Tag: Technology

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How to Do Stuff and Be Happy (Again) — Video

Here’s the latest version of my “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk, this time for Laura Brown’s “Professional Communication Skills” class at The University of Texas at Austin on April 29, 2011. The last few times I’ve done this talk, I’ve incorporated my thoughts on Tyler, The Creator and Odd Future, including his “Yonkers” video as an example of many of the things in the talk. The sound is still not great, but this is the best version I have so far.

Many thanks to Laura Brown for recording me, for enduring the “Yonkers” video, and for inviting me to do this at all.

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Zizi Papacharissi: A Networked Self

Zizi Papacharissi is an academic powerhouse. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, she probably makes you look lazy. She holds a Ph.D. in Journalism from my own University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Communication Studies from Kent State University, and a B.A. in Economics and Media Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Since getting those, she’s been busy: She is a professor in — and the head of — the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the author or editor of three books — most recently A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) and A Networked Self (Routledge, 2010) — and countless articles and book chapters, and a frequent speaker and lecturer on issues of connectivity and community, as well as public and private concerns. Many thanks to Zizi for taking the time to discuss a little of all of the above with me.

Roy Christopher: If you had to sum it up for the uninitiated, what would you say your work is about? What are your major areas of concern?

Zizi Papacharissi: I am interested in social and political things people do online – and offline. I see little value in drawing a distinction between offline and online that treats the two as separate worlds and thus claims some of these interactions as real and others as virtual. To me, that is like suggesting that a phone conversation with some one is less real, because it becomes possible through the use of a medium. And many media historians have of course talked about how early reactions to the telephone prompted similar conversations about the complexion and reality of mediated conversations.

I do think it is meaningful, however, to think of offline and online spaces, and understand then how people traverse through these spaces in their everyday routines. People adjust and adopt their behaviors as they move from one space to another, so as to handle their interactions in a way that permits them to attain an optimal balance = happiness. Spaces draw out different aspects of our personalities and inspire us to do different things (or might leave us completely uninspired).  We also frequently design or reorganize spaces so as to suit our personalities. There are particular types of behaviors that work better or facilitate communication in certain spaces (for example, speaking loudly in crowded bars), but are utterly discouraged via the organizational logic of other spaces (yelling in a yoga class). I am very interested in how individuals develop behaviors that allow them to traverse through offline and online spaces fluently.

I do not find the term “social media” particularly useful. All media are social, in their own unique ways. To claim that some media are social implies that there are other media that are a-social, or anti-social. It also suggests social media are more social than other media not qualified by that label. I do not find that to be the case. The phrase also ascribes a certain  neutrality to the term medium, and I do not believe in that either (media are neither good, nor bad, nor are they neutral, á la Melvin Kranzberg). I prefer to think of technology as architecture — in case that was not abundantly clear already 😉

RC: danah boyd‘s equation for privacy entails context and control. With the convergence of technology and its blurring of boundaries you discuss in A Private Sphere (Polity, 2010) — especially those that define space and time, public and private, active and passive, producer and consumer — how are we to maintain control of these shifting contexts?

ZP: I agree with danah and find that this is a tremendously meaningful way of explaining privacy to the public and to policy-making communities. I have a slight preference for the term autonomy, over control. Perhaps it is because I am Greek 🙂 In A Private Sphere I use Deleuze’s work to explain how control is ultimately not about discipline. So, control, from the perspective of the individual or from the perspective of society, or institutions, is about offering a number of possibilities so that people can choose ‘freely’, while not being restricted yet still perfectly guided by a defined set of possibilities. Autonomy is about having the right to determine what those possibilities will be, to choose from them, or to refuse them altogether. Autonomy also is suggestive of self-reliance, independence, self-governance and reflexivity of the self – or individuation.

I suppose I find that ultimately, life is about philosophizing your way out of  the concept of control to a state of autonomy, and that might be why I am partial to the latter word. But in the end, you know, it is just a word. A definition.

RC: The web and mobile devices have changed the ways we connect with each other, but has social media really changed the nature of those connections? (i.e., some claim that Facebook is changing how the youth define “friendship.” I know what the literature says on this, but I wonder what you think.)

ZP: The youth has always redefined things, and I hope they never stop. It is what they do best! Otherwise, what is the point of being young?

On the topic of “friendship”, the literature shows that people handle their friendships in different ways across different spaces, and that has always been the case. We have always had friends from a number of social spheres (work, college, childhood, through mutual/spousal/ familial acquaintances), sometimes these spheres overlap and sometimes they do not, and we socialize with friends on a number of spaces, including spaces facilitated by internet platforms. Friendship means different things to different people. We also adjust and evolve our perspective on friendships as we mature through the different cycles of our lives. So everything that “the youth” is doing on Facebook needs to be understood in this context.

So, if anything, we might say that the word is being redefined, not the actual meaning of friendship, or closeness. It is a matter of language evolving, so as to reflect our practices. Weak ties can be actually be very strong, but is that really a term to be used to describe anyone? Who wants to be told:  “I do not consider you a friend, but you sure are a meaningful weak tie to me” or “Btw, I also consider you an important acquaintance.” So, as a society, we must come up with words that value and provide social context for these connections that may now be maintained and activated in more convenient ways.

Friendship  is an abstraction, a word invented to refer to and measure other emotions that are also aggregates and temporally sensitive. But friendship, or whatever it might be called in the future, is not going anywhere. It has always been a survival strategy for social beings, and will always be.

RC: Along the same lines, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that the adoption (or lack thereof) of communication technology in general changes the idea of communication (what I’ve been calling the “Tyranny of Adoption”). For instance, the diffusion of the cellphone has made it a personal assumption, a requirement in many cases (One can see this with social networking sites and lifestreaming media as well). How do we temper the spread of technology with our personal needs and desires?

