The End of Cyberspace

Paper Spaces: Visualizing the Future

I'm going to Oxford this summer for the workshop on imagining business. I'll be talking about "paper spaces," the large, often room-sized roadmaps, timelines, and other documents the Institute uses in its workshops.

I've put a PDF of the paper online; I may experiment with putting a copy on Google Docs, and using Zotero to manage the citations (though that seems iffy, given that I often write pretty long footnotes). Whatever environment I use, the piece is like to undergo substantial revision over the next couple months, as I know there are a couple parts of the argument I want to expand. Here's the introduction:

This article is about paper spaces: room-sized maps, timelines, and charts used to develop, record and share ideas. When used in collaborative work, paper spaces support both focused, creative activity—the creation of a strategy roadmap, the outlines of a software development project, etc.—and informal social goals, like the development of a sense of community or common vision. These are essentially very large pieces of paper, but the term "paper spaces" (the term is borrowed from computer-aided design ) highlights several things. First, we're used to thinking of things made of paper as physical objects whose qualities help shape the experience of reading, but it's useful to pay attention to their spatial and architectural qualities as well. Large visuals aren't just things: they're spaces that possess some of the qualities of desks or offices. IFTF workshops exploit their scale and physicality to promote social activity between workshop participants. In this case, the spatiality of paper is fairly self-evident; but many of our interactions with paper, books, and writing have a spatial quality. Scholars could gain much by analyzing print media using conceptual tools from architecture, design, and human-computer interaction, as well as literary theory and book history.

Second, studying paper spaces help us understand the role that visualizations play in contemporary organizations. Historians have used studies of visual media and visual thinking to expand our understanding of science, technology, and other fields. The business world is supersaturated with visualizations—everything from advertisements, to PowerPoint presentations, to org charts, to brands, to workflows and flow charts—and studying those images could bring similar benefits. At the same time, it warns us against taking too passive or formal a view of visual tools in business, of treating them like paintings on a wall. In the way users interact with them-- they're annotated, extended, argued over, and played with-- they're more like Legos than landscapes. The process of creating maps, and the maps themselves, both reflect a set of attitudes about how to understand and prepare for the future, one that emphasizes user involvement, and the need for actors to develop and possess shared visions of the future. Finally, the term "paper spaces" highlights their hybrid, ephemeral quality. They work because they're simultaneously interactive media and workspace, but their lives are brief and easy to overlook: they are designed to support idea- and image-making, but leave little trace of themselves.

To illustrate how paper spaces work, this article will focus on their use in a specific context: in expert workshops and roadmapping exercises conducted at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley-based think-tank. The article begins with an overview of information spaces, and a brief look at IFTF's local culture and research practices. Next, it looks in detail at our expert workshops and facilitated exchanges, and describes how they're organized, what they aim to accomplish, and how they work. It then discusses how paper spaces support the co-creation of knowledge about the future, and a sense of group solidarity. Finally, it argues that paper spaces are ubiquitous: most of our interactions with texts and other media have a spatial dimension that affects the ways we read, think, and create.

The piece is currently a relatively svelte 5000 words long; I figure it'll hit 6000-7000 before I'm done. There are two big things I still have to do.

First, I have to build out the discussion of how working with (or in) paper spaces generates group solidarity, or a sense of common identity and purpose among participants.

Second, I hadn't planned on doing this, but my experience working with ZuiPrezi has made me think I should make explicit something I had planned to leave implicit: that the paper spaces I describe will become extinct in the forseeable future. When I was in Malaysia, I used ZuiPrezi in one of my workshops, and it was a terrific experience; and it leads me to believe that we're not far off from being able to replicate most, if not all, of the social functionalities of paper spaces in digital, projected tools. Thinking about what has made paper spaces work well has been essential for making them obsolete, and I think I'm going to add a section explicitly laying out what a digital system has to do in order to work as well as paper.

Technorati Tags: displays, end of cyberspace, facilitation, Kitchen Budapest, materiality, media, paper spaces, workspaces, ZuiPrezi

Reading, observing, and thinking

From Lorraine Daston, "Taking Note(s)," Isis 95:3 (2004), 443–448, on 444.

