Preoccupations

Kayaking

The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.
— Scott Bradner, former trustee of the Internet Society (quoted in Here Comes Everybody)

The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well,
and because they are easily modifiable they can be made to fit better over time. — Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody, p 158) 

Back before Easter, I was at the ICA for the Eno/Shirky evening. One of the books I then read over the break was Here Comes Everybody. I’ve been meaning for some time to put down a few notes about it here. This has grown to be a long post as I’ve added to it, wanting to get a few things out on the page and, so, clearer in my own mind.

It’s a great book to suggest to friends who are not familiar with the technologies Shirky discusses as it hides its knowledge well — but there are still leads to follow up. The modest ten or so pages of the Bibliography threw up a number of articles I'd either not heard of before or hadn’t visited in a long while. In the former camp, I recommend: Anderson: More Is Different (Science — 1972); R H Coase: The Nature of the Firm (pdf) — a 1937 economics paper; Richard P. Gabriel — Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big: worse is better (1991); Alan Page Fiske: Human Sociality. (There’s an online “webliography” here.) And chapters 8–11, covering so many big topics — social capital; three kinds of loss (some solve-a-hard-problem jobs; some social bargains; negative aspects to new freedoms); small world networks; more on social capital; failure (‘open source … is outfailing’ commercial efforts, 245); more on groups (‘every working system is a mix of social and technological factors’, 260) — hit my Amazon Prime account hard. (Incidentally, there’s a Kevin Kelly piece on “more is different”, Zillionics, that appeared earlier this year. See also Kevin Kelly’s The Google Way of Science and Wired’s The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different.)

Further reading to one side, a number of things discussed in the book particularly interested me straightaway. Firstly, sociality, privacy and exposure online. Leisa recently posted Ambient Exposure, an update (of sorts) to her post of last March, Ambient Intimacy. The titles tell their own story. Early on, Clay writes about ‘how dramatically connected we've become to one another … [how much] information we give off about our selves’. This took me back to Adam Greenfield’s recent talk at the Royal Society (I’ve also been re-reading Everyware). Our love of flocking is being fed handsomely by means of the new tools Clay Shirky discusses so well.

Privacy is always coming up in conversations at school about online life, and what I’m hearing suggests our students are beginning to look at privacy and exposure with growing circumspection. Facebook’s People You May Know functionality has made some sit up and wonder where social software might be taking us. We’re slowly acquiring a stronger sense of how seduction through imagined privacy works (alone in a room, save for screen and keyboard) and a more developed understanding of what it means to write for unseen audiences. Meanwhile, there are things to be unlearned: ‘those of us who grew up with a strong separation between communication and broadcast media … assume that if something is out where we can find it, it must have been written for us. … Now that the cost of posting things in a global medium has collapsed, much of what gets posted on any given day is in public but not for the public’ (90).  In the Bibliography, Clay refers to a post of Danny O’Brien’s — all about register — which is a longtime favourite of mine, too.

Then there was what the book had to say about media and journalism. Simon Waldman, well-placed to pass comment, on chapters 3 and 4:

The chapters most relevant to media/journalism - ‘Everyone is a media outlet’ and ‘Publish first, filter later’ should be required reading for pretty much everyone currently sitting in a newspaper/broadcaster. It’s certainly the best thought through thing I’ve read on this, and the comparison to the decline of the scribes when the printing press came in is really well drawn. 

The summary to Chapter 4 (‘Publish, Then Filter’) runs, ‘The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact’. ‘Filter-then-publish … rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means the only working system is publish-then-filter’ (98). (Language like this can sound an utopian note that rings on in the head long after the book’s been closed, as if we’d entered a world beyond old constraints. And look!: the Praetorian Guard of elite gatekeepers is no more.)

I was interested, too, to read Shirky’s thoughts about the impact of new technologies on institutions. His application of Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper and, in particular, the idea of the Coasean floor (‘activities … [that] are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way’), was very striking: the new tools allow ‘serious, complex work [to be] taken on without institutional direction’ and things can now be achieved by ‘loosely coordinated groups’ which previously ‘lay under the Coasean floor’.

We didn't notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. (47)

Later in the book (107), he comes back to institutions, taking what is happening to media businesses as not unique but prophetic — for ‘All businesses are media businesses … [as] all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world’:

The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organisational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be. The linking of symmetrical participation and amateur production makes this period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means that once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well. Owning a television does not give you the ability to make TV shows, but owning a computer means that you can create as well as receive many kinds of content, from the written word through sound and images. Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of "consumer" is now a temporary behaviour rather than a permanent identity.

‘Every new user is a potential creator and consumer’ (106) is reminiscent of Bradley Horowitz in Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers (2006).

*****

Hope. At the ICA, Clay said that he is no longer a cyber-utopian (he’s said this on numerous other occasions, too: eg, see David Weinberger’s notes on Shirky’s talk at the Berkman Center), and in the book he addresses this directly, in the context of institutions and their value:

This is not to say that corporations and governments are going to wither away. Though some of the early utopianism around new communications tools suggested that we were heading into some sort of post-hierarchical paradise, that's not what's happening now and it's not going to happen. None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared — relative, that is, to the direct effect of the people they represent. (23)

(Compare what he said last June about expertise: ‘Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline.’ And here he is, in the book, talking about youth: ‘young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models not because they know more useful things than we do but because they know fewer useless things than we do. I’m old enough to know a lot of things just from life experience. … In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true. … My students … don’t have to unlearn those things, because they have never had to learn them in the first place. The advantage of youth, however, is relative, not absolute’, 303–4.)

