It’s a rare thing that I read a Doc Searls post and start shaking my head half way through. The recent $100 million investment in Twitter, bringing their valuation to $1 billion, has unleashed a torrent of criticism. Driving my daughter to school the other day, I heard an “analyst” on NPR chirp that Twitter couldn’t be worth $1 billion because it was just a fad, that people might stop using it tomorrow and the bottom would fall out. If using Twitter were a random activity that returned no value, I suppose that could be true. Just as people could decide to stop going to the movies, stop eating pizza or stop listening to “analysts” on NPR. If the value of something is disregarded at the start, it’s rather difficult to speak sincerely of valuation.
Searls’s criticism is a reprise of the open source silo meme. The drumbeat for the nationalization of Twitter has re-emerged. The capitalist pigs at Twitter have chosen to build a business rather than contribute their technology to the open source technology commons. Praise is sung for linux, rss, email and http. If only Twitter would see the light and release what they have to benefit the common good. Twitter’s business is just lumber from which other software developers should be allowed to create value. The complaint is that because Twitter is neither open nor decentralized, it has created an intractable engineering problem and does not contribute to the greater good of the web.
I would contend that Twitter is both open and distributed. Its characterization as a silo misses the point. Rather than using the silo as a criteria for openness, what if we look instead to the pipe. In the Unix command line, the standard output can be piped to the standard input of a new filter. Some very complex forms of processing can be created by chaining together a series of filters and piping data through it. The “chainability” of the javascript library Jquery is another good example of this model. The critique of the silo is its lack of interoperability, you can’t pipe to or from it.
Now, let’s look at Twitter. Can you pipe messages to Twitter? Can you pipe messages from Twitter? There was a time when I used Identi.ca as a primary micromessaging client. I typed messages into the Identi.ca web client and they entered the local pool, then I piped them to FriendFeed, where they also entered that ecosystem, FriendFeed sent them to Twitter, and Twitter sent them to Facebook. Examining this relay chain could you say that Twitter is a silo that owns my messages? Each of these venues represents a slightly different social graph and has a different tool set with which to display, prioritize and filter my messages within the context of the local graph. Twitter and Facebook are simply the most successful venues with which to read and write micro-messages (formerly called status messages). Google reader shares, SMS messages, Blog entries, et cetera can all be piped in and out of Twitter. Or if one prefers, Twitter can be left out of the chain entirely.
The mind share that Twitter and Facebook have built can’t be nationalized and distributed as lumber for a hypothetical socialist realist distributed micro-messaging ecosystem. If one is truly interested in open, look to the pipe, not the silo. Certainly there’s work that needs to be done on the pipe itself. Issues around real time, rate limiting, identity, social graphs, micro-communities, activity stream formats and track are all very important. But the real time stream environment is already here and operational. Many in the open source crowd are just rewinding the VCR and replaying the last battle. Steve Ballmer summed it up nicely in his interview with Mike Arrington, “we want to be first, best and interoperable.” Even Microsoft has embraced the pipe.
It began with a discussion of ornamentation. As we look around us, the ornament seems to be disappearing. The things we use have been stripped of ornamentation in favor of pure functionality. Form, we are taught, must follow function. Decoration is an unnecessary expense, as it adds nothing to the function of a manufactured thing. Ornament has lost the battle of Return on Investment.
“The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.
A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominanace in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution.”
These engineers were building the factories, bridges and railways that would provide the infrastructure for the industrial age. Style simply wasn’t a consideration.
“The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott.
The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.”
In 1923, Le Corbusier penned a book called ‘Toward a New Architecture‘ which outlined the principles of this new approach to the design of buildings. Again, from De Botton’s book:
For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture — meaning, architecture movtivated by the quest for efficiency — was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.
And with that prelude, we arrive at the web search engine and the use and meaning of ornament. There’s an interesting experiment currently being conducted called Blind Search. The creators of this test wonder what happens to a user’s perception of search results when all branding is removed. Google initially established itself by producing noticeably better search results. Now, established as a verb meaning “to search,” does Google still provide results that are visibly superior? The results indicate that Google still leads, but not by as much as you’d think: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. And putting the Google brand on any search results increases satisfaction.
