Tag: Technology

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Culture, Computers, and Communities: Two Recent Books

Culture is technology-driven William Gibson once said, and, with the proliferation of digital media, the aphorism is less and less debatable (if it ever was). If technology is indeed the engine and infrastructure of our culture, then understanding it is tantamount to understanding ourselves.

The books written on the topic could fill a library, and two recent ones caught my eye. The first attempts a broad-reaching macro-view. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009) promises not only to get to the bottom of the technology undergirding our culture, but to be an engaging read as well. I first came across Arthur’s work in M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (Simon & Schuster, 1992). Arthur stumbled upon the theory of increasing returns (what are known in cybernetics and systems theory as reinforcing feedback loops) while attempting to apply biological principles to economics. The academic crossbreeding proved fruitful as Arthur deftly outlined the reasons for the dominance of everything from Microsoft Windows to QWERTY keyboards.

Unfortunately, his mixing and matching of intellectual domains falls short when it comes to the science of technology. First of all, The Nature of Technology starts by conceptualizing the two (nature and technology) as opposing forces, calling them “tectonic plates grinding inexorably into each other in one long, slow collision” (p. 11). As often as it has been employed elsewhere, this is a premise of limited promise. Technology is an extension or continuation of nature. They are parts of the same continuum. Viewing them as adversaries leads to many other fallacies, not the least of which is the attempt to draw a line separating the two. For example, on page 10, Arthur envisions a world where all of our modern technologies disappear, yet we’re still left with some. He writes, “We would still have watermills, and foundries, and oxcarts; and course linens, and hooded cloaks, and sophisticated techniques for building cathedrals. But we would once again be medieval.” Drawing such an arbitrary line in the sands of time is exactly the mistake that those against technology make. As if speaking and writing aren’t technology. As if harnessing fire or clothing ourselves aren’t technology. We shape our tools and they shape us, as McLuhan (1964) put it. Our overall developmental lifecycle is the result of a structural coupling—in Maturana and Varela’s terminology (1987; Maturana & Poerkson, 2004)—with our technology. Not that Arthur is against technology, but making distinctions as such is not only treacherous, it’s just ludicrous.

Brian Arthur is a brilliant scholar and subsequently this book is not without insight. “A change in domain is the main way in which technology progresses,” he writes on page 74, echoing Thomas Kuhn (1962). If only he’d based his book on this statement, we might have ended up with a more useful theory of technology.

Another of Arthur’s key ideas is one he calls “deep craft,” writing, “Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work” (p. 159). Eitienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John David Smith apply their deep craft to technology and the ways in which communities and technology work together. A little over a decade ago, Etienne Wenger wrote a classic text on the ways that we work and learn together called Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Applying the ideas to software, networks, and connectivity, Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities (CPsquare, 2009) is a handbook that every IT manager should keep handy. It won’t tell you which specific software tools you need for your business or community, but it will guide you through your needs and illuminate aspects of your community (and its technology use) that you scarcely knew existed. For example, the simple idea that the “always on” of broadband connectivity equals the “always there” of the community (p. 186; an idea that my friend Howard Rheingold has explored in depth in his many books, most recently Smart Mobs, 2003) puts technology’s augmenting role in your community in a new light.

Wenger, White, and Smith’s many well-worn and time-tested insights yield a book rife with the same. In-depth scenarios and quick advice pop up on nearly every page, often bolstered by real-world examples and their relevant URLs, as well as excellent graphs and flowcharts. A lot of the general information in Digital Habitats might be common knowledge for the experienced technology steward, but the experience and research collected here is likely to be useful for everyone interested in creating, fostering, or maintaining a working community augmented by technology.

Technology infiltrates our lives in ways we don’t even realize. Rem Koolhaas went so far as to say that human culture wouldn’t exist at all without technology, calling it “a decaying myth, an ideology superimposed on technology” (1995, p. 210). As much as we may want to grasp a grand unified theory of its ubiquity, perhaps it’s just easier to look at it on the micro-level. Either way, technology is as much a part of us as we are of nature (and vice versa). Drawing lines between us and it or it and nature are useless.

