The End of Cyberspace

Words, words

Last week I was on the Wall Street Journal Web site, talking about Z2K, the New Year's Eve Zune collective meltdown. One of the really outstanding, subtle points I made (ha!) which unfortunately were left on the cutting room floor (or these days, the studio's server) is that the problem illustrates how we use certain words to describe functions that both humans and machines perform, but which we perform in very different ways-- and this ends up creating problems for us sometimes.

Take for example the concept of "memory." People and computers both have it, but at a fundamental level, human memory functions very differently than computer memory, and in some ways using the same term for the two obscures more than it connects. Yes, I remember my phone number and computer passwords (barely); but my memory is an active thing. I'm constantly in the process of updating and reinterpreting old memories-- putting personal things in new contexts, sifting through recollections for some shaft that can illuminate a current dilemma. Part of my "memory" consists of facts; but a much bigger part of it consists of things I know how to do. (When you get amnesia, you may forget who you are, but you don't forget how to walk. Traumas affect different forms of memory differently.)

So human memory is lots of different things-- procedural, descriptive, somatic-- and is not just information stored and retrieved. With computers, however, "memory" is something much more specific: it's about exact recall of specific things. If my computer gets imaginative with my credit card number, I'm in trouble. Indeed, computer memory is supposed to possess a kind of exactitude and reliability that our memories don't: it's supposed to be strong where human memory if frail.

To some degree, the Z2K problem might have been influenced by a failure to recognize that humans and computers deal very differently with something else that we describe using a common word: namely, time. One early theory held that the extra second in the year threw off Zunes. Humans aren't going to notice one second more or less in a year, but computers will. More generally, we think of time (or timekeeping, more precisely) as something that is absolute and completely standardized, like units of volume or the boiling point of water (well, Hasok Chang's brilliant book Inventing Temperature undermines that last idea): time marches on, time never changes.

Only it doesn't exactly. Years get a tiny bit longer or shorter, depending. The calendar isn't a unit of measure: it's more like a suit that's taken up and let out. For humans, those differences usually aren't an issue; but they can be a problem for computers. (What was the Y2K threat but a reflection of how computers and humans deal differently with time?)

This problem also applies to describing activities people engage in online and offline. For example, marketing guy Dave Evans writes:

You've no doubt heard of people with hundreds, thousands, or tens or hundreds of thousands of online friends... [O]bviously, when someone "friends" a hundred or a thousand people online, clearly they are thinking about something very different than a traditional friendship. [Thanks to Zoë for the link.]

Personally, I think the word "friend" means very different things in Facebook versus real life. Yes, there are people I know on Facebook who I see in my daily life, but it would be better if we had a different term than "friends" to describe people with whom we only interact on services like FB or MySpace or LinkedIn.

Update: And speaking of memory, it turns out I've written on this before:

One of the reasons that predictions about the death of the library, office, workplace, book, etc. in the age of the Internet have not come to pass is that these older institutions or technologies had uses that went beyond the strictly functional ones of information processing, storage, retrieval, etc.. Offices, for example, aren't just places where knowledge workers move zeros and ones around; the good ones are creative spaces that offer workers access to unique stores of informal knowledge.

A second reason that bits haven't triumphed over atoms is that some activities or functions look the same when done by computers (or networks) and people (or institutions), but turn out to have subtle but critical differences. Two examples recently crossed my radar.

Twitter baby

Maybe I shouldn't have worried so much about how my use of Twitter could be more meaningful, in light of this:

corey menscher built the ‘kickbee’ while attending the itp program at new york university this fall. the device is designed to record kicking movements from a pregnant woman’s baby. once a kicking is sensed, the device will send a signal to its onboard electronics, which will in turn transmit the signal to a computer via bluetooth. the computer then logs the information on the online social messaging service twitter. this send a message out to followers letting them all know that the baby kicked.

Of course, you might argue that a kick is a lot more meaningful than anything I could post.

Menscher elaborates:

As an expectant father, I am once-removed from the physical knowledge my wife has of our baby and its development. With the Kickbee, I wanted to create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby's movements. It can also aid in tracking the frequency of fetal movements, which is an important way to monitor the health of the developing child.

The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit small but detectable voltages when triggered by movement underneath. An Arduino Mini microcontroller transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth. (a SparkFun BlueSMIRF v2 module that communicates serially with a Macbook Pro)

The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.

Zeroing, Twitter, and ambient awareness

A few weeks ago a friend of mine announced that she was taking a break from Web 2.0.* She was going to prune her Twitter feeds, reduce her time on Facebook, and cut back on her time on IM. She needed to pay more attention to her real life, and to real relationships. Recollecting friends from high school and college was interesting for a while (Web 2.0 is a time machine for my generation, after all), but a large volume of acquaintances can't provide the same satisfaction and support as a handful of friends you can see-- or who can take the kids out to the park for an hour. Getting Tweets on her cell phone was also a poor combination of intrusiveness and minutiae. And there was laundry to be done.