ZP: I think we need to find a place for technology in our lives. In that sense, we blend technology with our own humanity and resist or challenge the tyranny of adoption. In our everyday lives, we routinely make decisions about what works or what does not. So, we do not choose to buy and use just any car, we buy the car that will fit our needs, our budget, our personality. We also choose to not buy a car, and rely on public transport. We choose clothing, houses, appliances that are compatible with our lifestyles and enhance our lives. We may not always make successful or optimal choices, but we are driven by the need to select. At the same time, our choices are shaped  by the options we have  at hand. And our socio-cultural context may present some of these options as more appealing  or popular than others.

I am not sure that we will ever be able to fully escape the tyranny of the popular, or adoption. Afterall, the capitalist backbone of our economic system rewards the popular. But I think of it less as a tyranny and more of as a habitus. Ultimately, they may both be understood as systems of control, but I suppose a habitus also embeds the notion of reflexivity, socio-cultural context, taste – it is a richer way to think about this. So, in a sense, we might think of not the tyranny of, let’s say, Facebook adoption, but rather, the Facebook habitus, as a way of socializing us into (and remediating) schemata, tastes, and habits  about friendship.

RC: Are you working on anything, have anything coming up, or just a topic I missed that you’d like to mention here?

ZP: A lot of people these days are interested in the notion of affect, or jouissance, and affective networks. I think there is a lot of potential in thinking about affect, as it permits us to understand content creation as both play and work; to look at the internet, in Trebor Scholz’s terms, as both playground and factory.  Lately I have been very interested in the performative aspect of play online, specifically as it applies to performances of the self in everyday life. So I have been reading a lot of performance theory, and working with the “as-if” aspect of play to understand how people imagine, perform, then redact and remix identities online.

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Of Bicycles and Bipeds: Farming Flying Forms

A wing is a bridge. Flight is a ride on that bridge from take-off to landing. Dinosaurs became bipedal, balancing their large bodies on two legs via counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same biological process—or set of processes between biology and environment—morphed wings, and thereby, flight. Using this transition as a metaphor is an trip we might do well to take.

Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight… Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings…
— Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 24-25.

The approach I want to take here is what Kingslover and Koehl (1994) call “bounded ignorance.” That is, I’m going to outline a possible homology between the evolution of flight in animals and in human technologies, one that “seems consistent with available evidence” (p. 426). One could say this is how McLuhan theorized changes in the media. Kingslover and Koehl were looking at flight in insects, which does our tack no good. Insects added extra limbs/wings as needed. Drones, swarms, crowds, organizations — these are insect analogs (cf. Parikka, 2010; Shaviro, 1996). We’re interested in a transition from quadraped to biped to winged flight (cf. Paul, 2002; Chiappe, 2007). That is, we’re interested in an appropriation of existing limbs, not an adding on of new ones.

Explaining the transition in dinosaurs, Shipman (1998), writes, “First, activities of the forelimbs and tail became separated from those of the hindlimb, pelvis and torso” (p. 89). This freed up the forelimbs for other purposes, while the hindlimbs grew accustomed to holding their own. She continues, “Thus, logic, anatomy, and paleontology all support the same deduced sequence of evolutionary changes: bipedalism first; wings second; tail third” (p. 89). Not all wings were created equal. Not all wings were made for flying. Some enable related abilities such as walking on water (see Schaller, 1985). Some are made for thermoregulation (see Chiappe, 2007; as they are in butterflies in addition to flight; see Halpern, 2001). Nonetheless, the dual transition to walking on two legs and flapping wings is mirrored by the dual transition of balance on two wheels and wings, both of which usually and ultimately lead to flying.

Karl Popper (1968) called our creation of tools and externalization of knowledge “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). It’s a structural coupling—in Maturana and Varela’s terminology (1987; Maturana & Poerkson, 2004)—between us and our environment. Technology is a part of our nature. Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli. We farm adaptive forms.

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, 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).

So, it stands to reason that one kind of balance begot another. Just as the bipedal dinosaur became the flying dinosaur and the bird, our own bicycles became the airplane and the jet. Admittedly, I’ve been trying to get poetic and playing language games (e.g., forms, firms, farms, etc.), but how many of our design processes legitimately come from organic means?

Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight…

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A new paper by Andy Ruina, Jim Papadopoulos, and their colleagues attempts to get at what’s behind bike stability [runtime: 3:25; with thanks to Jessy Elfy for the tip].

References:

Chiappe, L. M. (2007). Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Halpern, S. (2001). Four Wings and a Prayer. New York: Vintage.

Kingslover, J. & Koehl, M. (1994). Selective factors in the evolution of insect wings. Annual Review of Entomology, 39, 425-451.

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.

Paul, G. S. (2002). Dinosaurs of the Air. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Priakka, J. (2010). Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. Cambridge, MA: University of Minnesota Press.

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

Schaller, D. (1985). Wing Evolution. In M. K. Hecht, J. H. Ostrom, G. Viohl, & P. Wellnhofer (Eds.), The Beginnings of Birds. Eichstätt: Brönner & Daentler.

Shaviro, S. (1996). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail.

