Category: value

Stigmergy: Writing is a Real-Time Gesture

Published October 18, 2009 by cgerrish

surrealism_escher

My notebook is filling up with musings on the real-time web. I keep trying to boil things down to the simplest formulation, the simplest expression of why the Network is moving into a real-time mode. It’s more difficult than one would imagine to create a palatable reduction. While we can apply Occam’s razor at a certain level, so much flavor is lost when the particular is replaced with the abstraction.

Occam’s razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question.

When the web was an exercise in reading, there was no need for real-time. The professional infrastructure of writing and publishing didn’t require much change in the move from offline to online. There was a bright line between professionally produced writing and the amateur personal home page. The pace of publication was a function of the competition between professional writing organizations. The reading of professionally produced writing has always been a distributed affair. A scarce number of writers produce writing for the abundant population of readers. Economics and value ensue from these kinds of ratios.

Search engines are largely based on the traditional economic model of the production of writing. What is returned for a search query should not only be what you’re looking for, but should be authoritative on the subject. Historically we’ve associated the kind of writing product emitted from the professional writing and publishing infrastructure as the most authoritative. While there’s not an explicit provenance, there is an implicit one based on the gesture of the citation link.

As originally conceived, the world wide web was a read-write environment. But clearly the two gestures did not occupy equivalent environments. Reading required a computer, web browser and a connection; writing required so much more. This difference in friction determined the early patterns of development for the Network. To some extent it also deferred the disruption of the established writing and publishing infrastructure.

Writing existed on the Network, but it was contained in the backwaters of the UseNet, Mailing List and the BBS. Real-time writing was limited to instant messenger, internet relay chat and the UNIX talk application. Isolated networks like the Plato System provided a highly sophisticated read-write environment that modeled many of the challenges that today’s Network is confronting.

Reducing the friction in writing to the Network, and here I’m referring to the world wide web, really began with the advent of widely available blogging software. This movement was accelerated by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed and others. Twitter, in particular, lowered the level of friction to almost zero. This is why a person can now write about what they had for lunch and publish it to the Network. Each of these services is a read-write social environment with public and private publication/broadcast modes. On the level of public gestures, they provide the same level of connectivity as any other public node on the Network.

So let’s loop back to the real-time web. It’s simply the gesture of writing, of making a mark on the Network, that has necessitated the move to real time. But here when we speak of writing, it is a different writing. We don’t refer to the industrially produced writing product created for mass consumption. Instead we refer to making a mark, a gesture, in a dynamic networked environment. The rather clumsy word Stigmergy has been used to draw a circle around some of these ideas.

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.

It is derived from the Greek words stigma (mark, sign) and ergon (work, action), and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions

It’s the gesture that necessitates the real-time web. Through public gestures, we make marks in the environment that others can sense and to which they can respond. The latency in the Network needs to be low enough for a flow to occur. The time of the real-time web is a technical speed that enables this flow of marks, traces, actions, gestures to dynamically connect to other marks, traces, actions and gestures in an ongoing loop and become visible to a micro-community that defines the larger emergent social objects.

Writing, in this sense of the word, is no longer about something. It is the thing itself.

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Fragments to Multitask by…

Published October 13, 2009 by cgerrish

octopus-info1

Some short fragments on the idea of multitasking. In the frame of the task, the thing to be done owns the attention of the doer. The doer’s attention is released when the task is done. The idea of multitasking is to engage with a portfolio of tasks, rapidly switching attention among tasks, or initiating actions that affect more than one task. The critique of multitasking states that the energy expended on switching and re-engaging among tasks lowers overall productivity. The comparative case is a set of tasks done sequentially with a singular focus. The design of the comparison begs the question about the value of what is learned in process. If the strategy, goal and tasks are static and nothing learned in process will change them, then there may be an optimal sequence to complete tasks. On the other hand, if the information released through engagement with the portfolio of tasks dynamically affects strategy and goals, then the early uncovering of both known and unknown unknowns provides better overall visibility. However, generally, in a corporate setting, strategy and goals are not responsive to the task. The pecking order doesn’t allow information transfer in that direction, especially with top down management styles that neutralize the bottom-up approach by championing it.

The other frame in which multitasking finds itself is in the behavior of rapid switching among electronic media inputs. The critique here is that our attention spans have been shortened and by virtue of the new media environment. Reading a long novel, or some other activity, that requires sustained attention over a long period is thought to be on the way out. We’re only interested in the highlights.

The operational assumption is that consumption of narratives is a process in which an individual starts at the beginning, goes to the end and then stops. Deviation from that model provides evidence of dysfunction, an inability to concentrate attention. Empirical observations show individuals engaging for short bursts and then moving on to the next thing. The short engagement is thought to be a response to the flood of information. Nothing can be fully engaged, so everything is engaged at its most shallow, in a summary form. The depth of the narrative product is untouched. Imagine a person ordering 12 completely different dinners and only having a taste of each course. The equivalent of 1 dinner is consumed, and 11 dinners wasted.

EconTalk: Tyler Cowen on Creating Your Own Economy:
EconTalk

It was in listening to a recording of Tyler Cowen in conversation with Russ Roberts that the bit was flipped for me. By simply looking from the reverse angle, the pieces fall into place. The narrative is also on the side of the individual. Cowen posits that individuals have long running narratives for which they collect fragments of information. Perhaps you’re a fan of a baseball team, a particular musician or a kind of dog. The ocean of information and the multiplication of sources is a welcome addition to the environment. Tracking a favorite musician through the ocean of information on the Network creates an efficient filter. Tracking other people who track this musician creates a micro-community of interest and extends the reach and focus of an individual.

What looks like multitasking turns out to be a single task executed across multiple media sources. What might look like a lack of focus and a short attention span is simply a relentless filter throwing out fragments that don’t enhance the internal narrative. The new media environment affords the possibility, and significantly reduces the cost of, productive research. The connections formed among these diverse sources loop back into the Network as a new node in a virtuous circle.

In an environment of scarcity, narratives might be savored— the story eagerly consumed from the ‘once upon a time’ to the ‘they lived happily every after.’ In an environment of abundance, the rare narrative is the one you’re building for yourself. The one built from the abundance of material uncovered through the Network.

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The Silo & The Pipe: Doc Searls gets Venezuelan

Published September 28, 2009 by cgerrish

It’s a rare thing that I read a Doc Searls post and start shaking my head half way through. The recent $100 million investment in Twitter, bringing their valuation to $1 billion, has unleashed a torrent of criticism. Driving my daughter to school the other day, I heard an “analyst” on NPR chirp that Twitter couldn’t be worth $1 billion because it was just a fad, that people might stop using it tomorrow and the bottom would fall out. If using Twitter were a random activity that returned no value, I suppose that could be true. Just as people could decide to stop going to the movies, stop eating pizza or stop listening to “analysts” on NPR. If the value of something is disregarded at the start, it’s rather difficult to speak sincerely of valuation.

Searls’s criticism is a reprise of the open source silo meme. The drumbeat for the nationalization of Twitter has re-emerged. The capitalist pigs at Twitter have chosen to build a business rather than contribute their technology to the open source technology commons. Praise is sung for linux, rss, email and http. If only Twitter would see the light and release what they have to benefit the common good. Twitter’s business is just lumber from which other software developers should be allowed to create value. The complaint is that because Twitter is neither open nor decentralized, it has created an intractable engineering problem and does not contribute to the greater good of the web.

I would contend that Twitter is both open and distributed. Its characterization as a silo misses the point. Rather than using the silo as a criteria for openness, what if we look instead to the pipe. In the Unix command line, the standard output can be piped to the standard input of a new filter. Some very complex forms of processing can be created by chaining together a series of filters and piping data through it. The “chainability” of the javascript library Jquery is another good example of this model. The critique of the silo is its lack of interoperability, you can’t pipe to or from it.

Now, let’s look at Twitter. Can you pipe messages to Twitter? Can you pipe messages from Twitter? There was a time when I used Identi.ca as a primary micromessaging client. I typed messages into the Identi.ca web client and they entered the local pool, then I piped them to FriendFeed, where they also entered that ecosystem, FriendFeed sent them to Twitter, and Twitter sent them to Facebook. Examining this relay chain could you say that Twitter is a silo that owns my messages? Each of these venues represents a slightly different social graph and has a different tool set with which to display, prioritize and filter my messages within the context of the local graph. Twitter and Facebook are simply the most successful venues with which to read and write micro-messages (formerly called status messages). Google reader shares, SMS messages, Blog entries, et cetera can all be piped in and out of Twitter. Or if one prefers, Twitter can be left out of the chain entirely.

