The End of Cyberspace

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

Blogging through different devices

Just got a Nokia N95 (here's a review), thanks to the generosity of Nokia Research. (You guys are the greatest! [sniff])

I'm mainly using it as a mobile blogging tool, since my Verizon account doesn't work with it.

But I'm curious to see what being able to blog and Flickr in a more mobile manner, on a smaller device, will be like. A kind of empirical test of some of the things I've been talking about.

Technorati Tags: blogging, end of cyberspace, mobility, Nokia Research Center, Web 2.0

I now officially recommend blogging to all scholars

When I started this blog, I figured it would be useful. But it's not. It's proved to be incredibly valuable.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that my Budapest talk was written just by going through the blog, picking out quotes, and stringing them together using ideas I'd just tossed up in the occasional post; but it certainly was a lot easier to write the talk, having this digital notebook to draw upon.

I haven't actually given up on paper notebooks, but I find that I tend to write more about the organization of the book, and the management of the project itself, on paper. I do some Big Thinking on paper, but increasingly the bits and pieces start out in digital form, and stay there.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, postacademic, work, writing

Thinking with a word processor

Occasionally you come across the work of someone you've never heard of, but whose interests curiously parallel your own. Tonight I came across Kristóf Nyíri's 1993 essay "Thinking with a word processor," which asks, "in what ways, if any, are our thoughts affected by the shift from the pen or the typewriter to a word processor?" The relationship between information technologies (very broadly understood), cognition, and perception is an especially difficult one to get at-- starting with arguments about what constitutes "technology," "cognition," and "perception," and moving on from there-- and it's one that some of my favorite recent authors (like Andy Clark and Michael Chorost) have thought about. Nyiri's conclusion:

But what is it really, I would like to ask by way of conclusion, we think "with" when we think with a word processor?... [O]ne of the fundamental Wittgensteinian discoveries [was] that mental phenomena cannot be identified independently of Umstände, of the broad story within which they occur.... So what are the characteristics of the context, of the circumstances, under which we say that we are thinking - with a word processor? What kind of language game is: "thinking with a word processor"?

When we think with a word processor it is a synchronous intellectual exchange with fellow thinkers all over the world we are, ultimately, engaged in. So what are we thinking with when we think with a word processor? The word "with" here, I conclude, does in the last analysis point not to instrumental application - but to human companionship.

Nyiri has since gone on to head a project on the mobile information society in the 21st century:

While in all areas of life we witness a radical increase in the demand for mobile communications, questions as regards further directions of development are at many points open, and need to be addressed by the social sciences. The mobile telephone is by now more than merely a device to transmit voice. It has become a multi-purpose data transmitter – a mobile companion.

Basically, the man's becoming a futurist, though his work remains as grounded in philosophy as mine in STS. It looks like it could be a very interesting project: it's generated five volumes of essays so far, and I have to have some respect for anyone who's willing to argue that

[T]he mobile telephone need not necessarily be anathema to the spirit of Heideggerian romanticism. For the mobile phone is not just the most successful machine ever invented, spreading with unheard-of speed; it is also a machine which corresponds to deep, primordial human communicational urges. The phenomenon of the mobile phone constitutes an obvious challenge to philosophy, and indeed to the humanities.

--or even think to raise the question, "does the cellphone constitute a challenge to Heideggerian romanticism, or doesn't it?"

They're doing a conference on the philosophy of telecommunications convergence this fall. Maybe I'll try to whip up a proposal, though I doubt I'll actually get it done.

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence, philosophy, technology, writing

Back to the book

I did an end-of-cyberspace-and-what-it-means-for-products talk tonight for the Silicon Valley chapter of the Product Management Institute. It was a pleasant time, a good crowd and all (and I'm sure the chocolate-dipped fruit will be delicious), but this is the last talk on the subject I'm giving until I've finished the book.

I printed it all out this afternoon, and was pleased to see that it's starting to feel like a real book manuscript. It's up to about 125 pages, and is about half finished; suddenly, it feels possible to write the rest.

