Relevant History

"when ideas and solutions appear pat, cute, easy, or triumphant, they’re almost certainly wrong"

Balloon Juice:

I think TED talks are the worst example of modern faux-intellectualism. Audience flattering, based on ego and personality, dripping with self-congratulation, they contribute to one of the great lies of our time, which is that the truth is entertaining and can be contained in bite-sized, ready-for-television aphorisms. The reality is that progress is hard, that knowledge making is a long and dispiriting slog, and that when ideas and solutions appear pat, cute, easy, or triumphant, they’re almost certainly wrong.

Mainly this is an excuse to trot out my favorite Bart Simpson quote: To those who say there are no easy answers I say you're not looking hard enough!

As someone who's given TEDx talks, yet is occasionally put off by just how much buzz these talks generate (or really, how ready some speakers are to point to hit counts as proof that They Are Taken Seriously) I can understand the criticism.

Yet there can be value in struggling to take a complex project and at the very least, show people enough of it to make them think that it would be worth investing their time and attention to see the whole thing. Good TED talks aren't like music videos; they're like movie previews.

Second reflections on writing

A while ago I wrote a piece about writing for the trades. As someone who'd written for academic audiences, and for corporate and government clients, it was interesting to take on the challenge of writing a book for a popular audience.

I just finished the first draft of the manuscript-- as in, sent it off to my editor and agent a couple hours ago-- and while it's all still fresh, thought I'd spend a little more time on what I've learned about writing.

via flickr

The single most important thing is, be organized. The reason I was able to write this draft in a year was that I started the process with  a strong, well-organized outline-- an outline that I took very seriously, because it was the basis of my book contract. So that short-circuited all that screwing around you do trying to find the perfect structure. I had one that the publisher liked, and so I was damn well going to stick with it.

Then on a daily basis, this means: organizing your goals for the week, listing out the sections you're going to write, and generally spending as much time as you need to be clear about what you're going to write-- so long as you actually write it. There's always the danger that this kind of prep becomes a substitute for actual word production. Watch out for that.

It also meant always setting up the coffee the night before, and organizing your workspace before bed so you could just sit down and be ready to go.

These are little things, but they make tangible your commitment to the project.

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Another is to seek solitude. Turn on Freedom, or LeechBlock, or whatever. Put on the headphones. Before they exist on paper, good words live in a very quiet space, that you can only really reach in solitude. Of course you need to share your work in writing groups, with editors, and (you hope) a very big public. But in order to have ideas good enough to share, you need to seal yourself from everything but the words.

It's like how monastics describe the role of silence in contemplation of the divine. A common theme in monastic practice is that you cannot hear the voice of God, or achieve Enlightenment or satori, or see the ultimate truth, until your soul is quiet and ready. God does not make himself heard over the din. You have to listen for Him.

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Another thing that I found really helpful was to stop for the day in mid-thought, or with one more sentence in the paragraph. It had to be something I knew I wouldn't forget, but having that as the first thing I did the next morning really helped me get started. The beginning is always the hardest part, and so if you can make the start of each writing day easier by actually knowing exactly what you're going to say, you'll make your life easier.

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I now think that after years of writing, there's a more direct connection between whatever parts of my mind generate good ideas, and the part of my mind that controls my hands. There's a relationship between the physical act of writing and the "mental" act of creating that is not merely linear: I don't have ideas and then write them down. I have ideas because I am writing.

So it's absolutely essential that I spend time at the keyboard.

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And I needed something to make it easier, because I was getting up in the pre-dawn hours and writing for an hour or two before anyone else woke up. (Even the dog stayed asleep and didn't follow me out to the living room.) I am absolutely NOT a morning person, but it made a big difference to have that time to myself, and to write in a state where I was actually to tired to distract myself. My semi-conscious brain was better able to stay on target, and whatever good ideas were bubbling up from my subconscious had an easier time reaching the calmer surface of my mind.

via flickr

This was a complete change from the way I normally write and live. I'm naturally a late sleeper, and so it took real will for me to get up early. But it really did work. I was actually taken by surprise. I figured that having some words under my belt before I took the kids to school would be a psychological boost. What I didn't expect was that the very early morning would actually be a good time to write. But it turns out it was. Everyone should experiment with writing on a different schedule, or in a different way, to see if there are things that work better for them.

Thus endeth the lesson. For now.

Trying out Blogsy

I decided to download Blogsy, a blog editor for the iPad, and give it a try. I've lamented the apparent absence of decent Typepad editors (indeed, I still pine for the old days of Ecto), but this one looks pretty promising.

via flickr

I spent yesterday at the Being Human conference in San Francisco, about which I'll have more to say shortly. It was a very interesting time, and quite well-done.

A year ago...

