IFTF's Future Now

RIP Arthur Clarke

I doubt there's anyone who thinks seriously about the future who hasn't read Arthur C Clarke-- probably a lot of Clarke, as he wrote about a hundred books and an uncountable number of essays. Now the Guardian reports,

Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90.

Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books in a career spanning seven decades, died of heart failure linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years.

His forecasts often earned him derision from peers and social commentators.

But although his dreams of intergalactic space travel and colonisation of nearby planets were never realised in his lifetime, Clarke's predictions of a host of technological breakthroughs were uncannily accurate.

Technorati Tags: science_fiction

Revolutionary IT in Cuba?

A short but interesting piece in the New York Times on IT and political activism in Cuba.

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress....

“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”...

[T]he government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night.

Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.

“There is a whole underground market of this stuff,” Ariel said.

This sounds similar to the story told in Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi's great article "Small Media for a Big Revolution," about the role that cassette tapes played in Iranian protest movements in the late 1970s.

She talks about three technologies in particular: the cassette tape, the leaflet, and foreign news services. Cassette tapes are small, easily hidden, highly portable, and relatively easy to copy with equipment ranging from the cheap to the industrial-strength and expensive; they also fit in well with a culture that had 65% illiteracy, and still favored oral over printed negotiation. Single-page xeroxed leaflets "were another form of small media utilized by the opposition." These were likewise easy to produce, copy, and publicize. Finally, Iran's intelligentsia had "had long supplemented… domestic information channels with various international media such as imported newspapers and news magazines, Persian-language broadcasting… and short-wave radio" (BBC Persia was a favorite).

The difference in that case was that new information technologies were seen as tools of the state and modernizers; much of what Sreberny-Mohammadi is interested in is how traditional institutions and centers of political discourse and information exchange-- in particular the mosque and the bazaar-- appropriated modern technologies for their own use. As she puts it,

The traditional elements with the help of perceptive advisors embarked upon an ingenious and creative adaptation of modern technologies of communication to serve their own purpose…. Current media technologies such as audio tapes and xerography allow multiple points of production and distribution so that they are almost untraceable and irrepressible, providing powerful tools of political propaganda that even the most authoritarian regime finds hard to control.

Despite the differences between the two cases, one can imagine that the problems the Iranian government of the 1970s had with tapes, leaflets, and BBC are likely to be even harder to deal with in an age of flash drives and cell phone cameras.

Technorati Tags: communication, politics, smart mobs

Technology, perception and coffee

Slate as an article about experimenting with a new $11,000 coffeemaker, the Clover 1S, that is inspiring rave reviews among coffee fanatics. You can read the article in various ways-- a sign of the amazing ways Western civilization is decaying, perhaps-- but I see it as an interesting example of how new technical capabilities change the way we apportion our attention. Just as the invention of the telescope and microscope in the seventeenth century made it possible to study phenomena that had previously been unknowable, so do things like exceptionally precise coffeemakers encourage us to think about ordinary things like coffee in new ways.

[There are] six variables that contribute to the taste of brewed coffee—choice of bean, grind, "dose" of coffee, brewing time, temperature, and amount of water. The first three, for better or worse, are in the hands of the barista ("Call me when you get a better grinder!" [Clover rep David] Latourell half-teases the Grumpy staff)—but the Clover can precisely regulate the last three.

Adams spends several hours brewing cups of coffee with different temperatures and brewing times, and comes up with some very different results-- and, just as important, exactly the same results when he resets the machine to a previous setting.

I'm becoming a Clover addict, just as I feared. It's not the tasty coffee itself that's drawing me in—although that caffeine euphoria certainly colors my mood. It's the joy of tinkering, really delving into the possibilities of a coffee bean in a way I've never considered before....

The immediate consequence of the Clover and its precision isn't necessarily better coffee, but more attention to coffee. By creating this rigorous laboratorylike brewing environment, it encourages cafes to explore the nuances of different beans, where and how they're grown and dried and sorted and roasted....

Is owning a Clover worth $11,000? Not for the individual—don't be silly. But even a smattering of Clovers in the right hands promises to broaden the way we think about coffee. The very fact that an $11,000 coffee machine is receiving such excited media attention seems like a clear sign that we're headed toward a "third wave" of coffee, an age of terroir, aided by technology that can give different beans the different careful treatments they deserve.

[To the tune of 2Pac, Dr. Dre & Roger Troutman, "California Love (Remix)," from the album "All Eyez on Me".]

Technorati Tags: attention, coffee, psychology, technology

Architecture of the future? Probably not

Some of the most famous images of the future are architectural. Buckminster Fuller's 1967 Montreal Expo dome, for example, was hailed as a vision of the future; conversely, some of the first images that come to mind when you think of "the future" are things like the Jetsons' house.

Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, however, argues that avant-garde architecture like Fuller's, which is often described as "'experimental,' 'innovative,' or 'cutting edge'"-- and thus a preview of what everyone will be designing in years to come-- is actually a pretty unreliable guide to the future:

the term architectural avant-garde is an oxymoron, since an architect, unlike a painter, is able to experiment only within relatively narrow bounds. Buildings are expensive, and they are intended to last a long time, so the people who build them tend to be risk-averse.... Even if a building succeeds in breaking the mold, that is no guarantee that it is showing the way, for innovative buildings rarely anticipate the future. There have been exceptions. Frank Lloyd Wright's first Usonian house, built in 1936, with its one-story living, open plan, carport, and low-slung roof, did foreshadow the ranch houses of the '50s and '60s, and Mies van der Rohe's novel Lake Shore Drive apartment towers in Chicago, completed in 1951, were the first example of the steel-and-glass-curtain wall that would dominate commercial architecture for the next two decades....

The truth is that buildings belong firmly to their own time. This is especially true of architecture that self-consciously attempts to predict the future. That's why the settings of old sci-fi movies are often so funny; the future never turns out the way people imagine. Most buildings have a shelf life of 20 to 30 years; that is, it takes 20 to 30 years before they are perceived as "old-fashioned." This doesn't mean that the buildings are ugly, or not useful, or not cherished—simply that they now represent the past. That's not necessarily a bad thing—it would be disorienting to live in an environment that never aged (actually, it would be like living in Las Vegas).

