Archive for March, 2004
Audible magic
Mar 11th
ArtMachine on Audible Magic, DRM, the music industry, and economic inequality. Nice work.
Bamboo and Network Architecture
Mar 9th
What with the current vogue for eco-metaphors when describing social networks and the living city, people have been talking about swarms, viruses, and ecosystems for a while. So the other day while wandering through the Mt. Coot-tha Botanical Gardens, I noticed this sign about how bamboo evades all attempts to eradicate it, and thought it was a nice metaphor for underground social networks (already a metaphor, of course). Besides, the opportunity to use the word “rhizome” in a sentence of my own was just too good to pass up 
Even more intriguing was the apparently well-established (but naughty) practice of leaving graffiti on the bamboo – personal traces written into the living network. But I wondered, why only the bamboo and not the fruit trees or the pines??
Consumption is [not] a Dirty Word
Mar 8th
Matt Jones picks up on some other bloggers’ disgust and despair about the tired and dirty terms consumer and user, and wonders whether there might be a simple and adequate replacement:
A colleague here at Nokia suggest a simple substitute for both words, after hearing me whine one-time-too-many about the usage of ‘consumer’.He suggested “Individual”.
Does that work? A quick mental search-and-replace as a test:
User-centred design = Individual-centred design
Consumer electronics = Electronics for individuals
Consumer awareness = Individual’s awareness
User interface = Interface to an individual
Matt gives “indidividual” 7/10 and asks for our thoughts.
Well, I’m coming at it from a different angle than designers probably do, but I’m guessing the problem that using the term “individual” might solve is this: both “consumer” and “user” are inadequate terms because they construct passive [individuals].
These terms construct purchasers or operators of objects whose design and purpose are assumed to be neatly contained in the mind of the producer. And this runs counter to all good contemporary thinking (I’m guessing) on how design does and should work (open, transparent, participatory, minimal??), and how our interactions with cultural formations and objects (cities, screens, buildings, computers, celebrities, games, and phones) more broadly do work.
[I need to point out, though, that the "not" in the title of this post refers to my belief that part of the problem that the term 'consumer' has is a widespread failure to understand that consumption is not necessarily passive in the first place]
So in these terms, “individual” doesn’t work too well either – in fact it erases all trace of the interaction between a person and a technology or cultural object or, indeed, other human beings.
As for other alternatives, I kind of like “prosumer” as a blend of producer and consumer, but it leaves that dichotomy intact and is a term used to refer to hi-fi enthusiasts as much as anything. And it’s just so…corporate buzzword-esque.
So bugger it, why not “player”?? It’s a pipe dream I know, but it would be cool.
I’d love to hear any other ideas.
New on The Wire Website
Mar 5th
The Wire’s shows on Resonance FM are now archived for approximately one month on The Wire website.
Plus:
New additions to the MP3 gallery plus new articles from the Wire vault in the Archive Section:
BBC Radiophonic Workshop by Mark Sinker (from issue 150, February 92)
Exotic Audio Research by Rob Young (from issue 139, September 95)
David Toop’s interview with Bill Laswell (from issue 130, December 94
Portishead interviewed by Rob Young (from issue 178, December 1998)
Iannis Xenakis interviewed by Ben Watson (from issue 136, June 95)
So good to see The Wire enriching their web presence with such goodies.
Blogging for credit?
Mar 5th
Sebastien Paquet wonders, along with Andrew Chen, Jill Walker, and Professor Bainbridge about the benefits of research blogs as opposed to formal academic publication. I don’t quite see why it’s an either/or situation – for me, a research blog is a thinking, talking, networking tool and a shared interest magnet; academic publishing is a more rigorous (but far slower) way to disseminate concrete findings and test well-thought out arguments – and of course, formal publication is an absolutely essential CV building exercise.
The question in most of the above discussions is whether the public engagement, reflexivity, and contribution to current or emerging knowledge that come out of blogging should be CV-builders too. Perhaps, as others have said, in these ways blogging is analagous to giving conference presentations. I think that genuine research blogging should be a recognized part of each individual’s overall research profile. It isn’t entirely clear how something parallel to the peer review process can be shown to have taken place – but I think that weblogs could easily be asessed for quality (in terms native to the web, not to the print journal) and weighted accordingly. Sadly if this shift does take place, it won’t be soon (ah, but when I run the world…).
Mar 5th
OK, P2P is “piracy.” But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry. By Lawrence Lessig, for Wired.
Participation, Collaboration, and Play
Mar 4th
Two things caught my roving eye this afternoon:
The UK government’s culture online initiative
Culture Online is an innovative initiative to increase access to, and participation in, arts and culture. It brings together cultural organisations with cutting-edge technical providers to create projects that will delight adults and children of all ages and backgrounds.Culture Online aims to:
- enhance access to the arts for children and young people and give them the opportunity to develop their talents to the full;
- open up our cultural institutions to the wider community, to promote lifelong learning and social cohesion;
- extend the reach of new technologies and build IT skills;
- support wider and richer engagement and learning by all adults.
We intend to bring people further into the arts and culture through history, the visual arts, the performing arts, music, crafts and science. Each experience will be highly participatory and encourage the innovative use of technologies such as the Internet, digital interactive TV, mobile and wireless devices.
OK, all well and good, some really cool projects (and some not-so), and it looked all bottom-up and participatory – in as much as a “government intitiative” ever can be. But I was deeply disturbed by an assumption I thought I detected – that is, that creativity is a social good that the “underprivileged” lack and that can be given to you, or taught to you, or developed in you, by arts experts. I wasn’t sure if I was just being cranky – after all, this has been the assumption of much arts education for a long time.
Then I encountered a blast of fresh air at Anne Galloway’s blog – always plenty of fresh air to be had there. Anne discusses Transcendent Interactions: Collaborative Contexts and Relationship-Based Computing, Ludicorp’s presentation at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (an event financially inaccessible to mere mortals) – thankyou Stewart for posting the slides. It’s about play as a fundamentally people-centred and collaborative field of interaction – and by the way, I am with Anne in thinking that “play” as a concept is a deeply important way of framing cultural action, interaction, production, and consumption – particularly in digitized and urbanized contexts.
This has important implications for policy-makers and critics, educators and designers – and from what I can see, it is the designers who are ahead of the game in understanding it. I won’t repeat the presentation or Anne’s excellent [not that it is of poor quality--see comments] summaryexegesis of it here, but I will pull out a particularly resonant quote:
Applications, like architecture, can shut down possibility … The real action of inter-relation happens in the spaces between these monolithic structures. Play, improvisation and communication don’t need containers, they need platforms.
Excellent.
Everyday Americans as Content Producers
Mar 2nd
Via hypergene mediablog, a report from the Pew Internet and Everyday Life Project:
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files.
- 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
- 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
- 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
- 13% maintain their own Web sites.
- 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
- 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
- 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
- 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
- 6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
- 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
- 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
- 3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
- 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs