Relevant History

The Onion on cyberstalking your children

This is just brilliant:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

I kind of worry that I'll turn into one of those parents.

[To the tune of The Police, "Every Breath You Take," from the album Message In A Box: The Complete Recordings (Disc 4) (I give it 4 stars).]

Merry Christmas

Just arrived-- the volume with my latest article.

Second scholarly piece this year. Not too awful a record, but next year will be better. Dammit.

Reflections on tinkering

I spent a really stimulating day yesterday at the Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge conference, listening and talking to people like Dale Dougherty (founder of Make Magazine, the Maker Faire, etc.), Mitch Resnik (MIT Media Lab), Rick Prelinger (the Prelinger Library and online film collection), Anne Balsamo, and others. We're meeting for part of today, but I wanted to start reflecting on yesterday's discussion; and in particular, I want to get at the question of what tinkering is. Is it a unified body of practices? Is it a distinct set of skills? is it an historical moment? Is it just a trendy name? This is something we spent a fair amount of time discussing, either formally or informally, and the answer is: It's all of those. I also thinking there are a couple other important things that define tinkering.

What is Tinkering?

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Anne Balsamo and Perry Hoberman have looked at a wide variety of tinkering activities, ranging from circuit bending to paper prototyping to open source to blogging. They argue that these varied activities are unified by a common set of principles or practices. (The following are just highlights.)

• Tinkerers improvise, iterate, and improve constantly.
• Tinkerers use materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.
• Tinkerers are also social animals. Their success depends in part on being able to tap into porous and ad-hoc communities. For most of what they do the manual is useless; other tinkerers are the only ones who are likely to have the information you need.

Tinkering isn't so much a specific set of technical skills: there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. You pick up just enough knowledge about electronics, textiles, metals, programming, or paper-folding to figure out how to do what you want. It certainly respects skill, but skills are a means, not an end: mastery isn't the point, as it is for professionals. Competence and completion are.

Is Tinkering Shallow or Deep?

One of the things I talked with several people (Mike Kuniavsky in particular) about was how historically specific tinkering is. The deeper question is, is this just a flash in the pan, a trendy name without any substance underneath? The answer we came up with is that this is like a musical style, both the product of specific historical forces, and an expression of something deeper and more fundamental. (Think of jazz: you can talk about how it emerges in the early 20th century out of blues, ragtime, and other previous musical forms, reflects particular sociological and historical trends, and is guided by certain assumptions about beauty and what music is; but at the same time, it definitely expresses a deeper impulse to create music.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

• The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology-- explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here's my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
• The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
• Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are "consumers"-- passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don't just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
• Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
• The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you're making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined-- and redefined-- by users.)
• From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn't discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity-- as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning-- just didn't exist: it's what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that "working with your hands" defined you as lower class: "My son won't work with his hands" was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

No doubt there are other sources you could point to-- microentrepreneurship or the growth of "jobbies," the presence of an infrastructure that supports the sharing and tracking of unique handmade things (from eBay to ThingLink).

Does Tinkering Matter?

That's a pretty varied list. And it suggests that tinkering is more than a local, Valley, geek leisure thing.

First, tinkering is a powerful form of learning. Even if it doesn't stress mastery of skills, tinkering does emphasize learning how to use your hands, learning how to use materials, and to engage with the physical world rather than the world of software or Second Life-- though tinkering does share a sensibility toward the world that lots of kids demonstrate to programs and virtual worlds: you just get in there, hit buttons, and see what happens.

This really matters because you can be creative with stuff in ways you can't with bits, and that the more you understand the possibilities and limitations or materials-- or more abstractly, if you learn how to develop that knowledge-- the smarter you become. In this respect, it dovetails with "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering" that Gregg Zachary wrote about a few weeks ago: "a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." (I write about this at greater length on End of Cyberspace.)

