Every once in awhile I like to just sift through the grist that is being processed on the great wide interweb and take a gander at trends and events that feel like they are going to be important building blocks in the near future.
To this I add a first level of links that allow further exploration of what this technology is about and what it is linked to:
So we have a new way to manipulate data that allows a different insight to emerge from massive amounts of information.
The television series CSI and its geographical offshoots have always pushed technological advances with their fancy computer graphics, image enhancing and hand or voice controlled computer displays. Now we see the next steps. One truism that has prevailed from the early days of computer use is that the greater the capacity of the system the larger and more sophisticated projects than can then be undertaken. There’s a problem in the programming industry with its much larger programs and applications where the coder/developer can no longer hold the whole picture in their mind. These two tools alone have implications for that entire paradigm.
The charge into Cyberspace has been blunted by technology that is not up to the word and idea visions of William Gibson et al nor the movie maker’s spin ala the Matrix.
Technological advancements are accelerating and convergence is a growing force. My smartphone is the end result of this convergence. The former incarnation required a large physical box connected to a wire based network, a camera, a video camera, a library, a typewriter, an entire postal system, a boombox, a tape recorder, a bookstore, a video store plus many, many more separate systems and infrastructures.
A lazy Sunday that has brought some new insights to my daily ruminations. To sum up I wish to drag you a bit sideways into my mind space and I offer as a final tidbit this piece:
one of the lectures i’ve been watching recently on the video lectures site (see blogroll for link to their homepage) features a young eastern european guy who’s been working in conceptualising the dynamics of the web, the evolution of networks/ links, and how ideas or topics spread through networks.
it’s one of several on the topic of social media and theorising or graphically representing social networks, sentiment analysis, and so on. they are not as professional as those on TED, featuring presentations from conferences all over the world, and so to some extent you need to check out the ratings given by other viewers to determine whether the lecture is going to be rivetting or not…
a good resource anyway.
[future iPads] “…less of a giant iPhone for old people.”
Well…somebody’s kid; publishing their review–574 views and counting.
Another millenial’s view.
Comment. Them younger peeps want me some robust gadgets and they want it all now!
iPad will be a big hit. However, as an Apple user for 25+ years, and as a casual observer of Apple, I know enough to wait for the second generation to arrive. This will happen in 12-18 months. I haven’t checked out the full specs, so I’m hoping that its flash drive storage can be augmented via USB. The only other requirement for me personally would be that it can display Adobe Acrobat. This would allow me to read scholarly papers while horizontal. I don’t know why Apple hasn’t licensed Adobe Flash, although I could go and find out. Maybe some combination of dollars and security figure into this odd deficit.
Materiality is the main factor in the difference in affordances between screen and page.
Reading online is becoming quite common and required for many research projects and in academia. Dissertations submitted for marking at many universities are done electronically and sent to markers in PDF form. Amazon has been offering books in Kindle format for some time. Yet paper-based books continue to be published and sold.
‘Materiality’ here pertains to the discrete object which is the tactile and separate artefact having printed text and diagrams on the surface of separate pages. It is distinct from the published or written or graphic work which can be saved in a file in a computer. Although laptops and computer hardware in general are artefacts and material objects that can be transported, their affordances lie in the amount or quantity of files and texts which can be stored on the one hard drive. At the time of writing these are still somewhat heavy and unwieldy so that they are difficult to read in bed or put in one’s pocket for example. However, even with advances in technology that allow small lightweight personal readers such as Kindle to be manufactured and thus easily transported, there are still differences in the affordances of each modality that lend the book and paper magazine their continuing allure.
Now we have the prospect of Apple releasing their iSlate, a small transportable mobile phone enhanced reader – and one might also guess (hope) further enhanced with the capabilities that Han earlier introduced, that is to say, touch screen interfacing.
Here’s one of the latest rumour milling-abouts from Wired: [btw, sorry, but the taped interview is in french - the article tho is in english]
In Lanier’s eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn’t expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That’s not a crazy idea, but it’s just Lanier’s hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today’s theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.
There’s also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn’t found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: “We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it’s accessed.” Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don’t see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.
Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.
The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn’t want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It’s time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.
Lanier appeared on PBS’s News Hour this week. My immediate impression was that he doesn’t have very developed television chops. In fact, I could personally relate to his rambling style and to his brave attempt to dare being expansive in the old medium. Lanier strikes a paradoxical position. On one hand he achieved one of the most public profiles of all those who could be said to represent the first wave of post-Mosaic web celebrity. (Howard Rheingold, Larry Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Meg Whitman, Sherry Turkle, and many many others achieved his kind of celebrity.) On the other hand, his pushing back against the ‘wild west’ of the internet is reactionary, is maybe even naive.
Mass behavior may be the most difficult-to-grasp impetus for internet trends. Being a social psychological phenomena, such behavior may especially befuddle the code warriors and technologists. That the behavioral and monetary costs have tended to depart from each other, with the former typified by how much time a user invests, while the latter in many examples approaches zero, do not constitute anything able to be put back in the box.
Take the example of music. The biggest challenge for the “sociopathic” consumer is managing their time, whereas the cost of content–in the world’s biggest record store–is already realized to be zero, free. Yet, at the same time, advertising space is utilized by, for example, global Fortune 100 companies in the form of pop-up and widgetized ads splashed at the very sites where the sociopathic takings are occurring.
The net.art generator automatically produces net.art on demand.
This version of the net.art generator creates images. The resulting image emerges as a collage of a number of images which have been collected on the WWW in relation to the ‘title’ you have chosen. The original material is processed in 12-14 randomly chosen and combined steps.
The net.art generator was programmed by Panos Galanis from IAP GmbH, Hamburg, and was a commission by the Volksfürsorge art collection.
I did spend hours judging my own “luck of the draw.” This was very enjoyable. As a collagist and digital artist, I reckon the Galanis Generator is the best of the current lot. It occupies a gray area because its procedure appropriates random material via google, and, by definition, derives kitsch product. Yet, results could be passed off as being the result of craft, even artistic, skills.
(I did do some futzing with the raw collages using Photoshop.)
To me, it is a Web 1.0 deployment. Java-driven toys came in with the entry of java. So-called ‘generators’ make up a genre of appropriation.