Cyber-utopian he may not be, but there’s plenty of hope and idealism here (and I’m not using ‘idealism’ negatively). The section (chapter 5) focusing on Wikipedia, ‘perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today’, which was very helpful to have to hand whilst writing the material for our first year’s course on Wikipedia (see here and here), extols a living process of editorial composition (‘process not product, always unfinished’, 119) in a project that feels new to many of us but old to my 14 year-old students (it’s half as old as they are). The faith Clay shows here is inspiring, even if I come away thinking that we still have a lot to learn about how Wikipedia works. (And as for how it will work …)

Highlighted bits of this chapter for me include, memorably, ‘a wiki is a hybrid of tool and community … [it] augments community rather than replacing it’ (136, 137). I like that.

Social tools: group action just got easier. In his talk at Harvard, Shirky sets out very clearly, within the first few minutes of speaking, the momentousness of what the web is enabling: ‘we’re living through the largest increase in human expressive capability in history’. He singles out four other revolutions which compete with this: the invention of the printing press and movable type (taken as a broad period of innovation); the telegraph and the telephone (again, taken as one broad period); recorded media of all types — images, sound, moving images, moving images and sound; broadcast (images and sound). He notes the curious asymmetry here: of these four, the ones that create groups don’t create two-way communication, and the ones that create two-way communication don’t create groups. Either you had broadcasting/publishing (eg, TV, magazine), where the broadcast was from centre-to-edge and the relationship was between producer and consumer (one-to-many); or you had the telephone — two-way conversation, but no group (one-to-one). And then there’s now. We have a network that is ‘natively good at group forming’ (many-to-many).

Much of this is also found in the book (106–7).

*****

Earlier days. I came to really use (ie, read and write to) the web when I started blogging, in November 2003. Compared to savvier friends, this is very recent and, consequently, I’m glad for those parts in the book where Clay talks a little about the history of web and net. For example, in Chapter 4 he discusses the ‘early days of weblogs (prior to 2002, roughly)’ when ‘there was a remarkable and loose-jointed conversation among webloggers of all stripes’, when ‘weblogging was mainly an interactive pursuit’ (which perhaps explains something of what Doc Searls is missing in blogging today). He’s good on cyberspace: ‘The idea of cyberspace made sense when the population of the internet had a few million users; in that world social relations online really were separate from offline ones … an accident of partial adoption. Though the internet began to function in its earliest form in 1969, it was not until 1999 that any country had a majority of its citizens online. … In the developed world, the experience of the average twenty-five year-old is one of substantial overlap between online and offline friends and colleagues. The overlap is so great … both the word and the concept of “cyberspace” have fallen into disuse. The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life’ (195–6).

The note to page 281 is a glimpse back into the world of Usenet: ‘one of the three great global experiments in social tools prior to the invention of the Web. (The other two were e-mail discussion lists and online communities such as the WELL and ECHO.) At the height of its popularity in 1994, usenet was at the core of most users' experience of the internet’.

*****

Other bits I enjoyed:

‘A profession exists to solve a hard problem … [and] becomes, for its members, a way of understanding their world’ (57–8). Most ‘exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management’ (57) and its ‘members have a tendency to equate provisional solutions to particular problems with deep truths about the world’ (59). Then, with new technologies, the profession that seemed ‘like a fixed and abiding category … turns out to be tied to an accidental scarcity’ (76).

‘Two things are true about the remaking of the European intellectual landscape during the Protestant Reformation: first, it was not caused by the invention of movable type, and second, it was possible only after the invention of movable type’ (67).

‘small group communications and large broadcast outlets all exist as part of a single interconnected ecosystem’ (99). ‘When people talk about user-generated content, they are describing ways that users create and share media with one another, with no professionals anywhere in sight. Seen this way, the idea of user-generated-content is actually not just a personal theory of creative capabilities but a social theory of media relations.’ (83)

‘Every web page is a latent community.’ (102)

‘Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. … a tool … has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.’ (105)

‘What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.’ (149)

‘social tools don’t create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. … This is why many of the significant changes are based … on simple, easy-to-use tools like email, mobile phones and websites, because these are the tools most people have access to and … are comfortable using in their daily lives’ (159–60). (Cp Chris: ‘Tools are zuhanden — ready to hand. They should disappear in use, they aspire to be forgotten, but are absolutely necessary and useful.’)

‘To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly.’ (171)

*****

Cognitive surplus. Clay’s talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (transcript here), which was given after his book was published but is of a piece with it, was at first received rapturously and was publicised widely online. Its argument needs no rehearsing here. The criticism of TV — as a mask for the cognitive surplus, as something watched mindlessly and passively — is bound up with an apparent attitude to consumption that has itself been criticised effectively by (for example) Chris in his post, everything i.e. anything: ‘Nothing is worth creating if it isn’t consumed (yes, yes, there’s gain in the process of making, or craft, also). … It would be great if people did create more, and especially felt empowered to create, change, edit, curate, but we can’t expect them to do that without consumption and reflection’. (See also Tom’s Consumption is also about choice: ‘the world Shirky describes as preferable to the constant passivity of TV is not one of constant production, constant creation, but one where “passive” and “engaged” are two ends of a sliding scale - and that it’s the inner of that scale, not the edges, that is most commonly inhabited’.)

(In fact, I don’t think Clay is anti-consumption, but the language he uses can, again, create an after-effect that isn’t justified by the full text: ‘media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share’.)

And TV? Was watching it always such a lonely, passive thing? As Ian points out, until multiple sets appeared in homes watching TV was a family affair. (That could, and did, cut both ways. I came to find family viewing frequently oppressive.) This is a good place to recall something Warren Ellis wrote back in 2006:

Nigel Kneale died today, at the age of 84. Best known for his creation of the four QUATERMASS serials, Nigel Kneale, along with producer Rudolph Cartier, essentially invented adult science fiction and horror on television. He was also a clever and sensitive adapter of other works for tv, such as 1984 and LOOK BACK IN ANGER, and a brutal and pioneering satirist in his plays for television, perhaps most famously for his YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS, predicting the “Big Brother” shows from 1968. ... It’s hard to imagine, now, the impact that the first three QUATERMASS stories had. For six weeks, the country would go home on QUATERMASS night. Pubs would empty out. In those early days of television, an unapologetically adult, complex and weird piece of speculative fiction was common culture. When tv people in the States tell me that the masses “just don’t get” science fiction, this is what I tell them: that before the cast of THE X-FILES was even born, Britain used to shut down on QUATERMASS night, and it’s all people would talk about the next day. And that was down to Nigel Kneale, last of a generation of writers for British television who were determined that this common culture should always be entertaining, intelligent, challenging and groundbreaking.

(Can social tools make TV social again? The Twitter backchannel.)

My own memory of TV from my childhood is so close to Douglas Adams’ view of it (‘during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment’) I want to try very hard not to overlook what television did, and can still, achieve. (Ian again: ‘I’d take issue with the whole idea of TV programmes as something monolithic and deadening. “Cosmos”, deadening? “Life on Earth”? “Civilisation”? TV can be massively inspirational’). Everyone should read Stephen Fry on the future of public service broadcasting (video; audio). Describing his TV during his school years, ‘a cultural revolution of astounding depth, variety, imagination and dynamism’, he concludes:

Many of us are likely, whatever our professions, to have an attachment to the kind of broadcasting we grew up with, a fierce pride in the staggering history of quality and innovation that has characterized British television and radio for fifty years.

As for Clay’s talk, I think Ed Cone has it right in his comment on Nick Carr's Gilligan’s web (comment dated May 16, 2008 09:05 AM):

Clay made a clever if hyperbolic argument about the creativity unleashed by the web. Nick wittily pointed out some of the hyperbole -- but one needn't be a kool-aid drinking web theologizer to recognize the cleverer parts of Clay's argument. So, yes: on the scale of world-healing goodness to which we all so clearly aspire, giving blood to the homeless trumps contributing an article to Wikipedia, which may have more social value than watching Gilligan's Island, which itself is roughly equivalent to giggling at lolcats or pursuing this particular thread much further.

Enough. I’ll be commending and recommending Clay’s talk for a long time to come. He’s a born, and inspiring, story-teller who knows how to exhort and you need to take this in that spirit:

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment … just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. … when people ask me what we’re doing … that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I'm betting the answer is yes.

*****

Whither? 2005, Yochai Benkler, in Open-source economics, ‘explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they're paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants’.

My belief is that Wikipedia’s success dramatizes … a change in the nature of authority, moving from trust inhering in guarantees offered by institutions to probabilities created by processes. — Clay Shirky, Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise (2006)

This is new. We have never before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it. The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label ‘media’. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can’t be fit into the old mode of “content”, where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I’ve discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and re-combinability of all the patterns together … — Clay Shirky, at the Penguin blog (2008)

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right – “Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up.” It’s not easy to set up a conference call, but it’s very easy to email five of your friends and say “Hey, where are we going for pizza?” So ridiculously easy group forming is really news. We’ve had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we’ve only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we’re just finding out what works. We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things. — Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003) 

Our future can be kept generative only if we can continue to see the Internet’s invitation to be participants in its use, rather than consumers of it. The path forward is illuminated by the coupling of technological tools – like wikis – that have promoted openness, with social customs and law – like those of Wikipedia – that solicit people to take an active part in building the world they want, rather than simply paying for it and expecting others to do the rest. — Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It (2008)

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in. — Clay Shirky, Folksonomies are a forced move: A response to Liz (2005)

The dramatic improvement in our social tools … makes our control over those tools much more like steering a kayak. … The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has already happened. — Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (p 300)

My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. — Jeff Jarvis (2008)

(Interactive TV, then — but not as we’ve known it.)

*****

Douglas Adams: ‘We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing. Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.’

