Preoccupations

Links for 2009-07-11 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-12T00:00:00-07:00

Infovore » Text In The World
"Mission objectives - or, at least, reminders thereof - written into the environment, mapped over space, appearing to the player along; subjective and stylistic, but never part of a HUD. It’s classy and striking, and not something people are playing with in games nearly enough."
Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » Notes on blogging for journalists | Blogs |
via Adrian Monck. "the main difference between bloggers and professional journalists is that while journalists tend to think of a news article as the end of the journalistic process, bloggers tend to think of a blog entry as the beginning of a conversation"
The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State | DISCOVER
"The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks ... the executive control system ... [&] the default network. ... that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless ... Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. ... zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering. In their fMRI study, Schooler and his colleagues found that the default network and executive control systems are even more active during zoning out than they are during the less extreme mind wandering with awareness. When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture."
User:Dcoetzee/NPG legal threat - Wikimedia Commons
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/11/1239244/UKs-National-Portrait-Gallery-Threatens-To-Sue-Wikipedia-User: ""The National Portrait Gallery of London is threatening litigation against a Wikipedia user over his uploading of pictures of some 3,000 paintings, all 19th century or earlier and firmly in the public domain. Their claim? The photos are a 'product of a painstaking exercise on the part of the photographer,' and that downloading them off the NPG site is an 'unlawful circumvention of technical measures.' And remember, the NPG's taxpayer-funded mission is to 'promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media [...] to as wide a range of visitors as possible!'""

Being that much better

2009-07-11T19:16:00+01:00

From the immemorial to the ephemeral. I’ve been moving steadily Mac-wards in the last couple of months. If nothing else, it’s liberating to learn to think with different tools. (The desire to have tools that are ready-to-hand, but the value that lies in appreciating constraints — then we have a fighting chance when the picture might otherwise hold us captive.)

The operating system I should really be using is Linux, for the reasons John Gruber summed up so well in a footnote to his recent blog post about Google Chrome OS/vapourware. What he had to say about Linux is so good it’s worth quoting it all:

“Linux” means different things to different people. At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by “Linux”, though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel. For use as a desktop PC operating system, all the various “Linux distributions” are basically the same thing: variations of Gnome or KDE sitting atop the ancient X Window System.

Ubuntu is almost certainly the pinnacle of these distributions, but they’re all conceptually the same thing, and the only significant difference is the choice between Gnome and KDE, and even there you’re just choosing between two different environments that are conceptually modeled after Microsoft Windows. The entire X Windows/Gnome/KDE “desktop Linux” racket has never caught any traction with real people. Almost no one wanted it, wants it, or will want it.

My theory on this is rather simple. Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista. But it’s still fundamentally a clone of Windows — menu bars within the window, minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top right of the window, the ugly single-character underlines in menu and button names. At a glance it looks like Windows with a different theme. The idea being that if you want Windows users to switch to Gnome or KDE, you’ve got to make it feel familiar. But that’s not how you get people to switch to a new product. People won’t switch to something that’s just a little bit better than what they’re used to. People switch when they see something that is way better, holy shit better, wow, this is like ten times better.²

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different. …

² The group that’s the most enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE desktop Linux systems consists of those who care the most about the political and licensing aspects. With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better.

In amidst fruit-picking, I’m playing with a better camera and I think I’m moving on a little, inspired by time spent alongside Jonathan, engaged by how he works, and, interesting-to-me, by computer games. To start with, that familiar sense of panic that, years ago, poetry once gave me (“I’ll never get this”) and then, at first slowly then more and more quickly, the coming of understanding and pleasure. Games absolutely encourage a try-and-fail-and-try-again approach. I used to be paralysed by the seeming unpredictability in learning anything much at all about digital photography, but treating it like play (which is certainly how I see Jonathan set about things) makes it all right — and fun.

Tools for thought: this post was semi-made on a Mac — I could have made this in a pure-Mac way (following a path no doubt excellent but seemingly laborious), but LiveWriter remains the best tool I know for blogging (a lot of the time it gets out of the way). And VirtualBox is free — and works.

Technorati Tags: play, constraints, tools, thinking

Links for 2009-07-10 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-11T00:00:00-07:00

Twitter / Adam Liversage: A year of the most intensi ...
via http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-tweet-of-the-week-ex-bt-pr-adam-liversage-on-phorm/ — Liversage, "until recently BT’s chief press officer": "A year of the most intensive, personal-reputation-destroying PR trench warfare all comes to nothing at the end of the day. Phantastic..."
Braid Review | Games | Game Room | Macworld
"Every few years a game comes along that begins to push the gaming industry in a new and exciting direction. These games transcend entertainment and are in fact pieces of art. Inevitably, they are not commercially successful. Braid is a bit too cerebral for the average player and the puzzles of the later stages are so challenging they will likely frustrate users. That's a shame, too, because the ending is worth the arduous (if brief) journey. Without multiplayer or much replay value, the game is simple, focused, and raw in its flaunting of conventions. Unlikely ever to be remembered as fondly as Mario, Braid is six levels too clever for its own good."
TAT - The Astonishing Tribe
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/augmented_id_augmented_reality_facial_recognition.php; http://www.polarrose.com/
Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: peak web
"It’s a fast food place in Soho. It’s using Twitter and Facebook (although I can’t actually find them there) to promote its business – there isn’t a need to have a URL and a website any more. They’re harder for people to remember and find, harder to create and harder to keep up to date."
Royal College of Art | Sustain
BBC - dot.life: The Web at 20
"Bill Thompson: I saw the web first as a relative latecomer in 1993. The change that it has wrought - it's much bigger than television. What it's achieved in just twenty years is astounding. In fact it's more important even than print. Think about the web in evolutionary terms - like developing a new eye. Delivering us access to more than a raw collection of facts but to knowledge. One of the most important things we have done as a species."
Raph’s Website » Obama’s Ghana speech in Metaplace
"Virtual worlds need not be a world apart. Here we see virtual worlds taking their place alongside other social media in a discussion that is truly broad, bringing the unique characteristics of placeness and co-presence to the table."
Google’s Cloud: How to cope with the disappearance of the PC :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
"Long-term relationships can be extremely valuable and healthy; it makes sense to get new and promising ones off on the right foot."
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change
BBC NEWS | "The canvas should be blank"
"Governments and companies should limit the snooping they do on web users. So said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who said that growing oversight of browsing could have a pernicious effect. A greater part of the value of the web lay in the lack of constraints on what people could do with it. He also warned that attempts to censor what people could say or what they could do online were ultimately doomed to failure. "When you use the internet it is important that the medium should not be set up with constraints," he said. The internet, said Sir Tim, should be like a blank piece of paper. Just as governments and companies cannot police what people write or draw on that sheet of paper so they should not be restricted from putting the web to their own uses."

