Relevant History

BuzzMachine

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting idea on BuzzMachine:

If I were a reference publisher, a library association, a university, a media company, or a foundation, I’d take Wikipedia as raw material and vet entries, perhaps even charging for the service: On demand or on the basis of traffic and links, I’d go in and vet already-written pieces and bless that version of it. Then maybe I’d publish a book from it....

Now that I think of it, this might have been a nice business model for the shrinking Britannica. It might still be.

Certainly Britannica had (and maybe still has, despite pressures to the contrary) one of the most elaborate, nay detail-obsessed, fact-checking processes I've ever seen in my life. Of course, to some degree the Britannica Internet Guide was supposed to provide a degree of certification-- though there seems to nothing left of that project but some aging awards badges on various sites....

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia

Paul Hawken Interview, July 2002

A couple years ago, I did a long interview with Paul Hawken about his then-new company, Groxis (now Grokker). For a while I thought about doing an article, or even a short book, on zooming browsers and the next generation of computers interfaces. For various reasons I didn't, and the interview itself didn't get circulated.

Recently, though, Paul got in touch and suggested that I should publish the interview. The transcript is published after the jump.

Technorati Tags: business, design, environment, search, visualization

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

Quote of the day

"Imagine if television were actually good. It would mean the end of everything we know." (Marvin Minksy)

Quoted by Bruce Sterling in his short, precient "The Future of Cyberspace: Wild Frontier vs. Hyperreal Estate."

[To the tune of Sea Level, "Midnight Pass," from the album "Best of Sea Level".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace

Quote of the day

[Found this in my drafts folder-- don't know why I didn't post it way back when.]

The point of cyborg-like extensions or prosthetics won't be to make us more like robots, but more like people.

From City of Sound:

[T]he most interesting things about the products and devices emerging today is their ability to create or contribute towards a sense of self - both in terms of the product and the owner. As products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour - in some senses, becoming reflexive - and as their raison d'être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality - in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users - there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.

[To the tune of Yoshinori Sunahara, "Life & Space," from the album "Take Off & Landing".]

I keep repeating myself

I've been working on this piece on the future of collective intelligence, and almost at random, came across the review I wrote of The Social Life of Information a couple years ago. The last paragraph jumped out at me, as it basically talks about what I'm trying to get a handle on now:

[T]he challenge of producing, storing and managing information is as old as civilization itself; the term "information age" threatens to be as meaningless as "architecture age" or "transportation age." Most attempts to describe today's information age have drawn most strongly from either intellectual history or philosophy. "The Social Life of Information's" emphasis on the importance of organizational learning and tacit knowledge suggests that to a degree that no one has yet appreciated, the history of information is an institutional history, rather than an intellectual one: It needs to be told at the level of libraries and archives, businesses and publishers, universities and corporate research labs. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that the first book on library management and the last book on classical memory systems, which had been used for millenniums by orators and scholars, were published within a few decades of each other in the 1600s.) It also suggests that the really significant technologies driving large-scale social and economic change today may not be those created to assist individuals but may instead be the tools for organizational learning, creativity and remembering. The information age is represented for most of us by consumer products like the cell phone and Palm Pilot, but perhaps it is corporate databases, project management and collaboration software and data mining tools and search engines that will be the real levers that move the world.

I can't decide if this kind of thing is good, a proof of consistency and an ability to think for a long time about something, or a warning that I've run out of ideas.

Quote of the day

Quoted on Matt Chalmers' Web page:

For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory but for recollection, - for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.

You are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise."

Plato, recounting the response of the Egyptian god Thamus to Theuth's invention of letters

[To the tune of Gin Blossoms, "Hey Jealousy," live recording from the Internet Archive, 01-24-2003, Agoura Hills, CA.]

More in Wikipedia

Matt Jones has an interesting idea about using information design to make the authority of Wikipedia articles easier to judge.

Bob McHenry on Wikipedia

Bob McHenry, my boss at Britannica, has an article in Tech Central Station on Wikipedia, or as he puts it, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia"."

Not surprisingly, he's skeptical of the long-term value of Wikipedia, for some obvious reasons:

To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms:

1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.

2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

[via Victoria]

SIMS lecture series

It's probably silly to puff a lecture series that you've spoken in, but I'm very impressed by the fall lineup for UC Berkeley SIMS' Distinguished Lecture Series. It's a very diverse, interesting group of speakers, and a good audience-- even though Berkeley has SO many different things going on, it's easy for people to get overloaded and just hang out at Cafe Milano. Check it out if you're there.

Refrigerator: food cathedral, information bazaar

Recently I had to do a little reading about Internet-enabled refrigerators (don't ask, just don't ask). LG and Samsung both have them out already (Electrolux announced one a while ago, but I don't know if it made it to market). What's interesting is that neither one tries to do the whiz-bang, talking to Peapod to order more groceries when it senses that you're out of milk, kind of thing. Rather, both play off the fact that families routinely turn the refrigerator into an information bazaar, a clearing-house and display area for everything from finger-painted pictures, report cards, coupons, and phone messages to the family calendar. (Palm's ill-fated Audrey device also tried to take this practice digital.)

But how did the refrigerator evolve from a food cathedral to an information bazaar? When did families start using it as a bulletin board and calendar? I'm looking around a little, and aside from Jonathan Matthews's piece on information devices in the home, I can't find anything written on the secret history of the refrigerator as an information technology. Anyone? Anyone?

[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Wolf In The Breast," from the album Heaven or Las Vegas.]

Goodbye HyperCard

I missed this when it first came out, but Tim Oren's eulogy to HyperCard-- which Apple quietly let expire recently-- is very interesting. (So is this follow-up.)

I used HyperCard when I was in graduate school, creating stacks of notes on things I was reading for my orals. It was fun, and my first exposure to hypertext.

