(Augmentia - with permission from DoctorWat)

“You can find anything at the Samaritaine” is this department store’s slogan. Yes, anything and even a panoramic view of the all of Paris. All of Paris? Not quite. On the top floor of the main building a bluish ceramic panorama allows one, as they say, “to capture the city at a glance”. On a huge circular, slightly tilted table, engraved arrows point to Parisian landmarks drawn in perspective. Soon the attentive visitor is surprised: “But where’s the Pompidou Centre?”, “Where are the tree-covered hills that should be in the north-east?”, “What’s that skyscraper that’s not on the map?”. The ceramic panorama, put there in the 1930s by the Cognac-Jays, the founders of the department store, no longer corresponds to the stone and flesh landscape spread out before us. The legend no longer matches the pictures. Virtual Paris was detached from real Paris long ago. It’s time we updated our panoramas.”

The World is the Platform

Augmented Reality is going to make it possible for us to see through walls. It will remove some of the blindness that has crept up around our industrial landscape. But what is the “use” of this tool we’ve fashioned? And how will it even be implemented; how will many different app developers ever agree on what we see from a single window?

In a couple of weeks a bunch of us are going to get together to talk about this at ARDevCamp . But as a pre-amble to that I thought I’d share some of my own questions, thoughts and observations.

The hype has started to become real as William Hurley observes. Personally I blame Bruce Sterling but perhaps the iPhone 3GS and Android phones share some of the blame. This last weeks prime example should have been brought to us by companies like TomTom or Garmin given recent acquisitions. Instead (in what is clearly a longer term strategy) Google stopped licensing TeleAtlas in the USA and started provided their own higher quality interface and UI (and taking a bit of a stab at Apple at the same time not to mention the Open Street Maps community). The interface itself is shifting from a traditional top down cartographic orthodoxy to become more game-like; with street-view projections, heads-up-displays and zero-click interfaces. The hidden pressure underneath these moves may not be to just provide better maps but to provide a better higher fructose reality. A candy coated view that shows you just what you want just-in-time decorated with lots of local advertisements and other revenue catch basins. Cars and traffic reports are just the gateway.

In my mind this isn’t just hype but something relevant and important. Augmented Reality isn’t just an academic or even safe exercise. It connects in a very primal and critical way to who we are as humans. It’s not just an avatar in Second Life or a profile on a OKCupid – it is us. It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”. They want to own the foundation of the single consistent seamless way of presenting an understanding of the world. And as such it is about to become extremely competitive.  Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge.

Personally I’m trying to approach an understanding with praxis; balancing between time reading and time making. On the making side I’ve been writing an Augmented Reality app for the iPhone. For me that’s already a unique exercise. It’s the first time I’ve written code and then had to actually go outside into the real world to test it. On the thinking side, and coming from an environmental interest, and from a critical arts and technology perspective I’ve also been fascinated by how we understand and use Augmented Reality.

Collision of Forces

Like many new technologies Augmented Reality magnifies tensions between things that were normally separate.

In a sense it is the same dream that the social cartography community has had. This is the community that coalesced around Open Street Maps, Plazes, Where 2.0 and the idea of geo-tagging as a whole. This was a vision of a crowd-sourced bottom up community driven and community owned understanding of the world. It is a vision that failed in some ways. Yes we have nice free maps but we never did get to the point of being able to see our friends, or the contrails of where our friends had been, or really where the best nearby place to have a nap was. But now the idea is returning more forcefully and with more determination than ever.

It is also about an actionable Internet. There is a community that is rebelling against the morbidity of indoor culture and a largely passive media consumption centric lived experience. One that wants to decorate the world with verbs and actions – that wants to put knobs and levers on everything – or at least make those knobs and levers more visible. Diann Eisnor talks about Transactional Cartography – an idea of maps that are not passive – that don’t just show you where you can solve a problem – but that hear your request for help and call you back with solutions. Just imagine the kinds of trust and brokering negotiation infrastructure that this inevitable end game implies.

It is also about an ideal of noise filtering as a pure problem. There’s been a long and unsolved problem of building working trust networks on the web as a whole. Even aside from spam there are acres of rotting bits out there that will completely drown out any new view unless they are filtered for. Many social graph projects have failed to help filter the deluge of information that we are inundated with every day. When you can’t see the forest or the trees then this becomes a much higher priority to resolve.

It dredges up an amusingly disparate rag-tag collection of development communities who have been safely able to ignore each other. Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds. Self-styled Augmented Reality Consortiums are emerging with the proposition to define the next generation notational grammars by which we will share our views of reality.

It brings the ubiquitous computing and ambient sensor network people to the table. These are folks who had safely been hiding out in academia for the last decade doing exotic, beautiful and yet largely ignored projects .

It creates a huge pressure and demand for interaction designers to actually make sense of all this and make interfaces that are usable.

It draws a pointed stare towards the act of siloing and building moats around data. When your FourSquare cannot see your Twitter and when your Layar view can’t show the gigantic T-Rex stomping towards you … well people just aren’t going to put up with that anymore. What is needed is a kind of next generation Firefox or foundation technology that underpins and unifies these radically disparate realities.

It is going to take the idea of crowd-sourcing to a wildly energetic new level above where it is now. When your body is on the line the idea of real-time tactical awareness suddenly becomes much more important to everybody. When the SFPD can volunteer that they’re going to put a radar gun at a location, or when a driver can post about a car accident to the cars behind him or her – you start to involve a real time understanding that affects your quality of life in an visceral way. It’s almost the beginning of a group organism. Something that goes beyond merely flocking type of behaviors and becomes more like a shared nervous system. It’s an evolution of us as a species – and probably just in time as well given the kinds of environmental crisis we are facing.

It takes the Apple ideals of interface to a new level. Instead of one click there are zero clicks; the interface becomes effortless. As Amber Case puts it interfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself. They become part of the background, ambient and everywhere, we breathe them and can see through them, the virtual pressure of these interfaces becomes like an information wind steering us around invisibly like toy boats on a lake.

It will connect us to the environment because everything actually is connected to the environment – we just manage to ignore this. Our natural environment underpins everything around us but we largely ignore it. There’s a feeling in the movement that things are constantly getting worse. That we’re losing more of Eden every day. We hear in the media about plastic oceans, carbon dioxide and the like. Derrick Jensen says “what would it take to live in a world where every year there were more salmon, and every year there were more birds overhead, and less concrete and more trees?” Paul Hawkens talks about an idea of thousands of local organizations developing a local understanding of their region and each working in parallel over local issues. When people can see environmental issues around them, and connect those issues more simply to related economic issues then it will vitalize action.

It will do interesting things to national boundaries. When you can look through walls and see other kids who are exactly the same as you – clearly that will have some kind of impact. Either to humanize us or to make us carry an even greater burden of cognitive dissonance.

It even brings out that eternal question of what it means to be human. We’re so willingly embracing technology today it almost feels like a planet wide mania. Consider how the One Laptop Per Child is challenged in terms of is it the best and cheapest technology device for kids but rarely is there a question of if technology at all is the right thing. We give some kids augmentia while other kids pry precious metals out old desktops while coughing out toxic smoke from nearby jury rigged smelter operations.

As Sheldon Renan posits in his ‘theory of netness’ a sufficiently dense network exhibits an emergent behavior. A virtuous field is created that affects not only the participants in the network but everything around it, even things not directly connected to it. By way of allegory in the United States we used to back our currency with gold. At some point we left that backing because the illiquidity was a hindrance to velocity. Local area information is about to get a similar speed up and disconnection from its argumentative grounding. You won’t have to visit city records to see the hidden history of the homes around you or the supply chain behind a package of smarties. AR is in some ways like seeing the speculative sum of the Noosphere. Privileged information may become cheaper. Inflationary economies may take hold. But by making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.

Historical Perspective

In 1997 I co-founded Virtual Games Inc. We were a specialized 12 person venture funded games co focusing on real-time immersive many-participant shared experiences. You could put on a VR helmet and run around in our game worlds and interact with other players ( usually by shooting them unfortunately ).

Back then the relatively moderate performance of 3d rendering hardware made it difficult to keep up with the rapid head movements of the players. The lag between moving your head and seeing the 3d display repainted could make you nauseous. Today the average video game machine such as the WII, XBox or Playstation II can paint around 100,000 lit shaded polygons at 60 frames a second but back then home computers were much like the mobile devices today; capable of only very limited 3d performance.