Second, tinkering is forward-looking. It's partly about how we'll use and interact with technologies in the future. As much as any loose movement can be described this way, tinkering is a set of anticipatory practices, aimed at developing a sensibility about the future. It's a way to develop skills that are going to matter in the Conceptual Age, in the ubiquitous computing world. As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge. (I talk about this some in an article in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine.)

Finally, tinkering is an expression of the nature of our engagement with technology. If you buy the argument of Andy Clark that we are natural-born cyborgs, you can see tinkering as a form of co-evolution with technology, or a kind of symbiotic activity.

[Update 5/29/2009: I just published a new piece on tinkering and the future in Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. Check it out!]

Robot parade

Interesting article about how people come to develop emotional attachments to robots. I blogged about it on End of Cyberspace, if it's behind a subscription firewall.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, robotics

Social software and nostalgia

Guardian commentator John Harris draws an interesting line from the Led Zeppelin reunion and Police tour, to Hollywood's love of remakes, to social networking software: what connects them, he argues, is "an almost neurotic retrospection" that seems to define this decade.

Across the globe, 18 million people subscribe to Friends Reunited, keen to rekindle playground bonds that are usually best forgotten, and one of the appeals of more cutting-edge social networking to anyone over 20 is much the same.

A case might be made for all this future denial being an inevitable response to our horizons being cast in terms of post-9/11 dread and ecological apocalypse - but past generations had the threat of the cold war going nuclear to deal with, and they managed to keep moving ahead. More relevant, perhaps, is the reinvention of what age entails, and the power wielded by people who affect to stay young by endlessly reviving their past....

[F]xating on the past is an in-built aspect of the human condition, but limited technology used to keep it in check. We had space and productive capacity only for so much stuff: a hidden hand cleared the cultural world of outdated clutter. And now? Bandwidth and memory grow exponentially, TV channels extend into the distance, and providing the means by which the classes of 77, 87 and 97 can get back in touch is a cinch. The same technology that we once thought would propel us into a fast-changing future stokes nostalgic appetites and condemns us to a present so laden with repetition that it's beginning to feed back on itself.

Essentially, the drama that Ellen Ullman described several years ago about the differences between computer and human memory is playing out on a grander, more social and public, scale.

[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Dust In The Wind," from the album "Something/Anything? (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: memory, history, social software

Insane, yet amazing, coffee drink

This afternoon, after Sue Thomas' talk on transliteracy (which I liked, but which revealed how much I dislike the term "literacy"), we walked up to Caffe Del Doge to talk about my end of cyberspace book, and her new project on nature and cyberspace.

I've been off coffee for the last week, as I suspected that I'd feel better if I cut way down on the java (but not the caffeine-- I'm drinking copious quantities of tea now). After the first day, when I had a headache, I've been fine, and have in fact felt better. Clearly, my body now reacts pretty strongly to coffee: sometimes it's necessary, but I shouldn't drink it on a regular basis.

It turns out Doge has these amazingly extravagant coffee drinks, served in martini glasses. Sue ordered one that's espresso and melted chocolate, whipped into essentially a mousse; I got a Marco Polo, which is espresso infused with cardamon, under a geological layer of whipped cream and more cardamon.

via flickr

Pretty unusual, but stunningly good.

via flickr

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Hey Jude," from the album "The Beatles 1".]

Technorati Tags: cafe, Palo Alto

Not only does he do cool work, Eric Paulos has bolder fashion sense than me

But I'll bet my shirt has more pockets.

Taken by Marc Davis with a cool camera cell phone that basically did everything but use face recognition technology to tag the picture. It's like having Eschelon in your pants!

via flickr

Tags: MobileMash-Up 2007, lunch, Crowne Plaza Cabaña, Eric Paulos, Palo Alto

The Victorians live on, it seems

In my previous incarnation as an historian of Victorian science, I was drawn to the people I wrote about for two reasons: the best of them were intellectual omnivores; and they had incredible work habits. Both of these are traits I admire and aspire to, but never quite make my own.