Today, of course, HyperCard looks like a precursor to the Web; but as Tim argues (and as Chris Espinosa once told me), one of the curious problems with HyperCard was that it was so many different things, it was hard for Apple to position it:

HyperCard always had a marketing problem of not being clearly about any one thing. Since it was initially packaged with every Mac shipped, it's likely the majority of buyers used it as a quicky Rolodex, if anything. But HyperCard's biggest win was a very low entry threshold for those who wanted to build their own 'stacks' - combinations of user interface, code, and persistent data. There were plenty of examples to suggest ideas, and all the code was open for tweaking. This did enable a burst of creativity by users, many of them educators and artists with no training in programming or database.

The proliferation of ideas created its own confusion. What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question.

When, I wonder, is the "problem of not being clearly about any one thing" really a problem, and when is it not? It seems to me that there are plenty of technologies that are pretty open and extensible, and thrive because of that: think of the Palm Pilot, or the Mac itself. But maybe the problem that HyperCard faced was that it didn't seem to have a couple things it did really well, which got people hooked on the program and interested in exploring it further.

[To the tune of Ahn Trio, "Oblivion," from the album Ahn-Plugged.]

Stanford, hot spot

I'm at Stanford this morning, to meet with a couple colleagues (maybe I can call them that). I got here early, went to the Art History library, fired up my laptop, and got online. (Stanford has a pretty tight security system that requires you to register the MAC address of your card; fortunately, since I've still got an affiliation with the STS program, I could get access.) I used to come here to use specific resources, usually in the library, and often still do that (mainly archival stuff); but increasingly, the stuff I need is online, but accessible only to Stanford people.

As a result, I'm starting to think of the campus as one giant hotspot, and as long as I can get a signal, I can get to the stuff I need. I no longer need to go to Green; getting within the vicinity is good enough.

Mike Keller, the university librarian, is walking past. Mike's about the most energetic and charismatic person I've ever worked for. He's also a madman, in a good way. It's amazing to me that the guy isn't a senator or four-star general. (Though given how big the Stanford Library system is, and how influential it is in the library and information science world, he may have more influence in this job than in those.)

Julian Jaynes Society

Via idiolect, I found The Julian Jaynes Society, which is devoted to the work of (surprise) Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist who wrote The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

I stumbled upon Origins my freshman year of college, and was sufficiently inspired to go up to Princeton to talk to him about his work. Looking back, it was rather ridiculous a thing to do, and it's a testament to Jaynes' generosity that he would take part of a Saturday morning to talk to an 18 year-old who cold-called him.

I'm not sure what to make of his ideas now; it would be interesting to go back to his book and if it seems as impressive. The book's argument isn't the kind that you can't prove right or wrong, but maybe it would still be worth arguing with.

Children, TiVO, and media

Alan Taylor writes that "As far as my daughter knows, TiVo has always been around," and has developed some assumptions about television watching that differ from those that her parents grew up with. She assumes that commercials are optional; she doesn't know what time the shows she likes to watch are broadcast, and doesn't need to know; and she assumes that you can pause the TV to go do other things, then come back to it.

It's similar to how my own daughter has developed different viewing habits and strategies for regular TV, videos and DVDs. Clearly this new generation is growing up with a different relationship to media than mine did.

[via Blackbelt Jones]

Coffee houses and the Internet

On my work blog, Future Now, I have a long piece that riffs on a recent Economist essay comparing the early modern coffee-house with the Internet. Rather than publish it in both places, I'll just provide a link and go to bed.

On a totally unrelated note, are any TypePad users finding that the text boxes aren't word-wrapping? (I'm using Netscape.) It's kind of irritating.

Tiny hard drive from Toshiba

dottocomu reports on a tiny hard drive that Toshiba now has in the lab.

This isn't a very scintillating post, but I'm trying out my blog posting feature in NewsGator, and want to see how it handles HTML.

eSTAR

There's a very interesting astronomical research project called eSTAR that combines intelligent agent software, grid computing, and remote telescope operation. It's part of the bigger, multi-century story of attempts by astronomers to deal with information overload and unique events through techniques that we'd call open source and distributed. I write about it at length at Future Now.

Heather, this is exactly the kind of post you don't have to read now that the Institute pays me to blog!

Bill Joy interview

Bill Joy's interview in Fortune is now online. It's worth reading.

If I were to propose one thing that we as the human race need to do, I'd say we can't let the future just happen anymore.

Tim Berners-Lee

An interesting interview with Tim Berners-Lee on BBC's Go Digital.

Future of print

I've got about ten tabs open in Mozilla, all of which are articles I've meant to blog in the last few days but haven't gotten around to. So, here we go.

A couple days ago Wired News reported from Seybold 2003 that "the print industry is hobbling but it is far from dead."

[W]hat will most strongly drive the workplace to "less paper" -- not completely "paperless," Romano quickly added -- are wireless devices. As post offices raise the price of postage to make up for the decline in mail, offices will mainly conduct business using e-mail, conference calls and handheld devices that they will lend to their workers. This business practice, in turn, will drive down the prices for handheld computers.

By 2015, a laptop will cost a mere $300, compared with $1,500 today, Romano said. A tablet PC in 12 years will cost $40, a PDA $20, an electronic book reader $30, a pocket TV $10, and a combination Web-enabled cell phone and e-book reader $70. Even though these gadgets exist today, they cost up to 50 times more, as is the case with the tablet PC, for example.

An interesting claim. I don't know where the financial projections come from, but notice that the assumption is that hand-held, portable, wireless devices-- technologies that (like the e-book) seek to reproduce some of the physical and ergonomic qualities of paper documents-- are the thing that could reduce paper use. (Of course we all know that, so far, computers have increased the amount of paper used in offices.)

And yes, there are print publications that have seen subscriptions decline thanks to online competition, but no type of publication, I would argue, has been transformed as radically by the Internet as the encyclopedia.

We have seen the enemy, and want to sell to him

[T]he digital era is giving birth to one of the most remarkable transformations in business history. The Customer is King? No, the Customer as Enemy.

