IFTF's Future Now

The Economist on mobility and cohesion

This week's Economist has a good special focus on mobility and community in America. The article on community groups-- a sort of update on Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone-- is especially interesting:

[A]fter years of decline, civil society is staging a comeback.

This is showing up in three areas. First, after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, civic and public engagement spiked.... Second, the internet is at last beginning to have an effect on voluntary associations.... [as] online groups have started to use “convening technology” to create face-to-face social bonds.

This reminds me of the fact that in Berkshire Publishing's Encyclopedia of Community, the two most frequently cited works were Putnam and Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities. Sometimes bibliography is destiny.

The third force helping to revive old-fashioned civic life is religion, and one sort of religious organisation in particular, the megachurch.

The whole set of articles is well worth reading.

Technorati Tags: community, culture, democracy, economics

Real divorce, virtual goods

It was bound to happen: virtual goods becoming a bone of contention in a divorce settlement. From Pacific Epoch:

Game Accounts Take Center Stage In Divorce

A divorce in Chongqing has turned ugly when both parties want their joint online game accounts, Chongqing Business Post reports. Mr. Wang from Chongqing and Ms. Ye from Huibei met last September on Shanda's (Nasdaq: SNDA) online game Legend of Mir 2. Wang saved Ye's character from being killed by another player. The couple married at the end of October but decided to get a divorce in June. During their marriage, the couple jointly played over ten Mir 2 accounts, attaining level 40 to 50 status for all of them. The characters and virtual items are estimated to be worth 40,000 to 50,000 Yuan. Wang said that he wants to keep the accounts and virtual items and is willing to give their joint apartment to Ye. However, Ye wants to split the apartment and game items equally.

Technorati Tags: China, culture, games

The ultimate in user customization?

It is sometimes said that since the invention of the printing press, every new media in the West is used first for three things: anti-Semitic literature, political (and often libelous) tracts, and pornography. Cell phones haven't sparked an explosion in the former, but they have had well-documented effects in political mobilization.

As for the last, we can assume it was only a matter of time, and it's no surprise that the more mobile-happy Europeans would lead the way. Though I'm glad I didn't hear any of these when I was in London:

Orgasmatones ready for climax

The industrious Alfie Dennen and his team have put together recordings of women screaming the pleasures of the 500 most popular male names in the UK (complete with bow-chicka-bow-bow background music), seriously raising the stakes in the porno ringtone biz. Big-name porn stars that have gotten in to the ringtone business charge more than Orgasmatones for generic dirty-talkin' ringtones, with no personalization.

The fact that someone can use the term "porno ringtone biz" with a straight face is something I have a hard time dealing with.

[via BoingBoing]

It's good to be a trendsetter

Last Christmas one of my in-laws gave me a 1 GB flash drive-- a very nerdy present, but since he's a programmer, it was very fitting. I immediately found a chain (actually a piece of string), and started wearing it around my neck. Fitting, I thought, to keep close to my heart all my notes, old articles, book manuscript, and everything else that defines my intellectual life is on it. (And my cell phone and iPod already compete for space in my pocket.)

Little did I know I was (for once) a fashion trendsetter, as The Economist reveals:

Flash drives, which allow huge amounts of data to be carried around easily, are changing from geek toys into fashion items...

[F]ash-drive necklaces are most popular among men in wealthy Asian countries. The bestselling models in Asia are cute and shiny with brightly contrasting colours. SanDisk, a firm based in Sunnyvale, California, that pioneered flash drives, recently launched new models with vibrantly coloured rubber casings, which are selling briskly in Asia....

Rappers and hip-hoppers bear some responsibility for the rise of the wearable flash drive. Their enthusiasm for heavy, metallic neckwear made it acceptable for men—who own 80% of flash drives—to wear chunky pendants. But flash drives aimed specifically at women are on the way too. PNY, a New York-based manufacturer with a product line that includes a flash drive hidden inside a pen, will launch a collection this autumn of drives with “feminine” shapes, colours and materials. “A fashionable drive needs to be shown off,” says Stephane Rouveyrol of PNY. Similarly, Maastrek, a firm based in Hildesheim, Germany, that already sells flash drives built into watches, is designing a line of flash-drive earrings and bracelets, and a series of necklaces in the shapes of tigers, birds and fish. They will go on sale later this year.

Technorati Tags: design, digital culture

Where's Doug?

Tom Foremski complains (following up on an earlier piece) about how the Valley has ignored Doug Engelbart-- and unintentionally demonstrates what he's complaining about.

Silicon Valley lauds this person and his work and his influence, and ignores him for more than 20 years? I cannot understand this attitude. Why isn't Doug sitting at Stanford University, guest lecturing from time to time?

The thing is, Doug actually does guest lecture at Stanford from time to time. (He did a course in 2000.) And Stanford and Institute for the Future (ahem) co-sponsored a day-long symposium on Doug's "Unfinished Revolution" in 1998-- almost six years ago. There were a flurry of tributes to him a couple years ago, and a more informal set now, thanks to the John Markoff book.

Still, while Doug's accomplishments are formidable, it now seems okay in the official culture of Silicon Valley to Forget Doug Engelbart. Our collective attention fixes on him briefly, but it's hard to stay focused; and eventually, we all seem to forget about him. Until the next round of tributes, and the next set of complaints about the lack of recognition.

In a forthcoming essay, I say that Doug is the Roy Orbison of Silicon Valley-- innovative early in his career, then forgotten for a long time, and honored in his old age. Foremski's post suggests that that's not quite true. Doug is more like Death in the Terry Pratchett novels: a character who's indispensable, who keeps showing up, but who ordinary humans can't quite recognize, and can't quite remember. People see Death, but their brains just can't handle processing the signal that says, "I see Death;" so through the miracle of neural plasticity, the brain translates him into Santa Claus, or nothing at all.

This is absolutely not to say that Doug doesn't deserve all the credit he now gets, and that in a fairer world he wouldn't get even more; it's an attempt to identify a weird blind spot in the Valley's collective consciousness. It seems absolutely determined to honor Doug, and at the same time ignore him.

Technorati Tags: Silicon_Valley, What the Dormouse Said

Culture is destiny

The International Herald Tribune has an article about cultural and national differences in cell phone use in Europe. It's an example of the growing appeal of ethnographic studies among technology companies-- and the degree to which culture, not technology, is destiny.

A mobile tale of three cities

Amparo Lasén, a Spanish sociologist, is completing a study conducted for the Digital World Research Center at the University of Surrey in England of mobile phone users in London, Madrid and Paris to compare behavioral changes between cultures and over time....

"Europe is looked at as a broadly similar market," Lasén said. "But in studying mobile phones you can see details in each country can change enormously."... Actually, there were not many surprises for people already familiar with the daily cultural habits of Spaniards, Britons and the French, Lasén concluded.

Londoners tended to be the most reluctant users of mobile phones in public and Madrid residents the most talkative. Parisians had the strictest rules governing mobile phone etiquette, and they often felt free to enforce it on others, her study showed.

The reaction toward other mobile phone users varied by cities. Loud conversations in public spaces are tolerated in Madrid, prompt gentle frowns in London and cause Parisians to intervene with complaints....

Modern love sometimes involved the mobile phone, with Lasén observing a number of people in both Madrid and Paris kissing while on the phone. No such thing took place in her observations in London.

"These were neither simple goodbye kisses nor short telephone conversations," Lasén said. "Such behavioral habits could make users reluctant to adopt use of videophones."

There was yet another difference Lasén found as her study unfolded that supported cultural stereotypes. She discovered that the residents of each city reacted quite differently to her as she worked.

Parisians frowned, Londoners pretended not to notice and people in Madrid didn't mind.

Thanks to the TELECOM-CITIES list, which pointed me to this article. I'm proud to say that one of the list's guiding lights, Anthony Townsend, is due to join the Institute shortly. Doubtless the quality of the blogging will go up after he's around.

How do you identify a Torah?

When I see an article with the headline "New Tech Protects Ancient Torahs," particularly in Wired News, I automatically assume it's going to be about RFID. It's almost refreshing that today's article, on different methods of identifying Torah scolls for theft recovery, doesn't mention the little tags at all-- though it does point out some interesting challenges in identifying objects.

There's a big international market in stolen religious artifacts. Much of the traffic is aimed at museums or private collectors, but there's also a market that aims to sell valuable but workaday items to clerics. Within this world, Torahs are attractive targets for two reasons: standardization and anonymity. They're always written in the same language; the same scroll can be used by any congregation, anywhere. Further,

Torah scrolls are inherently anonymous. Jewish law dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text. That means no "property of" stamps, no serial numbers, no visible identifying marks of any kind.

This obviously creates a challenge. How can you identify something that can't be modified?

There are currently two systems that try to solve this problem. The Universal Torah Registry, solves it by modifying each scroll just a tiny bit: "eight holes arranged so their position relative to one another describes a unique identification number in a proprietary code."

A rabbi uses the template [generated by UTS] to perforate the coded pattern into the margins of the scroll with a tiny needle. To keep an enterprising thief from swapping the perforated segment with a section from another stolen scroll in some kind of twisted Torah chop shop, the registry recommends applying the code to 10 different segments of the scroll....

The system is legal under a rabbinical ruling issued in the 1980s that says it's kosher to make small perforations in a Torah. "Punctures are already used to sew different panels of the parchment together," explains Rabbi [Geoffrey] Haber.

The second system, Machon Ot's International Torah Registry, "takes advantage of the handcrafted nature of the Torahs:"

Under Judaic law, a new Torah must be meticulously copied from an existing scroll by a trained scribe, who pronounces each Hebrew letter aloud -- for accuracy -- before writing it on squares of animal skin. The pieces are later sewn together and reeled onto giant wooden rollers....

But while every scroll is the same, each scroll is also unique:

Though the content is always the same, the position of the lettering varies from scroll to scroll, making each Torah as individual as a halachic snowflake. By measuring the distances between letters at certain standardized points, and entering them into a computer program, Machon Ot generates a 20-digit number that uniquely identifies each Torah.

Content and media are harder to separate than we think. This is true for centuries-old, handwritten texts; but it's also true for information technology.

Technorati Tags: culture, information technology, security

John Thackara, "In the Bubble: Daily Life as a Design Opportunity"

Notes of a talk John Thackara just gave at IDEO. John's latest book, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, is just out. As usual, these should be read as my take on the talk, not a transcript.

Big idea. We used to think that innovation starts where technology starts. That's changing now. Innovation starts with groups of people who possess tools to link up with each other, to locate and track things, and to coordinate actions between people, objects, and places. The challenge for designers is to figure out how to do their work in ways that supports this trend.

Here's how.

Principles for doing design projects in daily life

Enable human agency. Design people into things rather than out of them. Take the "walking bus," in which parents walk groups of kids to school: this is an incredibly simple thing, but parents who organize it are basically forming smart mobs, using GPS to plan routes, mobile phones to coordinate ad hoc groups, etc.. With tools that enable human agency, genuine grassroots innovation becomes possible.

From science fiction to social fiction. The view of technology as something fantastic and futuristic-- and of futures that are technology-driven-- should be replaced by a vision of alternate social futures, or social fictions. Take Estonian potato farming. The food quality/quantity tradeoff (e.g. plenty available through corporate ag, but at the cost of quality) has driven creation of collaborative groups who are reorganizing food production and distribution, with effective results. Small-scale potato farmers are doing better, people who wish to be more connected to their food are able to be so; these groups are borrowing tools from DHL, FedEx, as well as other stuff.

Self-service > enable sharing. We all have needs to share stuff. Power drills are used for 10 minutes during their lifetime; cars are used for a few minutes a day; the result is huge inefficiencies in consumption. "The notion of sharing material resources is just exploding," particularly in Europe. People are designing sharing systems for space, equipment, time, services.

Sharing knowledge is also a big thing: Deborah Solomon's Nomadic Banquet (organized for Doors of Perception 8) gave people a chance to share inside knowledge about street food. They expected it to be a cellphone, Zagat's guide online kind of thing; but there are all kinds of social and cultural sensibilities surrounding street food that couldn't be accommodated by the technology. It turned out to involve issues natural resource allocation, distribution, packaging, storage, displays, streetscape, etc., etc..

High concept > deep context. "Going with a concept and trying to apply it to a context is a terrible way to do design.... Concepts predate the messiness and complexity of real-world situations," and don't take into account all the complexity of everyday social and cultural life. The "nature in the city" movement, for example, has morphed from large-scale efforts led by the Daniel Burnhams or Christopher Wrens, to self-organizing, small efforts on rooftops, brownfield sites, even dustbins converted to planters. In Europe, there's a tremendous variety in the rules these follow.

Think whole systems. "95% of design is still about objects in showrooms being admired for their objectness. I'd thought we'd destroyed that idea?" The result of a focus on objects is either bad products, or objects that are cool but hard to use.

Don't own, locate. I don't want to own a car, but I want to be able to use one when I need it." Car-sharing schemes in Europe are approaching critical mass: in Amsterdam, car services, mobile phone providers, and the city have worked together to create a pretty good system, but there's still lots to be done that could make the service easier to use. What these efforts point to is the possibility of reducing the sheer amount of stuff you need, and need to own, to have a good life.

Continuous computing

A few days ago I pointed to the Wade Roush-Eric Hellweg discussion about the iPod vs. cellphone. Turns out that Wade has reposted his arguments about the survival of the iPod on a new blog, Continuous Computing. What's it about? Wade explains in the manifesto:

A new crop of computing tools is beginning to change the way we think, learn, and interact with the physical world and with other people. This change is accelerating, and it will spread through our culture so fast -- and upset traditional notions of communication so radically -- that even the last half-century of rapid technological progress has not prepared us for it.

These new tools are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and social, meaning they enable new kinds of interactions between people. Almost below our mental radar, they have ushered us into a world of what I am calling continuous computing.

We recently talked about what's going to happen when you mix together mobile information technologies, social software, lightweight software (RSS is a poster boy for a service that's amazingly simple, yet incredible useful), and massive numbers of users. I laid out my ideas about the coming end of cyberspace, the growing sociability of information devices, the breakdown of the physical/digital divide, and the emergence of a new kind of computing that essentially is an overlay atop (rather than distraction from) social interactions and physical places. We're both talking about the same thing, it's clear, using somewhat different language.

But the critical thing that we share, and that I think we both detect in the work of the del.icio.us / Technorati / Flickr gang, is a feeling that the really important innovations aren't happening so much at the level of hardware or software, but at the level of social behavior and practices. In fact, the elegant simplicity of systems like del.icio.us is one of their defining characteristics: they're smart enough to not try to do everything, and to recognize that there are some things that machines are really good at, but other things that humans are even better at. The new objective isn't to create a systems that substitute for more traditional forms of human communication or collaboration, but add to them: that can be in the room, as it were, and called upon when necessary.

This similarity of approach makes me both more disposed to think well of the new blog, and to think that I've got to finish my long-in-draft paper on all this.

Wade, you'll get in the acknowledgements if and when I finally get the piece out.

Another Richard Florida media appearance

There's a long interview with Richard Florida, of the "creative class" argument, in Salon magazine. Florida's latest book, The Flight of the Creative Class, might best be thought of as combining the sensibilities of Oswald Spengler and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: it argues that competition for the creative class-- or rather, competition to create places that are attractive to the creative class-- has gone global, and the U.S. is not doing too well:

There are two factors interacting here [and working against the U.S.]. The first, which would have happened anyway, is that other countries realized how important talent is and cities in those countries have become really effective in competing for talent. So the playing field has been leveled. In the past, people would have said, "Absolutely, my first choice is to move to New York or Boston or San Francisco or Seattle or Chicago ..." Now cities like London, Dublin, Amsterdam and Stockholm have become extremely attractive to talented people, not because of any particular public policy but because of the way they've developed over the past decade....

The second factor is that -- obviously spurred by this so-called threat of terrorism -- we've become far more restrictive in our ability to absorb and attract foreign talent. The numbers are all there, showing the decline of foreign students in the U.S. and the decline in the number of visas issued.... Not surprisingly, there's a general sense in the world that the United States isn't as welcoming....

[I]t's not that any one country is going to emerge as the next great superpower and attract all the best talent. It's not like "It's going to be the EU" or "It's going to be China." That's silly. But if these increasingly competitive countries take 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 percent of the talent that used to come here, when you add that up over 10 to 20 countries, that's a huge loss.

And what's happening, of course, is that India and China and the Chinese-speaking countries are focusing on retaining their kids and attracting back their expatriates. And at the same time, Canada and Australia, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Dublin are all trying to get a toehold on attracting really talented people from all over the world....

We've never seen labor markets on this scale that are so strongly global. And the United States is at a tipping point where we might lose our historical advantage.

Florida has been developing this argument for a while: it popped up our radar almost a year ago, when Florida noted in Washington Monthly that "high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas."

No 2 Expo

In an earlier life, I wrote a couple articles about the use of geodesic domes in trade fairs and expos in the 1950s and 1960s. For much of the Fifties, domes were used by organizers of American pavillions; consequently, for millions of people in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, they became symbols of American ingenuity. Trade fairs weren't just places to show off new products or sign export deals; they were ideological battlegrounds, where the American and Soviet systems were set side by side. No serious defender of the American way of life would have missed it.

Contrast that attitude to today: the Seattle [1962 Expo] Weekly notes that the U.S. has now dropped out of the Bureau International des Expositions, the official body that chooses venues for expos.

Even businesses are less interested, for an interesting reason: "[C]orporate America, which often supplied sponsorship cash, has gone transnational. Global brands can be harmed if they are perceived as too American."

Ironically, globalization may be making the expo less significant a venue for cross-cultural exchange, demonstrations of national greatness, or industry self-promotion. Symbols of global trade are made irrelevant by global trade itself. The American pavillion at the Aichi, Japan 2005 World's Fair is sponsored in part by... Toyota.

But this line also struck my eye:

In recent years, the U.S. pavilions at world's fairs have been utterly embarrassing token gestures. In Seville in 1992, we offered up a used geodesic dome, an old film from General Motors, and a mock-up of Kansas City.

How far symbols can fall....

Why Can't Anyone Throw a Baseball Faster Than 100 MPH

Slate has an excellent article on the biomechanical limits to how fast a human can throw a baseball.  Great article for baseball fans (which is everyone isn't it?), or folks interested in human enhancement.

Aren't you glad he's on our side?

Bruce Schneier, whose book Beyond Fear is a must-read, mused a few days ago about how to hack a papal election:

As the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, people like me wonder about the election process. How does it work, and just how hard is it to hack the vote?

Of course I'm not advocating voter fraud in the papal election. Nor am I insinuating that a cardinal might perpetuate fraud. But people who work in security can't look at a system without trying to figure out how to break it; it's an occupational hazard.

Fortunately, he concludes that "the voter verification process is about as perfect as you're ever going to find." But still, "[t]hat leaves us with insider attacks." Nonetheless, he draws some useful big lessons:

First, open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder.... Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure.... [Third,] when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good.

Homo economicus

The Economist has a piece on the role that trade may have played in the development of Homo sapiens, and our species triumph over prehistoric competitors.

Jason Shogren, of the University of Wyoming, and his colleagues... [argue] that trade and specialisation are the reasons Homo sapiens displaced previous members of the genus, such as Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man),...

Neanderthals existed perfectly successfully for 200,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived in their European homeland about 40,000 years ago, after a circuitous journey from Africa via central Asia. But 10,000 years later they were gone, so it seems likely that the arrival of modern man was the cause....

One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade.... To see if trade might be enough to account for the dominance of Homo sapiens, Dr Shogren and his colleagues created a computer model of population growth that attempts to capture the relevant variables for each species.... [T]he researchers assumed that on average Neanderthals and modern humans had the same abilities.... Only in the case of the trading and specialisation variables did they allow Homo sapiens an advantage: specifically, they assumed that the most efficient human hunters specialised in hunting, while bad hunters hung up their spears and made things such as clothes and tools instead. Hunters and craftsmen then traded with one another.

According to the model, this arrangement resulted in everyone getting more meat, which drove up fertility and thus increased the population. Since the supply of meat was finite, that left less for Neanderthals, and their population declined.

Not surprisingly, the Economist (very gently) spins the story as one of the power of markets; I think it can also be seen, more accurately, as a fable of the tremendous importance of cooperation to the evolution of humankind-- a subject that we see as quite important (nicely summarized by Ross Mayfield here, and covered exhaustively in the class Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri taught at Stanford last quarter).

Big Brother, Little Brother

USA Today piece on the democratization of surveillance technologies, and the consequences of their availability.

Husbands and wives, moms and dads, even neighbors and friends increasingly are succumbing to the temptation to snoop, thanks to a growing array of inexpensive, easily accessible high-tech sleuthing tools once available only to professional investigators.

Move over, Big Brother. Little Brother is squeezing in.

From software that secretly monitors computer activity to tiny hidden surveillance cameras and global positioning system devices, spy tools that can track a person's location now can be purchased in retail stores and on the Internet.

Paul Saffo on technology, privacy and identity

Our own Paul Saffo had an op-ed piece in this weekend's Washington Post, "A Trail of DNA and Data." The big argument:

The technologies described are already being developed for industrial and medical applications, and the steadily dropping cost and size of such systems will make them affordable and practical police tools well before 2020. The resulting intrusiveness would make today's system of search warrants and wiretaps quaint anachronisms....

The ubiquitous collection and use of biometric information may be inevitable, but the notion that it can deliver reliable, theft-proof evidence of identity is pure science fiction.

Baby Name Visualization Application

There is a great example of data visualization at the Baby Name Wizard Site. Go to the site and click on "Launch Baby Voyager". The application is very simple. You enter in a name and a chart shows you how popular the name has been over the last century. In addition displaying a lot of data in an easy to understand way, it is also fun.

Thanks to Jason Timmermans at Echo Location for pointing this out.

What the World's Poor Watch on TV

Found this slightly dated but quite interesting article doing some research, noted in Worldchanging.

Beating up on Richard Florida

This month's Metropolis has a short piece in which Kerrie Jacobs explains "why I don't love Richard Florida:"

Florida has taken something qualitative and turned it into something quantitative. That's what social scientists do. It's their special form of creativity. But in his argument in favor of economic development based on the arts and on businesses favored by the kind of people who enjoy the arts, he seems to have exaggerated either the size or the creativity of his Creative Class. I don't have any more faith in the prevalence of Florida's class than I do in the so-called values voters who cropped up after the elections. Both groups exist in nature but have been somewhat inflated for the sake of argument.

These days every time I walk down, say, Rivington Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, or Fifth Avenue, in Brooklyn's Park Slope, I notice how the distinctions between the hip places are beginning to blur. One cool business district looks pretty much like the next, just the way one suburban mall looks pretty much like the next. And once you start thinking about creativity in terms of class, hipness as a monoculture seems like the inevitable outcome.

As for the zeitgeist, I don't think there's a developer alive who doesn't think that the way to give a slow-moving property some cachet is to install a gallery or a few artists' studios. Which is to say that I don't think Florida is wrong. It's just that his distillation of creativity into the kind of prescription routinely proffered by management consultants makes me fairly sure that what he's selling is not the virtues of creativity but rather the ingredients of a formula.

Metropolis also ran an interview last year with Joel Kotkin that took issue with Florida's work.

William Eggers on "Government 2.0"

See the caveat on talk notes, at the end of the post.

Big idea. Today's governments are designed for a different era: the last major set of reforms dates from the Progressive Era, and was guided by a mechanistic vision of government, and a Tayloristic ideal of constructing the "one best way" to run things.

Today's information technologies let us change everything about how the government works, from education to regulation to connections with citizens. Adding e-gov front ends, Web sites, etc. won't do much in the way of basic changes; but rethinking the role of IT in government could produce a "new Progressive Era."

In the 1970s, IT was about cost and efficiency; in the 1990s, Web was about accessibility and service; the challenge now is to use it to create reform and results (a tech-enabled transformation).

Citizen choice. Accessibility of information is a key to choice-based services (e.g. private vs. public education). Traditionally it's been hard to get comparative information about price, performance, and quality; now, government agencies, regulators, etc. generate a variety of information that make providers more accountable to citizens, increase the viability to choice-based services.

