Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga.

The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally:

A week in California and a finger in the recessionary wind has shown me where the smart money is moving. It is from online towards “live experience”.

The example of the music business is already well-known. Earnings from recordings have been plummeting for a decade, while from live they are rising ever faster. Warner Brothers release albums free online to publicise forthcoming concerts. In Britain HMV is closing 40 shops while tickets for a Rihanna concert can cost £330, and for Coldplay £180. A seat for Madonna is more expensive than her entire recorded output. A top American performer would reckon to earn between 80% and 90% of revenue from live performance. In the US alone, touring revenue that grossed $1bn in 1995 rose to $4.6bn last year. The big money, goes the catchphrase, “is now at the gate”. Nor is this just a youth phenomenon. On the American music circuit, 96% of singers were reportedly over 40 and almost half were over 60.

The potency of experience extends far beyond the realm of music. The upsurge in live comedy began in the mid-90s with tours by Robert Newman and David Baddiel, but now has Michael McIntyre and others appearing weekly, with back-up teams that would staff a circus. Performers such as Stephen Fry have taken to reading their books in public, Dickens-style, and simulcasting to hundreds of local cinemas. Close to a million people worldwide watch the Met Opera live in cinemas.

The most carefully researched audience activity, American politics, has swung from advertising and staged events to the archaic political form of active debate. The Republican primary campaign has seen 23 debates, winning unprecedented television audiences of 5-6 million …

The issue is the convergence of authenticity and mediation in what Joe Pine calls the experience economy. People matter in the world of (industrial) design and cultural production in a way that we haven’t seen for a long while. As I was recently commenting [link], the values at the heart of this human-centered design ultimately come down to relationships between people, their artifacts, and, crucially, both in the context of what Jenkins calls “civility”. (Recall the etymology – this is the world of the civis, the citizen – what I am calling res publica.)

Jenkins only comments on the significance of authenticity, of presence, of liveness. He doesn’t delve into the workings. A forthcoming book edited with Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye does just this kind of exploration with some performance artists and academics.

Presence, trace, record, media, document, archive … it is one of the culminations of our five year long “presence project”:

[Link] – Amazon

Here is a write-up in Fast Company – Storytree Wants Families To Spin, Share, And Save Good Yarns.

Storytree: Remember the Time from StoryTree on Vimeo.

A panel discussion with Marisa Gallagher of CNN. The topic was the future of journalism and the place of narrative. Mobile Media Design – Is the Medium Still the Message?.

The contemporary crisis in journalism is simple. With everyone able to witness and publish their experiences of newsworthy events, what role is there for the skilled, and expensive, journalist who is likely not present at the event?

Marisa showed us CNN’s superb new project – Open Stories – where anyone can make their own (online digital) contribution to an ongoing news event. [Link]

The role of the (CNN) journalist is here to

curate content.

I reiterated my now well-worn distinction between narrative and storytelling,
where narrative is the structure or grammar of character, plot and event, and

storytelling is the performance of narrative.

Storytelling – the articulation of performer/storyteller, place/event, audience/commentators, where narrative structure is (potentially) adapted to suit the particular performance. Storytelling can accommodate deep critique of the familiar formulaic frames that we all know so well and which shut down our appreciation of the unique human experience of place and event.

The (future) journalist – enabling, curating such performative events.

Faro – (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) – lighthouse (after the Pharos of Alexandria, with its cultural beacons – the Library and Museum).

Faro, Portugal – The European Convention of Faro: Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Council of Europe, 2005) – [Link].

FARO – the NGO cultural agency/consultancy in Flanders dedicated to promoting cultural heritage within the spirit and terms of the FARO convention.

Faro – an extraordinary sweetened and quintessentially Belgian ale based upon spontaneously fermented lambic.

I am back after a visit to Brussels and Tongeren (Limburg, Flanders, or technically, the Flemish Community) exploring the future of heritage – that powerful and contentious notion of cultural legacy.

Questions about the role of the past in the present, what to do with historical and archaeological sources and sites, museum collections, and especially in this part of the world, questions of the links between nation state and people, the region and “Europe”. Policy and agendas in this most important of cultural fields.

I was with FARO, the agency in the Flemish Community charged with integrating cultural heritage policy, stimulating qualitative management, long term sustainability and the unlocking of the cultural heritage. FARO is at the heart of a network of cultural heritage organizations designed to cultivate, to represent, to acknowledge and to valorise the different ways the public participates in and experiences cultural heritage. Under Marc Jacobs they are doing a superb job across several hundred museums organizations, local history societies, community groups. I heard about a year of events organized around the notion of “the fake”, a massive regional assessment of just what “heritage” is in the Flemish Community, managed through a new and open online database, plans for the annual week of taste – celebrations of cuisine and locality.

In particular FARO looks to implement the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention of 2005, as its name suggests. This is human-centered heritage (as distinct from focused upon sites and collections), particpatory, dynamic and negotiated, with cultural values and memory practices at the heart of quality of life and sustainable society, that is, looking forward as much as back. My long-standing argument that archaeology is as much about the future as the past.

For my part, I talked about the archaeological imagination, animating the archive, and ways of cocreating cultural heritage.

