greenpoint design

The Master Switch

In 1994, when I was  introduced to the WWW portion of the internet, my first question was, “Who owns it?”

“Everybody does,” was the answer at the time.  For the first two decades of the web’s existence, that was true. Now that may be changing.

Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires looks at the cycle of creation-chaos-and-control in communication systems.  ”Information technologies give rise to industries, and industries to empires.” Wu said.  This cycle ultimately destroys the innovative spirit that creates new information technologies and the openness that typifies them in their early years. This pattern appears to be replicating itself with the internet, Professor Wu said in a recent NPR interview. For more detail, see The New Yorker for a series of video interviews with Tim Wu and Jefferey Toobin.

Wu has also been an advocate of network neutrality, the principle that all information carried on a given network is treated the same. For more of Professor Wu’s writing on this topic, see the Network Neutrality FAQ.

The issues of network neutrality and big capital trying to control information systems are not unrelated. Like the collusion of Western Union and the Associated Press 150 years ago, several players have been trying to consolidate content and its distribution over the net into one system.

A pair of articles, in the September issue of Wired ( “The Web is Dead” ),  by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, persuasively makes the case for an emerging class of applications and proprietary software supplanting HTML in the next few years. As the authors write, the devices and software used on the net will shift from open (HTML, XML, etc.) to closed systems (apps, iTunes, video codecs).

“Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control, ” Anderson writes in his piece. Oddly, Tim Wu is never mentioned in the article.

Traffic in the WWW portion of the net has seen a consolidation with the big players. As Wolff write in his Wired article:

“the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Milner says. “In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.”

That may be result of Google’s indexing of the web, which favors already popular sites, or a natural laziness on the part of readers who just want to get their info in a coherent package and move on to the next thing.

Both Anderson and Wolff cite the failure of internet advertising as a major force behind the move to closed systems and subscription services.  But they overlook the importance of open repositories — Wikipedia content, KML annotations, Yelp reviews, Twitter feeds — in supplying the information that makes apps worthwhile. Oligarchs may be moving the web toward closed systems, but they still need the rabble to provide the bulk of content.

Certainly the internet is evolving.  The web itself — the information wrapped in HTML and related languages — is a declining portion of all traffic online. Video content now accounts for 26 percent of traffic online, according to an October 25 usage study by Cisco, while P2P file sharing claims 25 percent of IP traffic and HTTP (primarily web pages cast in HTML) retains 26 percent.  In June, a Cisco study predicted that by 2014, 91 percent of all consumer traffic on the net will be video. The same report forecast a four-fold increase in internet traffic:  ”In 2014, the Internet will be four times larger than it was in 2009. By year-end 2014, the equivalent of 12 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month.”  The “Internet” is the now-40-year-old set of standards  (notably Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP) that facilitates the transmission of all data types on the net.

All of these tools are transitory. The hardware and software we use now will seem quaintly absurd in a decade or so, but the idea of a global network open to everyone is concept that capital alone cannot kill.

How to Be Digital

Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Program or Be Programmed, makes a good argument for agency in the digital age.  The 140-page book elaborates on 10 Commands:

1. TIME: Do Not Be Always On
2. PLACE: Live in Person
3. CHOICE: You May Always Choose None of the Above
4. COMPLEXITY: You Are Never Completely Right
5. SCALE: One Size Does Not Fit All
6. IDENTITY: Be Yourself
7. SOCIAL: Do Not Sell Your Friends
8. FACT: Tell the Truth
9. OPENNESS: Share, Don’t Steal
10. PURPOSE: Program or Be Programmed

A more in-depth discussion of the book is on NPR’s On Point.  The repository of this popular NYU prof’s writings can be found on his website, Rushkoff.com.

In a similar vein,  author Nicholas Carr examines the effect of extensive internet use on our cognitive processes. His most-recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, is excerpted in the June issue of Wired. The upshot: the net promotes skimming and multi-tasking at the expense of concentrated linear thinking.

