Chris Anderson, in his excellent Long Tail blog, uses basic physics to elegantly place technology hype in its appropriate context. Referring to a recent speech from Michael Wolff hinting that because of the power of the web, Consumer Report (the US Which?) was now a marginal business model, Anderson tries to seperate the facts from the hype:

Actually, Consumer Reports says it has about 4 million subscribers, which by anyone’s estimation makes it non-marginal (although I don’t get the magazine, I do pay $26/year to subscribe to its excellent website). Vanity Fair, or for that matter Wired, would love to have anything close to that. But I think I know what Wolff meant. To understand his claim, you have to realize that there are three kind of people, which being a science geek, I will describe in physics terms (that noise is the sound of a readership stampeding for the exits):

A) Position People
B) Velocity People (first derivative)
C) Acceleration People (second derivative)

Category A people think: “4 million subscribers is a lot. Consumer Reports must be doing something right.”

Category B people think: “It used to be 4.2 million. Consumer Reports is in decline.”

Category C people think: “They lost 200,000 readers in three years! Consumer Reports is dead.”

One of the most linked-to posts on this blog was an attack on Wired Magazine’s tendency to report acceleration more than velocity or position. Anderson, a Wired writer, makes a defense of this tendency, saying that it is the raison d’etre of the magazine. That’s a fair enough comment, but my beef is with the volume, in terms of numbers and noise, of Category C people within technology circles.

Anderson points out that any emerging blip might be the germ of something that changes industries, or nothing whatsover, and ‘end-ism’ (as in ‘this means the end of radio/tv/print media/work/etc’) is an appropriate rhetorical device to report the potential acceleration of any disruptive element. But for me, this vision of pure speed, of a potential world measured purely in terms of disruption and acceleration, is not only exhausting, but also tends to provide a limited lens to imagine the future.

In her excellent book ‘When Old Technologies Were New’, Carolyn Marvin uses the term ‘cognitive imperialism’ to describe the future visions for electrical products and services that were published in electrical engineers’ journals in the 19th Century. In her analysis, most contemporary writers imagined futures in which their own skills and expertise were transformative and increasingly valuable, changing the landscape of the world and transforming business models. In the case of electricity, they were broadly right, but not in the ways they imagined. It is usual in our culture to project acceleration in a straight line forward, without taking on board other drivers that might affect its path. But are there other ways of thinking about the future that place less of a focus on acceleration, and more on position?

An article in The Guardian’s Life section last week reported on the Aymara people of the Andes, who seem to refer to the past as ‘in front’ of them, and the future as ‘behind’. Researchers have been filming conversations with Aymarans and recording how their speech and hand gestures signify their position within a reverse timeflow, with the future moving from behind them whilst they face the past. The reason for this might give us a fascinating insight into why we are so locked into our ‘end-isms’, forever seeing the future rushing forward to erase the past:

Núñez [one of the researchers] thinks that the reason the Aymara think they way they do might be connected with the importance they accord vision. Every language has a system of markers which forces the speaker to pay attention to some aspects of the information being conveyed and not others. French emphasises the gender of an object (sa voiture , son livre), English the gender of the subject (his car, her book). Aymara marks whether the speaker saw the action happen or not: “Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it).”

If these markers are left out, the speaker is regarded as boastful or a liar. Thirty years ago, Miracle and Yapita pointed to the often incredulous responses of Aymara to some written texts: “‘Columbus discovered America’ – was the author actually there?” In a language so reliant on the eyewitness, it is not surprising that the speaker metaphorically faces what has already been seen: the past.

It is interesting to compare how the word ‘vision’ is used here – for most of western culture, ‘vision’ is seen as something moving forward, penetrating the murky depths of the future; a ‘visionary’ is someone who can trace accelerating paths from the random matter of the everyday. For the Aymara, vision is literal truth – the ultimate arbiter of experience and therefore the benchmark for claims about the past or future. As the past can be claimed to have been directly experienced, it has more weight, more gravity, perhaps. Marta Hardman, one of the anthropologists working on the study, thinks there are advantages to the way the Aymara think: “We pretend [the past] is not there, yet we’re lugging it with us as we go”.

