The End of Cyberspace

Newsweek on Facebook and Baby Boomers

I've said before that for people my age (I'm 44), Web 2.0 is a time machine. So it's nice to see that Newsweek has caught onto the idea (though why they had to title the article "Why Facebook Is for Old Fogies" is beyond me. Excuse me!).

• Facebook is about finding people you've lost track of. [This is so true. In fact, I found the article on a college classmate's Facebook page. We'd been out of touch for about 20 years before I friended her (though she insists she friended me first... yeah, right). Which just proves the article's point.]
• We're no longer bitter about high school. [How can I be bitter about it? I can hardly remember it.]
• We never get drunk at parties and get photographed holding beer bottles in suggestive positions. [Don't I wish....]
• Facebook isn't just a social network; it's a business network.
• We're lazy. [True that.]
  
• We're old enough that pictures from grade school or summer camp look nothing like us.
  
• We have children.
  
• We're too old to remember e-mail addresses. [But we're smart enough to know that we don't have to. Our address books sync with our iPhones, we import them into Gmail, etc.]
  
• We don't understand Twitter. [We do. We just think harder about using it.]
  
• We're not cool, and we don't care. [Well, that's a pose.]

Technology and solitude

Sitting in the quiet living in the pre-dawn hours, I came across William Deresiewicz's essay on technology, sociability, and solitude in the Chronicle Review. For those who have access to it, it's well worth reading.

One book that influenced me when I was younger was Anthony Storr's Solitude. I didn't actually read that much of it, and I doubt I understood it very well, but the idea that solitude was worthwhile and rewarding, and nothing to be afraid of, was a novel concept for me. Deresiewicz argues that his students, who've grown up with MySpace and text messaging (among other things), have lost most opportunities to learn and benefit from being alone.

If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.

I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?

To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience.... For the still, small voice speaks only in silence.

One thing that jumped out at me was that Deresiewicz contrasts the physical solitude that used to characterize being online, with the situation today. It used to be that "connecting" online was more a physically isolating experience, done at desks, in front of desktops. Today, though, you don't have to be alone to go online: just as cellphones and mobile Web technologies make it less likely that you'll ever be offline, and lower the bar for jumping onto the Web, they make it less likely that you'll be fruitfully alone.

But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive.... Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.

Of course, we all know plenty of people who manage to feel alone even today, and it's possible to resist the pull of technology: there are people who rebel against constant connectivity, on the grounds that it's too intrusive and distracting. But still, I think Deresiewicz points to a bigger trend that most of us will recognize.

A rich essay. Worth reading.

Naming children in South Africa after cellphone services

Were any kids named "cyberspace" or "TCP/IP" or "Compuserve"?

Would you name your child Nokia?

Ever since mobile phone services were introduced in KwaZulu-Natal some parents have named their children after some of the terms used by mobile services providers.

According to Home Affairs statistics some of the children born from 1993 when mobile services were introduced in the province (and the rest of SA) have the following names:

1. Network Madondo
2. Subscriber Zulu
3. Nokia Khumalo
4. Siemens Mdlalose
5. Motorola Buthelezi
6. Dial Magubane
7. Vodacom Mkhize
8. Call Later Ndlovu
9. Voicemail Ngobese
10 Simcard Makhathini
11 Scratchcard Mlaba
12 Talktime Luthuli
13 Send Ndebele
14 Paging Nyawose
15 Cellphone Mpungose
16 Message Gumede
17 SMS Mabaso
18 Phonebook Dlamini
19 Ringtone Khoza
20 MTN Shezi
21 Prepaid Zwane
22 Pay as you go Mfeka
23 Please Call Me Cetshwayo
24 Contract Mabaso
25 Charger Ngobese
26 Hands Free Tshabalala
27 Unavailable Masondo
28 Switchoff Mabuza
29 Sim-Rejected Hlongwane
30 Airtime Zwelithini
31 Internet Mthethwa
32 Server Mkhize

Obviously you can read this as a measure of the social or psychological importance of cellphones, though I think there's also a tradition in southern Africa of adopting words from other languages into names.

Zeroing, Twitter, and ambient awareness

A few weeks ago a friend of mine announced that she was taking a break from Web 2.0.* She was going to prune her Twitter feeds, reduce her time on Facebook, and cut back on her time on IM. She needed to pay more attention to her real life, and to real relationships. Recollecting friends from high school and college was interesting for a while (Web 2.0 is a time machine for my generation, after all), but a large volume of acquaintances can't provide the same satisfaction and support as a handful of friends you can see-- or who can take the kids out to the park for an hour. Getting Tweets on her cell phone was also a poor combination of intrusiveness and minutiae. And there was laundry to be done.

As one of the digital lemmings who pushed her over the edge, the episode got me thinking. Why do I Tweet? After thinking about it for a while, I've come the conclusion that while it's certainly popular with lots of my friends, I have a couple serious questions about Twitter, as a writer and a reader.