Malcolm Gladwell tackled the limited utility of social networks in his recent New Yorker article, “Small Change, Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted.” Gladwell uses examples from the American Civil Rights movement to show why “strong ties” are a necessary component of real social change. He contrasts this with the “weak ties” engendered by social media:

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

Gladwell has identified the particular weakness of click-here activism and a trend in networked communication.  As Gladwell writes in his conclusion: “The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo.”

It doesn’t take a pundit to posit a shift in the zeitgeist regarding the web. Now that the network is ubiquitous, now that the internet accounts for such a large portion of our daily diet of information, we really do have to watch what we eat.  Critical thinking and personal agency is part of the equation. An awareness of how the medium can skew the message  (and maybe our synapses) also helps. The limits of internet activism also must be acknowledged, along with an understanding of the web’s place in the broader economic context. But more on that later.

Right now I have to do some yard work.

Book Review: The Language of New Media

The Language of New Media, by Lev Manovich. Published by the MIT Press, 2001.

Why do I read books like this? Any book about computers and culture is bound to be out of date by the time is printed. So why invest the time it takes to plow through 333 pages, not including the index? I guess I was looking for a framework for understanding and perhaps a few fresh ideas. Professor Manovich provides ideas in abundance, however, the framework he selects is flawed.

The construct Manovich proposes is cinema, in particular Vertov’s seminal 1929 film Man With a Movie Camera. In his prologue, Manovich uses Vertov’s film to illustrate his key ideas. Foremost among these is, “cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, of narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data.”

In some respects taking cinema as a model for the development of new media is a valid heuristic technique. Film conventions have clearly influenced the world of gaming and VR. Yet the model breaks down before too long. Cinema is primarily for entertainment; it tells a story to the viewer. The internet is primarily a communication tool; it facilitates the exchange of information. PCs may have become more like media players, but they are still computing machines whose key functions are generating text, processing numbers and tracking transactions. Lastly the net is a far larger medium than cinema ever was; it embraces commerce, communication, learning, construction and entertainment with billions of active participants.

If the big picture eludes Manovich, he is much better at outlining the methods and characteristics of new media. His definition of new media is succinct and flexible. Manovich posits five characteristics that define new media:
1. It’s digital (has numerical representation)
2. It’s modular
3. It’s automated
4. It’s variable
5. It is transcoded (the computer layer shapes the culture layer).

In his chapter on Form, Manovich, a professor of visual arts at the University of California San Diego, notes how computer tropes have been picked up by the popular culture and how well-known computer forms have influenced real-life. Twenty years ago computer designers looked to real-life to give form to their tools. They chose items like a desktop and a filing cabinet to represent computer space and function. Nowadays aspects of computer function and the GUI influence popular culture (see for example MTV or Alex Garland’s The Beach).

The chapter on the Database also spins out some interesting ideas but misses the point. Manovich proposes an opposition between database and narrative, between the nonlinear and the linear. He gives as an example here the way film editing constructs a narrative out of a database of images and sounds. Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera is cited as a manifesto of the then new medium of cinema because it catalogs film techniques and constructivist angles in much the same way a lexicographer would catalog the grammar and syntax of language. No such manifesto has appeared for the computer age. Although, one must note that almost 35 years elapsed between the time the Lumiere brothers screened The Arrival of a Train at the Station and Vertov’s cinema manifesto.

One of the interesting ideas in this chapter is that the computer has become a “universal media machine”. As all previous cultural artifacts are becoming digitized, the net has become a vast database of media. Or as Manovich says, “the Web gave millions of people a new hobby — data indexing.” The author says that the age of new media is an era of recycling old media — sifting through millions of recorded images and sounds to cut and paste them together in new ways. Pastiche and quotation form the database of the new culture.

