Chatter astride the Social Network Divide, Halloween Edition

c.010101 is in your "face" for Halloween

Today, folks my (middle) age are split right down the middle. Half are FB junkies, half are still poleaxed by the social networks, their triviality, their meteoric rise in popularity (in direct proportion to that triviality). To both halves, the haves, the have nots, the "likes" and the "like nots" this is my final apologia.

I like having a tab on my 16 year old son and knowing who his friends are through FB. I like catching up with my nephews in college and my own friends from 20-30 years ago. I like knowing that my brave friend MN is a master woodworker and though she has breast cancer I can "like" her post in which she tells all, that I can offer her support and encouragement along with dozens of others of her friends. I'm sure she'll carry a little positive buzz into her next chemo session. I love the rolicking political debates I have with farflung friends in FL, PA, CA and all over on issues as diverse as "the meaning of tolerance" "abortion" the "Tea Party." I like bating my old TU classmate who is both a Republican media consultant and though he might howl at the label, a closet liberal. One guy from FL has a real knack for throwing out a debate topic and watching people pounce all over it like wolves. This makes for lots of freewheeling intellectual interplay and just plain fun on a purely social level. If you post about what you had for lunch and that you're at work and bored, chances are I'm not going to care or answer you. It takes less than a second to engage or dismiss a trivial post, but for the rest of us, there is discourse, real intelligence out there. You don't have to look very hard for it. I have a wife, two tech-savvy boys, a business and a pretty active "non-virtual" social life.

I am done justifying the value of being an online social networker. I'm not turning into a socially maladjusted hermit for using it but you may be turning into a socially maladjusted hermit if you don't use it. Many people are saying that the social platform is rapidly becoming not just the next communications platform, but the next communications, computational do everything platform. So whatever you say about the intrusion of the media into our private lives, social media are/is here to stay and some of us have stopped puzzling over what it says about us (as a society) and started wondering what it says next.

Facebook needs some work as a "cloud ap." Doing some things on it still takes too much guesswork and clicking about. That's all about to make a radical leap.   


Form Factor Follies

From geek ...

Computers. We have always been slaves to their form factors. When I was a teen wolf, they were as big as libraries, and now you can slip one in your pocket and carry it everywhere. One of my standard jokes is that as a tween geek I always dreamed about owning a pocket computer and now that I have one (a 5 year old Palm Treo) I'm old enough to need glasses to read it it. The joke loses something without my scintillating delivery, but the Treo, mature tech, fits handily in my pocket. So the problem with mobile computing is no longer size, but two other issues. Better imaging and input. We've all seen people walking down the street staring and clicking away at tiny screens until they walk into walls or other people. They're mobile, but the tiny screen and finger input sucks. It requires that you absent yourself from your surroundings. In the case of texting and driving to disastrous results. Wearable, discrete, heads up displays built into glasses or contact lenses and corneal sensors and the next phase dataglove-finger/hand-whatever thingy sensors will solve this issue. That's just current/breaking tech. Who knows what kind of cool, weird body-integrated computing interface is being dreamed up by the bright boys and girls in Silicon Valley and MIT.  



To chic!



The form factor change of computers drives the very definition of "computer" and "computer user." It's changed and will continue to. Computers used to be computational devices. They solved mathematical problems. Like the payload to get men to the moon and back. Then they shrunk down onto people's desks and became personal problem solvers. Business machines. Users changed from scientist to teenagers. Now our personal communications machines are social machines. And they are rapidly becoming ubiquitously portable.

Here's what the next big leap will look like.

It's more of the same.

It's everwhere.

It's in your face, introducing ...

facespace-3D



FaceSpace 3D Live--What, you think it won't happen?

 Imagine, Facebook 3D and other non-virtual platforms where social networks run amock and becoming completely equally untethered and mobile. Whether I want to or not, I'll be wading through endless streams of social data. Ron in Florida is stirring up his conservative friends. My sister in Virginia is posting the Steelers jerseys she knitted for the lab puppies. Here in Philly, I take a moment and friend the Art Museum as I run up its steps and do my Rocky victory dance.

The Rocky Statue, already my friend, says, go ahead, friend both the museums too. When I get to the top, I'll let you all know. Heck. You'll all be watching. We'll share likes and posts from the restaurants, galleries, service stations and CVS's I pass on foot or you drive by in your car. You think we live in a media-cluttered world now. Man, just wait.

