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Category: collaboration

Live Web’s Point of Contact: The 5th Guy in the Room

Published August 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Walter Benjamin

There’s a sense in which the digital is a copy at its origin. It has no uniqueness, no originality. The difference between the first copy and subsequent copies is just a time stamp in the file system.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin was thinking about the digital before it existed:

That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the ‘aura’ of the work of art. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition and substitutes plurality of copies for a unique existence.

– Walter Benjamin

The digital seems like a black hole, a format that is non-auratic at its core. While digital files can be very amusing, can they ever have the ‘aura’ and unique presence of the original work of art? As we look at the digital objects surrounding us, it seems as though we could be having one of Phillip K. Dick’s nightmares.

Layering the digital on top of the digital, mashing up a new media venue reveals a real time moment that has an originality at the point of contact. Live radio broadcast over the real time web creates a moment of danger, imperfection and improvisation. I’m not talking about commercial radio stuffed down another channel, but the kind of stuff that is emerging from micro-communities within the social web. While these files can be consumed on a digital delay, at the present moment of their creation they show every sign of having an ‘aura.’ You can see it happen sometimes with live music, and in rare cases with comedy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a kind of spark or electricity that happens when you can actually hear people listening to each other. The members of the Firesign Theater are eloquent on this point:

“There was no leader,” Bergman says. “Everything was communally written, and if one person didn’t agree about something, no matter how strongly the other three felt about it, it didn’t go in.” This principle was to hold true with each subsequent Firesign effort because, as Bergman explains, “If one of us doesn’t get it then something’s wrong. But if we get it, then it doesn’t matter who else does.” All the Firesigns agree, however, that a mysterious synergy took place whenever the four of them got together. “It’s like, suddenly there is this fifth guy that actually does the writing,” Austin says. “We all vaguely sort of know him, and a lot of the time take credit for him.”

– Phil Austin

The real time web has the potential to offer redemption to the digital, the return of the detached aura in that moment of creation. While the digital has proven itself as a bread winner, it’s only just now learning how to dance.

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TwitterVision: Generative Infotainment

Published July 20, 2008 by cgerrish

Signal Path for Producing Discreet Music: Eno

I downloaded the TwitterVision app for the iPhone last week. But I didn’t really get a chance to look at it until I had an in-between moment last night while visiting a friend’s new house up on a hill in Fairfax. Left to my own devices for a few minutes, I pulled out my iPhone and touched the TwitterVision icon. Suddenly I was seeing a stream of Tweets from people I didn’t know from all over the world. Seeing those personal moments, many of them in-between moments, brought a smile to my lips– and, of course, started a train of thought.

This kind of engagement brought to mind what’s variously been called furniture music, discreet music or ambient music. This kind of music has many origins, I first became aware of it through the music of Erik Satie and Brian Eno. Eno first discussed the concept in the liner notes to his album Discreet Music.

In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.

In the liner notes to Music for Airports, the concepts had become more refined:

Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

TwitterVision strikes me as this same kind of engagement. It accommodates many different levels of engagement. There’s a sense in which it’s always on, and always changing, much in the way that generative music can create music algorithmically that can have a duration of 1 year or 10,000 years. It’s a kind of engagement that works very well for our in-between moments, the moments where the system puts us in a holding pattern. We provide our own hold music.

The pertinent correlation is the input that Twitter provides and the way that it’s incorporated into the loop. This area of exploration was opened by Terry Riley and his Time Lag Accumulator and by Brian Eno’s Frippertronics, signal delay processor. The cowpaths and paved roads from experimental music seem to point to the future layers that will be built out on top of Twitter. Stay tuned.

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@SteveGillmor : Plan B, and Playing ‘Dealer’ in Real Time

Published June 3, 2008 by cgerrish

Lightning

There are moments when a crucible unleashes both light and heat. In Michael Hiltzik’s book Dealers of Lightning there’s a description of a weekly meeting run by Bob Taylor at Xerox Parc’s Computer Science Lab in the 1970s. The meeting was just known as “Dealer.” The name was derived from the book about blackjack called  “Beat the Dealer,” by an MIT Math professor named Edmund O. Thorpe.

In casino blackjack the dealer plays against everyone at the table. In Taylor’s variant a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it from dissection by his peers. …The pitiless judgements dispensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught that an answer can be right or wrong, “one” or “zero,” but not anything in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half right, or had made a decent try.

The output of Xerox Parc and Bob Taylor’s meetings was nothing short of personal computing as we know it today. Every element of the graphic user interface, networking, social behavior over electronic communication media, the laptop, the Macintosh, object oriented programing, ethernet — found its origin in that fertile period.

I thought of ‘Dealer’ while listening to the Gillmor Gang talk to FriendFeed co-founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. The Gang was trying to teach Bret and Paul the old lesson that the street has its own uses for things. Feeding friends is one thing, but understanding that you have an opportunity to tap into a strong current of the zeitgeist is another.

You can listen to Dealer Live here:

To understand the show’s theme of Plan B, you sorta needed to be listening all along. The writing is a sound check of the ongoing jam session, the riffs are well established and the players all have distinctive sounds. It’s a textual interlude in the orchestral maneuvers of the fierce urgency of now.  If you have an “A,” it’s the “B” that creates the positive bid-to-cover ratio. The basic idea is that markets create the demand for common technical standards. And there’s an irresistible movement of the Network toward the real time flow of interactions. Real time interactions on the Network have had a limited scope. The “track” function in Twitter has opened a window to a powerful set of new interactions. “Track” works because Twitter is a primary market for gestures, but if @Ev, @Biz and @Jack don’t understand the lightning they’ve unleashed, those of us who’ve had a taste will need to consider Plan B.

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Intermediation 2.0: The New Rhizomatic Economy

Published May 22, 2008 by cgerrish

In the spirit of assigning numbers to ideas, I introduce Intermediation 2.0– a new era of data wholesalers and value-added retailers.

Retail distribution’s primary value in physical space is coverage of relevant geography, it’s about location. The Network annihilated distance and a wave of disintermediation followed.

Mahalo, Summize, Friend Feed, Mint, Techmeme, Twhirl, Newsgang and even Google Friend Connect take wholesale data feeds and add value through a transformation of the raw data, the addition of tools, and sometimes curation.

The first generation was Amazon, Travel aggregators, and the news/RSS readers. What makes Intermediation 2.0 possible is the emergence and recognition of new valuable wholesale data feeds. Twitter as a wholesale full-stream event based XMPP feed establishes a new economy around making that stream more valuable to the user.

The question hanging over this new economy is the threat that another round of disintermediation will follow. Developers have bitter memories of platform vendors incorporating their software products into the platform without compensation.

This is where the new Rhizomatic Economy emerges. If 75% of Twitter exists through API usage, the growth and extension of the Twitter stream depends on retailing partners. Twitter improves and grows by providing better API functionality to its partners. Twitter benefits through better distribution and fosters faster innovation.

The days of the totalizing whole, the drive to monopoly and hegemony, of being locked in the trunk, are coming to an end.

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