seem to him to be the ones most likely to bring those ends about.

Oh yes, they Kan

2007-10-23T12:17:00.000-05:00

The Christian Science Monitor published my letter in response to Dinesh D’Souza's “What atheists Kant refute.” D’Souza is a conservative author who, like Ann Coulter, uses over-the-top controversy to sell books and land College Republican speaking engagements.

His op-ed piece is based on a reading of the early sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While it's probably not fair to refer to D’Souza as a pseudo-intellectual, he clearly hasn't done his homework here. Of course, his reason for taking up Kant is not to engage in serious and fair-minded Kantian scholarship; it’s to cherry-pick the philosophical tradition for arguments that may be made to serve the cause of social conservatism. D’Souza’s arguments rest on two fallacies.

The first is the alleged authority of Kant. D’Souza asserts that Kant has never been refuted. It's true that no work has ever been produced which is universally recognized as a refutation of Kant’s Critique, but philosophy doesn't really work that way. A lot of philosophers never saw Kant’s arguments as an adequate rebuttal of Humean empiricism. Others took the Kantian paradigm as far as it could go, but a critique can only bear so much fruit. There are certainly elements of Kantian philosophy still in currency, and I sympathize with quite a few of them. But unreconstructed Kantians are rare in the academy.

The second fallacy is inappropriately using the noumenon-phenomenon distinction to place one’s confidence in the existence of God outside the reach of human reason. Had D’Souza read the second half of the Critique, or perhaps read a commentary on it, he would know that Kant himself argues against this approach. When we’re debating whether or not God exists, we’re taking up an idea of God—a phenomenon—for consideration. D’Souza is arguing for a noumenal God. If my reading is correct, Kant allows that his Critique can free one for such a belief, but denies that it can be used in defense of such a belief. A noumenal God is not one that D’Souza would much care for, anyway: it would be unknowable, featureless, and unrelated to human life.

Note: This is a bit more purely philosophical than usual; I’ll get back to the tech talk soon!

The soft luddite

2007-10-16T18:54:00.000-05:00

This month’s GQ—the 50th anniversary issue—has an article written by Scott Greenberger about the decline of the printed newspaper:

For many, it’s hard to imagine Sundays without a two-hour stint on the couch, surrounded by the detritus of the impossibly fat Sunday New York Times. ... There’s something to be said for rituals, and no good rituals involve staring at a twelve-inch screen.

I’m sure you've seen a lot of articles like this. I have come to refer to the attitude expressed in them as “soft luddism.” Unlike the classical luddite, who rejects technology because of its role in commoditizing labor, the soft luddite is all too happy to enjoy the benefits of technological advances. He just won’t admit it.

Gosh, I can’t live without my email these days, but wouldn’t it be nice if people still wrote letters? Has anyone stopped to consider what we’ve lost?

Soft luddite commentary falls into two recognizable sub-genres. The first is the rant of the befuddled writer, at the mercy of his computer because he’s indignant that he should have to invest any significant amount of time in learning how to use it. The second, much more common, is a creepy fetishism for industrial-age technology: lots of loving odes to ink-stained fingers, loud machinery, and the smell of developer fluid, moments lost in time like tears in rain. Greenberger again:

It’s depressing to think that future generations of men won’t know the joy of discovering the sports section left behind in a bathroom stall.

Yeah, isn’t it?

When I worked as a web producer at the Christian Science Monitor, most of our work consisted of converting material created “on the print side” for the web, and we were frequently made to run commentary pieces in the soft luddite spirit. The drumbeat of technophobic whining made me feel at times like the target of silent interdepartmental loathing.

Perhaps I’m naïve, but I doubt that was really the case. I knew that the editors were choosing pieces likely to appeal to the Monitor’s print subscribers, an aging demographic. And this was just prior to the industry-wide epiphany that brought web journalism to the forefront. At that time, it was still “The Newspaper,” not yet “the print product”—and the newsosaurs were confident that the web would remain forever marginal. Nowadays, as print budgets are being slashed and news companies are pouring money into web infrastructure, the hostility is more open, and in some cases becomes luddism of the good, old-fashioned, save-my-job-from-the-machines variety.

Of course, new technology shouldn’t always trump the old. Given an outcome we’re trying to reach, we should choose the technology which will help us reach it in the way that is most in line with our values. So the objection to the soft luddite is really an objection to nostalgia, a false consciousness that transforms the old and familiar into the natural and the good.

