I need to write a long post tying together the past few months. In the interim, this says some things which nestle close to my thinking, if not hatched in quite the same nest. Perched on a nearby branch, maybe. Under the same sky…

I feel that his post, in its entirety, ends up diluting the most important thought — this one:

For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.

Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.

I’ve written before about the generation who are of the Cloud, and the schism between them (us, I know which is my tribe) and the rest. I think it’s a genuine possibility — if that particular singularity hasn’t already happened — that there is some splitting of the Western psyche going on here… not quite what the transhumanists and techgnostics have proselytised, but something of equal scale.

Something of that — maybe one way into this is to frame it by saying that we are experiencing the effects of adoption of the first generation of post-communication technologies: tools that aren’t (endlessly-failing) attempts at meetings-of-souls (c.f. Durham Peters’ argument in Speaking Into the Air), but rather frameworks for something like Deleuze’s desiring machines: or as in Olson’s pronouncement: desire is a cluster which seeks to cluster (from whence the title of this site).

What if it’s that? That this is what we have post-communication. Because the Cloud isn’t about communication: it’s [not only but also] the cluster(s) where functions can be reallocated from the self. Mutually. We are a cloudscape, together. And that’s new.

[Towards a credo for any business serious about engaging with and transforming through networked technologies. The overarching thought is that the adoption of such tools drives attention, knowledge and skills out into the World, not in into neat 'managed' silos within the business]

1. Everything you do is being done better elsewhere. Get used to it.

   What does that leave? What you have: talent, brand, reputation, your social networks. What you are: elegant, charming, engaged. Generous.

2. Outsource the rest to the Cloud. (You will need to find someone with the skills to manage this process).
3. Audit yourself: do you understand your reputation, your brand?
4. Map your social networks.
5. Employ hackers. They were here first. They know the rules. But employ hackers who share your values and talents: generous hackers. Elegant, charming. Engaged. You may learn from them how to share.
6. (Re-)Focus the effort you spend on process onto improvement and adaption, not on invention. Learn the craft skills of the networked society: to stitch and glue, patch and fold together others’ excellence into your own fabric. To give back to the commons for the common good. You will find opportunities for real innovation & creative excellence along the way. Seize them and use the skills and connections you’ve developed to exploit the possibilities you see.
7. Invention will come, but it will arise where there’s a real value to it, and you will find you have at hand the tools to invent speedily and well, and access to other hands which will help in the task.
8. Think in interfaces, as much as in functions. The power of the hand is in the relations between the fingers, not in their individual strength.
9. Befriend tall giants, with strong shoulders. Climb bravely. Stand tall. See further.
10. Fail gracefully. Not all should be lost because one plan (or all of them until now) didn’t work out. “Try. Fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

We digital immigrants consider our (media-saturated post-modern) physicality as the ‘real’ world. For today’s young digital natives, their transmedial realities — the elseware of MySpace, Second Life and the rest — are equally valid. Unlike many, we don’t think they’re escaping from, or denying ‘real’ reality: they’ve just internalised the precept that all reality is socially constructed, and vanished off into someware more fun, of their own making. And why not?

Their generation is busily — knowingly — creating their own be-ing. The rest of us, in denial, still privilege a ‘genuine’ reality, while all the time, we are also moving (not retreating or escaping, but simply moving — inexorably), into digitally-mediated realities (The-World-According-To-Google is as much a virtuality as Second Life) where the temptation of easy self-selecting tribalism leads to ever-reducing direct contact with others’ world views — and thus a weakened shared ontology of the World.

At least the kids acknowledge their departure. The rest of us media-immersed first-worlders could do to be more honest about the future we’re making. Forget a ‘Clash of Cultures’ — cultural evolution far outpaces the biological kind, and is equally senseless and free-floating: we’re not heading onward-and-upwards towards some glorious technotopian dawn, we’re setting course towards a fundamental schism with the reality experienced by the rest of our species.

Without a common ontology — an origin story of the metaverse of divergent cultural shards — we no longer have a shared basis for debate, resistance or synthesis; let alone understanding, or reconciliation. This contemporary chaos of dysculturation jettisons dialectic: the paths of our private realities may start separate and parallel, but we fear those tracks will soon diverge, leading off into ever more isolating futures.

We no longer talk, but damned if we aren’t in love with tools for Social Network Analysis, ‘reality’ content, all such proxies for actual engagement: touching from a distance, further all the time.