In looking at the design of the Google user interface, we see the influence of Le Corbusier. The typographic logo is the only design on the page, and occasionally it is playfully re-imagined to commemorate notable events. Here, form follows function.
In his book, De Botton tries to articulate how we find beauty— the mechanics of what attracts us:
“We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally are deficient. We respect style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.”
While we may perceive the Network as vast, complex and opaque— with its simplicity Google’s design provides us with the antidote. Now look at this image of Microsoft’s Bing home page:
Bing’s user interface is decorated with a background image that gives a sense of what it does. I’m fairly certain that the image has no effect on the quality of the search results. Bing is attempting to provide a usage model for the consumption of faceted search results. Queries return both potential facets along with the traditional list of links. Bing is designed with both facets and links in mind, while Google appends facets to the bottom of the link list.
As the facets and links that search engines return become more and more indistinguishable, what is the difference that will make a difference? One could assume that there will always be an engineering innovation right around the corner that will make a significant and visible difference. We like to believe that progress is always linear.
Corporate brand clearly makes a difference, users like a brand name search product. Microsoft’s brand has been held in the background and a new brand has been established. Images have also been used to distinguish Bing. Ornamentation has been exiled for so long, it’s hard to understand how to even value it.
Let’s return again to Alain De Botton:
The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worth wile — which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of the good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forthrightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.
Le Corbusier’s aesthetic demanded design be “ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal.” He had a hatred of any kind of decoration. Google’s engineering aesthetic is a terminal design. Any competitor employing a purely functional design will unintentionally be referencing Google. There’s no way to get radically simpler than Google, and therefore no way to create enough space to allow for differentiation. The only alternative is to move back into ornament, into the decorative, into beauty.
While we may think of computerized search of the internet as a purely functional affair of ONEs and ZEROs, the simple lists of links are being pulled into organic forms by their facets. Human forms of life are surfacing in and through our search queries. Search results will begin to bloom into something that looks much more like a natural form than points and lines in a frictionless space. This moment may mark another turning point…
Next week I’m going to see Puccini’s Il Trittico (The Triptych) at San Francisco Opera. It’s comprised of three short operas: Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. Soprano, Patricia Racette will be performing the lead role in each story. It’s rare for a single performer to take on all three roles. Puccini started with the idea of three short operas about Dante’s Divine Comedy, but in the end only Gianni Schicchi maintained a connection.
Even if you don’t know opera, you may be familiar with an aria from Gianni Schicci, it’s called O mio babbino caro. Courtesy of YouTube, here are some renditions of that song.
Maria Callas
Renee Fleming
Anna Netrebko
And here’s a preview of the San Francisco Opera production of Il Trittico:
Il Trittico premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on December 14th, 1918.
Space/Name Space: “Syndication Doesn’t Make Sense In The Age Of The URL”
I’d like to take something Clay Shirky said out of context. First of all, here’s the context from which I’m going to extract the quote: Shirky gave a talk to a group of journalists about the forward visibility of what he calls “Accountability Journalism.” There are a couple excellent posts on Shirky’s talk by Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger. Both are highly recommended reading. The bottom line seems to be that while Shirky, at least, is beginning to be able to articulate why newspapers, as a media type, are unsustainable— visibility into the method by which “accountability journalism” will perdure is very limited. Listening to the Q&A after the talk brought to mind a song by Aimee Mann.
Oh, better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheroes
wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put baby together again
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put baby together again
Aimee Mann Humpty Dumpty, from the album Lost in Space
The journalists in attendance continued to sift through the pieces of egg shell looking for the formula that will put it all back together. I imagine them watching Shirky closely for some signal that pay walls or micro-payments just might be the glue for pieces they’ve been left holding.
Shirky makes clear that he values what “accountability journalism” provides— investigative journalism that holds people, corporations, governments and other institutions accountable for their actions is a crucial function in a democratic society. However, the notion that only newspapers, or news organizations, as they are currently constituted, can fill that need fails to heed the lessons of history.
