Circumbendibus

Content plan

2007-03-04T16:36:00.000-08:00

Content Development Plan

Who: The content manager for the site development will be responsible for assigning all content development, scheduling and enforcing content freezes, and developing a post-release content update schedule. The content manager will designate which editorial staff may enter or alter content in the content management system.

What: The initial site content will include browsable lists of media companies at different tiers of influence, ownership information for media outlets, and links to various informative media-focused blogs and other sites. Each searchable media outlet has an individual surfaceable page with a logo, name, what company owns it, what companies it owns. There will be a link to a printer-friendly version. Web 2.0 features: There will be an RSS feed on the home page, to surface timely media information quickly. There will be a list of search terms ranked by popularity on the home page.

When: It should take an estimated 80-120 work-hours to complete the initial content release and 400 work-hours to populate the database; quarterly database updates will take 24-40 work-hours. These updates will be released on the nearest weekday on or before the 15^th of January, April, July, and October.

Where: Content files will be located in the UW file system on UW servers, and site content will be maintained on TheyOwn.net via a content management system yet to be determined.

Why: To provide timely content that meets the project's stated goals and objectives.

How: Initially, the ownership information and other static content will be researched and input by temporary data entry staff. Content updates will be performed every three months, either by paid staff or by student interns. Blogs will be refreshed at least twice per week by faculty members.

Privacy Policy

2007-03-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

Privacy Policy

TheyOwn.net respects the privacy of Web users. We make all reasonable efforts to protect your personal information and to not intrude on your email and Web space without your continued permission.

We monitor our systems and networks, and collect standard access logs to them. We never use our access logs for anything but our own administrative purposes. We never open those logs or the results of our monitoring to anyone other than our administrators.

We use IP addresses to analyze trends, administer the site, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information, except within blog comments. To discourage harassment of users, we log all individual comments with the IP address of the writer. We do not make that information public, however.

Our sites contain links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies of these sites.

No part of TheyOwn.net is intended to attract anyone under 13 years of age. We do not collect information from anyone we know to be under 13.

We offer email newsletters and updates for those interested in what's new on our site. We ask for email addresses so that we can send these to readers, but we do not sell, rent or share user information or mailing lists. We also intend to challenge any subpoena or other legal process seeking access to our mailing list, access logs, or any other user information. We do not require your actual name, nor do we enhance our mailing lists by linking them to other databases.

We don't intend to change our privacy policy, but we do reserve the right to change it at any time. Changes will not go into effect until the posted privacy policy is modified.

If you have questions about our privacy policy, please contact us.

Personae nos. 1 and 2

2007-03-01T00:59:00.000-08:00

Marcus Grady, age 20 -- student journalist, activist

Marcus Grady is a second-year student at Shoreline Community College near Seattle. He hopes to enter UW or Evergreen State next year. He graduated from Ingraham High in 2004, and lives at home with his parents and two brothers in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. Marcus worked mainly as a warehouse temp for one year after high school in order to buy a car and save a little money. Now he works 15 hours per week at the Greenwood branch of the Seattle Public Library and delivers pizza on Friday and Saturday evenings for a few hours to help cover his school expenses, buy gas, and have some spending money.

He is interested in public policy and journalism, writes and edits for the Shoreline Community College newspaper, and is a dedicated student activist. Marcus led a successful effort to keep an independent coffeehouse on campus rather than allowing a Seattle's Best Coffee store to open in its place, and often participates in campus peace actions. He hasn't totally made up his mind yet about the 2008 presidential candidates, but he is eager to learn more about Barack Obama and has donated $25 to his campaign.

Marcus uses the Web daily to get news, research his course papers, fact-check stories for the school paper, and support and promote his activism (with MoveOn and MySpace especially), as well as to keep in touch with his friends from high school, download music, and plan his social life. He has tried Second Life, but he is an extrovert and finds it a somewhat frustrating way to interact, so he has decided that for now he'd rather spend his time and money elsewhere. He did meet an old girlfriend through Facebook, but isn't dating anyone right now. He accesses the Internet at home (where he has DSL access), at school, and occasionally at work. On weekends, when he's not working, he hangs out with friends, usually listening to music at their houses or going to occasional raves.

