Technobiophilia

A road trip with Google Maps

Can't resist posting this cartoon from xkcd. Although it's not strictly about cyberspace, it could be!

(via Bill Thompson on Facebook)

Richard Feynman - the inconceivable nature of nature

This entire film is wonderful but I want to draw your attention to the section roughly from 34 to 40 minutes where physicist Richard Feynman explains what he calls the 'inconceivable nature of nature'.

I found this video via Web 2.0 - Twitter, to be precise, from a tweet by Tim O'Reilly.

timoreilly   Retwt @Werner: Listening to Feynman is like watching Magic.For those who don't know him this  documentary is a start. http://twurl.nl/2j0jo0          about 2 hours ago from twhirl          

I picked up the tweet, watched the film, and as a result wrote this post. This is how information spreads and is reprocessed via the internet.

In the particular section I'd like you to watch, which runs from around 34 mins into the film, to around 40 mins,  Feynman gives a very clear and graphic explanation of the way that radio and light waves work What really struck me about his explanation is how it is resonant it is of the (much much less than his example) complexity of Web 2.0, what Clay Shirky has called 'the mess'.  One of the objections to Web 2.0 is that it is more complex and messy than any human can cope with, but Feynman's talk on how we separate out visual and audio signals specific to our own interests whilst simply not noticing all the other personally irrelevant data reinforces the fact that humans are able to filter and sort very large quantities of material.

But his account also makes me wonder.  Light and sound waves are, I believe, naturally occurring, whereas the media of the web (words, images, etc) are highly processed, and perhaps this is getting in the way just as over-processed food can be hard to digest. Let me try to explain my thought. Feynman's account describes the many waves occurring in the space of a room, but I am wondering whether it might be possible, some time in the distant future, to use the internet to extend that 'room', or sensorium,  beyond its brick walls to the entire world, or even the universe, beyond? So that we swim in an even larger pool of information yet are still able to filter out what we need in the manner he describes here? This world would certainly not be trapped inside any kind of screen, but would more resemble what Feynman calls 'the inconceivable nature of nature'. Most importantly, it would not be an intellectual experience, but something totally and inconceivably sensory akin to what happens when, as in Feynman's example, we choose to tune in to a radio station. If we turn off the radio, the radio waves are still there - we're simply not listening to them anymore. Can you imagine how it be for the internet to work like that? Wow! [And in fact this is quite close to an essay I wrote in 2005, Virtuality as Air, which is a pretty similar notion. Looks like I'm going round in circles. Oh well!]

Richard Feynman - The Last Journey Of A Genius (1988) Producer: Christopher Sykes

(warning: pls ignore his unfortunate opening sexist comment - this was 1983, I guess that's the excuse)

Jungles and forests

The Old River Soar from my balcony
Originally uploaded by suethomas

Across the river from my flat is an area of riverbank which is bare in the winter but overgrown with trees and bushes in the summer. In the winter the deciduous trees create a lot of empty space visited by no-one except the occasional peeing man on the way back from the pub or drug dealers selling their wares, and now and then one or two school kids exploring. But when the vegetation is heavy, as it has become in the last few weeks, the proximity of sudden wildness in the centre of the city seems to drive people a little crazy. This week, in the hot weather, I've heard them yelling and whooping in there. Although they are only a few metres away, across the sluggish old River Soar, I can't see them for the trees, but I can hear them very clearly. Yesterday a drunk girl sang extended contralto riffs while her male companions described their toileting, oblivious to the fact that our apartment block is so close. They can certainly see us, even if we can't see them. As the weeks go by I expect lots of more of this, especially if the weather is hot - perhaps there will even be campers pitching their tent and lighting a campfire next to the old railway wall. This has happened before, although I'm surprised it hasn't happened more often. When I was a kid we were always looking for these kinds of scrap ground to make dens on.

