Stephen Fry: The internet and Me

Stephen Fry was talking technology on Radio 4 yesterday, and some of the highlights have been transcribed here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7926509.stm

Since Fry's probably more responsible than anyone else for taking Twitter over the tipping point and into the popular consciousness (in the UK at least), his views are worth having. Among his more piercing points, he talks of web snobbery, and in particular the platform migration of early adopters as the great unwashed swarm in (FB, is for example, now "low rent").

Interestingly, he defends txt spk, pointing out that when paper and ink were expensive in the 17/18C, words were at a premium: "letters were, as they say, crossed. You'd look at them writing horizontally and then there'd be vertical lines all the way down and round the margins. And 'your' is 'YR', you know just as it is in a text. It's exactly the same point - you're compressing." I might also say that compressed language allows quicker expression; literally less time for the word to get from the brain to the page, which helps keep the flow of thought. See also, Pepys' diaries written in shorthand - when the pen was the primary mode of inscription it was the cheapest and easiest way to get words out.

And here, on the metaphysics of presence, he talks of being able to have a proper conversation by email because all the bodily interaction is absent: "As I talk to you now, and as one talks, especially to strangers, all the terrible problems of class, differences in education, race and gender all have their part to play in the embarrassment of real life conversation, but the moment one's let loose with a keyboard or a pen you can express yourself properly." The writer A.S. Byatt made a similar point at the Digital Lives conference I attended last month. There she said that she preferred to give interviews via email, because there “you can have a real conversation.” All of which perhaps flies in the face of Dreyfus' worries about telepresence and the absence of bodies; maybe I need to read Derrida after all, which is something I'd been trying to avoid.

Later, a riposte to the dystopians: "I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn't congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel - about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead."

Good stuff.

Links, links, links

1. Another from AlertBox, this time tips on Blog Usability:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

2. An article from the NY Times, 2002 "TECHNOLOGY; A Rift Among Bloggers" about the reaction of the "veteran" bloggers (Kottke et al) to the insurgence of "war bloggers". Kottke compares it to hating seeing your favourite band go overground (''It's like being the punk-rock fan who was into punk rock before everyone else") - a tone which certainly comes through in Blood's book (which I'm rereading - a posting on that to follow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10BLOG.html?ex=1024286400&en=e399bdc149d15532&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

3. An online article by psychologist John M. Grohol, entitled "Psychology of Blogs (Weblogs): Everything Old is New Again" - talks a little about the analogue, but not as useful as title suggests as he talks more about the similarities between blogs and online mailinglists than anything else. Also has links to other early articles about the psychology of blogging by the same author - not the most heavyweight of insights, useful though ...

http://psychcentral.com/blogs/blog_new.htm

4. An article by Travers, Uni. Washington, entitled "Blog Invasion! What Are They? Where Did They Come From?". A good source of references.

http://homepage.mac.com/dtraversscott/Academics/BlogHistory/index.html

5. Nielman Reports is a (student?) journal hosted at Harvard, looks like lots of articles about blogging as it relates to journalism:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports.aspx

6. Article from Wired announcing the demise of the blog in the face of Twitter, FB, etc. So soon?!

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay

7. Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" 2008, figures and analysis:

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

More links

Another few links from Jakob Nielsen at Alertbox:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Summary: "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."

Which, given the supposedly participatory, inclusive power of these sorts of tools, is pretty damning - seems to be a new hierarchy, just a little more distributed. Includes some good stuff about improving usability and incentivizing the process to get more people involved.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Summary: How people read websites: "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html

Summary: "Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned." Talks about user studies involving the reading of blogs.

"Primates on Facebook" (Economist article, 26 Feb 09)

Just to archive this link: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13176775

It's to an Economist article which quotes findings that although the average number of friends on FB is 120, the intimate circles of friends people are regularly, actively, in contact (Men=7, Women=10) is no bigger than pre-social-networking:

Quote: "people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

Social networking as social broadcasting...

Initial thoughts on Langdon Winner’s “constitution” of sociotechnical order

Winner’s neo-luddite approaches to technology are quite refreshing as an antidote to the cyberbole of the revolutionary nature of the Internet, etc. I don’t think I agree with him, but his point of view is certainly worth airing. In the “Whale and the Reactor,” he proclaims: “Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn’t proclaim it as the salvation of a free society” (20). On pp. 95-6, he elaborates:

“Dreams of instant liberation from centralized social control have accompanied virtually every important new technological system introduced during the past century and a half. The emancipation proposed by decentralist philosophers as a deliberate goal requiring long, arduous social struggle has been upheld by technological optimists as a condition to be realized simply by adopting a new gadget. This strange mania ... is alive and well among those who celebrate the advent of the computer revolution.”

