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Category: digital

A Cloud of Unknowing: The Machine and The Tribe

Published May 6, 2008 by cgerrish

Cloud

The number of web pages on the network is at around 20 billion. The rate of growth of that number continues to rise. We describe the “space” that these pages occupy as a cloud. The number of travelers through the network cloud continues to increase as well.

The cloud is opaque. While everything is a click away; visibility is close to zero. The only visibility we have to other locations is through the presence of hyperlinks on a page. Were we to stand at the boundary of a collection of pages and attempt to peer in to the cloud to see contiguous space, we would see nothing.

Think of destinations and starting points on the network. Where do you start and where do you end up? A search engine that indexes all 20 billion pages can potentially link you to every possible destination on the network. A start page, or portal, provides a curated collection of links giving you visibility into the new and the popular. Sometimes the hyperlinks of a portal are only inward looking within its own small collection. Other times the links connect outward as well. While portals provide search, they are fundamentally different ways of looking into the cloud.

We are blind as we travel through the cloud; we cannot see beyond our current page. To understand the success of search engines as a business you must realize that they provide a sense of vision into the darkness. A third method of seeing is emerging, and its impact is growing daily. We are gathering as tribes on web sites that enable social networks within the cloud. When we want to know what’s out there and what’s worth traveling to, we ask our friends.

When confronted with a cloud of unknowing, do we turn to the absolute knowledge of the machine or our flawed set of human relations?

 

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The Agility of the Book in the face of the Digital and the Censor

Published May 4, 2008 by cgerrish

Tim Tate: Video book artist

I have shelves of books, some that trace back all the way to my childhood. A few others were passed on to me from my grandfather, through my father. I expect my long relationship with books will continue throughout my lifetime. However, the book seems to be in transition, and it’s not clear if the current package can survive the challenge of the digital. As a non-volatile storage medium, the book has many virtues, and currently provides substantial value. In the shadow of this looming threat, the book has inserted itself into my thoughts recently through two upcoming shows:

San Francisco Center for the Book
Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship 
In the Gallery: Fri Aug 15 – Wed Nov 26
Opening Reception: Fri Aug 15, 6-8pm

Donna Seager Gallery
The Art of the Book
Third Annual Exhibition of Handmade and Altered Artist Books 
April 25 – May 31, 2008
Reception for the Artist: Friday, May 9, 6 to 8pm

The Center for the Book show will feature artists reacting to the act of censorship and the recovery of texts and thoughts. The show at Donna Seager’s  gallery features artists exploring the form and expanding the meaning of what it means to be a book. When artists engage with books at this level, there is a profound conversation that occurs outside of language. It’s an excellent reminder that substantial thought can occur across many modes of expression.

The artist book is generally singular; it’s not meant to be mass produced as an inexpensive package for text or images. In that sense, it’s the opposite of what has made the book successful as a form. The digital is no threat here. The artist book is singular and original, the digital is a copy at its origin. The leaves of an artist book aren’t limited to text and images; and the book form itself explodes out to its boundaries and beyond. We’ve lived with the classic form of the book for so long that it’s become part of us. A show like “The Art of the Book” reminds us that even with a familiar object, an infinite realm of possibility abides in every moment. And the book reveals itself to be an agile species changing its form to adapt to new artistic landscapes.

The question of banning a book in the age of the digital is an interesting one. One might ask if it’s even possible. Certainly we’ve seen books banned by governments, by school systems, religions and other social collections. And yet, it’s not the form of the book that is being banned, it’s the ideas and stories that are considered dangerous. All books aren’t banned, just certain ones. The digital and the network make it much more difficult to stop ideas through the banning a particular package and delivery method.

Our country’s history of banning books is a series of markers on our trek toward a more perfect union. As we contemplate the banned book, we need to look both backward and forward. In the future, it may not be the book that is banned—and interestingly, that could provide a new opening for a kind of book to route around the ideologically filtered network.

The work at the top of this post is by Tim Tate, and is called “Page 100 of Each Volume of the 1954 World Book Encyclopedia.” Mr. Tate has created a compelling vision in which a book is revealed through cast glass, electronics and video. As the book traces its evolutionary arc, it emerges here for a moment or two as an interesting kind of amphibian.

 

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Personal Data Management: Mesh, Evernote, the Atom and the Wave

Published April 29, 2008 by cgerrish

A couple of early observations about MS Mesh:

Storage space will need to be unlimited and permanent. Imagine a 7 year old starting to use Mesh today. What will their data storage, connection and organization requirements look like in 20 years? Why should anyone need to delete anything ever?

It’s early yet, but it seems like there’s a missed opportunity around changing the desktop and folders metaphor. The single stream tag and search metaphor allows every object to be tagged (or filed) in many categories at once and retrieved along many facets. As the stream of data that is pointed at the Mesh grows, the idea having to drag things to folders stops making sense.

Although not a platform, Evernote does a good job of allowing you to save things to a storage space using multiple devices. They have Web, Phone, PC and Mac clients and you can send items via email. Tagging is already in place, but it doesn’t current support standard feed protocols or SMS. And it doesn’t support both individual and group storage, or have a newslog of system activity.

The physics of personal data storage seems to come down to the atom and the wave. Are things to be stored individual objects or are they streams? The answer is that they exist as both depending on your perspective. Can you mix the metaphor? Can you put a stream in a folder?

While not strictly competing, it will be interesting to compare these two services as they go forward. Complexity and simplicity are large factors in user acceptance. The service that can be most useful to digital natives will eventually go viral. What would a digital native save? And how would they like to access it?

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In Dialogue: Shirky, Anderson, Bateson and Schumacher

Published April 29, 2008 by cgerrish

Technology annihilates distance. There are some good things about that and some bad. While it’s at it, I’d also like technology to do something about time. I’m reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” and I can’t help but want to thread some conversations together. Unfortunately, time gets in the way. I guess I’m looking for something like what Norman O. Brown created with his book “Closing Time.” Two texts rubbing up against each other, Brown put James Joyce and Giambattista Vico into conversation across time.

I keep imagining a conversation between Gregory Bateson, E.F. Schumacher, Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson. It’s the podcast I’d like to listen to on the BART train tomorrow morning. Time prevents that from happening. When will technology do something about that? Perhaps it doesn’t have to, if I listen closely enough, I can hear hear the texts in conversation.

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