Category: network

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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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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All of My Works are Full Length, Some are just Longer than Others

Published January 25, 2009 by cgerrish

Socrates in the Agora

Peter Aspden and I were born in the same year. And when I read his columns in the Financial Times I find myself nodding as my eyes scan the page. We’ve been on the same wavelength for the last couple of months. I’ve recently been trying to come to terms with the idea of “faster” versus “realtime.” It may have been in the 50s when this idea of the velocity and acceleration of our daily lives took hold as a sign of our separation from the things that matter. As the Web moves relentlessly toward unfolding in real time, the chorus of shouts from Nicholas Carr and others rise up around us. In his latest column “iPod therefore I am,” Aspden lays out the complaint:

It is received wisdom that the velocity and superficiality of modern life have resulted in a deterioration in the quality of our thinking and means of expression. A combination of technology, social permissiveness and sheer fecklessness has wrecked our capacity to reflect calmly and lucidly on our common concerns, the argument runs: our cultural triumphs lie in the past, and a unlikely ever to be surpassed.

The chief culprit in the decline of Western Civilization? — a declining ability to fully immerse oneself in the great and engaging works of our culture. As Aspden points out, this kind of engagement implies a scholarly withdrawal from the hurlyburly of life.

First Witch: “When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
Second Witch: “When the hurlyburly’s done, / When the battle’s lost and won.”

Aspden’s column was triggered by listening to a podcast called Philosophy Bites featuring an interview with Don Cuppitt. It’s a program that I listen to also, and in much the same way he does. He listens on the subway while commuting to work. He describes the experience:

It took 15 minutes, the length of all Philosophy Bites interviews, and it stayed with me the whole day– a day typically filled with tedious chores and niggling lack of coherence. This was how I liked my philosophy, I decided: sprinkled in short doses as part of my lived life. It made me think of the agora or market place of ancient Athens, where you were as likely in your perambulations to pick up a Socratic quip as a kilo of lentils.

When we consider the deep and abiding issues and themes of our day, must we withdraw from our lived lives and retreat to an academy where time and space allow a full measure of perspective and retrospection? Philosophy in a podcast, an RSS feed or a Tweet with a link is the opposite of the normative historical practice. Aspden describes the flavor of this new practice:

This is a little like the world we live in now, fast-moving, interlinked and demanding of minds that can absorb new information quickly and uncomplainingly. The best of our culture reflects this: it is edgy, provocative, mired in ambiguity, and happily dispensible– pop-up art for popular times.

But it’s not speed (as in more beats per second) that’s the critical factor, it’s the reintegration of this practice of thought into our lives at the speed at which they are lived. The media conforms to the speed of life rather than the reverse. As we talk about the economics and fates of walled gardens in the commerical web, perhaps we don’t notice that the walled gardens of the academy have been breached as well. Those pursuits that could only exist in the specialized environment of the classroom have escaped and are now sitting on your iPod, among other places, ready for your engagement when you have a minute or two. Aspden concludes:

But think about it this way: the closer we come to a truly inclusive, all-embracing culture, art that unifies all of us, the less time we have for those rarefied, introspecitive meanderings that once passed for genius. Art and philosphy bite harder today. Get used to it.

There are those who say we get the culture we deserve, and point despairingly at all the usual places. But I’m reminded of the old story told by Nasrudin:

One night, a neighbor strolling by Nasrudin’s house found him outside under the street lamp brushing through the dust. “Have you lost something, my friend?” he asked. Nasrudin explained that he had lost his key and asked the neighbor to help him find it. After some minutes of searching and turning up nothing, the neighbor asked him, “Are you sure you lost the key here?” “No, I did not lose it here. I lost it inside the house,” Nasrudin answered. “If you lost the key in the house, Nasrudin, why are you looking for it out here?” “Well, there’s more light out here, of course,” Nasrudin replied.

Change is a funny thing. The culture that we’re creating today may start appearing in new forms on new networks– length or venue won’t be a determining factor. It’s the work’s ability to connect inline to the flow of our lives. As Samuel Beckett once replied to a criticism of his play “Breath,” — “All of my works are full length, some are just longer than others.”

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The MicroCaster in Chief

Published January 21, 2009 by cgerrish

Barack Obama, Community Organizer

Watching President Barack Obama work his way through the long, long inaugural day, I see a virtuoso. In each venue, at each moment, he’s broadcasting live across multiple streams of media. It’s live, well thought out, and in the moment. While the messages are carried by the major media networks, the voice speaks to the micro-community.

During the general election, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin made the remark that “a mayor was like a community organizer, but with real responsibilities.” It was a line that drew thunderous applause from the assembled convention. It also revealed a fundamental difference in communication styles and strategies, a difference that made all the difference.

A community organizer is successful when he can connect with a small group– the microcommunity. It’s direct, it’s specific and it must be honest. The members of the community understand when they hear the ring of truth.

When Obama addresses the nation, he speaks as a microcaster directly to a host of microcommunities. He talks to you and asks you to talk to your neighbors, and to knock on doors to spread the word. It’s a political communications strategy that couldn’t possibly work. Ask any expert. Obama relied on the strong connections of the small group instead of the weak connections created by mass media. Small world theory was writ large. And it’s an approach that will move naturally from the campaign to governing.

When a great player improvises he’s not making things up out of thin air. He knows the scales, the changes, the modes, the melody, the rhythm and the audience. And from those raw materials he makes something both familiar and new.

Steve Gillmor keeps asking the question about the power of microcommunities. I think we’ve seen part of the answer today.

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