Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…

I thought it worth quoting this summary paragraph in full, but please go and read the full essay:

“But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry – hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, “L’Affaire des Quatorze.” But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called “mauvais propos” or “mauvais discours”, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.”

I love the phrase ‘collective creation’, particularly in this political context…

Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…

I thought it worth quoting this summary paragraph in full, but please go and read the full essay:

“But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry – hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, “L’Affaire des Quatorze.” But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called “mauvais propos” or “mauvais discours”, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.”

I love the phrase ‘collective creation’, particularly in this political context…

Continue reading →

Matt has written an interesting post about slowness in networks. He refers to an article talking about minority views and the time it takes for these views to be heard in a system, and relates that to a project he’s working on about online participation.

This reminded me of an ad-hoc workshop I led at a conference at Banff NMI last year. The conference was about networks, mobility and public space, and I brought up an idea that had been at the back of my mind for a while – Public Caches. I’d been fascinated by the distributed patterns of physical media along transport systems – for example the ‘Metro’ newspaper that is given away free at UK train stations. It seemed like such a good way to distribute information – piggy-backing on the dynamics of people’s commuting, and the letting the carriers leave the information, meme-style, lying around on trains for others to pick up. I commute for over 1.5 hours a day, and picking up someone else’s copy of the Metro or Evening Standard can be a godsend on a delayed train.

I started thinking about this in relation to PDAs, and thought of the idea of installing ‘Public Caches’ – stand alone devices embedded into street furniture or trains that people could use to upload or download content. You could send an e-book or avantgo article that you had finished with, or browse the cache to see what people have left behind.

Streetbeam have been doing this for a while with their infra-red beaming stations in street furniture, but they seem to see it as a broadcast distribution network, rather than the decentralised, P2P network that fascinated me.

Anyway, in the workshop, the group got really interested in the idea, but kept insisting that the individual public caches would also be connected to the internet, so that you could upload content remotely. I wasn’t at all interested in this, but in re-introducing a physical aspect to a digital network, something like a Human Computer Transfer Protocol, where individuals with their PDAs are the packet carriers between a number of disconnected storage nodes. Most of the group thought this was pretty pointless, as it runs against the whole point of digital networks – speed and connectivity. But there was something there that intrigued me, something about the contrary and serendipitous network of people-connected nodes that seemed valuable. These values might be:

Slowness, and the reinforcement of community
In such a network, information would have to travel physically between people’s devices in order to jump from cache to cache. The cache on your train or street corner would be full of stuff that only people who physically travelled through or visited your neghbourhood could access. This would mean it would take a long time for ‘memes’ to migrate through a network, but it would also increase local specificity, and so enhance a sense of place and community.

No economy of scale
In highly-connected networks, there is a huge economy of scale – it is as easy to send information to 1000 people as it is to send it to one. In the HCTP public cache network, there is no economy of scale, as you would have to physically travel to each Cache location to upload material across the whole network. The effort increases proportionally for each additional node if you try to broadcast information in a ‘one-to-many’ manner. On the down side, this resists the rapid development of ‘memes’ and other power-law related behaviour. On the upside, it makes it a spam-free network, as would-be spammers face a gargantuan physical task in flooding a network.

Super-connectors
Certain individuals who regularly use the caches would become super-connectors, responsible for a significant proportion of traffic between particular caches. There might be a DJ who regularly travels to Europe, downloading MP3s from European Caches and uploading them in the Caches near his home. Or there might be high degrees of connectivity between suburban Caches and ones in the city as people commute to and from work. Some interesting dynamics of exchange would develop out of this.

But why bother?

This is the question the group ultimately hit on, and I can’t say I have the answer. I was really just being perverse, and thinking about where slowness in a system might be an asset, as so much of our network culture eulogises speed. Interestingly, we came up with no examples where slowness itself was an asset, but a few of the effects of slowness were interesting. One was privacy/security – the Public Cache network most closely resembled the physical networks of drop-boxes and other intelligence/spy techniques. The process of uploading/downloading should be anonymous, like the messages left under park benches or empty trees in many a cold-war spy story. More recently, attempts to close down the financial support for terrorists stumbled on the decentralised, trust-based Hawala system that can allow the transfer of millions of dollars without a paper trail, using a trusted network of individuals.

