Culture
What? A quickly found picture to celebrate the 5000th post on this blog.
By Pierre la Police of course, depicting an imaginary sport elec competition.
Weird devices, electricity and strange people. Surely a good summary of this blog.
This well-known internet meme of Jesus or Mary on a toast struck me as particularly relevant while reading Brains in a vat by Hilary Putnam:
"An ant is crawling on a patch of sand. As it crawls, it traces a line in the sand. By pure chance the line that it traces curves and recrosses itself in such a way that it ends up looking like a recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill. Has the ant traced a picture of Winston Churchill, a picture that depicts Churchill? Most people would say, on a little reflection, that it has not. The ant, after all, has never seen Churchill, Or even a picture of Churchill, arid it had no intention of depicting Churchill. It simply traced a line (and even that was unintentional), a line that we can 'see as' a picture of Churchill. (...) We can express this by saying that the line is not 'in itself' a representation1 of anything rather than anything else. Similarity (of a certain very complicated sort) to the features of Winston Churchill is not sufficient to make something represent or refer to Churchill. Nor is it necessary (...) So it may seem that what is necessary for representation, or what is mainly necessary for representation, is intention.
Why do I blog this? reading pdf scattered on my desktop at the airport, waiting for my flight to Montreal, always a good time to think about such abstract matters. That topic, related to apophenia is always intriguing to nail down.
"I cant believe it, the way you look sometimes,Like a trampled flag on a city street, oh yeah,
And I dont want it, the things youre offering me, Symbolized bar code, quick id, oh yeah,
cause Im a 21st century digital boy, I dont know how to live but Ive got a lot of toys, My daddys a lazy middle class intellectual, My mommys on valium, so ineffectual, Aint life a mystery? "
Bad Religion - 21st Century Digital Boy Why do I blog this? listening to old tunes while reading critical studies about new media often leads to interesting encounters and resonance.
"one of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world"
Barnaby Rich (1580-1617), writing in 1613.
So, as it seems, the new "big thing" is consider "everyone as a monitor" as attested by this article in the Economist. Some people now claims that "The sheer ubiquity of mobile phones amounts to “the biggest leap in history, bigger than the printing press, which, after all, stayed in the hands of very few people,” (Katrin Verclas from MobileActive.org). Although I am not sure about this, it does not dismiss the whole issue. The article interestingly addresses the different modalities of such a "monitoring" feature: be it explicit (people take pictures, shoot videos, send messages, etc.) OR automatic. As they say in the E, "this is now on the horizon" for the good (participatory urbanism for instance) or the bad ("a coming surveillance state"). Funny enough, this article appeared in my RSS feed reader right next to this other one by Bruce Schneier on Wired which basically states that "What happens to our data happens to ourselves / Who controls our data controls our lives". Why do I blog this? quick references for later. It's again the tension between explicit versus automatic sharing of personal information, a topic I am interested in.
Reading this interview of Daniel Dociu on BLDGBLOG, I was intrigued by a comment from Greg Smith about the relationship between gaming and architecture:
"Seeing real discourse about gaming in an architectural context is very exciting for me. Architecture tends to have stock discussions about gaming: the eternal resuscitation of the Situationist International and the expected conversations about 3D modeling. The winfall in thinking about gaming is much bigger when you consider the medium without being crippled by these limitations. While I do appreciate the fine art of "level design" I think the real prize in comparing gaming and architectural design is the exploration of simulation, interface and play (the latter of which is to gaming as programme is to architecture). (...) what interests me the most is how the medium ties into the history of architectural representation. Given the intimate relationship between architecture and "viewing apparatuses" (from the panorama through orthogonal projection on the drawing board) gaming can be read as the latest in a procession of technologies and techniques for constructing images and ideas"
In an insightful blogpost, Greg Smith also discusses this topic. He mentions two interesting projects relevant for that matters:
(A example of Echochrome)
Why do I blog this? I find this topic interesting and touched it last year during my year at the Media and Design Lab. It's good to think in both directions: what urbanism/architecture can bring to game design and how game design can influence urbanism/architecture. And it's not only about aesthetic concerns. The "Space Time Play book is a good resource about this topic.
Also, what does this mean in reality? are there signals of echochrome-like structures in the physical space that would allow parkour-like interactons? See for example the following example that I've already mentioned in this blog:
According to the Phrase finder:
"What does the phrase "to stir the pot" generally mean?Deliberately provocative, yes, but not necessarily maliciously. Picture a pot of soup. A lot of ingredients have settled to the bottom, out of sight, until stirred. Metaphorically, a lot of issues/resentments/obligations can drop out of sight when nobody mentions them. One can "stir the pot" to bring issues to the surface, sometimes with malice, but sometimes merely to create awareness and effect change."
