Category: tribes

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

ManhattanHenge And The Real-Time Moment

Published July 12, 2009 by cgerrish

After spending a day at the Real-Time Stream CrunchUp and listening to the companies and people converging around this new sector, I thought it would make sense to invert the question. Investments will be made in the technology of encoding and relaying, filtering and finding, and reading and writing into streams. But what is it that the real-time web should be focusing its camera on? How does what we pay attention to change when we move from the corpus of stored data to what is happening right now.

There’s a sense in which real-time retrieves older patterns. Before time was flattened into a linear sequence by the clock, it was primarily present as rhythmic cycles. We lived within the cycles of our bodies, the seasons and the movements of celestial bodies. The recurrence of an event was an affirmation of our perdurance.

ManhattanHenge is a biannual solstice event that occurs each May 28 and July 12/13. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, brought it to the world’s attention.

The recurrence of ManhattanHenge is a kind of modern-primitive event. Its immediate appeal is the emotional satisfaction of the visual event– it’s like witnessing a hole in one. And while the traditional news media may treat it as an oddity, as a bit of fluff for the end of a broadcast— this event resonates at a much deeper level for those who take the time to unpack it.

In his later work, Wittgenstein turned to the construction of language games as a way to engage in the activity of philosophy. In his excellent book, How to Read Wittgenstein, Ray Monk describes it like this:

It seems the best way of understand the use Wittgenstein makes of language games is to see their role in the construction of Übersicht, and thereby their role in producing ‘the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections.’

ManhattanHenge is a way of seeing a connection between the linear Euclidean thought that results in the architecture of the city of Manhattan and the circular activity of time expressed into the movements of heavenly bodies. And while Stone Henge was built to specifically capture that connection, ManhattanHenge emerged out of the unconscious elements of a Euclidean landscape to make the same connection. This fleeting image encapsulates so many strands of thought– nature/culture; web/real-time; language/forms of life; and linear/circular.

That point on the horizon, the blaze of light at the end of 42nd street— that is the real-time moment, the connection between our technology and the natural world unfolding around us.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed