Summary: Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. But the flipside is that context morphs very easily, so what are the moral and ethical implications of that?
Following on from my post the other day about Systems Builders, in which I touched on these themes: synthesis, analysis, visonaries, implementers. Some interesting trackbacks occured out of this. Let me first mention Jon Udell's post this morning, because his discussion of "sound bites" is particularly relevant to the points I want to make here. Paul Graham made a speech at Oscon 2004 that caused ripples of controversy around the Web. Ironically I haven't heard that particular speech yet, but I read Graham's 'Great Hackers' essay and listened to an earlier interview he did with Doug Kaye. Here's what Jon said about Graham's Oscon speech:
"Consider Paul Graham's remark. I suspect that most who commented on it did not actually hear it, but instead read it, or read about it. How much of its impact is conveyed by the text, and how much by the delivery? Whatever that ratio, access to the primary source -- the words as actually spoken -- is bound to affect the perception of the remark."
It's all about context. According to Jon's quote above, how you take Graham's remarks will depend largely on whether you heard them in the original audio or in text form (transcription, synthesis, extracts, etc). I'd go further and say that how you received Graham's remarks also depends on whether you listened to just an extract of the speech, or the whole thing. The most reliable context is listening to all of the original audio.
Jon Udell goes on to say:
"In the realm of public discourse, it's easy to imagine what this could mean. The presentation and analysis of sound bites has been almost entirely at the discretion of the broadcast media. Think how different it will be when we the media can choose the sound bites that we want to discuss."
Jon is putting a positive spin on the situation - every Joe and Jane Bloggs can now put things into their own contexts. We don't rely on broadcast media to do that so much now.
But... there's a flip side to that coin. Before I get to that, here's a bit more from Jon:
"Think about how we "write up" meetings today. Some people try to transcribe, and fail to synthesize. Others synthesize, at the risk of revising history. A collective synthesis rooted in the audio transcript seems like the best of both worlds."
It's true that a "collective synthesis" is very democratic and has wider breadth, because it's not just a product of a broadcasting elite (i.e. journalists). But let's not overlook the corollary of that: the more people you have transcribing, analyzing and synthesizing audio and text on the Web, the more things get taken out of their original context. For example, something that makes a great deal of sense within the context of the original source file, can take on a totally different meaning if you take a snippet of the original file and put it into your own post which is on a different subject.
Paul Graham wrote a number of controversial things in his 'Great Hackers' essay. For example, this paragraph:
"Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up."
When I read that in the original essay, I understood the point he was trying to make: that to manage hackers you need to understand their spirit, to be in the same headspace. That theme was recurrent throughout his essay and therefore it strongly resonated with me. But when you take that paragraph out of the context of the rest of his essay (as I've done just now), it becomes much more blunt and the meaning changes. In fact when that paragraph is isolated from the rest of the 'Great Hackers' essay, as in Andrew's post yesterday, I now find I disagree with what Graham says. I don't agree that only programmers can manage other programmers - that's just plain wrong. In my view a visionary may not be a programmer, yet he or she can certainly lead a team of programmers in the implementation of his or her vision. Examples are Mitch Kapor and Marc Canter.
So you see my point? I had two different reactions to Paul Graham's paragraph on managing programmers - I agreed with him in the context of his original essay, but I disagreed with him when I read it again in Andrew's post.
Incidentally, at the end of his post Jon Udell mentioned Glenn Gould's The Idea of North (did he get that link from me, via my link to him?). The form of audio splicing that Gould did in The Idea of North is one method of putting things people say into new contexts and creating new meaning out of that. That was re-contextualizing as art, but what's happening now on the Web is context-morphing on a mass scale.
Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. They enable us to bootstrap the Web of Ideas. But context on the Web is much more fluid and it morphs very easily. So when we link to something (a piece of audio or text) but give it a different meaning - what are the moral and ethical implications of that?
I came across an article in Computerworld that has some good advice on designing and building IT systems. The article is by Michael Hugos and he starts out by defining "Systems Builder":
"This person can speak both the language of technology and the language of business. This person understands the specific business issues that a new system is supposed to address and is always looking for simple and effective ways to use technology to get things done. I call this person the systems builder."
The whole article is worth reading, but there are a couple of points in particular that resonated with me. Firstly:
"Look for the simple underlying patterns. This is the creative leap where investigation and analysis give way to synthesis and the design emerges."
