« April 2007 | Main | June 2007 »
By Peter Cashmore, on the Web 2.0 Blog:
Tim Berners-Lee said recently that he looks forward to a day when the web is like paper. Nobody says "I'm going to write a letter on some paper", and it seems likely that as the web gets more pervasive, there won't be such a thing as "going on the web" either. And if the network is omnipresent and invisible, do we really need the term "cyberspace"?
Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace
One of the distinctive features of Web 2.0, I've felt, is an understanding that humans are very good at certain things, computers are really good at different things, and groups of people are good at yet other things; and that creating systems that combine individual, machine, and collective intelligence will be powerful-- more powerful than, for example, software that tries to mimic human capabilities.
Today, while reading Bill Leslie's brilliant article, "Blue Collar Science,"* on Western Electric's efforts to commercialize the transistor and integrated circuit-- a category of work that, he argues, is just as important in the history of R&D as the more famous and detached style of research that we normally think of as "R&D"-- I came across this 1964 quote by Eugene Anderson, a Bell Labs researcher:
[H]ighly complex assembly machines... are always expensive and are extremely specialized. A change in design or technology can turn a beautiful machine into a boat anchor overnight. We tend to forget that while labor costs are high, so is the cost of capital. We are finding that simple tools coupled with the sensing, judging and tactile abilities of people are often more desirable than complex machinery. It is very difficult to make a machine that has the eyeball sensory abilities or is as smart as even a scatterbrained 18-year old... at least for the same cost and flexibility.
A similar kind of relationship between human and machine, which recognizes that symbiotic systems can sometimes do better work, more cheaply, than ones that try to cut humans out of the loop.
* Stuart W. Leslie, "Blue collar science: Bringing the transistor to life in the Lehigh Valley," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Science 32:1 (2001), 71-113.
Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, manufacturing, social software, Web 2.0
I love Jeff Han's multitouch display, but I was watching one of the videos again, and something struck me.
A number of times during the demo, Jeff remarks that "there's no interface." I think this is a shorthand for, "this is something very easy to use." Is that right? Or is he making the more radical claim that there really is no interface?
Just wondering.
Technorati Tags: displays, end of cyberspace, interface
Pretty amazing: a video of Sony's flexible color OLED.
This is the kind of display technology that will be important to the disappearance of the desktop-- or perhaps more accurately, the proliferation of all kinds and scales of displays that communicate digital information and images.
Technorati Tags: displays, end of cyberspace
Nigel Thrift, "Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness," Economy and Society 33:4 (November 2004): 582-604. [pdf]
In other recent articles Thirft has "looked at how, as a result of the intervention of software and new forms of address, these background time-spaces are changing their character, producing novel kinds of behaviours that would not have been possible before and new types of object which presage more active environments." This paper argues that "the activity of calculation has become so ubiquitous that it has entered a new phase, which I call 'qualculation'," (584) and this new form of calculation is starting to change the way we perceive and think about space.
The World of Paratexts
"All human activity depends upon an imputed background whose content is rarely questioned: it is there because it is there. It is the surface on which life floats." This used to be largely natural, but in the last century industrialization has created a new artificial background shaping human activity. "Now a second wave of second nature is appearing, extending its fugitive presence though object frames as diverse as cables, formulae, wireless signals, screens, software, artificial fibres and so on." This is a mundane, inescapable "fugitive materiality" that requires a lot of invisible support-- e.g., the creation of metrics, standards, addresses, and modularity. But if "all these characteristics can be imposed, then the logic of the system, as it becomes both necessary and general, will gradually become the logic of the world." (586)
From Quantification to Qualculation: The Growth of Calculation
"The growth of quantitative calculation in the world... is a long and complicated story" going back to the ancient Greeks. "But what seems certain is that the sheer amount of calculation going on in the world has undergone a major shift of late... [and] is becoming a ubiquitous element of human life" (586) thanks to the growth of computing power, growth of ubiquitous computing, and the of substitution of "analytic solutions... by brute computing force." (587)
Just as earlier systems for creating and organizing knowledge about the world-- ranging from the discovery of mathematical notation in ancient Greece (a process akin to the impact of writing described by Havelock Ellis and other), to new visions of space in the Scientific Revolution, to information management tools in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the rise of logistics in the 20th century, all "produced a new sense of the world and new forms of representation of it, so we can see something similar happening now." (587) In all these historical cases, and today, "number does not just describe, it constructs.... number tends to cast the world reciprocally in its image as entities are increasingly made in for ms that are countable. Number performs number." (589-590)
New apprehensions of space and time
"[T]he sheer amount of calculation that is now becoming possible at all points of so many spaces is producing a new calculative sense, which I will call 'qualculation'." In this new calculative order, "calculations become part of a background whose presence is assumed." (592) To those of us living today, qualculation is as much a part of the "background" of reality as animal tracks and weather were to our ancestors.