Recently, while reading an article by Nigel Thirft about the impact of information technologies on our perception of space and bodies (part of my slow but steady work on the end of cyberspace), I came across a very intriguing reference to Raymond Tallis' book The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Naturally, I looked him up, and found a Guardian profile from 2006:

If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder. For 30 years he has been rising at five in the morning to write for two hours before going off to work as a doctor. He has been a GP, a research scientist, and a professor of gerontology, one of Britain's leading experts, who has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-edited a 1,500-page standard textbook of gerontological medicine. But in the solitary hours of the early morning he has also been a distinguished literary critic, poet and philosopher who has written a radio play about the death of Wittgenstein.

Clearly, people who can get up very early in the morning have an advantage over the rest of us. Working at night, it seems, isn't the same. (Of course, most evenings I consider myself productive if I make the kids' lunches and do some e-mail.)

[To the tune of Plush, "No Education," from the album "Fed".]

Technorati Tags: academia, end of cyberspace, postacademic, reading

So long and thanks for all the fish

I did an end-of-cyberspace-and-what-it-means-for-products talk tonight for the Silicon Valley chapter of the Product Management Institute. A good time, but I've definitely reached the stage where it's time to stop doing talks, and focus again on writing the book.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Optimistic," from the album "Kid A".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, writing

Suspect Nation redux

There's a copy of Suspect Nation on Google Video now.

And nope, I'm not in it. The B-roll of Draegers survives, but I'm in documentary oblivion. Still, it was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

[via Stef]

Technorati Tags: England, policy, politics, privacy, RFID, security

Suspect Nation

For the time being, at least, Suspect Nation, a British documentary that I was interviewed for back in September, is available on YouTube. Most of it is about technology and the decline of civil liberties in the UK, but they spent some time in the U.S. as well. (Here's a Guardian article about it.)

Don't know if I actually made it in, or am languishing on the cutting-room floor. Given that they got Al Gore and various other cool people on-camera, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm nowhere to be seen.

Update: Looks like the B-roll that they shot in the store made it in, but I didn't. Ah well.... Still, it's a good show.

Later update: There's a weird gap in the film-- actually, a section that appears twice. So I can't really tell if I made it or not. Who knows?

Technorati Tags: England, policy, politics, privacy, RFID, security

The only man in Santa Cruz wearing a jacket

I'm in Santa Cruz this afternoon, doing an end of cyberspace talk for a Santa Cruz futurists' group. I don't get down to Santa Cruz much, and when I do, I'm always headed to the university: downtown is the wrong direction. So being down here is a bit of a change.

via flickr

Downtown is pretty bustling on a Sunday afternoon, in a pleasant way, but I'm the only person wearing a jacket. Flannel and shorts, and various forms of exotic yet extremely comfortable footwear, seem to be the uniform du jour around here. I kind of stick out a little.

via flickr

The place I've touched down is a cafe called Gelatomania, which is a weird combination. On one hand, it has the kind of bright happy tourist-friendly colors and chrome accents that suggests overpriced jelly beans and rows of little bears with "I heart Santa Cruz." But it's got free wifi, they make a mean chai, and it's got an oxygen bar.

via flickr

Or maybe this IS what the tourists around here like. Who knows.

Lazy Sunday

I'm enjoying a cup of coffee and reading Adam Greenfield's Everyware. This is not particularly unusual; what is new is that now I can write about it from the garage, thanks to the second AirPort Express in the laundry room that's boosting our wifi signal.

Ah, the joys of connectivity.

I woke up early-- as I always pledge to do on Sunday mornings, but rarely manage-- so I could get a couple hours' reading and work on my end of cyberspace project. My son got up not long after me, watched about 10 minutes of TV, then decided it was more fun to follow Daddy out to the garage. After a while he was lured back by the promise of breakfast, so now it's just me and the Beatles.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Strawberry Fields Forever," from the album "1967-1970 (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, work

In Santa Cruz today

I'm spending much of today in Santa Cruz, which should be pleasant. I'm doing a talk on the end of cyberspace at UCSC, but am going down there a few hours early to sit in one of the college cafes, work on the talk, and generally soak up the ambience. (I just hope I'm not too allergic to patchouli oil.)