Shipman, P. (1998). Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Alternate Titles:

Of Wheels and Wings: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Flying Things

Of Feet and Feathers: Taking Leave of Terrestrial Tethers

Of Birds and Bikes: How Sprockets Became Rockets

Of Pedals and Pterodactyls: The Evolution of Flight

From Flapping to Flight: Winged and Wheeled Escape Velocity

From Perches to Pedals: Gliding and Flying from Birds to Humans

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[Drawing by Roy Christopher, August 6, 2007]

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Generation BMX: New ESPN Piece

I finally have a new piece up on the ESPN BMX site. This one is about the generational differences between first and second generations of riders. Heraclitus once wrote that generations turn over every thirty years. Well, it’s about that time.
You’re right, Roy, you’re hopeless. Hopelessly obsessed with a time in your sport that died a long time ago… — McGoo
Roy Christopher executes a Backwards Elbow Glide at a Jacksonville NBL contest circa 1990. (photo by Peter Cowley)
Here’s an excerpt:
The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was in the ’80s. Given the proliferation of technology into every aspect of our lives, that’s not much of an insight, but hear me out. In addition to the lack of dope video games, the riders of thirty years ago were also missing out on the parks. There were like three ride-able skateparks in the whole country. Now there are at least that many in every city of any size whatsoever. Where the past was spent riding curb cuts, banks, walls, streets, and backyard ramps, today the terrain consists of those as well as many human-made options. It makes for different riding, different tricks, and different values.
The full piece is up today. As always, thanks to Brian Tunney for the opportunity and for coordinating these things.

…

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McLuhan the Younger: Two New Books

There have been plenty of people touted to carry the mantle left behind by Marshall McLuhan — Neil Postman, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Levinson, even Jean Baudrillard, but no one has been working more behind the scenes and under the radar to keep his legacy alive than his own son and sometimes co-author Eric McLuhan.

Eric McLuhan has amassed a significant body of work in his own right, including Electric Language (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (University of Toronto Press, 1997), the forthcoming Theories of Communication (with Marshall), and The Human Equation (BPS Books, 2011; discussed below), among many others.

One of Marshall’s most important and most overlooked works was co-authored by Eric. The posthumously published Laws of Media (University of Toronto Press, 1988). In this book, they tackle the Shannon-Weaver model of communication as needlessly linear (a task I’ve attempted myself), writing, “The Shannon-Weaver model and its derivatives follow the linear pattern of efficient cause — the only sequential form of causality” (p. 87). Formal cause was a lesser known but chronic concern for McLuhan.

[T]he formal causes inherent in… media operate on the matter of our senses. The effect of media, like their ‘message’ is really on their form and not in their content (Marshall Mcluhan in Gordon, W. T., 2005, p. 10).

In Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (NeoPoiesis Press, 2011), Eric brings together three pieces by Marshall and an extended essay of his own (“On Formal Cause”) that references them, as well as historical context provided by his new introduction and a Foreword by the inimitable Lance Strate.

Aristotle’s definition of formal cause — one of four causes he defined, and the one that contains the other three — reads the “essense, idea, or quality of the thing concerned” (Bunge, iii; what Heidegger would call “the thing thinging”). McLuhan saw Aristotle’s oral orientation conflating formal and final cause. This view and the Shannon-Weaver model are the results of left-brain thinking, and we need a right-brain perspective if we are to cope with the new electronic age. “Communication theory necessarily concerns the study of the public and not of the program,” McLuhan wrote in an unpublished letter to Archie Malloch. “The ‘content’ of any performance is the efficient cause which includes the user or the cognitive agent who is, and becomes, the thing known, in Aristotle’s phrase” (p. 10). He goes on to cite his mentor Harold Innis as the first to show that the alphabet is what split Greek thought between “thinking” and “being” (p. 30). “Literacy become synonymous with Western civilization that divorced ‘subject’ from ‘object’ and thought from feeling, just as the dominant metaphors of mechanism widened the separation of  ’cause’ and ‘effect'” (p. 31). Knowledge of the alphabet distances us from knowledge of formal cause.

And understanding formal cause is tantamount to understanding our new media ecology. It was at the center of McLuhan’s work. Eric writes, “Formal cause is still, in our time, hugely mysterious: The literate mind finds it is too paradoxical and irrational. It deals with environmental processes and it works outside of time” (p. 87). McLuhan wrote, “effects precede causes” (p. 43). The bright light of the future casts shadows on the present from forthcoming events — that’s formal cause.

[Media] Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns. It does not seek quantities, but satisfactions and understanding (p. 8).

Mass media in all their forms are necessarily environmental and therefore have the character of formal causality (McLuhan to Ruth Nanda Ashen, NAC, 1975).

McLuhan mentioned predicting the present in his work several times, and an observance of “daily miracles” like his oft-studied subject Chesterton. He also approached all of this mass-media mess from what amounts to a systems point of view: figures, grounds, environments, anti-environments, sense ratios. He was trying to get outside of it all to see what it was doing from the highest possible vantage point.

So this is all about perspective. And McLuhan pointed out that perspective is a mode of perception that involves a single point of view — or fragmentation, in space and time, in painting and in poetry (Gordon, Hamaji, & Albert, 2007, p. 139).

The perspective is part of what makes The Human Equation by Wayne Constantineau and Eric McLuhan (BPS Books, 2010) so effective: the vantage point, the human as central concern, the human as center of the universe. This is “Book 1: The Human Equation Toolkit,” and the toolkit consists of numerous sets of four related concepts, tetrads, not unlike the ones in Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers’ The Global Village (Oxford University Press, 1992), and those included in the aforementioned Laws of Media. The Human Equation starts with four embodied positions — standing, lying down, sitting, and kneeling — as the basis of all extensions thereof (i.e., media, technology, etc.). Co-authored by the late mime Constantineau, that the book’s foundation is comprised of body positions should come as no surprise.

This short book is rife with odd new perspectives on our media, culture, our place in the universe, and indeed our bodies themselves — much like so many of Marshall McLuhan’s own odd shorter works.

This year marks the centennial of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, and his work is as relevant now as it ever was. Here’s to everyone who’s keeping his legacy alive, especially his son Eric McLuhan.

References:

Bunge, M. Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science. Metaphysics, 32, Bk. 1, ch, iii.

Gordon, W. T. (2010). McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum Books.

Gordon, W. T. (2005). McLuhan Unbound, #14. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.

Gordon, W. T., Hamaji, E, & Albert, J. (2007). Everyman’s McLuhan. New York: Mark Batty Publisher.

Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

McLuhan, M. & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. R. (1992). The Global Village. Oxford University Press.

National Archives of Canada. (1975, July 2). Marshall McLuhan to Ruth Nanda Ashen.

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Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive — My Talk from SXSW Interactive

I’ve been thinking about all of the ways we change our world with our technology for years now, but more so lately as my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture, comes into better focus. This talk itself is brand new and not quite complete. Regardless, I decided to take my own advice and get it out there. I did this one for the first time at SXSW Interactive 2011. Judging by the post-talk discussion, these ideas are generative if not fully formed. In what follows, I expand my speaking notes, including bits from my thinking aloud in old posts from this site, references, my slides, and a video clip. Also, the audio from the talk is available on the SXSW site.

—————-

Technology is not taking over our world. It already did. Take a look in any coffeeshop, and you’ll see humans strapped to machines, ignoring one another. Take a look at any street in the city, and you’ll see humans strapped into machines, ignoring one another. Your cognitive surplus is sitting in traffic. We shape our technology and it shapes us. Marshall McLuhan said that, but his thoughts have become such a staple of our vocabulary that no one even cites him anymore. Chances are, your feet are literally shoe-shaped. Some of us have bodies that are car-shaped. Our technology frees us from so much physical labor, but we to exercise. We drive our cars to the gym to run on treadmills. The very existence of gyms points to a disconnection between our physical bodies and our work.

When I first started thinking about this disconnection, I was on my way to class and then the climbing gym. I realized that I had the option of taking the elevator to class on the seventh floor and then going to the gym to climb afterward. It struck me as odd that the two actions were completely disconnected. Getting to a higher floor in one building and the act of climbing up the wall in another were totally disassociated, even though they were essentially the same act.

We love our technology. Walk into an older building, built before elevators were standard, and you’ll see grand staircases filling its atrium. In newer buildings, one can scarcely find the stairs. They’re tucked away out of site, while the shiny elevator doors are on display. We showcase our latest mechanical marvels.

Also when I started thinking about these disconnections, I went looking for an example of connection. I found a map showing a direct link from the brain to the act of riding a bicycle — something our bodies never forget how to do. In addition during this, I started riding a fixed-gear bicycle. That is, a bicycle that has a direct connection between the front and rear gears and the rear wheel (the pedals and the rear wheel are thereby working in concert at all times, so that the bicycle doesn’t coast). Given the extra work and hazards associated with such a vehicle, people often ask me why? What’s the appeal? Well, one of the reasons that fixed-gears are so seductive is the direct connection one has to the distance traveled and the control of the motion. No matter the terrain or conditions, your body is always at work negotiating the ride. You and your brain are directly connected to your environment. Once you start coasting, the disjunct begins.

If you want to investigate this simple disconnection a bit further, think about your activities from the point of view of your pets. Think about what you’re doing from the point of view of your dog (your cat won’t care what you’re doing). If your dog is confused by your sitting and staring at a screen or a paper for too long, you are disconnected.

A beginning is a split, a disjunct, a bifurcation. At the beginning of every story, there is a phase during which one feels a bit disoriented: the first pages of a novel, the first scenes of a movie or play, the first notes of a song, the first song of a record, the part of the performance where the audience members are still finding their seats. You don’t know where we’re going from here.

The introduction of every new technology gives us the same feeling. Significant advances in technology are disjunctive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. Feared and disparaged at first, technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in and change our world. They literally change our minds. They change our relationship with our worlds and with each other.

If you came here looking for the contemptus mundi, it-s-all-going-to-hell point of view, you’re in the wrong place. Technology is a part of our nature. The singularity already happened. It was called “agriculture.”

These concerns are not new. People have been worrying about technology taking over our lives for as long as we’ve been externalizing our knowledge and tempering our world with tools. This is a painting by Harry Grant Dart from a 1911 issue of Life Magazine — one hundred years ago. It depicts an extreme example. A man is shown seated in the middle of a room where speakers, tubes, ducts, projectors, and printouts provide his every need – comfort, nutrition, information, entertainment. He needn’t ever leave his chair.

More recently (same slide), artist Jeff Nicholson depicted the main character in his 1994 comic Through the Habitrails enduring technology-enabled, all-at-once weekends. His work week leaves him so drained of enjoyment and so far from his interests that he seeks to fill the gap as quickly as possible. “My stimuli is taken directly to my nerve endings and orifices,” he wrote, “and I take it in and in and in with clenched teeth and a fibrillating heartbeat.” Attempting to reconnect the disconnected parts of his life, Nicholson’s nameless protagonist relies solely on technology.

Context: This is where we’re going from here:

  • Disconnection
  • Threshold
  • Bridge

This is the process of technological mediation, a process that happens in three stages: disconnection, threshold, and bridge. First, there is a break, a split, a disconnection. As with a new invention or application, a new path is formed deviating from the old. This break leaves a threshold to be traversed, a chasm between what was and what is. Crossing the threshold requires a bridge, a new metaphor. When one first hears a novel metaphor, there is a new way of seeing something, a break from the old (disconnection). The existence of this new knowledge leaves an obvious gap between it and the old way (threshold). Before long, the metaphor becomes the only way we think about the idea (bridge).

Technology is quickly antiquated, so this process happens very quickly. Think about when you see picture or movies that have cathode ray tube monitors or televisions in them. They look old! But it’s only been in the past few years that we’ve switched to flatscreens. Just saying the word “MySpace” gets a chuckle. Again, it’s only been a few years since it was not only relevant, but part of the zeitgeist.

We’re no good at predicting these things either. Sure, we can tell that cell phones are going to get smaller and become ubiquitous, but in other ways, we’re clueless. I watch Blade Runner (1982) on a regular basis, and for all of its prescience, it completely misses a couple of key things. In one scene Deckard is reading a newspaper (not a fancy, animated Minority Report newspaper either), and in another he uses a payphone. In the movie’s defense, it was a video payphone, but I seriously doubt that either of these technologies will be extant in Los Angeles in 2019.

