Smart and juvenile (day 230)

I finished the Jaron book.  He finished off with a discussion of how neoteny is the reason we are so smart and juvenile all at the same time, and a discussion of post-symbolic communication in virtual worlds.  Yes the book takes a turn away from a critique and toward an exploration of the pleasures of morphing, concrete communication, and the development of language.   In the end what I retain from the book is his belief that there is no need to elevate technology to the level of humans or debase humans to the level of technology.  There is no philosophy that will fit all the ways in which we need to think about these things and the important thing is not to get trapped.  I appreciate the way he discussed his research at the end of the book.  There was something really sweet about it.  Like a kid really enjoying the space to think about what is possible still.

I wonder what it would be like to tune out of web 2.0 for an extended period of time.  What would I miss?  What would be richer?  What if the whole world had to take a 2.0 break for a month?  What does that feel like?  Is it like the silence you hear when the electricity goes off and nothing is buzzing anymore?  Or is it the silence that makes your foot wiggle and makes you run to the nearest pub?  For me, the thought of the world tuning out from 2.0  brings the most insight about the true value of what has been created through it.

Now I have to find my next book.

A song for this post.

Articulate truth (day 213)

Aldous Huxley, Bill Joy, Jaron Lanier.  What do those names have in common?  They are all articulate and have all warned of potential pitfalls of technology.   I'm not sure about Aldous but certainly Bill and Jaron have been called "Haters".  That's what happens when you speak about the gaping security holes in technology development.  There's always a new set of people being introduced to the tech of the day who will be enamoured with it.  They will keep alive the belief that nothing can go wrong.  Meanwhile the ones that have around long enough to start seeing the patterns and remember the old ways will start to question whether we are really better off.  They will be called haters.  But if you listen to them, they are all calmly stating that we must take a more measured approach with an aim to preserve what is most unique and beneficial to us, to the earth, to others.  There are tremendous advantages to looking at where we are going and at least agreeing in part how we will get there.  When people with so much invested in tech or in their own reputation speak out knowing they will be called haters, we could listen and form our own opinion. 

Aldous spoke about the dangers of overpopulation, systems of organization, propaganda, and TV.  Bill spoke about the dangers of nanotechnology, and Jaron speaks about the dangers of losing some very essential bits of our humanity by making ourselves fit the machine.   I've just started Jaron's book "Your are not a gadget" and already I'm taken in by some of his descriptions which really parallel my own experience.  Things that not many people talk about.  Or at least not in that unapologetic tone.  For example, he speaks about the random interaction delays on the iPhone.  We all know what he's talking about but the way he talks about it doesn't finish with "but still, it's so amazing isn't it?".  He talks about how these delays are a direct result of operation system choices we made a long time ago that don't favour human interaction which requires responsiveness.   It's like all of sudden I can breathe because someone has given me permission to to say we deserve better.  Or maybe it's that after watching so many Apple product launches and commercials I was starting to believe it was only my iPhone behaving this way.  Everyone else was having this perfect wonderful experience.   Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone but it does require a good deal of indulgence.

I had a discussion with someone who is about the same age as I am about how we are both a little disillusioned with tech.  We wondered if the younger generations whose formative years included desktops, laptops, iPhones will have this disillusionment earlier, later, or not at all.  There might come a time for everyone where the promise of technology starts to feel repetitive.  Just like there comes a time when a headline saying that in 50 years technology X will bring such and such a wonder doesn't grab you in the same way as it used to because you'll be dead in 50 years.  The wonder will belong to someone else and they too will be promised even more.

Disillusionment is not such a bad thing.  Just like any disappointment, it shows you where you were holding on to a certain result.  It's always better to stay fresh and be ready to be surprised.

A song for this post.

Desire for innovation (day 179)

I was on a panel about innovation today.  Alex asked me to be on the panel yesterday after someone else cancelled.  I was a bit panicky at the idea of speaking about innovation because the word has been so overused that I can barely get a grasp on it.  It seems to be a word we use when we mean "something new that will make me lots of money" when really it should be more like "something new that makes life better for a lot of people".  Either way, it's simplistic and trite to add it onto practically every company and product and high-up person out there.