Perhaps the attraction of Anderson’s Category C thinking is the feeling of freedom we get from pretending we’re not carrying this weight, and that we can just focus on the dizzying acceleration instead. But this is an illusion, and risks the ‘cognitive imperialism that Marvin illustrates. We should instead use Anderson’s ‘physics of hype’ equation as a tool, and encourage a rhetoric in which position is as important as acceleration. After all, to slightly paraphrase, objects in the rear-view mirror may be closer than they appear…

Continue reading →

Deitch Projects – the gallery of uber-art-scenester Jeffrey Deitch – is launching ARTSTAR, a reality TV show based on the lives and practises of contemporary artists:

ARTSTAR is the first-ever unscripted television series set in the New York art world. Selected from this open call, eight artists will have the opportunity to participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects, and may have a chance to land their own solo exhibition with Deitch Projects. ARTSTAR will document these eight artists as they interact with leading critics, collectors, curators and artists in New York, while making new artworks as part of a historic collaborative exhibition at Deitch Projects.

My first response is glee, as I’d imagine the programmes would be a glorious litany of tantrums, egos, posing and naked desire. But looking through the (limited) information on the website, I see that Christopher Sperandio, part of the artistic partnership Grennan & Sperandio, is listed as an executive producer.

I’ve long been a fan of their work, which involves an almost ethnographic immersion into an exisiting community, with the final artwork as a collaborative production with people from the community. Recently, their work has focused on comic books that illustrate the lives of people in specific communities. They did a version of this project with people in York for the Photo 98 festival, when I was production manager at Impressions Gallery.

The comic books are perfect vehicles for the vernacular stories they uncover, and are seen as mainstream products, distributed by Fantagraphics or DC as well. In the light of Sperandio’s involvement, ARTSTAR is an extension of their practise, using another vernacular vehicle – the reality TV show – to uncover the invisible lives and stories of a particular community – the NY art scene.

The success may hinge on whether this is as empowering an intervention as most of their work. Starting with their ground-breaking contribution to the show ‘Culture in Action’, where they worked with the unionized employees of a Chicago chocolate factory to design and market their own chocolate bar, their work has used cultural production as a tool of empowerment. Will ARTSTAR do the same? We will see artists taking power of the medium to wrest control of the artworld’s economic hierarchy? Or will it just focus on the most telegenic spats and hissy fits and synch them to a retro-punk-funk soundtrack?

Continue reading →

Deitch Projects – the gallery of uber-art-scenester Jeffrey Deitch – is launching ARTSTAR, a reality TV show based on the lives and practises of contemporary artists:

ARTSTAR is the first-ever unscripted television series set in the New York art world. Selected from this open call, eight artists will have the opportunity to participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects, and may have a chance to land their own solo exhibition with Deitch Projects. ARTSTAR will document these eight artists as they interact with leading critics, collectors, curators and artists in New York, while making new artworks as part of a historic collaborative exhibition at Deitch Projects.

My first response is glee, as I’d imagine the programmes would be a glorious litany of tantrums, egos, posing and naked desire. But looking through the (limited) information on the website, I see that Christopher Sperandio, part of the artistic partnership Grennan & Sperandio, is listed as an executive producer.

I’ve long been a fan of their work, which involves an almost ethnographic immersion into an exisiting community, with the final artwork as a collaborative production with people from the community. Recently, their work has focused on comic books that illustrate the lives of people in specific communities. They did a version of this project with people in York for the Photo 98 festival, when I was production manager at Impressions Gallery.

The comic books are perfect vehicles for the vernacular stories they uncover, and are seen as mainstream products, distributed by Fantagraphics or DC as well. In the light of Sperandio’s involvement, ARTSTAR is an extension of their practise, using another vernacular vehicle – the reality TV show – to uncover the invisible lives and stories of a particular community – the NY art scene.

The success may hinge on whether this is as empowering an intervention as most of their work. Starting with their ground-breaking contribution to the show ‘Culture in Action’, where they worked with the unionized employees of a Chicago chocolate factory to design and market their own chocolate bar, their work has used cultural production as a tool of empowerment. Will ARTSTAR do the same? We will see artists taking power of the medium to wrest control of the artworld’s economic hierarchy? Or will it just focus on the most telegenic spats and hissy fits and synch them to a retro-punk-funk soundtrack?

In Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Starr’s excellent book Sorting Things Out, they investigate the creation of the Nursing Interventions Classifcation (NIC) by a group of nurses in Iowa. The NIC was created to address the lack of visibility and accountability of nursing work in hospitals. As information technology became widespread within hospitals, nursing work needed a standardised vocabulary in order to be adequately recognised and compensated by hospital authorities. This was resisted by some nursing professionals, who argued for a more flexible taxonomy that preserved the ‘natural’ language of nurses.

