echovar

If I’m interested in buying a car, soon advertisers will know it. When I surf the web, I’ll see nothing but car ads. As my preferences for car type are revealed in my online behavior, the ads will become more focused, I’ll just see ads for blue hybrids with 4-doors and GPS. As my transactional intentions across a number of threads surface, my advertising environment will mirror the state of my desire. They’ll see me coming a mile away.

Under the rubric of an evolutionary improvement in the targeting of advertising, Stephanie Clifford, of the NY Times, writes about two firms: BlueKai and eXelate that want to buy your cookies– although not from you. As part of their session management and optimization processes, most commercial websites record user interactions with web pages and some of that data is stored in a cookie that serves to identify the behavior of unique users.

These new firms are setting up an intermediary market for user cookies. They’ll buy the cookies from firms that have set them on your behalf, and then sell them on to other sites that want to sell you things based on the implied intentions contained in your cookie. Your gestures are being sold and you’ve been cut out of the take. Saul Hansell of the NY Times Bit Blog puts some more context around the issue, especially as it’s implemented through the Google/DoubleClick combination. And of course Steve Gillmor conceptualized all this stuff about five years ago.

In order to maintain the common good and a civil society, there’s a rule that says that both scripts and cookies may not operate across domains. But as is often noted, there’s no problem in software engineering that can’t be solved by another level of indirection. While another site may not directly read the cookies I’ve set on behalf of a user, apparently this doesn’t stop me from selling that cookie to a third-party who can then create a market to sell it to the highest bidder.

We assert that the user owns her own data– and presumably this means that the user should benefit from any value derived from that data. This new breed of “service” will sell your data and you’ll never know it happened. The whole thing will be quite painless. There’s nothing to be afraid of. And yes, of course they take your privacy very seriously. That’s why they’ll let you opt out of their service. The usability of their opt-out process, no doubt, is one of their top priorities. Explicit licensing of user data by users, along the lines of creative commons, may ultimately be part of how this story plays out.

Turning this model around, there’s Phil Windley’s new company, Kynetx. In this model, the user has the capability of sharing information with a web site through information cards and possibly other means. Ambient data like a user’s location as implied by an IP address are also fed into the mix. A site, knowing you live in Chicago, might offer you a special discount. In Windley’s model, the user has a much higher degree of control. He discussed his new firm with Jon Udell on an episode of IT Conversations‘ Interviews with Innovators:

Contextual Browsing w/ Phil Windley – Contextual Browsing

The user experience industry has been working hard on developing consistent and simple user interaction experiences within particular web properties. Many companies, financial institutions in particular, with multiple web properties with divergent websites and experiences are endeavoring to merge them into a single visual and interaction design with a common authentication/identity system. There’s ample evidence that next horizon of cross-domain user experience is gaining traction.

A person’s intention to buy a car isn’t limited to a single web domain. Her search will take her through many physical locations (recorded w/ GPS?) and many different online locations.  The capability to address the cross-domain/multi-domain gesture set that expresses a user’s transactional intention is the next frontier of commerce on the Network. The question is: who will be doing the targeting, the customer or the vendor?

It’s a discussion that should happen out in the open. Perhaps the next Internet Identity Workshop in May could provide a forum for a discussion that could include Omar Tawakol of BlueKai, someone from eXelate, Phil Windley and Doc Searls from the VRM point of view. If cookies become valuable, companies will increase their revenue opportunity by putting more and more behavioral information into them. There’s a hand in your cookie jar, the question is, are you going to do anything about it?

Newspapers and news-gathering are breaking up. The information ecosystem is changing — has already changed — and a migration must occur. The food and water that sustained the journalist is drying up. The climate has undergone a drastic change. If the environment they inhabited had remained largely stable, the kinds of calibrations they’re currently attempting might have been successful. Central to the conditions necessary for a stable ecosystem are flows of sustaining energy across established trophic dynamics. The sustaining energy flow of the newspaper system has been fundamentally disrupted. No amount of calibration will halt the transformation of the verdant forest into a scorching desert.

Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms interact with every other element in their local environment. Eugene Odum, a founder of ecology, stated: “Any unit that includes all of the organisms (ie: the “community”) in a given area interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (ie: exchange of materials between living and nonliving parts) within the system is an ecosystem.^” The human ecosystem concept is then grounded in the deconstruction of the human/nature dichotomy and the premise that all species are ecologically integrated with each other, as well as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope.

Following the threads initiated by Richard Dawkins, we’ve come to think of the life of memes independently from human life and society. Memes can be thought of as having a will of their own to both live and replicate. It’s through this lens that the news distribution system is often viewed. In this model, journalists are not the source of news stories (memes), these information units are spontaneously generated from the social activity of the environment and dispurse through the Network. While this perspective is useful for certain kinds of analysis, it’s too constrained of an approach to shed much light on this problem. We need to take a few steps back and find a view that brings the human element back into the picture.

Did journalists create the ecosystem they currently inhabit? Will they create the ecosystem to which they must migrate? No member of an ecosystem creates, or can create, a new ecosystem. But clearly both journalists and what used to be called “newspapers” will need to evolve to survive and prosper as the next ecosystem emerges.

Natural selection will dictate that the skill set of the journalist change to match the media through which stories and information are transmitted. Text, audio and video have previously been divided into separate streams of production based on the available technologies. The digital doesn’t distinguish among these modes. Text, audio and video are all bits traveling through the Network; and the page is no longer just hypertext, but hypermedia. Even the static document is giving way to the dynamic textual environment of wikis, blogs and other modes of version-based publication.

The editorial function has been displaced from its position as a quality control agent prior to publication, and now must find its role as a post-publication filter. The energy required to use traditional editorial filters after the fact is very high, so new methods will need to be found (Track). The walls of the newsroom have become transparent and permeable on their way to disappearing all together. New hierarchies and inter-dependent systems (meshworks) will need to emerge from the digital environment to form a new ecosystem.

The organizations formerly called “newspapers” will need to come to terms with the new digital environment as well. Geography, locality and the publication of syndicated content are no longer differentiating advantages. These things have a different meaning in the current context. Those that are able to, will need to migrate into the real time multimedia news space with distribution through the Network to fixed and mobile endpoints (microportals). Dramatically lower cost structures will allow them to disrupt the cable news networks. Soon the flat screen will come in a number of sizes and will be able to connect to any node broadcasting on the Network from any location. Yes, even the living room and the kitchen table.

And what used to be called the audience, or the readership, has organized itself into social media clouds. What was a one way, one-to-many relationship has become a two-way, many-to-many relationship. The capacity to connect where ever necessary and discriminate between high and low value real time message streams has become a necessary adaptive trait for both individuals and organizations.

We are in the unique position to be able to contemplate and effect the ecosystems within which we reside. And yet the nature of an ecosystem is such that our understanding of it is always partial. In his essay “Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization,” Gregory Bateson discusses the human dilemma with regard to trying to direct our own ecology:

…We are not outside the ecology for which we plan– we are always inevitably part of it.

Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology–that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming part of our own ecosocial system.

We live then in a world different from that of the mountain lion– he is neither bothered nor blessed by having ideas about ecology. We are.

What are the signs that the new ecosystem is starting to take hold and stabilize? Look to the new systems within the Network environment that transform labor into capital. Apple’s appstore, the Kindle, Google’s adsense and affiliate networks are a few of the early players. This process happens in a number of modes, sometimes it’s quite subtle. Until an economics that supports a sustained transforming energy flow emerges, the news and news-gathering ecosystem will remain in flux.

“Design is preserving ambiguity.” This fragment recently surfaced and won’t leave my current playlist. It was a thought expressed by Larry Leifer in a talk called “Dancing with Ambiguity, Design Thinking in Practice and Theory. ” Today it finally collided with a blog post on StopDesign.com. Douglas Bowman is leaving Google, where he was employed as a visual designer. He summed up his reason thusly: “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”

Our human interactions with the Network swim in a sea of data. Each stroke of a key or click of a mouse leaves a trace somewhere. The business of analyzing these traces to plot the trajectory of our activity streams powers the internet economy. And while past performance is no guarantee of future results, it’s apparently close enough.

