In the future, we’ll have to opt out of what kind of data we track about ourselves. I keep logs of a frightening amount of information with the “Daily Tracker” app and can’t say enough good things about “Sleep Cycle.” And of course there’s Foursquare. But that’s nothing compared to Nicholas Felton’s annual reports. NYT Bits blog describes his data collection, ranging from number of songs played to miles flown, also featured in this WSJ article last year. “The ‘2009 Annual Report’ took a different route: Mr Felton asked the people he interacted with on a daily basis to fill out an online survey describing their social experience with him: What was he wearing, what did he eat, was he happy or sad? In the end, 51,445 words were submitted by hundreds of friends, co-workers and random acquaintances. He then spent three weeks digging through it all and creating visualizations of the data. The result is now up for sale on his Web site.”
Great post on possible design for iPad and iPhones as “hub + satellite” setups.
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:
How to Capture an Idea
Falero. Departure of the Witches, 1878 (via.)
One of the best things about living in this era is that there are countless options available to capture ideas, digital or otherwise. You may have a moleskine in your pocket, but you still jot an idea down on your iphone, depending on what the idea is, the rhythm of it, and what you plan to do with it.
The decision to type or handwrite usually boils down to how fast do I need something captured and searchable? If I know I’m immediately going to use an idea, I usually write it as an email to myself. I delete the email as soon as the text is integrated in the intended project, whether it is an article or blog post or short story I’m writing.
When I come up with a somewhat poetic turn of phrase, I usually write it out on a paper notebook I always have with me. For years, I carried kraft brown Moleskine Cahiers, but now I’m obsessed with and never without Muji’s recycled paper note sets. (I also have the Chronotebook with me always, but mostly use it for mind mapping, rather than scheduling.)
I title these notebooks something obscure (”Are you a sling shot or a snake charmer?) and date them with silver sharpie. It has to be silver sharpie or I really will not use the notebook. There’s probably a deeper rationalization for why I need silver titles on recycled brown paper covers — like how most of my work is about where the organic meets the inorganic, nature and technology at odds — but in any case that’s one area I’m uncompromisingly neurotic.
Attending a lecture, I would much prefer to take notes on my iPhone, but because that action is so often misconstrued, I usually write things down on whatever pamphlet was handed out before the event.
I could never type a journal. I always write them in ink, partly because my handwriting is so terrible, it may as well be in cyrillic. Handwritten, the secrets in my journal are safe from others, sometimes indecipherable even to myself just a few years later.
When I do type out my ideas, it’s because I need it fast. If I’ve got a story beginning to end in my head I will cancel anything to get straight to my laptop because otherwise key elements will escape from my brain between the time I’m going about my day and the time my fingers are typing it out.
Lately, I’m experimented with voice recognition like the DragonNaturallySpeaking iPhone app, and I’ll explain that in an upcoming post. I get a lot of use out of Simplenote on the go, but because typing on an iPhone presents hiccups, I dont ever bother with articles or conjunctions. Usually these notes result in lists of scattered nouns and verbs, to remind me of the original idea.
Reading about Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti and knowing JG Ballard only used a typewriter, made me think about getting one. Just to mix things up and see what kind of writing might result from the introduction of a new tool to deliver it.
When I have a rough idea I need time to stretch out, I create a file and type a loosely structured outline. I use TextEdit, Google Reader, MarsEdit, or something else, depending on how much time I have to type it, whether it is going on the blog or to an editor, and a bunch of other deciding factors. And Ommwriter is a dream come true for the book of essays I’m writing.
I’ve got this blog, a tumblr, a twitter, a posterous account. The choice I make over what goes where is based on similar kids of decision — whether it’s social, private, a first draft, etc. I also have a long file in Google Wave, I’m using as a project timeline.
When it comes to preserving facts, quotes, reference material, it’s just as much a matter of how this information is being used.
For a while, when I was working on a novel, I would cut out relevant articles and put them in labeled green folders in a wire sided cabinet on casters (again, really particular about colors for some reason.) I’m afraid the last time I filed something was about a year ago, as I read fewer and fewer print publications, and don’t print out articles as often as I did in the past. That’s not to say, I wouldn’t start doing it again if a new project called on it.
I use del.icio.us is spurts, either tagging several things a day or ignoring it for three months at a time, instead saving links in text files with full quotes.
Search is really the key reason I feel digital storage is the best place to save other people’s ideas I want to build on. However well I label paper folders, I still can’t plug in “beijing” and “shoe design” or whatever and come up with several results in a snap.
It’s also partly why I subscribe to as many blogs as I do. I can search for “Tiger Woods” and the results come from my little globe of blogs and publications I like, rather than, well, what happens when you search for “Tiger Woods” in Google.
I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough?
Robin at Snarkmarket commented:
[William Gibson] said it’s like dipping a finger into the zeitgeist. It this river roaring past, and you’re just taking its temperature. The reason to go for scale—to subscribe to 700 feeds, not just 70—is to increase the chance of weird combinations, of unexpected collisions that reveal something new & interesting. To pile it all into your brain and wait for interesting things to happen, not necessarily on the conscious level! Warren Ellis talks about this too: about throwing it all in the brain-pot and letting mysterious things happen
And it’s not just the odd combinations that result; it’s essential for trend spotting. When all of a sudden everyone is talking about Rodarte, not just the fashion bloggers, but the design bloggers, even the boy bloggers, well, then you know it’s happened: it’s tipped.
Farhad Manjoo once wrote:
RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day? That’s how I began to feel about my reader. RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you’ve got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don’t want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It’s like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read.