I don't know how I feel about that. Ten years from now, I'll no doubt be nostalgic for the relative simplicity of these our current times. That's just the way it works. We will all walk around endlessly distracted by our personal technology and our personal enviroment and its global extensions. Soon our environment and our technology will merge. And we will merge. I just hope I can keep up with all of it.

Off to get some Halloween candy with "Tween Wolf." Live from the trenches.

c.010101 EOY Round-up Home for the Holidays

Mamma told me there’d be days like these.

In the year that the term defriend became the lingua franca de annum in a publication as august as the New Oxford English Dictionary, we’re certainly witnessing the dawn of the social networking era and its inevitable hyper-self-absorption as witnessed in this subsequent navel-gazing debate over whether the announcement actually meant to say “unfriend.” Unfriend/Defriend? Am I unconcerned or deconcerned? Ask me next year.

When I started cleaning my email e-Holiday card list I went first to my own modest social network on Facebook, then took a dive into LinkedIn and even Skype and Plaxo for hard to find colleagues who’ve changed addresses, jobs or locations. The social networks have proven remarkably agile at this task and I suspect will become moreso as their ubiquity increases. Gone are the days when you had to endure pop-up, spyware crap laden “Look-up applications” in order to update an email ad' or a phone number. The S-Net represents the first, albeit baby step toward each one of us being able to manage our own presence and information profile effectively and for this they are important and good. My first pass was able to garner me a brand new line on a friend I hadn’t seen in 32 years and current emails for 30 job-hoppers who hadn’t remembered to send me “I’ve moved” notices.

Once I nailed that problem down, (about two days over a 1900 entry address list), I tackled a hair-puller that has plagued me for four years. This one involved how Outlook sends graphic files. I created my nice little e-card ...

 ... but repeated sends revealed that somehow Outlook was mashing it up and sending this

Ugh!!!

My seasonal nightmare four years running. Tried saving in all formats and all resolutions. Always the SOS.  I could find nothing in the online literature that suggested why this was so, but a combination of research and trial and error and dumb ### luck finally yielded a way to insert a modestly attractive gif file into the Outlook message envelope and not have it look like hash after it’s sent. For those of you on my e-card list. This is why you got it today, rather than a week ago. For those of you who employ high power graphics programs and remailers or software designed to block such email, you don’t care, so read on. Anybody interested in how I did it can contact me. I’ll spill all for the benefit of science.

InterFACEbook

My 15 year old asked today whether it was random chance that Facebook made it so big rather than MySpace or other social sites and I asked him why he thought it was so. He thought for a moment then said perhaps it was “the menu and stuff” which I took to mean “interface” and we had a “teachable moment” about interface design and its importance to personal information management. His is the interface generation. They juggle icons and menus like my generation manipulates words and phrases. We talk about how much catching up they have to do to bring depth and nuance to their conversations but our generation has just as much catching up to bring conversation to our depth and nuance.

Nobody has really monetized social network applications yet, but I have a feeling that the social networks have created the next great wave in personal computing and that we’re just on the lift of the swell of the Web 3.0, the “you web” where you can do everything from start a revolution to learn what your f&f had for dinner.
The social networks bring another small but not so minor innovation to the desktop, particularly if you use Outlook, like much of corporate America. Using a plug-in named Xobni, (“zobni”) it interfaces with your social network and if the api stars align, you get a little thumbnails for your contacts.

Google Wave promises to slam all that together under the ubiquitous Google umbrella as the next big e-thing and while the big G offers users tremendous utility for the show-stopping price of “free” you have to worry about how much of your life you’re willing to entrust to the G cloud, from search history, to documents, to emails to social networks, before they “own” you. This from the company that was so willing to support the Great Firewall of China. They don’t exactly call to mind the hard-bitten media moguls of the 20^th Century who stood on free speech as if it were inviolable and sent grizzled reporters and publishers to prison singing Cumbayah before they’d allow a government entity to dictate to them. I don't know how good I feel about putting all my eggs in a cloud. Strange days indeed.

There are sources of stuff “they don’t want you to know about” But you have to go looking. My top 5 choices for stories to follow in 2010 are:

1.      Do you really think the Obama administration will have the balls to go after financial reform when the Treasury Department is just another revolving door for Wall Streeters?

2.      Who the ### is Joe Lieberman to take the public option off the table and why the Dems are allowing the Senator from The Insurance State to steal true healthcare reform from us?