A new sensorium
So what effect will the rise of qualculation have on the sensorium? Two possibilities are the rise of new phobias (something we saw with the transformation of the Euro-American city in the 19th century), and "the rise of new forms of intuition" (like thin-slicing). (596) Most interesting, however, is a "reworking of space and time... written into the human body and language." (596) Thrift points to three changes:
Hands. "The sensory system of the hand is complex and capable of exquisite fine-tuning. It is not just an 'external' organ: it is so vital to human evolution that it seems quite likely that parts of the brain have developed in order to cope with its complexities rather than vice versa." (597)
[I]n a qualculative world... the sense of touch will be redefined in three ways as haptic engineering moves beyond today's primitive keyboard, keypad, mouse and data glove. First, from being conceived as a heavily localized sensation, touch will increasingly be thought of as a sense that can stretch over large spaces.... Second, entities that are able to be touched will correspondingly expand; all manner of entities will be produced with an expanded sensory range. Third, paramount among these newly touchable entities will be data of various kinds which, through haptic engineering, will take on new kinds of presence in the world as something closer to what we conventionally regard as 'physical' objects. In other words, the hand will extend, be able to touch more entities and will encounter entities which are more 'touchable'. The set of experiences gathered under 'touch' will therefore become a more important sense, taking in and naming experiences which heretofore have not been considered as tactile and generating haptic experiences which have hitherto been unknown. (598)
Space. "It will become normal to know where one is at any point.... As importantly, the ability to tag addresses to moving objects which started with barcodes and credit cards and is now expanding and becoming more infor mation-rich with the rapidly expanding use of radio frequency identifier chips will mean that over a grid of fixed co-ordinates will be laid a series of moving addresses specific to particular entities." (598)
Language. "[V]ocabularies of spatial configuration will multiply. The critical importance of spatial distribution in flow architectures will produce an extended spatial vocabulary which will provide new opportunities for thinking the world, opportunities which will themselves be constitutive of that world. We can already see something of this going on in the practical aesthetics of fields like architecture, performance and film." (600)
Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, mobility, Nigel Thrift, pervasive computing, place/space, ubicomp
Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. (Alfred North Whitehead, 1911, quoted in Nigel Thrift, "Movement-space")
Cyberspace is a "metaphor we live by," born two decades ago at the intersection of computers, networks, ideas, and experience. It has reflected our experiences with information technology, and also shaped the way we think about new technologies and the challenges they present. It had been a vivid and useful metaphor for decades; but in a rapidly-emerging world of mobile, always-on information devices (and eventually cybernetic implants, prosthetics, and swarm intelligence), the rules that define the relationship between information, places, and daily life are going to be rewritten. As the Internet becomes more pervasive-- as it moves off desktops and screen and becomes embedded in things, spaces, and minds-- cyberspace will disappear.
This blog is about what happens next. It's about the end of cyberspace, but more important, about what new possibilities will emerge as new technologies, interfaces, use practices, games, legal theory, regulation, and culture adjust-- and eventually dissolve-- the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is an historian of science and futurist.
Part of the Corante Innovation Hub.
Recent Comments