The End of Cyberspace

We don't read the robot TO you, we feel the robot AT you*

One of the things I've come to realize in the course of this project is how rewarding it can be to look closely at humans' interactions with computers, mobile devices, and other technologies. Cyberspace, I'm arguing, made sense in a world in which getting online was hard, and there were clearer behavioral divides between the everyday world that we inhabit naturally, and the online "world" that we visited via computer modem. Today, things like the cellphone, iPhone, and Intel's new Mobile Information Devices, combined with the proliferation of wireless networks and always-on services, are all eroding that sense of the digital world as something separate from regular life.

Today I saw another example of how changes in the ways we engage with technologies can break down conceptual divisions-- this time involving the divide between people and robots. New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with the Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner. Apparently a lot of owners give their Roomba a name, dress it up, or even take it on vacations:

"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey... which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.

Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.

Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."

So as they move from environments that we don't like into places that are more familiar, and from doing work we hate to work we just dislike, two things happen to our perception of robots: their social status goes up, and they become more familiar. But this doesn't just happen with robots who are doing "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs: humans who are doing those jobs can develop bonds with those robots, too.

US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.

This is not to say that we're starting to think of robots as more like people, but at least we're starting to treat them a little more like, say, pets: they're not us, but they're still part of our emotional lives, and we have some appreciation for what they do for us.

(* A reference to Stephen Colbert's great description of what would make his show different: "Other shows read the news to you. We feel the news at you.")

[To the tune of Mono, "Lost Snow," from the album "Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005".]

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace, HCI, psychology, robotics

Spelling with my hands

I have a strong interest in learning how people's uses of technologies changes the way they think-- or less grandly, how it shapes the way they perform cognitive tasks or approach problems. Recently, I found an example of something I do that's definitely an artifact of my long engagement with a very specific technology: I realized I spell with my hands.

The other night, my wife and I were at the dining room table, each of us working on stuff. (Since she's a teacher at a pretty demanding school, she often has papers to grade in the evening.) She asked me how to spell a long word. I thought about it for a second, and couldn't just recite the letters, even though I was sure I knew how it was spelled. So I typed it.

Of course, I can recite the spelling of plenty of words, but after thirty years of typing, complex spelling is something I do with my hands more than my mind's eye. I know a word is misspelled when I feel my fingers hit the wrong keys, or reverse the order of a pattern. For me, correct spelling is a matter of feeling my fingers move over the keyboard in the right, comfortable way, not a matter of thinking "this word is spelled like this," then translating that into a set of motions. The keyboard has become an interface between the words I know how to spell, and the actual act of spelling them correctly.

This helps explain why I find using the predictive text feature on cell phones a somewhat puzzling experience. On a keypad with predictive text turned on, you really do have to think about the spelling of a word, because you're essentially feeding the phone clues about the word you want it to spell. Hit the wrong number on the keypad, and it's led astray, a sure as giving someone the wrong clue in a mystery will lead them to a mistaken conclusion. What makes it more confusing is that as you hit the keys, the phone may guess a completely different word than it had before; and of course, some keypad combinations can spell several different, equally popular words (46 can be "in" or "go," or a bit less likely, "ho").

For someone accustomed to spelling on a QWERTY keyboard, this is a pretty mystifying interaction. Of course, I'm getting better at it; but writing on a traditional keyboard and a keypad aren't merely different activities in terms of the fingers you use, or the prominence of the thumb versus the other digits; it places different cognitive demands on someone who's grown up spelling with his hands.

Technorati Tags: cognition, end of cyberspace, interface, keyboard, N95

Write Room and Skype

Recently I've been using a couple tools a lot, for reasons that are worth noting (worth it to me, anyway). Increasingly, I find my choice of technologies depends on fairly small and specific things, keyed more to the way I'm able to use them than to functional specs.

The first is WriteRoom. I've had it for a while, but I've now made it my default basic text editor. The interesting thing about WriteRoom is that it revives an old interface for a new purpose: it turns it into a tool for focusing an author's attention. This is writing without distraction, the Web site promises.

Walk into WriteRoom, and watch your distractions fade away. Now it's just you and your text. WriteRoom is a place where your mind clears and your work gets done. When your writing is complete, exit WriteRoom and re-enter the busy world with your work in hand.

