extensions

A couple of days ago, I attended a “Futures of the Internet” lecture at NYU. It brought together notable academics, practitioners, and artists, all attempting to describe where the future is headed. The discussion — and the audience — was informal, a bit raucous, and fun as hell. Here are some of my notes, apologize in advance for any thought-mangling…

Clay Shirky: Started by joking that as an academic, he’s smart enough to know never to predict the future. Better to let the future happen, and then explain why it did. Shirky believes we are in a “post-sitcom” era, as the sitcom was a major factor in transitioning our culture from the industrial age to today. He spoke a bit about the importance of social factors that make the Internet “work.” He sees “continued support for diverse surprises” on the net, and saw flexbility as its best feature.

Tim Wu: Sees the history of media as a pattern of decentralization to centralization, and the future is a collision between these two forces. So far, centralized media has always won out. He spoke of the “first YouTube era,” the early days of film, where something like 11 movies per day were being made. All media start this way, open, decentralized, and eventually they are co-opted and reigned it. So the central question is, will this happen to the Internet? Will it remain open, or will net neutrality fall? Will hard drives eventually get banned? Will the net turn into a “permissions-based” entity?

Lauren Cornell: She noted the art world’s economics have not really been threaten by the Internet; it’s still a curated system, based on scarcity. Rhizome started as a mailing-list community, and has grown from there, still retaining, though, that sense of community. “Artists and pornographers are always the ones to test new media.” She sees the newest generation of artists as using the web much more “intuitively” than others before them. Wonders if and how alternative economies for artists might develop in the future.

Jimmy Wales: Wonders how mass collaboration can be done with music, art, or video — on Wikipedia, since it’s text, it’s much easier. The tools may already be out there, but we just don’t have the social models for this type of collaboration. Global nature of the Internet is a major future trend — currently, about 1 billion people online, over the next 5-10 years will be the next billion (China, Africa). We will increasingly be in contact with new people. Concerned that free, open technologies may be closing, including a Chinese-style censorship model. (It’s not the firewall, which is actually quite porous; it’s the chilling effect.) An example of this closed model is the Facebook API, which is locking in developers to that platform.

Jonathan Zittrain: Sees three possible futures. First, “Rainbows and Buttercups” — the trippy, techno-utopian vision of freedom. A collective hallucination. Second, “Internet Meltdown” — openness of the net eaten away by reality: the ITU, the net becomes “enforceable and lockdown-able.” Third, “Not a Bang, But a Whimper” — pleasant but insidious, symbolized by the iPhone — a prison. Wants to see a “federated future,” one where everyone has some way to create “mischief,” outside of the “incumbents.” Need to be able to trust “everybody” (Shirky’s “everybody”), instead of just a few. Consumers need to come to realize they want a mischief box. Developers need to be more politically conscious.

After each of the above spoke, a lengthy discussion ensued, much of that around the idea of “community.” Shirky noted how most of today’s online collective action is “stop action” — protest. Not much is happening around “start action.” Shirky said we need a better way to address “groups” legally, as the only legal entity in this form today is the “corporation.” Wu added to that, noting that “community” has always been the great allure and great disappointment throughout history. Communities sometimes work so well, and other times not all at. We still haven’t figured out why, but it’s clear it’s not the technology, but the social factors that influences this.

There was also some time spent on the pros and cons of the OLPC program. Shirky questioned whether all that money is better spent funding students to attend schools, rather than this device. Most everyone agreed much of the technology inside the XO was on-target.

While my notes cannot really translate how engaging and insightful this discussion was, I hope it at least highlights what these folks are thinking about in terms of critical issues around Internet culture, and encourages anyone reading this to take a look at their work for more information.

Where, you ask, can I find a student-run conference in New York City that brings together graduate students from media studies, sociology, film studies, and other disciplines to talk all day long about media theory?

Why it’s the Critical Themes conference at The New School!

Saturday, April 26, 2008.

The Keynote speaker will be Harvard University’s Giuliana Bruno.

If that’s not enough, there will be free wine!!!

On the same day Amazon introduced their Kindle e-reader late last year, an NEA study was released, announcing Americans are reading fewer books. This confluence of events only added to the long-dragged-out trope, “the death of the book.” Ever since the dot-com bubble, people have predicted the rise of some sort of e-book…but it’s never ever panned out. Why? My guess is book-reading is physical and tactile, and an e-book can’t (so far) replicate that.

There is no doubt, though, the book — or at least the physical artifact we know as “book” — is in something of a crisis. Not too long ago, I heard Ken Wark, a Professor of Culture and Media at The New School’s Eugene Lang College, remark that the professor is now really a “DJ,” as books are no longer assigned to students; rather, collections of essays are gathered up in readers, or, increasingly, just pointed to on the web. What was “the book” is now a mashup. It’s significant that the academy no longer views the book as the center of learning.

Along somewhat similar, but obviously much more theoretical terms, the “death of the author” has been raised, most famously by Barthes. Nicholas Rombes, in an essay in CTheory from 2005, refutes this notion, stating the author is “everywhere”:

Indeed, the author has grown and multiplied in direct proportion to academic dismissals and denunciations of her presence; the more roundly and confidently the author has been dismissed as a myth, a construction, an act of bad faith, the more strongly she has emerged. The recent surge in personal websites and blogs — rather than diluting the author concept — has helped to create a tyrannical authorship presence, where the elevation of the personal and private to the public level has only compounded the cult of the author. We are all authors today.

All of this, so far, is what I hope to be a thought-provoking preamble to an article in today’s NY Times, about a professor and business-owner who has over 200,000 books listed for sale at Amazon. Lots of hours tucked away in the attic writing all that? Hardly:

Mr. Parker…has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

…The computer is given an assignment — project the latent demand for antipsychotic drugs around the world, based on the sales figures in the United States. “Using a little bit of artificial intelligence, a computer program has been created that mimics the thought process of someone who would be responsible for doing such a study,” Mr. Parker says. “But rather than taking many months to do the study. the computer accomplishes this in about 13 minutes.”

The articles notes the quality of some of these books may not be all that high, and some of them are not much more than what is found through Google searches.

Still, it begs several questions: Is the author (still) dead? What is an author today, when computers write books on their own? What, then, is a book? Have books lost their relevance? If not, is this yet one more step down that path?

Editorial note: So far, I have not figured out how to get my Mac to write these blog posts…

I saw Steven Johnson’s lecture last week at Parsons, part of The New School. It was titled, “The Urban Web,” and its main premise, which ties to Johnson’s outside.in business venture, was to examine how the web is being embedded within our everyday lives.

Most interesting was the review of some of his earlier work, especially his “web as city” metaphor, which he based on the work on Jane Jacobs. For the web to be useful, Johnson argues, it needs to have the same qualities (values, really…) we find in many cities:

• Stranger Interaction — the city’s walkable sidewalks and interesting storefronts encourages interactions, just as the web has forums, blogs, etc
• Serendipity — walkable cities encourage chance happenings, something less likely in car-based surburbia. He calls this “swerving” — how you’re walking down the street and see something interesting and decide to take a peek. Swerving in a car means something very different. Web sites like Boing Boing epitomize the kind of serendipity found on the web.
• Neighborhoods — just as distinct neighborhoods form in a city, the web encourages spaces of like minds. Sites such as Daily Kos…
• Order From Below — this is the “grassroots” effect. Digg, for example.
• Density — lots of all the above packed into relatively small spaces

Today, as technology changes, the “urban web” is no longer a metaphor; it’s reality. The web is turning into the geographic web, as it becomes an interface to the real world. An early example of this was Meetup, which became most well-known with its association with the Howard Dean Presidential campaign, as his supporters used Meetup to organize their real-world meetings.

An important reason the urban web is forming is mapping technology. Both Yahoo and Google have added maps to their sites, and through opening their maps through programming interfaces, the field of “amateur cartography” has developed. With some relatively simple programming skills, anyone can overlay the geography of the material world with what they think is significant. So, for example, people have created maps of the “best bike routes through Brooklyn.” The web has become a “filter and user interface” for the real world.