...I was settling into Cambridge. Wow.

my road, via flickr

 

Quiet day in the cafe

Maybe because it's Thanksgiving week, but it's oddly quiet at Cafe Zoe, where I'm now working, as the construction crews are back digging up the Hetch Hetchy.

cafe zoe, via flickr

One of the things we believe about working at home is that it's quieter than the office, but that's only true if you don't have backhoes and giant cement machines chuffing back and forth outside your window.

"Real time" and Jóhann Jóhannsson

I'm working this morning on a section of the book about the idea of "real time"-- how the concept got started in computer science, how it's multiplied and diffused through the financial sector and Web and social media to color our perception of time, and finally how unreal it is, compared to spiritual or religious ideas about and experience of time.

I've got Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlandia blasting on the stereo, mainly because it's a pleasure to listen to something that's so beautifully crafted and passionate. Jóhannsson has turned into a hero of mine. He composes works about machines (the Ford assembly line, the IBM 1401 computer), and he's technically brilliant, but his work is lush and passionate. You get the sense listening to his best work that nothing of him is held back. That's what I want my readers to feel.

Has anyone written a history of the idea of "real time"?

Has anyone written an article on the term "real time"-- where it comes from, how it's been used in the last few decades, and what it means today? In particular, I'm interested in how and when the "realness" of things like computer network and information flows became more "real" than those of more "natural" everyday human life.

Lady Gaga, Glee, and me

Probably the only time in history I'll be mentioned with Lady Gaga and Glee: Publishers' Weekly's article on what books American publishers are selling at next week's Frankfurt Book Fair.

Look under the listings of Hachette, the conglomerate that owns my publisher, Little Brown.

(And so long as I live, I swear I'll never get tired of saying "my publisher, Little Brown"!)

Reflections on writing for the trades

After a couple months working on it, I've been thinking about the experience of writing a serious non-fiction book. It's been a stretch for me, in quite a good way so far: I'm writing about something big that I'm passionate about, but in a manner that I find new and very challenging.

First, writing without footnotes is a pretty liberating experience. I'm the sort of scholarly writer who likes the recapitulate his entire intellectual history in the first five footnotes, and construct a dense thicket of citations to support my main text. If anybody doesn't know, this is part of an academic game that has several goals: creating a defensive barrier below your work that keeps it from being undermined ("well, yes, you would think that's a flaw in my argument if you haven't read these sixteen other things"), creating a place for your work in the literature, and sending little mash notes to people whose work you like. The downside is that this is an enormously time-consuming game, and it's a great way to procrastinate; if you get too caught up in it, it gets harder to actually write.

Little Brown doesn't do footnotes; instead, their books have bibliographic essays at the end. This means that I don't have to document every claim I make as I write it; I need to keep track of what I'm doing and where things come from, of course, but there's a whole slice of literary labor that I can forget about. The standard in the industry is also to quote other people sparingly, unless they're Shakespeare or Yogi Berra; as my editor explained, they're buying MY ideas, not my gloss on someone else's.

The result of all this has been that I'm writing faster; it also means that I'm constructing a different kind of relationship between this work and my sources, and between my authorial self and other writers in the field.

Put most simply, knowing that I can't impress readers with spectacular acts of citation jujitsu means that I have to make the work itself more compelling, and my own voice more authoritative. A footnote citing half a dozen books can be the intellectual version of an incomplete sentence, an erudite way of saying, "Well, you know..." With this, I have to actually FINISH the thoughts, and make them mine.

The practice of quoting other works has one big benefit: it means I'm doing more interviews with people. Even when I can pull a quote from something a person has written, it's better to quote from an interview. This is, in effect, a great excuse to talk to have conversations with interesting people, which is something I always enjoy. And fortunately they're quite forgiving when we go over things they've already written about; few people actively dislike talking about their work, and most of them know how this game work.

What I find really unexpected is that this kind of authority-- writing that depends more on what the AUTHOR does, than on who the author cites-- is, for me at least, truer to the ideal of scholarly authority. It forces you to take complete responsibility for your ideas. (Even at the Institute, while we didn't use footnotes, we often supported ideas that were challenged by readers (usually clients or prospective clients) by saying, in effect, we're just telling you what our expert sources told us.) You can argue that some writers abuse this, by appropriating other people's ideas, or not sufficiently acknowledging their debts; I hope to avoid that, but I can now see how it happens.

I've also been struck at how much writing is a business, albeit one that requires a high degree of focus and creativity. Even after editing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, publishing an academic monograph, turning out articles in newspapers, Scientific American, and lots of academic journals, I'm learning a LOT about how the trade book market works, and it's pretty different from everything else.

With my ambitious 1,000 word/day writing schedule, I'm also having to be very ruthless about my time and avoiding distractions. I'm not always successful (WILL JACK EVER ESCAPE FROM THE OTHERS? WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SMOKE MONSTER?), but this kind of writing requires starting early (the days when I'm up before 6, and get some writing done before I have to take the kids to school, are the most satisfying), and not giving up. People who think you get inspired, then rush to the keyboard and write in a creative frenzy, have it exactly backwards: you sit at the keyboard, and hope you can get to that state.

