vaunraymondblog

BRANDING, GENRES & AUTHENTICITY

2007-02-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

Pretty gruesome cartoon, isn’t it? When I hear business people evangelizing about the importance of “branding” I can’t help but think about the original meaning of the word and the whole subject of herding animals.

For most of my life the word “brand” was practically synonymous with “company” or “manufacturer.” Kellog’s was a brand of cereals. Campbell’s was a brand of soup. These brands were big, permanent, iconic parts of society, as Andy Warhol well appreciated. In the last few decades, however, brands have become slippery, filmy, elusive things that come and go, spring up like mushrooms and often fly by night. In the age of corporate buyouts, outsourcing and transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, brands and companies seem to have become separate entities.

Several years ago I was videotaping in a factory that manufactured a certain product for several companies. As I taped, my tour guide made sure I avoided capturing images of packaging that would reveal who the factory’s clients were. He explained that if people found out that some of their favorite brands are manufactured in the same plant, by the same people, from the same raw materials and on the same production lines as many other competing brands, they might be a little upset.

Today when I look at product labels, advertisements or websites, I think back to that factory and realize that the images companies strive to project - of unique products created by passionate people in special places - are often a bunch of baloney. That down-home chili company that shows a grandma stirring an iron kettle on its label and gives a mailing address in a small Texas town may be nothing more than a guy with a phone and some investment capital, making deals with manufacturers and distributors from his office in New Jersey.

In the boomtowns of the Old West (where the benefits of branding, in the original sense, were well understood), businessmen knew how to herd people into their tents and take their money. They did it by nailing a bunch of boards together, painting them to look like storefronts and propping them in front of the tents with signs that said things like “Jake’s Elegant New York Bar: Fine Sprits, Wines and Card Room; Ladies Welcome.” Never mind that the walls would flap on a windy night.

Today we are living through another Boomtown era in which, as marketing people say, branding is everything.

When I first moved to Seattle I was struck by the fact that all the apartment buildings here have names. Where I come from only the grandest buildings have names. Now, as Seattle booms and grows, apartment buildings are being replaced by condominiums that not only have their own names, but their own “brands” and marketing campaigns. As soon as a couple of quaint old houses up on Capitol Hill are razed, a big sign springs up over the muddy pit, with stock photos of trendy young people and text that says something like, “YOU ARE THE CITY – Come live on the Cutting Edge of Street Smart Architecture in the Uber-Sexy Ferronnzzatta Condominiums, pre-selling now, from the low $300,000s.” In the coming months I watch as guys in flannel shirts and hard hats throw up two-by-fours, drywall and corrugated metal siding, as behind the sign rises...yet another crappy apartment building. Never mind that the walls may flap on a windy night.

Sometimes the branding craze gets so out of control that it parodies itself. Recently I saw a truck with lettering on its side, reading “Image Movers: We deliver an image of quality for you.” What???? Doesn’t this company realize the irony that can be read into their motto? Do they really think I would trust them to move something important for me, when all they promise to deliver is an image? I would sooner trust a company advertising itself as “Joe’s Movers, Since 1972.”

Why am I ranting about this subject today? Partly it’s because the corporation that owns the restaurant where I work has been talking about “re-branding” us. Although many people love our restaurant, the hotel to which we are attached is being renovated, so the corporation feels that it may be time to give the restaurant a new name and decor for good measure. They also hope that a new image will improve our sales. For those of us who have put a lot of ourselves into making this restaurant a unique local eatery, the idea of being “re-branded” feels like the threat of a red-hot iron on our backsides.

It is important, of course, for a product or a company to have a personality and character that make it unique in the public eye. But the best kind of branding, I like to think, grows naturally out of the actual personality and character of the product or company, rather than being invented out of whole cloth in a marketing department and slapped on like a paper label.

I was glad to find the same kind of spirit applied to software and website design in one of our readings for this week: Tim Greenzweig’s Aesthetic Experience and the Importance of Visual Composition in Information Design. Greenzweig argues that style is not something that can be varnished onto a product at the end of a design process, but should be built in at every stage. Software engineers and website designers, he writes, too often consider the “look and feel” of a website or a software product to be merely “an issue of how to ‘decorate’ the information,” rather than as an issue of how to create and structure their product from beginning to end.

Greenzweig goes on to discuss various traditional methods of composition and Gestalt theory, including grid systems, the rule of thirds, juxtaposition and musical ABA structure, recommending that information designers and usability experts harness these principles throughout their design processes. By imbedding good design principles deeply within products, Greenzweig believes, designers will make the very use of these products aesthetically pleasing. Greenzweig envisions people enjoying software programs and websites in the same ways they enjoy listening to music or looking at paintings.

Greenzweig is right. A good tool is a pleasure to use. For me, using a well-designed software program like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word is, indeed an aesthetically pleasing experience - like dancing or eating a good meal - and a well-designed website is a pleasure to visit. And it isn’t the trappings, Flash animation or “branding” that make them so. No amount of these can overcome a poorly designed product.

Another part of our assignment this week was to define a website genre and describe three examples of it. Our group was assigned e-commerce, which we defined as websites that allow people to buy and sell products or services. For my three examples I chose websites that sell skateboards, bagpipes and a mysterious industrial product called “cores.”

The Bagpipe Store, at www.bagpipestore.net, is a classic e-commerce site with L-shaped navigation, thumbnails of products, customer reviews and a rating system of stars on its home page. All of products featured are rated with five stars. The site uses a shopping cart system with the classic shopping cart icon, but calls it a “basket.” Perhaps this is the Scottish or the European terminology. In keeping with its traditional products, deeply rooted in history, the site boasts that it has been “selling bagpipes online longer than anyone else (since 1995).” Here one can buy not only a variety of bagpipes and accessories, but also clothing, jewelry and Scottish products for men, women and children. Clearly, this is the place to go not only for bagpipes, but the complete bagpipe lifestyle.

My next example is a company called Simpson Enterprises, which sells a mysterious product called “industrial cores.” Their website is identifiable as an e-commerce site because of a large aerial photo of their plant in Three Rivers Michigan on the home page. I was hoping to see a Flash animation of Homer Simpson himself walking out of the plant and hopping into one of the cars in the lot, but I was disappointed in this. Links from the home page lead to descriptions and photos of their manufacturing systems and their one product: industrial cores. Even after looking at photos of these “cores,” which looked to me like some sort of molded plastic elbow widgets, I had no idea what the company’s products are or what they are used for. This is the classic sign of industry-to-industry marketing: complete opacity to outsiders. Equally mysterious is the fact that although I wrote down this website’s URL as http://simpsonent.com/, this URL will not work now and a Google search for the company yields only its address and phone number, but no website. Was I dreaming when I visited this site?

Equally bewitching and opaque to outsiders is a website for a Southern California organization called the Toymachine Bloodsucking Skateboard Company at http://www.toymachine.com/, It is hard to tell at first whether this is an e-commerce site or…something else…I’m not sure what. The main feature of the front page is a sort of photo blog with dozens of pictures of skateboarders showing off horrible wounds and doing various things not necessarily related to skateboarding, captioned with often cryptic descriptions and with even more cryptic comments from blog viewers.

The most unusual thing about this site is the fact that all of the text is hand-written in a crude scrawl, like some teenager’s Junior High School poster project. Only when you move your cursor over some of the scrawled words do you realize that they are actually hyperlinks. Scanning down a navigation column on the left side of the home page, you find “products” and “shopping” links mixed in with various news and entertainment features. This website seems well targeted at its audience and “branded” in an authentic way. I laughed, however, when I thought about all the sophisticated HTML coding by a professional designer that must have gone into making this site look so crude and home made. Like Dolly Parton likes to say, “It takes a lot of money to make me look this cheap.” Well done!

DESIGN: THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY

2007-02-10T22:23:00.000-08:00

My father, Sam Raymond, came up with the idea for the cartoon above many years ago. Like Harvey Pekar of American Splendor, Sam has lots of ideas for cartoons, but lacks the drawing skills to put them on paper. He frequently tells people his cartoon ideas, apologizing for the fact that he has to describe them. It was this habit of his that inspired me to draw my first cartoon for this weblog, and now look at me: I have become addicted to cartooning!

When I described Sam’s idea for the “go fishin’” cartoon to my friend Jennifer, she giggled and said, “Engineer humor.” True, indeed. Sam is an MIT-trained engineer, just like Donald Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things, which I read for my book report this week. Like Norman, Sam has strong feelings about good and bad design in everything from garlic presses to deep-sea camera housings. He has designed many of the latter for oceanographers and filmmakers including James Cameron, but he exhibits no less passion when talking about the engineering of humble, everyday objects like the former.

My father and Donald Norman have a lot in common. I laughed out loud when I read Norman’s story about his elaborate modifications of the light switches in his laboratory to achieve more “natural mapping” between the controls and the lights – in other words to help him figure out what switches controlled what lights. This is exactly the kind of thing Sam does all the time: adding screws, clamps, guards, extra holes and so on to all sorts of manufactured items that come his way in order to make them better suit his purposes.

In some families on Christmas morning, parents have to stop their children from playing with their presents right away. In my family, the children try in vain to stop our father from not only playing with his presents – and our presents - but also taking them apart, reassembling them and grabbing tools to start improving them.

One primary edict of Norman’s with which Sam would agree whole-heartedly is “Make controls visible.” Devices with invisible controls or tiny, low-contrast labels drive Sam nuts. He battles them with Sharpie pens, Scotch tape, brightly colored paper and paint. He has no compunction about taking a sleek, shiny, expensive new stereo component or computer device and immediately plastering it with hand-drawn arrows and big lettering to clarify how it should be used. To him, devices are things to be used, not status symbols or art objects, so no modification that could make something easier to use is out of bounds.

I have never learned to modify things with such ease. I like things to be pristine and cannot even bring myself to make a mark in a book. By contrast, the first thing Sam does when he buys a new book is pull out a pen and start underlining. His kids laugh at him a little because he will often underline the title, the author’s name and everything else on the cover page. It seems to us that when you underline everything, you defeat the purpose of underlining.

