Preoccupations

Being that much better

From the immemorial to the ephemeral. I’ve been moving steadily Mac-wards in the last couple of months. If nothing else, it’s liberating to learn to think with different tools. (The desire to have tools that are ready-to-hand, but the value that lies in appreciating constraints — then we have a fighting chance when the picture might otherwise hold us captive.)

The operating system I should really be using is Linux, for the reasons John Gruber summed up so well in a footnote to his recent blog post about Google Chrome OS/vapourware. What he had to say about Linux is so good it’s worth quoting it all:

“Linux” means different things to different people. At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by “Linux”, though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel. For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System.

Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE “desktop Linux” racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.

My theory on this is rather simple. Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when they see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.²

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different. …

² The group that’s the most enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE desktop Linux systems consists of those who care the most about the political and licensing aspects. With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better.

In amidst fruit-picking, I’m playing with a better camera and I think I’m moving on a little, inspired by time spent alongside Jonathan, engaged by how he works, and, interesting-to-me, by computer games. To start with, that familiar sense of panic that, years ago, poetry once gave me (“I’ll never get this”) and then, at first slowly then more and more quickly, the coming of understanding and pleasure. Games absolutely encourage a try-and-fail-and-try-again approach. I used to be paralysed by the seeming unpredictability in learning anything much at all about digital photography, but treating it like play (which is certainly how I see Jonathan set about things) makes it all right — and fun.

Tools for thought: this post was semi-made on a Mac — I could have made this in a pure-Mac way (following a path no doubt excellent but seemingly laborious), but LiveWriter remains the best tool I know for blogging (a lot of the time it gets out of the way). And VirtualBox is free — and works.

Technorati Tags: play, constraints, tools, thinking

Tilt into the future

So many reasons to be gloomy as we slide into 2009, but I’m with Eno in refusing to go down that route. I’m buoyed up by what so many friends are doing, by the inspiration students give me and by my 92 year-old mother getting up in the night to watch the US election results (“after the 60s and the civil unrest, I just had to see this through”).

Barack Obama with his family on election night in Chicago, IL on Wednesday, November 5, 2008L
David Katz/Obama for America (Flickr)

I first came across Obama in 2005 and quoted him that summer in a farewell speech I gave for a close friend (alter ipse amicus) as he stood down from his pastoral post in a boarding school. I think the Economist had reported on a speech to graduating students that Obama had made that June, where he had invited them to ask of themselves, "What will be my place in history?":

In other eras, across distant lands, this is a question that could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant of Rome, you knew you would spend your life forced to build somebody else's Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might take everything you had - and that famine might come knocking on your door any day. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom to worship and speak and build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne. And then, America happened. A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form "a more perfect union" on this new frontier.

I quoted another bit (shorn it of its specifically American references), made right for the occasion because it expresses perfectly my friend’s own wise, kind and optimistic humanity (expended tirelessly in his work with the young):

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own … journey? Surely. But the test is not perfection. The true test … is whether we are able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time.

Go and read this 2005 speech: it’s often fine (Obama and rhetoric!) and prescient, attuned to the challenges of technology and globalisation, to what an inter-connected world means — and to the significance of education. It is youthful and attentive to youth, inspired by hope and looking to the future:

So let's dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let's imagine what we can do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.

Back in March of last year, Marc Andreessen wrote about Obama (“We asked him directly, how concerned should we be that you haven't had meaningful experience as an executive -- as a manager and leader of people? He said, watch how I run my campaign -- you'll see my leadership skills in action.”):

It's very clear when interacting with Senator Obama that he's totally focused on the world as it has existed since after the 1960's -- as am I, and as is practically everyone I know who's younger than 50.

Well, Palin and the plumber are just a memory and we’ll soon be seeing how it goes. My 01.20.09 t-shirts now have a whole new life ahead of them.

(My non-Obama take-away from last year’s campaign: “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power” — Bill Clinton.)

As Warren Ellis wrote in another context:

Tilt into the future. Or get the eternal past you deserve.

Technorati tags: Obama, hope, optimism, 2009, America

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

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

Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World

— the title of a very long report by Harris Interactive on behalf of the OCLC, available for download (pdf) here. (You can also download sections of the report from here.) In its conclusion it poses the question, 'what are the services and incentives that online libraries could offer users to entice them to come back or to visit more often or even devote some of their own time to help create a social library site?'.