Synthesis in logical terms is the opposite of analysis. It's when you combine individual elements of thought (the results of your analysis) into a coherent whole (the design). I loved the way Hugos expressed this: the "creative leap" that takes you from analysis to synthesis and the emergence of a design. It sounds more organic than iterative, doesn't it?
But it's not just any design that you want to emerge. Ideally the design should display these properties:
"Strive to create system designs that display an elegant simplicity. Use as few technology components as possible, and use each component for what it does best."
Elegant Simplicity... I should get that tattooed onto my forehead.
btw a follow-up article by Hugos is online: The Systems Builder as Leader.
I also did a bit of googling on "systems builder" and this article about INTJ types came up. As I'm an INTJ, this bit appealed to me:
"INTJs are known as the "Systems Builders" of the [Myers-Briggs] types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability."
Yes, you definitely need imagination to make that "creative leap" and reliability to turn it into reality.
On another tangent, yesterday I listened to Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor and at one point they talked about 3 types of people in the Web world: users, visionaries, and implementers. Dave defined a visionary as being someone who has "an expansive view of what's possible". So I guess you'd put the Systems Builder into that visionary category.
When I think of visionaries of the Web, names like Mitch Kapor, Dave Winer himself, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Canter come to mind. I'd like to think I'm in that mold as well, although of course I'm yet to prove myself in the real world like those other folks have. I'm working on it though ;-)
Open-Media.org is an Open Source Media Project launched today by Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica. It's going to be like the Internet Archive, only for multimedia files. In fact Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (home of the The Wayback Machine) is providing free storage and free bandwidth for Open Media. Here is J.D.'s description:
"Open-Media.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video). Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action. Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative."
I'm not sure why "amateur video" gets top billing? Audio, art, eBooks, photos, and mixing the whole lot together - these all seem to me to be just as important. Maybe it'll become clearer to me over time.
Here is Marc's description of Open Media:
"Then all this content at the Internet Archives can be accessed - built-right into your image gallery or jukebox (audio or video!) We're also going to establish a way for ANYBODY to contribute their media (via OpenMedia's and other orgs web sites) to this common Creative Commons pool of media."
Sounds great! I've joined the Open Media project, which is currently based on a SocialText wiki. You can ask Marc or J.D. to send you an invitation.
I'm not sure yet what I can contribute, but with my analytical mind and vision for multimedia and the read/write web - I'm sure I can help! I'm particularly interested in the "digital storytelling" aspect and the potential to promote electracy (21st century media literacy). I'd like to think eBooks have a place in this project too, so maybe I can contribute my ideas on that.
I recently wrote about a new kind of literacy, one in which Generation Y is more fluent than the rest of us. It is transforming the act of reading and it's also re-defining Knowledge Management, I believe. In my travels (on the Web) I came across a new term that may help us grasp this new 21st century literacy: Electracy. It's a neologism, a new word to describe something that didn't exist before. In this case, electracy is seemingly a combination of the words Electricity and Literacy. Here's a better definition:
"Electracy is to computing what literacy is to print. [...] In the history of human culture there are but three apparatuses: orality, literacy, and now electracy."
A fair warning: there's a lot of icky terminology to wade through when discussing elactracy. The word 'apparatus' is but one example. This is because it's the domain of philosophers (especially a bloke called Derrida), linguists and other academics. I'm going to try and avoid such terms and write about it in plain english.
I came across the word 'electracy' when reading this conversation between Talan Memmott (editor of a Hypertext/Hypermedia Journal called Beehive) and theorist Gregory Ulmer, who wrote a book entitled Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. Here's how it's described in the book blurb:
"Ulmer uses the invention of literacy by the Ancient Greeks as a model for the invention of "electracy" (which is to digital media what literacy is to print)."
So it seems Ulmer is the originator of the word. Who better to explain it to us then.
[incidentally, if you're looking for a musical accompaniment to reading my post - try Loveless, by My Bloody Valentine. I'm listening to it as I write this and it's like a soundtrack for electracy]
It seems I can't get away from defining what "apparatus" means, as it turns out to be quite crucial. Here's Ulmer:
"Literacy is an "apparatus," which is not a neologism but a common term given specialized meaning in media studies. I borrowed it from media studies to name the matrix of a language machine, partly social and partly technological, that operates in a given epoch. An apparatus is not only a technology (e.g. the alphabet, paper, ink etc) but also an institution and its practices developed along with the technology."
