Preoccupations

Net Neutrality

From Four Eyed Monsters. Via Dave Snowden, who got it from a friend on Facebook, who …

US Citizens: Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Technorati tags: net neutrality, internet, web

Mobiles

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network, which is double the level in 2000. And figures from the International Telecommunications Union show that by the end of 2006, 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions were in developing countries.

— from The New York Times article focusing on the work of Jan Chipchase (and colleagues), Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?.

… have you ever stopped to wonder why? Why, regardless of culture, age, gender and increasingly context you're likely to find a mobile phone in the hand, pocket or bag of the person next to you? Put simply - the ability to communicate over distances in a personal convenient manner is universally understood and appreciated, and it's easy enough to get the basics without going to night school or taking a PhD. It certainly helps that, as a functional tool that can be used discreetly or with a flourish, the mobile phone makes an ideal vehicle for projecting one’s status and personal preferences - from the choice of brand, model, ring tone or wallpaper, or simply that (because you're connected) you've arrived.

Today over 3 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people have cellular connectivity and it is expected that another billion will be connected by 2010. But what is often overlooked is the disproportionate impact of mobile phones on different societies, which is one of the reasons why as researchers, we increasingly prefer to spend time in places like Cairo and Kampala: there is simply more to learn. These are places where for many, it's the first time they have the ability to communicate personally and conveniently over distances - without having to worry whether someone can overhear the topic of their conversation - communicate with whom they want, when they want. It makes new businesses viable and creates markets where there was none. For many it's the first time they can provide a stable fixed point of reference to the outside world - a phone number, which in turn creates a new form of identity that in turn enables everything from rudimentary banking to commerce. And not least - each new feature on or accessible through the mobile phone brings new modes of use - unencumbered by my, and probably your entrenched (and increasingly outdated) notions of entertainment, the 'right' way to capture and share experiences, the internet. If you work or study in the mobile space and you're expected to innovate, these are places that bring fresh thinking and new perspectives.

— from Jan Chipchase's article, Small Objects, Travelling Further, Faster.

The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. ... we've passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history -- faster even than the polio vaccine.

"We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end," says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google. "It will end with 5 billion out of the 6" with cellphones. ... "Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious."

"It's the technology most adapted to the essence of the human species -- sociability," says Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. "It's the ultimate tool to find each other. It's wonderful technology for being human."

— from The Washington Post, Our Cells, Ourselves.

Technorati tags: mobile, mobiles, cellphones, Jan Chipchase, communication, internet, identity

You Can't Picture This

Thousands of UK residents have signed a petition against a law preventing photography and filming in certain public places. Yet this all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and no such law was proposed. Rajesh investigates the way we view the lens and the way it views us.

via Tom.

Technorati tags: UK, filming, photography, surveillance, security, law, rights, privacy, fear

Celebrating Colin St John Wilson, architect of the British Library

Quoted by Fiona MacCarthy:

A great library is like a coral reef whose exquisite structure as it grows proliferates a living network of connectedness, and its ramification is all of a piece, like knowledge itself — the knowledge that bridges the endless curiosity of the human mind, from the first pictogram to the latest microchip.

(That coral reef thing again.) (Libraries and conversation! Michael Oakeshott!)

Technorati tags: British Library, Colin St John Wilson, libraries, knowledge, conversation, Michael Oakeshott

Ted Nelson @ St Paul's II

The Bush years have not been kind to those Americans living abroad and dependent on the dollar exchange rate. Out of necessity, then, Ted and Marlene, who first came to St Paul's in July 2007 (see here), are soon to return to the States — but, before leaving, they revisited St Paul's. Today, Ted spoke about his work, his current book-in-progress (Geeks Bearing Gifts) and Xanadu.

Farhan's blogged Ted's talk so well that there's little left for me to add. Thanks!

There were some lovely glimpses into Ted's childhood — a boy who loved reading and words and knew, by ten, who had coined tintinnabulate … chortle … serendipity; growing up in Greenwich Village without realising it, then reading about it and longing to see this Bohemian paradise; experiencing Mrs Roosevelt as a near neighbour. He was (as expected) both amusing and savage about the blackhole which is the clipboard. His father had taught him that writing is mostly re-writing, and re-writing is mostly rearrangement — so why devise writing tools that are so bad they hide the very material you're cutting? (CTRL+C, CTRL+V: cram and vomit.) By the time he went to college, he'd written a lot by linking cut and pasted pieces of writing.

Graduate school in 1960 and a computing course saw him suddenly quite sure that personal computers would come and that his job was to design the documents of the future: make it possible to see the parts and compare the versions, to visualise the origins of quotations, to expose deep rearrangements. Hypertext was first used by Ted in 1963, but it was 1986 before it was used outside his immediate circle.

