Both Tom and Matt have reported back on the London Social-Software summit organised by the good people at iSociety.
Month: November 2002
Information and entropy
After I was rambling on about definitions of information and entropy the other day, I remembered the master’s ruminations on that theme relating to September 11th 2001.
» Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: This is Information
[via the awesome linkmachinego]
Pinging…
…is not the only thing that computers and submarines have in common:
“The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim” – Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
The inmates are running the asylum.
Or at least they’ve gone and built their own asylum, somewhere nice, by the sea.
It’s been linked up the wazoo already, but in case you missed it, a number of the usual IA suspects have set up an institute for “advancing and promoting information architecture”: The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture Best of luck to all involved.
The most interesting/provoking parts of all this to me were:
a) A quote on the homepage from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain
“Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -the actual enemy is the unknown.”
Which I found sort of alienating. I’m not a big fan of ‘order’, or treating the unknown as an enemy. Big fan of simplicity, which often, but not reliably often, comes from simplification. I know, I know… I’m being vague, but that quote set my teeth on edge. BWDIK?*
b) Andrew Hinton‘s ’25 Theses’ manifesto, which I have niggles with:
e.g. “3. Without human intervention, information devolves into entropy and chaos.”
Huh? What’s the defn. of information used through this piece? Is it “Meaning?” which is inherently linked with human perception; or is it the physicists definition of ‘information’ – i.e. that “Information is what remains after one abstracts from the material aspects of physical reality”
On reading Andrew’s point (3), a physicist friend of mine said that it implies that consciousness is the only thing that can lower entropy. Physics, and specifically thermodynamics say that entropy and information can and do exist without reference to human consciousness. And there is also a fair amount of theory and experimental evidence to point to order spontaneously arising from chaos.
And so it unravels.
If I do a quick search-and-replace on the manifesto substituting ‘information’ with ‘meaning’**, things get interesting.
I’ve used the clumsy metaphor of the construction industry before – that architects, engineers, construction workers, clients and everyone else involved in the complex interconnected endeavour of actually building something, unite in understand around that which they are actually building, which is actually a building.
UX/ID/IA/Designers/Programmers/Whatever could unite around what they are actually building – which is ‘meaning’. (cf. Mok’s ‘understanding business’) Forming a federation or just loose field of understanding, around what you need to construct for ‘understanding’: The Meaning Construction Industry
But I digress. And hey! It’s a manifesto, you’re meant to have niggles with it!
(C) Andrew’s notion of the internet being a ‘shared information environment’ is fantastic – might help those in the Meaning Construction Industries(tm) to think outside the webpage/website paradigm, and into the more ecological mindset recquired to deal with next-generation concepts like web services and the semantic web.
Anyway – all of this doesn’t distract from the good that this will do those who practice IA (in the USA at least) – and congratualtions to all involved.
CTRL-D: Hypergene have got blog.
New required-reading for the revolution. The Hypergene collective, who a couple of years back authored the prescient, provocative and still-inspiring “Amazoning the news” whitepaper, have got themselves a blog.
Tagline: “News from the bottom-up: All about Participatory Journalism – how audiences are changing the future of news and information.”
JPB at the ICA
John Perry Barlow is speaking within sight of the mother of all parliaments tommorrow night:
“On an increasingly surveillanced planet, and in a world where intellectual property is owned by major corporations such as AOL/Time Warner, John Perry Barlow talks about politics and ownership.”
See you in the ICA bar before hand maybe.
In the city
there’s a thousand things I want to pict to you, to paraphrase P. Weller.
In last week’s excellent Guardian supplement on urban design, “Cities Reborn”:
“How anyone can say that popular culture does not influence the changes to our cities, that popular culture doesn’t spark urban regeneration, is beyond me,” stresses architectural journalist and presenter Phil Griffin. “It has more influence on cities than anything else.”
A quote from Will Alsop jumps out:
“It was punk and acid house that made people in general visually literate”
Walking through London’s supposedly-hipper districts, you’re bombarded with images on every available surface: aside from graffiti and adverts, it’s a visual cacophony of guerilla-marketing, guerillia-marketing that’s been adbusted, artworks masquerading as guerilla-marketing.