This illlustrates well the issues currently being raised by the growth of informal tagging and taxonomy infrastructures in services like delicious and flickr. Some commentators have hailed these informal or ‘folk’ taxonomies as a revolution in classification methodology, whilst others, like Danah Boyd, have argued that ‘folksonomies’ don’t help taxonomists address questions about the meaning and impact of classification:

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

This is precisely the tension described by Bowker and Star. Their book investigates the interface between the ideology and practise of classification, and how this affects professional and social behaviour. One of their central themes is ‘invisible work’ – the act which creates taxonomies, like history, but is not represented in the final outcome. The NIC is an attempt to make the invisible work of nurses visible, but also to keep the process as visible as possible, via workshops with nurses around the US, and regularly revisions via contributions and conferences.

It is this visibility that is lauded in folksonomies, with wikipedia being the prime example. The exponential network effects of the internet enable mass vernacular collaboration, and systems that can make visible the creation and revision of taxonomies that are simultaneously ‘in play’ as working infrastructures. Does this represent a revolution in classification processes? Does this visibility allow people to resolve the tensions inherent in any taxonomical structure, or make its implementation any more effective?

One of the most contentious issues in the NIC was the classification of social functions, such as ‘mood management’ (preparing a patient for grief or stress before an operation) and even ‘humour’. How could humour be represented in a taxonomy? How could you reimburse or measure it? The resulting classification might help to make visible this work, but it sits uneasily as a classification, as illustrated by this exercept:

ACTIVITIES:
Determine the types of humour appreciated by the patient
Determine the patient’s typical response to humour
Determine the time of day that patient is most receptive
Select humourous materials that create moderate arousal for the individual
Encourage silliness and playfulness

Are these useful classifications? Who do they best help? The practising nurse or the administrator? Do you think these descriptions could be productive for a conversation between the two? Or would they perhaps impose artificial boundaries on the improvisational nature of this kind of care?

Perhaps this illustrates the limit of folksonomies – they are only useful in a context in which nothing is at stake. Folksonomies are, in essence, just vernacular vocabularies; the ad-hoc languages of intimate networks. They have existed as long as language itself, but have been limited to the intimate networks that created them. At the point in which something is at stake, either within that network or due to its engagement with other networks (legal, financial, political, etc) vernacular communication will harden into formal taxonomy, and in this process some of its slipperiness and playfulness will be lost.

Digital networks have massively increased the scale of the intimate networks we can potentially create, and therefore have increased the number of participants that can create and share ad-hoc vocabularies. The internet has created tools that preserve the loosely-connected, the playful, the ad-hoc, vernacular, or amateur – the conditions of the infinite, rather than the finite game.

But this is a revolution of scale, not the erasure of tension between formality and informality. That boundary still exists, and will be just as sharp, if not sharper, as it will be negotiated between thousands, rather than a handful, of participants. Whilst folksonomies are used to create loose taxonomies of leisure pursuits (photography, music, websites, tv, etc) there is little at stake, and even a participant group measured in millions can happily share these loose infrastructures. And yes, there are business models that have been made possible by the exponential increase in scale that would have been untenable before digital networks transformed our intimate relationships. But this is an increase in scale of an already existing set of behaviours, not a new set of behaviours in themselves.

Bowker and Star identify three values that are in competition within classfication structures: comparability, visibility and control. Folksonomies have elevated visibility, but at the expense of comparability (being able to translate classifications across taxonomies or contexts) and control (the ability of the classification to limit interpretation, rather than interpret ’emergent’ behaviour). Whilst nothing is at stake, and there is little lost by not being able to transfer taxonomies from one context to the other, or users are not disadvantaged by the need to independently assess and contextualise meaning, folksonomies will provide a useful service.

At what point will visibility not be enough for these emerging folksonomies? Jimmy Wales has already discussed spinning off ‘hard’ versions of wikipedia, so that users who are less interested in playfulness and more interested in authority can feel more secure using the service. As a purely social service, Flickr might be able to stay playful for longer, without users worrying too much about the uses and abuses of classification.

This, then is the question we need to ask of folksonomies – how revolutionary is the ability to play? What are the real benefits to users? What are the costs? And more importantly, who is able to play, and who is excluded?

Continue reading →

As Megnut (had) said – would you fucking believe it?