Things get even more murky when we delve in to 'newness'.  I've blogged about this before.  As we become more public and engaged with each other, the origin of new is harder to pinpoint.  Indeed, companies have stiff competition in the innovation business -- their clients.  An example is Napster as innovation coming from the user base.  It made life more pleasant for millions of music lovers and it did not come from the music industry.  What businesses can do is take an innovative product created by the user base and stabilize it, bring to it innovation in the business model, and give a platform for spin-off right back to the user base.   Value accrues for everyone.  I'd say Apple did half of that with iTunes.  Google does the other half.  Together they'd be unbeatable.  But that is not to be.

As to the origin of innovation, the juicy word of the day is 'desire'.  I think it is the real driver.  Not technology, not money...desire.  It's that longing for something better, something else, the constant craving that kd sings so well about.  It exploits technology but technology is not the root.  Imagination is the fuel of desire, play is the catalyst.  If we are willing to imagine something else, something better and play at creating far out scenarios and start prototyping, soon enough there will be innovation.  The issue is that often we are fearful that freedom of thought will distract us from the 'real business' at hand.  I get the protection instinct, particularly for small companies struggling to maintain their hold in a market.  But I think a company that forgets the spark that started it is doomed to boredom and ultimately, failure.

A song for this post.

I'm not in love (day 63)

I used to fall in love with technology easily and deeply.  New gadgets, new tools, new languages, they all  triggered enough interest and hope that I would just fall in, willingly believing that they would change everything.  There are books that end in that phrase.  How x changes everything.   I still fall in love.  Now though I don't feel the love back in the way I used to and I lose interest a bit faster.  Sometimes I resist falling in love.  I don't love Twitter and Twitter doesn't love me.  It's a shallow conviction.  I will eventually get a Twitter account, if only to steep in a new crowd language for a time.  I appreciate that the online culture has fallen in love with social media.  I picture it in my head and I see the fascination in our eyes, the infatuation.  It's sweet and naive and joyful all at the same time.   What I don't love is everything becoming a nail to be hammered by social media.  This too shall pass.  I'm looking for the next stage.  If we've been solipsistic, perhaps we need to have a call and response situation.  I heard the term 'sentient city' today.   The holy grail of being heard is when the city responds automatically.  The grand telematics experiment.  It might evolve into a kind of SimVanCity where popular beliefs and desires are mocked up and tried out before being moved into the physical world.  It might be a mixture of virtual and real.  The idea of a more direct response to our social participation is attractive.  I'm not in love yet, but I could be.

A song for this post.

Tell me a story (day 14)

I read remarkably little fiction.  Most of my time is spent reading someone's treatise on media theory, or technology history,  gaming, narrative, etc.  I read other people's opinions.  Rarely but notably I hit upon a well written book in that genre that inspires me and genuinely changes my way of thinking about something.  The previously mentioned "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong is an example,  "Deep Time of the Media" by Siegfried Zielinski is another.  There is something about the way these authors write that has at least some resemblance to narrative.  In "Deep Time of the Media", the approach is a sort of trip through time and space where we are told of technologies that maybe didn't make it but were important to the development of other technologies, and certainly important to the culture of the time.  There is a also an attention to the characters (and they mostly were characters) that invented and peddled technology -- the geeks of their time.  I love the fact that the author makes no apologies for taking a romantic stroll through history.   He says that he chose the anecdotes and technologies in the book by looking for the 'shiny things', the bits that were just too curious to pass up.  He calls this a kind of archeology, taking issue with the idea that the evolution of technology (like any evolution) is linear and always yielding the best solution.  Indeed, the word 'best' implies defined criteria that could lead to optimal solutions to...well..I don't know exactly.   The point is that luck plays a giant role in any new technology gaining popularity and that there are some sad failures that were very exciting at the time.

This may be sacrilegious but I no longer make time for books like Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" or Deleuze and Guattari's "Thousand Plateaus".  I own these books but I don't love them.  Maybe it's an underlying pining for more fiction, but I genuinely wonder why the topics of these books couldn't have been written with a little more of the pleasure of discovery built in.   I know some people love "Thousand Plateaus" and I may be tragically missing out but everyone draws boundaries on their time and I've drawn mine at their door.  Brian Massumi is an author that comes closer to making that kind of material more human, and certainly his book "Parables for the Virtual" is an interesting read where he allows himself a more fanciful jaunt through the material.

A lot of the books I read were recommended by Amazon.  In some ways they have my tastes figured out.  But it would be nice if the recommendation engine could notice that I don't read fiction, and suggest fiction based on the kinds of non-fiction that I read.  Surely there are some books that would bridge the two worlds.  I feel like I might be missing a whole treasure trove of material...