Technorati tags: Clay Shirky, groups, economics, hope, open source, participatory culture, cognitive surplus

Net Neutrality

From Four Eyed Monsters. Via Dave Snowden, who got it from a friend on Facebook, who …

US Citizens: Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Technorati tags: net neutrality, internet, web

Ted Nelson @ St Paul's II

The Bush years have not been kind to those Americans living abroad and dependent on the dollar exchange rate. Out of necessity, then, Ted and Marlene, who first came to St Paul's in July 2007 (see here), are soon to return to the States — but, before leaving, they revisited St Paul's. Today, Ted spoke about his work, his current book-in-progress (Geeks Bearing Gifts) and Xanadu.

Farhan's blogged Ted's talk so well that there's little left for me to add. Thanks!

There were some lovely glimpses into Ted's childhood — a boy who loved reading and words and knew, by ten, who had coined tintinnabulate … chortle … serendipity; growing up in Greenwich Village without realising it, then reading about it and longing to see this Bohemian paradise; experiencing Mrs Roosevelt as a near neighbour. He was (as expected) both amusing and savage about the blackhole which is the clipboard. His father had taught him that writing is mostly re-writing, and re-writing is mostly rearrangement — so why devise writing tools that are so bad they hide the very material you're cutting? (CTRL+C, CTRL+V: cram and vomit.) By the time he went to college, he'd written a lot by linking cut and pasted pieces of writing.

Graduate school in 1960 and a computing course saw him suddenly quite sure that personal computers would come and that his job was to design the documents of the future: make it possible to see the parts and compare the versions, to visualise the origins of quotations, to expose deep rearrangements. Hypertext was first used by Ted in 1963, but it was 1986 before it was used outside his immediate circle.

It was great to have Ted and Marlene here again. I was particularly pleased that a number of our 13/14 year-old students came along: Ted has been a name to them in their ICT course — and here he was.

Technorati tags: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, ZigZag

Comics are in everything

Welcoming Jack Schulze to St Paul's a week ago was the realisation of a long-held wish: it is, of course, an understatement to say that Jack and Matt continually surprise and delight, prompting and pushing us on to think about, to see things in new ways.

At Interesting2007 (start at the bottom of that page, with a possible date for your diary), Jack gave a fantastic (and warmly received) talk on comics. (I blogged about Interesting here.) When we cooked up the idea of Jack coming in to talk to some of our students, I really wanted comics in the frame. Anyone who knows Jack knows how comics — their design, their playfulness — inform his work as designer.

Jack's and Matt's design work is a challenge in a number of ways. For UK schools (perhaps for a long time — but certainly now) there's far too little in the curriculum that prepares you for how they think and work. I can imagine how even the diverse influences that inform their work might seem at first bewildering, even unassimilable. Since Jack spoke here, what's struck me is how all who heard him seem to have got hold of something (and haven't readily let go) and, in some cases, seem to have understood him whole and from the start — great for any speaker/teacher to feel this quick rush of comprehension at an intuitive (I'm-on-this-wavelength) level.

Some of our students may find it helpful if I pull together some links here for the different parts of Jack's talk. In order of appearance, then: 

1) Lab-Grown Meat, 2005:

 

While at the RCA, Jack took part in a brief run by Tony Dunne on the industrial future of food and lab-grown meat (a staple of the newspaper columns in 2005). This presentation comes from a two week exploration that also involved the making of replica origami food, as shown in the slides.

From Dunne’s original brief: Scientists are developing methods of growing meat in labs using animal cells. This area of research, called In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production raises all sorts of complex issues about the meaning of food, our relationship to animals (and nature), human values and behaviours, and even taboos. [...] The purpose of the project is to explore how design can be used as a medium to draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of ‘cultured meat’.

2) Metal phone (Nokia Personalisation), 2005. This link takes you to all the postings about the project; you can start with Overview:

We’re working with practitioners of a number of different crafts to explore how their materials affect the mobile phone. We’re experimenting with the short-run manufacturing techniques available in small workshops and on desktops to look at, for example, the impact of Rapid Form Prototyping on phone housing.

3) Olinda, 2007:

For the past month we’ve been working on the feasibility of Olinda, a DAB digital radio prototype for the BBC (for non-UK readers: DAB is the local digital radio standard, getting traction globally). That stage is almost over now - oh and yes, it’s feasible - so now’s a good time to talk. 

Olinda puts three ideas into practice: 

• Radios can look better than the regular ‘kitchen radio’ devices. Radios can have novel interfaces that make the whole life-cycle of listening easier. At short runs, wood is more economic as plastic, so we’re using a strong bamboo ply. And forget preset buttons: Olinda monitors your listening habits so switching between two stations is the simplest possible action, with no configuration step. 
• This can be radio for the Facebook generation. Built-in wifi connects to the internet and uses a social ‘now listening’ site the BBC already have built. Now a small number of your friends are represented on the device: A light comes on, your friend is listening; press a button and you tune in to listen to the same programme. 
• If an API works to make websites adaptive, participative with the developer community, and have more appropriate interfaces, a hardware API should work just as well. Modular hardware is achievable, so the friends functionality will be its own component operating through a documented, open, hardware API running over serial.

What Olinda isn’t is a far-future concept piece or a smoke-and-mirrors prototype. There’s no hidden Mac Mini–it’s a standalone, fully operational, social, digital radio.

