In my efforts to be more holistic with my media literacy approach I’ve been moving in the direction of not just looking at the content of media, but their entire production process, from the making of content to the production of gadgets. There’s a good book,Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
Technology
5
Jul 10
Conflict (mineral) resolution
27
Mar 10
Defective thinking and the iPad
Wired has a bunch of smart guys ruminating about the the iPad’s impact on computing. As to be expected in Wired, there is a dearth of discussion about the impact of obsolescence on the environment. On a separate note, with so many brilliant minds in the room, surpassingly only one person made an intelligent comment: Steven Johnson (author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software ). You can read a snip below, but essentially he points to the fundamental contradiction between technological access and corporate gatekeepers. If we want a truly ecological gadget–that is, one that is open, shareable and hence designed to evolve the way that ecosystems are–than DRM and copyright are going to have to be radically reconsidered. In the end, I don’t believe we can reconcile a closed system (the current regime of intellectual property) and an open system like the Internet. One will have to give.
For more on the iPad’s DRM issues, check out defectivebydesign.org.
13 of the Brightest Tech Minds Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet | Magazine:
The End of an Era
“But then something extraordinary happened. The personal computer proved to be more than just a fancy calculator. It turned out to be a device for doing things with words. Each milestone in computation and connectivity unleashed a new wave of textual breakthroughs: Early networks gave rise to email and Usenet; the Mac UI made reading text on the screen tolerable; the Internet platform (and the NeXT development environment) made it possible for one man to invent a universal hypertext system; Google harnessed distributed computing to make the entire Web searchable in microseconds; and thanks to Wi-Fi and cellular networks, along with hardware miniaturization, we can now download a novel to an ebook in 10 seconds.
It has been an exhilarating ride, but it is coming to an end, and that magical experience of instantly pulling Middlemarch out of the ether and onto your Kindle suggests why: Compared to other kinds of information that computers process today, text has an exceptionally small footprint. With the arrival of the tablet, we have crossed a critical threshold: Where text is concerned, we effectively have infinite computational resources, connectivity, and portability. For decades, futurists have dreamed of the “universal book”: a handheld reading device that would give you instant access to every book in the Library of Congress. In the tablet era, it’s no longer technology holding us back from realizing that vision; it’s the copyright holders.”
11
Nov 09
The future is always/never dangerous
In simple terms, the rise of a scientific society means a society of constant expectations directed toward the oncoming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is ‘progress.’ What we seek, in the end, is Utopia. In the endless pursuit of the future we have ended by engaging to destroy the present.
Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid
11
Nov 09
Which telecommunications milieu are you?
A) The David Lynch Phone
B) The Terminator Phone
C) The Ladies and Gentlemen We’re Floating in Space Phone
4
Oct 09
Astronautitis
I’m in the process of developing a malady called “astronautitis” in which I increasingly view the efforts to explore space a failure of imagination to find a way home to Earth. As Loren Eiseley argues in The Invisible Pyramid, the space program is not much different than the pharos trying to achieve immortality with their public works programs of yore. Eiseley goes as far to say that humanity is behaving like a slime mould in which it devours as much as possible before death so that it can shoot spores out into space in order to reproduce.
Anyhow, I like Dmitry Orlov‘s take on economics and observations about collapsing empires (Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects). What follows is a snip from his blog in which he discusses in an interview, among other things, the decline of technology as a result of resource depletion, and the fate of space programs.
ClubOrlov: Marketing in a Small Town – Interview No. 3:
DD: Recently on CNN there was a report about the U.S. mission to the moon. The Indians are planning to land there in 2020, the Russians and Americans in 2025, and the Chinese in 2030. I think that the popularity of conspiracy theories about the staging of those events is that we find it hard to imagine that we can not repeat the achievements of three decades ago without a huge effort. Meanwhile, examples similar to the lunar program are starting to occur more and more frequently. Experts say that Russia has lost the ability to produce modern weapons on a large scale for quite trivial reasons, such as lack of sufficiently skilled metalworkers, because the system of training them has collapsed. How justified are we in fearing that we (the world in general, not just Russia) are starting to slip back in time in terms of technology?