Links for 2009-07-09 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-10T00:00:00-07:00

The Generation M Manifesto - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
"Dear Old People Who Run the World, My generation would like to break up with you. Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences. ... What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s. Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government."
Radiohead manager teams up with Mama Group to launch record label - Telegraph
"The new label – a partnership between ATC, of which Brian Message is a partner, MAMA Group and Vancouver-based artist management firm Nettwerk Music Group, plans to look at innovative digital releases like this for both new and established artists. Adam Driscoll, the co-chief executive of MAMA Group, said: "We will do whatever is most effective to get an artist noticed. Giving an album away for free may get one million people listening to a new artist." For new artists, Mr Driscoll said Polyphonic would probably offer a 50/50 profit sharing deal, but established artists would retain a bigger share. "
BBC - dot.life: Can O2 cope with smartphone traffic?
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/radiocomms/ifi/licensing/classes/broadband/cellular/3g/maps/3gmaps/coverage_maps.pdf, http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/07/09/iphone-and-palm-pre-owners-locked-to-britains-patchiest-3g-network/
Human-Centered Design Toolkit - Case Studies - IDEO
"IDEO partnered with International Development Enterprises (IDE), Heifer International, ICRW, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a toolkit for applying Human-Centered Design to inspire new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need."
Top 10 comic book cities | The Critics | Architects Journal
"From Gotham City to Mega City One, the Architects’ Journal presents a selection of the greatest illustrated urban spaces"
2D Goggles » Lovelace– The Origin
Charles Leadbeater argues that supportive relationships are key to tackling social ills | Society | The Guardian
"The best way to make public spending more effective is to reduce long-term dependence on repeat service solutions by helping people devise alternative ways to meet their needs that will mean they do not need a public service. The key to that is not in tougher targets or new rights and entitlements, but in better relationships. For most of the last decade, we have seen public services as systems and standards, to be managed and rationalised. Instead, we should reimagine public services as feeding the relationships that sustain us in everyday life."
Official Google Blog: Find Creative Commons images with Image Search
Google LatLong: The blue circle comes to your desktop
Google takes privacy very seriously, so your location will never be used without your permission. The first time you use My Location on Google "Today we're excited to announce exactly that, the launch of My Location for Google Maps. ... Maps, you'll be asked to confirm that you're happy to share your location with Google Maps, and you can always undo your decision. See the help center article on Privacy and My Location for more information about how your location is used."
Reuters - Handbook of Journalism
Unqualified Reservations: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
"Google is not a control interface, because no predictable mapping exists between control input and system behavior, and none can be expected. ... any such mapping is inherently impossible for full-text search. Google's problem is an intrinsically heuristic one. The result of the search is always a starting point for further analysis. There is never any automatic next step. The advantage of this inherent unpredictability is that since a search request never implies any precise rules for the prioritization of results, a search engine can use arbitrarily fuzzy and complex heuristics to get the best results to the top. And, indeed, should. Thus, Google can be Google, and Google should be Google. And Google is Google. Give it up to teh Goog."
BBC NEWS | Technology | Tech Lab: Sydney Padua
(More) tips for writing well (Austin Govella at Thinking and Making)
via Cennydd (Twitter)

Dyers hand

2009-07-09T22:50:00+01:00

Garden and kitchen have been claiming their time. We were picking and prepping red currants for a couple of days and now — on to the gooseberries. Sometimes, the garden can feel very bossy (and that’s generally a good thing).

A little while back I had several books on the go, including The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, Alice Oswald’s first collection of poems. In the time I’ve had just recently, I’ve been re-reading it. It’s very beautiful.

The sea had mastered them. They couldn’t make
even the simplest sense of what they had witnessed:
the moon, the birds, the crooked boat. They moved
far out between absurdity and wonder,
rocking like figures in a nursery rhyme,
the waves like great smooth beasts shoving them on.

…

The sea was miles and miles of palish tin
and a small countermoon was floating there,
very clear, very irregular perfect —
an aspirin in the middle of the world

and may the mystery move them now — the sea
cannot be finished with; each layer is laid
co-terminous with light but more than light
and seamless and invisible in water —
cannot be closed or opened, only entered …

*****

As we work, the rhythm takes us over, until we look up, backs aching, hands, t-shirts and shorts part-dyed with berry juice. You and the work and the world immediately around you (and that’s all you are aware of now) have melded.

Monday, stacking wood for a couple of hours, the same with differences: splinters in my hands, a little blood on the wood, and, after a time, the feel and smell of the wood in my head.

And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Lucy straightens up, stretches, bends down again. Field-labour; peasant tasks, immemorial.

… embodied actors interacting in the world, participating in it and acting through it, in the absorbed and unreflective manner of normal experience.