It deafens one’s eye.
It also makes the city a rich source to sample from with your camphone. If you want to compose a witty montage to communicated with friends, then your pallette is all around you. Needless-to-say then, that a mobile phone operator is already using guerilla marketing posters to that effect [requires Flash] to push it’s camphones…
Just like professional photographers have their favourite haunts and locations around the world and within cities to capture and communciate with, we’re all going to have our favourite locations to compose and parcel-up our pictograms of thought and emotion.
These areas may respond – becoming hotspots for public art collectives, graff-writers and other visual urban guerillas. Marketers as always will fast-follow – hunting the new, cool urban upload spots, to try and squeeze some pixels of their own into our pictorial conversations. And, tech-by-tech, step-by-step, arm-in-arm, we all wander into the visual dreamlands imagined by Noon, Stephenson, Gibson, Ballard and Burgess.
Scavenger smartmobs
Most people who know me are fed-up to the backteeth of hearing me go on and on about Hiptop Nation, the collective photoblog for those in the USA lucky enough to have a hiptop/sidekick.
Last week, they staged a hiptop-augmented team scavenger hunt for Halloween.
The results are not as far as I can tell posted on the site in coherent form yet, though I’m sure they will be. Already however, those who took part are starting to describe it as revelatory experience; which they are going to devote study to:
“This paper examines the successful evolution of a specific smart mob into a wireless community of practice. It begins with an examination of a popular wireless blogging website “Hiptop Nation” (http://hiptop.bedope.com). “Hiptop Nation” acts as a central blogging site for owners of the “Sidekick” device, a portable handheld data communications device recently introduced by Danger (http://danger.com). The Sidekick supports wireless AOL Instant Messaging, email, SMS text messages, and web access. Users of the Sidekick can post wireless public blogs on Hiptop Nation via their Sidekick device, as well as upload photographs from the Sidekick’s digital camera.
On Halloween, October 31 2002, Hiptop Nation sponsored a photo-scavenger hunt competition across the US. Participants were users of the Hiptop Nation blog site who were placed into competing teams, and participants coordinated their actions as well as acquired and uploaded photographs across the US exclusively via their Sidekick wireless devices. The hunt lasted for 24 hours.
The author of this paper participated as a member of one of the teams (Team Raven), and witnessed firsthand the evolution of an unorganized and homogeneous wirelessly-connected group of people (smart mob) into a highly motivated and organized group of team members with very common goals and flexible roles (wireless community of practice).“
[my emboldening]
I’m really looking forward to reading more of what the participants thought of the experience – particularly around the aspects of the technology giving rise to cooperative relationships between stangers, as alluded to in the paragraph I’ve emphasised above.
I so have to get round to buying/reading Smartmobs. Luckily, Peter is doing it for us.
All this reminds me of how much fun playingNoderunner was. Fascinating to see so many people investigating how personal tech is going to give rise to new urban games and sports, and redefine our relationships with the space of the city.
Bobby Womack and Wifi
Adam Greenfield has redesigned V-2.org, making one of the most well-considered sites writing about technology, humans and cities even more elegant, and very, very usable. Permalinks, at last!
He’s written, as have Steve Bowbrick and Kevin Werbach, about the recently produced map of Manhattan’s wireless access points. His post is entitled ‘The digital divide made visible’ points out as Steve also has, the naked truth of access to technology, laid bare through visualisation.
Two things:
- With reference to the project I’m working on: he power of visualisation to inspire social/political thought; and the attendent dangers: “lies, damn lies and sexy-info-visualisations” if you like. Aside from Tufte (I guess?) anyone got any pointers/research for me around computer visualisation and politics?
- Bobby Womack’s ‘Across 110th Street’ is now lodged in my brain:
“Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind,
I knew there was a better way of life that I was just
trying to find.
You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under
pressure,
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester.”
Public-Service Simian
Azeem has posted some very interesting and provocative thoughts about what the BBC as an 800lb non-commercial, non-governmental public-service gorilla could be doing in the networked world if it put it’s mind to it.
Being a lowly employee of aforementioned venerable public-service organisation, I couldn’t possibly comment or contribute to this debate
You could though.
Petafloptimism 