Category: digital

Collecting Fragments: Pieces of Beatles, Pieces of Stones

Published February 16, 2009 by cgerrish

closingtheloop

Neil Young, talking to his biographer Jimmy McDonough, divides the musical world into two poles. It’s a way for him to put aside distraction and focus on what he sees as important about the music.

“So I’d taken rock and roll and divided it into two categories. Rolling Stones and Beatles, okay? And I realized that if you divided into those two categories, color makes no difference, what part of the world made no difference. Beatles are on one side, Rolling Stones are on the other side, everybody else line up, okay? Crazy Horse and the Mynah Birds, they were on the Rolling Stones side.
–Buffalo Springfield were the Beatles?
Yup.
–CSNY?
Beatles

When you get to the “the take�? the moment when you know you’ve got the right, not just the best, but the right performance of a composition or a piece of music– it’s either loose like the Stones, or tight like the Beatles. Young puts all popular music into one category or the other. It’s a tool he uses to understand both music and the openings and possibilities within the process of making music.

But let’s step back from the categories, and look at the moment when things are still unformed and fragmentary. The small pieces that are not yet joined, loosely or otherwise into a categorizable finished piece. The fragments are identified, collected, iterated — put together in different ways, explored forwards and backwards, different styles are layered on until something solid emerges, or it doesn’t. Or perhaps it doesn’t at that moment at time, and it’s stashed away for later.

The perfect take hides the alternate universes that the moment is built upon. Before the world is divided into Neil Young’s two categories– the bits and pieces any artist plays with look very similar. It’s the process taking those pieces and connecting them up, running them through your filters that makes the finished work. Identical raw materials could result in diametrically opposed outcomes.

The shards of glass, the pieces of broken pottery, the phrase, the scraps of paper, the image, the reference– these are all pieces that go into the final product. Sometimes they’re visible and shine through in the end. Sometimes they’re invisible, a starting point left somewhere down the road.

This brings us to the idea of bricolage, we make new things from the things we collect from our environment. We carry with us a mistaken idea of creativity– a divine creating out of nothingness, new things emerging fully formed without history or context. As Wittgenstein might say, if such a thing could happen, we couldn’t understand it.

Bricolage refers to:
▪ the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available;
▪ a work created by such a process.
It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – the core meaning in French being, “fiddle, tinker” and, by extension, “make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose).”

On the Network there are a lot of ways of collecting and consuming items of information. Twitter, FriendFeed and RSS subscriptions offer a raging stream of roughly filtered items for our consumption. But that’s the old model, the conveyor belt of tasty treats moving endlessly and efficiently toward our collective gaping maws. The restauranteurs of the machine of popular culture want to teach us to eat faster.

I’ve just started integrating a software application called Scrivener into my writing practice. There are a number of possible writing workflows that can be built with Scrivener– but the one that currently interests me has to do with the structure of the application’s document format. Each document is comprised of two sets of outlines: a research outline and a draft outline. The draft outline is for composing text using an outliner approach, fragments of text can be arranged, rearranged and put into hierarchies. The research outline is for collecting raw material, which can be text, web pages, quicktime files, images, audio– anything that might serve in the writing process. In my system of categories they’re called the raw and the cooked.

These days when we talk about the two-way web, we understand very little about the writing part. We’re obsessed with creating a manageable and consumable stream of information. The latest manifestation of this is the dream of the perfect dashboard with a blinking readout and summary of our online digital existence.

But one might ask, once these digital information items have been consumed and digested– what’s next? Are those selections and collections we’ve made the raw material for building something new, or are they ‘used up’ once they are consumed and partially digested– routed to the sewage treatment plants running continuously in the river of our unconscious minds?

To close the loop, the reading tools have to be connected to the writing tools. To create my research outline in Scrivener, I have to copy and paste the things I find into it. The application isn’t connected to the Network, it doesn’t have an inbox listening for items I might like to route to it. The closest thing we have to this kind of application today is Gmail, an editorial application disguised as an email tool.

