Category: media

A Loss of Connection: Digital Intermediaries

Published August 8, 2009 by cgerrish

third_eye_camera

It’s a behavior pattern that has emerged in a number of realms and many are taking note. Michael Kimmelman, of the NY Times, noticed it while he sat and sketched in the Louvre. The visitors to the museum weren’t actually engaging with the art work. They either walked blindly through the galleries or were primarily focused on their personal digital machinery. Rather than directly experience the work in front of them, they seemed to be under the impression that paintings and sculptures can be collected in a digital camera for viewing at a later, more convenient time.

There was a time when people making the grand tour of Europe’s cultural treasures would prepare themselves by learning to make pencil sketches. Their sketching and painting were not primitive modes of recording images— they were, and are, modes of seeing and understanding (in the sense of making connections). We are not allowed to touch paintings in a museum; we can’t take our fingers and trace the shapes to feel their relationship to the entire composition. We can, however, accomplish this touching through seeing with a pencil and a sketch pad.

sketching_art

As we wander the world and only act as digital sample (sound/vision) collectors, we are not present in real time. We act today for the future time when we can look back on the present. As McLuhan said, we live our lives in the “rear view mirror.” We mechanically collect the digital artifacts of what might have been our own experience. We exclude ourselves from the real-time moment in favor of standing apart and playing the role of the recording machine operator at the service of the great digital archive (the Simulation).

The tragedy is that many miss the real experience because they’re busy collecting, and then they never even go back to reflect on what was collected. They don’t even bother to look in ‘the rear view mirror.’ They miss the sound and its echo, the image and its afterimage. They’re caught in the shadow between the motion and the act, losing all contact with our life in real time as mortals on this earth.

TS Eliot
The Hollow Men

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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The Real-Time Web and Information Arbitrage

Published July 25, 2009 by cgerrish

hermes

As the ‘RSS-is-fast-enough-for-us’ crowd begins to resemble the Slowskys from the television commercial, an effort has begun in earnest to speed up the transport of RSS/Atom feeds in the face of real-time media. These efforts will answer the question about whether RSS is structurally capable of becoming a real-time media. If the answer is yes, then RSS will become functionally the same as Twitter. If the answer is no, then it will become the rallying point for the ‘slow-is-better’ movement.

There’s a strong contingent who will say that more speed is just a part of the sickness of our contemporary life. We need to ‘stop and smell the roses’ rather than ‘wake up and smell the coffee.’ And while there are many instances in which slow is a virtue, information transport isn’t one of them. Under electronic information conditions, getting your information ‘a day late’ is probably why you’re ‘a dollar short.’

When you begin thinking about the value resident in information, it’s instructive to look at the models of information discovery and use on Wall Street. Analysts generate information about companies in various investment sectors through quantitative and qualitative investigation. The high-value substance of the reports is harvested and acted upon before the information is released. High value information lowers transaction risk. Each stage of the release pattern traces the dissemination of the information. Within each of these waves of release, there’s an information arbitrage opportunity formed by the asymmetry of the dispersion. By the time the report reaches the individual investor—the man on the street, it is information stripped of opportunity and filled with risk.

In Friday’s NY Times, Charles DuHigg writes about the relatively new practice of high-frequency trading. Under electronic information conditions, the technology of trading moves to match the speed of the market.

In high-frequency trading, computers buy and sell stocks at lightning speeds. Some marketplaces, like Nasdaq, often offer such traders a peek at orders for 30 milliseconds—0.03 seconds—before they are shown to everyone else. This allows traders to profit by very quickly trading shares they know will soon be in high demand. Each trade earns pennies, sometimes millions of times a day.

If you were wondering how Goldman Sachs reported record earnings when the economy is still in recession, look no further than high-frequency trading. The algorithmic traders at Goldman have learned how to harvest the value of trading opportunities before anyone else even knows there’s an opportunity available. By understanding the direction a stock is likely to move 30 milliseconds before the rest of the market, an arbitrage opportunity is presented. High-frequency traders generated about $21 billion is profits last year.

Whether you think the real-time web is important depends on where you choose to be in the release pattern of information. If you don’t mind getting the message once it’s been stripped of its high-value opportunity, then there are a raft of existing technologies that are suitable for that purpose. But as we see with the Goldman example, under electronic information conditions, if you can successfully weight and surface the opportunities contained in real-time information, you can be in and out of a transaction while the downstream players are unaware that the game has already been played.

Creating an infrastructure that enables speed is only one aspect of the equation. The tools to surface and weight opportunities within that context is where the upstream players have focused their attention. And while you may choose not to play the real-time game, the game will be played nonetheless.

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Boundaries of the Real-Time Stream: The Ping and The Tweet

Published July 8, 2009 by cgerrish

all_seeing_eye

Omniscience is the capacity to know everything infinitely—from the strangest sub-atomic particle to the thought that just drifted through my mind. As finite creatures we long for the infinite, for the chance to peer through the lens of the all seeing eye. The boundaries of omniscience tend to form around the idea of ‘what is knowable’ and the event horizon of time. It’s possible that we could know everything that had already occurred— especially if there was some form of documentation, a written record. Things that have recently occurred are contained in the set of things that have already occurred. Time future has not yet happened, and so is only a possibility. Knowable perhaps only as a probability. And what of time present? That set of things rising just now over the horizon—what of everything that is happening right now?

This is the problem of the live web, or real-time search— how shall we know all that is in the state of becoming in time present? Here again we must speak of what is knowable. The knowable is a thing that has entered language, has registered its presence in a system of re-presentation. The thing-itself cannot be spoken, so we make do with the artifacts of re-presentation. But even here, as we scour the record for instances of wet ink to determine what has just been noted down, we find ourselves looking at the very recent past.