This begs the question that was asked of Mr. Bowman. If design and ambiguity are intimately intertwined, can ambiguity be preserved through the sword of data? In this particular skirmish, the answer appears to be no.

Ambiguity is the enemy of economics in the Network’s current equation. The ratio of clarity to ambiguity must always be advancing in favor of clarity. Value is equated with unimpeded visibility, its end goal a kind of panopticon. What then of poor ‘ambiguity?’ — linked in this context to the opposite of value. In the grips of such an economy, why should ambiguity be preserved?

If design has value, then ambiguity must have value. What, then, is the nature of the value of ambiguity? A thing that is ambiguous may have more than one meaning, and may have many meanings. Proponents of logic would have us push ambiguity in the direction of nonsense.

But we can also move in the direction of the dream and poetical thinking. The design object is overdetermined, overflowing with meaning. It connects with the emotions of each individual and the diverse set of circumstances that are linked to those emotions. Imagine a graph linking the design object to the emotions of each person and then the circumstances that provided the ground for those emotions.

Clarity produces value in a restricted economy, in a controlled vocabulary. Ambiguity produces value in a general economy, in a language open to play. Just as with clarity, not all ambiguity is created equally. The poet’s pen, the designer’s pencil, the painter’s brush make the clear mark that overflows with meaning.

Of course these thoughts have been batted back and forth over the tennis net for years upon years. Ambiguity continually undervalued, the underdog, beaten at every turn, it continues to limp along. Although, never fully disposed of, for to get to where you’ve never been, there is no clear road. To see what you’ve never seen requires a different kind of vision.

From T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets:

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

In sorting through the coverage of Apple’s iPhone 3.0 software announcement as it dribbled in through the refreshes and streams of the various tabs on my web browser, I returned to the thought that the iPhone both is, and is not, a telephone. This major upgrade to the operating system had little or no new information about the telephonic capabilities of the device. And the connaisseurs of the mobile telephone often tell me that the iPhone really isn’t a very good telephone. Still, the upgrade to 3.0 brings some significant new possibilities for this device, whatever it might be:

• Cut, Copy and Paste
• Push Notification via Apple’s relay cloud
• Peer-to-Peer wireless connectivity among iPhones
• Programming interfaces to iPhone Accessories (Medical, etc.)
• Access to Core Location within Applications
• Spotlight-style search
• In application follow-on purchasing

Those who stand by and compare the iPhone’s feature/function set to other mobile phones will complain there’s not much new there. In some form or another, all of these things exist on other phones. Here’s where I have to return to my thought that the iPhone is a phone that isn’t a phone; to the idea that it’s a closed device that is more open to both existing and potential connections than many open devices, that it’s created a vibrant ecosystem with a fully-functioning economy where none existed before. That apples and oranges can be compared, but how fruitfully?

To explore this idea I went back through some interviews given by Steve Jobs and created a mashup. Here’s my imaginary interview with Steve Jobs, where I ask him from a product design perspective what it means to ‘rethink’ the activity of using a telephone; about the importance of software in the integrated design of the post-pc consumer device; and why the iPhone, and not the computer, will be the vehicle of the most radical change in the augmenting of human capabilities through networked computing.

“There’s a phrase in Buddhism,”Beginner’s mind.” It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.”

***

“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer, I think of it as reinventing the phone.�

***

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.”

“One of our biggest insights [years ago] was that we didn’t want to get into any business where we didn’t own or control the primary technology because you’ll get your head handed to you.”

“We realized that almost all – maybe all – of future consumer electronics, the primary technology was going to be software. And we were pretty good at software. We could do the operating system software. We could write applications on the Mac or even PC, like iTunes. We could write the software in the device, like you might put in an iPod or an iPhone or something. And we could write the back-end software that runs on a cloud, like iTunes.”