So writes Michael Schrage in his latest column in Technology Review that echoes some of the points from yesterday's posts on academic journal publishers and the limits they're putting on electronic access to journals.

As intellectual property increasingly becomes the critical value-added component of competitive innovation, the fear that it may leak or seep away through inappropriate copying is completely understandable. Similarly, wrapping services such as remote monitoring and tracking around the products companies sell may seem like an eminently reasonable way of maintaining ongoing relationships with customers.

But the business consequences of customer-as-criminal mindsets are inevitably perverse. For customers, the prospect that vendors are looking over their shoulders to track whether this copy is authorized and that usage is approved creates a powerful disincentive to embrace innovation.

Access denied (2)

Invisible Adjunct relates a story [update 9/10/2003: IA expands her reflections here] from her university library involving tradeoffs they're making in access to electronic resources. It makes me wonder what in the world publishers are up to.

It's one thing for libraries to make tradeoffs between different subscriptions: they've always had to do that. But it sounds like this another example of the systematic closing of the intellectual commons that Larry Lessig and others have so rightly been worried about.

But just what is it that publishers think they're protecting? Do they think that members of the general public could constitute a potential new revenue stream that can be tapped if only free public access to journals is eliminated? Were they thinking, "Gee, I would spend $9,000 a year for a subscription to Letters in Neuroscience, but since I can read it for free, I won't"? And now they will?

The more I think about it, the more this strikes me as something that started as overprotectiveness of one's IP, but collapses into something that's just mean-spirited.

Access denied

This is bad:

In June the journal shelves at the Health Sciences Library of the University of Pittsburgh began showing holes. Where current issues of Leukemia Research were once stacked, now stands a small cardboard sign: "Issues for 2003 are available only in electronic form." The cardboard tents have replaced print copies of hundreds of journals.... And at the library's computer terminals, where employees and students of the university can tap into the fast-growing digital collections, other signs advise that "You need an HSL Online password to use these computers." Restrictions in the contracts the university has signed with publishers prohibit librarians from issuing passwords to the public....

[O]rdinary citizens have for decades enjoyed free access to the latest scientific and medical literature, so long as they could make their way to a state-funded university library. That is rapidly changing as public research libraries, squeezed between state budget cuts and a decade of rampant inflation in journal prices, drop printed journals in droves. The online versions that remain are often beyond the reach of "unaffiliated" visitors....

Research libraries are likely to continue carrying print copies of general-interest journals, such as Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine. And a few powerful institutions--among them the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at San Francisco--have insisted on "walk-up" clauses in their contracts that allow any patron full access to their online journals at workstations within the library. But they are the exception; as a rule... publishers insist that their online journals remain "protected" from the general public.

Grrr....

[via Bill Cockayne]

You don't have time to read this. Really, you don't

Another argument in the category of "something we think of as perfectly ordinary and measurable turns out to be the product of interactions": some ground-breaking work in understanding of time, anchored by a new paper in the Foundations of Physics Letters (available in PDF) that raises some challenges to our notion of time and motion. The author is a "broadcasting school tutor" (I don't know what that is, either, but someone who's business card says "futurist" is in no position to make fun) in New Zealand. Here's the abstract:

It is postulated there is not a precise static instant in time underlying a dynamical physical process at which the relative position of a body in relative motion or a specific physical magnitude would theoretically be precisely determined. It is concluded it is exactly because of this that time (relative interval as indicated by a clock) and the continuity of a physical process is possible, with there being a necessary trade off of all precisely determined physical values at a time, for their continuity through time.

The paper described by the article is pretty controversial-- some reviews think its brilliant, while another said, "it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection." (Ouch!)

However, the work appears to offer a solution to Zeno's paradox (available, again, as a PDF).

So where does our sense of time come from? Lynds makes the argument that it is a product of consciousness. As he puts it in the abstract to yet a third article (also available as a PDF-- isn't science publishing great?):

The conclusion of physics, within both a historical and more recent context, that an objectively progressive time and present moment are derivative notions without actual physical foundation in nature, illustrate that these perceived chronological features originate from subjective conscious experience and the neurobiological processes underlying it. Using this conclusion as a stepping stone, it is posited that the phenomena of an in-built subjective conception of a progressive present moment in time and that of conscious awareness are actually one and the same thing, and as such, are also the outcome of the same neurobiological processes.

All the articles are relatively short, and I think worth looking at. They're certainly unlike anything else you're likely to read today....

[via Arlington Institute Future Edition]

Too much information?

Bob McHenry, my mentor at Britannica, takes me gently to task in re: my post on Lyman and Varian's measurement of the amount of information produced in the world:

This sort of thing merely perpetuates on of the great errors of our time. Apparently word has yet to get around that there is no such thing as "information."

Sounds nuts, right? Of course information exists. I just burned a CD this morning with a few hundred pictures of my kids; there are now 620 MB of JPEGs on that CD-- in other words, 620 MB of information.

Well, not so fast. Bob makes his case in an essay, "Content with Content" (not sure how to pronounce it? That's kind of the point), which argues:

Information has no physical existence. What exists are myriad arrangements of objects and energy in the world, and brains that are wired to detect and respond to certain patterns in them.... [I]nformation is not put in, as is usually said to be the case; nor is it sent; nor is it somehow detected or extracted. It has no being whatever, out there in the world.

In short, information is a mode of perception, just as is sound, just as is color. There is no sound in nature; sound is how we humans perceive compression waves in air. There is no color in nature; color is how we humans perceive wavelength in electromagnetic radiation. There is no information in nature; information is how we humans perceive patterns. The word "information" as it is used in "information science" - to designate some substance, some aspect of substance, in the physical world - is a figure of speech, another metonymy.... It's a useful figure, of course, as figures of speech usually are - else we would not have them - but it is important for us shamans who pretend to work with it in various ways to understand it for what it is.