What this chapter on databases misses is the real utility of the database. Unstructured data piles like the net are confusing (although indexing tools like Google have gone a long way toward making sense of the pile). Structured databases impose a grid on information. That grid allows us to measure time, track sessions, compare, contrast and evaluate information. That capability, while not as easily understood as a filmic narrative, is more powerful than narrative alone. The relational database contains many possible narratives, all tagged with vital information like who, what, when, and where. The only thing the grid cannot tell us, perhaps, is why.

At several points in this long book Manovich calls for a new information aesthetics — a narrative to make sense of the ebb and flow of information. A single narrative may be a limited way of understanding the whole. In The Myth of Total Cinema, Andre Bazin said that the idea of cinema existed long before the technology made it possible. One could say that about the net as well. The idea of an internetworked world of knowledge has probably been around as long as the idea of flight. With the system in constant state of becoming, a simple story could not encompass its totality. The narrative must transcend itself — a larger resonance is needed. Maybe this is why metaphors are so powerful in bringing ideas to fruition. Stories like Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash created metaphors that transcended their stories. They suggested a reality that would later come to pass.

In his introduction Manovich explains that this book is an attempt to write “a theory of the present” regarding the new media. Having worked in the field, he knows how quickly the medium is changing. Much of the material for the book first appeared as postings to Rhizome, the journal of digital arts. Most of The Language of New Media was written before 1999 — before XML, Google and the rise of the blogs — so some of the examples Manovich uses are bound to be a bit dated. But as far as presenting a theory of the present goes, Manovich has succeeded. As to what it all meant, that will be left to future scholars – with the grand perspective of time — to tell us.

Book Review: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by Rosenfeld and Morville. Read Aug 03-Feb 04.

It seems to me that in a how-to book prolixity is a cardinal sin, especially a how-to book about organizing information. Although the authors have organized their information well, they have failed to edit it. I could have cut this book in half — to 200 succinct pages — and made it a much better product. Still there are useful chunks of info in here about conceptualizing search systems and metadata, explaining the practice of IA, moving big orgs toward rational info sharing, and labeling. I’ll probably refer to it from time to time. BTW: there’s a pattern of winter web renovation here — as the days get short and the weather awful, I’m more inclined to sit at the computer and shuffle pixels and bytes about.

Book Review: Designing Web Usability

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, by Jakob Nielsen. Read February 2003.

The guru of User Interface lays down the law. Should have read this when it was published in 2000. Here’s the synopsis:

• Separate design from content; separate presentation from meaning – use semantic coding, e.g.,
• Use style sheets with relative sizes and positions
• Design for speed. Maximum of one-second response time; over a 56K modem that’s about 34KB per page.
• Use descriptive link titles
• Use visited link color to show which pages have been viewed.
• Version 4x browsers were introduced in 1996. By standard rates of adoption, most users should have V5 or 6 browsers by now. Design for V4 or above.
• Use thumbnails and brief descriptions for video served from the web
• The homepage must explain WHAT THE SITE IS AND WHAT IT DOES. It must have simple navigation to main content areas, a summary of primary content, and a search feature.
• “Content is king.”
• “Design Darwinism” dictates that in the melee of web experimentation, bad design will die off for lack of users.
• Dense sites can be made navigable by: aggregation, summarization, filtering, truncation, and example-based representation.
• Read the search logs from your site along with the user traffic analyses. Frequently searched-for items are a key indicator of demand.
• Add common misspellings of keywords to meta tags to pull errant searches
• Intranets MUST have: a personnel directory with pics, projects, employee background, contact info and location; site directory with a hierarchical organization of info; a full-text search function; current company news, memos etc.
• Test early; test often. Get representative users and have them perform typical tasks on the site.
• Great websites are HOMERUNs: High in quality content; Often updated; Minimum time to load; Easy to use; Relevant to user’s purpose; Unique to the medium; Net-centric

Neilsen on modern tools: “… this is the first time humanity has lost mastery of its tools. … We have lost 2000 years of progress in rationalist thinking and reverted to superstitious and animist behavior (where these new tools are concerned).”