Last night I finished an article on the uses of science studies in futures research, and will send it off the the journal soon, to begin its long journey through the editorial python of academic publishing. The end is also in sight for my wife's book, which is due to the editors this month; there's still lots of caption writing and other stuff she'll have to do, but we can see the end of the tunnel.

Bottom line, I'll be able to clear enough space in my life to get back to working on this seriously. So: Next task will be to run through the manuscript, and map out the major revisions and additions. A couple of the chapters near the back are pretty sketchy, so I've got to outline those as well. Then it's just a matter of writing like Hell.

I figure I should be able to get this thing done by Christmas at the very latest, and preferably before my birthday in September.

Technorati Tags: books, end of cyberspace, work

The experience of using Google docs and the future of collaboration

Today one of my colleagues at the Institute and I finished up a draft of a piece on the future of biomimicry. We've been working on it for a while, and had divided up the piece into several sections. But when it came time to write the opening and conclusion, and do the editorial work necessary to make the pieces flow together, we decided to try something new: we put it up on Google docs (formerly Writely), and worked on it together.

The experience was a very interesting one, for a couple reasons.

First, the technology. Google docs has a basic word processor, and while it doesn't do footnotes, it has most of the essentials for styling and structuring documents (though most people mistake the former for the latter). It also has a pretty good revisions tracker, which is a cross between the "track changes" functionality in Word, and the view changes feature you see on many wikis.

I suspect that when people design (or start to play around with) such systems, they imagine the collaborators being separated by oceans and time zones: that the real benefits will come to coauthors in Berlin and Berkeley, or Paris and Perth. And for lots of groups, that's probably a plus. But what struck me, as my colleague and I were working on our article, was how valuable it was for the two of, even though we were right across from each other. We'd brainstorm a transition, or talk about how to restructure a paragraph; one of us would make the changes, and save the version; we'd hit refresh, look at it on our respective machines; and rework it until we had it right.

In a couple hours we had written as much as we'd each written in the previous month. Why? In part, writing together serves to tighten attention. I'm easily distracted, and can hit Google to look up some very specific fact, only to find myself ten minutes later looking at a Web site about animal pictures on the London Underground.

It also serves to eliminate some of the rationalizations that slow traditional multiauthored pieces. There are always turns of phrase or pieces of argument that really need to be worked out with your co-authors; when you're writing alone, it's easy to put those sections off until later, and tell yourself, "Well, I can't write the next paragraph until we work out that transition. I wonder if there are any new cat videos on YouTube?" When your coauthor is right beside you, and it's easy to make changes right in the document, the bar to completion gets lower.

It's also much easier to make changes directly onscreen, in a way that everyone can see, than to put edits on a printed page, which have to then be carried later (if you can remember exactly what they meant).

Of course, the technology could be a little better: having automatic line or paragraph numbering, for example, would make it infinitely easier for collaborators to stay on the same page (as it were). Instinct suggests that this isn't hard to implement, but if you assume that coauthors are going to be working asynchronously and at a distance, you don't need it.

But that doesn't detract from the big point: the system may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence, social software, work

Manufacturing and the end of cyberspace

I have an essay on rapid prototyping, personal fabrication, and the future of manufacturing in the latest issue of Samsung DigitAll Magazine. Here's the opening:

The transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a creative, knowledge-intensive space is a development few could have seen. Are you ready for the next industrial revolution?

For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers.

Technorati Tags: design, manufacturing, pervasive computing, ubicomp, Web 2.0

Talking in Santa Cruz

I'm doing a talk on the end of cyberspace at UC Santa Cruz on April 25. Here's a copy of the flyer:

I've had long and sporadic, but very rewarding, intellectual relationship with UC Santa Cruz. In the late 1980s, I spent a month in the Lick Observatory archives, doing work that became the foundation of one of my dissertation chapters (and later an article in Osiris). A couple years later, I discovered a cache of papers in the Lick archives on astronomer-printer relations that became the basis for a second (and still in some ways my favorite) article.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, future, Santa Cruz

Blogs as research tools

I've been working on this end of cyberspace idea for a while, and occasionally posted about it on my other blog; this blog, in contrast, is just over a month old. However, I think there's a good case to be made for the utility of special-topic research blogs-- or perhaps more generally, of using social media (including blogs) as research tools.