The biggest challenge we faced wasn’t hardware however. Rather it was simply knowing where to start; how to define the topic as a whole. We had very few examples. Issues such as User Interface controls that could be used while moving, having a Heads Up Display, having a radar view, or decorating the VR world with visibly striking markers – these were all fairly novel ideas. We didn’t have a design grammar for representing the objects, their relationships and how they behaved.

Today many of the same issues are occurring again with Augmented Reality. The synchronization and registration between the movement of the real world and the digital overlay can feel like being on a ship at sea. Presenting complex many polygon animated geometries that interact with the users is still a challenge – especially on mobile devices where the camera is fairly dumb and the computational power limited. Making a publishable data representation of an avatar or interactive digital agent is in and of itself a significant challenge. There are fundamentally new ways of interacting that still haven’t been very well defined. The Augmented Reality Operating System has yet to be invented.

Now as a result there are fervent discussions about how to describe, publish, share and run an Augmented Reality world.  People are trying to design an ARML ( Augmented Reality Markup Language ) much like occurred years ago over VRML ( Virtual Reality Markup Language ). But the whole space still lacks the cognitive short-hand and the usability expertise that characterizes web development today.

AROS

“For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by the ocean? Look, it’s filled with fire. A war has started there. If you look closer you’ll see the details. Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of land spread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a relief map. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village near it. A little house the side of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox. Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house collapsed, so that nothing was left of the little two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke pouring from it. Bringing her eye still closer, Margarita made out a small female figure lying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little child with outstretched arms. “That’s it,” Woland said, smiling, “he had no time to sin. Abaddon’s work is impeccable.”

Building the technology for a next generation OS is going to be challenging.

There will need to be some kind of way of publishing AR objects onto the Internet. This description will have to describe what an AR object would like to be presented as. Its geometry as described by a series of polygons or mathematical surfaces, texture, appearance, lighting and animation. Often appearance is tied to underlying functionality and a description of the behavior of the object needs to be shipped as well. Some of this behavior is gratuitous; eye-candy for the viewer, and some is utilitarian, actual work that the object may do for you. The clear legacy for this kind of description comes from the world of video games.

Unlike the traditional web probably there will be one view – not many separate web-pages. Everybody’s stuff will all pour together into one big soup. Therefore there will need to be a way to throttle 3d objects that are presented to you; limiting the size, duration and visual effects associated with those objects so that one persons objects do not drown out another persons. Objects from different people will have to interact gracefully with the real world and with each other.

There will be an ownership battle over who owns ordinary images. Augmented Reality views may be connected to real world images around us. An image of an album cover could show the bands website, or it could show Amazon.com – depending on who ends up winning this battle. An image of you could show your home-page or a site making fun of you. Eventually a kind of Image Registry will emerge where images are connected to some kind of meta-data.  An AR View would talk to this database.

There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view. We’re going to evolve a set of gestures that don’t conflict with gestures we use around other humans but that are unambiguous.

There will be a messaging system. It’s pretty clear that most signage, sirens, alerts and social conventions will be virtualized. You’ll probably be able to elevate your car to being an ambulance in certain conditions and have everybody clear the road ahead of you for example.  This kind of transaction will require an agreement on protocols at least – aside from privileges, permissions, and payment systems.

There will probably be huge incentives to have trust well defined. Since your actual body is usually involved in an augmented reality – you’re likely to be more sensitive about full disclosure. Trust is usually accomplished by a whitelist of friends who are allowed to see you or contact you – and perhaps one or two degrees of separation may be allowed as well.

New Senses

Of course we can imagine that we’ll move past these challenges. And then it becomes like any human prosthetic; integrated with our faculties, shifting who we are, and becoming invisible. Modern video games have a well framed design grammar that is taken for granted – the experience of being in a VR world is completely natural. Mobility, teleporting, just-in-time information – all completely normal. We can navigate a VR world with about the same ease that we can trace our finger along a map or browse the chapters of a book. And like maps or books if it is convenient and helpful then it becomes necessary.

Today I am sitting in the park between the Metreon and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I’m currently surrounded by thousands of “agents”, ranging from birds to pedestrians to street-signs to the grass itself. Clearly we are fit for this world we live in. Plants in general are color coded in such a way that their coloration has critical meaning for us. There is a well understood inter-species dialogue between ourselves and other kinds of agents at many levels. The pace of the world runs at about the pace of our ability to keep up with it. Our world is highly interactional – a total tactile and sensory immersion if we permit it. Our whole body is ventured and at risk. The world affects and defines us by the compromises we make; we put substantial cognition into avoiding harm. It is not about arbitrary irreverent static images floating around in our field of view like a detached retina. We are a persistent but porous boundary between an inner state and an outer state. Our embodiment is affected by the powers and needs we have.

Augmented Reality is (I imagine) more of a new kind of power. It isn’t quite like our own memory or quite like the counsel of friends. It stands in its own right. It is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. A view instrumented with extra hints and facts is of course not entirely novel. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters. A key aspect is that it seems to be faster. It’s as if we are evolving in a Lamarckian fashion to deal with a new kind of world.

It is hard to imagine what having a new sense is like. Recently I was invited by Mike Liebhold at the IFTF to hear Quinn Norton talk about having had magnetic implants in her fingers. She is the writer for Wired Magazine who interviewed Todd Huffman a few years back on the same topic and had the procedure done to herself. By brushing her fingers over a wall she could literally feel the magnetic field lines where the electrical wires ran underneath the surface. Her mind integrated this as a new sense; not merely a tugging on her fingers but a kind of novel sensory field awareness.  Quinn also spoke about wearing a compass cuff; a small ankle bracelet that would buzz on the north facing side. Over time it gave her an awareness of which direction was true north. It wasn’t just a buzzing feeling in her leg, but a feeling for her orientation with respect to the world. This kind of sensory awareness may be like what a homing pigeon feels intuitively. Choices we make may be quietly guided by an understanding we have.

Boxes

Who have persuaded man that this admirable moving of heavens vaults, that the eternal light of these lampes so fiercely rowling over his head, that the horror-moving and continuall motion of this infinite vaste ocean were established, and contine so many ages for his commoditie and service? Is it possible to imagine so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himselfe, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperor.

Dirt Architecture has leaned in the direction of making our world simpler, safer and dumber. It seems to largely have been about the imposition of barriers, walls and structures to reduce the complexity of the world. This is prevalent today. Perhaps the primary legacy of the Industrial age is the fence.

Many of us still live sheltered box lives. In the morning you enter the small box that is your car and it safely navigates you to your office. During this journey you are protected from the buffeting winds, from people, from noise and from most other distractions. Once at the office you sit down in your cubicle, the walls safely blinkering away distractions as you myopically gaze into the box of your computer screen. Even the screen itself consists of very clearly delineated boxes. There are buttons that say “go” and buttons that say “cancel”. There is no rain, no sun, no noise. After the days work ends you get back in your car and you drive home. When you arrive at home you close the door behind you and relax – ignoring the outside world held at arms length outside of your domain.

There is a sense of pleasure in this artificial simplicity. A sense of closure, understanding and a lack of fear about things being hidden. There is also an undue sense of speed at our ability to race through these spaces very quickly.

This pattern is similar to that of working by yourself versus working with others. You gain privacy, concentration, control and velocity by doing it yourself, but you lose an ability to crowd-source problems and to avoid repeating work and energy that others have already put in. By expending more energy on being social you save energy on wasted effort.

This extends to the way we shop at Whole Foods, Costco, Walmart, Ikea and other such big box stores. Certainly part of the reason we don’t use local resources as much as we could is that we simply can’t see them. We don’t know that we can just pick an apple instead of buying one. We don’t know that a certain garage sale has what we need or that there’s an opportunity to volunteer just around the corner.

If we interact with spaces primarily as a series of disjoint divisions then we tend to think our actions on the world can be contained without side-effects. In any busy city you can see the store owners and proprietors manicure the space directly in front of their building. Planting plants, brushing the pavement, creating a sense of mood and ambiance around their particular restaurant. And that obligation stops immediately at the margins of their property line. Of course this just pushes negative patterns to the edge where pressure builds up more strongly.

Our aesthetic leads us to try to whitewash reality and yet it pokes through. An urban landscape becomes clotted with thrown away garbage, sidewalks blackened with bubble gum. Paint peels, weeds crack the pavement. We see sometimes vagrants, beggars and the dispossessed raging against the world, noisy, bothersome; frightening even. We see their helpless entanglement and inability to be indifferent as a kind of betrayal of Utopia.