The mind share that Twitter and Facebook have built can’t be nationalized and distributed as lumber for a hypothetical socialist realist distributed micro-messaging ecosystem. If one is truly interested in open, look to the pipe, not the silo. Certainly there’s work that needs to be done on the pipe itself. Issues around real time, rate limiting, identity, social graphs, micro-communities, activity stream formats and track are all very important. But the real time stream environment is already here and operational. Many in the open source crowd are just rewinding the VCR and replaying the last battle. Steve Ballmer summed it up nicely in his interview with Mike Arrington, “we want to be first, best and interoperable.” Even Microsoft has embraced the pipe.

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Ornamentation: The Beauty of Search

Published September 27, 2009 by cgerrish

It began with a discussion of ornamentation. As we look around us, the ornament seems to be disappearing. The things we use have been stripped of ornamentation in favor of pure functionality. Form, we are taught, must follow function. Decoration is an unnecessary expense, as it adds nothing to the function of a manufactured thing. Ornament has lost the battle of Return on Investment.

It wasn’t always so, there was a distinct turn. Alain De Botton, in his book “The Architecture of Happiness” explores the moment when engineering and aesthetics collided.

“The answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place.

A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century, but had thereafter risen quickly to dominanace in the construction of the new buildings of the Industrial Revolution.”

These engineers were building the factories, bridges and railways that would provide the infrastructure for the industrial age. Style simply wasn’t a consideration.

“The philosophy of the engineers flew in the face of everything the architectural profession had ever stood for. ‘To turn something useful, practical, functional into something beautiful, that is architecture’s duty,’ insisted Karl Friedrich Schinkel. ‘Architecture, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction,’ echoed Sir George Gilbert Scott.

The essence of great architecture was understood to reside in what was functionally unnecessary.”

In 1923, Le Corbusier penned a book called ‘Toward a New Architecture‘ which outlined the principles of this new approach to the design of buildings. Again, from De Botton’s book:

For Le Corbusier, true, great architecture — meaning, architecture movtivated by the quest for efficiency — was more likely to be found in a 40,000-kilowatt electricity turbine or a low-pressure ventilating fan. It was to these machines that his books accorded the reverential photographs which previous architectural writers had reserved for cathedrals and opera houses.

And with that prelude, we arrive at the web search engine and the use and meaning of ornament. There’s an interesting experiment currently being conducted called Blind Search. The creators of this test wonder what happens to a user’s perception of search results when all branding is removed. Google initially established itself by producing noticeably better search results. Now, established as a verb meaning “to search,” does Google still provide results that are visibly superior? The results indicate that Google still leads, but not by as much as you’d think: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. And putting the Google brand on any search results increases satisfaction.

In looking at the design of the Google user interface, we see the influence of Le Corbusier. The typographic logo is the only design on the page, and occasionally it is playfully re-imagined to commemorate notable events. Here, form follows function.

In his book, De Botton tries to articulate how we find beauty— the mechanics of what attracts us:

“We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally are deficient. We respect style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.”

While we may perceive the Network as vast, complex and opaque— with its simplicity Google’s design provides us with the antidote. Now look at this image of Microsoft’s Bing home page:

Bing’s user interface is decorated with a background image that gives a sense of what it does. I’m fairly certain that the image has no effect on the quality of the search results. Bing is attempting to provide a usage model for the consumption of faceted search results. Queries return both potential facets along with the traditional list of links. Bing is designed with both facets and links in mind, while Google appends facets to the bottom of the link list.

As the facets and links that search engines return become more and more indistinguishable, what is the difference that will make a difference? One could assume that there will always be an engineering innovation right around the corner that will make a significant and visible difference. We like to believe that progress is always linear.

Corporate brand clearly makes a difference, users like a brand name search product. Microsoft’s brand has been held in the background and a new brand has been established. Images have also been used to distinguish Bing. Ornamentation has been exiled for so long, it’s hard to understand how to even value it.

Let’s return again to Alain De Botton:

The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worth wile — which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of the good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forthrightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.

Le Corbusier’s aesthetic demanded design be “ascetic and clean, disciplined and frugal.” He had a hatred of any kind of decoration. Google’s engineering aesthetic is a terminal design. Any competitor employing a purely functional design will unintentionally be referencing Google. There’s no way to get radically simpler than Google, and therefore no way to create enough space to allow for differentiation. The only alternative is to move back into ornament, into the decorative, into beauty.

While we may think of computerized search of the internet as a purely functional affair of ONEs and ZEROs, the simple lists of links are being pulled into organic forms by their facets. Human forms of life are surfacing in and through our search queries. Search results will begin to bloom into something that looks much more like a natural form than points and lines in a frictionless space. This moment may mark another turning point…

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