References

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. New York: Free Press.

Koolhaas, R. & Mau, B. (1995). S, M, L, XL. New York: Monacelli Press.

Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maturana, H. R. & Poerkson, B. (2004). From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition. Heidelberg, Germany: Carl-Auer Verlag.

Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Rheingold, H. (2003). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books.

Waldrop, M. M. (1998). Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, E., White, N., & Smith, J. D. (2009). Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities. Portland, OR: CPsquare.

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The Clutter of Pop

Dave Allen: The Clutter of PopIn the mid-1990s my friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Inherent ViceTime is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest is out today and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

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Blanks for the Memories

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

Tom Waits by iri5

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.

“Home taping is killing music.” It sounds funny now, but the British Phonographic Industry — sister of the RIAA — was incensed. Their attitude was that every blank tape sold was a record stolen. “BPI  says that home taping costs the industry £228 billion a year in lost revenue,” McLaren said in 1979, “so they’re not happy that Bow Wow Wow have already reached No. 25 on the singles chart… ” The home-taping controversy was handcrafted for McLaren. He was managing Bow Wow Wow who had a hit with a song celebrating home-taping called “C-30! C-60! C-90! Go!”  “In fact,” adds McLaren, “it’s the classic story of the 80s. It’s about a girl who finds it cheaper and easier to tape her favorite discs off the radio… which is why the record companies are so petrified.”

“The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable,” elaborates Steven Levy in a recent Gizmodo piece celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the Walkman.

You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.

TapeThe magnetic tape was as much a part of the journey as the road. The portability and recordability of cassettes, which all sounds so very labor intensive now, were the precursor to today’s MP3s and iPods. Just as the book individualized the exchange of stories and information, the cassette tape and its attendant technologies individualized music listening.

Seeing the iconic cassette tapes on the shirts of the teens these days, like some technological Che Guevera, confirms Heraclitus’s conjecture that generations cycle on thirty-year intervals. You’re not likely to see the same thing come of the compact disc (it’s more of a RuPaul than a Che), so here’s to the cassette tape, the 3.5″ disc of the stereo.

[Tom Waits cassette art by iri5]

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You Will

In the early 90s, AT&T ran a series of commercials that posed some futuristic, technologically enabled task (e.g., “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?”), and then answered it emphatically (“You will.”), claiming they’d be the company to technologically enable such a task. I believe they’ve all come to pass except one. As Stewart Brand once said, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.”

You Will

I can’t help but think that many of the technological advances we debate and marvel about were downright inevitable. In 1982, when I first got a computer, one of my main intentions was to get a modem and connect to databases. My eleven-year-old self wasn’t as hungry for information — I could’ve gotten the same stuff from the “database”  down the street known as “the library.” I was hungry for the idea of connectivity. The idea that I could connect my computer to other computers and exchange information. The idea was exhilarating.

Doesn’t that feeling, one that I shared with plenty of people by then, make the internet inevitable?

Didn’t your first unassisted ride on a bike feel like flying? Riding that two-wheeled bridge of balance is like taking off on wings of your own. In more sober tones, Marshall McLuhan (1964) aligned the two activities as well, writing,

It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early planes seemed in some ways like bicycles (p. 182).

Supposedly birds evolved the same way. Dinosaurs became bipedal via their large, counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same concept morphed wings.

Karl Popper (1968) called it “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that now we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. McLuhan continues, writing, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli.

The argument that technology is organic begs the question of what to do about it: How do we maintain control over our contrivances?

The argument that technology is organic answers the question as well: We maintain control over our contrivances in the same way that we maintain control over our lawns. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.