I would like to explore, in a tentative vein, the implications of the history of scientific reading for other, more familiar forms of scientific practice, such as observation, but also for what might be called cognitive practices: economies of attention, arts of memory, the solidification and erosion of belief. Reading is and has been for millennia so central and seminal an intellectual practice that it has long served as the principal metaphor for understanding tout court. More concretely, ways of reading, absorbed at a young age and constantly practiced, may supply the templates for other ways of making sense of objects quite distinct from the manuscript or printed page —the morphology of a plant, the trajectory of a comet, the slide under the microscope, the “reading” of an instrument. This would especially have been the case for those who —for reasons of class, gender, and the cultural status of literacy —would have learned bookish skills before or to the exclusion of manual ones. Reading practices may also mold the self of the reader, at least among those who devote many of their waking hours to intercourse with books. Despite the bibliophobic rhetoric that since the seventeenth century has upheld the study of things over that of words, portraits of scientists even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still depict their subjects with books as well as with test tubes, skulls, chemical models, and other tools of empirical inquiry. The norms of scientific publication ensure that scientists continue to read for much the same reasons they continue to write — and both incessantly. The library remains as essential to most sciences as the laboratory. What imprint do these ingrained habits leave upon the scientific reader?

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, history of science, reading

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

The complex relationships between media

From Marc Andreesen's blog, quoting the New Yorker, July 14, 1951:

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.

"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."

Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory -- movies, comic books, radio.

Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.

It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.

Okay, leave aside the point that watching books on TV would be only a little more boring than golf. But anyone who watches an hour of cable news is probably exposed to more words and numbers-- in the form of headlines, crawls, stock tickers, etc.-- than their grandparents saw in a day; likewise when browsing the Web. Of course, that's a total guess. But as I mentioned a little while ago, my son is keen to start reading more on his own so he can play more advanced video games. The bottom line is, the relationship between new media and old skills is always more complicated than we think.

Technorati Tags: reading, technology, television

The de-privatization of reading

Commenting on recent court cases over whether bookstores need to turn over records of book purchases to law enforcement authorities, Peter Brantley at O'Reilly Radar makes and interesting point:

[R]eading is tuning into a series of digital transactions, transitioning from a private matter of solitary, silent reading into an inherently social act suitable for data mining. Indeed, the fascinating historical work of Paul Saenger demonstrates how the revolutionary change wrought in the early Medieval Ages by the Arabs and the Irish of separating words with spaces and punctuation to ease the understanding of translated Latin texts enabled silent reading, which in turn created modern expectations for privacy in the matter of what we read and think....

So we all must then inquire of publishers building online digital text libraries, and Microsoft and Google with their online books corpora: what happens when the police and courts of the state come to you? : Are you prepared to respect and reassert in a digital age -- an age in which the act of reading is inherently recordable -- the individual's control of privacy that has been maintained over the last 700 years? The alternative is to begin a retreat to the sunken expectations for the disclosure of our thoughts and writing that echo with eerie fidelity the cloistered labyrinths of the oral culture of 1200 AD -- a world far more inimical to free expression.

[To the tune of The Church, "Under the Milky Way," from the album "Starfish".]

Technorati Tags: books, end of cyberspace, law, privacy, reading

Proust and the Squid: The reader as cyborg

Another book to add to my bookshelf of "monographs that blend cultural history with neuroscience" (along with Raymond Tallis' The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being): Maryann Wolf's Proust and the Squid, which Caleb Crain reviews in the latest New Yorker.

Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in Proust and the Squid, an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.

Elsewhere, as she puts it, “The brain’s design made reading possible, and reading’s design changed the brain in multiple, critical, still evolving ways.”

This isn't a radical argument. As Stanislas Dehaene theorized in a 2003 New Scientist article,

learning to read, and other forms of cultural learning, are only possible if this built-in flexibility can be used to divert brain circuits from their previous uses. The brain is predisposed to develop only in certain ways. In effect, we are able to learn to read because the primate visual system evolved to do a different job that was sufficiently similar to allow it to be "recycled" into a reading machine.

There are two things really interesting about her argument, at least as it comes filtered through the reviews. First, Wolf argues that what's impressive about reading isn't that it's hard, but that it can be easy, because the brain learns to specialize, devoting certain sections to recognizing letters.

Wolf recounts the early history of reading, speculating about developments in brain wiring as she goes. For example, from the eighth to the fifth millennia B.C.E., clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia for tallying livestock and other goods. Wolf suggests that, once the simple markings on the tokens were understood not merely as squiggles but as representations of, say, ten sheep, they would have put more of the brain to work. She draws on recent research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that maps blood flow in the brain during a given task, to show that meaningful squiggles activate not only the occipital regions responsible for vision but also temporal and parietal regions associated with language and computation. If a particular squiggle was repeated on a number of tokens, a group of nerves might start to specialize in recognizing it, and other nerves to specialize in connecting to language centers that handled its meaning....

[R]ecent imaging studies... [show] how a modern child’s brain wires itself for literacy. The ground is laid in preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, perhaps with “Mother Goose” poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller.

