Month: October 2010

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The Essential Tension of Ideas

One of the key insights in Richard Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset (Harper, 2010) is that rapid transit increases the exchange of ideas and thereby spurs innovation. Where the car used to provide this mass connection, now it hinders it. Increasingly, our cognitive surplus is sitting traffic.

Ideas are networks, Steven Johnson argues in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From (Riverhead, 2010). The book takes Florida’s tack, comparing cities to coral reefs in that their structure fosters innovation. Good ideas come from connected collectives, so connectivity is paramount.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas. — H. G. Wells

On the other end of the spectrum, in a recent post about Twitter, David Weinberger writes,

…despite the “Who cares what you had for breakfast?” crowd, it’s important that we’ve been filling the new social spaces — blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, messaging in all forms, shared creativity in every format — with the everyday and quotidian. When we don’t have to attract others by behaving outlandishly, we behave in the boring ways that make life livable. In so doing, we make the Net a better reflection of who we are.

And since we are taking the Net as the image of who we are, and since who we think we are is broadly determinative of who we become, this matters.

His description sounds like we’re evening out our representations of our online selves, reconciling them with our IRL selves, initiating a corrective of sorts. Coincidentally, in their sad version of “The SEED Salon,” a recent issue of WIRED had Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson discuss the roots of innovation (by way of plugging their respective new books; here they are discussing same at the New York Public Library). Kelly states,

Ten years ago, I was arguing that the problem with TV was that there wasn’t enough bad TV. Making TV was so expensive that accountants prevented it from becoming really crappy—or really great. It was all mediocre. But that was before YouTube. Now there is great TV!

It sounds as though Weinberger and Kelly are calling for or defending a sort of “infodiversity,” which one would think would be a core tenet of media ecology. As Kelly puts it in What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), “Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information” (p. 10). He continues in WIRED,

To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap. Another example is spectrum. One reason we have this great explosion of innovation in wireless right now is that the US deregulated spectrum. Before that, spectrum was something too precious to be wasted on silliness. But when you deregulate—and say, OK, now waste it—then you get Wi-Fi.

In science, Thomas Kuhn called this idea “the essential tension.” In his book of the same name (University of Chicago Press, 1977), he described it as a tug-of-war between tradition and innovation. Kuhn wrote that this tension is essential, “…because the old must be revalued and reordered when assimilating the new” (p. 227). This is one of those ideas that infects one’s thinking in toto. As soon as I read about the essential tension, I began to see it everywhere — in music, in movies, in art, and indeed, in science. In all of the above, Weinberger, Johnson, and Kelly are all talking about and around this idea, in some instances the innovation side, and in others, the tradition side. We need both.

One cannot learn anything that is more than one step away from what one already knows. Learning progresses one step or level at a time. Johnson explores this idea in Where Good Ideas Come From by evoking Stuart Kauffman‘s “adjacent possible” (a term Johnson uses hundreds of times to great annoyance). The adjacent possible is that next step away. It is why innovation must be rooted in tradition. Go too far out and no one understands you, you are “ahead of your time.” Take the next step into the adjacent possible that no one else saw, and you have innovated. Taken another way, H. G. Wells once said that to write great science fiction, one must adopt a perspective that is two steps away from the current time. Going only one away is too familiar, and three is too far out. As Kelly puts it in the WIRED piece, “Innovating is about more than just having the idea yourself; you also have to bring everyone else to where your idea is. And that becomes really difficult if you’re too many steps ahead.” A new technology, literally “the knowledge of a skill,” is–in its very essence–the same thing as a new idea. For instance, Apple’s Newton was too many steps ahead of or away from what was happening at the time of its release. I’m sure you can think of several other examples.

Johnson, who has a knack for having at least one (usually more) infectious idea per book, further addresses the process of innovation with what he calls the “slow hunch.” This is the required incubation period of an innovative idea. The slow hunch often needs to find another hunch in order to come to fruition. That is, one person with an idea often needs to be coupled with another who has an idea so that the two can spur each other into action, beyond the power of either by itself (see the video below for a better explanation). It’s an argument for our increasing connectivity, and a damn good one.