In a simple information theory-engineering sense, information can be said to exist: it's pits on a CD, magnetic bits on a Zip drive, that sort of thing. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, called it "a difference that makes a difference." (At least I think that was Shannon; maybe it was Eric Ashby, or Ludwig von Bertalanffy.) But how does it make a difference? A bunch of ones and zeroes don't, in themselves, make a difference; they have to be decoded and interpreted, whether by a machine (which converts those ones and zeroes into other things-- words, pictures, programs, etc.) or a person (who makes sense of the products of that conversion).

In other words, "information"-- or more accurately, knowledge-- really only exists when those decoding and intepreting functions are going on. It is created by the exchange; it isn't a thing that is exchanged. The CD doesn't contain information; it contains instructions that, if acted on by the right computer running the right software on the right operating system, can become knowledge. Or as Bob puts it, "Our friend Thoreau said 'It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak, and another to hear.' This captures nicely the notion that what is really happening in communication happens in two brains and not somewhere in the middle."

You can also see this a little more clearly if you think about the disconnect between quantities of data and the importance of the knowledge that they contain. Classicist Gregory Crane, a professor at Tufts who runs the Perseus project, once pointed out that "While we have, for all practical purposes of data storage and computation, an infinite amount of art and archaeological materials, the corpus of Greek and Roman texts that survives is relatively small -- well under a gigabyte by any estimate." But that's damn important stuff, by any estimate. Likewise, you can get the Bible onto a CD with plenty of room to spare; but that doesn't mean that it contains less "information," in any social sense, than a double CD from N'Sync or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Finally, MP3s definitely have less "information" (meaning data in this case) than traditional CDs; but most of us can't hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. As Warren Weaver noted,

Information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present [strictly technical] viewpoint, as regards information.

You're too busy to read it, but...

Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, two professors at U. C. Berkeley, have a project measuring the amount of information produced in the world in a year:

Soon it will be technologically possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information. The natural question then becomes: how much information is there to store? If we wanted to store "everything," how much storage would it take?

We have conducted a study to answer this question. In particular, we have estimated yearly US and world production of originals and copies for the most common forms of information media. We have also attempted to estimate the cumulated stock of information in various formats. Finally, we have described the magnitudes of some communication flows that are currently not stored but may well be in the future.

The summary is worth reading.

The bottom line: about 250 megabytes per person. What's really interesting are three broad trends that they find:

The first is the "paucity of print." Printed material of all kinds makes up less than .003 percent of the total storage of information....

The second striking fact is the "democratization of data." A vast amount of unique information is created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80% of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film documents....

The third interesting finding is the "dominance of digital" content. Not only is digital information production the largest in total, it is also the most rapidly growing. While unique content on print and film are hardly growing at all, optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year.

All interesting notions. Though you probably can't ask this question without finding some cool trend. Michael Lesk made an estimate in 1997 of the total amount of information in the world, and noticed two big trends. First, that in the future "we will be able save everything:" the idea of having to make a choice about what information to preserve will seem anachronistic. Second, "the typical piece of information will never be looked at by a human being," but rather will be analyzed by a machine-- if anyone.

[via Smart Mobs]

Paying for science; nonsense is free

The Washington Post has a piece on the A Fight for Free Access To Medical Research:

Why is it, a growing number of people are asking, that anyone can download medical nonsense from the Web for free, but citizens must pay to see the results of carefully conducted biomedical research that was financed by their taxes?

The Public Library of Science aims to change that. The organization, founded by a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two colleagues, is plotting the overthrow of the system by which scientific results are made known to the world -- a $9 billion publishing juggernaut with subscription charges that range into thousands of dollars per year.

Scientific journals have always been in this odd position of charging their readers money for work that the READERS produce-- sort of like a restaurant charging you to put your dinner on a plate and serve it to you. That tension has been exacerbated by the growth of this alternative publishing medium (the Web) that theoretically eliminates lots of the overhead in publishing; the growth of preprints as a major form of science publishing (in lots of fields, by the time something gets into print, it's obsolete); and the amazing rising cost of academic journals, which has only thrown these issues into dramatic relief.

This is also an example of a broader phenomenon, involving a renegotiation of the commons of ideas (something that Larry Lessig has thought very eloquently about). Historians of science and science policy types have realized that the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (I think it's 1980; I'm doing this from memory)-- which allowed universities to commercialize research that was publicly funded-- is going to be as important to the structure of American science as the Merrill Land Grant Act of 1862 (which created the state college system), or the founding of the NSF (which helped institutionalize ongoing public support for basic science). The tremendous growth of biotech and Internet-related companies in the 1990s was partly driven by the new ability that faculty had to take their research from the lab, and move it into the commercial space-- something that schools like Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT have encouraged. Stanford's president, John Hennessy, is an electrical engineering professor who co-founded a startup. According to a friend of mine who's on the faculty, the prevailing ethos among the engineers is that your first sabbatical should be spent doing research, and the second should be spent doing your first startup.

This is a significant cultural shift. And while it's meant that research gets into the marketplace faster, it also may run counter to two older traditions in science: disinterestedness and openness. As Robert Merton argued, disinterestedness-- broadly defined as the renunciation of direct economic or political gain from one's research-- fostered objectivity and trust, and also enhanced the ability of scientists to be open in sharing knowledge with their colleages. Essentially, the scientific community can be seen as a kind of commons-- or perhaps more precisely, seen as a community whose form and norms are sustained by a commons.

The jury still seems to be out on whether this new regime has really done to that commons. For one thing, scientists have long drawn financial benefit from their expertise (Lord Kelvin consulted with telegraph companies, for example), and been encouraged to do so to a limited degree by academic institutions (a one day a week rule prevailed at lots of places); for another, universities are very keen to keep this new system in place, because they get a lot of money from it; and finally, it's not been around long enough to get a clear view of how it's working or not working. But it's something to watch.