Simplicity, linear surfaces, boxes, walls. These patterns fail because they hide but do not eliminate side-effects. In fact they magnify them. It is the lack of synthesis between spaces, the lack of free movement between them that makes pressures build up. If you can’t understand that you could share a ride with a new friend to work, or that kids are constantly vandalizing your street because they used to exhaust themselves instead in a wilder more abandoned overgrown forest, then you tend to work against opportunities, you end up spending more energy to get less.

This is so unlike a dirty natural entangled world where you have little say in how the world is phrased. Where one brushes through spider webs and thorns stick to you and you have to walk all the miles to a hopeful uncertain destination. You get wet and dirty and hungry and tired and rained on and slapped silly by nature if you make a dumb mistake. You have to balance many forces in opposition and if you tug on one thing you find it connected to everything else in the universe. In nature one is constantly leveraging the landscape itself, working very closely with what it affords and simply steering those resources slightly in your benefit rather than asserting them so strongly. And it is there that we always seemed happiest.

Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.  It is fundamentally different to see that something in a geographical proximity to you is actionable than to see it in a list view in Craiglist or read about it in a newspaper. It becomes a physical act – you can walk towards it, you can judge if you should participate.

Use

AR is a precise assault on dirt architecture. It is a response to design – not by changing the world but by changing us. It is as if we’ve become fatigued with the attempts to refashion perspective with dirt and are instead just drawing lines in the air. How will we use it? And by use I mean use in the same way that we wear a garment or use an art object – the value we derive from it individually and culturally.

The First Union Methodist Church of Palo Alto on Webster street is designed to evoke a certain emotion. It has a Gothic style with many small windows arranged to a peak. To me these tiny windows seem to imply souls, perhaps ascending to heaven. That the windows are small also seems to imply a certain kind of suffering in life and a certain role of humility. The architect who designed this invoked a visual language that subconsciously refers to historical references and understanding. Carlton Arthur Steiner, the designer, may indeed not have been a fully rational actor; much in the way that we casually gesture with our hands and expect others to understand those gestures even though we don’t fully know them ourselves as rational acts.

This church is a fairly objective object in our shared reality. We may bring our own prejudices, history and understanding to our perception but it exists as a series of reinforcing statements by an amalgamation of the people around it. To avoid a Wittgenstein-like knot: I use my perception of said church a different way than another person but I am not using something else entirely; there is some portion of it shared between different views.

Counterpoint this with the augmented reality case where the church may not even be there, or may be some other completely arbitrary and alien cartoon artifact – something so subjective to each user that agreement is radically impossible.

We’ve always draped our landscapes with our opinions. We downscore certain things, upscore other things and in this way exhibit a kind of prejudice. We’re afraid of and offended by people who are down and out, we embrace a certain definition of nature, and a certain definition of beauty. We think certain kinds of architecture, space and geometry is beautiful. There are a set of culture aesthetics that bias us to value certain kinds of artifacts, shelters and structures over others. We read between the lines in many cases, seeing the rules that guided outcomes, seeing policy and choice as reflected in the geometry of our world and nod approvingly or disapprovingly.

Most of us are not architects and don’t have permission to rewrite our landscapes anyway. We’ve had to comfort ourselves with criticism in text, image, placard or graffiti to communicate our point of view. Often it was at a degree of remove – not so closely conflated and overlaid with the view as augmented reality affords. Even graffiti is somewhat transitory and superficial; it is not a deep rewriting of structure ( at least not yet ).

In an augmented world these factors all move around. Your critical statement may be directly attached to the subject in question; not at a remove. Your statement is explicit, it can be published to other people, it isn’t just in your head. But at the same time your statement is increasingly subjective. It loses some of the value of an embodied artifact.

In an Augmented Reality we can erase buildings that offend us and we can paint golden halo’s around people that we like. We can prejudice our contemporaries and fuel a kind of hyper tribalism if we wish. But at the same time our power is diminished unless we can get a large portion of the mainstream to agree with our view.

Consensus

AR views will make our prejudices more visible and more formal. But they will also make them more subjective. Different people will subscribe to different views and build up quite a bit of bias before they’re forced to reconcile that with other people.

It may very well be that the role of consensus builder, or at least the role of holding a consensus space where issues of consensual reality can be debated, may become most important. I imagine that the role of a bartender for example, a neutral stakeholder who bridges other people together by offering a shared public space, might become quite important.

Let’s imagine that three people walk into a bar:

The first person, let’s call her Mary, a liberal environmentalist, has an augmented reality view that shows the carbon footprint of the people and objects around her. She can also see where the rivers used to run through the urban landscape, she can see if food is locally sourced and if purchasing power goes back into her community. She can see where super-fund sites are and where poverty levels are higher.

The second person, let’s call him a Derek, an artist, has an augmented reality view that redecorates the landscape around him with a kind of graffiti. All surfaces are covered with cartoon like creatures voicing criticism, comments, banal humor and art. He automatically has a critical perspective that lets him better understand others assumptions. He can see the contrails of his friends passage, the tenuous connections between people, and the location of upcoming art events in the area.

The third person, let’s call her Sarah, has a neo-american point of view and say is deputized as a police officer. She can see the historical pattern of crime in the area, she can see the traffic congestion, parking zones, gps speed-traps and can raise her space to emergency vehicle status if she needs it, she can see the contrails of important people in the neighborhood and can turn streets off and on.

The bartender serves them all a round of beers on the house and they sit down to talk about and share their differences.

Each of them is going to see their beer, and each other a radically different light based on their powers. For Mary the beer may appear especially palatable due to being locally sourced. For Derek the beer may have an attached satire which plays out about the human condition. For Sarah the beer may be seen with respect to late night noise ordinance violations surrounding the pub. This is on top of any personal memory that they have.

They get to talking about the beer, how regulated it should be, how it should taste and the like. A small typical bar conversation, but prejudiced by fairly strongly colored and enhanced points of view. Each participant thinks they are picking facts but they’re in fact picking opinions. Over time each one has subscribed to a set of prejudices that fundamentally altered what they now see. It alters how quickly they reach for the drink, it alters if they even enjoy it.

Over the issue of regulation Sarah might say that the sale of alcohol should be restricted. Derek might say that the alcohol should be served frozen so that it takes longer to consume. Mary might argue against regulation at all.

Each persons views are accumulated views. They are accumulated out of networks of people with like minds. Some networks are based on friendship, similar sentiment and trust. Other networks are constructed out of hierarchical chains of command. Each of these individuals reflects not just themselves but is a facet of a larger community and a larger set of views.

What comes to the table is not Mary, Derek and Sarah but Mary’s tribe, Derek’s tribe and Sarah’s tribe.

And the resultant consensus conflict becomes a classic case of the same kind of pathology that occurs when anthropologists try to understand a new culture. Each person is burdened by a deeply framed cultural lens that makes it difficult to really see things as they are. There is a tendency for all of us to divide the world into categories or into prototypical objects, and to then classify what we see as an example of some kind of object. We build mental machinery to deal with objects – we know how to deal with dogs or cats or a car – and we can mistakenly treat something as dog-like or cat-like when it in fact is dangerously not quite so. We cannot always give all things equal weight all the time, and in prioritizing, categorizing and scoring we necessarily create prejudice.

The redeeming difference here is that each of these participants can choose to trade views. Saran can put on Derek’s view, and Derek can put on Mary’s view and Mary can put on Sarah’s view. They can now see the world as scored from the other person’s point of view.

We find that Sarah has a personal financial benefit to seeing the world in her perspective. Her point of view is necessarily beneficial to continuing to earn a living. Derek perhaps also has a similar dependency. His point of view is necessarily driven by a need to continue maintaining a street credibility with his artist peers. Mary’s point of view is driven by and self-reinforced by a caution and concern for her well being. Each of these points of views is an embodiment of needs.

There’s both a risk and a promise that Augmented Reality will magnify prejudice but may also help us more clearly see each others prejudices. More to the point we’ll be able to hopefully trace back down to basic needs that lead to specific prejudicial postures. We can unwind the stack and get down to embodiments – perhaps we can tease apart our deep differences or at least respect them.