Technorati Tags: architecture, culture, future

The complex relationships between media

From Marc Andreesen's blog, quoting the New Yorker, July 14, 1951:

The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.

"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."

Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory -- movies, comic books, radio.

Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.

It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.

Anyone who watches an hour of cable news is probably exposed to more words and numbers-- in the form of headlines, crawls, stock tickers, etc.-- than their grandparents saw in a day. Of course, that's a total guess. But as I mentioned a little while ago, my son is keen to start reading more on his own so he can play more advanced video games. The bottom line is, the relationship between new media and old skills is always more complicated than we think.

Technorati Tags: technology, television, reading

Human evolution is speeding up

The Guardian reports on a new study of the pace of human evolution.

Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found.

The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct, although this is likely to reverse in future as populations become more mixed....

The researchers analysed data from the international haplotype map of the human genome, and analysed genetic markers in 270 people from four groups: Han Chinese, Japanese, Africa's Yoruba and northern Europeans.

They found that at least 7% of human genes have undergone recent evolution.... Some of the changes were tracked back to just 5,000 years ago, and "today they are in 30 or 40% of people because they [are] such an advantage," said Hawks.

The most interesting line in the piece, though, is this reflection on evolution and built environment:

"The widespread assumption that human evolution has slowed down because it's easier to live and we've conquered nature is absolutely not true. We didn't conquer nature, we changed it in ways that created new selection pressures on us," said anthropologist Dr John Hawks, who led the study.

Technorati Tags: evolution

Moving from Stranger Anxiety to Stranger Neutrality

It was just pointed out to me that a friend's daughter (about 10 years old) is a big fan of a handheld gaming system.  In this system, the children are able to play with anonymous strangers -- but can only choose someone to play with if they have their code. And they can only get the code if they physically know the person.  Further, even if they have a great time with Anonymous Gamebuddy, they can't ever find that person again.

While clearly this is a system designed to eliminate stranger danger (parents can keep kids off computers, so they can't just know someone on AIM and get their code...), it seems to me that, along with other like-minded "pick up game" formats, it will reset the current crop of gamers to be neutral with regards to people they bump into randomly and have one-off interactions.  Maybe it will be a good game, maybe not.

Because there is no recurring interaction, there is no need for a reputation system. It's reputationless. In a way, it relies on the singularity of the objective: play a game with me, then go away.

Chronology

I've recently been absorbed in been Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and so perhaps have been more prepared to catch notice of really curious theories. Via Baris Karadogan's From Instabul to Sand Hill Road, I came across this argument: by Russian mathematician Anatoly T. Fomenko that

the timing of historical events, Chronology, as we know it is wrong (Sir Isaac Newton makes this claim in a paper too). Fomenko asserts that history is off by about 1000 years. Cultures we think to have existed say 200BC is actually 800 AD.

The initial idea comes from analyzing lunar eclipses. There are working laws of physics that allow astronomers to predict exactly when and where on the world an eclipse will happen. We get news of this all the time. They can go backwards in time as well, and match all the recorded eclipses to what the theory predicts. But Fomenko notices (in the works of astronomer Robert Newton) a serious mismatch. Eclipses that were recorded to have happened between 700-1300 AD show lunar behavior that vastly differs from theory and could only be explained by a mysterious non-gravitational force applied on the earth-moon system. However, this mysterious force completely disappears, and everything matches theory, if the dates of the eclipses were wrong and each one actually about 1000 years later than claimed. This surprises Fomenko and he gets obsessed with analyzing chronology.

But he’s a lot smarter than many of us, and devises a statistical method that can determine whether two pieces of text are written in the same time period. Now this is very important, and touches the crux of what I am talking about. Language changes over time. The words we use change. New words are added and some words disappear. The kinds of sentences we construct change over time, and all those changes can be quantified. In a way, the syntax of a document, not its semantics, can be used to determine when it is written. This sounds reasonable and acceptable mathematically. As a result, Fomenko takes a documents said to be written in the times of ancient Rome, and compares it to a documents many years later and concludes that they are statistically from the same time period. There are chapters and chapters comparing kings of ancient Rome to kings of Germany, saying that these two kings were actually the same person.

Fomenko claims,

Unbelievable as it may seem, there is not a single piece of firm written evidence or artefact that could be reliably and independently dated earlier than the XI century. Classical history is firmly based on copies made in the XV-XVII centuries of 'unfortunately lost' originals.

Our theory simply returns the Chronology of World History to the realm of applied mathematics from which it was sequestrated by the clergy in the XVI-XVII centuries. We have developed a valid and verifiable method of historical research based on statistics, astronomy and logic.

For example, computer assisted recalculation of eclipses with detailed descriptions allegedly belonging to Antiquity shows that they either occurred in the Middle Ages or didn't occur at all. A simple application of computational astronomy to the rules of calculation of Easter according to the Easter Book introduced by the Nicean council of alleged 325 AD shows that it definitely could not have taken place before 784 AD.

As an historian, I'm hardly about to buy into the theory; on the other hand, it's an interesting argument.

Technorati Tags: history

Web 2.0 Technologies: The New Seekers

In "The New Seekers," The Spectator's David Jennings counters Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen's bleak vision of anarchy resulting from a "dictatorship of idiots." Jennings believes that Web 2.0 technologies are enriching our culture rather than reducing it to a state of chaos, where everyone fancies themselves experts:

Anarchy is not synonymous with chaos—many of nature'€™s most complex and stable systems could be said to be anarchic. On the contrary, it embraces influence and leadership, if not regulation. Order emerges from disorder and diversity by evolution, and the central innovation and beauty of the Web 2.0 family of technologies is that they find ways to harness and accelerate this emergence, digitising Babel so that it can be processed, distilled and structured.