[via Paul Saffo]

The secret history of Britannica Online

My former boss at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Robert McHenry, has written an informal history of Britannica Online. McHenry was editor in chief of Britannica during most of my (short) tenure there, then in various reorganizations became a kind of institutional Odysseus; he now has his own consultancy. He's one of the smartest people I've ever known, and a stunningly precise writer. The three years I spent working with him were some of the most intense, and memorable, of my life.

The piece is long on the technical history of Britannica Online, but there's also some stuff on the politics surrounding its creation and marketing. It's sort of a prequel to my article on the impact of electronic publishing on the work of the encyclopaedia, and the development of the Britannica CD timelines.

The history of Britannica is part tragedy, part farce: on one hand, the company has managed to attract some extremely smart editors who remain very loyal to the place, but at the managerial and strategy level, its performance has made Xerox PARC's failure to capitalize on its early innovative work in personal computing look puny. (I was a manager, but worked in the editorial division, so I'm an odd hybrid.) One day its recent history will be told, I hope.

Natural-Born Cyborgs and Drawing

I seem to be constructing several posts that use historical case studies as evidence in favor of the argument Andy Clark makes in Natural-Born Cyborgs. I suppose this might be cited as an example of the collaborative power of ad hoc networks, of the ability of the Internet to serve as a multiplier of intelligence. Though it occurs to me that that phenomenon might just as easily be seen as an example of what academics do all the time: pick up a thread from a book and pull on it, tie it to other threads, and see what new things you can do with it. (The notion is inspired by Susan's comment on an earlier post.)

One of the admirable (or perhaps "sensible" is the better term) things about Natural-Born Cyborgs is its attitude towards technology: it's broad enough to include things like writing (i.e., writing instruments, paper, and written texts) and-- though the book doesn't mention it-- drawing. Drawing is one of those skills that for a long time was appreciated for the mental and visual discipline it was thought to impart (in addition to its utility in the pre-photographic age); it's also one in which materials, and training matter profoundly in shaping how sight works-- how a person looks at a subject, what they focus on, what they select for. Or as Victorian critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton put it,

Every drawing is in a substance and on a substance. Every substance used in drawing has its own special and peculiar relations both to nature and to the human mind.

In the history of science, one of the great examples of artistic training influencing perception-- and through perception, our view of the universe-- is Galileo Galilei's observations of the Moon. Williams College art historian Samuel Edgerton uncovered the relationship between Galileo's artistic training and his studies of the lunar surface, and explored them in a series of articles and The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry, published in 1991. Galileo's lunar studies, Edgerton claims, provides "a clear case of cause and effect between the practice of Italian Renaissance art and the development of modern experimental science." ["Galileo, Florentine 'Disegno,' and the 'Strange Spottedness of the Moon'," Art Journal (Fall 1984), 225-232.] For my purposes, Edgerton's work is interesting because it provides an example of how our interaction with media can reshape the way we look at the world. I discuss it at greater length in the extended entry.

Natural-Born Cyborgs On The Internet

Not long ago I read Hubert Dreyfus' On the Internet, and found it pretty interesting. He makes the case that the cyberenthusiasts' vision of people becoming disembodied minds when they go online is, to use a phrase popular with the kids, bogus.

Dreyfus's deep point is that learning isn't just something that involves our brains processing information, with our senses (e.g., sight, hearing) just serving as inputs. Rather, our bodies are deeply, profoundly involved in our understanding of the world, and are very much part of the process of formal learning. Further, a lot of what we learn happens informally, even unconciously; and once you get above mere rule-learning, you get into a realm in which knowledge is communicated culturally. You don't so much learn stuff, as learn how to be wise about things (or at least expert in them). One important aspect is this is that much of that knowledge is tacit knowledge-- knowledge that is not codified, nad perhaps can't be, but nonetheless seems to be shared by members of a group (and indeed helps define that group).

Bottom line: distance education won't work, because while it may be a more efficient / convenient way to pipe information to people, learning involves MUCH more than just information processing. There's no escaping our bodies, and that's not a bad thing. We learn a lot from them.

When I read On the Internet, I found it to be a pretty convincing argument overall. It was a bit defensive about old-fashioned classroom teaching (I found its discussion of the virtue of lectures to be especially prickly, but maybe that was just me). But Natural-Born Cyborgs makes a compelling argument that our bodies are far less fixed and stable entities than we normally realize. You can do simple experiments that play with our perceptions of how tall we are, how we see, etc.. If this is so-- if Clark is right-- where does that leave the argument of On the Internet? (Clark actually talks briefly about Dreyfus, but doesn't say much about On the Internet.)

I think the answer is this: Yes, Dreyfus is quite right that there are things that we learn through embodiment that cannot be replicated through today's computers: the best course at the University of Phoenix cannot be as good as the best face-to-face course. And yes, soaking up tacit knowledge is a key part of what happens in advanced forms of learning (like graduate training). You could add that there are forms of learning that only happen in groups, and cannot ever happen via asynchronous learning (think of studying music, and the centrality of rehearsals and group performances in the training of musicians as performers and professionals); to say nothing of the forms of knowledge that you pick up through physical practice (plumbing and medicine, to give two examples).

This is all true... for today's computers. The experience of interacting with WIMP interface (windows, icons, mouse, and pull-down menu) is pretty impoverished, and not one that can support the sort of close mind-technology meld that he argues humans are so good at. We may agonize over computers, and spend a lot of time with them, but that doesn't mean we're developing deep, mind-changing relationships with them. So it's no surprise that they can't hold a candle to the classroom. (Computers can also be surprisingly intrusive and disruptive in a classroom: leaving aside their ability to allow students to tune out and play Freecell, the various distractions of computer use-- people leaning over their machines, looking at screens rather than each other, the clatter of keys, the whirr of fans-- all work to break the social fabric of a class.)