Bits become atoms

2007-10-09T20:24:00.000-05:00

It is often said that the conceit of the first Matrix film—with the “whoa” it brings forth from both the protagonist and viewer—is a variation on the “brain in a vat” thought experiment often given in introductory philosophy classes to illustrate the position of the universal skeptic. As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Consider the hypothesis that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrient fluids. This brain is connected to a supercomputer whose program produces electrical impulses that stimulate the brain in just the way that normal brains are stimulated as a result of perceiving external objects in the normal way. (The movie ‘The Matrix’ depicts embodied brains which are so stimulated, while their bodies float in a vats.) If you are a brain in a vat, then you have experiences that are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal perceiver. If you come to believe, on the basis of your computer-induced experiences, that you are looking at at tree, then you are sadly mistaken.

I would argue that while this comparison immediately leaps to mind, the real problem raised by the Matrix is much deeper. The brain-in-a-vat Gedankenexperiment implicitly assumes both that there is a real world, and that the computer-generated illusion isn’t it. In the Matrix films, however, this isn’t quite so straightforward.

Most of the simulated worlds we’re familiar with mimic reality at a very high level of emergence. Physics engines used in video games, for instance, copy the effects of Newtonian physics with macroscopic objects treated as primitives. But in the real world, the behavior of macroscopic objects emerges as a consequence of the crowd behavior of microscopic objects. Since the physics engine does not simulate these, it must substitute other causes to reach the same effect.

Take, for instance, the fact that two solid objects which collide will bounce away from one another rather than pass through each other. In the real world, this will occur because the particles which make up the solids will electrically repel each other; in a physics engine, this effect must be created with explicit collision detection and response rules.

But what if our physics engines had a great deal more computing power at their disposal, and simulated physics at the microscale, allowing macroscopic effects to emerge? In such a situation, the artificiality of the physical effects is less clear. They are not explicitly created by the programmer, but rather appear as a result of the same processes by which they come about in real life. As artificial intelligence researcher Steve Grand writes in his book Creation:

A computer simulation of an atom is not really an atom.... But if you make some molecules by combining those simulated atoms, it is not the molecules’ fault that their substrate is a sham; I think they will, in a very real sense, actually be molecules. ... the molecules made from it are second-order simulations because they are made not by combining computer instructions but by combining simulated objects.

Suppose we were to take this to its logical conclusion and posit a simulation based on the still-undiscovered Grand Unified Theory of physics, that is, a perfect physics engine from which even the behavior of the tiniest particles emerged from underlying rules rather than being directly simulated.

If we found ourselves in such a simulation, there is no way we could ever find it out; indeed, there is no way we can state with confidence that we are not. We don’t know anything about the nature of the ultimate substrate of this world. It could be a computer, the mind of God, or turtles all the way down. Yet this is the world which we refer to as “real.” I think we’re justified in referring to it as such, but in so doing we have to accept that being real does not necessarily exclude the possibility of being a computer simulation.

Although its portrayal is not entirely consistent, the fidelity of physical behaviors in the Matrix suggest that it’s just such a perfect simulation. The human occupants of the Matrix are shown to be aliens to that world. But it can never be entirely clear that the “real world” to which they escape is less of a simulation than the one they left, or that the natural inhabitants of the Matrix—the programs—aren’t less flesh-and-blood than their jacked-in counterparts. Indeed, both of these conclusions are hinted at in the second and third films.

Metaphysics matters

2007-10-03T17:28:00.000-05:00

Kant opens the first preface to the Critique of Pure Reason with a rumination on metaphysics:

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

In the 20th century, as science rose to its golden age, the then-dominant philosophy of science, logical positivism, succeeded in expelling metaphysics from favor among English-speaking philosophers. It is still seen in some circles as a little hokey to profess an interest in the Queen of the Sciences, and metaphysics remains a dirty word in science departments everywhere.

But there’s a reason why Kant says that metaphysics can’t be ignored. Today’s “common sense”—or as I prefer, “vernacular philosophy”*—did not spring ready-made from nature. It reflects the outcome of the intellectual battles of yesteryear, and those battles were shaped by historical and political forces. To fail to examine metaphysics does not free from you holding metaphysical opinions; it only ensures that those opinions will be uninformed.

That’s why it was refreshing to see an op-ed, “Dualism and disease,” at STLtoday.com, which blames the lingering, mind-and-body metaphysics of Descartes for inequity in today’s health insurance programs.

