Online booking is now available for my rescheduled Professorial Lecture at 6.00pm on Thursday 26th April 2012. Admission is free and booking is here.
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@suethomas
Thank you to...
- Geoffrey Dorne
For allowing me to use his delightful image of the 'clavier qui pousse' (growing keyboard)
Draft book jacket 'Technobiophilia: nature and cyberspace'
I'm delighted to share this first draft of the jacket for my book, scheduled for early 2013. I think it's beautiful.
My Professorial Lecture: new date Thursday 26 April 2012
I now have a new date for my Professorial Lecture, postponed from last November. It will take place at 6pm on Thursday 26 April 2012. Tea and coffee are usually available from about 5.30, the lecture lasts an hour, and then refreshments are provided afterwards.
People who had booked for the previous date have, I think, already been re-invited. It's not showing on the DMU website yet but you can watch for it here or email them. The title and abstract are the same:
The Future of Cyberspace
The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
Happy New Year from Nature and Cyberspace!
With thanks to Steve Himmer for bringing this picture to my attention (ages ago!) and to Justin Kemp for creating it. Happy New Year!
UCLA and IFTF, California, January 2012
Next month I'll be in California to do further research on my book and give two talks. The first, on 'Nature and Cyberspace', is at the Technology, Knowledge and Society Conference at UCLA 16-18th January. The second is on 'Amplification and Biophilia in a Networked World' at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, on 24th January. It will be a special pleasure to go back to IFTF, where I gave a talk a few years ago. I'll also be doing some research during the trip, and very much hope to visit the new Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, located in the room which hosted the very first ARPANET node.
Technobiophilia ?
The term ‘biophilia’ was coined by biologist Edward O Wilson, who believes that human beings constantly and often subconsciously seek connections with other living entities. He first conceived his hypothesis in 1961 during a field trip to Surinam, but it was twenty years before he finally published his thoughts in a book of the same name. He defines biophilia as 'the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes' [1] and sees evidence of the biophilic tendency everywhere, from childhood fantasy to repetitive patterns of culture across most or all societies. In his view, such examples are 'too consistent to be dismissed as the result of purely historical events working on a mental blank slate' and he even suggests that they may 'appear to be part of the programme of the brain' [2]. There have been numerous studies of the biophilic tendency, and research in hospitals, prisons, workplaces and schools has produced remarkable data to show that many human beings undergo transformative experiences not only from being outside in nature, but even from simply viewing it through windows and on screens.
In 2005 I set out to follow a hunch that cyberspace is permeated with the language of nature. Six years later my notebooks are groaning with proof that I was right, but until very recently I still couldn't explain why we do this. However, I now suspect that the biophilia hypothesis might hold the key. Furthermore, as my forthcoming book will show, cyberspace is as drenched in biophilia as any other human environment, and that leads me to tentatively propose a new term built on Wilson's original theory. I call it technobiophilia, 'the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology'. It's a somewhat clunky word and perhaps rather too stylised for its own good. I may yet change my mind about using it, but for the moment I'm offering it up as a way of getting to grips with the phenomena I'm working hard to understand. And time is pressing - the manuscript is due very soon....
I'll be talking about this for the first time at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, in January 2012. More information to follow.
PS: Lately the term 'biophilia' has been popularised by Bjork's new album/app of that name, and indeed there are certainly strains of technobiophilia to be found there too.
[1] Wilson, E.O. (1984) Biophilia, Cambridge: Harvard University Press p1. [2] ibid p85.
Professorial Lecture: The Future of Cyberspace 30/11/11
Every professor is asked at some point to give a Professorial Lecture. I've been invited to present mine on the evening of 30th November 2011. I'm really looking forward to it and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all friends and colleagues. Admission is free but you need to register via this page.
The Future of Cyberspace
The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.
Will Google+ drown in the Emerald Sea?
I've come to this discovery rather late. It was first discussed in March 2011 when Steven Levy's new book In the Plex came out, but it's still worth a mention. I've written before about the importance of watery imagery in the internet industry and this is a great example.
Matt Rosoff explains in a post for Business Insider that Google is 'supernervous' about the threat from Facebook, to the point that 'Last year, Google engineer Urs Holzle -- who was one of Google's first ten employees -- sent around an urgent internal memo warning that Google would be crushed if it didn't figure out its social strategy.The team named their social project "Emerald Sea" after this painting of a wave knocking a ship over -- Google was the ship -- and then recreated that painting outside the elevators where they worked.'