So there seems to be some value in deliberately slow networks, but these seem to be antithetical to our current economic, political and cultural interest in digital networks. Matt’s post about slowness just scratches the surface. I think we need to reintroduce physical timescales into our thinking on networks, and stop being slaves to the artificial acceleration of our technologies. Pure information might be able to travel at the near the speed of light, but things like trust and community build a lot more slowly.

Continue reading →

CityPoems is a fantastic new project by Blinkmedia, the new ‘creative projects’ agency who are also behind the long established Centrifugal Forces and Short Circuits:

“Fifty million text messages are sent every day in Britain. We use them to organise our lives, gossip and even flirt. And we take our mobile phones everywhere. They have become like books with an unlimited number of blank pages waiting to be filled. CityPoems uses text messages to write the biography of a city.”

I admit to a bias here – I worked with Andy Wilson to set up the first Guardian SMS Poetry competition in 2001, and Lisa Roberts, the other half of Blink, used to work with me at The Media Centre a few years ago. Bias aside, its a fantastic project, and Blink, along with Lumen, look like the most dynamic and innovative media arts organisations in Yorkshire. Here’s a sample CityPoem:

Sparklers
We write our names:
in traces on the dark;
on flat, wet sand;
in breath on windowpanes.

Continue reading →

Mark Waugh makes some valuable comments about my post below. He reminds me that my brain is pretty rusty in this area, and that its easy to confuse the general points I wanted to explore with the specific example of the FACT centre. To clarify- I’m interested in what roles infrastructures play in supporting emerging networks, not just in FACT and digital art. I used that as an example as it was oblique to most of the discussions I’m aware of about emergent networks, power laws, etc, and I wanted to think through these arguments in another context. I think it was useful, and I’ll try and link it to these other points in the second part of the essay. In the meantime, I want to pick up on one of Mark’s points:

“I am not without anxiety about the direction of FACT but believe that it illustrates a wider process in the arts, one that comprehends the processes of production are what need communicating to audiences if they are to penetrate the spectacle of consumption.”

Its the last bit that I think creates the ‘glass ceiling’ effect – organisations that were established in the early stages of emerging networks concentrate on supporting process, whereas mainstream cultural organisations focus on spectacle. There are exceptions to this – the performance art historical re-enactments at the Whitechapel were interesting for trying to merge the two, and Artangel have admirably supported work that perfectly mixes process and spectacle, such as Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave.

But I think Mark is suggesting that the shift to communicating process is a growing trend, and one that is particularly key to digital art. I’m not so sure. I think it sometimes seems to be so, but I think the dominant spectacle of our mainstream cultural infrastructure will always mitigate against process. White cubes struggle to show process-based emergent art, and after a period of settling in when both sides of the relationship try to get to know each other’s quirks, the white cube normally wins. Video Art is a good example of this – the trend has been to spectacle, not process, as illustrated by the recent works of Bill Viola, which overtly adopt the framing and scale of painting.

Ulimately, fantastic buildings are a spectacle in themselves, so need spectacular work to justify themselves. Organisations that resist the need to create spectacular infrastrcutures are generally better at remaining tactical, flexible and process-orientated. The question is, does this fatally limit their scope and ultimately their contribution to the development, maturation and historicisation of the practises they support?

I’ll get back to this eventually in the second part of this, but not till I’ve drunk lots of free booze in Liverpool. In the meantime, there’s an excellent article on FACT in today’s Guardian, but unfortunately they’ve not bothered to put it on their website. Pity.

Continue reading →

I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff in my head at the moment about power laws, emergent systems, network architectures, etc – partly from the google/blogger merge, partly from Clay’s writing, and partly because of where I work.

But the thing I need to write about is something else that has been gnawing away at me for a couple of years. Its to do with the sector that I used to work in – digital art – but the parallels seem more and more relevant to all these current issues. And my usual tactic in this instance is to take an oblique look at the problem, and see if I can creep up on it from there. Also, the last thing we need is another random blog posting about power laws or Bloogle. So here goes.