Links

http://swindlemagazine.com/issue08/banksy/

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/10/09/want-better-service-just-complain-on-twitter/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puddle_Thinking

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/augmented-reality-apps.html

http://crisismapping.ning.com/profiles/blogs/crisis-mapping-brings-xray

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/leftvright_world.html

http://www.nearfield.org/2009/09/nearness

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2009/10/sensing-the-immaterial-city.html

http://www.urbeingrecorded.com/news/2009/09/22/rss-augmented-reality-blog-feeds/

https://xd.adobe.com/#/videos/video/436

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ex-googler_brizzly_creator_on_real-time_web_filtra.php

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html#

http://mashable.com/2009/10/18/wolfram-alpha-iphone-app/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/20/wowd-takes-a-stab-at-realtime-search-with-a-peer-to-peer-approach/

http://goblinxna.codeplex.com/

look at a variety of iphone 3d engines such as the ones used during GOSH

http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1004454-Augmented+Reality

http://www.timpeter.com/blog/2009/10/06/how-important-is-local-search-heres-a-hint-extremely/

http://virtual.vtt.fi/virtual/proj2/multimedia/alvar.html

http://pointandfind.nokia.com/

http://www.augmentedenvironments.org/blair/2009/09/23/has-ar-taken-off/#more-104

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/robotvision_a_bing-powered_iphone_augmented_realit.php

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc2009112_353477_page_2.htm

(From the website) This Banff New Media Institute (BNMI)summit highlighted and facilitated the emerging dialogue on both artist-driven and socially conscious open source hardware projects. From prosthetic limbs to electronic hardware, the breadth of open source hardware projects and distributed models of manufacturing suggest that it is time for these disparate manufacturers, designers, artists, and engineers to come together to discuss the common issues of their practices.

Why it’s significant?

Because it’s one of the first centralized attempts at organizing all the hackers, phd’s, artists, creatives, interaction designers, experience designers, researchers, teachers, theorists, and studencts that work in open source hardware. While open hardware practices have led to the rapid development of a multitude of varied projects, no central organizing rules or practices exists for open hardware.

Open hardware brings excitement, a potential for real social effects, and a lightning-fast collaborative progress to the development of physical objects, but along with these benefits come a host of complicated issues. A central goal of the conference will be to bring to light these issues, in a multidisciplinary context that encourages exchange and collaboration.

Why does this matter?

‘Cause these are the people that are shaping the future of media experiences- for everyone. And we need to know what they are doing. These people are the ones that are inventing the next iphone, for free, for the sheer hell of it. They probably already have.

Why does this matter from a planning perspective?

Because good interactive design is social, and often experiential and progressive. And because these people are breaking down barriers and creating new ways to interact with their products, creating new kinds of products and totally re-working hardward as we know it.

Because this conference represents a core sampling of very different people all working in different ways under the framework of open hardware. Because they are not centrally organized, intentionally? and that represents an opportunity/platform for engagement with this audience on many levels- plainly speaking it means that they need help, guidance and support. They are growing communities of makers and they have to be service oriented in the social media space.

Following people and conferences like this that keep me inspired to do great work. The stuff I can learn in two days from a conference like this trumps hours of research. I got a first hand sense of the future of products, and design experiences by the people that are inventing tomorrow…

Wiki!

The wiki for the project is here: GOSH WIKI

Images

See Flickr.

I wanted to post some links to images from the final exhibit since I just got them.
I did my final thesis work on interaction design, the cyborgian state of our existence and socio-techno interaction in daily life. I looked particularly at the impact on craft, hacktivism, art and diy movements and discussed the implications on our sense of self and identity.

Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine, Quilt 2009 by Paige Saez

I Made You a Wearable Computer, I Hope You Like It, T-shirts by Paige Saez 2009

My thesis Everyday Practical Magic brings together my research in social media, experience design, and anthropology, 
with my experience as a maker of material objects and hence, a facilitator of intimate exchanges 
between people, objects and the media. Through the work of Donna Haraway and Clay Shirky I 
outline the conditions of our political identity as cyborgs. I highlight the tremendous impact 
networked cultures (mobile and internet) have had on our understanding of social ritual. I describe 
three projects completed over the last four years that laid the groundwork for this paper and 
my thesis exhibit. 
Using Wittgenstein’s writings on meaning and use in his Philosophical Investigations, I point to the 
political power of language in shaping cultural understanding of different kinds of economies. 
I illustrate the work of two other like‐minded collectives; Superflex and The Center for Tactical Magic, 
and clarify what happens when art‐making, cultural activism, and communication technologies collide. 
Through Henry Jenkins’ work on Participatory Culture, I elucidate the hybridity of social 
media and art and describe the difference between interaction and participation. 
I rely on Jerry Saltz’ review of The Generational: Younger than Jesus to explain my and other millennial artists work as evidencing a trend towards anthropology, 
sociology and ethnography. Then I summarize the simplistic process, yet complicated context of the 
work I created for the Practical Everyday Objects exhibit. Finally, I  point out that art itself is a social 
media that emerged through use, and shapes the world around us.  

There are a bunch of images on my flickr account here: paige’s flickr

Yesterday I ended up writing a small piece of code to determine what timezone code a person is in.  This was not as trivial as it sounds.

In fact it was a learning experience about how complex our organization of time is – living on a sphere and all.  Timezone maps are not country maps, in fact time-zone maps are a complicated politic cleaving apart regions that have a minimum number of people – like some kind of crazy voronoi diagram of clusters of human populations.  Country boundaries play a strong role, but timezones are more like a mold that has grown over the existing history of a landscape. Alberta has a time zone that juts into Saskatchewan just to capture one town. Argentina slices timezones horizontally towards the South Pole to conserve sunlight for farmers. Chile doesn’t give a damn and puts all of Chile in one gigantic vertical strip of a timezone – so that in the winter it is dark at 6:00 in Santiago but sunny at 6:00 in Tierra Del Fuego. In other places of the world things like small islands show up more clearly than in country maps because each island tends to be a well defined separation of human populations and thus a good opportunity to have a single time zone code. A lost history is left traced in palimpsests here of residual boundaries.

help the voronoi are invading

If you look at the zoneinfo article on Wikipedia you can get a sense of what is going on here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoneinfo

The backstory is that the OpenBSD folks wanted help to automate configuration of timezones for installs. What we did was take the geolocation of their IP and use it to look up a timezone code.

There are 27000+ polygonal boundaries that make up the timezones. And there an odd 370+ timezones including all the various cases.

The goals were:

• We wanted an extremely fast computation.
• We wanted it to be static ( not require a database ).
• Accuracy
• Return Olson posix string like “Europe/Paris” .

I did fix one bug which was that in asking MapServer to spit out .png files it was palettizing the colors into an 8 bit deep image – whereas I needed 9 bits… So I had to ask mapserver to print out a tiff. If you see any other bugs….

Here are the source files in any case:

• http://civicmaps.org/maps/timezones.h
• http://civicmaps.org/maps/timezones.c
• http://civicmaps.org/maps/timezone.tiff

You can build it by typing

gcc timezones.c

And you can test it running with a longitude, latitude pair – for example:

./a.out -114 53

Which should return to you a string showing the time zone you are in.

The way it works is that I read in a timezone shape file from this place

http://koordinates.com/layer/751-world-time-zones/

This was piped to the following program:

http://civicmaps.org/maps/layers.rb

Which instructed my mapserver to generate a special kind of cloropleth map – which can be seen here ( but don’t bother because it chews my machine ) :

http://civicmaps_dontbother.org/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/www/sites/civicmaps.org/maps/x.map&service=WMS&WMTVER=1.0.0&REQUEST=map&SRS=EPSG:4326&LAYERS=lowboundaries0&FORMAT=image/png&STYLES=&WIDTH=2048&HEIGHT=1024&BBOX=-180,-90,180,90

This data file can now be used as a bitmapped query interface for discovery of unique time zone codes as done above – or as done in ruby here :

http://civicmaps.org/maps/longlat.rb

You need ImageMagick installed.

If you wish, you can convert the image into a ppm file or something and embed it directly in the C program. Or memory map it and have a query gateway to it… that would be fastest.

Strange how the scale forms
in tiny patterns
on my antenna
and the Five O’clock Show, hello hello…
Brooklyn is crawling with famous people
I turn my vehicle beneath the river, West from South

Through the airwaves -
people never read the airwaves
do we only feed the airwaves
or stamp them out of street level?
Airwaves – the dampness of the wind
the airwaves – the tension of the skin
the airwaves

I really should have seen through the airwaves

Electric fences line our new freeway
here in the half-light, the motorhomes leave
knee-deep in water under a pylon

how slow my heartbeat, how thin the air I’m breathing in

Control has enabled the abandoned wires again
but the copper cables all rust in the acid rain
that flood the subway
with elements of our corrosion
cabled in to me…
Be in my broadcast when this is over
give me your shoulder, I need a place
to wait for morning.
No it was nothing – some car backfiring -
pleased don’t ask questions

I itch all over
let me sleep.

Like REALLY REALLY simple. Like this:

twitter.com/kissmehere

Kinda like a kiss. Yeah, just like that. Like a kissing booth! JUST like a Kissing Booth!

kisses!

