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.

I recently blogged about the value of virtual stuff in virtual worlds and games, and (tangentially) on gold farming (also called RMT, the Real Money Trade). Again, for the uninitiated, gold farming involves playing a game to earn in-game wealth or stuff, and then selling it to other players for real world money.

After having written that post, I read an MMOG Nation post on “Gold and the Perfect Game.” An interesting, quick review of the theory that gold farming is the result of bad game design. In short, if a game requires you to do non-fun stuff — so non-fun that you’d rather pay someone else to do it for you — then the game is inherently flawed.

I tend to agree, but maybe not for the same reasons, and maybe not with the same conclusions.

I’ve been reading fantasy lit since about the 3rd grade, when I first read the Narnia series. After that, it was all the classics, including Tokein, Ursula K. LeGuinn, Terry Goodkind, Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony, etc. etc. Dozens of series and, if you get into individual works, hundreds of books with some kind of fantasy theme.  And, at the moment, I am hard pressed to think of one where growing the wealth of the main character played a major role.

There are also danged few examples of stories where the quality of weapons/armor played a major role. Yes, Arthur needs Excalibur and the hobbits enjoy the use of their mithril armor… but those aren’t things that are bought in a store or traded for at a market. They are important narrative elements that come about after key plot points.

Now, in an MMO, not everyone can be Aragorn, Gimli, Gandalf, etc. Levels (earned in experience points) and gear (earned sometimes, bought sometimes) are the ways you know you’ve moved your character forward and are slightly more Aragornish than your buddy, Stan. Gold farming subverts that system, obviously, by letting you use real world money as a stand-in for in game activities.

But, again… when was the last time you saw ANY adventure story where the good guys needed to hang out and farm, mine, etc. until they had enough dough to upgrade their junk? Money itself is rarely mentioned, and when it is, it’s usually bad guys trying to make tons of it at the expense of good people, who are more interested in honor, culture, getting it on with the heroine, etc.

So what would an MMO without any gold look like? For that matter, what would an MMO with no specialized gear look like?

It would look more like a good story, I think.  Which is, of course, harder.

Take away gold and gear and you’re left with experience points and levels, and I’m fine with that. How would something like that play?

• Levels account for 100% of the damage you do with un-spelled weapons
• Spells that improve weapons would have to be on-the-spot spells, either self-cast, or by a party member. For example, your mage casts “burning” on your regular sword and then, ta-da, it’s a burning sword. More spells or more instances are only available at higher levels, or at the cost of not being able to cast other stuff.
• Same for armor. Assume that everyone can afford good, basic armor. Make it a choice between better protection that slows you down, or lighter protection that’s more flexible. Spells to affect durability and effects as per above.
• If you really want some “stuff” that signifies “I’m more bad ass,” then link it to a quest required to get a certain level. That is, to become a level 10 healer, you have to do XYZ, and are then given the staff of XYZ… that does nothing, except be a staff that shows you’re level 10. Can you give it away? Sure… but why would you?
• Make healing basically free (so you don’t need to buy potions), but have the places where you can do it somewhat off-the-path from where the quests are. I don’t mean a half-hour trek back to down for some water of life… but don’t put them within combat-duration distance of the combat. You want to heal in the thick of it? Bring a healer.

Now, you’re thinking, “But folks could still pay somebody to level their character up.” Sure, that’s always going to be a possibility. But what if part of what happened at the lower levels was real, actual training that carried over into higher levels? Essentially, some arcade elements that ramp up, such that if you jumped in at Level 20, you’d have no experience doing [the thing] that’s necessary to unlock higher order effects.

I don’t know. Some people like the grind, farming, mining, crafting, etc. And a game that made those things more a centerpiece of the action might also discourage RMT. But, for me, a game where I didn’t have to worry about gold and gear would be a bunch more fun.

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.

Todays journey of metaphoric bliss: Alzheimer, buses, jewelry, YouTube.

Patients with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive troubles who wander out of their nursing homes are a danger to themselves, of course. And with short-term memory issues, folks can go as little as a block away and then forget how to get back or why they’re out. To help with this, some German nursing homes have put “phantom” bus stops outside their facilities. Patients remember the distinctive look of the bus stops and associate it with “going home.” So they stop, rest, and the workers from the home come and get them (link).

