Within the bounds of our brief transit on this earth, we attempt to make our mark. Leaving a permanent trace of one’s life, in some quarters, is a large part of the purpose of our lives. In our digital lives, we leave traces wherever we go. We generate clouds of data as we surf along the surfaces of the Network. In the name of data portability, we claim the data we generate and assert personal ownership over it. We even leave instructions for how the data should be handled in the event of our death. What were footprints in the sand are now captured in digital amber.
While our most everyday communications have migrated to the Network, some of our most secret communications take a different path. It’s believed that governments have been sending secret messages using Numbers Stations since World War I. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:
Numbers stations (or number stations) are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children’s voices are used.
“Because [a message] can be broadcast over such an enormous area, you can be transmitting to an agent who may be thousands of miles away,” he says. And, he adds, computer communications almost always leave traces.
“It’s really hard to erase data out of your hard drive or off a memory stick,” he says. “But all you need here is a shortwave radio and pencil and paper.”
By using what’s called a one-time pad, these messages can’t be cracked. Again, here’s Mark Stout:
…because the transmissions use an unbreakable encryption system called a one-time pad: encryption key is completely random and changes with every message.
“You really truly cryptanalytically have no traction getting into a one-time pad system,” Stout says. “None at all.”
The use of short wave radio combines the capacity to send messages over great distances with the ability to obscure the origin of the broadcast. By taking down the message using a pencil and paper, the coded message stays off the information grid of the digital Network. Tools that pre-date the digital Network route around the media that makes permanent copies as a part of the process of transmission. While these messages are out there for anyone to listen to, and even record, the endpoints of the communication and the content of the messages remain opaque.
Historically, we’ve always had a medium that would allow us to communicate without leaving a trace. Now a whisper in the ear becomes an SMS message for your eyes only. While there’s much to be gained from our new modes of permanent public social messaging, I wonder if there’s a case to be made for the message without a paper trail, without a digital imprint, without any trace at all. Can we ever embrace the impermanence of a moment that can only be imperfectly replayed in human memory? The Numbers Station is reminder of another mode of speaking in a temporary medium.
June 16th is known as Bloomsday; it’s the single day, in 1904, on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses occurs. The day is commemorated around with the world with readings of the book and the hoisting of a pint or two.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
— Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:
— Come up Kinch. Come up , you fearful jesuit.
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking, gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.
Joyce’s book brought to popular notice the idea of stream of consciousness literature. The term “stream of consciousness” was coined by the philosopher William James in an attempt to describe the mind-world connection as it relates the concept of truth. As a literary technique, it involves writing as a kind of transcription of the inner thought process of a character. In Ulysses, we find that stream rife with puns, allusions and parodies. Joyce was trying to capture another aspect of truth.
What challenged the reader of the day as avant garde and daring has become a relatively normal part of our network-connected lives.
Twitter has become a part of my daystream
- Roger Ebert
The stream of tweets flowing out of Twitter could aptly be described as a stream of collective consciousness. And so today, we think a great deal about various real-time streams and how they wend their way through networks of social connection. The water metaphors we use to speak about these things have roots in our shared history; they describe another kind of network of connections.
With the university system languishing amid archaic traditions, and corporate R&D labs still on the distant horizon, the public space of the coffeehouse served as the central hub of innovation in British society. How much of the Enlightenment do we owe to coffee? Most of the epic developments in England between 1650 and 1800 that still warrant a mention in the history textbooks have a coffeehouse lurking at some crucial juncture in their story. The restoration of Charles II, Newton’s theory of gravity, the South Sea Bubble— they all came about, in part, because England had developed a taste for coffee, and a fondness for the kind of informal networking and shoptalk that the coffeehouses enabled. Lloyd’s of London was once just Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, until the shipowners and merchants started clustering there, and collectively invented the modern insurance company. …coffeehouse culture was cross-disciplinary by nature, the conversations freely roaming from electricity, to the abuses of Parliament, to the fate of dissenting churches.
But the coffeehouse as a nexus of debate was only half of the picture. Cultural practice at the time was to drink beer and wine, and maybe a little gin, at every opportunity. Water was not safe to drink, and so alcoholic alternatives were fondly embraced. The introduction of coffee and tea as popular beverages had a significant impact on the flow of valuable ideas. Again here’s Johnson:
The rise of coffeehouse culture influenced more than just the information networks of the Enlightenment; it also transformed the neurochemical networks in the brains of all those newfound coffee-drinkers. Coffee is a stimulant that has been clinically proven to improve cognitive function— particularly for memory related tasks— during the first cup or two. Increase the amount of “smart” drugs flowing through individual brains, and the collective intelligence of the culture will become smarter, if enough people get hooked.