The hardware API link above is well worth following. I'd also recommend Jack's three posts: Drawing Olinda, Olinda interface drawings, Olinda connections. 

4) Comics

Jack blogged his Interesting talk here — and lists the comics and authors he admires most. The slides of his talk are here. The wonderful Will Burtin image (drawn from a rifle manual) can be found in Burtin vs. Ellis/Williams, where Jack discusses it in relation to one of my all-time favourite images — page 5 of Desolation Jones #1 by Warren Ellis and J H Williams III. Warren Ellis has written about this image on his blog, quoting from the original script:

Pic 1: Surreal moment: Jones looks out the passenger-side window and there’s a thick RED LINE taking the place of the road, running alongside them – a massively magnified version of the kind of line that describes roads on maps.

Pic 3: AERIAL SHOT: The car is small in this shot, and it’s driving down a red line that describes a road, and now the rest of the map, of greater LA, is visible all around it…

Jack:

Look at the way the red line connects the sequence. The line morphs between road markings, Indiana Jones style aerial map views and back to the light trails from the vehicle. Williams guides your eye through the page, setting the page’s pace and rhythm. Optically it is very clever, it deals with how your eye scans at speed and also stitches the cue into the content of the panels. …

Burtin and Williams both use letters and images, in a sequence, on the page, and expect them to be read in two different ways: First in overview and then in detail. They deal with arrangement, pace and rhythm with the same sensitivity and same language. 

Comics are in everything.

Finally, Jack spoke about the work of Shintaro Kago …

Mr. Kago is what you’d call an ero-guro artist — that is, he specializes in bizarre and oftentimes disturbing manga with a hefty amount of blood, nudity, gore and violence. Don’t let this discourage you: I think what I find most interesting is the way he challenges paneling conventions. The idea of paneling in comics is to find the most ideal way to lead the eye of the reader in order to communicate a story. Mr. Kago pushes this to the limit. In his work “Abstraction”, Mr. Kago even goes a step further by integrating his experimentation with panels into the story in itself by making it a part of the plot. Read Or Die Weblog

  ***** 

My thanks to Jack for a wonderful talk. Here are a couple of bonus leads for all who came to hear him:

Warren Ellis » A Useful Quote:

“Science fiction is a way of thinking about things.” – Frederik Pohl 

Which may seem like a small notion. But it’s possibly the best working definition of sf I’ve yet come across, insofar as it does the crucial business of inviting the body in front of you to consider sf as a tool with which to understand the contemporary world.

The Pinocchio Theory » Sex + Love With Robots:

More precisely, SF (and nonfiction futuristic speculation as well) is a tool with which to understand those aspects of the contemporary world that are unfinished, still in process, and therefore (as it were) redolent of futurity. SF and futurism are vital and necessary, because they make us stop and look at the changes going on all around us, breaking with the “rear-view-mirrorism” (as Marshall McLuhan called it) that otherwise characterizes the way we tend to look at the world. That’s why I find it indispensable to read people like Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Charles Stross, Warren Ellis, and so on. The line between science fiction and futurist speculation is an extremely thin one (and some of the people on my list, most notably Sterling, explicitly do both). Extrapolating the future is necessarily a fiction-making activity; but we can’t understand the present, or be ready for the future, unless we go beyond empirical fact and turn to fiction.

Technorati tags: Jack Schulze, Schulze & Webb, social hardware, hardware APIs, Interesting2007, Olinda, comics

Life in hypertext

My laptop needed some repair work. Limping by on a school machine during the day was made more than bearable by having the use of an iPod touch the rest of the time and access to an N810. None of these are my own. Of the three, the iPod touch is a revelation — so easy to use, the Gmail interface is (as of now) outstanding and surfing the web on it is often a joy. I don't yet know the N810 well enough to comment about it, but one thing that lets the iPod touch down is the laboriousness of entering text. I look forward to putting the N810's keyboard through its paces, but somehow I doubt it will prove as comfortable to use as the E70's thumb keyboard. The E70 is simply the best device I've ever owned for texting.

As ever when my laptop's down, I learn things. One thing I learned this time: wireless, mobile computing is getting pretty enjoyable all of a sudden. Like everyone else, I now want to try the Asus EEE. These are all devices we need to trial in school.

Meanwhile …

I  William Gibson (my bold):

One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. So people--and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition--would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

(Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine — 1998, pdf: "Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily. In order to accomplish this Google makes heavy use of hypertextual information consisting of link structure and link [anchor] text. Google also uses proximity and font information. … The analysis of link structure via PageRank allows Google to evaluate the quality of web pages. The use of link text as a description of what the link points to helps the search engine return relevant [and to some degree high quality] results. Finally, the use of proximity information helps increase relevance a great deal for many queries.")

II  Adam Greenfield:

… the book is an obsolete mediation between two different hypertext systems. For everything essential is found on the del.icio.us page of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own blog.

Technorati tags: mobile computing, writing, knowledge, Google, del.icio.us

What we're teaching this year

I thought I'd post here some links to stuff we've developed and are using with our first year students (13 year-olds). The material is in the public domain, on JotSpot.