Marcus's brother is legally blind, and Marcus himself is color-blind, so he is very aware of ADA guidelines for the Web and is somewhat impatient with sites that depend on color graphics for navigation.

LaRee Ediger, age 25 -- public television producer

LaRee graduated from UW in 2004 in communications with a concentration in journalism; she did an internship at Scripps News Service in the summer before her senior year, and won the Excellence in Journalism award for an opinion article that was printed in the Post-Intelligencer. She started as an assistant and fact-checker at KNPB, the public TV station in Reno, three months after graduation (after attending a two-week journalism workshop in London and spending four weeks traveling around Scandinavia). In the intervening three years, LaRee has worked up to the position of producer. She produces a weekly talk show on arts, politics and humanities, “One on One,” and has co-produced occasional special features. She loves her job, though she does not plan to stay in Reno for more than another two years.

LaRee has a blog where she discusses her hobbies (cooking, bicycling, and walking her Labradoodle) and her aspirations to work at a cable channel like A&E, THC, or Discovery. She is very comfortable using the Web to address her work needs and some of her personal and social needs. She met her best friend Karleen through a Craigslist ad asking for weekend cycling partners, and has met a few guys through Nerve.com—though she met her current boyfriend, Jack, on a ski weekend nearly five months ago.

LaRee has bookmarked several journalism sites like Columbia Journalism Review, the Pew Center, and Poynter Online, and refers to them often—sometimes for work-related research, sometimes for career advice. She is currently making about $34,000 per year, and has set herself the goal of having a $50K salary in three years. She would like to become a vice-president of production of a cable channel in the next ten years.

Week 7 readings

2007-02-20T00:45:00.000-08:00

“Give Customers Short Paths to What They Want” by Moira Dorsey

(aka the “three clicks” (or the “well, duh”) paper)

Forrester found that on a site with a flat navigation structure, where important content is three or fewer clicks from the home page, users get where they want to be faster and with fewer errors. This has been a standard practice in web design since the last millennium, right? Obviously it's much easier to design this way if your site has a limited number of purposes (e.g., if all you do is sell widgets or allow users to post pictures and text). One important point: if your site is content-rich in a way that means that not all your content is surfaceable in two or three clicks, your search box needs to be obvious and your search engine good. It took me six clicks to get to the MCDM website from the UW homepage by selecting links, but only two when I searched on “MCDM.”

“Web Page Layout” by James Kalbach and Tim Bosenick

The Kalbach and Bosenick paper was interesting (and not just because it used RH nav for its own table of contents). At first I had some difficulty parsing the two hypotheses, but finally understood them thus:

LH navigation will be faster than RH overall, BUT
RH navigation will be initially slower, but will speed up as the tasks progress until there is essentially no speed difference between RH and LH navigation

From looking at their chart of results, it appears at first glance that these two somewhat contradictory hypotheses were borne out in their experiment, but Kalbach and Bosenick claim that there is in fact no difference between the two navigation schemes. The difference for Task 1 and Task 2 looks significant until you look at the standard deviations—and you have to give those more than a cursory look, because it turns out that nearly a third of the participants were unable to find an e-mail link (task 1) and a physical address (task 2) listed on the site within the three-minute limit. Users who were unable to complete a task in three minutes were not counted as data points; this cuts the number of points used for these calculations down sharply. Three minutes is roughly five sigma from the mean, and it seems bizarre for so many users to have ended up so far outside of that limit. It's impossible to know whether this stemmed from a design problem on the site or a problem with the way the study was conducted (I'm guessing site problem, though).

I find it hard to understand why they used such a small study population in the first place. When they remove the slow people, they're left with ~20 data points, which would make me nervous if it were my study. I'm not a statistician, have never played one on TV, but have taken a couple of statistics classes, which means I know just enough to make me want to know more about the sampling. The findings themselves seem reasonable, however.

