June 2012
162 posts
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“For all the possibilities of our new culture machines, most people are still stuck in download mode. Even after the advent of widespread social media, a pyramid of production remains, with a small number of people uploading material, a slightly larger group commenting on or modifying that content, and a huge percentage remaining content to just consume. One reason for the persistence of this pyramid of production is that for the past half-century, much of the world’s media culture has been defined by a single medium - television - and television is defined by downloading. Television is a one-way spigot gushing into our homes. The hardest task that television asks of anyone is to turn the power off after they have turned it on. The networked computer offers the first chance in 50 years to reverse the flow, to encourage thoughtful downloading and, even more importantly, meaningful uploading. What counts as meaningful uploading? My definition revolves around the concept of “stickiness” - creations and experiences to which others adhere. Tweets about celebrity gaffes are not sticky but rather little Teflon balls of meaninglessness. In contrast, applications like tumblr.com, which allow users to combine pictures, words and other media in creative ways and then share them, have the potential to add stickiness by amusing, entertaining and enlightening others - and engendering more of the same. The explosion of apps for mobile phones and tablets means that even people with limited programming skills can now create sticky things.”
—How computers can cure cultural diabetes - opinion - 05 July 2011 - New Scientist
Live Chat - Dan O'Hara →
www2.warwick.ac.uk
I still don’t quite see how you link skeuomorphism will Ballard, could you elaborate on that a little more?
I’m thinking, as you ask, of what Martin Amis said of Ballard, that he ‘seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain’. Ballard often writes of tapping into the ‘archaeopsychic zero’: the primordial self, our common corporeal memory as a species.
I wonder if there’s a relationship to be drawn between skeuomorphism and Ballard’s often very singular use of metaphor?
Not the kind of memory you have as an individual, but that which we all possess, insofar as our bodies and minds are records of our species’ evolution. To that extent, Ballard was overtly interested in skeuomorphic processes long before I’d heard of the concept.
What Jung would call “collective unconscious” then?
That’s the model Ballard used for understanding the skeuomorphic; he took the idea directly from Jung. But it wasn’t really adequate to explain the material world; sufficient for the human mind, but not for the made environment of technology.
This has similarities with Stiegler’s tertiary retention as well.
“Consciousness is thus a network of inter-connected and multi-layered circuitry, ranging from the unconscious to the history – the memory – of “culture itself” (what Stiegler calls “tertiary retentions”).”
It’s something Stiegler develops from Husserl regarding technology as a form of memory.
I interviewed Ray Kurzweil recently & he was adamant that his mobile phone was effectively his memory.
Certainly that’s true for McLuhanist’s like Kurzweil, though the instrumentalism implicit in such reasoning is a problem, for me. He’d still see technology as a set of devices in a master/slave relation. The Kurzweil thing is nothing new.
Merlin McDonald in “Origins of the Modern Mind” linked the act of writing a diary to ESS (External Symbolic Storage). The placing of memory into external sources.
Oh, that’s interesting: a kind of ‘exteriorization’ of mind in the social. It sounds quite similar to the extended mind thesis - except this argues for cognitive and epistemic parity between states and processes inside and outside of the skin bag.
Of course it’s nothing new, but it could be argued the widespread use of mobile phones ups the stakes somewhat.
I like what Mark Fisher has to say about smartphones particularly. At Virtual Futures, he described them as libidino-electrical parasites. And that’s a much more balanced view than the instrumentalism of Kurzweil; or at least it takes into account the fact that such devices are not ‘innocent’, that their very design carries a predetermined set of ‘habits’ over into our behaviour.
“the objects in IF tend to be more accessible as artifacts, and artifacts with narrative significance. Subject to the author’s willingness to write descriptions, you can pick up IF objects, smell them, taste them, get the heft of them; you can examine them and learn things about them that aren’t necessarily visually obvious; you can ask other characters about them. They carry — or at least can carry — evidence of the cultures and individuals they belong to, suggesting a wealth of information never explicitly spelled out. [1] IF tends not to be populated with dozens of the same thing (crates, beer bottles, weighted companion cubes) but with hand-crafted individual objects. It’s a kind of world that could only exist in text because it simplifies a real world environment tremendously — the average IF room, if found in reality with only the objects described, would be eerily empty. But the few objects we do get to see and interact with are freighted with that much more meaning.”
—Wunderkammer: The Fiction of Physical Things | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling
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“Only five years ago who would have imagined that today a woman in sub-Saharan Africa could use a mobile phone to access health information essential to bringing her pregnancy safely to term? Mobile phones are now the most widely used communication technology in the world. They continue to spread at an exponential rate - particularly in developing countries. This expansion provides unprecedented opportunities to apply mobile technology for health. How are mobile devices being used for health around the world? What diverse scenarios can mHealth be applied in and how effective are these approaches? What are the most important obstacles that countries face in implementing mHealth solutions? This publication includes a series of detailed case studies highlighting best practices in mHealth in different settings. The publication will be of particular interest to policymakers in health and information technology, as well as those in the mobile telecommunications and software development industries.”
