TinkerX

One of the best rants in movie history is, I believe, the one that Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon) lets rip on a recruiter from the NSA. Partly I love it because it’s delivered in the wonderful South Boston (Southie) accent that so many of my friends’ parents and older brothers had from the old neighborhood. Partly it’s because it’s a wicked rant:

Why shouldn’t I work for the N.S.A.? That’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot. Say I’m working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself, ’cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin’, “Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area,” ’cause they don’t give a shit. It won’t be their kid over there, gettin’ shot. Just like it wasn’t them when their number got called, ’cause they were pullin’ a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some kid from Southie takin’ shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, ’cause he’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they’re takin’ their sweet time bringin’ the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin’ play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain’t too long ’til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s got to walk to the fuckin’ job interviews, which sucks ’cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin’ him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starvin’, ’cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they’re servin’ is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I’m holdin’ out for somethin’ better. I figure fuck it, while I’m at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

It’s a beautiful rant, and delivered, apparently, in one breath.

I’ve written before on my thoughts about hunting vs. gathering mentalities. Here’s the quick version, in bullet point format because you just had to wade through a huge chunk of text and bullets will liven things up:

• The two main types of early human productivity focused on hunting and gathering. We’re anthropologically bent towards them.
• Hunting requires more “fluid” skills, gathering more “directed” skills. Neither is better or worse, per se, they are just different.
• The development of agriculture took gathering to a new level. Farming is, essentially, controlled gathering. You gather the crops and animals you want into your space, and then work on them there. It is, to my thinking, meta-gathering.
• The industrial revolution did to other jobs what farming did for food. It took jobs (blacksmith, for example) that required many different skills and broke them apart… “farmed” them out to many specific workers, shops and industries. You no longer had one guy making nails, hoes, rakes, plows, etc. You had one guy who made the one part that went into the one slot on the one product.
• The computer is a general tool; it allows one person to, once again, do many things.
• The Internet is a “hunt based” tool. It relies more on one’s ability to search, connect, add, comment, develop, etc. than it does on one particular skill. Ask yourself this: what would it mean to say, “He’s an expert at the Internet.” It’s a ridiculous phrase.
• Web skills and the ability to integrate them with other computer-based tools are turning us from gatherers (do the one thing, in the one place, over and over) into hunters (be flexible and fluid, concentrate on goals rather than steps, etc.)

There’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere, I’m sure. Just not for me to write.

All of this apropos a Seth Godin piece on change, by way of Stephen’s Lighthouse. Seth’s main point can be summed up by this quote:

Oh, there’s one other thing: As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change. In fact, competence is the enemy of change! Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat.

I would agree… except for one caveat. I believe that competent gathering is the enemy of change, whereas competent hunting is always ready for change and, in fact, lusts for it.

Set is right that “competent components” are reluctant to change. Why? If someone eliminates the square hole, and your job is to put the square peg in that sucka… game over. On the other hand, if your role involves leveraging skills that are more fluid — find, connect, describe, convince, improve, direct — you love change. Why? Because change is what you are trying to accomplish in a hunt. You seek to change the status quo (being hungry, let’s say), not through a well developed system of activities that anyone can accomplish. You seek change through the skills and abilities of you and your hunting party. You don’t know what you’ll find when you go out… but you know you want to kill and eat it.

Again… I’m not knocking gathering/gardening/farming/factory skills. They are hugely efficient for feeding millions of people, manufacturing huge tons of similar items, etc.

I’m just saying that hunting is coming back. And Mr. Will Hunting is right… we don’t want to be cogs in a giant, frightening machine that takes our individual work and accumulates it into something beyond our ken. We want to know, do, feel, connect, befriend, share, create, evaluate and reject. Why?

Hunting is simply more fun.

According to a new Nielsen poll (as found on cnet), Americans now send more text messages than make phone calls. And 13-17 year olds send 1,742 text messages a month. Assuming an eight-hour sleep cycle, that means they’re sending a text message about every 17 minutes of their waking days.

And, of course, someone has to read all those messages. I assume it’s mostly other teens. Which means that for every message sent, one is read. Which then means that they are either sending or reading a message about every 9 minutes.

Passing messages back-and-forth more than 6 times an hour. Even if the reply is just, “LOL,” that’s a lot of readin’ and writin’.

“Connect” is a big word. At my place of work, it ends up in our tagline:

OCLC. The world’s libraries. Connected.

From last Sunday around 4pm until Thursday around 3pm, we were disconnected by hurricane Ike. According to the weather folk, Ike pushed a really large, fast-moving warm air front up from the south. Said front met a cold air mass coming down from Canada (probably due to the good exchange rate, ha ha), and when they met… woosh. We had 75 mile an hour winds throughout much of Central Ohio, knocking out power for something like 1.4 million people in the state.

We were very lucky. We had some limbs down in the back yard, a bunch of twiggy, leafy crap in the front. We lost a fridge and a stand-alone freezer worth of food (which was covered by our homeowner’s insurance — something for y’all to remember), and had some very minor damage to our vinyl siding. No big whoop. And while having no power (or Web or phone or TV) for four days was a pain, it was also kinda fun, as it meant checkers by candlelight, more reading (I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s new “Anathem” on my phone),  and early bedtimes. Again… I’m extremely thankful that all we lost was some electrons and frozen shrimp.

So… we were somewhat dis-connected. Or were we? I still had my cell phone, as did my wife. I had Internet access at work and on my phone. I did have to go to some lengths to retrieve some files off my desktop PC at home (thanks for the battery back-up, Chris!), but that was about the only real, “Crap! I can’t do what I want without these connections!” that really needed to be “dealt with.” The rest was just, well… suck it up and wait.

I might have felt differently if the weather hadn’t been so pleasant, too. Nice, cool nights. Tack another 12 degrees onto the thermometer and Andy would have been a whiny camper.

So to celebrate our return to the connected world, I finally signed up for Twitter.  I have not yet really grokked Twitter. But, as a good corporate marketing wonk, I subscribed to an RSS feed of tweets that refer to my company, OCLC. And that has been very… interesting. Nothing hugely surprising in any given message (or as a whole), but the feeling it has given me is much the same as when I overhear a snippet of conversation in the lobby or at a restaurant. It’s a kind of… slightly guilty pleasure. Of course, all these people choose to twitter about whatever it is… but they don’t know, specifically, that I’m “overhearing” them.

Basically, it just seems kinda fun. Another level of Internetual awareness.

So… the Twitter widget is in my sidebar over there, and you’re invited to follow along, if you like. For the time being, my vow is that all my tweets will be in haiku.

Why? Well, why the heck not.

By way of Terra Nova, I found the Development Informatics (DI) working paper, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games.” Quick definition for y’all non-grognards: gold farming is the selling of virtual/game world goods and services for real money. The easiest example is that I play a game, and with my character, earn a whole bunch of in-game “gold,” and then sell it to your character for real money. Other types of gold farming include leveling (improving another person’s character for a fee) or actual in-game item sales (selling a very rare or powerful in-game object for real world money).

My first “holy crap” exposure to gold farming was in the excellent January, 2003 Wired story, “The Unreal Estate Boom.” In it, Julian Dibbel quoted a study that estimated the size of Everquest’s GNP (the biggest game at that time) at around $135 million which, per persona, made it the 79th richest nation on earth. Dibbel estimated that the “value” of all virtual stuff in all worlds in 2003 was around $300 million. Now… that’s the total calculation of what *everything* inside these spaces would have been worth if it could have been sold for real dough; the study compared what the going rate for in-game gold was, and multiplied that by the total gold value of all items and character accounts.