Zillions of tiny rivers connected yet apart
In September I'm giving one of the keynotes at Ethicomp 2011 in Sheffield. I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about what will be the prologue chapter of my book - the watery internet. Here's the abstract:
“We plug into the data stream as casually as we plug into an electric socket” writes Chris Anderson. J.P. Rangaswami calls Twitter “zillions of tiny rivers connected yet apart” and David Terrar describes it as “a twisty canyon with a fast flowing river.” Thomas Vanderwal proclaims it to be like “a flood and a creek”. Indeed, people use the metaphor of a stream not just for applications like Twitter but also for larger flows of data. In 1995, however, the data stream was not seen as a rushing river but as an esoteric place for meditation. According to the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun, cyberspace is frequently
Continue reading "Zillions of tiny rivers connected yet apart" »
Audio: I fell into LambdaMOO at #VirtualFutures
Warwick Knowledge Centre have put the audio of my talk online and it can be downloaded here. Sue_thomas_-_virtual_futures_2011 (1)
And here's a very nice photo of my talk by the talented photographer Prof Andy Miah!
A few more snippets from FutureEverything
I had some interesting responses to my talk 'Why do geeks go camping?' Jag Goraya told me about Geeks in the Peaks, a weekend geek camping event in the English Peak District. He wrote "We're fully subscribed this time round, but it usually happens twice a year (May/June and early September), doubling the opportunity for enjoying some geeky camping. :-)"
Lisa Barron wrote about it alongside Bill Thompson's talk in Alt Digital, and Claire Welsby of LIfe|Art|Us has a very enjoyable blog post with an iPad portrait of Howard Rheingold working in his garden. I followed the link to Flickr, which led to this movie of the process.
Virtual Futures 2.0'11
This summer I'm doing two future things - FutureEverything in Manchester, which I guess is mostly about the present, and Virtual Futures in Warwick, which is mostly about the past. Not a futurefuture conference yet then!
Anyway, Virtual Futures will be a great opportunity to revisit the most inspiring conferences I went to in the 1990s. My talk 'I fell into LambdaMOO at Virtual Futures' will reflect that and I'm really looking forward to reminiscing.
Why Do Geeks Go Camping? FOO And Other Brushes With Nature @ FutureEverything
This May I've been invited to the FutureEverything Conference in Manchester, England, to share some selected tales and speculations about nature and cyberspace.
I plan to connect:
- Apple trees with wikis
- Doug Engelbart and Tim O’Reilly by way of gunny sacks and mattress vine
- Google OpenSocial with American naturalist John Muir and President Roosevelt
- Network bandwidth with the Atlantic Ocean
- Twitter with zillions of tiny rivers
- and Howard Rheingold with all kinds of trees
At the FutureEverything conference visionary speakers explore the interface between technology, society and culture. According to The Guardian, the entire FutureEverything Festival is 'crammed with geek cool'. It runs from 11-14 May 2011. Find out more.
Lego Gardens Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
New media academic David Gauntlett created these two Lego gardens to illustrate the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. David recently gave a talk for us and showed this slide, which I was keen to look at more closely.
The unfortunate Web 1.0 gardeners are separated by high fences, whereas in the Web 2.0 garden everyone collaborates and shares :)
This image is Figure 1 in his new book Making is Connecting, which is published on 4 March 2011. A must-read for web-gardeners everywhere. I'm wondering, though, what a Web 3.0 garden might be like...
Internet as Jellyfish
Sharing this excerpt and image from Martin Dodge's now defunct Mappa Mundi website, full of fascinating articles about technology, history, and the future of cyberspace.
What Does the Internet Look Like, Jellyfish Perhaps?
Exploring a visualization of the Internet by Young Hyun of CAIDA (by Martin Dodge)
The Internet is often likened to an organic entity and this analogy seems particularly appropriate in the light of some striking new visualizations of the complex mesh of Internet pathways. The images are results of a new graph visualization tool, code-named Walrus, being developed by researcher, Young Hyun, at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) [1]. Although Walrus is still in early days of development, I think these preliminary results are some of the most intriguing and evocative images of the Internet's structure that we have seen in last year or two.
A few years back I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and I particularly remember a stunning exhibit of jellyfish, which were illuminated with UV light to show their incredibly delicate organic structures, gently pulsing in tanks of inky black water. Jellyfish are some of the strangest, alien, and yet most beautiful, living creatures [2]. Having looked at the Walrus images I began to wonder, perhaps the backbone networks of the Internet look like jellyfish? Read the rest
How your brain is like Facebook
"Scientists and writers love to compare brains to whatever the cool new technology is. Your brain is a steam engine! Your brain is a telephone! A calculator! A computer! And now, in 2011? Your brain is like Facebook, of course."