3.      Verizon promised me fiber to the curb in 1996. Who do I have to #### to get my FIOS in 2010?

4.      Save a tree and save our children’s’ spines. When will Amazon wake up and put a Kindle in every student’s backpack? 

5.      The strange particles that bombard us when politics and science collide over global warming. Will we get the real story before they ship us all off to Mars?

These are my hot buttons. You have the right to your own damned buttons but things like these really @!$$ me off and when they’re deliberately under-reported that really @!$$es me off even more. Stories like these are not right at your fingertips. You have to stretch a little. Stretching is good. Testing your calcium against diverse beliefs (as in a couple of above links) is good for the ethical bone structure and results in shining white teeth.

Make 2010 the You Web Year. Make the “You Web” yours and put it/yourself out there for the world to see. You even have the right to go through other people’s stuff (within limits they’ve established.) Most recently, you now have the right to aggregate and interface to satisfy your own peculiarities and curiosities. Poke it, prod it. Ride it for all its worth. It’s never been easier, more fun or more popular.

Just remember the words of Horace, the Roman poet who urged us and all schoolboys to “carpe diem” also warned “Semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum.”

Once released, the word flies (or in this case drops) irrevocably.

To all Friends and Family on more than one continent who care enough to keep coming back to read, mille mille grazia.

To all …

Happy END OF 2009 with BIG HOPES for Happier 2010!

Eye to Brain -- This post is too long!!!

My oldest friend, J, fellow writer and most observant critic emails:

My first take on (your blog) is hampered by my dis-inclination to read (with attention) off a computer screen. This is a real obstacle as evidenced by the efforts to produce a "reader" like Kindle. However, this may not be an obstacle for our kids but I worry about the loss of the habit of attentive, non distracted reading on our consciousness of the real, tactile world. Such may have been the medieval transition in human thought from oral tradition, bardic incantation of epic tales, wandering theatrical troupes to the emergence of print and the explosion of human knowledge.

My response:

J, I'm probably in the minority of early adopter types, but I still think Kindles suck and won’t get one until they get much better. Christ, they don’t even backlight, which means I can’t tote it to bed and read in the darkness while my wife sleeps. That's a deal-killer for me. I might as well sit in my comfy chair with a book or my desktop screen which has better resolution. But what's zero sum gain for one reader is a direct hit for another. I maintain each student in this country should be issued a loaded Kindle and juvenile backstrain would disappear overnight. Poor #2 Son has had to carry as many as 18 lbs. of treekill. I know, I always carry them for him on our walks from school and several times have weighed the bloody things.

From feeding to locomotion, there are some human needs so old and basic that the forms of the devices that service them are elegantly fixed by function, if not physics. Simple machines like the spoon and the wheel represent design perfection in their spooniness and wheelishness. With reading, the issue (as J points out) is also form factor, but as acquiring knowledge is a relatively new human endeavor, it is vulnerable to being pushed, bent, perhaps out of shape by the delivery mechanism. Books tire the eye less than e-screens. Portability, visibility, tactility are all easy virtues of books. Length becomes a design issue when it tires the eye and undermines rather than engages concentration.

So my essays are long and I'm faced with two choices:

Write shorter ones
/
or
\
acknowledge they are long because they have to be
to convey concepts that aren't easily condensed
and help the reader suffer through them as much as I can.

From a book aesthetic it seems artificial to mediate a solid argument with jumps, links, graphics, pictures, headlines and other publishers eye-candy to titillate tired or bored eyes. Yet, the British tabloids know exactly what they're doing with their (PG-13 rated) page three girls.

This is how we train people to write for the web. Content design born of the limitations and the audience's declining attention span. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay on a concept I coined as "deep interactivity" which I defined as using content driven branching and non-linear information architecture used to create the kinds of deep, meaningful resonances and complexities a reading a long passage in a story or essay provides. To quote U2, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Perhaps the quest is quixotic.

The printed page is a linear storage device. However experimental a writer's style, it will always be linear and thereby limited. Why is linear limited? Because linear compels each user to use the author's argument architecture largely to the exclusion of his own. The disk-based nonlinear storage of content frees us from linearity, offers us search, linking, bookmarking, compact storage, but it sacrifices the best of what even the paperback has to offer, the intact human voice telling its own story from start to finish. Reading itself seems to be evolving into something we won’t understand a hundred years from now.