The discussion section brings up a number of interesting points regarding how people scan a site. The Audi site is extremely spare, with a short right-hand menu, black-and-white graphics, and plenty of white space, which may well have contributed to the lack of difference in the outcomes. It would be very interesting to conduct a similar but more complex study with longer navigation menus. I think the main point here should really be that if you stick to good design principles throughout your site, it doesn't matter so much what your navigation scheme is as long as it is consistent and clean.

“Evolution of Web Site Design Patterns”

This is a very long, data-heavy paper, and difficult to treat critically in detail. Basically, the authors examined 1500 sites over the period 2000-2003 for 157 interface factors in order to determine whether website design has evolved towards better usability and accessibility. Examples of some of the these factors are number of links per page, average number of words included in a text link, font style and size, and number of HTML errors per page.

One problem the authors note is that much of the enormous amount of web design guidance available is confusing and contradictory. They grouped sites according to their rating by Webby Award judges in order to assess practices. Interestingly, after examining a number of highly-rated sites, the authors recommended that the Webby committee adopt a more rigorous evaluation procedure.

Overall, for the period 2000-2003, the authors found some improving trends, some disappointing trends, and a fairly shocking number of accessibility problems. One thing that's not made clear in the paper is whether the increase in HTML errors and the decrease in accessibility is due to the increase in the number of HTML-inexperienced web authors, using web interface tools that may not have been well designed.

Main points from book

2007-02-13T17:25:00.000-08:00

Important points from Carrie Bickner's Web Design on a Shoestring:

Planning saves money
Use resources at hand
Have a clear focus
Dare to do less

Web Design on a $hoestring

2007-02-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Web Design on a $hoestring by Carrie Bickner, which (in spite of the cutesy dollar sign) is straightforward and intelligently written, not just a list of dorky money-saving tips. Bickner addresses low-cost strategies in the areas of usability, content, design, CMS, web standards, domains, and web hosting. The book is part of the estimable New Riders "Voices That Matter" series (along with another book I seriously considered reviewing, The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, but rejected due to its length and narrower focus). More when I'm finished...

Group 1 discussion from last week, and updates

2007-02-05T00:37:00.000-08:00

Group 1 members (with links to their blogs):

Barrie (me)
Belle
Kevin
Magnus
Ragan

We spent the last half-hour of class on Jan. 30 trying to get our arms around the team project, finally agreeing to each go away and look at sites with a critical eye in order to apply some good design principles to the concept. (See my previous post; Belle and Ragan have also posted on this topic already.) We had some minor who-does-what discussion, with little resolution (other than my volunteering to be point person), but we agreed that a site map would be a good tool to work on early.

Model sites for TheyOwn.net planning

2007-02-04T23:03:00.000-08:00

I decided to look not just at media sites, but at sites I sometimes or often use for information, since TheyOwn will be an information site.

slashdot.org

This is a wide-ranging news aggregation site for those interested in open-source software and the many areas that it touches. It has the following standard features that work well on any information site:

Site identification in upper left corner

Search box in upper right corner

Left gutter main navigation, secondary top navigation

Center of page is given to current articles. Right gutter contains links to recent tags, as well as articles from the previous two days.

wikipedia.org

This wiki-encyclopedia is a major source of information for many, and the entries are usually updated concurrently with breaking news. It's a particularly usable and readable site, due in part to the following:

Navigation, search, and toolbox features are labeled in left gutter

Articles, discussion, wiki tools, and page history are tabbed at the top for easy access

Large default font size!

Obvious links

On a side note, the site is supported by a public foundation and has a link above the fold to donate—a good feature for any nonprofit site to emulate.

Democracy Now!

This site has excellent content, but some of the design elements look cluttered and there is too much “fine print.” Also, it's not clear what is clickable text and what is not. Positive elements include:

Clean, obvious archive search box and digest subscription box;

Well-placed, well-labeled “donate” button;

Good use of thumbnail graphics.