It was great to have Ted and Marlene here again. I was particularly pleased that a number of our 13/14 year-old students came along: Ted has been a name to them in their ICT course — and here he was.

Technorati tags: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, ZigZag

Wi-Fi and health

Recently, I needed to prepare something for use at school that would act as a summary to date of this debate. I took as my markers some of the high profile coverage Wi-Fi has received over the last year. It might be worth publishing this brief overview here.

1)  There's no basis for proceeding that's worthy of our consideration other than one based on the scientific evidence. There's masses of conjecture which generates fear, uncertainty and doubt.

2)  Let's start with mobile phones and phone masts - forms of wireless communication the radiation from which is (at source) far more powerful than that emitted by the kinds of wireless access points we'd be installing.

a)  December, 2006: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a study of 420,095 cell phone users (Danes). They began subscribing to cellular phone services between 1982 and 1995, and the study examines their cancer rates through to 2002. The study 'finds no increased risk of tumors or leukemia in subscribers'; 'Even among the 56,000 people who have used the phones for more than a decade, researchers found no increased risk of cancer'.

b)  July, 2007: the Essex University phone mast study — 'when tests were carried out under double-blind conditions, where neither experimenter nor participant knew whether the signal was on or off, the number of symptoms reported was not related to whether the mast was on or off. Two of the 44 sensitive individuals correctly judged whether the mast was on or off in all six tests, compared with five out of 114 control participants. This proportion is what is expected by chance and was not increased in the sensitive group'.

3)  Now we come to the Panorama programme, 'Wi-Fi: A Warning Signal', that ran last May and which the BBC's editorial complaints unit subsequently (November) conceded had not had 'adequate balance' and so had given 'a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue'.

a)  There's a a succinct and clear explanation of a fundamental flaw in the Panorama programme here. From the same source: 'Wi-Fi uses radio frequency (RF) waves that are "non-ionising" - that means they are not powerful enough to knock electrons off molecules in cells. One way they could harm cells is by heating them up. But this requires much higher power than is delivered by Wi-Fi networks or mobile phones (which use similar frequencies).  As every cautious scientist will tell you, you can never prove that something is absolutely safe and no one would want to gamble with the health of children. But there is good reason for thinking that Wi-Fi is, if anything, safer than the radiation from a mobile phone. The UK's Health Protection Agency says a person sitting within a Wi-Fi hotspot for a year receives the same dose of radio waves as a person using a mobile phone for 20 minutes'.

b)  Ben Goldacre, who, of course, writes the excellent Guardian 'Bad Science' column, took the Panorama programme to pieces and has also analysed the whole melange of ideas swirling round the "electrosensitivity" theme: Electrosensitives: the new cash cow of the woo industry; Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children… But Alasdair Philips of Powerwatch sells the cure! ('Of course you should be vigilant about health risks. I don't question that there may be some issues worth sober investigation around Wi-Fi safety. But this documentary was the lowest, most misleading scaremongering I have seen in a very long time.')

4)  I felt it was probably worth my including the two Independent articles from last year, Danger on the airwaves: Is the Wi-Fi revolution a health time bomb? and Wi-Fi: Children at risk from 'electronic smog' (both from April). These will have lodged themselves in the minds of some — and they're truly bad. Ian Betteridge took both apart here, concluding, 'what really matters is that the quality of the Indie's reporting on this is abysmal. Printing scare stories isn't just bad journalism - it's bad behaviour that actually damages our culture, promoting bad, hokey ideas as fact and encouraging anti-scientific and anti-rational propaganda. I'd love to ask the editor of the Indie which they prefer - a world where science and reason are encouraged, or a world of cranks, quacks and charlatans'.

A paragraph or two summing up what we can say we know and how best, then, we should proceed?  I can't really do better than these, from the Guardian article already cited in 3a above:

The World Health Organisation's advice on this is very clear. "Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects."  And an HPA statement issued last week is equally adamant that Wi-Fi almost certainly does not pose a problem. "On the basis of current scientific information Wi-Fi equipment satisfies international guidelines. There is no consistent evidence of health effects from RF exposures below guideline levels and therefore no reason why schools and others should not use Wi-Fi equipment.

And apart from bogus TV experiments, what do we know about the strength of Wi-Fi radiation in homes, schools and businesses? Kenneth Foster, a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, took 356 measurements at 55 different sites in four different countries to find out. Even though he took his readings close to wireless routers, in all cases he found that the radiation level from Wi-Fi was far lower than international safety standards and often much lower than other radiation sources nearby.  Wi-Fi is a new addition to modern life and no scientist can say with her hand on her heart that it is perfectly safe - particularly in the long term. But there is no theoretical reason to expect problems and no good evidence for any harm. Of course we need more research to understand its effects more thoroughly and also sensible precautions. But misleading and irresponsible scare stories serve only to cloud the issue.