I've always liked UCSC: to my mind, it's one of the most beautiful campuses in the world, though also one of the most unusual. It's also got a phenomenal archive on the history of 20th century astronomy.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, Santa Cruz, travel

Back in the Stanford system

I walked over to Stanford today, renewed my affiliation with the STS program, and got a new library card. Now I just need to get my Leland account (one's electronic campus identity, essentially) set up, and I'll be as full-fledged a member of the university as I ever am. The STS program has a new speaker series that's getting some good people, so I want to start going to those; and having the affiliation is very helpful in all my various works.

It was about as perfect a day to walk down Palm Drive and conduct business in the Main Quad as you could hope for: bright, sunny day, warm but not too warm-- just the kind of day that blows away those of us who spend years going to school on the East Coast.

While I was there, I dropped by the bookstore and picked up two books I've been meaning to get: Adam Greenfield's Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, and Vincent Mosco's The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace, both of which I have to read for the end of cyberspace project. (I'd like to at least work in oblique references to them in my Santa Cruz talk next week.) I had finished Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things earlier that afternoon, and while I need to write up my thoughts on it, I figured, why not get the next things I need to read.

I was briefly worried that the Mosco book would seriously overlap with what I'm trying to do, but it doesn't look like it will at all. Mosco's is more of a literary and critical book, while the closest I'm getting to literary evidence is talking about library design. (A subject I could talk about for hours, by the way.)

Now to write up my notes on Shaping Things, and I can dive into the next thing.

[To the tune of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "Hoedown," from the album "Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends".]

Technorati Tags: books, end of cyberspace, Stanford University, reading

John Perry Barlow is at Berkeley tomorrow; I'm at the pediatric dentist

I would love to go see John Perry Barlow hold forth tomorrow on the question, "Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign?" Unfortunately I've got to take the kids to the dentist instead.

One of the curious things about having little kids-- meaning children who don't have drivers' licenses and cell phones-- is that while I can schedule absences of a day or more without too much difficulty, getting away for a few hours for a talk always seems harder.

Ah well.

[To the tune of Particle, "Superstition," from the album "02-05-2005, House of Blues, West Hollywood CA".]

J. K. Rowling, futurist

The DVD of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out last week. I haven't bought it yet-- Pride and Prejudice just arrived last week-- but it'll only be a matter of time. I've been a big fan of the series, in part because I suspect eventually some readers are going to start building things in the books.

[To the tune of Elton John, "The One (1996)," from the album "Love Songs".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, science_fiction

Post-cyberspace terms all up

I've now posted to the End of Cyberspace blog all the suggestions David Pescovitz and I got for our Wired ""Cyberspace" is Dead" article.

I'm by no means finished with the subject, but this particular experiment in Raymond Williams keywords-list futureology can, for the time being, be put to bed.

[To the tune of U2, "Walk On," from the album "All That You Can't Leave Behind".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, language

The Wired article is out!

""Cyberspace" Is Dead," and the Wired Magazine article is out! It's now up on the Wired Web site, but of course you should go buy a copy of the magazine-- the printed version looks cooler.

I've never waited longer for an issue of Wired in my entire life. And I've been subscribing since roughly issue 1.02.

The bulk of the piece consists suggestions from William Gibson, Steve Jurvetson, Vint Cerf, and others on what word describes the mobile, always-on, social- and wireless- network-saturated world we seem to be building. Over the next few days, I'll also be posting on End of Cyberspace some the suggestions we got from other smart people-- like Edinburgh University professor Andy Clark, Berkeley smart dust pioneer Kris Pister, Xerox PARC alum John Seely Brown-- that we weren't able to fit in the article.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace

Dreams

I've got my first (short, co-authored) article in the February issue of a tech magazine I've been reading for years. I find myself now impatient enough about the piece's appearance, I'm dreaming about the issue coming out.