DO: In the end, the history of human trips to space will engender new myths: the primitive idols of the future will not be winged, but will sit astride rockets dressed in spacesuits. These trips were only possible thanks to large-scale industrial systems based on the use of fossil hydrocarbons, reserves which have already been exhausted, on average, about half. It will not be possible to exhaust them completely: the technological rollback has already started. It starts long before a particular resource is completely exhausted. To maintain homeostatic equilibrium, an industrial system requires a continuous flow of investment, and in order for this to happen capital must continually be created. If, say, the profitability of a coal mine is inversely proportional to shaft depth, it is enough to get to a depth at which the income is not sufficient to continue to update equipment, and the mine will close, regardless of how much coal there is left in it. But such a rational approach is rarely taken. Rather than make a difficult but timely decision, everyone begins to economize on safety, defer repairs, take on debt and so on. Periodically, the idea comes up that the situation can be improved if only everyone would show more zeal or ingenuity. We certainly all need some level of technology, and we all ought to stop to think hard which technologies can be sustained at a continually decreasing level of extraction of various natural resources. Instantly the thought occurs that aerospace technologies will not make it onto this list.
27
Sep 09
When the signal dies no one can hear you scream
Cribbing another post from BoingBoing: Cory Doctorow posted the above video as a complaint against a lazy plot device. But I suspect dead cell phones in plot lines to be part of a greater anxiety, and began to craft a response in my mind, but bingo! the commenter Tdawwg nailed it. Without further ado:
Maybe this issue points to a problem with plot-heavy storytelling in an increasingly deterministic, mapped-out, known, surveilled, mechanistic, etc., world.
Think of a similar genre, the Wanted Man-Technothriller: Enemy of the State is an early example from the nineties. In these films, endless (and endlessly tiring) instances must be concocted whereby the harried protagonist just barely manages to slip by the evil conspiracymongers’ (or corporation’s, or gubbmint rogue death squad, or….) Nefarious Web of Ubiquitous Surveillance. Whereas if we’re to accept the central premise of the film, that there exists a They Who Are Evil And All-Powerful, They’d have fucked the hero three ways to Sunday in reel one: but somehow the hero always always slips past the ever-tightening net of surveillance and control.
In the suspense-horror case, the fear comes from the existential threats of not being able to plug into the Grid (loss of safety and security); in the technothriller case, the fear comes from the existential threats of not being able to jack out of the Grid (loss of freedom and agency). And since these aren’t so much reflective or exploratory arty films, but plot-heavy popcorn summer blockbusters or the reliable, cheap thrills of contemporary horror flicks, so these completely stupid, adventitious reasons for tech failure keep popping up.
Thinking more about it, I really like how the clips above make technology the real monster-threat of the films. Good stuff.
19
Sep 09
Amputated dreams
Antero Alli, a fellow traveler in the realm of the DIY spiritual underground, has an interesting commentary about the impact of immersive media, something I had not thought about. He says, below, that the loss of dream memeory is an amputation of the imagination caused by allowing devices to imagine for us. This is similar to McLuhan’s claim that whenever we transport our senses into mediation we end up cutting off our own bodily senses.
Reality Sandwich | Information Bombs and the Canary in the Coal Mine: A Talk with Antero Alli:
In this hypermedia saturated culture, especially with people born in the early ‘80s on, I think there is a certain imagination lobotomy that has occurred where the external media technologies and sources have gradually usurped the poetic genius or our innate ability to image their own realities. So we succumb to images more gorgeous, interesting, fascinating, or compelling than we can create out of our own imaginations. So the imagination dies, it withers — imagination death or soul loss is involved. I think part of also what gets lost is dream recall.
Personally I don’t really think that it’s that people don’t dream, but that they’ve lost dream recall. There’s an association in my mind between the loss of dream recall and power loss in people’s lives. People losing power, losing the ability to influence the world in ways that are meaningful to them. So power loss, loss of dream recall, loss of imagination are all tied into a larger cultural epidemic resulting from this acceleration of media technology and its interface with human consciousness. Especially any kind of immersion software like video gaming, VR technology, and sometimes even films and television and other kinds of media too, where it just overwhelms and sabotages or takes over the individual imagination.
… Imagination is the new canary in the cultural coal mine; imagination death precedes loss of the soul.
29
Aug 09
Laptop ecology
Portals (Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.) have enabled guided Internet experiences, but Disney now takes it one step further. Its new Netpal notebook computer is entirely a computerized Disney environment. From ZDNet:
Developed with parents and kids in mind, the Disney Netpal has a reinforced mechanical design and, naturally, a Disney user interface. In addition to “more than 40 robust parental control options,” the Netpal sports an 8.9-in. LCD display, Wi-Fi, Windows XP Home and kid-friendly software featuring Disney characters.
I suspect these designer-brand net computers will be the wave of the future. We’ll move from generalized branded operating systems, such as Apple, Microsoft or Google, to more specifically designed interfaces that reflect particular styles and brand loyalty. Just as the skateboard industry has a variety of designer and custom boards, I foresee a slew of custom net systems. But I imagine that for now they will be mostly from high end (that is, well-endowed) corporate media brands (I’m sure Warner Brothers has one in the works), because the front-end design aspect must be prohibitive.
Is this Disney’s answer to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and its XO Laptop? Probably not, but it’s instructive to compare the two systems. Though the XO has its own custom operating system, it is open source, a guaruntee required by founder Nicholas Negroponte. Consider the 5 guiding principles of OLPC:
1. Child ownership
2. Low ages. Both hardware and software are designed for elementary school children ages 6–12.
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and open source
Also compare the high-minded mission of the OLPC with Disney. Guess which one cites radical educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire as the inspiration for its interface? Perhaps only the Magic Kingdom’s dungeon guards would recognize these names.
It should be said this is not a clear case of good vs. evil. OLPC has its detractors and there is one particularly disturbing anecdote concerning a comment made (before the OLPC program was developed) by Negroponte during a radio interview with neo-Luddite Chellis Glendenning. When his utopian vision of the digital world was challenged by the fact that computer hardware production was causing babies to be born without brains in Mexico, he said it didn’t matter. The toxic waste of computer manufacturing and disposal remains a blind-spot enabled by its outsourcing from the core to the periphery and from lack of sufficient dialog about the problem.
PS Interesting how Disney’s deliberately amateurish Netpal intro video is intended to make it feel personal and endearing as opposed to cold and flashy. Where’s the magic?
23
Jun 09
Tools as temporary body parts
What follows is scientific verification of McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of the body. I highly recommend reading the whole article.
Brain Represents Tools As Temporary Body Parts, Study Confirms:
Researchers have what they say is the first direct proof of a very old idea: that when we use a tool—even for just a few minutes—it changes the way our brain represents the size of our body. In other words, the tool becomes a part of what is known in psychology as our body schema, according to a report published in the June 23rd issue of Current Biology.
23
Jun 09
Phone coverage or cover-up?
I’m glad the issue of conflict minerals is seeing the light of day– literally. As this video depicts, minerals important for our communications infrastructure are often mined by children in conflict zones. Many of the materials that go into the manufacture and out with the disposal of computers, cell phones, etc. are devastating to the “global majorities” (those who actually comprise the majority of the world’s population, but are denied access to the benefits of global capitalism). I think that if we are to take seriously the idea of the transformation of consciousness as a result of communications technology, then we should also critically engage the world system that produces such devices. I’m not suggesting that it should be one or the other (that is no phones versus economic and ecological justice), yet I believe we need to turn the screws on the technology companies to behave more responsibly when they make products, and for us to be wiser consumers. Furthermore, we should think twice about tossing the old cell phone considering the hardship that went into producing its material reality.
This leads to a broader question concerning some of the Utopian thinking about communications technology: is it possible if such futures as the singularity occur, will artificial intelligence be able to gage the issue of social and ecological justice? Currently the programs that buy and sell commodities on international markets are the least interested in such concerns. How will computers sense the livelihood at the root of their own production?
31
May 09
Since when was Luddite a bad word?
“Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.” Herbert Read
I got this choice little quote from a great discussion between Chellis Glendinning, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Stephanie Mills about a Luddite perspective of technology, and where it stands today. If you’re into the debate about the role machines play in our lives, and their moral impact on the world, then I recommend reading on.
