Category: social graph

The Network as Real-Time Juke Joint

Published August 2, 2009 by cgerrish

It started during a conversation over dinner. Gaspare’s has a classic jukebox, and looking at it, it suddenly struck me that word “juke” was simultaneously very familiar and completely foreign to me. While the mechanical jukebox was a common enough feature of my childhood, it was already beginning to feel nostalgic. I was aware that the word “juke” came from the earlier phrase “juke joint.” Like all high value network nodes, the juke joint was located at the crossroads:

Classic juke joints found, for example, at rural crossroads, catered to the rural work force that began to emerge after Emancipation. Plantations workers and sharecroppers needed a place to relax and socialize following a hard week, particularly since they were barred from most white establishments by Jim Crow laws. Set up on the outskirts of town, often in ramshackle buildings or private houses, juke joints offered food, drink, dancing and gambling for weary workers. Owners made extra money selling groceries or moonshine to patrons, or providing cheap room and board.

But the juke joint put me no closer to the word “juke.” My sense was that it was meant to describe a style of popular dance. But digging a little deeper, this definition of the word’s origin emerged:

Gullah, the English-based Creole language spoken by people of African ancestry off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, retains a number of words from the West African languages brought over by slaves. One such word is juke, “bad, wicked, disorderly,�? the probable source of the English word juke. Used originally in Florida and then chiefly in the Southeastern states, juke (also appearing in the compound juke joint) was an African-American word meaning a roadside drinking establishment that offers cheap drinks, food, and music for dancing and often doubles as a brothel. “To juke�? is to dance, particularly at a juke joint or to the music of a jukebox whose name, no longer regional and having lost the connotation of sleaziness, contains the same word.

The hidden payload in the word “juke” is its connection to the “bad, wicked and disorderly.” Transgression is built into the cultural practice of the juke joint. This connected to Levon Helm’s description of the Midnight Ramble.

The story of the word “juke” is also a technology story. Juke joints began with live music and dancing. The mechanical juke box replaced live music and its real-time interaction. The musician as messenger was replaced with her recorded output. The juke box attempted to put all the commercial qualities of the juke joint into a machine, while excluding the wickedness of its origin.

The mechanical juke box provided access to the popular music of the day. The users of the juke box assembled their own popularity charts by playing their favorites in the society of their cohort. The mass production and consumption of vinyl records and stereo equipment diluted the power of the juke box. The term “juke box” was preserved to describe the function of CD Players that could be loaded with hundreds of CDs, making the music on them readily accessible.

The original juke box became an object of nostalgia. We think of it as a cultural artifact of the 1950s. Its technology reached a terminal point, but its image was symbolically preserved. John Lennon’s jukebox became an item of great interest. Through it we gain an understanding of his formative influences, his taste and what music moved him. Curiosity about the contents of Lennon’s jukebox is the equivalent of today asking about the music loaded on the iPod of a public figure. We make a game of interpreting the tea leaves of the playlists.

While the word “juke” has dropped away, the iPod has become our equivalent of the juke box. The social aspect of the juke joint has been submerged almost entirely. The iPod is a personal jukebox, loaded with only the music I like. The exposing and networking of playlists begins to recover some of the social aspects of the juke box, but none of the real-time interactivity of the juke joint.

The juke joint, the barrelhouse and the midnight ramble all had the quality of providing a refuge for disorder within the forces of order. Their location was the crossroads at the edge of town. The Network has the same relationship to space as television. Every point of interface is one click away. The edge of town can very easily become the focal point of a family’s living room. While the Network provides the basis for the retrieval of a real-time interaction with the musician, we still don’t understand how to manage the “juke” that might appear at any moment.

2 Comments

Attack Surfaces: The Body Reborn as Software

Published July 21, 2009 by cgerrish

The brutality of the online commenter can sometimes be astonishing. The violence of the language is often out of all proportion to its surroundings. Certainly not every commenter resorts to personal attacks, but like spam, it’s something we seem to expect— and for some reason tolerate. What is it about the environment of the Network that allows this kind of behavior to flourish? Initially it was thought to be a function of anonymous comments, but more and more, we see attacks launched from identities based in social networks.

What are we, when we’re in the Network? Marshall McLuhan saw it by looking at the primitives of the new ‘electronic information conditions.’ Well before the internet and social media, he saw this new medium was fundamentally different and would change us utterly. When information moves at electronic speed– and it is information that serves as a trigger for all transactions, our relationship to the space surrounding us becomes transformed and devalued.