Technorati tags: WiFi, health, FUD, bad science, media

Comics are in everything

Welcoming Jack Schulze to St Paul's a week ago was the realisation of a long-held wish: it is, of course, an understatement to say that Jack and Matt continually surprise and delight, prompting and pushing us on to think about, to see things in new ways.

At Interesting2007 (start at the bottom of that page, with a possible date for your diary), Jack gave a fantastic (and warmly received) talk on comics. (I blogged about Interesting here.) When we cooked up the idea of Jack coming in to talk to some of our students, I really wanted comics in the frame. Anyone who knows Jack knows how comics — their design, their playfulness — inform his work as designer.

Jack's and Matt's design work is a challenge in a number of ways. For UK schools (perhaps for a long time — but certainly now) there's far too little in the curriculum that prepares you for how they think and work. I can imagine how even the diverse influences that inform their work might seem at first bewildering, even unassimilable. Since Jack spoke here, what's struck me is how all who heard him seem to have got hold of something (and haven't readily let go) and, in some cases, seem to have understood him whole and from the start — great for any speaker/teacher to feel this quick rush of comprehension at an intuitive (I'm-on-this-wavelength) level.

Some of our students may find it helpful if I pull together some links here for the different parts of Jack's talk. In order of appearance, then: 

1) Lab-Grown Meat, 2005:

 

While at the RCA, Jack took part in a brief run by Tony Dunne on the industrial future of food and lab-grown meat (a staple of the newspaper columns in 2005). This presentation comes from a two week exploration that also involved the making of replica origami food, as shown in the slides.

From Dunne’s original brief: Scientists are developing methods of growing meat in labs using animal cells. This area of research, called In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production raises all sorts of complex issues about the meaning of food, our relationship to animals (and nature), human values and behaviours, and even taboos. [...] The purpose of the project is to explore how design can be used as a medium to draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of ‘cultured meat’.

2) Metal phone (Nokia Personalisation), 2005. This link takes you to all the postings about the project; you can start with Overview:

We’re working with practitioners of a number of different crafts to explore how their materials affect the mobile phone. We’re experimenting with the short-run manufacturing techniques available in small workshops and on desktops to look at, for example, the impact of Rapid Form Prototyping on phone housing.

3) Olinda, 2007:

For the past month we’ve been working on the feasibility of Olinda, a DAB digital radio prototype for the BBC (for non-UK readers: DAB is the local digital radio standard, getting traction globally). That stage is almost over now - oh and yes, it’s feasible - so now’s a good time to talk. 

Olinda puts three ideas into practice: 

• Radios can look better than the regular ‘kitchen radio’ devices. Radios can have novel interfaces that make the whole life-cycle of listening easier. At short runs, wood is more economic as plastic, so we’re using a strong bamboo ply. And forget preset buttons: Olinda monitors your listening habits so switching between two stations is the simplest possible action, with no configuration step. 
• This can be radio for the Facebook generation. Built-in wifi connects to the internet and uses a social ‘now listening’ site the BBC already have built. Now a small number of your friends are represented on the device: A light comes on, your friend is listening; press a button and you tune in to listen to the same programme. 
• If an API works to make websites adaptive, participative with the developer community, and have more appropriate interfaces, a hardware API should work just as well. Modular hardware is achievable, so the friends functionality will be its own component operating through a documented, open, hardware API running over serial.

What Olinda isn’t is a far-future concept piece or a smoke-and-mirrors prototype. There’s no hidden Mac Mini–it’s a standalone, fully operational, social, digital radio.

The hardware API link above is well worth following. I'd also recommend Jack's three posts: Drawing Olinda, Olinda interface drawings, Olinda connections. 

4) Comics

Jack blogged his Interesting talk here — and lists the comics and authors he admires most. The slides of his talk are here. The wonderful Will Burtin image (drawn from a rifle manual) can be found in Burtin vs. Ellis/Williams, where Jack discusses it in relation to one of my all-time favourite images — page 5 of Desolation Jones #1 by Warren Ellis and J H Williams III. Warren Ellis has written about this image on his blog, quoting from the original script:

Pic 1: Surreal moment: Jones looks out the passenger-side window and there’s a thick RED LINE taking the place of the road, running alongside them – a massively magnified version of the kind of line that describes roads on maps.

Pic 3: AERIAL SHOT: The car is small in this shot, and it’s driving down a red line that describes a road, and now the rest of the map, of greater LA, is visible all around it…

Jack:

Look at the way the red line connects the sequence. The line morphs between road markings, Indiana Jones style aerial map views and back to the light trails from the vehicle. Williams guides your eye through the page, setting the page’s pace and rhythm. Optically it is very clever, it deals with how your eye scans at speed and also stitches the cue into the content of the panels. …

Burtin and Williams both use letters and images, in a sequence, on the page, and expect them to be read in two different ways: First in overview and then in detail. They deal with arrangement, pace and rhythm with the same sensitivity and same language. 