So, here's the syllabus. (It's open to revision this year, as we teach it, and, of course, before we teach it again next year.)

Autumn Term

ICT at school, home ... mobile
Internet & web: key figures and events
Reading the social web: browsers, RSS and search
Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line I: Office(s)

Spring Term

Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line II: webmail, IM, chat, VoIP; blogs & wikis; video- and photo-sharing; social bookmarking and tagging; maps

Summer Term

Responsibility and Identity: Wikipedia (critical reading, responsible writing); social software (privacy, safety, digital identity)
The Law: copyright (links, permissions, problems); music (file-sharing, DRM); defamation and abuse (rights and responsibilities)
Games
Virtual Worlds   

Then there's a wealth of linked-to background material that served earlier this year as stuff for the department to immerse itself in as it readied itself. (We're very fortunate in the quality and commitment of the team which teaches this course.) I update this material from time to time so it can remain useful. 

Finally, the lessons to date: 

1  Introduction 

2  Home & mobile technologies 

3  The Internet 

4  Internet Pioneers 

5  The Web 

6  The Web 

7  Browsers 

8  Personalisation and home pages 

9  RSS & Aggregators 

10  Search 

11  RSS & Search: improving the signal to noise ratio 

12 Office: I

We've had fun delivering these within the constraints of time (one 40-minute lesson a week!) and the engagement of the pupils has been inspiring. 

In doing what we've been doing, my concern has been to leave behind what John Naughton called (in the Observer) the Old Person's ICT Curriculum. I also found inspiration along the way in Dave Snowden's blog post, Huginn and Muginn. Not everything there meshes with what we're doing (we're not delivering touch-typing and, yes, we should be) and we are teaching something of a body of knowledge (eg, about web history —€” Eliot: 'A people without history Is not redeemed from time' — but that's not what he was referring to: see 'don't teach ICT as if it was a "body of knowledge"'). Such things apart, I'm entirely at one with the spirit of remarks like these:

… make computers and broadband a universal right, like water … most computing skills and all social computing capability is learnt by doing and by regular practice rather than classroom lessons.

… what really matters is that children experience and contribute to the evolution of technology, and to see that evolution as a symbiotic relationship with human kind. That requires us … [to be] thoughtful and mindful. We don't need to sacrifice an eye to gain wisdom … but we do need to sacrifice an over explicit non-experiential approach to ICT teaching.

I also like his fifth point:

Let things emerge, don't plan … It's not so much about repeating a success as repeating the conditions which led to that success. In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. … you want multiple diverse initiatives to emerge, and you want to measure their impact on the social and educational fabric … not a series of pre-determined targeted outcomes.

There's been a surprising amount of room for things to emerge: pupils experiment in their own time, bring a lot to the table, anyway, and are excited by discovering more about the powers given them by contemporary computing.

I'd add to all this a word about the re-appraisal of Prensky's influential digital natives meme — a re-appraisal that has been going on for some time now. Here's Henry Jenkins (writing earlier this month):

Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees [of] access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

Teaching this course this year, we have had it confirmed that being born in 1994 doesn't mean that online life, for all that it may be familiar, is well understood: where it's come from, what it can do and what your options are —€” these are all things that unite adults and teens as we seek to develop and mature in this new and changing world.

Technorati tags: ICT, St Paul's, youth, teens, teaching, digital natives, digital divide

OpenSocial

The more I read on this, the less I think I'm understanding it.

At the Official Google Blog, OpenSocial makes the web better. Elsewhere, posts I've found useful include:

• Marc Andreessen's two postings, Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web and Report from the front: Tonight's launch of Open Social.

• Anil Dash's Six Apart piece, OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People.

• Ted Rheingold's 10 Reasons Why OpenSocial Will Be Very Beneficial.

• Jeremy Keith's posting, Open?

Lots of interesting points (and comments) there. Jeremy ends: 'I was initially excited that OpenSocial might be a magic bullet for portable social networks but after some research, it doesn’t look like that’s the case—it’s all about portable social widgets.'

Via Jeremy, I came across Tantek's OpenSocial and portability which I've also found very helpful:

… OpenSocial is a key step forward for social application portability, while for other forms of portability, we already have well implemented solutions (Chris Messina reminded me of the importance of "OAuth for provisioning access to all your portable facets"). Here is a portability map of the technologies, what portability they enable, and who they primarily help today:

portability	technology	primary beneficiary
social application	OAuth , OpenSocial	developers(1)
social profile	hCard	users
friends list	XFN	users
login	OpenID	users

All of these are components of social network portability.

Identity Portability could be argued to be a combination of the latter three, your portable social profile, your portable friends list, and your portable login / authentication.

Notes:

• (1) OpenSocial primarily benefits social application developers for now. The hope is that users will eventually benefit by having more choice of which social network sites they are able to use their favorite social network applications. Similarly OAuth saves the developer time by enabling to support a single API authorization protocol rather than one API authorization (Flickr auth, Google Auth, Yahoo BB Auth, etc.) per social network site.

OpenSocial as a component of social network portability?

Technorati tags: OpenSocial, Google, portability, social networks, social network portability

Snap

I've always loathed Snap previews, but this has been going around — Anil Dash, commenting on Something Snap.com this way comes:

so, I really don't know the details of any business relationship we have with Snap, and I have to confess the previews bug the crap out of me, too.