[We've been kicking this around for a while -- interested to see what you all think.]

In any corporate workgroup environment — and even more so in asynchronous, loosely coupled networks of workgroups, it’s a nightmare trying to maintain oversight of project-related workflow. Attempts at solution generally try to impose a systems structure which straightjackets process, or which stamps out nuance and ingenuity.

At the worst — and all too often — this can result in what we call a diorama intranet: the metaphor relating to those awful museum displays of ‘life on the veldt’, wherein, to illustrate the lives of wild creatures, those same creatures are hunted down, shot, stuffed, and arranged, thousands of miles from their homes, into ‘lifelike’ tableaux. Documents in a diorama intranet have similarly been hunted down in the working environment where they are part of a dynamic process, tagged, bagged, and placed carefully on view in some other place where it’s an effort to access them, and where they are immediately out of context, out of date, and generally meaningless.

In the real world, we all know documents have legs — the ‘current final final approved’ version of the pitch might well be on someone’s desktop, rather than on the server ‘where it should be’. The challenge is in tracking the little devils down to whatever digital corner they’re hiding in, digging them out, and then tagging them so they can go back out into the wild and get on with their digital lives — being modified, shared, presented — while still being trackable and accessible by others when needed.

We’re believers in the small pieces, loosely joined approach — if we acknowledge that documents are lively members of a dynamic ecosystem, that they have legs, and that they’re hard to herd, then logically we should be more interested in having a way to grab hold of their tails when we need to know what’s going on, than in stuffing them and mounting them in the glass display case of some convoluted intranet.

Lately, we’ve been playing with simple ways of doing just that — and the prototype we’ve got couldn’t be more simple — implementing a simple trackback in MS Office documents via an open source XML-RPC stack, some VBA code, and using a WordPress-based blog as the central tracking mechanism, which gives us for free all manner of slicing, dicing and aggregation goodness on the reporting side.

Currently, it works like this: when users create a document, they are prompted to fill in as much metadata as possible — client, project, author, and so on. Then at each save- or close-point, the save dialogue box includes the option of ‘reporting back’ the document status to the central blog — where status can be as simple as ‘change’/'milestone’/’signed off’ — with the last adding a write lock so the document can’t be changed further. The data sent back to the blog can be as simple as the document status, or as in-depth as the entire document contents. At first check-in, each document is assigned a unique code and an individual post on the blog. This makes it very easy for glanceable updates on project status, for example. Crucially, it also informs without interrupting workflow, and keeps people in the knowledge loop — if someone wants the actual document, it’s not sitting stale and stuffed in an intranet: they have to contact the last modifier themselves, which potentially gives them access to other tacit knowledge, or at least initiates a conversation. Better all round.

Of course there are flaws in this — what of modifications done offline? What of documents which get deleted? And so on. We’re working on that. At the moment, we’re more interested in the feeling of what happens working like this, as opposed to the central command-and-control of rigid workflow systems and/or diorama intranets. More on this soon.

In the roar of Spring, transmutations… [Charles Olson]

We could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time!), but after much coffee, we think we’ve glimpsed the mechanism via which the new dotcoms plan to rule the world. To work towards our conjecture, we need to start with a little network theory and a spangle of geometry.

Nothing too painful, we promise.

Step by step, then:

1. The Web is not the Internet
   The Web is one thing built using the Internet. Post 1994, and pre-prevasive broadband, the Web was the set of protocols through which most people have experienced internetworking. But it’s just one kind of experience possible through internetworked media — chances are your cable TV is delivered over what is effectively an Internet spur run by your provider, and that doesn’t involve the Web at all. That’s important: our final conjecture applies to any media which can be distributed digitally.
2. Networks (Can) Grow Exponentially
   Here in the UK it’s almost Spring — take a look at anything deciduous outside your window and examine the structure of branches — root to trunk to branch to twig: one trunk and a few birfurcating levels of branching and there’s room, come Spring, for those twigs, together, to support thousands, tens of thousands of leaves, which fill space and present an enormous surface area to suck up light and nutrients. Hold that image: a seemingly inert structure of branches suddenly bursting with ways to capture energy.
3. The Surface of a Network Can Fill a Hyperbolic Plane
   Imagine trying to draw the Internet on paper. A few branches out from wherever you start, there are simply too many sub-branchings to fit on the paper — networks (can) grow faster than the surface available on a flat sheet of paper grows.One way to represent networks has been to project them not onto a flat sheet of paper, but onto a hyperbolic plane — a ‘Non-Eucledian‘ geometry in which space expands the further you move out across it, unlike the flat (Eucledian) space we’re used to. There’s a lovely introduction to hyperbolic planes — and some crocheted models, over at Cabinet magazine, but for now, imagine:

   One way of understanding it is that it’s the geometric opposite of the sphere. On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface on which the space curves away from itself at every point.