Comics are in everything.

Finally, Jack spoke about the work of Shintaro Kago …

Mr. Kago is what you’d call an ero-guro artist — that is, he specializes in bizarre and oftentimes disturbing manga with a hefty amount of blood, nudity, gore and violence. Don’t let this discourage you: I think what I find most interesting is the way he challenges paneling conventions. The idea of paneling in comics is to find the most ideal way to lead the eye of the reader in order to communicate a story. Mr. Kago pushes this to the limit. In his work “Abstraction”, Mr. Kago even goes a step further by integrating his experimentation with panels into the story in itself by making it a part of the plot. Read Or Die Weblog

  ***** 

My thanks to Jack for a wonderful talk. Here are a couple of bonus leads for all who came to hear him:

Warren Ellis » A Useful Quote:

“Science fiction is a way of thinking about things.” – Frederik Pohl 

Which may seem like a small notion. But it’s possibly the best working definition of sf I’ve yet come across, insofar as it does the crucial business of inviting the body in front of you to consider sf as a tool with which to understand the contemporary world.

The Pinocchio Theory » Sex + Love With Robots:

More precisely, SF (and nonfiction futuristic speculation as well) is a tool with which to understand those aspects of the contemporary world that are unfinished, still in process, and therefore (as it were) redolent of futurity. SF and futurism are vital and necessary, because they make us stop and look at the changes going on all around us, breaking with the “rear-view-mirrorism” (as Marshall McLuhan called it) that otherwise characterizes the way we tend to look at the world. That’s why I find it indispensable to read people like Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Charles Stross, Warren Ellis, and so on. The line between science fiction and futurist speculation is an extremely thin one (and some of the people on my list, most notably Sterling, explicitly do both). Extrapolating the future is necessarily a fiction-making activity; but we can’t understand the present, or be ready for the future, unless we go beyond empirical fact and turn to fiction.

Technorati tags: Jack Schulze, Schulze & Webb, social hardware, hardware APIs, Interesting2007, Olinda, comics

Life in hypertext

My laptop needed some repair work. Limping by on a school machine during the day was made more than bearable by having the use of an iPod touch the rest of the time and access to an N810. None of these are my own. Of the three, the iPod touch is a revelation — so easy to use, the Gmail interface is (as of now) outstanding and surfing the web on it is often a joy. I don't yet know the N810 well enough to comment about it, but one thing that lets the iPod touch down is the laboriousness of entering text. I look forward to putting the N810's keyboard through its paces, but somehow I doubt it will prove as comfortable to use as the E70's thumb keyboard. The E70 is simply the best device I've ever owned for texting.

As ever when my laptop's down, I learn things. One thing I learned this time: wireless, mobile computing is getting pretty enjoyable all of a sudden. Like everyone else, I now want to try the Asus EEE. These are all devices we need to trial in school.

Meanwhile …

I  William Gibson (my bold):

One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody's going to google everything in the text. So people--and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition--would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

(Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine — 1998, pdf: "Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily. In order to accomplish this Google makes heavy use of hypertextual information consisting of link structure and link [anchor] text. Google also uses proximity and font information. … The analysis of link structure via PageRank allows Google to evaluate the quality of web pages. The use of link text as a description of what the link points to helps the search engine return relevant [and to some degree high quality] results. Finally, the use of proximity information helps increase relevance a great deal for many queries.")

II  Adam Greenfield:

… the book is an obsolete mediation between two different hypertext systems. For everything essential is found on the del.icio.us page of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own blog.

Technorati tags: mobile computing, writing, knowledge, Google, del.icio.us

What we're teaching this year

I thought I'd post here some links to stuff we've developed and are using with our first year students (13 year-olds). The material is in the public domain, on JotSpot.

So, here's the syllabus. (It's open to revision this year, as we teach it, and, of course, before we teach it again next year.)

Autumn Term

ICT at school, home ... mobile
Internet & web: key figures and events
Reading the social web: browsers, RSS and search
Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line I: Office(s)

Spring Term

Communicating & collaborating, on- and off-line II: webmail, IM, chat, VoIP; blogs & wikis; video- and photo-sharing; social bookmarking and tagging; maps

Summer Term

Responsibility and Identity: Wikipedia (critical reading, responsible writing); social software (privacy, safety, digital identity)
The Law: copyright (links, permissions, problems); music (file-sharing, DRM); defamation and abuse (rights and responsibilities)
Games
Virtual Worlds   

Then there's a wealth of linked-to background material that served earlier this year as stuff for the department to immerse itself in as it readied itself. (We're very fortunate in the quality and commitment of the team which teaches this course.) I update this material from time to time so it can remain useful. 