Picture of what is claimed to be the first-ever computer bug, 1947
I'm working on the Flora and Fauna chapter at the moment so thought I'd share this image of what is claimed to be the first ever computer bug, found by a technician working for the legendary computer scientist Rear Admiral Grace Hopper in 1947.
The First "Computer Bug"
Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".
In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.
Courtesy of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, VA., 1988.
NHHC Collection
The Valley of Silicon 1998
This great image, credited to Cobraboy, was created in 1998. It imagines a glowing electronic Silicon Valley streaming all the way to the Pacific Ocean. For those who have never visited Silicon Valley, you need to know that the geography is nothing like this and in fact the Valley is separated from the Pacific by a string of mountain ranges. Presumably the artist imagined some kind of magical smoothing by the power of technology.
I came across it at Siliconia, edited by Keith Dawson. Siliconia is "the definitive collection of Siliconia on the Web. Siliconia are appropriations of names beginning with "Silicon" by areas outside Silicon Valley. A Siliconium can be promoted by local boosters or it can be assigned to an area in a press account. An ideal Siliconium will capture something unique about the regional character and when first encountered will bring a fleeting smile." Over a decade old now but still worth checking out.
Cables as grass, The Observer 20.6.10
Blog posted here.
from The internet: Everything you ever need to know John Naughton, The Observer 20.6.10
Kevin Kelly Internet Mapping Project
Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly at his studio in the seaside town of Pacifica, California. I was intrigued to learn about his Internet Mapping Project - an idea very close to my own heart. You are invited to download the template, draw a map of the internet as you see it, and send it to him for inclusion in his Flickr gallery.
We talked about nature and cyberspace and I asked him the question I ask all my interviewees - 'if cyberspace were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?' His answer was complex and multi-faceted but I especially liked his description of 'A redwood grove with a cathedral-like feeling. The kind of place which conjures a sense of spiritual awe, of being in the presence of something bigger than ourselves' (my paraphrasing).
Kelly's new book What Technology Wants is out this autumn. In the meantime, much of the thinking behind it can be found in the Technium section of his website. Especially fascinating is his explanation of how 'technology has become the seventh kingdom of life'.
For 2010: "Our keyboard should be cultivated"
'Et comme le disait Volt@ire:
“il faut cultiver notre clavier”(our keyboard should be cultivated).. bien sûr !'
from Graphisme & Interactivite. More wonderful images here. Thanks for the link http://ifsoflo.ning.com/
Which space is more significant: outer space or cyberspace?
This month we're celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing. Few people connect this celebration with the fact that by some spooky serendipity 1969 was the year that humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July) and then ‘in’ cyberspace (the first two nodes of the internet were connected in September).
Today the mountains of the Moon remain largely neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat with a complex geography shaped by those who inhabit it. It could be said that the entering of cyberspace has proved to be a far more profound experience than the entering of outer space.
Image: Detail of ACC 1992 calendar, commissioned by Roland Bryan, a collaborative effort by ACC staff and the artist Chuck Huckeba
Where Lawns End
Where Lawns End: The Rumpus Interview with Amy Stein isn't about cyberspace but it resonates with my research because it focuses on 'our conflicting impulses to both hang back from and bridle the wild' - very relevant to the way human beings behave when they encounter an unfamiliar space. In cyberspace, very often, fear of wild animals is often replaced with of fear of the 'wild' humans who may be lurking with intent to harm. Even more reason, therefore, to be sure of one's boundaries. (With thanks to Tawny Grammar)
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The Twitter Tree
Sure, you could read about the history
of Twitter in long-form blog posts, but that seems to go against the spirit of the micro-messaging service. So instead, here’s a picture created by InfoShotsManolith
that puts some key moments of the service’s history in visual form.
This spans from the advent of UNIX “Talk” in the 1980s (an early
real-time text update system), all the way to the Twipocalypse. for the blog
of Twitter in long-form blog posts, but that seems to go against the spirit of the micro-messaging service. So instead, here’s a picture created by InfoShotsManolith
that puts some key moments of the service’s history in visual form.
This spans from the advent of UNIX “Talk” in the 1980s (an early
real-time text update system), all the way to the Twipocalypse. for the blog But also an earlier draft of the image concept:
'Nature and Cyberspace: The Wild Surmise' to be published by Bloomsbury Academic
Today I signed a contract with Bloomsbury's new scholarly imprint Bloomsbury Academic. Delivery date is September 2012 so i need to get my skates on - lots to do. I'm very excited to be working with Bloomsbury, since they seem to have the right idea about publishing in a new media world - they understand how open source works and they're prepared to experiment at the more risky end of publishing. I gather their new website will be launching soon, and there we will see the full glory of their intentions :)
As for The Wild Surmise - they want to switch the title around to 'Nature and Cyberspace: The Wild Surmise', and I can see how that makes sense because it's more explicit but retains the poetry of the original phrase. I'm keen to reach beyond academia with this book.