This OCLC membership report explores this web of social participation and cooperation on the Internet and how it may impact the library’s role, including:

• The use of social networking, social media, commercial and library services on the Web
• How and what users and librarians share on the Web and their attitudes toward related privacy issues
• Opinions on privacy online
• Libraries’ current and future roles in social networking

Any report this long is going to take time to read and digest, but a look at some of the conclusions should whet the appetite:

The drive to participate, to build, to seek out communities is certainly nothing new. “Connect with friends,” “be part of group,” “have fun” and “express myself” are the top motives for using social networks according to our research. We could as easily be describing the motives behind the rise of the telephone, civic associations or, more recently, the cell phone, or the motivations that drew e-mail from the office into the home. The motives that are driving the rise of social networking are not unique. And yet, this particular Internet innovation, the social networking craze, feels different. It doesn’t seem to be playing out like the digital revolutions that preceded it. Social networking is doing something more than advancing communications between individuals, driving commerce or speeding connectivity. It is redefining roles, muddying the waters between audience and creator, rules and relationships, trust and security, private and public. And the roles are changing, not just for a few but for everyone, and every service, on the Web. Whether one views this new social landscape as a great opportunity for improved information creation and exchange or as a messy playground to be tidied up to restore order, depends on one’s point of view. …

We see a social Web developing in an environment where users and librarians have dissimilar, perhaps conflicting, views on sharing and privacy. There is an imbalance. Librarians view their role as protectors of privacy; it is their professional obligation. They believe their users expect this of them. Users want privacy protection, but not for all services. They want the ability to control the protection, but not at the expense of participation. …

… librarians have pioneered many of the digital services we now see in broad use on the Web: intranets to share resources, electronic information databases and “ask-an-expert” services. And although it took some librarians a while to embrace the use of search engines as hubs for information access, librarians are now Googling more frequently than their users and teaching users how to maximize the potential of this powerful tool. But, unfortunately, librarians are not pioneering the social Web.

And from the final section of the conclusion, 'Open the Doors':

Our perceptions become our realities, and often, also our limitations. This was clearly the case for the authors of this report when we began our research on social networks a year ago. There is no doubt that our initial perceptions of social networks influenced our approach to this study. Handicapped by only limited personal experiences with sites, we began our study as we had every study before it—by looking at social networks as a service or set of services to be studied, learned and implemented. We conceived of a social library as a library of traditional services enhanced by a set of social tools—wikis, blogs, mashups and podcasts. Integrated services, of course, user-friendly for sure and offering superior self-service. We were wrong. Our view, after living with the data, struggling with the findings, listening to experts and creating our own social spaces, is quite different. Becoming engaged in the social Web is not about learning new services or mastering new technologies. To create a checklist of social tools for librarians to learn or to generate a “top ten” list of services to implement on the current library Web site would be shortsighted. Such lists exist. Resist the urge to use them.

The social Web is not being built by augmenting traditional Web sites with new tools. And a social library will not be created by implementing a list of social software features on our current sites. The social Web is being created by opening the doors to the production of the Web, dismantling the current structures and inviting users in to create their content and establish new rules. Open the library doors, invite mass participation by users and relax the rules of privacy. It will be messy. The rules of the new social Web are messy. The rules of the new social library will be equally messy. But mass participation and a little chaos often create the most exciting venues for collaboration, creativity, community building—and transformation.

Technorati tags: OCLC, libraries, social networking, privacy, trust

FOWA

I didn't go to this latest get-together (I did make the March 07 meet: see here), but we sprung five final year students from school for the day ... and I think they had a ball.

Alex's FOWA photoset is here — and Michael's, here, was picked up on (quite independently) by Marc Eisenstadt, here.

Chatting with Marc by email, he commented on what great role models FOWA gives up-and-coming teenagers. Tom Coates said the same thing to me about Kevin Rose (when we met last month at a dinner held for Howard Rheingold). I think that's all spot on.

Alex has a preliminary write-up here, Michael has posted twice — Future of Web Apps, The Future of Web Apps, and Diggnation: A Round-up, and (update!, 7/10) Adam has just posted an excellent piece on his blog, Future Of Web Apps & Diggnation.

Technorati tags: FOWA, Future of WebApps, conferences, Kevin Rose

Abundance in IT

The title's nicked straight off of Ross' post ("Chris Anderson gave perhaps the only bloggable talk at the Microsoft Global CIO Summit.  He gave a preview on his upcoming book before 200 Global 1000 CIOs.  This is posted with permission.") — a must-read. Some bits that appeal to me a lot:

Don’t make people jump through a lot of hoops, the cost of experimentation is free.  "Everything is forbidden unless it is permitted" vs. "Everything is permitted unless it is forbidden." ... Let the interns run riot.  They become a source of ideas and innovation at low cost, we identify talent because we can empower the edge. ... The old idea of IT determining what is appropriate prevents experimentation at the edges.  ... who needs a CIO?  The answer is they are necessary, but only if they can adapt to consumer technology and behavior.

