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[29 Mar 2002 1:44 PM]:Are We Still Having Fun?
Source Title: As the Web Matures, Fun is Hard to Find
Source Author: Guernsey, Lisa
Source Location: New York Times 28 March 2002: D1
Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/technology/circuits/28WEBB.html
Lisa Guernsey reports on various Web pioneers' disenchantment with the current state of the Web. "Where are the Coffee Cams and Jennicams of today?" they lament. Guernsey spotlights Glenn Davis, who founded Cool Site of the Day, once a labor of delight that celebrated the newest cool thing on the Web but now, under new management, is apparently little more than an online vanity press for Web designers. The Web, most people interviewed for this story agree, is no longer any fun.
Behind these laments, I suspect, is one of the oldest arguments regarding our media of communication, stretching back at least to Greek philosophy: should language, for example, be transparent, providing us with an unfiltered view of reality, or should it (does it, in fact, by nature) shape and even create our experience of whatever really is? Should it passively channel information or actively shape it?
One of the wisest recent meditations on this problem can be found in Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word. Lanham argues that Western culture oscillates between periods that stress "looking at" language and other symbolic media and periods that place the highest value on "looking through" language. Courtiers during the English Renaissance, Lanham's literary specialty, knew how to revel in language. By contrast, the seventeenth century witnessed the rise of modern science and an attendant dour advocacy of "plain language" that provided, as its proponents imagined, transparent understanding of a speaker's or writer's ideas.
From the perspective of such relatively long swells in our cultural attitudes toward media, it is probably fair to say that the twentieth century looked intently at media: the telephone, radio, TV, film, and the Web. Perhaps the crest of that long wave has passed (I doubt it). But on the scale of Guernsey's article--a mere six years or so--we are probably witnessing a more local phenomenon, something more like the choppiness that gets our adrenaline flowing when the winds of innovation stir the waters of mass media, and the subsequent sense of being becalmed when innovation slows for awhile. Fun is part of the rush, to be sure, but I think there's more at stake.
Aside from the voyeuristic dimension of Jennicam and its imitators, what made such sites interesting? Well, for one thing, they graphically registered a new wobble in the tightrope that connects the local and the global, the public and the private. If our first collective reaction to Jennicam was to wonder who would invite such scrutiny of her personal life, we soon began to suspect that the very technology that gave rise to the Jennicam would make such scrutiny of our private lives routine, though today we are more concerned about databases and digital eavesdropping than surveillance cameras.
Innovative uses of media modulate their immediate message with a compelling vision of the possibilities for communicating any message. "That is so cool!" we exclaim (or some variant exclamation, depending on our age and excitability). That's the reaction I hear every time I show someone Trip.com's FlightTracker, which displays the departure time, estimated arrival time, flight path, altitude, heading, and airspeed of any commercial flight I care to follow, along with a graphic showing the flight's current location against a map of the cities and physical features in the region (as I write this Weblog, United flight 8179 is passing southeast of Provo, Utah at 40,000 feet heading west-southwest at just over 500 miles an hour). Now, I usually log onto FlightTracker to find out if a flight I'm meeting is going to be late. Nearly every bit of information I get is icing on the practical cake, but it is no less tasty to me or others who watch far longer than it takes to find out if Mom's flight will be late, purring in appreciation every time the little picture of the plane against the Utah desert shifts its position or orientation ever so slightly.
A little reflection suggests that, while we may tire of watching tiny images of planes cross our screens, there is still much room for innovative uses of the vast streams and oceans of information, computational capacity, and bandwidth that makes sites like this possible--and worth monitoring closely. We may tire of Jenny, but wouldn't Web cams provide great opportunities for students to conduct research in remote sites that they cannot visit? Mix a practical purpose with a dash of innovation, and you've got your audience reveling in the tension between "looking at" and "looking through" media.
[29 Mar 2002 8:58 AM]:Multimedia: Print and Digital Trifles
Source Title: Billy Wilder, Master of Caustic Films, Dies at 95
Source Author: Harmetz, Aljean
Source Location: New York Times 29 March 2002: A1+
Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/27/specials/wilder.html
Today's New York Times contains a multi-page obituary for filmmaker Billy Wilder that includes a shot of Wilder on the set of "Irma la Douce" and stills from four of his films. Real estate in the print edition of the New York Times is dear and limited to text and still graphics, however, so the Times has also published an online retrospective of Wilder's career (see the Source URL above) that includes dozens of film reviews, profiles of Wilder's career, and film clips. The page also carries a small icon declaring that the New York Times is publishing this material
Which raises the intriguing question of how we concoct communications by mixing media formats. It must not always be a question of cost (print being more expensive than the Web) or technical feasibility (until we have electronic paper, there'll be no video in printed newspapers). Sometime, convention and habit must win out over, say, cost and ease of use, or why would the Times still publish multiple pages of stock prices printed in a font so small that I can barely read them out of the bottom of my progressive focus lenses.
Book publishers -- especially textbook publishers -- divide their products across media routinely; you pay for the printed book and have access to a Web site full of ancillary materials.
Academics, by and large, must still publish in the form of books and journal articles if they want to earn tenure and promotions, but raw data or supplemental materials related to their research can often be found online.
