Ted Joans, poet and artist, died in April. I remember seeing Ted read his poems at ‘Shakespeare and Co.’, the famous bookstore in Paris. My brother was staying in Paris for a month, and I was over to help the artist Cornelia Parker install an exhibition. I was 19, had just moved to Glasgow to go to Art School, and was enjoying my first tastes of fresh air after the stifling gas of suburbia.

We spent a few weeks in Paris drinking with people in bands that Chris had met under the pretences of starting a magazine that never got off the ground. Chris had wanted to show me the bookstore, so we went along one night to hear Ted Joans give a reading. He gave a fantastic performance, drawing out the lines and swooping his body to accentuate the rhythms in his poetry. He closed by urging us all to steal books from chain stores, then invited us to go and join him for drinks in a nearby bar, where he entertained a growing audience with more anecdotes, dirty jokes and poems.

I’m off to Paris in a couple of weeks, for the first time since that trip, so it feels strangely circular to come across news of Ted Joan’s death. Looking back, my trip reads like such a cliche – suburban kid goes to Paris to hear Beat poets, work with an artist and hang out with moody musicians who lived in crumbling 12th arrondissement apartments. But cliches are not cliches when you’re hearing them for the first time. I was lucky enough to work with Cornelia Parker on a couple more exhibitions, in Leipzig, East Berlin and London, and those trips were full of encounters like the one with Ted Joans at Shakespeare and Co. Full of those happenstance moments when you pinch yourself and think ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here, doing this’.

[more on ted here]

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SimonF makes a good point about my previous post on Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive:

Digitising is hardly going to help.
While we’ve lost some great works due to fires such as those in the Great Library of Alexandria, the chances are that copies of most printed works still exist. We’ve got almost all the great Greeks, for instance.

What happens as digital media becomes obsolete though? Vide the Doomsday Book project on laser disc.

He’s right to mention the (doomed) doomsday project. I think what Brewster is doing is slightly different, however. He’s not so worried about keeping information stored as keeping it *alive* – his motivation is to put stuff out there so that people who want to use it, can use it, and create new things from it. It’s a Darwinian evolutionary model – the information that finds a purpose survives, like the great Greeks Simon mentions. The trouble is, a lot of information isn’t even in the gene pool at the moment, so hasn’t got a chance to mutate and adapt.

Brewster’s archive is more like a World Wildlife Fund for information – he’s interested in keeping things alive and preserving diversity. Earlier attitudes to archiving, like the Doomsday project, were similar to Victorian explorers – kill it and stuff it and stick it on a shelf. The Doomsday Project was the DoDo of information archives – I think Brewster is more enlightened than that.

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Paula Le Dieu

Ben Hammersley

Cait Hurley

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Matt Jones

Alice Taylor

Tom Coates

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Matt Webb

James Cronin

Clay and Leo Shirky

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At ETCON this year, I thought I’d buck the trend and use some ‘receding’ media to document the trip. I’m a 50/50 gadget/old tech fiend, and there’s two areas where I’m resolutely non-digital – photography and music. All my music is on vinyl, and I’ve got a lovely old linn sondek turntable and leak tuner. I’m even thinking of buying a valve amp, but that might be going *too* far.

So I took my medium format camera to ETCON – a Mamiya C330 – with the idea of taking quite formal pictures of the people there, trying to get people to pause for a minute for something a little different from the usual snapped digital pictures. I found a nice blank wall that looked like the kind of cheesy background school photographers use, and persuaded a few friends to pose. I’m quite pleased with the results, and will post them up here over the next few days. My only regret is that I stopped after the first few days, and so missed many people, including Danny & Phil, and also that a film I took of Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive seemed to get fogged going through x-rays. I guess that doesn’t happen to digital cameras…

Still, it was a lot of fun – maybe Tim O’Reilly will be looking for a ‘school photographer’ for next year?