I finally broke down and “did a Sam” the other day with the remote controller to my DVD player. As on most remote controllers these days, the important buttons are jumbled in with a lot of other buttons I never use, so I constantly hit wrong buttons, which often leads to chaos. While watching a subtitled German film one evening I accidentally turned off the subtitles and couldn’t figure out how to turn them back on. Since I don’t understand German, I had to quit watching the movie. The next morning I bit the bullet, pulled out a Sharpie pen and drew big black marks around each of the four remote control buttons that matter to me. Then I tossed the controller aside with disgust. Now it is ugly, but I can see what I am doing in a dim room. I have joined “Sam’s Club.”

As an engineer who knows how to design things that work, Sam often wonders why, why, why there are so many badly designed things in the world. Norman has several interesting theories on this. One that I found especially illuminating has to do with the difference between design in the pre-industrial and the industrial world. In the old days, Norman explains, when things were made by individual craftspeople, it was relatively easy to modify designs because things were made one by one. This led to a slow, natural, Darwinian evolution in design.

In the industrial world, by contrast, things are manufactured in tremendous volume in elaborate processes that require costly templates and specialized machinery. This makes modifications more difficult and costly. In addition, designers are now distanced from users. In the old days, the blacksmith chatted with his customers in the forge, but today engineers and designers are separated from the end-users of their products by many layers of corporate bureaucracy. In many companies, designers are actually forbidden to communicate with users because of patent issues or the general culture of secrecy that pervades today’s corporate world. Another factor is the pressure of the capitalist market on manufacturers to constantly come up with something new and different to set their products apart from the competition.

The end result of this is that products seldom evolve gradually any more. When companies decide to modify a product, they usually introduce a whole new model with all kinds of new features added and often with good, old features removed. Norman discusses the paradox of products that evolve to the point of perfection and then go past that point and return to imperfection. If someone comes along and designs a perfect device, Norman writes, it is incumbent upon someone else to come along and design a competing device that will be different, and therefore less perfect.

I have a fantasy about some day giving my father a Christmas present that he would find so well conceived, engineered and executed that he would feel no need to modify it, only to admire it, using the word he reserves for the best kind of design: elegant. He would probably pick it up, look at the name of the manufacturer on its side, grab a Sharpie and underline it!

REALITY IS MY HOME PAGE

2007-02-04T23:50:00.000-08:00

A Sitemap. That’s what the two perplexed kids in my cartoon need. I didn’t really know what a sitemap was until I read about them in Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler’s book “Web ReDesign 2.0.” Now I look for sitemaps on all the websites I visit. Websites that offer them to users are probably the sites that need them least, however, because they are usually the best organized. Websites that don’t offer them may fail to do so because their designers never bothered to create a sitemap for themselves in the first place, as the authors indicate is all too frequently the case.

I have been to many a website where I have felt as lost and befuddled as my cartoon kids, going deeper and deeper into cyberspace against my will, as links lead me to places I didn’t expect and “back” functions lead me to places I don’t remember being. Often I find that links have led me through two or three websites, without my realizing that I ever left the first one. When entering a web page from a search engine, I often find myself in what feels like a lonely outpost of some great metropolis, with little or no indication of what city it belongs to or how to get to the main gate. Often I feel like a cyberspace Dorothy, clicking my heels together and saying “there’s no place like home page; there’s no place like home page.”

The usual results of my fumblings on the Internet are either getting unexpectedly kicked out of websites or deliberately dumping my searches and going back to Google. I almost always start my Web activities at Google and always go back there when I get lost. Google is a foster home for wandering waifs like me who can’t find home pages.

A “home” button on every page is a great thing, but a sitemap gives you an overview for which there is no substitute. The amount of information and the random access that the Internet provides are certainly wonderful, but the biggest thing I miss from the old fashioned, pre-computer days of browsing and doing research is OVERVIEW.

Most of the students in my class are too young to remember something we used to have in libraries called Card Catalogues. A card catalogue was actually a large area in each library where there were row upon row of big wooden cabinets, in each of which were hundreds of little drawers containing thousands of little cards with information on each book in the library. As I remember (it’s been a while now), there were two sets of card catalogues, one arranged alphabetically by subject, and the other by book titles and authors’ names.

I still remember the exciting feeling, when starting a new research project, of approaching the card catalogues and taking them all into my view, like Prince Henry the Navigator surveying the Atlantic from the cliffs of Sagres, vowing, “I shall send ships upon these waters.” Going up to the subject catalogue and finding the general alphabetical area for my topic, I would pull open drawer after drawer like so many treasure chests, and in a few quick glances would know how much gold lay in these territories. You see, there were little tabs that stuck up from the cards that indicated subjects and sub-categories of subjects, and so by glancing at these and at how many inches of cards lay between each tab, you got an instant overview of your topic and how much territory there was to explore.

There were a lot of drawbacks to card catalogues. Often you had to jockey for position with other people using the card catalogue or wait your turn to look in a particular drawer. Sometimes you would get a sore back or dirty knees from stooping or kneeling down to look in low drawers. Sometimes you would find a drawer missing because someone had pulled it out and put it on top of the card catalogue or on a nearby table to look through it. And of course once you found a card for a book that interested you, the card could not tell you if the book was actually available at the time or checked out. You had to go to the stacks to find that out. Then, if the book was not in the stacks, you had to go to the circulation desk to find out when the book was expected back. For librarians, who had to manually type each card, I am sure there were many other drawbacks.

Computerized library catalogues have removed these shortcomings and intoduced many powerful new tools, but so far they cannot offer the kind of all-encompassing overviews and lightning-fast random access that physical card catalogues made possible. Maybe I need help from a good librarian, but I find using computerized library catalogues extremely tedious and laborious as I click in and out and in and out of entries, endlessly going down and backing out of blind alleys, where my fingers used to dance lightly through card catalogues like those of a casino dealer riffling through a deck.

“Riffle” is a good word. I just looked it up and found that it means “to turn over something, especially the pages of a book, quickly and casually.” The ability to do this is definitely a feature of the physical world that the virtual world needs to better develop, for the sake of overview and fast random access.

Think of picking up a magazine and browsing through it. By riffling through the pages, you can, in about two or three seconds, get a pretty good idea of what is in that magazine: how many articles there are, how long the articles run, whether it has a lot of pictures or not and what tone and style the magazine and the individual articles have. You can also, in these two or three seconds, probably pick out at least one or two articles that interest you because of their titles or illustrations.

Now, try to do the same thing with a website. Sure, the home page will attempt to give you some oversight and some juicy teasers, but you have to click on hyperlink after hyperlink, going in and backing out of page after page, to get the same kind of overview of what’s really in there that you can get in a few seconds of flipping through a magazine.

Has anyone developed a tool that lets you “flip” through a website yet? If so, please forgive my ignorance. If not, could someone please start working on one? I realize that it takes a little time for each page of a website to load, so perhaps a “flip” or “riffle” feature could be made from graphic simulations of web pages rather than actual web pages. A sliding bar could be used to allow users to scan pages at incremental speeds - similar to sliders used to scan video in editing programs such as Premiere and Final Cut Pro. While flipping through these simulated pages, a user could stop on one that he or she finds interesting and simply click on it to be taken to the actual web page with all its hyperlinks and Flash features and whatnot that take time to load. Another, simpler way to do this, I suppose, would be to put whole websites, or big sections of them, onto single pages that users can scroll down quickly for overviews. I know that most website experts recommend that web pages should require minimal scrolling, but perhaps long pages should be re-considered or at least offered as an option. For online shopping websites, riffling or scrolling features like this might prove to be very profitable because they would increase serendipity and impulse buying.

My theme here is making cyberspace feel and function as much like real space as possible. Perhaps this seems a little old fashioned and curmudgeonly. But remember, we still live in the real world and that is where our senses and sensibilities are based. We have not yet morphed into cyberspace creatures, as people do in science fiction. So, as long as the physical world remains our home page, we would do well to learn from it and imitate its best aspects when we design websites. I suggest that old-fashioned magazines and library card catalogues are great models from which we can learn.

WHEN BOOKS TALK BACK

2007-01-30T02:15:00.000-08:00

You've been up most of the night working on a book report for a school assignment. After a few hours of sleep you get up, turn on your computer, and find a message from the author of the book you reviewed, thanking you for what you wrote. What??? Is this some kind of sleep-deprivation and caffeine induced delusion?? In the past it would have been, but not any more.

After typing my delerious thoughts about "The Cluetrain Manifesto" on my weblog last night into the wee hours, I woke this morning to find the following message in the Comments section of my blog:

"I am Chris Locke, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. David Weinberger alerted me and the other co-authors to your post, which is a wonderful essay of the state of affairs today. I don't think any of us really believed in 1999 that business would evolve across the board and fully rise to the opportunity the web offered. We did hope (in simplistic terms perhaps) to shame the Bad Guys and encourage the Good Guys -- both of which camps are still well represented out there. Your example of how individuals can and do make a difference is inspiring. Thanks for writing this."

Wow! Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. When you write a book report for school, you just don't expect to get a thank you note from the author the next morning. And Chris Locke isn't just some blogger; the Financial Times of London listed him as one of the "top 50 business thinkers in the world" in 2001. Later in the day I had a meeting with my teacher Kathy and asked her if she had forwarded my blog post to the authors. I thought perhaps they were friends of hers. She said no and explained to me about specialized search tools that authors can use to alert them anytime anyone posts anything about their work on the Internet.

By commenting on my humble little blog post, Chris Locke demonstated exactly what he and the other authors of "Cluetrain" are talking about. The world really is becoming a networked community and has the potential to become a more humanized place becaue of it. Thanks to the Internet, an author can rise up from the black and white of his text, materialize as a real human being to one of his readers and interact with the reader's thoughts about his book. Oh brave new world, indeed!