Finally, the lessons to date: 

1  Introduction 

2  Home & mobile technologies 

3  The Internet 

4  Internet Pioneers 

5  The Web 

6  The Web 

7  Browsers 

8  Personalisation and home pages 

9  RSS & Aggregators 

10  Search 

11  RSS & Search: improving the signal to noise ratio 

12 Office: I

We've had fun delivering these within the constraints of time (one 40-minute lesson a week!) and the engagement of the pupils has been inspiring. 

In doing what we've been doing, my concern has been to leave behind what John Naughton called (in the Observer) the Old Person's ICT Curriculum. I also found inspiration along the way in Dave Snowden's blog post, Huginn and Muginn. Not everything there meshes with what we're doing (we're not delivering touch-typing and, yes, we should be) and we are teaching something of a body of knowledge (eg, about web history —€” Eliot: 'A people without history Is not redeemed from time' — but that's not what he was referring to: see 'don't teach ICT as if it was a "body of knowledge"'). Such things apart, I'm entirely at one with the spirit of remarks like these:

… make computers and broadband a universal right, like water … most computing skills and all social computing capability is learnt by doing and by regular practice rather than classroom lessons.

… what really matters is that children experience and contribute to the evolution of technology, and to see that evolution as a symbiotic relationship with human kind. That requires us … [to be] thoughtful and mindful. We don't need to sacrifice an eye to gain wisdom … but we do need to sacrifice an over explicit non-experiential approach to ICT teaching.

I also like his fifth point:

Let things emerge, don't plan … It's not so much about repeating a success as repeating the conditions which led to that success. In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. … you want multiple diverse initiatives to emerge, and you want to measure their impact on the social and educational fabric … not a series of pre-determined targeted outcomes.

There's been a surprising amount of room for things to emerge: pupils experiment in their own time, bring a lot to the table, anyway, and are excited by discovering more about the powers given them by contemporary computing.

I'd add to all this a word about the re-appraisal of Prensky's influential digital natives meme — a re-appraisal that has been going on for some time now. Here's Henry Jenkins (writing earlier this month):

Talk of "digital natives" helps us to recognize and respect the new kinds of learning and cultural expression which have emerged from a generation that has come of age alongside the personal and networked computer. Yet, talk of "digital natives" may also mask the different degrees [of] access to and comfort with emerging technologies experienced by different youth. Talk of digital natives may make it harder for us to pay attention to the digital divide in terms of who has access to different technical platforms and the participation gap in terms of who has access to certain skills and competencies or for that matter, certain cultural experiences and social identities. Talking about youth as digital natives implies that there is a world which these young people all share and a body of knowledge they have all mastered, rather than seeing the online world as unfamiliar and uncertain for all of us.

Teaching this course this year, we have had it confirmed that being born in 1994 doesn't mean that online life, for all that it may be familiar, is well understood: where it's come from, what it can do and what your options are —€” these are all things that unite adults and teens as we seek to develop and mature in this new and changing world.

Technorati tags: ICT, St Paul's, youth, teens, teaching, digital natives, digital divide

On not rushing to disparage the internet

Vint Cerf in last Monday's Guardian:

It is not often that a technological innovation changes fundamentally the way people communicate. In the 15th century the printing press made it possible to distribute the written word. In the 19th century, the telegraph enabled rapid point-to-point communication over long distances. Then there was the telephone. And we're still coming to terms with the social effects of radio and television.

It takes decades if not generations to fully understand the impact of such inventions. We are barely two decades into the commercial availability of the internet, but it has already changed the world. It has fostered self-expression and freed information from the constraints of physical location, opening up the world's information to people everywhere.

Shelley Powers, responding two days ago to Doris Lessing's bleak assessment of the internet's impact on culture, education and reading:

The internet is no more culpable for people 'wasting' time away than the television was, and the radio before that, and the electric light before that–on back through history marked by one invention or another. Technology does not change culture, as much as technology and culture impact, equally, on each other. …

… Amazon has grown fat on the profits of selling that which we supposedly disdain: books. Entire web sites spend most or all of their space providing reviews of, what else, books. The Gutenberg Project actually makes books available online for free. Ms. Lessing mistakes our assumptions of easy access of books for indifference to books. A very romantic thought, but not a very logical one. …

As for the banalities of this space, among the items I've read this week were [detailed summary of online reading, viewing and web-led book discoveries follows] … I would be curious to know at what point in all of this reading is the moment where I stepped over the line from spending time in banal pursuits, to spending time usefully? What makes one piece of writing more important and therefore more worthy than another?

