Relevant History

Alec Baldwin and "the principle of preposterous virility"

From James Parker's piece on Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers in the December issue of The Atlantic:

Sitting at the bar with his ex-wife, his round a little glass something or other, Baldwin... is florid, potent, gloatingly and inflatedly masculine, like a genie who came out of a bottle of aftershave.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Airbag," from the album Radiohead in Berlin (I give it 2 stars).]

On "Growing Up on Facebook"

Catching up with some reading, I came across Peggy Orenstein's New York Times essay "Growing Up on Facebook," published earlier this year. One of its themes, about the conflict between leaving behind old social circles and reinventing yourself on one hand, and remaining in ambient contact with your old social life on the other, resonated especially strongly:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self? The cultural icons of my girlhood were Mary Richards of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Ann Marie of “That Girl,” both redoubtably trying to make it on their own. Following their lead, I swaggered off to college (where I knew no one) without looking back; then to New York City (where I knew no one) and San Francisco (ditto), refining my adult self with each jump. Certainly, I kept in touch with a few true old friends, but no one else — thank goodness! — witnessed the many and spectacular metaphoric pratfalls I took on the way to figuring out what and whom I wanted to be. Even now, time bends when I open Facebook: it’s as if I’m simultaneously a journalist/wife/mother in Berkeley and the goofy girl I left behind in Minneapolis. Could I have become the former if I had remained perpetually tethered to the latter?

This also connects with an excellent William Deresiewicz essay about social media's erosion of solitude-- which in our pop psychology moments we tend to equate with loneliness and want to banish, but which serves a tremendous psychic need. Humans are social creatures who seem to grow in equal parts through being with others and learning to be on their own-- my children are currently both going through a phase in which they spend a non-trivial amount of time in their rooms-- and Deresciewicz argues that solitude offers a chance (as Orenstein puts it) "to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation."

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "Swing From Paris," from the album The Best of DJango Reinhardt (I give it 2 stars).]

More on the Facebook as time machine

John Boudreau reports that "the Internet is reconnecting long-lost sweethearts," while Scott Harris writes about Facebook as a time machine (gee, that sounds familiar).

Boudreau:

Not long ago, such rekindlings were largely relegated to once-a-decade school reunions, those awkward gatherings that tend to be more about sizing up past rivals than reconnecting with former sweethearts. But the Internet is now profoundly altering some people's links to the past and sometimes upending their lives in unexpected ways. For some, the outcome is a blissful recoupling; for others, the reignited embers burn down the house....

[T]he Internet, and now social-networking sites such as MyLife.com. and Facebook, make relinking easier and more common. And people are doing it at a much younger age — instead of an uncomfortable phone call to her parents, all he has to do is do a Google search for her name.

Harris:

Many people tell of reuniting with cherished, long-lost friends, or reviving meaningful social circles that had frayed over the years. I've met a couple who were high school sweethearts but had been out of touch for 23 years. Now they credit Facebook for reconnecting them — and the romance is fully rekindled. ...

It's interesting how Facebook has connected a little social network of my high school friends — some close, some not so close. When I couldn't find an address for a friend whose father had died, I contacted one of her classmates through Facebook. She had the e-mail address.

Why is that?

Unlike predecessors Friendster and MySpace, Facebook succeeded by creating a culture of authenticity — not a dodgy realm of alter egos, but a place where people feel comfortable showing off photos of their children to their friends.

I would say that it didn't create that culture of authenticity: it set some initial conditions that allowed users to create it.

[To the tune of Django Reinhardt, "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing)," from the album The Best of DJango Reinhardt (I give it 1 stars).]

Coffeeshop workers in New York City

A pretty good New York Times article on people who spend a lot of time working in coffeeshops. My favorite: a matchmaker who works out of a "Nora Ephron-ish coffee shop in the West Village" rather than an office because it's "easier to get people talking in a cafe."

Essentially, cafes really have become cheap coworking space filled with cafe zombies.

[To the tune of Blur, "Coffee & TV," from the album 13 (I give it 2 stars).]

New Facebook group on "Digital Middle Age"

For a while now, I've been thinking and writing about how Web 2.0 fits in the lives of people my age: how technology affects memory (especially how human and computer memories differ); how the omnipresence of the Web may affect our capacity to forget and grow and mature; and how Facebook serves as a kind of time machines. I've now started a Facebook group on "Digital Middle Age" around these subjects.

There's an assumption that anyone over about 24, pretty much by definition, will find games, new media, and Web 2.0 to be a Strange Foreign Country. Partly this is an extension of the reigning assumption that only the young really "get it" when it comes to new technology. Witness Pamela Satran's gently humorous pieces in More.com explaining how not to act old on Facebook and Twitter. (Okay, a magazine aimed at women over 40 is likely to play on age anxiety more than most; but easy way the articles take for granted that teenagers know the "right" way to behave (certainly the first time in human history we've assumed that!) is still pretty striking.)

But the articles overlook the fact that their readership grew up with PCs, spent thousands of hours in front of computer screens, and is perfectly familiar with the Web. My cohort is one that grew up with computers, but not with social media. I was in high school when the first personal computers appeared. I spent hours with my high school's Apple II; I crunched the numbers for my senior thesis using Lotus 1-2-3; wrote my dissertation on a Mac; and got my first e-mail address when I was a postdoc. People my age have all the technical facility (I refuse to use the word literacy) necessary to rapidly take up services like Twitter and Facebook. There's a good reason older users are the fastest-growing user populations in the Web 2.0 world.

But unlike the teenagers and college students are using these services, we have lives that have taken place offline, largely outside the gravity well of the Internet. These services aren't just continuations of our current lives: they can reconnect us to people we haven't been in touch with for twenty years. Watching myself and my friends online, I sometimes think I'm watching a collision of two very different kinds of social worlds. And if like me you're seriously interested in the social impacts of new technologies, studying these kinds of collisions and transitional groups (like people my age) is a particularly valuable way to see how new technologies affect the way people work and play and socialize and think.

And while teenagers are an interesting subject because they're reckless, extreme, irresponsible, and everyone worries about them-- when you're not certain they're dead in a ditch, you're yelling at them to get off your lawn-- I think its safe to say that their parents have large amounts of disposable income, access to credit, a majority vote in household technology-related decision-making, etc.-- all the things that ought to make them very interesting not just to academic geeks like me, but to advertisers and publishers. (We also have more to lose: drunken blog posts or sexting may be bad when you're 19, but accidentally Tweeting trade secrets is a lot worse, if only because mortgages and parental responsibilities multiply the potential impact of big mistakes.)

So, as part of my ongoing effort to understand how media have affected this transitional generation, I've created the Facebook group. It's open to everyone who's in Facebook, and my hope is that it'll help me better understand how social media function in the lives of people who already have lives. Does reconnecting with people from high school really matter? Does it change your life in some non-trivial way? I think it can, but data is not the plural of anecdote-- especially when you just repeat the same anecdotes (your own) over and over.

Maybe there's an interesting article here. Who knows. We'll see what happens....

[To the tune of Daryl Hall & John Oates, "Out of Touch," from the album Big Bam Boom (I give it 3 stars).]

"a skill no child should ever have to learn"

Patrick Stewart-- yes, that Patrick Stewart-- has a harrowing but brilliantly-written piece in the Guardian about growing up with an abusive father:

One of the very last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk, his third stripe was chalked on to his uniform by an officer when no more senior NCOs were left alive. Parachuted into Crete and Italy, both times under fire, he fought at Monte Casino and was twice mentioned in dispatches. A fellow soldier once told me, "When your father marches on to the parade ground, the birds in the trees stop singing."

In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.

Read the whole thing.

[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Pur," from the album Four-Calendar Café (I give it 2 stars).]

Time for a new blog banner

It seemed like a while since I'd created the last one, and of course I had more complex, pressing things to do this evening, so I created a new banner for the blog. This one is from a September 2009 picture I took in London during my customary evening walk.

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1) (I give it 3 stars).]

Autonomous underwater explorers (and I don't mean my kids)

I've long had an interest in robotic systems in scientific research. There's been lots in this area in astronomy, with the growth of both remote and robotic observatories. Other scientists are developing robots for use in dangerous icy environments. But some of the most interesting work in this area is happening in ocean science, with everything from fixed sensor nets, to electronic tags on squid, and chemical tags in baby clownfish, to semi-autonomous thermal gliders.