Got that? Well the important point for me is that an apparatus is not just a technology, but a set of practices. This is partly what I'm exploring at my new topic-focused blog eBook Culture, where I'm setting the scene of eBooks as: not objects, but a culture. That is, eBooks are social practices and activities. (I'm also exploring eBooks from a practical sense too).
Ulmer goes on to define electracy as "a neologism, then, to give a name to the apparatus of the emerging digital epoch."
He draws comparisons between the shift from orality to literacy in Plato's time, suggesting that at the beginning of the 21st century we're experiencing a similar shift from literacy to electracy. He says there will "come a time when we are 'native' to the apparatus of electracy."
This is why I keep harping on about Generation Y, because they're the first generation to be steeped in computing and two-way social media technologies. The generation of my daughter, who'll be 3 soon, will be even more native to "electracy". As for us oldies, including Generation X (aging slackers!), we're going to have to adjust to this new world or risk being left behind on Planet Broadcast Media.
So what are some of the elements of electracy? Ulmer suggests that cinema and then advertising have been the torchbearers for electracy. He says:
"What is important for electracy is the creation of MOOD or atmosphere, the logic of which is fundamentally poetic or imagistic."
[this is why I suggested My Bloody Valentine as soundtrack]
In terms of learning, especially for the new generation (but this can also be applied to the world of KM I think), Ulmer has this advice:
"I am not saying to forget literacy, but to include aesthetic and performance experience in the educational process [...] [children] relate to the story not so much in terms of meaning but doing. High schools to become electrate need to add this aesthetic performance dimension to learning as well."
The keyword to me is "doing". I myself have a maxim that I try to follow in my life and on my weblog: learn by doing. It's the way of the Web, and it seems to be the way of education if we're to prepare our children for the new media world. This again from Ulmer:
"Electrate learning is structured like creativity, and does not replace the pedagogy of verification that structures most literate education, but supplements it with the structure of discovery."
Discovery, learn by doing, creativity. These are all participatory and productive things - not passive like 20th century consumerism. Come to think of it, maybe Gen X slackers were rebelling by being extreme consumers. That is, they were characterized in the 1990's (mostly as a stereotype, it has to be said) as being lazy and cynical. Which in reality often meant consuming things rather than producing things. What if, instead of being extreme consumers, they went the other way and became extreme producers? I know, the technology wasn't ripe until the very late 90's - way after flannel shirts and goatees were the rage.
...on that note the My Bloody Valentine CD is fading to a close, so I'll wrap up this post. It's the best song on the album too, called 'Soon'. Turn it up and feel the mood wash over you. It's electracy, baby!
p.s. bonus points for telling me what song the title of this post refers to.
Jon Udell has kicked off a series of articles at O'Reilly Network on what he calls "hypermedia blogging":
"The two-way Web unleashed by the blogging revolution is, and will remain, largely a textual medium. And yet we're clearly at an inflection point. It's increasingly feasible to create and share media content. If you needed special AV skills and instincts in order to do that, it would be a non-starter. But I've never been an AV guy. What motivates me to explore the subject now is a profound sense that it's ready to become part of mainstream communication on the Web. I'm not sure where this series of columns will lead, but let's take it one step at a time."
2004 for me has been the year that multimedia has finally started to live up to its promise - as a medium of expression for everyday people. I've dipped a toe into the waters with my recent audio blogging experiments. However I'm ashamed to say I still don't have a decent mobile phone, so photo blogging is something I haven't got into yet. It's a matter of time though. Like Jon Udell, I'm not naturally an "AV guy". But I am artsy-fartsy by nature and in 2004 I'm able to express that using any number of inexpensive and accessible mainstream AV tools - such as digital cameras, PDA's, pxt mobile phones, software such as Garageband - and services such as Flickr and Audioblog. And blogging of course is the foundation.
One of my multimedia heroes is the late great Glenn Gould, who in the 60's and 70's recorded some amazing contrapuntal audio tapestries. The best known is a trilogy of recordings called The Solitude Trilogy. Here's an excerpt of the first of them, called "The Idea of North". The interweaving of voices mirrors the counterpoint that Gould so loved to play in his music (Bach's Goldberg Variations being the most famous example - coincidentally I listened to Gould's rendition of Bach's The Well-Tempered Klavier just last night, for the first time in ages). Gould himself referred to his audio work for CBC Radio as "contrapuntal documentaries".