At the same time, while you need to hit your deadlines, you also need to be creative: anyone can tell the difference between what I've written when I'm really engaged and passionate, and what I write when I'm turning out Product. People don't tell their friends that they have to read this Product; Terry Gross doesn't interviews to writers about Product. They want strong, passionate writing, and creating it is... a challenge.

Paradoxically, I think setting a 1,000 word/day pace for myself turns out to be a good way to bring on that more creative state, that feeling of being entangled with the work. The more you're able to write to a schedule, the more likely you are to hit those great moments when you feel like you're transcribing ideas that come from somewhere other than your own mind. It can take at least a day to get to that mental state where the ideas really flow well; inspiration doesn't come in a flash, but after a long run-up. Put another way, those states can, to some degree, be induced: you can start wordsmithing and end up doing something really creative. This helps explain Frans Johannsen's observation (in The Medici Effect) that creative people do some of their best, most memorable work when they're doing a LOT of work. We assume that masterpieces are the result of long solitary focus on a single problem, but they're more usually part of a bigger enterprise.

Now back to real writing.

On Contemplative Computing

Recent posts:

• "Slowly, the tools of the hand disappear"
• Fred Stutzman on Freedom, productivity, and bigger/better/faster vs. smaller/better/slower
• Are there distraction-free graphics programs? Can there be Zenware for music?
• "Think of how unproductive Dickens would have been if he had to fight against Facebook"
• Quote of the day: Kenzo Awa on teaching vs. learning
• Nice mention in School Library Journal
• What was the first machine users considered an extension of themselves?
• The Slow Science Manifesto
• Derrick de Kerckhove on the Augmented Mind
• More on architecture, drawing, and thinking

Its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk

I notice that the last post here was about ten days ago, and I wanted to assure myself (and the two or three other readers) that I've been absorbed in working on my book, and so most of my posting is on the contemplative computing blog. Posts that have appeared there since Paris include:

• The street finds its own use for things, Berkeley edition
• Tony Perrettet on writing and distraction
• Alok Khorana on electronic medical records
• Another Zenware data-point: iA's Writer
• Do nudges work as public policy?
• Internet use and transactive memory
• Quote of the day: Hieronimo Squarciafico
• Coverage in the Francophone blogosphere

I suspect this pattern will continue, and at times I'll regret not having one blog for everything, but it's too late to stop now.

(The title of this post, of course, is from the classic Monty Python dead parrot sketch.)

Remembering Theodore Roszak

Theodore Roszak, author of Making of a Counter Culture and The Longevity Revolution-- and another two dozen books, more or less-- has died. I interviewed Roszak a few years ago for a project on the future of aging, and loved the passion and energy of his first book, on the counterculture. In effect, in those two books Roszak chronicled the Baby Boomer generation's great impact on American society and culture. As I explained a while ago,

Roszak spent his career at Cal State Hayward, and retired a few years ago. A decade ago, he went through a medical crisis "that would have killed our parents or grandparents. I came through this realizing that… I might live another twenty or thirty years," he recalled to me last fall.

His experience revealed two things. First, surviving an event like this is "a profoundly transformative, spiritual experience" that makes you "wonder what you're going to do with what you now see as a gift." Second, he wasn't alone: for more and more people, events like this are becoming a passage into a new, as-yet undefined phase of life.

I really became a fan of his when I came upon a review he wrote of Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that was one of the most critical, smart attacks on Fuller's worldview.

My other substantive encounter with Roszak happened a decade ago, around his book From Satori to Silicon Valley, which he was kind enough to let me republish on my Making the Macintosh project. He was quite supportive of my interest in the book (which makes an argument about the link between counterculture and computing later explored by Fred Turner and John Markoff, and more recently applied to theoretical physics by David Kaiser), and gracious in letting me reprint the book.

Finally, I recently rediscovered a book he published in 1986, The Cult of Information, which I'd picked up at a book sale and never actually looked at in detail. However, it prefigures some of what I talk about in contemplative computing, particularly in acting on an understanding of the difference between human and computer intelligence and memory:

Two distinct elements come together in the computer: the ability to store information in vast amounts, the ability to process that information in obedience to strict logical procedures. Each of these will be taken up in turn in Chapters 5 and 6 and explored for its relationship to thought. There we will see how the cult of information fixes upon one or the other of these elements (sometimes both) and construes its intellectual value. Because the ability to store data somewhat corresponds to what we call memory in human beings, and because the ability to follow logical procedures somewhat corresponds to what we call reasoning in human beings, many members of the cult have concluded that what computers do somewhat corresponds to what we call thinking.... The burden of my argument is to insist that there is a vital distinction between what machines do when they process information and what minds do when they think.

