Archives for January 2010
iPad…as family computer, as return to long form journalism, as taking over the textbook market, also entirely locked down, not a big iPhone … for old people….because it appeals to just about anyone. How to give a presention like Steve Jobs (no bulletpoints.) Jobs the auteur. Apple-free Engadget. Kim Morgan makes me want to see every movie she likes. Stag Heads With Human Faces. CD-Rom all over again. Caleb Crain on book pirates…and I’ve been thinking about this all week. The digital trashcan (a “boomeranged metaphor.”) Stefan Zweig is middlebrow. What’s next for Roger Hodge? Is Indie dead? Hilo microfiction contest. Interactive theater in Boston. Weekly World News on Google Books. Nick Denton’s blogs from minor to major league. At Sundance, New Routes to Finding an Audience. Globe Ideas on “cognitive fluency.” “I want the luxury of being able to push the pause button” – Douglas Rushkoff. Heather Havrikesky reviews his Frontline show “Digital Nation.” Ian Buruma on China/Google at WSJ on “Battling the Information Barbarians.” “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” – DFW. “The Internet is thrusting death upon me at a rate I’m not entirely equipped to deal with.” Boston is the “most challenging” large city to navigate in the United States. And congratulations Robin Sloan!
Tonight! Open Book: the first Boston Bookfuturists Meetup is at Microsoft’s Cambridge office at 7pm. We’ve got Joshua Glenn co-creator of Significant Objects and Hilobrow. Matthew Battles, also of Hilo, author of Library: An Unquiet History. New media artist Peggy Nelson and filmmaker Sean Fizroy are also presenting. As well as author Stona Fitch, founder of the Concord Free Press (with gifts.) Oh, yeah, and I’m going to be hosting it. C’mon! It’s going to be amazing!
How to Frame the Internet II: Entertainment and Culture Post iPad
Mainstream since the 50s, but rarely used since the early 80s craze, 3D is now expected of every major movie these days.
Why? You can’t download 3d glasses, let alone an IMAX theater. It’s the staging of an event, a singular experience. Something that cannot be so easily replicated at home.
Likewise, in 2008, I wrote a post How to Frame the Internet, calling for the staging of events online:
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented… Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
Twitter often takes this role. For the past few years, I make a point of watching the State of the Union as it airs, rather than later on in the evening, at a time more convenient to my schedule. Only then can I keep up with the tweets and status updates from friends and bloggers I follow.
In terms of segmenting information, I’m very enthusiastic about the iPad. One aspect in particular is intriguing, and it is the very aspect that annoys Gizmodo so much: No Multitasking.
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.
- Gizmodo, 8 Things That Suck About the iPad
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.
It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. Also in 2008, I wrote about how I feel the iPhone (and now the iPad) could gradually kill off some of the more inane youtube comments. From the post Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments:
If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading… A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.
The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.
If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
Previously:
“[Everyone] (with the least bit of inclination) should write a novel, and society would be much better off for it. Like so many forms of introspection (in many ways the enemy of fundamentalists and political zealots of all stripes), it can be one of life’s great pleasures, but (unlike many others) is not one that falls into the category of immediate gratification (like say, that mammoth black-and-white cookie I just scarfed down). It’s sort of like running a marathon; you have to train to build up to it and maintain some discipline, but ultimately, when you cross the finish line (even if you had to crawl the last __ miles or walk part of the way), you’re going to feel a great sense of accomplishment (even — or especially — if you didn’t win), and for at least a few seconds have some warm fuzzies about being alive and completing something that nobody will ever be able to take away from you. Whether the novel will be ‘good’ or not — much less successful, however you want to define that (but let’s think about it in crass, commercial terms as opposed to a sense of accomplishment) — is a completely different question, and I tend to think that not so many people have it in them to be ‘great’ novelists, much the way only a few runners can ever expect to win a marathon, because I think it requires a certain obsessive personality that falls way outside the boundaries of what most people would consider ‘normal’ and often borders on the psychotic.” – Matthew Gallaway
The director of Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley debates Jaron Lanier on WNYC. Comments Tech Dirt, “All in all it’s a fun debate to listen to, but I have to admit that I would have found it a lot more interesting if Lanier actually sounded like he understood the topic at hand beyond the superficial level.” (via.)