Here’s how silly our predictions look. This is Steve Newman’s “Telepaper” story as broadcast on KRON in San Francisco in 1981 [runtime: 2:17]:

5WCTn4FljUQ

Disconnection: We employ and implement technology to mediate the spaces between…

  • Ourselves and each other — The most obvious and least interesting of these disconnections.
  • Ourselves and our work  — Steven Johnson pointed out in Interface Culture (Harper San Francisco, 1997) that the Graphical User Interface makes us feel closer to our work on our machines, but that it’s actually a layer of abstraction between us and the work that’s going on inside the computer. It is a metaphor that we often acknowledge we are using.
  • Ourselves and our world — Clothes, cars, roads, buildings, cities, etc. As Max Frisch once put it, “Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”
  • Ourselves and our selves — Our minds are colonized by our technologies. Our minds are literally different when a new technology exists. New knowledge and new stuff physically and chemically changes the make up of what’s in your head. Howard Bloom uses the example of bags used to carry things. In his “Jack the Pelican presents” lecture from 2003, he explains it by saying that our brains are different when different inventions exist. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations exist in our world (the material to the spiritual). Before bags were invented, one could only carry what would fit in one’s hands. After bags, well, it depends on the bag and one’s fortitude for carrying.

All of our technologies have both the potential to augment human abilities and to obstruct them. For example, think about talking on the telephone. On one end of the spectrum, the telephone allows us to communicate with each other over vast distances, rendering our physical location almost irrelevant (augmentation). On the other end, the voice-only nature of the telephone strips our communication of facial expressions, gestures, and other nonverbal cues (obstruction). One can play this game with every machine and device we’ve conceived and implemented.

Every new technology frees us from something while binding us to itself.

We’ve used metaphors to conceptualize and understand phenomena since early Greek philosophy. Thinking theorists over the years have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer. The latter of which has been the most useful and generative, and its use is so common that we rarely give it a second thought. If the explanatory power of the metaphor in use is successful, the metaphor becomes obsolete. If a metaphor obsolesces into general usage, it is forgotten as a metaphor. These splits, these breaks, these thresholds, between disorientation and orientation and between acknowledging a metaphor and just using it — the beginning, the space between the two, and how we handle the transition — are where the process of technological mediation happens. Something is lost every time we cross over that space.

Donald Norman calls the threshold between our goals as users of technology and the interfaces of the physical systems we use — the mappings between the two — “distance.” The “gulf of evaluation” is what we have to figure across the gap, and the “gulf of execution” is what the machine does. I use his as an example of the threshold in all of these situations.

Threshold: In The Young & The Digital (Beacon, 2009), Craig Watkins points out an overlooked irony in our switch from television screens to computer screens: We gather together around the former to watch passively, while we individually engage with the latter to actively connect with each other.

And we want to get in there so bad... Think of Tron and Lawnmower Man: We’ve gone from wearing goggles and gloves in order to enter the machine (e.g., most typical virtual reality systems), to using our bodies as input devices (e.g., Wii,Kinect, etc.), bringing the machine into the room.

The size of our devices are now decided by the size of our appendages. We can make cellphones and laptops smaller, but then we wouldn’t be able to hold them. We have to design at human scale.

Advent Horizon: I call the line we draw at the edge of our level of comfort with technology our “Advent Horizon.” We feel a sense of loss when we cross it. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing, to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable — differently on an individual and collective level — in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. Any attempt to return to a so-called “Natural State” is a futile attempt to get back across the line we’ve drawn for ourselves.

Evidence that we’ve crossed one of these lines isn’t difficult to find. Think about the resurgence of vinyl record sales, or the way we teach computer animation. The former is an analog totem from a previous era, the latter is analog scaffolding for the digital world. Fans of vinyl records are either clinging to their youth or celebrating the only true music format that ever mattered. A vinyl record is a true document of a slice of time. I visited Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida last summer. In their animation and game design programs, students take illustration, flipbook-style animation, and 3-D modeling — real-world 3-D, like sculpture — before they ever sit down at a computer. Clinging to a previous era and having to back up to learn something new: These are evidence that an Advent Horizon has been crossed.

Bridge: Touchscreens are making strides to reconcile these limits, but the QWERTY keyboard is still our most ubiquitous bridge into the machineworld. Writing is a bridge. It is an interioralizing technology that externalizes knowledge and memory. No matter which story you believe about its origins, the QWERTY keyboard has changed our behavior.

The shift from writing to typing is also worth mentioning. The two acts — much like browsing for an item in a physical store versus searching for the same item in a database online — are related in only the most tenuous way. Typing an “L” and a “B” versus hand-writing an “L” and a “B” are just not related.

Technology curates culture. Aspects of our lives only matter because a certain number of us have decided that they do. Often called social construction and often harshly critiqued as uselessly postmodern, the concept is testable. Go to your local coffee shop or restaurant and try to walk behind the counter. You will be swiftly ushered back to the other side of the counter if not out of the establishment. Whether or not there is an actual physical barrier in place, there is an accepted area for the employees and one for the patrons – that’s social construction. As a society or culture we tend to agree on a great many of these constructions. We decide what matters.

Technology makes decisions for us. Often there isn’t a choice as to what is easier, more convenient, or more fun, much less what is more acceptable. Often the technology in place makes only one path available.

The tyranny of adoption. Many times we find that those around us have moved across an Advent Horizon en masse, leaving us behind, or forcing us to cross our line. The opposite is also true. If you’re the only one who adopts a technology, it’s useless until your friends start using it. MySpace works as an example here as well: It’s still viable if all of your friends are using it.

Last year here at SXSW, a friend of mine was exchanging contact information with this woman he’d met here. They both had iPhones, so he wanted to use an app called “Bump,” where you just bump two iPhones together and the contact information transfers from one to the other. Well, the lady he was trying to, er, “bump” didn’t have the app, so they had to enter their information in manually. That’s the tyranny of adoption.

“The Machine is not the environment for the person; the person is the environment for the machine.” — Aviv Bergman

“The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of people we want.” — Robert Sommer

We have to think cumulatively about what we design. Technology curates culture. Technology is a part of our nature. How will we control it? The same way we do our lawns or our weight: Sometimes we will; sometimes we won’t, but we have to remember that we’re not designing machines. We’re designing ourselves.

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So, there you have it. Again, the audio is here, and references are below. Please feel free to offer feedback in the comments below, or tweet about it using the #divisivedevices hashtag. Thanks to those who braved the time change and came to see it live, and as always, thank you all for your time and attention.

References:

Christopher, R. (2007). Brenda Laurel: Utopain Entrepreneur. In R. Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Johnson, S. (1997). Interface Culture. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

McLuhan,M. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Norman, D. (1986). User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction. New York: CRC Press.

Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin.

Sommer, R. (2007). Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Bristol, England, UK: Bosko Books.

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young & The Digital. New York: Beacon.


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Daylight Savings Tribe: SXSW 2011

Sometimes our Earth’s orbit brings us closer to other heavenly entities. Last Saturday for instance, our own Moon was closer than it has been in twenty years. Well, annually in mid-March, we collide headlong into another planet, a clusterfuck (as Buckminster Fuller would say) of talky panels, film screenings, and live shows that is known as South by Southwest, or more commonly by its planetary initials SXSW. This was only my second visit and the first at which I have spoken. The daylight saving’s time wormhole swallowed up a few key things and possibly a few people on Sunday morning, but I’m pretty sure everything I said about last year still holds. The panels are good, but the side conversations are the goods.

Our tribe for SXSW Day #4: L to R: Dave Allen, Merrick, Shivvy, Roy Christopher, and Michael McSunas.

My favorite locations on panel planet this year, included “Indie Success: Caching in on Collaboration,” a discussion of creativity and collaboration with Kenyatta Cheese, Heather Gold, Allee Willis, and Mary Jo Pehl. I met Kenyatta at SXSW last year because he was on a panel with my friend Alice Marwick, and I met the awesomely multi-talented and hyper-driven Heather at Geekend 2010 after my talk there. This is how the tribe grows.

Kenyatta is a beacon of positivity. He is just a benevolently inspiring presence. His words are strong yet playful at the same time. I ran into him and Tricia Wang (these two) serendipitously one afternoon on 6th Street, and my day was just completely made. “I am Kenyatta Cheese, and I am of the web,” he opened at this panel, and when the legitimacy of his last name was questioned, he said, “I didn’t choose my name, but I’ve chosen everything since.” Believe that.

The web allows us to create and distribute the most mundane of our thoughts, but getting them to the point of getting them out there is often a large part of the struggle. Heather insists that we need to give ourselves permission to create, and Mary Jo Pehl put it, “it’s so freeing to let go of the idea of quality.” Songwriter and artist Allee Willis posts her creations as they happen. She said that being a happy artist means knowing your comfort zone and getting out of it. She keeps every iteration of everything she does, 42,000 terabytes’ worth. It’s more about the process than the product (This was a common thread this year, as even 4chan founder Christopher Poole said in his keynote, “It’s the process at which you arrive at the product that is fascinating.“) Find the balance to corrupt the balance. You can’t learn from perfection. Let it go, work with others, and release your darlings. This is good.

I also caught a great talk on Gamestorming by the authors of the book of the same name, Dave Gray, Sunni Brown — whom I’d met in the registration line — and James Macanufo. As you know from my previous posts about notebooks, I love attempting to represent ideas visually — with pens and paper. Well, the Gamestorming crew is all about that. They encourage us to think of meetings or projects as games and to pursue them accordingly. James also encouraged creating artifacts, that is, writing things down. “If paper didn’t exist,” he said, “we’d have to invent it again.” I cannot be more supportive of these ideas. I love this stuff.

One of the main themes from last year — context (or lack thereof) — popped up time and again in discussions this year. Much to the chagrin of several reviewers of Follow for Now, and when the web started inflating and people were getting hired as “content creators,” I toyed with the idea of being a context creator. I still think it’s a viable task (I may put it down as my occupation on my 1040 this year), and so does my good friend, fellow traveler, and SXSW partner-in-crime Dave Allen. It seems like the core of what Dave and I — and our mutual friend Jeff Newelt — do is make connections and provide context for them. I see it like this: at its most basic, human interaction consists of three things: 1) contact, 2) content, and 3) context. They can occur in any order or simultaneously, but all three all have to exist in order for meaning to shine through. Leave one out, and meaning leaks.

Historical context is especially important and the most neglected, and that’s the main point of Dave’s post on SXSW this year. Our digital archives are so vast that we have access to much of the past, but no way to contextualize it in time. I am digressing, but this is a problem Dave and I talked about regularly this week and will be exploring further in the future. The idea is also deeply embedded in Tricia Wang‘s work (and subsequent panel, “Sleeping at Internet Cafes: The Next 300 Million Chinese Users“) in on the next internet community in China. As Geert Lovink once put it, “The New does not emerge. It erupts, then fades away.” We have to keep it in context.

Thanks to Jeff Newelt, Dave Allen, and Ume, I managed to see screen-scramblers Eclectic Method three times during SXSW. They do a multimedia remix show that’s like they’re flying a plane, driving a car, and conducting a train all at once: It moves in every direction, and they somehow keep it controlled. Their show on Sunday at the Seaholm Power Plant was huge. Just HUGE. They played the much smaller Pepsi Max event on Wednesday (just before the legend Pharoahe Monch), and a short set at the Austin Music Hall the next night (pictured).