Given that these comments were made in 1986, when the net was limited to universities and the Web was yet to come, and thus before the explosion of Web2.0 type stuff, they will now seem either utterly prescient or slightly misguided, dependent on your attitude as to how revolutionary blogs, etc. are (i.e. luddite or technophile?). The answer, of course will lie somewhere in between, but for the moment, I just wanted to get down a few initial thoughts on some solid claims Winner makes on pp. 47-8 of that book, about the nature of the “distinctive institutional patterns” he sees as having been created by modern industrial production over the last couple of centuries. This “de facto ... constitution of sorts,” (a “sociotechnical order”) and the way it relates to relationship to concepts of “membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice,” is presented by the identification of five primary traits, and I wanted to examine each of these briefly (and only as a first pass!) in relation to the modern Web environment. Basically, the thinking is, that these are five testable claims about an established order, which if the current “revolution” is really revolutionary, should be substantially effected or transformed by this new technology.

1. The first of Winner’s claims is that “technologies of transportation and communication ... facilitate control over events from a single center or small number of centers. Largely unchecked by effective countervailing influences, there has been an extraordinary centralization of social control in large business corporations, bureaucracies, and the military. It has seemed an expedient, rational way of doing things. Without anyone having explicitly chosen it, dependency upon highly centralized organizations has gradually become a dominant social form.”

RESPONSE: Certainly the Web has assisted in the the production of information/comment outwith those established centres, promoting self-publication and new modes of political discussion. Wikipedia, which I do think is a truly wonderful example of the potential of this technology, opens the knowledge-base of the encyclopedia to anyone with a laptop, web browser and web connection, self-regulated by its own community. Political blogs allow scrutiny of events like the Rather controversy which the mainstream media might have glossed over (the potential effect of which is easily – and often – overstated, of course). But hasn’t the Web also been a source of further growth in the means of control of those pre-exisiting centres (I’m thinking of new means of government snooping introduced by legislation like the Patriot Act in the US), also the fact that Google, by being so important to the functioning of these distributed centres, has itself become a fearfully large central organization. Maybe the positioning of the centres is changing, the organizations evolving, but when we look at the current battle over the T&Cs of ownership of content currently raging around Facebook, we might wonder whether we are becoming more or less centralized...

2. Secondly, Winner identifies “a tendency for new devices and techniques to increase the most efficient or effective size of organized human associations. Over the past century more and more people have found themselves living and working within technology-based institutions that previous generations would have called gigantic. Justified by impressive economies of scale and, economies or not, always an expression of the power that accrues to very large organizations, this gigantism has become an accustomed feature in the material and social settings of everyday life.”

RESPONSE: The Web definitely does not buck this trend. From home-working, distance-learning, etc. (and regardless of the efficacy of these), we can see that the need for physical proximity to the organization is lessened, hence the number of people who can be subsumed into the organization is increased (at least potentially). Indeed, this ability to increase the efficiency and effective size of associations, is often cited as one of the most powerful aspects of the Web...

3. “Third is the way in which the rational arrangement of sociotechnical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchical authority. Legitimized by the felt need to do things in what seems to be the most efficient, productive way, human roles and relationships are structured in rule-guided patterns that involve taking orders and giving orders along an elaborate chain of command.”

RESPONSE: Here, using the Wikipedia example, we might on the face of it see an organization without a hierarchy, in the traditional sense – but who is actually adding to it? Certainly not most of the people who use it, so is there hierarchy there? Again, using the example of the political blogs, are they challenging the traditional power structures in a substantially different form from the traditional letter to the MP or Newspaper? Is the hierarchy of the working environment being changed through the use of collaborative media? Hmmm ...

4. “Fourth is the tendency of large, centralized, hierarchically arranged sociotechnical entities to crowd out and eliminate other varieties of human activity. Hence, industrial techniques eclipsed craftwork; technologies of modern agribusiness made small-scale farming all but impossible; high-speed transportation crowded out slower means of getting about. It is not merely that useful devices and techniques of earlier periods have been rendered extinct, but also that patterns of social existence and individual experience that employed these tools have vanished as living realities.”