Technorati tags: Vint Cerf, innovation, Shelley Powers, Doris Lessing, reading, culture, web

Adactio hits St Paul's

It was such a pleasure to welcome Jeremy Keith to SPS last Tuesday, to talk about 'Designing for the Social Web'. As expected, it was a tour de force — but one which artfully concealed its learning and expertise so that everything was at once informed and accessible to the interested but not geekily literate.

Jeremy blogged the talk and visit here: I like his succinct overview of his talk as being about 'small world networks, the strength of weak ties, portable social networks and, inevitably, microformats'. Adam blogged it here; Alex, here. Jeremy's slides are available on Slideshare.

Adam's blog post captures very well much of what the talk was about. Part of his overview runs:

He began by outlining a brief history of the internet working his way from mailing lists and BBS to the modern social web, comparing and contrasting how they functioned and detailing the pitfalls of each. He gave specific weight to problems such as trolling and flaming, catalyzed by communities (usually over the dunbar limit) which lack a central aim and the methods by which these problems could be minimized, including keeping the community focused around groups. He named a few websites which managed this issue well (last.fm, delicious) as well as lambasting digg for failing on this front.

*****

A word about Web 2.0. Now over two years "old" — two years, that is, since Tim O'Reilly's classic paper, What Is Web 2.0; (see, also, his 2006 posting, Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again) — Web 2.0 means all things to all men: rounded corners and drop shadows; tagging; business models; leveraging collective intelligence … I hope the link to Tim O'Reilly's paper may be useful to some who attended Jeremy's talk, but this was not a talk that put this buzzword at the centre.

*****

Networks can scale very well but people don't. This is the challenge for social software design. Jeremy singled out four things to focus on and I've found myself digging back into these in the days since he spoke:

1) Social objects (eg, events — Upcoming; photos — Flickr; bands/albums/songs — Last.fm). This made me go back to Jyri's classic blog post, Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality (2005). (And see, too, his 2007 blog posting, What makes a good social object.) I recall, also, Stewart Butterfield talking about Flickr in these terms — something I blogged about here.

2) Community guidelines: 'be civil' (Jeremy's Irish music site, The Session); 'be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members' (Flickr); 'use common sense while posting' (Last.fm). As a school, when we go to set up a site (on Flickr, on Last.fm), guidelines are what we we soon start to think about. The advice here is sane, straightforward — and necessary.

3) Phatic communication. We miss this online. We long ago adopted emoticons, and some emergent social software just is phatic: eg, Twitter. (Facebook does phatic well.) Jeremy mentioned Leisa Reichelt's work on ambient intimacy (March, 2007) and Twitter:

I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter (and also Flickr and reading blog posts and Upcoming). I call it Ambient Intimacy. Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. … There are a lot of us … who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

I remember, too, Ian Curry's Twitter: The Missing Messenger (February, 2007):

It’s basically blogging reduced to what the Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin referred to as “the phatic function. (see note below)” Like saying “what’s up?” as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up, the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur. It made me think of the light, low-content text message circles Mizuko Ito described existing among Japanese teens - it’s not so important what gets said as that it’s nice to stay in contact with people. These light exchanges typify the kind of communication that arises among people who are saturated with other forms of communication.

This brought us on to the network effect of weak ties, which made me think of Joi Ito writing (in 2003) about Granovetter's classic 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties:

Strong ties are your family, friends and other people you have strong bonds to. Weak ties are relationships that transcend local relationship boundaries both socially and geographically. He writes about the importance of weak ties in the flow of information and does a study of job hunting and shows that jobs are more often found through weak ties than through strong ties. This obviously overlaps with the whole 6 degrees thing. … What I can see emerging is a way to amplify the strength of weak ties.

And here's Grant McCracken, How social networks work: the puzzle of exhaust data (July, 2007):

Naturally, networks, especially really distributed, anti-hierarchical ones of the kind we like, are profoundly reciprocal enterprises.  So it is especially true here that, as George Herbert Mead observed, our knowledge of ourselves depends upon what (and that) others know about us.  Or, to put this another way, we we find ourselves when others find us. … I'm ok and you're ok.  This means the channel must be ok, and this means that the network must exist, and this means that the network is ok, and this means that the network is active, and this means the network is flowing.  There is a "superorganic" concept of the network at work here, according to which every small moment of phatic communications so reverberates that we are briefly and tinyily reminded of our larger network and social connections.

This has all left me thinking I want to revisit network theory and weak ties.

4) Open Data: we make these sites (an old argument, as we all know). APIs, RSS, microformats all enable us to get away from the idea of a web site as a place and enable us to extract and redeploy our and others' data. We have mashups (photos+events; maps+photos …), lifestreams. (The time stamp is key.) Jeremy has written about lifestreams here and his own is online here. (See, also, Thomas Vander Wal, Life Data Stream :: Personal InfoCloud. And, on Jaiku as lifestream, Are You Paying Attention?: Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Loopnote.) 