And while the thread of this discussion is extremely important, I was taken off track by a phrase thrown out by Shirky in the middle of supporting one of his points. And this is where I’d like to remove this sentence from its context and treat it as a standalone fragment. It addresses the mechanics of distribution in space and name space:
“Syndication doesn’t make sense in the age of the URL, as AP has figured out, which is why they’re driving people towards their own content.�
Clay Shirky in a talk to the Shorenstein Center
for the Press, Politics and Public Policy
The business of syndication is distributing copies of material to non-overlapping localities in physical space. Something produced for one locality can be leveraged into new markets for the cost of sales and distribution. Electronic distribution changed the economics and size of addressable markets substantially. The mechanisms of redistribution generally take the form of local newspapers, television and radio stations. In order for the model to work, there must be a high barrier to entry for local redistribution endpoints.
The qualities of physical space— distance and nearness are the medium through which syndication operates. As McLuhan notes, under electronic information conditions, everything changes. Once there’s a shift from physical space to name space, the concept of distance evaporates. When the Network is the distribution channel, what’s the difference between remote distribution and local distribution? Access via URL obviates syndication, distribution is direct. There’s no business model for local redistribution of remotely produced media product.
It’s interesting that we model physical syndication in technical formats like RSS. Media content is transported from an originating production facility to remote reading machines. The sales proposition is a reversal of transportation energy. Rather than you expending energy “going” to a news source, the news source expends energy “pushing” the news to you. News distribution takes the form of file transfer from over there to my local computer. The value of the pushed news stream is in the editorial decisions around feed subscription. There’s no item level granularity, so while the aggregation of feeds is a substantial advance, it’s only in “shared item” feeds that we start to see the possibility of filtering tools to produce high value synthetic feeds.
The URL, the hyperlink, has allowed readers to tear up the New York Times and share the interesting parts through multiple messaging buses. As Shirky notes, the publication is reassembled on the demand side. This feed of high-value items doesn’t require transport of the items from here to there. In a broadband environment, a playlist of URLs (tweets) delivers the news without moving an inch.
When we use the metaphor of physical space to think through economics of a name space, we end up like the journalists staring at Clay Shirky looking for a sign that everything is going to be all right.
I’m a fan of the opera. And generally when I bring it up in normal conversation, I can see a barrier form. Opera is high art, high culture, expensive— it’s for rich people, old money preferred. There’s a very thick wall between most people and attending an opera. When examined from a monetary perspective, the results are quite interesting. Buying a single ticket (without a season’s subscription) to see an opera at the San Francisco Opera will cost you between $15 and $210. If you’d like to sit in a box seat, it’ll cost $275.
If you wanted to see the band U2 in a stadium this summer, a single ticket will set you back between $30 and $250. A Bruce Springsteen ticket will cost you between $29 and $89. Rock and Roll was originally considered low art, low culture— something on the fringe of popular culture. Through the 60s and 70s, it slowly moved to the mainstream of popular culture. Pop culture is abundantly distributed in multiple distribution formats, it’s on the radio and television. You can buy it on CD and MP3 download, and you can preview it on Lala.com or YouTube.com. The price of a ticket is related to the phenomena of scarcity. There are only so many performances, and a fixed number of seats available for each performance.
Of course, opera was popular entertainment and part of popular culture for many years. However now, more often than not, it’s used as a signal of class differential.
The barrier that some feel when approaching opera isn’t related to the ticket price. For a medium priced seat there’s no difference between grand opera and any other popular entertainment. It has to do with the distribution of the free part of opera. Popular music is sampled widely to create a demand for performances and sales of recordings. There’s a dynamic feedback loop between exposure to an art form and interest in an art form.
Many people find baseball boring because they don’t understand the nuances of the game. It seems like nothing happens for inning after inning. And then, there’s a quick flurry of activity, and then back to nothing. A single ticket to a baseball game falls into the same range as an opera or rock concert ticket. To see the Giants (for a premium game), your ticket will cost you between $25 and $135.
Baseball, rock music and opera all depend on their stars to draw and audience. For the San Francisco Giants, I might prefer going to a game where I know that Tim Lincecum is pitching and that Pablo Sandoval will be in the line up.