Why do I blog this? saturday morning search, when listening Prince Buster.
Having spent 2 weeks in California for ETech 2008 as well as meetings with other like-minded people (academics, designers, start-ups, people from the entertainment/design industries and foresight think-tanks/consultants), I tried to list some of the things that struck me ("what did I learn?"). The first thing that I really felt was the fear of an economic recession, especially for everyone relying on private money (even academics when they do private research). Lots of people, unlike Europe so far, fear something similar to what happen 7 years ago and led to lay-offs, less money in innovation/R&D/new media/weird stuff. The consequences that is often feared by people I met would be a the focus on the short-term (and US companies are already more short-term oriented than european one), more actionable/productive work than speculative/long-term projects.
Another element is that I encountered similar feelings that I have about academia being stuffy and the need to do "something different" but related to the circulation of knowledge and at the same time participating in design/foresight/shaping the future. Perhaps it's because I met people who did not have/wanted their tenure or the sacrifice of academic research competition.
So, I then notice how some structures receive some interest because they sit in between different worlds/process: Kitchen Budapest, Jump Associate or trendcentral (or even the near future laboratory). There seems to be a curiosity towards this new ecology of trendspotting, strategy consulting and think-made tank firms or boutiques.
Next, though was the difficulty in starting off ubicomp/"objects of the future" companies: both to find a domain and also because the western world has given up some much of its capacity (interest?) to create hardware (mostly to China) that it's difficult to make it possible and understandable to others.
As usual, it's always good to hang out/talk with people trying to work on similar aspects (user experience research, think tanks, foresight) because it allowed me to discuss potential services/ideas I/we can offer (though LIFT or the near future laboratory).
And of course, it was the opportunity to work on our pamphlet with Julian, observe California and take pictures of sidewalk, pavement, scifi city and other weird stuff as usual.
Although I am really not into Second Life, I have been to the Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away, Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon by W. James Au at ETech. The blurb was:
"Throughout 2007, reputed publications like Wired, Forbes, and the LA Times pronounced Second Life over-hyped, while negative press over Ponzi schemes, porn, etc. suggested imminent disaster. While all this negativity continued almost unabated, however, the world’s user base tripled (both in terms of monthly active and maximum concurrent users), and continues attracting about a half million new sign-ups a month. How can this possibly be happening?"
As backlash continues, user base keeps growing. Companies are continuing to invest heavily in SL (Cisco for instance), not just for marketing but practical applications (to see where resources/servers are being used). Even marketers are getting innovative (L'Oréal): companies adjusting to what people want to do in SL but corporate presence per se has never been the main story. Then why is it working? 3 reasons according to him: 1) Mirrored flourishing: what you do in SL should make you better in the world out there 2) Bepop reality ("the virtual world as a 3d jazz combo"): class atmosphere, diversity of genre/species, space station next to a church. 3) Second Life as a impression society: impression in the sense of cool, about creating something "cool", how much interactivity you can bring to the creativity + impression about long-term activity (how long you will stay in this environment): "whaddya got and how long are you gonna stick with it?
As a result: Second Life is a international cutting edge creative space with high barriers to entry (bad interface, frustrating rights form the start), a Metaverse like Mac World. And it leads to practical inovation: web2.0 innovation in 3D (HBO produced a machinima with SL as a platform), Ajax Life (web-based SL), 3D architectural design and prototyping tool in SL (like on a wiki in a webpage).
Why do I blog this? as I stated before, I've never really been into SL so I was curious about what is happening there now that the press is less talking about it. Some elements are interesting but I am still not convinced and the fact that some companies invest a lot in SL and virtual world seems as if it was meant this "social 3D web" was a self-fullfilling prophecy.
A truly good year/millésime, loads of work and passion, perhaps more professional this year. Colorful and lively, an incredible crowd, lots of trust, present friends/online friends who could not attend. Lots of traces, cheese and duct-tape.
Still need to parse all I learn, discuss and digest. Thanks speakers+attendants+partners in crime! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Being an organizer of the LIFT conference is also tricky and often lead you to avoid attending the conferences. That said, I managed to watch Bruce Sterling's introductory keynote. Bruce addressed what was important in 2007 that may shape 2008. In a sense, looking out in the rear mirror to see the near future. Which led him to state "What’s the punchiest thing one can say about the past year? That’s the way it was, now get out!". The first point of this keynote was that a big part of the good things that happen to us on this planet occur BECAUSE people make it out of bed in the morning ("The main reason people prosper if because they get out of bed, showing up is 90% of the job!").
He then described how 2008 might be boring ("It's a crap year!") caused by economic downturn, global warming memes. And in the tech world, the situation looks even worse to him: what is exciting when Microsoft wants to eat Yahoo ("Is MS really about innovation when Bill Gates leaves MS to go cure malaria?").