RESPONSE: Well, firstly, email/blogging/social-networking has perhaps impacted on traditional forms of communication like letter, phone, etc. As a nice example, a friend of mine, Catriona, recently (4th March) posted a FB status wondering, “if facebook is really that great. whatever happened to picking up the phone?", to which another friend, Chris (5th March), responds with humour:

“That's a bit unfair to the old F-book, methinks... I mean, when was the last time YOU just rang somebody out of the blue?? These days, as I've come to understand it, that's just poor etiquette. It's kind of like complaining: "Whatever happened to sending carrier pigeons?" Answer: "It's just not the done thing anymore." I mean, confronted with a carrier pigeon--or a telephone call for that matter--I'm just not sure I'd know what to do!” [NOTE: I’ll check that it’s ok to use this with both people involved – if not, I’ll remove it].

But we are all still keeping in touch in some manner, aren't we?! And in McLuhan’s sense of “retrieval,” can’t we see the return of some features of communication that were lost in previous modes – for example, instant messaging and social networking is much more immediate than a letter, which retrieves some of the immediacy of face-to-face conversation which was lost while we were tethered to the letter as a primary means of written communication over distance. The Internet, in fact, remediates many media to retrieve some characteristics lost in their analogue modes (e.g., youtube is television but with the instant right to reply, broadcast becomes less one-directional). So I would probably assent that the Web does propagate this tendency in one sense, but in remediating so many other media, it perhaps retrieves more than it obsolesces. Further, I don’t think we’re led blindly into losing these “living realities,” I believe we accept losses and gains in a flux of negotiation based on costs and benefits to our primary concerns – to use the example of Paul Levinson in “Digital McLuhan,” the invention of the window to let light into buildings might have led to a loss of privacy, but we soon invented curtains!

5. Finally, in what has become a rather long posting, Winner advises as the fifth attribute of this de facto sociotechnical constitution: “the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations exercise power to control the social and political influences that ostensibly control them. Human needs, markets, and political institutions that might regulate technology-based systems are often subject to manipulation by those very systems.”

RESPONSE: Winner gives the example of advertising as one means by which organizations sway opinion to suit them, but we might also include lobby groups, etc. Here, the big corps of the Web and computing in general (Microsoft, Google, et al) certainly don’t seem any more averse to using these means to their own ends than traditional organizations. If we look at the content of the Web environment, though, does increased potential for public scrutinization of organizations and public-sphere conversation outside of traditional big mainstream media, increase the scope for us to recognize and react to these influences? Maybe ...

The Onion Review's Latest Sony Gadget

After yesterday's treatise (which on reflection probably overran the boundaries of what is comfortable to read in this electronic form), I thought I'd post something for fun - as a first attempt to expand the function of this blog. I found this video, created by the spot-on "The Onion" on Kevin Arthur's blog at Question Technology.

Truly magnificent, but WARNING, CONTAINS OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE!!!


Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Sh*t That Doesn't F**king Work

The Charlton Heston Question

Some ideas in my head, wanted to get them somewhere safer (more permanent?) than the flow and flux of my (unreliable) mental equipment, so here we go.

I’ve been thinking on the question of the neutrality of technology, which is a question I think needs to come near the top of my thesis argument. Can we ask questions as to the inherent morality of given technologies, disregarding particular instances of their use? Thus, the title of this posting comes in a fashion after McLuhan, who responds to the suggestion that individual modern technologies are neither good nor bad: “That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say ... “Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.” That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good.” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11)

I’ve been thinking through this example, still used by the National Rifle Association in the US to counter those who seek to limit the availability of guns to civilians in the form of “guns don’t kill people, people do” (hence “the Charlton Heston Question, “ in honour/parody of the late president/spokesman of the NRA). I think it is nonsense to talk only of the particular uses of technologies and disregard the inherent ways in which they work on and shape the ways we relate to the world, our very psycho-social fabric. The very fact that we create guns at all, regardless of their eventual use, is, I think, instructive as to human nature.

For McLuhan, of course, mediating technologies are never neutral, they implicitly shape the messages they carry, in much the way a given metaphor transforms (and thus biases) our understanding of a concept – example: “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, which might tend to make us see ourselves as actors spouting words karaoke style from a predetermined script, but neglects to tell us, then, who the writer, the director, the audience, even the lighting-guy, is (presumably they’re all God, but then this means that this metaphor is implicitly shaping our view of the world as one created by a creator, who wants to watch over us, who approves or not, etc.) – thus we see the world in a novel way, a little differently, see common objects from new aspects, and hence we come to understand it a little better. Ok, so this is a good thing BUT we must heed the baggage and biases, and so iterate the ways in which that media (or metaphor) implicitly shapes the way in which we see the world.

