Siva Vaidhyanathan reviews Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” Great title, but very flawed thesis is what I thought at his talk at the Berkman Center a few months back. As Vaidhyanathan points out, he sets up the problem in easily relatable way, however the “expiry date” idea is just too neat, I find it hard to believe Mayer-Schönberger is even serious about it. Previously: Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Great post on possible design for iPad and iPhones as “hub + satellite” setups.
I’m especially enthusiastic about what the iPad means for art museums, galleries, and artists. Already there are some wonderful iPhone apps from the Van Gogh museum, Louvre, and others…and they might only get better. How about annotated Taschen books? Imagine what you could do with an iPad app for Art Basel? Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Met tells the WSJ: “We will absolutely continue publishing beautiful books about our own collections. But I also want to make sure that we put energy and attention into getting all the collections online, or as much as is reasonable, because we have two million objects. At a time when scholarship is rapidly advancing, are you best serving a collection by publishing a three-volume catalog of 800 pieces, where much of it becomes out of date within six months?” Previously.
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:
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.)
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 “In NYC you can find lots of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills – engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups.” – Caterina Fake (previously: Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men.)
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
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
“For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.” (via.) Previously: Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Here’s a great post on what the listing feature means for Twitter — the coming “curatorial economy.” (via.) For me, it means the most time on the site I’ve spent since the election. I’ve set up a few lists, and two in particular I check multiple times a day — “good ideas” and “book futurism.” The first is for geeky science/design/art/architecture/ballardians, many of them post just too much for me to follow on my main feed. Please let mw know of other such brainy people, (I’m not so interested in those who link to TED videos all day long, as I am in the people who are putting the ideas in some context.) My other favorite list is for people interested in tech and books. Some other lists I made: “notable,” mostly friends in media, some who wouldn’t fall in the other categories; “favs,” my favorite celebrities on twitter; and “the future” for science fiction thinkers.
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