“The electronic age…angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.” — Marshall McLuhan

The annihilation of distance is the state of affairs where everything is ready-to-hand— technology creates a powerful extension of human reach. We can be present at a meeting anywhere around the globe without leaving our chair. We can buy/sell any kind of goods or services, research any topic and access any form of entertainment—as long as we have an access point to the Network. The information economy transforms the worker into pure information (inputs/outputs). The person becomes disembodied, omnipresent, but not omnipotent.

In McLuhan’s book on the Global Village, he talked about the satisfactions that would result from these radical transformations:

Robotism, or right-hemisphere thinking, is a capacity to be a conscious presence in many places at once. It is a right-hemisphere mode— the dominant brain mode of the extended mechanical abilities of our bodies, keyed to one time and one place. Communications media of the future will accentuate the extensions of our nervous systems, which can be disembodied and made totally collective. New population patterns will fuel the shift from smokestack industries to a marketing-information economy…

McLuhan also discussed the dissatisfactions of this new environment:

Robotism is also decentralizing. In an electrically configured society all the critical information necessary to manufacture and distribute, from automobiles to computers, would be available to everyone at the same time. Espionage becomes an art form. Culture becomes organized like an electric circuit: each point in the net is as central as the next.

Electronic man loses touch with the concept of the ruling center as well as the restraints of social rules based on interconnection. Hierarchies constantly devolve and reform.

When we are born into the digital Network, we are formless— our point of origin is obscured. Connections to family, work, organizations, and local community are absent, we enter the Network untethered. Because our identity is unknown, it presents no attack surfaces, no surfaces of any kind. Should we choose to, we can launch attacks into any opening in the Network without fear of reprisal. Disconnected from our earthly connections, we are drawn toward and begin to flock with our mirror images.

When we lose touch with social rules based on interconnection, there are no checks on our behavior— we tend to move toward the extremes. Cass Sunstein in his new book Going to Extremes makes the case that “closed groups of like-minded people, if left to their own devices, will move towards the extreme.” He notes that when people with similar views debate an issue, they end up with more extreme positions than any of them previously held.

As we take root in the Network, some would call it establishing a personal brand, we expose— put forward representations of ourselves. As we produce outputs, we also seek inputs. It’s here where we begin to expose attack surfaces. As with any relationship, it’s the moment that we start to be vulnerable that the possibility of something interesting begins. In most small personal networks the connections occur directly between known entities. When one accepts inputs from the Network in general— there are no limits on who might respond and what they might say. While this relationship opens the door to an unlimited kind of discovery, it also opens the door to an unlimited kind of abuse. Openness of this kind depends on an assumption of civility.

There’s an asymmetry to the configuration of Network inputs and outputs. While the outputs are visible and have a known location, those producing inputs have no location requirement. A comment can literally come from nowhere. And the invulnerable commenter, like the spammer, rarely contributes anything of value. The premise of civility is founded on the idea that a person has something at stake. A person who comments under a personal brand puts that brand value at stake with each comment and so an economic calculation is made concurrently with each comment.

We started with the concept of a two-way web, but began with a publication medium (read only). Writing surfaces have been tacked on to reading material to simulate a two-way interface. I wonder what a symmetrical interface event with two-way visibility and read/write capability would look like? (Twitter? FriendFeed?) It’s the visibility into social connections that begin to exert a civilizing influence. Social connections are perhaps the most valuable thing we have: family, work, marriage, children, friends. Returned to a social context, the disproportionate nature of the violent comment is exposed and its true price is finally visible.

One Comment

Her Explicit Intention Was a Signal Of Something Else Entirely…

Published June 22, 2009 by cgerrish

Listening to John Cage talk about music, sound and silence causes me to think about data. We talk about data in similar terms, we think of it as structured, semi-structured and unstructured.

I don’t need sound to talk to me…
– John Cage

We often talk of trying to capture the intention of a person’s activity on the Network. Google has done this through providing the mechanism through which a question about the location of something is asked. In our age of quantification, it seems rational to dedicate our efforts to locate the consumer’s stated intention to buy. The rational engages the rational in a structured transaction where the best feature/function/price ratio is determined by auction in real time. This is a vision of humanity as a population of buying machines.