I’m going to Liverpool on thursday for the launch of the new FACT centre. Its a very ambitious Lottery-funded building project that is trying to create a new type of space for a mixed economy of media arts, from cinema to installation and web art. So why is that particularly ineresting? There’s been a glut of Lottery funded building projects in the last decade, some successful, some not. This one’s been in the pipeline for a while now, so why is it different? Well, the answer is to do with the organisation behind it, their philosophies, and whether they can successfully navigate the substantial shift in scale that the building represents.

FACT, the Foundation for Creative Arts and Technology, have been one of the leading lights in commissioning digital arts for over 10 years now. They’ve previously operated out of a small warren of offices in Bluecoat Chambers, Liverpool, with a broad portfolio of activities that have grown quite organically out of their core interests in supporting media art. These include the regular Video Positive festival, the ISEA 98 conference, The MITES service for galleries wanting to show media art, and a fantastic collaboration programme within the local community. The important thing is, their overheads have been (I assume) pretty managable. Their offices were pretty basic and staff broadly aligned to specific projects, so they could expand or contract depending on the size of their commitments. They’ve had some hits and misses, like any arts organisation, but have been around for over 10 years now, so must be doing something right.

All this is going to change with the FACT Centre. In one fell swoop, they’ve got to understand how to manage a complex and expensive building, and will have related staff costs, utilities, etc, before they can begin spending on artistic programmes. I’ve spoken to Clive Gillman, who has been heavily involved in this project since the beginning, many times in the last few years, and its been interesting to see the organisation prepare for the realities of running a building, and some of the hard compromises they’ve had to make.

What we have here is a challenge of scale, and one that has come out of a historical practise in an emergent sector. If we look at the way in which emergent media practises have been adopted into the cultural mainstream, scale, both architectural and in terms of audience, has been a crucial factor. There is a repeating pattern of infrastructures that support emerging practises, and similar ideaological crisis points between the practitioners and the infrastructures themselves. To be very crude, we could put it like this:

1st stage: Establishing a community of practitioners
This is when a new practise emerges, and early practitioners look to seek each other out and establish shared vocabularies. Primary needs are access to production facilities, which are often expensive and hard to obtain, and a peer network to share ideas about political, cultural and technical issues. Audiences for the products of this community is usually limited to the community itself, with a focus on innovation rather than high-quality presentation. Good examples of historical infrastructures at this level include the many photography resources that developed in the 1970’s and 80’s, such as Impressions in York or the now-defunct Camerawork in London. For net art, Rhizome has played an essential infrastructural role, as did Backspace in London.

2nd stage: Establishing modes of display and developing audiences
After a production community has reached a critical mass, quality of presentation becomes a critical factor in establishing the value of cultural products. This is for a couple of reasons, including the need to address the criteria for public funding and the maturing vocabulary of the emergent practise itself. 1st stage infrastructures often mutate to play a supporting role in this stage, developing more sophisticated physical or virtual spaces to showcase cultural products, and extending the network to peers on a national or global scale. Successful infrastructural organisations have an increasing effect on the emergent practise itself, by creating larger-scale opportunities that amplify certain elements of the practise whilst marginalising others. This is usually accompanied by the first crisis of identity amongst practitioners, with splits emerging between those who see this as ‘selling out’ and those who benefit from the opportunities. Most of the network of UK photography organisations went through this mutation in the 70’s and 80’s. Some managed to retain their links with practitioners, whilst others more overtly took the role of medium-sized galleries. Most significantly, the audience for these spaces grows outside of the practitioner networks, attracting clued-up members of the wider artistic community.

3rd Stage: Development of a ‘canon’ and historicisation of practises
The emergent practise is now attracting a lot of interest from mainstream cultural infrastructures, including the media and museums. This accelerates the profile of the practitioners who successfully adapted with the mutating infrastructural organisations, and as a result appear as part of an early ‘canon’. This can be a problem, as the scale of opportunities increases rapidly, putting a strain on practitioners who don’t want to say no to the exposure, but can easily overcommit themselves and see the work suffer as a result. The primary needs in this stage come from the ‘early adopter’ agents from the mainstream, who demand a level of quality and uniformity of practise that has not typically been there in the early stages. There is also a need to adapt the practise to the needs of their infrastructures, for example, a museum or a newspaper. Again, practitioners whose work can adapt to these needs prosper, whereas those who cannot, or choose not to because of their allegiance to the more political and egalitarian aims of the early stages of the emergent practise, find themselves increasingly marginalised. Audiences are now very significant, and the mainstream exposure of the practise is no longer seen as such a novelty. A good example of this stage is the survey show, exemplified in digital art by the confluence of major shows at SFMOMA and the Whitney in 2001. Both these shows are typical in that they try to locate an emergent practise within a broader cultural milieu, attempting to trace historical precedents and parallels with commercial practises.

4th Stage: Assimilation
By now, successful practitioners have been able to create international careers, and are regularly featured in mainstream shows along with more traditional practitioners, or are offered one-person shows in private galleries. This introduces a commercial audience for the work, and ways to edition or otherwise commoditize the practise are developed. The practise is now almost unrecognisable from its early, socialized forms, with any ambiguity about authorship, presentation orthodoxies and historical relationships resolved as part of its assimilation into the mainstream. Interestingly, there are virtually no examples of ’emergent’ infrastructural organisations who can adapt to play a role at this level. Its a kind of glass ceiling – the shift in scale to meet the needs of audiences rather than communities is so huge that organisations face a crisis of identity, and many don’t survive. Those that do normally shift their focus to a related emerging practise that is at stage 1, 2 or 3, where they can more easily identify a role. This happened to most of the photography organisations in the UK, as emerging practises and funding streams for digital multimedia shifted support from ‘traditional’ chemical photography to these new forms.

The challenge for FACT
In creating their new centre, FACT are trying to break this cycle. Rather than seeing emerging practises mutate to fulfill the needs of mainstream spaces, they are creating a bespoke centre that is at least partly based on the needs of emerging practises. Its intended to be a flexible, dynamic, space; in a way a materialisation of the philosophy of the organisation over the past decade. But will they succeed?

I don’t know. That there are precious few precedents is a worry, although there are a few similar projects that are in development. They’ll need peers, both for the network externalities this brings (sharing investment in programming, franchising exhibitions, etc) and for the kind of competition that will develop audience interest in this sector. The trouble is, the cost of entry to market at this scale is so huge that there are unlikely to be many other organisations able to make the same step up, especially in a Lottery funding climate that is much harsher than when FACT got their funding. If they see their immediate peers as organisations out of their sector (the Tate, Whitechapel, etc), then the bespoke conditions of their space will not be exploited, as they’ll have to make concessions in their frachised programming to the facilities available in standard ‘white cube’ spaces. MITES is a partly successful attempt to deal with this, but is still geared towards adapting ‘white cubes’, not replicating the far more dynamic spaces that the FACT centre has.

But the biggest problem could be the building itself. All cultural centres of this scale subsidise their programming activity with the support services that mass audiences expect – cafes, bookshops, etc. FACT have addressed this head-on, with 2 cinema spaces that will show art-house programmes that are related to the other emergent work exhibited. But this could easily become the tail that wags the dog, as audiences might identify the FACT centre as a great cinema with some funky exhibition spaces attached.

Of course, this could be their overt intention. There is nothing wrong with this at all, but it would represent a significant shift away from the programming philosophies that have underpinned their work for over 10 years, and would prove my theory that no organisation involved in emergent networks of practitioners can manage the shift in scale from supporting communities to supporting audiences. This is where the relationship to power laws and the Google/Blogger relationship comes in, and I’ll get around to exploring this in part 2. In the meantime, I’m off to Liverpool on Thursday, and will let you know what I think when I get back.

Continue reading →

ZONE

The space of a mobile phone conversation is a real space as well as a node on a technological network. These communication spaces used to be architecturally defined, such as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s classic ‘K2‘ red phone box. With mobile technologies this architectural referent disappears, and the ‘zone’ created by switching your attention from a social public space to a private call or message is defined by product design and gesture, neither of which have effectively replaced architecture as a commonly understood social protocol.

The ‘zone’ also describes the cell-like structure of mobile phone networks themselves, explored very effectively in the work of Dunne & Raby at the RCA. This technological boundary is more fluid than physical architecture, moving dynamically with you as you walk between zones, but can still be used as a way to locate the user within physical space.