This was the first time I encountered the detail of the Faro Convention. It is quite a visionary document, very much worth sharing and discussion.

Not a long document: here are the highlights, as I see them.

Preamble
Recognising the need to put people and human values at the centre of an enlarged and crossdisciplinary concept of cultural heritage;

Emphasising the value and potential of cultural heritage wisely used as a resource for sustainable development and quality of life in a constantly evolving society;

Recognising that every person has a right to engage with the cultural heritage of their choice, while respecting the rights and freedoms of others, as an aspect of the right freely to participate in cultural life enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and guaranteed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966);

Convinced of the need to involve everyone in society in the ongoing process of defining and managing cultural heritage;

…

Article 1 Aims

c. emphasise that the conservation of cultural heritage and its sustainable use have human development and quality of life as their goal;

d. take the necessary steps to apply the provisions of this Convention concerning:
– the role of cultural heritage in the construction of a peaceful and democratic society, and in the processes of sustainable development and the promotion of cultural diversity;

Article 2 Definitions

a. cultural heritage is a group of resources inherited from the past which people identify, independently of ownership, as a reflection and expression of their constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions. It includes all aspects of the environment resulting from the interaction between people and places through time;

Article 3 refers to different forms of cultural heritage that together constitute a shared source of remembrance, understanding, identity, cohesion and creativity.

Article 5 – Cultural heritage law and policies

The Parties undertake to:

a. recognize public interest, enhancing value through identification, study, interpretation, protection, conservation and presentation;

c. ensure, in the specific context of each Party, that legislative provisions exist for exercising the right to cultural heritage as defined in Article 4;

d. foster an economic and social climate which supports participation in cultural heritage activities;

e. promote cultural heritage protection as a central factor in the mutually supporting objectives of sustainable development, cultural diversity and contemporary creativity;

Section II – Contribution of cultural heritage to society and human development

Article 7 – Cultural heritage and dialogue

The Parties undertake, through the public authorities and other competent bodies, to:

a. encourage reflection on the ethics and methods of presentation of the cultural heritage, as well as respect for diversity of interpretations;

d. integrate these approaches into all aspects of lifelong education and training.

Article 8 – Environment, heritage and quality of life

Here is recognition of the complementarity of cultural, biological, geological and landscape diversity

and 8c refers to the importance of “place”

Article 9 is about sustainability – cultural heritage as an essential component of change

d. … promote the use of materials, techniques and skills based on tradition, and explore their potential for contemporary applications;

Section III – Shared responsibility for cultural heritage and public participation

This section is about the importance of participation and access, especially among young people – including encouraging constructive criticism of policy.

Article 13 – Cultural heritage and knowledge

a. facilitate the inclusion of the cultural heritage dimension at all levels of education, not necessarily as a subject of study in its own right, but as a fertile source for studies in other subjects;

b. strengthen the link between cultural heritage education and vocational training;

c. encourage interdisciplinary research on cultural heritage, heritage communities, the environment and their inter-relationship;

Article 14 – Cultural heritage and the information society

The Parties undertake to develop the use of digital technology to enhance access to cultural heritage and the benefits which derive from it, by:

a. encouraging initiatives which promote the quality of contents and endeavour to secure diversity of languages and cultures in the information society;

This begs development of participatory, collaborative and social software and networks.

Implementation?

Broad and visionary, yes, with questions immediately raised of implementation. That’s what we are trying in the Binchester project, and this is what I talked about at Tongeren, with a group of heritage managers and academics at the Gallo-Romeins Museum [Link] and [Link].

What associations will emerge?

The result – a textured wireframe model of one of the architectural features of this hill top settlement. As excavated by the archaeologists. Gigabytes of information. And you can spin the circular structure, look at it from any direction, zoom in, zoom out. Maybe at some point you might be able to put smart gloves on and touch the model.

Point – you can explore the site off-site, with colleagues who may never have been there. And preserve the past for ever as a data matrix, albeit a big one (but consider Quine’s Democritean universes – this will never work).

Wired magazine (September 2003) have just run an article claiming this technology as a way of preserving the past. They have scanned in the forum at Pompeii.

But what is being represented here in such photographic reality that surpasses photography?

This modeling and imaging is based on the notion that archaeologists dig up the past and the end result is a product – the site, the artifact – and this product is the past, what we are after, what we desire, want to hold on to.

But it isn’t. These are gigabyte-big models of things made by the team of archaeologists who decided that some stones belonged together as a building of a certain date and cleared away the stones thought secondary to the structure. The end result comes at the end of a long and often contentious process of interpretation – this is the detective work that is archaeology.

And why do I want all this information about the undulations across the surface of an ashlar block, or the stratigraphic surface left irregular by the archaeologist? Photography can be highly naturalistic and look real, but often tells us mostly about superficial details that don’t matter to our attempts to make sense and understand.

This is the old illusion – that perspective and a faithfulness to the external appearance of things gives us a hold on reality.

The dream – eventually with so much data at hand you will be able to fill in the gaps. This is the usual and impossible desire to bring back the dead. I say – look! – the past is over and done, decayed, ruined, lost. We only have a few bits to work on. This is what is fascinating.

What about the things that are going on underneath, that produced the remains of the past that we work on?