“So we could write all these different kinds of software and make it work seamlessly. And you ask yourself, What other companies can do that? It’s a pretty short list. The reason that we were very excited about the phone, beyond that fact that we all hated our phones, was that we didn’t see anyone else who could make that kind of contribution. None of the handset manufacturers really are strong in software.”

***

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.”

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. “

***

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.”

***

“I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.”

***

“Well, Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: We do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we’re really good at packaging that all together into a product. We’re the only people left in the computer industry that do that. And we’re really the only people in the consumer-electronics industry that go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers, and they can also be used to make things like iPods. And we’re doing both, and we’ll find out what the future holds.”

***

“I know, it’s not fair. But I think the question is a very simple one, which is how much of the really revolutionary things people are going to do in the next five years are done on the PCs or how much of it is really focused on the post-PC devices. And there’s a real temptation to focus it on the post-PC devices because it’s a clean slate and because they’re more focused devices and because, you know, they don’t have the legacy of these zillions of apps that have to run in zillions of markets.”

“And so I think there’s going to be tremendous revolution, you know, in the experiences of the post-PC devices. Now, the question is how much to do in the PCs. And I think I’m sure Microsoft is–we’re working on some really cool stuff, but some of it has to be tempered a little bit because you do have, you know, these tens of millions, in our case, or hundreds of millions in Bill’s case, users that are familiar with something that, you know, they don’t want a car with six wheels. They like the car with four wheels. They don’t want to drive with a joystick. They like the steering wheel.”

“And so, you know, you have to, as Bill was saying, in some cases, you have to augment what exists there and in some cases, you can replace things. But I think the radical rethinking of things is going to happen in a lot of these post-PC devices.”

***

“There’s a phrase in Buddhism,”Beginner’s mind.” It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.”

-30-

The fluidity of William Kentridge is astonishing. My mouth hangs open in awe. It’s difficult to even find the words to describe what he does. I’ve just returned from the members preview of his major exhibition at SFMOMA called William Kentridge | Five Themes.

As Kenneth Baker of the SF Chronicle says, “Even people only causually involved with contemporary art tend to bookmark memories by their first encounter with the work of William Kentridge.” Mine was about 4 or 5 years ago at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I happened upon a small exhibition of charcoal drawings and one of Kentridge’s “drawings for projection.” These hand-drawn films are composed through a process of making a set of charcoal drawings corresponding to the main scenes of the film. A drawing is created, one frame is shot, then a portion of the drawing is erased and redrawn. Another frame is shot. And so on. The palette of the narrative becomes a palimpsest.

The film was called “History of the Main Complaint” and was made after the establishment in South Africa of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The narrative plays out through a ‘medical’ investigation into the body of Soho Eckstein, the white property-developing business magnate– and it eventually works its way around to point the way toward the emergence of conscience and the possibility of reconciliation. This is not agit-prop theater, its politics are filled with poetry, ambiguity and some sharp edges.

Kentridge’s process of drawing a film is a fundamental artistic act, a gesture in four dimensions. Thousands of individual drawings are created and destroyed in the process of making the projectible drawing. Marks are made, erased, new marks are made and erased– and the camera catches each state of the drawing. These fleeting moments of being exist only on film, the individual states of the drawing flash into being and are at the same time, both irretrievably lost and leave ineffaceable traces.

The SFMOMA show includes a performance of Kentridge’s design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute through projections on a very large toy theater. The YouTube videos have embedding disabled, so you’ll need to click the links to view them.

• Kentridge on Magic Flute
• Magic Flute, Part 1
• Magic Flute, Part 2
• Magic Flute, Part 3

While working on Magic Flute, Kentridge concieved another piece called “Black Box.” It’s a stunning piece of work. Stop whatever you’re doing, go to SFMOMA and watch this work from beginning to end. It’s another mechanical theater piece consisting of animated film, kinetic objects, drawings and a mechanical actors/puppets. It is a powerful piece of political theater, a Trauerarbeit machine. (These videos don’t do it justice)

Kentridge discusses the role that memory and mourning play in his work:

There was a term someone introduced to me that I’ve kept in my head for Black Box, it’s the word Trauerarbeit – the work of mourning. Freud writes about that in 1917 in Mourning and Melancholy.