Class exercise

2007-01-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

I am tracking my steps as I look at the Imaginary Forces website:

I. Finding their web videos project:

1. Click on "Projects" in upper right-hand corner
2. Click on "Interactive" -- just because it looks like the most likely web-related category
3. Click on "Honda Element," because it's the first one on the list. Voila--I was lucky.
4. Obligatory dumb mistake: use the back button to try to move around in the site. Back button takes me out of the site entirely.

II. Finding a map to their East Coast office:

1. Move cursor to the weird icon in the upper right-hand corner
2. Click on "Contact" when the menu appears
3. Click on "Map and driving directions" under the New York address
4. Mapquest gives a suggestion for a similar address (i.e., identical, but with the designation "St." after the street address). Click on that.
5. Adjust map scale to orient myself to the part of Manhattan I'm familiar with.

I didn't find this exercise to be particularly difficult. I think I'm pretty good at intuiting the right link to click, and am quick to set my grooves even when site navigation is suboptimal. However, I do find the site generally unintuitive and annoying. (When I select "Interactive," why does the screen not remain static? Eventually it morphs back to the menu.) Bottom line: too much flash (lowercase or uppercase F, your choice) sucks.

Finding the right role

2007-01-18T18:30:00.001-08:00

A confession: I've been the “red flag client” (to use Goto and Cotler's phrase) myself. I once used production resources for a web project, and forgot some very important dingus that I had to beg to have added on at the last minute. I got a mild dressing-down from the production manager afterwards, which I consider part of my training in how to be the client. At the time, I didn't cut myself any slack (and the manager didn't either), because I had a better idea than an outside client would what the production process was like. I now also recognize that some fault lay with the production department, whose equivalent of the client survey was pretty inadequate. I think one key take-away is that you can't trust your client survey completely—you need to have the client run you through the user scenario from before the start to after the finish, even if it means beginning with “First, the user drinks her morning coffee...”

McGovern and Norton emphasize the importance of training on content management systems, though they don't go the logical extra step and put the trainer in as a member of the publishing team. I know firsthand what an issue lack of understanding of the CMS can be for web editors—I've seen people leave jobs in very negative ways because of this. For the last CMS I used, management wisely planned a week of training.

As I read about the various roles in these different articles, I'm drawn to several of them: content manager, information designer, and usability expert. I have a little problem, though: while I have some critical faculties (I know when navigation is inefficient, and when a site just plain sucks, and I'm a crack copy and line editor) I'm essentially an adaptor rather than a critic. I figure out how to work with the existing system and forge a path that I can reuse over and over. It's been a good trait to have the last decade and a half, but I haven't yet discovered a way to use it to my advantage professionally. That's one of my goals for this class.

Finding the right role

2007-01-18T18:30:00.000-08:00

Obsessing about the weather

2006-11-29T01:28:00.000-08:00

One of the very few things I hate about the Internet is that it has turned me into my mother. (Not that my mother uses the Internet--I tried with her, but gave up when I found that she was "sending" a church newsletter assignment by typing stuff into her computer, printing it out, then taking the paper with her to the church to type the contents again, this time into their computer. )

It has rudely jumped me a generation by making me check weather.com multiple times per day. That's how I found out on Saturday, in The Dalles, that there would be snow on Sunday, and that it would rain and snow all the way home to Seattle. About the only change I made due to knowing this in advance was to wear warmer clothes and stock up on car snacks, but I earned Official Weather Bore status by talking about the snow twelve hours before it happened. Pointless, really--I would rather have been surprised, and I'm sure the others would have too.

On the other hand, I appreciate not having to listen to half an hour of radio banter in the morning just to find out if the Seattle schools are closed. And it's good to have the cell phone to compare in-situ road conditions with my husband. And hey, it's even good to have a virtual class meeting.

Early adopter follies

2006-11-29T01:02:00.000-08:00

So, I've always been kind of interested in e-book hardware, not for any particularly good reason. After all, there's nothing wrong with an old-fashioned book made of paper. But recently, against every sensible instinct I should have had, I purchased the Sony Portable Reader. I try not to be an early hardware adopter, but a) an earlier version of this had been marketed in Japan for a year, and b) it was my birthday.

Naturally, it was backordered, so I had to wait a long time for it to arrive, though not as long as Sony's website told me. (I give them points for that. As Jeff Bezos used to tell the worker bees at Amazon.com, always underpromise and overdeliver.) Then I finally got the software loaded into my laptop, got the laptop authorized on the Sony Connect site, and tried to authorize the Reader so I could download newly-purchased books into it.

You know where this is going, right? With everything connected, all the i's (and j's too, for that matter) dotted, I could not get the Connect software to recognize the Reader. Cue theMuzak for many hours online and on the phone, including one of those infamous sessions where you spend 35 minutes talking to a tech who apparently decides he can't sacrifice his stats to someone as unhelpable as you, so you get disconnected. The last support tech I talked to was actually intelligent, experienced, not a mumbler (rare these days--do they teach the Bangalore staff to mumble too, I wonder?) and jumped through some Windows-shaped hoops with me for a good hour and a half, to no avail. He promised to kick the problem upstairs. Since then...silence.

So far it's a $250 paperweight. But the e-ink technology is very cool.

The walls come down...and then we forget

2006-11-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

Dan Gillmor cites three new rules of public life:

1) Outsiders can, and will, find out private stuff about public figures, and tell everyone else;
2) The insiders and the outsiders are now connected, and that bell can't be unrung;
3) The private information that becomes public may or may not be the truth.

To that I would add

4) After everyone finds out everything about everyone else, they'll forget it.

I love it that his first example was the Trent Lott debacle, because it points up the fact that what redeems the new lack of privacy in public life is the ADD nature of collective memory. We're so quick to move on to something else that a public figure's humiliation, one that would once have ruined a career entirely, is over and done with after a couple of years. When Lott was elected Minority Whip two weeks ago, the Strom Thurmond story was mentioned--barely--in passing.

The concept of the commons

2006-11-13T00:07:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of factoidal bones to pick with Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." First of all, he says, "...there is no prosperous population in the worldtoday that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero." But the population of Europe (which seems pretty prosperous) has been dropping precipitously for a couple of decades--they're all worried about who's going to pay their pensions. Google "European fertility" if you haven't heard about this. The UN says that even developing countries are practicing more contraception and marrying later (see http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/pop917.doc.htm for a nice little summary), which is bringing birth rates down in many of those countries. And sub-Saharan Africa, which has 10% of the world's population, also has 64% of its AIDS sufferers, which is bound to have an effect.

Second, the section titled "Conscience is Self-Eliminating" is just silly. Yes, I understand the argument that conscience is either genetic or environmental, but there are so many other factors that "limit breeding": peer pressure, econonomics, social realities (such as increased acceptance of same-sex relationships and of people who choose not to reproduce)--not to mention environmentally-induced infertility (which, granted, is probably canceled out by the effects of ever-more-sophisticated fertility technology). With so many variables, it seems ridiculous to discuss the effect of isolating a single driver.

Now that the bones are picked, it's easy to see how the concept of the commons is taking hold on the Web, or has already done so. I wish spam didn't immediately come to mind, because on the whole, the last two decades of free--in both senses of the word--exchange of information has been not only revolutionary, but positively so.

Using the Web as a gigantic town meeting seems a natural outgrowth of the way it developed. I have no experience with e-voting except for trivial matters, but I have taken many electronic polls and have felt comfortable doing so. I would like, in an ideal world, to be able to vote in elections via the Web. However, the stakes are pretty high. If I answer a Harris Interactive questionnaire about automobile use and the data is hacked or misused, it's likely that I'll never know about it--and frankly, if I did, it wouldn't keep me up at night. Voting on who to hand power to comes much closer to the bone. As I ponder, I read stuff like the EFF's page on e-voting: http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/

The rumblings of Web 3.0

2006-11-12T10:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html

Supplementary reading for Tuesday, Nov. 7

2006-11-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

Weiss, Aaron. "The power of collective intelligence." NetWorker 9, no. 3 (2005): 16-23.

Available on ProQuest.

Abstract (from ACM):

Though the overall health of the tech sector may have looked bleak a few years back---at least in the eyes of financial analysts---a blend of old and new ideas, evolving technologies, and changing cultural values have recently given the online world new vigor. With content derived primarily by community contribution, popular and influential services like Flickr and Wikipedia represent the emergence of "collective intelligence" as the new driving force behind the evolution of the Internet.

Summary and comments:

Technology pundits Vannevar Bush and Joseph Licklider predicted the rise of social/collaborative computing decades ago, but it took a long time to get going. The early ban on commercial use of the World Wide Web slowed the development of social networking sites. When that ban was lifted, the stampede of developers caused a chaotic few years in the mid-'90s, with a combination of multiple standards and bugware shaping a confusing user experience. The open marketplace, however, did its job: the best sites survived, the worst disappeared, and as time passed, it got easier for people to connect on the Web. [Barrie: I believe there were some demographic studies of early adopters on the Web. Ten years down the road, it would be interesting to do a follow-up study of those people. I expect, having had the flexibility and smarts to navigate through the garbage piles of the early days, that they have innovated and flourished in the cleaned-up digital community.]

One of the first interactive Web technologies, Web logs (blogs) first surfaced in 2000. The differences between a blog and a homepage are automation and accessibility; blogs made building an online community simple. Podcasting was the next big social community technology—essentially, podcasting is making an audio blog. But lurking underneath all of this great community content, behind all of the peer-to-peer networking, are some thorny ethical issues, specifically those of file sharing and spamming.

Weiss calls blogs “one- and two-way conversations with the world,” but the next development, the wiki, is “a collaborative cocktail party.” Developed in 1995, the wiki reached critical mass in 2001, with the launch of Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia open to all contributors. Sanger and Wales, the founders of Wikipedia, believe truth will arise from consensus. [Barrie: Yes, given enough time to let the chaff sink to the bottom—which may not take too long.] Their Wikimedia Foundation also launched WikiNews, which brings the same collective effort to news coverage. The Wikipedia community, sterling ideals aside, has not been immune to controversial authoring, and the model is still being fine-tuned. Weiss calls the wiki process “more finely grained and more complex” than message boards or feedback blogs. Wiki authors are essentially of equal standing, and contribute chunks of knowledge that are woven together into a whole piece.

As this model of sharing and collaboration grows, new uses crop up. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, has become a public photography database with a community-defined taxonomy. Flickr did something else revolutionary: it published its API (application programming interface) so that users could write their own applications that access its database. Weiss calls Flickr a “triple play”: a company that is sharing objects, knowledge, and resources. API sharing spread like wildfire—Yahoo!, Google, and other social software sites followed Flickr's example. For example, many niche websites now display a Google Map with their own data superimposed. [Barrie: While I see more fantastic possibilities in this than scary ones, there's still a Big-Brother aspect that will need to be kept at bay (imagine a stalker, for example, who could have other people post updates of where you were last).]

What's next? asks Weiss. We don't know, exactly, but the next generation of Internet users have grown up with social and interactive computing, and so the Web they build will naturally incorporate cooperation and collaboration.

Worlds upon worlds

2006-11-05T22:24:00.000-08:00

The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots. --T.S. Eliot, "Preludes"

I've been participating in online communities since 1982, starting with e-mail groups at my workplace, then moving progressively to Compuserve, BBSes, Usenet, listservs, and the Web. (Kathy Gill mentioned the huge community of knitters on the Web last week; I was on what I think was the original knitters' listserv from 1992-1996, the "knitlist" as we all called it, and yes, it really was a powerful force in a lot of people's lives, partly, I think, because we concentrated so much on productivity.) Funnily enough, though the interfaces keep getting slicker, the communities themselves haven't changed much (discounting the tendency at the beginning of any technology revolution to talk about the technology--e.g., "Duuude! I'm calling you from the bus, dude!").