Networks. Traditional image of government is hierarchical and siloed; but increasingly we're moving to a networked model in which public agencies, subcontractors, NGOs, etc are brought into the project of governance. We see this in the military, with the growth of contractors as suppliers of major services and security. "In a networked world, the lines blur between public and private." Accountability, flexibility, and dynamism are somewhat at odds: sometimes less accountability can encourage operational flexibility and creativity.

Transparency. The more public functions are put online and made visible, the more efficient and transparent government becomes. (Essentially, the Internet serves as a medium for transparency.)

Participation. Seeing into government is one thing; being able to respond and participate is another. The Dean campaign is known for using MeetUp and blogs, but what matters is that it's "the first campaign to go from a one-way to a two-way conversation." But can you govern using some of these same tools? WE argues that they can.

The Impact of Technology on Pressing Issues. Technology can lead to dramatic changes in government. We've already seen this in the military; we could use pervasive computing technology to create real-time pay-per-use models for taxing public services and infrastructure; virtual charter schools knit together home schoolers (and give companies a single point of entry into that market).

Caveat: These are notes from a talk given today by William Eggers at the Institute. As with all notes of talks, they should be read as my take on what the speaker said, not a transcript: like anyone, I tend to focus on things that I find particularly interesting or impressive, and tune out other stuff.

Anthony Townsend on "Korea: The Broadband Republic"

See the caveat on talk notes, at the end of the post.

Big Idea. "You don't have to be in front of a Web browser to see the impact of the Internet; it's out in the streets." The emerging Korean broadband society is about Koreanness, not broadband; so the lessons may not translate.

Yet it's still worth studying for two reasons. 1) Speed at which things have happened: it's 3-5 years ahead of Japan, 10 ahead of US, 20 ahead of Europe. 2) Korea is one of the most urbanized countries in the world: 90% of the population lives in 7 urban areas, putting it on the edge of global demographic trends.

Korea, Broadband Republic. For all intents and purposes, 100% of people who could be online already are; the exceptions are the elderly and people in rural areas. (At one time, 25% of the world's broadband users were in Korea, and 10% were in Seoul.) Korea is well ahead of Japan in wireless infrastructure, 2.5G or 3G, broadband, and is about to launch digital mobile broadcasts-- 15 channels of digital TV to mobile devices delivered by satellite.

Broadband and mobile buildout dates from the IMF crisis of 1997-98. Almost the entire infrastructure was erected between 1998 and 2001, and it shows: cell repeaters, for example, are stuck on top roofs and towers in downtown.

Three examples of the domestication of broadband:

1) Gaming. There are 3 cable channels devoted to live gaming (the studio for one of them is in the hippest mall in Seoul, beside the Apple store), and Starcraft champions are celebrities. But Go is also televised, and Go champions are public celebrities. In other words, celebrity game culture is nothing new.

2) PC baangs. There are about 20,000 of these in Korea, and they got a start in the late 1990s, before broadband hit households. Baangs are popular with gaming clans, who take over a baang and play against teams in other cafes. But the notion of third spaces and rented rooms go back to the 14th century, with tea baangs; pool baangs flourished in the 1960s; and video baangs are popular for young couples.

3) Korean web sites. Interactivity, multimedia, and content density are all much higher than in American Web sites. But that information density makes them look rather like Korean cities.

The "screening" of Korean public spaces is also really something. Samsung and LG displays are all over the subways; Seoul is the capital of digital billboards; color displays are standard on ATMs and POS terminals; and of course cell phones have had great color displays-- and cell phones can now have 2-3 displays (one for digital TV).

Korea, Proving Ground. Despite its specialness, Korea is useful as a testbed for new consumer electronics. Samsung has a huge, demanding, fickle, domestic playground: people abandon Web portals regularly, cell phone upgrade cycles are about 12-18 months; and there are lots of cool niche applications (e.g., public printers that print out pictures from your cell phone; mobile phone POS systems; coin-operated mobile phone charging stations) that do a good job of letting users integrate broadband and wireless into their daily lives and cultural practices. The government (which has worked hard to enforce standards among providers, financial services, and other players) has also articulated a policy in which the phone will be the key future device.

Social Life of Information. For a lot of these services, they're not about me doing something; they're about us doing things together. The paradigmatic example is a cell phone that has a deal with an online video game, and has a one-touch feature to alert your friends if you're online and getting your butt kicked: it will SMS them, telling them where you are in the online world and that you need help. The ubiquity of video cell phones also means that you get phenomena like OhMyNews, which will broadcast video feed of events minutes after they occur-- far sooner than you could get a professional crew to a site.

Caveat: These are notes from a recent talk given by Anthony Townsend at the Institute. As with all notes of talks, they should be read as my take on what the speaker said, not a transcript: like anyone, I tend to focus on things that I find particularly interesting or impressive, and tune out other stuff. (Had Anthony talked at length on philosophical matters, for example, there would be a big blank spot in my notes.) As Jacques Derrida put it, every decoding is another encoding.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, Townsend is a recent MIT Ph.D. who recently spent several months in Korea, studying the cultural impacts of ubiquitous broadband and wireless.

Is World of Warcraft the American Dream?

Today World of Warcraft opens its portals for European gamers. It's been on sale in pretty much the rest of the world since fall 2004, where it has sold more than the maker, Blizzard Entertainment, could imagine even in their wildest dreams.

New York Times has an interesting article (free subscription required) about how the Warcraft massive multiplayer online-world has exploded in an unforeseen scale. Almost 700.000 copies of the game has been sold in America, Australia and New Zealand - and more than 250.000 people are playing in peak hours.

With World of Warcraft, massive multiplayer games have gone from a niche to a mass market audience - the ordinary people. It's no longer games confined to the dedicated fans. It's more inviting and easy to get started and comfortable with.

What I especially find interesting with massive multiplayer games, are the way they turn the normal society hierarchy upside down. As Blizzard's community manager Della Bitta says:

"You literally can see a 68-year-old doctor arguing with a 13-year-old about some obscure gameplay issue, like how paladins should be nerfed," Mr. Della Bitta said.

"The only real way to determine status on the message boards is the level of your character. If you're Level 60, what you say immediately has weight. But if you're only like Level 5, you could make a perfectly valid point on something and everyone will be like, 'Shut up, what do you know?' And if you're a doctor or lawyer or something in real life, you're probably not used to that, so we see the frustrations."

With MMORPGs it's tabula rasa - no one brings their real life status with them, everyone begin from scratch and work their way up. Everyone gets a new chance to accumulate knowledge with the benefits and possibilities of sharing it brings. It seems like the digitized version of the American dream.

The question is: Can or will MMORPGs with time become an alternative to real life? I know, the question is as old as the computer game itself, however, as MMORPGs with The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft reach critical mass - it's as relevant as ever before.

Examples of transparency in new technologies

News from the NYTimes of the open source philosophy being applied to biotech. Australian researchers are reporting a new method for creating GMO crops that steers clear of existing biotech patents, and they'll be sharing the method for others to study, copy, and, ideally, improve upon. Granted, just because a biotech technique is available openly doesn't mean that those wary of GMO will suddenly embrace modified crops, but in the absence of trusted long-term studies an open source spirit will bring more minds, and more diverse minds, to weigh in on issues of GMO safety.

Two recent parallels come to mind regarding transparency in new or unknown technology. First, MIT Tech Review reported last month about overcoming Nigerian suspicions about the polio vaccine. Clerics in northern Nigeria believed that the vaccines could sterilize girls or be contaminated with HIV. Among other efforts, the WHO brought a Nigerian commission to visit vaccine manufacturers in Indonesia, India, and South Africa. Similar steps should be taken in the small California one-school town that now requires its junior high students to wear RFID tags for automated attendance. As my colleague Alex points out, the school was quite negligent in implementing the new practice without informing parents, but otherwise school officials seem to be taking privacy concerns seriously. Since RFID is still new and unknown, merely expressing concern isn't enough. The administration should strongly consider bringing parents & the community into the school and demonstrating the technology, specifically what information is stored on a student's tag (supposedly just an encrypted ID number, not personal information), the distance a tag can and cannot be read from, and what is done with the attendance data. Parents may still decide that an RFID solution is too invasive, but at least they would have an accurate understanding of the technical capabilities of this school's implementation.

RFID sniper rifle

Science fiction, hoaxes, and art installations can shine at least a small light on perceptions of technologies, and the anxieties they cause. Think, for example, of Cold War science fiction movies that reflected contemporary fears of nuclear war, or stories featuring evil robots and computers.

In the case of RFID, there are a growing number of sometimes-clever hoaxes-- news stories, fake devices or services-- that play on worries about how RFID could be used in surveillance and privacy invasion. Last year, an April Fools' report that welfare agencies were going to start tagging the homeless was widely reproduced on the Web.

Now, there's the case of ID-Sniper, the brainchild of Danish artist Jakob Boeskov. He's the "founder" of Empire North, a "company" developing non-lethal weaponry that features "outstanding Danish design and know-how." From their Web site:

As the urban battlefield grows more complex and intense, new ways of managing and controlling crowds are needed. The attention of the media changes the rules of the game. Sometimes it is difficult to engage the enemy in the streets without causing damage to the all important image of the state. Instead EMPIRE NORTH suggests to mark and identify a suspicious subject on a safe distance, enabeling the national law enforcement agency to keep track on the target through a satellite in the weeks to come....

[The ID-Sniper rile] implant[s] a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.

The "company" has another "product" that's more clearly a spoof. I think.

[via Bruce Schneier]

Forehead Advertising - Hopefully Not a New Trend

Man uses eBay to auction his forehead space to advertisers. From the BBC.

Question from the Edge

Not directly related to the future, more a shot of mental espresso: John Brockman's Edge recently published a bushel of answers to the question, "What do you believe is true even if you cannot prove it?" 120 people responded, creating a 60,000-word document. Among the respondents is IFTF affilate Howard Rheingold.

Amateurs and professionals

The distinction between professionals and amateurs is one that's so familiar today as to seem perfectly natural. Professionals are serious, amateurs are dilettantes; professionals know what they're doing, and have credentials and training, amateurs don't; professionals get paid, amateurs are hobbyists. Of course, in a few fields there are exceptions to the rule: astronomy, for example, continues to have a place for amateur comet-watchers.

In the past few years, we've seen a number of claims that new technologies or technology-enabled phenomena are leveling the playing field between professionals and amateurs. The interpretation of blogging, and in particular of political blogging, as a bottom-up response to professional journalism is but the latest incarnation of this trend-- though it's interesting to note that this is an occasion in which the term "professional" is used as an epithet: it's right up there with "elitist." (I've also written about blogging and the Victorian concept of the amateur here.)

According to a newly-released report by UK research group Demos, there are a number of fields in which you can see the balance between amateurs and professionals shifting:

The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy.

For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of Pro-Ams and containing new data about the extent of Pro-Am activity in the UK, this report proposes new policies to support and encourage valuable Pro-Am activity.

Perhaps it's no surprise that a British think-tank would see this trend: after all, the sophisticated amateur-- or "gentlemanly specialist" as historian of science Martin Rudwick described them-- was a staple of science, letters, and other enterprises into the last century.

Open source and the production of knowledge

Bob McHenry, a former editor in chief at Encycloapedia Britannica and my former boss, has an article in Tech Central Station on Wikipedia (discussed previously here and here).

To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms:

1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.

2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

Does someone actually believe this? Evidently so. Why? It's very hard to say. One possibility that occurs to me is this: The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as "journaling."... It may well be that the practice of journaling in the schools, along with the acceptance of "creative spelling" as a form of personal expression not to be repressed, underlies much of the success of Wikipedia.

Superimpose on this intellectual preparation the moist and modish notion of "community" and some vague notions about information "wanting" to be free, et voila!

Leaving aside the question of whether journaling is responsible for faith in Wikipedia, Bob's piece does point out a significant issue about Wikipedia: the lack of peer review. Leave aside the absence of editorial standards or consistency (which are good things, but in my experience most readers don't really notice them), or the lack of systematic fact-checking. As a number of authors have pointed out, successful open source projects incorporate peer review mechanisms, and often operate in environments in which the criterial for measuring success and failure are understood by all participants. Code either works or it doesn't.

Fuzzy content, in contrast, is a different story. Here, even if you get all the basic facts right, experts can argue over how the facts fit together, or which facts matter. The assumption that contributors share a common understanding of what defines a decent article on a subject, what constitutes important facts, and what sources can be trusted to back up claims, which can be used to guide the growth of Wikipedia, may not be warranted. If the open source model is to be extended from software development into areas where debate over ground rules and epistemology are regular affairs-- as in history and encyclopedia writing-- this problem will need to be solved.

Privacy and information technology

I recently read an article by Leysia Palen and Paul Dourish, "Unpacking "Privacy" for a Networked World" (available here), that I found quite interesting. We tend to think of privacy as something enforced through the withholding of information, or as a kind of fence that we police. In contrast, they take a much more dynamic view of privacy:

Our central arguments [are]... that privacy management is a dynamic response to circumstances rather than a static enforcement of rules; that it is defined by a set of tensions between competing needs; and that technology can have many impacts, by way of disrupting boundaries, spanning them, establishing new ones, etc....

Privacy management is a process of give and take between and among technical and social entities... in ever-present and natural tension with the simultaneous need for publicity.

Given how much talk there is about privacy and information technology, and how much of it tends to treat privacy as either an absolute, this seems a promising approach.

Next-generation bookmobile

Wired News has an article about the Anywhere Books bookmobile, which distributes print-on-demand books in Africa:

Kids in rural areas of Africa have few resources on hand to bolster their education, but in several areas of the continent, one of the foundations of education -- books -- is coming to them.

Anywhere Books has piloted a digital bookmobile -- a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine and cutter -- in remote areas of Uganda to print free books for children since November 2003. Now the project has plans to expand to Ghana and Macedonia.

This is one of several digital bookmobiles: the Internet Archive has another.

The notion of a bookmobile-as-digital-hub-and-printing-press may seem odd. But the bookmobile is a well-recognized social institution (as well as a distribution mechanism) in many parts of the world.

Further, the technology has now gotten cheap enough to make print-on-demand pretty interesting. It can cost less than $1 to print and bind a 100-page book, which is less than it can cost a library to loan it (once you factor in the costs of checking it out, processing it upon its return, putting it back on the shelf, etc.). In other words, it can be cheaper to just give a book away than to loan it out.

Otaku and the "mania" economy

The Nomura Research Institute (disclosure: NRI is an Institute client) has a new study on the economic influence of otaku, summarized in this Mercury News piece:

They obsessively collect comic books, dress up like their favorite cartoon characters and buy all the latest gadgets.

Japan's legions of hard-core hobbyists have also done something else: created a big-money market that analysts are calling the "mania'' economy.

These ardent consumers of pop culture, known as "otaku'' in Japanese, fork out $2.35 billion a year on comics, animated films, computer games and goods featuring their favorite entertainers.... That spending outstrips what gadget-lovers in Japan -- home to electronics giants Sony and Panasonic -- shell out for either digital cameras or DVD players....

The Nomura report estimated that about 2.8 million Japanese fit the definition of otaku consumers in their traditional hobby areas. They account for 11 percent of spending in the $21 billion market for comics, animation, computer games, as well as products associated with pop stars.

Otaku are even more valuable to businesses because of their ability to set trends by creating a buzz about specific products.

"These 'mania' consumers wield a strong societal impact,'' the report said, citing their use of the Internet in starting trends and spreading information.

A number of writers (translated: things I've read but can't put my hands on just now to reference in any rigorous way) have noted that Japan is in the process of shifting from being just an economic global power, to being more of a cultural global power. What the NRI report documents are the economic and consumption practices that are driving the growth of Japan's cultural power.

The report isn't public yet, but NRI's publications page has a number of other interesting pieces.

Genevive Bell, "Getting to God: Technology, Religion and the New Enlightenment"

[Note: The Institute has a regular visitor series, the LOTT ("Lunch on the 'Tute"). Today we had Intel cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell talking about technology and religion. What follows are my notes of the talk. The usual caveats apply: as Jacques Derrida put it, every decoding is another encoding, and this isn't a transcript or approved summary.]

Introduction

Bell is doing a 3-year project "examining ways in which cultural practices in urban Asia are shaping people's attitudes to technology."

You can get paper versions of cell phones, computers, CDs to burn, thus equipping your ancestors for their afterlife. "These are a really nice index of what's important to the Chinese diaspora." Last year space shuttles were big, thanks to China's putting a person in space. Now, you burn cell phones and prepaid cards every year to keep your ancestors' accounts up to date.

Clearly, there are some interesting things happening at the intersection of communications technologies and religion.

Survey of ICT and religion

Lots of communications technologies are being used to serve religious practices, from Bibles in your PDA to GPS-enabled cell phones that show you the direction of Mecca (quiblah applications) to religious SMS messages, prayer reminders, etc..

Yet this is an analytical gap among anthropologists, STS people. What do we make of the absence of critical scholarship or research in this domain> and how can we use these repurposing as a critique of dominant visions of technology futures?

Technology and religion: What does it all mean?

Mobile phones for Muslims are a great example of a new technology designed to support traditional religious practices. You see this in the quiblah software, but also in phone envelopes designed to echo minarets. In the Christian West, the Papal SMS service, Lent SMS messages, religious ringtones (hymns), the Bible in SMS format ("4 God so luvd da world").

There are also anxieties about the use of these technologies within religious institutions, and by those institutions: Phillipine bishops banned confession and absolution could be conducted over SMS, e-mail, or fax; Islamic countries are split over whether you can divorce your wife via SMS, and whether lotteries via SMS constitutes gambling; Korean churches have cellphone dampers.

There's also discussion around practices to naturalize phones through religious practices: blessing mobile phones (one company sells pre-blessed phones), augmenting cell phones with religious iconography.

There are online versions of religious institutions (virtual parishes), sacred spaces that extend into physical spaces (the notion of the Internet enabling a cyber-ummah) and new sacred spaces that exist completely online (Isidore of Seville as patron saint of the Internet, online ancestor memorials, online fortunetelling and soothsaying).

There are some entirely new online religious practices... and they're largely American. There's also Satanic worship. Interestingly, there's less revival of ancient, pre-Christian religious practices (e.g. European animist, Norse religions) than you might think. Native communities in the U.S. were early adopters of fax machines, and quickly moved to the Web, despite problems with connectivity. In Australia, aboriginal communities became local TV content producers, and developed their own samizdat of aboriginal television; but there are infrastructure problems as big as in the U.S.

Ubicomp and religion

The rhetoric of ubicomp is profoundly secular, which may be a problem, given how religion helps shape many daily practices.

The use of computing technologies for religious purposes challenges some basic assumptions of the kinds of work that technology does (both literally and culturally). Attending to religion also informs other larger contexts for technology consumption: i.e., privacy, security, etc..

Demographic surprises

Few forces affect the future more profoundly than demographics, but it's one that is easy to underappreciate. Companies are just starting to think seriously about the ways that the aging of the Baby Boomers will affect their business stategies, the products and services they offer, and the ways they relate to their customers, despite the fact that lots of people have been pointing out that the Boomers were almost certain to transform aging and retirement, just as they had changed youth. Demographics is one of those "inevitable surprises" that GBN's Peter Schwartz talks about: a change that we can see coming, but all too often don't see.

Hence American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt's essay on "Four Surprises in Global Demography," published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, is worth reading, particularly because it argues for the importance of some unexpected trends in global demographics.

Contemporary world population patterns are shaped by the �demographic transition� concept introduced to the field by the great demographer Frank Notestein several generations ago. That schema offers a stylized description of the great shifts in modern population patterns. Death and birth rates start out high, but more or less in equilibrium. Then, advances in knowledge and improvements in income result in broad declines in mortality, precipitating rapid population increase. Finally, socioeconomic development brings about sustained fertility reductions via voluntary, deliberate changes in childbearing patterns, at which point births and deaths once more come into balance.

While Notestein�s schematic may still describe the human condition in broad stroke, today we can observe some important and surprising exceptions to these generalizations. Four of these unanticipated trends are (1) the rapid spread of sub-replacement fertility, (2) the emergence of unnatural gender imbalances among the very young, (3) sustained increases in death rates, and (4) American �demographic exceptionalism.�

Howard Rheingold in BusinessWeek

Howard is interviewed in Business Week. He makes some interesting cases about integrating a number of existing technologies and always-on systems to create a new economic system.

Listening to academics

The Feature has been running a series of interviews with academics studying the impacts of mobile communications technologies:

Swedish professor Mikael Wiberg taks about "mobile meetings and information sharing." One of his more interesting points is that always-on connectivity creates frictions that people work out in "micronegotiations"-- e.g., subtle cues that you use in a meeting to see if you can take an incoming cell phone call-- and that these can be translated into services: "Instead of the current accept or reject call options, we need more options. An example could be different settings where the called party could respond with an SMS saying I'm ready in 2 minutes or 30 minutes....The mobile operators should try to emulate some of these micro negotiations that take place in face to face meetings."

LSE's Carsten Sørensen talks about "merging the social emphasis of academic work with the technological thinking of industry." He argues that "organizations have done what they can in optimizing their product supply chain. Now they are looking at their knowledge supply chain. In the same way they have integrated different elements of the physical supply chain with technologies such as ERP, they can create a virtual organization through mobile technologies."

British academic Niki Panteli on "mobile virtuality and interactivity." Her work confirms something that we've seen at the Institute: that mobility "really allows the blurring of boundaries -- between work and home, between different tasks and between different clients that you are working for. We will see a lot more of what we have been calling the multi-tasked individual. They work with lots of different clients, but don't feel the obligation to tell them where they are or what they are doing."

The interviews are somewhat short, but still worth reading.

M-Agers and mobile phones

BBC News reports on a new study of cell phone use among 10-14 year-olds:

A new generation of mobile users are becoming so emotionally attached to their phones that they cannot live without them.

This is one of the key findings of a study into how people use their mobile phones entitled Me, My Mobile and I.

The annual study from research firm Teleconomy reveals that 10 to 14-year-olds - dubbed M-Agers - are rapidly becoming the most sophisticated users of phones.

Even toddlers are able to tell the difference between incoming phone calls and text messages said Professor Michael Hulme, chairman of Teleconomy.

The findings confirm my own experience with children and cell phones.

On the other hand, Irish Archbishop Sean Brady recently declared that

TVs and mobile phones should be switched off one day each week to help preserve Irish society... [as] the incessant noise of modern life was threatening to tear society to pieces.

At a church service in County Kilkenny, Dr Brady said there needed to be a return to "a sound of silence".

Ireland had "lost its soul" and many people were experiencing "alienation from life itself", said the Archbishop of Armagh.

Fukuyama on Huntington, Who Are We?

Francis Fukuyama, the Nicholas Carr of neoconservative thought, has a great review of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? The book, which argues that Hispanic immigration "threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages" (it's well-summarized in this Foreign Policy article, available via free registration), has generated plenty of discussion, particularly over Huntington's argument that "Anglo-Protestant" values-- essentially, an updated version of the Puritan ethic described by nineteenth-century (German) sociology Max Weber-- are central to America's success and under assault from those darned foreigners. Fukuyama's best points:

Let's begin with the question of who the true bearers of "Anglo-Protestant" values are.... His chapter describing "core" Anglo-Protestant values ends up focusing almost entirely on the work ethic: "from the beginning," he writes, "America's religion has been the religion of work." But who in today's world works hard? Certainly not contemporary Europeans with their six-week vacations. The real Protestants are those Korean grocery-store owners, or Indian entrepreneurs, or Taiwanese engineers, or Russian cab drivers working two or three jobs in America's free and relatively unregulated labor market. I lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, and remember passing groups of Chicanos gathered at certain intersections at 7 a.m. waiting for work as day laborers. No lack of a work ethic here....