At the center of this is the shift from passive consumer to active critic, driven by discovery:

Discovery itself is an anarchic and unruly activity: it loves to slip through cracks, disappearing down rabbit holes and making associative leaps between material that may not at first appear to be connected. We all know the pleasure of arriving at the work of a new favourite author, composer or film-maker via what seems an incredibly circuitous path or a chance mention from a friend. It is our natural inquisitiveness that leads us to root out these new discoveries, foraging in the areas that appear most fertile in terms of our tastes.

Web 2.0 technologies, regardless of how short-lived some of them may be, allow us to find connections that we hadn't seen before and learn more about our own taste and the tastes of those in our networks. These "taste trails" pave the way for further discovery and encourage us to become active seekers.

One of my favorite examples of these is Last.FM. After creating an account,  you download a plugin for your media player which "scrobbles"—€”sends track metadata—€”to Last.FM. Over time, Last.FM compiles the data to create public charts of your most listened artists and songs. The site recommends "Neighbours," users with similar music taste, and artists that, through the data collected from all users, align with what you like. Last.FM also has a radio feature that allows you to listen to stations based on your data. There are also journal features and all artist information pages are editable by Last.FM members like a wiki.

Last.FM connects artists to artists, artists to people, and more, making it a fantastic discovery engine and personal music dashboard. I've been using it for a while now so I have a lot of information which might make my profile a fun one to poke around if you're not familiar with the system: http://www.last.fm/user/agreatnotion. One of my favorite features is the Events tab, which allows me to list what shows I have attended/will attend.
 

I for one welcome our new computer overlords

The National Academies' Center for Education has been working on a study of the future of computers and work. By 2030, they ask, what kinds of capabilities will computers have; how well will those capabilities prepare them to do jobs currently done by humans; and what proportion of the workforce might be displaced or rendered unemployable?

The results are rather scary. After looking at trends in machine vision, speech, reasoning, and movement, and estimating how important these are for doing various kinds of work, the author estimates that displacement rates could be over 80% in some fields-- sales, administrative support, food preparation, and personal care. These are also the sectors that employ the largest number of people. The safest fields for humans? Law (6%), medicine (10%), science (10%), and engineering (11%)-- fields which currently employ the smallest number of people.

[Source: Stuart W. Elliott, "Projecting the Impact of Computers on Work in 2030," p. 37, available online [PDF].]

A draft of the article is available online, and it has a lengthy description of its methods.

At first glance, it looked to me like there was an obvious flaw in the study. The high rates of replacement in "education, training, and library" suggested a systematic under-valuing of tacit knowledge or the social dimensions of work. If you assume that education is learning facts, and librarianship is finding books-- and nothing else-- then these high displacement rates would make sense, but otherwise they wouldn't. However, the relatively low replacement rates for repairmen and protective services suggests that that's not so. Any method that undervalues teachers isn't likely to also overvalue Larry the Cable Guy.

So the best places for humans in the future will be litigious, technocratic societies that spend a lot on health care. Actually, that sounds a lot like California.

Technorati Tags: computer, future, work

Evolving out of the Malthusian trap and into the Industrial Revolution?

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, has a forthcoming book, A Farewell to Alms, that argues that "the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population," and the application of evolutionary pressures operating in England that gave reproductive advantages to people possessing "values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save."

According to the New York Times, Clark argues that between 1200 and 1800, "the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap-- each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level."

Given that the English economy operated under Malthusian constraints, might it not have responded in some way to the forces of natural selection that Darwin had divined would flourish in such conditions? Dr. Clark started to wonder whether natural selection had indeed changed the nature of the population in some way and, if so, whether this might be the missing explanation for the Industrial Revolution.

He first looked for evidence that disease resistance was the key, and that the poor-- thanks to the amazingly high mortality rates in London and elsewhere-- were essentially breeding people who could survive the harsh environments of medieval and early modern cities. But in fact, Clark saw something else.

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor.... That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people’s preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800.

“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,” Dr. Clark writes.

Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency first emerges in the English economy. It was this significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England’s escape from the Malthusian trap and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution.

Finally, Clark takes on the question that's dogged economic historians for ages: why did the Industrial Revolution start in England and Europe, rather than China or Japan, or some other Asian country?

Dr. Clark has found data showing that their richer classes, the Samurai in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China, were surprisingly unfertile and so would have failed to generate the downward social mobility that spread production-oriented values in England.

Needless to say, arguments about the inheritability of social traits like thrift and prudence are bound to be controversial. And no doubt the book will be held up as proof that the rich are evolving into a class of super-beings who should, at least, be exempt from the taxes of ordinary mortals-- despite the fact that Clark's argument hinges on the downward mobility of portions of the upper classes into professions and crafts that they previously had not occupied.

The New York Times says the book will be available next month, but Amazon seems to have it in stock.

Technorati Tags: economics, history, industrialization

Person with disability? Superhero? Why not both?

Two articles this morning point to a future where the line between disability and super-heroism is blurred or just plain gone.

First, from the UK's Daily Mail, a preview of the upcoming US remake of the 1970s show The Bionic Woman. Premise of both incarnations: an athletic woman with near-fatal injuries is re-built using not-quite-existing technologies to become a crime fighting superhero.

The second article from today's New York Times notes the growing visibility of people with disabilities in the media and society, from Heather Mills on Dancing with the Stars to the woman in Maryland adorning her prosthesis with American flag stickers.

I was first struck by similarities in the visual language between photos in these two articles, faceless photos from the waist down focusing on metallic, almost ethereal artificial legs. But will the common ground end there? I think it all depends on what directions the creators of the new show take.

Despite being set in the future (or at least using futuristic technology), the new Bionic Woman could very well be the anachronism. Looking back at the photos, we see her prosthesis only in a hospital bed, the standard context for disability for many years. Compare this to Sarah Reinertsen, the athlete featured in the Times article, surrounded by dancers in a nightclub while fully revealing her artificial leg below a skirt. And not just revealing, but proclaiming her difference.