With so much e-mail and information pouring in, the digital life we lead can sure be a blur. If you've found it getting harder to focus on the words you want to write, if you've forgotten how great it feels to really write distraction-free, then let WriteRoom help you rediscover your muse.

Of course I find the spatial metaphor interesting.

But what I find I really like about it is that it's particularly well-suited for writing late at night. I have these regular bouts where I'm up until 2 or 3 at night writing-- periods when I can really get a lot done, or have those conceptual or organizational breakthroughs that every writer finds really satisfying. Most of the time I'm not writing something that requires elaborate formatting or layout, so I can use a simpler writing tool. But when I'm in bed, the lights are out, and I'm trying to work without keeping my wife up, the amber lettering on a black screen seems especially fitting. The amber and black screen are gentler on the eyes. They focus attention on the words at a time when I don't have much energy, but have some of my best ideas.

The other tool I'm using a lot these days is Skype. Of course, I have lots of ways to talk to people-- two cell phones (one used mainly for text messaging), but I'm finding Skype really good for work-related calls, for a couple reasons.

First, I just bought a headset, which has made it possible to walk around while talking. Before I had it, I had to lean over the computer and yell into the microphone (wherever it is on my computer), which is not a superior communications experience. With the headset, on the other hand, the sound quality is excellent, and I can get up and move about. Much better.

Further, when I'm working, I'm never at my desk-- I don't even have a desk-- but I'm always at my computer. (When I'm not working I'm also often at my computer.) Since I actually lost my office phone a long time ago, it's a lot easier to do calls through Skype.

Finally, the combination of talking and texting makes it possible to share notes with the person you're talking to, pass URLs back and forth, etc. Since I generally have to send a follow-up e-mail after any phone conversation, having the ability to write those notes in real-time is really useful. And since Skype can save text threads, you can use it as an archive of previous conversations. That's really useful for things like weekly conference calls, which I'm now doing with some Oxford students I'm advising on a project.

The library is still not dead yet

If you're of a certain age, or particularly geeky, you'll recall the "bring out your dead" bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Libraries, like the unfortunate guy slung over John Cleese's shoulder, are still not dead yet. And they're getting better. The newest data-point: a Pew Internet and American Life Project survey on library use.

Some of the more interesting findings:

• Internet users were more than twice as likely to patronize libraries as non-Internet users, according to the survey.
• More than two-thirds of library visitors in all age groups said they used computers while at the library.
• Sixty-five percent of them looked up information on the Internet while 62 percent used computers to check into the library's resources.

As the New York Times (actually an uncredited Reuters writer) reports,

The survey showed 62 percent of Generation Y respondents said they visited a public library in the past year, with a steady decline in usage according to age. Some 57 percent of adults aged 43 to 52 said they visited a library in 2007, followed by 46 percent of adults aged 53 to 61; 42 percent of adults aged 62 to 71; and just 32 percent of adults over 72.

"We were surprised by these findings, particularly in relation to Generation Y," said Lee Rainie, co-author of the study and director of the Pew project. In 1996 a survey by the Benton Foundation found young adults saw libraries becoming less relevant in the future.

"Scroll forward 10 years and their younger brothers and sisters are now the most avid library users," Rainie said.

Technorati Tags: library

Thought of the day

Kevin Kelly has an interesting meditation on displays, thinking, and knowledge work. Nut graf:

At the time I had been trying to imagine the office of the future. I suggested to the film team that we would be surrounded by a single seamless screen in an arc, and that we would stand up and gesture into it. I had observed that when you think on your feet you have different thoughts. I like to think while I walk or pace because I feel my whole body is thinking then. It may turn out to be a short-term anomaly that today we think while we are sitting.

Technorati Tags: design, displays, end of cyberspace, office, work

The decline of the graphical user interface (1): Mobile devices

I'm not a Mac fanatic, but every computer I've bought with my own money has been a Mac. I got an SE in 1988, and have gone through various Quadras, iMacs, and laptops since then. Since the beginning much of the appeal of the Mac was the graphical interface. First, it was the only personal computer with a GUI. Then after the appearance of Windows, it was a better version of the GUI: cleaner, faster, more intuitive, or whatever.

I still gravitate to Macs, but I'm beginning to see the outlines of a future in which graphics are really good, but the graphical user interface is obsolete.