Questions about privacy follow, inevitably. As Jeremy suggests (following Jeff Veen), there may be a generational difference here, younger people tending to think "my data is public except where I say it is private". I was glad Jeremy found time to talk about his experience with the Flickr API, Lock up your data: 'I don’t know the answers but I’m fairly certain that we’re not dealing with a technological issue here; this is a cultural matter'.

*****

One thing even the successful social software sites don't share well so far is our social groups — which brought us swiftly to the idea of portable social networks. Here are a few touchstone reference points I've collected recently:

"If you add content to a site, then you should be able to take that content with you. You should also be able to take all associated tags and metadata. You should be able to move your content from one site to another." MoveMyData.org

"… you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to your profile information [and] your social network from any existing profile of yours. In addition it would be nice if preferences around notifications [and] privacy also transferred between profiles" Social Network Portability

"it seems like a no-brainer to design systems that allow for simple import/export of your social network. ... Today I want to walk through the mechanics of how Dopplr is working on helping you migrate your social network." LikeItMatters

"Great experiences & trust are going to be key differentiators. ... We’ve seen this movie before and walled gardens eventually get about as interesting as Biosphere 2. ... make your networking data open ... it’s the smart play given how the Web works" LikeItMatters

A lot of the data that's needed to make social networks portable is out there in the URLs, the microformats (XFN, hCards ...). Provided we accept a Pareto-like solution (over the semantic web — which works well in places with very structured data such as museums and universities), we can get to a very good end-result of portability.

*****

Finally, two things I read last night that I think are wise about how we should proceed with social software and networking. The first is a blog posting, the second a comment on the same. (Adam's argument is that 'the whole milieu in which these concerns of openness and portability are contained is broken - and not just a little broken, but badly so'. His argument challenges, as he says, a hugely popular approach to social networking online. For my part, I think Mike's comment is dead right.)

Adam Greenfield: 

For all of these reasons, I believe that technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

I understand that this is very much a minority opinion, and one which will not carry the day. But neither is it simply the knee-jerk, reactionary rejection of technology; I see it as a demand, rather, that we use information technology for the things it’s good at, and keep it far, far from the things it damages at first touch. I feel far too strongly about my friends and about the experiences we’ve shared, and which I cherish, to submit any of them to the idiot regime of social networking as it is currently understood.

Mike Migurski: 

The only sane social network relationships I’ve seen are modeled in terms of the objects featured on that network: who gets to “see your trips” or “view your photos” is a superior description of a relationship than “friend”.

Technorati tags: social networking, web, friendship, friending, semantic web, portable social networks, lifestreams, social objects, phatic communication, ambient intimacy, weak ties, microformats, open data

Talks, talks, talks

I get to do a lot of these within the school and I don't post about most. But a couple of weeks ago I talked to a group of some 80 parents of students about social software and I thought it might be worth saying something about this talk here. (I believe there's value in also saying something about a couple of other talks: clips from one follow below; I'll post about another shortly.) The slides are now on Slideshare, here. (Update: some of these slides have been rendered less than clear in the process of uploading and converting them to Slideshare. If you download the slideshow, everything returns to its original PowerPoint glory.)

Parents are worried about social software — and given the sensational way in which it is commonly reported in the traditional media this is no surprise. I was keen to convey how, from the outset, the web was conceived as social and how, in being so, it is fulfilling something fundamental in our nature.

Some of these slides are ones I've used before: they are, for the moment, useful reference points. Some have parts blocked out in the interests of others' privacy. Few need explanation to anyone immersed in Web 2 culture. The 'St Paul's: ICT Group' slide is a snapshot taken from earlier this term when we had just set up this group: the group is not a replacement for our ICT support but a recognition that communities of users have a considerable body of experience and can be their own best resource for help.

A section near the end, 'IV SPS', looks at what we're teaching this term to our first years (13 year-olds) at St Paul's School (SPS). I'll be posting more about this course soon. My job, as this section goes on to say, is very much about having an open office and my guiding star is danah boyd — whose writings are referenced, explicitly and implicitly, in the closing slides. I can't recommend the Congressional Internet Caucus video too highly. 

The social web: a cause for celebration, for thinking again about what we do when we teach and learn … and, as David Weinberger says, for joy.

***** 

During this term I talked to our top two year groups (17 and 18 year-olds) on three occasions. The subject of one talk was, again, the social web — its nature, the need for digital literacy, the implications for work (taking newspapers as an example) and the contrast between how long the technological changes have been coming and the perceived suddenness of it all. I don't think there's much merit in publishing all the slides on the web, but here are my favourites from some of the quotations I used:

David Weinberger: 

Hyperlinks … enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy … Most of all, they are social.

Douglas Wolk: 

Each blogger is a gravitational center, great or small, but there's no sun they're all orbiting around.