Will the Bionic Woman character be allowed to do the same? Will she reveal her extensions when she's out kicking butt, or constantly cover them up with slacks and long-sleeved blouses? (eminently practical attire for impromptu crimefighting) Can she really be a role model if we never see her facing the challenges and modeling interactions as a person with disabilities? The Bionic Woman version 2 has the potential to embody the new face of disability: a constant mix of continual struggle and, increasingly, technological and intellectual dexterities that extend physical and mental abilities into the realm of the superheroic.

Whatever directions this show takes, when The Bionic Woman is remade circa 2017 it will surely be as reality TV, not fiction.

A room of their own

The New York Times reports on a small revival in separate bedrooms in American homes:

Not since the Victorian age of starched sheets and starchy manners, builders and architects say, have there been so many orders for separate bedrooms. Or separate sleeping nooks. Or his-and-her wings.

In interviews, couples and sociologists say that often it has nothing to do with sex. More likely, it has to do with snoring. Or with children crying. Or with getting up and heading for the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Or with sending e-mail messages until well after midnight.

In a survey in February by the National Association of Home Builders, builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president of research at the builders association. Some builders say more than a quarter of their new projects already do.

One interesting element is that it seems to be driven more by wives then husbands:

"Couples today are writing their own script, rewriting how to have a marriage," said Pamela J. Smock, a University of Michigan sociologist. "The growing need for separate bedrooms also represents the speed-up of family life — women’s roles have changed — and the need for extra space eases the strain on the relationship. If one of them snores, the other one won’t be able to perform the next day. It’s nothing to do with social class, and it’s not necessarily indicative of marital discord."

Nevertheless, Professor Smock said husbands were less willing to change familiar patterns. "Men are supposed to be one, dominant, and two, sexual," she said. "Their wives might be thrilled to have their own bedroom, and see it as a romantic thing — going back to their romance, going back to dating, to intimacy, but the husband might not see it that way.

"As a social pattern, this could increase," she continued. "A lot of people I know fantasize about living in the same apartment building as their husband — but in a separate apartment. That could be next."

Technorati Tags: family

Beijing Hipsters Hit Manhattan

I had the chance last night to catch two new alternative rock bands from Beijing that are touring the US, Rebuilding the Rights of Statues and Lonely China Day, at Cake Shop on New York's Lower East Side.

The music was definitely good, but it was a struggle to hear any unique Chinese influence or sound. Most of it seemed derived from various US and UK alternative music sounds - I definitely heard some Siouxsie and the Banshees in the Rebuilding's style. So while I was hoping for more, and I wouldn't say the Beijing sound is going to sweep the world, I think it's pretty cool that Beijing hipsters are popping up in Manhattan. Who would have thought that 10 years ago or 20 years ago? Who'll be here 10 or 20 years from now? Lahore hipsters? Lagos hipsters?

Cake Shop's Flickr feed (a couple days behind, look for the March 8 shots in about a week)

Web 2.0 video creator writes about empathy on the web

Michael Wesch, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, who made the popular Web 2.0 video answers some questions at Battelle's Searchblog about the motivation behind his video.  I like that he talks about the opportunity not in terms of information but in terms of visibility and the chance for empathy.  Empathy through a computer screen is pretty hard, but it's worth the effort to make the state of the world more visible online - as in Gapminder or World Mapper, or to highlight violations of peoples' human rights - as in WITNESS.

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization....

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

Elderly gamers and Nintendo Wii

My colleague Mike Liebhold points out a DailyTech article about Nintendo going after the elder gamer market-- or more precisely, creating a new video gaming market:

The Wii’s innovative controller design has opened up video gaming to a previously untapped market—non-gamers.

The marketing minds behind Nintendo looked beyond the traditional gamer mediums and advertised its innovations at targets as far from gaming as you can imagine, such as retirees....

The marketing minds behind Nintendo looked beyond the traditional gamer mediums and advertised its innovations at targets as far from gaming as you can imagine, such as retirees. Nintendo even went against the current and took the Wii to an AARP convention....

Nintendo’s efforts seemed to have paid off. The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the Wii is now the latest rage at the Sedgebrook retirement community in Lincolnshire, where the average age is 77. In particular, the Wii Bowling component of Wii Sports has members of the retirement community hooked on playing the Wii installed inside the Sedgebrooks’s clubhouse lounge.

From the Chicago Tribune story:

"I've never been into video games," said 72-year-old Flora Dierbach last week as her husband took a twirl with the Nintendo Wii's bowling game. "But this is addictive."

Dierbach said residents love the Wii set up in the clubhouse lounge.

"They come in after dinner and play," she said. "Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, their grandkids come play with them.

"A lot of grandparents are being taught by their grandkids. But, now, some grandparents are instead teaching their grandkids."

This shouldn't be much of a surprise. A couple years ago, Wired Magazine had an article on the popularity of online chess, checkers, and other non-alien destruction / non-first-person shooter / non-multiplayer smackdown among the elderly. For many of the people in that piece, the appeal of those games was the opportunity they afforded to interact with other people: the chess program on your computer is probably a lot more challenging than your nephew, but, well, it's just a machine.

It's no coincidence, as the Marxists used to say, that the Tribune article talks about a bowling tournament and grandparents playing with their grandchildren. In both cases, the video game isn't something that keeps people in their rooms. In the context of the retirement home, the point of the Wii isn't just to play, but to play with others. As always, other people are the killer app.

Technorati Tags: aging, elders, future, games

Giant (robot) steps

Mike Love pointed me to this video of a Japanese robot playing John Coltrane's solo from "Giant Steps."

via YouTube

As Mike notes, "it sounds horrible yet it's note for note."

[via Positive Ape Index]

Technorati Tags: Japan, music, robotics

Internet, China's wonderland of fun

My colleagues at the beautifully-designed Virtual China will no doubt have more interesting things to say about this report, but the New York Times had a piece on Chinese company Tencent what its dominance among Chinese Internet users-- it's like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and MySpace all rolled into one-- reveals about national differences in Internet use:

While America’s Internet users send e-mail messages and surf for information on their personal computers, young people in China are playing online games, downloading video and music into their cellphones and MP3 players and entering imaginary worlds where they can swap virtual goods and assume online personas. Tencent earns the bulk of its revenue from the entertainment services it sells through the Internet and mobile phones.