😉

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Last Friday, I went over to the Internet Archive and met Brewster Kahle. I remember Danny interviewing him for the Irish Times and being blown away by all the projects Brewster’s involved in and his sheer energy and enthusiasm. Its all true. I don’t really have heroes, but Brewster is definitely not a mortal.

Where I work, there’s been a culture change project with the slogan ‘cut the crap’. Its great, but its aim is pretty modest – to try and cut down the stifling gas of bureaucracy inside the organisation. Is that as high as we can aim? Cutting down on meetings and cynicism is one thing, but trying to get a million books available at a dollar each to people all over the world – now *thats* something to wake up for in the morning.

Danny’s Oblomovka piece is a much better description of the projects than I could write, so go there to learn more about the man. In the light of Cory’s talk at ETCON, this quote jumped out at me:

“The history of libraries is this: they get burnt down. By governments. I’m not anti-government: I’m a librarian, not a libertarian. But that’s the truth.”

A new definition of Public Service: make sure the stuff we make can’t get burnt. Its not enough to just make stuff anymore – we can’t just fire it out into the ether and sit back feeling smug. All the radio and tv broadcasts since Marconi are still out there somewhere, beaming past the solar system decades after they were made. News coverage of 9/11? Just past Jupiter last time I checked. The Moon Landings? probably halfway to Alpha Centuri. But that’s a fat lot of good if you happen to be stuck on planet earth, and still want to see them.

We can’t send a thousand Tivos into space to catch all this stuff, but we can make sure the stuff is still available down here. The blocks to doing this are normally either rights issues or cost of digitisation and storage. Larry Lessig has answered one question, Brewster Kahle the other. Lets cut the crap and do it.

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Away from the ETCON flock, Tomski unearths this nugget:

“Our artists no longer try to put us in touch with God and the eternal, but with the infinity of our own archives.” -James Flint on Brian Eno

This reminded me of some things I’d been thinking about on the ‘sublime’ in digital art. The sublime – the ‘shock and awe’ of aesthetic experience – was, in 19th century culture, normally represented by nature, as in the paintings of Caspar David Freidrich. The sublime is a vertiginous moment – the moment when an excess of visual pleasure leads to a kind of terror, or awe – usually interpreted as a humbling realisation of God’s power.

In a Godless world, the sublime is invoked by the achievements of science of technology. Its understanadable that contemporary artists will reflect our vertiginious, ambiguous responses to technological progress – this is not so much the infinity of our archives, as the infinity of the spaces we can describe through the application of logic.

My favourite ever piece of digital art is an excellent example of this kind of sublime infinity. In Every Icon, John F. Simon Jr created a Java app that systematically explores every possible combination of black and white squares on a 32×32 grid. Starting at the top left in January 1997, the app has been cycling through combinations every since.

It took about 16 months to cycle through the entire first line of the grid, so how long do you think it would take to go through all the possible combinations of the 32×32 square? 100 years? 1,000 years? a *million* years?

Not even close. more like several hundred trillion years.

That’s what the digital sublime looks like.

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Clay did his usual tour de force at ETCON today. He’s a fantastic and compelling speaker, but the elegance of his metaphors can often hide some logical wrinkles. Only one stood out today – he said that we are getting close to ‘ubiquity’ – that in some circles (students, office workers, etc) access to digital networked technology is assumed, and that in these situations we can start to see mature usage of social software.

This struck a nerve, initially because the assumption feels wrong, but then because the assumption of how we *get* to ubiquity, and what that means for behaviour patterns, felt too simplistic.

In the early stages of the growth curve for a new form of social communication, the user base is so low that any behaviour is likely to be atypical in the long term – with a small sample, unusual behviour is almost as prevalent as the mature patterns that will develop as adoption scales. Its not until we reach about, say, 50% ‘ubiquity’ that these mature patterns start to become clearer, and the earlier models and theories are discarded.

The thing Clay is forgetting is that the first few stages of the adoption curve are often very different from the final push to mass adoption. Approaching ubiquity, there is often a subtle shift in the use of the technology – a tipping point that gets the last 50%, or 40%, or 30% to adopt. This is when something can truly be assumed to be ubiquitous – when the network isn’t characterised by its early adopters, or even the second wave that starts the ‘mature’ phase, but has become an almost neutral utilty.