Cory Doctorow: 

… there's no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used.

Henry Jenkins:

… help young people place Wikipedia in a larger context, developing a deeper understanding of the process by which the its information is being produced & consumed. ... develop a more critical perspective on other, more traditional sources of information.

Clay Shirky: 

Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. 

Journalism.co.uk, reporting Alan Rusbridger:

For at least 10 years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return… [in] the expectation that things will change. 

Roy Greenslade, reporting Rusbridger:

The print-on-paper model [for newspapers] isn't making money and isn't going to make money. It's no longer sustainable. Though the future is unknowable, we are taking an educated guess about what we should be doing and where we should be going.

BuzzMachine:

Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent.” 

A Deutsche Bank analyst says (from BuzzMachine): 

… newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users spend an average of 20 minutes each day inside the site vs. 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites …

And on change, Tom Coates: 

'The snail! The snail!', they cry. 'How can we possibly escape!?. … the snail's been moving closer for the last twenty years, one way or another, and they just weren't paying attention.

 

Technorati tags: social web, St Paul's, SPS, change

Two talks and a visit

A busy few weeks, during which friends (for whose generosity I am so grateful) came to talk about what motivates and fires them on the web and in online life. Since we started these occasional talks, we've been fortunate to have winner after winner — and the two most recent ones were no exceptions.

Back on 8 November, Paul Farnell and David Smalley, co-founders along with Matt Brindley of Litmus (and see, too, Salted), came in to talk about starting a web-based business. Being a young entrepreneur is of interest to several students I teach or know at St Paul's; some have already launched their first ventures.

So: start with an idea that solves a problem (Litmus was born this way, in 2005); don't keep your ideas close but discuss them openly; have a revenue model; work with vision and passion, getting your first version out as soon as possible —  fail faster. Focus on the product, not on patents, NDAs, paperwork, limited company status … Earn money whilst your product cooks: freelance work (eg, web design) pulls money in for work on the product (until this starts paying its way) and also gives you the chance to learn new skills and to network (discovering potential clients). Strike whilst young: it's harder to make the jump to a start-up after earning a full salary working for someone else, and, if you start at university or school, you have a context within which you can take risks with greater safety and ease than later on.

Paul and David blogged briefly about their visit here and have posted a reading list 'of sites and articles which we’ve found to be invaluable over the years'. Adam blogged the talk here.

Riccardo Cambiassi came in the following Thursday to talk about Second Life. Briefly tracing the roots of virtual worlds from William Gibson's 1984 novel, Neuromancer (cyberpunk, cyberspace), through Neal Stephenson's third novel, Snow Crash (1992) and its use of metaverse, he brought us to 2003 and Linden Labs' launch of Second Life (Wikipedia): blending science, art and technology this offered the user the possibility to create and explore innovatory, 'what if' situations. A quick run down on key terms: avatar (Wikipedia: 'In video games, the term avatar refers to the character in the game's diegetic world controlled by the player. Although Neal Stephenson takes credit for creating the term in his book Snow Crash (p. 440), earlier usage can be found in the LucasArts virtual world Habitat); world — reprogrammable (open technology), allowing you to be the magician and write the spell; people — the major difference between web experience and virtual world experience — IM (etc) and voice; metaverse (not the only one: see developments in some web sites and in MMORPGs) — you can read the web, email, IM … see how the virtual world economy is faring vis-à-vis the real world's.

The case studies Riccardo went through were great for our students, illustrating something of the range of what can be done within Second Life: creating 3-D mind maps; creating a space (in this case, the work of an Italian journalist) to produce a low cost conference with high quality content; creating art pieces; an art gallery with a PDF, downloadable library; the celebration of a real life marriage in virtual reality; and Riccardo himself as R2D2. Finally, ajaxlife.net, an AJAX based SL client created by 15 year-old Katharine Berry (Google Code: 'it does not rely on browser plugins, making it suitable for use where you cannot install plugins, e.g. at work, school, or games console') — but sadly, since Riccardo's talk, taken down (see here). There are screenshots of AjaxLife here and an interview with Katharine in Reuters here.

Finally, on Friday, 16 November, Mark Selby, VP Media, Nokia, spent two and a half hours with us. The rise of mobile computing and the rapid development of powerful handheld devices (I've been using an N800 for a while now and we have an N810 on order) lent special purpose to Mark's visit, but above all I wanted him to to see what we're doing, what our students are using and playing with … and to talk directly with some of them. I hope we'll be able to build on this visit.

Conversation follows these talks and visits, breaking out around the speaker and carrying on over lunch and coffee. My thanks, again, to Paul, David, Riccardo and Mark for giving up so much of their time and for proving such good and stimulating company.

Technorati tags: Litmus, start-ups, entrepreneurs, Second Life, Nokia, mobile computing, virtual environments, metaverse