But here's the thing: Regular people on the web *love* Snap previews. I know you don't believe it -- I didn't want to believe it. But it's completely true. In the testing and feedback I've seen, it's some emotional pull about the fact that links "do something" now, instead of just being on the page. I know we all feel these people are idiots, but it's our own geek cultural imperialism that makes us think we know better than non-techy folks.

I can't claim to really understand why this is the case, but I know far better than to question people's emotions about such things. :) My first reaction was "ew, omg, opt-in only, please!", but you will be totally shocked how many people will delight in having them. And yep, you can block 'em completely for yourself.

Snap.com came to LiveJournal, then, in September, following Vox.

Technorati tags: Snap.com, LiveJournal, Anil Dash, user experience

Sherry Turkle: 'what will loving come to mean?'

At the entrance to the exhibit is a turtle from the Galapagos Islands, a seminal object in the development of evolutionary theory. The turtle rests in its cage, utterly still. "They could have used a robot," comments my daughter. It was a shame to bring the turtle all this way and put it in a cage for a performance that draws so little on the turtle's "aliveness." I am startled by her comments, both solicitous of the imprisoned turtle because it is alive and unconcerned by its authenticity. The museum has been advertising these turtles as wonders, curiosities, marvels — among the plastic models of life at the museum, here is the life that Darwin saw. I begin to talk with others at the exhibit, parents and children. It is Thanksgiving weekend. The line is long, the crowd frozen in place. My question, "Do you care that the turtle is alive?" is welcome diversion. A ten year old girl would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: "Its water looks dirty. Gross." More usually, the votes for the robots echo my daughter's sentiment that in this setting, aliveness doesn't seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl opines: "For what the turtles do, you didn't have to have the live ones." Her father looks at her, uncomprehending: "But the point is that they are real, that's the whole point." … "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive? Sherry Turkle — Edge, 2006: What is Your Dangerous Idea?

Last Thursday evening I was at the Saïd Business School for an OII event, Sherry Turkle talking about Cyberintimacies/Cybersolitudes:

Recent years have seen the development of computational entities - I call them relational artifacts - some of them are software agents and some of them are robots - that present themselves as having states of mind that are affected by their interactions with human beings. These are objects designed to impress not so much through their 'smarts' as through their sociability, their capacity to draw people into cyberintimacy. This presentation comments on their emerging role in our psychological, spiritual and moral lives. They are poised to be the new 'uncanny' in the culture of computing - something known of old and long familiar - yet become strangely unfamiliar. As uncanny objects, they are evocative. They compel us to ask such questions as, 'What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with machines?' And more generally, 'What is a relationship?'

This was a sceptical talk in the best sense, questioning the cyberpresent and the imminent cyberfuture ('this is very difficult for me — I'm not a Luddite'). The broad thrust of the talk was born of a desire to 'put robots in their place': the debate about machines and AI was once a debate about the machines; now, Professor Turkle believes, the debate is increasingly about our vulnerabilities. Something new is happening in human culture, for robots are not (simply) a kind of doll on to which we project feelings but are produced with "embedded psychology": they appear to be attentive, they look us in the eye, they gesture at us. Human beings are very cheap dates: we ascribe intentionality very quickly. Consequently, we are engaging with these robots, not (just) projecting feelings on to them.

She calls this change in culture the 'robotic moment'. Our encounter with robots crystallises how the larger world of digital technology is affecting our sense of self, our habits of mind. (In turn, software, virtual worlds and devices are preparing us, at times through nothing more than superficiality, for a life with robots.) The earlier, romantic ('essentialist') reaction to the coming of robots ("Why should I talk to a computer about my problems? How can I talk about sibling rivalry to a machine that doesn't have a mother? How could a machine possibly understand?" — 1999 interview) no longer holds sway. Now, she says, 'I hear that humans are faking it and robots are more honest.'

When we're thinking about robots we're thinking, then, about how we conceptualise the self. Narcissism and pragmatism combine and self-objects in perfect tune with our fragile self confirm our sense of who we are. If you have trouble with intimacies, cyberintimacies are useful because they are at the same time cybersolitudes.

Consider the elderly — this is Sherry Turkle writing in Forbes earlier this year:

Twenty-five years ago the Japanese realized that demography was working against them and there would never be enough young people to take care of their aging population. Instead of having foreigners take care of their elderly, they decided to build robots and put them in nursing homes. Doctors and nurses like them; so do family members of the elderly, because it is easier to leave your mom playing with a robot than to leave her staring at a wall or a TV. Very often the elderly like them, I think, mostly because they sense there are no other options. Said one woman about Aibo, Sony's household-entertainment robot, "It is better than a real dog. … It won't do dangerous things, and it won't betray you. … Also, it won't die suddenly and make you feel very sad."

Consider, alternatively, the paralysed man who said that robots can be kinder than nurses but went on to say that even an unpleasant nurse has a story — and 'I can find out about that story'.