This is why I don’t think we can say we’re approaching ubiquity – digital networks, and social software tools enabling people to inhabit them, are reaching the mature phase, but we’ve not begun to see signs of the subtle shift that will turn these tools into utilities.

We’ve moved on from the atypical behaviours of MOOs and MUDs, but I still don’t think we’ve seen the tipping point. If there are signs anywhere, its in SMS use. We get excited about how blogs and wikis are ‘small pieces loosely joined’, but text messages are very, very small pieces, loosely joining real people in real places, and helping them navigate and use those spaces in ways that couldn’t have happened before this simple digital network was opened up as a social space.

If this is true, then the final push to ubiquity might be an extension of the mature patterns we’re starting to see emerge on Blogs, Wikis and community spaces like UpMyStreet conversations. But as with all networks, the ‘last mile’ of the adoption curve will be the most significant. We’ll see these emerging mature behaviours become more concrete, but it as likely to be in a completely different platform or context from the ones people are talking about here at ETCON.

[NB: Tom Coates has just finished the UpMyStreet presentation here, and Stef had the last quote – ‘The future of the internet will be in the enmeshing of digital networks into the real world’ – this is the most believable description of the ‘last mile’ problem I’m talking about – how will digital networks make the real world better?]

Clay did his usual tour de force at ETCON today. He’s a fantastic and compelling speaker, but the elegance of his metaphors can often hide some logical wrinkles. Only one stood out today – he said that we are getting close to ‘ubiquity’ – that in some circles (students, office workers, etc) access to digital networked technology is assumed, and that in these situations we can start to see mature usage of social software.

This struck a nerve, initially because the assumption feels wrong, but then because the assumption of how we *get* to ubiquity, and what that means for behaviour patterns, felt too simplistic.

In the early stages of the growth curve for a new form of social communication, the user base is so low that any behaviour is likely to be atypical in the long term – with a small sample, unusual behviour is almost as prevalent as the mature patterns that will develop as adoption scales. Its not until we reach about, say, 50% ‘ubiquity’ that these mature patterns start to become clearer, and the earlier models and theories are discarded.

The thing Clay is forgetting is that the first few stages of the adoption curve are often very different from the final push to mass adoption. Approaching ubiquity, there is often a subtle shift in the use of the technology – a tipping point that gets the last 50%, or 40%, or 30% to adopt. This is when something can truly be assumed to be ubiquitous – when the network isn’t characterised by its early adopters, or even the second wave that starts the ‘mature’ phase, but has become an almost neutral utilty.

This is why I don’t think we can say we’re approaching ubiquity – digital networks, and social software tools enabling people to inhabit them, are reaching the mature phase, but we’ve not begun to see signs of the subtle shift that will turn these tools into utilities.

We’ve moved on from the atypical behaviours of MOOs and MUDs, but I still don’t think we’ve seen the tipping point. If there are signs anywhere, its in SMS use. We get excited about how blogs and wikis are ‘small pieces loosely joined’, but text messages are very, very small pieces, loosely joining real people in real places, and helping them navigate and use those spaces in ways that couldn’t have happened before this simple digital network was opened up as a social space.

If this is true, then the final push to ubiquity might be an extension of the mature patterns we’re starting to see emerge on Blogs, Wikis and community spaces like UpMyStreet conversations. But as with all networks, the ‘last mile’ of the adoption curve will be the most significant. We’ll see these emerging mature behaviours become more concrete, but it as likely to be in a completely different platform or context from the ones people are talking about here at ETCON.

[NB: Tom Coates has just finished the UpMyStreet presentation here, and Stef had the last quote – ‘The future of the internet will be in the enmeshing of digital networks into the real world’ – this is the most believable description of the ‘last mile’ problem I’m talking about – how will digital networks make the real world better?]

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