GET A REAL JOB

2007-01-29T01:41:00.000-08:00

One evening recently I was standing in line at my local convenience store and overheard a conversation between the female clerk and a young man who had several shirts in a dry cleaner’s bag draped over his arm. He apologized for the shirts as he juggled them to dig for his wallet and remarked, “I never used to have anything dry cleaned until I got a real job.” The clerk and I shared a laugh after he had left and agreed that we somewhat resented his phrase “real job.” She told me that she loves her job and considers it as real as any other.

We both knew what he meant by a “real job.” A “real job” means working in an office, doing things that are often boring and stressful but are generally considered to be somehow vital to our society and our economy; it means sweating under pressure in a starched shirt, but with the satisfaction of knowing that you are on a real career path, betting on the Main Chance, following The Money and getting in on the the Real Action.

The two kids in my cartoon will eventually abandon their piratical lemonade stand and may get “real” jobs some day - maybe even work for BigCola.com or BigBucksBillboards.com. A “real job” means working for THE MAN, the Establishment, for the kind of organizations that the authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” predicted in 1999 would soon become dinosaurs.

In 1999 David Weinberger, Doc Searls and Chris Locke created a “Cluetrain” website and book in which they heralded “the end of business as usual,” due to the arrival of what they call “networked markets.” Thanks to the spread of the Internet, and the development of intranets within big companies, they believed that businesses could no longer control markets, nor their own employees, and therefore could not continue doing business as they always had. The ability of people to communicate instantly, find information on virtually anything and find each other through the Web had broken down the barriers that businesses have traditionally erected around themselves.

I have seldom read anything as funny or as true about business as the authors’ searing observations of the traditional culture of “real jobs.” They compare corporations to medieval castles, surrounded by moats of secrecy, ruled over by absolute monarchs and favored courtiers. The primary force, they write, by which companies strive to motivate employees and structure their organizations, is fear. They point out that corporations create elaborate security networks to protect themselves not so much from their competitors as from their own customers and their employees: to make sure that no one but their inner circle really knows what it going on. They observe that corporations consistently avoid any kind of real dialogue with customers or employees, but instead issue propaganda that few people in or out of a company fully trust or take seriously.

As I laughed and cheered my way through articles from the Manifesto, I found myself writing down quote after pithy quote in my notebook, like:

“Somewhere along the line, we confused going to work with building a fort…As the drawbridge goes up behind us, we become business people, different enough from our normal selves that when we first bring our children to the office, they’ve been known to hide under our desk, crying.”

“Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.”

“Companies need to realize that their markets are often laughing. At them.”

“Companies attempting to ‘position’ themselves need to take a position…Bombastic boasts – ‘We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ’ – do not constitute a position.”

“Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.”

Observations like these echoed my own experiences of corporate cultures and the two worlds I have found there: the official world of corporate propaganda and the actual world of day-to-day work in the trenches.

I remember well my shock when I first discovered the gulf between these two worlds. In the office of a large telecommunications corporation where I worked for a while, a new supervisor arrived with great credentials but no actual skills, and proceeded to complicate everyone’s job with a lot of red tape, slowing us down by making us fill out detailed reports on everything little thing we did. When we complained, the general manager explained, “I know you all do a great job, but headquarters doesn’t perceive that you do a great job. So, the most important thing we have to do is change that perception. If we have to make ourselves a little less efficient in order to be perceived as more efficient, that’s what we have to do.”

Another day at this same company the whole staff was called into an all-day meeting, complete with a big lunch and fancy snacks, during which a representative from our new health insurance provider explained, at great length and with many glossy handouts, all the wonderful benefits of our new health insurance plan. As the hours dragged on, we began to wonder, why all this fuss? Then, late in the afternoon, the truth finally came out. “Now, I think you’ll all agree," said the general manager, “that these benefits the company is giving us are wonderful and that we need to do our part too.” Then the hammer came down as he explained how each of us would begin paying for this new health plan with big deductions from our paychecks. They had fattened us up and lulled us with happy talk all day so they could tell us that the company wouldn’t be providing us with health insurance any more. We had to buy our own.

I remember reading annual reports from a company in which I owned some stock. Year after year there were glowing reports about how they were growing and expanding into new facilities and new markets. Then one year they reported with equally glowing words, about how excited they were to be “streamlining” their operation by “downsizing” their staff, selling off excess facilities and “focusing on a more select section of the market.” They were sinking like the Titanic but their brass band was playing a rousing march.

I could go on and on. We have all had experiences like these that have made us grow somewhat cynical over the years about the business world. The authors of “Cluetrain” believed in 1999 that our cynicism was cresting, both as customers and as employees, thanks to our new ability to communicate with each other through the Internet and see the waves of B.S. that the business world is constantly rolling our way.

In a chapter called “Internet Apocylpso,” Christopher Locke tells the story of how little, isolated cells of techies began communicating with each other in the early 1990s and how they developed an iconoclastic, no-holds-barred style of communication that frequently punctured the overblown images of the organizations for which they worked. At first, he writes, the Internet was so small and specialized that no one in power took it seriously. By the time organizations realized how big the Internet community was growing and where it was heading, it was too late to control it or stop its freewheeling spirit. By 1999, the authors believed that organizations needed to either adapt themselves to a new spirit of realism, honesty and open communication or else go out of business.

So here we are now, eight years later. Have the predictions of the authors of “Cluetrain” come to pass? Has the spirit of the Internet community ushered in a new age in business? To some extent, yes. As in all revolutions, however, many people have simply put a new cockade in their hat and have kept their old ways. Also, as in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” many of the new bosses are acting more and more like the old bosses all the time.

Businesses are certainly presenting themselves with a new kind of image. An organization that once emblazoned the marble lintel over its door with brass letters reading “Associated Telecommunications Corporation” is now likely to call itself “aTeK,”in a logo that looks like hip hop graffiti. If its motto was once “America’s Communication Leader,” it is probably now something like “Communicate. Share. Discover.”

Businesses are also communicating differently. On its website, aTeK probably describes its services as “cool features” and “killer aps.” At meetings executives call each other “dude.” Customers can now “access” the company “24/7” through its website.

Of course most of this is just window dressing. Many companies are simply using new technologies and new communication styles to keep on shoveling the same B.S. they have always shoveled. Some of them are using the Internet to shovel EVEN MORE B.S. than they did before, thanks to the ability to send Spam infinitely and spread rumors anonymously on the Web. Some organizations are using their websites to retreat even further from the public than they did before. Want to learn more about aTeK? Just click on this link. Want to get in touch with us? Just email us and our computers will analyze your inquiry and send you an automated, personalized response instantly. No, you won’t find our address on the website. You don’t need it. We are everywhere and nowhere. Want to call us? Here’s an 800 number you can call to get recorded information. Want to talk to a human being? No problem. Just type in your credit card number and we will set up a customer service account for you.

Real changes are happening, of course, due to new technology, globalization, outsourcing and, yes, to the new spirit of business the authors of “Cluetrain” describe, and many of these changes are good! I think it is important, however, for everyone involved in e-commerce and digitized organizations to take a good look at the Internet’s potential to improve their relationship with the public, instead of just its potential to make life easier or more profitable for themselves. Everyone should read “The Cluetrain Manifesto” to catch the Utopian spirit its authors felt at the dawn of the Internet age. We need to keep this spirit alive.

There is hope that we can. A couple of years ago we got a new department manager at the hotel restaurant where I now work. He came from a background in human resources and one of his first acts was to call a meeting for the whole staff at which he presented, with great passion and with many Powerpoint slides, our parent corporation’s Mission Statement. When he was done he asked us how we felt about it. For thirty seconds thirty faces stared blankly at him. Finally, a little reluctantly, I raised my hand and commented that it sounded pretty much like the Mission Statement of every other company for which I have worked. What we really needed to talk about, I suggested, was our own individual mission as a restaurant and our specific goals, strengths and weaknesses, rather than the generic philosophies of the corporation. The new manager turned a bit red and began stammering, but the staff breathed a sigh of relief and a lively discussion of real issues ensued.

Later I heard through the grapevine that after the meeting the new manager was asking people, “Who was that incredibly RUDE guy?” In the following months, however, he and I became good friends and conspired together to make some real waves around the organization. On the day he left for another job at a bigger company, he hung up a beautifully printed, laminated poster on the back room wall. It was a brand new Mission Statement for our restaurant, which he had written himself, that really talked about who we are and where he saw us heading. He had gotten my message.

In little ways, here and there, the gaps between “real jobs,” real people and the real world may be closing.

DELIVERABLES

2007-01-24T01:15:00.000-08:00

Kathy told a significant story in class tonight. She was working on a project for a company where deadlines were so rigid and unrealistic that, in order to keep on schedule, she had to train customer service people to troubleshoot a product that didn’t even exist yet. On the final day of the schedule, “delivery” was achieved by sending a rough version of the product from one office of the company to another. Thanks to this “successful delivery” on the target date, some vice president was able to get his bonus, even though the actual product was not ready until many months later.

This story is a great example of the cultural phenomenon I raised: our obsession with setting and meeting ambitious goals and timetables. Of course goals and schedules are important, but not when they are unrealistic, arbitrary or designed mostly to make some manager look good or as a marketing strategy to win a contract. As Magnus ironically commented, projects today are budgeted with the idea that they will go over budget.

In light of this, let me re-phrase the memo I proposed in my earlier post “Into the Flow” (see below). Imagine this:

“TO ALL DEPARTMENTS: DELIVERABLES MUST BE DELIVERED ON DELIVERY DATE REGARDLESS OF DELIVERABILITY.”

. . .

PASSION & PURPOSE

2007-01-22T00:44:00.000-08:00

In “Notes on Design Practice” Thomas Erickson reveals an interesting trick of the trade among art directors and designers. Having created a fairly finished design on a computer, the designer places a sheet of paper over the screen and traces the design by hand for presentations. This creates the impression that the design is more preliminary and more open to suggestions and changes than it actually is. Erickson also lists “roughness” as one of the important characteristics for prototypes. Roughness helps to present an idea in progress, without a flavor of finality.