The line-up that night was bananas: local favorites Ume, ‘Bama trunk-popper Yelawolf, Texas representative Trae the Truth, a DJ set by Erika Badu, Eclectic Method with Childish Gambino AKA Donald Glover, and the legendary Wu-Tang Clan. I saw The People’s Champ Paul Wall on his way there and Bam Margera backstage. Bananas…

Ume filled the cavernous venue with their joyous noise sounding the best they’ve ever sounded. No offense to their old drummer Jeff, but the addition of new drummer Rachel really steps up their sound. They’re bound to finally smash the next level now… I was bugging out so hard during Yelawolf’s set that it prompted Eric from Ume to tweet, “It is fun watching @RoyChristopher have fun.” (Favorite. Tweet. Evers.). Yelawolf killed it, and I certainly enjoyed myself.

After several discussions with folks at the show, we concurred that in order to legitimately claim the the Wu-Tang Clan was in the building, there had to be at least five of the extant members present. Well, We got U-God, Cappadonna, Inspektah Deck, GZA, and Ghostface Killah — just enough for the city. They were plagued with sound system problems, mainly screeching mics, but the energy was at a feverpitch. The five of them eased out on stage one by one, exchanging verses, and when Ghostface finally emerged, I thought the Austin Music Hall was done for.

Rob Sonic reppin' the Well-Red Bear

Somehow since last time I’d seen him, Rob Sonic had become convinced that I didn’t love him anymore. Fortunately he came back to town with Aesop Rock and DJ Big Wiz (collectively known as Hail Mary Mallon), and I was able to profess my love to him anew. The boys were in town to rock the back patio at Home Slice Pizza. They brought their friend Kimya Dawson (see the clip embedded below), who made me weep like a baby every time she took the stage. Aesop Rock, Rob, and Wiz did a quick but thorough mix of old and new material, all of which was the toppest of notches. Cannot wait to hear all of  their new records (several in the works from these folks).

Somehow, my man Merrick (of Music Impacts — more on this project on the site later) got us into the VIP at Perez Hilton’s party at The Moody Theatre, where we drank free drinks and watched Liz Phair freaking own the place. No small feat considering the size of that monstrosity. We stumbled off into the night not long after her stellar set (which included classics like “SuperNova,” “6’1″,” “Flower,” and closed with “Fuck and Run”).

Not Liz Phair.

A ten-day orbit of fun and stimuli like this makes saying “thank you” seem ridiculous, but I must try anyway. Many thanks to old friends Dave Allen, Jeff Newelt, Kenyatta Cheese, Heather Gold, Kerrisa Bearce, Travis McCutcheon, Miriam and Jake Hodesh from Geekend, Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic, and Big Wiz, as well as Lauren Larson, Eric Larson, and Rachel of Ume (and mutual friends Andrea, Jessica, Ronnie, and Chad), for getting me into stuff, buying me drinks, and just for simply being my friends.

High-grade humans I met this year whom I must thank include Donna Coxon-McCory, Merrick and Shivvy of Music Impacts, artist Gary Baseman, Ian and Johnny of Eclectic Method, their manager Justin Bolognino, Char Zvolanek, Michael McSunas, Shadamation, Mark E. Johnson from The University of Georgia, Brady Forest from O’Reilly, Sunni Brown, Zadi Diaz, Steve Woolf of Blip TV and Epic Fu, Tricia Wang, Kelly Khun, Cecy Correa, Stephanie Spear, Lauren Rae Bertolini, Amy Allcock, Dang Nguyen, Miriam Shoemaker, Kim Stezzi, and Brian Scipione of Sonic Living: You all made this year what it was, mind-twistingly awesome. And to those I missed: Michelle Rae Anderson, Zachary Dominitz, Chris Grayson, Sloane Kelley, Doug Stanhope, Brendon Walsh, Mark Budgell, Mark O’Sullivan, and Paul Iannacchino, Jr: Next time.

I walked out of my place at midnight on Day Number Nine, and I could hear the distant drone of a million bands still playing downtown. You can’t worry about missing something on Planet SXSW, because no matter what you’re doing, you’re always missing something.

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Here’s Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock (a.k.a. Poltergasm!) doing “Delicate Cycle” at Home Slice Pizza on March 19, 2011 [runtime: 4:33]:

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Ogilvy Notes picks “Disconnecting the Dots”

So, Ogilvy Notes is going to do a graphic representation of my talk at SXSW Interactive, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive. Here’s the announcement I got today:

We are pleased to inform you that Ogilvy has selected your session, “Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive”, as one they would like to graphically record at the event.

What does this mean exactly? This means an artist will visually document your SXSW panel session in real-time, and then share their interpretation via Ogilvy’s online channel and with limited-edition prints in the SXSW Trade Show Day Stage. Ogilvy is only able to provide this service for a very limited group of panel sessions, so it is quite an honor to be selected.

More information on this program, along with examples of work from all the talented artists involved, is available on their site. I love these live renderings and am super stoked to have been selected for this.

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Here’s one by Heather Willems from the Ogilvy site:

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The Austin Chronicle: “The World is Your Cubicle,” featuring Me

For Nora Ankrum’s recent roundup of SXSW Interactive panels and talks having to do with distance working, “The World is Your Cubicle,” she interviewed me about my SXSWi talk Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive and my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture.

Here’s the excerpt that features me running my mouth:

“Having a beer with someone is still one of the most connecting things you can do,” agrees Roy Christopher, a communication studies doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Still, he says, “the nature of being human is having technology.” Christopher is currently writing a book about human relationships with technology, which he’ll discuss in his panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices Are Divisive. “Every new technology falls on a continuum between obstruction and augmentation,” he says, and as such it poses unexpected paradoxes. For instance, “Everyone says ‘location doesn’t matter’ – but it makes location all the more important because you can choose to be anywhere.”