Two things are driving the fall of the GUI. One is mobile devices, whose screens are too small to handle the kinds of GUIs we've had on personal computers. The other is the growth of search and tagging tools as an alternative to visual (and often hierarchical) systems for organizing and accessing documents on personal computers. I'll talk about the first here.

Consider the iPod. For all of the attention the neat color screens have gotten-- and they are pretty neat-- what strikes me about the iPod, and the iPod Touch, is how much of the navigation is text- and list-based. Sure, it'll play movies and TV shows, and show you album cover art, and the little screens are surprisingly easy to watch (though I have a much more satisfying time watching things I'm familiar with, probably because my brain is filling in details that the screen doesn't actually show). But you don't use icons to navigate: you navigate through text menus.

I've spent a little time playing with Cover Flow, and my sense is that it really doesn't make the iPod interface less logocentric: it provides an additional piece of information to, for example, help you tell the difference between two different versions of "Midnight Train to Georgia," but it doesn't put you back in a world of folders or desktops.

Likewise, every cell phone has a nice color screen, and some icons that when clicked on will take you to different functions; but again, most of the time, I'm selecting from menus and scrolling through lists. The screen may be pretty, and the color is nice on the eyes, but my cell phone company hasn't tried to create a little information landscape on the phone's screen. Instead, they've gone with menus.

That's probably a smart choice, because menus are probably easier to work through, particularly when you're only giving partial attention to the interface. When I was sitting at my desk, I could focus on icons and folders, but when I'm walking down the street or driving (not that I ever do that), I want something much simpler: looking at simple words, or better yet, one-touch dialing.

Creating devices that let you interact with information while interacting with the world reduces the appeal of interfaces that are themselves little worlds. And I suspect that shifting from situations where we devote the bulk of our attention to graphical interfaces, to ones where we devote fragments of our attention to text-based interfaces, reduces the relevance of the the idea that we're interacting with an alternate dimension of information.

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace, interface, mobility

Making information visible

This Australian government ad about reducing greenhouse gases is not a bad example of making information visible can be the first step to changing user behavior.

Technorati Tags: visualization, climate, end of cyberspace

The truest things, said in jest-- or on t-shirts

At the Institute, a couple of us have been talking about the declining perceived value of anonymity as one of the big impacts of Web 2.0. Social software (however you want to define that slippery term) encourages sociability by giving people stable identities, even if they needn't be identities that track back to a person in the physical world.

I think one of the consequences of the growing centrality of online identity is a growing recognition of how anonymity didn't work online: while there's an argument that it allowed marginal people to be heard in online conversations that they never could have joined in real life, it also served as a cover for-- or even promoted-- bad behavior, as this t-shirt succinctly put it:

[from Penny Arcade Store]

I was thinking about this recently while driving on the freeway, and having to put up with various drivers doing 80, occasionally passing saner drivers by zipping onto the breakdown lane. One of the reasons this kind of behavior happens on the highway is that if you do something bad on the highways, you can essentially drive away from the consequences of your actions. The odds are incredibly small that you'll be chased down, much less have anyone remember you at a time when they can do something to bring you to account. Contrast this to a small town where everyone recognizes your car, sees you in the coffee shop, and damn well is going to have a word with you if you cut them off on the road.

[via ack/nak]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, internet

The experience of using Google docs and the future of collaboration

Today one of my colleagues at the Institute and I finished up a draft of a piece on the future of biomimicry. We've been working on it for a while, and had divided up the piece into several sections. But when it came time to write the opening and conclusion, and do the editorial work necessary to make the pieces flow together, we decided to try something new: we put it up on Google docs (formerly Writely), and worked on it together.

The experience was a very interesting one, for a couple reasons.

First, the technology. Google docs has a basic word processor, and while it doesn't do footnotes, it has most of the essentials for styling and structuring documents (though most people mistake the former for the latter). It also has a pretty good revisions tracker, which is a cross between the "track changes" functionality in Word, and the view changes feature you see on many wikis.

I suspect that when people design (or start to play around with) such systems, they imagine the collaborators being separated by oceans and time zones: that the real benefits will come to coauthors in Berlin and Berkeley, or Paris and Perth. And for lots of groups, that's probably a plus. But what struck me, as my colleague and I were working on our article, was how valuable it was for the two of, even though we were right across from each other. We'd brainstorm a transition, or talk about how to restructure a paragraph; one of us would make the changes, and save the version; we'd hit refresh, look at it on our respective machines; and rework it until we had it right.