The way this all works is that when you send a message to @kissmehere on twitter and you include the name of some people, it will send a kiss to all those people. For example:

@kissmehere go kiss @paigesaez @zephoria @soycamo @semaphoria @anselm

Kissmehere is no prude, you can kiss more than one person at the same time – or kiss only one person – it is up to you.

Kissmehere maps your kisses too!

MakerLab Kiss Map!

@kissmehere

How did I build it? This is just a riff on the same twitter code I have been using before. There are a few twists. First we have some pre-amble and we have a geocoding engine – thanks MetaCarta!!!:

require 'rubygems'
require 'dm-core'
require 'twitter'
require 'net/smtp'
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'json'
require 'dm-core'

#
# passwords
#
TWITTER_USER_NAME = "kissmehere"
TWITTER_PASSWORD = ""
METACARTA_USERID = ""
METACARTA_PASSWORD = ""
METACARTA_KEY = ""

#
# a very very nice metacarta utility to brute force discover location in text
#
def geolocate(location)
  location = URI.escape(location, Regexp.new("[^#{URI::PATTERN::UNRESERVED}]"))
  # location = URI.escape(location)
  host = "ondemand.metacarta.com"
  path = "/webservices/GeoTagger/JSON/basic?version=1.0.0"
  path = "#{path}&doc=#{location}"
  data = {}
  begin
    req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(path)
    req.basic_auth METACARTA_USERID, METACARTA_PASSWORD
    http = Net::HTTP.start(host)
    #if response.is_a?(Net::HTTPSuccess)
      response = http.request(req)
      puts response.body
      data = JSON.parse(response.body)
    #end
  rescue Timeout::Error
    # DO SOMETHING WISER
    return 0,0
  rescue
    return 0,0
  end
  begin
    lat = data["Locations"][0]["Centroid"]["Latitude"]
    lon = data["Locations"][0]["Centroid"]["Longitude"]
    return lat,lon
  rescue
  end
  return 0,0
end

We have a simple data model as usual to track our activity… again using datamapper which is a favorite of mine.

#
# Only send out 10 tweets at a time
#
twittercap = 10

#
# Grab a database
#
DataMapper.setup(:default, {
    :adapter  => 'postgres',
    :database => "kissmehere",
    :username => '',
    :password => '',
    :host     => 'localhost'
})

#
# here is our schema
#
class Kiss
  include DataMapper::Resource
  property :id,          Integer, :serial => true
  property :provenance,  Text
  property :uuid,        Text
  property :title,       Text
  property :link,        Text
  property :description, Text
  property :screenname,  Text
  property :userid,      Text
  property :location,    Text
  property :lat,         Float
  property :lon,         Float
  property :secret,      Integer, :default => 0
  property :friended,    Integer, :default => 0
  property :kissed_at,   DateTime
  property :created_at,  DateTime
end

We have the usual twitter gem code to peek at the twitter state. I am really starting to wonder how the heck twitter even stays up with the amount of traffic it is getting… In any case mine is not to worry but to do!

#
# Remember kiss requests
#
twitter = Twitter::Base.new(TWITTER_USER_NAME, TWITTER_PASSWORD )
twitter.replies().each do |twit|
  uuid = "#{twit.id}"
  kiss = Kiss.first(:provenance => "twitter", :uuid => uuid)
  next if kiss
  secret = 0
  secret = 1 if twit.text[/ secret/] != nil
  lat = 0
  lon = 0
  if twit.user.location && twit.user.location.length > 1
    lat,lon = geolocate(twit.user.location)
  end
  kiss = Kiss.create(
             :provenance => "twitter",
             :uuid => uuid,
             :title => twit.text,
             :link => nil,
             :description => nil,
             :screenname => twit.user.screen_name,
             :userid => twit.user.id,
             :location => twit.user.location,
             :lon => lon,
             :lat => lat,
             :secret => secret
          )
  kiss.save
  puts "Saved a kiss on twitter! #{kiss.userid} #{kiss.title} #{kiss.lat} #{kiss.lon}"
end

Next we want to respond to kisses in an intelligent way; telling everybody, friending new friends and all that kind of fun stuff.

#
# Pass new kisses onwards ( only do twittercaps worth )
#
@kisses = Kiss.all(:order => [:created_at.desc],
                   :limit => twittercap,
                   :kissed_at => nil
              ).each do |kiss|

  # tease each kiss apart for multiple receivers
  kisses = kiss.title.scan(/\@\w+/)
  kisses.each do |luckyduck|
    next if luckyduck == "@kissmehere"
    if kiss.secret == 0
      kiss.link = "http://twitter.com/#{kiss.screenname}/statuses/#{kiss.uuid}"
      gossip = "#{luckyduck} got a kiss from @#{kiss.screenname} - see #{kiss.link} "
      # if kiss.lat != 0 && kiss.lon != 0
      #  gossip = " - #{gossip} near #{kiss.location}"
      # end
    else
      kiss.link = nil
      gossip = "@#{luckyduck} got a kiss from an anonymous admirer!"
    end
    kiss.description = gossip
    result = twitter.post(gossip)
    puts "Told everybody #{result} of #{gossip}"
  end
  if kisses.length == 0
    puts "No love from #{kiss.screenname}"
  end
  kiss.kissed_at = DateTime.now
  kiss.save

  # friend everybody - could improve this
  begin
    twitter.create_friendship(kiss.screenname)
  rescue
  end
  kisses.each do |luckyduck|
    begin
      #if twitter.friendship_exists(TWITTER_USER_NAME,luckyduck)
      twitter.create_friendship(luckyduck)
    rescue
    end
  end

end

Finally we write out an RSS feed for Google Maps – thanks @ajturner for the quick tip. I wasn’t able to get ruby rss maker to do anything useful such as allow me to specify custom namespaces for the geo:lat and geo:long attributes so I wrote everything by hand! By doing this we can then make a map page which has all the kisses on it just for fun. I guess I won’t show this blob because it breaks the layout engine in wordpress… I will link to the original file however at agent.txt

That’s it. Have fun out there in the twitter verse!

http://twitter.com/anselm

http://twitter.com/meedan

http://twitter.com/makerlab

In Vonnegut’s futuristic dystopia, the Handicapper General uses a variety of handicapping mechanisms to reduce inequalities in performance. A spectator at a ballet comments: “it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two hundred pound men.”  [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory ]

Chapter 1 : The beasts move as one

Anselm: Have you noticed how it is that the beasts in nature can in some circumstances appear to move as one?

Socrates: Indeed. One has to look no further than to witness the swifts descend upon the Chapman chimney tower in Portland.

Linked from Richard Barnes without permission

Anselm: Yes the swifts are a good example. They follow each other and swarm in patterns that clearly indicate an awareness of each other. There is some kind of signaling going on between them which coordinates their actions and makes them appear as if they are all components of a larger organism. As well in Portland many of the computer geeks themselves exhibit a similar swarming behavior using technology. I don’t think there is anything new under the sun. I propose that by observing how animals communicate in general that we can draw parallels to better understand the deeper roles that technology is manifesting.

Socrates: Certainly as it is in nature so is it in human behavior.  We are a part of nature and nature is a part of us and we cannot stand outside of that ‘wheel of life’ as the Buddhists like to say. Our cognitive wings let us fly at a greater elevation above the landscape but nature is grander than we can comprehend even so.

Anselm: Furthermore I’d like to focus primarily on Twitter.  Twitter itself is a very simple technology, letting people share brief messages in a public way about where they are and what they are doing. It crosses showing off with people watching.

Theodorus: Did you just say Twitter?! Nobody uses Twitter for anything serious. It is at best a distraction, at worst a plague.

Anselm: True Twitter may yet prove to be the digital age’s version of the sitcom. Nevertheless animal signaling theory has recently become popular among anthropologists as a way to study human communication [*]. And in that light I see Twitter as a form of biomimetic signaling. It is starting to emulate the kind of subtle, gestural and soft signaling patterns that we see in nature. If the metaphor holds true then by looking at nature we can gain insight into where our digital savannas are taking us.  [ * http://ssi.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/4/603 ]

Socrates: There may be a kernel of truth here. It is supported by others such as Rheingold who have already noted flocking behavior among the digerati.

Anselm: There’s an emerging degree of swarming, coordination, just in time planning, that makes a cohesive group appear to exist out of a series of autonomous individuals. I’ve personally witnessed people get rides from airports at midnight after the transit stopped, people collectively swarm to try track down a stolen bicycle, venue changes for meetings where nobody misses a beat, random get-togethers facilitated by a real time awareness. There is a kind of real time responsiveness not present with services such as email, the telephone, the classifieds or even newspapers and television mass media.

