The End of Cyberspace

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?

Plato's laptop and the problem of informal knowledge

A few years ago I wrote an online column for Red Herring. The gig was interesting, but after a change of editorial regime, they decided to stop the experiment. The pieces all kind of disappeared after a while, and I realized that some of them were actually pretty good. Heaven knows I spent plenty of time on them.

So if for no other reason than to have easily-accessible copies of them, I'm going to start reposting them here. Most were from 2004, so they might seem a bit dated; but I think some of the ideas are still worth playing with.

Knowledge is power. For a long time we thought it was something immaterial, cerebral, almost otherworldly. No less a figure than Plato argued that the world of things and appearances was but a dim reflection of another world of ideal types, more real than reality itself. But Plato's theory is too good for this world. Knowledge is also things, and actions.

One of the key events in twentieth-century philosophy was the discovery that the Platonic model of knowledge was incomplete. In mathematics, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that mathematics could never be a perfectly self-contained, exhaustively proven system. For decades, philosophers and mathematicians had worked to find the fundamental foundations of mathematics; Gödel's incompleteness theorem showed that the search was fruitless.

The critique continued in philosophy. Cambridge University's Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the twentieth century's most influential philosophical mind, argued that the meaning of language arises from its use, rather than from its logical properties. A few years later, British philosopher Michael Polyani coined the term "tacit knowledge" to describe things that we can know but can't effectively communicate. Tacit knowledge, Polyani argued, is an important component of skilled work, and even shapes activities that we traditionally have thought of as entirely logical (like science).

Historian Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions took Polyani one step further, and opened up a whole new front in the assault against traditional notions of knowledge. Structure reconceived science as a puzzle-solving activity guided by a mix of formal methods and cultural norms, and punctuated by dizzying revolutions and paradigm shifts. Sociologists of science, cultural anthropologists, literary and gender theorists, all used Kuhn as an inspiration to their critiques of objectivity.

You would think that after all this, the Platonic model of knowledge would be dead and gone. But it lives on in information technologies.

Paper Spaces talk

The Oxford conference talk version of my "paper spaces" project is now viewable on ZuiPrezi, the presentation system I've been playing with and really like.

I've got extensive blog posts about the trip and conference on my personal blog.

conference, paper spaces, Oxford University

Proofs!

Today I got proofs for my article on "Mobility, Convergence, and the End of Cyberspace," for the volume of papers from the Budapest conference on the philosophy of telecommunications convergence. Even though I spend so much of my intellectual life online, I still have this atavistic reaction to page proofs: it marks a passage of my words from tentative, fragile things to Truth, even if it's riddled with typos and things I've still got to fix.

Of course, I know that there's no difference between a PDF I print from a file in Write Room, and something generated by Page Maker. But it still feels different.

Recently I've been getting more ruthless about spending a little time each night on the book manuscript, and am making progress. I've got several small essays that I wrote here and there that need to be incorporated into the Giant Official Manuscript File, and a pretty clear set of changes I need to make. I'm also going to start setting up interviews with researchers who I think of as doing end of cyberspace-type things, or who've thought about subjects-- copyright and intellectual property, most notably-- that I'm talking about.

It's easy to think of little articles like this Budapest piece as a distraction from the big monograph, but I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. One reason I'm doing more on the cyberspace book is that I recently had an article come out in a history of science volume in Germany (what is it with publishing in Central European collections? I don't know), am doing more stuff with friends at the Said School at Oxford, and just had a paper accepted at a conference in Europe this summer.

While none of these generate any money or professional capital (that I know if), they're tokens of recognition of my effort to maintain a scholarly life both outside the academy and the Institute. The fact that these admittedly small efforts are paying off (in some fashion) makes working seriously on the book seem more worthwhile.

So small projects are a distraction in the sense that they take away some amount of the always-finite time and energy that you have to spend; but they may make up for it by incentivizing you to shift time away from, say, Nintendo Wii, to research and writing.

Technorati Tags: Budapest, end of cyberspace, postacademic

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