In our day, the coffee house connected to a wifi network has been an accelerant to the businesses populating the Network. When Starbucks announced that they would be introducing free 1-click wifi in their stores, it reminded me of Stephen Johnson’s descriptions of the London coffeehouses. The coffeehouse provided a physical meeting place and the caffeine in the coffee provided a force multiplier for the ideas flowing through the people. There was a noticeable change in the rhythm of the age. By layering a virtual real-time social medium over a physical meeting place that serves legal stimulants, Starbucks replays a classic formula. Oddly, there’s a kind of collaborative energy that exists in the coffeehouse that has been completely expunged from the corporate workplace. Starbucks ups the ante by running a broadcast web service network through the connection. Here we see wifi emerging as the new backbone for narrowcasted television.
As we try to weave value-laden real-time message streams through the collaborative groupware surgically attached to the corporate balance sheet, we may do well to look back toward Bloomsday and also ask for a stream of unconsciousness. It’s in those empty moments between the times when we focus our attention that daydreams and poetic thought creep into the mix. Those “empty moments” are under attack as a kind of system latency. However it’s in those day dreams, poetic thoughts and napkin scribbles that we find the source of the non-linear jump. Without those moments in our waking life, we’re limited to only those things deemed “possible.”
The philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seems to underlie many of the stories bubbling up around the leap from fixed computing to mobile computing. Especially with regard to Apple’s role in forming the ecosystem, the market and some of the decisions they’ve taken about what to leave behind. Santayana’s aphorism has been restated in a number of ways, another popular formulation is: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” At any rate, there’s an implication that history, the past, should never be repeated— doing so is the occupation of the doomed. There’s also a sense of coming upon a node, as we move through time, that contains the possibility of looping back to a previously experienced stretch of history. Although we don’t replay it note for note, the chord changes seem follow the same pattern.
There are two stories that run through the minds of observers:
1. The Apple and Microsoft story. An integrated computing system that pushed the boundaries of human-computer interaction into the realm of usefulness, and the lower-cost modular computing system (DOS paired with any manufacturer) that provided a ‘good enough’ experience and a solid return on investment. In the end, Microsoft’s Windows became the dominant personal and business computing platform.
2. The Monopoly and Anti-Trust story. From its position of market dominance, Microsoft used its position to maintain power. The law is fine with the use of soft power (you choose it because it’s best, whatever best means to you); but steps in when hard power is exercised (you choose it because it’s the only choice). A settlement was reached: Microsoft’s brand suffered damage, some APIs were opened up and market dominance was largely maintained. The second act of this story has developers starting to route around Microsoft by creating cloud-based applications of ever-increasing sophistication.
1. Apple and iPhone/iPad Touch/iPad as an integrated platform and device
2. Google and Android/Chrome across multiple manufacturers
3. Microsoft and Silverlight/Windows Phone across multiple manufacturers
Tech pundits expect an exact replay of The Apple and Microsoft story. Although, Google has been cast in the role of Microsoft this time. Steve Jobs, they say, has not learned from history. Apple will eventually be overtaken by a more “open” and commodified horizontal platform. On the other hand, both Google and Microsoft have learned from Apple and have bought in to integrated design practices while maintaining a multiple-manufacturer production model. And while Apple is thought to be repeating its mistakes on the one hand, on the other, they’ve been cast in the role of Microsoft based on their dominance and control of the new mobile market. On a recent Gillmor Gang, Blaine Cook suggested that Apple is courting an anti-trust action based on their recent behavior. The implication being that there is no choice but the iPhone/iPad, and that competition is hindered by Apple controlling their own device platform.
Google and Microsoft have understood that more control and tighter design integration will be required to compete with Apple. Google has started down that road with the Nexus One. Microsoft, with their Windows Phone 7 announcements, have shown that they’ll be moving in the same direction. They’re very fast followers, some might even say they’re tailgating Apple. As in any race, drafting into the slipstream of the leader provides many advantages.
The term “slipstreaming” describes an object traveling inside the slipstream of another object (most often objects moving through the air though not necessarily flying). If an object is inside the slipstream behind another object, moving at the same speed, the rear object will require less power to maintain its speed than if it were moving independently. In addition, the leading object will be able to move faster than it could independently because the rear object reduces the effect of the low-pressure region on the leading object.
A fast follower wants to put himself into the position to execute a slingshot pass. By drafting in behind the market leader, the follower can exert less energy while keeping pace. The slingshot allows the follower to generate passing speed by optimizing the aerodynamics of their relative positions. The leader wants to adjust position to block this kind of move. The analysis and play-by-play has been based entirely on the assumption the lessons of history have been locked in, and this new race will play out with exactly the same dynamics. The lesson Apple may have learned is that a post-PC approach and strong portfolio of patents could change the outcome of some key points of the narrative.
A subplot to the main story involves Adobe and its Flash runtime. Adobe’s Flash is playing the role of Netscape in the current transition. Although Hal Varian was referring to Netscape in his 1999 book Information Rules, the thought applies equally well to Adobe. They face a classic problem of interconnection. Their competitors control the operating environment in which they are but one component. Adobe owes its current level of success in the fixed computing environment to Microsoft’s dominance.