Working with the iPad

On this trip I've experimented with leaving my laptop behind and just taking my iPad, and so far it's performed pretty brilliantly. So long as I have an Internet connection I can do pretty much everything I would want to do with a laptop, and even without one I can do about 80% of the things I would normally do with my MacBook Pro.

The thing that makes the difference is the keyboard. Apple makes an excellent Bluetooth keyboard, which is both extremely thin and light, and has a good solid feel: they're full-sized keys, and they have nice throw, so I don't feel like I (or my hands) are compromising. And the difference between writing with a real keyboard, and tapping on the screen, is like night and day: I can tap with more than one finger on each hand, but it's not as fast or accurate as when I'm using real keys. Not only do I make more mistakes, but I can't feel when I make mistakes, the way I do when I'm using a regular keyboard.

Of course, the other thing that makes a big difference in the functionality of the iPad + keyboard is not the device itself, but rather the fact that I've got a bunch of useful material up online that I can access when I'm writing my talks. In particular, my habit of putting pictures up on Flickr is really starting to pay off: as my photography has improved (or at least gotten more quirkily distinctive, and migrated to ever more impressive devices), that's turned into an online repository that I can access when I'm revising my talks and need to illustrate new points.

I would like to see better synchronization between my machine and iDisk, or a feature that automatically backed up files to my iDisk. Or rather, I would like this for my hosts, so they could always have access to the latest version of my talk.

I may go for an adapter to connect the iPad to a monitor, but I really liked being able to carry around the iPad and read my talk off it. I worried that it looked a little dorky, and it probable does; but apparently the aluminum back reflects the stage lights in cool ways, so I'm going to keep reading off it (and maybe look for some holographic cards or such to tape on the back for such occasions). I know it makes me look a little like Jonathan Pryce's evil Rupert Murdoch-like character in that James Bond movie, but c'est la vie.

The other thing I'll have to practice is using it as another display surface, so I can occasionally different images than what's showing in the presentation, or maybe toss our specific words than I want the audience to focus on. Not even technically or logistically difficult: I could just add pictures to the presentation text, and flip over the screen when I want to show something to people.

Though I wonder if the VGA adapter works with the iPhone? Could I do presentations in Keynote and then run them off my phone, while reading the text on the iPad? Must experiment. I should also see what the Keynote remote control is like.

Marseille

I'm in Marseille, France, for another hour or so. Since I got here I've been running around, looking at demos, working on my talk, or walking around and taking pictures, so I've not had a lot of time to post. However, I'm now in the train station, waiting for a train to Paris, and rather than walk around one more neighborhood with my bags, I decided to just hang.

via flickr

Before I came here, I checked out my local bookstore for travel guides on Marseille. There aren't any. This is the second (or maybe third) biggest city in France, yet according to the travel industry no one goes here: tourists avoid it in favor of Aix or Lyon or other more attractive places. You'd never know that it wasn't a destination here: the train station is full of backpackers and families with rolling luggage.

via flickr

But I can see why it's not considered by the guidebooks to be authentically French, in that imaginary pure Gallic way: being a 3,000 year-old port city, Marseille is a real hybrid, with people from all over the Mediterranean. Lots of Tunisian and Moroccan restaurants, west African shops, tourists from Scandinavia and Spain, and the occasional English speaker. It's not as hyper-developed as some cities; it's more like Budapest than Vienna, but it's by no means unattractive or run down, nor is it palpably unsafe.

via flickr

I gave my talk on contemplative computing on Friday afternoon, right after lunch. Somehow I seem to gravitate to the post-lunch talk times, but what can you do. I was up until 3 the night before refining the talk, and the next morning tinkered with it some more; partly I was still cutting it down, and partly I was working in references to earlier talks and some cool demos I had seen at the conference exhibit hall. But I think it paid off: I was certainly pleased with the talk, I think it introduced the ideas well, and people seemed to like it.

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I'll put up a copy of the talk with pictures later.

One of the great things here has been the food: both nights I ran into people with whom I went out to dinner, and we found various Moroccan or Tunisian places that were excellent. I may have to buy a tagine when I get home.

via flickr

Okay, off to get my train. More from Paris!

Starting my trip

I'm at SFO, on my way to the Lift 2011 conference in Marseille. Curiously, while it's the second largest city in France, it doesn't seem to be a place that you can get to from here; plus, thanks to some complications with my travel plans (which my conference organizers were incredibly good about dealing with, I must say for the record), I'm flying to LAX, connecting to a New Zealand Air flight to Heathrow (ah, Heathrow!), then taking Air France to Paris. After that, it's onto the TGV, for a three-hour train ride to Marseille.

I'm actually quite looking forward to that last, as it'll give me a chance to see something of France. Other than one hurried connection through De Gaulle about five or six years ago, I haven't been in France at all, and hear there are some parts that are cool.