I can hear the loud objections already. Not everyone needs to be able to write. Writing should be left to the professionals. And then comes the vigorous pointing to the power law curve showing participation rates in two-way systems. The only point here is if you give everyone access to two guitars, a bass and some drums, something good is bound to come out of it. Music isn’t just for listening. And remember, as music can stand in for writing, writing can stand for the research you do before a purchase or some other kind of transaction. Doc Searls might call it VRM.

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Searching the Map: Searching the Territory

Published February 12, 2009 by cgerrish

rome_ancient_map_medieval

When we say that Google searches the web, we don’t have it quite right. Google, and other search engines, spider the web— bring back an impression of what they find and deposit it into an index. When a search query is submitted, Google checks the map it’s constructed of the Web and provides results based on their snapshot.

This is where we must turn to Alford Korzybski, the father of general semantics. He reminds us to look at the space between the territory and its map.

“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness”

Search engine optimization is the process of teaching the territory to look more like the map. In this case we have a landscape that wants to flatten itself into the shape of the map. The reasoning is that only by using a map could something be found. After all, you can’t just ask someone walking down the street.

In order to have the best and most accurate search results, one must construct the best map. But the territory is live earth, it changes from this to that, expands, contracts and sometimes parts of it disappear all together. The map must be continually updated, a drawing that’s never finished. Can we ask a question of the snapshot taken 4 months ago? How about ten minutes from now?

borges

And here’s where we must turn to Borges and his thoughts on maps, territory and the exactitude of representation:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

So one might ask, in the real-time web, is there a map worth looking at? Or is it the territory itself that we seek to uncover, locating the swarms of attention that congregate across the digital landscape. Not the representation of the thing, but the thing itself. Perhaps we could just ask someone walking down the street.

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In This Real Time Digital Landscape: Can I Get a Witness?

Published February 8, 2009 by cgerrish

cell-phone-camera

The malleability of the digital is perhaps its essence. Everything in the digital world is constructed from a combination of ones and zeros, and because of that anything can be changed into anything else. The freedom to rearrange those ones and zeros is the basis of our information economy. But as signifiers pointing to actual events in the world, the digital is an unreliable narrator. There’s a sense in which the raw capture of the world through digital sensors is considered the starting point, the beginning a a series of digital transformations.

We’ve seen movie stars from another era reconstructed digitally and made to sell products to which they had no connection. We’ve seen digitally altered photographs released through newswires purporting to give us an eye witness view. What happens when we want digital media to authentically transmit the raw capture of an event? Can we ask the digital to put aside its transformational qualities and stand as an honest witness? The question about how we prove the authenticity of a digital artifact is a difficult one. A witness swears an oath and tells us what she has seen. A man signs a paper with wet ink to attest to the truth of statement he has written.

John Markoff of the NY Times recently reported on a new approach to preserving the authenticity of witness testimony encoded digitally. The process involves creating a cryptographic hash of timestamped digital material. This signature is unique and any change to the digital material would result in a new signature that would not match the original. It’s a process commonly used to ensure the integrity of a message as it is transmitted from one point to another on the Network.

…a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive. This system is intended to be available for future use in digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide. Such tools are of vital importance because it has become possible to alter digital text, video and audio in ways that are virtually undetectable to the unaided human eye and ear.

In the digital world we have uncertainty surrounding all the elements: personal identity, signing or attesting and the digital document which contains the testimony. And even if we can verify that the digital document has not been altered, we have to apply all the usually filters to the testimony itself. In our courts, we have a bias against “heresay.” Wikipedia’s article shows us what degree of scrutiny we apply to this kind of testimony.

The theory of the rule excluding hearsay is that assertions made by human beings are often unreliable; such statements are often insincere, subject to flaws in memory and perception, or infected with errors in narration at the time they are given. The law therefore finds it necessary to subject this form of evidence to “scrutiny or analysis calculated to discover and expose in detail its possible weaknesses, and thus to enable the tribunal (judge or jury) to estimate it at no more than its actual value�?.