Theodorus: But if you look at how people tried to use Twitter for something serious – the Mumbai crisis [*] being an example – it had almost no impact. [ * http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/11/twitter_in_cont.html ].

Anselm: Yes but where were television and other media at this time? They were not even reporting the event till hours later. Twitter is closer to a natural signaling pathway between peers. A near real-time operator-in-the-loop opportunity exists. There’s a possibility of not just consuming the big events but participating in them and understanding them. And that possibility is new.

Signaling

Theodorus: You’ve been using the term ‘signals’. What kind of signals do you mean to speak of?

Anselm: By signals I mean not just say voice, or text, or the shriek of a falcon for that matter. Signaling includes any and all marks or signifiers embedded in the plainly visible world. For mice and men the world is decorated with placed hints that aid in navigation through it. Droppings, trails, marks on trees, the presence or absence of others, their haste or sloth. These all are aspects of a voice that can be used to communicate polyphonically across many media.

Socrates: Are all signaling mediums equal or are there divisions that we can apply?

Anselm: The choice of which medium to use depends on the goals but I propose a few core criteria namely 1) secrecy, 2) fidelity, 3) volume, 4) persistence. Creatures great and small often want a semi-public boundary of privacy where our messages are visible to specific peers. They may want to signal one message to predators or symbotic species, and a different message to other members. As well the choice of medium depends on the environment. Clearly for example the vibrancy or color of a rich coat of feathers is not visible at night – so to signal vigor requires perhaps an audio based medium.  There may be a desire to communicate clearly; more than simply “I am here” and the fidelity of the medium, it’s ability to clearly carry the message, may affect the choices. Volume itself; who can hear the message, may affect the medium. And finally some mediums afford a longer term persistence.

Socrates: What kind of mediums then do you see?

Anselm: I would roughly classify signaling mediums into 1) transient and 2) durable.

Socrates: Of the transient flavor then are there any different kinds of mediums? For certainly worms communicate differently than birds do they not?

Anselm: I would suggest that we define transient media just using the five basic senses of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. A bird will flash the tip of its wing to signal that it is turning left or right. Carrion will circle over the site of a likely meal. Dinoflagelletes will bioluminesce in ocean tides (for reasons not entirely understood). Plants practice interspecies signaling using appearance, odor and taste. Grooming and nit picking instincts are employed by chimpanzees to broker peace.

Bioluminescent Dinoflagelletes surround a swimmer.	Alpine berries signal readiness by color and taste.

Anselm: Of the durable flavor I would say there are not divisions but simply variations of a similar theme.  Any durable markings left persistently upon some medium. I admit it is worthy of note that marks, signals, scratches and the like can be imprinted on intelligent agents themselves but I don’t see that distinction as critical.

Theodorus: To be practical, where do you see evidence of signaling then in human communities?

Anselm: Well, Individual appearance and clothing style choices are strong indicators of social alignment. Using Portland as an example again personal tattoos are deeper signaling commitments. Individuals use private email for discretion but we also see the use of public blogging and indeed Twitter. Graffiti and advertising of course fit into this as well as standing on the corner with a bullhorn or dancing in a parade. Of course we know this from Marshall Mcluhan and others; how the mediums have a plasticity that changes in response to their loads, their equivalence and indeed their commonplace ubiquity. It is as if we are all constantly “Helen Kellering” our way through the world; adapting to new ways of being informed on an ongoing basis.

Heterogony

Socrates: Do you mean to indicate that all people are equal then?

Anselm: Yes. Let us start with the proposition that we’re all equals.  We are all people who attempt to communicate with each other.

Theodorus: Equal? I don’t see how I am equal with say large advertising firm such as Weiden-Kennedy. They have more money, more time, and more attention devoted to making their message heard.

Socrates: True. Communication arts are practiced daily by Weiden-Kennedy and by many others – even individual artists who exhibit at events such as First Thursday or Last Thursday or any of the numerous gallery art openings. These people put more resources into their messages than do most of the rest of us.

Anselm:  True. Some people do put a lot of effort into their messages. I suppose we call this advertising at a certain point. But advertising is more often hit than miss – nobody really understands the human mind yet.

Theodorus: Still one can scarcely say that these actors are equivalent. If some can devote more reasoning to their message then time itself becomes a barrier that makes us different.

Anselm: True. But it feels like we are just leaving the age of industrial broadcast media. I agree that one of the key characteristics of the previous empire was the ease with which our attention and our energy could be diverted for private gain. Advertisers successfully steered the flocking behavior of large segments of the population for worse. I am not certain that it will hold true much longer however.

Socrates: This is deeper than simply individuals. It is deeply woven into the legal and accepted definition of western culture itself.  Our concepts of the ownership of space, and appropriate use of space are largely owned by privatized interests. We accept that it is legal and accepted to place large billboards that capture our attention. We accept that it is illegal for an individual voice to “vandalize” equivalent space with graffiti. In fact almost all physical urban space is actually private. There is no real place to rest ones eyes or ones body. The illusion is provided as long as one doesn’t attempt to stand still.

Anselm: I must concur. I’ve often felt that if beauty is in the eye of the beholder then at least some portion of the value should belong to the beholder. Yet we see a tenacious externalized ownership of social objects even though these become part of the consumers cognition. It creates a space of false signals that reflect wholly accepted yet corrupted pseudo-truths. Baudrillard makes the point in Simulacra and Simulation that we don’t even know where truth is anymore in fact. This is not even a question of truth being relative and contextual but rather simply being arbitrary and unconnected to anything.

Theodorus: If you really believed this then you would actually do something about it.

Anselm: Certainly, but this implies a value judgment of deeply ‘right’ or deeply ‘wrong’. I’m not entirely certain industrial media is ‘wrong’ in the sense that it should be ‘stopped’. Yes it is ugly, and true all value is aesthetic, but the advertisers message is something we are now becoming inoculated against. In surmounting that obstacle we ‘the people’ have evolved. True many beautiful and transitory communication art forms do not exist that could exist. This is life. I do feel that attention economics is like real economics – unpredictable. Attention is that most rare of beasts, fooled once but learning quickly and innoculated quickly; in almost a Jungian manner.

Socrates: Not only are well funded interests able to make their own messages most loud but they’re also able to listen to us much better than we can listen to each other. One need look no further than ventures such as http://www.scoutlabs.com/ and http://newmediastrategies.net/ to see how social signaling or sentiment tracking is a core part of day to day business analytics. Projects such as http://microplaza.com also deserve consideration. Even consider projects such as http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/profile.asp?u=anselm&p=27 on the personal side.

Anselm: True. It’s clear that there is an inequity between participants and that there is some value, dollar or otherwise, in capturing attention. Let us acknowledge then that there are different kinds of participants ranging from small to large. In some senses the larger participants are the predators or at least symbiants, benefiting from the actions of the smaller predators. And perhaps they should be distinguished as such.

Growing Pains

Socrates: In what ways does Twitter permit signaling?

Anselm: I’ve proposed that Twitter is a form of biomimetic signaling, in that it emulates patterns in nature, but in fact to be more clear it is more akin to a nervous system that is incomplete. And in this light I would like to defend it not for what it is but for what it could be.

Theodorus: Why defend Twitter? It is just one more walled garden – another ‘latest internet craze’ as the BBC put it. There are many of these.  Do you mean to defend them all?

Anselm: I feel Twitter is one exemplar. And I feel that there is a backlash against technology in total even though technology is simply surfacing epiphenomena that exist anyway. For example human communities engage in a certain volume of channel maintenance; where any random traffic is sent across the channel simply to keep it open. This annoying bubbling of “social trivia” is often lampooned but it is critical to making sure the channel is there when it is really needed. Noise is a deliberate artifact of human behavior in general.  Knowing that somebody peed means knowing that they are alive and can hear you.

Theodorus: Nevertheless why Twitter? Why not FaceBook or why not other services foremost?

Socrates: Indeed I agree with Theodorus. Twitter is just one signaling mechanism. For example recently a bay area tsunami warning alert system became more visible after it failed for better or worse [ * http://bit.ly/QttaQ ].

Anselm: Twitter is best known to my community so it serves best. And Twitter messages are closer to the atoms of social networks than Facebook messages. They are minimum sized “social objects”. Even the connections are one-to-one without any group concepts at this level. And messages themselves are just text, there are almost no special “powers” associated with a message such as you might find on other systems.

Socrates: Can you elaborate on this?