The terrifying conclusion to all this is that we may have to trust our employees.

Technorati tags: Chris Anderson, Ross Mayfield, CIO, IT, ICT, innovation, abundance

The certainty of chance

From the Economist's obituary of George Melly:

As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”.

'The 'certainty of chance' was', James Boyle says, 'the phrase André Breton used to describe both modernism and his own philosophy of life'.

Earlier this month, the TLS reprinted George Melly's 1991 review of A Book of Surrealist Games, in which he concluded:

It may puzzle the more pompous as to why this body of men and women, these ardent revolutionaries of the spirit, spent so much time engaged in occupations usually considered more suitable for bored children on wet afternoons. The answer is, to quote the preface, that “Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic”, that it “breaks, the thread of discursive thought” and, above all, helps to confirm the primary Surrealist belief in what they called “objective chance” or “the certainty of hazard”. These games will prove to you that not only was Lautréamont justified as to poetry; one could add a rider: “Surrealism too can be made by all.” 

Of the cover, George Melly wrote:

… a bourgeois interior, painted with the minimal realism of early Magritte. Seated opposite each other in identical armchairs, a young father is engrossed in his newspaper while his wife is teaching their son to read. Something is mildly askew. Is it because, while it is dark outside, the curtains are undrawn, or that the room is lit by anachronistic Victorian oil lamps, or that the newspaper, despite the completely Western ambience of the decor, is printed in oriental typography?

The origin of this illustration is unrevealed. I suspect it may have been an advertisement for a pre-war European product aimed at the Japanese market, or vice versa, but it is a brilliant trailer for the displacement on offer within. In a balloon-shaped inset, replacing perhaps a commercial slogan, is a quotation from Lautréamont, the nineteenth-century writer so revered by the Surrealists: “Poetry should be made by all.”

Amazon carries an "editorial review" (cited as Amazon.com): 'Surrealism is far more than some dead art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. … If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft.'

I see Anne's been here before — and quotes more of the preface to A Book of Surrealist Games than George Melly did:

Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminancy for premeditation and deliberation... In one particular and important respect Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic. This is in its irrepressible propensity to the transformation of objects, behaviours and ideas. In this aspect of its proceedings Surrealism makes manifest its underlying political programme, its revolutionary intent.

Before going on to put some surrealist games online, Anne also quotes Philippe Audouin:

It is not to belittle Surrealist activity to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

Unsurprisingly, various things here made me think again about the aleatoric. 

Technorati tags: George Melly, André Breton, surrealism, chance, aleatoric, play, magic

Narrating the work

E O Wilson in Consilience, quoted by Jon Udell:

The creative process is an opaque mix. Perhaps only openly confessional memoirs, still rare to nonexistent, might disclose how scientists actually find their way to a publishable conclusion. In one sense scientific articles are deliberately misleading. Just as a novel is better than the novelist, a scientific report is better than the scientist, having been stripped of all the confusions and ignoble thought that led to its composition. Yet such voluminous and incomprehensible chaff, soon to be forgotten, contains most of the secrets of scientific success.

As Jon put it elsewhere,

By narrating the work, as Dave Winer once put it, we clarify the work. There can be more than narrator, but it makes sense to have one team member own the primary role just as other members own other roles.

The first Jon Udell piece referred to above focuses on Timo Hannay:

As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay’s projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication. The social and collaborative aspects of these systems are, of course, inspired by their more general counterparts on the web: del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blogosphere.

Jon's interview with Timo Hannay is here. I'm keeping a close eye on what Nature is up to.

Dave Winer's original usage runs: 'I think that narrating your work is the way to go'. I can see why Jon Udell likes that as much as he does.

Technorati tags: E O Wilson, Jon Udell, Dave Winer, Nature, Timo Hannay, conversation

Microlearning 2007 … and conversation

Time at last for a couple of conference retrospects. First up, this year's Microlearning organised, as ever, by Martin. It was heralded by a puff from Judy on SmartMobs and it was a great success, Martin — congrats! And many thanks.

A mellow tone developed from the start: the three days saw a lot of warm, friendly conversation and really interesting talks. For me, it was a pleasure to have the chance to chat with Martin at much greater length than last year and to meet (their write-ups of the conference follow in brackets after each name): Hemma Kocher (here), Teemu Leinonen (here), Ajit Jaokar (here), Mark Kramer (here; Mark's photos of the conference are here), Stephanie Rieger, Arnaud Leene (here) and Martina Roth.