Anyway, this behaviour led me to see a correlation with the way people often behave when they visit virtual places for the first time. Many times I've seen sensible people drop their inhibitions the minute they enter a MOO, a chatroom, or more recently Second Life. I haven't seen it happen so often via voice on applications like Skype - perhaps the voice is a little too real for such behaviour. But it's clear that newbies often feel shrouded and hidden in the jungle of virtuality, and thus enabled to misbehave in a somewhat exhilerated way. Sherry Turkle has written about this phenomenon quite widely. I'm mentioning it here because I think it works as a nature metaphor - the web as jungle or forest. I've written elsewhere about the web as the site of The Tempest but now I'm also thinking that it's a kind of Midsummer Night's Dream, just like the one that takes place across the river from me every summer.

If Twitter were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?

suethomas   To all twitterers: If Twitter were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be? Please tweet me your description!

vanderwal   oh my, Twitter is back at flood stage for me. I like the creek flowing through the last few days.

vriyait   @suethomas It's a huge big field of red poppies!!

josiefraser   @suethomas for me it would be an enormous station, all kinds of vehicles & a lot of milling about. & a big time-space crack through it.

Karoli   @suethomas a field of multi-colored wildflowers

 
pfanderson   @suethomas #landscape The patterns of light & invisible gravity waves between stars, in a dense galaxy shaping the dark space.

		jobsworth   @suethomas a collection of zillions of tiny rivers connected yet apart

         

	mystrev   @suethomas - Twitter is a the hallway of a dorm for grownups
	PaulGovan   @suethomas, pretty things with odd scandanavian names! Klop. Pang. Spling. Shroot. Now i'm back to The Office!
	AJCann   @suethomas  Archipelago.
	DT   @suethomas Twisty canyon with a fast flowing river
	billt   @suethomas Twitter: Suffolk as painted by Jackson Pollock

Google's new app OpenSocial campfire-style

Very short of time today but can't resist drawing attention to Google's campfire movie for the new OpenSocial project - the long-awaited open source answer to Facebook. It certainly has jumped straight into the Google Notebook I keep for metaphors of nature and cyberspace, especially since it doesn't even need any physical space whatsoever - it exists entirely in the ether, untethered even by a server: "With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all." Just look at those flickering flames and that cute log!

(x-posted at PART)

Antony Gormley's Blind Light and the Coat Closet at LambdaMOO

Blind Light is the name of Antony Gormley's current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, and it's also the title of the individual exhibit which is attracting much attention this year, an invitation to "lose yourself in light and vapour in this cloud-filled glass room that is cold, wet and disorientating".

I removed my spectacles and hooked them into the top of my shirt, then walked into the mist. Immediately my nose started running copiously and then something sharp in the air caught at my throat and made me cough. I hesitated, wondering whether the atmosphere was toxic in some way they hadn't warned us about. I could hear other people coughing elsewhere in the mist too, but it must only have been the shock of the difference in density, because breathing was immediately easy again and I was able to continue my exploration. My skin quickly became  coated with moisture and I wondered whether my clothes would be wet afterwards (they weren't).

I've been in fog similar to this before, but only when driving, never when walking. And usually in Britain, although there was one memorable moment when, driving north of Los Angeles (I think it was on Interstate 14 near Red Rock Canyon but that may be misremembering), I passed through a series of canyons burning with sunshine with the exception of one which was full of white fog, suddenly reducing visibility to just a few yards.  In the box of fog which is Blind Light, I was reminded of that cloud-filled canyon when I realised I could see nothing below my knees but thick white vapour. I held out my hand in front of me, and it was perfectly visible, but when I looked down, nothing. Then the mists shifted and my feet drifted momentarily into view before disappearing again in a swirl of white.

What does this have to do with nature and cyberspace? Quite simply because the space I was most reminded of when I was in Blind Light was the Coat Closet at LambdaMOO. Log on as a guest and that's where you'll find yourself - in a dark, cramped space.  It appears to be very crowded in here; you keep bumping into what feels like coats,  boots, and other people. But then as I thought about it further I remembered also that I myself built a foggy room in LambdaMOO - or rather, a foggy field, as part of a space called

_^^~^___ the fields---_____~~^_^-~~ ____^^___~~~~~~

The sky is an English grey, as if the mists of Autumn are held fast in a canopy above our heads; a canopy which at any moment might fall and surround us, billowing out to hide the stream and the trees and the tractor and the wheeling birds... until we are left alone and silent in a muffling quilt of cloud.

So Blind Light recalled my early days at LambdaMOO when every visit felt like wandering through fog yet knowing that hundreds of people were close by - you just couldn't see them. At the exhibition, however, there was one big drawback, and that was the voices, calls and laughter of other visitors, which made it impossible to focus. I know many will dislike this idea, but I think Gormley should impose a rule of silence on people entering the exhibit. Without that, it's not much more than a fairground ride.

Why do we watch Bear Grylls? Does Facebook make you long to be alone in the wild?

It turns out that survival role-model Bear Grylls isn't quite so much of a wilderness guy as he makes out.  According to an article in The Sunday Times  - TV 'survival king' stayed in hotels - he enjoyed the pleasures of civilisation a little more frequently than might have been expected during the making of his TV series Born Survivor, where we see him devouring a wide variety of raw and live food - see the stomach-churning video on the Sky site - and doing other Tough Man things. Must have been tortuous, especially if, for example, he had just enjoyed a tasty boxed lunch from his hotel, the Bass Lake Pines Resort in the Sierra Nevada.

So why do we watch so many TV programmes about nature red in tooth and claw and why do we want to believe them? Why are we fascinated by people like Bear Grylls, with his ridiculous name and his faux wildness?  Or, for that matter, Grey Owl, aka Archie Belaney, the Englishman with the capacity for deep deep fantasy who I wrote about in Hello World and who, I suspect, enthralled my grandparents at a talk he gave in Leicester in 1930s as well as the young Richard and David Attenborough, also in the audience that night.

But I digress. There are many reasons why we fall for this, and I'm exploring them in my research,  but right now what I'm wondering about is the connection between this phenomenon and  social networking sites like Facebook. Think about it. Time was when watching TV and reading books were considered anti-social, but recently the isolation of solo consumption has taken a new turn - now it gives us respite from the endless pressures of social networking. At home, by ourselves or with our intimate friends and family, we watch Bear Grylls make his way in the wilderness alone, and we are there with him, or we even become him, our imaginations plugged into his - or at least, into his producer's.  But log on to a site like Facebook and  you're thrust into a noisy city. 

I've only been on Facebook a few weeks and as an old-time online community person I've been hugely impressed by the sophisticated functionality which informs me about everything that everyone I know is doing. Indeed, it can only be a matter of time before I will be informed, real time, of the exact moment when anyone takes a pee. Well, I'm quite sociable myself sometimes, and I like to be in contact with people I know, but I don't want to be Zombie, or Compare People, or create a map of my best friends as opposed to those friends I presumably care less about. Every time I access someone else's feature I do not want to be offered the opportunity of installing it for myself. It's all too much, just too too much.

Bear Grylls and his enterprising TV crew at least offer me the fantasy of solitude, and that's starting to feel preferable to the fantasy of civilisation that I'm getting on Facebook. So how can I survive in the seething naked jungle which is Facebook? Excuse me while I bite the head off this Zombie.

Windows Vista: dreaming nature in cyberspace

With the release of the Vista operating system, Microsoft wants us to believe it is finally throwing open the Windows and allowing screen-burned users out into the fresh air. We can wander free through the pastures of cyberspace and frolic in Aero's transparent mists. Vista recognises a deep truth - that when we log on to join the flow of collective intelligence, we bring with us a subconscious desire for cyberspace to be just like the (never-was) Edenic countryside of our youth, a verdant Elysian Fields of virtual harmony. Sounds unlikely? Picture this:                                                                                                               

                              

You sit immersed in a wireless cloud, navigating your way through the folders on your hard drive. It is a floating forest of branching tree directories anchored to a root folder buried somewhere deep inside the machine. You are listening to streaming audio whilst a torrent of more music flows into your MP3 player. While it downloads, your system is organising your music library into fields within a database and generating a feed direct to your homepage. Via your Flock browser you twitter to your friends about the latest item on the newsriver then post a few paragraphs to your blog, where they join the complex trail of links and paths going in and out of your site. While you surf, it's easy to forget that beneath you lies a creepy invisible underworld populated by spiders, bugs, crawlers, worms, and microscopic viruses, whilst above ground your transactions are hungrily devoured by sheep that shit grass before being aggregated into the Long Tail. That data trail you're leaving behind stimulates the synapses of the global brain, which is in turn pulled towards the gravitational core of the Web 2.0 solar system...