Anselm: In Twitter human agents have to type “rt” by hand to forward a message through the network – there is no special button called “rt” and there is no button called “thumbs up”. This makes Twitter simpler. What happens is that the weight of user needs shift into the grammar rather than through special features built into the framework. In the grammar one issues a message to say @anselm or issues a “leave” request. Like Rael Dornfest’s IWantSandy [ * http://iwantsandy.com ] project the burden is shifted into a more natural human dialogue. The same sense of a single input box is also visible in the new Firefox Ubiquity project [ * http://connect.educause.edu/blog/rmcdonal/ubiquityforfirefoxprettya/47246?time=1235691044 ]. This gives the environment a greater composability at some computational cost. In fact for this reason Twitter is a kind of universal solvent: it sits underneath other services. It is dissolving away other services that are too baroque.

Theodorus: Nevertheless Twitter itself has so many deficiencies. It doesn’t have group concepts – an idea that was already common in IRC and ICB a decade ago. It is hard to filter noise. It is a silo. It is crash-prone. It is hard to hear whole conversations. It is hard to have history. There is no way to subscribe to a geography. More deeply, it can be demoralizing – it is in many ways an ego game. And we don’t even know how the marketers are going to be exploiting this medium yet – or the spammers.  It seems like the only thing it can coordinate is a pillowfight – the minute it is used for anything dangerous the status-quo will turn it off. The biggest problem is that it is so full of noise that in order to consume it you need third party analytical tools.

Anselm: Granted. In these cases Twitter is the exemplar and it stands for the whole. It’s deficiencies are similar to deficiencies of other services and these separate pools will likely merge into a single view. My concern is that like all new things it has many weaknesses but they distract from where the future is leading. It is precisely to better analytical tools, but ones that are more evenly distributed that the future leads.

Curation

Theodorus: Can you provide more detail on where you believe the future is leading?

Anselm: In nature Biologists use the phrase “honest signals” and the phrase “dishonest signals” to distinguish between kinds of animal signaling. I feel that an idea of human curation could help improve the presence of “honest signals”. For example thomson gazelles engage in stotting when being chased by predators. They run in vertical bounds that actually make it easier to catch them – but at the same time the vigor of their jumps may indicate to predators that they are not going to be easy to take down. [ * http://www.springerlink.com/content/w58k120n74033231/ ]. Stotting is hard to fake and therefore is an honest signal. If you could select for the human equivalent of the ‘stotting’ channel then you’d have access to a true read on a situation.

Theodorus: What is the benefit of more honesty?

Anselm: Insofar as critiques of Twitter we probably all acknowledge that the noise to signal ratio is indeed unbearable. Honesty in this sense is one part of a noise reduction strategy because it can be hard to fake and therefore expensive and therefore less common.

Theodorus: Well a private network would be even better – there would be no noise at all.

Anselm: Yes admittedly true. But being open points to an additional quality. Proponents of privacy argue that sharing information is a liability because predators or destructive forces in general can exploit the very communication pathways to find and take advantage of individuals. The term radio-silence derives from this fact. But an open communication network can be faster than predation on individuals. The network can signal very quickly, and the network itself can be improved by critical analysis. The word open is crucial because it has to be easy to access. Let us say that predators bring more computational power and analytics to the table. The flocks of lesser beasts bring a distributed network of sensors and computation to literally out-compute the situations in real time.

Anselm: As another parallel to nature consider frog cacophony. Frog cacophony in nature is designed to bewilder predators while allowing frogs to signal each other. The timing of these signals is crucial and in fact when airplanes fly overhead they disrupt the cacophony and allow predators to more easily pick out the location of frogs. Here the frogs are operating in the open but predatorial forces cannot easily exploit the signals. What is signal to the frogs is noise to the predator.

Theodorus: These signals seem awfully arbitrary.

Anselm: True, they are ritualized over time and usually side-effects of more pragmatic behavior. Narrowing the eyes and flattening the ears is a practical defense to protect the eyes and ears but it is now also a signal. Some of these signals are loud, visible to everybody, others are ‘conspiratorial whispers’ where the signaler and the receiver try to conceal the signals from third parties. There’s a concept that we see in stotting called Zahavi’s handicap principle – that in order to be honest a signal must be costly to the signaler. Peacock tails being an example. And of course we see mimicry of any signal; poisonous frog coloration being a good example of a predator defense.  [ * http://www.sparknotes.com/biology/animalbehavior/signalingandcommunication/section1.html ]

Theodorus: What are predators in human systems?

Anselm: The term predator is perhaps loaded since it implies ‘bad’. I tend to think more of exploitive forces using energy for their own benefit but improving the fitness of the system. For example in nature mosquitos can smell carbon-dioxide and use that to find sources of blood. This is predative behavior that doesn’t necessarily kill the host but it’s an example of loads that the host carries. In human networks this could be anything from a brand such as Nike trying to create visibility for some arbitrary new style of shoe, to a banking institution trying to determine if they can get away with unusually high account fees. There are also large natural forces such as environmental change due to global warming, and the attendant pressures on food supplies and a resultant rise in father-knows-best style autocratic decision making.

Theodorus: Well, Twitter and like system’s don’t really deliver on these ideas. They are noisy and don’t do any particularily good job of making important facts available.

Anselm: There is a telios at work here. The future is drawing us towards bigger networks. The pressure is environmental, political and social; we need to “become bigger” because our social networks are larger, we are more mobile and indeed the problems we see are larger and swifter. Bigger means more noisy. But this isn’t by defacto an argument for smarter algorithms to search or cull data. People could indicate which media is worthy simply by the attention they pay to it. In human communities we can gaze in a direction and other people will follow our eye. That signaling behavior is unconscious but functional at steering attention.

Theodorus: How can this work on the Internet?

Anselm: We need an ability to formally “curate” which signals are worth listening to. I chose the word “curate” to imply a human mediated approach rather than a technology mediated one. There are millions of twitter channels, and hundreds of thousands of ideas, links, posts, articles pushed through the network every day. But this is no more challenging than the real world which has an equal density of objects. Many Twitterers are just noise, but some are specialists, there are outlets for utilitarian information and different kinds of communities define utility in different ways. Curation simply recognizes that there’s a matchmaking, ranking, scoring, categorizing and brokerage role that some participants in Twitter can perform for other participants.  A value chain of different kinds of participants can then emerge.

Theodorus: When you say formal curation what do you mean?

Anselm: The curatorial role is one of exploring the raw data and marking and categorizing worthy material. A curator needs to be able to filter the data by six criteria: 1) subject 2) location 3) time 4) trust network 5) novelty and perhaps also possibly 6) language. The actual interface, such as say offered by http://search.twitter.com has to allow cleaving along these different criteria. And then it has to be possible to clump and aggregate results into buckets, and to up-score and downscore content.

Theodorus: So is this all about better search? Better search would make Twitter better?

Anselm: No, the search role is a curatorial and editorial role. Consider newspapers. A newspaper such as the New York Times has a staff of editors who in a sense curate what the readership is going to read. The readers flock to the newspaper based on their values, but they don’t pick the articles themselves. What’s missing in our system is a way to search the space from an experts vantage point in order to find the content that people will want to read.

Theodorus: But people have different criteria all the time. They move, their interests shift, they have new interests.

Anselm: Indeed. And subscription itself should be dynamic. You should be able to listen to a specific geography – and have that geography follow you around as you move [ * http://twitter.com/caseorganic ] . The curatorial role is not restricted to the curator – it is just aimed primarily at people who want to put the energy in – and intended to benefit everybody. If you cannot set boundaries or filters then you can end up with something that is more intended to be serendipitous art than pragmatically functional such as http://twittervision.com [ * David Troy ].

Socrates: Such as it is in nature; birds can selectively listen to the channels they understand and ignore the irrelevant?

Anselm: Yes. The key draw is that Twitter and like systems could offer the potential to allow us to as a whole to react instantly and simultaneously to the signals of other agents if we could just find the emitters that were relevant. This isn’t just crisis response but every day opportunity. A well culled set of emitters can provide awareness about a specific topic extremely quickly to a wide community – including persons who are not explicitly listening to that emitter as a first order relationship at all times.

Examples of Curation

Theodorus: So how does one build such filters?

Anselm: Today there’s no way for the community to dynamically and collectively build the filters that we want. Twitter lacks group concepts so there is no natural way for clusters to emerge in an authoritative way yet. And searching in Twitter is just beginning to improve. But we can look at examples of primitive attempts to manually build such filters and we can use this as an example of how such curation might exist.

Theodorus: Ok, then, what are some examples of curated sets?