   So, on a hyperbolic plane, which expands exponentially out from wherever you start, there’s exponentially more space to draw the roots and leaves of a fast-branching network, like the Internet.

   Why does this matter — the Internet is virtual: it’s a configuration of things, not a space-occupying thing in itself, right? Surely the space-filling challenges of drawing it are only challenges for anyone stupid or bored enough to try? The Internet itself doesn’t take up any space!

   Wrong. It matters. Look out that window again — think of naked branches and twigs as you see them now, in Winter, as the Internet. What matters is that, come Spring, buds burst with life, and the whole space defined by the network of branches and twigs is suddenly green with purpose: to absorb energy. The potential inherent in the structure of the network (branches) bursts into exponentially space-filling reality when the nodes (leaves) suddenly occupy real space to a real purpose.

4. CONJECTURE: Dotcom 2.0 Makes For A Hyperbolic Media Surface
   See where we’re going? We believe that the Dotcom 2.0 pioneers have seen the (virtual, spaceless, inert) structure of the Internet, which has grown over the past decade through the success of the Web, as the dormant, Winter version of a hyperbolic media surface, which, come some dawn, will burst into Spring. And when it does, the leaves of media sprouting from the lifeless branches of the virtual network will fill a very particular space — that of our attention, via the very real, space filling agency of computer, TV, mobile phone screens, ePaper, video games: the full range of interfaces for digital content.
5. If the Conjecture is True, Traditional [Flat] Media is Doomed
   How does that work? As we’ve pointed out before, the generous gifting of cool tools to the community by Google, Flickr and the like generally provide for the originators of the tools to claim a little space for media on any resulting innovations. Think of each of these tiny presences, each tiny media presence — be they used for ads, video, whatever — as taking up an incremental attentional space. Like a leaf, these individual spaces might seem insignificant — but in totality constitute a vast new, hyperbolic media surface which will eclipse the reach of any traditional flat media.

So how has this escaped notice? We think first, because the Dotcom 2.0 Spring is as yet still a potentiality, though close to fruition. Second, to learn a little from the geometers: locally, a hyperbolic plane appears flat. From any particular perspective — that of TV, the blogosphere, whatever — the nascent new media surface appears to be an incremental threat: a PVR technology here, a streaming Video-on-Demand service there. It only when you look at the shape of the new media threat that the sheer audacious scale of what Dotcom 2.0 may do to media is apparent. It’s not an order-of-magnitude bigger in potentiality than traditional media, its an order of scale: exponential rather than linear growth.

Actually, we didn’t need to bring in the bit about hyperbolic space at all — the space-filling should be terrifying in itself to anyone used to buying attention programme-by-programme, or channel-by-channel. But the idea of this strategy requiring space which itself has to grow to accomodate the channel is an easy way to visualise the magnitude of the threat!

[See also the stuff we've been writing at BigShinyThing recently... ]

So. Having done some research: a number of sites offer calendar hosting and search. Well and good. But obviously not enough to get people very excited: these sites are mostly fairly low-key, even though they offer some fairly high-value data (calendars for sports rosters, national holidays and so on), that in a world truly turned-on to the power of calendar pub/sub, you would reasonably expect to find not tucked away on a hosting site, but regularly updated on the websites of the related organisations, teams or governments. There’s a real gap between potential and perceived value.

What’s missing? Or a better question: what’s needed to push this into broader consciousness? Two inter-related aspects: passion and personality. People care about calendars because they care about stuff which happens: bands go on tour, teams compete in championships. People will pick up on technology to the extent that the people who are doing the stuff that people care about (let’s generalise them as actors) pick up on it. we don’t need more sites hosting random collections of calendars, we need the people who do stuff hosting their own, so the people who are passionate about what they are doing (lets call them the fans) can keep closer in touch, more easily.