Technorati Tags: poetry, literature, Alice Oswald, embodied, flow, work

Links for 2009-07-08 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

Google Chrome OS - 12 winners and losers
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
How Google’s Chrome OS has deep roots in Eric Schimdt’s past | VentureBeat | Technovia
"Moores’ Law makes “thin clients” into thick ones."
Status-Q » Blog Archive » Google OS
"This may mark the point where the PC really is an extension of your online apps and storage, rather than the other way around."
Why Google is parking its tanks on Microsoft's lawn | Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/08/google-chrome-microsoft-windows-os
Ocado on the Go
"Ocado on the Go is the most convenient way to shop for groceries on the move. Use your iPhone or iPod touch to browse through thousands of household groceries, then place your order for delivery in a handy one-hour time slot."
SnapTell Blog: SnapTell acquired by Amazon.com subsidiary A9.com
"We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of customers for over a decade and is a pioneer in online shopping. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for visual shopping and we are thrilled to join A9.com at this exciting time."
BBC - dot.life: Chrome - living in a Google world?
"this is another quite significant event in the gradual migration of millions of ordinary computer users ... out of the Windows world. If, like me, your first experience of computing was through a desktop machine in the office - or a classroom computer - then you are very likely to be living in that world. ... But just in the last couple of years the scenery has begun to change. Google is probably the brand most familiar to the new generation of computer users. Now they're discovering that, as well as searching with Google, they can use its software to send e-mails, to write documents and spreadsheets using Google Apps, to take a journey down their neighbour's street with Street View, or to browse the web using Chrome. Then there's the fact that a mobile phone is becoming the way millions of people now get much of their access to the internet and, in some cases, their first introduction to computing."
Google Chrome OS and GooOS
"the browser is increasingly the sole point of interface for our interaction with computers. In a way, real operating systems are becoming irrelevant. Google's got it exactly right with Google Chrome OS: a browser sitting on top of a lightweight Unix layer that acts as the engine that the user doesn't need to know a whole lot about with the browser as the application layer. OS X might be the last important traditional desktop operating system, if only because it runs on desktops, laptops, the iPhone, and the inevitable Apple netbook/tablet thingie. But even OS X (and Windows and Google Chrome OS and Gnome and etc.) will lose marketshare to the WebOS...as long as users can run Firefox, Safari, or Chrome on whatever hardware they own, no one cares what flavor of Unix or tricked-out DOS that browser runs on."
BBC - Glow JavaScript Library
"Glow is a JavaScript library which aims to make working with JavaScript and the DOM easier. It tries to do this by abstracting common tasks, hiding cross-browser issues, and providing a set of user interface widgets."
FT.com / Christian Engström (Pirate Party MEP) - Copyright laws threaten our online freedom
"File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice."
Task Force Recommendations for Best Practices for Child Online Safety Ι Point Smart. Click Safe.
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/07/best-practices-for-online-child-safety.html" "The most important and timely recommendation from the report (which previous online safety task forces all agree upon) is the need for digital media literacy and safety education that empowers kids, parents, and educators. It's important that kids of all ages learn what it mean to be a digital citizen and how to navigate the online world safely, and it's equally important that parents and educators have the resources and online tools to help kids make the right choices online. That's why we support the SAFE Internet Act, introduced by Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), which would establish a $175 million dollar competitive grant program for state and local education agencies and nonprofit organizations to promote Internet safety education."
Curating conversations | The Guardian Open Platform | guardian.co.uk
"Twitter is becoming an ever present backchannel at conferences and events. However sometimes it needs curating and moderating, especially if it's to be displayed large as a part of the event. Here we talk about an app built in a few hours and open sourced today which we used for this purpose for The Guardian's Activate Summit." "Decoupling the live stream and a display was something we'd not seen before. We had some interesting issues relating to people feeling we'd censored or over-moderated some comments. In hindsight I feel we were far too cautious in that issue, however in many ways I'm glad we were too cautious as we would have missed out on a very good and very public discussion (often played out on the large screen) about moderation/curation and censorship and the fine line between these three things."
Why Do Schizophrenics Smoke Cigarettes? | Brain Blogger
"“There is substantial evidence that nicotine could be used by patients with schizophrenia as a ‘self-medication’ to improve deficits in attention, cognition, and information processing and to reduce side effects of antipsychotic medication"; "In addition, the process known as “sensory gating,” which lowers response levels to repeated auditory stimuli, so that a schizophrenic’s response to a second stimulus is greater than a normal person’s, is also impacted by cigarettes"; ""Several studies have reported that smokers require higher levels of antipsychotics than nonsmokers. Smoking can lower the blood levels of some antipsychotics by as much as 50%".
GNM to cut a quarter of London print jobs | printweek.com
"Joe Clark, GNM general manager, said: "The economic downturn has had a significant impact on the print site in terms of the number of newspaper copies we are printing. Circulation figures across the industry have fallen and are not expected to return to previous levels. "This has meant that we have had to look at how GPC is structured, to meet our changing needs. This is no reflection on the GPC staff, who consistently work to the highest industry standards." GNM has already announced that editorial numbers at its Kings Place headquarters in north London will drop from 850 to below 800, plus 82 out of 840 jobs will be lost in the commercial department." via Adrian Monck

Links for 2009-07-07 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

Facebook's Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users
Time Wastes Too Fast - And the Pursuit of Happiness Blog - NYT
reTristram Shandy, see http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/images/vc26a.jpg (via http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffleg.html)
Prowl
Andreessen leads funding for US political blog network | Media | guardian.co.uk
"Web pioneer Marc Andreessen is leading a round of funding for US political blog network, TPM Media, which many say is a model for investigative journalism in the digital age"
Pachube :: blog: Pachube2SketchUp: realtime sensor data in SketchUp
"With this tool, you are able to import both realtime and historic Pachube data (i.e. sensor and environment data) into popular 3D CAD package Google SketchUp. The incoming data can be used to generate or modulate a 3D model of a building or environment, and enables sophisticated design-decisions that are based on actual (and not simulated) sensor and environment data."

Links for 2009-07-06 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

The Lessons of the Loess Plateau
via Gavin, http://twitter.com/agentGav/statuses/2494175113
No SOS needed for newspaper RSS - currybetdotnet - 6 July, 2009
"Our feeds are simply generated as a function of publishing. If you take any 'front' like Sport or keyword page like Roger Federer on The Guardian site, and add /rss to the end of it - you will get the contents in RSS format. ... as a publishing platform all these feeds come for free, but only when they are requested. Nobody at The Guardian sat up all night specifying a zillion different RSS feeds, and the R2 platform is only pumping out the ones that people actually request. On The Guardian site you can also build 'combiner' URLs, that slice the content by keyword and content-type. ... there is an almost infinite number of ways to combine The Guardian's tags, to make pages or RSS feeds that are rendered on demand. Direct consumer subscriber numbers might be low, but making content available in a machine readable format is all about being part of the platform of the web, rather than just being in browsers."
Patients should store their health records with Google or Microsoft, says David Cameron | Politics | guardian.co.uk
"The proposal has aroused controversy because of Cameron's close links to Google. Steve Hilton, his most important policy adviser, is married to Rachel Whetstone, a senior Google communications executive."
Cameron favours small IT contractors :: Contractor UK
"David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has called the government to broaden its base of IT contractors away from large technology companies like Capita. Rather than simply being reserved for the “the big players”, the Tory leader said contracts for the supply of services to the government should go to smaller outfits. These outfits might be voluntary groups or small firms, but both would typically be “inventive and doing exciting things,” Mr Cameron said in a speech in London. ... In January, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, set out a “better IT deal for the taxpayer” to save £600m a year by opening up Whitehall’s IT procurement process. Under the plan, a big software project would be split into chunks, manageable for multiple firms using open-source, instead of being left whole for a single IT company."
Recruiters linking in to social networks | The Guardian
"One-third of employers now use social networking sites to connect with potential recruits, meaning it's not what you know but how you promote yourself on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn that counts. Research by recruitment consultant Harvey Nash and the Department for Work and Pensions reveals half of employers believe that if candidates invest time in developing a strong online brand using social and other networks, they are more likely to be hired. Almost a quarter of employers routinely use sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn during their recruitment process – 15% said they would miss out on key recruits if they didn't do so. Yet, it seems this trend has gone unnoticed by young jobseekers. Although 92% of online 18 to 24-year-olds are registered on social network sites, only 12% said they use these to get job leads or make useful career contacts." + http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jul/06/social-networking-employers
EarthURL.org
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2009/07/earthurl_released.html
Penguin Axes 100 Staff To Meet Digital Challenge | paidContent:UK
"according to Penguin Group CEO John Makinson, it’s not down to the recession but the shifting media landscape. In a memo to staff, he says: “We have to think about what kind of company we might have in five years time if we sat back and changed nothing... Penguin has been in the vanguard of many of the changes sweeping our industry—the rise of the digital economy and the impact of emerging markets are just two current examples—and we have to stay ahead if we’re to grow and prosper.”"
Web pioneer launches fund, pulls back curtain on Facebook | Media | guardian.co.uk
"Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen reveals that Facebook is on track to generate $500m in revenues this year and predicts it could earn billions in five years". + http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/06/andreessen-facebook-revenues-to-pass-500-million-in-2009-wouldnt-sell-shares-yet/
Facebook for Parents
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=96616137130
ELSPA says, we're ALL gamers now... | Technology | guardian.co.uk
"What the ELSPA figures quietly confirm, alongside a growing mass of comparable data, is that society really is moving beyond the age of mass non-interactive entertainment. Television jumped the shark with reality TV; the nation's cognitive surplus is being deployed elsewhere."
[mySociety:public] What Lisa said
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/06/telegraph-hazel-blears-expenses-civil-servant-sacking; http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/06/telegraph-politics-mystery-blears-sacked-civil-servant