But will that be true in the future? I think Clark would argue that 1) our bodies are not the fixed entities that On the Internet assumes they are, and 2) the technologies that Natural Born Cyborgs talks about-- the ones that move us closer to worlds of ubiquitous or tangible computing-- will be much easier to use, will allow a closer integration of user and technology, and extend our sense of self in ways that desktops cannot. If indeed these technologies "really do expand and alter the shape of the psychological processes that make us who we are," (NBC, p. 32), then I think Clark has a winning argument. But that's a very high threshhold for any technology to cross.

Malleability

One of the running themes of Natural-Born Cyborgs is that our sense of ourselves is rather more malleable than we think: the connection between our brains and bodies is at once intimate and contingent. Indeed, after a couple introductory chapters that are principally concerned with surveys of work in ubiquitous computing, tangible computing, wearable computing, and augmented reality, the book turns to consider the way our minds and memories work; the way our sense of our bodies in constructed; and our relationships to the space around us. After the lab tours, it's more than a slight change of ground, and one must be prepared for it.

The long and short of all three chapters is that while we have stable senses of the world around us, and believe that our bodies have clear boundaries that separate "us" from that world, the truth is more complex. The information we gather about the world is opportunistic, and pretty much created on the fly. For example, we retain far less visual information about our surroundings than we expect; our focus is pretty narrowly confined most of the time, and if we need to check on something at the periphery of our vision, we refresh that information (look over for an instant), rather than try to recall it.

Further, you can pretty radically alter the ways we perceive the world, and our brains eventually can readjust. There are famous experiments in which people are made to wear glasses that turn the world upside-down; after a couple weeks, something switches in the brain, and the wearers stop noticing the effect. What's particularly interesting about this is that experiments with manipulating vision show that people can adapt to new systems-- but not if they don't act them out.

A subject fitted with the [reversing] lenses, but simply pushed around in a wheelchair, does not show the adaptation, while one who walks along a complex trail does.

So we can construct and reconstruct our perceptions of the world, though it's a project that requires active engagement, rather than passive observation:

The whole business of seeing and perceiving our world is bound up with the business of acting upon, and intervening in, our world. (95)

Indeed, the "passive" observation turns out to be as much an oxymoron as "jumbo shrimp."

Why is this so important? Clark is on the lookout for the seams between our brains and bodies, those points where are perceptions are actively constructed, because they're places where we can graft technologies onto our selves, or insert them in the brain-body-world loop. This is the neurological and psychological foundation for the claim that our ability to be cyborgs is what makes us human: it turns out to be a consequence of the way the relationship between our brains and bodies is constructed. We're natural born cyborgs, indeed.

Agent Smith Smart Mob!

Fascinating. It appears that smart mobbing is starting to become a form of entertainment. (They're called "flash mobs" in New York.) A couple days ago a flash mob swarmed a Macy's (some great pictures of the event are here and here; here's Wired's article on it). As one participant so charmingly put it, "Everyone loves a mindless mob!" Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, a smart mob of Agent Smiths swarmed Tokyo and Osaka. (The connection between smart mobs and Matrix Reloaded is one of those things that, in retrospsect, you realize had to happen sooner or later.) While this is definitely one of those things that would be hard to do when you have kids, it does look like it would be a lot of fun. Maybe it's something I can organize at the next academic conference I'm at. It doubtless would flip out some people. Update: San Fracisco pioneered a Mad Santa Crawl, featuring "a crowd of santas [that] descends upon one of san francisco's most-touristed neighborhoods to get drunk, to hand out disturbing gifts, and to frighten tourists. " This Santarchy is spreading.... Later: Was I drunk when I wrote that update? A screwed-up bold tag, a  misspelling... standards are falling. Yet another Update: Howard Rheingold says that "inexplicable mobs are popping up all over the place," including New York, Detroit, and elsewhere. Also, in the Department of Smart Mobs and National Stereotypes, Australian teenagers are using SMS for high-powered party hopping. One young lady invited

70 friends to her 18th birthday party, held at her parents' home in the eastern suburbs. About 300 youths turned up uninvited. There were fights, but her father managed to kick out most of the intruders.

My kind of dad!

DVDs and biblical verse

Yesterday Elizabeth wanted to watch the "Wubba Wubba" song (a song sung by Sesame Street character Grover the Monster, on one the 10,000 Sesame Street videos we own), and was somewhat frustrated by our inability to find it. Partly it was the normal impatience of a 4 year-old, but it was also something else: she just takes for granted that you can always cue up the song or scene that you want, or watch things in whatever order you want.

This isn't to say that she's completely without a sense of narrative cohesion or linear plot development. Cinderella is to be watched from beginning to end, and she's as fastidious about it as the Woody Allen character in "Annie Hall." But she assumes that there are choices she can make about how to watch videos, and constructs different rules to different ones. If she wants to watch the outtakes on "Toy Story 2" before the rescue scene, as she puts it, "I can decide for myself."

So her familiarity with DVDs has left her with a sense of the flexibility of movies: they can be entire, organic things, or collections of scenes. She watches movies the way we listen to CDs: a very few (e.g., Dark Side of the Moon) are meant to be listened to from beginning to end, but the vast majority are mix-and-match.

I found myself treating movies with the same flexibility after I got my DVD player. I don't watch "Hard Boiled," I watch the teahouse shootout, the warehouse shootout, and the hospital siege (the last one of the most gripping 40 minutes on film). Indeed, I treat most action movies, and anything with Keanu Reeves, the same way. I didn't do this with videos, or did so only very rarely; but DVDs make it very easy to treat movies not as whole works, but collections of scenes. (To be fair, this is a practice that existed in one film genre before DVDs. Porn actors apparently refer to the dialogue and plot development bits of X-rated movies as "the fast-forward." There's nothing like pride in your craft....)