Chellis Glendinning, Stephanie Mills and Kirkpatrick Sale: Three Luddites Talking:
SM: OK. So how do you see technology’s place in today’s world?
KS: My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It’s that economic system that has led to Western civilization’s willingness to enslave ourselves to machines — because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet. Add to that the fact that modern governments, existing primarily to protect and enhance capitalism, maintain their power through the use of technologies that control the populace — by bread or circuses, by war or schooling, by armies and police, all of which are enabled and empowered by technology. That is what we might call the stick part of capitalism, while the riches-for-the-few is the carrot.
It’s worked pretty well for five centuries. But it’s come to the point that the technologies are destroying the earth. I’m convinced that the catastrophes of the next two decades will be so vast as to bring about a world where life, if it survives, will be far simpler — and the technologies, too. Then we will have come full circle to something like life on the savanna.
SM: So … a systemic analysis of technology derives from nature.
CG: A crucial point!!
SM: Yes. If a technology is elegant, biodegradable, made from renewable materials and employs a minimum of muscular, water or wind energy, is responsive, beautiful in its way, and challenging to the user in that it develops the user’s senses and strength — it may comport with nature.
A deep analysis judges technology morally — from its conception and intention to the totality of its consequences, knowing that all “raw materials” once were someone’s home or sustenance, that extraction and manufacture at industrial scale reduce landscapes and their human beings, that distribution, employment, and disposal of technologies change lives in unpredictable ways.
17
Jan 09
Is the Mac Catholic?
This short piece by Umberto Ecco is a bit of an inside joke (you have to be old enough to remember using MS-DOS). Also, it makes more sense when you are surrounded by Renaissance art.
Eco – “Writings: IBM vs. Mac”:
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
Thanks Peter!
29
Dec 08
Media ghosts
Holy ghosts and talk show hosts
Are planted in the sand
To beautify the foothills
And shake the many hands“Plateau” by Meat Puppets
One of the earliest 19th Century anxieties about media had to do with their seemingly strange spiritual properties. Electricity was thought to enable us to communicate with spirits, cameras could capture ghosts, and we could now record people’s voices that would let them live well beyond their graves. Such is the strange, eerie quality of this new One Laptop Per Child commercial featuring the voice of John Lennon. It is the first commercial approved by Yoko Ono to allow the use of his apparition in an ad.
This is an unusual example of media being a kind of “hell” realm the Tibetan Buddhists speak of. In the Buddhist version, it’s occupied by hungary ghosts– entities with small throats and big bellies who can never eat enough and are perpetually starved. Now, I don’t mean to disparage Lennon in any way. He is most definitely one my greatest heros (despite the fact that this is a very un-punk thing to say). Nonetheless, there remains something oddly creepy about the electronic realm in which each and every one of us is entering into as avatars and extensions of our mental selves. The fact is that this world of “imagination” remains one within the capitalist enclosure, and is still disembedded from ecology.
What remains to be seen is if we can transform media hell into a kind of heaven, albeit I don’t like the utopian tone of the term nor the fact that advertising already purports to represent a kind of consumer paradise. I suppose my dream– If I were to imagine what this world of crackling electrons will become– is to turn it into a kind of sustainable permaculture garden full of biodiversity and ideas, buzzing with insects and sweet smells of earthen humus and rain dew. The alternative is to become that alternate version of our future selves that already occasionally manifests in the hell media realm: ashen aliens in search of our life-giving properties.
11
Nov 08
E-wasting away
60 Minutes is on the scene in China’s Guiyu region to document toxic waste from our discarded computers. We like to think of information technology as being clean, but in fact it can be quite toxic. We need to encourage manufactures to do a better job at building toxic-free computers that can be upgraded rather than discarded every six months when a new operating system is developed.
2
Sep 08
Understanding Chrome
From high tech to low tech, Scott McLoud (Understanding Comics) penned for google a fascinating comic-style tour of Chrome’s development. Damn those google guys are smart!