That is not to say that there aren’t and won’t be problems. I think Kevin Kelly lays it out perfectly here:

…[T]here will be problems tomorrow because progress is not utopia. It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as unsoiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expending possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now (p. 101).

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Here’s the book trailer for Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From [runtime: 4:07]:

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References:

Florida, R. (2010). The great reset. New York: Harper.

Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from. New York: Riverhead.

Kelly, K. (2010). What technology wants. New York: Viking.

Kuhn, T. (1977). The essential tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weinberger, D. (2010). “Why it’s good to be boring on the web.” JoHo The Blog.

WIRED. (2010, October) “Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on where ideas come from.” Wired.com.

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Gang of Four Kinect Commercial

I guess it’s logical that the older you get, the more the music you grew up listening to is likely to end up in the last place you’d expect. Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” in Microsoft’s official Xbox Kinect televison campaign. Good friend and ex-bass player Dave Allen seems summarily nonplussed. [runtime: 0:32]

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Sandy Carson: Paradise Has Relocated

Longtime BMX homie and amazing photographer Sandy Carson has a show on display here in Austin at Okay Mountain Gallery. The opening on October 23rd was a bicycle scene reunion. We all gawked at Sandy’s photos, and geeked out on bikes, parks, and trails. A good time was had by all.

Here’s what the Okay Mountain site says about the show:

“Paradise Has Relocated” attempts to capture the lifeless remains and emptiness of a once thriving and historic island devastated by Hurricane Ike in September of 2008. Ike was the third most destructive and costliest hurricane to make landfall in the United States, destroying and flooding 75% of homes and landmass. The project deals with the physical dead space and ghostliness of Galveston- post hurricane. Each image whispers of an ordinary past lost to the ravages of Mother Nature. The everyday objects left behind in haste suggest former human inhabitation. The unoccupied landscapes, fractured structures and mundane interiors I have carefully composed compel the viewer to look beyond cultural stature and financial complexities, and question geographical location.

The geographic anonymity of my photographs prove that such devastation is not reserved for the third world but stand right on our doorstep. This is important to remember given the current state of world climate change. Unfortunately some believe that this may be the final blow for Galveston. With an already anemic economy and population decline that predates Ike by 50 years, survivors who are re-building or relocating, feel that their mythical land never fully recovered from the first Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

Sandy’s book Paradise Has Relocated is available from Blurb (where there’s also a full preview!). A percentage of the sales will go directly towards Hurricane IKE relief, so do good and buy a copy.

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Douglas Rushkoff: The User’s Dilemma

For over two decades, Douglas Rushkoff has been dragging us all out near the horizon, trying to show us glimpses of our own future. Though he’s written books on everything from counterculture and video games to advertising and Judaism, he’s always maintained a media theorist’s bent: one part Marshall McLuhan, one part Neil Postman, and one part a mix of many significant others. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age (OR Books, 2010) finds him back at the core of what he does. Simply put, this little book (it runs just shy of 150 pages) is the missing manual for our wild, wired world.

“Whoever controls the metaphor governs the mind.” — Hakim Bey

Rushkoff agrees with many media thinkers that we are going through a major shift in the way we conceive, connect, and communicate with each other. His concern is that we’re conceding control of this shift to forces that may not have our best interests in mind. “We teach kids how to use software to write,” he writes, “but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves” (p. 13). We’re conceiving our worlds using metaphors invented by others. This is an important insight and one that helps make up the core of his critique. This book is more Innis’ biases of media than it is McLhaun’s laws of media, and it left me astounded — especially after reading several books on the subject that were the textual equivalent of fly-over states. Program or Be Programmed is a welcome stop along the way.

I first interviewed Doug Rushkoff in 1999. We’ve stayed in touch since and discussed many ideas over the intervening decade, but we haven’t recorded any of these exchanges. I used this book as an opportunity to ask him a few questions.

Roy Christopher: Program or Be Programmed seems to distill quite a lot of your thinking about our online world from the past twenty-odd years. What prompted you to directly address these issues now?