Another distinguishing feature is the youthful face of China’s online community. In the United States, roughly 70 percent of Internet users are over the age of 30; in China, it is the other way around — 70 percent of users here are under 30, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Because few people in China have credit cards or trust the Internet for financial transactions, e-commerce is emerging slowly. But instant messaging and game-playing are major obsessions, now central to Chinese culture. So is social networking, a natural fit in a country full of young people without siblings. Tencent combines aspects of the social networking site MySpace, the video sharing site YouTube and the online virtual world of Second Life.

These kinds of national differences have long been recognized as important for multinational companies trying to enter new markets; but in a world of user-generated media, such differences have the potential to drive the evolution over time of distinctive national technical and media styles.

Technorati Tags: business, China, culture, entertainment, IM, internet, social software

New blog: Law and Technology Theory

Somehow I stumbled on the new Law and Technology Blog this afternoon. It looks very promising:

Creators of new technologies seek to signal a message of novelty and improvement. Instinctively, many of us want to endorse the message and believe that this new technology will make our lives better. We want to believe that the new technology is special and unique. This causes us to look at each new technology in isolation. For example, scholars tend to specialize in the study of Cyberlaw or Law & Genetics or Law and the Neurosciences. Similarly, legislatures often formulate special legislation to deal with specific privacy threats. An example of a recent trend is legislation targeting privacy threats imposed by cell-phone cameras.

The goal of this symposium is to inquire whether we should continue to assess and react to each new technology in isolation or whether we could also implement a broader approach. In other words, should we have a general theory of law and technology that will formulate principles of how the law should react to technological change? Particularly, we would like to focus on whether it is possible to formulate a generalized legal approach to the use and adoption of new technologies. Is it possible to formulate a uniform approach to these instances where new technologies threaten existing social institutes and social values?

I'd recommend them, but because of one of their early posts, I've blown about two hours tonight listening to (and blogging about) Ms. Dewey.

Technorati Tags: law, technology

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Earlier this week the Institute had Fred Turner over to give a talk on his new book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Tonight Next Thursday, November 9, Fred's part of a symposium at Stanford on the subject.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog

A Public Symposium featuring Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold and Fred Turner
Thursday, November 9 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM
Cubberly Auditorium, Stanford University

During the 1960s, student marchers chanted "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate!" as they railed against computers and the Cold War-era military industrial complex computers seemed to represent. But within just three decades, computers had become emblems of countercultural revolution.

This symposium will feature a conversation with three people who played key roles in that transformation: Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and New Rules for the New Economy, and Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

The discussion will be moderated by Fred Turner, assistant professor of communication at Stanford and author of the new book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

This free event is sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries, the Department of Communication, and the American Studies Program.

It will be introduced by Henry Lowood, of the Stanford University Libraries, and followed by a public reception.

No doubt this'll be a fascinating event, if for no other reason than to watch historical subjects put in the same room with the person who's written about them.

Technorati Tags: computer, counterculture, Silicon Valley, Stanford University

Computer memory, social memory, and the road to Big Brother

The New York Times has a pretty scary article detailing how it's getting harder to expunge criminal records:

In 41 states, people accused or convicted of crimes have the legal right to rewrite history. They can have their criminal records expunged, and in theory that means that all traces of their encounters with the justice system will disappear....

But real expungement is becoming significantly harder to accomplish in the electronic age. Records once held only in paper form by law enforcement agencies, courts and corrections departments are now routinely digitized and sold in bulk to the private sector. Some commercial databases now contain more than 100 million criminal records. They are updated only fitfully, and expunged records now often turn up in criminal background checks ordered by employers and landlords....

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer in Miami, tells her clients that expungement is a waste of time. “To tell someone their record is gone is essentially to lie to them,” Ms. Rodriguez-Taseff said. “In an electronic age, people should understand that once they have been convicted or arrested that will never go away.”

Judge Stanford Blake, whose court often enters expungement orders, said his inability to make them effective had left him feeling frustrated and helpless.

“It’s a horrible situation,” said Judge Blake, the administrative judge of the criminal division of the Eleventh Circuit Court in Miami. “It’s the ultimate Big Brother, always watching you.”

As Ellen Ullman argued in her brilliant essay "Memory and Megabytes," there's a big difference between human and computer memory, and we tend to overlook the critical differences between them. Computers are indiscriminate rememberers. This is a very good thing if they're keeping track of bank records or subatomic events, but it's more problematic when it's applied to the world of more complex human affairs. This is because individuals are much more selective about what they remember, and societies actively negotiate what they choose to remember and call attention to.

First, the case of individuals. Forgetting insults and painful events, we all recognize, is a pretty healthy thing for individuals: a well-adjusted person just doesn't feel the same shock over a breakup after ten years (if they can even remember the name of Whoever They Were), nor do they regard a fight from their childhood with anything but clinical detachment. Collectively, societies can also be said to make decisions about what they choose to remember, and how to act toward the past. Sometimes this happens informally, but has practical reasons: think of national decisions of avoid deep reflection on wars or civil strife, in the interests of promoting national unity and moving forward.

Sometimes, though, that forgetting is the product of formal social negotiation. For a long time, our actions as youths have been understood to be separable from adulthood, and we've agreed that bad things that kids do shouldn't always count against them as adults. Likewise, there are expiration dates on most bad actions. Someone who does jail time for a crime is supposed to have paid their debt to society. We feel a little uncomfortable when politicians have thirty year-old college arrests splashed in the news (it's not a big thing, it was a long time ago); we may have mixed feelings about a 83 year-old woman who's deported for serving as a guard at a Nazi prison camp in her youth (yes, it's bad, but is it too harsh to throw an elderly woman out of the country where her husband is buried?). Of course, there are some deeds that are too serious to ever outlive: serial killers don't get second chances.