Freud talks about how memory compares to reality and what it takes to arrive at an objective view once the lost object is actually gone. It’s a process of detachment and de-vesting.

A Trauerarbeit machine on stage could turn, and things would come out of it.

Kentridge works without a detailed plan, here he discsuses the moments before the real-time flow of his work begins:

“Walking, thinking, stalking the image. Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forth across the space gathering the energy, the clarity to make the first mark. It is not so much a period of planning as a time of allowing the ideas surrounding the project to percolate. A space for many different possible trajectories of an image, where sequences can suggest themselves, to be tested as internal projections. …It is as if before the work can begin (the visible finished work of the drawing, film, or sculpture), a different, invisible work must be done. A kind of minimalist theater work involving an empty space, a protagonist (the artist walking, or pacing, or stuck immobile) and an antagonist (the paper on the wall).”

A contradiction must be captured, Kentridge must make a clear mark that preserves the ambiguity of his original impulse. It’s writing under erasure. Time, memory, history, humanity and reconciliation inhabit his work.

It happened at some point. While I’ve been following Kentridge for a number of years, I missed the moment when he emerged as the artist for this generation. If you’re not conversant with his work. Seek him out, his work touches all the notes in the central narratives of our time. And indeed, time itself.

Working backwards, we start with Roland Barthes’ slim volume: The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes turns the phrase around, upside down, inside out; opens the dimensions of the words across several languages; and views it through the lens of dozens of thinkers and poets. The pleasure of the text and the text of pleasure.

If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer’s complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee– guarantee me, the writer– my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader’s “person” that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game.

Roland Barthes
The Pleasure of the Text

There’s the pleasure of the text itself, which is Barthes’ subject, and then there’s the pleasure of the activity of reading the text. The text has lead a cozy existence, tucked away in a folio as ink on paper. Its reading required only a clean, well-lighted place and a sufficiently comfortable chair. Requirements not lost on the large book retailers.

As the text lifts anchor and departs from its safe harbor of ink and paper, it will visit many ports before it finds an acceptable new reading environment. The fact that one can read text from a computer screen or a mobile phone does not mean that it’s a pleasurable experience.

In the act of reading, we often become so absorbed by the narrative that we lose sight of the mechanism by which the words enter the stream of our consciousness. It’s that flow, that lift off that the user experience of reading must enable.

But let’s take a step back. What happens when a reading experience falls short? Rather than each word pulling you toward the next, the reader must exert energy to pull herself from the current word to the next one. If the value of the text is high enough, the energy expended is offset, and a surplus of value remains. If the cost is too high; no reading takes place. There are many use cases where this kind of investment transaction provides value. Over time an investment in a complex transaction type leads to a higher skill level and better yield.

When reading for pleasure, we want the cost be very low, almost non-existent. And that gets us to the user experience of reading the digital text. Digital text has been available for many years, but the “all in” cost of reading has been too high. We’ve seen similar value equations with listening to MP3 files and using the Network through a mobile phone. The pieces were all there, but the user experience wasn’t right.

When will we know that the user experience of digital reading has found the right ratio? We’ll know when there is no experience of the activity of reading, but only the pleasure of the text.

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:

1. This library contains one-of-a-kind handwritten manuscripts
2. This library contains manuscripts and copies of manuscripts, both produced by hand
3. This library contains manuscripts, copies of manuscripts and printed books
4. This library contains printed books and audio/visual media encoded in celluloid, vinyl, recording tape and CD/DVD
5. This library contains printed books, encoded audio/visual/textual materials and a connection to the Network to view web pages
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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 Odyssey to 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.

Peter Handke
Song of Childhood

Arts organizations and charities swallowed hard when they looked at the fine print of President Obama’s budget. Tax deductions on charitable donations from the wealthy are to be further limited in the new plan. The New York Times reported on the ire of the charity industry.