So… check out the list of countries by GDP from Wikipedia. You’ll find quite a number of small countries whose GDP is lower than $500 million. That means that people all over the world have now attributed the worth — in actual, real dollars — of a year’s worth of virtual/gaming stuff as more valuable than everything Granada produces in one year.

I’m sure someone smarter (and with more time) could figure out what the “unrealized” GDP of these virtual spaces is; meaning, what all the virtual stuff would now be worth if it could be sold. If (and I’m totally making this up) that $500 million, for example, purchased 500 billion pieces of “gold” (a 1,000-to-1 ratio), and there were actually 50 trillion pieces of game gold being used… that would be a 100-to-1 real-to-virtual ratio, giving us a worldwide, virtual GNP of $50 billion. Which is more like the size of Croatia.

[Edit, 08/04/08. I just realized that the above bogus approximation is probably too complicated even for being so crappy. It might be easier to ask ourselves, “What percentage of virtual goods are realized in actual world money.” I still don’t know, but a 100-to-1 ratio doesn’t seem too absurd; that is, for every one piece of gold purchased from a farmer, 100 are generated “naturally” and not sold/bought.]

As I said… that calculation is pretty bogus. But when you figure that a fairly small percent of all the virtual stuff that’s generated ends up being gold farmed… a 100-to-1 relationship doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.

$50 billion worth of magic swords, character attributes and elvish gold. You may want to have your kid start playing *more* games.

I was on vacation last week. The beach in SC. Lovely, thank you, but very windy the last couple days. Good for surfers, bad for families with kids.

I try to read one non-fiction book while on vacation (along with several pieces of brain candy). This year, it was “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I don’t always agree with Clay, but even when I think he’s wrong, he’s wrong with intelligence and style.

In the case of this book, he ain’t wrong. It’s his best work yet, I think, and a must read for anybody who’s serious about thinking seriously about the ways in which the Internet (and associated technologies) are intersecting with society. I may do a longer review post at some point, but for the time being, just go read it. Lots of good, telling examples. Lots of well thought out questions, without necessarily giving any answers. Which is a good thing. Asking the questions well is important. Pretending you know the answers is less so.

Clay talks a bit about the “publish then edit” mode that the Internet enables. In traditional media, you “edit then publish.” That is, producers and directors and publishers sift through (edit) a mountain of content, and then present what they think is best. On the Web, everybody publishes everything, and then we, the public, use a number of functions — links from friends, search engines, blog posts, etc. — to edit down the already published stuff.

In another part of the book, Clay talks about how folks all over the world are using this functionality to impact political situations. He gives examples of how smart mobs, email campaigns and even Twitter are used to turn the usual “Big Brother” thing on its ear. This started me thinking… Publish, edit, politics, government. Role reversals.

And then I started reading William Gibson’s new novel, “Spook Country”. Not done with it yet, but 1/3 of the way in… it’s great. There’s a scene where one character is talking to another who may be doing some sneaky “anti-terrorist” stuff. He says (I’m approximating, as the book’s downstairs and I don’t feel like getting it), “A nation is defined by its laws more than it’s circumstances at any particular time. A person whose morals change with circumstance is not moral. And a nation whose laws change based on circumstance is not true to those ideals that brought it into being.”

Bong. Gong goes off in my head.

Are laws, when taken as content, the result of publishing or editing? I would argue that laws themselves are a kind of editing; they keep us from doing certain things; they proscribe. Is the tendency of the current administration to do whatever the frick it wants, and then justify it later, a kind of “publish then edit” rather than the other way around? We’re supposed to come up with laws based on (among other documents), the Constitution, which (as my Republican friends point out all the time) does more to limit the power of government than describe it.

OK. If government is meant to be limited (edited), and laws are meant to be editorial tools… then doing things first, then coming up with wild-ass justifications for them, is a case of going “public then edit.” Action as public publishing of events; editing as the spin, rewrites, cover ups, justification, etc. after the fact.

I’m still not sure if this makes any sense. But all these thoughts are tangled up in my head in this way, and sometimes they need to live somewhere where I can come back and look at them later.

Publish then edit gives power to the creative masses. Editing, not publishing, is the proper function of government and laws.

Are the current hijinx in the White House a kind of reaction to the new balance of power imposed, to some degree, by the Web and the Flat World? Are politicians “doing more things” outside the lines of editorial (read: Constitutional) correctness because the Great Unwashed now has access to so much more creative power.

I have no idea. But it’s ringing in my head.

I saw Disney/Pixtar’s “WALL-E” yesterday with my son. Fun movie, excellent animation, some good laughs. A bit heavy-handed on the overarching messages about society side… but that’s Disney for ya. B+

Based on the film, I was going to write a quick post about how, apparently, in the film, singularity is achieved through waste management. Go read the Wikipedia article on “technological singularity” so I don’t have to do a crappy job summarizing here. [pause] Thanks.

Machine intelligence is a wonderful topic for when you’re hanging out waiting for a movie to start, or sitting around drinking wine coolers on the deck on a nice, early summer evening. It’s fun to discuss the differences between creativity, computation, cognition, recognition, etc. and go on about how men and machines may differ — both now and in the future — in terms of thinking-type activities.

My point, from watching WALL-E, was going to be that we equate (especially as children) emotional goals very specifically with self-awareness. You can have an animal (or a plant, a teapot, a statue, a car, etc.) in a movie be, essentially, a prop, and have no “feelings.” Or they may be rudimentary feelings that reflect back from the main characters. But for a creature to be “alive,” it needs to do thinky things that have more to do with its own well-being (usually emotional) than with sheer computing power. Thus, though WALL-E may be able to do many computational things, what makes him “thinking,” what has pushed him beyond the singularity, is his ability to formulate his own goals.

Interestingly, the “bad guy” in the movie [very minor spoiler] seems alive, too… but has received his goals as part of a program; ie, they are not his own goals, per se, but are direct instructions from a human.

That was about it for my original post idea… the thought that we base our idea (at least in a shallow, entertaining sense) on what is “real person thinking” on the ability not to solve problems, but to come up with them. To decide, “This situation isn’t ideal for me… I can envision another possibility.” Person-hood based not on survival (which requires all kinds of problem solving, and which animals do all the time), but on idealism.

That was the extent of it. But then I read a new post at Kevin Kelly’s The Technium about “The Google way of science.” The basic idea being that a new kind of cognition (or at least, though-work) is being done through super-fast evaluations of super-huge data sets. The example I like is the one about how Google provides on-the-fly Web site translation. They don’t have an translation algorithm, they just compare enormous sets of currently translated documents.

This is, as Kelly and other point out, a fantastic way to solve problems. You don’t worry about a model, you don’t worry about a theory or an equation. You just put trillions of cycles of computing power to work examining billions of data points, and then you figure out where new data points would line up.

Fascinating, important stuff, yes. But Kelly goes on to suggest that this kind of computation disproves Searle’s riddle of the Chinese room,  whereas I think it actualy *proves* Searle’s point in that thought experiment. If I had access to all the (let’s say) Chinese-to-English-and-back documents that Google does, I, too, could translate between the languages without understanding both. Maybe even neither. If you’ve ever tried Google’s spot-translation facilities and seen what it does to metaphor, you know that quite a bit of understanding is lost (ahem) in translation.