There is an ad for “Search Stories,” short videos created by Robert Wong at Google’s Creative Lab, on the NYT website today. Very nicely done. Here is “Parisian Love” and “Mad to Live.” I wonder if they might roll out these ads on TV?
Charlie Huston’s “Sleepless” reviewed by Ed Champion: “The sleepless are doomed to an early mortality, but this doesn’t stop sleazy Hollywood producers from recruiting them as extras. Nor does this hinder predatory industries, both on and off the Dow Jones grid, from tempting this withering demographic with shiny new pharmaceuticals. In one of Huston’s sly satirical jabs at the overstimulated life, the sleepless flock to an addictive multiplayer online game called Chasm Tide, where virtual economies bloom as real currencies flounder.” This book sounds incredible (especially at 4.23am EST) Previously: Who Needs Sleep?
Thinking of the past or future causes us to sway backward or forward. “University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.”
Accidental Storytelling
The world is split into two different kinds of people. When I moved into my flat, we were having all our kitchen goods delivered. My then girlfriend got off the phone and said to me, “we need to stay in because the fridge men are coming.” The world is divided into those who hear that and think, “I need to be in because I’m having a kitchen delivery” and those who hear the word “fridge men” and immediately conceive of a kind of cyborg creature with a big open door in his chest and stopping arms and legs and kind of freezing demeanor—a fridge-man hybrid.
Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set)
As I mentioned the other week, I’m testing out the Dragon NaturallySpeaking iPhone app. This is my first experience using speech recognition software, but I’ve always had warm feelings about the brand since it is what Robert Conquest uses and well, who doesn’t love dragons? My hope was it would alleviate two major problems in my life right now: I have to drive many miles every day and I have very little time to write.
James Franco on General Hospital and I think on that of New York as a band being of what people think New York is her more every day lead when they were young that there is no New York has true iPod Andy Warhol imagination in his bed There is no need to work as true as the noon your hands me or call imagination on his background before you and being so general but all in the mid-the TV show General Hospital is written by someone who doesn’t know what a gallery show is really alive or what’s going in hard and really live it’s written by someone who was never there
In that particular paragraph, my actual comment was that New York is, at its best, a projection of Andy Warhol’s fantasies of New York from his bedroom in Pittsburgh. It’s a city with a rich history at odds with the fantasies of those who finally arrive after dreaming of living there. LA is the same way, like that wonderfully titled documentary “LA Plays Itself.” From that point, I said General Hospital’s “Franco” character is scripted like the writers have never met an artist, never gone to a gallery. It’s this fantasy element like the city itself. They might as well have dressed him in a beret and given him a French accent. If Dragon NaturallySpeaking worked better, I can’t says that any of these thoughts would make the cut to draft 2. It was just something I was considering at the time. I was talking out my ideas, which is very strange for me as I’m definitely someone who thinks before she talks — having the classic introverted tendency of holding back in conversation until developing a strong opinion, rather than shaping and creating opinions in the act of a conversation. Speech recognition seems to work for Fred Wilson and it probably works for certain type of talking — “to do” list transcription or very direct correspondence. Just speak clearly, with uncomplicated words and sentences. I’m amused Dragon recognized “Franco” of all the words — Conquest’s influence? Conquest, by the way, explained to WSJ, “my handwriting’s pretty bad and my typing is worse.” In the same interview he points out Henry James always dictated his novels. Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set) As for the way I like to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it operates as a from-pollen-comes-honey word machine. “There is no need to work as true as the noon.” Now, I have a higher tolerance for purple prose than most, but that sounds lovely to me. Maybe I’ll turn that into a song lyric, a medium less stringent upon the precision of words and their meanings. I have no idea what I was saying when that line appeared on the screen. But I’ll take that and make something from it. I didn’t think it, but I created it. Either way it is mine. “your hands me / or call imagination / on his background / before you and being so general” … Well, I’ve written far worse song lyrics than that in the past. Now, I’m not recommending speech recognition for the moments that you badly need to capture an idea before it escapes. But if you just playing around some thoughts, ideas aren’t so committed to, this is a fun way to seek inspiration. We are so often presented with these kinds of quick fiction experiments. I can’t argue with my savings account interest rate but the credit union website makes me want