If I get to see these players, I know that my chances of seeing something spectacular are much higher. It’s that possibility of excitement combined with the scarcity of the performance and the limited number of seats that defines the value/price of the event.
Opera also depends on its stars to draw an audience, in particular, its divas. On Wednesday night, I attended a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore (The Troubador) at San Francisco Opera. Looking at the line up card, I could see that there was the possibility of seeing something spectacular. Nicola Luisotti at Conductor, Burak Bilgili as Ferrando, Sondra Radvanosvsky as Leonora, Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the Count di Luna and the great Stephanie Blythe as Azucena. The team delivered, as the last note faded the crowd leapt to its feet shouting bravo and brava.
The grand opera is often thought of as a refined entertainment, an art form that considers the higher values of our culture. But Verdi’s Il Trovatore is nothing more than animal passion unleashed. A Count orders an old Gypsy woman to be burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft. The gypsy’s daughter steals the infant son of the Count and throws it into a fire. A revolutionary war revolves around the passion two men feel about the beautiful Leonora. The Count di Luna obsessed with Leonora will commit any war crime to possess her. The gypsy Azucena will do anything to exact revenge for the death of her mother. These forces are unleashed without limit within the narrative of the opera. It’s the women that drive the story forward: Leonora and the men who lust after her; and the gypsy Azucena and her single-minded obsession with revenge.
Performances not to missed: Sondra Radvanosksy as Leonora. Here she is singing an aria from Il Trovatore:
Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe also delivers as Azucena. Here she is in concert, singing an aria from Bizet’s Carmen:
This evening baseball and opera will intersect at AT&T park. In cooperation with the San Francisco Giants, San Francisco Opera will present a free HD simulcast of Il Trovatore at the ballpark. High culture and low culture mix and intermingle. Arias and hot dogs with plenty of mustard. Families spreading out a blanket on the infield and enjoying the high passion of Verdi’s opera. The gigantic emotions and passions of Il Trovatore will expand to fill the ballpark.
Here’s a preview of San Francisco Opera’s Il Trovatore:
Earlier this year, the Giants and SF Opera presented Puccini’s Tosca at the Ballpark. About 30,000 people showed up to enjoy the show. I expect to see a similar turn out for Il Trovatore. After Tosca was over, and the crowd began to leave, I noticed a young girl turn to her mother and say, “that was a great opera Mom.”
Charles Darwin: The Evolution of Film Distribution
A film about the life of Charles Darwin called “Creation” recently debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. The film hasn’t found a distributor in the United States. The word is that film distributors are concerned about a backlash from the religious right. It’s interesting to observe the effect of fear and intimidation on our culture and the circulation of thought.
The absence of this film from the American market is a signal of an inflection point in the evolution of film distribution. Routing around the installed movie theater infrastructure will be enabled by a number of technologies including: semi-pro “home” theater, HD video distribution via the Network, and Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Movie theaters used to require that the projector be physically present in the theater. In the Network, every point in space is next to every other. The beam of light emitted by the projector can now be routed through the Network to any set of screens. It will much more difficult to block distribution through this kind of Network. Although I hope I don’t have to wait for the mechanics of natural selection to become operative before I have an opportunity to see this film.
We, perhaps, misunderstand silence. We think of it as the absence of sound. Or the absence of music. We might think the same silence fills each absence. But silence itself, is always full, whenever there is a listener.
In John Cage’s work 4:33, the performer and the audience become one. Every assembly of witnesses marks a different social graph, listens through a different network of consciousness, a different set of dreams.
The (TV) Guide is Broken: And Now Everything is TV
There’s an old joke that time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. But more and more, it seems like everything is happening at once.
Where television channels used to offer one program at a time, one after the other, laid out along a time line, now there are an infinite number of channels. To the extent that programming is recorded, or recorded live for broadcast, it can be tuned in on demand. Programs don’t need to unravel at a particular time on a schedule anymore. We’ve entered the era of random access; everyone can be watching different shows on the same channel— because it’s the watching that is the channel, not the broadcasting.
Live broadcasts used to be so labor and infrastructure intensive that it wasn’t possible to go live with more than one signal. Many broadcasters now emit multiple signals—different mixes and playlists of programming.