Kelly goes on to quote George Dyson in a response he (Dyson) made to an article Chris Andersen wrote in Wired on this subject:

For a long time we were stuck on the idea that the brain somehow contained a “model” of reality, and that AI would be achieved by constructing similar “models.” What’s a model? There are 2 requirements: 1) Something that works, and 2) Something we understand. Our large, distributed, petabyte-scale creations, whether GenBank or Google, are starting to grasp reality in ways that work just fine but that we don’t necessarily understand. Just as we will eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we will discover that true AI came into existence without ever needing a coherent model or a theory of intelligence. Reality does the job just fine.

By any reasonable definition, the “Overmind” (or Kevin’s OneComputer, or whatever) is beginning to think, though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend. What Chris Anderson is hinting at is that Science (and some very successful business) will increasingly be done by people who are not only reading nature directly, but are figuring out ways to read the Overmind.

Now… I love science fiction. But I really don’t buy that dipping into enormous pools of data to look for correlations counts as any kind of “thinking” that we would recognize as being of an order even close to that of animals, to say nothing of the cute (yet not cuddly) WALL-E. Dyson himself says, “… though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend.” Well… why call it “thinking” if it’s something completely different than what we call “thinking,” and on a totally different scale… Mama always said, “Life is like a box of semantics.” If I can call what the weather does “thinking” because it moves enormous numbers of things around and exacts changes and is involved in activities based on ultra-complex rules, then OK. What Google etc. does could be called “thinking,” too. If we open it up that far, though, we’ve lost the original intention of what we mean when we use the term to apply to us man-apes.

When you challenge a child who has done something stupid or dangerous and ask, “What were you thinking?” you’re not looking for an answer in terms of their problem solving abilities. If the boy-child has emptied 25 cans of shaving cream into the kiddie pool and is making “summer-time snow angels,” you may love the creative spirit, hate the waste of money (and how he smells afterward), but your chat with him afterward will be about making choices, not about air pressure and aroma. You want to know what led him to the choice to do the unwise thing, so that you can teach him not to lead himself there. You want to help him create better problems for himself, not, in many cases, solve them.

I can’t tell time anywhere near as accurately as a watch. But that doesn’t mean that a watch is thinking. Or, if want to say it is, it is only ever thinking about what time it is.

* * * * *

PS: Irony of the week. The last line of dialogue in WALL-E was clipped slightly at my showing by the “pop” you get during a slightly crappy jump from one reel to another. A movie created using advanced, computerized digital effects about an advanced, computerized digital creature… partly f’d up by an analog zit. I was amused.

[Note note: the draft of this post was written months ago. I’m not sick anymore, thanks for asking.]

Note: I am sick as heck. Bad cold. This is Day 4 of what, at work, is being called affectionately, “The Pox.” I read an interesting post on Lifehacker about “Presenteeism,” the opposite of absenteeism. The idea that going to work, regardless of consequences, is necessary. We’re all the stars in our own life drama. So the idea that I’d put my own work requirements above the health and welfare of my coworkers isn’t completely unreasonable; especially when we take into account the fact that we don’t know what facts to take into account in terms of where/how we get sick. All this being apropos of nothing, except that I did stay home from work Thursday and worked from home on Friday, and now consider those acts to be somewhat selfless and communal. Whereas before, I would have considered myself lazy and weak. New wine, old skins. Yea.

Meanwhile… having been sick, I’ve been waking up early and watching The Daily Show on the DVR. One of the episodes from last week featured an interview with Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” I did not read the book, and don’t plan on it. This is a review of a couple things Lee said on the the show.

First, he made the claim that relationships mediated by electronics — the Web, that is — aren’t really as real as those in real life and (?) those conducted over the phone. Hmmm… Odd that he wouldn’t consider the phone part of the machine of the electronic mob. When it debuted, critics believed that the phone would end civilized discourse, as it allowed for communication without physical presence and, therefore, without possible physical repercussions. That is true (I suppose), as you can call somebody a dillweed on the phone and not worry about him/her cracking you on the mellon.

Lee went on to say that because of the lack of real presence on the other end of the digital line, we tend to imbue “the other” with our own characteristics, thus making the relationship both shallow and somewhat fictional. That’s not a bad point. It is easier, certainly, to create a web (ha ha) of assumption when there is more left to the imagination. He then started talking about bad behavior on blogs and bulletin boards, what with the ranting and raving and flaming and invective and… and… and…

And he lost me. Even as an interesting antagonist to my own view… he lost me. Because you can’t have it both ways, Lee. If the machine is bad because it is a concave lens that diminishes our perception of “other,” that’s one thing; if it is a convex lens that exaggerates the bad behavior of others… hold on. Can it be both?

Well, here’s the thing: it can, if you’re being a dillweed.

I tend to expect the best of people, regardless of circumstance. I assume that they, like me, want to get along, be friendly, be smart, do the right thing, etc. That holds true online as well as in RL. I’ve had very cool, long, intelligent disagreements with people in both places. Where it stops (again, regardless of media), is when someone clearly just wants to rant on their own, and has no interest in discourse; no interest in the voice of “the other.”

Does that happen on the Web more than in RL? Perhaps. Comments on blogs are often not set up as discussion points, but more as stand-alone statements. And it is certainly possible to read a such a comment as if it were aimed right at you, thus making it seem like a churlish response, rather than a simple statement.

And so we’re back to the Web, as Lee said, distorting relationships because of our tendency to put ourselves in the center of the whole thing. We either assume closeness that isn’t there (because we want to see it), or assume animosity that isn’t there (because we read everything as personal).

At least we do when we’re being dillweeds. I’ve done it, for sure. A disagreeable statement that, in RL, might have been mitigated with a shrug and eyebrow-raise, comes across as totally hot-headed and unreasonable. And I’ve flamed back, too. But… but but but (this is the big but, and I like big buts, and I can not lie)… because of this tendency, signs and appeals to reason come across even more strongly, too. I’ve made some very good friends over the Web — some of whom I’ve never met in person. And in almost every case, it is because their online voice is one that I want to hear more of.

Which is the same as in RL. We seek out those people whose presence is pleasant. And that’s the case online, too.

Yes, there are more cranky, shallow statements on the Web. But there are also more chances for rare and beautiful flowers to spring up, in stark contrast with the dillweeds.

I used to really like the Encyclopedia Britannica. By “used to,” I mean of course, “before Wikipedia.” It’s a fine reference work, and I never had anything against it until they, and others, started getting smarmissimus about how Wikipedia sucks because it’s written by people who aren’t on the staff of an encyclopedia. And how kids shouldn’t be citing it as a resource. Etc. etc.

Now… I don’t want to get into a fight about Wikipedia. I don’t care if you like it or not or have issues with it. This is not an opinion piece. The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia gets waaaay more hits than Britannica. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia is free. Maybe it’s because it has lots more articles. Maybe it’s because people like to think that anybody (themselves included) is smart enough to help somebody else out with a reference question.

Maybe it’s all about elves and pixies. Repeat: I don’t care. From a marketing and sales perspective, yelping about how your customers are dumb because they choose a competitor is, well… dumb.  Britannica could hop about, get red in the face, and produce volumes of statistics about how it’s better. If users don’t have a compelling reason to go there, they’ll go somewhere else.