However, boundaries of communication spaces are not only defined by architecture and technology. Erving Goffman also describes the way in which we use social conventions of inclusion and exclusion to demarcate these boundaries – what Goffman calls ‘situational closure’. This describes the way in which we communicate, or pretend to communicate, our participation in a conversation. Depending on our familiarity with the participants or the context, we can take a number of positions in relation to a conversation, from active to passive, from bystander to focal point. Goffman investigates these positions, and most importantly into the transitions between them, in great detail:

“One example of this is small enclosed spaces like elevators, where individuals may be so closely brought together that no pretence of not hearing can possibly be maintained. A similar kind of issue seems to arise in near-empty bars, or with cabdrivers. So too with the individual who is momentarily left to his own resources while a person to whom he has been talking answers a telephone call; physically close to the engaged other and patently occupied, he must yet somehow show civil inattention.”

Erving Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places

In these examples Goffman is describing how intimate conversations affect the status of the observers in the immediate vicinity. Instead of a singular connection between the people participating in a conversation, there is a ‘fall-out’ amongst everyone in hearing distance, with the consequence that they must somehow signify their inclusion or exclusion from a discourse that they are not in control of. A similar set of relationships occurs when one person takes a mobile phone call in a public space, even if the surrounding audience aren’t necessarily known to the person taking the call (for example on a train).

The ‘zone’ in this case does not describe a kind of ‘cocoon’ that temporarily separates the individual from social space, but a kind of wave that affects everyone within the vicinity of the communication. Yet again, the moment of intimate communication is not merely an exchange between two people and the technologies that connect them, but a complex social environment with a large number of participants, each of whom has to play a role, whether voluntarily or not.

Continue reading →

INTIMATE

“The young ladies of Frankford … have recently discovered that by holding a piece of tin against the iron foot-rests driven into the wooden poles of the Southern Electric Light Company they receive a weak electric shock, and almost every evening a group gathers around the poles that are not situated on the main thoroughfares and enjoys the fun for hours… One pretty miss was heard to remark, after her first experience, “Oh, I thought I was squeezing a handful of pins” “yes,” said another, “it’s something like being kissed by a young man with a bristly moustache.”

Carolyn Marvin – When Old Technologies Were New

What do we mean by a technological intimacy? Is it about communication with intimate others? Or being intimate with technology itself? The original use of the word ‘intimate’ in TIZ referred to the irruption of a private, on-to-one communication in a public space. This has traditionally been signified by a form of architecture – a phone booth or other construction that makes it clear to passers-by that the user has stepped out of the public realm and into an intimate communication space. With mobile technology, these physical signifiers have almost disappeared, replaced by ever-shrinking mobile phones and ‘hands-free’ interfaces. The phrase TIZ was formulated to describe this new phenomena – temporary, intimate communication zones that are not architecturally signified, but instead performative – signified, if at all, by gestures as much as by products.

But the word ‘intimacy’ invokes a closed, binary relationship, where we know that mobile communication is partly public, even this is unintended. Privacy might be a better term, but privacy has become one of the most political terms in technological discourse, and the weight of these arguments overloads it for this context. But perhaps this discourse focuses too much on the huge discrepancy in scale between individuals and an abstract technological network, and not enough in the real space of human encounters enabled by these networks. Intimacy and privacy are not concepts that exist as binary oppositions (intimate/distant, private/public), but as a continuum that is negotiated socially and affected by specific contexts.

In Erving Goffman’s , “Behaviour in Public Places”, he describes the social and cultural factors that delineate ‘proper’ or ‘improper’ behaviour, and how these create protocols that should, ideally, communicate these boundaries to all participants. These protocols are incredibly complex, with nuances reflecting subtle changes in the make up of social groups, cultural norms or location. For Goffman, these protocols define different levels of ‘tightness’ or ‘looseness’ in social situations that describe how individual behaviour is either tolerated or proscribed:

“It would seem that there may be one overall continuum or axis along which the social life in situations varies, depending on how disciplined the individual is obliged to be … the terms ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ might be more descriptive and give more equal weight to each of the several ways in which devotion to a social occasion may be exhibited”

Perhaps these definitions of ‘tightness’ and looseness’ could valuably be transferred to debates about ‘intimacy’ or privacy in networked communication. Rather than isolating the individual as a node on one end of a network that is vast in comparison, we should understand that intimate and public behaviour exist along a continuum, where the local context is as important in negotiating concepts of intimacy or privacy as the global perspective. Just as a temporary, ephemeral message can attain status and longevity through their context – for example an accrual of attention or scale – so levels of intimacy or privacy are products of a complex, almost fractal, social discourse, negotiated between participants using body language, clothing and a host of other signifiers.