There’s a magic trick that’s often used to sell the non-verbal within the corporate environment. A series of visual illusions are displayed to prove the point that each person brings something of themselves to every situation. Usuallly a test is then given— and a person’s set of answers are then mapped to a psychological profile. Colors or archetypes predict what each person might bring to the party. These maps are then provided to make visible the invisible threads running through our everyday interaction. Magic, of course, is entirely rational. Diverting our attention between the Turn and the Prestige is its art.

Image advertising works at a lower level, it creates a personal connection to the economics of a person’s psychological ecosystem. The image asks for completion: I want to be that; I want that social status; I think that’s sexy; I think that’s funny; That thing is practical, like I am; I’m frightened, that thing looks safe. Is it really possible that advertising on the Network could be all ego and no id? Can brands survive as pure feature/function/price sets to be compared in a data matrix?

Crusades are being launched to structure and link all the data on the Network. The age of enlightenment strives toward its completion. And yet, I wonder, as I listen to John Cage talk about the sound of the traffic on 6th Avenue in New York City, how much of what goes on between people works at the level of the rational, unambiguous signal? How much more can we learn about what’s going on right now by listening to the sound of the traffic?

Take a moment, what is the sound of the traffic on the Network from your particular vantage point?

Comments closed

The Numbing Violence of the Firehose of Messages

Published June 16, 2009 by cgerrish

Midway through a series of thoughts on gluttony, violence, numbness and the Network, I found myself leafing through Robert Pinsky’s verse translation of The Inferno of Dante:

Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well

I’ll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder

Off the true path…

The train of thought started with the asymmetric publish-subscribe social network model popularized by Twitter. In a symmetric model, there must be assent by both parties for a connection to be forged. In an asymmetric model, a person may follow an unbounded number of other people. Like a kid in a candy store, we greedily subscribe to this one and that. Oh, and the one over there looks very interesting. Our virtual stomachs and appetites have an unlimited capacity.

As we sit back to digest the stream of messages, we find ourselves looking into the business end of a firehose. Each person we subscribe to may produce a manageable flow, but if we aggregate all these messages and make them march single file through a small opening the velocity becomes violent. The senses are pummeled with a raging torrent of voices from all quarters of the globe.

The response to a violent overstimulation of the senses is numbness and withdrawal. It started out so innocently, a few friends gather round a bar and swapped one liners. Every joke was heard, and each built on and referred to the previous one. Now the messages move by so quickly we can barely grasp the words they contain. We grow numb, distant, we hold the stream at arms length, our emotions disengage.

What does the defender against this battering look like? Is he the one who decries this new-fangled firehose of messages? Dismisses it as unneeded, as superfluous? The one who lovingly points to the old ways and speaks eloquently of their sufficiency?

Or perhaps it is the one who points the way, showing us evidence of a path that seems to lead over the horizon. Telling of us of a wondrous time and place where the new technology is perfectly integrated—all friction resolved. The one who expectantly points to what is absent and asks us for our present for the sake of the future.

If media is an extension of our central nervous systems; if these subscriptions are extensions of our eyes and ears, our sense of touch— then each of these sensors serve to collect impressions, translate them into words, images and sounds and relay them back to us.

But when we first come upon them we don’t recognize them as parts of ourselves. Perhaps we see them as just another commodity in the corporate marketplace of entertainments—an amusement to occupy our time. Sense organs detached, packaged, and sold back to us on a subscription model.

At this present moment, we walk like a drunkard, numb to the world around us, filled to the gills with firewater and lurching to and fro. We promise we’ll only dip in from time to time. But we find ourselves, eyes glazed, mouth open, staring at the flow racing through the glowing rectangle. Unable to comprehend, unable to pull ourselves away. Comfortably numb.

What would it look like if we used those subscriptions as purposeful extensions of our senses? Our senses serve us as we navigate and discover the spaces of the Network. We share, create and connect. We might extend our senses through subscriptions to those with whom we share an affinity. The shape and value of the social graph would be measured not by its sheer size, but rather by its sensitivity to our circle of concerns. Is there a road we can travel to reconnect to our own sensibilities?

…This hollow where we stand. There is below
As far from Beelzebub as one can be

Within his tomb, a place one cannot know
By sight, but by the sound a little runnel
Makes as it wends the hollow rock its flow

Has worn, descending through its winding channel:
To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;

And following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I—so far,
Through a round aperture I saw appear

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.

Comments closed