Still, this practice isn't ubiquitous. While two stories about film in today's Times included pointers to online supplements, none of the reviews of plays, exhibitions, or concerts had similar online counterparts. Why not?
[29 Mar 2002 7:54 AM]:If Wishes were Books, Readers would . . .
Source Title: Wish List: 9 Innovations in Search of Inventors
Source Author: Pogue, David
Source Location: New York Times 28 March 2002: D1
Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/technology/circuits/28STAT.html
David Pogue imagines nine inventions that would make our lives easier. Tellingly, most of his proposals simply apply existing technologies in new ways or combining existing technologies into new systems -- an accurate model of how most innovations occur, I'd guess. Pogue's proposals include food products with barcodes that microwave ovens could read (much as TV listings now communicate with VCRs) and Bluetooth devices that would function as wearable, but subtle, personal ads, comparing notes with others wearing similar devices and vibrating when you are in the proximity of a good match. Pogue speculates that such devices could take some of the risk out of dating. (He doesn't speculate about how to ensure that the data in these devices is any more accurate than the information in personal ads, but, to be fair, that's not the point of his innovation.)
If you had a stable of digital media designers working for you, what innovations in writing, reading, and communications technology would you commission?
I thought it would be easy to come up with a long wish list, but, short of the direct connection between my thoughts and a recording device something like a word processor (see my entry entitled "Reading Minds," I'm stuck for the moment. My son comes to the rescue by reminding me of a recent story in the Times about systems that superimpose visual data (text, graphics, video) onto your visual field by means special headsets. The story noted that mechanics working in cramped spaces could have at their disposal libraries of technical information appropriate to whatever they were looking at.
Critics of cyberculture complain that ever more realistic computer representations are sapping our allegiance to the natural world, often neglecting to mention that books, as much as computers, require us to withdraw our attention from our surrounding. How would literature change if it were superimposed on our view of the material world, shifting in response to our ever-changing visual field? The novel might be tough to adapt to such an environment, but what about the lyric poem?
[28 Mar 2002 2:35 PM]:Reading Minds
Source Title: Don't Point, Just Think: The Brain Wave as Joystick
Source Author: Eisenberg, Anne
Source Location: New York Times 28 March 2002: D6
Source URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/technology/circuits/28NEXT.html
Anne Eisenberg reports that researchers at Brown University have created an electronic interface between the brain of a rhesus macaque monkey and a computer game, allowing the monkey to move the cursor simply by thinking about moving the cursor. The principle seems relatively simple to this reader (innocent as I am of any knowledge of the science behind the story): you hook up electrodes to about 30 neurons, monitor the electrical activity of those neurons as the monkey manipulates a real computer mouse, teach the computer to recognize the "brain-wave data" related to the monkey's physical movements and translate those patterns into cursor movement. Hook the monkey back up to the newly programmed computer, and in a matter of "minutes, not weeks," it learns to move the cursor just by thinking about moving the cursor. The engineering itself seems pretty elegant, even if it still has a long way to go. The neurological news, according to one Dr. Heetderks, is "the potential of the brain itself to re-allot tasks."
This research could, as the story notes, prove to be a boon for people who are paralyzed, allowing them to move everything from computer cursors to prostheses. But if you think about the story from the perspective of technolgies of writing, the implications are equally significant.
I once learned to send and receive Morse code at about 35 words a minute--faster than I type when I am composing at the keyboard, I think. More proficient coders can communicate at significantly higher speeds. As you improve at both sending and receiving code, you stop thinking about the dots and dashes. Instead, you are simply spelling words in your head or, when you get even more proficient, thinking word by word. The physical movements take care of themselves.
Now sending Morse code involves pretty simple physical movements--pushing on a key or paddle for a (relatively) long or short time. I suspect that, like me, most amateur radio operators are able to understand Morse code at a higher speed than they can send it with acceptable accuracy. It's just too easy for the fingers to slip or tire when tapping out code at 35 words a minute. But if I could skip slapping the key or paddle, just think about keying, my code could fly. Eventually, they might be able to do the same thing with the more complex motor movements of typing. Good-bye, carpal tunnel syndrome.
The technology could prove helpful to visually-impaired computer users, too. I've observed proficient users of screen-reader software who, audible feedback notwithstanding, find it challenging to type on a keyboard they can't see. Hook up a voice synthesizer to a virtual Morse code paddle and you could hear your thoughts without having to type, no?
There's more. A researcher in "neural prosthetics" at Cal Tech is working on a system that could dispense with the wires used in the research at Brown by implanting chips that could transmit information wirelessly. Does that mean that your chip could transmit Morse code to my chip, which would produce a stimulus in the neurons involved with hearing that I could recognize as the dots and dashes of code?
We have always thought of writing as inscribing (cutting, painting, penning) marks on durable materials, making the messages contained in the writing available to others over great spans of time and space. Sound and digital recordings perform the same trick.
But after messing with all the hardware of writing and data recording, communication still depends on sensory inputs to the brain. Impairments in those inputs and other special circumstances have led to Braille, computer screen readers, and Morse code, ingenous methods of communicating alphabetic writing. This story suggest how subtle the hardware of "writing" might become.
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