First, I have to admit that my regular life isn't interesting enough to justify throwing out real-time updates about it. Nobody needs to know that I've just convinced the kids to make their own breakfasts, or have come back from lunch at Zao Noodles, or am trying to decide where to go on this weekend's hike. The exception is when I'm on the road or doing something else unusual: at those times, my life-- or my world-- might get interesting enough document in detail.

There's also the problem that I'm not sure what I get out of my own tweets. One of the signal features of Web 2.0, I think, is that it's not just broadcasting: it's self-documentation. Some of my friends use Twitter to jot down little notes about what they're reading. But for me, the absence of tags in Twitter makes it hard for me to find things I've looked at long enough to know I should look for them again later, or to keep track of citations; del.icio.us is still the better tool for that. (I suppose you could replicate a little of that functionality with #tags, but that's a workaround, and there's no auto-complete....) And I'm not sure I've gone back and looked at my own Twitter stream, ever. My regular blog is valuable because it's a way to keep track of my own life; this one has been invaluable for recording and trying out ideas for my book; my kids' blog has been a place where I could store huge amounts of detail about my kids' childhoods-- those pictures of them doing cute but ordinary things, or saying wonderful things, or just growing up. Tossing out tweets feels like shooting sparks from a wheel: the sparks may be entertaining, but it's the object you're shaping with the wheel that's really valuable.

Finally, as a reader, I find that seeing the raw feed of even a few people's lives can quickly become overwhelming. In the last 24 hours, a relatively quiet time after Thanksgiving, I got 34 tweets; during a busy time-- when people are traveling or at SXSW-- I can get several times that, easily. There's an argument to be made, as Clive Thompson has done, that the minutiae of tweets resolve into ambient awareness... but as it's currently designed, the system still puts big demands on readers, who have to constantly read their friends' Twitter streams, develop a sense of the rhythm of their posting, and build up a model of their real-world state from their online behavior. In a world in which the challenge is not to broadcast a lot of information, but to generate a lot of meaning, the stream-of-existence quality of tweeting makes it easy to mistake detail for intimacy, quantity of tweets for quality of expression or depth of understanding. As a preview of the world of ubiquitous computing and ambient awareness, Twitter is an interesting experiment (an experiment that's being conducted my hundreds of thousands of people on themselves and their friends.)

This is actually not a bad lesson for designers. Creating ambient devices isn't about pushing information; presence isn't just about connection. Connecting people virtually is as much about quality and meaning in the digital world as it is in the real world.

Which is not to say that Twitter is hopeless. Twitter is strongest as a platform for conversation and reportage. It's easy to share a rapid fire of short notes at conferences, for example, and the final result-- assuming people are listening and paying attention-- can be useful. (I wonder if there are examples of Twitter being used by students in lecture classes?) A couple of the people I follow use it as much for pinging friends as for talking about what they're doing: for them, Twitter is a cross between the Facebook wall and a chat room. And I find Twitter useful for getting reactions to news events: I stopped watching the presidential debates this fall, for examples, after I realized that most of my friends were tweeting their reactions to them.

So what do I do with my Twitter stream? I'm not going to shut it down, because there are times when I'll want to provide moment-by-moment updates about what I'm doing ("Just cleared customs in Kai Tak! Where's the cab line?" "Have now been in Victoria Stations on four continents...."). But for me, when I do use it, the challenge will be to figure out how to write the Web 2.0 equivalent of Zen koans: to fit meaning into 140 characters, rather than to fight the limitations of the medium by posting a lot.

Scrolling Forward

This a review I wrote of David Levy's Scrolling Forward, which originally appeared in the L. A. Times about ten years ago. Not that long. It just feels like it.

Kids and technology

[Reprinted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

About fifteen year ago, we began to hear about children who helped their parents with new technologies. They were the ones who knew how to program the VCR, get onto the Internet, and troubleshoot the computer. It was a cliché, but a meaningful one that marked two shifts in the way technology was integrating into our lives. The first is that children were getting their hands on new technologies. Before, they had had intermediaries standing between them and a new device, slapping their hands away and warning them that they'd lose an eye if they touched it. Now, not only were they using computers without grown-ups, they were adapting faster to them than their parents. They could figure out computers more easily, were more flexible in the face of rapid change, and more willing to just play around with a device—and hence really learn how it works.

Kids are big market for technologies today. Adolescents are major consumers of cell phones, users of instant messaging, patrons of Playstation. But their importance goes beyond simple numbers. They're also fanatical consumers: teen gamers do more research on new games than adults do when buying a new car. They're harsh critics: visit any game or computer discussion board, and see for yourself just how detailed they can be in their criticism.

Finally and most important, they're serious social innovators: they're much less likely to follow the manual, and much more likely to invent new ways of using technologies, or build entire subcultures around them. Teens turned cell phones from business tools into pieces of youth culture. They've driven the growth of instant messaging and SMS. And they've flocked to blogs. They're not just early adopters. They're early adapters, too.

