The End of Cyberspace

Project Prezi

A while ago I created a Prezi for an end of cyberspace talk. Prezi has a cool functionality that lets you create a path or trail through a presentation (very Vannevar Bush).

I've realized that because of the trail feature, this presentation isn't just a single talk, or it doesn't need to be. Rather, I can use it as a kind of online studio for displaying everything I talk about in this project, and just create different paths through the Prezi for different talks.

I think I'm going to make this a persistent post, so it always stays on the front page. If you want to go directly to the Prezi, here it is.

Mighty Mouse, Italian edition

I seem to have an article in Disegno industriale 39. I can't read it, but it seems to be there. Hooray!

[To the tune of The Police, "When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What's Still Around," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 2) (I give it 3 stars).]

The return

This project has been on my back burner for longer than I want to admit. However, I've decided to dive back into it. I've watched enough damn movies this summer. If I don't finish this book, I'm never going to live it down. When I was an academic, I didn't want to be one of those guys who never published a book after they got tenure, or had good ideas that never were realized; and I still don't.

[To the tune of Bebel Gilberto, "Cada Beijo," from the album Versions (I give it 2 stars).]

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

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.

Where's my paperless office?

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005.]

Whatever happened to the paperless office? A decade ago, futurists and pundits were confident that personal computers, CD-ROMs, and the Internet would render books and magazines obsolete, turn paper money and checks into curiosities, and bring about the paperless office. Of course, none of these predictions has come true. Books and magazines are still around, and while total paper use has declined in the last couple years, offices use more paper now than before personal computers became commonplace.

What this suggests is that the relationship between the paper and electronic worlds is more complicated than we first thought. On its own, this is hardly surprising: it's a truism that we overestimate the magnitude of technological changes in the near term, and underestimate them in the long run. But understanding why early predictions about the death of paper haven't come true will help us map out some of the possible futures of paper in the coming age of pervasive computing. This is a world in which computers are small and cheap enough to be embedded in virtually any built object; information can be associated with everyday objects and places; and networking technology allows devices to communicate and cooperate on behalf of their owners.

If paper was supposed to be made obsolete by the personal computer, what future could paper have in a world in which computers fly off the desktop and are everywhere, in everything?

Smart home, smarter home

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

When modern architecture emerged in the first years of the last century, it threw down a gauntlet at the feet of traditional neoclassical and academic architecture. Modernism's style was stripped-down and functional. It celebrated the beauty of machines and the art of engineering, and expressed itself in concrete and steel, rather than brick and wood. Most important, it declared that the future would never again look like the past: from now on, architecture would be about innovation and change, not about working with timeless principles and eternal proportions.

Implicitly at first, and then consciously, architectural exhibits became predictions. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, first exhibited in 1927, exemplifies how modern architecture backed into the futures business. The Dymaxion house was a hexagonal structure, suspended from a central load- and services-bearing column. Virtually everything in it was made of aircraft-grade medal. The house wouldn't be built on-site, like traditional houses; instead, it would be mass-produced, like cars or cans of peas, and delivered to owners.

Soon "the home of the future" became a stock element of every architectural exhibit, World's Fair, forward-looking corporate display, or popular magazine special issue. (Even World War II couldn't derail them: a 1943 brochure showed a couple admiring a neighborhood of modern houses under the caption, "After total war can come total living.") Sporting automated kitchens, robot butlers, furniture that you washed with a high-pressure hose, and helipads (the long, sad story of why we don't have personal helicopters or jet packs will have to wait for another time), these houses were sleek temples of convenience, promises of a world in which the home would be as frictionless and worry-free as a department store.

Of course, almost none of this has come to pass. Instead, the "home of the future" projects serve as textbook examples of how you can get the future wrong, and why.

Tinkering

Long post on the nature of tinkering, coming out of a conference I've been attending at the beautiful Carnegie Foundation. I'll link it to the end of cyberspace soon, I hope.

conference, endofcyberspace, tinkering

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.

Solitude

[Reposted from the Red Herring blog, ca. 2005.]

Let me begin with a confession. I spend most of my working life in front of a computer, and I suspect a fair amount of that time is wasted. I check my e-mail several times an hour. I regularly scan my RSS feeds for new posts. I visit news sites, just in case they've updated the list of breaking new stories. I can follow hyperlinks from one end of the Internet to the other if I'm not careful.

It's all the electronic equivalent of bouncing your leg up and down, or ripping a napkin apart. And I don't need to be this wired. It doesn't help my work or thinking; to the contrary, these information-era equivalents nervous tics are just distractions. Yet I do them.

I'm hardly alone. Some of my friends lead lives that require Blackberries; others have Blackberries that take over their lives. A recent Yahoo-OMD study of 28 people forced to go offline for two weeks shows how dependent—both in the functional, and the emotional sense—people become to being connected. According to The Atlantic Monthly, "Across the board, participants reported withdrawal-like feelings of loss, frustration, and disconnectedness after the plug was plug was pulled." Indeed, "[t]he temptation to go online was so great that the participants were offered "life lines"—one-time, one-task forays onto the Web—to ease their pain." Add to this the recent Pew Internet Survey study that found that Internet users are spending more time online, and less watching TV, and you get a picture of growing numbers of people turning productivity tools into weapons of self-distraction.

It's just the latest evidence confirming the truism that we live in an age of information overload. How did this happen? And is it going to get worse?