Increasingly, however, thanks to the imposition of computers on what been a psychologically nuanced and socially negotiated activity, those second chances are becoming harder to come by. Just as important, the chance to move beyond past bad events-- both ones done by you, and ones done to you-- is starting to slip. Computers remember, but they don't mature; people can forget in ways that computers don't, and that's one reason they do.

Technorati Tags: computer, crime, memory, privacy

Ten Year Forecast 2006 Keynote

Here is a video from our Ten Year Forecast this past Spring of David Pescovitz' keynote, "Voicing the Future: Artists Speak." 

Download TYF_06_Pesco_Keynote.mov  (runs with Quicktime)

Smart homes and smart aging

The Associated Press has an article on a new JAMA study documenting the relationship between daily exercise and longevity:

Chores can keep elderly alive

Just doing household chores and other mundane activities of daily living is enough to help older adults live longer, new research suggests.

Elderly couch potatoes were much more likely to die within about six years than those whose lives included regular activity no more strenuous than washing dishes, vacuuming, gardening and climbing stairs, according to a study of adults age 72 to 80.

About 12 percent of people with the highest amount of daily activity died during the six-year follow-up, compared with nearly 25 percent of the least active participants.

This is the latest in several studies establishing a relationship between activity and longevity among elders. Taken together, they send a clear message about the design of smart home technology, one that we advanced in last year's RFID report:

The ideal smart house used to be thought of as one that would take care of everything for you. It would be a “machine for living in,” to borrow modern architect Le Courbusierʼs phrase. In contrast, some of todayʼs best scientists aim to create systems that help residents do things, instead of systems that doing things for them. As professor Stephen Intille has described the MIT House_n project:

Our primary vision is not one where computer technology ubiquitously and proactively manages the details of the home. Technology should require human effort in ways that keep life as mentally and physically challenging as possible as people age.

Work on communications and monitoring systems has taken off thanks, in part, to the discovery of a clear relationship between isolation and depression. Elders are much more likely to stay active when their social lives are active and theyʼre in touch with family and friends. Active elders are healthier elders. Sedentary elders are at greater risk of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. (Elders often need encouragement to remain active. In Japan and the United States, the elderly watch 5–6 hours of television per day.) Likewise, there is evidence that, by remaining mentally and physically active, elders can fight the onset of Alzheimerʼs. Having a house that does too much to take care of you can be bad for you.

Technorati Tags: aging, architecture, design, RFID, smart_home

Crack and hack; or, the secret link between meth, identity theft, and the Internet

Bruce Schneier points to a New York Times article about the discovery of a relationship between meth use and identity theft. Essentially, the argument is that the particular nature of meth addiction, and its highly decentralized production, mean that "For these drug users... identity theft was the perfect support system."

First, the high. Meth users are "awake for days at a time and able to fixate on small details.... [B]ecause the drug has a long high, addicts have patience and energy for crimes that take several steps to pay off." Contrast this to crack use, which "creates a rapid craving for more, [forcing] addicts [to] commit crimes that pay off instantly, even at high risk."

Second, the production angle:

Methamphetamine... can be manufactured in small laboratories that move about suburban or rural areas, where addicts are more likely to steal mail from unlocked boxes. Small manufacturers, in turn, use stolen identities to buy ingredients or pay rent without arousing suspicion.

In contrast, both producers and users of crack and heroin have an incentive to locate in

well-defined urban strips run by armed gangs, which stimulates gun traffic and crimes that are suited to densely populated neighborhoods, including mugging, prostitution, carjacking and robbery....

Technorati Tags: security, crime

Identity Mashup Conference: June 19-21

a conference for anyone who will be around Boston next week and is interested in identity systems. Click here for the conference program.

The Identity Mashup Conference is a three-day open event (June 19th, 20th and 21st) being held at Harvard Law School and the MIT Media Lab to explore the role of identity management systems in furthering or inhibiting privacy, civil liberties, ecommerce, and new forms of civic participation. The conference is being co-organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the MIT Media Lab, the Interra Project, and Boston Main Streets.

A variety of parties—governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial institutions, international agencies, and merchants among them—are clamoring for identity systems to address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornog­raphy to identity theft and spam. The proposals vary dramatically from national ID cards with centralized data store and a single universal identifier to highly-distributed “user-centric” models with distributed data stores and authenticated anonymity.

Will we have to amend Tom Friedman's McDonald's Law

Years ago, as proof of the generally beneficial effects of globalization, Tom Friedman argued that no two countries that had McDonalds had gone to war with each other. A new article in the European Journal of Social Psychology suggests we might want to amend that to Starbucks:

Coffee makes us more likely to say 'yes'

Moderate amounts of caffeine can have an impact on the extent to which we can be persuaded.... [R]esearchers from the University of Queensland found that with caffeine consumption we are more likely to attend to, and agree with, persuasive arguments.

The experiments involved asking people their attitudes about voluntary euthanasia before and after reading persuasive arguments against their initial beliefs. Prior to reading the arguments, the participants consumed orange juice with either caffeine (equivalent to two cups of coffee) or no caffeine (placebo).

The level of 'systematic processing of the message' was found to be increased by caffeine as shown by increased agreement with the arguments, greater message-related thinking and better argument recall.

Apparently this is one reason police will offer suspects coffee: it can make them easier to interrogate.

Technorati Tags: coffee, collaboration

The Dunbar Number

This bit of sociology was new to me, the Dunbar Number, a proposed measure of the limit to the number of persons with which a person can maintain stable relationships. A number around 150 has been suggested as the mean group size with sufficient reason to remain together. Its been suggested that social networks may also be limited in this way. In part related to some of Gladwell's Tipping Point arguments. Here is a further discussion, with some detailed debate. Not sure if I buy this, but its a intriguing idea.

Only 11 years until Blade Runner...

...but it looks like Los Angeles won't bear much resemblance to the most famous movie about its future.

What is the Future of Los Angeles?