References:

Brand, S. (1988). The media lab: Inventing the future at MIT. New York: Penguin.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Popper, K. (1968). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

——–

And here they are, the AT&T “You Will” commercials from 1993:

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“Disconnecting the Dots” on Reality Sandwich

For my latest piece for Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan’s web publication, Reality Sandwich, I poached and updated a few things I’d written about here. Here’s an excerpt:

Technology curates culture. As such, the alienation we feel from our technologically mediated “all-at-once-ness” (as McLuhan called it) comes from a disconnection between physical goals and technology’s “help” in easing our workload.

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life,” Alice Kahn once quipped, “please press three.”  I’m not anti-technology, but I have been trying to grasp what our devices are doing to us, as well as the relationship between technology, culture, and people. Our devices are often divisive.

Read the full article here.

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The End of Print

Magazines have always been my favorite form of media. Having grown up in rural areas of the South, I found the window to my interests opened in their glossy pages. The big photos and words from other worlds kept me connected to all that I wanted to be a part of. If this sounds a bit romantic, it was. The grocery store newsstand and the mailbox were the modem jacks of the time.

Back then, it was music, skateboarding, and BMX magazines, and though those still capture my attention on a regular, these are the ones of which I don’t miss an issue.

SeedSeed
For my regular science fix, Seed is by far the best magazine out there right now. If Wired was still weird (like it was up until 1998 or so) and focused on science instead of the web, it might resemble Seed. Excellent visualizations and great writing, plus the Seed Salon in which two luminaries — whose interests are often unexpectedly juxtaposed — discuss a pressing science issue. Past Seed Salon’s have included such pairs as David Byrne and Daniel Levitin, Albert-László Barabási and James Fowler, Jonathon Lethem and Janna Levin, Benoit Mandlebrot and Paola Antonelli, Will Self and Spencer Wells, Jill Tarter and Will Wright, Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga, and Robert Stickgold and Michel Gondry, among many others. I’m obviously biased, but I love the fact that every issue includes this form of dialogue alongside the monologue of Seed‘s traditional articles, which are consistently stellar (oh, their website is excellent as well).

GoodGood
Coming in second on my magazine must-haves is Good. Some of the best infographics I’ve ever seen have been on this magazine’s pages. Good is not necessarily about anything in particular, except good things — good ideas, good design, good stuff. Each issue of Good is themed, which is both good and bad. It’s good because when they cover something, they cover it well. It’s bad because sometimes one might not be interested in the theme. With that said, they’ve often won me over anyway.

WiredWired
Though the common sentiment (I even expressed it above) is that Wired used to be better, it’s still one of the best. The lost art of long-form narrative journalism is alive and well in Wired. They’re also consistently refreshing their voice with new writers, staying true to much of their original blueprint, and challenging their readers with easter eggs. Their recent “Mystery Issue,” guest edited by J. J. Abrams no less, is chock-a-block with perplexing puzzles and hidden games. So times have changed and so has Wired, but you’ll still be hard-pressed to find a better read at your local Safeway.

MakeMake
Make is more like a quarterly how-to book — how to do everything yourself. It’s the D.I.Y. bible. Some of the most creative people and writers alike work for Make (people like our friends Gareth Branwyn and Mark Frauenfelder), and they spread and network with makers from all over with the magazine, the website, tools from the Maker Shed, and Maker Faire — the latter of which is going down in San Francisco this very weekend!

There are a few more I pick up once in a while: Geek is never quite as cool as it purports to be, but I still snag it sometimes. Fast Company is sometimes interesting enough to buy. Psychology Today often reels me in in spite of myself. And despite everything I’ve written above, DIG BMX is still the best magazine on the planet.

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Roundtable Question, April 2009

Compact Disc of DoomWith the slow demise of the compact disc, the music industry’s last physical organizing principle, I thought it appropriate to ask some people inside and on the margins of that industry how the CD’s death was affecting their conception of recorded music. In ironic honor of Record Store Day, this month’s roundtable question is How has the decline of the compact disc affected the way you approach the idea of recording music? I asked producers, musicians, emcees, DJs, and label folks. Continue reading “Roundtable Question, April 2009”