Of course, today's kids are tomorrow's consumers. There are new products to be created to serve their preferences; new skills to be exploited by the next generation of devices; and new services to be sold to support their lifestyles. But today, even really small children—the Sesame Street and Disney Princess set—are interacting with technologies, and developing some powerful assumptions about technology and media.

Smart home, smarter home

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

When modern architecture emerged in the first years of the last century, it threw down a gauntlet at the feet of traditional neoclassical and academic architecture. Modernism's style was stripped-down and functional. It celebrated the beauty of machines and the art of engineering, and expressed itself in concrete and steel, rather than brick and wood. Most important, it declared that the future would never again look like the past: from now on, architecture would be about innovation and change, not about working with timeless principles and eternal proportions.

Implicitly at first, and then consciously, architectural exhibits became predictions. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, first exhibited in 1927, exemplifies how modern architecture backed into the futures business. The Dymaxion house was a hexagonal structure, suspended from a central load- and services-bearing column. Virtually everything in it was made of aircraft-grade medal. The house wouldn't be built on-site, like traditional houses; instead, it would be mass-produced, like cars or cans of peas, and delivered to owners.

Soon "the home of the future" became a stock element of every architectural exhibit, World's Fair, forward-looking corporate display, or popular magazine special issue. (Even World War II couldn't derail them: a 1943 brochure showed a couple admiring a neighborhood of modern houses under the caption, "After total war can come total living.") Sporting automated kitchens, robot butlers, furniture that you washed with a high-pressure hose, and helipads (the long, sad story of why we don't have personal helicopters or jet packs will have to wait for another time), these houses were sleek temples of convenience, promises of a world in which the home would be as frictionless and worry-free as a department store.

Of course, almost none of this has come to pass. Instead, the "home of the future" projects serve as textbook examples of how you can get the future wrong, and why.

Solitude

[Reposted from the Red Herring blog, ca. 2005.]

Let me begin with a confession. I spend most of my working life in front of a computer, and I suspect a fair amount of that time is wasted. I check my e-mail several times an hour. I regularly scan my RSS feeds for new posts. I visit news sites, just in case they've updated the list of breaking new stories. I can follow hyperlinks from one end of the Internet to the other if I'm not careful.

It's all the electronic equivalent of bouncing your leg up and down, or ripping a napkin apart. And I don't need to be this wired. It doesn't help my work or thinking; to the contrary, these information-era equivalents nervous tics are just distractions. Yet I do them.

I'm hardly alone. Some of my friends lead lives that require Blackberries; others have Blackberries that take over their lives. A recent Yahoo-OMD study of 28 people forced to go offline for two weeks shows how dependent—both in the functional, and the emotional sense—people become to being connected. According to The Atlantic Monthly, "Across the board, participants reported withdrawal-like feelings of loss, frustration, and disconnectedness after the plug was plug was pulled." Indeed, "[t]he temptation to go online was so great that the participants were offered "life lines"—one-time, one-task forays onto the Web—to ease their pain." Add to this the recent Pew Internet Survey study that found that Internet users are spending more time online, and less watching TV, and you get a picture of growing numbers of people turning productivity tools into weapons of self-distraction.

It's just the latest evidence confirming the truism that we live in an age of information overload. How did this happen? And is it going to get worse?

Dreaming in black and white, dreaming in color

This is a really interesting example of how technology might affect perception: a new study indicating that people who grew up watching black-and-white television dreamed (and still dream) in black and white, while people who grew up watching color TV dream in color:

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.

The findings suggest that the moment when Dorothy passes out of monochrome Kansas and awakes in Technicolor Oz may have had more significance for our subconscious than we literally ever dreamed of.

Eva Murzyn, a psychology student at Dundee University who carried out the study, said: "It is a fascinating hypothesis.

"It suggests there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed.

"What is even more interesting is that before the advent of black and white television all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in colour."...

Research from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white but the tide turned in the sixties, and later results suggested that up to 83 per cent of dreams contain some colour.

Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been priming the subjects' dreams.

cognition, memory, psychology, television, dreams

City of 404s

From the first post in Ophelia Chong's new blog, 404 City:

In real life, a 404 is a common occurrence in Los Angeles. You drive to a store, only to find it closed and a Starbucks in its place. My answer would be to flip open my cellphone and Google for the closest alternative, while my car idles at the curb with the air conditioning blasting my hair back like I had my own personal tornado. Angelenos are accustomed to an ever changing landscape; we are so blasé that when new area codes are added we just blink once and roll through another stop sign. We blithely move through do-overs, makeovers, rehabs, and, even when the ground beneath us moves, we take it all in stride and look for the next new thing. With each metamorphosis we are assured that the only sign of permanence in Los Angeles is Angelyne's age.

This could be also said about the journey I have traveled in my adopted city of Los Angeles. I am a transplant from the north, by way of China through my parents. I came here to start a new life, with a blank slate and stare. In the years I've been here, my life has changed many times over, and none of it can be revisited because the emotional, personal and physical landscape has changed. Most of my life is a code 404.

blogging, city, memory