But it’s rare than fandom is limited to a single actor — most fans care about related clusters of actors and what they’re up to. Currently fans who want to track a number of actors’ calendars use client-side aggregation/layering in desktop software like iCal, giving them their own personally aggregated ‘calendar-of-me’, reflecting their varied passions and predilictions.

And there it currently stops.

As if we had never had IMDB, playlists or Amazon lists, or any of the other network-based, edge-fed collaborative filtration systems. What’s missing: internet-based publication of those personally-aggregated clusters of actors and events back online, so we can all benefit from the incremental value added at the edge by people who care about stuff, and aggregated back into the network (the purple arrow in the above diagram). With that feedback in place, we could start building systems that harvest value from network characteristics and patterns: popularity, clustering, geospecificity. The (small) benefit that each edge user accrues from their own desktop aggregation would be no longer be lost out at the edge, but instead become part of (yet another) network of live networks (like all the others with which we are now familiar: CDDB (as was), page ranking, LiveFM, mp3 playlist search etc.). And I think aggregation does add value for calendar systems. Amongst other network effects, it’s easy to see how preferrential aggregation would quickly give rise to ‘instant fame’ for fans whose calendars were really useful to others: imagine city-wide gig guides for specifc genres of music. Or the stickiness of such guides if sponsored by famous DJs or music critics. There’s something to this. More thinking to do

With the blossoming profusion of online music sales sites, it must just be a matter of time before meta-sales sites turn up, offering simple consolidation of search (so you can specify an artist/song and the service will track it down for you at a price/in a format you want). Such a portal would have an interesting effect on the market: I can’t imagine it unseating ITMS, which is heavily tied into a brand experience and standalone software (iTunes), but the effect on the smaller online music distribution (OMD) businesses could be quite dramatic, adding to sales but weakening branding and brand presence: the endless cycle of commodification continues.

What I’d be most interested to see would be such a portal also offering on-the-fly format transcoding. Not exactly a commercial proposition (wait for the lawsuits on that one!), but certainly something that, if released, deCSS-style, as a covert open source hack, might prosper in the wild: cheap easy online music sales, where the music companies actually get their cut, but consumers get the freedom to use a single portal interface and whatever device they choose for listening…

And from the INSA list: “[...] the first experiment in learning the face-to-face communication patterns of a large group by equipping the people within the community with wearable sensing devices. The main contribution of this thesis is to have demonstrated the feasibility of learning social interactions from raw sensory data. In this thesis we have presented a framework for automatic modeling of face-to-face interactions, starting from the data collection methods and working up to computational methods for learning the structure and dynamics of social networks.” I haven’t read this yet. Looks interesting.

Heidegger makes the distinction between tools with are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and those which are ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). We are, he says, only conscious of tools as tools when they are present-at-hand. When we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of the tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which ‘withdraws’ into the task.

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves is primarily the work.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, quoted in Paul Dourish, Where The Action Is

But this assumes exclusive modalities: we are either performing a task or not. It seems to say little about a world in which we seek constant ambient awareness. We want the tool to withdraw into the task, certainly, but what is the task? The easy answer is that it is being-in-a-context: being-at-work, relaxing-at-home, escaping-on-holiday. Each of those roles would call for activation of a different set of tools, which then withdraw themselves into the actions appropriate to that role. But I don’t think thats how it is. Extended awareness is analagous to metatools such as language; the task is that of being-in-the-world. There isn’t an off button.

As Ben points out, it is strange that ubiquitous computing is mostly treated as an engineering problem. It is not impossible that, 8000 years ago, writing was conceived as the mostly technological issue of flint-sharpening.

[More on this later]

Ages ago, we had the idea for the net.sack; a small rucksack thing with stalk camera and headset mic/earpiece, and decent bandwidth cellphone transmitting it all. So you could rent yourself out to whoever is at the other end of the connexion, and they can watch and direct — for remote shopping, tourism in general, whatever makes sense ethically and/or economically.

That was about 7 years ago…I think now, much more interesting with GPS — ‘hook me into someone THERE’, with there being pretty much anywhere…so it becomes realtime, border-hopping — p2p to people.

and right on the edge of enabling that being simply a checkbox on the settings of any decent modern cellphone with a video camera hookup.

assuming of course that at some point the price of 3G becomes sane

or of course the other more interesting route — mesh network of low power 802.11b or bluetooth descendents…

…of course that would just be shadowing, active control presumes complicity, involvement, a place for this idea to nest in people’s heads…

…and don’t start with the whole gibson loa thing…