The apparatus created to capture time present are necessarily built around the activity of encoding re-presentations— making a mark in a medium, something to stand for the new thing.

Subscription and polling works by me asking you if you’ve done anything new lately. And then asking you again at regular intervals. Eventually, I’ll ask and you’ll answer with something new. The list of those new things is a kind of picture of what’s happening now.

The ping server is a kind of centralized carbon paper. As a publication event on the Network occurs at a remote endpoint, a ping is sent to a central repository noting that some new thing has happened. Presumably we could watch the pings as they come in to the server to get an idea of what is happening now. Obviously this would only include those events that chose to concurrently ping the server as they pressed the publish button. A feed of these new items can be constructed to provide a picture of what’s being published right now.

If we continue with the carbon paper metaphor and move up the stack through the top layer of paper to the tip of the pen itself, we have the other point from which we have a view of what’s happening now. The ink, as it flows through the nib of the pen, forms shapes on the paper— encoding (re-presenting) the new thing. (Or perhaps we should talk about fingers pressing keys on a keyboard causing typographic characters to spill forth in a linear sequence across a screen.) Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and eventually Google Wave are the pens with which we write. The 140 character limit is the boundary that trails the present moment. The tweet captures the thing that happened at least 140 characters ago. While with Google wave, we will have character-by-character recording of the present moment—phonemes that haven’t yet fully manifested as words. Here also, we have a real-time view of the things written with these particular pens. Although through connections to the SMS and email systems, most cellular telephones will serve the purpose of real-time authoring tools.

Knowledge (what is knowable) is equated with a certain set of techniques for re-presenting a thing. Linear typography is the preferred mode. But when we share what’s happening right now, we might use a photograph or a sound/video stream. When operating in real time we often employ ostension. We gesture toward the thing itself. Rather than translate a thing into words, we use its image, or its sound. We say, “it’s like this.” And then shrug in the direction of the thing to which we refer. Twitter is a citation medium par excellence, a few words and link that points. This is where the web of sites becomes a web of citations.

When we talk of the real-time stream on the Network we sometimes fall into thinking that we could achieve a kind of omniscience. We believe that there might be some way to know every single thing that is happening now— just as we can index, search and sort things that exist at known locations in the name space of the Network. While these streams eventually flow into the ocean of the Network, they currently run between well-defined boundaries. It’s only at the very tip of the pen that the real time manifests as real time.

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Fair Use And Remixing Post-Literate Thought

Published June 24, 2009 by cgerrish

marshall_crop

There will be no laughter. No enjoyment of any kind. As Laurie Anderson once said, “sit bolt upright in your straight-backed chair, and button that top button,” the words, images and videos assembled on this page are for the purpose of either commentary, criticism or education. Please keep this in mind as you “read.”

Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Music Hour.
The spot on your dial for that relentless and
impenetrable sound of difficult music [music, music, music]
So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair,
button that top button
and get set for some difficult music:
Ooola.

Laurie Anderson
Difficult Listening Hour

Sequences of letters, especially in the form of typography, have the wonderful quality of hiding their origins. We dip our hand into the cloth bag, pull out some scrabble tiles and fashion words which we string together into original sentences. The audience’s attention is misdirected, and we magically produce language out of thin air. Images and sounds, on the other hand, betray their origins— collaged or remixed, we recognize the original context. It’s a snippet of this song, a clip from that movie, or a fragment of a rather famous photograph.

Even text has taken on the attributes of recorded media. Printed sequences of words become an image of text. An image that can be matched to other images to determine whether a particular flow of words actually manifested ex nihilo or was, in fact, a photocopy of previously recorded material. Mike Masnick asks whether King Lear could be written under current legal conditions— its sources are legendary. As the digital swallows all other media, we can see, with eventualities like Google Wave, text will be recorded as it is typed— with instant universal playback at our finger tips.

I remember you typing that letter to me. I watched as the characters filled in one by one— moving across my screen. You mispelled the word “ambidextrous” and the spell checker caught it in real time. The rhythm of the typing was hypnotic. I play it back often, just to watch the letters dance.

If images, video and sound were to be embedded in the substance of a stream of thought, could the thinker be sued for copyright infringement? And could that stream really be called thought? If there is such a thing as post-literate thought, and it has a beat you can dance to— what would distinguish it from music? But the more important question is: is it really necessary to keep music/video/images out of thought? It’s a question first seriously addressed in the conflicts of Byzantium between the iconoclasts and the iconodules.

Kurt Weibers, in his Marshall McLuhan Remix, takes some of these issues head on. The project is presented in three parts and is well worth your time. Although please keep in mind that these videos are for your edification only, any enjoyment, finger snapping or inappropriate context switching could put Mr. Weibers in legal trouble. So, button your top button, and press to play…

An interesting coda to Mr. Weibers’s production is the revelation of his correspondence with YouTube over the use of samples from a song recorded by the Talking Heads, called “Take Me To The River.” The epilogue [3/3] of the work was blocked by YouTube, and Mr. Weibers disputed the action based on the definitions of fair use in the copyright act. YouTube responded quickly and unblocked the video.

These questions are not simple ones. While it’s true that the remix is the medium of our time, the issues permeating the economics of the transition are very serious. When the value of music was thought to be price one could charge to see a performance, signing a recording contract that paid a small fixed fee for the session seemed to make sense. We have yet to discover the economics of the remix, but discover them we must.

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