—WHO | Global Observatory for eHealth series - Volume 3
“A socio-technical system (STS) is a social system operating on a technical base, e.g. email, chat, bulletin boards, blogs, Wikipedia, E-Bay, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Hundreds of millions of people use them every day, but how do they work? More importantly, can they be designed? If socio-technical systems are social and technical, how can computing be both at once? The huge 30,000 word “chapter” has taken over a year to produce, involving 2 authors – Brian Whitworth and Adnan Ahmad – and 3 editors, including Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam.”
—Putting people first » A huge chapter on ‘socio-technical systems design’
“The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a prestigious group of 22 internationally known scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation. ‘It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,’ warns lead author Anthony Barnosky. ‘The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.’ The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. Humans have already converted about 43 percent of the ice-free land surface of the planet to uses like raising crops and livestock and building cities. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity. ‘My view is that humanity is at a crossroads now, where we have to make an active choice,’ says Barnosky. ‘One choice is to acknowledge these issues and potential consequences and try to guide the future (in a way we want to). The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, ‘Let’s just go on as usual and see what happens.’”
—Earth Approaching Tipping Point Say Scientists - Slashdot
“A NEW THEORY FOR DATA NEEDED
The database industry has benefited immensely from the seminal work on data theory started in the 1970s. This work changed the world and continues to be very relevant, but it is apparent now that it captures only part of the problem. We need a new theory and taxonomy of data that must include: • Identity and versions. Unlocked data comes with identity and optional versions. • Derivation. Which versions of which objects contributed to this knowledge? How is their schema interpreted? Changes to the source would drive a recalculation just as in Excel. If a legal reason means the source data may not be used, you should forget about using the knowledge derived from it. • Lossyness of the derivation. Can we invent a bounding that describes the inaccuracies introduced by derived data? Is this a multidimensional inaccuracy? Can we differentiate loss from the inaccuracies caused by sheer size? • Attribution by pattern. Just like a Mulligan stew, patterns can be derived from attributes that are derived from patterns (and so on). How can we bound taint from knowledge that we are not legally or ethically supposed to have? • Classic locked database data. Let’s not forget that any new theory and taxonomy of data should include the classic database as a piece of the larger puzzle. It’s a great time to be working with data. Lots of new and exciting things are happening!
Q” —If You Have Too Much Data, then “Good Enough” Is Good Enough - ACM Queue
The database industry has benefited immensely from the seminal work on data theory started in the 1970s. This work changed the world and continues to be very relevant, but it is apparent now that it captures only part of the problem. We need a new theory and taxonomy of data that must include: • Identity and versions. Unlocked data comes with identity and optional versions. • Derivation. Which versions of which objects contributed to this knowledge? How is their schema interpreted? Changes to the source would drive a recalculation just as in Excel. If a legal reason means the source data may not be used, you should forget about using the knowledge derived from it. • Lossyness of the derivation. Can we invent a bounding that describes the inaccuracies introduced by derived data? Is this a multidimensional inaccuracy? Can we differentiate loss from the inaccuracies caused by sheer size? • Attribution by pattern. Just like a Mulligan stew, patterns can be derived from attributes that are derived from patterns (and so on). How can we bound taint from knowledge that we are not legally or ethically supposed to have? • Classic locked database data. Let’s not forget that any new theory and taxonomy of data should include the classic database as a piece of the larger puzzle. It’s a great time to be working with data. Lots of new and exciting things are happening!
Q” —If You Have Too Much Data, then “Good Enough” Is Good Enough - ACM Queue
“Anne is primarily concerned with questioning the role of haptics in the reading experience and whether the use of hands engages the brain in ways that play a constitutive role in the reading process; what DOES the clicking do or add to the reading experience? She is particularly interested in evaluating and theorizing the impact that physical and technological affordances have on the phenomenological experience of immersion in narrative storyworlds and longer linear texts, as compared with reading a narrative by leafing through pages of a book. At the heart of her passionate talk are questions of what these physical/technological affordances do with the reading process cognitively, phenomenologically and perceptually, and how we experience a text differently when we handle it with an e-reader, mouse and screen as compared with the print medium. The talk reflects on these questions and related concerns using findings that address different aspects of reading from a host of empirical studies she surveys (though a large portion of findings range from a time before the experience of the digital reading and writing landscape substantially evolved to what it is today).”
—Masters of Media » Anne Mangen on the Technologies and Haptics of Reading
“Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency,” DARPA stated.”