So I said that this kind of project is like that in the movie the Matrix – to create a world that actually doesn’t or didn’t exist, though it appears real. It is an illusion.

Instead of VR why not develop AR – augmented reality – like in Terminator or Robocop – where our cyborg hero/antiheroes can access and pull up all kinds of information in their field of vision that helps them make sense of what is going on and decide on a course of action. And it may simply be a text entry in a simple database – not a gigabyte of graphics.

And on reconstruction – see what we are doing with deep mapping.

Over at Anne Balsamo’s place.

Tilty table – tilt the table and the picture projected on it moves. Wonderful.

As Joe Adler pointed out – a new way of scrolling, of flying across a picture or document – and it could be the size of a football field.

New physical and embodied interfaces for digital media – new material media and people-thing relationships – shove, pull, slide, whatever.

I love the lab too – lots of stuff to get you thinking lying around, places to talk, places to make stuff.

Background – XFR – experiments in the future of reading – a project of Research in Experimental Documents, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and run as an exhibition that started at San Jose Tech Museum.

Sam and I have been talking about his thoughts on media and archaeology, and about the Metamedia lab for a few months now – I have pulled together some of the highlights.

The main point is about setting up a dialogue between Sam’s world of information science and software design, and mine of archaeology and material culture.

An idea for Traumwerk

Traumwerk is our wiki.

Monday 11 Nov 2002

Sam to Michael

BTW – I had another idea for all this: do some kind of text analysis on each entry you type in to try to find ‘matching’ entries in some sense, richer than just matching on single words. The idea being to have the system spot people who are talking about related things or things from the same point of view, and bring them together automatically. Some of this might just come out of the organization of the data itself, but I have a suspicion that there are more interesting ways to look at the text coming in and correlate it.

This might be a bit for this abstract as well – the idea that this is a framework for exploring different ways of correlating information and communication, and mapping that correlation on to either a topology or a community, or both. In fact, an interesting ‘meta-community’ idea would be to allow some kind of programming of the ‘correlation engine’, so a community of developers could use this tool to explore even more creative kinds of correlation. Like…image recognition correlation, lexical analysis of the text entered to discover ‘readability’ and thus connect people at like levels, etc.

One other idea that comes to my fevered brain sitting here is that we should try to connect this to the larger world somehow – maybe the pages can be used to do intelligent google queries and import data (an example – the lists feature google has could be used to look for and complete lists of ideas being developed within the community, and to develop links between the various lists identified). I like this a lot, because it means you can turn this system loose, tell it to restrict to your domain when looking at google, and it will organize your data for you as you add data. Lots of leverage for the entering of your data…this is a cool idea.

New media?

Thursday 27 March 2003

Sam to Michael

Another thing I thought about on the way home…for ‘old’ media, we had sets of rules about how to build documents (sentence, paragraph, etc). Many of these rules have cultural impact (“how do I interpret this painting?”) some are practical (“what the hell is this newspaper article about?”). The new media need new rules for and new techniques for discovering the rules – this is an aspect of the study of this center. For example, imagine a living document meant to act as a resource for, say, doctors. It’s not enough to just make it a rich document, you also have to have an idea in the structure of the document of the validity of the information, timeliness, reputation of the doctor, etc. The structure of the medium and the tools to create it would need to reflect this. You’d want a theory of documents to fall back on when designing this (middle layer), and some methodology to test, build and refine it (bottom layer).

Michael to Sam

Right.

What your are thinking through is a theory less of media and more of what has come to be called discourse (in a Foucauldian rather a than common sense notion), with discourse subsuming different media, but including performatives, communities, hierarchies, gatekeepers, archives, rhetorics, and a whole lot more.

The difference – taking on digital implications from an insiders/designers view.

Sam to Michael

I suppose that’s true. I thought that a major theme of your work was that the line between discourse and media is blurred, at best.

Michael to Sam

As we were saying yesterday – the old notions of media are quite outmoded – so yes a blurring, but also both terms need radical rethinking (the key is the need for detailed theorising of the relation between media, events (temporality, process), and clients/communities/networks/cultures.

Sam to Michael

Agreed.

We are going to need some new words.

Here’s a question for you – is the internet a test bed for new document types, as we discussed yesterday, or is it, itself, simply a single new form of media? In other words, is a chat group analogous to a paragraph, or to television?

And here’s another thought about a form that has evolved out of the structure of a new media – the emoticon – the smiley. A classic example of how the parameters of a meduim (the lack of emotional bandwidth of email coupled with the low cost and latency) lead to a need (the ability to communicate emotional content) and an emergent standard form (particularly fascinating is that the form was emergent – there’s probably a Ph.D. or two in just analyzing how networked groups develop document standards in new media without centralization – you could do this for all kinds of new media – newsgroups, comments in source code, blogs, etc).

