The End of Cyberspace

Clive Thompson on ambient awareness

From this Sunday's New York Times, a good piece by Clive Thompson on microblogging, ambient awareness, and what it means.

Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too.

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life....

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.

Also the obligatory quotes from Mimi Ito, Marc Davis, mention of Dunbar numbers, collective intelligence, etc., etc.. All good.

communication, social software, Web 2.0

Reading as biocultural activity

Reading David Morris' argument that "reading is always biocultural:"

Literary theorists tend to dismiss as obvious or irrelevant the ability to read. Reading is openly or covertly employed as a synonym for interpretation. Thus the mysterious act that most Westerners perform as a state-required rite of passage—learning to read—remains more or less invisible. Even literary approaches that focus on reading, such as reader-response criticism, mostly take for granted the biology that allows our brains to transform written marks into words, concepts, and experiences.... Reading, however, like writing, holds a distinctive place among historical practices that help constitute modern human consciousness. My specific aim is to explore the implications of an understanding in which, viewed as a product of interactions between culture and biology, reading is always biocultural.

A biocultural approach to reading is inescapable because the historical transition from oral to literate cultures demanded new cognitive skills and created new neural networks within the brain. Writing and speech, beyond their status as logical binaries inviting deconstruction, are human acquisitions marked with biological difference. Neuroimaging studies show that our brains process written language differently than they process oral speech. Moreover, the ability to speak is innate for humans, but reading is an acquired skill. Genetics alone assures that children learn to talk simply through exposure to spoken language, but all readers need a written alphabet or its equivalent in nonalphabetic languages. Such alphabets first appear around 1500–1700 BCE, long after the invention of agriculture, and at a biological level they make reading a visual (not solely phonological) experience. Beyond the left-hemispheric cerebral activity in areas typical of speech, alphabetic readers also require activity in the visual cortex. English-speakers appear to have separate systems within the brain for aural understanding of language and for silent visual understanding. Unlike speakers, readers also require brain activity in the occipito-temporal area, or word-form region. "Following repeated encounters with the same word," as Sousa summarizes, "the child's brain forms a composite neural model of the word that includes its spelling, pronunciation, and meaning."

Composite neural models help explain another biological difference significant in any full discussion of reading: the gap between novice and skilled readers. As compared to novice readers, skilled readers show material differences in brain development. In skilled readers, comprehension and fluency increase as the developing neural networks connect specific word forms to complex cortical and subcortical pathways, including connections to memory and to emotion. These combined processes, involving vision, word-form region, and neural networks, work seamlessly together for skilled readers in ways that make it difficult to prevent the brain from reading. We mindlessly decipher writings as we stroll through airports or shopping malls. The skilled brain gets so fluent at construing alphabetic marks into meaning that even badly misspelled words, if the first and last letters are in correct order, cannot block comprehension.

brain, history, literacy, neuroscience, reading

Harold Rosenberg on action painting

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. (Harold Rosenberg)

art, endofcyberspace, paper spaces, quote

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