Douglas Rushkoff: I guess it’s because the first generation of true “screenagers” or digital natives have finally come of age and, to my surprise, seem less digitally literate than their digital immigrant counterparts. I’ve written a number of books applying the insights of digital culture — of its do-it-yourself, hacker ethos — to other areas, such as government, religion, and the economy. But I realize that we don’t even relate to digital culture from the perspective of cultural programmers. We tend to accept the programs we use as given circumstances, rather than as the creations of people with intentions.

So I wanted to go back and write something of a “poetics” of digital media, sharing the main biases of digital technologies so that people can approach them as real users, makers, and programmers, rather than just as passive consumers.

If anything in particular prompted me, it was watching the way smart writers and thinkers were arguing back and forth in books and documentaries about whether digital technology is good for us or bad for us. I think it’s less a question of what the technology is doing to us than what we are choosing to do to one another with these technologies. If we’re even choosing anything at all.

RC: You mention in the book that anyone who seems a bit too critical of digital media is labeled a Luddite and a party-pooper, yet you were able to be critical, serious, and hopeful all at the same time. What’s the difference between your approach and that of other critics of all-things-digital?

DR: I think the main difference is that I’m more concerned with human intention and how it is either supported or repressed in the digital realm. Empathy is repressed, the ability to connect over long distanced is enhanced. I go down to the very structure and functioning of these tools and interfaces to reveal how they are intrinsically biased toward certain kinds of outcomes.

So I’m less concerned with how a technology effects us, than how our application or misapplication of a technology works for or against our intentions. And, perhaps more importantly, how the intentions of our programmers remain embedded in the technologies we use. I’m not judging a technology one way or the other; rather, I am calling for people to make some effort to understand what the technologies they are using were made for, and whether that makes it the right tool for the job they’re using it for.

RC: You evoke Harold Innis throughout this book. Do you think there’s something that he covers more thoroughly or usefully than other media theorists since?

DR: I think he was better at looking at media shaping the nature and tenor of the social activity occurring on it, or around it. He’s the guy who would have seen how cell phones change the nature of our social contract on the street, turning a once-public space into lots of separate little private spaces. As far as media-ecology goes, he was probably the purest theorist.

RC: The last programming class I took was a Visual Basic class in which even the programming was obscured by a graphical interface: there was little in the way of real code. For those of us interested, what’s the first step in becoming a programmer now?

DR: I guess it depends on your interests. There are many different places to start. You could go back and learn Basic, one of the simplest computer languages, in order to see the way lines of code in a program flow. Or you could even just get a program like Director, and sequence some events. Hypercard was a great little tool that gave people a sense of running a script.

If I were starting, I’d just grab a big fat book that starts from the beginning, like Dan Shiffman’s book Learning Processing (Morgan Kaufman, 2008). You can sit down with a book like that and, with no knowledge at all, end up with a fairly good sense of programming in a couple of weeks.

I’m not asking everyone be a programmer at this point. Not this generation, anyway. That’s a bit like asking illiterate adults to learn how to read when they can just listen the radio or books on tape. I get that. But for those who will be living in increasingly digital spaces, programming will amount to the new literacy.

RC: Though you never stray too far, you seem to have come back to your core work in this book. What’s next?

DR: I have no idea, really. Having come “home” to a book on pure media theory applied to our real experience, I feel like I’ve returned to my core competence. I feel like I should stick here a while and talk about these issues for a year or so until they really sink in.

I’ve got a graphic novel coming out next year, finally, called ADD. It’s about kids who are raised from birth (actually, earlier) to be video game testers. I’d love to see that story get developed for other media, and then get to play around in television or film. There are also rumblings about doing another Frontline documentary. Something following up on “Digital Nation,” which I’d like to do in order to get more of my own ideas out there to the non-reading public.

I guess we’ll see.

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Astra Taylor and Laura Hanna (the filmmakers behind the film Zizek!) put this short video together to help illustrate the ideas in Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed [runtime: 2:18]:

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