My talk at the conference is on contemplative computing, and is part of a session on the concept of "Slow." I'm doing a much less technical version of the talk this time: the first couple times I gave it, I was speaking to HCI and new media audiences, and this one will be a broader mix of people (though since it's sponsored by an organization devoted to next-generation Internet activities, there will be plenty of folks who do know technology). So rather than being a lot of stuff about the skilled nature of calm and name-checks to Wittgenstein and Weiser, the main message of this talk will be "you don't have to let information technologies drive you nuts."

I'm experimenting with just taking my iPad2, and leaving the laptop behind. This means I can't work on the slides, but I consider that a good thing: given that when I can I'll promiscuously throw in images and new ideas at the last minute, it's better for me to have the discipline of a fixed set of images to work with. I can-- and as I hear other speakers, fully expect to-- revise the talk itself, and it occurred ot me last night that I could actually edit it on the iPad and read it on the device. I don't know if that'll be cool or dangerous, or a little of both.

But given that my talk style is now to use almost all images and no text, I think this new approach will work.

I've also not packed ANY books at all: I've got other stuff to work on, and besides, I put a couple things on the Kindle. (I'm very skeptical of ebooks being useful for intellectual work, given that serious reading is a martial art, but I figure they should be fine for Jane Austen and Raymond Chandler.) So I'm now in the curious situation of having a camera that's considerably heavier than my computer. I can live.

I got here ridiculously early-- we start boarding at 11:20, and I got to SFO just before 9. But better that than rushing through the airport. And besides, I can work in airports and airplanes as well as anywhere.

The rise of self-publishing

I've spent the last few weeks working on a book proposal around contemplative computing. It's been a great, absorbing experience, so naturally an article on the growing respectability of self-publishing would catch my eye.

With Bowker reporting an "explosive growth" of 169% last month in "non-traditional" publishing, it's not just vanity projects that are taking the self-publishing route these days. Amazon announced last week that John Locke had sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing, making him the first self-published author to join the "Kindle Million Club", alongside the likes of Stieg Larsson and James Patterson. Meanwhile, self-published authors Louise Voss and Mark Edwards currently top Amazon.co.uk's Kindle bestseller list, and say they're selling up to 1,900 copies a day of their jointly-written thriller, Catch Your Death. Faulkner award-winning author John Edgar Wideman last year chose to publish his new collection of short stories through Lulu.com; the site, offering authors an 80/20 revenue split, has published over 1.1 million authors to date, adding 20,000 titles to its catalogue a month. Writers around the world are getting their books to readers – and getting paid for it – without a publisher standing in between. Self-publishing, it seems, is becoming respectable.

Many of the authors who this Guardian article talks about are established authors with fan bases: their name recognition means that they're going to be sought out by readers, and don't have to compete as hard as first-time authors.

So what's changed recently? According to one author who's selling a lot online,

"Two major developments have had a hugely beneficial impact on self-publishing. Firstly, changes in technology, in particular the adoption of ebooks by the mainstream thanks to Amazon's Kindle, the iPad, etc... If you're a self-publishing author today, you have a vast audience waiting, and a decent number of professional channels through which you can easily make your work available. I personally know authors who are doing this to great effect – some are making over $10,000 every month! Secondly, the advent of social networking has had an incredible effect."

Word of mouth matters a lot for both printed and electronic books. And as another author makes clear, for professional writers, this isn't just about disintermediation, or being free of the shackles of the editorial process: to be a success in the self-publishing market, you need to

"Write the best book you can, hire a real editor to make it better. Have it professionally copy-edited to remove typos. Get a real cover artist – if you're not a professional artist, don't do your own cover. Get that book into ebook form. Start promoting, and start on your next book. Repeat, repeat, repeat."

So essentially self-publishing is "create your own virtual publishing house."

Contemplative art

I was in Washington DC last week, and managed to take in the Nam June Paik exhibit at the National Gallery. It was an unexpected lesson in technology and contemplation.

via flickr

Last night in Cambridge

On our last night in Cambridge, my son and I took a long walk through Jesus Green and the colleges.

the cam beside jesus green, via flickr

On his last trip to Cambridge my son had bought a wool hat with a cat's face on it, and wore it pretty much nonstop since February. So naturally he wore it tonight.

my son outside st. john's, via flickr

It was a perfect evening, clear and cool. Early evenings like this, when the sky turns deep blue and the lamps come on, are probably my favorite part of the day in Cambridge: visually the town is at its most vivid and mysterious.

all saints' pass, via flickr

We went down Trinity Lane to Garrett Hostel Lane, which is the path I took every day to the lab.

trinity lane, via flickr

trinity lane, via flickr

The view of the Cam from the bridge is one of my favorite: no matter how many times I crossed it, it always impressed me. I've been very lucky with commutes. When I lived in Chicago, my drive to work took me down Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue; in California, it's been to Stanford, Sand Hill Road, and downtown Palo Alto. None too shabby. But this is the best of all.

clare bridge from garret hostel lane bridge, via flickr

trinity college backs, via flickr

The challenge now is to get to the airport in the wee morning hours tomorrow. And then, after that, to make something out of the three months-- to make this sabbatical the start of something important, rather than an interesting lark. I know there are a couple great articles here, and maybe a book, if I'm really diligent; certainly I believe strongly in the idea of contemplative computing, and think it's one that deserves a wider audience-- and to be improved by being discussed and tried out and stress-tested by people other than myself.