Teemu's slides for his talk, 'Knowledge Building in New Media Environments', are on Slideshare, as are mine for my talk, 'Where Next?' — here. Hemma's talk, 'How to Deal With Microcontent at the Workplace 2.0', is available as a podcast (from Mark) here and as slides here.

Martin wrote to me that this year's conference had been something like what he had always imagined university life would/should have been like: 'digital media does create a whole new dimension of "scientific community" - I hated the days of "real hard work in the faculty meatspace"' (Twitter). This is something I keep hearing people say — about the web, about great conferences … To borrow from Martin again, it was an experience of 'collective friendship'.

Conversation is absolutely central here. In his talk, Teemu quoted Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Any true understanding is dialogic in nature', and Tim Spalding's comment on my post of last month, Conversation, led me to Barbara Fister's Gorman Forgets to Wind the Clock and so to Michael Oakeshott's 1959 essay, 'The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind'. Disappointingly, this essay doesn't seem to be available online, but Barbara Fister quoted two wonderful passages:

We are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation that goes on both in public and within each of ourselves . . .

Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance.

And I found more, quoted on Mike Love's blog, in his post Oakeshott’s Conversation of Mankind:

In conversation, ‘facts’ appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; ‘certainties’ are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other ‘certainties’ or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. … voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances.

There's a lot to think about in that! (Need to get hold of the whole essay.) I love how Konrad Glogowski plucks out part of it in Unending Conversation and writes, 'teaching, the way I see it, is what Michael Oakeshott refers to as "unrehearsed intellectual adventure"'.

And doesn't what Oakeshott wrote remind you of something else? Play. 'Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions.'

*****

We surely need some full studies of conversation — it occurs in so many ways. It's realised when companies find that users generate up to 70% more tagging terms than the company taxonomists had dreamed of (because that's how users talk about what's important to them) — Thomas: a triumph of the vernacular over the-officially-provided. (The del.icio.us lesson holds good — and see also the later post — but conversation ensues.) It's conversation that organisations of all types are in part trying to enable when they aspire to go beyond the artery-clogging practice of e-mail. And it's conversation that drives me to del.icio.us-tag items found via friends and people I know through the web with 'via: ...': I want to keep those links alive in my outboard memory as well as in my own head. (There's something very Ted Nelson about this — show all the links. A humanist's web. I would dearly love to see del.icio.us develop more of its native social identity.)

At Reboot this year, one of the most interesting slides I saw was Jyri's of the the hum/wave//beat/particle world of communication. I posted this slide on my Tumblr site, here, and you can access Jyri's talk here, Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media. Right now, I find I'm using hum/wave software tools a lot (that's what they're there for, that's why they're hum/wave), Twittering and Jaikuing away (even Pownce-ing a bit) — part of that online, conversational world that David Weinberger calls 'continuous partial friendship' and that Martin refers to as 'creating the kind of little loose social events we'd like to have in a real-space environment, but now in the digital dimension':

 … part of the greater tendency to *duplicate* the dimension of small events that together make "daily life" into the digital dimension. like, say, meeting people at the university campus, exchanging witty, sarcastic, melancholic comments in the floors, between courses ... or at an office floor in some media company ... it is an "urban lifestyle layer" for non-spaces.

The best things I've read on Twitter (the above apart): Ian Curry's take, Twitter: The Missing Messenger, and his use of 'phatic function' (Bakhtin/Jakobson); Matt(Jones)'s comment there, referring to Matt(Webb)'s brilliant Glancing piece; Khoi Vinh's Writing and Sizing Twitter (which I heard him talk about at FoWA); Leisa's 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') and Reboot talk (which I got to hear).

Of course, you can say Twitter's 'not for conversation… it’s for stream of consciousness thoughts or status reports', but I don't think that's the whole truth. Ambient things get taken up into conversation, become themselves part of the conversation. (Yes, there's the tension between Twitter's ambient nature and its capacity for threaded conversation … But there's also this other, distinct phenomenon — I've lost count of how many times, meeting someone in the flesh, we refer to things we know about through Twittering.)

I also want to situate 'conversation' in a Long Now perspective. The young are inspiring and, as we grow older, it's obviously in them that our hopes for the future come naturally, and increasingly, to rest. I can well imagine being one day where the great Richard Feynman found himself towards the end of his life — in this conversation with Danny Hillis:

"I'm sad because you're going to die."

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

But before that (!), we need to get the young to our conferences — and you can imagine my delight that people were saying this to me at Microlearning and Reboot and Interesting2007. You know, you don't find this attitude everywhere you go. Thanks, again, Martin.

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