Skip to content →

Category: zettel

scraps of paper

Take Me To The River: Where Did I Put That Remote?

Published October 21, 2008 by cgerrish

We live in an age of rivers and streams. As the internet becomes the live web, it’s an increasingly large set of streaming data– images, video, text and sound. We’re back to the infinite number of cable channels that we surf between and among. These streams move at different speeds and are made up of objects/items of different sizes.

Television is the new internet. The Network swallowed the old television network whole. Of course, that was after the DVR permanently changed broadcasting’s relationship with time. Now even live broadcasts can be paused and reversed. The DVR started with one tuner, and moved to two tuners, so two shows could be recorded at the same time. YouTube added an infinite number of tuners.

The remote control is the user interface for the DVR/TV. It switches between channels, scrolls through recordings, searches by title, and controls the flow. These controls are starting to find their way into the live web. Both election.twitter.com and real time friendfeed have added the pause button to stop and start the stream.

Martin Heidegger returned to the ancient Greek idea of aletheia to think about the idea of truth. Here’s a brief explanation:

…aletheia is the truth that first appears when something is seen or revealed. It is to take out of hiddenness to uncover. It is not something that is connected with that which appears. Allowing something to appear is then the first act of truth; for example, one must give attention to something before it can be a candidate for any further understanding, for any understanding of space it must first somehow appear. Untruth, then, is something concealed or disguised.

Contained in aletheia is the river Lethe , one of several rivers in Hades– it literally means forgetfulness or concealment. Aletheia is discovery, uncovering truth that is hidden from view. We can search the past, the stream that has passed us by; or we can track the stream as it first appears. Our tools and interfaces to manage these rivers and streams are primitive. We barely even have a working remote control. Our toolkits are designed to manage documents, we need tools to manage and create streams.

Comments closed

Music of Politics: The Birth of Cool

Published October 19, 2008 by cgerrish

It was a comment by Aron Michalski on a post-debate NewsGang Live: Obama was like Miles Davis, it was the notes he didn’t play that made the difference. Somehow that’s the image that has stayed with me. It’s not a frame that will gain wide usage, but I find it useful to measure the currents of both politics and technology. Leaving space for the silence, leaving space for the other players to fill in. Not responding to every theme sounded with a long personal improvisation, but sometimes just letting them finish. Letting the silence respond– opening a space for the next theme to be introduced. Perhaps we’re seeing a kind of post-Bebop public political conversation, it may be a new birth of cool. Lowering the temperature of the debate, moving from a hot sound to a cool sound.

And it’s not just a lowering of the temperature, it’s a move to modal jazz and away from being tied down to the chord changes. Wikipedia discusses the new direction of a modal approach:

An understanding of modal jazz requires knowledge of musical modes. In bebop as well as in hard bop, musicians used chords to provide the background for their solos. A song would start out with a theme, which would introduce the chords used for the solos. These chords would be repeated throughout the whole song, while the soloists would play new, improvised themes over the repeated chord progression. By the 1950s, improvising over chords had become such a dominant part of jazz, that sidemen at recording dates were sometimes given nothing more than a list of chords to play from. Creating innovative solos became exceedingly difficult.

In the later 1950s, spurred by the experiments of composer and bandleader George Russell, musicians began using a modal approach. They chose not to write their songs using chords, but instead used modal scales. This meant that the bassist, for instance, did not have to ‘walk’ from one important note of a chord to that of another – as long as he or she stayed in the scale being used and accentuated the right notes within the scale, he could go virtually everywhere. The pianist, to give another example, would not have to play the same chords or variations of the chords, but could do anything, as long as he or she stayed within the scale being used. The overall result was more freedom of expression.

In fact, the way that a soloist creates a solo changed dramatically with the advent of modal jazz. Before, the goal of a soloist was to play a solo that fit into a set of chords. However, with modal jazz, a soloist must create a melody in one scale (typically), which could be potentially boring for the listener. Therefore, the goal of the musician was now to make the melody as interesting as possible. Modal jazz was, in essence, a return to melody.

The addition of flexibility created a return to melody. It seems to be a change that is seeping into the general environment. I’d equate melody with pragmatism.

Everett Dirksen & LBJ

The conservative George Will recently stated that the next president will need to attend to the words of Everett Dirksen of Illinois:

“I am a man of principle, and one of my principles is flexibility.”

As we move in to these difficult economic times, we’ll need to improvise, not on the well-worn chord changes, but within the new modes that we find ourselves. It’s that cool temperament that will be able to reach out and find the melody of our times.

2 Comments

Unringing The Bell: Traction, ReTraction and Zero-Response Time

Published October 15, 2008 by cgerrish

The Liberty Bell

The page in the newspaper that prints corrections and retractions is one of the most insincere parts of a publication. It’s the old unringing the bell problem. Once a statement is published, there’s no real way to unpublish it. The original image, or in this case the peel of the bell, is the one that continues to resonate in our public discourse.

A common technique in political (and commercial) campaigns is to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about an opponent. One hears the attack ad, but not the rebuttal. This tactic is based on the idea that the retractions morally cancel out the original attack, and therefore they’re allowable. The negative attack gains traction before it is retracted.

The tactic works because of the built in delay– time elapses before a response can occur. The delay exists because of the technical requirements around the production of news, it’s what we call the news cycle. Interestingly, companies create the same kind of delay when they engage in a formal process of constructing replies to conversations in the market.

In the Live Network, there is zero delay. Response is immediate. The model of the news cycle collapses to the simple conversation. You say something; I say something back. You say something, interest swarms around and responds. The bell rings, but a thousand bells ring in response. Think of the sound of change ringing— Change we can believe in.

One Comment

Composite Identity: A Collection of Wholes

Published October 14, 2008 by cgerrish

African Masks

Lately I’ve been thinking about identity as a composite. There was a point where I was convinced by the reversal of poles – switching from the system-based identity to the user-centered identity. An individual has many roles and she can reveal whichever identity attributes that are necessary for a particular transaction. We think of these fragments of identity as the pieces that make up the whole. But another way to look at it is to think of identity of a composite of wholes. Some elements match exactly, but live in a different name space. It’s probably not a complete list, or maybe it’s too long, but here’s an an initial take on the modes of identity. Each one could be consider a whole identity.

  • Anonymous
  • Citizen
    • City
    • State
    • Nation
    • Journalist
    • Politician
  • Social
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted
    • Artist/Writer
  • Personal
    • Medical
    • Legal
    • Financial
  • Consumer
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted / VRM
  • Business
    • Employer
    • Employee
    • Contractor
    • Proprietor

If identity is composite, should there be a single control point? If there were to be a single point of access to the management of this identity, authentication would have to be both multi-factor and multi-band.

Should we put all our eggs in one basket? With investment portfolios we preach diversification– we seek assets that don’t correlate in changing markets. It’s called covariance, we don’t want everything to go up or down at the same time. If we can’t risk a single control point, then we need to move to multiple control points. And in fact, even the ownership of identity is in question. We hear a lot about “my data” and “my identity,” but there is no data or identity outside the Network. The idea of multiple control points means more than I control my identity from multiple credential sets, it means I share control of my identity with other entities. The power and political economy of an identity is distributed throughout a network of relations. We don’t live in a frictionless plane, we live as mortals, among mortals, in this world that unfolds around us in the stream of time.

2 Comments