So I was interested to see that the NSF has just awarded a $1 million grant to create automated explorers at much smaller scales. The grant will allow a team at Scripps

to design and deploy autonomous underwater explorers, or AUEs. AUEs will trace the fine details of oceanographic processes vital to tiny marine inhabitants.

While oceanographers have been skilled in detailing large-scale ocean processes, a need has emerged to zero in on functions unfolding at smaller scales. By defining localized currents, temperature, salinity, pressure and biological properties, AUEs will offer new and valuable information about a range of ocean phenomena.

"We're seeing great success in the global use of ocean profiling floats to document large-scale circulation patterns and other physical and chemical attributes of the deep and open seas," said Phillip Taylor of NSF's division of ocean sciences. "These innovative AUEs will allow researchers to sample the environments of coastal regions as well, and to better understand how small organisms operate in the complex surroundings of the oceans."

The miniature robots will aid in obtaining information needed for developing marine protected areas, determining critical nursery habitats for fish and other animals, tracking harmful algae blooms, and monitoring oil spills.

There's a video on YouTube about the robotics and the future of ocean science, but be warned, it's an hour long.

This seems like a technology that could be really cool, and not just because it pushes automated exploration to a new, smaller scale: AUEs that are very small are likely to become pretty cheap, which means that sooner or later they'll be adopted, appropriated, or copied by amateur scientists (or citizen scientists, as some call them). Amateurs aren't likely to tag dolphins or sharks, but an amateur naturalist living in Carmel or Cape May could pretty capably study the micro-environments of the beaches nearby, producing a cross between Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne and a more quantitative intensive area study.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Home by the Sea / Second Home by the Sea," from the album Live at the Los Angeles Forum (October 16 1986) (I give it 3 stars).]

Happy 150th, Origin of Species

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Happy birthday, evolution! (Alfred Russel Wallace, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found.)

And yes, this is the world's worst Stephen Colbert impression.

[To the tune of Peter Gabriel, "In Your Eyes," from the album Live at Estadio River Plate, Buenos Aires (October 15 1988) (I give it 2 stars).]

The decline of the once-proud American webcam sex industry?

This just arrived in my in-box:

DotIn, as in, an Indian domain name.

Excuse me, this is not right. Not that I have anything against India. But when I was in Denmark, I was struck by the fact that American porn dominated the late-night airwaves, and I considered it a little mark in my country's favor. It's America's manifest destiny to dominate the market in pornography: we've long been a leader in consumption of it, and damn if we're not producers, too. It's our last genuine globe- um, straddling, American industry. Now is it all going the way of automobiles and steel? Are we going to turn into Britain, but with a better tan? And what'll be left for us? Manufacturing financial panics?

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Heroes," from the album Live at Olympic Stadium, Montreal (August 30 1987) (I give it 3 stars).]

Music, media, and discovering (or rediscovering) music

A piece by Steve Almond lamenting the death of the LP and the sentimental culture surrounding it-- okay, it's more nuanced than that-- got me thinking about music, materiality, and memory.

[To the tune of Sea Level, "That's Your Secret," from the album Live at the Bottom Line (November 27 1978) (I give it 3 stars).]

This morning's phishing expedition

Either Gmail has outsourced itself to jetli.org.cn, or this is a phishing expedition.

While as a futurist I don't can't completely rule the possibility of the first being the case, I'm going with the second.

Be careful.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Firth of Fifth / Los Endos," from the album Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, London (June 10 1976) (I give it 3 stars).]

Bee Gees at the Los Angeles Forum

Listening to this 1976 concert on Wolfgang's Vault tonight reconfirms my sense that the Bee Gees were much more brilliant than we remember. The recording was made at the Los Angeles Forum, a venue I know absolutely nothing about, but the show is polished and professional without being soulless; the audience is enthusiastic; and the brothers themselves are engaged and passionate, not just going through the motions. As I've said before,

The Bee Gees were brilliant songwriters, and their best songs-- I think of "Nights on Broadway," "Fanny Be Tender," "Run to Me"-- are beautifully crafted, passionate, and unforgettable. The problem is that their sound was SO phenomenally distinctive, it made it hard for them to be copied: the whole falsetto thing was really easy to parody, and easier to ignore. If ABBA was the Mies of 1970s pop, the Bee Gees are Eero Saarinen.