So now the idea becomes a firm reality. I'm really looking forward to it!
Tim O'Reilly: "If the internet were a landscape, it would be an ocean."
When I recently interviewed Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, I asked him the same question I've been asking all my interviewees - "If the internet were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?" His first impulse, he said, was to think of it as an ocean:
"The sea is a sustaining medium, most of which is invisible to us and which, like our atmosphere, we largely take for granted. But elements of it occasionally swim within our range of vision. I think the internet is a lot like that - we see very little of it at any one time."
I was reminded of his comment yesterday when I marked my last week in California with a whale-watching trip in the Santa Barbara Channel. We saw several humpbacks but the really exciting moment was when we were surrounded by dozens of leaping dolphins racing alongside and even under the boat, speeding just below the water, right beside us, and flying into the air in groups of three or four. The water was boiling with them all around! This crummy phone picture doesn't begin to do justice to their joyful grace. Of course, we have no idea whether they are joyful in any sense at all, but being out there with them reminded me of how joyful they make me feel, and of how little I know about the mysteries of the ocean. I stared into the water and tried to imagine how deep it was and what was down there. It will be a while yet before the internet is equally deep and complex but I do agree with Tim O'Reilly that we see very little of it at any one time and indeed when I think about the deep web I often get that same sense of unplumbed depths. And I wonder what kinds of strange creatures are evolving down there in the internet dark?
The drive to Esalen
I haven't visited Esalen on this trip, although I've been there a couple of times in previous years. This picture dates from the bronze-casting workshop I attended in 2004. But for this research I've been reading Jeffrey J Kripal's book 'Esalen', and I came across this great description of the simple act of getting there, which reminds me of the travails of the journey to Big Sur:
"The forty-mile drive down from Monterey and Carmel, past Pebble Beach on a famous road whose twists and turns along an ocean mountainside could easily end your life at any moment has already slightly altered your state of consciousness and made you a bit nauseous. You feel funny, a bit disorientated. You are grateful to step out of the car and stand on land that is not moving or, worse yet, falling." (p4)
"Many people mistakenly think of the internet as a destination but, like zen, it is merely a pathway" Philip Toshio Sudo
I was recently reminded of this quote, which I love. It's from Zen Computer, by the late Philip Toshio Sudo. I highly recommend this thoughtful and delightful read.
Historic Computing Calendar from 1992
Last week I interviewed Roland Bryan, one of the original Arpanet team and now CEO of MachineTalker, a Santa Barbara based company developing intelligent wireless networks. I was in pursuit of some drawings I found a few years ago on Martin Dodge's great Atlas of Cyberspaces - namely the 'scroll' to be found some way down this page. Dodge attributes the scroll to Roland, however I discovered when we talked that he did not actually design it, but commissioned it to his concept in 1992 as a promotional calendar for his company Advanced Computer Communications (ACC). ACC helped design and
implement the first packet switch network for a U.S. Government agency and was later sold to Ericsson. The artist was in fact Chuck Huckeba, now based in Arizona. I was excited to learn that Roland still owns the original painting and we went together to his storage facility in Santa Barbara in the hope of locating it. It didn't surface on that occasion but hopefully he will find it soon. Judging from the colour prints he has sent me, it must be very lushly-coloured and rich in detail. It was fascinating, also, to discover that the images were colour - the pictures on Martin Dodge's site are black and white and it never occurred to me that the original would be anything other than monochrome. Roland has very kindly allowed me to blog about these images. I have uploaded them to Flickr and linked to them here. I am delighted - they are a real find. I especially like the cool shades worn by a very hippy-looking Leonardo da Vinci!
(I also recorded Roland talking about the images and will post the audio once it has been edited.)
1: Full image
2: Roland Bryan
3: Detail
4: Detail naming a number of important individuals from the early
days of computing including the creators of Arpanet and showing the
first computer mouse, designed by Douglas Engelbart
Attribution: The content of the ACC calendar was a collaborative effort by ACC staff and the artist Chuck Huckeba
Creators of Arpanet, precursor of the Internet, photographed for Wired in 1994
Roland Bryan sent me a link to this great picture of the team who made cyberspace possible. Full story in Wired December 1994. Roland is also the person who commissioned an artist to create some fascinating paintings about the Arpanet project, of which more soon.
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