Only now I dream that I get the issue, and can't find the article. I know it's in there, but there are too damn many ads.

That's the great thing about the Internet. No ads.

Oh, wait....

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, work

New blog: The End of Cyberspace

I've decided to start a separate blog on my end of cyberspace stuff. I've got a couple articles coming out in the next few weeks that deal with aspects of the subject, and thought that this would be a useful way to build on those pieces.

The blog is titled, appropriately, The End of Cyberspace.

[To the tune of Yes, "Onward," from the album "Keys To Ascension (Disc 1)".]

So much for the end of cyberspace?

The Air Force's new mission statement was announced today to great fanfare (that was that strange noise you heard earlier this morning):

The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.

And maybe it's just me, but wouldn't "sovereign options" be an excellent name for a band, or perhaps a high-end line of men's accessories?

[To the tune of Marvin Gaye, "God is love," from the album "What's going on". Wasn't Marvin a genius?]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, military

Myth of the Paperless Office

I'm rereading Myth of the Paperless Office, as part of my new high-fiber regimen, and because I read it in a hurry last time and felt like I didn't get quite as much out of it as I should. I picked it up after reading Malcolm Gladwell's review of it in The New Yorker, and my impressions of the book were pretty strongly shaped by that review: I was reading it looking for what Gladwell saw it in.

The myth of the paperless office, indeed!

For a university press book about the automation (or non-automation) of office work, it got a surprisingly large amount of play in the general press. Though the Guardian's review had the great damning-with-faint-praise line (and this isn't an exact quote), if you must read one book about office automation, read this one. (Ow.)

What strikes me most about the book this time around is how obvious a lot of the stuff in the early chapters is-- which is not to say it's not useful. There are some books whose arguments or findings seem completely and utterly sensible, which only makes you wonder why they're not already common knowledge.

Take, for example, their observations about the complexity of reading. They make two big arguments. First, there are actually many different kinds of reading: an English professor reading a manuscript in an archive, a pilot going over flight plans and safety checklists, and a law clerk reading a draft of a ruling, are all reading-- but they're all doing it in different ways. Handwritten manuscripts, manifests and checklists, and typescripts of legal opinions all look different, contain different kinds of information, and are read with different purposes in mind. (I think this is a point that even many historians of reading don't give quite enough attention to.)

Second, reading is rarely the solitary, linear activity posited by literary theorists. Most reading that's done in the workplace is embedded in other activities: people read across multiple documents (to compare arguments or facts, say), take notes while reading, read documents with other people in meetings, or move between printed documents and word processor files open on a computer. The classical model of reading so beloved by defenders of the book-- someone sitting with a book, oblivious to the world-- is beloved because it's a luxury.

Paper also turns out to have other functionalities that are easy to overlook, but which are important to pay attention to in the workplace. One of the best sections of the book is its discussion of the role that paper plays in air traffic control centers. Air traffic control centers are filled with little slips of paper with information about every plane that controllers are watching. As planes moves through their territory, controllers may make notes on the slips, then pass them on to other controllers. You'd think that if there was any kind of document that would benefit from computerization, this would be it.

But it turns out that those slips aren't just inefficient legacies of an older system. One of the most important things an air traffic controller has to know is which planes he or she is responsible for. Those slips of paper offer a very efficient way to gather that information; as the developers of the Ambient Orb would put it, they make the information a "glanceable thing." When a plane passes from one controller's screen to another, the paper is handed off-- an act that reinforces the transfer of responsibility. And the paper also makes it easier for supervisors to see if someone is overloaded, and to transfer some of their planes to someone else-- by taking a few slips of paper and moving them to someone else's desk.

The point that Myth of the Paperless Office makes is, if you were to create a truly paperless office, you have to create a paperless system that can handle all these different kinds of reading. Assuming that the printed page is just an extremely clumsy storage device for words and numbers misses the affordances that readers exploit in paper, the varied natures of reading, and the roles paper documents play in the workplace.