Anselm: There are collections such as Britta Gustafson mentions at http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/ , http://delicious4teachers.pbwiki.com/ and the like. Of note here is one kind of manually built set of particular interest – location : http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/Twitter%2BPack%2Bby%2BGeographic%2BLocation . As well google readily returns a few more mainstream collections which I will repeat here for discussion:

Mainstream Green Twitterers [ * http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/19/best-green-twitter-feeds_n_119694.html ]

• Grist’s twitter complements the green updates from its excellent environment, humor and politics site.
• The Green Options twitter compiles news from all of the website’s blogs.
• EcoGeek’s twitter offers news updates based on the website’s green tech postings.
• The Sprig twitter reports green living tips from the Sprig website, which advertises itself as “your daily green style guide.”
• Sustainablog’s twitter features excerpts of the blog’s postings.
• The Eco-Chickie twitter is based on green news from Eco-chick’s website.
• The Green Wash Brigade’s twitter is based on news from the American Public Media’s blog:
• Eco-entrepreneur Shea Gunther’s twitter features updates from his green sites EarthFirst and GreenOrder.

Mainstream News Twitterers  [ * http://my-creativeteam.com/blog/?p=694 ]

• Charlotte Observer, @theobserver
• Financial Times @FTmedianews, @FTfinancenews
• Honolulu Star Bulletin, Honolulu, HI @starbulletin
• Knoxville News Sentinel, Knoxville, TN @knoxnews
• LA Daily News @ladailynews
• LA Times @latimesbreaking, @latimesworldNashua Telegraph, Hudson, NH @NashuaTelegraph
• The New York Times, NY @nytimes
• The News & Observer, Raleigh, NC @newsobserver
• The Oregonian, Portland, OR @oregonian, @OregonianBiz, @OregonianTraff, @OregonianSports
• The Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL @orlandosentinel
• USA Today @ondeadline
• CNN @cnn, @cnnbrk, @CNNNewsroom
• Fox News @foxnews
• KOAT, Albuquerque, New Mexico @KOAT
• KPBS News, San Diego, CA @kpbsnews
• News 2 Colorado, Denver, Colorado @News2Colorado
• NPR News @nprnewsblog, @nprnews, @bryantpark

Mainstream Tech Twitterers [ http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=12041 ]

• Rob Enderle (Analyst, Enderle Group)
• Paul Thurrott (Founder, Windows Supersite)
• Jeremiah Owyang (Analyst, Forrester Research)
• Lance Ulanoff (Editor in Chief of PCMag)
• Charlene Li (Author and thought leader)
• Jason Snell (Editorial Director of Macworld)
• Rafe Needleman (Editor of Webware)
• Dave Zatz (Digital lifestyle writer)
• Padmasree Warrior (CTO at Cisco Systems)
• Harry McCracken (Editor of Technologizer)

(An older list of) Portland Tech Twitterers [ * http://siliconflorist.com/2008/03/19/portlands-top-30-tech-twitter-ers-1-may-surprise-you/ ]

• Hajime Kobayashi
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Josh Bancroft
• Rick Turoczy

• The Oregonian
• Aaron Hockley
• Scott Hanselman
• Alex Williams
• Scott Kveton
• Tim Lauer
• Verso
• Matt Haughey
• Raven Zachary
• Paul Colligan
• Sarah Gilbert
• Audrey Eschright
• Jason Grigsby
• Steven Frank
• Dawn Foster
• Josh Pyles
• Betsy Richter
• Sam Lawrence
• Jason Harris
• Simeon Bateman
• Jake Kuramoto
• Michael Buffington
• Holly Ross
• Jessica Beck
• James Keller
• Rael Dornfest
• Chris Brentano
• Justin Palmer
• Greg
• Peat Bakke*

Mainstream Comedy Twitterers

• John Hodgman
• Paul F. Tompkins
• Punchline Magazine
• The Onion
• Mike Birbiglia
• Bo Burnham
• Jesse Thorn
• Dead Frog
• Jake and Amir
• YouTubeReviewed
• John Aboud
• Chris Hardwick
• Notorious BIG
• The Apiary

Theodorus: That may seem like a lot of sources but the reality is that it doesn’t even to begin to reflect the diversity of values and interests that people have. Consider bicyclists, Baconists, Wiki fanatics, Data visualization folks, Artists, Musicians, Foodies, Furries, Parents. And as well in almost all of these cases there is a strong desire to filter geographically.

Anselm: True. Hand curation in this way is inefficient. That’s the whole point. There needs to be a way to do this using the power of the community.

Socrates: Twitter themselves have started to offer a suggestion service for people to listen to. What is needed beyond this? [* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-suggest.html ]

Anselm: It is too hard to subscribe to individuals. I believe that there must be ways to subscribe to classes of signals en-masse. In mediums where group concepts are supported this is much easier.  The email mailing list ‘geowanking’ is a good example of an authoritative single subscription point that gives you a best overview of the entire social cartography scene. In a strong sense I see this a parallel to a better vision. If we can see the data better then we can choose which data we are most interested in.

The future

Theodorus: Let’s pretend that you had a team of people who would scour twitter for you and return to you exactly that set of twitters and say twitter people that exactly match your current interests – what real benefit or difference would that make for your everyday life?

Anselm: Well obviously as you state – a real signaling system will tell people what they need to know just in time. It would most likely tend to reflect real local concerns and local geography therefore. This is not entirely dissimilar from social cartography projects [ * http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/science/17map.html  ] but with a much higher emphasis on a data driven approach. It is also not dissimilar from services such as Craigslist except for this aspect of being real-time. It’s just that with a phrasing around real time, curation and mobile access it would be a qualitiatively different experience.

Theodorus: Why don’t such solutions exist yet?

Anselm: http://ushahidi.org is a good example of the non-trivial challenges. Ushahidi is an emergency response solution for crisis situations such as floods, earthquakes or conflict. The same problems that Twitter is encountering are evident in Ushahidi. Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla of Ushahidi have started on looking at ways to build a filtering system around these same data collection problem in fact [ * http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2009/02/04/crisis-info-crowdsourcing-the-filter/ ]. Chris talks about the difference between “database barf” and human curated collections that are sensitive to subtle human concerns.

Socrates: Well, this has been an interesting discussion.

Anselm: Overall my hope here is to simply draw attention to numerous signaling parallels between human and animal populations. I hope that by thinking of digital media not as some kind of new space, but as a variation on existing spaces, that we can dispel some of the new age kind of response to new media and simply recognize it as just another part of our world.

‘If connotation and personalization, fashion and automatism, all tend to focus upon those astructural features whose irrational motivations the logic of production seeks to control and systematize, this is perhaps also because man has neither clear will to transcend nor any great prospect of transcending the aformentioned archaic structures or projection; or at least that he has a deep-seated resistance to sacrificing subjective, projective virtualities and their eternal recurrence on the altar of concrete structural development (both technical and social); or again, to put it in the simplest terms, that man has a profound resistance to imposing rationality upon the purely arbitrary goals of his needs. This may well constitute a fatal turn for the modus existendi of the object, as indeed of society as a whole. Once a certain point in technical development has been reached, and hence primary needs have been satisfied, we may well demand a phantasied, allegorical and subconsious edibility of the object as much as, or even more that, an actual functionality.’ Baudrillard, The System of Objects pg.128

‘The objects dysfunctionality, its counter-purpose, is governed, by two parallel sets of determinants; a socio-economic system of production and a psychological system of projection. It is the reciprocal involvement of these two systems, their collusion, that we need to define.’ Baudrillard, The System of Objects pg.123

‘Man, for his part, by automating his objects and rendering them multi-functional instead of striving to structure his practices in a fluid and open-ended manner, reveals in a way what part he himself plays in a technical society that of the most beautiful all-purpose object, that of an instrumental model.
In this sense automatism and personalization do not contradict one another in the slightest, Automatism is simply personalization dreamt in terms of the object. It is the most finished, the most sublime form of the inessential – of that marginal differentiation which subtends mans personalized relationship to his objects.’ Baudrillard, The System of Objects pg.112

None of this is reprinted with permission, and as such will most likely get me into trouble. I wanted to just let you know that this stuff is mindblowingly cool to read and came out about 30 years ago. I am relying on his writings as a form of critique for the work that I am doing towards my final show.

here is a link to the book on amazon.com

Whatever happened. Well, let us think seriously about this. Some things move on. Value is fleeting in a liquid environment like this.

Technology has been the most liquid of all stages of societal development.

Cross your eyes so that the two middle images become three, and then kind of watch the middle. Or you can use stereoscopic glasses.

Ciao.