For those not familiar with the codes of modern architecture, Saarinen was one of the most amazingly distinctive 20th century architects; but after his death critical opinion tended to regard him as an eccentric, rather than a visionary. Like Saarinen, the Bee Gees are instantly recognizable in a way that ironically detracts from their reputation: the signature singing style-- and their unfortunate association with disco-- distracts from the fact that the songs stand on their own. (Check out Feist's cover of "Inside and Out" for proof.)

Four secrets of innovation

My latest piece, "Four Secrets of Innovation," appears in this month's U.S. State Department-sponsored eJournalUSA. Naturally it starts with one of my usual historical references:

In today’s innovation-obsessed, knowledge-intensive global economy, it might come as a surprise that for most of their long histories, science and business have had almost nothing to do with each other. Had you suggested to a silversmith working in ancient China, a captain plying the spice trade during the Age of Exploration, or a Quaker brewer in 18th-century Philadelphia that science could improve commerce, he would have looked at you as if you were crazy. Even today, describing the relationship between science and business — and figuring out how science and industrial policy can be designed to work to the benefit of both parties — is a challenge....

So we seem to be entering a new age in which science is more important for innovation than ever, but is more unpredictable and harder to benefit from. In an age that values innovation, companies and countries have a harder time than ever encouraging and profiting from science.

But does that mean that science policy is now impossible? Certainly not, and successful regions and countries have learned several secrets.

So what are the four secrets? Go read it and find out.

[To the tune of Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, "Rich Woman," from the album Raising Sand (I give it 3 stars).]

Knowledge Tools of the Future

A report on "Knowledge Tools of the Future" that I co-authored with Mike Love (not the Beach Boy, the other one) is now available on the IFTF Web site. For those of you too lazy to download the PDF, I've summarized it in the extended post. For those too lazy to click on the "Read More," it comes down to this:

Computers good.
People better.
Computers + communities = best.

That's pretty much it. There's also some philosophical (or sociological, depending on team you play or root for) stuff about the nature of knowledge, and the degree to which knowledge tools have to be social; the different types of intelligence that humans and computers exhibit (something I've also written about on The End of Cyberspace); and the future of memory.

It also lays out an argument for why simple, social, and symbiotic knowledge tools are triumphing over complex ones-- why the mouse conquered the world, but the chord keyboard and the rest of Doug Engelbart's system languishes in obscurity.

Update: It occurs to me that this is one of a number of pieces that I wrote or co-authored that are available on the IFTF Web site. Others include:

• The Next Scientific Revolution
• Ecoscience in the Marketplace
• DIY Manufacturing
• Simulation and the Future of Virtuality
• Intentional Biology: Nature as Source and Code
• Science and Technology 2005-2055
• The Future of RFID
• The Future of R&D

I also have pieces in the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Ten Year Forecasts, though those are very large PDFs.

[To the tune of U2 and Johnny Cash, "The Wanderer," from the album Zooropa (I give it 3 stars).]

Revising

I'm spending the morning trying to finish up revisions to Futures 2.0, which has been accepted for publication in Foresight, an academic journal on futures and forecasting.

via flickr

I have lots of other work on my plate, clients and editors who I don't want to disappoint, and am taking the family to Colorado for the weekend (to see my folks before they relocate to Singapore in January). So I'm trying to focus.

[To the tune of Norah Jones, "Lonestar," from the album Come Away With Me (I give it 1 star).]

Can dolphins think about the future?

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert argued that humans are the only animals who think about the future. Gilbert's not the only one who's made this argument, and it's not uncontroversial. Recently, there have been several reports of other mammals demonstrating forward-thinking ability, most recently dolphins:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming.

But she didn't stop there.

One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

[To the tune of Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, "Trad: Blue Little Flower," from the album Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet (I give it 2 stars).]