The bardic tales were passed by oral tradition, so Homer, Gilgamesh, the Upanishads and a handful of the great oral works fortunately survived long enough to be fixed in the amber of written language. But what we certainly lost are lesser known tales and even the finest extemporaneous interpretations of the tale, because a scribe wasn't around at a particular campfire to write it down. It would be like a 21st Century saxophonist reinterpreting John Coltrane, without any original recordings to reference from. Each oralist brought both enhancement and degradation in his ownership of the stories he committed to memory.

Modern disciples of the oral tradition, like my professional storytelling brother argue that the paradigmic shift from oral to written tradition lost something precious, i.e., storytelling as a socially binding, community-reinforced experience. In workshops, conferences and festivals all over the country, a new generation of bards are subversively deconstructing the modern media to reconstruct and reclaim the ancient oral arts.

Tactility has also suffered. I keep coming back to it as it might be at the root of what J is saying. You can touch a storyteller, hear him, smell her, hold hands with an audience member during a scary part. Emotions and social engagement are subcarrier waves for long, involved stories. Tactility is another content subcarrier.

Books have a more reserved but still profound tactility. Papers, bindings, edges, covers, fonts, illustrations, the shapes of paragraphs so fixed and legible that you can see patterns in the way the letters line up. The smell of a new book. The smell of an old one. The soft flick of a turning page, the satisfying thunk of the cover closing to assure that everything you've read and yet to read will be in exactly the same neat rectilinear package tomorrow.

The web; keyboards, speakers mice and screen. We're still clicking away. Each generation abstracts the kinesthetics of knowledge acquistion a bit further.

Yet those who only look back without looking ahead (and J is certainly not one of them) demonize the web as an anti-socializing, anti-intellectualizing force, neglect to grasp something fundamental. The web has taken giant strides toward synthesizing the instantaneous emotional resonances of the communally shared story and the archival compactness of text, adding search, networking and infinite storage, a synthesis paper can never accomplish on the same scale. Synthesis is meaning and context. Community is meaning and context. Community adds complexity. The tactility issue is addressable by bandwidth and innovation.

Today, the Kindle, tomorrow i-glasses, which will let you read the entirety of the world’s web of knowledge, while walking, but only line at a time. Or you'd rather have a v-hat that plunges you full and deep into 4-d holospace. You could experience the classics of world literature in full Sensurround without ever needing to learn how to read. Will you want to? What will change next? Will the language itself become more pictographic to balance the inverse proportionality of textual and visual literacy. Will density and complexity of information continue to degrade or can a newer, meatier sensory-augmented alphabet convey more with less.

As our generation ages and dies off, many believe the trend of information decay will accelerate until like pond scum it blankets the surface and blots the sun from the deep spaces, satisfied to be skipping along the bright and superficial, the odd and confrontational while avoiding the deep elaborate organic tide pools where complexity flourishes and well-reasoned resolutions to multivariate arguments are forged.

Are we really the last champions of "complexity" that we so smugly assume ourselves to be?

Or are we witnessing the watershed of language evolution, the indrawn breath before the explosion of the new language, new concepts and new achievement in thought and word propel us to new heights.

Or did Gutenberg, like the Beatles, get it absolutely right the first time, only to have successors dilute and degrade the medium and the message beyond all future recognition or hope.

Late to the gate?

A Trident Production

Day 1. Take 2. I blog, therefore I am. After casting about for a more lightweight, contemporary version of my dormant digital zine, the blogging craze finally connected with the simian steno pool at Trident Central. From the beginning, I struggled with the layout, time and list management demands of the monthly newsletter model which ceased to make sense long ago even though friends and colleagues know I've always had plenty to write about life as a conspicuous consumer and producer of big and small M media.

Well c.010101 is back and marches right into the fray of politicos, eroticos, scribes and pharisees who blog away at the drop of whatever they're droppin'. I like the spontaneity, interactivity and sense of community the better blogs cultivate. Heck, in some countries, you can get five years in jail for doing this. There must be something to it. I promised many moons ago, with c.010101's maiden issue, never to bore faithful readers, a promise reiterated here, to those who reward this post with a click. To paraphrase a more self-important media outlet's tagline, (I don't have voiceclips so you'll have to imagine the velvet JE Jones VO here) -- you give me a handful of minutes and I'll give you the world. Or at least a piece of it that we both care about.

yours in the faith,
-@v@- rick