The problem, as Alejandro Portes, a professor of sociology and immigration studies at Princeton, has pointed out, is not that Mexican and other Latino immigrants come with the wrong values, but rather that they are corrupted by American practices. Many young Hispanics are absorbed into the underclass culture of American inner cities, which has then re-exported gang violence back to Mexico and Central America; or else their middle-class leaders have absorbed the American post-civil rights era sense of victimization and entitlement.

Ireland wants scientists

The Scientist reports that Ireland wants to drain US brains:

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), a government agency, is planning a publicity campaign in the United States aimed at attracting early-career Irish expats as well as top American scientists....

SFI's mandate is to spend �646 million (USD $770 million) between 2000 and 2006 on academic researchers and research teams in biotechnology and information and communications technology. Last year, they lured prominent genetics researcher John F. Atkins back to Ireland using �3.2 million over 5 years to support him and his research team.

The cost of the campaign has yet to be determined, as SFI has now put the project out to bid to ad agencies. SFI has said it will run for a year and target major TV news outlets, as well as newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

...

The Irish campaign is just the latest to target the American market. Other countries, such as Canada and Singapore, have been recruiting for some time.

[via Wired News]

Financial Times on kids and tech

At the Institute, we spend a fair amount of time talking to teenagers, who are some of the most creative adapters and reinventors of technology. The Financial Times is running a series on digital media (available to subscribers only), and had the sense to talk to teenagers in "Tokyo, Mumbai, Beijing, London and New York about their media consumption and leisure habits in a bid to see what trends emerged to support survey findings in individual markets":

Three prominent trends which appeared were:

• the use (except in the US) of mobile phones as personal organisers as well as communication tools;

• the in-roads made by video games, on and offline, into more traditional pastimes and media;

• and a comfort with using the web for information, entertainment and community - "more like a magazine, and less like a directory", as MindShare's Sheila Byfield says....

One thing that is particularly striking is that the "urban child" has very similar experiences in the digital world, wherever they live. Only 38 per cent of Indian households have TVs and 0.6 per cent have home computers, according to Mediaedge:CIA.

But an affluent 11-year-old in Mumbai "Googles" the same word on the web as an 11-year-old in New York. And a child living in Beijing exposed to computer games, mobile phones and the internet may have more in common with a child in London than someone growing up in rural Guizhou.

This last point is perfectly consistent with what the likes of Manuel Castells has observed, that the "space of flows" created by digital networks has created an interconnected world of high-tech islands, all of which tend to converge into a common social and cultural type, and which have less and less in common with whatever surroundings they happen to be in.

Another use for cell phones

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Nokia was developing a kit to add RFID scanning to its mobile phones comes word of a laser scanner used to help gamblers beat the house at roulette:

Last week a Hungarian woman and her suspected accomplices, a pair of Serbian gamblers, were questioned by Scotland Yard detectives over an alleged swindle that has astonished casino owners for its audacity and sophistication.

They are alleged to have used a computerised scanner to predict the outcome of every spin of the wheel at their table at the Ritz Club casino.

The device, concealed in a mobile phone, supposedly measured the speed of the ball and calculated which numbers it was most likely to finish on.

The possible existence of such a machine, which could reduce the odds of winning from 37-1 to just 6-1, has sent shock waves through gambling venues.

Apparently this is not an April Fools' Day prank.

In-car cooking

One of the things we've noticed in our research on daily life is that the automobile is turning into the new living room: for lots of families, it's where they catch up, plan the next day, even (thanks to DVDs and flat screens) watch TV. Now, it's morphing into a kitchen.

[via Wired News]

Black Star

Discussions of the cultural and economic impact of the Internet, wireless, and mobile phones tend to focus pretty exclusively on the developed world-- the U.S., western Europe, and East Asia (or even more specifically, Silicon Valley and a few other high-tech American enclaves; Scandanavian cities; Japan and to a lesser degree Korea).

At one level, this is perfectly logical: these are the places with the densest communications networks, the best access to high tech, and the longest traditions of hacking and playing with computers. Plus, they're rich markets. Studying them makes sense.

But there are also built-in limits to such an approach. For one thing, technology and culture are inseparable: you can't understand why technologies evolve without reference to the environments in which they evolve, and always focusing on the same set of countries-- which themselves share many similiarities-- limits your ability to understand how that relationship works. Further, if you're interested in technical and social creativity and innovation, you want as diverse a range of cultures in your sample set as possible. Easy access doesn't necessarily lead to creativity: some of the most innovative experimentation is driven by scarcity, not abundance. Put another way, profligacy can lead to certain kinds of creativity, while scarcity leads to others. Both are worth studying.

A third reason for looking beyond the normal iron triangle of North America, Europe, and East Asia is that there's a chance that major technical and product innovations will come from companies working outside those markets. Clatyon Christensen and Stuart Hall argue that companies serving the "base of the pyramid"-- those 4 billion people who make less than $2,000 a year-- can experiment with new technologies and products in ways that companies in richer markets cannot. Poor markets don't have giant installed technology bases that hinder adoption of newer technologies, as many wireless companies have found. Companies that serve these markets also learn to be lean, mean, and resourceful: Japanese electronics and auto companies grew up serving what was essentially a Third World economy, and this made them tough competitors when they went global.

So when a detailed study of high technology adoption and re-invention in an unfamiliar part of the world appears, it's worth knowing about. Such a study came out in the latest issue of First Monday: "Black star: Ghana, information technology and development in Africa," a study by Gregg Zachary (full disclosure: Gregg is a friend of mine) of computer use in Accra. Here's the abstract:

Accra, the capital of the West African country of Ghana, is technologically marginalized by any measure. But over the past ten years, the introduction of the Internet, wireless technology and freer radio broadcasts have vastly expanded communications and information. The Internet is widely available. E–mail usage is soaring. Wireless telephony is growing rapidly. Radio stations are proliferating. Once mired in information poverty, the people of Accra, Ghana now face the challenge of using information and connectivity to their best advantage. In examining how Accra adapts to technological change, we gain a better understanding of how people in poor African cities use technology and what they want from it. Debates over the so–called "digital divide" can be enriched by close studies of lived experience in parts of the world where the revolution in information technology remains more prospect than reality.

This follows up an earlier report sponsored by Columbia University's Center for Science Policy and Outcomes.

Geocaching goes mainstream

The San Jose Mercury News has an article on the growing popularity of geocaching, a sport that involves using GPS and the Web to locate hidden caches-- a bit like high-tech (yet accessible, and relatively cheap) treasure-hunting.

Several of us at the Institute have been fascinated with geocaching: it's a great example of a self-organizing, technology-enabled activity. There's no official geocaching rules body, though Geocaching.com comes closest to being the hub of the network. In the course of reading articles about geocaching published in the last several years, I noticed something interesting: in the last 12-18 months, people stopped writing about the sport as a weird, nerdy thing, and started writing about it as a kind of wholesome family entertainment. It ceased to be a marginal activity for techies, and became a way to get the whole family into the great outdoors.

Today's Mercury News piece both exemplifies this rhetorical shift, and provides some data-points, including the organization of a geocaching cruise in which "cachers can meet and socialize, then hunt for caches when the ship drops anchor in Grand Cayman, Costa Maya, Cozumel and Belize before returning to Tampa, Fla."

There probably should be some kind of rule among social scientists that when you can fill a cruise ship with people interested in something, it can no longer be described as a marginal activity.

Digital cameras and everyday photography

As is often the case with new media, the appearance of digital cameras has generated some controversy among professionals and connoisseurs over whether digital pictures are, or can be, as good as film. The debate has tended to revolve around technical and aesthetic questions like, "Can the colors in a digital picture be as rich and true as film?" It parallels earlier arguments over, say, CDs versus vinyl: some audiophiles argued (and still argue) that LPs have a richer, more dynamic sound than CDs.

BBC News has a piece arguing that "Why digital cameras = better photographers," and it builds its case less on the technical merits of digital photography, than on the practices that it makes possible: you can immediately preview your pictures, the LED screens let you set up your composition more easily; you can erase the bad pictures in near real-time; and you can Photoshop out red-eye or other problems (within limits).

This highlights a common difference in the way that professionals and ordinary users think of the same technology. When professional photographers think of photography, they think of the work of Ansel Adams or Richard Avedon. The rest of us think of the pictures that come back from the drug store or drive-through photo booth. Ordinary users are interested less in the ideal properties of a technology than in what it lets them actually do.

Law and speech in cyberspace

Today's New York Times has an article on a dispute arising from an article critical of The Sims Online. "In his online newspaper, The Alphaville Herald," Peter Ludlow "reported on thieves and their scams. He documented what he said was a teenage prostitution ring. He criticized the city's leaders for not intervening to make it a better place."

Then he got kicked off The Sims Online. His account was closed, and his persona-- and everything that persona, or Ludlow, owned-- was deleted.

It's a story that raises a variety of interesting legal questions regarding free expression in cyberspace, the degree to which online games are public places that must allow free speech, and how much control players versus companies can have over online worlds. As the article points out, these questions are only going to become more pressing as more people play these games, and as they intersect more with real life-- i.e., as the trade in online characters grows, and cross-marketing deals between online worlds and real companies become more common, and as we play these games in a wider range of places.

For more on the story, and on the implications of online gaming more broadly, I highly recommend Terra Nova, a group blog of researchers studying online worlds. As of this post they'd only posted a short piece taking notice of the article, but check back later: no doubt there'll be more. (Guys, if you're reading, get on the story! And while you're at it, add a search feature to your blog!)

Update: Greg Lastowka provides a link to Terra Nova's earlier, very lengthy discussion, of the Alphaville Herald story.

Coffee houses, the early modern Internet

One of the most interesting parts of Neal Stephenson's breathtaking (or maybe simply exhausting: after 2000 pages, the line between exaltation and overexertion becomes a thin one) Quicksilver is how much of the action takes place in and around coffee houses. Coffee houses were important centers of news, gossip, and commerce: so much so, in fact, that a recent issue of The Economist has one of those essays that you subscribe to magazines in hope of reading: a piece compares the early modern coffee-house with the Internet:

Where do you go when you want to know the latest business news, follow commodity prices, keep up with political gossip, find out what others think of a new book, or stay abreast of the latest scientific and technological developments? Today, the answer is obvious: you log on to the internet. Three centuries ago, the answer was just as easy: you went to a coffee-house. There, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could read the latest pamphlets, catch up on news and gossip, attend scientific lectures, strike business deals, or chat with like-minded people about literature or politics....

Collectively, Europe's interconnected web of coffee-houses formed the internet of the Enlightenment era.... It was in coffee-houses that commerce and new technology first became intertwined.

Coffee houses were also important centers for forming new businesses-- information-intensive businesses, anyway. The Society of Lloyd's (that's Lloyd's of London to you and me) got its start in, and took its name from, Edward Lloyd's coffee house, which attracted merchants, shipowners, and others involved in maritime commerce.

The notion of coffee houses as "the internet of the Enlightenment" is a nice metaphor, though I'm not sure it's entirely accurate: coffee house culture is rather richer than chat rooms or blogs, in the way that real life and interaction with other people is always richer than its digital equivalents. A more precise comparison might be to the very active correspondence networks that kept savants informed of each other's latest ideas, and also served as a channel for exchanging samples of fossils, engravings, seeds, and other interesting stuff.

I liked the article, but I think it is built around two assumptions that are worth questioning.

First, the parallel between coffee houses and the Internet works in part because we think of the Internet as a kind of place: you "go" to a Web site just as you go to your corner cafe. (And with the proliferation of Wi-Fi hotspots in cafes, you can now kind of do both at the same time.) But as I've argued before, the concept of the Internet as a place is one that has some specific historical roots, and should be treated with greater care: it's one of those metaphors that influence reality.

Second, it seems to me (and it never comes out and says so explicitly, so your reading may differ) that the essay assumes that much of the trade in ideas and news that took place in coffee houses can be reduced to words on a screen. Yes, the Royal Society dissected a dolphin in a coffee house once (try doing that in a Starbucks!); but the article describes most coffee houses as akin to Internet nodes, collecting and passing on information. But as a number of people and books have argued, knowledge isn't just formal rules or statements that can be articulated and recorded: a lot of the most valuable knowledge is shared by organizations, or is tacit. (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information is one of my favorite treatments of this subject.) Yes, coffee houses were centers for information, but they were much more.

I point this out not just to be pedantic, but because I'm starting to think that one of the big stories with the future of information technology will be the growing recognition of the importance of social and tacit knowledge, and the growth of devices that more smoothly insinuate themselves into the working and intellectual lives of users and groups. Computers have tended to disrupt social interactions-- how many people can have conversations while sitting in front of a desktop computer?-- but pervasive computing technologies offer the possibility of devices that are more low-key and unobtrusive, to say nothing of facilitating the creation of systems that let us plant data in places (or at least associate information with specific spaces).

We've been living with the concept of the Internet as a place, with all the good and bad implications it holds, for about twenty years now; twenty years from now, I suspect it's going to seem very anachronistic. But the notion that the early modern coffee house has contemporary parallels will seem quite relevant-- but not because coffee houses are like Internet nodes, but because of the rich mix of culture, commercial and intellectual exchange, and information-gathering and -sharing that took place within them.

A history of the dismal

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History is "reviewed" by Virginia Postrel in Avoiding Previous Blunders, today's NY Times.

Some consistent themes emerge from the many and varied entries. One is the importance of technological innovation in raising living standards.

Building from facts like "in 1850, shoemaking employed more workers in the United States than any other manufacturing business," the book ultimately attempts to cover "nothing less than the entire material existence of the human past." The book seeks simply to answer the age old economic question, "What accounts for the wealth of nations?"

Social networking thinking

Kris Maher discusses people who are using social networking tools in this piece in today's Wall Street Journal.

The presentation of "best practices" -- which are a bit too obvious -- seems to foretell the hyperhyping of social networking software, similar to how the Harvard Business Review piece on blogging marked the faddishness of blog discussions (and the rise of RSS/RDF discussions).

Kevin Werbach provided the most succint and honest analysis of the social networking achilles heal last week, which has been a continuing thread on his site since.

Envisioning cyberspace

Today on the "Mapping Cyberspace" discussion list, Amy Hogan, a PhD student at the University of Bath, posted an announcement of a study she's doing on the psychology of cyberspace visualisation:

How do you envision cyberspace?

• An urban landscape of skyscrapers of pulsing information and circuitry?
  
• A multi-dimensional string puzzle emanating through a hierarchy of levels?
  
• A dynamic, amorphous, gaseous cloud?

She's got an online survey that's collecting material for her project. I found it somewhat hard to do: it seems to run only on IE (I'm a Netscape fan, as I like tabbed browsing), and the design is rather clunky.

But the notion that the metaphors we use to think about and describe the Internet are actually important, both for the way we use it in our everyday lives, and the way we imagine it could be used in the future, is right on. (Chris Espinoza, documentation manager for the original Macintosh, told me that George Lakoff's work on metaphors influenced the way the Mac group thought about computers.) It's a subject I've been wrestling with in an article I'm working on (in my copious free time-- ha) examining the breakdown of the border between the physical and digital worlds.

Most of the article deals with the technologies that are making this growing overlap possible-- things like RFID, wireless, pervasive computing, and the like-- but in the course of sketching it out, I was struck by a question: Why do we talk about "cyberspace" or "the digital world" as if they were real places? And why did we ever come to think of the digital and physical worlds as separate?

Though it's now so familar as to be something we can use and never think about, the place metaphor for digital networks is hardly an obvious one. When we talk on the phone, we don't think of ourselves as entering a "space" defined by the connection between ourselves and the person we're calling. So why do the spatial metaphors come so easily?

Here's a tentative answer, from the draft of the article. Comments are quite welcome. Doubtless there are things I've overlooked.

The idea evolved over the last two decades, from a variety of sources. From its introduction in the late 1970s, the personal computer was seen by enthusiasts as a kind of technological new world to be explored, rather than a device to be used. At about the same time, computer games�particularly space-based shooters like Defender, Galaxian, and Xevious�gave players access to science fiction-like alternate universes. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) introduced the term "cyberspace," and painted a vivid picture of the Internet as a place, separate and different from the physical world. This was reinforced in other "cyberpunk" novels like Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, with its "Metaverse;" television shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its holodeck that could simulate countless worlds, also took up the theme. It was only natural that with the growth of BBSes, FTP sites, and HTML and the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, users came to think of the burgeoning online world as exactly that: a world.

The gulf between the digital and physical worlds widened in the 1990s. The popularization of the notion of virtual reality epitomized the notion of computers containing alternate universes. The publication in 1992 of George Landow's, Hypertext, Jay David Bolter's The Writing Space, and Myron Tuman, ed., Literacy Online, announced that digital media were poised to upend our print-centric notions of reading, writing, authorship, authority, and education; they were joined in 1993 by Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word and Myron C. Tuman's Word Perfect. In 1994 and 1995, John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson published widely-read articles declaring that traditional notions of intellectual property were about to become obsolete.

At the same time, the appearance of the first Web browsers introduced a geographical language of "surfing," "Web sites," and "World Wide Web." IRC (Internet Relay Chat), IM (instant messaging), and chat rooms, and virtual worlds like MUDs (multi-user dungeons), connected users to each other. But while these connections happened in real time or near-real time, they were seen as distinct from users' normal lives (as the popularization of the term IRL, or "in real life," demonstrated).

In the late 1990s, countless dot-com companies were started on the premise that traditional "bricks and mortar" businesses�including universities and libraries�were hopelessly antiquated, and that the future belonged to agile, borderless, virtual companies.

Throughout this period, the experience of using PCs reinforced the sense of the computer containing a separate place. The screen, keyboard and mouse offer a very narrow interface between the digital and physical worlds. Just as important, the size of computers and monitors, and the relatively large amount of attention they required to operate properly, severely limited the physical and social contexts in which computers could be used (usually desktops), and restricted a user's ability to interact with other people.

So what am I leaving out?

And what metaphors will people develop to describe a digital world that is woven into the physical world? Will we talk about an "overlay," about digital signposts or ponds or virtual structures, or something else? A meteorological metaphor? Clouds or fog?

Laptop personalization

David Kushner, writing on Technology Review's group blog sings the virtues of personalization:

When it comes to new technology, personalization is always a good thing. Think computer game modifications. Or homemade Winamp skins. Or pop punk cell phone ring tones. Personalization sells. People like to feel a human connection with their high tech experiences. They want their machines to reflect their personalities. In the most McLuhanesque sense, they want their technology to be extensions of their bodies, minds, and souls.

Kushner mentions the PC maker Voodoo, whose notebook computers come in "8 limited edition Allure Finishes and optional Graphic Tattoo," which Kushner explains "have a tribal, East Village NYC look, with funky names like the Mantis or the Bamboo Tiki Man."

The whole notion of personalizing information technologies-- or more profoundly, of those technologies being able to adapt themselves to their users' practices and needs, and to co-evolve with users-- is a powerful one.

Though if anyone can explain "tribal, East Village NYC look" for me, I'd be grateful.

Reclaim your brain?

BBC News calls on readers to "reclaim your brain." It's not actually clear what they mean by this, but the piece's confusion itself is illuminating in an odd way. Basically, they're making an information overload argument, drawing on Lyman and Varian's estimate of the amount of information produced in the world. (Here's a summary, in case you're too busy reading other things to read the whole report.) The article suggests that there might be problems caused by the existence of 800 MB of data being created for each person in the world.

But as Bob McHenry, my mentor at Encyclopaedia Britannica (where I was managing editor for several years), pointed out when I wrote about Lyman and Varian's work on my blog (and from which I draw for this entry), there is a fundamental problem with these estimates:

This sort of thing merely perpetuates on of the great errors of our time:... there is no such thing as "information."

Bob makes his case in an essay, "Content with Content" (not sure how to pronounce it? That's kind of the point), which argues:

Information has no physical existence. What exists are myriad arrangements of objects and energy in the world, and brains that are wired to detect and respond to certain patterns in them.... [I]nformation is not put in, as is usually said to be the case; nor is it sent; nor is it somehow detected or extracted. It has no being whatever, out there in the world.

In short, information is a mode of perception, just as is sound, just as is color. There is no sound in nature; sound is how we humans perceive compression waves in air. There is no color in nature; color is how we humans perceive wavelength in electromagnetic radiation. There is no information in nature; information is how we humans perceive patterns. The word "information" as it is used in "information science" - to designate some substance, some aspect of substance, in the physical world - is a figure of speech, another metonymy.... It's a useful figure, of course, as figures of speech usually are - else we would not have them - but it is important for us shamans who pretend to work with it in various ways to understand it for what it is.

Of course, in an information theory-engineering sense, information can be said to exist: it's pits on a CD, magnetic bits on a Zip drive, that sort of thing. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, called it "a difference that makes a difference." But how does it make a difference? A bunch of ones and zeroes don't, in themselves, make a difference; they have to be decoded and interpreted, whether by a machine (which converts those ones and zeroes into other things-- words, pictures, programs, etc.) or a person (who makes sense of the products of that conversion).

In other words, "information"-- or more accurately, knowledge-- really only exists when those decoding and intepreting functions are going on. It is created by the exchange; it isn't a thing that is exchanged. The CD doesn't contain information; it contains instructions that, if acted on by the right computer running the right software on the right operating system, can become knowledge. Or as Bob puts it, "Our friend Thoreau said 'It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak, and another to hear.' This captures nicely the notion that what is really happening in communication happens in two brains and not somewhere in the middle."

You can also see this a little more clearly if you think about the disconnect between quantities of data and the importance of the knowledge that they contain. Classicist Gregory Crane, a professor at Tufts who runs the Perseus project, once pointed out that

While we have, for all practical purposes of data storage and computation, an infinite amount of art and archaeological materials, the corpus of Greek and Roman texts that survives is relatively small -- well under a gigabyte by any estimate.

But that's damn important stuff, by any estimate. Likewise, you can get the Bible onto a CD with plenty of room to spare; but that doesn't mean that it contains less "information," in any social sense, than a double CD from N'Sync, or a DVD of Fellowship of the Ring. (Certainly critics would vigorously argue if you suggested that the film version of Cat in the Hat had more information than the book. In the most technical sense that is true; but it also shows that the "technical sense" is rather trivial.) Conversely, MP3s definitely have less "information" (meaning data in this case) than traditional CDs; but most of us can't hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. As Warren Weaver noted,

Information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present [strictly technical] viewpoint, as regards information.

Sadie Plant's "On the Mobile"

I've seen earlier versions of it, but Joi Ito points to a copy of Sadie Plant's "On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life" that I'd never encountered: the final published one.

In addition to it being a very smart piece of research, the report is a beautifully designed-- economical, sleek, and at the same time rich.

[via Joi Ito's Web]

Dating & the internet in NYT

The NY Times has deigned to enlighten us on the trend of online dating / hooking up in a piece entitled Love in the Time of No Time by Jennifer Egan.

In a sense, the explosion of online personals speaks to the fervency of that wish. In the first half of 2003, Americans spent $214.3 million on personals and dating sites -- almost triple what they spent in all of 2001. Online dating is the most lucrative form of legal paid online content. According to comScore Networks, which monitors consumer behavior on the Internet, 40 million Americans visited at least one online dating site in August -- 27 percent of all Internet users for that month.

The piece is a comprehensive look at why sites like Friendster are really taking off (as opposed to, say, LinkedIn), and mirrors some recent quotes from users of the social networking sites.

iPodjacking and Bluejacking

I've been working like mad to finish off several essays, so I stayed offline yesterday. However, some things are too interesting to ignore.

Today's Wired News reports on a small, yet interesting phenomenon among iPod owners. iPods come with distinctive white earbud headphones; apparently, a few iPod owners have developed a little ritual in which they recognize each other from the headphones, stop, plug into each other's iPods, and share their music for a minute. Steve Crandall, a tech executive in New Jersey, blogged about the practice (and updates it here and here-- the latter has also generated some interesting comments):

Including myself four iPod users take walks in my neighborhood. We generally nod, smile or give some similar form of lightweight greeting, but recently the greeting has become more active. If both parties are clearly enjoying their music the headphone jack is unplugged and offered to the other person. We then stand and listen to each other's music for a minute or so, unjack, thank the other person and move on...