And all this time you thought you were just cruising the information superhighway. In fact, the metaphors we use to describe our encounters with the internet are much closer to the natural world than the cyberpunk urban fantasies we've absorbed ever since novelist William Gibson invented the word cyberspace in 1984. The strikingly numerous examples above don't come from any single deliberate attempt to influence internet culture, but are the result of an evolving vocabulary which has been around since the earliest days of computing.

Consider the traditional organisation of data into fields, strings, webs, streams, rivers, trails, paths, torrents, islands, and even walled gardens, And then there are the flora - apples, apricots, trees, roots, and branches; and the fauna - spiders, viruses, worms, pythons, lynxes, gophers, not to mention the ubiquitous bug and mouse. Indeed, Vista was previously code-named Longhorn, after a breed of cattle noted for its ease of calving and long lactation period - make of that what you will.

All of this is bad news for Vista because it turns out that its smooth romantic landscapes are just one more fantasy. In reality, the organic, holistic, evolving eco-system of Web 2.0 connectedness is less like a travel brochure and more like a brackish swamp seething with mutations. It's messy, steamy and soggy. To quote science fiction author Bruce Sterling, if the internet were a landscape it would be 'a bubbling primal soup full of worms and viruses.' Not exactly the pristine prettiness of the Windows Media Center coral reef, but most certainly an interesting example of the estuarine meeting of transliteracy and geography.

[x-posted from the Transliteracy blog, 24 March 2007]

                           

                              

You sit immersed in a wireless cloud, navigating your way through the folders on your hard drive. It is a floating forest of branching tree directories anchored to a root folder buried somewhere deep inside the machine. You are listening to streaming audio whilst a torrent of more music flows into your MP3 player. While it downloads, your system is organising your music library into fields within a database and generating a feed direct to your homepage. Via your Flock browser you twitter to your friends about the latest item on the newsriver then post a few paragraphs to your blog, where they join the complex trail of links and paths going in and out of your site. While you surf, it's easy to forget that beneath you lies a creepy invisible underworld populated by spiders, bugs, crawlers, worms, and microscopic viruses, whilst above ground your transactions are hungrily devoured by sheep that shit grass before being aggregated into the Long Tail. That data trail you're leaving behind stimulates the synapses of the global brain, which is in turn pulled towards the gravitational core of the Web 2.0 solar system...

And all this time you thought you were just cruising the information superhighway. In fact, the metaphors we use to describe our encounters with the internet are much closer to the natural world than the cyberpunk urban fantasies we've absorbed ever since novelist William Gibson invented the word cyberspace in 1984. The strikingly numerous examples above don't come from any single deliberate attempt to influence internet culture, but are the result of an evolving vocabulary which has been around since the earliest days of computing.

Consider the traditional organisation of data into fields, strings, webs, streams, rivers, trails, paths, torrents, islands, and even walled gardens, And then there are the flora - apples, apricots, trees, roots, and branches; and the fauna - spiders, viruses, worms, pythons, lynxes, gophers, not to mention the ubiquitous bug and mouse. Indeed, Vista was previously code-named Longhorn, after a breed of cattle noted for its ease of calving and long lactation period - make of that what you will.

All of this is bad news for Vista because it turns out that its smooth romantic landscapes are just one more fantasy. In reality, the organic, holistic, evolving eco-system of Web 2.0 connectedness is less like a travel brochure and more like a brackish swamp seething with mutations. It's messy, steamy and soggy. To quote science fiction author Bruce Sterling, if the internet were a landscape it would be 'a bubbling primal soup full of worms and viruses.' Not exactly the pristine prettiness of the Windows Media Center coral reef, but most certainly an interesting example of the estuarine meeting of transliteracy and geography.

[x-posted from the Transliteracy blog, 24 March 2007]