I got thinking about these two concepts while I was creating this week’s cartoon, which is both rough and hand-drawn. In a cartoon, I realized, the most important thing is the idea, not the drawing itself. Maybe this is why most cartoons are drawn rather simply, providing just enough information to get the idea across, without a lot of fussy details that might distract from the idea. So perhaps a prototype is a sort of cartoon for an idea of a final product.

There is also an appealing quality to things that show the mark of a human hand. Perfect renderings prepared with mathematical precision on a computer have an initial appeal, but this fades quickly, leaving a feeling of coldness and lack of heart in its wake. Although recent generations have grown up learning to love the smooth, spotless look of molded plastic and the “new car smell” of petroleum by-products, I doubt that we will ever entirely lose our instinctive attraction to hand-made things and natural products.

As I ride the bus through the endlessly repeating landscape of malls and chain stores that surround Seattle (like one of those looped backgrounds behind the Flintstones as they drive), I often ask myself one question. Why is it that we, the richest, most productive society on earth - who can design and produce almost anything we want in any shape we want – do not surround ourselves with incredible beauty?

I am always looking around for things worth drawing or photographing, for things and places that are literally “picturesque.” Sometimes I find a lot of them in the same place. But more often I go for miles and miles without seeing any. I have noticed some patterns. For example, I find that very rich and very poor neighborhoods tend to be the most picturesque. Nature, untouched by humans, is usually beautiful, but there is also great beauty to be found in the most un-natural of environments: in factories and industrial districts where aesthetics have no value.

Recently, on a long drive, my sister and I started talking about all this, comparing notes on what we found beautiful, ugly or bland in the places and things we passed. Finally I asked her what we were looking for. What makes man-made things beautiful or not beautiful. She thought for a moment and finally answered “passion and purpose.”

These two words answered a lot of my questions. In factories, there is beauty in raw, naked PURPOSE in action. In the poorest of slum neighborhoods in Third World countries, one can sense the PURPOSEFUL way people survive as best they can, and the PASSION with which they make and adorn their houses with whatever resources they can find. In the richest of neighborhoods and resorts, the PASSION of connoisseurs and the artists they can afford to hire dazzles the senses.

By contrast, in the vast aesthetic wastelands of American suburbs and malls, passion and purpose are either lacking or diluted. Everything here is designed by committees, and ideas go from research teams to design teams to engineering teams to corporate oversight teams and so on, as Erickson and others describe. In such a process, how can even the most brilliant of ideas not get compromised? Often simple, elegant ideas get overcomplicated, as more and more people add their input, and we may end up with vacuum cleaners equipped with rocket launchers. Frequently we end up with compromises between aesthetics and functionality, with end products that are neither fully passionate nor fully purposeful. Hence their lack of beauty, as well as practicality.

We end up surrounded with products and environments that are at best approximations of quality and beauty - at worst caricatures of them. When I was a kid I used to watch television on Saturday mornings, and in between the cartoons there were ads for toys in which cartoon-like plastic people were shown driving cartoon-like plastic cars and living in cartoon-like plastic houses. Today I feel like this cartoon world has grown to full size: we are all Barbies and Kens and GI Joes living in a cartoon world made by Disney, Mattel and Hasbro.

So it is no wonder that smart designers trace plans off computers to present them in hand-drawn diagrams that bring back a sense of passion and raw purpose to their presentations. In doing this, however, they are merely creating an illusion. In order to achieve truly great design, in order to achieve the full potential of the power we have to shape our world, we need to bring passion and purpose back to the way we design and build things from start to finish. We need to give more power to individual designers and inventors, break down the walls between designers, engineers and business people, and reduce the distance between ideas and final products. We also have to reduce the distance between people and the work they do, give them a stronger stake in it and a greater sense of ownership. We should also return to some old fashioned ideas of craftsmanship, artistry and ethics.

Above all we have to learn that we cannot get away with cheating. Yes, we can make things that look okay and work okay and people will buy them. But people can tell the difference between things that are okay and things that are great. Even if people don’t know they can tell the difference, they sense it sub-consciously, in their bones. The quality of the things we make and the environments we create really does effect people's sense of values and the level to which they aspire to greatness in their lives.

VIRTUAL TEAMWORK

2007-01-16T18:58:00.000-08:00

“What’s that you say? You say we’re going to create a brand-new,high-tech, cutting-edge website? And I’m in charge? Hot diggety dog! I’ll get right on that, chief!”

Tonight’s assignment is to describe what I would do if I were made project manager of a website development team whose members are geographically scattered. I guess the first thing I would do is get on the telephone and introduce myself to any team members I do not know already. There is certainly nothing better than a good old-fashioned conversation to establish a relationship with someone. Perhaps I would ask all team members to contact each other by telephone to introduce themselves. From then on most communication would be by email.

How would I help develop team spirit? Perhaps one way would be to establish a team wiki or ask team members to keep a weblog, as we do in this class. This would provide me with informal progress reports and would allow other team members to see how their associates are doing and get a sense of how the team is doing as a whole.

I would also keep a weblog in which I would post an overall progress report, highlights from team members’ weblogs (just as our teacher Kathy does) and my reactions to them. I would encourage team members to post any relevant pictures to their weblogs, including preliminary designs, pictures of themselves tearing their hair out, etc.

In a virtual team, as opposed to an actual team, communication is a little slower and a little more awkward, of course, but I think there are actually some advantages. Working with teams in the past I have found that a lot of time gets wasted with small talk, jokes and half-baked ideas. I think that the effort and concentration required to sit down and compose an email might filter out some of this noise and force team members to think more carefully about what they are communicating.

Of course the best teamwork comes from people who keep the group’s goals as well as their own jobs in mind at all times. Therefore, I think that this group wiki or blogging arrangement would work well to create a kind of public sphere in which team members could see the their own work alongside that of the rest of the team.

INTO THE FLOW

2007-01-14T20:05:00.000-08:00

Here we go into the belly of the corporate beast! That was my thought as I began this week’s readings on digital design in the business world. Immediately I began to stumble over strange words and concepts like “deliverables,” “functionality planning” and “workflow management.”

“Deliverables” is an example of how corporate newspeak retrofits language, turning adjectives and verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs. I suppose “deliverables” is a convenient term for all sorts of things that get delivered during a project, such as proposals, reports, prototypes, etc., but imagine this memo: “To all departments – please deliver deliverables as soon as they are deliverable.”

I always assume that people design things to be functional, without need for “functionality” planning. I guess if they don’t sit down and do such planning, they may end up making stuff that has what Thomas Shelford and Gregory Remillard so wonderfully call “whacky functionality.”

As far as “workflow,” I have never experienced it. I’ve worked; I’ve followed procedures; I’ve made progress and I’ve completed tasks, but I don’t think I have ever flowed. I drew the cartoon above to show my impression of what “workflow management” might look like.

In Shelford and Remillard’s chapter on “Web Team Roles,” I was struck by how many different jobs there are on a web development team. Developing a complex website for a big organization must be somewhat like producing a motion picture, where there are also many jobs with a lot of overlapping functions and fine distinctions between similar roles. What Shelford and Remillard call a Project Stakeholder is what people in the film industry call the Executive Producer: the money guy or the studio boss. A web team’s Project Manager and Producer are comparable to a film’s Producer and Director, respectively, who do a kind of dance together as they balance the logistical and creative decisions of a project.

The rest of the team perform similar dances in both web development groups and film crews, with passionate graphic designers and art directors who cry “I must have this!” butting up against pragmatic HTML developers, cinematographers and electricians who reply, “okay, but it’ll cost ya.” I chuckled at the similarity between a web team’s Quality Assurance Group and a film’s Continuity Person (called the “script girl” in the old days), who must go up to the Cecil B. DeMille after he yells “Cut!” on the parting of the Red Sea, and squeak, “Excuse me, sir, but you’ll have to do that again because Moses had his stick in the wrong hand.”

The complexity of relationships on a web development team, with all the possibilities for conflict and office politics, reminded me of why I got into documentary-style filmmaking, where I could work pretty much alone. I hope that similar opportunities for loners exist in small-scale Web design.

No matter how many hats you can wear, however, you always end up working with somebody else in the long run, such as a client. In “Web Re-Design 2.0,” I liked Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler’s advice on how to put questions to clients and look out for “red flags” in clients’ expectations. I recognized some of those red flags in clients I have had. Particularly amusing is the client who “doesn’t know what the content should be but wants it to look cool.” This is exactly the kind of response I get from my high school video students when I ask them what kind of video they want to produce in class: “I know! I know! Let’s do something really cool with a lot of really cool action and some really cool music!”

Actually, I have been extraordinarily lucky in the clients I have had over the years – maybe because I haven’t really had all that many. Most of them have been very cooperative and down-to-earth and have given me a lot of creative freedom.

For the last five years I have had the absolute dream client. Each year around May she calls me up with the names and phone numbers of two people about whom she wants me to produce video biographies. Long ago we agreed on basic procedures and prices, so now we don’t bother with contracts, proposals, progress reports or any of that stuff. Off I go, traveling around and doing my work, seldom speaking to my client until I send her two finished products in early September. Occasionally she will need a tiny tweak, but usually she just emails me, “looks great; send me your bill,” and that’s it. Some years we don’t even see each other at all until the big charity ball in October where the videos are screened.

Doing business is seldom as simple or as sweet at that. I gulped when I read about the client surveys and audience research Goto and Cotler advise website developers to do. At first I was skeptical about the need for gathering all that background information, thinking it was just a way to justify more “billable time.” Then I turned the page and read about the ramifications of different browsers, screen sizes, computing speeds, bandwidths and so on. I thought we had it bad in the video world, where our biggest worry is what kind of video monitors our viewers have, and whether their brightness, contrast and color balance will be adjusted correctly. The possibilities of a website designer’s work getting “lost in translation” seem so much greater.

So much to do before we even begin talking about design! So much before we even start thinking about all the technical challenges that lie ahead! The little stack of unopened Dreamweaver software and tutorials beside my computer is starting to cast a long and ominous shadow across the room.

WEEK NINE & TEN: TECHNOLOGY & TRADITION

2006-12-03T22:24:00.000-08:00

My travels in New England during Thanksgiving week got me thinking about how digital technology can fit into traditional lifestyles. I spent part of my trip in a rural New Hampshire town called Alexandria, where my sister Monica recently moved with her husband Todd. They live right off the village green, which is about the most picture-perfect example of an old New England town center you can imagine.

Except for paved roads, cars and telephone poles, the scene here is vintage Currier and Ives: virtually unchanged in the last one hundred and fifty years. Unlike other well-preserved places like Colonial Williamsburg or Old Sturbridge Village, however, Alexandria is not a museum or historic district, artificially frozen in time; it is just a place where people have seen little need for change.

Access to media must have been quite a challenge here until recently. The town library is open just three hours a week and has only a few hundred books. To compensate for this, satellite TV dishes have sprung up in many barnyards, alongside ubiquitous hand-pump wells and broken-down farm machinery. The village is also wired for cable television and broadband Internet. When my sister isn’t kayaking, cross-country skiing or making furniture in her barn, she works from home as a consultant in epidemiology. She does almost all of her work online on a laptop computer for clients ranging from a nearby clinic to a public health department in Washington State. Currently she is coordinating an interdisciplinary project to help farmers in Washington avoid disease resistance in cows by curbing overuse of antibiotics in the animals' food.

Monica is certainly not the only wired professional in the village. One day she took me to the town selectman’s office, located in one of the newer buildings (built in 1903) on the village green. In a tiny office on the second floor, across the hall from the town’s one-man police department, the town clerk sat beside a propane stove working on an Excel spreadsheet. As she helped Monica research some land for sale, the clerk spoke with deep disdain of a nearby county office that does not have its records online.

Another day, Monica took me to visit a nearby Shaker museum. I always assumed that Shakers were severe traditionalists like the Amish or the Mennonites, but the tour guide here set me straight. Although Shakers believe in a simple life and are traditionalists in some areas such as dress, they have always been quick to embrace new technologies that can make work easier and increase the quality of their famous products, such as furniture and wooden storage boxes. Shakers believe that striving for perfection in their work is a religious duty and also that the less time work takes, the more time they can devote to religious meditation. The guide told us about several labor saving devices invented by Shakers in the 19th century, including a circular saw and one of the earliest patented mechanical washing machines. He told us that the few remaining Shakers, who all live in a village in Maine, today make use of computers, cell phones and other modern devices they see as enhancements to their traditional lifestyle.

Shaker inventor with a vacuum pan evaporator for distilling medicinal herbs

Later that evening Monica told me about a different community where traditional ways and new technologies meet in stark contrast. She and Todd were traveling recently in the Himalayan region of India, were they observed many homes where heating and cooking were done with indoor fires. None of these homes had fireplaces or chimneys, however. Smoke simply filled the living quarters until it seeped out through cracks in the ceilings. A few buildings, such as a café where they stopped for refreshments, had woodstoves equipped with chimneys, but their owners apparently had no idea how to use them. People shoved long logs into them, leaving the stove doors open so that, without proper draft, smoke poured out and filled the rooms, just as in the homes without stoves. Monica remembers coughing and rubbing her eyes constantly, as did the other inhabitants of the café. Ironically, this place was a sort of INTERNET CAFÉ where people were working on laptops and talking on cellphones! People in this remote mountain region had no problem adopting technology only a few years old but had yet to come to terms with other technologies that have been around for centuries.

Finally, at our family reunion in Manchester New Hampshire on Thanksgiving, I talked to an elderly relative who simply refuses to accept Internet technology. She complained that her children had forced her to get a computer so they could communicate with her by email. Now, she said, she is getting ten, fifteen emails a week from all sorts of people, and she doesn’t know how to cope with them. I tried to give her advice, but she lampooned everything I said until I finally advised her to take her computer out to the dumpster, throw it in and be done with it. This was the only answer that pleased her. I picture her now, writing a letter or two as she sits by her fireplace – presumably one with an excellent chimney. High tech may be fine for New Hampshire farmers, Shakers and Himalayan villagers, but it’s not for everyone.

………………………..

One of this week’s weblog assignments was to write about a new technology we have adopted. The most recent technology I have adopted is digital still photography. I had a nice film camera many years ago, but gave it up when I started shooting video. I found shooting stills on film to be nerve wracking because I always seemed to press the trigger about three seconds too late, and never knew what I had really shot until I got the film back from the lab. Often I would be disappointed because my exposure would be off. Video was exciting when it became affordable in the 1980s because I could capture action continuously, and although the early viewfinders were black and white, I could pretty much see what I was getting and whether or not it was exposed properly.

Using Rogers five stages of adoption, my history with digital photography runs as follows:

1. KNOWLEDGE: I began to see a lot of people using digital cameras. When I got a computer-based video editing program, I realized that I could use my video cameras to shoot still images and then edit and print them through my computer. It was thrilling to be able to create still images this way and incorporate them within documents and emails.

2. PERSUASION: I realized that digital cameras have a lot of the same features that I like about video cameras, including auto exposure, a viewfinder that shows you pretty much what the final image will look like (WYSIWYG) and the ability to shoot lots of images without incurring large costs. What I did not like about the early digital cameras was the several-second delay after pressing the trigger. When I heard that this problem had mostly been solved, it weakened my resistance to trying this new technology.

3. DECISION: When I blew up stills from my video cameras, I realized that I was getting much lower resolution than I could achieve with even a cheap digital still camera. So I took part of my pay from a video production job and bought a pretty nice Canon point-and-shoot.

4. IMPLEMENTATION: I tried this camera out on a trip to Las Vegas with my best friend Jennifer, who, sadly, had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Shooting pictures of her at night on the Strip, I quickly realized that I preferred shooting with available light, instead of shooting with a flash. When I got back from the trip I was disappointed that many of my night images were blurry. Then a friend told me about still cameras that have digital image stabilization – just like my video cameras – to correct for hand movement during the long exposures needed in low light. So I upgraded to a Canon with this feature.

5. CONFIRMATION: Although the new Canon had lower resolution than the first one, my low light pictures turned out better. One of my favorite resulting pictures was this image of Jennifer, taken under very low light during a Christmas party at the restaurant where I work. I added paint filters in Photoshop and used it for Christmas cards last year.

Later I realized that I could also shoot short video clips with my new still camera. I began using it to shoot video on many occasions when it was not practical to bring along a larger video camera. When Jennifer’s father came to visit, shortly before she died, I was able to capture their last moments together in video thanks to my digital still camera. This footage became an important part of an hour-long documentary I made for Jennifer’s family about the last two years of her life.

I love the fact that I can now shoot pictures casually, just for the heck of it, instead of being filled with anxiety as I was whenever I shot stills in the old days. Now I am even thinking about getting a digital SLR so that I can get better manual focus control.

………………………..

Our other blogging assignment was to write about how we used digital technology to cope with the recent snowstorm in Seattle. I first learned about the “storm” when I looked out the window of the airplane that brought me back from New England and saw snow on the ground. Knowing that Seattle has virtually no ability to cope with snow, and that what constitutes a nice winter day in New England can be considered a “state of emergency” here, I simply put on my warm cap, started humming Christmas carols and knew not to expect to get anywhere very fast. The only time I used digital technology during the “storm” was when I took out my digital camera to snap a picture of my cat sniffing some dried weeds I brought from New Hampshire and stuck into the snow on my lawn.

WEEK EIGHT: IN THE SWAMP

2006-11-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

As soon as I read Dan Gillmor’s wonderful phrase “Cyberswamp,” I knew what my cartoon this week would be about. In chapter five of “We the Media,” Gillmor talks about the anarchy of information and problems of trust that have unfortunately resulted from the wonderful freedom of communication afforded us by digital technology and the Internet. He shows how the ease with which we can cut and paste information can lead to words being taken seriously out of context. He points out the dangers inherent in our ability to alter images in Photoshop and other image programs. He gives examples of businesses and political factions that have taken advantage the anonymity of the Web to smear competitors or spread rumors in order to sway public opinion. He points to a public relations firm that actually advertises “online word-of-mouth marketing” among the services it offers.

Gillmor says rightly that in this new digital era we need to become active users, not merely passive consumers of information and news. This is a little depressing to those of us who thought that technology was going to make our lives easier, rather than creating more work for us. We need to take information “with a grain of salt,” Gillmor says, and most importantly, we need to consider the source of information to determine if it is reputable and free from ulterior motives.

Gillmor’s advice is correct, but my fear is that we are turning into a society in which people feel they can’t completely trust anything. I’ve run into people who feel like this already, especially about politics. I remember one very frustrating conversation I had with a young man who responded to every point I made with questions like, “What’s your source for that? How do you know he really said that? Were you actually there when he said it?” He believed that any video, audio or written record can be faked and therefore you can’t believe anything unless you have first hand experience of it. After a while I realized it was impossible to have a serious conversation with this person, just as it is with a child who asks “why?” about everything you say.

Attitudes like this are more than just frustrating; they are dangerous, because an atmosphere of doubt stifles progress, tends to support the status quo and shifts decision-making away from reason and toward emotion, wishful thinking and self-interest. For years the tobacco companies had basically just one response to all the mounting evidence about their products’ health risks: “There is no conclusive proof.” That one phrase introduced enough doubt, in many people’s minds, to blow away all the evidence. The exact same thing is happening today with the American attitude toward global warming. All George Bush has to say is “the jury’s still out,” and for many people the whole subject goes away.

There was a time when Walter Cronkite was known as “The Most Trusted Man in America.” Where is our Walter Cronkite today? If anyone has come close to this title recently, it would probably be Rush Limbaugh, but we would also have to give him the title “Least Trusted Man in America” at the same time. I’m starting to doubt that we’ll ever trust anyone the way we trusted people in the past.