to pull my hair out. For months, I was fine accessing my account through Mint.com. Then one day there was an error, I needed to re-answer the security questions about my first car and major in college. Well, I did and still generated error messages. I had to go to the credit union’s website, which presented me with an entirely different list of questions! On both sites there were a bewildering number of questions I had the option to answer. Here’s the catch, anything about me — my favorite food, my alma mater — was not available to answer on the Mint.com prompt. The only questions that were available to answer on both Mint and my credit union’s site were about my spouse’s favorite food, or my child’s preschool. Well, I have neither a child nor a husband, but for the purpose of accessing my accounts online, I’m happy enough to invent them. Remember Sarah Palin’s email hacking? All it took to get into her gov.sarah@yahoo.com account was answering “Where did you go to high school?” Even being quite private about these kind of details, were I married, just how hard would it be for anyone to figure out my “spouse’s occupation?” or where we met? LMGTFY. But who would ever guess that I do have a husband, his name is Nikolajs, we met in an airport in Abu Dhabi, and he works a pilot? The children are Omni and Jurate, we married in Riga, Latvia, and have a summer home on Saturn. For security purposes isn’t it better to invent a story? Otherwise, your password might as well be “123456″
Anyway, this is as good a place as any to announce an exciting event next week, I’m thrilled to take part in: Boston Bookfuturists: Introducing experiments in storytelling and The first ever Bookfuturists Meetup is this month at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center Boston Bookfuturists 1 Interested in presenting at future events? Please contact us: info@bookfuturists.com Please visit our website Host: Joanne McNeil, The Tomorrow Museum Presenting: Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based journalist and scholar, is coeditor of Hilobrow.com and co-curator of Significant Objects, an online experiment that pairs writers with secondhand junk, then sells the junk on eBay (using the story as an item description), in an effort to answer this question: “What makes things meaningful?” Peggy Nelson is a new media artist whose work encompasses film, augmented reality, performance art, and reenactments. In Search of Adele H is a Twitter movie, a re-imaging of the life and fictionalizations of Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle. But as with a book, the moving images are intentionally missing. The Twitter movie happens in your head, much as the main character’s life happened in hers. Stona Fitch writes powerful novels that have earned an international following. His novel SENSELESS is now a UK feature film and a cult classic that critics often refer to as the most disturbing novel ever written. St. Martin’s is publishing his next novel, Give + Take, in April. He has been selected as one of the Boston Public Library’s 2010 “Literary Lights.” In 2008, Stona and other writers/thinkers founded the Concord Free Press, the world’s first generosity-based publisher, which publishes original novels and gives them away in exchange for voluntary donations to worthy causes or people in need. Matthew Battles has written about technology, language, and culture for such publications as the American Scholar, the Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. He’s cofounder of the blog Hilobrow.com and author of the book Library, an Unquiet History. Previously: Handmade Looking Writing “The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism. It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery—even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness—is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.” – Andre Breton (seen tagged over an awful Diesel ad.)
Dragon NaturallySpeaking best delivers as a game giving clues to help you remember something you once said. It takes your words and scrambles them. No idea how the desktop version fares, but the app is very selective in what is chooses to recognize. Or my accent is indecipherable. But it’s free, so I can’t complain about that. Just take a look at what happened when I tried to get thoughts down for a review of James Franco’s “performance art” on General Hospital:
Another storytelling experiment for fiction writing block: reCAPTCHA. “Looming hours” …”helium years”…”hobnails out.” If you are the sort of person like China Mieville describes, you can make something out of that. Not that these accidents are exclusive to the screen either. Someone I met the other night had mistaken my name for “Japan.” In a flash I fantasized about how my life could have turned out… “Japan” studied visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, wears clear frame glasses, and drinks Talisker on ice. I could get away with another level of pretentiousness with a name like that. 
publishing — exploring the intersection of books and technology.
near the MIT campus in Kendall Square. Come listen to presentations on
experiments in storytelling and publishing. The event is free. Please
RSVP:
7-9pm
January 29
Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
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