I’m a huge Boston Red Sox fan, despite being born and bred in England. Its a long story, but I started playing Baseball the same time that Channel 4 in the UK showed the ’86 WS, with the Sox and the Mets. I chose the Sox, wept at Bill Buckner, and was destined to join the Nation for the rest of my days…

Beyond what anyone dared hope, the Sox overturned a 3-0 Yankees lead in the best-of-seven ALCS finals to win 4-3 and go to the World Series for the first time since 1986, and to give them a chance for their first WS win since 1918.

Is it finally time to lift the curse?

In celebration, i’ve posted up some pictures I took at Fenway Park in 2002. I shot them using a 3200 film, for maximum contrast and grain. Here are my favourites, with more at my flickr site.

Continue reading →

West Pier, Brighton

West Pier, Brighton

Continue reading →

Ingenious is a new website from the NMSI – the consortium of UK museums that includes the Science Museum, National Museum of Photography, Film & TV, and the National Railway Museum. Its got an interesting mix of articles, images and debates that are structured on a kind of ‘ican’ style participation curve, from READ to DEBATE to SEE to CREATE.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there, particularly the photography collctions from the NMPFT, where the lovely autochrome of a young girl above comes from. Its from 1910, but looks strangely contemporary, almost like a faded kodachrome from the 1970’s.

Continue reading →

Remember ‘The Beast’? the game that was secretly launched around the movie AI? It seems that there is another similar augemented reality game currently being developed, and the rumour is that it is linked to the launch of Halo 2 on the xbox.

go to ilovebees for the mysterious launch pad for the project, and this message board to catch up on the game’s progress. At the moment, players are converging at a number of GPS points across the US, where they are expecting something related to the game to take place. Although there is equal scepticism that this is just a large puzzle publicising Halo 2, and not a fuly-fledged Augmented Reality puzzle at all. I’m sure all will be revealed over the net few days…

Cloudmakers, the group site for people solving The Beast, is a great resource for online/AR gaming.

Continue reading →

Dan Hill points to this marvellous article from harlem.org on how the amount of information we have about the music we listen to is decreasing rapidly as we embrace digital formats. We’ve gone from the LP, with the luxurious space for liner notes, credits and shout-outs, to the bare few lines of metadata in the itunes database, often only containing artist, title, and release date, and often factually incorrect.

This boils down to a trade-off between access and serendipity. In order to increase access, we streamline the product to its bare minimum – an optimised algorithm of ones and zeroes. But serendipity is about getting snagged on the extraneous data, about following the forking paths that link one item to the next.

This isn’t just a romantic paen to the esoteric pleasures of old vinyl. When I was more actively collecting records, I used to recognise producers from albums I liked, and take that as a hint for new discoveries. Beat-diggers often value the producer or label over the artist, as they are the more responsible for the particular qualities that make a good break than the person playing the instrument.

I remember first realising that a lot of records I loved on the Cadet label – from Terry Callier, Rotary Connection and Minnie Riperton – where produced by Charles Stepney in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I started to look for Stepney’s credits on records in second-hand stores, and recognised his epic, experimental production style on tracks from compilations. In this case, Charles Stepney was the key bit of metadata, the root connecting me to lots of other interesting artists. In fact, he actually created Rotary Connection as a front for his studio experiments. How would you come across this information without being able to pore over music sleeves, etc?

Ok, so this is still a real minority interest, and most users are more than satisfied by being able to type ‘Coldplay’ into a search box and downloading the results, but the products of these twisting paths of metadata sometimes find their way back into the mainstream. Beat-digging has returned the forgotten contributions of visionaries like David Axelrod and Galt MacDermot to public attention, whilst the huge amounts of beats sourced from obscure music library records from the 60’s and 70’s has gained long-overdue credit for artists like Alan Hawkshaw, Nino Nardini and Cecil Leuter. Metada isn’t just about search, but about noise. The more there is, the more signals you can extract from it.

My favourite music-medata discovery? After a long search, I managed to track down a copy of Labi Siffre’s rare album ‘Remember My Song’ for the killer track ‘I Got The…’, which has a *huge* break sampled by, among others, Eminem on ‘My Name Is…’ Checking out the credits on the album, I noticed that bass and guitar players where none other than Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock, popular english session musicians at the time. That meant that one of the fattest bass breaks in hiphop was played by a member of the oft-derided cockernee novelty act Chas & Dave. As a spurs fan, this was priceless…

Continue reading →

Continue reading →