Which is a somewhat similar starting point (though they reach different conclusions) to Heidegger, whose “The Question Concerning Technology,” (In: "Basic Writings", London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, pp.287-317) seeks to address the essence of technology in relation to human existence. There, he posits the view of technology as neutral to be the instrumental/anthropological definition. Thus “According to ancient doctrine”, he advises, “the essence of a thing is considered to be what the things is” (288) and through this definition, we arrive at two statements: “One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity” (288). In these terms, technology is neutered, reduced to nothing more than a human activity pursuant to particular ends.

For Heidegger, this “uncannily correct” (288) definition does not, of course, tell the whole story. For him, in the terms of his earlier work, this would be the ontic explanation, correctly identifying states of affairs but not telling us what it is to be in this relationship. We have privileged ourselves, as the efficient cause of the coming to be of technology, at the neglect of Aristotle’s other three causes: material, formal, final. The material a technology is made of, the particular form it takes, and its telos, that which gives it its cultural bounds as a technology for a purpose, are all responsible for, all at play in the “bringing-forth” of, a given technology.  

Thus the potentialities of the stuff and structure of given materials, along with (and most importantly for Heidegger) the cultural context into which that technology is to be employed, are all necessary causes alongside that of the efficient cause. Given this, in the example of the coming to be of a sacrificial chalice, the silversmith is the efficient cause, “not at all because he, in working, brings about the finished sacrificial chalice as if it were the effect of a making ... The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted. To consider carefully is in Greek legein, logos. Legein is rooted in apophainesthai, to bring forward into appearance. The silversmith is co-responsible as that from whence the sacred vessel’s bringing-forth and subsistence take and retain their departure.” (291, author’s italics)

So technology is an occasion of “revealing” rather than creation, bring out of concealment into unconcealment, and this, if right has big implications for our understanding of what it is to be the cause of something, as inventor, creator or author. If we aren’t in full control of the coming to be of technology, then the instrumental/anthropological definition is deficient because it neglects the ways in which our technologies act on us, the way we are influenced to bring them to be. Heidegger goes on to argue that our true relation to technology is one of the enframing (Gestell) of nature, challenging it as a “standing-reserve” of resources to be plundered, and that this has a negative impact on our existence. I don’t want to tackle that can of worms just now though, rather just use the first part of his argument (can I just use the first part without being bound to accept the latter? – I think so, but maybe not) as an illustration of why the view of technologies as neutral is deficient, to demonstrate that human intention is not the sole author of technology, and to iterate the reasons why we must attend to the ways in which they are working on us as well as us on them.  

For Langdon Winner, in “The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,” technologies have political consequences:

“The things we call “technologies” are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume, and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness.” (28-9)

Thus, he proposes that the neutral view of technology blinds us to an essential matter of enquiry: “we usually do not stop to inquire whether a given device might have been designed and built in such a way that it produces a set of consequences logically and temporally prior to any of its professed uses.... If our moral and political language for evaluating technology includes only categories having to do with tools and uses, if it does not include attention to the meaning of the designs and arrangements of our artifacts, then we will be blinded to much that is intellectually and practically crucial.” (25)

All of which (I think) I agree with, and leads back into my research, where the definition of materiality I gave in my last post (“materiality: the effects and affects of carrier on experience of content”) can be, perhaps, be sharpened into the research question:

“What are the material differences between analogue and digital forms, and in what logically and temporally prior ways do these differences hold the potential to effect and affect creation, consumption, and curation of content?”

As an example of the sorts of questions this is trying to pose: what does it mean that I can put a hyperlink here to something which may or may not be related to this piece, how does that effect my writing this, your (if you’re there) reading of it (did you immediately link through to it, or if you didn’t, will you ignore it now that I’ve made it questionable whether its even connected, will you even come back to read the rest of this if you do click on it?), and the effects on the archive (e.g. if this blog were being archived, would that page now be considered part of this work?). How does this sort of interlinking of information affect us? Is there anything in the truisms that concentration suffers, depth of thought sacrificed for a life of surfing/scratching the surface? Are we all living essentially post-modern lives on the net, lives of a random flow of unrelated shreds of information, a loss of traditional narrative form for one where any casual interconnection is taken to be symbolic of the larger web of meaning(lessness)? Etc, etc, etc. Wild speculation at the end, I know, but that’s where all this stuff is eventually heading ...