Assume for a moment that broadcast video/audio will move entirely to the internet—the new Network. How will you know what’s on? When everything that exists is on at the same time—how do you choose? This problem is similar to deciding which book to check out from a public library. The selection set you walk into the library with doesn’t include every book on the shelves.
I hate cable television listings because they present everything equally in a grid. And, of course, this is Comcast’s product—I understand that TiVo is much better. The schedule of programs knows nothing about me, therefore it presents everything in the equivalent of a comma separated value file with sub-primitive tools to work with the data. Everyone gets the same bad listing of a 1000 streams. There’s a sense in which this is the same problem users have with RSS readers and Twitter streams. Rolling cable television listings look disturbingly like an RSS or Twitter stream. They’re a linear representation of simultaneous data.
The suggested solution isn’t really a solution. It’s simply the acceptance that you’ll miss things that would be valuable for you to see. It’s noted that since you can’t completely consume a multivalent, multi-threaded real-time stream, instead you must simply jump in from time to time. When you jump out, you miss what you miss— and that’s okay. As with phone calls, if it’s important, they’ll call back.
With so much programming simultaneously available, its value is significantly reduced. Experiencing something and not experiencing it have a roughly equivalent value. This corresponds to the idea: The more information, the less significant information is. The less information, the more significant it is. Philip Roth put it this way: in Eastern Europe (before the fall of the wall) nothing is permitted but everything matters; with us, everything is permitted but nothing matters.
More and more we live in simultaneous time with links that provide us with random access to an almost infinite number of connections. The index was the first tool that was attempted, but the map could not keep up with the rapid growth of the territory. The search engine using a citation algorithm was the next tool. This would be a welcome method to discover when a program was on, when a program with an actor was on, when a program by a writer was on. More complex queries would enable more advanced discovery.
Why did the girl throw the clock out the window? To see time fly.
But as we live in simultaneous time so do the things that we experience. As McLuhan noted, everything has become television, streams of text, video and audio sensory data. We aren’t matching the grid of our daily schedule to a grid of programming. The grid is an artifact of linear time. The selection set in simultaneous time doesn’t contain everything, it emerges from a swarming micro-community in real time. The infinite universe is bounded by the social graph, but it expands into infinity through six degrees of separation.
The new guide leverages the swarm, the social graph, the real time network and track. So, what’s on?
In Beckett’s Endgame, the character Hamm says: “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” The beginning, however always seems to emerge from the middle. The release of the remastered Beatles Catalog has caused me to replay memories of listening to their music as it was originally released. And as I listen to the new releases (at this point, I only have Rubber Soul), the music isn’t heard directly, but through the lens of the intervening years. The music travels backwards and forwards through time connecting to a thousand threads, its sound resonant with reverie.
From this distance, I see the arc of the band beginning with Rubber Soul, continuing with Revolver and ending with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The time period spans 1965 to 1967. Of course, they performed and recorded before and after those dates, but this is the period where they seemed to really come into their own. The times were tumultuous, culture and technology were changing rapidly and the Beatles provided much of the soundtrack. The distance from Rubber Soul to Sgt. Pepper seems like it could only be measured in light years.
In the film Help, they presented an image of what it was like to be in a successful rock and roll band. The lads were friends and collaborators, they lived together, worked together, and enjoyed each other’s company. They serve as an extended family to each other; they inhabit a world without parents, wives or children. On Rubber Soul, you can begin to hear each member of the band start out on a path that will ultimately end in a parting of ways. I’m going to focus on the work of John Lennon and George Harrison. (You can do this same exercise for Paul and Ringo). By this time, they’d met Dylan, psychedelia was emerging and the idea of a rock band as a social unit was beginning to feel a little hokey. The band’s popularity had started to cut them off from both the world and their identity as performing musicians.
John Lennon had a tragic relationship with his mother, and it colored his relationship with women all his life. The line I’d like to trace here is from the song “Run For Your Life” with it’s violent lyrics about jealously and fidelity to a later, solo effort, called “Jealous Guy.” The movement within Lennon reflected the movement and growth of our culture. A similar arc can be traced from the song “Girl” to the song “Woman.”