I guess what I'm saying in this post is that I'll be closely following Jon Udell's series of columns on the mechanics of multimedia blogging. At the same time, I hope to explore the creative side of multimedia - building on the foundation of Glenn Gould and many other multimedia visionaries. I see lots of bloggers posting photos, mixing audio, and even composing original music. The time is ripe for multimedia.
I've started a new topic-focused weblog: eBookCulture.com. It's going to be exclusively on the topic of eBooks and the read/write culture that I think will develop around eBooks over the next few years. eBooks have so far not broken through into the mainstream, due to a number of factors - e.g. technical limitations of devices to read eBooks on, pricing that's way too high, reluctance to give up paper books, and many other things. All of which I'll be exploring at eBookCulture.com.
So why a blog focused entirely on eBooks, you may be asking? Here's some of the reasons that I wrote in my introductory post:
I decided to create a new weblog focused entirely on eBooks, because it's a topic I'd really like to get stuck into and 'learn by doing' (one of my favourite maxims). Possibly only a minority of my readers at Read/Write Web are interested in eBooks, so it made sense for me to start a new weblog on this topic. I can explore eBooks and write about them as much as I like over here :-)
If you're at all interested in eBooks, then feel free to subscribe to its RSS feed. I would expect it to attract a different type of audience to Read/Write Web, but there's bound to be some crossover appeal too. In any case, rest assured that Read/Write Web will remain my main online presence - my Web avatar, if you will. eBookCulture.com has a very narrow focus, which will allow me to explore different aspects of blogging.
Oh and I get to use Movable Type 3.0 in my new blog (yay!). I'm using the default design at the moment, but actually I quite like it. I won't be experimenting very much with web design on eBookCulture, as the focus will be on the topic of eBooks.
As a follow-up to my Reliance post yesterday, which was on the subject of my dependence on web servers, I read something by Mitch Kapor this morning that resonates (even though his post was from a different context):
"I think I've unfairly maligned servers in the past. It's not the server I dislike, it's the idea that as an end user I am disempowered if the work I want to do depends on the administration of a piece of software I don't control, can't get access to, and plays by a different set of rules. The PC-era pioneer in me says, "get rid of it". Another approach might be, "tame it and make it serve me".
Electricity comes out of the plug in the wall reliably (in the developed nations). Landline telephones have reliable dial tone. Why can't we have utility-level connectivity for user data? And why can't it be open source? This is a big, ambitious vision, and it's not just about servers per se, but operational reliability as an overall system function (think Google with its hundred thousand servers) but maybe there's something here. More on this later too."
There are a number of themes here that interest me. It's early in the day where I am and I haven't got my head around it all yet, but it's to do with: operational reliability, user empowerment on the Web, integration of the web system with one's person, control, "taming" computers, commoditization, and of course the old chestnut of browser-based apps vs desktop apps. This is a placeholder post, while I mull over it. If anybody has any relevant pointers or links, feel free to make a comment. p.s. isn't it interesting that when people discuss heavy themes like this, Google always comes up...
Audio and video blogging seem to be hot topics currently. I myself have done two, pretty low-tech, audio blog posts. Both were readings of textual posts, one of a Read/Write Web classic from January 2004 - The Fractal Blogosphere. And the second audio post was something I wrote just last week - A New Kind of Literacy. The results of my experiment? Ahem, it's fair to say my audio blogging has underwhelmed the blogosphere.
At first I was a bit perplexed by this, because I had thought that hearing a blogger's voice would give an extra dimension to blogging and bridge the gap even more between writer and reader. Audio blogging, I'd theorised, would bring the weblog as avatar concept one step closer.
However the reality turned out different. For a start I didn't get as much feedback on my experiments as I'd hoped for. Despite my C-List status, I expected at least 1-2 "so that's what you sound like!" type comments. Eventually I managed to coax a couple of blog buddies to give me some feedback. And it was then that the penny dropped. Thank-you Andrew and Liam!
Here's a summary then of what I did wrong and why audio blogging isn't for me, at least right now:
1. Reading out long-form blog posts, of a technical nature, isn't optimising the audio format. Each of my audio posts was 9-12 minutes long and dry in content - too long and boring to hold peoples attention. The optimal use of audio blogging is short, sharp and off-the-cuff commenting. Liam put this best:
"It's totally cool to hear your voice and all but I think it works best in short blasts - reading out the blog is a bit redundant and right now I think audio blogging is great for spur of the moment reports from the field."