I've learned an immense amount here. Not only do I have much better grasp on the HCI literature than I did when I came here (though there's still a lot I don't know, despite the best attempts of my colleagues to tutor me), but I've discovered works-- in particular Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, but also Seneca's Letters, Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own, and others-- that I think will influence me pretty deeply in my normal life, not just my thinking and writing (though the boundaries between those three are pretty thin when all goes well). And there's probably no better place to practice contemplation of all sorts than here.

the cam near our house, via flickr

I have a sinking suspicion that the project is a bit of a disappointment to Microsoft, though; it's at once not quite philosophical or theoretical enough, nor has it expressed itself in a prototype. So this only more motivation to produce something great: I feel the need to prove that the odd choice of a futurist as a visiting fellow was a good one after all.

Unfortunately I can't finish the work here: to remain would be too disruptive of our normal lives. After three months here, I feel very much at home-- I can conduct a normal life here, rather than just be a tourist-- but I know my regular life is waiting for me in California.

a t-shirt shop on bridge street, via flickr

But I'll be back.

via flickr

The end

It had to happen some time....

via flickr

Packing up my office

It's my last day at Microsoft Research Cambridge. with the exception of a couple papers, which I'll finish reading and then recycle, I seem to have cleared out my office pretty completely....

my office before the cleanup, via flickr

It's been an extraordinary time, and I've been able to do some work that I think will bear some good results. It'll continue to evolve when I'm back home, but I think I'm onto something, even if the current version of the magnum opus is still evolving rapidly.

Gotta take my boxes of books downstairs (the Cambridge and Ely bookstores have done very well by me) and finish a couple readers' reports. Then rewrite the introduction of the essay.

What I've been doing when I haven't been traipsing to the Orchard

After working on this for a couple weeks, I've reached that familiar point with the contemplative computing article (or mini-monolith, as it's well over 10,000 words) where it's not yet completely finished, but I need to put it down for a little bit, and go do other things. I have a couple editors who are ready to kill me if I don't deliver on other work, and it would be good to get a little critical distance from the piece.

This time I'm trying an experiment: I've put the article up on Google Docs, and made it public. You can read it here, though it may take forever to load, as Gdocs tends to choke on large files, so I've also posted a PDF.

The introduction is below. Naturally, comments are welcome.

Contemplative Computing

The phrase "contemplative computing" sounds oxymoronic. Information technologies today do many things, but they do not make us more contemplative. Instead, they interrupt and distract us; they throw up swarms of real-time data that obscure our long-term perspective; they encourage us to spread our attention across a range of activities and devices—Web pages, documents and presentations, emails, phone calls, text messages, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Some look to technological solutions (e.g., better filtering tools or "distraction-free" software) or better personal management (exemplified by the GTD—"Getting Things Done" movement) to give teem balance; a few take digital sabbaths, and simply leave their digital lives behind for a day a week. I believe, however, that we can create information technology that does not distract us from the world, but invites us to engage with it more thoroughly, thoughtfully, and profoundly. In this article I will describe what contemplative computing could be; why it is an appealing and achievable design goal and attitude to devices; and how we can get there. My argument will unfold as follows.

I first explain why contemplation is valuable, and how contemplative practices have been applied in fields as diverse as military training and psychotherapy. I then look more closely at contemplation itself: contrary to the popular perception of it as a solitary, passive state, I argue argue that contemplation is active, skilled, embodied, and social. From this, I develop a set of design principles for contemplative computing. These are intended for both designers and users, for neither have complete control over the way people use computers; indeed, contemplative computing requires being contemplative about computing-- learning to think about how and why we use technologies in particular ways, and how to improve our relationships between devices. I explain how an approach to information technologies that emphasizes engagement, self-experimentation, and embodied cognition; that skillfully used spatiality and sparse design; that rewarded challenges, acknowledged obliquity, and allowed for mind wandering and reentering, would help us begin to deal with the problems created by today's information technologies and our interactions with them.

Thus this article is an effort to demonstrate how we can design with values in mind [Harper, Rodden, Rogers, and Sellen, 2006]. The project also seeks to answer the call proposed by Levy to develop new means for contemplation in creative and scholarly life [Levy 2007] in response to growing time and productivity pressures [Menzies and Newson 2007]. As computers make their way into more and more parts of our everyday lives, we need to understand how tools initially built for the scientific laboratory or office may be ill-suited to the home or family; how the objectives of efficiency and optimization may not work in environments characterized by irreducible uncertainty and ambiguity. Given the ubiquity of computers and their power to influence our lives, it makes sense to think about how they can be designed and used to better promote our abilities to see, act in, and improve the world, and to improve ourselves.