This blog is founded on the premise that figuring out how to live with our present and near-future technologies will require intellectual work beyond engineering and design, beyond sociology and economics, down to the very first principles of philosophy. What happens to epistemology when search becomes as fast as recollection, and knowledge moves from the cranium to the cloud? What happens to metaphysics when form learns to mimic matter, when simulations become indistinguishable from nature and algorithms become indistinguishable from machines? These are questions with real, practical consequences.

*Edit: In Small Pieces Loosely Joined, David Weinberger uses the phrase “default philosophy” to refer to the same phenomenon. His is a much more graceful expression, and I’ll probably crib it for future use.

After the Net comes the Mesh?

2007-09-28T20:11:00.001-05:00

By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive

Wireless mesh networks hold promise for lowering barriers to network connectivity. They also hold the potential to alter the balance of power in cyberspace, and revive the hopes of those who once believed that the Internet could provide a forum for open communication beyond the reach of corporate or government censorship.

Verizon and AT&T have both expressed interest in bidding on wireless spectrum in the FCC’s January 2008 auction. So has Google. Many analysts see this unusual move as a ploy to force the telecoms to observe open access rules which Google supports but which the telecoms oppose. However, at least one technology pundit, PBS’s Robert Cringely, believes that Google is planning to use the spectrum to build a large-scale mesh network and bring wireless broadband to the masses.

Meshes behave differently than the communications networks we’re familiar with. In our existing communication infrastructure, most client devices connect directly to a service provider’s network. When you make a cell phone call, for instance, the first stop for the signal after leaving your handset is your carrier’s nearest tower. If your phone can’t find a tower owned by your carrier or one of its roaming partners, you don’t get to make the phone call.

With a wireless mesh, however, other client devices become links in the communication infrastructure. A cell phone that was part of a mesh network wouldn’t necessarily be stranded if it couldn’t find a tower right away. It could search for other cell phones within range, and then bounce a signal from mobile to mobile until it found a tower. If the person you’re trying to call isn’t too far away, you might be able to connect to them without even using a tower. A Swedish company called TerraNet is trying out a cell phone system based on this concept. TerraNet phone calls, which are free, are routed using only other cell phones and the Internet.

The same principle has been used to extend the range of Wi-Fi Internet access points. MIT is working with the city of Cambridge, Mass., to provide free Internet access throughout the city by means of a wireless mesh. A company called Meraki is doing the same for San Francisco. Meraki is partially funded by Google, adding fuel to the rumor of a wireless ‘Googlenet.’

While a mesh network can provide a route to the Internet backbone, using a mesh to connect individual users in a peer-to-peer fashion may prove to be the more revolutionary application. The One Laptop Per Child project plans for its devices to be used in this way, communicating directly with each other to enable chat, voice-over-IP, and project collaboration without accessing the Internet.

Bringing the power of social computing to the world’s poor is just one revolution that mesh networking could bring about. If everyone used their laptop as a server, client and router, it just might breathe life back into the dream, once held by many, that the Internet could be a positive force for liberty.

In 1996, early in the Internet’s explosion as a popular medium and just prior to its broad commercialization, activist and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow released “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” a cyber-libertarian manifesto. Addressed to the “governments of the Industrial World,” the declaration asserted the identity of the Internet as an autonomous democratic community, exempt from the authority of existing governments.

The declaration was widely read and its sentiments broadly shared among early adopters. However, the Wild West of the early Web was not to last. Its independence was a consequence of the cultural gap between computing enthusiasts and authority figures, not an intrinsic feature of the Net itself. No one has believed in the independence of cyberspace since the government of the world’s most populous nation erected the “Great Firewall of China”—an electronic censor monitoring all Net traffic in that country—to restrict the free flow of ideas to its people.

In the U.S., the government and Internet backbone corporations have worked together to compromise civil liberties, often using copyright, pornography and terrorism as pretexts to invade the privacy of civilians. AT&T is the target of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company collaborated with the NSA to illegally spy on American citizens. A federal judge has ruled the lawsuit may go forward, despite the government’s attempt to have it dismissed on state secret grounds.

Wireless mesh networks could allow users to communicate by routing signals through computers held by private citizens, without the need to pass through a backbone controlled by corrupt government and corporate entities. The result would be to wrest control of the infrastructure from powerful interests and bring it under the domain of the public good.

©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.