But…it’s not email. It’s not directed at you. You don’t have to read it all or respond to any of it.
Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian’s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it.
Since I don’t have much time to read blogs during the day, I usually glance at Google Reader and star whatever looks interesting for reading later. At the end of the day, I go through whatever I starred, unstar a bunch of things that at second glance doesn’t seem interesting, and read what is left.
The best thing about Google Reader is it is so multi-use. The sharing and liking fuction isn’t really as well used as it could be, but the potential is there. If I had really thought about the question, I might have listed Zach Seward’s shared items as the best new blog this year, since he seems to read just about everything and leaves insightful notes.
This is really just what works for me. Having the information stored and searchable matters more to me more than seeing the full design of a blog or coming across it in a serendipitous way. Although, I really get what Michael Surtees has pointed out about wanting to read blogs at the original sites. Even if I already subscribe, I definitely go the URLS of my favorite sites a few times a week, whether to click on the archives, check out the comments or just view them in a more aesthetically pleasing format.
And I understand I’m in the minority here, but I really don’t like Twitter as a link aggregator. I wish more people used it for the epigrammatic rather than an arrow to elsewhere. Yeah, I miss what you had for breakfast, ok? Your “must read article on architecture” bit.ly link may be my “already saw it on Metafilter three weeks ago, and six other blogs.” For the most part, bloggers title posts relevant to the post, but there’s not much space on Twitter to explain what the link is about. I might use it more if there were sites where you could search your friends’ feeds. Again, I’d much rather search just my friends for “Tiger Woods” than all of twitter.
The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control.
Google Reader just makes my life a lot easier and if there were only one
thing I’d ask of it, it would be an auto import to Instapaper.
Previousy: Survival Creativity
At 5 tomorrow (Sat, April 25,) I’m giving a talk about some of the ideas I hammered out here in a panel on “Fiction and Media Change.” It is part of the super-interesting MiT6 (Media in Transition) conference at MIT this weekend. Immediately following is a panel on The Future of Publishing with Gavin Grant, (Small Beer Press), Jennifer Jackson, (Donald Maass Literary Agency), Robert Miller, (HarperStudio) and Bob Stein, (The Institute for the Future of the Book), moderated by MIT CMS Geoffrey Long.
Anyone want to create an iPhone short story app with me? (See Jenna Wortham’s NYT article on the “Gold Rush.”) Call it iRead or something (iStory is taken.) $1 per story, like A. O. Scott suggested. Look, over 10,000 people downloaded David Nygren’s short story written on Excel. (Here it is on Google Docs.) I can’t be the only one would have paid a buck to see it. $1 times 10,000 … that’s a nice way to make a living. I’m always looking online for text of short stories to Instapaper and read on my iPhone. (Here’s one, two (thanx), and three for your commute.) Yeah, I’d download them each for less than the price of a coffee. It would also be a good way for young and aspiring novelists to promote their work.
No more worrying about international calling plans while abroad. Skype is rolling out an iPhone app.
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
Jeremy Dickinson, “Football League Wall Map of England and Wales” NYT recently did a story about people addicted to keeping up with the news. One of the interviewees reported bringing her Kindle to bed with her to keep up with blogs — and many of us can relate. So often I have fallen asleep with my iPhone in my hands, catching up on RSS feeds. This probably sounds unhealthy but I really have gone though Instapaper while fixing dinner — skillet in one hand, iPhone in the other.
I could wait to fire up my laptop, but even in opportunities when it seems more appropriate, I sometimes favor my iPhone. The tactile experience of scrolling through text makes me focus on the article I’m reading at the moment, curbing the urge to open multiple tabs (mostly because I can’t do so inside a significant time delay.) Plus, I don’t think of my iPhone as the key piece of my “workstation.” What this means is I’m emailing less and commenting less, but reading much more.
Yehudit Sasportas, “Black Circle I” Every writer should aim to read at least as much as he writes — to feel, at the very least, you are in someway advancing the pursuit of ideas rather than offering something redundant to the hundreds of thousands of books published every year. And that’s true for anyone on the Internet.
But discussion on blog posts usually disintegrates into repetitive or inflammatory remarks when a thread gets lengthy. Arguably no one, at comment 1,000, read everything before he pressed submit. Marginal Revolution once posed the question, “Does the quality of blog comments deteriorate?”
1. The truly smart people only like to make smart points on “fresh” posts. For instance more people read the comments on fresh posts (but why?), so the benefit of a quality comment is lower as the post becomes older.
2. As time passes, the chance that a warring twosome find each other, and take over the thread, increases.
3. There is a tendency to attack or respond to the stupidest or most controversial thing said, and the longer the comments thread runs for, the stupider this will get.
4. As the number of comments multiplies, so does the number of independent discussion threads and the optimal number of threads is exceeded.
5. (Addended) As one (early) commentator notes below, the simple fact of diminishing marginal utility.
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?
Olaf Breuning, “Smoke Bombs”
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading. Jerry Brito got AlphaSmart Neo last winter explaining, “If I go to a coffee shop to get some work done, the only thing I can do with my Neo is write. There are no distractions. There isn’t even bold or italics (something I get around with Markdown). When writing is the only thing you can do, you get it done, and it remains an enjoyable activity because it’s not the thing that’s keeping you from Twitter.”
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.
Images from ArtInfo’s Frieze preview
Previously:
Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital
New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?
Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
The iPhone alarm isn’t as loud as some of us need, which is why I can’t wait to get the AirCurve, an “acoustic amplifier that turns your iPhone into a no-power-drain alarm clock on your nightstand, or a mini sound system that never needs batteries or adapters.,” (via.)
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
Sponsors
