I remember there times when I was younger that I could stay up very late watching television. Everyone else had gone to bed, and I was by myself, bathed in the blue glow surrounded by darkness. It was a guilty pleasure. Usually it was some late night movie from the 1940s. I consider these experiences as part of my visual and cultural education.
When the movie was over, the broadcast day ended. To cap things off there were some announcements and then the ceremonial showing of the film “High Flight.” I remember the images of a jet plane flying, dancing through the clouds, while an overwrought poem was read in an earnest, solemn voice. It was the marker, the ceremony at the end of night. Then perhaps, a brief test pattern– and the oblivion of snow blending with my oncoming dreams.
Static on your television is random emissions of electrons from the cathode of your CRT onto the phosphor screen. Cosmic rays, (not really rays but protons or alpha particles), penetrate our atmosphere with extreme uniformity and the density is fairly well known. There is a statistical probability, then, that some of the dots on your screen are caused by them. But you can never know which ones.
That sort of ending has been pushed to the edges. In the center, the city never sleeps, the eye is unblinking, the sun shines brightly at midnight. Consciousness, or a form of it, no longer flashes its wakefulness as dawn breaks across the spinning time zones, receding as the night grows dark. The waking life and dreaming life blend in a Network that is always lit up– sleeping with the lights on.
“sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled”
-George Santayana
While you slept, the storytellers continued unwinding their threads. The story continued to unfold– and as you awake you find yourself walking into a program already in progress. But is it really any different than any other day? Didn’t the world always already spin millions of different stories outside of your earshot? It’s the points of connection, the spots where your story connects with the stories of others– that’s the bit that matters. That’s the web of connections now visible in real time.
The question is posed regarding the current status of the signifier “Open” as deployed in the dialog about the technological infrastructure that underpins the world around us. “Open” is a battle cry, a sledgehammer, a cause, a stance, a secret weapon, a manifesto, a politics, and a call for transparency. The warriors of “Open” sit around the campfire and tell stories of the historic battle, it was 10 minutes to midnight and “Closed” had almost succeeded in its diabolical mission of total hegemony. Given that small slice of daylight to maneuver, these brave warriors were able to push back the night. No official end of hostilities were ever declared, and so we’ve settled into an era of a restless armistice, eternal vigilance, and the dull gray skies of a cold war.
We like to think in binary oppositions, so “Open” takes its place across the aisle from “Closed.” In its driest form we try to drain the blood and passion from these opposing forces and create logical truth tables appropriately filled in with the tokens “true” and “false.” At the other end of the spectrum, we paint a mask on the face our opposition and call them by the name “enemy.”
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
“Open” and “Closed” are perceived as mutually exclusive possible futures; and any resolution to the conflict would require the elimination of one or the other. From “Open’s” perspective “Closed” must disavow its nature, and pledge allegiance to “Open” and its attendant laws and moral codes. “Closed” learned that the price of total victory was much too high, but to disavow its nature and allow the plunder of its assets was unacceptable as well.
There’s a natural tendency to attempt to preserve the ecosystem of a binary opposition, and an economy and political structure grows up around it to maintain a stable state. But there’s another kind of thing that happens when a thesis and antithesis engage in a dialectical interaction. Hegel called this aufhebung, which is generally translated as sublation.
In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing (the German verb aufheben means both “to cancel” and “to keep”). The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.
The background music to this conflict has been the growth of the Network. That music has now pushed itself to the foreground. It’s fundamentally changed both the terrain of the conflict and the meaning of each side. In a network, the question isn’t: are you now, or have you ever been “Closed?” The question is: can you connect to other nodes and exchange information with them? The heterogeneous nature of the Network has already been established– value and the capacity to connect are now inextricably linked.
The emergence of XML has served as a Rosetta Stone for the Network. A story that could have unfolded like the Tower of Babel or the Confusion of Tongues, instead has evolved a mechanism to enable trade between countries of different faith, language and culture. So now one might ask, if “Closed” can connect and trade information with any instance of “Open,” along with any other kind of “Closed” — do those terms retain the same purchase within this new context?
Translation carries with it the risk of misunderstanding– and so, some long for a return to paradise, a time before the confusion of tongues.
…prior to the building of the Tower of Babel, humanity spoke a single language, either identical to or derived from the “Adamic language” spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise. In the confusion of tongues, this language was split into seventy or seventy-two dialects, depending on tradition.
But time is an arrow, and it points toward the future. Despite the evidence of our DVRs, we cannot pause and rewind it. Paradise cannot be regained within the sojourn of this mortal coil.
If thesis and antithesis have formed a synthesis, their common truths reconciled, and a new proposition has emerged: What is the nature of this new networked landscape in which find ourselves? We seem to have stepped across the divide between a Ptolemaic vision to a Copernican one, a decentering has dropped us in a terrain inhabited by a diverse population with many forms of life (or perhaps, simply opened our eyes). We begin to understand how networks are ecosystems, ecosystems are networks, and our future panarchic.
The new questions that surface around comparative value have to do with the establishment and deployment of identity artifacts, the capacity to connect and trade bits of information, the cost, speed and latency of the transaction, the transparency of public channels and the security of private channels. And across this new topography, the filters that can catch the high-order bits in their mesh from a diverse set of streams will fill the social function of what used to be called newspapers.
Coda:
As we learn to fish in these new waters, a new ecosystem will emerge and begin to mature. Some will cast a net across the whole ocean. Others will go fishing where the fish are. Despite the divergent methods, I have an inkling that the size of the catch will be roughly similar.
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.
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.