For one thing, turning research into a form of public performance encourages you to keep at it. One of the great problems with scholarly work, or almost any kind of writing, is that it's easy to get bogged down, blocked, run yourself around in circles, or just put the project down for a little (and then a little longer, and a little longer). Talking about it makes it harder for those things to happen.

More important, it makes public and sharable things-- citations, notes, reflections on other people's work, connections you draw between your work and others'-- that in the pre-Web scholarship world were almost always private, or sharable only with a small circle of colleagues. Any given piece of content from this flow is going to be interesting only to a tiny number of other people; but to them, it could be very interesting.

With a more conventional specialist academic project, the value of a blog is likely to be reduced by the fact that you already know everyone else who's interested in your work (or everyone who's opinion is really going to matter when promotion time comes around). For interdisciplinary projects, in contrast, a blog can serve as a tool for attracting attention across disciplinary and geographical lines. The people who are most interested in this project, and have made the most thoughtful comments on it, are people I knew only very peripherally or not at all when I started the blog.

I'm also finding that Technorati and del.icio.us are more useful than I expected. I've used Technorati to follow references to this blog, the Wired article, and the term "end of cyberspace." Essentially, it lets you follow your ideas, see who else is thinking about them, and survey the reactions they're generating (ranging from positive, to thoughtful, to not so positive, to negative, to more negative). Del.icio.us, because it lets you follow keywords rather than specific hyperlinks or exact terms, has a slightly different, more diffuse function: it's more a tool for sampling the collective unconscious than recording specific conversations. (If Del.icio.us is a Jungian analyst, Technorati is an NSA wiretap.)

In my old academic life, you rarely heard much about your articles, and the signals you did get that others had read them-- comments from people at conferences, reprint requests, citations in other people's work-- were all the more precious for their rarity. Consequently, the ability to see how people are reacting to your work in real time-- to turn an imagined community of scholars into a conversational circle-- is as amazing as being able to iChat across the Atlantic.

Finally, this reinforces an argument I've been making in my work at the Institute: that information technologies often begin as tools for increasing efficiency and productivity, but morph into tools for enhancing sociability (without losing those earlier functions). The telephone started out as a tool for businessmen: early users were even warned to keep women off the line, since they'd just gossip. It took a couple decades for telephone companies to realize that there was a lot of money in people gossiping. Likewise, cell phones were first sold to busy executives and highly mobile workers (like sales reps); now my kids ask when they'll be old enough to have cell phones. The personal computer? Efficiency tool-- you can write papers, balance your checkbook-- to social tool-- you can IM with friends, play Everquest. Part of the value of setting up Technorati watchlists resides in the content they capture for you; but the deeper value, I suspect, will come from the people they help connect you to.

This begins to move you to a model of scholarly performance in which the value resides not exclusively in the finished, published work, but is distributed across a number of usually non-competitive media. If I ever do publish a book on the end of cyberspace, I seriously doubt that anyone who's encountered the blog will think, "Well, I can read the notes, I don't need to read the book." The final product is more like the last chapter of a mystery. You want to know how it comes out.

It could ultimately point to a somewhat different model for both doing and evaluating scholarship: one that depends a little less on peer-reviewed papers and monographs, and more upon your ability to develop and maintain a piece of intellectual territory, and attract others to it-- to build an interested, thoughtful audience. Since the former are getting more expensive for everyone (academic journals have become stunningly expensive, and some universities are starting to rebel against the high prices publishers are trying to charge), and the latter are getting harder to produce (university presses are less willing to subsidize the publication of books that are guaranteed to lose money), such changes may be in the cards anyway.

Of course, there are plenty of potential downsides to such a model: it could be license for people to perpetually tweak the details of projects, and never put a stake in the ground; there are opportunities for gaming a system that measures popularity and the quality of responses; and it might favor trendy, easier-to-describe subjects over harder ones. Then again, you could make the same criticisms of the current system.

[To the tune of Steppenwolf, "Magic Carpet Ride (Single)," from the album "Steppenwolf the Second".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, history of science, postacademic, work