Paco Underhill did absolutely groundbreaking work in the science of retail shopping behaviors. The New York Times called him, “the anthropologist of the dressing room.” He wrote “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,” (Google, WorldCat) and has consulted all over the place. In a 1996 NewYorker article (by Malcom Gladwell, no less), titled “The Science of Shopping,” the concept of the “butt brush” theory is discussed. Full article here.

The quote that I’m most interested in today, though, is, “…the likelihood of a woman being converted from a shopper to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being brushed on her behind while she’s examining merchandise.” Which is the explanation for giant, wide aisles around the jewelry, perfume and watch displays in stores like Lord and Taylor, Macy’s, etc. When pondering a pretty purchase, we get into a kind of dreamy, fugue state. Being bumped on the behind takes us out of that state and puts us back into the reality of, “Holy crap… that watch costs as much as three car payments.”

[Note: I share this story with all my marketing and advertising students, male and female. It's a good trick, and not just for guys with wives and girlfriends. Men go into this same state, I believe, when shopping for power tools, HDTVs, boats, video games, etc. My non-scientific assumption, though, is that men are more likely to break out of Shopper's Fugue if you bump them in the testicles.]

What’s the connection to degenerative brain disorders and shopping for jewelry? Well… let’s move on to YouTube.

Douglas Galbi, over at the ever-intelligent and interesting “purple motes” blog, has an excellent recent post titled, “Stories largely missing in online video.” His conclusion, after going over some good stats, is that online video is not successful in telling stories. While I agree with him that the “short form” video — with YouTube as its major example — isn’t doing much storytelling, I’m going to point out some details that, I think, are important with regards to online viewing habits.

First, Doug is 100% right that the majority of YouTube videos are short, and a large percentage are repurposed  music videos that, in the past, would have run on MTV or VH1 or a similar network. A research study I was involved with at my day job provided much the same insight (”The YouTube Phenomenon,” page 2-16 of “Our Social Spaces,” from “Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.”) Our survey indicated that 49% of the top 100 YouTube videos were music videos. Also, 63% of the top 100 videos were “professional,” in nature. This segment of the material is clearly not “user created content,” but maybe best described as “user uploaded.”

Doug also points out that online video viewing time only amounts to 3% of traditional TV viewing time. When considering this, lets remember that TV is, and has been for 50 years, the dominant communication medium in our country. It’s only over the past few years that even a decent minority of the U.S. population (23.3% as of December 2007, according to the OECD) has access to broadband Internet service, which is pretty much a requirement for watching online video.

My two points, and they relate back to comfort — which relates to bus stops and butt touching –  are simply as follows.

First, we currently regard TV as, largely, a “comfort medium.” We sit down to watch, don’t interact much, and enjoy it largely as entertainment. There are good stories on TV, yes. Because stories are a big part of how we like to be entertained, especially in “comfort” mode. I would remind my several readers, however, that lots and lots of TV is also “short form” entertainment, lacking in real storytelling elements. We have talk shows, sports, game shows, reality TV, news, weather and informational shows that don’t have traditional narrative. And many of these have parallel elements in Web video. I just watched, for example, Clinton’s “campaign suspension” speech on the NYT site. It was very, very nice to have the transcript and a TOC right next to the video. I think that as more online video becomes nested within other activities, it will gain more usage. I also think that as broadband becomes more the norm, non-narrative video will seem much more natural online, both in aggregate and compared to TV viewing.

As to when we’ll get more narrative, storytelling content on the Web… well, it’s starting. Hulu provides free (ad supported) access to narrative TV and movies. I missed an episode of Battlestar Gallactica a few weeks ago and watched the hour-long show on the SciFi channel’s site to make up for my DVR behaving badly. I now have a desk chair in my home office for working on the computer… and a comfy chair nearby for relaxing and watching DVDs and long Web-videos. But, even when I choose to watch long-form video on my computer, there are issues. My spam-blocker, anti-virus software pops up in front of the movie screen and tells me it’s finished updating and update. Super. My IM pings, unless I’ve remembered to turn it off. My screen saver kicks in sometimes. Geez. I’m trying to watch TV on my computer and it keeps behaving like a computer.

The boundaries are melting. Slowly, yes. I agree with Doug that, at the moment, there’s not a lot of storytelling going on specifically within online video. I do think, though, that it’s beginning. And, also, that many online “stories” have video as one element, with other media embedding video as part of the story.

We like our comfort zones, and TV is a *HUGE* comfort zone for Americans. We head to the bus stop of our La-Z-Boy lounger because it means, “Here there be relaxation.” Major changes in how we watch long-form video will take time, and will require computers to become something other than “working machines,” and to stop touching us on our collective butts when we’re trying to enjoy a story.

[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.

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.

Fascinating post titled, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” at Fast Company. In it, author Clive Thompson focuses on work done by Duncan Watts (a Columbia U. network-theory scientist on sabbatical to do work for Yahoo!) that shows how trends move through society. Contrary to the work of Malcom Gladwell, who wrote “The Tipping Point,” and who posits the importance of “Influentials” in establishing trends, Thompson’s research suggests that anybody can be the “spark” that ignites a conflagration of popularity. In fact, one of his research projects points to the almost random nature of hits:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song’s merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had “social influence”: Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another’s opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here’s the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs–and the bottom ones–were completely different. For example, the song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song’s success seemed to be due to merit. “In general, the ‘best’ songs never do very badly, and the ‘worst’ songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible,” he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

Yikes. The reaction of older music industry executives, in Watt’s words, was, “They were all like, ‘I think it’s bullshit. I’m still going to go with my gut,’” he recalls. “And I’m like, Okay, good luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

This reminds me, a bit, of the reaction of old-school baseball scouts in Michael Lewis’, “Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game.” From the New Yorker editorial review:

The Oakland Athletics have reached the post-season playoffs three years in a row, even though they spend just one dollar for every three that the New York Yankees spend. Their secret, as Lewis’s lively account demonstrates, is not on the field but in the front office, in the shape of the general manager, Billy Beane. Unable to afford the star hires of his big-spending rivals, Beane disdains the received wisdom about what makes a player valuable, and has a passion for neglected statistics that reveal how runs are really scored.

Lewis wrote about how old-school scouts woud go out and pick players based on some basic, observed phenomenon — batting skills, running ability, etc. — and then go with, essentially, a hunch based on which ones looked “the best.” This is, to my mind, akin to looking for these Influencers that Gladwell and others insist are important to the hit making (ha ha) process. What Billy Beane found, though, was that all kinds of other stats were a better indicator of how well a player would perform as part of a team and contribute to scoring and, thus, wins.

I’m in a funny place, here. Because, on the one hand, I believe in the power of powerful ideas, influences and influencers. We’ve seen how trends can catch on based on support from a powerful patron like Oprah. But…

I’m also an old-school ad man. When I read about WoMM and how important it is to generate buzz… I can agree that, yes… it *seems* sensible. Let’s try to get people who have influence to be excited about your product. But I also know, from having managed hundreds of marketing campaigns, that when you do the same, smart, old, right stuff… it just works. All other things being equal, for example, I’ve found that frequency beats size in print advertising. If you have the choice of placing 20 half-page ads vs. 10 full-page ads… take the 20 smaller ones. Why? The stopping power of an ad isn’t important if nobody sees it, and people have to see your ad multiple times in order to even register the dang thing. Breakthrough creative is great… but you can’t budget for it. Make your ad solid, get the basics right, and flog it like mad.

There’s another post in here somewhere too… something about how the Wisdom of Crowds is more like the Random Influence of Crowds.

My title for this post reflects the possibility that while the Long Tail is great for finding interesting, niche stuff… the head of that curve is governed less by quality and influence than by… chance. If that’s the case, then chance favors the prepared, I believe. And being prepared seems to have more to do, if Watt’s is right, with playing to the bleachers as opposed to the box seats.

God, I love mixing metaphors.

Books and articles by Duncan Watts:

Watts, Duncan J. “A Twenty-First Century Science.” Nature. 445. 7127 (2007): 489.