Doubtless there are film buffs who decry this approach to movies, and they have a case to make. There's also a fascinating historical parallel. Three centuries ago, John Locke warned against the practice of chapter and verse numbering in the Bible, on much the same grounds. He warned that the use of chapters and verses encouraged "Common People" and even "Men of more advance'd Knowledge" to treat the Bible not as a grand unified text, but rather as a bunch of unconnected sayings, each of which could be read without consideration of the broader context in which it appears. With the introduction of chapters and verses, "Scripture crumbled into Verses, which quickly turn into independent Aphorisms." This, in turn, allowed the flourishing of heretical sects, which often based their legitimacy on just a few lines of the Bible. (A contemporary parallel might be drawn to snake handlers, who are inspired by three passages in the Bible about snakes and serpents.) If you read the Bible the way it was meant to be read-- from start to finish and with attention to its larger structures-- Locke argued, you wouldn't have these problems.

I don't know if there are contemporary versions of this argument with regard to reading the Bible. But it is interesting a practice that we now take for granted (when's the last time you saw a passage of the Bible quoted without chapter and verse citation?) was once considered deeply dangerous. Today, though, the phrase "citing chapter and verse" indicates a deep knowledge of your material, not a tendancy to misunderstanding or decontextualization.

[The extended entry contains extracts from Locke's An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles. By Consulting St. Paul Himself, in which he lays out his argument against the use of chapter and verse.

Word spacing, silent reading, and cyborgs

I was thinking about historical studies of how information technology affect thinking and perception, and maybe I was too hasty in saying that well-researched examples are too few and far between. Two more came to mind: Paul Saengers work on word spacing in the middle ages, and Samuel Edgertons work on geometry, perspective, and Renaissance science.

Word spacing is something that we never think about, much less think about having been invented or having a history.The Romans almost never used it: Latin texts and inscriptions on buildings often ran words together (the graffiti-turned-grammar lesson scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian notwithstanding). But Saenger makes a compelling case that its adoption and diffusion in late medival Europe had tremendous ramifications in monastic culture, book history, and eventually intellectual and political history.

Ill talk about Saenger here, and leave Edgerton for a later post.

Thinking about things, versus THINKING

A comment by Hyungsub Choi, a history of science graduate student at Johns Hopkins, to my last post helped me clairfy a distinction in the literature on IT and thinking. Basically, I realized that I see works that show how IT plays a role in social movements, political campaigns, etc. as different from works that argue that IT changes the way people reason. It's the difference between thinking about an issue, versus Thinking, capital T. The former is now a relatively easy argument to make: we're awash in examples from all over the world. The latter is a harder, but more profound, phenomenon to nail down.

In a way, this is a replay of the progress of externalism in the history of science. First you had people like Robert Merton, Joseph Ben-David, Randall Collins, et al making the case for examining social structures, institutions, and norms in science, but NOT arguing that those structures had an effect on scientific knowledge: they asked questions about the production of knowledge, of the shaping of research agendas, and the uses of scientific knowledge, but didn't connect those to questions about the content of science. The next generation of historians and sociologists of science, represented most vividly by the Edinburgh School, argued that in fact, those social factors DID play a role in shaping scientific knowledge.

So you might see someone like Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi as making the "soft externalist" case that cassette tapes and leaflets played a significant role in disseminating the message of revolutionary forces in 1970s Iran ("small media" that lead to a "big revolution"), while Eric Havelock makes the "hard externalist" case that the invention of alphabetic writing leads to the rise of philosophy and skeptical thinking in ancient Greece.

Is this correct? Maybe so, maybe not. For the moment, I think it's a useful way of thinking about the literature, though.

Thanks, Hyungsub. And tell Bill Leslie "Hi" for me when you see him next.

Information Revolutions and Natural-Born Cyborgs

In my last swing through the academic world, I developed a course called "Information Revolutions." It was about the history of information technology from the invention of writing to the World Wide Web; and its basic premise was that while we think of ourselves as living in an "information age," there's never been a time when information hasn't played a transformative role in human history. Indeed, the history of information-- of technologies, libraries, social organizations that create and use information-- IS the history of civilization.

It was a fun class to teach (for anyone who's curious, the syllabus is here), but I had one frustration with it: There are fewer good examples than I would have liked of studies that argued that information technologies had an effect on the way people think or reason. I think we all intuit that something happens to our brains and reasoning processes when we move from writing with a pen to typing on a computer, and it's something deeper than just not revising or thinking as carefully about what we write; there's something else going on. The best-developed set of historical arguments on this phenomenon involve the invention of writing in ancient Greece, epitomized by Eric Havelock's work, particularly "The Muse Learns to Write" (and which in turn builds on the work of Alfred Lord, Milman Parry and others who argue that the Homeric epics capture the shift from oral to literate culture), and Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy" (which builds on Jack Goody and Ian Watt's famous essay on "The Consequences of Literacy," and other works). I was always keen to find more examples of these shifts, and they're fewer than you might expect. (Yes, there's always McLuhan, but I was shooting for something deeper.)

One of the reasons Natural-Born Cyborgs has resonated with me is that it suggests a way of getting at these questions. If it is correct, then information technologies do have an effect on thought, perception, and reasoning-- and that suggests that some evidence of those shifts might survive in the historical record.

My instinct is that to trace that relationship you couldn't rely too much on the close reading that Parry and Lord could with the Homeric epics-- as usual, they're exceptional. The challenge is to mark and measure the flow of ideas between mind and medium, and to do that you've got to get away from the published work, and as close to the moment of creation-- or reading or writing or sketching-- as possible. What you REALLY want is all the stuff that normally ends up in the garbage can-- drafts, scrap paper, annotated books and manuscripts, sketchbooks, etc.-- but which occasionally gets thrown together in those archival boxes marked "Miscellaneous."

You might think that there's not a whole lot of that stuff that survives; but I'll bet there's more than we realize, and more evidence of this kind than we think-- if we know where to look for it, and know what we're looking for.

Interview with Andy Clark

Here's an interview with Andy Clark about Natural Born Cyborgs.