Time and the Technium

2007-09-27T19:14:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered that, in addition to his widely-read “Cool Tools” blog, former Wired executive editor and Long Now Foundation board member Kevin Kelly has a blog called “The Technium.” If you’ve never heard of it, go read a few entries. It’s everything I hope this blog could someday be.

In the inaugural post, “My Search for the Meaning of Tech,” Kelly introduces the idea of the Technium:

It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology—one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.

We all have a habit of referring to only the leading edge of innovation as “technology”—in part, no doubt, because of the process of naturalization I described earlier. Things that count as “technology,” in our vernacular way of speaking, include computers, biotech, advanced manufacturing processes, space-aged alloys. Things that don’t count include bricks, novels, roads, languages.

In order to understand how technology and society evolve and transform each other, however, the concept must be freed from the contemporary moment. Technology is more than a handful of arbitrary categories that history has brought to momentary prominence. Once you drop the “cutting-edge” requirement, it becomes difficult to draw a line between artifacts that count as technology and those that don’t. Eventually, one must concede that technology includes all structures, concrete and abstract, which humans have created in order to bring about some imagined, desired end.

Viewed in this way, technology becomes inseparable from techne, one of Aristotle’s five categories of human knowledge. The study of technology becomes the study, not of artifacts or a disembodied historical force, but of human being and knowing.

I can't let you do that, Dave

2007-09-24T22:09:00.000-05:00

Two articles caught my eye over the weekend because of their opposed views on the relationship of society to technology: Regina Lynn’s “Rude People, Not Tech, Cause Bad Manners” at Wired.com and George Johnson’s “An Oracle for Our Time, Part Man, Part Machine,” at NYTimes.com.

Lynn’s column argues against a common complaint: that an increasing number of people defer face-to-face interaction in order to connect via IM, cell phones, etc., often leading to obliviousness of people in their immediate, physical vicinity.

According to Lynn, technology doesn’t impede, but only enables interpersonal relationships. An IM-only friend is as real as an in-the-flesh friend. Indeed, for the socially awkward, electronically mediated relationships may be deeper and more open than those conducted face-to-face. And the real problem with too-loud-in-public cell phone conversations is less the gadget than the oaf holding it.

I tend to agree, with some reservations. If technology is capable of enabling “good” socialization, it must likewise be capable of magnifying our rudeness.

Lynn sees us as in control of our actions. The technology has no insidious impact on human behavior. It is powerless and thus blameless: cell phones don’t offend people, people offend people. Yet no one can claim that antipathy towards public cell phone use isn’t a social phenomenon, or that it could exist if there were no cell phones.

Johnson’s piece begins by breaking down the etymology of “algorithm” before omenously announcing, “It was the Internet that stripped the word of its innocence.”

He takes issue with two distinct, but closely related phenomena of the internet age: the automation of judgment through the use of powerful algorithms, e.g. Google’s PageRank or NewsRank, and systems—both human- and machine-directed—which perform knowledge-intensive tasks through crowdsourcing, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Johnson fears that these entities are robbing of us of judgment and enslaving us to a technological hive-mind. His is less an argument than an appeal to the viscera: on his account, these entities are horror-show symbiotes of man and machine, perhaps a “buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts”, or “an organism with an immune system of human leukocytes”. The illustrations accompanying the article belong to a type commonly seen in the media of fearful technological essentialism: crude cyborgs of human tissue and forms superficially evocative of industrial tech.

It seems unlikely that Wikipedia will overthrow the nation-state as the leading technology for the subjugation of individual will (though virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, for one, is troubled by the possibility). Systems can and do take on a direction of their own, but they are always created to satisfy a set of human interests. Rather than framing our fears in terms of man-versus-machine, let us ask who the machine is working for, and if their values are our values.

Dedication

2007-09-18T17:32:00.002-05:00

text–script–machine is dedicated to the memory of Ronald Anderson, SJ, my friend and advisor, who passed away in June at the age of 57.

Ron was a Jesuit priest and held PhDs in physics and philosophy. His research involved applying the techniques of literary analysis to 19th century scientific texts, in order to better understand the development of electrical theory. He was also deeply interested in how the Catholic faith might respond to the challenges of postmodernism.

It was Ron who introduced me to science and technology studies, and I will sorely miss not being able to correspond with him as I set out on this endeavor.

about that official launch...