This practice-- iPodjacking, it's called by a few-- is a bit like the tunA concept that I wrote about last month, though that relied on wireless technology and was more passive: people could listen in on each other's music without first making contact. But the tools for doing this kind of (perfectly legal, socially constructive) music sharing are already available. While the term suggests similarities to Bluejacking, which has also gotten some press recently (the Smart Mobs blog discusses it here), in fact the two are very different. Bluejacking is a kind of prank, and unless both parties are familiar with it, an anti-social one at that-- the sort of joke that makes its victims think twice about using the technology in the future. iPodjacking, in contrast, requires a basic level of consent and trust among between participants (you're not going to steal my iPod), is intimate rather than anonymous, and (however briefly) physically connects people together: it's socially constructive, not destructive.

It's a nice lesson in how portable-- and in the future, ubiquitous-- technologies and connectivity could allow the formation of social rituals that build on and enhance, not erode, links to other people. In the PC days, connecting to others online often meant isolating yourself in real life: in the future, the successors to Bluetooth and 802.XX (and maybe even use people's electrical fields as channels) will encourage connecting with people in your own space, as well as people online.

Music visibility and identity

One of the more illuminating parts of Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs (newly available in paperback) is its discussion of the ways that technologies are being used to craft social identities. Epinions, eBay buyer and seller feedback, and Slashdot contributor ratings are but a few examples of how we're now able to create public identities and social capital online. (It's one thing for me to put up a blog; it's something else entirely for a thousand people to rate me as someone worth reading.)

Recently, Wesleyan University student Stephen Aubrey described a new activity that uses online information to shape social identity: playlistism.

I�ve discovered a new hobby, no, a new way of life.... Forget discriminating people based on their race, religion, gender, or colloquial term for four-square, it�s all about playlistism. That�s right, judging people by their iTunes playlist.... Some people don�t have any Elliot Smith in their playlist. This means they�re not as brooding as they ought to be and they have no respect for the dead.... Some people have obscure bands I�ve never heard of. These people are probably too cool for me....

He recently expanded his remarks in a Wired News article:

Aubrey said an iTunes music library tells a lot more about people than the clothes they wear or the books they carry.

"It's the T-shirt, plus the book, plus the haircut," Aubrey said. "It's everything."

Aubrey said Wesleyan students are enjoying a new parlor game -- going through music libraries trying to guess what their owners are like. At any one time, 30 or 40 iTunes libraries are available on the campus network, which is shared by about 2,000 students....

Students are starting to realize they must manage their music collections, or at least prune them, to maintain their image, Aubrey said. He confessed to deleting a lot of stuff himself.

"I had a lot of show tunes I had to get rid of," he said. "And a lot of punk pop from my earlier days like Green Day and Blink-182."

As well as trimming their music collections, some students are enhancing them, but not always subtly. Aubrey said the campus' resident jazz expert complains that any jazz he talks about instantly shows up on his fellow students' playlists.

This is different from Slashdot rankings, in that there's no online feedback: the social consequences are played out in real life, rather than in the virtual world. However, that mix of digital data and real-world action is what makes playlistism interesting: today, the connections between electronic identities and real people occur more by chance that by design, or are concentrated in a pretty narrow world (e.g., bloggers going to blog conferences, members of a professional discussion list finding each other at a society annual meeting).

The other, much more significant, difference is that a Slashdot or eBay ranking is based on a pretty narrow set of criteria. For those of us who really love music, in contrast, our music collections are windows into our souls. It's not as potentially destructive as having your medical or financial records publicly available, but having your music collection viewable by anyone offers a far more intimate perspective on a person than can be deduced from whether they ship they orders on time, or say interesting things about Linux.

In this respect, playlistism may foreshadow a future in which more of this kind of information becomes-- intentionally or not-- more accessible.

Finally, this is happening at a time when many of us use tools to publish all kinds of odd, and occasionally intimate, knowledge about ourselves. Wesleyan students may be looking at each other's music collections; but there's also an application called Kung Tunes lets users blog lists of songs that they're listening to. We worry about cell phone cameras being used for salacious purposes, while some anonymous bloggers document their sexual histories in remarkable (one is tempted to say photographic) detail.

In other words, the bounds between publicity and privacy are getting harder to draw on the basis of content and behavior. We know that broadcasting such information can cause problems: as the character in a recent Onion article lamented, after his mother discovered his blog,

She's going to know exactly who I hang out with, where I go, and what I spend my time doing on a daily basis. I am so in hell right now.... She'll have access to not only my life, but the lives of all my friends who have web sites. She'll have the names of all the places in Minneapolis where we hang out, which she can�and will�look up. With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is [expeltive deleted] serious.

We're already seeing RFID getting caught in a tangle over privacy. The territory will probably only get hearder for institutions and companies to negotiate.

E-mail blackmail

Mainichi Interactive reports on the growth of e-mail blackmail scams:

Japan's yakuza are getting high-tech, blackmailing online auctioneers and swooping down on chat sites, bulletin boards and webmasters. But, unlike the punch-permed, Hawaiian shirt-clad, pinky severed real thing, Japan's Net Yakuza are only playing at being gangsters, even though they're deadly serious, according to Spa! (11/11).

Here's the scenario. A regular on a gay chat site receives e-mail from somebody claiming to be "an underworld figure." Unless he receives an immediate cash payment of 30,000 yen, the mobster will expose the man among family and work colleagues - a potent threat in a country where "coming out" still largely means to leave some place indoors.

Apparently the perpetrators aren't actually gangsters, but only pretending to be.

Mainichi Interactive, incidentally, summarizes some pretty offbeat material from Japanese-language papers. Some of the articles are weird, salacious, or little more than rumor; a fair number are all three; but a few useful things get through.

[via Lyn Jeffery]

Inventing the future at Dartmouth

Venture Blog reports on how ubiquitous wireless access have affected student life at Dartmouth College:

The wireless revolution is possibly over-hyped, but don't tell that to the good folks at Dartmouth. They have gained wireless ubiquity, and are completely re-thinking how they use cellphones, PDAs, computers, newspapers, instant messenger, printers, power outlets, and most importantly, their time.

I have a little knowledge of what's going on at Dartmouth, since we had an intern at the Institute who is a student there now, and Venture Blog's post rings true. Read it as a report from the future.

[via Due Diligence]

Stealth computers

The New York Times (registration requred) has a somewhat whimsical, but still illuminating, article on stealth somputers-- DIY machines built around the mini-ITX, a low-power, low-heat motherboard that allows hackers to build computers into all kinds of imaginative enclosures-- old toasters, vintage radios, Ikea breadboxes, even plush toys.

The tone of the piece is a little "aren't these geeks a nutty bunch," but there's a serious side to this phenomenon. It's a kind of bottom-up, soldered-together ubiquitous computing: many of these devices are designed to blend in with their environments, to look like anything but a computer. And the users are making it happen. As Richard Brown, marketing VP at Via (which makes the mini-ITX) puts it, "The hobbyists are actually the ones leading the way. They're very serious mechanical and technical projects."

If you want to see where technology is going, it's worth watching what skilled enthusiasts do. Had you attended meetings of Macintosh user groups in the mid-1980s, you would have seen demos of what would later become networking products and software packages; at a place like BMUG, people who would become technology journalists, Mac evangelists, and entrepreneurs; and a culture that assumed that it was possible to do some profoundly interesting things with the personal computer. The future of computing was visible at those meetings. A piece of it may be visible in mini-ITX machines.

[Update, 24 October 2003: Anne Galloway discusses the value of end-user configuration.]

Location sensing and music sharing

The latest Samsung MP3 player, the YP-910GS (it's cobranded with the newly-revived Napster service), has a built-in FM transmitter. Not a tuner, to let you get FM stations; a transmitter, so you can broadcast what you're listening to. (Actually, it has a tuner, too.) The Apple iPod, which is many ways is the social innovator in digital music these days (full disclosure: I'm an iPod fan), has a plug-in FM transmitter (called, inevitably, iTrip). They use FM a bit like Bluetooth: to wirelessly connect devices together and pass information between them. But there's a lot more going on here.

I don't recall FM transmitters ever being something that were a part of the Sony Walkman, or portable CD players. Indeed, as Chris Lunch notes, the logic of the devices made such a feature unlikely because

The history of portable technology has emphatically shown a desire towards inwardness rather than outwardness. From the Walkman to the iPod, the Game 'n Watch to the Gameboy, all succesful personal technology has succeded by allowing the user to create their own personal world that disconnects them from the external world they travel through.

This is changing. The social practice of collecting and listening to MP3s, however, is taking place-- for better or worse-- in a cultural context that assumes that sharing music is a good thing. This is starting to be reflected in the design of personal players: they're beginning to turn into something more like a local-area broadcast unit. The Radio Station of Me.

One interesting recent experiment is the tunA system, developed by Media Lab Europe (an MIT Media Lab spinoff). tunA, as cityofsound explains is

is a mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices. Users can "tune in" to other nearby tunA music players and listen to what someone else is listening to. Developed on iPaqs and connected via 802.11b in ad-hoc mode, the application displays a list of people using tunA that are in range, gives access to their profile and playlist information, and enables synchronized peer-to-peer audio streaming.

tunA could accommodate a number of scenarios in which people gather during the course of the day. For example, while riding the bus or subway to and from work, people could discover what other commuters are listening to nearby and perhaps get to know each other over time. Or while spending an afternoon in a park or on the beach, people could tune in to the music their friends are listening while relaxing under the sun and have a shared music experience without disturbing others nearby who don't wish to listen to music.

It's a very interesting concept, not so much for the specific scenarios it presents, than for the underlying idea that if you put this capability in people's hands, they'll do interesting things with it. I'm not sure I'll like the music that my fellow train passengers like, just because we all take the train; sharing a public space doesn't mean we share musical tastes. Matt Jones, for example, proposes an alternative scenario, featuring stable, rather than ad-hoc, location-based music sharing:

Prototyping "locational" rather than "personal" Tuna might be not only easier and cheaper, but also a more satisfying experience, in that your choices of environment might well give you more luck in discovering music you actually want than walking past total strangers.

Fashion stores, record shops and watering holes are perhaps the most obvious: "People who have been in this bar also liked..."

You'd perhaps get interesting feedback loops - the most liberal or cutting edge libraries amassing in certain shops or bars, giving them a fleeting reputation or cachet amongst musiclovers or information sharers. Perhaps becoming places where new artists flock, or creativity and delamaking flourish like the Coffeehouses of Pepys' London.

The cool thing about-- or one cool thing about it-- is that it creates a kind of voluntary boom box effect: you can play your music as loud as you want (on your headphones), and others can listen to it, but only if they want to. The music also becomes part of the brand of the space, and portable in a way that it is not currently: it takes the Starbucks-Hear Music CD concept, and makes it more dynamic. In Matt's scheme, you no longer buy a CD that's playing: you capture a little piece of an experience.

There are various technical issues that would have to be worked out to make this work, but there would also be social protocols that would have to evolve. cityofsound wonders how they would work:

Turn on Bluetooth scanning in a social space (pub) these days and you pick up nearby devices (phones) labelled "Dave's 7650", "Stef's mobile", "Keith Watson P800" etc.... tunA and the like will enable a series of benevolent transactions with strangers, friend, anyone with the right gear. Do we want to make this visible? tunA's image of sharing on the bus is nice. Do we want to make that sharing akin to a physical, social transaction? Would a visual nod of recognition - of receipt - add meaning to the otherwise invisible, inaudible digital transaction?

As Chris Heathcote elegantly put it, "It's not about downloading any more, it's about synching." Synching with friends, with places, with (given some collaborative filtering) smart mobs.

The Samsung-Napster MP3 player, iTrip, tunA, and the comments around them-- as well as various other imagined music sharing devices-- suggest to me that the real long-term importance of the Napster-Gnutella era will not be the erosion of music companies, but the rise of technologies that allow responsible music sharing, and have the secondary purpose of building social connections. Inded, the latter follows from the former. People like to share music. People like to sing together. Indeed, the collective production of music is fundamental to social life in virtually every society that doesn't have CDs. Given this, systems for social sharing of recorded music are virtually inevitable.

Global phones, local culture

Technologies never stand alone. Their design, the way they're marketed and sold, and especially their user are all shaped-- to a greater or lesser degree-- by culture, economics, and history. This is extremely clear with mobile devices, which are often customized by individual users, and whose useage patterns evolve differently in different countries and societies.

This came to mind this morning when I read a report on the Smart Mobs blog that

Muslim faithful have used a short messaging service for years as a digital muezzin, texting them to prayer five times a day from the cellular towers instead of minarets.

Now, taking the concept further and pointing Muslims towards Mecca, LG Electronics (LGE) has developped a GPRS mobile phone equipped with a compass and programmed to indicate direction.

According to an article in eTechKorea, the phone is

equipped with a compass and programmed to indicate direction. This cell phone can point towards Mecca (Quiblah), a service that will prove very useful for Muslims. The company has launched the product on the market already.

Muslims perform Salat (prayers) to Allah in their prescribed ritual five times a day - at sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, and midnight. They have to face the direction of Kaaba (the House of Allah) in Mecca, but they have difficulty locating the direction in the desert.

By setting the -5300-compass to the north and inputting their location information, Muslims can now easily find the direction of Mecca. With this feature, the handset positions itself as a specialized functional phone in the Middle East market. In particular, it is expected to spur a boom in the region because the compass may be used even where GPS services are unavailable.

In addition to the Arab nations, LGE is set to expand the compass phone market to target the 1.1 billion Muslims all over the world, including those in Asian nations such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Arguably, makers of what you could think of as intimate technologies-- devices that you carry around with you all the time, that are always on, and that you use to manage personal information, contacts and communication-- have to think more about the contexts in which their devices will be used than other industries, for at least two reasons.

First, the line between a home run and a base hit can be very thin: a centimeter or half-ounce difference on a small product can change its feel and attractiveness.

Second, many devices require people to change their habits to conform to the technology; but products intended for a mass market can't do that. They need to be easily integrated into users' daily lives with an absolute minimum of fuss or adoption. They should be like a good kids' toy: you pick it up, you see immediately how it works, and you start playing with it.

Personal servers and personal memory

Every futurist does a lot of scanning. I have to (or try to) read a tremendous amount of stuff, in a variety of formats-- things published on the Web, articles in PDF or Word, PowerPoint presentations, old-fashioned words on paper, and articles on the radio. (This blog is essentially an attempt to leverage that work, to turn it from a public resource into a public good.) One of the biggest problems I have comes when I want to track down something I read or heard in passing two or three weeks ago, and which now is relevant to a project I'm working on. We have lots of good tools for managing information that we know is important; the big challenge comes in retrieving something that you thought was irrelevant, but turns out to be an indicator of some emerging trend.

I've often wondered why there isn't a tool to help with this kind of problem-- a kind of Google that would just index everything you've read, rather than everything on the Web. The closest I've come has been a product called iRemember; unfortunately, it only works on the Macintosh, and hasn't been updated for OS X. So I soldier on.

If someone asked me, "Would you want to be able to store and remember everything you've ever read, written, or even seen and said?" I'd say "Yes!" without hesitating. Or I would have. I'm now having second thoughts... just at a point when we can confidently say that such a technology will be available in the next decade.

There are several efforts to create a technology to record everything you say, do, and read. Some of the projects aren't designed specifically with that purpose in mind, but would make it possible. One example is Intel's personal server project, recently described in an article on vunet:

Within 10 years we could be carrying personal computing devices that store our every word and deed, according to chip giant Intel.

Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, senior Intel researcher Roy Want unveiled a prototype device which the company calls a Personal Server.

He explained that the matchbox-sized PC could be used to store a wide variety of personal information that could be accessed by many different devices.

"Storage capacity is growing in leaps and bounds. By 2012 you will be able to carry a device that could record a lifetime's conversations. It would take about three terabytes of data to do," said Want.

"To include video you'd need 97 terabytes, which is expected to be economically viable at current development rates by 2014."

The concept is interesting not just for what it says about how steep the curve of Moore's Law is getting, but for what it assumes about the built environment of a decade from now, and the ways pervasive computing could affect memory and identity. Wireless Review's July 2003 article on the personal server project notes that:

The personal server... will do away with the display screen and the keyboard-- at least in the device you carry in your pocket. "A lot of research for mobility has looked at things like PDAs, or combining computers with cell phones," said Want, Intel Research's principal engineer. "But these devices have not been very successful."... He is working on a device that makes any PC become your PC. 'You can walk up to any computer, make a connection and bring up a window which makes that computer look like yours," he said. "As storage capacity increases, then progressively the concept of personal computing becomes more attractive because you can carry so much more with you."

The essential idea is to create a computer the size of a deck of cards (or an iPod), which you could always have with you, and which you would access through devices in the environment: displays on walls, keyboards left lying around, and so on. As Want told Brighthand, "[W]hen PDAs become inexpensive enough that they are left scattered around, in the same way we treat pens and paper today, you could pick up any of these devices and through the personal server it would, by association, become your device accessing your data."

My colleagues at the Institute have been talking about the coming age of ubiquitous displays for some time: as Kathi Vian puts it, we'll stop thinking of cheap flexible displays as "displays" (with their connotations of being expensive technologies that you use in specific locations) and start thinking of them as "design elements," which can appear anywhere. Imagine animated packaging that makes a store shelf look like Times Square. It sounds like Want is thinking along the same lines: in the future, you can just take the existence of displays for granted, and just focus on how to connect your personal server to them.

A technology like the personal server could do just what I need: help me rewind my reading, and find that quirky fact that seemed merely interesting, but may actually be significant. Yet there's a downside to being able to remember-- or more precisely, being able to retrieve-- everything in this way, as Ellen Ullman points out in a brilliant essay in the latest American Scholar. (Full disclosure: I'm on the American Scholar editorial board, and I think I might have recommended Ullman as a columnist.) For those who don't know her work, Ullman's Close to the Machine is one of the best meditations on programming ever written: she's a remarkably clear, vigorous writer. In the essay, she describes the experience of discovering, after buying a new laptop, that

The latest versions of Microsoft Windows make it easy to copy everything over to your new computer. Just plug in a cable... run a little "wizard" program that guides you step-by-step through the transfer... and soon millions of information bits will be streaming from your old machine to your new one.

Thanks to Moore's Law, you never have to throw anything away-- for better or worse.

What is happening, essentially, is that each new computer has enough disk space to hold everything you've ever stored on all the computers you've ever owned in your life. The equivalent would be a new house that, every time you moved, would be so much larger than all your past houses that all the furniture you've ever purchased would follow you, indefinitely. Board-and-cinder-block bookshelves from freshman years... Danish modern coffee table from grad school... the rug you picked up at a garage sale after a tipsy brunch, that secondhand dining table bought hurriedly after the divorce-- all of it, no escaping it, the joy or humiliation of every decorating decision you've ever made, the occasion that brought each object into your life perpetually, unflinchingly present: the brutality of the everlasting....

I felt I had to be careful. This was not like going through your papers to wind up with a carton you could store in the basement. Once the wizard program had waved all this over to the new machine, there it would all be, right in front of me.... At any moment, while you are whiling away time, maybe avoiding another task, or just daring yourself to think of the past, you might go "click," and then it all pops out at you: fresh, unyellowed, cruelly unchanged.

The fundamental problem is that personal memory doesn't work the way that computer memories do. Humans don't "retrieve" memories from storage so much as they reconstruct them: we remember things a little differently each time, and the meanings of events can subtly alter over time.

In some essential way, I had to forget all that. I needed the unreliable retellings of memory, the balm of revision. If we had to be confronted, daily, with the incontrovertible data proving the despair that attends the writing of books, how would anyone ever begin another? Or (for that matter), forever rereading anguished Letters for the Drawer [a folder of unsent letters], how would anyone ever make the breathtaking decision to remarry?

This is not to say that tools for remembering and calling up things we've read months or years ago wouldn't be useful (Ullman doesn't transfer the files, but she does keep the old computers); but they would have to be used very judiciously. The ability to creatively mis-remember your past, to reinterpret past events in the light of later knowledge and wisdom, is one of the things that makes us human. It's certainly something that makes us wiser humans. We've all had the experience of seeing extraordinarily difficult events as having laid the basis for later successes, or realizing that a silver cloud had a dark lining. It would be harder to do that if those memories were more accessible.

History is full of conflicts that are fed by ancient rivalries or wrongs; the ability to put the past aside, to forget and abandon old grievances, is essential to progress. It's also essential for people, as I concluded when I worked in the Buckminster Fuller papers. The Fuller papers consists of thousands of boxes of correspondence, notes, audio and video tapes, photographs and slides, and artifacts; the earliest material dated from the early 1900s, the latest from 1983, the year Fuller died. This wasn't just a repository: Fuller actually used it, sifting through it for ideas, reorganizing it, and reviewing it. (In the 1950s he sent to architecture schools extracts from his archive documenting his work-- I've seen them at MIT, Berkeley, and NC State-- and in the Fuller papers I found that he had changed the contents and order of the collection over time, highlighting new aspects of his work.) Fuller had a remarkable consistency in this thinking, and even in his speaking: while his lectures famously were all ad-libbed, he recycled stories from year to year, and was still using the same turns of phrase in the 1970s that he had in the early 1950s. At one point I developed a hypothesis that this gigantic repository served as a brake on Fuller's creativity, making it harder for him to explore new ideas and territory. By the 1950s, it consisted of hundreds of boxes; by the 1970, thousands-- a vast memory palace, but maybe also a great drag. I couldn't contain the heretical thought that if it had all gone up in flames at some point, Fuller might have started a new intellectual life, and achieved even more than he did.

How then do you remember everything and stay human? One thing to do is recognize the significance of what you're carrying around. I suspect we'll develop social rituals around getting personal servers (or their equivalent devices). Right now, my wife and I record my children's development and everyday activities: I photograph them, take short video clips, save art projects, etc.. We're their archivists, and we decide what's worth keeping and what's not. I can image a day when taking control of this process would be one of the things that marks your shift from childhood to adulthood: your parents and friends still take pictures of you, but you are now the one who is in control of your archive, and the repository goes from being a biography to being an autobiography, from being about you to being by you. With that responsibility would come the need to learn how to use the technology well-- particularly to learn how to put away some memories, to make them hard to access so you can move forward. Social navigation researchers have developed some interesting tools for changing the status of documents and information depending on how they're used; it may be possible to adapt those to make our own personal memories more manageable.

In the future the challenge may not be one of learning how to remember things; it may one of learning how to forget them. We already live in an age of "information pollution" (or so Jakob Nielsen recently declared), consisting of information that's pushed to us; the personal server could create another, possibly more pernicious, version of that problem.

Cell phone ethnography

I'm working on piece on the uses of ethnography in futures research, and came across this BBC News piece on the latest research of Genevieve Bell, an Intel ethnographer studying the use of mobile technologies in Asia. I'm working on the ethnography and futures piece over the weekend, but wanted to run ahead with the BBC piece:

Technology is often seen in the West as a way of making our lives more efficient or as a way of having fun.

But researchers have found big cultural differences between East and West when it comes to what people actually do with their computers and mobiles phones.

In many Asian countries, technology has become a tool for learning, religion and politics, says Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell....

"We can learn lessons from why the mobile phone has been successful in Asia," Dr Bell told BBC News Online.

"It is relatively robust, relatively small, you don't need a desk, you don't need to be a in particular place.

"And you don't have to be literate to use them or speak English. These are all constraints when it comes to operating a computer," she explains. ...

More importantly, mobile technology has been adapted to reflect the cultural priorities of each nation, such as their religious faith.

In Malaysia you can now get mobiles that come with a built-in directional finder to help Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca.

"This is a wonderful way of imagining technology doing something unexpected," says Dr Bell, "so rather than being a tool for work it becomes a tool for someone's religious devotion."...

"These devices are really up for grabs and what people are going to do with them is very different and very unexpected," she says.

Bell has conducted research everywhere but Antarctica, it seems; her Web page has a list of research articles.

More on this kind of research, and what it reveals about technology and people, next week.