I applaud organizations like Media Matters.org who strive to be watchdogs over the media. We need more organizations like these to help us sift through the masses of information, disinformation, spin and opinion that confront us every day. Perhaps some day even major news organizations will see this as their role (once again), instead of seeing it as providing entertainment, selling advertising or supporting corporate agendas. Perhaps the really big winners in the new information market will be those who figure out ways to guide us through the Cyberswamp and win our lasting trust.

WEEK SEVEN: NO TIME TO SAVE THE WORLD

2006-11-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

Reading Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” I remembered the spirit of global concern that was in the air when I was a kid in the ‘60s. You heard a lot of talk back then about the problems of overpopulation, pollution, nuclear winter, etc. And a lot of people took it very seriously. I remember vowing, when I was about twelve, that I would never pollute the air by owning a car. If I had to ride a horse to get around, I would ride a horse.

I never did get a horse. I owned a car for a while but finally traded it in for a bicycle about fourteen years ago. I recycle, I compost, I conserve electricity, I mow my lawn with a push mower, I don’t eat meat, I try to support local organic farmers, but on the whole I consider myself just about as selfish and lazy and hedonistic as the average American.

My sister took the spirit of the ’60s more seriously than I did. She did a lot of protesting at a nuclear power plant and spent time in jail for it. Then she bought some land in upstate New York and became a veritable Thoreau, living with her dogs in a yurt and hauling water from a well while she painstakingly built a house for herself by hand. Today she’s a nurse and public health administrator, living in a New Hampshire village with her husband who is a nurse practitioner. They are two of the most fun people I know, but when I told them recently how much I enjoyed a trip to Las Vegas, they remarked that they would never go to a place like that because of all the water and electricity it wastes. They have principles.

Today people who took the spirit of the ‘60s seriously are laughing stocks. Damn hippie, tofu-eating do-gooders. The tide of anger and outrage that swelled up around Vietnam and Watergate swept the progressive movement forward in mainstream America through the ‘70s, when it was actually fashionable to care about the world. Then cocaine and the Reagan conservatives brought a new “morning in America” when people woke up, rubbed their eyes and asked themselves, “What was that nightmare I had? Sheez, let’s stop worrying and have some fun! Time to think about ME! Time to party!”

That party is still going on today, not only in America. Globalization has spread a freewheeling, free-market spirit of “more for me NOW!” to almost every corner of the globe. We still read articles and see television stories that warn us of impending perils, but our knee-jerk reaction today is to make jokes about them. Whoever came up with the idea, back in the ‘80s, of the bumpersticker that read “Nuke the Whales” knew exactly where our consciousness was heading.

Hardin’s article is even more depressing to read today that it would have been in 1968, if you think about how much worse the problems he talks about have gotten. In this age of high tech it is startling to read Hardin’s statement that there are no technological solutions to our problems. In this age of Information Revolution it is depressing to read Hardin’s prediction that even spreading information cannot stem the tide of our problems. Most depressing of all is his prediction that voluntary temperance and good behavior not only will not solve our problems but may actually make them worse, by making it easier for others to be intemperate and behave badly. As Hardin says, it only makes sense to grab what you can. Letting your neighbor grab it instead, because of your idealistic notions of doing good for the world, is perverse.

The implications of Hardin's arguments are pretty clear. If things keep going the way they are (and they will), the only possible ways to prevent disaster are political. As population grows bigger and the world, by comparison, grows smaller, we must realize that the earth itself is our “commons” just as the pasture in the middle of a New England village was a commons shared by all inhabitants. If we are to solve the problems of the use of this world commons by political means, the political power to do this must be some kind of world government.

The idea of world government is a pretty scary concept in itself, but it may be inevitable, just as giving up many of our cherished freedoms may be inevitable. Let’s hope we can find a path toward world government that will preserve as many freedoms as possible. Let’s hope we develop a world government that embraces the best aspects of democracy, socialism and free enterprise. Certainly the establishment of the United Nations was a step in the right direction. We must support and strengthen this institution, instead of bypassing it and deriding it as “irrelevant” as the Bush Administration and their ambassador John Bolton have done.

We laugh today at the people who thought that the telegraph, or the telephone or television, would bring world peace and brotherhood and sisterhood. Despite this, I believe that if the Internet can be maintained as a “commons” for free and candid communication throughout the world, it can be a powerful vehicle for bringing about progressive, non-oppressive political solutions to global problems.

WEEK SIX: COMMENTS FROM THE STALL

2006-11-05T23:25:00.000-08:00

Forgive my gross cartoon this week. I never dreamed I would be drawing a purple-haired nerd sitting on a toilet, but this week’s reading on “Communities in Cyberspace” got me started on this train of thought.

I have not spent a lot of time in online communities, but I have visited a few user groups for video and audio equipment, where I found some helpful interactions, a lot of merchandise plugs obviously planted by salespeople masquerading as users, a surprising number of smartass comments and some downright rude putdowns. In many cases, the tone of conversation suggested that members of these communities had learned their social graces in the School of Beavis & Butthead.

On my first foray into YouTube, the first and only comment I got on a video I submitted was a death threat. I removed the video immediately and am still so frightened by the incident that I am reluctant to reveal any details about it here on the Web, lest my would-be killer should somehow track me down.

I have peeked around the Internet enough to know that my experiences are not unusual. Indeed, there is a unique style in much of the communications you find in cyberspace, characterized by a breezy, high-handed, cavalier, anarchic and sometimes mean-spirited tone, usually in fractured sentences and exactly the kind of chatty, conversational voice that H.W. Fowler warns against in the end of “Modern English Usage.”

But beyond all that, Cyberspace has a definite ATMOSPHERE: a sense of place so strong that sometimes I think I can actually SMELL it. And what does cyberspace smell like? I could not figure this out until last night, when I was reading about the ugly “flaming,” feuds and “virtual rapes” that occur in online communities. All of a sudden I realized what smell had been creeping up my nose. Cyberspace sometimes smells like…a public toilet.

This is a bit more than just a smartass metaphor. I will explain.

I remember going into the boys’ room on my first day of Junior High school, where I was accosted by the smell of urinal cakes, cigarette butts and other odiferous matter, and by the crudest, meanest writings and drawings, scrawled all over the toilet stalls. How anyone could think such thoughts and visualize such images, let alone scratch them onto the walls, I could not fathom.

When I went to college, I found graffiti of more literary and philosophic character, often arranged in threads of interactions between several writers that flowed down a wall or were connected by links in the form of arrows. Each thread usually ended when some writer trumped the others with an unanswerably crude summation. Does this remind you of anything?

The other night, after several hours of studying under the stained glass windows of Suzzallo Library’s Reading Room (to which I heard an undergrad refer as “the Harry Potter room”), I went into a nearby men’s room and there, in crude scrawls around the toilet paper dispenser, I found that nothing has changed. I wondered which of the scholars with whom I had been studying spend their breaks scratching the nastiest things they can think of into the bathroom wall. I wondered which of them, clicking away at their laptops, might actually be flaming on the Internet as they sat studiously in the great hall of learning.

There are a number of theories why people behave differently in cyberspace than they do in real life. Some people say that the sense of anonymity and the relative lack of repercussion to things said on the Web make people feel free to let loose the dark side of their personality. Some say the opportunity to invent a new identity, independent of physical limitations, encourages people to experiment with different selves. Chris Pirillo told us in class about a theory that part of our brain, where sympathy and humanity reside, shuts down when we sit in front of a machine.

These are all good theories. My own theory is that the Internet can function as a toilet stall: a dark, walled, private place where we can sit and do ugly things and communicate anonymously with other anonymous beings on the walls, all without being observed. Or can we? Congressman Mark Foley and others have recently learned otherwise. There’s a camera in the ceiling! The school principal is about to bust down the door and catch you in the act! Alligators in the city sewers can come up through the pipes and bite you in the…YIKES!

In order to keep cyberspace from becoming an ugly, smelly, dangerous place, like a public toilet, we need to put it into perspective. We need to keep our feet on the ground while our heads swim in cyberspace. We need to stop thinking of cyberspace as a “whole new world,” disconnected from the everyday world, where we can do anything we want. We cannot treat the people we meet there like virtual dragons or robots that can be slain for points in a game. We should not think of cyberspace as a wild frontier, where there are no rules. Instead we should think of it as an extension of our traditional world, where we can carry on our traditional quests for progress, happiness and community, using wonderful new tools. We should bring the best of our traditions, methods, rules and courtesies into cyberspace and let them flourish.

WEEK FIVE COMMENTS

2006-10-30T12:25:00.000-08:00

Please forgive my late posting. My Internet connection has been down all weekend due to a dead cable modem.

One of Thomas Friedman’s goals as an author is to shock his readers, as his title “The World is Flat” suggests. In my opinion, what he is really talking about is the economic and technological LEVELING, not FLATTENING, of the world, but the word “Flat” makes for a better title, and ever since the Levelers Movement of the 17th century the word “leveling” probably has too much of a socialist flavor for a misty-eyed capitalist like Friedman.

Friedman’s book is certainly thought provoking and so well written as to actually qualify as a “page turner.” I read his first several chapters this summer and chapters nine and ten for this week’s assignment.

Friedman’s “flattening” is evident all around us and I myself have benefited from this phenomenon in the last few years. This past Saturday night I attended an annual black-tie ball in the grand ballroom of the Westin Hotel, where executives from the Pacific Northwest grocery industry gather to raise money for cancer research. For the fourth year in a row, I had produced several short video biographies, to be shown at the ball, about people receiving awards that night. I produce these videos on low budgets, so the sponsors of the event always show their gratitude by inviting me to come and have a free dinner.

Ten years ago I would not have been able to produce video programs slick enough for an event like this unless I owned or worked for a video production house with equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, thanks to small 3-CCD video cameras and software programs like Final Cut Pro and Photoshop, I can produce professional-quality video programs, with plenty of bells and whistles, on my home computer.