Monday 31 Mar 2003

Sam to Michael

An article today in Salon ? it isn’t really about what we’ve been talking about, but the first page of it muses on some modern digital effects. A good quote:

“Now it seems that the project of science is not primarily to represent the natural world with language but to reconfigure the natural world as language, so that it can be composed, transformed, and manipulated in the ways our minds are equipped to operate upon knowledge itself. ”

Another good quote:

“The computer is seen in quantitative terms, as a large dose of the exact ideas brought about by the print revolution three centuries ago. ”

Michael to Sam

When we talked the other day about semiotics meeting information science we raised a whole load of baggage about the nature of language, its paradigmatic status and what it has to do with communication (information etc etc) – there have been a few books that have brought critical theory together with information/cognitive science, but all are very much theory.

Sam Schillace (2009)

Sam to Michael

We don’t have to get stuck on anything raised in that conversation. I think we’re undergoing a new round of finding a common language to discuss our concerns. Think of that as the seed crystal…I would like to get to a charter for the meta-media lab sooner rather than later, but it ought to be the right one.

New discourse?

Tuesday 1 April 2003

Sam to Michael

You said something yesterday about “now we’re getting into a theory of discourse”. It stuck with me as being wrong somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I have it:

Before modern technology, there was “discourse” and there were “documents”. This division represented a choice between two tradeoffs. Either you could have immediate, fluid connection with someone, without any recording of the conversation (a play or lecture, for example, is only recorded in one direction, conversations etc are not recorded at all), or recorded conversation that was not fluid or alive (a book, cultural discourse in the form of a painting, etc).

Now you can pick any of (recorded, not recorded) and (fluid, static) in any medium you want (and mix and match – kids today can record your lectures, render them into text via speech recognition, and make all kinds of manipulations on that – fluid, but also preserved, searchable, linkable, etc). In fact, the idea of the eigenvectors paper is that you have even more choices beyond that (and, I’m realizing as I write this that we must also believe that these choices will continue to subdivide forever, according to our charter).

So that idea (the blurring of the distinction between document and discourse) is in the ‘middle’ layer of the MML. It’s not the whole layer, it’s just one specific theoretical instantiation of the more general abstract idea that “more computational power is makes a qualitative difference in the practice of all the arts and sciences” (our most abstract charter), in a specific field of knowledge, discourse.

And Traumwerk is a specific practical implementation of that middle piece of theory – a deliberate exploration of the connection between document and discourse, in a living setting, with an eye towards the changes and effects that occur as the parameters are changed (oh, and here’s another one for the future: when we get enough power in the programming language, the parameterization of the tramwerk will become self-referential: the participants will be able to make changes to the configuration as part of their discourse. We could actually do some of this now in a more hard-coded way, e.g. links to a chat room, online meeting, etc, but it would be fun to explore this idea further).

So that’s our conversation by the fountain, rehashed.

(BTW, I like “Computational Semiotics” better than “Semiotics in the information age”).

Michael to Sam

This is one of those issues of vocabulary of our different fields – we are actually in precisely the same space and I agree with everything you are saying here – I was using discourse in a technical sense – so when I say we are getting into a theory of discourse, it is one that is making just these points about materiality, form, relationality, institutionalization and more.

The concept of discourse, in this specialized sense, I think, offers a way of bridging social sciences/humanities/cognitive science/information science.

And the very neat thing, is, as you say, that the likes of Traumwerk is both based on such thinking (about discourse), but also allows refinement of the thinking in its use and development.

I have a section about discourse in one or more of my books, but I can’t remember where!

Sam to Michael

Ah, I understand now. I’m sure this will be a challenge going forward…actually, one of the things the Metamedia lab can do, possibly, is develop this kind of rigorous language that the disparate disciplines can use to communicate…who knows?

Media and archaeology (and social evolution)

Wednesday 7 May 2003

Sam to Michael

So…I’ve been reading your nemesis, “Guns, Germs and Steel”. Jared Diamond makes an argument that I’ve heard before, and I’m sure you have, about the reasons behind the rise of societies. But, this time I’m seeing it in the context of the MML, and there’s perhaps an interesting conclusion to it now.

The story about why we have centralized societies goes basically like this: we shift from hunter-gatherer to food production basically because of accidental selection of domesticable species. Food production means more frequent birth schedules and thus denser populations, which means more food production, etc. When the group is clan size or below (couple of hundred people), everyone knows everyone, and the societies are typically egalitarian. But as soon as the group gets big enough to have strangers in it, you begin to need central authorities to manage conflicts, etc. These authorities eventually get selected for the ones who tell the most compelling stories about why they are in power (i.e. religions), advantage their clan appropriately, etc. Eventually this autocatalytic cycle carries you up to the size of states. This is why all successful societies are centralized, have some kind of religion, etc.

I think the *new* conclusion to see in this is that the original problem (getting strangers to communicate and be organized) is basically one of, you guessed it, communications medium bandwidth. In other words, early societies never had enough bandwidth to effectively communicate and self organize past a few hundred people, so they had to invent heuristics (religions and laws) and implement them (churches, courts) to function.

But…and here’s the cool thing…we are now beginning to have that bandwidth. A trivial example: consider the communication that happens in a chat room (bunch of people who’ve never seen each other, don’t even know where they live, communicating about a shared topic) from the perspective of a primitive society – it’s absolutely fantastic, and we take it utterly for granted because it’s now ‘easy’. So now, we can communicate in large communities (web pages, news groups, slashdot, google, automatic trading networks, etc, etc) without having central organization. In fact, this kind of self organization is one of the more exciting things going on right now.

