A small thought experiment: The video above was made on May 18, 1960 and features Marshall McLuhan. The subject is ‘literary man’ and ‘electronic man.’ It’s a description of the transition from the solitary world of the book to the tribal world of electronic media. Watch the video above and substitute the words “RSS” for “Book” and “Tw*tter” for “Electronic Media.” Think about the message in the characteristics of these two kinds of media.
Of course any reference to McLuhan’s work in public is a risk.
What are we doing when we use RSS? Are we solitary or social? Can we share using the electronic method– by hyperlink? Or do we share like we do with a book, by making a copy, or loaning the book itself. While the RSS feed has a location in the Network’s name space, the item we’d like to share must be xeroxed, put in an envelope and mailed.
When McLuhan talks about his idea that the ‘Medium is the Message‘ he immediately refers to the qualities of space as they relate to our senses. Think about how RSS and Tw*tter manifest in the space of the Network. If the value of a node in a Network is its capacity for connection to other nodes, then what is the value of RSS in light of the social web? In what sense can RSS be said to take advantage of a network effect?
It must have been a strange experience to be Marshall McLuhan in 1960. The world was compelled to listen, held rapt, but unable to grasp his meaning. They knew there was something there, but it seemed continually just over the horizon.
A few thoughts that need to be captured before they return from whence they came. I’ve been re-reading Baudrillard’s Simulations— thinking about it in light of the possibility of Internet Identity. Online identity is already a concept that’s overloaded; it’s become a blank slate on which entrepreneurs, privacy advocates and open source geeks project their hopes, dreams and ambitions. Binding code to the soul to create a hard link posits a kind strong symbolic order that we’ve seen before in the pre-industrial era.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Baudrillard looks at three orders of appearance and examines them with regard to mutations of the law of value:
Counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the “classical” period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution
Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era
Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by code.
In the first period an individual (an identity) is assigned a place of rank, or caste, irrevocably– class mobility is non-existent. Baudrillard calls this strong ‘symbolic order’ a ferocious hierarchy. There is a strong binding between an individual and a set of signs. The binding of identity is assigned by the circumstances of birth; Identity and signs are not arbitrary in this schema.
The industrial era puts an end to the problem of uniqueness, or the importance of the point of origin. Signs and objects are produced on a massive scale (two or n identical objects). The key phrase for me was: “In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the men that produce them.” In the industrial schema, you are what you do. Identity is useful with regard to the role it plays in production– workers are interchangeable parts in the machinery of production.
“Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings.”
In the age of simulation, there is no labor involved in producing copies. In a sense, there is no original digital artifact– it is a copy at its origin. When we look to origin, we look to the code of DNA. Identity is linked to the curration of collections of simulations.
Identity is generally thought to be an inward quality of a person. Through this sketch, we can hold it up and look at it as an external binding of a system of signs, a kind of exoskeleton. And as we look at the mutations in the binding point of identity, we can see that it matches the mutations in the instantiations of value.
Thinking, for a moment, about a particularly difficult human-computer interface problem with a dynamic set of requirements… which I suppose is any problem of this kind. The problem itself points the limitations of representation; as the solution forms, life moves on. The problem can also be expressed in terms of data and databases– the only data that exists in a database is the data that’s entered; and it doesn’t change unless energy is expended to change it. It’s a snapshot of a moment. Certain problems like Search are amenable to employing robots for the gathering of data. But what we think we’re doing when we search for something continues to change.
There’s a little book by James P. Carse that I return to now and again. It’s called Finite and Infinite Games, I’ve reproduced the entire first chapter below:
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
We play a series of finite and infinite games in the pursuit of the infinite game of continuing the play. The rather large portfolio carved out by interaction and human factors designers plays along this edge– the finitude of the designed object against the infinity of its use within a form of life. William Gibson expressed it simply as: “the street has its own use for things…” The street is a particularly rough game whose object is primarily to continue the play.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the book Philosophical Grammar describes how the fundamentals of an interaction (a finite game) relate to its expression in a system of representation. It’s a succinct story about how the front-end relates to the back-end of a certain kind of web application.