After the screening of the first video on Saturday, the chairwoman of the Washington Food Industry Association, who was sitting at my table, leaned over and asked “Where is your studio?” I told her that my “studio” is a closet-sized room in the back of my tiny apartment in Capitol Hill. Later, when it came up in conversation that my other jobs is bussing tables in a restaurant, the CEOs and their wives around me raised their eyebrows as they realized that I was not likely to be a member of their country club. It is Friedman’s “flattening” that brings me to this event each year to work, break bread and sometimes even make friends with people who, not long ago, were way out of my league.

Throughout his book, Friedman presents a picture of a world changing so fast that you have to “run faster and faster just to stay in the same place”. I must be getting old because this image makes me feel tired and a little sad. I must admit, as I look around me, that Friedman’s spirit is the spirit of the age. At the charity ball every year someone always asks me how I plan to “grow” my video business. When I tell them that I’m not ambitious, that I’m happy with things the way they are and don’t really want more clients for now, they always look surprised. Some of them find my attitude novel and amusing; others look slightly disgusted and seem to lose interest in talking to me.

Today, business is all about ambition and growth. One day in my restaurant I heard a businessman say, “the purpose of having a business is to buy out or be bought out.” It’s not enough any more to just stay in business, make a fine product, make a profit; today to be a “player” you need to constantly be growing, growing, growing (like a cancer?). In Friedman’s view, growth, change and moving “to the next level” are essential for the survival not only of companies, but also of nations.

In chapter nine, “THIS IS NOT A TEST,” he issues strong warnings that the United States is falling far behind nations like China and India in education, innovation, research and development. I was struck by a quote from Bill Gates saying that in other nations, he finds that the leaders are often scientists and engineers, while in the United States they are almost all lawyers. My father, who is an engineer, was impressed by this quote when I read it to him. I told him that I am very proud of the fact that my representative in Congress (Jim McDermott) is not a lawyer, but a psychiatrist, as well as being one of the few members of Congress who voted against the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

Friedman gets down to brass tacks with some ideas that I like, including making college education in the United States free or even mandatory. He proposes that corporations need to be constantly educating their employees so that people will be ready to change jobs as technology changes and their old jobs get outsourced overseas. He also suggests that “portable” health insurance and retirement benefits be developed to help ease the difficulties of people moving from job to job. Freidman calls this approach, “compassionate flatism.” This is a noble idea, but I’m not sure how much weight the concept of compassion has in today’s world of freewheeling capitalism.

In chapter ten, THE VIRGIN OF GUADALUPE,” Friedman applies his sense of urgency about development, education and free-market “flatism” to the whole world. He creates an amusing, provocative metaphor by reducing the world community to the scale of a small city, in which each region is a distinctive neighborhood. In this metaphor, regions like China and India are the bustling neighborhoods, where people “never sleep.” Europeans would not be flattered by Friedman’s characterization of their neighborhood as an “assisted living facility” of geriatrics attended by Turkish nurses. I was very amused by his description of the U.S. as a “gated community, with a metal detector at the front gate and a lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining about how lazy everyone else was.” There is a lot of stereotyping going on here, but it rings pretty true.

Friedman believes that the wealth or poverty of nations today turns on their willingness to open themselves up to trade with other nations. To make this happen, many nations need to do a lot of de-regulation, privatization, union busting and abolishment of protectionist policies and socialist programs. Freidman may be right. In a world of ever-growing population and ever-shrinking resources, constant growth, ambition and fierce competition may be the only ways for a nation, a company or an individual to survive.

Friedman waxes almost poetic about what could be described as hungry, grasping, clawing ambition. His words and his tone make me rather uncomfortable. It all sounds too much like cancer: growth that never stops until it destroys itself by destroying the body on which it grows. Friedman paints globalizing nations and multi-national corporations as being strong, confident realists who just want the best for everyone concerned. He never mentions the word “greed.” He doesn’t talk about factories in China, unhindered by government regulation, dumping toxic waste in rivers and destroying traditional farming villages downstream. He doesn’t talk about the World Bank and the IMF prying their way into the economies of nations with predatory lending programs, getting them hooked on debt until they have to practically sell their souls to get out.

Instead, Friedman’s villains are people who resist globalization and change. In his global village, people on the Arab street “have their curtains closed, their shutters drawn, and signs on their front lawn that say, 'No Trespassing. Beware of Dog.'” Now, I myself enjoy people who are worldly and liberal and open to new things, but I also respect the rights of people who want to be left alone. In fact, I find people and groups and nations that hold onto traditions and obsolete ways to be fascinating, often beautiful and inspiring. And I’m not the only one. Look at the great tourist spots of the world. Many of them are old, perversely unchanged places and cultures. And I think it’s more than just nostalgia or curiosity that draws us to the old parts of Friedman’s global town, where strange, outmoded buildings stand proudly and there are few new shops popping up, flashing neon. I think that in these places we find a sense of enduring values and reassuring feeling (or illusion, perhaps) of permanence.

In Freidman’s world, people and companies and nations who think like me are the laggards, the losers, soon to be left behind, swept aside or taken over by the swift and the sure. Friedman would be one of those people at my banquet table whose lip would curl with slight disgust when he learned that I “like things the way they are.” Well, soon I and those like me will be in an assisted living facility, attended by Turkish nurses, while Friedman’s steamrollers roll on and on and on.

WEEK FOUR COMMENTS

2006-10-23T01:24:00.000-07:00

Vannevar Bush was certainly a forward-thinking guy. I am a backward-thinking guy, so I drew this cartoon, showing how cell phones might have looked if they were introduced in the early 1900s. Even in their slickest forms today, cell phones make me giggle, especially when they are so small as to be nearly invisible and people talk into them loudly, making facial expressions and gestures as if standing face to face with the person on the other end of the line. And every time I hear a groovy ring tone I want to do start doing a Pee Wee Herman dance.

Roger Fidler brought up some fascinating stuff in “Mediamorphosis.” It makes perfect sense that computers descended from the weaving trade. A piece of cloth is literally a net-work, and when you look at a big loom or think about what goes into making a Persian carpet, it is clear that a great deal of logic, calculation and, well, programming are involved in bringing a bunch of colored threads together to make a pattern. After thousands of years of weaving technology, Jacquard came along and streamlined it with wooden punch cards. Then Babbage figured out how to turn Jacquard’s punch cards in a whole new direction: how to weave a new kind of cloth from numbers and ideas.

It is amusing to read how often in the history of communications people got things wrong or backwards. For example, Bell and Watson thought the most promising application for the telephone was broadcasting of concerts and lectures, while the “hams” saw radio’s future in two-way communication. And oh how wrong was everyone involved in the early development of television. They thought it would be easy and just take a few years, but it turned out to be a much tougher nut to crack than, say, the telephone, radio or the light bulb. I have been working in video for many years and I can tell you that we are still trying to get it right. HDTV is a big step forward, but video remains a flawed and frustrating medium.

Thoreau was massively wrong when he predicted that Texas and Maine, once connected by telegraph, might not have anything to say to each other. Time has shown that Texas and Maine and practically every other place have a heck of a lot to say to each other all the time. I suppose the real question Thoreau posed was: once we have these fantastic mediums for communication, how much of real value will we communicate? This is a valid question.

When I started teaching high school classes a few years ago I noticed students busily typing away on their computers during class. Sometimes I peeked at their screens and saw that they were sending messages to each other across the room, having conversations like:

“Wasup?”

“Jus chillin”

“Me 2. Wasup with Jose?”

“He chillin 2.”

When I was in high school, kids used to pass stupid notes back and forth when they were bored. Now, thanks to an incredible international network of computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, microwave towers and satellites, kids can still pass stupid notes in class, only now they can attach bouncing pink elephants or rude sound effects to their notes, and all the while look like they are doing something really important.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my computer and I love the Internet. I just think we have to be careful not to get so caught up in communication technology that we forget how to communicate with each other. We should not forget how to spell our language correctly; we should not forget the important differences between written and spoken language; we should remember that a flesh-and-blood person beside us deserves a little more consideration than a distant, virtual person on the other end of a cell phone, instead of the other way around; we must remember that there is no “undo” command in real life; we should remember how to use our natural senses and instincts, rather than relying on data and credit reports, etc. to judge the world and our fellows; we should learn to value what we have, rather than always waiting for the next big thing; we should take care of our physical world and remember one very important thing about cyberspace: it’s a nice place to visit, but you can’t live there.

Marshall McLuhan was deeply prophetic when he said that in a world of instant communication “trends and rumors” become the ‘real world.’ All you have to do is stand in a supermarket line, scanning the magazine displays, to see that McLuhan’s world is here now. “Is Jen pregnant?” “New lo-carb diet trims abs fast!” Etc. etc. And then there is TV news: horror after horror, scandal after scandal, all fascinating for a day or a week, all to be forgotten as the next big story - the next trend - comes along. Call Rove and his pals in the Republican Party understand this all too well. The “fact-based” world can always be trumped by a juicy rumor; a good man or woman can always be tarnished by ugly innuendo; an inconvenient truth can always be pushed aside by a big new story inserted at the proper point in the news cycle. They understand the dark side of the communications revolution and are harnessing it to make sure that the global peace and understanding imagined by the pioneers of this revolution in the last two centuries will not come to pass.

What would Vannevar Bush be predicting today? One would have to be as prophetic as Bush himself to tell you that. I like to think that he would not have unqualified enthusiasm for unlimited extension of all the technologies we are developing today. I like to think he would be calling for technology to help us make sense of the information we have, rather than to create, gather, share and store more and more information all the time.

Bush envisioned a heroic new generation of pioneers, helping us find new and valuable paths through seas of data. This vision is somewhat different from what I see today. I see kids talking passionately about the killing power of weapons in the newest computer game, using words like “cool” and “sweet” to describe virtual horrors. I see business people floating obliviously along the sidewalk, their glassy eyes fixed on numbers in their minds and distant people talking inside their heads. I see people gradually turning into robots as devices grow out of their ears, with blue lights flashing like jet planes cruising through the lonely night sky. Soon these devices may grow out over their eyes, so they can see stock prices and email messages superimposed on the real world before them. Eventually these devices may bore into their brains so that data can enter directly into their thoughts. I am frightened enough by these people today, as I try to greet them as human beings in the restaurant where I work. I hate to think of how distant and difficult to understand they could become in the future.