2007-09-18T17:23:00.000-05:00

I had intended to do a sort of “grand opening,” including a mass email announcement, a new design, and a rigorous posting schedule. But I seem to be easing into things—collecting notes for good topics to write on, letting people know one-by-one, and so on. This is working for me so far, and I think I’m going to keep it up.

I’m a trained graphic designer—if not a practicing one—so using the default blogger template bugs me. There will be a new design along at some point. I’m also going to do my best to post at least three times a week from here on out, though life will get in the way at times.

If you have a Google account, please feel free to log in and comment on or argue with any post you see here. If you’re just tuning in, the original post features some brief notes on what this blog is about.

Shiny plastic cases

2007-09-17T21:16:00.001-05:00

One of the things that fascinates me about technology is what I call technological encapsulation, the process of obfuscation by which the engineering miracle is brought down to earth and made humane.

We’re really not all that interested in how the gadget got here. We only want it to exist, ready-to-hand, to help us in satisfying our wants and needs. And so we hide each of its Aristotelian causes, except the final cause, which is our own reason for employing it.

Like a grain of sand in an oyster shell, the technological artifact must be physically enclosed. Otherwise, its rude workings may remind us of the inferiority of our understanding to that of the technologists who created it. Thus its formal and material causes are hidden from view. And since we might object to the environmental or socioeconomic misdeeds that were likely involved in the creation of any modern artifact, its production process is hidden behind factory walls, in foreign nations, and concealed as an industrial secret.

Of course, we must be complicit in the process of technological encapsulation; if we wanted to open the case or research the production process, we could. And some people do—but this is a distinctly different attitude in approaching the object than the manufacturer intends, or most people practice.

If the process of encapsulation is complete, the technological artifact will enter our world as a “natural” object, or at least a humane one. But the process is almost never complete, and so most artifacts require the passing of a generation to become naturalized.

Witness, for instance, the phenomenon of typewritten text. An entire generation of writers railed against the dehumanizing aspects of the clattering mechanical beast. Of course, the pen it replaced was also unnatural, strictly speaking, but had the advantage of familiarity. Now, typewriters are quaint collectibles, calling to mind a more romantic era when the novel was king and writing was still performed with mechanical devices in physical space. And modern techies of a conservative bent swear by “plain text,” i.e., typewritten text, as the simplest, most honest incarnation of the written word.

Pie in the sky

2007-08-29T21:33:00.000-05:00

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, it was a Copernican moment in a way. The keepers of the universe-on-paper, the universe of cosmological theory, had long ago banished the earth from its privileged position at the center of it all. The universe-as-lived, however, remained unavoidably Ptolemaic. For our ordinary comings and goings, and consequently for the liberal arts and social sciences, the earth has been the end-all and be-all.

But the moon landing, which fulfilled the project defined by Jules Verne in From the Earth to the Moon a little more than a century after he first penned it, expanded our realm of influence by a sphere. The center of gravity of human life shifted outward, and we began to think of ourselves as spacefaring.

Lately, we have begun to think of the moon—which might as well have been made of green cheese, for all we knew or cared—as a real economic resource.

As my brother reminds me, that mining the moon will ever prove worthwhile is still a long shot. But the mere fact that it has been proposed signals a sea change in our thinking.

The Spock Entity Resolution and Extraction Challenge

2007-08-27T21:09:00.000-05:00

Newly launched people search engine Spock is offering $50,000 to the team that can create the best algorithm for identifying unique individuals from the ever-changing morass of personal data on the internet. The team of judges is composed of software engineers, computer science professors, and a venture capitalist.

It’s too bad that no philosophers or sociologists were invited to tag along. They could have advised the Spock team that personal identity poses some of the oldest problems around. A Buddhist or Heraclitean would argue that the entity Spock is chasing is a non-entity, that no enduring personality exists—only temporarily assembled bundles of individual properties.

Without going that far, one still finds it nearly impossible to identify a collection of features that an individual retains from infancy to elderhood that is unique enough to be essential to them. People change party affiliation, citizenship, gender, size, and hair color. People change interests, ideologies, addresses, names. Perhaps your DNA is coincidentally unique to you, but what if you had a twin (or a clone)? What if you changed your genetic makeup through gene therapy?

Of course, there is at least one identity that remains constant and trackable, for those of us who aren’t secret agents, at least—and I suspect it’s the one Spock is trying to identify us with. It’s the one that cashes the checks—our “official” identity for civic and financial purposes. Unfortunately for Spock, the figures that nail it down—DOB, SSN, etc.—are the ones we are well-advised to keep off the internet. And for those of us unlucky enough to have our identities stolen, even this “official” identity doesn’t always resolve to a unique individual.