What Britannica *should* have been doing is figuring out a way to get more people into their space. Which they now have, with a very clever little program called Britannica WebShare. Basically, if you write a blog or publish on the Web in any way, you can apply for a free year of access to the entire online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and link to the full articles there.

That’s clever. Very clever. My readers now have an ancillary benefit from my blogging relationship with EB. If you’re a regular ol’ person with no subscription to EB (it costs $70/year normally), and you look up “Wikipedia,” you get this:

Wikipedia:  free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. The English-language version of Wikipedia began in 2001. It had more than one million articles by March 2006 and more…

Wikipedia… (75 of 754 words)

But if you go to that same article from a link on my blog, even if you don’t have a subscription, you can see the whole thing.

Yep. All 754 words. You’re welcome.

Very, very smart. They have turned chunks of their content into advertising for the whole, and enlisted the help of people who build the Web to engage in that advertising. They get links and good marketing, I (and my readers) get full text articles.

This is a good thing to think about in a general way — how can other content owners release some subset of what they create/own in ways that promote an economic model that makes sense for them?

PS: If you’re interested in the full text of any particular Britannica article, let me know and I’ll work it into a blog post  

At work, I get to do some research about the information industry and related technology because, well, libraries are deeply involved in the mediasphere. So that’s cool. And last week I was reading up on teens (god, I hate the terms “tweens” and “screenagers”) and tech. And there’s a neat, very recent report from Pew on teens and writing, and another, older study from Fox about “Never Ending Friending” and a NYT article that asks, “Can Cellphones End Global Poverty,” another good report from Pew on the demographics of mobile data use, and on and on. Stuff about social networking, teens, mobile phones, games and media literacy. So that’s all in my head.

Then, this morning, I read Clay Shirky’s blog post, “Gin, Television and Social Surplus.” It’s good. Go read it and come back.

Clay is talking about what we do, as a society, to deal with radical shifts in culture. He gives the example of people going on a generation-long gin bender when the industrial age brought millions of people into cities. In order to deal, they got plastered.

Years ago, I read a similar theory about the pyramids. You had this ancient, Egyptian agrarian population that, like most of such, spent almost all their collective time farming and starving. Then some clever dudes figure out some basic math, engineering and astronomy, and put the knowledge to use to create an irrigation system that is N% more productive and reliable than the old methods. Whatever that “N” is, it provided a bunch of time that nobody new what to do with. So they built the pyramids. Partly as a program of public works… but mostly because they had a bunch of people with time on their hands and no idea how to spend it. They already knew how to build stuff… so why not build really big stuff!
Clay makes the point that TV has been sucking up brjillions of hours of our free time, and that we now have more choices about what to do with that time, many of which are creative, and that people like being creative, and so they are choosing things that are at least interactive as opposed to truly passive. Best quote of the post, imo:

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

That’s just so true it makes my teeth hurt [note, I actually enjoy both of the above, but the comparison is valid as hell].

OK. So we’ve got new media literacy. We’ve got participatory media and massive social applications. We’ve got mobile phones that are increasingly used as tools for digital participation, and are less expensive (than desktop PC’s with Web access) and thus more readily available to folks in lower economic strata, and that includes kids. That’s all in my head. Don’t worry… it’s a really big head.

Some people have said that participatory media is a move back to a time when people made their own fun and entertainment. Up until the printing press, if you wanted a story, you pretty much had to *hear* a story. News and history were participatory media. Until radio, there were no mass, single-source, culture-wide stations. Then TV came along. And we had tens of millions of people watching “Leave it to Beaver” and “Dallas” and and and and. I grew up in the middle of that. I joke that I had three parents: Mommy, Daddy and Teevy.

It was, and is, a cross between beauty and horror. I love, for example, that there are now hundreds of channels of TV. We watch all kinds of history, science, engineering, etc. programs with my 8-year-old son (Hooray for Myth Busters!). But he also watches Sponge Bob and  Avatar and other stuff (so do I, btw). Big budget media can produce some neat stuff.

Soon he’ll start typing in earnest. And then, I assume, will enter the mediasphere as a participant; commenter, responder, linker, writer, poster, photographer, videographer, blogger, cartoonist, podcaster, IMer… something. Many things. Some interesting, some meaningful, some trivial. Just like life.

And that, I think, is the major difference between the old, top-down media (TV being god there) and what we’re getting into now — it’s more like life.

I’ve taken to saying that my motto for the new, participatory mediasphere is “verbs over nouns.” Whenever you want to bet on a new trend or idea or technology, ask yourself… is it improving (or growing) something “noun-y” (stuff), or something “verb-y” (activities). The line that many of my (older) friends use about much of the new content on the Web (YouTube and journal-style blogs seem to be the favorite targets), is that, “It’s a bunch of crap.”

Well, yeah. But for the people who created it, it’s their own personal crap as opposed to a small piece of a giant load of crap dropped on them from 30,000 feet up that also hits a couple million other people.

It’s also useful to keep in mind that the pyramids, when looked at a certain way, are crap, too. Engineering marvels? Sure. Wonders of the world? Of course. But what have they ever done for you? Would your life be any different if the pyramids were suddenly not there? Or if they’d never been? The Colossus of  Rhodes went away in 226 BC. Do you miss it? I mean, sure… it would be cool to see. But I’ve never, once, in my life, said, “Thank God for the pyramids!” (as opposed to penicillin, steam power, the printing press, blues, chocolate, etc.)

How will we spend what Clay calls our “social surplus?” Will we make more friends in more places? Spread knowledge? Create great works?

I don’t know. I feel that it’s inherently better to do things that are creative and connected. That time spent creating even the “least of these” in terms of blogs and YouTube movies is better than time spent watching a rerun of (shudder) “Welcome Back Kotter.” But I also wonder if partly all we’re doing is creating many, smaller pyramids.

The nice thing, with the new media, is that we get to decide what’s important. It doesn’t have to be a centralized project like the pyramids or TV. And, just like with the printing press, I bet (as does Clay) that many smaller voices will add up to something more important than one, big voice.

After more than a year, JotSpot (bought by Google that long ago) has come out from behind the gCurtain and has reemerged as Google Sites.

I blogged the Google purchase of JotSpot back in November of 2006; I called it the “2nd wiki that Google bought.” Writely (the engine for Google Docs) being the first.

So… now you can use Google to create not just pages that you can view (iGoogle), but pages that you can share with everyone. Visitors can view the pages, registered users can create/edit stuff. [I’ll have a better review of the functionality after I get a Google Site up and running]

So what? So you can now use Google to search, create docs, create Web pages, share stuff, etc. etc. Nothing new here, right? These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…

Maybe they are.

I keep pointing people to this essay by George Dyson on Edge. In it, he says:

The books that have been written are easy. They represent the collective memory and imagination of mankind, and the technical resources now exist to deliver The Complete Works of Homo Sapiens, Unabridged. Who can argue against this? It is the realization of every librarian’s dream — unless you harbor suspicions about who is going to need librarians once the Universal Library has digested all the books… The Universal Library promises us a repository for the souls of all existing books — and the resurrection of all titles that have gone extinct. And the books that have not been written yet?

Emphasis mine.

The biggest library in the universe is the one of those works as yet to be written. Every year the Web sees the creation of more content than exists in the Library of Congress. I don’t want to discuss the relative value of those materials at this point. I’m just noticing that lots of people are adding lots of new stuff to “The Library” all the time.

And now Google has pushed out another service by which that content can be… manipulated? Captured? Serviced? Advertised? Searched? OK… whatever you want to call it. You can do it on Google.

So what? Some will ask. I can create a Web site on MySpace or WordPress or with a free, generic tool and a couple bucks on GoDaddy. It’s not that what Google is doing with Google Sites is particularly unique, it’s that it’s doing it in conjunction with everything else.

Creation, too, has a much bigger brand footprint than search, advertising, etc. When you create something, you put yourself into it. The Web becomes more “yours” when you create a Wikipedia entry or post a YouTube video. Or if you create a site with Google.

No prognostication on this post. Just observation. The world’s mightiest search/advertising engine is now even further into the business of creativity as well as findability. It’s the printing press for the Universal Future Library as well as the table of contents and advertiser.

It takes love over gold nd mind over matter
to do what you do that you must
when the things that you hold can fall and be shattered
or run through your fingers like dust.

Dire Straits, “Love Over Gold”

Kevin Kelly wrote a great post recently titled, “Better than Free.” In it, he makes the point that, “…when copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.” He asks the question, “…why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” He then goes on to list eight “generatives” (because they generate value) that are “better than free.” They are (and I’m going to shorten his description of each, and add my own little parenthetical tag that will make sense in a minute):

• Immediacy – Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset. [Get something for less of your time]
• Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot… As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. [Get something better that someone else has spent time on]
• Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. [Experts save you time]
• Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was indeed actually performed by the Dead. [Don’t waste time on fake crap]
• Accessibility – Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. [Timeliness]
• Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good… The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive. [This is a red herring as far as this discussion goes… more on that in a moment]
• Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect… The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something…. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. [patronage is based on the emotional/brand connection between buyer and seller; another red herring on this list, I think]
• Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. [Findability = value in less time]

What I noticed about Kelly’s list when I first read it is that all but two of these “generatives” map to some kind of time value as opposed to product value. And I believe that the two “red herrings” I noted above, while indeed “better than free,” aren’t related to the digital world, which is what Kelly’s main (and excellent) point is about. I think he should lose those two from the list. Why?

“Embodiment,” is actually the idea of something having a tangible, “non-free” value, without regard to the content, per se. I can create the wonderful, creamy, cottony book experience for an absolute crap novel, and the physical value of the leather, paper, gold trim, etc. will be the same as if I print a book I love the same way. Any value I place in the book I love vs. the crap novel is the same value that differentiates a free, digital copy of the two works.

Second, “patronage” is a value that works as well (or maybe even better) in the physical world as it does in the digital. The idea that a digital copy I pay an artist for, in order to support their work, has more value to me than one I steal is, indeed, true. But you cannot separate out the value of patronage from the overall value of the work, digital or otherwise. Users will get no “patronage value” from a piece of work that they detest. And they may, in fact, have a negative patronage experience if they support an artist, and then are burned by a bad product. In short, what I think I’m trying to say is, patronage only works as a value if someone was going to value something anyways.

So… of the eight, six are, I think, pretty directly related to the value of time. I’ve been talking about this with my advertising students for a couple of years now. In order to understand the history of advertising, you have to start with a point in time when there was almost *no* advertising. And why was there no advertising? Because people made almost everything they needed, and had very access to cash. In that environment (which accounts for most of the last 10,000 years of civilized-ish human economic history), real value almost always devolves to land, in one form or another. You live on the land, get your food from it, get wood and coal and metals from it, get water there, etc. etc. You can’t have a king without a kingdom, and the “dom” is the land.

Over the last 150 years or so, though, we’ve moved away from land-as-root-value. Yes, it’s still there, of course. As the man said, real estate is a good investment because they ain’t making any more of the stuff. But more and more frequently, those things with the most value have little connection to real property.

One definition of wealth I heard years ago and really liked was, “Wealth is a measure of excess food.” Right. If you have to spend 100% of your time hunting/gathering in order to barely survive, you are as poor as you can be and not be dead. Better control/ownership of the land and its uses provides better/more food for people, allowing them to do things like invent even better farming tools/techniques, be artists, lawyers, teachers, etc. The wealthier a society is, the less time/effort per capita is spent on food, giving people more time to do other stuff that can add to the quality of life.

Did you notice how we moved into “time” as a value even in that discussion? Society (everybody doing something) needs to produce food, or we die. Less time spent on food = more time for fun, games, medicine, music, etc. As soon as somebody figured out how a horse can plow the same plot of land and get more food off’n it, the equation changed from “land is the basis of all wealth,” to “technology that improves the land use is a good thing, too.”

Back to Kevin’s list. And to a discussion on Terra Nova about whether or not the theft of virtual items counts as theft. When we pin all our ideas about possessions, wealth, etc. on “stuff” (like land), then the idea of virtual theft is absurd. Of course the owner/publisher of the game can just “undo” the theft instance and give us back our virtual thing-a-ma-bob. That’s not the point. I’m not paying the publisher (or the advertiser) in order to have access to things; I’m “spending my time.” And that’s a phrase that, now, I think is hugely significant.

We live in an age when food is almost free. Or course, this is only true in those societies engaged in the kind of digital economics that Kevin talks about. Very few areas where starvation is a real issue are in any way worried about digital piracy and the value of free copies of content. But for those of us in the “Internet World,” food is very, very cheap; about 10-15% of household income for those of us in the middle class. And since most of us don’t rely on investment income from real estate (or other tangibles), but on wages… time, in a very real sense, ends up being equal to money for us.

But… that value may not be fungible, depending on how you measure it. If you peg your time back to your salary/wage, you end up with a dollar-per-hour calculation that can easily be compared to that of everyone else. Right? Fred makes $20/hour and Grace makes $40/hour, so her time is worth twice as much as his.

Or is it? Grace’s time is worth twice as much to the economy that determines wages based on the service provided. But is it worth twice as much to society in general? Or to their families? Suppose, after work, Fred spends 20 hours a week tutoring kids who need extra help with reading. He does this for free. Grace, on the other hand, watches TV. Nothing wrong with that. But aside from their hours spent working, can we say that an hour of Grace’s time watching the Food Channel is as valuable to society as an hour of Fred’s time improving the minds of our youth?

And, regardless of the value to society, can anybody but Fred or Grace determine the value of any given activity relative to their own time spent? And another and… can anyone place a value on time spent doing things that are universally acknowledged as having personal value, such as playing with one’s kids, going to church, loving up your honey, etc.? Meaning, is one hour of Grace’s time spent with her family any more or less valuable to her than an hour of Fred’s time spent with his?

We need a new way to think about value when much of what we are concerned with is how we spend our time, rather than how we spend our money. Kevin points out, wisely, that there are things we can do to add value to digital stuff that is easily copied. My view is that most of those “generative” qualities map to relative time-value of various activities. I value…

• Immediacy – Getting something in less time
• Personalization — Getting something someone else has spent time matching to my needs, rather than having to spend that time myself
• Interpretation — The time of experts
• Authenticity — Not wasting my time on stuff that will suck
• Accessibility – Being able to get something at any time
• Findability — Spending less time looking for something

In regards to virtual theft, then… someone who steals my virtual “stuff,” is actually robbing me of immediacy (if I can’t use it when I thought I could), authenticity (the “magic circle” of me thinking of my stuff as mine), accessibility (I can’t use it when I want), and “findability” (I may have to go back to the publisher for a new copy).