We are all cyborgs

Friday I picked up a new book by Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. (My wife had heard an interview on NPR with the author, and suggested it was something I should track down.) I generally take a skeptical attitude toward books written by scientists-- so many of them look promising, but are boring and superficial-- and so I was prepared for the worst.

But it turns out that this is the most stimulating book I've read since Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs. (For a sense of the argument, read this essay, published in Edge.) There's a certain kind of book that is very rich in associations, and-- if you come to it with the right baggage and previous reading-- can spark all kinds of associations, even though the book's basic premise is extremely simple. I wouldn't put NBC in the same league as Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions or Gombrich's Art and Illusion, but those are good examples of books that had some pretty straightforward ideas, but generated all sorts of intellectual fission.

NBC's key idea is this: we are all cyborgs, and-- ironically-- that's what makes us human.

Let me unpack that a bit. First, our conventional images of "cyborgs"-- of strange creatures like the Borg, Terminator, or Kevin Warwick, with machine implants in biological bodies-- is misleading. You can put an ID chip in a cat or a dog (or if you're really insistent, a human), and it doesn't fundamentally change them: there's no new cat-machine symbiosis that emerges from the combination. More generally, thinking of interesting human-machine combinations in terms of implants distracts us from what really matters:

What is special about human brains, and what best explains the distinctive features of human intelligence, is precisely their ability to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids. (5)

We already develop some very deep-- indeed, transformative-- relationships we develop ordinary technologies. Take the example of writing. For me, it's a recording medium: the place where I store stuff so I won't forget it. It's an acid: when I try to write about something, I quickly find out what I do and don't know, and expose the gaps in my knowledge. It's even a mnemonic aid: paradoxically, taking notes on a book helps me think about and remember the book better (and I've got notes on it, should I forget). I don't think about things and then write them down: I have a thought, I make a note of it. I barely think off the page.

My relationship with my notebook and pen is infinitely more intimate, and more important, than one I would have with all but the most powerful implanted device-- a pacemaker, say, or an insulin pump. What matters, Clark argues, is not the fact that something is injected or implanted in the body, but the kind of relationship that develops between technologies and people. We've spent thousands of years with technologies that change our ability to think, remember, analyze, and understand. Humans have been cyborgs for a long time. In fact,

It is because our brains, more than those of any other animal on the planet, are primed to seek and consummate such intimate relations with nonbiological resources that we end up as bright and as capable of abstract thought as we are. It is because we are natural-born cyborgs, forever ready to merge our mental activities with the operations of pen, paper, and electronics, that we are able to understand the world as we do.... Minds like ours were made for mergers. (6-7)

In other words, being cyborgs is what makes us human. Or rather, the ability to develop these deep, powerful relationships with technologies (particularly information technologies) is what separates us from animals. Chimps and gorillas can do it a little; but we're in a different league.

So we have to think about ourselves a little differently than we're used to: not as bodies and minds whose boundaries are clearly demarcated, but as something rather more complex:

[H]uman thought and reason is born out of looping interactions between material brains, material bodies, and complex cultural and technological environments. We create these supportive environments, but they create us too. We exist, as the thinking things we are, only thanks to a baffling dance of brains, bodies, and cultural and technological scaffolding. (11)

More on the book as I read further.

Update: My discussion of Clark extends over several posts:

An interview
Information Revolutions and Natural Born Cyborgs
Word Spacing, Silent Reading, and Cyborgs
Malleability
Natural Born Cyborgs on the Internet
Natural Born Cyborgs and Drawing

Edward Peters

The Penn Gazette, my alumni magazine, has a cool article about "the immeasurable curiosity of Edward Peters," a medievalist at Penn. It has a particularly cool discussion of Peters' work on the history of curiositas, the medieval equivalent of curiosity. The interesting thing is that we think of "curiosity" as a good thing (unless you're, say, a cat), but medieval thinkers considered it dangerous, and potentially heretical.

It's a good example of how you can use the changing meaning of "keywords" (to use Raymond Williams' term) as markers for the evolution of ideas. When I was teaching, I found that tracing the evolution of keywords was almost always something that the students liked-- the engaged ones, anyway.

I never had a class with Peters-- I was in an anti-pre 19th-century history phase for, oh, about eight years-- but once when visiting Trinidad, a friend of mine who was working on 10th-century Arabic poetry and I gave a lift to a woman who turned out to be named Ettie Peters. She was very nice.

The state of user manuals

After some effort, I finally got the comments counter (the little thing under this entry that probably says "Comments (0)" working. It used to be the case that it wouldn't refresh unless I rebuilt the entire site, and I knew that other MT-driven sites (like Steven Johnson's) had counters that updated themselves more easily.

It turns out that there was a patch to take care of the problem. More or less at random, I stumbled across it on the Movable Type Web site.

I'm glad I found it, but you pretty much have to be a regular poster to the Movable Type user discussion boards, and a member of the community, to figure out that this kind of thing exists, and is available. It's certainly great that the technology exists to make it so easy for users to put their minds together, and for some technologies that's become a very important thing: the Apple Newton is now sustained by its users, long after Apple itself pulled the plug. And since MT is basically a single room of people, so far as I can tell, it's amazing that they get any programming done at all. But this takes the notion of "users as part of a community" a little too far, in my view, by devolving responsibility for keeping track of updates, patches, etc., onto the community. A discussion board and search engine become a substitute for a well-written manual with upgrades, when in fact it never can be.

There actually is a larger story that I hope one day to tell: about the rise and fall of technical writing. At the very least, I want to do a piece about how the growth of hypertext and CDs changed the way that technical documentation was written and read; I would also like to trace the technical writer community in Silicon Valley, as it's had some pretty interesting people pass through it. I remember Caroline Rose, who was documentation head for the Macintosh project, tell me that hypertext had more or less completely changed the game of tech documentation, and I've always wanted to follow up on that. It also struck me that, more than any other literary genre, it was one that had been hit by a transformation that literary theorists say will affect all writing one day. Technical writing is one of those places where the future is already here.