I firmly believe that we now have a literally unprecedented ability to communicate, record, and organize ourselves without central control, and that we are just at the very beginning of figuring out how to use this, largely because we’re just mired in old habits. Someone will figure out new ways of being a community and a society that are more effective (see the Bruce Sterling story “Manki Neko” for example) and all of a sudden things will change. It will seem obvious in retrospect when it happens.

So this is cool, I think. It connects the media work to your archaeological work, but from a different angle – instead of seeing archeology as a media event or document, this is more an archeological view of media and how it impacts (or could impact) physical and social culture.

If you want to be really grandiose, you could say that we want to embark on the new realm of non-physical archeology in the digital domain – examining the digital artifacts of communication to understand the underlying virtual communities. That would be an almost literal mapping of archeology onto the digital age, except that I think you are contemporary with what the society being examined, and may even look ahead of it and affect it.

Michael to Sam

Origins of farming? Actually it wasn’t really like this at all – the old distinction between h/g and agriculture has been overdrawn – it is much more of a continuum – this is where Diamond is still very nineteenth century in his thinking. (And notice his realtor’s view of history – all that matters is location, location, location.)

But this does not detract from the comments you make about bandwidth.

Sam to Michael

Ah, I should have know I was bringing coals to Newcastle. This makes sense. This notion of self-organization is, for me, the really interesting issue.

Michael to Sam

I actually think that some early communities were large AND self-organizing – we do have examples of egalitarian communities with extensive range and the capacity to organize large labor forces (early farmers in the Near East and Europe).

Sam to Michael

This is very interesting. I’d like to understand more about these communities, and why they failed. Perhaps bandwidth isn’t the whole picture – there’s always a strong element of natural selection and effectiveness. So, yet another way to look at the modern era is with a biological analog: a new biosphere has been opened up by the internet and we are just beginning to try to exploit it. It may or may not be the case that some organizational strategy more fit will arise from the new configuration of the biosphere (“mediasphere”), we have to wait and see.

I wrote the following – What do you think of it?

I firmly believe that we now have a literally unprecedented ability to communicate, record, and organize ourselves without central control, and that we are just at the very beginning of figuring out how to use this, largely because we’re just mired in old habits. Someone will figure out new ways of being a community and a society that are more effective (see the Bruce Sterling story “Manki Neko” for example) and all of a sudden things will change. It will seem obvious in retrospect when it happens.

Michael to Sam

Maybe unprecedented, I would emphasize the ‘mired in old habits’.

Sam to Michael

I think the cheapness and low latency of distance communication is unprecedented, literally, and also the ease of recording and searching old communications (think “oral traditions” – this is an important task for all societies). The massive, cheap availability of all these is unprecendented, and I make the claim that this quantitative change will in fact turn out to be qualitative.

And what about the following:

So this is cool, I think. It connects the media work to your architectural work, but from a different angle – instead of seeing archeology as a media event or document, this is more an archeological view of media and how it impacts (or could impact) physical and social culture.

Michael to Sam

Right – an archaeological view of media – media with history and legacy.

And a material view of media – in that media have material form and effect.

And in fact media are not ‘media’ per se (coming between, mediating units that are given, a posteriori, primacy), but are intimate aspects of the socio-cultural fabric – media as modes of (socio-cultural) engagement.

Sam to Michael

Yes. I like this a lot, actually. I had been looking for this connection.

And this?

If you want to be really grandiose, you could say that we want to embark on the new realm of non-physical archeology in the digital domain – examining the digital artifacts of communication to understand the underlying virtual communities. That would be an almost literal mapping of archeology onto the digital age, except that I think you are contemporary with what the society being examined, and may even look ahead of it and affect it.

Michael to Sam

Well I’m right with you here – you’re beginning to see the archaeological everywhere! – and yes, as the MATTER of information science.

Sam to Michael

An interesting way to put it.

I’ve never heard of anyone make this connection, actually. Basically, archaeology is active and vital in the digital age, and may, in fact have connections to a more proactive (instead of observational) science, due to the changing nature of the media forms it’s examining (i.e. the digital forms are fast and malleable enough that you can do archaeology in ‘realtime’ instead of thousands of years in the future. This becomes some kind of engineering discipline that is active instead of passive). Writing this up might be one of our medium term goals – we might think of the projects we do in the lab in terms of generating good material to expose this thesis.

We should have a sit down one of these days.

Metamedia Lab, Stanford – April 2006 – Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sandro Kop, Tilda Swinton, Henry Lowood, Sam Schillace, Henrik Bennetsen

The fitness of new media

Sunday 11 May 2003

Sam to Michael

I want to get back down to more practical ideas, if we can. Or at least brainstorm some.

An interesting aside, first: I read a quote today in the Merc about how people spend time doing things like being in a chat room instead of being out of the house, and that, while most people think this is not good, it’s hard to stop. I think this is an interesting phenomenon, the chatroom media (in this example) is being selected for in some sense. This fits in, to some degree, with our earlier conversation about fitness of the new media and the concurrent changes.