The idealized relationship of the band as a kind of endless post-adolescence was beginning break up, as each of the members had to struggle with their own inner demons and find an individual path (the path to adulthood).
George Harrison’s contribution to Rubber Soul was a song called “Think For Yourself.” In the lyrics of this song you can see the seeds of Harrison’s future direction:
Although your mind’s opaque
Try thinking more if just for your own sake
The future still looks good
And you’ve got time to rectify all the things that you should
One can trace an arc from that song to Harrison’s solo work, specifically songs like “Isn’t it a Pity” and “Beware of Darkness.”
Watch out now, take care
Beware of soft shoe shufflers
Dancing down the sidewalks
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
Beware of maya
As with the beginning, the end, too, emerges from the middle. The Sgt. Pepper album marked the end of the Beatles as a performing group and the beginning a new era of recording artistry. The asynchronous process of recording the album put additional stress on their unit cohesion. Ringo remembers those recording sessions as the time when he learned to play chess. The recording studio had become the dominant instrument, and the producer’s role central to the creative process. The resulting album marked the pinnacle of their success.
Around this time in Woodstock, New York, Bob Dylan’s backing band was creating an album that would be known as Music from Big Pink. It was the polar opposite of Sgt. Pepper. The group would eventually be called “The Band,” and they presented a new idea of what it meant to be in a performing rock and roll band. Their sound was firmly, and visibly, rooted in the sounds of American country music, early rock and roll and the Stax/Motown sound. After Sgt. Pepper, each member of the Beatles tried to move the group back toward being a performing unit. But the music was now Paul with a backing band, John with a backing band and so on. The Beatles were over.
The release of the remastered Beatles catalog provides an opportunity to really listen to the music, and the quality of the sound they created. I’m retracing my footsteps, starting with Rubber Soul. It may take 20 or 30 listens for me to truly hear it. Then I’ll move on to Revolver, and finally to Sgt. Pepper. Over 36 months, The Beatles’ music changed radically, it traces an unexpected and expansive route. As they used to say, “it blows my mind.”
I paid less attention to the work George Harrison the first time around. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate him more and more. One of the things that brought me back around to Harrison was this cover of his song Isn’t it a Pity by the Cowboy Junkies:
The boundary line separates this from that. National boundaries are called borders, they indicate the line of demarcation between this country and that. By crossing such a line, the set of laws, the cultural practices and often the spoken language will change. Of course, one imagines a flock of migrating birds crossing a border completely unaware of any significant change in the environment. We think of the line between countries as being stable, the power of a sovereign nation is used to defend its borders. But if we zoom out and select a larger increment of time, we would see that even national borders are fluid—they move with a specific viscosity, velocity and trajectory.
The line also connects this and that. Wittgenstein discussed thinking as a process of seeing connections, discovering connections and making connections. Lines can converge, cross or run in parallel. (and if we admit the visions of the string, super-string and M (membrane) theorists – each line may exist in parallel universes where all their permutations are expressed.)
The line of inquiry, tends, in its character, to gravitate toward the one or the many. We can think of these methods as the “either/or” and the “both/and.” The line of inquiry that models the one seeks to purify and clarify itself, it cuts off connections to things that it sees as outside of its concept. A boundary line is enforced, an outline of a shape is drawn, an ideal template is generated through which the world can be sorted and filtered in a binary action (fits, doesn’t fit). The ideas of internal coherence, self-consistency, and conceptual integrity emerge from this approach to thinking as the elimination and reduction of the multiplicity of meaning. This is the process of clarification and the removal of the non-germane. The power of this kind of inquiry is measured by its ability to defend its borders. Its sovereignty and its identity depend of the continued existence of a bright line of demarcation.
When this mode of the line of inquiry begins to unwind, its identity, the central image/concept begins to blur. The borders are breached, foreign connections are established and begin to gain purchase. The viscosity, trajectory and velocity of the line are now in play, the inquisitor has lost exclusivity of editorial control. Here we connect to another kind of line. As lines of inquiry unravel and are overcome, they disperse into a sedimentary layer making up part of the next line of inquiry.