When I spend time on a digital asset, I’ve assigned value to it relative to anything else I might have done with that time. When somebody/something requires that I spend more time on something, they’ve robbed me. Thus, DRM that requires me to spend time fiddling around with various protection schemes is robbing me of my time-currency in order to help protect the digital security of some content. The fact that a song I buy on iTunes can’t be used on all my devices is a theft of immediacy, findability and accessibility.

Time is the new gold. We should work on ways of assigning and evaluating time-value that aren’t rooted in dirt, food and metals.

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betray’d to endless night
My world’s both parts, and oh both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it, if it must be drown’d no more.
But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; let their flames retire,
And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.

John Donne, The Holy Sonnets

————————————————————

There is an interesting discussion going on over at Terra Nova about the blurring of lines between virtual worlds and social networking spaces. This discussion is not new.

Is the distinction between “social networking space” (MySpace and Facebook being the current exemplars) and “virtual world” important? In a comment on the current post, Richard Bartle says:

10 years ago, an avatar was a graphical representation of a character in a virtual world. Textual worlds didn’t have a need for the concept, but graphical worlds did, so it arrived. However, the term was so often misused by people new to virtual worlds that nowadays the default meaning of “avatar” is “character”. This leaves a hole for what we had before as “avatar”, which seems to being filled by “toon”. The result is, though, that there’s a weaker connection between player and character.

I agree.

The fact that some similar things can happen in a virtual world and on a social networking site doesn’t mean that one is the other. And while mash-ups and APIs will almost certainly begin to overlay virtual worldiness onto social sites (and vice versa), there comes a point at which you have to say, “This, here, is a virtual world… and that, there, is not.”

Why should there be a distinction? I’ve argued recently that getting up into a user’s perceptual values is less than helpful. That people should be allowed to make, use, comment on and experience media in as many ways as possible, and in as many ways as they like. I’m not changing that stance here. I’m not arguing that many of the experiences on a social networking or in a virtual world are better or worse because of their location. Nor am I arguing against putting more social features into virtual worlds, or more worldiness into social spaces. Mashing is good for the system.

What I am saying, though, is that there is a line between communication and the sharing of experience. The threshold may be different for some people, but if there is little (or no) sharing of experience, I don’t think a space can be called “a world.”

This is not meant to be platform restrictive, either. You and I can build a virtual world together using email. I’ve played text RPG games via email where the players and game master built marvelously complex and rich worlds together. And while the entire experience was communicative, it wasn’t *only* communicative. If you asked any of the players about their characters, they would be able to describe not only the actual experiences of the game… but possibilities they considered and rejected, places that were only mentioned briefly in the text but were more meaningful in their minds, and relationships between characters that were “felt” rather than explicit.

Can any of this happen on, let’s say, Facebook? Well, someone could write a text RPG plugin for Facebook, certainly. And just like we played it using various email clients, the participants could have a great, text RPG experience using that plugin.

What that means, however, is not that Facebook is a virtual world. But that it hosts one. Our play-by-email games weren’t “the world of email.” They were the words of email, describing a world that could have been built using speech around a table, snail mail or a wiki.

To be blunt, the “virtual world” was embodied in the technology of text.

Facebook can host text, yes. So can MySpace. But they do other things, too. They are — and this is the main point of my longwindedness — in THE world. They can support or host virtual worlds, but they can’t BE one.

In contrast, Second Life or World of Warcraft are worlds. Why? Because when people interact there, it has to be “there.” They are together in an activity that is separate from the real world in at least one environmental sense.

I love open source stuff. Who can argue with free? And with the idea that a community of users can work on something they love and make it good and, in some cases, better than a corporate version. Good stuff. Unfortunately, sometimes the price of “free” is that you have to be an enthusiast in order to get stuff to work. And while that can be fun if you are, in fact, an enthusiast… the difference between “not worth my time” and “whoa! cool!” can be measured in frustration.

Two new services (new to me, anyway) help put the “easy” into “free.”

WinLibre bundles some of the best open source, desktop softare for Windows into one complete, customized download and install routine. You download one (pretty big… 151 MB) WinLibre setup file, choose the components you want, and BLAMO! they all get installed in one swell foop. Optional installs include Open Office, Firefox (and other free browsers), creativity software (Audacity, InkScape, Blender, Gimp), multimedia utilities and helpful Windows tools . A Mac version, MacLibre, is available, too.

On the Web front, JumpBox creates virtual machines that do easy installs for a number of popular, open source applications. I’ve installed a number of these “by hand” over the years (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki, PmWiki, MediaWiki and others), and it can be a royal pain. Others on the list I have tried… but couldn’t get past the steep learning curve for installation. JumpBox promises to make the process of installing web-side software that much easier. I haven’t tried it yet, but if I do, I’ll come back and let you know how it goes. It can’t be any harder than some of these installs (ahem… MediaWiki) are without support. There are currently 22 applications in the JumpBox library.

Previous post on open source, with list of additional free stuff.

Hey! It’s been at least a year since I coined a new, ridiculous term. So here it is: O-Cubes (as in O’s-to-the-third): Objective Oriented Objects. As per usual with the new term coinage, the aether fairly rings with the sound of, “What you talkin’ about, Havens?”

Anyone mildly familiar with programming (I qualify as “mildly” in the most mild interpretation of the word “mildly”) will know the term “Object Oriented Programming (OOP).” The basic idea behind OOP is that it’s easier to have chunks of code that can be fitted together in various ways as opposed to writing all programs from scratch. See? Mildly mild familiarity… The “objects” in OOP are code routines. Not actual objects, of course. For O-Cubes I’m using the term “objects” with reference to rendered, 3D objects for use in games, virtual worlds, design, architecture, art, etc.

I had read somewhere else, but was reminded today, of a new 3D program called Dryad out of Stanford. The purpose of Dryad is to allow users to create virtual 3D trees using an intuitive, “game-y” interface. If you’ve ever done any 3D design, even with great programs, you know that designing 3D objects is, at best, a delicious pain.

In OOP, the assumption is that programmers want to start with reasonably discreet, meaningful chunks of programs, rather than from first-order tools. With something like Dryad, the assumption begins with, “Users want to create a tree that looks something like a tree, but with lots of options.” That’s a good assumption. I can’t ever remember wanting to create a 3D image of a tree and thinking, “I hope it comes out looking like a Swiss Army Knife.”

In standard 3D programs, you often start with what are sometimes called “prims.” Which is short for “primitive,” meaning “primitive geometric shape.” Depending on the program, there can be lots or a few prims, and the tools to modify them range from simply (grow, rotate, stretch) to complex (combine, extrude, bevel). But, in the end, anything you build is made from lots of wee cubes, toroids, pyramids, etc., all woven together carefully over a loooong period of time.

What many users (me) often do, is search for a finished 3D object (from a royalty free collection, of course) that is close to what is needed, and then modify (mod) it. You want a blue, 1940’s style sports car? Find a green 1960’s style one and mess around with it. Much easier than primming a car from scratch.

Which is, essentially, what Dryad is doing: providing base forms to mod. They’re just doing it on purpose, and with a specific end form in mind. I would call this a basic O-Cube: you have an objective (”I want a big, bushy red tree”), and the objects presented to you are oriented towards that.