With its clogged freeways and endless horizon of sprawl, Los Angeles has become what other cities strive to avoid. Its enclaves of glittering wealth contrast with flatlands of poverty. It’s immigrants, speaking dozens of languages, enrich cuisine and music, charging the city with entrepreneurial energy, but also find themselves trapped in a persistent underclass. Los Angeles is an “ecology of fear,” as Mike Davis so memorably put it, subject to earthquakes, floods, and wildfires. Joan Didion has painted a landscape of disconnection and disaffection, just as noir movies depicted a city hardened by dreams that had died.... architectural record’s James S. Russell, AIA, asked some longtime local observers and participants to think about what L.A. means to American culture and to speculate on its future.

Interviews include Thom Mayne, Frank Gehry, Joel Kotkin, and Richard Koshalak.

[via Bill C.]

Technorati Tags: architecture, California, city, future

exorbitant Myspace phone

 

Helio is a new mobile virtual network operator, backed by Internet service provider EarthLink and Korean-based SK Telecom, that has rolled out two phones being marketed especially for Myspace. They even have the tagline, "Helio: Don't call it a phone."  The phones are being marketed to 18 to 32 year olds, costing around $250 and between $85-135 per month for service.  The phones make it easy to photoblog, add friends or send messages on Myspace, as well as to gift or beg friends for content like games, videos or ringtones.

One of the funnier posts from the Myspace profile created by Helio:

"In about a month or 2 there will be kids, teens, adults <---- ewww to the adults. Walking around with no concept of theyre surroundings because of this device. . . .SHAME ON YOU"

I think I'll start a global standard today

Recently I spent an afternoon with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. She's author of the Crafter Manifesto, and recently launched ThingLink, a "free product code for creative work." The basic idea is very simple:

Thinglink.org is an open database where makers can register free unique identifiers for their work and create labels for their products. The beta was launched at the Maker Faire/San Francisco in April.

Artists, crafters, designers, and small producers stand to benefit from online recommendation systems because recommendation systems place their products on equal footing with those of the large corporations. However, recommendation systems require unique identifiers for products. UPCs, EANs and EPCs are examples of standard ID schemas. These codes are not accessible to individuals and small producers especially in developing countries because the codes cost money and reserving them is a complex process.

Thinglink is a free, alternative product ID code that can be attached to products in the form of a human-readable label, a barcode, or a RFID tag. The idea is that anyone can thinglink a product, and anyone with the will and the skills is free to create a recommendation system for thinglinked products.

I think there are a bunch of provocative things here, all wrapped up in a very simple object.

First is the idea that there's value in attaching digital IDs to handmade-- or really any unique-- objects. Ten years ago, creating a unique identifier system that closes the gap between an object and information about that object would have seemed really weird, or just sinister; but now, at least among some circles, the value of such a system is easier to see. (ThingLinks are little bits of spime.)

But this isn't just a matter of creating a UPC scheme for crafts. Industry codes establish objects as members of a family, and do so largely for purposes of supply chain and inventory management. While you might be able to build such functionalities around ThingLink, its purpose seems to different: ultimately, it's not about helping establish some object as part of a category, but capturing unique information about it. This is particularly cool because, as Dan Pink might put it, more and more of us don't buy things; we buy things that have interesting stories.

Of course, the two functionalities aren't mutually exclusive. Consider books, which have ISBN numbers. Booksellers who deal in rare or used books can use ISBN numbers just like Amazon; but they also want to collect information about specific books. Antiquarian booksellers record information about a book's overall condition, dust jacket, marginal notes, inscriptions, dedications, water and mold damage, and other things; having a way for that information to be associated with books would be quite useful.

The fact that the system is low-tech compared to UPC codes is also something that works in its favor. It means that the barriers to entry are pretty low, and may create more room for experimentation and evolution. For example, I could imagine a in which weavers could send pictures of their latest creations to ThingLink via their camera cell phones, and have the system send back an ID for that object, and create a record of it in the database (with the ID number, the picture, creation date, and information about who sent it). Such a system might be like folksonomies or Wikipedia: informal and imperfect, but good enough for everyday use, and very attractive when the alternative is nothing at all.

But what struck me most forcefully wasn't anything about ThingLink itself, but the casual ambitions behind it. Have we really reached the point where a graduate student in Helsinki, Finland, working with a few friends and a couple off-the-shelf commercial services, create an international standard? Are there enough servers in the world, enough cheap computers, and sufficiently ubiquitous Internet access-- not to mention an instinct regarding the value of using common protocols, if not absolutely formal standards-- to make this possible? Can individuals now command the resources to do what used to require formal organizations, lots of special interest group meetings, and offices in Geneva? Josh Schachter pulled off something like this with del.icio.us; of course, Tim Berners-Lee arguably did this with the World Wide Web protocol (though being at CERN and being able to build on a trend toward standardization in publishing formats helped).

Maybe.

Technorati Tags: business, cooperation, culture, digital-physical, RFID, Shaping Things, Web 2.0

Chinese Google (Guge) lets in some of the "bad" stuff

Part trashing Google/Guge, part pursed-lips shock, part guide to the backstreets of virtual China, this May 10 "Daily Economic News 每日经济新闻" article spells out how to find drugs, guns, and other illegal things online--and makes the assertion that Guge/Google is not doing a proper filtering job. 

The reporter's central question: "How can we prevent the Internet from becoming more of a breeding ground and bridge for harmful information?" 

The reporter compared keyword searches of 谷歌(Guge/Google) and "other major search engines."  When he/she typed in keywords "gambling 赌博," "drugs,毒品," "guns 枪支," "fake ID 假证件," and "pornography 色情," on Guge/Google, there were tens of millions of hits.  When entered on the other, unnamed search engines, however, this message came up:  "The keyword you have entered may not conform with the content of relevant laws and regulations." “你键入的关键词可能不符合相关法律法规的内容”.