Technorati Tags: books, epaper, reading, work

Library, meet Web 2.0

As part of my piece on the end of cyberspace-- a project that I hope comes to an end before cyberspace itself does-- I've been doing some reading on predictions of the death of the library, and arguments about why it's continued to survive. It turns out that worries that the library would disappear under the impact of computerization and automation have been part of the library world since at least the 1960s, but it's only in the last twenty years or so-- and especially since the late 1980s-- that they broke out of the world of library schools and professional journals.

Anyway, the survival of the library as a physical place and institution tells us something about how information isn't just a bunch of zeroes and ones that can be pulled off of pages and poured into great big databases, disconnected from places, and separated from people. Good libraries aren't just warehouses of obsolete media: they're places where people find each other, where librarians and users collaborate to create new knowledge (even if users don't recognize the contributions of librarians in the process)-- and of course, where readers find and read stuff.

So I was intrigued when I came across an abstract for a talk by Peter Brantley, director of technology at the California Digital Library (now that's gotta be a cool job), on service-oriented architectures, social software, and the future of libraries:

Deploying services, not libraries: Staying out of the Middle of the Road (3.9 mb ppt)

After years of simple automation of existing and easily understood practices, libraries must reconceptualize their roles within their host environments. Refactoring requires the development of new services that are directly accessible by users, that are capable of recombination, and permit the removal of overt mediation for content discovery and delivery. A services oriented architecture enables libraries to evolve into stronger organizations, even as their presence diffuses into the users experience of the network. It encourages libraries to use and enhance open-source services contributed by others, rather than owning and manipulating services to meet baroque needs. Finally, libraries become incentivized to enhance collaboration with a wider set of actors, including traditional content publishers and commercial firms in the information retrieval, management, and presentation market. A futuristic example of services defined around large collection of digitized monographs will demonstrate some of these points.

In essence, much of the automation that's taken place in libraries has (as the director of the Penn libraries once put it) happened behind the librarian's desk-- meaning, it's involved automating things like card catalogs, interlibrary loan borrowing systems, and other information resources or work processes that mainly involve librarians, not users. Until the spread of laptops, and later of Wifi, the main experience users had with computers in the library was the computerized card catalog system, CDs or online databases like OCLC, and more recently online publishing systems like JSTOR.

What Brantley is arguing, if I read his piece right, is that we're entering a new, Web 2.0-like phase in the intersection of libraries and IT, in which success is going to be defined by how well libraries and librarians can provide services, create (or let users create) tools for collective content creation and remixing, and gently disintermediate themselves (at least to the degree that users aren't particularly aware of their presence or contributions to the enterprise of knowledge-creation and -sharing). It's a very interesting vision.

Technorati Tags: library, social software, Web 2.0

My evening with the Bene Gesserit

Last night I gave a talk at the local branch of the Special Libraries Association. SLA (an acronym that has slightly unfortunate historical overtones in the Bay Area, but what can you do) is for librarians who manage collections in law firms, corporate R&D labs, consulting companies, and the like. (They've been around for a while, as the 86-year run of their journal-- available as roughly a thousand PDFs-- will testify. I really look forward to diving into some of the old issues. That or bungee jumping the Grand Canyon. One or the other)

I agreed to do the talk without giving it a whole lot of thought. Coming as it did between the Globe and Copenhagen talks, it was lower on my radar than it should have been. Unfortunately, this wasn't so nice for my host, as it put her in the position of having to bug me to deal with the logistics of the talk.