At a key point, Microsoft had no competitive product and agreed to distribute the Flash runtime along with its operating system and browser. This put Flash on a high percentage of the installed personal computing user base. This kind of market penetration probably could not have been achieved if users had been required to download and install the plugin on their own. Once the Flash player was in place, apps could be pushed over the wire, and there was a high likelihood that they would operate. The Flash runtime could even update itself once it was established on the local Windows machine. The Macintosh and Linux platforms were filled in by Adobe, but were given a much lower priority based on market share.
Adobe has two problems in this transitional environment. The first is that their competitors control both their operating environment— and the distribution channel. Secondly, where they once had a willing partner, Microsoft now has Silverlight which competes directly. Because Adobe has had a high penetration percentage, they claim as much a 99%, they feel entitled to ship with any new operating environment. It used to be that way, but things have changed. The problem that Adobe’s Flash solved now has other solutions in each of the mobile stacks.
In the post-PC mobile computing world all of the original assumptions and agreements are being reassessed. This new environment isn’t an extension or an evolution of the fixed desktop environment– the blackboard has been erased and the project has been built up from scratch. That means you don’t assume Adobe’s Flash runtime, you don’t even assume copy and paste, multi-tasking or a file system. The first couple of things you might put on the blackboard are 10 hour battery life and always-on wireless network connectivity— that’s what makes the device usable in a mobile context. From there we can add location and streaming services, real-time responsiveness and the rest. But it’s battery life that’s the limiting factor. It’s the invisible tether that eventually draws us back to the power source to recharge. Where silicon once ruled, we now look to lithium.
The assumption that history will repeat itself relieves us of the burden of figuring out what’s going on, of understanding out the differences that make a difference. No doubt some threads of history will repeat themselves, but they may not be the ones we expect. When we come upon a node, as we move through time, a moment that contains the possibility of looping back to a previously experienced stretch of history. We also have the opportunity to take a familiar melody and go off and explore unexpected directions.
Feeding on a Collection of Channels (57 Channels and Nothin’ On)
It’s slipping into time out of mind, that knob with 13 positions that lined up with the VHF broadcast television channels. The first time I really understood it, there was only signal available at four of the dial positions. The other channels broadcast a static pattern that was called ‘snow.’ One had the sense that there could be signal coming through these channels and through the extended set of numbers available through the UHF dial as well. The reality was the vast majority of the channels provided only snow. In Sweden, Denmark and Hungary snow is called ‘the war of the ants.’
The channel is a very powerful metaphor. When cable-based replaced over-the-air broadcast as a means of delivering video signal to a television the number of channels carrying signal exploded. The increase in the number of channels fundamentally changed the distribution of programming. Where in the past, three or four channels bore the responsibility for the whole range of human endeavor from news and public affairs to sports, to comedy and drama— now each of these domains could have their own channel. And so we see a sports channel, a news channel, a cooking channel, a movie channel, a comedy channel, etc.
One effect of this expansion mirrors that of professional sports leagues. When a league goes from 12 teams to 24 teams, the talent pool is diluted. Now imagine the quality of play if Major League Baseball were to expand to 500 teams. On the one hand, we might talk about the economics of abundance and how in this new democratized environment, anyone can have a professional baseball team. But there would be a fundamental shift in how we valued viewing baseball games and the importance of baseball in general.
Baseball has a method of dealing with this problem. The teams and players are assigned to leagues, and the leagues roughly approximate levels of talent. League size is collared by the relationship between the availability of talent and the quality of the on-field product. There’s the major leagues, triple A, double A and single A. And then there are the various international leagues. Talent rises within a league until it moves to the next level. Vaudeville worked in the same way, there are many interconnected networks that have this kind of relationship. Economies of talent form within these pools, when talent reaches a certain level it is pulled up to the next level.
The proliferation of cable television channels has changed the value of a channel. When there are 500 channels to choose from, the channel itself ceases to be important. Even with 500 channels, it’s often the case that there’s nothing on. In the early days of cable televsion, 57 channels seemed like a huge number— this may have been the first time that we noticed that even with 57 distinct channels, there was rarely anything worth watching. René Giesbertz takes inspiration from Bruce Springsteen’s song ’57 Channels and Nothin’ On’ to explore what the experience of layering the sound of 57 television channels one on top of the other.
As cable television begins to migrate into the Network, the channel begins to merge into the feed. We move from having too many cable channels to an infinite number of data feeds. The dial is expanded to an infinite number of positions and the cost of broadcasting on one of these channels is minimal. The breakdown into finer and finer categories of broadcasting continues. Bathroom scales broadcast weighing events by user, shoes collect and broadcast running data, Twitter captures and broadcasts a whole range of miscellany. When the cost goes low enough, there’s no reason that everything that can emit state and event data shouldn’t be equipped to broadcast via a unique feed.
Just as the channel is meaningless when there are 500 of them, feeds are meaningless when there’s an infinite number of them. Aggregating data at the feed level doesn’t amount to much in an abundant feed economy. It’s the equivalent of aggregating cable television at the channel level. We don’t watch channels or read feeds, we’re interested in specific items. We surf from item to item, looking for signals along the way to tell us what’s important, what’s valuable. The channel, or feed, encasing the item in a sequence is a low-value clue in a rich information environment. The dial is no longer an adequate navigation interface where we have instant, direct random access to each and every item/program.
While the new metaphor hasn’t come completely into focus yet, the real-time web begins to point the way. There are two primary modes of interaction with items: now and later. We either interact now in real-time, or we defer until a later real-time. The third mode is elimination of an item from the consideration set. Rather than endlessly switching channels, we need an environment rich with signals and pointers to tell us whether or not something is going on. And perhaps even more important, we need to be able to tell when there’s nothing happening. Whether there are 4 channels, 57 channels, 500 channels or an infinite number of channels— it’s still quite possible that, in this real-time moment, there’s nothin’ on.
This train of thought attempts to wrestle with how we arrive at precision with a mode of expression that is inherently imprecise. And what precision could possibly mean in this context.
When we work with coding languages, our view of human language and interaction can become skewed. We sometimes believe that the qualities of a constructed language can be transferred to, and enforced within, an organic language. At the point where social interaction and computing models touch, languages of different kinds meet and intermingle to form unexpected combinations. Can we use language in the manner of Lewis Carroll’sHumpty Dumpty? And when we try to use it in this way, what happens?
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
“They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they’re the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
As we read and write into the Network, we often look at how this activity leads to the fulfillment of our needs, wants and desires. The gestures we make in this direction are scraped up, processed through our identity and fed back to us around the edges of our viewport. The person is defined by the role of the consumer, life is limited to the transactions that will cause the state of the world to be re-organized such that it quenches our desires.
We can imagine there might be an intention economy, some way for us to write a requirements document for whatever it is that we want. This document would then be published to the Network and vendors would surface at exactly the right moment with exactly the right product or service. The primary benefit seems to be that we wouldn’t get sales offers that are completely inappropriate. Theoretically, we would see a lot less advertising, and the ads we do see should be a good match for our intentions. However advertising is only minimally about making the offer, it’s primarily about the production of desire. In this prospective scenario of intentions, the roles of salesmanship (the power to close the sale) and marketing (the power to create desire in the consumer) only change slightly.
This idea of unequivocally expressing an intention assumes a great deal of exactitude. When do we exactly that we arrive at our true intention? Is it right away, or is there a journey to get there? When we express our intention the first time, how close are we to the mark? Do we trace the path of a spiral moving round and round toward the center of the target? Is there a static version of our intentions (our desires) that lives outside of time and is awaiting a perfect invocation through language? Or are both language and desire shifting and fluid within the dynamics of the flow of time? Perhaps it’s more like learning to dance to the music of time.
As I visited the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco to see the Emerald Cities exhibition, it occurred to me that the Jakata Tales depicted in so much of the art of Siam and Burma got at the same question. These tales depict the previous lives of the Buddha—his lives prior to being born for the last time to become the Buddha.
The Buddha became the Buddha after iterating through hundreds of lives. Perfection doesn’t come with a single try, nor is it the meticulous re-enactment of a pre-existing template. Can we expect to easily toss off perfect expressions of our desire? Are there unequivocal formulas we can deploy to place a standing order to fill the holes we perceive in our lives?
From a commercial perspective, advertising exists to align our desires with the set of products and services that have already been manufactured and are ready for sale. Dreams and desires for the most part are pre-fabricated and ready for occupancy. Industrial modes of production flatten desire into the kinds of shapes that can roll off an assembly line. When we advocate changing the polarity from what the vendors want to what we want, we find ourselves in the position of customers for the 1909 Model T— we can have the car painted any color we like, as long as it’s black.
How is it that when I use a word, it doesn’t mean exactly what I intend it to— neither more nor less? Where does the extra meaning come from? It’s as though when I deploy words out into the world, they’re only outlines that are waiting to be colored in by the listener. Meaning emerges through the overlapping follow clouds of a series of directed social graphs, as the words travel from node to node, their context, the world of their context changes. The set of possible connections expands and contracts, new avenues flash into view and fade away as the words travel on. It’s like following the stories of the characters of a road movie instead of those of the towns they pass through.
Denise Levertov wrote a poem about the activity of writing contrasted with the activity of reading a poem. Imagine these two moments of a poem as it travels through the world, connecting with the poet from the inside out and the outside in:
When a poem has come to me,
almost complete as it makes its way
into daylight, out through arm, hand, pen
onto page; or needing
draft after draft, the increments
of change toward itself, what’s missing
brought to it, grafted
into it, trammels of excess
peeled away till it can breathe
and leave me—
then I feel awe at being
chosen for the task
again; and delight, and the strange and familiar
sense of destiny.
But when I read or hear
a perfect poem, brought into being
by someone else, someone perhaps
I’ve never heard of before—a poem
brings me pristine visions, music
beyond what I thought I could hear,
a stirring, a leaping
of new anguish, of new hope, a poem
trembling with its own
vital power—
then I’m caught up beyond
that isolate awe, that narrow delight,
into what singers must feel in a great choir,
each with humility and zest partaking
of harmonies they combine to make,
waves and ripples of music’s ocean
who hush to listen when the aria
arches above them in halcyon stillness.
The Context of the Search: Public and Private Identities
The widget is beginning to supercede the hyperlink as a proper response to a search query. You can start to see this with the deals Google and Bing are making, the search engine results page (SERP) can no longer satisfy as just a prioritized page of hyperlinks.
Search returns public social gestures in real time. But clicking a link isn’t necessarily what’s needed in this context, perhaps it’s a ‘like’ or a ‘retweet.’ Maybe it’s a reply. The SERP interface will extend the requisite affordances to enable these gestures.
Search returns videos that are playable inline. Perhaps they can be directed to a playlist which can be shared. Perhaps it finds the news clips and streams that relate to the healthcare debate or the Web conference that’s going on in real time or the public video streams from the protest march. Search returns that quote from a movie and cues the video up to exactly the right spot
Search returns music (Google’s deal with Lala.com) with an option to buy a web-only version or a file download. And, of course, you can listen to it one time for free just to get a sense of whether you really like it or not. Or perhaps it reminds you that you own a copy already and you can play it from your cloud-based record collection. Perhaps you want to add it to a playlist, or see what kind of genius list it generates. Perhaps you want to see who in your directed social graph also has this song in her playlist.
Search finds the debate around the news of the day. The journalism is pulled apart and acted out by the participants in the discussion. The discovery is not separated from the debate.
Search is becoming two-way, social and contextual. It’s not just a connector to a page— it is the connection itself, and it’s exposed through the response to the query. Search is no longer search. It’s a browsing activity, zig-zagging across the Network, it’s berry picking, it’s a bullshit session over a cup coffee, it’s researching and working through a problem, it’s finding out if anything worthwhile is going on right now. It’s not about the efficiency of the link, but the pleasure of the journey and the company we keep. It’s asking a question anonymously, but it’s also shifting modes and filtering the response based on personal identity and social graph. It’s asking in public, but it’s also asking in private.
We sometimes search for context among the things we index. But it’s not things that are semantic, it’s the people. As Wittgenstein notes, the meaning of a word is in its use. And the use of a word is in its social exchange, search begins to search for the real-time moment of exchange– and in that instant search is transformed.
My notebook is filling up with musings on the real-time web. I keep trying to boil things down to the simplest formulation, the simplest expression of why the Network is moving into a real-time mode. It’s more difficult than one would imagine to create a palatable reduction. While we can apply Occam’s razor at a certain level, so much flavor is lost when the particular is replaced with the abstraction.
Occam’s razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question.
When the web was an exercise in reading, there was no need for real-time. The professional infrastructure of writing and publishing didn’t require much change in the move from offline to online. There was a bright line between professionally produced writing and the amateur personal home page. The pace of publication was a function of the competition between professional writing organizations. The reading of professionally produced writing has always been a distributed affair. A scarce number of writers produce writing for the abundant population of readers. Economics and value ensue from these kinds of ratios.
Search engines are largely based on the traditional economic model of the production of writing. What is returned for a search query should not only be what you’re looking for, but should be authoritative on the subject. Historically we’ve associated the kind of writing product emitted from the professional writing and publishing infrastructure as the most authoritative. While there’s not an explicit provenance, there is an implicit one based on the gesture of the citation link.
As originally conceived, the world wide web was a read-write environment. But clearly the two gestures did not occupy equivalent environments. Reading required a computer, web browser and a connection; writing required so much more. This difference in friction determined the early patterns of development for the Network. To some extent it also deferred the disruption of the established writing and publishing infrastructure.
Writing existed on the Network, but it was contained in the backwaters of the UseNet, Mailing List and the BBS. Real-time writing was limited to instant messenger, internet relay chat and the UNIX talk application. Isolated networks like the Plato System provided a highly sophisticated read-write environment that modeled many of the challenges that today’s Network is confronting.
Reducing the friction in writing to the Network, and here I’m referring to the world wide web, really began with the advent of widely available blogging software. This movement was accelerated by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed and others. Twitter, in particular, lowered the level of friction to almost zero. This is why a person can now write about what they had for lunch and publish it to the Network. Each of these services is a read-write social environment with public and private publication/broadcast modes. On the level of public gestures, they provide the same level of connectivity as any other public node on the Network.
So let’s loop back to the real-time web. It’s simply the gesture of writing, of making a mark on the Network, that has necessitated the move to real time. But here when we speak of writing, it is a different writing. We don’t refer to the industrially produced writing product created for mass consumption. Instead we refer to making a mark, a gesture, in a dynamic networked environment. The rather clumsy word Stigmergy has been used to draw a circle around some of these ideas.
Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.
It is derived from the Greek words stigma (mark, sign) and ergon (work, action), and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions
It’s the gesture that necessitates the real-time web. Through public gestures, we make marks in the environment that others can sense and to which they can respond. The latency in the Network needs to be low enough for a flow to occur. The time of the real-time web is a technical speed that enables this flow of marks, traces, actions, gestures to dynamically connect to other marks, traces, actions and gestures in an ongoing loop and become visible to a micro-community that defines the larger emergent social objects.
Writing, in this sense of the word, is no longer about something. It is the thing itself.
Liner Notes For The Gillmor Gang: Dynamic from Both Sides of the Glass
At the outset the frame of defacement is fitted for the conversation. Google’s SideWiki opens the door to an exploration of free speech, owned speech, unadulterated speech, graffiti, the Network as place and home, and what it is to write and read. Of course, the conversation isn’t really about SideWiki at all. Let’s start our exploration with writing.
A text is always already situated within a network of intertextuality. While we think we “have our say,” we assemble our sentences from an ocean of influences and predecessors. The connections stretch out back into history and as it tumbles out, our writing becomes fodder for the next person with something to say. Our writing and speech are never solely ours. The difference is that within the Network, the connections can be made visible. SideWiki, Disqus and Echo all aggregate and surface textual connections. Just as I might cut two related stories from two different newspapers and put them in a single manila folder.
The aggregated view exposes the edges of each piece—it’s that juxtaposition that activates the points of contention, the volatile elements of meaning, the interesting bits. To some extent, this is what we do when incorporate citations or quotations into our writing. We expose the fragmentary edges of a text to our commentary.
We like to talk about a two-way web, or a read/write web— but we still conceive of this as a half-duplex transmission. The revolution seems to be in the ever broader distribution of writing. We’ve yet to understand a full-duplex read/write— a writing that is also reading; and a reading that is also writing. The same pencil both writes and reads. McLuhan talked about this transition in terms of the old media becoming the content of the new media.
The act of reading is re-writing. The text is torn, ruptured and cut to make room for the commentary, associations, orthogonal meanderings, debate, and dialogue. Reading is always already all this. Writing itself could be called a form of close reading. Sometimes there’s ink in the pen, other times we let the thoughts fade away. We even employ Tmesis to insert our commentary into the middle of a word, for example: I abso-bloody-lutely have the right look at your website using Google’s SideWiki.
…we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass). Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure, here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets what is useful to a knowledge of the secret against what is useless to such knowledge; tmesis is a seam or flaw resulting from a simple principle of functionality; it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only a the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)
The question of reading as re-writing reaches its pinnacle with the transition from quotation to the practice of superimposition. For instance, imagine a program that alters the contents of a browser through adding new layers based on a personal context— I remix on the fly, in real time. Perhaps for every image of Robert Scoble that loads into my browser, a mustache layer is added to the appropriate spot in the image. If I found this to be a valuable or amusing way to consume the web— I have every right to do so. We saw something like this with the recent Kanye West site rewriting. A very amusing way to view the web. The Medium is the Remix:
The Network is becoming dynamic from both sides of the glass. Web servers connected to data stores created the possibility of dynamic pages at the server level. When combined with AJAX techniques, the dynamic set of pages becomes a viewport into which various dynamic data resources are called. A form of personalization can be created from the server’s data store based on the assignment of a unique identity to the user. But as far as this stack of techniques has come from the flat HTML page, it’s still a server-centric stack of technologies and techniques. It’s dynamic from the server’s side of the glass.
It’s here that the actual topic of discussion begins to emerge: the possibility of a dynamism from the user’s side of the glass. Perhaps we begin by painting mustaches on Robert Scoble, but we quickly move to the creation of a personal context that superimposes our purposes on to the web that passes through the browser viewport.
The technologies that make a dynamic web possible from the user’s side of the glass are already well under way. The Firefox greasemonkey plugin exposed the potential of reading/writing browser viewport content. The information card, the selector, KNS and the action card make up the foundational elements of a new ecosystem for the user’s side of the glass. Here’s Craig Burton:
Web augmentation is an incredible phenomenon that we are just beginning to understand and use. There is a spectrum of tools available to accomplish various levels of augmentation. I only talk about two of those here. Greasemonkey and Action Cards.
I stand by my position that Action Card web augmentation changes everything. And that greasemonkey—at its most lofty view—is a mere harbinger of the real thing. Greasemonkey lets you do basic web augmentation with lots of potential problems and drawbacks.
Action Cards—the combination of the selector-based information card, KNS, and cloud-based data is elegant, well thought out, and well architected capable of making long lasting significant changes to the Internet.
Phil Windley provides the example of looking at Amazon.com search results with a superimposition of an indicator telling the user whether a particular book is available at a local library. The personal context might be: whatever I’m looking at, when a book is mentioned, let me know if it’s available at my local library. I might be entitled to discounts based on membership in an organization or club. That context could be made visible when I shop online. The potential for the mobile web is even greater.
The value of dynamism from both the client and server side on the image in the browser’s viewport has yet to be fully understood or imagined. We barely have the language to talk about it. The October 1st Gillmor Gang attempts to start a discussion about users writing to the browser from the client’s side of the glass.
We end, perhaps, where we began, with Windley’s Bill of Rights:
I claim the right to mash-up, remix, annotate, augment, and otherwise modify Web content for my purposes in my browser using any tool I choose and I extend to everyone else that same privilege.
Of course, rights are one thing and capability entirely another. That object floating in the glass between the server and the client is about to become an entirely new kind of collaboration.
Writing, when it is professional, is constructed like sculpture. Whereas speech, is the medium of real time. What writing is has been formed by the technical practices developed around typography and printing. The idea of real-time writing is a contradiction, it violates the standards of professional production. Professional writing must operate within the limitations of the medium of print.
Imagine a communications medium that could only be produced at best once a day, or once a week or a month. Or in many cases, only one time, ever. And once its product had been produced, the capacity to change it did not exist. The physical qualities of the medium of ink, type and paper dictate the professional qualities of the writing process. The alphabetic sequences to be published must be perfect, or as complete as humanly possible. Ink, painted on type, and pressed onto paper is a bell that can’t be unrung. A mistake is a stain on the permanent record.
From the perspective of the ink-stained wretch, faster news cycles mean a lowering of standards. There isn’t time enough to be professional. And the concept of real time is the equivalent of broadcasting false information. Real time is attacked as having no accountability, no standards, no credibility and no real value. The permanence with which ink is fixed to paper is a metaphor for the assurance with which the signifiers are bound to the signifieds.
The history of real-time writing is also connected to the technical limitations of particular communications media. The telegraph enabled a kind of real-time writing. Messages could be encoded and sent back and forth instantaneously across a wire. Because of its scarcity as a resource, it was rarely used as a medium for casual conversation. Although one can imagine the professional operators of the equipment occasionally sending personal messages to each other in real time. This medium, once it became technologically boring, evolved into instant messenger conversations across the Network.
To understand the epochal change writing is experiencing, one must look to the changes in the quality of the medium through which writing is transmitted. The professionals of the previous medium prefer to move the discussion toward standards and practices, as though hypertext and the Network were another kind of printing press. But this is just a red herring, an attempt to frame the challenges of new medium within the strictures of the old medium.
The moment that the time and cost of changing one letter in an alphabetic sequence to any other letter approached zero, the medium was fundamentally changed. Adding, modifying and deleting text are not only possible, they are fundamental to real-time writing. Hyperlinking and comments open up the space even more. And these changes extend not just to production methods, but to the culture, standards and practices of writing. It is a transvaluation of all values. And of course, the practitioners of the previous medium will claim it’s the absence of values, the abandonment of the commitment to truth.
Real-time writing has the quality of a transparent on-going investigation, new facts can, and do, change the story. It’s a time-bound performance, with a beginning, middle and end. A melody is laid down and explored through improvisations and variations on the theme. Print has no duration, time matters with hypertext on the Network. In the previous regime, information was excluded to meet the deadlines proscribed by the technical requirements of the print medium. If new information arrived after the deadline, that was just too bad. In real-time writing, that same process would be called suppression, and the new information would emerge through other dynamic publication endpoints. The capacity to incorporate new information, and to listen to comments for new perspectives, fundamentally changes what counts as professionalism. Cable television news networks, when they engage in on-going coverage of a live event, operate within the value system of this new medium. Although, they can no longer restrict their inputs to a selection of their own correspondents and a few newswires.
Mastering the live mix (remix) of the real-time performance— of writing the new hyper-text, has many points in common with role of the MC in hip-hop music:
…Rapping, also referred to as MCing or emceeing, is a vocal style in which the performer speaks rhythmically and in rhyme, generally to a beat. Beats are traditionally generated from portions of other songs by a DJ, or sampled from portions of other songs by a producer, though synthesizers, drum machines, and live bands are also used, especially in newer music. Rappers may perform poetry which they have written ahead of time, or improvise rhymes on the spot with or without a beat. Though rap is usually an integral component of hip hop music, DJs sometimes perform and record alone, and many instrumental acts are also defined as hip hop.