Users of Second Life will be familiar with the in-game tool that lets you create very specific, highly customized avatars. You can change, simply by manipulating a couple dozen sliders, body shapes and sizes in an endless variety of ways. One slider, for example, will control leg length. Move it to the left, longer legs; to the right, shorter ones. The same goes for, as I said, dozens of other features: head, shoulders, knees (you can make them knocked or bowed) and toes (big or small feet). Further manipulation is possible by layering flat images (textures) on your avatar, both for clothes and “skins” (basically, clothes that are under all the other clothes). So, with almost no training, a player can create an avatar that looks like… well, just about anyone. This kind of avatar is another example of an O-Cube, of course. And I’m going to call the tools that allow you to create avatars (SL) and trees (Dryad) “O-Cube Extruders.” Yeah. That’s really odd and unsexy. Should catch right on.

But then, in Second Life, if you want to create anything else… it’s back to pyramids, blocks, spheres, etc. In 20 minutes a design novice can create a person-figure that looks a lot like Albert Einstein. But in 20 hours, an Albert Einstein couldn’t create a decent looking boat. Or car. Or shoe. Or tree.

Making the design of 3D objects *part* of the game is the next step in creating more interesting, compelling virtual reality spaces, I believe. I’d love to build my own wonderful, specific, creative house in Second Life. I just don’t want to do it from blocks.

Is this the “dumbing down” of design? It depends on what level you examine the term “design.” I haven’t ever made my own paint from minerals and oils. But I have painted. Is that a dumbing down of the painting process? Same for graphic design: I use programs like Photoshop and InDesign. They are highly object oriented, in many cases.

Imagine a virtual world where there were “Dryads” for hundreds or thousands of objects. You want your in-game house to be a giant aquarium? Great. Rather than design 100 different fish pets from scratch, start with the Fish-o-matic.

What someone should design is a virtual world where the tools to make O-Cube extractors are provided. Sliders to control what the sliders control. That way non-programmers (and non designers) can create the things that they (and others) can then use to create things. Which will then populate the virtual worlds.

If that sounds far-fetched to you, try Second Life just long enough to mess around with the avatar creation tool. It feels very intuitive and is a bunch of fun. Now imagine being able to have that much control over all kinds of stuff.

Fun.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
– H.M. Warner (Warner Brothers), 1927

Let’s agree on one thing: different is different. Fine. That’s pretty straightforward. But to say something is better or worse — without giving some context — because it’s different… is ignorant.

Recently, David Lynch had a little video moment about how watching a movie on your (”fucking”) phone is, in his words, “a sadness.” He says that you can’t “experience” the film on your phone. “You’ll think you have experienced it, buy you’ll be cheated.” The video’s been around the ‘net and parodied, etc. Here’s my favorite version:

Now… if you watch this YouTube video of an iPhone playing the video, rather than the original, and you think you’ve seen it, you’re wrong. You may think you’ve experienced the 30 second interview with Lynch, but you’re being cheated. My appologies.

If Lynch’s obvious point is that films are created with an original intention that they be watched on a large screen, and that watching them on a much smaller screen is different… well, ok. That’s fine. The experiences are, clearly, different.

But couldn’t we say the same thing about watching films on TV? Or on the 8-of-12 screens at my local multiplex that are, frankly, way too small to be considered movie screens? The ones only about as wide as 10 seats. That’s not a movie; that’s a really big TV. You wanna see “Lawrence of Arabia,” you should have to turn your head a little, even from half-way back in the theater.

Couldn’t we say the same thing about eating while watching a film? The creators didn’t write, direct, produce and perform the film with the thought, “I wonder how this will look and sound while someone is slupring Diet Sprite and mawing down a 2 lb. bag of Goobers.” We could say the same thing about seeing the movie while drunk, stoned or tired. I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of films in theaters, and I’ve fallen asleep for a moment or two a few times. Have I been cheated?

What if I don’t understand the references in a movie? Either actual ones (vocabulary, history, geography) or tangential ones (art, cinematography, culture)? Am I being cheated if I don’t “get” all the funky allusions in a Tarantino picture?

Follow this out far enough, and I don’t think I can experience a David Lynch film uncheated… unless I’m David Lynch. He seems like a nice enough guy, sure… but I think my wife would be surprised if he showed up in the kitchen at 7 am tomorrow.

Who decides? In the creation of art, the author does, obviously. A writer or director or actor makes innumerable decisions about what to edit from any moment of a piece. You (often/usually) can’t go back and ask for the early drafts or takes. You get what is put forward as the final piece.

But from there, it’s up to you to decide. Do you power-read a book of Yeats’ poetry so that you have a vague familiarity with it? Or do you spend some good, quiet time with each piece? Or do you read some background history on the work so that you can put it into a biographical and cultural context? That’s up to you.

“You’ll think you have experienced it” may be the most egotistical remark I’ve heard thus far this year.

Update: Another iteration. Thanks m_m:

If you’ve never been active on a bulletin board (especially one related to games), you will find these to be random, silly, obnoxious, foul and pointless. If you have been active on a board, you will find them random, silly, obnoxious, foul, hysterical and on-the-money.

Many, many kudos for the first (that I’m aware of) anthropomorphizing of a captcha.

Internet Commenter Business Meeting

The sequel

So the drawing game my son and I started with "My Team, Your Team" (MTYT), was turned into the site/blog "The Superest" by professional artists, and from there became the open MTYT blog, "Bayou Battle."

It’s an interesting progression, from an activity/skills perspective. The original game was played on paper (the back of Bob Evans placemats, to start) with crayons, and so the skills involved were imagination (of course), drawing and tactics. Those same skills are used by the artists at The Superest, to which they add whatever necessary technical skills blog creation/operation require. We might include some PHP or SQL knowledge, the ability to design the site (it looks real nice, eh?), some promotional skills involved in getting folks involved, the digital art skills that you need to either create a picture for the web or get it there, etc. A whole buncha stuff.

But they still involve drawing. And, since The Superest guys are artists, pretty dang good drawing. Better than I can do, for sure. Give my boy a few years and he might catch up. But me? I’m a hack. I’m a crafty guy, but certainly no artist.

Enter Bayou Battle.

The highest compliment an egoist such as myself can pay to an idea is, "I should have thought of that." Well, when it comes to Bayou Battle… I should have thought of that. It’s a mashup of MTYM and LOL cats. Rather than start pictures from scratch… start w/ a web graphic, maybe Photoshop it a bit, add a caption (or, in the case of MTYM, a description of your power), and voila! MTYM for the MySpace age.

So… looking forward. What I’d love to see is a Facebook or MyPage applet that lets you play MTYM with your friends, back-and-forth on your profile pages. So if anyone here is that kind of creative, get crackin’! Just remember to send some link love back to Tinker, eh.

All of this being another (small) chapter in the book relating to what you need to know to thrive in the networked world. If you haven’t read the MacArthur white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," do it now. I mean it. Right now. I can’t stress strongly enough the importance of this piece.

According to Henry Jenkins (the primary author, blog here), the new skills required to flourish in a culture of participationare:

• Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery 
• Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes 
• Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content 
• Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details. 
• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities 
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal 
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources 
• Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities 
• Networking— the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information 
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities,discerning and respecting multiple perspectives,and grasping and following alternative norms. 

