The End of Cyberspace

Juxtaposition: Cyberspace as cognitive surplus

Jon Ippolito on cyberspace, late 1998:

If Gibson's picturing of data as a navigable space were only a literary device, then accepting that device as a paradigm for actually building cyberspace would shackle us to old, spatial metaphors rather than enable new, post-geographic insights. But what may have begun as a literary device has quickly risen to the status of a cultural necessity in a decade when the rapid proliferation of telecommunications protocols become so complicated that no single user, much less reader, could understand them all. The sudden splintering of the job of Computer Programmer into various specialized vocations reflects how ill-prepared our culture was for this steep technological learning curve.

Clay Shirky on Wikipedia and leisure, 2008:

"Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, end of cyberspace, wiki

David Hockney on the power of images

Painter David Hockney-- who has in the last few years made some very interesting speculations about the history of art-- has a piece on the Guardian about "Pictures and Power:"

Michael Curtis, one of the founders of Hollywood and director of Casablanca and many swashbuckling Erroll Flynn movies, tells a story about seeing his first bit of cinema in about 1908, in the Cafe New York in Budapest. He recalls what fascinated him: it wasn't the film itself but the fact that everybody watched it. He realised not everyone goes to the theatre, not everyone goes to the opera, but the cinema will attract the masses. By 1920 he was in Hollywood - which was the sticks then, compared with Budapest - but California had the money, the light, and the technology. He was right.

Now let's go back 350 years, to Neopolitan scholar Giambattista Della Porta, who published a book, Natural Magick, about optical projections of nature. He was a renaissance man: scientist, playwright and showman. He put on shows using optical projections (simple to do) and was hauled before the Inquisition by the church.

The church at that time was the sole purveyor of pictures. It knew the power of images, and Della Porta would have noticed, like Michael Curtis, how people were attracted to that optical projection. They still are.

The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What's now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.

As a number of commenters have pointed out, the church didn't quite have "control" over images: Renaissance states could be substantial patrons of the arts, and popular iconography-- particularly after the invention of the printing press-- both served as counterbalances to ecclesiastical power. On the other hand, you can make the argument that for familiarity and drama, the church's was hard to beat. It wasn't just the ability to produce rival images that earned Della Porta an appointment with the Inquisition: it was his ability to do novel, dramatic things.

I'm not exactly sure how this connects with the end of cyberspace, except through cellphones... but I'm sure I'll find some link.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Naive Melody," from the album "Live at the Georgia Theatre, 31 December 2005".]

Technorati Tags: art, history, religion

Earlier examples of The Cloud

Thanks to Heather for pointing out this E. B. White quote from... a long time ago.

I live in a strictly rural community, and people here speak of “The Radio” in the large sense, with an over-meaning. When they say “The Radio” they don’t mean a cabinet, an electrical phenomenon, or a man in a studio, they refer to a pervading and somewhat godlike presence which has come into their lives and homes (E. B. White, quoted in Tom Lewis, " 'A Godlike Presence: The Impact of Radio on the 1920s and 1930s," OAH Magazine of History, 1992)

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, place/space, radio

"Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality" is a bit overwrought a title, in my view...

But still, from the New York Times:

Nature Giving Way to Virtual Reality

As people spend more time communing with their televisions and computers, the impact is not just on their health, researchers say. Less time spent outdoors means less contact with nature and, eventually, less interest in conservation and parks.

Camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks are all declining in a shift away from nature-based recreation, researchers report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

''Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts,'' wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic. ''We think it probable than any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation.''

''The replacement of vigorous outdoor activities by sedentary, indoor videophilia has far-reaching consequences for physical and mental health, especially in children,'' Pergams said in a statement. ''Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance.''

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, entertainment, virtual reality

Social software and nostalgia

Guardian commentator John Harris draws an interesting line from the Led Zeppelin reunion and Police tour, to Hollywood's love of remakes, to social networking software: what connects them, he argues, is "an almost neurotic retrospection" that seems to define this decade.

Across the globe, 18 million people subscribe to Friends Reunited, keen to rekindle playground bonds that are usually best forgotten, and one of the appeals of more cutting-edge social networking to anyone over 20 is much the same.

A case might be made for all this future denial being an inevitable response to our horizons being cast in terms of post-9/11 dread and ecological apocalypse - but past generations had the threat of the cold war going nuclear to deal with, and they managed to keep moving ahead. More relevant, perhaps, is the reinvention of what age entails, and the power wielded by people who affect to stay young by endlessly reviving their past....

[F]xating on the past is an in-built aspect of the human condition, but limited technology used to keep it in check. We had space and productive capacity only for so much stuff: a hidden hand cleared the cultural world of outdated clutter. And now? Bandwidth and memory grow exponentially, TV channels extend into the distance, and providing the means by which the classes of 77, 87 and 97 can get back in touch is a cinch. The same technology that we once thought would propel us into a fast-changing future stokes nostalgic appetites and condemns us to a present so laden with repetition that it's beginning to feed back on itself.

Essentially, the drama that Ellen Ullman described several years ago about the differences between computer and human memory is playing out on a grander, more social and public, scale.

Technorati Tags: history, memory, social software

Big Idea of the Day

Jaron Lanier says, "Pay Me for My Content."

Internet idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!

That’s the line I spouted when I was part of the birthing celebrations for the Web. I even wrote a manifesto titled “Piracy Is Your Friend.” But I was wrong. We were all wrong.

Examples of the merger of the digital and physical

Jim Benson visits The Email Mall in Shanghai, and find an eerily familar-looking store in Xi'an.

via J. LeRoy's Evolving Web

yatsiu flickrs the same store:

via flickr

Technorati Tags: China

"truly is Gibsonian"

A friend in Seoul, 5 a.m. Korean time:

(The picture is here.)

Technorati Tags: Korea, science_fiction, William Gibson

Notes on Nigel Thrift, "Movement-space"

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

Confusing the online and real worlds

A data point from my favorite new comic, Alien Loves Predator.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, humor