—Layer 8: Apple of my eye? US fancies a huge metaphor repository
“It is not only our material environment that is transformed by our machinery. We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and our world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs.[…] Our machines allow us to reach out beyond the limits of our flesh. Our machines alter the ways in which our senses feed us information about the world beyond. […] Our machines offer us an image of ourselves — an image, which like the reflection of Narcissus, can hold us transfixed in self-adoration.”
—Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert | The Awl
“The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure.”
—MIT SENSEable City Lab
“Urban Remix is another ‘soundmap’ project like we have seen before. There is more to this project than just recording and uploading audio though. As the name suggests, you are able to remix the sounds you, or any other participant previously uploaded to the Urban Remix website, by drawing paths on a map.”
—Urban Remix - Everyday Listening - Sound Art, Sound Installations, Sonic Inspiration
“Computer networks that can’t forget fast enough can show symptoms of of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers new clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic brains, say researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University. In their experiments, the scientists used a virtual neural network to simulate an excessive release of dopamine in the brain and found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what’s meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters.”
—Scientists Afflict Computers With Schizophrenia - Slashdot
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“Interestingly enough, Sutton-Smith (1997), citing Kenneth Burke and Gregory Bateson, made a similar suggestion about the function of play biting in animals. He suggested that play might be the earliest form of a negative, prior to the existence of the negative in language. Play, as a way of not doing whatever it represents, prevents error. It is a positive behavioral negative. It says no by saying yes. It is a bite but it is a nip (Sutton-Smith, 1997). In both cases, the urge to play is a means of communicating in a situation in which intelligent creatures have not yet acquired language. A play action is a signal similar to a predator call, except that its referent is to the social world. If you’ve ever owned a kitten (paging Graham Harman) you will see that play biting goes quite far down and quite far in to mammalian ontogeny. Think about what this means. It means for a kick off that what we call language is a small part of a much bigger configuration space. For a word to be a play-bite, a play-bite has already got to refer to a genuine bite. There has to exist an interobjective space in which “meaning” can take place. The fact that we speak, then, means not that we are different from animals, but that we encapsulate a vast array of nonhuman entities and behaviors. For language to exist at all, there have to be all kinds of objects already in play. All kinds of inscribable surfaces.”
—ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Of Nips: Play and Realism
Up, not North - Automatypewriter →
upnotnorth.net
The Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type by itself:
It can also detect what’s being typed on it. It can be used to send text to and/or receive text from a computer via USB. It was designed as a platform for playing interactive fiction games
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“If we want robots to be successful in healthcare, we’re going to need to think about how do we make those robots communicate their intention and how do people interpret the intentions of the robot,” added Kemp. “And I think people haven’t been as focused on that until now. Primarily people have been focused on how can we make the robot safe, how can we make it do its task effectively. But that’s not going to be enough if we actually want these robots out there helping people in the real world.”
—How Do People Respond to Being Touched by a Robot? | ScienceBlog.com
“Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl.”
—Cloud Girlfriend, the stalking has just begun - Infocult: Uncanny Informatics
“Really, social networking is just another salient venue where problematic relationships can play out and can have an impact on depression.”
—‘Facebook depression’ claim is research-challenged | NetFamilyNews.org
“there is a mental condition to accept the loss of data as the price of doing business with computers. And beyond that, the expectation that data will be lost, and the spreading of this idea to the point that data loss becomes no big thing.”
—“epidemic mental condition” | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
“if stories themselves are universal, the way we tell them changes with the technology at hand. Every new medium has given rise to a new form of narrative. In Europe, the invention of the printing press and movable type around 1450 led to the emergence of periodicals and the novel. The invention of the motion picture camera around 1890 set off an era of feverish experimentation that led to the development of feature films by 1910. Television, invented around 1925, gave rise a quarter-century later to I Love Lucy and the highly stylized form of comedy that became known as the sitcom. As each of these media achieved production and distribution on an industrial scale, we saw the emergence of 20th-century mass media: newspapers, magazines, movies, music, TV. And with that, there was no role left for the consumer except to consume. Then, just as we’d gotten used to consuming sequential narratives in a carefully prescribed, point-by-point fashion, came the internet. The internet is the first medium that can act like all media — it can be text, or audio or video, or all of the above. It’s nonlinear, thanks to the world wide web and the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking. It’s inherently participatory — not just interactive, in the sense that it responds to your commands, but an instigator constantly encouraging you to comment, to contribute, to join in.”
—The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories? | Wired Business | Wired.com
“Unlike a mirror, which reminds us of who we really are and may have a negative effect on self-esteem if that image does not match with our ideal, Facebook can show a positive version of ourselves,” Hancock said in a statement. “We’re not saying that it’s a deceptive version of self, but it’s a positive one. For many people, there’s an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad. This is one of the first studies to show that there’s a psychological benefit of Facebook.”
—Visiting your Facebook profile boosts your self-esteem | ZDNet