2. There was little in the way of added value in my audio renditions of textual posts. I pretty much orated word for word what I'd written, so for people who'd read it on the screen there was nothing extra to be gained by listening to it. Except of course, for the curiousity value of hearing my voice (which turned out to be pretty low value). If I was to audio-blog again in the future, I'd look at purchasing software such as Garageband and try to add things that complement the text - background music, sound landscapes, voice sampling, digital recording trickery. In other words, mix in some media!
Andrew Chen summed this up well:
"If I were to really want to listen to it, it would be for value-added-ness in which the quality of your tone, rate of speaking, and so on would actually tell me more about the content than was conveyed in the text. Of course, given the nature of what you're writing about in those posts, there isn't supposed to be much more than what is conveyed in the text."
3. Lack of excitement. OK, I admit I'm not exactly a Barack Obama-like orator. My delivery was monotone, although I did try to inject some enthusiasm into the second post. There was even a brief moment of hilarity when I read out the 2blowhards.com quotes... wasn't there? Why are you shaking your head? Ok ok, Eddie Murphy's donkey in Shrek I am not.
4. Audio didn't reveal as much about my personality as I thought it might. Andrew summed this up best:
"It doesn't reveal much about you as a blogger or as a person - it just reveals something about you as a reader."
5. I was too low-tech and MP3 would've been a better format than WAV. Basically I just spoke into my Palm PDA, using its in-built Voice Mail software, and transferred it to my PC. I knew this would produce a lowish quality recording, but Doug Kaye of IT Conversations confirmed this in a comment he left on my first audio post:
"Your WAV was recorded at only 8,000bps/16-bit, so your quality is roughly that of a telephone. (8,000bps sample rate captures audio to ~4kHz.) If you record your WAV files at, say, 48,000bps, you'll get much better audio quality, most of which will be preserved when you compress to a 48kbps MP3. You won't get a smaller file than you have now, but you'll get one that sounds better. Then you still have the option of making an even more compressed MP3, such as 32,000bps or even 22,100bps if you want to give up some quality for file size."
So the upshot of all this? Well I learned a bit about audio and about my own limitations in the field at this point in time. I think I will come back to it later though, when I have the tools to play with it more and make decent quality recordings. For now, I'll stick to my knitting and keep on producing the long-form textual posts that you've come to expect from Read/Write Web.
The thing about web technology - and computing in general - that continues to frustrate me, is that it forces me to rely on hardware and software that is often outside of my direct control. It's all very well embracing the server side and using browser-based products like Movable Type and Bloglines, as I do. But it does mean I rely on the people who control the servers I use. For example, I've been trying to contact my web server hosts for the past week. They're based in the US and I've sent them a flurry of emails... but no response. It's holding up the release of my new topic-focused blog. And then this morning I notice that my website is down due to a server issue. And I'm helpless, because I don't control the server.
The moral for living on the server side is always to Back Up Your Data. Even so, when you rely on services - it's about more than data. It's almost like the servers I rely on are a part of me. Like extra limbs. Except in the back of my mind, I know the limbs can go dead or start twitching uncontrollably at any time. Or even fall off!
Anyway there is a point to this macabre little rant (besides venting my frustration at my web hosting company). Radio Userland's just appointed Steve Kirks as Product Manager and Steve has written a promising letter outlining the actions he'll be taking to improve the Radio Userland product. This is great news for Radio users, even if it's at least 2 years late. Like Marc Canter, I used to use Radio - a desktop application - to publish my weblog. In May I swapped to Movable Type, a server-side app. The big advantage of a desktop app is that it gives you more control, or at least it is one step removed from the reliance on a server. If the server goes down, you can at least continue to run the product on your desktop even if you can't publish your content. So your extra limbs continue to work, albeit in a restricted manner if the server is down.
I liked Radio, but decided to undergo a weblog transplant operation in May - opting for a more flexible blogging limb with enhanced functionality. I wrote a long post at the time that outlined why I moved from Radio to MT, which would be a useful reference to Steve now.
But the flexibility I got out of my new blogging limb came at the cost of increased reliance on my web server, which I sometimes feel isn't attached to me as closely as I'd like. Radio used to be marketed as a "personal web server" (not sure if it still is), which implies that the server is attached to you personally rather than being something you remote control from afar via an Internet connection. I have to admit, sometimes living on the desktop makes your extra limbs feel more naturally a part of you.