Contemplation offers a variety of benefits. A contemplative stance can help people be more creative; deal with complex problems that require months or years to solve; and is essential to long-term happiness. Contemplation promotes both self-sufficiency and close, questioning observation of the world, and both are particularly valuable in this moment in the history of technology. We need to develop personal tools to better control information technologies, and to see how technologies that often are described as irresistible and inevitable are really shaped by human decisions and choices (or the failure to make such decisions). Contemplative computing can help with both of these urgent tasks.

My upcoming appearance at Watershed in Bristol

I'm giving a talk in Bristol this Friday at Watershed, one of those super-hip harborside renewal projects / performance / research spaces. It actually sounds quite cool:

Watershed is a cross-artform producer, sharing, developing and showcasing exemplary cultural ideas and talent. Curating ideas, spaces and talent, Watershed enables artistic visions and creative collaborations to flourish. Watershed is rooted in Bristol but places no boundaries on its imagination or desire to connect with artists and audiences in the wider world.

Clearly I'll need to shapen my goatee and choose the blackest clothing I can find!

Here's my abstract:

Can computers be contemplative? They interrupt and distract us, throw up swarms of real-time data that obscure our perspective and encourage us to spread our attention across a range of activities. In short, whatever their many benefits, computers don't encourage contemplation and users who seek to regain a sense of balance tend to turn off the wifi, fire up distraction-free Zenware or take digital Sabbaths.

Alex Pang argues that while these solutions offer temporary respites, they aren't solutions: better design is. He believes that we can create IT that does not distract us from the world, but allows us to engage with it more thoroughly, thoughtfully, and profoundly. In this Lunchtime Talk, he will describe what contemplative computing could be, why it is an appealing and achievable design goal and how we can get there.

Dr Alex Pang is a research fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working in the Socio-Digital Systems group on contemplative computing. He is figuring out how to design information technologies and user experiences that promote concentration and deep focused thinking, rather than distract you, fracture your attention, and make you feel dumb.

Of course, the answer to the first question is, of course not. Computers can't be any more contemplative than fountain pens or bicycle tires. People can be contemplative. But, and this is the important part, people can be contempative with computers.

I'll be using the much-improved Prezi, which it turns out is now pushing the boundaries of what the technology can do. But in order to get the look I want for this talk, I needed to push.

 

Friday night

I've been working this week on the first of the long contemplative computing essays, and so far I think it's gone pretty well. The kids left on Monday, so I really got into it starting on Tuesday; fortunately, having written pretty regularly on the blog, I had a lot of raw material to start with-- about 15,000 words, much of it extracts from other people's work, of course, but still better than starting from zero.

This week my wife and I decided to try working more like locals. Thursday night we went to our local pub, the Issac Newton, had dinner, then another drink while we kept working.

the isaac newton, via flickr

I generally don't drink much, and usually the relationship between alcohol and inspiration is not a very stable one for me-- I get sleepy rather than creative-- but this time it worked.

Friday we were going to go to evensong at King's, but it was cancelled, so we went to the Eagle instead.

drinks at the eagle, via flickr

Despite it being a brilliantly cerebral place during the day, Friday night is not exactly the right time to pull out the laptops and write over a couple pints, so we repaired to Yo! Sushi for dinner.

sushi travelator! food of the future! via flickr

After that, it was over to Clowns of Cambridge for coffee.

double double lattes, via flickr

Altogether, it was quite productive for me. I'm still working on the piece, but it feels like it's coming together well.

I know at the end of this I'm going to think to myself, why couldn't I have written this thing in half the time? I always think that with a piece I'm happy with: if the flow is logical, the argument makes sense, I wonder why I couldn't just write that at the beginning, and forget about all those dead ends and intermediate drafts and Baroque phraseologies that I created and then discarded on my way to something simple and direct.

revisions of the article, via flickr

Of course, I've been doing this long enough to know I can't really get to the simple, direct statement without going through all the complicated stuff. Maybe other people can, but that's not how I work, or how my writing brain works. For me, writing is an exercise in obliquity, a roundabout process to generate something simple.

Koan of the day

Users are to the computer industry as women in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own are to men. Discuss.

The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator: example of mind wandering, or distraction?

The distinction is one I've been thinking about today. How does it appy to the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator?

(thanks, Heather!)

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows

Spent the day (and most of the evening) reading Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows. The money graf:

"[I]f, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It's not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It's that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli-- repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive-- that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions." It's "the single most powerful mind-altering technology... since the book." (116)

I'll have a more detailed analysis of the book on the Contemplative Computing blog tomorrow. I'm trying to make my way through as much of what you might think of as the digital Cassandra literature as I can stand.