Let us imagine that chess had been invented not as a board game, but as a game to be played with numbers and letters on paper, so that no one had ever imagined a board with 64 squares in connection with it. And now suppose someone made the discovery that the game corresponded exactly to a game which could be played on a board in such and such a way. This discovery would have been a great simplification of the game (people who would earlier have found it too difficult could now play it). But it is clear that this new illustration of the rules of the game would be nothing more than a new, more easily surveyable symbolism, which in other respects would be on the same level as the written game. Compare with this the talk about physics nowadays not working with mechanical models but “only with symbols”.
Imagine what the Network would look like if it were only composed of finite games. Now imagine a Network in real time composed of both finite and infinite games. In building an application for this Network, would you use the same techniques with an infinite game as you would for a finite game? How would they differ?
Here’s another fragment from Carse:
Although the rules of an infinite game change by agreement at any point in the course of play, it does not follow that any rule will do. It is not in this sense that the game is infinite.
The rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself.
The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play– such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material resources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.
The task is to design rules that will allow the players to continue the game by taking these limits into play– even when death is one of the limits. It is in this sense that the game is infinite.
This is equivalent to saying that no limitations may be imposed against infinite play. Since limits are taken into play, the play itself cannot be limited.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
There’s a sense in which the hyperlink allows the infinite to be contained within the finite. Or rather, it extends the finite into the infinite. In an open Network, hypertext links to hypertext, which links to hypertext. And by the word “text” we refer to all media types. The “hyper” in “hypertext” means the referent is not present, but directions to its location are ready to hand. (The signs within a language work this way, although sometimes the directions can be ambiguous and aren’t always legible.)
The hyperlink embedded in a static document system originally opened this door. But the static document is giving way to the dynamic document and a series of hypertext fragments populating a stream of information and thought objects moving in real time. Described as a kind of stream culture, our tool set to engage with the possible set of streams is remarkably absent. Somewhere a stream is emitting the information we need to know, but can’t find with our standard set of queries. Instead we gather around to argue whether or not it’s actually a stream we’re standing in, and whether our feet are actually wet.
In thinking about building a tool for the stream culture, will the techniques developed for use in finite games be sufficient? — or will we need to crack open a bottle of new wine?
“Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
To support a conjecture in the world of humans, we often point to the natural world as some kind of final arbiter. “You see, this is the way it works in nature, therefore this is the way it is.” Aesop’s fable about the Ant and the Grasshopper has been used in this way in political circles for years. The social behavior of ants and bees has also been of particular interest to those of us thinking about the complex digital social networks emerging all around us. We take the folk wisdom of Aesop as gospel, and using that tool, we make an attempt at interpretation. Ants are industrious, collective and coordinated. If only people could join together in such a natural kind of cooperation. It’s only our human foibles that prevent this return to Eden.
Meanwhile, Anna Dornhaus, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has been painting ants. She does this so that she can track the individual behavior of a particular ant. Despite the anthropomorphism of Aesop’s fable, we tend to think of ants as a swarm of ants– as a collective. In a fascinating profile of Dornhaus by Adele Conover in the NY Times, we discover that:
“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,� said Dornhaus. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.�
Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.
A few days ago I was re-reading Clay Shirky’s blog post on Power Laws and Blogging which describes the distribution of popularity within the blogosphere. In his book, Here Comes Everybody, he expands this idea of self-organizing systems and power law distributions to describe how things generally get done in social networks like Wikipedia. Aspects of the process have also been described by Yochai Benkler and called commons-based peer production.
My results indicate that at least in this species (ants), a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.
With specialization, tasks can be isolated and identified, and machinery can be built to do the job in place of labor.
As we begin to think about the characteristics of “swarming behavior” within digital networks, we can now start to “paint the ants” and look much more closely at how things get done within the swarm. Digital ants may all behave identically, but ants as we find them in nature behave unpredictably. Rilke notes that “we are the bees of the invisible,” but is a bee simply a bee?