Technorati Tags: Chrome
8
Jun 08
Cut and paste your mind
Samsung is trying to get on the iPhone bandwagon with its F480 or “Tocco”(“touch” in Italian). Hey, why not just call it the “Taco”? It’s something you eat with your hands… Anyhow, as I argue in my book, one of the greatest distresses of media users is a lack of a sense of place. Samsung is well aware of this problem, so it offers us this alternate reality presented in its “Drag and Drop World” ad.
As an old zine publisher I often feel a tension between manipulating pixels and actually working with my hands. I prefer scissors and glue, but I’m old school. The use of traditional stop motion animation and collage to create this ad is an excellent example of “media composting,” which is to repurpose/recycle/remediate dead media into new media as a way of enriching and tapping into authenticity. The struggle of all marketing right now is to appear authentic, and of course to grab our “inattention.” Riffing on the successful HP “Personal Again” ad campaign, which has famous creative types changing the world with the wave of the hand, here Samsung shows not only how this is possible, but maybe it leads to too much information, overcrowding, and complexity.
As mentioned elsewhere, these new touch devises are remediating the body– trying to bring it back into the fold. So rather than the mouse or button pad being finger surrogates, we can manipulate the machines more directly. This also may be a step closer to direct manipulation with our minds. But as I have noticed with my infant daughter, she maps space through touch before the mind patterns it for her to design expectations of how reality should present itself. Without touch, there is nothing there.
Unfortunately the ad depicts the aspirations of a wannabe– a young male who desires the luxuries of the old industrial world: space, the mastery of nature, compliant women and material wealth with no one to intrude upon that realm. Notice how the forest scene has a bulldozer clearing forest for the new house and truck. But in typical hypocritical fashion, it’s OK for the individual to do that, but not everyone else! Which is what the ad is showing our young protagonist. He wants the wealth of the world, but only for himself. Dream on, the ad tells us, so instead construct your own virtual world in your isolated electronic reality. Your home is the hybrid world of Samsung electronics and Ikea furniture. Let your browser master the world, while you sit back and enjoy a microwave dinner with your virtual wife.
PS
You can view this user demo of the Samsung F480 on YouTube– note the difference between the speed the ad shows and its actual use, kinda like the difference between a McDonald’s Big Mac ad and the real thing.
This unboxing video demonstrates how the refined hunter gatherer can experience Christmas everyday!
28
May 08
iEarth
Earthscape is an interesting application for the iPhone that will allow you to “geobrowse” by zooming in and out of Earth images that change perspective according to how you tilt the phone. I’m a bit fascinated by our ability to view earth via images. McLuhan observed that once we saw Earth from satellites, the planet became a work of art. Others have argued that we are simultaneously leaving our bodies and looking at ourselves from the outside, creating a curious dynamic of being and observed at the same time. Does the reduction of Earth to a 3-D photo map mean we are interacting with it more, and seeing more “truth,” or is it simply another way to conquer the territory by thingifying it as an image? It’s probably all these things are true at once, so it’s difficult to know what the consequences of these kinds of apps will be. One thing is for sure, you gotta love the new euphamisms coming out of tech, such as Earthscape’s promise that with its software you can “experience social geobrowsing.”
Via Daily Galaxy
6
May 08
The $100 laptop: a field report
Rising Voices published a report on successes and challenges of the OLPC XO-1, AKA the $100 Laptop. This comes from a sixth grade class blog in Uruguay.
Bloggers Desde La Infancia » Blog Archive » Analyzing the use of laptops in the first month of class:
Use of Laptop:
Weaknesses:
They freeze up and it is slow to fix them
I lose my work every time they freeze up
They are very slow
The keyboards have different layouts
The battery life finishes quickly
It continuously disconnects from the internet and I lose the connection to the web page I am reading
You can only connect at school because the wi-fi antennas don’t have much range
It lacks a Flash plug-in and so there are websites and activities that we can not see
We can not upload images to make slideshows.
It takes a long time to load images.
We are not able to see the videos on the Internet
We lose the desire to work
I see warnings online that say “these seem to take longer than usual,” which doesn’t allow us to work continuously.
We are losing a lot of time in class because of the delay.Strengths:
Free access to the internet
We can write, take pictures, record audio, film, paint, and edit images.
The text and images from the web can copied and pasted in some cases
Easy to carry.
We can work collaboratively.