As far as these Skills 2.0 go, the original MTYM promoted play (for sure) and (possibly) performance, in a fuzzy sense of the word. Add in the requirements for The Superest, and you’ve got simulation (drawing that moves from pen-to-web), distributed cognition (understanding the web/blog tools necessary to put the pics "out there"), collective intelligence (you need at least two players) and networking (duh). Bayou Battle takes that and adds appropriation (modding pics), transmedia navigation (finding pics in places other than the original blog/site), and (probably) negotiation, since it is an open blog.

I find this absolutely fascinating. And not just because me and the boy came up with the original game. That’s just a good excuse for why I’m paying attention to this nanomeme. It makes me wonder what would happen if teachers took any learning activity and tried, consciously, to adapt it such that it addressed as many of the above skills as possible. If something as simple as MTYT can move so fluidly and effortlessly into 2.0-Land, what would happen if someone with real pedagogical chops took a swing at the classic curricula?

Makes me wonder what I could do with TaleWeaver to turn it all 2.0-y.  

For a long time, there’s been speculation about why video phones haven’t really "caught on." Maybe it’s because we like to answer the phone without brushing our hair. Maybe it’s because there are not enough other people that have it. Maybe it’s because the idea of a telemarketer seeing me *at all* is somewhat terrifying.

I think partly it’s because there hasn’t been a "killer connectivity" issue related to one-to-one video conferencing. Yes, there are web cams. And they’re still largely being used by bleeding-edge types, or by businesses with an interest. Absent a desire to connect with another, specific person… as of yet, there isn’t a really good reason why an individual consumer might say, "Yeah. I need that."

Until — maybe — now.

Arsenal Interactive has announced "HeyCosmo," an online Texas Hold’em poker plug-in for Facebook, complete w/ webcam support. So you can see the other people you’re playing poker with (up to 10), join new games and watch other games.

Poker is one of the few games that’s; A) wicked popular, and, B) is actually improved by face-to-face play. I’m sorry… it may be more fun to play sudoku cooperatively, but I’m pretty sure that being able to vid yer opponent’s mug won’t significantly affect the gameplay. Poker, though? The psychology of the game is a huge part of it… in real life. And while webcam support doesn’t provide all the benefits of live play — you won’t catch your opponents’ tells if they’re below the neck — it will, I suspect, add to the fun and playability for many players.

Combine that with the fact that Facebook already has a couple bjillion users who already know each other… and this might be the moment that webcam stuff takes off for the masses.

I am fantastically and wonderfully glad (and proud) to announce that the game my son and I made up one night at Bob Evans on the back of a paper menu has a site devoted to its play.

Check out: TheSuperest.com

An ongoing match of My Team, Your Team. 

These are actual artists, people. Which is scary. I don’t know if my powers of superness will be super enough to be superest…

Truly spectacular props to the creators, Kevin Cornell and Matthew Sutter. These guys are funny, smart and Dan and I will totally kick their BUTTS if they just come to Ohio and sit down in a greasy spoon w/ us over a plate of eggs and sausage gravy.

My next thought is that a site where anybody can create an account and link to Flickr pics (or whatever) with indications of who they "beat" w/ that picture. We’ll see…. Hmmm….

Anyway, my thanks to Kevin and Matthew for propogating the joy that is My Team, Your Team. And may the best toon win. 

[nsfww = not safe for wussie work. There’s no porn here, but I will be using words like "shit," "crap" and "piss." You, your boss, the camera above your desk and the NSA have been warned] 

I have lots of arguments with people about the boundaries of crap.

Crap is the stuff that you don’t want to qualify as valuable or worth any effort at a particular moment. It’s not necessarily an insult. I often talk about "all my great crap," or, "the kind of crap you can get from Archie McPhee," or, "the bunch of crap left over after brunch… help youself."

Crap is not shit. If something is "shit," it’s worthless. As opposed to "the shit," which is roughly synonymous with my childhood, Boston slang term, "wicked pissah." In certain parts of New York (where I’ve spent a bunch o’ time), a "pisser" is also a good thing. "That Kenny… funny guy. His party last night was a pisser." Also, a "piss-cutter" can be good thing. I guess if something is strong enough to cut piss, it must be good. Yet "not giving a shit" and "being pissed off" are bad things. So… where are we on the relative value of bodily function metaphor? I won’t even start on f**k, as we all know that it now means everything and nothing.

But back to crap.

I have friends who think modern art is crap. Some think science fiction is crap, while others love it and think the term "sci-fi" is crap. Personally, I love Star Wars Episodes 4-6, and think that 1-3 are crap.

Mostly, though, the argument I hear is that "all this user created content on the Web is crap." When I point out that most of the professionally created content on the Web, on TV, in magazines, etc. is crap, too… I usually get a shrug and the reply, "Yeah. I suppose so. But there’s so much more crap on the Web."

My point about the relative positive/negative metaphoric value of words like crap, piss and f**k is that there is the same relative value placed on the crap itself. What is now part of the canon may once have been, from the point of view of authority, crap. This is not news. What also is not news is our sociological inability to cope with a fantastically different medium than the ones that have come before.

We see this in telco. Phones were the devils that would interrupt family time and cause people to lose the personal, face-to-face familiarity that is the all important glue of society. Never mind that we’d been writing letters for a couple thousand years. Letters good (thoughtful, intelligent, educated prose), phones bad (conversational, immediate, pedestrian). Then cell phones were bad because they’d do the same thing in public. Then they weren’t. Now people are complaining about Blackberries and other portable email readers. Give it five years, folks. The ettiquette will work itself out.

So there’s lots of stuff on the Web. And much of it (like this blog) is "amateur" content; ie, nobody pays us. Much of it is also, by traditional standards of authority, crap. Of course it is. To claim that most MySpace pages, YouTube videos or eBay items are anything but crap would be nonsensical. I’m not saying that they aren’t crap.

I’m saying that crap is OK. And that may be what the canonical guardians of traditional media are really afraid of finding out. That for many people, well… we like the crap. Yes, yes… required statement about the value of classics goes here. I’m a Lit Major, for the love of Proust. I read "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu" in French. I’ve written 20-page essays on "The Wasteland." I’ve read Dickens that wasn’t a course requirement. I like classical music.

But I also like web comics. Which wouldn’t have existed without, well… the Web. Comics like (in no partiklar order):

• Cat and Girl
• XKCD
• Red Meat
• Homestar Runner
• Savage Chickens
• 30 Second Bunnies Theater Library
• Fredo and Pid’jin (Two Evil Pigeons, One World to Destroy)
• Gaping Void
• Indexed
• Dinosaur Comics

There are many more. OK, two of the above (Homestar and Bunny Theater) aren’t comics, per se, but cartoons; animation. So sue me. I love ‘em and they’re on my list.

My crap list 

Some will argue that a few (or all) of the above are the work of professionals. Just like reading the NYT on the Web, it’s OK. It’s not the medium that’s crap, it’s the bjillions of messages. But without the bjillions, there’s no Web. And if they couldn’t blog, post, comment and connect… they wouldn’t have spawned the messages above.

The medium is the message. And the medium now includes everyone. And you don’t get your crap without it being mixed in with everyone else’s. As I’ve said before, there’s not such thing as "user created content." Everybody is now a user. Stop worrying about it and enjoy.