 

phone shui

Jason Li at Virtual China writes: Samsung Motorola has recently put forth a patent for the Feng Shui Phone, which, according to Unwired View, does the following (and I quote):

• Three-dimensional Hall-effect sensor for measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields and to form a compass to determine the geographic direction in which the main wall of the house faces.
• Digital camera to determine color saturation, order and balance of the surroundings.
• GPS receiver to determine geographic location of the phone.
• The coordinates are then sent to the GIS databse through wireless network to to get the information about the surroundings of the location, e.g. the distance from the undesirable sites such as major airports, landfills, and factories.
• Cellphone microphone is used to measure noise level of the location.
• AM/FM radio to measure the AM and FM transmission strength and the distance form nearest AM/FM towers.
• The table with the chi values of each parameter is stored in phones memory and is used for calculation of chi  values of different parameters.

Via PostShow; info from Unwired View

Korean Couples Court Through Gaming

I finally had a chance to read Florence Chee's paper on korean gamers this morning on the train, after it sat in my "To Read" folder for over a year. This section caught my eye - it was something I saw repeatedly in Korea:

Finding the courtship and PC bang link interesting, I later interviewed a couple in their early twenties who played Lineage together almost 40 hours per week. Stating that they now help each other cut down their hours online, their story included both of them arriving at an offline Lineage meet. The male saw the female, and it was “love at first sight.” The female, however, did not notice him and ignored his advances. After the meet, the two would see one another online in Lineage, where the male would then try to protect the female from harm against attacks. After a while, this impressed the female enough so that she consented to having a date with him.Their relationship slowly evolved and as of the time of this paper being written they are still very happy, very much in love, and going to PC bangs together.

I suppose I would have tried the same technique as a teenager, but alas the only MMOGs back then were Star Trek-style space colonization games on dial-up BBSes that I mainly played against middle-age HAM radio geeks.

Technology and religion

Two data-points on the intersection of religion and communications technology. First, from the Washington Post:

'Kosher' Phone Merges Technology, Faith

It sounds like the setup for a punch line: What do you get when you cross an ultra-Orthodox rabbi with a mobile phone? But the "kosher phone" is real and its developers are serious about looking beyond the religious enclaves of Israel. Some Arab companies even have inquired about the phone's main feature: keeping out sex lines and other worldly temptations.

"There's interest out there in a conservative phone," said Abrasha Burstyn, the chief executive officer at Mirs Communications Ltd., an Israeli subsidiary of Motorola Inc. and pioneer of the kosher mobile that debuted last year.

The phones -- carrying the seal of approval from Israel's rabbinical authorities -- have been one of the most successful mergers of technology and centuries-old tradition in the ultra-Orthodox community, which is most widely recognized by the men's black garb based on the dress of 19th century European Jews.

The kosher phone is stripped down to its original function: making and receiving calls. There's no text messaging, no Internet access, no video options, no camera. More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and other offerings are blocked. A team of rabbinical overseers makes sure the list is up to date.

Second, Infocult notes the debut of a "Christian-themed alternative to MySpace:"

America's culture wars hit social networking. Or the market offers another YASN niche. Or multiculturalism in YASN iterates again: there's a Christian-themed alternative to MySpace. Xianz ("It's not MySpace - it's HIS space!") positions itself as a safe space, clearly playing off of the growing cultural meme of fearsome MySpace.

The news release on Xianz (think Xmas, but this time the "war on Christmas" thrown into linguistic reverse as the "X" is appropriated by believers; as a piece of semiotic guerilla warfare, it's nothing short of genius) fleshes it out a bit:

With MySpace becoming one of the most popular sites on the Internet, it seems that the social networking phenomenon is here to stay. However, along with it's popularity comes the myriad of concerns about private information being posted online. It could be a parent's worst nightmare....

Xianz offers a safe environment for teens and people of all ages to interact with others of the same or similar interests. Among other safeguards, settings can be specified that allow only people of the same age range to communicate.

Features include: Customized profiles with photos, video and music, private and instant messaging, online Blogs, personal message boards, birthday reminders & invites, shared interests, friends lists & shout outs, groups, events and listings. A large music module will be integrated in the next few weeks.

These also reflect something my colleague Paul Saffo has recently written about. Last fall, in his essay "The Ghost Dances," Saffo argued that both religious fundamentalism and extropian enthusiasms were expressions of a desire to deal with the uncertainties created by technology-driven change. "The global rise of religious fundamentalism is pure Ghost Dance," he writes, "be it Islamic fundamentalists pining for a return to the Caliphate, Jewish fundamentalists battling moderate secularism, or Christian fundamentalists preaching an imminent Second Coming."

But this isn't just a straightforward anti-technological movement:

Iranian fundamentalists see no conflict in nurturing an aggressive nuclear program even as they rail against the corrosive effects of western ideas and technologies.... [At the same time], Techno--theoretic “extropians’’—believers in an unbounded technological future—argue that technology is not moving fast enough. While some ghost dancers desperately want to put on the brakes, these technological believers are convinced that redemption can be achieved only by stepping on the gas and fleeing into the future.

Xianz and the kosher phone are likewise expressions of the tension between the desire to embrace the new, while reaffirming the traditional. What both of these examples share is a desire to use these technologies, but at the same time to protect believers from the negative effects-- porn and predators. Finally, they remind me of the Chinese government's attempts to make the Internet "safe" for its citizens (and itself): to harness what's powerful about technology, while minimizing exposure to the bad stuff.

Indeed, all three raise the question of whether the "future of the Internet" isn't a "future of Internets:" whether one of the big stories with the future of the Internet might be the creation of distinct arenas closed off not for commercial purposes (like the walled gardens of cell phone networks), but for the purpose of cultural and religious defense.

Technorati Tags: culture, phone, religion, social software

End of cyberspace terms

I've now posted to the End of Cyberspace blog all the suggestions David Pescovitz and I got for our Wired "'Cyberspace' is Dead" article. They range from John Seely Brown's philosophically-informed Infomated World, to Andy Clark's tongue-in-cheek Interactatron (shades of Woody Allen's Sleeper), to David Sifry's contention that cyberspace is a fine term and won't disappear.

Looking over them, what's interesting is that they (and the suggestions that have come in from readers) fall into roughly three cate