Spock shows much promise. But identity as found on the internet is unavoidably a bundle of properties without a substance to adhere to. Insofar as people are multifaceted or conformist, Spock will never entirely be able to resolve them.

The uber-gadget, deferred

2007-06-12T14:49:00.000-05:00

By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive

Two years ago, while working and studying in Boston, I considered buying a PDA but decided to wait. I had limited space in my pack and already had to contend with a cell phone, mp3 player, digital camera, and laptop. The U.S. Army Survival Manual advises:

“In preparing your survival kit, select items you can use for more than one purpose. If you have two items that will serve the same function, pick the one you can use for another function.”

In this case, what’s good for the soldier is good for the urban commuter. At the time, I could look at the trend lines of converging device functionality and predict that, in a year or two, I would be able to replace my aging gadget fleet with a single lump of shiny plastic. This uber-gadget would perform the functions of the PDA, cell phone, internet communicator, digital music player and camera well enough for serious everyday use, even if not as well as an agglomeration of dedicated devices.

The Apple iPhone debuts at the end of this month as the much-hyped fulfillment of convergence manifest destiny. Does its advent signal a brave new era of pants with only one bulging pocket?

Alas. As I was watching my brother-in-law trying to connect his Nintendo DS to my home wireless network the other day, it occurred to me that the reality of the situation is—and could only ever have been—something quite different. While the iPhone or a similar device would allow me to do away with all the little lumps of plastic in my life, no single gadget could ever be everyone’s end-all. While many people carry around multiple pieces of personal tech, most of them have a go-to device, closer to their hearts and the center of their digital lives than the others. Ask yourself: if you could take only one gadget with you, which would it be? For most people, this would be a cell phone. For others, it might be a music player, GPS device, or handheld game console.

Instead of a single class of uber-gadget, what seems to be emerging is a plurality of multifunction device types, each organized around a different primary function. Even the iPhone is, first and foremost, a cell phone—a point underscored by Steve Jobs at its announcement, when he declared that its “killer app” is making phone calls.

Whatever your gadget of choice, the odds are good that beyond its primary function it can do many of the things that other devices can do. A few years out, devices like your favorite will almost certainly continue to exist as a class—and will take on more and more functionality that overlaps with other device classes.

Who knows? Some day, we might even see an iPod with a built-in FM radio.

©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.

Moving merchandise like media

2007-05-11T10:45:00.000-05:00

By Darren Abrecht, McClatchy Interactive

There is something about shopping online that makes obtaining physical things feel a lot like obtaining information: click, click, get this weekend’s weather report; click, click, get a pair of sunglasses. With just a few more clicks, you can compare prices on the same item at different stores, see the rest of the manufacturer’s product line, or view similar items from other manufacturers.

This way of shopping is tremendously liberating, a point that was driven home for me one day when I was standing in front of the wall of small kitchen items at Target, shopping for a basting brush. I realized suddenly that all of the products were sorted by manufacturer, meaning that if I wanted to compare basting brushes, I had to search up and down the entire wall. I wanted to click the top of a column and change the sorting options on my search results.

With the exception of a few items that truly need to be seen in the flesh, I would gladly buy everything online. The only thing that prevents me—and, I suspect, many others—from taking that leap is the high cost of shipping. The lower sticker prices that can often be found online are offset by the price of getting it to your door, especially in the case of anything larger than a bread basket.

This is the point at which the physicality of the thing you’re trying to “download” comes back into sharp focus. You can pay more to get it there faster, or pay less if you’re willing to wait, but you will have to pay to get it there. While different studies give different figures for the percentage of virtual shopping carts abandoned over “shipping shock,” all of the numbers are big ones. Finding a way to reduce the cost of shipping is a major challenge for the online retail industry.

Of course, moving data around isn’t free, either, despite appearances. Not only does the user have to pay for access, publishers also have to pay for the bandwidth their visitors use. But getting information online “feels free” in a way that getting objects shipped to your door doesn’t.

A recent story from Wired News presents an opportunity to think about these two very different species of deliverables in similar terms. Google and the Space Telescope Science Institute were trying to move a 120-terabyte repository of data from the Institute’s servers to its new home on Google’s. As anyone who has ever had a too-large e-mail attachment dropped en route could tell you, the Internet is woefully suited for data transfer on that magnitude.