Here’s some ideas on pragmatism: I want to actively design a new media form. I would like to actually work through the eigenvectors idea a bit, in terms of contemporary examples of successful new media, specifically look at how they interact with different tasks and situations, and design some media that is more interesting. A specific example – I think that email is successful because it fills a ‘situational niche’ in people’s lives – that is, it’s the right combination of behaviors (latent, asychronous, recorded, easy) to fill a role for certain kinds of communication. The role was always there (or normal human behavior always afforded this kind of media), it used to be filled by other media (e.g. letters), and those are now being displaced by email.

So…I want to design some communication tools that are well integrated with these kinds of user needs – a concrete example is a wiki/blog that is integrated well with email and instant messaging. Integrating rich media (images, voice, ink, etc) is in there too…the goal would be to create a genuinely new form of media or community or site that is more compelling to work with. We can do this within the Traumwerk project, I think.

Why email is useful

Thursday 5 Jun 2003

Sam to Steve (snewman@speakeasy.net) and Michael

Just an interesting thought – I sometimes use email as a reminder system, kind of like a mercury line. Example – I have an issue with the help stuff I’m working on. I need Claudia to answer it, so I send her an email…and forget about the issue, assuming I’ll hear back from her. In essence, the email has a tiny bit of workflow built into it – the system emergently ‘knows’ that a message is active (it’s sitting in someone’s mailbox), with very little unnatural intervention from the users other than replying to each other, and (unless the humans decide otherwise) the message will continue to propagate until it’s resolved. A very nice extension of my brain – a piece of ‘living’ data that will come back to me with very little intervention on the part of any of the people involved.

I think this is probably part of what’s so appealing about email, that it’s a tiny, tiny step in the direction of software that’s able to understand the context of human interaction and help out (it doesn’t help out much – it just remembers the sender(s) of the mail, contents, helps you store it in a natural queue to deal with, will deal with moving it back with all this information intact, etc). There’s probably a very good bit of thinking/research to be done here to expand this ability. E.g. what other kinds of context can we capture through the structure of a communications medium. I’d love to see something like email that can ‘understand’ the nature of things like unfinished thoughts, groups of related ideas, etc. This is probably a good place to start thinking about some kind of system that integrates documents with communications like email or IM – there’s probably a way to structure the system so it ‘knows’ when a piece of information should be stored in a particular online document, when it should be cross-referenced, etc.

Food for thought.

Steve to Sam

Yup. Lots of people work like this.

I tend to leave messages in my outbox until I’ve gotten a reply or otherwise know that the issue has been resolved. I wish I had a better way to track such things.

To experiment with this, I think step 1 is to create a system that has access to all of your email traffic, and as much other data as possible (maybe it’s integrated with a Wiki). Then start iteratively adding features. Arguably, to be able to do any good, the system should *be* your email client (replacing your current client). That’s a significant first step to cross, but it is tempting to try to cross it.

Here they are in draft (and written jointly in Hydra)

Aims

to discuss and describe media in the abstract, that is as distinct from technical and material properties

to develop a set of terms and methodologies for proactive design of media forms – tools for ‘product design’

These terms will also function as components of a history of media and of (media) design.

Premise and timeliness – media in the light of the digital

Design is here seen as heterogeneous engineering (that is not presupposing any particular definitions of materiality, virtuality, the technical or the cultural)

The aims imply an analysis of the components of product design today in a digital world – creativity, collaboration, research, analysis, styles, and with the digital involving an erosion of conventional distance between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’.

The digitization of media removes artifacts from ‘material’ culture. This allows a more rigorous and abstract analysis of media forms and a more deliberate construction of them for specific tasks. The goal is to put forward a set of well-defined terms and methods for doing this analysis and construction.

Alternate way of expressing this: the digitization of media replaces the media artifacts of material culture with different artifacts of digital culture.

See also the Metamedia Lab discussion document

Definition of medium

A medium is a formalized method for conveying a specific kind of information to specific participants. The manner in which this happens is subject to control and negotiation. Usually there has to be some agreement over encoding and decryption. Historically the notion of medium has been intimately associated with and constrained by material and technology, e.g. paint, paper, etc. And also certain institutional forms that controlled the technology. Now it’s becoming less constrained because of the increasing digital nature of communication.

Conventional terms/definitions/components

Media Studies are well established as a branch of cultural studies. Topic – cultural production.

NB also theme of creativity – creating in a cultural sphere

And here culture is often oppposed to material infrastructures in that it is seen to consist of ideas, values, images/representations.

Components of such a cultural studies

technology – eg TV
tools as extensions of the person and the group
material form – paint, film, paper
rules and norms
qualifications for entry
archives/storage
gatekeepers
organisational architectures – TV studio, movie studio
groups, communities, producers, consumers, institutions, organizations
relations of cultural production
power relations – access, control
ideology critique – mass media as ideological state apparatuses

semiotics – communication – signifier-signified-referent
narratology and applications of literary theory/cultural theory

media history

Eigenvectors – media components/parameters

Latency

The delay from changing information to it’s being consumed by other participants. E.g. IM is extremely low latency, email has this weird asymmetric latency – it’s fast to respond but may be slow to read. Newspapers are very slow. Blogs are very fast. Most digital media has low latency. Except eg digital layout for conventional print media.

People notice latency.