Technological intimacy is merely another level of signification along this continuum. Particularly in the real spaces of mobile communication, the technological network is just one part of a context that includes the architecture, people and events around us. Definitions of privacy or intimacy that only take account of the relationship between the node and the network look thin and naive compared to the rich sociological context of Goffman.

Continue reading →

TEMPORARY

The mobile experience is temporary in that, as the subject is in a more dynamic situation than is usual for communication technologies, the moment of connection is ephemeral and far shorter than the usual experience of, say TV or the web. But it is also temporary in that the forms of discourse itself tends towards the ephemeral – gossip, comment or diaries rather than longer writing forms. This kind of public discourse is nothing new – Juliet Fleming, in her book ‘Graffiti And The Writing Arts of Early Modern England’ , traces a similar kind of public discourse played out over walls, windows and other architectural elements in the 16th Century:

“I imagine the whitewashed wall as being the primary scene of writing in early modern England … The writing that survives from the Elizabethan period was produced by people who had the technological and financial resources for the laborious procedures of securing paper, pen and ink. The poor, the hurried and those (it may have been practically everybody) unconcerned with the extensive circulation and long survival of their bons mots wrote with charcoal, chalk, stone and pencil”

Fleming here describes a wealth of literary activity that, transplanted to a different kind of accessible technology, mirrors the huge amount of writing that takes place over mobile networks via SMS. The success of SMS, viewed as part of a continuum of ephemeral public writing stretching back at least as far as the graffiti of Elizabethan England, is less surprising than currently appears. It seems that the lure of a white wall, or a blank screen that serves as such, is irresistible to a public that wants to communicate, however ephemeral or banal that communication may be.

Although it is ephemeral, this kind of writing occasionally seeks to reach a more public level of discourse, and with it some kind of longevity. In graffiti this is marked by a transition in scale, from the tiny etching on windows of Elizabethan ‘writing rings’ or names scratched on a school desk to huge slogans painted onto the side of a building. This kind of transition tends to be signified architecturally – in Rome, four ‘speaking statues’ are historical focuses for such samizdat ‘publishing’ – a location that has accrued a status as a ‘speakers corner’, where individual comments become public pronouncements. There are examples of these spaces enabled by current technology, such as hellomrpresident, but another example may be blogs, where the boundary between unheard comment and public discourse is defined not by scale or architecture but by a complex network of attention and reference (linking).

By definition, this kind of ephemeral public discourse, even when scaled in size by physical or virtual architectures, is lost to history. Is this a good thing? What gets lost when these complex networks of intimate public discourse are erased, either by whitewash on a wall or deletion from a server?

Continue reading →

Ok – i’ve found the essay that I wrote for Horizon Zero, and as I’m planning to use this as a space to put those things I don’t use in my day job, I’m going to put it up in three parts. But first a bit of background.

In my previous job, I developed a series of experiments using mobile technology. I also got interested in thinking about the new social behaviours that mobile use was creating, and the historical parallels with the introduction of other new technologies. I strongly believe that there are a few common fantasies that recur with the launch of every new technology, and these tend to be both utopian and dystopian. Inevitably both types are hyperbole, and picking your way between the two is a better way to think about the future. Most of the stuff I find myself idly thinking about, or idly writing, is like this.

In this presentation, I went back to a term that I used half-seriously to describe the experience of mobile telephony – the Temporary Intimate Zone or TIZ – and picked through each part of the phrase to see if it made any sense. Its a rambling essay about public space, discourse, and technology, and doesn’t really go anywhere, but includes most of the ideas that I’d like to think more about, so seems a good place to start this blog from. Well, ignoring the first rant about bad web design, that is…

oh, and yeah, TIZ is meant to be a slightly tongue-in-cheek adaption of Hakim Bey’s TAZ. But I wouldn’t take it too seriously if I was you…

Continue reading →