My workplace

I'm not exactly sure how much I should document life within the lab, so I'm going to err on the side of opacity rather than transparency. Still, I have to say something.

the lab at night, via flickr

Starting to get busy

Last week was spent getting oriented, shaking (or drinking or sleeping) off the jet lag, and dealing with logistical stuff; now I'm finally getting down to work, inasmuch as thinking ever counts as work.

I've started writing about my work on the Contemplative Computing blog, though if you want to cut to the chase, check out the Prezi that gives an overview of the project.

Contemplative Computing on Prezi

First REAL day in Cambridge

I woke up some time before 6 this morning, roused myself out of bed after a while, and got my morning started.

The house I've rented is a century-old place, with singing pipes and radiators that deliver a certain amount of heat. It's actually fairly cozy in some rooms, which is nice; the bathroom includes some fixtures-- including a gravity toilet and a cast-iron water tank that would kill whoever it fell on-- that I suspect are original, or if not are built to last the ages.

my road, via flickr

First day in Cambridge!

After many months of proposals, preparation, visas, rallying parents, reassuring children, and wondering how elderly cats would handle it, I'm finally in England-- in Cambridge, starting my three-month visit at Microsoft Research.

I started last night, on the evening flight out of San Francisco, and ended around dinnertime, when I got into the flat (technically a terrace house, I think) we're subletting. About 18 hours all told, though none of it was really stressful: heavy yes, thanks to my having brought two suitcases (I am going to be here for three months, after all), but not really difficult. The bus even took me into downtown Cambridge, more or less, to the station on the edge of Parker's Piece, rather than the car and park on the edge of town (damn you, National Express Web site-- I could only buy a ticket as far as the Park and Ride on the edge of town, but the driver was fine about letting me go into city centre).

After I got things more or less sorted out I went out and wandered around the town a little. Naturally I headed for the town center, walking past St. John's and Gonville and Caius, then up along the market.

Not long now

Two weeks to Cambridge and counting...

[To the tune of Kenneth Gilbert, "Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 - Prelude & Fugue #3 In C Sharp, BWV 848," from the album Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier (a 3-star song, imo).]

PowerPoint doesn't make you stupid, and LOLcats doesn't rewire your brain

Via Duke professor Cathy Davidson, I just came across this L. A. Times piece by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. (They're authors of The Invisible Gorilla. The essay aim at "digital alarmism," the argument that the Internet is making us stupider by "trap[ping] us in a shallow culture of constant interruption as we frenetically tweet, text and e-mail," both leaving us less time to read Proust, and rewiring our brains so we're incapable of paying serious attention to... anything.

More at Contemplative Computing.

Review of David Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

Originally published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

David M. Levy, "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age" (New York: Arcade, 2002).

When I got the chance to review "Scrolling Forward," I went to Kepler's, my local bookstore, to pick up a copy. I had seen a stack there a few days earlier, but by the time I arrived it had moved, and I had forgotten the title. I asked at the information desk about a book that had been on the "New Science and Technology" table that past weekend, had orange and blue on the cover, and was about documents. They couldn't remember the title either, but they remembered the book, and knew the most likely place their stock of half a dozen copies had been moved. So, despite not knowing the author or title, we found it in a matter of seconds.

Drawing on knowledge of its recent location, jacket design, general subject, and the way books circulate between display tables and shelves to find a particular volume may seem disorganized and baroque. It is, but it's how most of us work. Our complicated relationship with documents-- everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias-- is the subject of David Levy's "Scrolling Forward: Thinking About Documents in the Digital Age." Levy, a computer science Ph.D. and calligraphy, is well-placed to compare the old and new. His books is organized around broad subjects-- reading, writing, and the like-- but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the this- reminds-me-of-that principle, rather than something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents, and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.

The very fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes towards digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia-- George Landow's "Hypertext" and Jay David Bolter's "The Writing Space"-- declared that thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed, and linear thinking was passe. They were widely praised within academic circles, and provoked defenders like Sven Birketts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.

First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: we might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, "Scrolling Forward" begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but a... deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies.

"Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," (162) Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." (29) It takes a village to make a document.

Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. (It is instructive that the early adopters weren't book publishers, but companies that had high-volume, varied, or rapidly- changing material. The Encyclopedia Britannica's publishing system was adapted from one developed for the Jehovah's Witnesses, who published countless pamphlets in dozens of languages.) In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, web browsers gave readers direct access digital works. This last, and most-publicized step, was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole "print versus digital" debate seems irrelelvant.

The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials, but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing.

Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations... are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letterforms on a piece of vellum." (156)

This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It IS to say that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: they have to be created in the social world, and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy's concern is that we recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced-- often to the good-- the way we read, organize our thoughts, and create order in our intellectual worlds.