As one of the digital lemmings who pushed her over the edge, the episode got me thinking. Why do I Tweet? After thinking about it for a while, I've come the conclusion that while it's certainly popular with lots of my friends, I have a couple serious questions about Twitter, as a writer and a reader.

First, I have to admit that my regular life isn't interesting enough to justify throwing out real-time updates about it. Nobody needs to know that I've just convinced the kids to make their own breakfasts, or have come back from lunch at Zao Noodles, or am trying to decide where to go on this weekend's hike. The exception is when I'm on the road or doing something else unusual: at those times, my life-- or my world-- might get interesting enough document in detail.

There's also the problem that I'm not sure what I get out of my own tweets. One of the signal features of Web 2.0, I think, is that it's not just broadcasting: it's self-documentation. Some of my friends use Twitter to jot down little notes about what they're reading. But for me, the absence of tags in Twitter makes it hard for me to find things I've looked at long enough to know I should look for them again later, or to keep track of citations; del.icio.us is still the better tool for that. (I suppose you could replicate a little of that functionality with #tags, but that's a workaround, and there's no auto-complete....) And I'm not sure I've gone back and looked at my own Twitter stream, ever. My regular blog is valuable because it's a way to keep track of my own life; this one has been invaluable for recording and trying out ideas for my book; my kids' blog has been a place where I could store huge amounts of detail about my kids' childhoods-- those pictures of them doing cute but ordinary things, or saying wonderful things, or just growing up. Tossing out tweets feels like shooting sparks from a wheel: the sparks may be entertaining, but it's the object you're shaping with the wheel that's really valuable.

Finally, as a reader, I find that seeing the raw feed of even a few people's lives can quickly become overwhelming. In the last 24 hours, a relatively quiet time after Thanksgiving, I got 34 tweets; during a busy time-- when people are traveling or at SXSW-- I can get several times that, easily. There's an argument to be made, as Clive Thompson has done, that the minutiae of tweets resolve into ambient awareness... but as it's currently designed, the system still puts big demands on readers, who have to constantly read their friends' Twitter streams, develop a sense of the rhythm of their posting, and build up a model of their real-world state from their online behavior. In a world in which the challenge is not to broadcast a lot of information, but to generate a lot of meaning, the stream-of-existence quality of tweeting makes it easy to mistake detail for intimacy, quantity of tweets for quality of expression or depth of understanding. As a preview of the world of ubiquitous computing and ambient awareness, Twitter is an interesting experiment (an experiment that's being conducted my hundreds of thousands of people on themselves and their friends.)

This is actually not a bad lesson for designers. Creating ambient devices isn't about pushing information; presence isn't just about connection. Connecting people virtually is as much about quality and meaning in the digital world as it is in the real world.

Which is not to say that Twitter is hopeless. Twitter is strongest as a platform for conversation and reportage. It's easy to share a rapid fire of short notes at conferences, for example, and the final result-- assuming people are listening and paying attention-- can be useful. (I wonder if there are examples of Twitter being used by students in lecture classes?) A couple of the people I follow use it as much for pinging friends as for talking about what they're doing: for them, Twitter is a cross between the Facebook wall and a chat room. And I find Twitter useful for getting reactions to news events: I stopped watching the presidential debates this fall, for examples, after I realized that most of my friends were tweeting their reactions to them.

So what do I do with my Twitter stream? I'm not going to shut it down, because there are times when I'll want to provide moment-by-moment updates about what I'm doing ("Just cleared customs in Kai Tak! Where's the cab line?" "Have now been in Victoria Stations on four continents...."). But for me, when I do use it, the challenge will be to figure out how to write the Web 2.0 equivalent of Zen koans: to fit meaning into 140 characters, rather than to fight the limitations of the medium by posting a lot.

Scrolling Forward

This a review I wrote of David Levy's Scrolling Forward, which originally appeared in the L. A. Times about ten years ago. Not that long. It just feels like it.

The fun fair of bookmarks

I just got back from a family vacation in Disneyland. Having spent more time on rides than I want to think about, and less time doing actual productive work (I know that vacations are supposed to be when you completely unplug; sue me), I was naturally tickled to see this post by Ophelia comparing old browser bookmarks to carnival attractions.

How many bookmarks do you have? I have over 10 folders and each one holds an average of 100 bookmarks. These have been gathered over the last 8 years. I have even more on my other laptops that I had not transferred over, just because I wanted to start fresh with each new computer. Going back and looking at those bookmarks is like a walk back in time, a road map backwards and as I scroll through, I can see the burning heaps alongside the road....

Why haven’t I gone back and visited those sites? Probably the same reasons I don’t go to fun fair carnivals that set up for a day. At night the carnivals are a thing of beauty, the sparkling lights, the smell of popcorn, and the booming music coming from each ride is a lure to buy a book of tickets. I am a sucker for anything flashy and I will try each ride, but after the quick thrill I am done. I could ride the most exciting rides again, but I already know what is going to happen, when it will break to the right or drop suddenly, a sense of ennui sets in. My bookmark folders are Fun Fair carnivals filled with exciting rides that I have ridden once. My reasons why can be explained by using the carnival ride analogy.