At some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts. Instead of passing along a “dorsal route” through occipital, temporal, and parietal regions in both hemispheres, reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient “ventral route,” which is confined to the left hemisphere. With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.” Imaging studies suggest that in many cases of dyslexia the right hemisphere never disengages, and reading remains effortful.... When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone.

Second, this sounds pretty similar to what Andy Clark describes in Natural-Born Cyborgs, and Tallis in The Hand: a process wherein neural plasticity and technology work to create a human-textual (or human-alphabetic) symbiosis. It's no coincidence that Dehaene titled his 2003 article "Natural-born readers."

Technorati Tags: cyborg, neuroscience, reading

Check

Atul Gawande has a terrific article in last week's New Yorker on an information technology that, after several years' testing, looks like it could transform intensive care. It's mainly been used in the reduction of line infections, which Gawande explains are

so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care.

This new technology was developed a few years ago by Johns Hopkins professor Peter Pronovost. After the first trial using it in a hospital,

The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital... [it] had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

For years we've heard that information technology could solve some of the most tractable problems with our health care system, and this seems to make that promise true. So what is this technology?

A checklist.

Not a gigantic database, or RFID tags in unconscious patients, or steerable needles (which boffins at UC Berkeley are now working on); but pieces of paper listing the steps you're supposed to take when doing something. You know what they are.

So why are they good-- good to the point of being able to save lots of lives and millions of dollars in an average hospital? Checklist offer

two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Tools like checklists aren't just accidental media containing information; when you look at how they're used, they turn out to be aids to memory, objects that help standardize what can be chaotic practices. Under some circumstances, they're tools for diffusing practices and raising standards.

The power of checklists rests in their simplicity, particularly the simplicity of their use. Documents behave predictably. That predictability, I would argue, in turn is important for its incorporation into work practices. With a checklist, you can easily see that steps have been followed: it's a bit like how strips of paper in air traffic control centers serve as tools for tracking who has responsibility for a plane.

Constructing the scholarly habitus

A little while ago, Kevin Kelly suggested that the habit of sitting at desks might be "a short-term anomaly" that we would abandon in the future. This got me thinking: what is the ergonomic history of writing and thinking? Five hundred years ago, what kinds of spaces did philosophers or essayists construct for themselves; how were they furnished; and how did they work in them? There are lots of pictures of scholars or saints at work-- Saint Jerome in his study and all that-- but how idealized are those? How well do they reflect what scholars actually did?

I asked Anthony Grafton what had been written on the subject, and he suggested, among other works, Gadi Algazi's 2003 article, "Scholars in Households: Refiguring the Learned Habitus, 1480–1550." It's a really excellent piece of work, and it'll resonate with anyone who ever writes within sight of children's toys, or revises articles on nap drives. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that Algazi's Web page mentions that he has three children!) Here's the abstract:

Until the fifteenth century, celibacy was the rule among Christian scholars of northwestern Europe. Celibacy was a major element of the codified cultural representation of the scholar and his specific way of life, sustained by peculiar institutional arrangements and daily routines. Founding family households implied therefore a major reorganization of the scholar’s way of life. Broadly speaking, this involved refashioning the scholarly habitus (understood as a system of durable and transposable social dispositions), redefining social relations, and developing the necessary material infrastructure. The paper focuses on three aspects of this process during a period characterized by uncertainty and experimentation. It discusses the structure of scholars’ families, arguing that at least until the middle of the sixteenth century, received models still persisted, while new viable models for articulating family reproduction with the transmission of scholarly dispositions had not yet crystallized. It then turns to the reorganization of domestic space, focusing on the different uses of the study to manage social distance and regulate domestic relations. Finally, among the different manifestations of the scholarly habitus, it argues that the emotional detachment of learned men was itself a learned habit. The well-documented discussion of competing options for organizing scholars’ family households and cultivating an acquired nature in academic settings provides an exceptional occasion to examine the way a group habitus is reshaped and to explore the cultural work involved in this process.

Of course, there's Dora Thornton's The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy, which I've encountered a couple times, but never looked at with this particular subject in mind.

There's also some work on commercial and mercantile calculation and writing. I think Alfred Crosby talks some about this in one of his books, and of course there's JoAnne Yates' Control Through Communication, which is full of interesting detail on 19th-century business information practices.

Technorati Tags: history, history of science, workspaces, writing

I'm not the only one reading Raymond Tallis!

via flickr

Technorati Tags: books, cat, end of cyberspace, reading

The whole presence / collective intelligence / augmentation thing is now officially over...

...if David Brooks is doing it.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S....

I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves....

Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, end of cyberspace, mobility