So what may shape 2008? Is it possible to produce focuses insights about it? To Bruce Sterling, a powerful driver can be something that came unexpected, out of nowhere and largely covered in the press. Before jumping into it, the gave a disclaimer "You will probably not like it but you'll get why it's important to other people": Mrs Carla Sarkozy.
The first point he started with is to consider why talking about this in a tech conference like LIFT. To him, it's because they met at a french tech summit about the current problems encountered by the music industry and P2P policies. So to some extent it's an "internet policy romance" where Carla Sarkozy (the "Madame Du Barry of the Digital Renaissance") can be considered as a black swan. If you're not familiar with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work, a black swan is a "a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations", a ‘wild-card’ event that cannot be predicted with accuracy (in the foresight jargon). An history like this, as he said, "writes itself" and rules the world... showing that there are certain histories ("believe it or not") who dominates.
Using this metaphor, he then presented the two driving forces related to this black swan: ambition ("carla is ambitious") and publicity ("carla and nicolas are notorious, they can't turn the press off, they feed the press") with a matrix like this:
The next part of the talk was a depiction of what each square of this matrix would imply and are their what probabilities. The high ambition/high publicity square between the classic weirdest/useful scenario ( “Future tends to be weird, … but glamour has its use.”). The scenarios (and this topic) he presented may seem awkward BUT: what was interesting here was this sort of template/matrix to explore the future, a similar technique as the one we employed last year at the LIFT07 workshop about the city of the future. And of course, another black swan for the 21st century was definitely the Internet, as he pointed out.
The end of the talk were rather advices/behavior to adopt towards the future. For instance: “Let me tell you something you can take certainly in 2008, it’s to find the very character of our time. You can smell the future, you can embody it", "you cannot predict the future but you can describe it" or take futurism as the goldilock hypothesis as the future is either "too hot, too cold, just right".
Thus, he basically tied together foresight research techniques, black swans theory, goldilock hypothesis, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and the Internet to discuss a sort of attitude towards the future. Some discussions with people+blogpost reading showed that lots of people thought he was "ranting against" this weird french couple. This was not a rant by any means, rather an exemplification of the foresight method and how unexpected events as well as driving forces can be employed to described scenarios. He wanted to state that if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we won't understand it. It requires to get the the driving forces: “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.“
I am the LIFT conference and I just received this nice spam:
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Why do I blog this? pure nonsense when working with the LIFT team on the participant greetings at University of Geneva.
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan, 1967
"I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace."
Why do I blog this? I was reminded of this poem after listening to Paul Saffo's talk at the Singularity Summit and I quite liked it.
Fabien dug out an interesting paper by Bruno Latour about the implications of digital traces entitled "Beware your imagination leaves digital traces. The article, published in Times Higher Literary Supplement (6th April 2007) addresses the increasing traceability and how it will open up new inquiries by social sciences
"It is as if the inner workings of private worlds have been pried open because their inputs and outputs have become thoroughly traceable. (...) Before digitalisation, social psychologists used very vague words such as “rumours”, “influences”, “fads”, “fashions” or even “contexts” to describe the complex ecology of our minds. But today it just happens that a character from a game can be followed through the IP numbers of the computers from which they are clicked or from the stream of news in which they are commented upon, all the way from the designers who draw them to the blogs where their adventures are exchanged. (...) The ancient divide between the social on the one hand and the psychological on the other was largely an artefact of an asymmetry between the traceability of various types of carriers (...) today the data bank of Amazon.com has simultaneous access to my most subtle preferences as well as to my Visa card. As soon as I purchase on the web, I erase the difference between the social, the economic and the psychological, just because of the range of traces I leave behind. (...) The consequences for the social sciences will be enormous: they can finally have access to masses of data that are of the same order of magnitude as that of their older sisters, the natural sciences. But my view is that “social” has probably become as obsolete as “natural”: what is common to both is a sort of new epidemiology that was anticipated, a century ago, by the sociologist Gabriel Tarde and that has now, at last, the empirical means of its scientific ambition."
Why do I blog this? I quite like the holistic perspective Latour describes here and how tools lead to a situation in which researchers need to go beyond reductionism. And pointing out Tarde is also relevant.
... is the motto of Captain Nemo in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne. It actually means "Moving in a Moving thing"... showing how change occur through a changing medium, very well in line with one's behavior in a "worldchanging" environment.
The NYT has a piece on the "culture of mistake" that I found intriguing
"good grades are usually a reward for doing things right, not making errors. Compliments are given for having the correct answer and, in fact, the wrong one may elicit scorn from classmates. We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.The resistance to making mistakes runs deep, he [Mr. Schoemaker ] writes, but it is necessary for the following reasons, which he outlined in the article: - We are overconfident. “Inexperienced managers make many mistakes and learn from them. Experienced managers may become so good at the game they’re used to playing that they no longer see ways to improve significantly. They may need to make deliberate mistakes to test the limits of their knowledge.” - We are risk-averse because “our personal and professional pride is tied up in being right. Employees are rewarded for good decisions and penalized for failures, so they spend a great deal of time and energy trying not to make mistakes.” - We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs. - We assume feedback is reliable, although in reality it is often lacking or misleading. We don’t often look outside tested channels."
Why do I blog this? all of this is exemplified a lot in the psychology literature but I still find this very interesting. Especially if you think about the context of technology design, these elements echo a lot with some problem in how certain technologies are designed. My favorite, and the one I try to face in my work with designer is certainly the "We tend to favor data that confirms our beliefs"... as user experience researcher, it's always a matter of challenging people's mindsets... which is often turned to belief confirmation.
Reading Glitch aesthetics by Iman Moradi (mulimedia design dissertation - 2004), I was intrigued by the definiton of glitch in that work. The author starts by describing how the dictionary definition of the word “glitch” would be too narrow, especially because it does not consider "the different works and practices prevalent in the production and presentation of glitch artwork".
(Picture is glitch in Second Life found here).
So, the definition can be defined by these excerpts, showing two dimensions:
"The pure glitch is the result of a Malfunction or Error. (...)So in a sense the glitch has always been associated with the definition of a problem. It’s a word used to describe the result of a situation when something has gone wrong. (...) The Pure Glitch is therefore an unpremeditated digital artefact, which may or may not have its own aesthetic merits. (...) Glitch-alikes are a collection of digital artefacts that resemble visual aspects of real glitches found in their original habitat. (...) Pure Glitch ----------- Glitch-alike Accidental ----------- Deliberate Coincidental ----------- Planned Appropriated ----------- Created Found ----------- Designed Real ----------- Artificial"
Why do I blog this? pure curiosity towards failures, malfunction and their possible aesthetic. The part about the techniques to create glitch is insightful as well (replication-repetition, linearity, fragmentation, complexity). The glitchbrowser is a good example for that matter.
Some quotes from Latour, B. Pragmatogonies: A Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties. American Behavioural Scientist 37(6), 1994, 791-808 to keep up my sleeve:
"According to my origin myth, it is impossible even to conceive of an artifact that does not incorporate social relations, or to define a social structure without the integration of nonhumans into it. Every human interaction is sociotechnical. (...) [cannot consider] the artifacts with which we share so much of our society as mere things. They deserve better, they deserve to be housed in our intellectual culture as so many fully fledged social actors. They mediate our social action? No, they are us"
. Why do I blog this? morning cultural sessions with bruno latour with a Golden Yunnan tea.
We've put together a small LIFT event in Seoul, Korea on September 12th with speakers such as Adam Greenfield, Bruce Sterling and Korean architect Yoo Suk Yeon to discuss real and digital spaces. Topic: Spaces: From Real to Digital. How technological developments in both the physical worlds and virtual environments are reshaping our buildings, our games, and soon our web browsers.
When: 12 September 2007 Where: at the Yurim Art Hall in Seoul, South Korea.
The program will be as follows: • Adam Greenfield will show us the opportunities and problems of living in a world where technologies pervaded the physical space. • The upcoming hybridizations of the digital and the physical will be tackled by Bruce Sterling, who will also present what he, as a science-fiction writer and technology journalist expects. • Korean architect Yoo Suk Yeon will then talk about the latest trends in architecture and how this hybridization is of importance. • Lineage programer and XLGames CEO Jake Song who will talk about the lastest trend in MMORPG.
Registration: the event will be free but registration is required. To register, head to liftconference.com.
Reading this marketing study from MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft, I was more interested by the qualitative aspects than the quant stuff. The part that I found the most interesting is the following that shows how "Young people are not geeks":
""technology" itself is irrelevant to kids and young people. (...) "For kids and young people, 'tech' isn't a separate entity now, it's organic to their lives," said Fahey Rush. "They are completely focused on functionality." Apart from a few key new media terms, most young people avoided industry jargon. Only 8% of those questioned used the term "multi-platform," and only 16% admitted to using the phrase "social networking." The terms they use most frequently are those relating to accessing content for free, like "download" and "burn." They also use brand names rather than category terms, with MSN, Google, and MySpace amongst the most popular. The term "web 2.0" is used by very few people (8%) outside China."
Why do I blog this? this is very interesting in terms of "what does that mean" for industries that I know like video game design or mobile application development. Simply, it ponders the overemphasis on technology and the so-called coolness around it. The naming of technologies is particularly important, that is really something which struck me here, listening to kids talking about "mp3" for the device playing the file and not the format.