Three tests are calculated to expose possible weaknesses in a statement:

Assertions must be taken under oath

Assertions must be made in front of the tribunal (judge or jury)

Assertions must be subject to cross-examination.

Assertions not subject to these three tests are (with some exceptions) prohibited insofar as they are offered testimonially (for the truth of what they assert).

The basis for our scrutiny of witness testimony is that it is a recounting of the past. The memory of an event from a single point of view is not considered highest form of trustworthiness. In that sense our idea of witness and truth rely on the social character of truth, we ask for a corroborating witness or evidence. We ask for the right to cross-examine an assertion, and hear the story from other points of view. It’s through this process that we come to terms with what happened.

In his TED talk from 2006, Peter Gabriel talks about Witness, an organization that seeks to spread the use of digital cameras, blogs, and cellphone cameras around the world. Their battle cry is “See it, Film it, Change it.” By capturing human rights violations on digital video and making that footage available through the Network, we can see what’s happening for ourselves. This kind of communication isn’t conclusive, but rather it is the start of an investigation. Here we must rely on the authority of the person capturing the event and Witness, as an organization, to guarantee its veracity.

This brings us around to the real-time web and its role in this process of “See it, Film it, Change it.” A cellphone camera with the capability to instantly publish an image to the Network changes things substantially. A cellular telephone with live video capability changes things further. A cellular telephone with live video capability, GPS and a verifiable timestamp changes things even more. A real-time witness has a very different standing; many real-time witnesses bring in the social element of corroboration. While the world may not always be listening, real-time capability changes the political equation.

We’re very early in our understanding of the real-time web. As with any technology, this real-time capability can be used for good or evil. And the technology itself will be the target of repressive political forces. We’re already seeing the Taliban threatening to attack cell phone infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan. A real-time infrastructure changes the conversation from ‘what should have been done in the past, and bemoaning our lack of foresight‘ to ‘what’s happening right now, and how can and should we change it?’

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Google: All Your Books Are Belong To Us

Published February 2, 2009 by cgerrish

Reading Google & The Future of Books by Robert Darnton

My Sunday morning reading started off in one direction and veered suddenly in another. I had been thinking about the position Jason Calacanis put forward on yesterday’s GillmorGang broadcast. Calacanis has recently been lamenting what he believes is the death of blogging. He sees a “race to the bottom” where writers will do anything for ratings. Rather than write a blog, he’s returned to the era of epistolary exchange and combined that with the mailing list. In the limited economy of that form, he finds more of the kind of value he’s looking for.

It’s at that point that I started reading Robert Darnton’s essay ‘Google & the Future of Books‘ in the latest New York Review of Books. Darton begins his essay with a look back at the Enlightenment:

The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won.

This free flowing economy of thoughts, ideas and conversations was perhaps a Utopian ideal from the beginning:

Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor’s approbation, printed in full in their text.

You can easily trace the lineage, the geneology of the idea, from the Republic of Letters to Vannever Bush’s Memex, Ted Nelson and Xanadu, Doug Engelbart and Augmentation, and Tim Berners-Lee and the original World Wide Web.

This is where Darnton hijacked my stream of thought. My desire to explore the political economy of restricted and general systems of epistolary conversation was shoved aside as Darnton revealed his purpose in the essay. He enlightened me to the fact that Google has monopoly ownership of the right digitize our nation’s books. And this of course means that all access will have to go through Google.

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement. They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by copyright in the United States.

Darnton mourns the lost opportunity to create a National Digital Library. As Google search is increasingly the provider of our first hyperlink to click as we enter the World Wide Web; now they will have absolute power over access to all books under copyright. In this Google moves from Soft Power to Hard Power. We choose to use Google’s search engine because it works well for us. If we want to search the nation’s digital library, our Republic of Letters, we will have no choice but to ask Google. Darnton believes it’s too late to change the outcome. I hope he’s wrong.

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