I found Kollock and Smith's examination of identity persistence very interesting; Googlability and other forms of identity tracking really do constitute a strong social control on Web behavior. It wasn't always so; back in the "olden days" of BBSes, control--and trackability--rested with the sysop or moderator, and who cared about the sysop or moderator? They kicked you off, you just logged on again with a new identity--or if they were verifying phone numbers, which many did (sysops were, by and large, control freaks), you logged on to a different BBS; most of them were pretty much alike, anyway. Still, it really was pretty easy to tell when Tom the Troublemaker and Paul the Pill on different systems were actually the same person; most people are terrible liars, and can't conceal basic elements of their personalities for more than one post. No surprises there. Then all of the "nice" regulars would out them as their previous identities and cut them to ribbons, virtually speaking. So again the community prevails over the individual.

Strangely, though I've met many people from my virtual communities IRL (in real life), some of the "realest" communities to me have been the ones that I've had little or no face-to-face contact with. In fact, I have to stop blogging now, because if I keep thinking about it I'll go back to reading newsgroups that I weaned myself off of a decade ago, just to see if any of the old crowd are there.

If I leave my Blackberry in the forest, do my messages still exist?

2006-10-29T23:35:00.000-08:00

It's interesting to be commenting on Howard Rheingold's commentary on Postman's ten principles. I talked to Rheingold for an hour on the telephone once, and it was the conversational equivalent of Chinese food: when we hung up, I couldn't remember anything he'd said. It's as likely that it was my fault as his, but not much has changed.

Some of his commentary is too oblique for me to follow--for example, regarding #3, "Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others." It's odd that Rheingold's response was about texting, which merely predisposes us to type fast and spell badly--I mean, symbolically--and to my mind contains no powerful idea that the telephone and e-mail haven't already covered.

I also find it surprising that Rheingold had so little to say about #8, “Because of their physical form, different technologies have different sensory biases." He seems to have gotten hung up on the fact that cell phones have multiple physical biases, but that's due to technology convergence into that one little appliance. Otherwise, it's something of a no-brainer. New technologies have made us hyper-sensitive in touch, sight, and sound. We all know the feeling—literally--of being shifted one key on the keyboard. Most people are attuned to a certain monitor resolution, and notices a difference when they sit at a different computer or watch HDTV instead of the old portable TV in the spare bedroom. Parents may know the sound of their own child's cry, but everyone jumps to the sound of their own ringtone (the need to differentiate them is why something so trivial as the sound of a phone has turned into a $500 million business).

From the Manhattan Project to the Internet, in not very many steps

2006-10-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

"The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it." --Vannevar Bush

It's hard not to wish Vannevar Bush were here today, to see his own predictions in cold hard metal and plastic: digital cameras, credit cards, personal computers, the Web. If he could see all of that clearly through the the vacuum-tube jumble of the clumsy televisions, cameras, and adding machines of the mid-20th century, we have to ask what he would see through the iPods, Blackberrys, pacemakers, and Priuses of the early 21st. My own looking-glass is a bit opaque. I expect that Bush, like I do, would think that so much has changed in the world of computing that the new frontiers of science are elsewhere, probably in genetics. What hereditary disorders will we eliminate in the next decades?

Is technology an animus for creative geniuses or a pacifier for sociopathic slackers?

2006-10-15T22:15:00.000-07:00

I was at first annoyed when I read "Informing Ourselves to Death," and spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. Everything that Postman writes seems true--yes, we are over-informed; yes, we are increasingly isolated; yes, on the whole most of us have lost perspective about what is essential and what is not. Yet he also seems to be trivializing the advantages of time and labor (and money, because both time and labor equal money) that computerization has brought. He clearly thinks it's silly that we can pay bills online, but at $0.39 a pop, saving a dozen stamps per month and 144 in a year, plus the charge for printing 144 checks, is going to save me enough to pay the phone bill one extra month. Is that chump change? For me, maybe, but not for everyone, and I would argue that we're hardly selling our souls for that $57.

