The End of Cyberspace

New York Talk Exchange

The New York Talk Exchange is a really interesting exhibit now running at MOMA.

New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.

In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?

Naturally, there are some really cool visuals, and some terrific animations.

Technorati Tags: art, cities, end of cyberspace, internet, museum, visualization

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

Clouds are things, too

Cyrus Farivar pointed me to this piece from Harper's Magazine, an annotation of a blueprint for a Google server farm on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon. It's interesting as a reminder of the materiality of "the cloud," that apparently amorphous and evanescent computational resource that exists... somewhere... but who care where.

Google and its rivals are raising server farms to tap into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. The blueprints depicting Google's data center at The Dalles, Oregon, are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.... [T]he Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity-- enough to power 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington....

In 2006 American data centers consumed more power than American televisions. Google... and its rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power. Microsoft has announced plans for a data center in Siberia, AT&T has built two in Shanghai, and Dublin has attracted Google and Microsoft.... As the functions long performed by personal computers come to be executed at these far-flung data centers, the technology industry has rapturously rebranded the Internet as "the cloud." The metaphor is apt, both for our foggy notions of a green Web and for the storm that awaits a culture that squanders its resources.

Some time ago, Richard Grusin pointed out that claims by hypertext theorists that electronic writing was "immaterial, ephemeral, [and] evanescent" were problematic because "these ephemeral electromagnetic traces are dependent on extremely material hardware, software, communications networks, institutional and corporate structure, support personnel, and so on." Or, as he put it elsewhere, "Claims for the agency of electronic technologies marginalize the materiality of these technologies."* Clearly assumptions about immateriality and evanescence haven't gone away.

It also occurs to me that the metaphor of "the cloud," in contrast to cyberspace, is decidedly non-spatial: the could isn't a place, it's the absence of physicality.

*The Grusin quote is from, "What is an Electronic Author?" Configurations 3 (1994), 469-483, quotes on 476, 471.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, internet, materiality

The whole cafe as creative space thing is now over

The warning sign? The Onion, as always:

Senate Meets At Coffee Shop To Brainstorm Legislation

Citing a need to finally reach consensus on the country's most pressing political matters and a desire to foster a healthy, open environment for drafting new legislation, the U.S. senate held its first-ever brainstorming session Tuesday at Café Karma, a funky little coffee shop near the Capitol Building.

"We were all very pleased with the results of this historic meeting," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE).... "It was a great opportunity for us to really get the juices flowing and start thinking outside the legislative box. It's amazing how many great new resolutions you can come up with if you're just willing to let your creative inhibitions go and really listen to other people's ideas."

Biden added, "In this space, no idea, no matter how polarizing or ideologically unconscionable, is a bad idea."

Technorati Tags: cafe, collaboration, humor

Materiality of digital collections

Marlene Manoff, "The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives," portal: Libraries and the Academy 6:3 (2006), 311–325. [available via Muse]

Digital and textual objects are coming under a new kind of scrutiny as scholars are becoming more interested in physical artifacts and their relation to their social and cultural environment. This study of material culture suggests a need to explore the nature of digital materiality, as well as the broader historical context in which electronic objects and collections are created. The following essay analyzes the implications of this work and related research into the ways in which knowledge is shaped by the technologies used to produce and distribute it. Understanding the materiality of digital and textual objects will be crucial for charting the future of libraries....

Early theorists of the electronic environment made much of the ostensible immateriality of digital objects. More recently critics have acknowledged that electronic objects are as dependent upon material instantiation as printed books. We access electronic texts and data with machines made of metal, plastic, and polymers. Networks composed of fiber optic cables, wires, switches, routers, and hubs enable us to acquire and make available our electronic collections. Why does this matter to libraries? As we preside over the explosive growth of digital content, we cannot simply ignore what these material changes mean for our users or ignore what the long term impact will be on the scholarly community. Our evolving collection practices promote new ways of conducting research and limit or constrain others. We must try to understand the implications of our decisions as we allocate our resources and decide what to acquire. If the role of academic and research libraries is to support and facilitate teaching and research, we must understand the nature of the objects we provide to support those activities.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, library, materiality

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

Libraries as Space 2.0... and early indicators of social IT trends?

One thing I've been very interested in is the survival of academic libraries in the 1990s and 2000s, and the ways they've changed in the last decade. If you read academic library journals from a decade ago, you'd see a lot of pessimism: people were worried that libraries were going to disappear completely, as more publications went online. Of course, that hasn't happened: instead, many libraries have reconfigured themselves, devoting more space to group study, to campus academic functions, or to collaborative work.

If you think about it another way, libraries have followed the same path that the Web has: from thinking of themselves as places that are mainly about information storage, retrieval, and communication, to places that support groups, creative work, and (a particularly intellectual form of) social networking.

in other words, libraries that are self-described "information commons" are not unlike social software. They're libraries 2.0.

But if I'm not mistaken, librarians started talking about information commons around 2001-- well before Friendster, LinkedIn, and all the rest of Web 2.0 happened. I wonder what librarians are talking about these days?

Technorati Tags: library, social software, Web 2.0

Writing spaces

A great special report in the Guardian on writer's room.

The relationships between space, contemplation, and writing are so well-established it's hard to imagine them ever being detached.

Though I find that while I need space for books and stuff, a lot of my best writing is done in the absence of all that stuff-- at cafe tables, on planes, and the like.

[via Heather]

Technorati Tags: place/space, work, writing

Rooms and conference calls

I'm listening to a demo by a company called Vello. It's a phone conferencing service, but doesn't require dial-in numbers or passwords. If the organizer of your conference call has your coordinates (Entourage importing, yadda yadda), you can just dial in from your mobile phone, and it can automatically "drop you into the room where your conference is happening."

So we talk about virtual "rooms" where you talk to people. Since meetings happen in real space, it makes sense to use the term.

Technorati Tags: conference, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility

Anthony Townsend on presence

My colleague Anthony Townsend recently gave a talk in Newcastle about mobility and presence:

[W]hat I want to talk about is not the future of mobility but rather, the future of presence. By “presence” what I mean, is that if movement or travel is a means - then presence is the end. And so I want to broaden the discussion of mobility to include technologies and practices of telecommunication - ways of being "present" at remote locations....

I keep looking at the map of my social network on Dopplr, a site that lets people share trips, and realizing that young people are defining their very identity through mobility, and network-enhanced and augmented mobility. We need to appreciate just how deeply embedded this high degree of personal mobility has become in our lives, and plan for lots of it rather than pretending we can socially engineer ourselves to stop. This is not just my group here of globe-trotting hipsters, its also the millions of Britons who'll holiday in Spain and Greece this year.

Technorati Tags: mobility, place/space, travel