Latency is often relative to expectations within the task at hand. A 10 second delay in the context of IM is noticeable and annoying, but in the context of web publishing, is nothing. Hydra is another good example of this.

Persistence

How robust the medium is, how long the data persist without active maintence. Email is fairly persistent, IM is not. Documents are mostly about persistence.

issue here of materiality and curation – in relation to archives
matter here of the archaeology of media

Redundancy

Persistence is related to redundancy. Digitization gives us the choice of how much redundancy we want, and this is an economic choice and we always choose the short-term most economically efficient path. So, we tend to have very ephemeral digital media, because there’s no (economically acceptable) way to choose robustness.

Richness

Raw email text may not be very rich – is very flat – a haiku may be very rich – layout may increase the richness of text

NB McLuhan’s hot and cold media

Complexity

In an information sense this is related to entropy (how much disorder is there?) eg a string of digits is non-entropic because it can be easily compressed – compression is about finding non-entropy/order – and high entropy looks like random noise

Digital media are more complex – they are more entropic – more difficult to compress

Encryption – compression is related to encryption (the encrypted form looks highly entropic)

a painting therefore doesn’t look very complex – eg digitally curating the Mona Lisa might result in a high res compressed file of 10MB – but this is not very redundant

One-to-many-ness

A broadcast factor (1-1, M-M, etc)

Computational accessability

Text vs video vs paint vs XML – eg trying to create semantic webs – semantic computation as a project that ignores (usually) the sociology, the culture

a new factor is available computing power – Google has lots of computing power

Structure/formalism

Programming language, HTML, vs raw text, etc – the degree to which it is parsable (and is therefore computationally accessible) Structure and CA, are often at odds with people. This can be solved, and is more and more, with additional computation. eg Google. Or, my ‘mood indicator’ on my email program, etc.

Lots to think about here with respect to grammar and formal anaylsis.

Temporal structure

The ability to capture, index, retrieve data over time.

- synchronous communication/concurrence – also NB speech and text

Transactional costs

- go down across the board with computation and digitization. E.g. painting with oil vs painting with Painter Pro. wet plaster v Epson printer – NB the sociology of this and matters of democratization/ status/prestige goods/media) WWW has low transactional costs v TV (with its studios, licenses, organizations)

Compatibility/social context

eg everyone uses Word, and hates it.
Also known as network effects.

We need some vectors with more social/political implications – control, accessibility, hierarchy.

and in heterogeneous engineering the iconography is embedded in the painting – there is always the specific location of the painting that is part of its being

NB cross linkages
persistence/robustness/archive – related to complexity, entropy

Examples, with their vectors

- email
- Hydra
- blogs
- video
- instant messaging
- google
- newsgroups

Analytical methodologies

Notes

is the term medium now obsolete?

event engineering – this is partly what the new ‘media’ do

and ‘media’ are now so evidently about social/cultural groups making themselves via things/interactions/information transfers – as they always were

what does it mean now to invent a new ‘medium’?
eg – is a blog a medium?

University of California Irvine
at the UC Humanities Research Institute

Occasion – a colloquium on the future of the humanities in a digital world.

Attending – people from university humanities centers across the US, librarians, some government people, IT people (various supercomputing centers), and from the IT industry.

There are some big initiatives planned or underway – to take the digitization of libraries further, to have digital copies of every book and document available online, to digitize museums.

Most of the discussion was around a classic archaeological matter – cultural preservation – creating archives and catalogues, digital libraries and museums of cultural goods – literature and art especially. This is not a new project at all, of course, whatever the implications of information technology. It reminds me of some of the great defining projects of archaeology – to create vast museum collections; but also data repositories – catalogues of ancient sites and civilizations. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum – a series of catalogues of ancient ceramics in every museum in the world. Pauly-Wissowa – Realencyclopaedie der classischen altertumswissenschaft – the last, multivolume, word on classical antiquity. At least these were the dreams of their creators.

Now though, the custodians of culture, (Culture capitalized), have the resources, or at least the technology, they think, to realize the great encyclopedic goals of modernity. Make it all digital and open to everyone from the comfort of their home PC (in the nineteenth century it was the rail network and no admission charges to the British Museum).

More specifically, most discussion was around the design of the information to be archived, and the machinery of preservation – scanning books (what of physical objects?), recording metadata, what kind of hardware infrastructures?

Here are some of the issues that came up.

The machinery of preservation and information design. Archives and museums, though based around physical artifacts (books, papers and all sorts of other things, including CPUs, hard drives and monitors), are usually seen as information systems. So, for many, the question is how to design a database for eternity, or at least one that can be updated – if we are going to digitize everything, lets make sure the database is designed the right way. Technically and administratively this is an issue of metadata standards and interoperability.

Interdisciplinary fields are prominent in people’s thinking. So – how do we get scientists together with humanists? Here this is usually taken to mean techies, providing the databases and hardware, and content people, the authors, artists and academics. Several of the IT people called out for it to be realized that they have the solutions – the machines are available, the storage capacity, the software expertise, the science – if only the content people would just give them the goods.

Infrastructures. What is needed to achieve the great archive of everything? Do the big amounts of data need grid strategies and distributed resources? Here we are into institutional policy. Many were concerned about being at the table in policy decisions that addressed grand top-down strategies.