Johnson noted that the major roadblock today preventing the geo-tagging of everything from happening is the web is not organized geographically. The web works today through both standard virtual locations (URLs), and through standard time stamps (made possible because of blogs).

But what the web cannot do is: “Find what everyone is saying about the schools within one mile of my house.”

That, of course, is the problem Johnson’s outside.in is trying to solve.

The reminder of the lecture was generally about outside.in, how it works, where it’s going next. One interesting idea was an integration with Twitter, so that as you walk around the city (presuming you’re using an iPhone, for example, with geo-location built-in), outside.in will send tweets about the places you’re passing, as well as tweets your followers where you are at any given time.

Frankly, it all sounds way too much like a technological panopticon for me. To his credit, Johnson did state that when implementing this technology, they will be very conscious of making this an “opt-in” service by default, meaning you have to explicitly tell the site you want it to start tracking a tweeting where you are to everyone.

Because the lecture was for Parsons, it was much less theoretical than I would have liked, but Johnson is a very interesting and entertaining speaker, so it was well worth it. I should add, he was extremely gracious in the Q&A, and really tried to answer everyone’s questions.

On Friday, I presented my paper, entitled “Virtual Memory: The Blog as Technological Prosthetic,” at the NSSR Interdisciplinary Memory Studies conference. It went very well overall, but the most difficult part of presenting a paper is the Q&A that follows. I think I did OK, but, now that 48 or so hours have passed, I think I have much better answers to the questions I received.

First, I was asked about the materiality/immateriality of the blog; that is, it’s in cyberspace, and “not-there,” yet there is a physical component to it all (servers, network connectivity), and it is really “memory” when we’re so often disconnected to the net?

It’s a great point. I think that bloggers, given they are constantly blogging, are perhaps more connected than others throughout the day. But there is also an asynchronicity to blog conversations — bloggers can carry on, indifferent to time in this sense. One person speaks, and the replies may come back in a few minutes, or in a few days. Within the subjectivity of the blogger, within these asynchronous conversations, memory is available when needed.

There are also other forms of social media — Twitter comes to mind — that perhaps approach real-time and connectedness more than the blog. Because Twitter, for example, works across platforms, including cell phones, the “tweets” that take place are much more accessible, and take place more in “real life.” Unlike the blog, though, Twitter provides little to no memory, as the tweets aren’t stored in a database, and, in this respect, look more like the ephemerality of primary oral cultures.

The next question was whether I wasn’t really talking about an “archive,” rather than “memory.” I think here, we need to question further the nature of an “archive.” First, to me, an archive is something distant — the stacks in the local library. As the time and distance decreases between “I need to remember something” and “here’s the answer” — that is, as we’re able to google our answers as we need them, I think the notion of “archive” begins to wane. Google Books, for example, is an effort to essentially digitize every book — this, I think, changes the meaning of archive. Increasingly, as we search google for, say, Deleuze, we turn up the actual words of Deleuze (his books), rather than the words of other people talking about Deleuze.

At some point, as things can be instantaneously recalled, as we become continually closer to our technology, doesn’t the divide between memory and archive simply cease to exist?

I also think an archive is something fixed. Again, the stacks of books. And yet, the kinds of memory we’re building in a digital age — wikipedia, for example, is hardly fixed. Digital archives/encyclopedias/memories can be updated, and changed. Fixity is lost.

Finally, with respect to the blogger, the memories stored in the database are actually often retrieved and actively “used.” This is because the hypertextual nature of blogging requires an active use of memory — bloggers are extremely self-referential. So, for example, if I want to comment on something I said last week on the blog, my comment will include a link back to that previous post. The form and style of blog culture is heavily reliant on memory, heavily reliant on the ability to find prior blog posts and prior blog comments. In the subjectivity of the blogger, the constant use of the database is something more “active,” something much “closer at hand,” than the term “archive” implies.

But, um, yeah…should have thought of all this when the questions were asked. Not 48 hours later…

I’ll be presenting a paper at the New School’s “Interdisciplinary Memory Studies” conference soon, and the full conference program is now up.

The paper is titled: Virtual Memory: The Blog as Technological Prosthetic.

Should be fun!