Google’s solution, christened “FedExNet,” was to ship an array of empty hard drives to the scientists, who shipped them back full. Commentators on various Internet community sites were quick to dig up a quote, attributed to computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

All this serves to remind us that it was only very recently that the commercial distribution of data came to be separable in principle from the movement of discrete physical objects. Newsprint, strips of magnetic tape, and plastic platters are still with us, but their importance is steadily diminishing. Not so long ago, they were the only game in town.

The story serves to remind us, too, that the Internet, revolutionary though it may be, is just the latest in a series of vascular networks built to faciliate communication and commerce between far-flung groups of people. Each of these networks—the highway system, the telephone lines, the railways, to name a few—has its own unique characteristics. Nonetheless, they share certain essential similarities that present opportunities to think about them in similar terms, such that it becomes meaningful to discuss the bandwidth of a station wagon.

Given these similarities, is there anything that can be learned from the business models of content distributors that could make moving boxes down the highway “feel free” for the end-user? This may seem an odd question to ask, given that web content has been notoriously difficult to monetize. But to the extent that it has generated revenue, it has done so by adapting techniques from older, more established content distribution models. These techniques have already proven their worth at paying for shipping, because they date from the plastic-and-paper era, when consumer-sized portions of content had to be shipped, just like Google’s hard drives or that set of cutlery you just ordered.

The first and most obvious of these techniques is bundled advertising. How much would a manufacturer pay for you to find their insert as you open your package and remember that, in addition to the new sweater, you will also need a pair of mittens? Most large retailers already keep extensive data on what items are likely to be purchased together, so enabling targeted advertising of this sort would require very little additional investment. The ads could be used to subsidize shipping, perhaps allowing a broader range of items to be shipped free-of-charge.

A second technique, the subscription model, is already being tested in a new program at Amazon. The service, called Amazon Prime, takes a cue from the free-content illusion associated with a home internet subscription. Internet content feels free because you pay the same, easily-forgotten price whether you download 100 gigabytes or 5. Amazon Prime translates this logic to the highway. Sign up for the service, and you pay $79 for a year of free, two-day shipping on all purchases, with a few exceptions.

Amazon has a history of pioneering innovative methods for dealing with the high cost of shipping. They were among the first to offer free shipping on certain items or purchases above a certain price threshhold, now standard industry practices. Although some experimentation will be necessary to find the proper price-point for a service such as this, I predict that applying the subscription model to shipping will pay off both for Amazon and for other online retailers who follow in its footsteps.

©2007 McClatchy. Reprinted with permission.

official launch in July August

2007-05-11T10:27:00.000-05:00

I am hoping to have enough prep work done to begin posting regularly in early- to mid-~~July~~ August. I hope, too, to debut a unique visual design for text–script–machine at that time.

In the meantime, this space will serve primarily as an archive for my technology columns appearing on McClatchy newspaper websites.

Technology is a humanism

2007-05-11T09:51:00.001-05:00

text–script–machine is a blog dedicated to the premise that the boundaries between our physical, mental, and representational life-worlds are dissolving, giving rise to a new, emergent reality. This reality is prefigured, but not entirely realized, by such twentieth-century concepts as Gibson’s cyberspace and Derrida’s “enlarged” textuality.

The name text–script–machine is meant to draw attention to the script, i.e., the computer program, as a paradigm for the entities which will inhabit this new reality. The script dwells at an intersection of the previously distinct categories of text and machine. A work of both literature and engineering, the world it invokes is both fictional and real.

In particular, the “object” of object-oriented programming, which by virtue of its opacity gains metaphysical substance, has begun to serve as the building block of simulations which are more than simulations, enabling such characteristic developments as science in silico and a brisk commerce in virtual goods.

Meanwhile, computing is transforming our experience of physical space, not only through the influence of its output devices—screens, speakers, printers, rapid prototyping devices, and so on—but also by changing our habits, expectations, social interactions, and theoretical categories.

text–script–machine will take it for granted that engineering cannot be allowed to stand separate from humanistic questions; in particular, the methodological abstraction of “how” from “for whom” must be regarded as a mistaken notion from a now-fading historical era.

This will probably suffice for introductory remarks. At any rate, the character of the blog will be determined less by my mission statement for it than by what trends emerge as it develops. This is very much an exercise in exploration, and it’s far too early to determine what that exercise might turn up.