But it turned out to be a great venue. As a group, academic and corporate librarians are a pretty sharp bunch; by virtue of their positions, they get to see what people in their organization are working on. But despite the potential value of their performative ties, as a group they're among the most underused intellectual assets in an organization. I don't know if they spend a lot of time thinking about professional issues, but when they do, my experience is that they're pretty good at it. A professional culture that features both high IQs and sensible shoes is one that ought to be able to deal with both big issues and details.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Squonk (Live Version from Seconds Out)," from the album "A Trick of the Tail".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, libr

Libraries and IT centers

How many college or university libraries have incorporated the outreach / training / service functions that were once handled by college computing centers? At one time, people were talking about how computers and the Internet would make libraries obsolete; but a quick Google search on "library and technology center" yields some 15,000 hits. Admittedly this is a very coarse search, but it suggests that more than a few institutions have folded the functions together.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace

The Internet of Verbs

On Future Now I've posted one more little thread in the ever-growing tapestry (or perhaps just hairball) that's the end of cyberspace piece, playing off something Ross Mayfield recently observed:

NetGens think of the computer as a door, not a box. When they are on, they have 5-7 IM windows open and multiple tabs into different communities. Each community provides a way of being, to express facets of their identity while engaging in an activity. Most activities are centered around objects to spin stories and hold conversations. They don't go to places, it's more likely they augment plazes in the real world. With increasing mobility they tap groups for what they need to get done no matter where they are and make where they are matter. They Google, Flickr, Blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate and above all share. In other words, the web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.

I suspect Ross is really onto something deep here-- one of those apparently quirky anecdotes that actually throws a light on a whole world-- and I try to outline what it is. (I'll refrain from the obvious Robert Darnton comparison. Oops.)

[To the tune of Mott the Hoople, "All the Young Dudes," from the album "Super Hits: Mott the Hoople".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture

Happening Friday night

It's not yet 9:00 p.m., the kids are in bed, and my wife has retired early with a headache.

So, it's a Friday night, and Daddy's free.... Time to... pop in Infernal Affairs, and mine Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace: First Steps and Brown and Duguid's Social Life of Information for stuff for my end of cyberspace piece-- which just keeps growing. It's either going to be a very long article, or make the leap to a short book.

In the last several houses my father's owned, he's converted the basement into an office, and put a TV in as well. Over the last 25 years, the TVs have gotten bigger-- they started out as little black-and-whites, and he's now up to a plasma TV approximately the size of a tennis court. Most evenings that I'm there, he's in the basement, reading some large volume on political economy of Asian regional development, with a movie in the background.

There's a great line in an episode of Thirtysomething where one of the male characters says, "Do you ever worry that one day we'll wake up and find that we sound like our fathers?" The other replies, "No. I worry that we'll wake up and find that we've become our fathers."

I've now officially reached that point.

Though the TV's not as big yet.

[To the tune of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (dirs.), Infernal Affairs.]

Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, future

At Stanford Shopping Center

I'm at Stanford Shopping Center, outside the Palo Alto Roasting Company, having a cup of coffee and doing some work while I wait to meet my family. They're at a Christmas cooke-making event, the sort of thing that I try to stay away from because, well, I'd end up eating most of the product. The holidays are enough of a challenge to my waistline without my looking for calorie trouble.

I'm trying to get an article finished before the end of the year-- my own little Christmas present to myself. Normally, it's a good thing for a piece to be smooth-- to flow well, to have an elegant and spare prose style, to have an argument that builds well-- but sometimes I find that drafts end up being smooth in another, less useful way: I wear them down to the point where they no longer offer a conceptual foothold. Or maybe they wear me down.

The particular piece I'm trying to finish is one that talks about stuff I talk about every day: the emergence of pervasive computing and the end of cyberspace. Very briefly, what I want to argue is that the notion of "cyberspace" as a kind of alternate universe has a number of sources, including a particular form of human-computer interaction embodied in the personal computer. One opportunity that pervasive computing will create is the chance to rework the relationship between people, computers, and place, in a way that breaks the digital divide that separates cyberspace and real life.

Should be simple, right?

Unfortunately, I've passed some evil point where it was simple: now I look at the pages, I know that there are big gaps and how to fill them, but... suddenly... so... tired... must... check my e-mail again.... But having worked on the piece for so long, I'm determined to finish it.