Axioms of Usenet

Gene Spafford's axioms of Usenet, first circulated in 1987 and 1988. (This version from Spafford's 1992 farewell to Usenet.)

Axiom #1:
"The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even resemble the real world."
Corollary #1:
"Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic -- electronic voodoo."
Corollary #2:
"Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to divine the future."

Axiom #2:
"Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense."
Corollary #3:
"An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards could produce something like Usenet."
Corollary #4:
"They could do a better job of it."

Axiom #3:
"Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet."
Corollary #5:
"In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes the 10%."
Corollary #6:
"Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too."

Qwitter

I'm working on a long post about the virtues of withdrawing somewhat from the world of Twitter, Facebook, etc., and this post about Qwitter-- a service that "monitors your twitter account and notifies you when someone stops following you"-- only reinforces my instinct that real-time-updated-and-read social media might not quite be ready for prime time.

My favorite part:

I’ve had 4 people confront me because I stopped following them and Qwitter told them. All 4 of those people were pissed off at me for it. 3 of them had stopped following me to get even. The one who didn’t, well he didn’t follow me to begin with but was still angry, yet in the e-mail he sent me he noted that he didn’t know who I was. The truth is I didn’t know who he was either, don’t remember following him, don’t recall anything he’d ever tweeted about and can only assume I added him by accident at one point when following a reply thread. Qwitter caused negative drama between two people who don’t know each other, have had no interaction, and really no reason for any bad feelings.

Briefly, I'm starting to think that the current generation of instant-update, small-bite social media tools make us too connected to other people in the wrong ways, that they encourage us to sacrifice volume of contact for depth of contact in ways that ultimately are unsatisfying, and promote a highly social version of ADHD. More on this later.

Yet another thing for me to look up

An example of a whole category of objects that cross the line between the physical and digital, seen yesterday at Target:

via flickr

via flickr

endofcyberspace, toys

Listmania

[Reprinted from my Red Herring blog, 2004]

Lists are the white noise of information. They're everywhere, and we all make them, but they're so familiar they escape our notice. What's on a to-do list is what matters; the list itself as a thing—as a way of organizing information—isn't worthy of attention.

This has been true for a couple reasons. First, lists are incredibly simple, yet incredibly versatile. They can represent anything from an inventory of goods to a set of tasks to be completed. Second, lists are functional things, tools to get a job done. It's what we can do with a list that matters, not the list itself. It's the message that matters, not the medium. Finally, lists aren't like literature. Everyone knows how to make them. There are no aesthetics of list-making, no such thing as a stylish or elegant list, no difference between a list made by Ernest Hemingway or your Uncle Ernie.

But to invoke the overused Marshall McLuhan phrase, the medium is becoming the message. In the online world, lists are starting to morph from tools for managing complexity, to tools for projecting identity. This transition reveals something about what happens when old and new information technologies converge.

Incognito ergo sum

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

Recently BBC World had an article on baby blogs-- blogs that parents will keep about their children, the digital equivalent of baby books. Coincidentally, that same day I posted my 500th entry on my blog about my children, which I started soon after getting a digital camera. Like most articles about blogs, its substantive points were mixed up with a measure of alarmism and technical naivete. Some of it was taken up with worries about what pedophiles unmentionable things could do to those cute baby pictures, and fretting over how revealing details about your child's daily routine isn't very smart. (Hello? Ever heard of password protection?)

The article also suggested that baby blogs were invasions of privacy. What if, twenty years from now, the merest acquaintance could read about your child's potty-training exploits, or their first visit to Grandma's house? Wouldn't making those details of your child's life available to people they barely know violate their privacy, and make it harder for them to get dates? (At this point in the article I wanted to pump my arm and shouted "Yessss!" My five year-old daughter is only in nursery school, and already I've guaranteed that she'll spend her college years undistracted by a social life.)

My efforts to archive my children's lives stand in stark contrast to the scanty documentation of my own past. My entire childhood is preserved in just under two hundred pictures, a few letters, and a couple yearbooks: it all fits in a single box. In contrast, I can take two hundred pictures of my daughter at a birthday party. The constantly-falling cost of digital media lower the barriers to recording everyday events, and preserving every last picture and audio file. At my current rate, each of my children are in danger of having me take 50,000 pictures of them by the time they turn 18.

Of course, parenting is one long invasion of privacy, but the idea of baby blogs coming back to haunt their subjects later in life is still an interesting one. Technology promises to take a ritual that had traditionally been a painful but very limited rite of passage-- the baby books shown to the fiance, the clever candids shown at the wedding reception-- and make it into a full-time affair.

It also shows that the relationship between privacy and technology is really pretty complex. Worries about technology affecting privacy are perfectly reasonable; but worries about specific technologies are often misplaced. To really know what to worry about, you have to think a bit more about what privacy is, and how technology can affect it.