If we take a step back, we can see that every line of inquiry is composed of layers of sediment. At the height of its power, it’s able to cover over these historical sources and present itself as a simple, coherent, consistent identity. Its origin is either proclaimed to be ex-nihilo or a new history of its birth is created.
In the opening section of Deleuze and Guattari’s essay “Rhizome,” it says:
We wrote ‘Anti-Oedipus’ together. As each of us was several, that already made quite a few people. Here we have used all that drew near to hand, both the closest and the furthest away.
Deleuze sees the starting point, not as identity, but as a set of lines. Although it should be noted that the boundaries of this set are fluid. A person, or a line of inquiry, is always already composed of many threads, at whatever moment we choose to call ‘the start.’ These threads are spun into a yarn, braided into rope, disassembled and remade over and over again. They are spread out like a spider’s web, or wound into a ball.
As individuals and groups we are made of lines, lines that are very diverse in nature. The first type of line (there are many of this type) that forms us is segmentary, or rigidly segmented: family/profession; work/vacation; family/then school/then army/then factory/then retirement.
What of the line of inquiry that begins as many and seeks to connect to many? Is there a thinking that asks after multiplicity from the first moment? This mode, from the perspective of its polar opposite, can only be described as disruptive, anarchic, incoherent, gibberish, illogical, unrealistic, unfocused. What can one say about a line of inquiry that doesn’t defend its borders? A line that exposes its mixed origin of birth— from sources both ‘closest and furthest away.’ What kind of line doesn’t drive toward clarity and sharp, bright lines; but rather makes connections as they emerge. How are we to find meaning in such a swirl of chaotic crossed lines. Can meaning emerge from such a maelstrom?
The task seems impossible if we remain ensnared in the logic of identity. If we believe that each intersection of lines must establish identity and dominance or be defeated and ground into a sedimentary layer of its betters. (The logic of identity is also tightly tied to the economics of value through scarcity.)
It’s inevitable that the whirl-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens… we can get through . (McLuhan 1995)
For a line of inquiry that consists of seeing, discovering and making connections, meaning and value emerge from the swarming and clustering of connections in the unfolding of real-time. Meaning and value have the potential to be very fluid. The sorts and filters aren’t permanent exclusions, they’re qualities of a view. What is important to us one day may seem unimportant the next. This is not to say that meaning a value must always move at a high velocity. These lines have different qualities of viscosity, some move very slowly, some quite quickly. Meaning emerges at the point at which we engage the interface.
The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems… are immersing us in a whirlpool of information… the aloof and dislocated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new intense depth participation… decentralising – rather than enlarging – the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. (McLuhan 1995)
These lines, these borders, are surfacing with more visibility in our everyday lives. The borderline between work, family and friends used to be a physical line defined by the boundaries of a workplace. The telephone began the disruption of that space, and thus, the personal phone call was prohibited or limited. This same policy has transferred to a personal connection to the Network. Control of a corporate image means that employees must be silent. The brand must speak with a clear and pure voice— all signal, noise absent.
The iPhone expanded the disruption by overlaying a powerful personal Network connection over the limited connection of the workplace. An inversion of the relative power of technologies has amplified the rupture. If the Network is the computer, the personal connection has access to the computer; while the corporate connection wears blinders. Access to multiplicity provides more access to power, value and meaning, than the narrow scope of the corporate machine.
Women were the first to have to deal with the reality of multiple (social) networks overlaying the workplace. They have the potential to be simultaneously workers, mothers, daughters, wives and more. Men were only too happy to leave their role as ‘father’ at home— and exist solely as a worker in the workplace. The ability of a worker to be all the people she can be may ultimately surface as a civil rights issue.
The boundaries of the Network and the Nation State begin to cross and struggle for power when the US State department asks Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance because of real-time events in the Middle East. This is the beginning of a moment where the Nation state will inscribe its sovereignty within the outlines of the Network. The borders of a territory are surfacing as both physical and virtual.
Borders will continue to try to control lines of connection; the question that emerges is whether the locus of power, meaning and value is moving toward the line of connection, and away from the boundary line that excludes.