Admittedly, that last insight is not mine. Nicholas Negroponte pointed that out in his book Being Digital (Vintage, 1996). I’ll claim at least the synthesis of the rest though. I’m anxious to talk about this stuff at SXSW Interactive and in the new book.

Many, many thanks to Nora Ankrum and The Austin Chronicle for their time and attention.

 

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TEDxAustin 2011: Right Now.

Quoting Ray Kurzweil, TEDxAustin co-curator Nancy Giordano opened the day by saying that as humans we’re prepared for linear change but completely unprepared for exponential change. We were certainly unprepared for the full day of potential change she and the TEDxAustin crew assembled in the Austin Music Hall on February 19th: Right Now. Giordano warned us a few times of “intellectual whiplash” when the schedule leaped from one topic to entirely another. She never warned us about “expectation whiplash” though. Right Now was a rollercoaster.

Several people* have pointed out that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Sunny Vanderbeck isn’t after the end of capitalism, just capitalism as we know it. In one giant leap toward fixing it, he takes a long-view that includes responsibility for the world in which business is done over short-term gain. In another, he advises openness. No more relying on sweatshops or sneaky offshore practices. If we make and demand that processes be more transparent, change happens. Change is a contagion. … Ralph Wagner showed us the future of biotechnology, then Robyn O’Brien, author of The Unhealthy Truth (Crown, 2009), showed us how it can go horribly, unhealthily wrong. Here’s hoping her contagion catches on. She showed us crazy data on genetic food modification, pesticides, and food allergy and cancer rates in the U. S. versus the rest of the world. These are not a pretty pictures of our country or its policies. …  Runner Gilbert Tuhabonye advised us to do our work with joy. He has done his under many circumstances. He advises joy.

“Language and culture are the software of the 21st century,” proclaimed Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of ComminuCard. Um, I’m no rocket scientist (Acevedo is. No, really.), but I would argue that language and culture were the software of every century prior to the 21st. Software is the software of the 21st century. … Osama Bedier monstertrucked through his Skyped-in presentation with his back thrown out and taught us about the history and presumably the future of payment. By way of comically extended metaphor, he also taught us why the limitations of the Space Shuttle are based on the width of horses asses. It’s a great story, and I won’t give it away here. Gregory Kallenberg illustrated how creative media can bring polarized opinions together with his documentary Haynesville (2009) about a giant natural gas reserve (170 trillion cubic feet or the equivalent of 28 billion barrels of oil) in the backwoods of Louisiana. It’s an amazing story of hope and possibility. … Poet and teacher Joaquin Zihuatanejo brought tears to the eyes and chills to the skin with his starkly told stories and dynamic delivery thereof. If you’ve ever doubted the power of words, look up Zihuatanejo. … After we all got hyped up, Flint Sparks made sure everyone got very relaxed. The bumpers and graphics on the screen between and during the talks were excellent, and I was stoked to see Public School among the credits.

In each of our packets, there was a list of three people TEDxAustin thought we should meet. As most conference-goers know, the sidebar conversations are usually as important as the planned speakers, the serendipity of bumping into the new. As John Maeda once put it, “serendipity comes from differences.” Unfortunately, we tend to seek out similarities, and I found some like-minds in the halls (big ups to Kevin and Paul from M3 Design, Todd the freelance writer, and Travis the designer), but even my micro-experience echoed the larger impression of a bunch of white folks patting themselves on the back. By the end of the day, no one had found the three people on their suggested list.

Gary Thompson has some great ideas about how the internet and the cloud should serve us better, but he’ll have to help Sunny Vanderbeck fix capitalism before he’s likely to be able to implement any of them. Companies still want our information to stay separate because it serves them — and capitalism — that way. … Peter Hall was my favorite speaker by far. He talked about the difference between maps and mappings, and showed lots of great examples. He’s at my own University of Texas at Austin, so look for me to be tracking him down soon. … Lionel Tiger, author of The End of Males (St. Martins Press, 2000) and professor from Rutgers University who coined the term “male bonding,” came to defend the men. He made many interesting points about boys growing up believing they’re just bad girls, but the reason we don’t have men’s studies departments and courses on masculinity is the same reason we don’t have White Entertainment Television: It has always already been that. The study of history up until the last 30 or so years has been the study of men. We’re still doing it wrong, but we’re doing it.

TEDxAustin: Right Now ended with a bit of a whimper and not a bang. Tavo Hellmund was the most “sought-after” speaker of this event, but I couldn’t really figure out why. His talk was on the benefits of bringing a Grand Prix Formula 1 facility not only to the United States but to southeast Travis County, which he’s doing. It seemed antithetical to the piped-in Brené Brown talk we’d just heard. … He and Dustin Haisler should talk about generating interest in their communities. The messenger is the message, Hellmund seemed to be saying. Haisler, who spoke last, has obviously read Clay Shirky’s last book, but not Dan Pink‘s. Harnessing the cognitive surplus to renovate local government looks great on a comment card — it’s like democratizing democracy — but incentivizing it with virtual money doesn’t sound feasible. I don’t want to play Farmville with the players of Farmville, so I hardly want my city government run by them. Incentive comes from within. Engagement starts with the person, not the external rewards.

I left TEDxAustin inspired and very glad I managed to slip in, perhaps with a few of my expectations violated. The organizers, curators, participants, and volunteers all deserve massive gratitude and credit for putting this thing together.

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Here’s one of the videos of one of the talks we watched at TEDxAustin. It’s Brené Brown from TEDxHouston 2010, and it’s awesome [runtime: 20:45]!

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* Michael Hardt, Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, at least.