I should say that I admired Postman (may he have found his way to a pixel-free paradise) and think that gadflies generally serve important functions, one of which is getting ordinary people to think about how they live and why. But here Postman never seems to acknowledge that stuff gets invented because people have creative urges that they can't satisfy through just any creative means. We're not all Picassos; some people are turned on by the idea of digital cookware or virtual pets or reusable newspapers, and can't rest until they've built a prototype. Should these people be the mad professors of society, while the rest of us continue to cook on woodstoves? Frankly, while the good old days may have contained more human contact and more book reading, I wonder if there wasn't really an awful lot of thumb-twiddling and plain old boredom, if only from having to read the same books over and over.

Postman seems to find what Stafford et al. call "process gratification" distasteful. The reality is that while our gadgets do feed our process gratification, it's our content gratification that's better fed these days than ever before. If you have any internal filters, any self-control, you can easily be a selective human magnet, picking up the information you need quickly.

The picture above is of the 15th-century astronomical clock in the cathedral of St. Etienne at Bourges. In the 15th century, people had things like this built for them because they were rich and wanted to show off, not because they needed to know what time it was. Three centuries later, the world had opened up, and a clock like this one wasn't accurate enough to meet the needs of a world gone crazy for exploration. I don't know jack about "supervening necessity," and the law of unintended consequences seems like a no-brainer to me--of course we don't know everything that will happen as a result of what we bring forth. But people build things because they need to build them, and sometimes they decorate them to make them beautiful, and then they use them and try to improve on them. That's just what people do.

The last days of telephony, and other late-night musings

2006-10-10T00:19:00.000-07:00

I found the Sept. 2005 Economist article "How the internet killed the phone business" pretty interesting reading, not least because it came out a full year before I used Skype for the first time. Don't get me wrong--Skype is great--but I do think the rumors of telephony's demise are greatly exaggerated. While it will undoubtedly morph to a new form, there could still be plenty of money made from plain old phone users before the last tinny ringtone is silenced; there are still over 50 million Americans who do not use computers or the internet.

The job of the telephone companies now may be to figure out how to help customers transition gracefully with interim technology. This is not something they, or perhaps their predecessors, have done well in the past. Reading the 1994 article "Social Aspects of New Media Technologies," I was reminded of a tedious family issue I had long since forgotten. My parents were the canonical POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) customers for a decade after most of their friends and neighbors had moved on to touch-tone dialing and cordless phones, and no amount of arguing could make them see that there was any point in changing a system that worked for them. In about 1990, annoyed by the inconvenience of pulse-dialing long-distance numbers while visiting them, I called Southwestern Bell (pretending to be my mother) to see if I could change their service, and was told that there would be a monthly surcharge for touch-tone service. I no longer remember what the (small) surcharge was, but what mattered was the breathtaking backasswards illogicality of the fact that Bell was still supporting two systems when it could simply have offered the recalcitrant old-timers a nice crisp $5 bill and a free phone to switch to touch-tone dialing. Instead, it had given them every incentive to sit tight, one hand on that heavy black receiver, the other index finger stuck in the rotary dial.

The article itself seems fairly accurate about the gratifications of technology adoption, even though it predates TiVo, wi-fi, and VOIP (among other highly gratifying technologies). Full disclosure: I confess that I am not a TV watcher--nay, not ever, except for one hour on Sundays when "The Sopranos" has a new season out. (Rhetorical question of the day: When do people with computers find time to watch TV?) However, it occurred to me that this article is too old for its authors to have observed the contemporary television-watching pattern that involves multiple platforms. First, a viewer receives a reminder via cellphone or Blackberry calendar that "Lost" is airing in two hours. Viewer continues about her business, secure in the knowledge that TiVo is taking care of the program. Viewer sees show at her leisure later that evening, then logs into an IM program to discuss the episode at length with friends. The following day, she includes her favorite snippets in her daily blog or e-mail. Does satisfaction increase with the number of technologies used, and if so, how?