For me, the best part of her OII/Saïd talk was her listing of the five points she considers key (also in the Forbes article, 'five troubles that try my tethered soul'). From my notes:

1. Is anybody listening? What people mostly want from their public space is to be alone with their personal networks, to stay tethered to the objects that confirm their sense of self.
2. We are losing the time to take our time. We're learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices.
3. Does speed-dialing bring new dependencies? Children are given mobiles by their parents but the deal is that they then must answer their parents' calls. Tethered children feel different about themselves.
4. The political consequences of online/virtual life — an acceptance of surveillance, loss of privacy, etc. People learn to become socialised, accepting surveillance as affirmation rather than intrusion.
5. Do we know the purpose of living things? Authenticity is to us what sex was to the Victorians, threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. "Data on aliveness can be shared on a need-to-know basis."

(On tethering, this from a piece in the New Scientist, 20 September, 2006, is helpful: 'Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says "I am on my cell", "online", "on instant messaging" or "on the web", these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social existence through technology, a tethered self. I think of tethering as the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people and things we reach through them.')

There were good questions from (in particular) Steve Woolgar: just how new is this robotic "threat" (think of the eighteenth century panic about mechanical puppets) and what of our ability to adapt successfully to "new" challenges ('we learn new repertoires and relate differently to different kinds of "robots"')? I was also glad that someone mentioned E M Forster's 'The Machine Stops' (1909; Wikipedia — which links to online texts; the text can also be found here). Other than that, there was insufficient time for discussion. This was disappointing and so, too, was the caricature of hackers (a 'group of people for whom the computer is the best they can do') from one section of the audience (complete with careless remarks about autism).

Much food for thought, but I came away wishing we could have talked for much longer. I note amongst the students I teach the emergence of good questions about digital technology and a well-established desire to do more with the tools it gives them than sustain a narrow, narcissistic self. Many of them are, of course, using the web in inspiring ways, and the ingenuity of the young in escaping from being tethered (to parents, to authority) is not in doubt.

I want to give the floor to Sherry Turkle and link to other material of hers that I've found useful in thinking about this talk. In the course of a review of her Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Howard Rheingold fired three questions at Sherry Turkle (I think this is all from 1997). Here are excerpts from her replies:

As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions about what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living life on the screen or in the screen? Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code. The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain....The computer is an evocative object that causes old boundaries to be renegotiated. Mind to Mind

We have grown accustomed to thinking of our minds in unitary images. Even those psychodynamic theories that stress that within us there are unconscious as well as conscious aspects, have tended to develop ways of describing the final, functioning "self" in which it acts "as if" it were one. I believe that the experience of cyberspace, the experience of playing selves in various cyber-contexts, perhaps even at the same time, on multiple windows, is a concretization of another way of thinking about the self, not as unitary but as multiple. In this view, we move among various self states, various aspects of self. Our sense of one self is a kind of illusion . . . one that we are able to sustain because we have learned to move fluidly among the self states. What good parenting provides is a relational field in which we become increasingly expert at transitions between self states. Psychological health is not tantamount to achieving a state of oneness, but the ability to make transitions among the many and to reflect on our-selves by standing in a space between states. Life on the screen provides a new context for this psychological practice. One has a new context for negotiating the transitions. One has a new space to stand on for commenting on the complexities and contradictions among the selves. So, experiences in cyberspace encourage us to discover and find a new way to talk about the self as multiple and about psychological health not in terms of constructing a one but of negotiating a many. Mind to Mind 

At one level, the computer is a tool. It helps us write, keep track of our accounts, and communicate with others. Beyond this, the computer offers us both new models of mind and a new medium on which to project our ideas and fantasies. Most recently, the computer has become even more than tool and mirror: We are able to step through the looking glass. We are learning to live in virtual worlds. We may find ourselves alone as we navigate virtual oceans, unravel virtual mysteries, and engineer virtual skyscrapers. But increasingly, when we step through the looking glass, other people are there as well. In the story of constructing identity in the culture of simulation, experiences on the Internet figure prominently, but these experiences can only be understood as part of a larger cultural context. That context is the story of the eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self which is occurring in both advanced scientific fields of research and the patterns of everyday life. From scientists trying to create artificial life to children "morphing" through a series of virtual personae, we shall see evidence of fundamental shifts in the way we create and experience human identity. But it is on the Internet that our confrontations with technology as it collides with our sense of human identity are fresh, even raw. In the real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold between the real and virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along. As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. Mind to Mind 

And this is from the Edge piece (2006) quoted at the start:

Do plans to provide relational robots to attend to children and the elderly make us less likely to look for other solutions for their care? People come to feel love for their robots, but if our experience with relational artifacts is based on a fundamentally deceitful interchange, can it be good for us? Or might it be good for us in the "feel good" sense, but bad for us in our lives as moral beings? Relationships with robots bring us back to Darwin and his dangerous idea: the challenge to human uniqueness. When we see children and the elderly exchanging tendernesses with robotic pets the most important question is not whether children will love their robotic pets more than their real life pets or even their parents, but rather, what will loving come to mean?

Also worth looking up: the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and Evocative Objects, a new book edited by Sherry Turkle. The talk was filmed, so I assume there'll be a webcast and that it will appear here.

Technorati tags: Sherry Turkle, evocative objects, relational artifacts, robots

if the algorithm holds ...

Doug Rushkoff's Edge formula entry: