Among the world’s best bars, there’s Tosca Cafe; and across the street, stands one of the world’s best bookstores, City Lights. Earlier this week, they teamed up to present a reading by Ellen Ullman of her new novel “By Blood.” It’s difficult to explain the kind of perfection this event captured. The literary history of San Francisco welled up in the room and presented the kind of event, anyone will tell you, never happens any more.
On floor 3b of the Mechanic’s Institute Library, there’s a section tucked around a corner that shelves the books of Marshall McLuhan. I’d been reading a lot of McLuhan and was scanning the section for new candidates for my reading list. My eyes passed over a title of a small book, “Close To The Machine.” I’d come and gone from that section three or four times before I finally picked up the volume. The title alone read like a poem. It was already inside something I’d been giving a lot of thought: our intimacy with the Network. Ellen Ullman wrote the book in 1997, long before the Network reached critical mass. She writes about technology with a facility and intimacy that’s very rare. Ullman is a programmer, critic and novelist with a view of the long arc of the culture of technology and the technology of culture.
Ullman’s second book was a novel called “The Bug,” and it continued to explore the world of computer programming and technology. At the reading, I asked her about the new book, “By Blood.” How and why did she decide to leave writing about technology behind? She answered that if she continued to write within the boundaries of technology, her work might stray off into the world of science fiction. Ullman’s work isn’t about the machine, it’s about being close to the machine, deep inside it, the strange intimacy we have with our technology. She said that she would continue to write essays about technology, but that her fiction would no longer be bounded by it. I look forward to both.
The whole train of thought started in the most unlikely spot. It’s a bit of a random walk, an attempt at moving in circles to get closer to a destination. I was listening to a podcast called ‘Sound Opinions‘ and Al Kooper was talking about the sessions in Nashville for Bob Dylan’s ‘Blonde on Blonde.’ They didn’t have a tape recorder, so Dylan would teach Kooper the changes and then Kooper would play them over and over again on a piano in Dylan’s hotel room. Dylan worked on the lyrics, Kooper played the changes and gradually, over many hours, the songs took shape.
Kristofferson described the scene: “I saw Dylan sitting out in the studio at the piano, writing all night long by himself. Dark glasses on,” and Bob Johnston recalled to the journalist Louis Black that Dylan did not even get up to go to the bathroom despite consuming so many Cokes, chocolate bars, and other sweets that Johnston began to think the artist was a junkie: “But he wasn’t; he wasn’t hooked on anything but time and space.”
Thinking about that process, I wondered if it would actually have been made better, more efficient, through the use of a tape recorder. Would the same or better songs have emerged from a process where a tape recorder mechanically reproduced the chord sequence as Dylan worked on the lyrics. Presumably, Kooper didn’t play like a robot, creating an identical sonic experience each time through. While Dylan and Kooper’s repetitive process eventually honed in on the song—narrowing the sonic field to things that seem to work—the resonances of the journey appear to be resident in the grooves. From this observation a question emerged: what is learned from a repetition that isn’t a mechanical reproduction, but rather a kind of performance? This kind of repetition seems to have the shape of a inward spiral.
We rush toward optimization and efficiency, those are the activities that increase the yield of value from our commerce engines. The optimal, by definition, means the best. Recently Nasism Taleb exposed the other side of optimization. When there’s a projected relative stability in an environment, as well as stable inputs and outputs for a system, optimization results in a higher, more efficient, production of value. In times of instability, change and uncertainty, optimization produces a brittle infrastructure that must use any excess value it generates to prop itself up in the face of unanticipated change. Unless there’s a reversion to the previous stable state, the system eventually suffers a catastrophic failure. Robustness in uncertain times has to be built from flexibility, agility and a managed portfolio of options. Any strategic analysis might first take note of whether one is living in interesting times or not.
Some paths of thought can’t be fully explored by using optimization techniques. We tend to run quickly toward what Tim Morton calls the “top object” or the “bottom object.” The top object is the most general systematic concept from whence comes everything (“anything you can do, I can do meta“). To create this kind of schema you need to find a place to stand that allows you to draw a circle around everything—except, of course, the spot on which you’re standing. The bottom object is the tiny fundamental bit of stuff—Democritus’s atom—from which all things are constructed. Although physics does seem to be having a tough time getting to the bottom of the bottom object—they keep finding false bottoms, non-local bottoms, anti-bottoms and all kinds of weird goings on. The idea that there may be ‘turtles all the way down’ no longer seems far fetched.
Moving in the opposite direction from a solid top or bottom, we run into Graham Harman’s presentation of Bruno Latour’s concept of irreducibility. Here’s Latour on the germ of the idea:
“I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else. This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one. It was a wintry sky, and a very blue. I no longer needed to prop it up with a cosmology, put it in a picture, render it in writing, measure it in a meteorological article, or place it on a Titan to prevent it falling on my head […]. It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free.”
In his book, Prince of Networks, Harman expands on Latour’s idea. No top object, no bottom object, just a encompassing field of objects that form a series of alliances:
“An entire philosophy is foreshadowed in this anecdote. every human and nonhuman object now stands by itself as a force to reckon with. No actor, however trivial, will be dismissed as mere noise in comparison with its essence, its context, its physical body, or its conditions of possibility. everything will be absolutely concrete; all objects and all modes of dealing with objects will now be on the same footing. In Latour’s new and unreduced cosmos, philosophy and physics both come to grips with forces in the world, but so do generals, surgeons, nannies, writers, chefs, biologists, aeronautical engineers, and seducers.”
The challenge of Latour’s and Harman’s thought is to think about objects without using the tool of reduction. It’s a strange sensation to think things through without automatically rising to the top, or sinking to the bottom.
Taking the principle in a slightly different direction we arrive at Jeff Jonas’s real-time sensemaking systems and a his view of merging and purging data versus an approach he calls entity resolution. Ask any IT worker about any corporate database and they’ll talk about how dirty the data is. It’s filled with errors, bad data, incompatibilities and it seems they can never get the budget to properly clean things up (disambiguation). The batch-based merge and purge system attempts to create a single correct version of the truth in an effort to establish the highest authority. Here’s Jonas:
“Outlier attribute suppression versus context accumulating: As merge purge systems rely on data survivorship processing they drop outlying attributes, for example, the name Marek might sometimes appear as Mark due to data entry error. Merge purge systems would keep Marek and drop Mark. Entity resolution systems keep all values whether they compete or not, as such, these systems accumulate context. By keeping both Marek and Mark, the semantic reconciliation algorithms can benefit by recognizing that sometimes Marek is recorded as Mark.”
Collecting the errors, versions and incompatibilities establishes a rich context for the data. The data isn’t always bright and shiny, looking its clear and unambiguous best—it has more life to it than that. It’s sorta like when you hear someone called by the wrong name, but you know who’s being talked about anyway. Maybe you don’t offer a correction, but simply continue the conversation.
And this brings us back to Al Kooper banging out the changes on a piano in a hotel room, while Dylan sits hunched over a typewriter, pounding out lyrics. Somehow out of this circling through the songs over and over again, the thin wild mercury sound of Blonde on Blonde eventually took hold in the studio and was captured on tape.
Plotting your route as the crow flies is one way to get to a destination. But I have to wonder if crows really do always flyas the crow flies.
Even though there’s only a slight movement in this direction, it’s worth pulling on the threads to see what it’s made of. The release of “Readability“ was the latest event to bring this set of issues to mind. If you’re not familiar with Readability, it’s a program that takes long text documents on the web, strips them out of their context, and instantaneously formats them into a layout designed for easier reading. To some extent Flipboard, and the host of current text DVRs, are working in the same area. In fact, Readability has formed an alliance with InstaPaper to bring simple readable layouts to DVR-ed text.
These services beg two questions. The first: why is it necessary to strip and reformat pages in order to read them? The answer seems to be that contemporary design for commercial web sites has resulted in a painful reading experience. With the heavy emphasis on corporate branding and the high density of flashing and buzzing display advertisements competing for our attention, it has become difficult to focus on the text.
Eye-tracking studies show that the modern consumer of web-based text is expert at focusing on the text, creating a form of tunnel vision by blurring everything that doesn’t seem related. Surely there must be a cost to this kind of reading, a constant throbbing pain shunted to the background each time a text is attempted. And each time the user manages to blur out a particularly abrasive ad, a newer, more abrasive ad is designed to ‘cut through the clutter.’
In some ways the Readability model doesn’t interfere with the online publication’s business model. The publication is looking for unique page views, and these are largely accomplished by attracting clicks through provocative headlines broadcast through social media channels. Reading the text is besides the point. In another way it does interfere, the distraction that Readability removes is central to the publication’s business model, its advertising inventory.
The Text DVR model, if it can gain critical mass, will have an analytics model similar to link shorteners like Bit.ly. Data about saved texts becomes valuable in and of itself. Valuable to readers looking for other interesting texts, valuable to writers of texts looking for readers. Anonymous streams of what readers are saving now, and lists of the most saved and read items become content for the application itself. The central index of the Text DVR provides the possibility of discovery, the development of affinity groups, and a social channel for commentary on items deemed worthy of saving.
The second question is more fundamental: Can web pages have other pages as their content? In essence, this is what’s happening with the translation Readability does. A target web page becomes the content of the Readability application. This question originally came up with the use of the HTML frame. A site could frame a page from another site and present it under its own auspices. This practice lead to howls of outrage, charges of theft and the development of javascripts that prevent a site from being framed.
In the case of the HTML frame, the site is being presented as it is, without alteration. The “same origin policy“ ensures that no tampering can occur. With Readability, what the reader deems as the value of the page is extracted from its point of origin and poured into a new design. I’ve yet to hear any howls of outrage or charges of theft. Readability does, after all, directly compensate the author of the text. So who has the authority, and at what point is it okay, to take some ‘content’ from the web and remix it so that it works better for the user? And why has the burden of designing for readability been displaced onto the reader?
As a related phenomena, it’s interesting to note the number of writing tools designed to minimize distraction. Scrivener’s full screen mode, OmmWriter, WriteRoom and others offer authors the kind of pure writing space not seen since the typewriter, or the paper notebook.
What would you think of a service that could make television programs available about 20 or 30 minutes after the initial live broadcast started? Normally there wouldn’t be a benefit to a delay. However, this service automatically deletes all the advertising from a program and removes all the in-program promo bugs at the bottom of the screen. The service would provide a cleanly designed and easily readable revised television schedule of programs for your convenience, and all this for a small monthly fee plus the purchase of small device to attach to your television. The editing process would happen on a local device after the broadcast signal had been received in the home. It’s the kind of thing you could do yourself, if you wanted to spend the time. This new service just automates the process for a small fee. And while you wouldn’t be able to interact on social channels about the show in real time — you would be able to interact with all the other users of the service in slightly delayed time.
The issues raised return us to the questions asked after the launch of Google’s SideWiki product and Phil Windley’s declaration of a right to a purpose-driven web.
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.
While the volume of the debate faded to barely audible levels, the issues seem unresolved. As with many things like this, you may have a personal non-commercial right to remix anything that crosses your screen. However, once you start sharing it with your Twitter and Facebook friends and it goes viral—is it still personal?
When you do this kind of remix and relay in a commercial and systematic way, you run smack into the hot news doctrine. And, as soon as this kind of systematic remixing was possible, it occurred. In the early days of the wire services, the Hearst corporation would hijack foreign wire copy from competing newspapers, change a word here or there and call it its own. Last year, a company called Fly-on-the-Wall was sued for doing a similar thing by passing along investment bank research in near real time. How do we judge a commercial tool that makes personal remixing possible for millions of people? Does that rise to the level of ‘systematic?’
At the bottom of all this is the malleability of text. In the days of ink on paper, a remix would require a pair of scissors and a pot of glue. In the digital era, text seems to have no form. The closest we get to pure text is with a code editor like Vi or eMacs, or when we view source on a web page to see the mark up and scripts that cause the page to render in a particular way. But if we think about it, whenever we see text it is always already formatted; it cannot be experienced in a formless state. And text, at least on the web, can be extracted, deformatted and reformatted in an instant.
One of the cause celebres of the Web Standards Movement was the separation of formal and semantic mark up in the HTML document. Through this kind of separation, the “sense”? of the document could be given expression through an infinite number of pure style sheets. The CSS Zen Garden is a wonderful example of this kind of approach. A single semantically segmented document is given radically different design treatments through the addition of varying sets of cascading style sheet instructions. This bright future filled with an infinite variety of compelling design has failed to materialize. Instead, the reader resorts to negating the local design in favor of something that’s more neutral and readable.
The design of the form of web-based text currently has a negative value that can be brought up to zero with some user-based tools. What is it about digital text that creates this strange relationship with its form? As digital text courses through the circulatory system of the Network, for the most part it leaves its form behind. It travels as ASCII, a minimal form/text fusion with high liquidity, a kind of hard currency of the Network. Text and form seem to travel on two separate tracks. It seems as though form can be added at the last minute with no loss of meaning. However, in order to maintain its meaning, the text must retain its sequence of letters, spaces, punctuation and paragraphs. A William Burroughs style cut up of the text produces a different text and a different meaning.
In the provinces of writing where text and form are fused in non-standard ways, the digital text has blind spots. Poetry, for instance, has many different ideas of the line; where it should begin on a page, and where it should end. Imagine a digital transmission of the poems of e.e. cummings or Michael McClure. In these instances can the form of the words really be discounted down to zero? Isn’t a significant amount of meaning lost in the transmission? From this perspective we see the modern digital transmission as the descendant of the telegraph and the wire service story. It’s built for a narrow range of textual expression.
While time and context shifting will continue their relentless optimization of our free time, we need to take notice when something important gets left behind. I try to imagine a text on the web that was so beautifully designed, that to read it outside its native form would be to lose something essential. Like listening to a symphony on a cheap transistor radio, the notes are there, but the quality and size of the sound is lost in translation. We’re looking for the vertical color of text, the timbre of the words, the palpable feel that a specific presentation brings to a reading experience. The business models of the big web publishing platforms tend to work against readability and the reader. They’re designed for the clicker—the fingertip, not the eye. If things keep going in this direction, the new era of user-centered design may happen on the user’s side of the glass.
Each strand of professional media was originally segregated by virtue of the physical properties of the medium and their particular economics of production. Newspapers, radio, television— each expanded on previous media models without completely replacing its predecessors.
The economics of professional media require that the cheapest delivery channel be utilized. This is why newspapers, for instance, are printed on newsprint. When you put the Network into the equation, it immediately becomes the cheapest delivery channel for the content of every other medium.
When a medium like the newspaper directs its productive output (news reporting, etc) to the Network, instead of to the printing press— it loses many of the qualities that define and differentiate it as a unique form of media. The technical requirements and opportunities of the new media are now in play.
It’s like white light hitting a prism, once a legacy medium is redirected at the Network, it is splintered into a rainbow of colors. Radio becomes print and video—each now has all the capabilities of the others. The physical properties of the media are no longer a limitation. There’s no sense in publishing a newspaper on the Network. The Network is a multiple-media media. In the context of the Network, each individual legacy media type must raid the others to supplement their stable of talent so it can publish text, audio and video into the Network.
The economic difficulty of newspapers and other media that have treated the Network as additional delivery option is that their production methods and costs can never be reduced beyond the requirements of their home physical media. When this kind of media organization competes with an organization structured to produce for the Network first, and anything else second— they will inevitably lose. The only question is whether they’ll able to withstand the wrenching transition of their infrastructure to a Network-first media organization. You can see some of this drama played out with The Daily Beast/Newsweek and the Huffington Post’s hiring of Peter Goodman and Timothy O’Brien from the New York Times. Once a Network-based media organization has established a sufficient economic base, it begins to poach talent from legacy media.
A fairly advanced form of this media reconstitution can be found in the sports news world. Comcast Sports Bay Area covers Bay Area sports. They have a cable station where they broadcast pre- and post-game shows, and in many cases the games themselves. They have former print journalists writing analysis of teams and games for their web site and appearing as guest analysts on their television shows. These analysts also appear on local sports radio. They run regular online chat rooms, and Twitter feeds. All of the “on-air” (read on-Network) talent write a blog. They’ll run both full-dress studio television shows and shows based mostly on ad-hoc video shot with a Flip cam. While they don’t broadcast all of the local professional team live press conferences over their cable station, they do make them available in a live stream on their web site. They blend text, photography, audio and video into in-depth, almost 24-hour, coverage of a set of sports teams. One can easily see this model working for coverage of music, entertainment, politics, business, financial and technology news or green energy.
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,â€? 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.
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.