Watts, Duncan J. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton studies in complexity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Adamic, L. “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Duncan J Watts.” NATURE -LONDON-. 6929 (2003): 265.

Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton, 2003.

Watts, Duncan J. “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon.” The American Journal of Sociology. 105. 2 (1999): 493.

Kossinets, Gueorgi, and Duncan J Watts. “Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network.” Science. 311. 5757 (2006): 88.

Citation HTML generated by WorldCat Lists. 

For the record, I think Kevin Kelly is a genius and often am extremely gratified to find him exploring weird, wild areas of technology and the mind. Even when I disagree with him, it’s usually on small points or on wording.

In his latest post on The Technium, though… I just think he’s wrong and oddly so, to boot. Read the post, so I don’t have to paraphrase it too much, here. It’s short. I’ll wait…

So, where is he wrong? Well, let’s start with the idea that computer scientists are more comfortable with technological change because, “They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers.” Really? There are computers designing computers and writing code? There are robots building robots? I haven’t seen much of that.

What I’ve seen is that computer scientists use computers in their daily business, and that computers do more tasks than they used to. But not tasks that used to be done by CS folks. The scientists are doing the same tasks, just with more complex, robust and cheaper tools.

I also haven’t ever seen good art created by a computer or good poetry or fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) written by a computer. But many artists, designers and writers absolutely embrace technology because the tools are just so flippin’ helpful. The writers I know love word processors, for example, and the spell-checking, note-taking, formatting functions now available. I don’t in any way begrudge my computer the ability to look up spelling much quicker than I did with a dictionary back in college. Yet there isn’t a computer out there that could, as of yet, write this blog post.

Same with designers. Those of you out there with a graphic arts background, especially those who have come-of-age in the last 15 years or so, will understand why “Photoshop is God” is a popular phrase. Does the computer do a better job at some mundane (and elegant) tasks associated with design? Hell, yes. Doing layout with InDesign or Quark Xpress is hundreds of times faster, easier and better than using the old paper layout methods. But a computer has yet to design a great piece of packaging or ad or children’s book illustration.

In some cases, I think this is the opposite of what Kelly is saying. As a writer (and sometimes designer), I have absolutely no fear of adopting new technology, because I think it’s impossible (or at least waaay down the road) for a computer to “do” what is at the heart of what I do: create. I’d put many musicians and film makers in this bucket, too. Again… I don’t see any films being made by computers, but the movie industry is moving the tech ahead in many cases.

And about doctors… I’m not sure what docs Kelly is working with, but most of the ones I know are huge tech nuts; they love they new toys. The digital distribution of records and labs is something they *rave* about when I talk to them. Scans of X-rays go on the hospital computer system and show up on the computer screen in the patient’s room, maybe even across town, in minutes rather than hours. MRI and CAT scan tech relies incredibly on computer power, obviously. Genetic engineering of drugs is almost impossible without computers. Maybe there are some good ol’ GPs who don’t want to computerize their bills… but I think this is a micro-example of a pain-in-the-ass system that nobody even likes the old way, so they don’t want to spend time on it.

In short… I think this is just a weird argument. When computer technology disrupts your job to the point that you are totally disintermediated –  take, for example, the guys at the print shop who used to cut film — you aren’t, I think, going to be thrilled about it… but, to be successful, you may have to get on board. But there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll go the other direction and be pissed off. On the other hand, if computers make your job easier, you’ll probably be OK with them in other instances, sure.

Oh… and I know some UNIX grey-beards who absolutely resent new computer technology. They liked being part of a small, elite band of brothers who understood computers when they were big and important and separate. Now that there’s a computer in my cell phone, and kids can mash-up aps on the Web, they feel a bit massintermediated.

Turing proposed a computer that was indistinguishable from a person in a conversation. In Kelly’s examples, he seems to be talking about our tech (computers in this case) besting us on particular tasks. Well, that’s been happening  since spear-throwers came along. John Henry died trying to beat the steam drill. I’d die trying to beat a spell checker. Just because I respect a tool’s ability to multiply my value doesn’t mean I think it’s likely to replace my value.