Let’s develop technologies that help us live life richly, not technologies that turn us into machines. Speaking of which, I have been sitting here at my computer far too long. I am going to turn it off now and play with my cat.

Hypertext Fiction

2006-10-16T00:39:00.000-07:00

I just can't resist making a cynical comment about "Hypertext Fiction." After about five minutes of clicking my way through link after link on these sites, I started to get carpal tunnel syndrome and finally cried out loud, "I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS NONSENSE!" And that was the end of that.

Comments for Week Three

2006-10-16T00:26:00.000-07:00

In chapters two and three of Media, Technology & Society Winston does a good job of illustrating how much more complex the process of invention is than we tend to assume. I wasn’t sure where he was going with all the technical details, but he certainly gave me an impression of a bumbling, stumbling, confusing process out of which the telephone somehow managed to emerge.

As far as “supervening social necessity,” yes, I can see how the rise of the modern corporation accelerated development of the telephone. But Winston has made no mention so far of rural telephone users, who (I have read elsewhere) outnumbered urbanites as “early adopters” of the telephone for many years. For lonely farmers and ranchers, whose nearest neighbor might be miles away, the rural party line was more of a necessity than the telephone was for city folk, who could easily communicate by walking across the hall or across the street.

I am not quite understanding what Winston means by repression of a technology’s “radical potential.” Perhaps someone could explain to me what “radical potentials” of the telegraph and telephone were not achieved due to repression. Winston says something about the telephone failing to “redress imbalances in information power within society,” but that potential seems a bit far-fetched to me.

How am I going to apply the concept of “supervening social necessity” to my research topic on museum websites? I am not certain I can. As with many computer applications, I see a museum website as a nice thing, a fun thing, but beyond providing basic information, not a profoundly “necessary” thing.

I tried for half an hour to find and the Proquest article “Determining Uses & Gratifications for the Internet” on the library website and finally gave up in frustration. So I cannot comment on it.

I certainly liked Neil Postman’s talk “Informing Ourselves to Death.” Yes, technology has become practically a religion for many people today. I have heard them preach with rapture of the technological paradise to come; I have seen them sitting with eyes transfixed on their glowing shrines; I have felt their withering disdain as they look down on heretics and ignoramuses like myself who do not speak their mystical language of acronyms. I appreciated Postman’s quoting Thoreau. I was afraid we had all “gotten over” Thoreau and his skepticism about “progress” by now.

Yes, the information revolution has created a glut of information that can be overwhelming and confusing. I love having access to all the information that the internet provides, but I am also learning to be wary of it. In the past, people had to go through a lot of hurdles to get things published, so there was a built-in filtering process. Sure, this was restrictive, but it also filtered out a lot of nonsense. Today, there is practically nothing to keep nonsense out of circulation. All you need to do is sign up for a free Blogger account or create a website to start spreading misinformation or ugly opinions to the world. There is a lot of it out there, and I am confident that many corporations and political parties are busy making use of the internet in sneaky ways to misinform and confuse people for their own advantage.

The Vannever Bush article “As We May Think” was listed somewhere on the class website, and I thought it was a reading assignment, but I guess it wasn’t, since no one else is commenting on it. It is an amazing ariticle, written in 1945, in which the author predicts technology to come. You should read it.

Bush is prophetic. I laughed out loud in amazement again and again at how close his ideations of future technology came to the high-tech gadgets around me and the computer on which I was reading his article.

Although he is obviously somewhat stuck in his time period, with all his discussion of film, you can see that he is heading in the right direction when he talks about “dry” photography. If only he knew more about television imaging, his description of future photography would have matched even more completely the “point-and-shoot” digital camera hanging on the wall beside me, with its auto-iris, auto-focus and instant output: all features that Bush predicts.

Similarly, he talks a lot about punch cards for computing, but he clearly has something more advanced in mind when he says “arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature…(and will) make clever use of relay circuits.” When he finally describes his imaginary “Memex” machine, his accuracy is breathtaking. He describes personal, desktop computing devices with slanting screens, keyboards and even “supplemental levers” for scrolling quickly through documents (today’s “mouse”). He even places this “lever” in the correct position: on the user’s right side.

Bush’s most important predictions, however, have to do with how all this technology will be used: not merely for mathematical calculations, but for almost any kind of logical process, by doctors, lawyers, scientists, historians and so on. He also envisions the possibility of pushing computing devices beyond linear processes of logic, making them mimic the “associative” reasoning of the human brain.

I loved his description of “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” That’s a great way to see yourself as you sit there, surfing the web. For anyone who thinks today’s technologies are limited by their drawbacks, Bush has these wonderful words: “It would be a brave man who would predict that such a process will always remain clumsy, slow and faulty in detail.” If Vannever Bush were alive today, I wonder what he would be predicting now.

2006-10-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

COMMENTS ON WEEK-TWO READINGS

Oh my goodness what a rough night I had after starting to read Brian Winston’s introduction to Media, Technology & Society. Like a much-too-rich meal, it gave me feverish dreams of clawing through brambles of elaborate theories, obscure allusions and cryptic diagrams all night. I would definitely not recommend this for cozy bedtime reading.

By the morning light, however, the fog cleared as I moved on to Winston’s first chapter about the telegraph. As soon as he started writing about historical events and actual technology, his abstract theories in the Introduction began to make sense. His model for how communication technologies develop and spread could be applied to a lot of inventions:

1. Scientific basis
2. Ideation
3. Prototypes
4. Supervening Social Necessity
5. Invention
6. Supression by various political, commercial and social concerns
7. Diffusion
8. Spinoffs

One interesting item here is Winston's discussion of the distinction we make between “prototypes” and “inventions.” Only when an innovation has reached a form acceptable to the public, he points out, do we bestow upon it the term “invention.” While many people may contribute to the development of a device, only the person who brings it to its accepted form is remembered by the lofty title of “Inventor.” Indeed, people like Morse and Bell have almost godlike status, while I have never heard of most of the other people Winston mentions who worked separately on the telegraph and telephone and achieved nearly the same results.

I like Winston’s delineation of an “ideation” stage, when people let their imaginations run wild, as we do when we “brainstorm.” I think of Popular Mechanics magazine and Star Trek. So many things we take for granted today started out as science fiction. I remember seeing a drawing from the early years of the 20th century, showing an Edwardian family in a parlor, looking at an ornately-carved piece of furniture, in the middle of which was a screen showing a football game. I seem to remember the father in the picture actually holding a beer mug and yelling at the screen. The artist got just about everything right, except that he imagined the TV screen as tall and narrow.

On the darker side of Ideation, how about that George Orwell? The characters in 1984 have apartments equipped with “viewscreens” through which "Big Brother" not only spews daily propaganda, but also watches the people in the room! We seem to be moving closer to this all the time. I understand that there are police cameras in England equipped with loudspeakers that let police scold passersby who do something wrong. And then there are webcasters who voluntarily create an Orwellian situation by keeping their webcams turned on all the time, so that the public can spy on their lives. I also understand that teleconference developers are working on a way to replace the webcam with pixels on computer screens that display and receive images at the same time. Orwell was right in his “ideation” of viewscreens. Let us hope he was not right about many other things he imagined.

One concept of Winston’s with which I am a little uncomfortable is the term “supervening social necessity,” although he makes a good case for this force with regard to the electric telegraph. Ideas and prototypes for this device were rejected time and time again until the advent of single-track railways created the need for instant communication between distant stations to prevent collisions. In this case, acceptance of the telegraph was definitely a “necessity.”

Looking at other technologies and innovations, however, I am not sure that “necessity” is always the appropriate word. What about video games, for example? Unless you see parents urgently needing a device to get their kids to sit down and shut up, or parking lot attendants desperately needing a means to pass the time by playing computer poker, I am not sure that the acceptance of video games was the result of “supervening social necessity” so much as it was the result of “interest” or simply “demand.”

And what about the way CDs replaced phonograph records in the early 1990s? Was that driven by “supervening social necessity”, or simply by business decisions by the music industry?

This conveniently leads me to the “Uses and Gratifications” and “Diffusion” theories presented in the article Social Aspects of New Media Technologies. I liked the fact that this article offers several distinct ways of looking at communication and media. Kathy Gill told us that our term papers need to be based on some kind of communications theory, and here is a grab bag full of them:

1. Uses and Gratificiation
2. Ritual vs. Instrumental Use
3. Critical Mass
4. Diffusion Theory
5. Media System Dependency
6. Social Information Processing

In the brief overview this article provides, the Diffusion Theory strikes me as the most sophisticated, while the Media System Dependency theory promises all kinds of fascinating revelations on the interdependency of government, media and society. Think of people who make themselves dependent on Fox News for information, while Fox depends on the Bush administration for access and the administration depends on Fox for propaganda. There’s a thorny patch of brambles we could get into.

The article about “free” internet phone service was interesting and made a lot of sense. I spend a great deal of time sitting here at my computer talking to my father on the telephone in between sending him emails. Why not be talking to him on the computer instead, perhaps even face-to-face through an Orwellian “viewscreen?” Other than that ideation, however, I am not much of a forward thinker about telephones. I don’t know if I will ever get a cell phone. For Christmas I really want to get myself a working reproduction of a 1920s candlestick phone, made out of wood: you know, the kind where you hold one part up to your mouth and the other part to your ear.

Finally, I discovered that I was not the only person who had a rough time with Brian Winston’s Introduction. In Dr. Lau’s class a Chinese student turned to me, pointing to Winston's book, and asked with a perplexed expression, “is this English?” I told him not to worry and just keep reading. It gets better.

First blog entry

2006-10-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

Hello!