In a couple hours we had written as much as we'd each written in the previous month. Why? In part, writing together serves to tighten attention. I'm easily distracted, and can hit Google to look up some very specific fact, only to find myself ten minutes later looking at a Web site about animal pictures on the London Underground.

It also serves to eliminate some of the rationalizations that slow traditional multiauthored pieces. There are always turns of phrase or pieces of argument that really need to be worked out with your co-authors; when you're writing alone, it's easy to put those sections off until later, and tell yourself, "Well, I can't write the next paragraph until we work out that transition. I wonder if there are any new cat videos on YouTube?" When your coauthor is right beside you, and it's easy to make changes right in the document, the bar to completion gets lower.

It's also much easier to make changes directly onscreen, in a way that everyone can see, than to put edits on a printed page, which have to then be carried later (if you can remember exactly what they meant).

Of course, the technology could be a little better: having automatic line or paragraph numbering, for example, would make it infinitely easier for collaborators to stay on the same page (as it were). Instinct suggests that this isn't hard to implement, but if you assume that coauthors are going to be working asynchronously and at a distance, you don't need it.

But that doesn't detract from the big point: the system may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence, social software, work

Cyberspace, a state of mind?

Buried in my del.icio.us links was a paper titled "You Are Where? Building a Research Presence in Cyberspace," by an Edinburgh-based writer named Rory Ewins. It makes the argument that we should understand cyberspace as a kind of state of mind-- or more accurately, as a kind of imaginative state that we enter when reading:

While most of us associate cyberspace only with computers and the Internet, we have been living in it for years. Whenever we pick up the telephone to talk to another person, we meet them in cyberspace, a place that corresponds to neither end of the line and to both.... [C]yberspace actually predates the “cyber”; we have been shifting in and out of it for as long as we have been communicating at a distance. It’s possible, perhaps, to trace it back even further in the history of communication: long-distance conversations carried out via airmail letters could be said to take place in a kind of cyberspace as much as at either end of the correspondence. As could letters from one side of town to another, or messages carried by couriers. All invoke an imaginative space in which two sides can meet and exchange information.

As anyone who has spent any time surfing the Web knows, it’s quite possible to spend hours at a time “in” cyberspace even when the only communicating one is doing is clicking on a link every few minutes to get a browser to send a request to a server for a new page to read. Most of our time online isn’t spent talking; it’s spent reading. Yet we still feel as if we are “in” cyberspace as we read words from the screen. Because of the history of the term itself, and the way we access these words via the Internet, we might conclude that computer technology is an integral part of this feeling of being in cyberspace....

Given the strong overlap in contemporary thinking between cyberspace and the Internet, and the past examples of the phone and telegraph networks, we might be tempted to think of cyberspace as arising out of communications networks, as being the place we meet when we communicate with each other. But that cannot be the whole story.... [R]eading takes us into an imaginative state, a state shaped by the author of the words we read, and by ourselves as readers. As readers we know what it feels like to be in that state; and we know what it feels like to slip out of it. We have all felt our minds wander as we read words on a page, and found ourselves having to go back and re-read them—forcing ourselves into a focussed, “reading” state of mind—immersing ourselves in those words, giving our attention over to them, quietening our own inner voice to listen to the voices of others.

What is this mental state? Where are we when we are in it? I would argue that it’s cyberspace; we simply didn’t have a name for it before. It’s a virtual place—the place where our mind meets another’s; where reader meets author. It’s the place we find ourselves in when we read a friend’s email; the place we meet when we hear their voice on our mobile phone. We have less opportunity when reading a printed page to respond to their words in a way that they will hear, but communication is still taking place, even if one-way....

So cyberspace is not something new. We have been building it for centuries, book by book, letter by letter, web page by web page. Or rather, we have been building gateways to it for centuries, because that’s all any of these are: means of access to the real cyberspace, which is invoked by our minds. Cyberspace is an imaginative state—a state of reading, of communicating, of thinking—which we have made more and more a part of our lives through advances in technology, from writing to printing to telecommunications to television to the Internet.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, reading