MaterialitiesWith respect to physical things – some were concerned about creating digital museums (based upon objects as well as texts). And, of course, there are many examples of web sites and museum exhibits that use IT to access collections. But they are limited and the task of creating complete digital versions of collections was unanimously considered too great – too much time and labor involved.

Bioinformation – clearly this is going to be a major component of information networks in the future. What is to be done with it? This leads to questions of access, digital divides, copyright and creative commons.

Digital impacts on society. While the archivists were interested in preservation and record, others were very aware of the implications of digital authorship. For the academics it means looking to digital publishing – e-publication – as the medium of scholarship. Many journals already rely on on-line access. University promotions committees will soon have to recognize a web site as grounds for tenure, rather than a monograph published by the likes of Cambridge University Press.

Here now, it started getting more interesting for me, with questions like – what might interdisciplinary humanities do?

And, more abstractly – what are the underlying metaphors, appropriate, inappropriate? Many are spatial – D spaces, sites. Or physical – records.

My line?

I am very wary of the old dreams (call them metanarratives) underlying these discussions. Many rely on modernist and romantic notions of the triumph of technology. So some of the techies, and this is how they see themselves – as problem solvers, were saying we can do whatever you want, we have the tools, it will not be an issue of hardware, we can make everything available, after we decide on the standards. The, unvoiced, corollary is that, as custodians of culture, we are facing loss. An alliance of scientists, policy makers and administrators can engineer social memory – a utopia in the face of loss, forgetting, and maybe a digital dark ages. The barbarians may even be at the gates.

We think of archives, libraries and museums as store houses – monumental and static, maybe even dusty. We think of archives, libraries and museums as store houses – monumental and static, maybe even dusty. No – this is an antiquarian emblem and just the appearance that overlays the immense efforts of curation that they embody.

Information lives. Information is a verb. Data are best conceived as events – series of queries and decisions about appraisal, value, curation, what to keep, what to just leave, what to let go. Tim Lenoir, as a historian of digital technologies is absolutely right to emphasize what we all know – that the life of particular media today is minimal. Many data formats, file types, hardware media are now inaccessible, even with the original machinery and in the hands of those who generated and worked with the original data – it was always a skill to get things to work, and those skill sets don’t necessarily persist. We need an archaeology of the information age.

What lasts? Stone tools, clay tablets, but even then only with the work of archaeologists to recover and conserve, and with the effort of decryption, analysis, interpretation, relocating in the archaeological present.

Information design? Is it a case of crafting the perfect digital record card? Of anticipating users’ queries fifty years ahead, and thus ensuring the useful life of the information? I think such a project is doomed to failure. I think it is a utopian dream to imagine that we can come up with a design that will have significant persistence, that is without actions performed upon the archive, without curation.

Here we do well to distinguish preservation from conservation. Think of one of my Molly’s jokes. How do you preserve wildlife? Pickle a squirrel. Conservation, as curation, requires a persistence of acts of intervention, looking after things and everything, ecologically, they connect with. In this way data are active and require energy to persist in their cultural ecologies.

An anecdotal and academic point – archaeologists have been collecting and publishing their finds for two centuries and more. The vast majority of stuff in museums and data published in journals and monographs is useless to the contemporary archaeologist. Why? Because archaeologists today are not interested in the same questions as prompted the collection and publication back then. But this is not just to say that people’s int

erests change. Past and present archaeological interests are connected. Data are different today precisely because of the work of archaeologists a century ago.

Another way of seeing this life of the archive is to realize that an eternal life for information is not an option. We need to be able to let go of the past. And what remains is changed. Just as memory is not a record of what happened in our past – it is the act of recollection in present circumstances. And these circumstances change what we recall and how we treat it.

So how might we imagine the work of these cultural archives. What are these acts of curation? Apart from the obvious – the need to constantly look after stuff and translate it into current purpose and interest. We can start by switching from a custodial project to one of active authorship. Sam Schillace is always on at me about the significance of open source production, of iteration and adaptational strategies at the heart of creative and useful software design.

So we can come at the question of digital culture from the opposite direction to that of that utopian information design I have described. For example, with processing power and storage very cheap, and becoming greater and cheaper, the best approach to the archive is surely one that works with messy data, constantly accreting and changing, and relies on smart searching – new kinds of search engines. Local and site specific relationships with information (rather than global design solutions). We can think of the implications of disintermediation, of distributed and decentralized storage and curation. Here browsing and searching are curatorial interactions with the archive, interventions that relocate specific information sets.

On digital media – I see too much focus on the digital as a distinct, rather than hybrid medium, rather than as optionally different modes of engagement. So in shifting from custodial model of digital information to an emphasis on active authorship, we need to work upon the heterogeneity of the digital, dealing with the physicality of relationship, of engagement. Acts of curation are also performative engagements. And text on a screen is not text upon a page, though the alphabetic encryption may be identical. A screen upon a wall is not a theater, just as a TV screen is not a handheld PDA, even though they all may transmit the same content. I am starting to wander off the point now.

To end – the point I constantly make about archaeology – archaeologists don’t discover the past – they work on what is left behind.