Under the administration’s proposal, taxpayers earning more than $250,000 will have their ability to deduct contributions to charities reduced to a rate of 28 percent from a rate of 35 percent, according to an analysis by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations.

Professional fundraisers, while concerned, took a different view:

“Research has shown again and again that for major donors, taxes are at the bottom of their list of reasons why they make these gifts,� said Margaret Holman, a fund-raising adviser in New York. “They make these gifts because they love, are intrigued by, want to invest in their favorite charities.�

Most, if not all, of our country’s museums, symphonies, regional theaters and opera companies depend on the generosity of large donors. In this severe economic downturn large arts organizations have also seen a sharp reduction in the income generated by their endowments. And as people cut back on their expenditures, the sale of season’s and individual tickets will fall as well. While we focus on the nation’s banks and core industries, there’s a lot of collateral damage being done to our cultural institutions and working artists.

While there’s no such thing as a contribution limit for charities and the arts, one can’t help but compare their predicament with the campaigns of presidential candidates. Historically, winning campaigns have attracted the support and contributions of large donors. This is a continuation of a patronage model that is deeply rooted in the political economics of our history. The largess of the few was the only method of raising the significant sums of money required to run a national political campaign or a major arts organization.

The Obama presidential campaign changed the equation. By reaching out to everyone, employing the Network and lowering the cost of managing a very large number of small donations, Obama was able exceed the results of the traditional fundraising model. A simple way to think of it is to imagine the size and complexity of the social graph of the McCain campaign compared to the Obama campaign. The math is pretty simple, to raise equal amounts of money– how much, on average, needs to come from each node on the network?

To some extent, public broadcasting follows the model of casting a wider net with their pledge drives. The problem is that this method of fundraising is widely perceived as annoying and unpleasant. Donations are often simply made in exchange for bringing the pledge drive to a close. We pay our public broadcasters to stop dragging their fingernails across a blackboard and return to regular programming.

As the business models for public and private broadcasting (including newspapers) begin to converge, we are in dire need of some innovation in how funds are raised. Doc Searls has shown us one possible future with his PayChoice program.

PayChoice is a new business model for media: one by which readers, listeners and viewers can quickly and easily pay for the goods they use — on their own terms, and not just those of suppliers’ arcane systems.

The idea is to build a new marketplace for media — one where supply and demand can relate, converse and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by thousands of different silo’d systems, each serving to hold the customer captive.

At minimum an opportunity needs to be provided to donate after a great experience with an organization, as opposed to donating to make a bad experience stop. PayChoice is trying to make donations a user-initiated event– where value is paid for when it’s experienced. Needless to say, it’s easier to imagine complex systems than it is to lay down the pipes that would allow those kinds of transactions to flow.

In this era of transformation, arts organizations will need to examine their social graphs and the quality and frequency of the events transacted through them. They’ll need to decide whether they consider social media to be a mere toy, or the foundation of their future.

While we’ve been waiting for the convergence of media devices, we haven’t noticed that the media itself has already converged. We are all broadcasters now, whether in live performance or live over the Network. The potential points of connection have multiplied greatly, but remain largely unused and unappreciated. Just as Barack Obama’s campaign was able to connect and activate a very large network and benefit from those economics– arts organizations, and many businesses, will need to execute the same maneuver. Our relationships just got a little more complicated: they’re connected through the Network in real time, time-shifted, two-way, mobile and always on. The times they are a changing.

Christine Cariati, Deborah Franzini, and Victoria Kirby are participating in a three-part show at Back To The Picture Gallery where each artist explores nature in her own media.  Through use of texture, juxtaposed subjects, color, and technique, the artists invite the viewer to contemplate what it means to observe and be inspired by the natural world around us, even as we dwell within cities and constructed environments.

Paint, Print, Stitch
Reflections on Nature

February 28 – March 27
Back To The Picture Gallery
San Francisco, California

Opening Night Reception
February 28th