As a story plays out across the Network, as new information is uncovered, the inputs are routed through the mixing board of the writer’s keyboard. A writer must now listen to how the whole jam is sounding— the writer is a player down in the groove with other players. As we learn to write through a real-time medium, we’ll need to look to the values, standards and practices of live performance. But these performances aren’t necessarily the traditional one-to-many events unfolding within a proscenium. We’ll need to dig into the performance theories of Richard Schechner and the Happenings of Allan Kaprow; revive the thoughts of Michael Kirby and The Art of Time, and the work of Fluxus. The journey from text on a page to hypertext on the Network is not a small adjustment to a business model; it’s a transvaluation of all values.
There was a shift in momentum, the reading we do on web pages and the reading we do with printed books joined together in the Kindle and the iPhone. The movement was from perceiving the situation as ‘either/or’ to one of ‘both/and.’ The question about one thing replacing another suddenly seemed less important. Another point of access was opened, another door.
Consider the following sequence:
This library contains one-of-a-kind handwritten manuscripts
This library contains manuscripts and copies of manuscripts, both produced by hand
This library contains manuscripts, copies of manuscripts and printed books
This library contains printed books and audio/visual media encoded in celluloid, vinyl, recording tape and CD/DVD
This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials and a connection to the Network to view web pages
This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials and a connection to the Network to view web pages and digitized audio/visual/textual materials.
This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials, a connection to the Network and loans out eReading devices that can contain and connect to any digitized media.
This library contains nothing. It makes digital media available to its members via the Network through a variety of reading, viewing and listening devices
A library moves from a building that contains things to a service that enables connection to things.
Note: this change in the distribution network also reveals the converging business models of for-profit and non-profit journalism. But that’s a discussion for another time.
Now consider this eReading use case:
I’m reading a hardcover printed novel in my favorite chair. I get to a stopping point and mark my place with a bookmark, and I use my iPhone’s camera to send a bookmark to the Network. Later, I pick up my eReader, find my place and continue reading. I’ve got to go meet a friend so I mark my place and then drive over to a cafe. In the car, I turn on the streaming audio version of my book. It’s remembered my place, and picks right up with the story. I arrive at the cafe, mark my place and then go in and sit down. My friend is late, so I pull out my iPhone, find my place and continue reading. My friend arrives, I mark my place and start talking to my friend about this facinating novel.
We have the sense that the book is the container that holds the words. The library sequence above tells us something about the changing technology of the containers and the contained. As the book itself breaks free of a specific container and allows us to interact across multiple access points, all we ask is that the particular sequence of words be preserved and that our current place be available when we need it.
If the book isn’t its container, but rather a fixed stream of words that can be accessed through a variety of devices, are we fundamentally changing our idea of the book? When we buy a “book” are we buying access to the stream of words via a particular set of methods?
This way of talking about books as a stream of words brings to mind an older form, the tradition of oral storytelling. Homer, if there was such a person as Homer, sang the stories of the Iliad and the Odysseyto an audience of listeners. A significant difference: in the oral tradition, variation in the word sequence is part of the value proposition. In modern books it would simply be considered an error.
As textual media moves toward a digital stream the boundries between and among books become more ambiguous. We’ve become used to the idea that search functions are available for individual digital books. As the community of digital books grows, we will also have search among books. Search will be unbounded to play in the intertextuality of all books. We may be traveling across the connections between books just as today we traverse the hyperlinks of the web. But the linkages aren’t just matching bits of text here and there. They aren’t just words, they mean something.
The idea of all books becoming one book– and of books becoming intimate, brings to mind the work of Norman O. Brown. Specifically the preface to Closing Time:
Time, gentleman, please?
The question is addressed to Giamattista Vico and James Joyce.
Vico, New Science; with Joyce, Finnegans Wake.
“Two books get on top of each other and become sexual.” John Cage told me that this is geometrically impossible.
But let us try it. The book of Doublends Jined.
At least we can try to stuff Finnegans Wake into Vico’s New Science. One world burrowing on another.
To make a farce. What a mnice old mness it all mnakes!
Confusion, source of renewal, says Ezra Pound.
Or as James Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake: First mull a mugfull of mud, son. As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (HOMO INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (HOMO NON INTELLIGENDO FIT OMNIA).
As Brown reminds us, books have never been separated, their containers are a kind of illusion, encoding only an instance of a song. The dark territory between texts is murky, and we may need to mull a mugfull of mud before we find anything of value. And value can be found both in ambiguity and in clarity.
Joyce was known for writing down a stream of consciousness and printing it out as something that resembled a novel. It’s a river that runs through all of us. And in Joyce, the streams of books, and the streams of consciousness are joined as when the child was a child…
When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.
When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.