Stacked logs [Flickr]

2009-07-06T09:33:44-07:00

Preoccupations posted a photo:

Links for 2009-07-05 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-06T00:00:00-07:00

Computers should be used to make art - Telegraph
The Great Geek Manual » Physics Blogs
…My heart’s in Accra » Jonathan Lyons on the Islamic resolution of science and monotheism
"Arabic libraries held hundreds of thousands of books. When the sultan decided to donate books to a new school, he sent 80,000 from his personal collection. The seat of knowledge was Baghdad ... the calif was a student of Euclid ... While Madina-al-Salam was a mathematically planned city, the magic of it came from a city governed by law rather than by tribal tradition. Al-Mansour ordered translations of scientific works from Greek and Persian. Ordered the creation of the House of Wisdom - the Beit al Hikma. It was modeled after the libraries of great Persian kings. This effort was strongly supported by the general population, not just by the caliphs. ... to translate these texts, the scholars needed to become deeply knowledgeable as scientists. They corrected, edited and revised these texts. The Arabic translation of a great Greek work was often better than the Greek original ... The desire for science wasn’t in conflict with relgious authority - there was deep Islamic support."
Participo: Making the web useful no 47265 - plain text
"I asked a few friends if they fancied doing the same - ploughing through my 'to read later' list and each selecting a few articles. Which we did. And we also used Lulu to (privately, because we didn't want to breach copyright) publish the book, which came out rather nicely ... The irony of taking what was often a print publication's electronic edition of an article, pushing it through a service that converted it to plain text and then printing a physical edition of that book isn't lost on me. But novelty aside, the ability to curate, with friends, a set of articles, was a great experience. The latest changes to the Instapaper website and in particular, the iPhone app, have been focused around curation: starred items, folders, and being able to access other user's saved articles."
acrossair | Nearest Tube Augmented Reality iPhone 3GS App
to go with that YouTube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZk0HaIs4s
Red Sweater Blog – Perfect Preview With MarsEdit
How We Write a Comic | The Public Domain |
"I am hard at work writing our new comic on the history of musical borrowing, with my two brilliant co-authors, Jennifer Jenkins and Keith Aoki." — via Twitter
Wikipedia (mobile)
Pasta&Vinegar » Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary
"Nassim Nicholas Taleb ... "a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. ..." Why do I blog this? mostly two reasons for this on a sunday evening: 1. Because it highlights to what extent books and resources ... can be seen as TOOLS. ... 2. As a reminder to avoid the fear of having stack of un-read books here and there. It’s sometimes menacing but reassuring at the same time (still some material to peruse). The importance of the “un-read” is in direct correlation with possible discoveries and new vectors."
Click Nothing: Live and Let Die
"meaning does not come from playing a game... it comes from playing WITH a game. It is the manipulation not only of the actors in the game that is meaningful, but the manipulation of the game itself. This discussion is not about how to make a game more meaningful. It is about how games mean."
notes.husk.org. The City Of London Highwalks
BT drops Phorm targeted ad service after customers cry foul over privacy | Business | The Guardian
"But BT has decided not to proceed with rolling out Webwise to its 4.8 million broadband customers, dealing a heavy blow to AIM-listed Phorm. The company, which has received complaints from customers about Phorm, said the decision was down to its need to conserve resources as it looks to invest £1.5bn in putting a next-generation super-fast broadband network within reach of 10 million homes by 2012. Privately, however, BT bosses have been increasingly concerned about consumer resistance to advertising based on monitoring users' online behaviour and specifically about the backlash against Phorm."
Codex Sinaiticus - Home
"Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book. ... The Codex Sinaiticus Project is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript."
Cory Doctorow: invention is now a lot more like collage than discovery
"The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. And that means that the two literatures — how-to and fiction — have effectively merged into one master story, the "plausible premise." ... In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. ... What does this all mean for science fiction? ... The formerly rare occurrence of technology jumping off the page and into the world (Heinlein's waterbeds, Clarke's geosynchronous orbits) are about to become a lot more common. When readers can download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it becomes much simpler to turn fiction into reality."

Fyfield, towards the Ridgeway

2009-02-07T23:06:50+00:00

A wonderful afternoon’s walking in the snow, up on Fyfield Down. Wiltshire doesn’t stop amazing me with its beauty.

Technorati tags: Wiltshire, Fyfield Down, Ridgeway

Things (and quite a few people) are talking to me

2009-01-18T17:11:00+00:00

One of the bits of our new course for Year 9 that has given me the most pleasure to write is the part about microblogging. We have a number of students nurturing entrepreneurial ambitions and, when their ideas hit some kind of maturity, the next thing they may come to talk about is how to get themselves known. Looking at how Stephen Fry has used Twitter to reach a lot of people is something instructive to put before these students (if only because of what makes him so different), but everyone can benefit from looking at this sequence below. There’s much food for thought here — about celebrity and the web, brands and the web, scale, writing for unknown audiences, creating and sustaining (and providing confirmation of) your digital identity, the relationship between the person posting and the companies she/he is associated with … as well as “just” microblogging in general, of course. (Roo has a very good post, How do you use Twitter?, that I recommend to our students.)

That’s one strand.

Then, all those things now a-twittering: Andy House, Botanicalls0106, Mars Phoenix, the Shipping Forecast, Tower Bridge … old Father Thames.

Oh to be young now and see how this all works out. Matt: "treating the web not as a web of pages and websites but as a web of data"; "digital and physical things—and, increasingly, excitingly—things that can’t make up their mind which they are". Russell: "The stuff that digital technologies have catalysed online and on screens is starting to migrate into the real world of objects."

In just one lesson (35 minutes) a week, in just one year group, sometimes we can’t do more than give a heads-up (omitting so much), but I hope our nascent engineers, software developers, designers, advertisers, planners of cities, architects, climate scientists, privacy activists, politicians, doctors, civil servants … in short, all wide awake citizens-to-be are getting this.

PS I haven’t even mentioned Google Profiles — have you created yours (or taken the decision not to)? Or used that new Contact info tab yet? There’s a bit about them, and Windows Live Profiles, in Lesson 17. Jyri just twittered, “Google profiles reached that state where it was time to point my blog’s About link there”.

Technorati tags: Twitter, things, physicality, microblogging, coral reef, profiles, Google Profiles, social networks, Windows Live Profiles

Our work (so far) this year

2009-01-11T17:23:00+00:00

It’s again been an exhilarating experience to teach our first year’s (13 year-olds) their ICT course. The pace of adoption by them of technological developments still surprises: once again, I notice how this year’s cohort is just that much further on than the equivalent year group last year. It’s not just us, the adults, who notice this: where we might think that teenagers swim in all this digital stuff like fish in water, it’s eye-opening to watch only slightly older students being amazed at what 13 year-olds now know. So last month, a year on from when I last posted here about this course, I was feeding back to colleagues whose specialism is not ICT:

Last year, for example, we taught about tabbed browsing, but this year we didn’t need to: our 13 year-olds are experimenting freely with different browsers, wasting no time in downloading and adopting the recently released Google Chrome. They joined the school knowing more than last year’s 4ths about operating systems and several have experience of Linux. They are keen to learn about how they can maintain their personalised experience of computing (by exploiting web apps) when using the school’s networked machines and many were already using iGoogle before joining St Paul’s. One 4th former routinely uses PortableApps and showed others how to do the same. Others know about running Firefox from a memory stick, retaining all their individual settings no matter what PC they are on. There is a wide range of hardware in use and the barrier between desktop machines (hitherto commonly taken to be synonymous with computers) and mobile devices has gone — notebooks, mini-books, smartphones, the iPodTouch, iPhones ... all proving their computing worth in day-to-day life. Location-based services are being widely used on mobile phones; such services are coming soon to browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and operating systems (eg, Windows 7).

Some further context here: a year ago, iGoogle was alien to nearly all our first years; memory sticks were used more or less only as … memory sticks — running apps off of them was a fringe experience; browsers and the exploitable differences between them simply hadn’t the popular prominence they have now. Most interesting in many ways to me is the demand for Open Source software: because of 13 year-old, pupil-led demand we are networking Open Office, running it alongside MS Office. It’s up to the user which product he/she wants to use. I’m also interested in reports from colleagues about 13 and 14 year-old pupils, when asked to create a document or to collaborate, opening web-based apps as a matter of course.

So, the course as it is evolving this year is currently online here. I have no doubt, though, that we are now at a watershed and, as I also summed things up for colleagues, ‘The current course, revised from that of last year, will need fundamental revision for next year in order to keep pace with the changes afoot and the rate of adoption by young teenagers’. In particular, I think we’re now ready to make a fundamental shift towards the creative — and this pleases me a great deal.

They don’t have blogs, or I’d link to them, but my gratitude to the team with whom I co-teach this course (Richard, Andrew, Olly, David) is great: my thanks to them for all their hard work and enthusiasm.

This year has been very busy on a number of other fronts. We took the decision late last academic year to re-design our website and asked Clearleft to undertake the work. As I knew it would prove, it’s been a pleasure to work with Clearleft: we’re somewhere around halfway through the project and I’ve learned a great deal from them — about web-design, for sure (we had fun with affinity diagrams and played with post-its), but also about how good design work probes and challenges a company’s perception of how it’s promoting itself. I recommend the experience.

We’ve also been working a lot with Firefly, the company who write the software that powers both our website and our intranet. Simon and Joe, the founders and developers of Firefly, were pupils at St Paul’s and wrote the first iteration of Firefly whilst studying here. With the great help of Jess and Serena from Headshift, we have worked together, discussing how the interface and capabilities of Firefly might be developed, and this month saw the release of the new product. Thank you, Joe and Simon, for all your work on this. In summary: comments can now be enabled on all pages; we have blogs; the editing interface has been re-worked and made in-line, write-access is on by default and key editing options are immediately visible in hover-over mode; RSS has been made both much more obvious and widely available; the permissions dialogue has been improved and made more transparent; search has been improved both in UI and performance; template documentation is on its way, as is tagging; shared workspaces are available; calendaring now supports iCal; pages are owned by their creators but stewardship of a page is assignable (useful with classes, projects, etc). These are major software improvements for our intranet (which has amassed some 25,000 pages), providing us with something to build on collaboratively (staff and pupils) and develop further.

When we were deliberating the next iteration of our ICT Development Plan, I wanted green computing to be high on the agenda and I’m delighted that we worked with Gavin at AMEE and are now poised to start aggregating our energy data for the school (ie, the whole site) with AMEE. Our building program recognised the importance of sustainability from the outset.

We’ve been in discussion with Google about starting a branded YouTube channel. We filmed most of this year’s talks (see below) and have these and other stuff to go up. All this takes time, of course, but it’s coming.

This year we also began what I sense is necessarily a thoughtful, slow and sensitive engagement with games and gaming. These have a poor standing in schools, yet their cultural influence and their ubiquity in the lives of many younger people (by no means “just” students) is evident and widely reported. Grand Theft Auto originates from Paulines, of course, and it was high time to address the whole “matter”. We founded a society this term, met a couple of times (the first time without anyone, perhaps, realising it was meeting) and grew it out of two influential, important talks (see below). Next term we move the throttle forward and give it some more oomph. Those involved (it’s pretty popular) bought the idea of everyone reading more about games, and we’ll start with Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.

We’ve had a great run of speakers so far this year, with more to come. Last academic year I blogged these talks as we went, but this year things have been too busy for that (along with all the work detailed here, I’ve also switched to commuting daily, which involved decamping mid-term from my school flat and giving some much overdue attention to our own home — and then there was learning to live with First Great Western …). So here’s the run-down …

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (left) came on 16 September to talk about all things Arduino/Tinker.it. For those who don’t know her, Alexandra is an industrial and interaction designer and the CEO of the technology and design consultancy, Tinker.it — who make the Arduino project, ‘an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software … intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. … The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.’ This was a much enjoyed talk (we have a strong interest in electronics) and we’re now liaising with Alexandra to do more together. In common with all the talks this year, hers was promoted widely and attracted a cross-disciplinary student and staff audience.

Gavin Starks (right), 18 September. Gavin is a director of d::gen network ltd and Managing Director of CI. An astrophysicist and a composer (he worked at Jodrell Bank in radio astrophysics, and created new courses in Electronics and Music at Glasgow University), in 1995 he helped set up Virgin Net ISP and in 1996 helped establish the International Webcasting Association in Europe. In 1999, he created the cross-media company, Tornado Productions, leading projects with clients who included Channel Four, Rolls Royce, Tate Modern, Shell, Christian Aid ... He is the Founding Director of AMEE, Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine, a software project designed to create a standard for carbon dioxide data and profiling. AMEE is used by the UK Government (Defra and the Act On CO₂ campaign), The Climate Group, the RSA, Radiohead ... and (now) St Paul's. It was about AMEE and the threat of climate change that he spoke:

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform to measure and track all the energy data on Earth. This includes aggregating every emission factor and methodology related to CO2 and Energy Assessments (individuals, businesses, buildings, products, supply chains, countries, etc.), and all the consumption data (fuel, water, waste, quantitative and qualitative factors). It is a web-service (API) that combines measurement, calculation, profiling and transactional systems. Its algorithmic engine applies conversion factors from energy into CO2 emissions, and represents data from 150 countries.AMEE aids the development of businesses and other initiatives - by providing common benchmarks for measurement, tracking, conversion, collaboration and reporting. AMEE is designed to add to, and support, your business or projects. Its role is to help create, stimulate and be part of the emerging ecosystems around energy data; whether you are creating a calculator or a marketplace, tracking a building or a supply chain. AMEE is complimentary to and can facilitate Smart Grids, information systems, legislative frameworks and compliance schemes. We aim to assist with the development of energy as a global carbon currency, assisting governments and companies that need to account for and trade internationally in CO2 emissions. Over two hundred organisations have developer access to the AMEE platform across dozens of sectors.

Again, this was a talk that attracted computing enthusiasts (massive data aggregation and tracking) and a wider audience, too — environmentalists, geographers, school development and estate staff …

Phil Gyford, 7 October. Phil is the creator of the online Pepys’ Diary:

This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England (read more about him). A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day over the course of several years; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003. If this is your first time here, you may want to read the the story so far, the frequently asked questions or some information about the text. You can also read the site using RSS and receive diary entries by email. If you want to post your own annotations you should also read the annotation guidelines.

Phil has never spoken about his work with Pepys’ Diary to a conference: this was a first — and one I’m delighted we hosted. Many paths meet in his work and he pulled in an eclectic mix of students and colleagues: those interested in Pepys, Old Pauline; those interested in both the why and how of what Phil has done, in how the site has been received and developed, in the community that's built up around it (it's very popular); then, amongst the literati, those wondering about Pepys-on-the-web, the differences between a hand-written diary and a blog … Thank you, Phil.

On 9 October, Oil came to talk about their new project, Routes. Kim led the charge (very good to have had you here, Kim). Oil is ‘an interactive drama and entertainment studio’, and this is Routes:

Launching in January 2009, Oil’s first commission from Channel 4 is an interactive thriller and Alternate Reality Game (ARG), based around genomics and directed at a teen audience (14-19 year-olds). The format will span multiple websites, broadcast channels and mobile technologies. Routes is not a passive viewing experience; it is a story that participants can reach out and touch, where all telephone numbers work, where the fictional bio-tech company websites are indistinguishable from their real counterparts and where characters may turn up on your doorstep asking for help. The participant is not just a fan of the game and the accompanying narrative; instead they are a tangible part of its universe with their actions shaping the events that unfold in the story. Routes differs from most ARGs produced to date in that the narrative is underpinned by credible, cutting edge science; so much so that the format has gained recognition and investment in the form of sponsorship from The Wellcome Trust.

We know that as many as 99% of our pupils may be gamers and I was prepared for a crush: it was the best attended talk of any during my time at St Paul’s, the room close to bursting. The quality of engagement the students showed with the game designers was stunning: for over an hour, attention was focused and comments incisive and intelligent. Several of our students will be getting stuck into Routes when it goes live shortly and I hope we can build further upon this relationship with Oil.

Steven Johnson came on 15 October to talk about the subject matter of The Ghost Map: nineteenth century London and the challenge of cholera; the emergence of epidemiology; maps and their role in showing how cholera spread; the importance of hyperlocal knowledge; the importance of what he calls the Long Zoom — the ability to move across different disciplines, synthesising information; the lessons of all this for today — for social networks, for the modern mapping abilities of the web (see his project Outside.in), for the understanding of the well-being of cities.The cross-disciplinary approach he has developed went down well with the (again) cross-disciplinary group who came to hear him. I’ve been teaching a sixth-form course on cities and have made use of Steven’s TED talk, The Web and The City. I hope some of those from that course, or from those who came to hear him speak, will go on to read both Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and his new study, The Invention of Air, a book exploring not only Priestley's scientific work that led to the discovery of oxygen but also the role Priestley had in the founding of America (a ‘lost Founding Father’, ‘a hugely important figure to Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson who is barely mentioned today in most accounts of the revolutionary generation’). We look forward to having Steven back before too long to talk about games.

On 18 November, Tom Armitage came to talk about ‘If Gamers Ran The World’:

It’s more likely than ever that in the coming years people with power - political, industrial, corporate, technical - will have played videogames. And not just had a passing experience with them; they may actually be what we might term “gamers”. In the coming years, the world will face problems such as impending recessions, peak oil, and global warming (not to mention all manner of other difficulties over the horizon). And it's not just impending disaster; there are all manner of positive challenges we're going to have to rise to. What have videogames taught the leaders and innovators of tomorrow? What are the necessary skills for the 21st century that gamers have been learning for years? What can we learn from games, and what can gamers - and game designers - take to other industries and sectors?

This hit the bull’s eye: like Oil’s session earlier in the term, it raised the bar on debate about games and left everyone — enthusiastic gamers and sceptics — with plenty to discuss. You can read the full text of Tom’s talk here — and you can listen to him being interviewed on Canadian radio about the same, here. If you follow up those leads, you’ll see why Tom’s talk was the perfect final stepping stone into our kicking off the St Paul’s Games Society — and a week or so later we met properly at last. (I’m particularly grateful to Tom for this talk and for his inspired writing on his blog about games: there’s a good body of criticism now grown up around and about games, and Tom’s a great guide if, like me, you missed out on computer gaming when young and are now trying to understand what it’s all about.)

Finally, on 1 December, Cory Doctorow came to talk about the kinds of issues that inspired, and lie behind, his new novel, Little Brother, his very successful dystopian novel written with teenagers in mind. The reading marked the occasion of its UK publication in paperback.

In my science fiction course for sixth-formers, I’ve been dropping broad hints that they should read Cory’s work, including his column for the Guardian and his personal blog. There’s a bang up to date Guardian interview with Cory I’d recommend, too — Cory Doctorow: willing science fiction into fact:

“I’m a presentist,” he says, smiling broadly as he leans back in his chair. “All science fiction writers, whether they admit it or not, are writing metaphorically about the present. To extrapolate the future is really to comment on the now. ... The job of a science fiction writer, historically, has been to understand how technology and social factors interact,” he says, “how technology is changing society. An activist’s job is to try to direct that change. ... My hope is that Little Brother is a verb and not a noun, that it’s a thing you do, not just a book you read,” he continues. “That’s where thinking about the future and influencing the future converge.”

I also strongly recommend this recent Guardian piece by Cory, Database nation.

Earlier in the year, some of our students did some filming with Cory and one of those who took part, Noah (14 years-old), wrote after Cory’s talk, ‘It’s not often you find someone who’s into technology and can actually keep you listening when they talk about it. Cory Doctorow certainly proved that he is one of that select few when he talked … about how computers and the power of networking can and have been used to beat the establishment.’ Thanks, Cory.

What else? We’ve started a small society for entrepreneurs. I talked to parents in an updated version of last year’s talk, 'A Social Web, A Social World'. And, wearing my literary hat, we squeezed in a poetry reading (6 November): Michael Symmons Roberts, James MacMillan’s librettist.

And now, term’s about to start all over again. Life may be a little calmer this year and I’ll try to post about what we’re doing as we do it. Or thereabouts.

Technorati tags: St Paul's, talks, ICT, teaching, London, Litte Brother

Tilt into the future

2009-01-05T21:42:00+00:00

So many reasons to be gloomy as we slide into 2009, but I’m with Eno in refusing to go down that route. I’m buoyed up by what so many friends are doing, by the inspiration students give me and by my 92 year-old mother getting up in the night to watch the US election results (“after the 60s and the civil unrest, I just had to see this through”).

Barack Obama with his family on election night in Chicago, IL on Wednesday, November 5, 2008L
David Katz/Obama for America (Flickr)

I first came across Obama in 2005 and quoted him that summer in a farewell speech I gave for a close friend (alter ipse amicus) as he stood down from his pastoral post in a boarding school. I think the Economist had reported on a speech to graduating students that Obama had made that June, where he had invited them to ask of themselves, "What will be my place in history?":

In other eras, across distant lands, this is a question that could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant of Rome, you knew you would spend your life forced to build somebody else's Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might take everything you had - and that famine might come knocking on your door any day. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom to worship and speak and build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne. And then, America happened. A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form "a more perfect union" on this new frontier.

I quoted another bit (shorn it of its specifically American references), made right for the occasion because it expresses perfectly my friend’s own wise, kind and optimistic humanity (expended tirelessly in his work with the young):

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own … journey? Surely. But the test is not perfection. The true test … is whether we are able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time.

Go and read this 2005 speech: it’s often fine (Obama and rhetoric!) and prescient, attuned to the challenges of technology and globalisation, to what an inter-connected world means — and to the significance of education. It is youthful and attentive to youth, inspired by hope and looking to the future:

So let's dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let's imagine what we can do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.

Back in March of last year, Marc Andreessen wrote about Obama (“We asked him directly, how concerned should we be that you haven't had meaningful experience as an executive -- as a manager and leader of people? He said, watch how I run my campaign -- you'll see my leadership skills in action.”):

It's very clear when interacting with Senator Obama that he's totally focused on the world as it has existed since after the 1960's -- as am I, and as is practically everyone I know who's younger than 50.

Well, Palin and the plumber are just a memory and we’ll soon be seeing how it goes. My 01.20.09 t-shirts now have a whole new life ahead of them.

(My non-Obama take-away from last year’s campaign: “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power” — Bill Clinton.)

As Warren Ellis wrote in another context:

Tilt into the future. Or get the eternal past you deserve.

Technorati tags: Obama, hope, optimism, 2009, America

The Guardian Saturday Poem

2008-08-02T23:30:00+01:00

King Lear

It does not keep you safe; it does not

give you the words you need, it does not

tell you how much to pay, how much

they owe you. It will not work, like egg-yolks,

to cool the numb heat of lost eyes and treacheries.

It does not surrender to the reasonable

case for not risking everything to keep

secrets and rivals, the white line in the tickling

membrane of freedom. It will not keep you dry: rain,

like crying, sinks down to the bone.

It will not stop: not when you sleep, not

when you wake, not when you want it to,

not when you want to settle with the mirror

of your shame. Never. It will not. Never.

Rowan Williams

Technorati tags: Rowan Williams, poetry

Kayaking

2008-07-03T23:29:42+01:00

The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.
— Scott Bradner, former trustee of the Internet Society (quoted in Here Comes Everybody)

The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well,
and because they are easily modifiable they can be made to fit better over time. — Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody, p 158)

Back before Easter, I was at the ICA for the Eno/Shirky evening. One of the books I then read over the break was Here Comes Everybody. I’ve been meaning for some time to put down a few notes about it here. This has grown to be a long post as I’ve added to it, wanting to get a few things out on the page and, so, clearer in my own mind.

It’s a great book to suggest to friends who are not familiar with the technologies Shirky discusses as it hides its knowledge well — but there are still leads to follow up. The modest ten or so pages of the Bibliography threw up a number of articles I'd either not heard of before or hadn’t visited in a long while. In the former camp, I recommend: Anderson: More Is Different (Science — 1972); R H Coase: The Nature of the Firm (pdf) — a 1937 economics paper; Richard P. Gabriel — Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big: worse is better (1991); Alan Page Fiske: Human Sociality. (There’s an online “webliography” here.) And chapters 8–11, covering so many big topics — social capital; three kinds of loss (some solve-a-hard-problem jobs; some social bargains; negative aspects to new freedoms); small world networks; more on social capital; failure (‘open source … is outfailing’ commercial efforts, 245); more on groups (‘every working system is a mix of social and technological factors’, 260) — hit my Amazon Prime account hard. (Incidentally, there’s a Kevin Kelly piece on “more is different”, Zillionics, that appeared earlier this year. See also Kevin Kelly’s The Google Way of Science and Wired’s The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different.)

Further reading to one side, a number of things discussed in the book particularly interested me straightaway. Firstly, sociality, privacy and exposure online. Leisa recently posted Ambient Exposure, an update (of sorts) to her post of last March, Ambient Intimacy. The titles tell their own story. Early on, Clay writes about ‘how dramatically connected we've become to one another … [how much] information we give off about our selves’. This took me back to Adam Greenfield’s recent talk at the Royal Society (I’ve also been re-reading Everyware). Our love of flocking is being fed handsomely by means of the new tools Clay Shirky discusses so well.

Privacy is always coming up in conversations at school about online life, and what I’m hearing suggests our students are beginning to look at privacy and exposure with growing circumspection. Facebook’s People You May Know functionality has made some sit up and wonder where social software might be taking us. We’re slowly acquiring a stronger sense of how seduction through imagined privacy works (alone in a room, save for screen and keyboard) and a more developed understanding of what it means to write for unseen audiences. Meanwhile, there are things to be unlearned: ‘those of us who grew up with a strong separation between communication and broadcast media … assume that if something is out where we can find it, it must have been written for us. … Now that the cost of posting things in a global medium has collapsed, much of what gets posted on any given day is in public but not for the public’ (90). In the Bibliography, Clay refers to a post of Danny O’Brien’s — all about register — which is a longtime favourite of mine, too.

Then there was what the book had to say about media and journalism. Simon Waldman, well-placed to pass comment, on chapters 3 and 4:

The chapters most relevant to media/journalism - ‘Everyone is a media outlet’ and ‘Publish first, filter later’ should be required reading for pretty much everyone currently sitting in a newspaper/broadcaster. It’s certainly the best thought through thing I’ve read on this, and the comparison to the decline of the scribes when the printing press came in is really well drawn.

The summary to Chapter 4 (‘Publish, Then Filter’) runs, ‘The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact’. ‘Filter-then-publish … rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means the only working system is publish-then-filter’ (98). (Language like this can sound an utopian note that rings on in the head long after the book’s been closed, as if we’d entered a world beyond old constraints. And look!: the Praetorian Guard of elite gatekeepers is no more.)

I was interested, too, to read Shirky’s thoughts about the impact of new technologies on institutions. His application of Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper and, in particular, the idea of the Coasean floor (‘activities … [that] are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way’), was very striking: the new tools allow ‘serious, complex work [to be] taken on without institutional direction’ and things can now be achieved by ‘loosely coordinated groups’ which previously ‘lay under the Coasean floor’.

We didn't notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. (47)

Later in the book (107), he comes back to institutions, taking what is happening to media businesses as not unique but prophetic — for ‘All businesses are media businesses … [as] all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world’:

The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organisational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be. The linking of symmetrical participation and amateur production makes this period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means that once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well. Owning a television does not give you the ability to make TV shows, but owning a computer means that you can create as well as receive many kinds of content, from the written word through sound and images. Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of "consumer" is now a temporary behaviour rather than a permanent identity.

‘Every new user is a potential creator and consumer’ (106) is reminiscent of Bradley Horowitz in Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers (2006).

*****

Hope. At the ICA, Clay said that he is no longer a cyber-utopian (he’s said this on numerous other occasions, too: eg, see David Weinberger’s notes on Shirky’s talk at the Berkman Center), and in the book he addresses this directly, in the context of institutions and their value:

This is not to say that corporations and governments are going to wither away. Though some of the early utopianism around new communications tools suggested that we were heading into some sort of post-hierarchical paradise, that's not what's happening now and it's not going to happen. None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared — relative, that is, to the direct effect of the people they represent. (23)

(Compare what he said last June about expertise: ‘Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline.’ And here he is, in the book, talking about youth: ‘young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models not because they know more useful things than we do but because they know fewer useless things than we do. I’m old enough to know a lot of things just from life experience. … In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true. … My students … don’t have to unlearn those things, because they have never had to learn them in the first place. The advantage of youth, however, is relative, not absolute’, 303–4.)

Cyber-utopian he may not be, but there’s plenty of hope and idealism here (and I’m not using ‘idealism’ negatively). The section (chapter 5) focusing on Wikipedia, ‘perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today’, which was very helpful to have to hand whilst writing the material for our first year’s course on Wikipedia (see here and here), extols a living process of editorial composition (‘process not product, always unfinished’, 119) in a project that feels new to many of us but old to my 14 year-old students (it’s half as old as they are). The faith Clay shows here is inspiring, even if I come away thinking that we still have a lot to learn about how Wikipedia works. (And as for how it will work …)

Highlighted bits of this chapter for me include, memorably, ‘a wiki is a hybrid of tool and community … [it] augments community rather than replacing it’ (136, 137). I like that.

Social tools: group action just got easier. In his talk at Harvard, Shirky sets out very clearly, within the first few minutes of speaking, the momentousness of what the web is enabling: ‘we’re living through the largest increase in human expressive capability in history’. He singles out four other revolutions which compete with this: the invention of the printing press and movable type (taken as a broad period of innovation); the telegraph and the telephone (again, taken as one broad period); recorded media of all types — images, sound, moving images, moving images and sound; broadcast (images and sound). He notes the curious asymmetry here: of these four, the ones that create groups don’t create two-way communication, and the ones that create two-way communication don’t create groups. Either you had broadcasting/publishing (eg, TV, magazine), where the broadcast was from centre-to-edge and the relationship was between producer and consumer (one-to-many); or you had the telephone — two-way conversation, but no group (one-to-one). And then there’s now. We have a network that is ‘natively good at group forming’ (many-to-many).

Much of this is also found in the book (106–7).

*****

Earlier days. I came to really use (ie, read and write to) the web when I started blogging, in November 2003. Compared to savvier friends, this is very recent and, consequently, I’m glad for those parts in the book where Clay talks a little about the history of web and net. For example, in Chapter 4 he discusses the ‘early days of weblogs (prior to 2002, roughly)’ when ‘there was a remarkable and loose-jointed conversation among webloggers of all stripes’, when ‘weblogging was mainly an interactive pursuit’ (which perhaps explains something of what Doc Searls is missing in blogging today). He’s good on cyberspace: ‘The idea of cyberspace made sense when the population of the internet had a few million users; in that world social relations online really were separate from offline ones … an accident of partial adoption. Though the internet began to function in its earliest form in 1969, it was not until 1999 that any country had a majority of its citizens online. … In the developed world, the experience of the average twenty-five year-old is one of substantial overlap between online and offline friends and colleagues. The overlap is so great … both the word and the concept of “cyberspace” have fallen into disuse. The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life’ (195–6).

The note to page 281 is a glimpse back into the world of Usenet: ‘one of the three great global experiments in social tools prior to the invention of the Web. (The other two were e-mail discussion lists and online communities such as the WELL and ECHO.) At the height of its popularity in 1994, usenet was at the core of most users' experience of the internet’.

*****

Other bits I enjoyed:

‘A profession exists to solve a hard problem … [and] becomes, for its members, a way of understanding their world’ (57–8). Most ‘exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management’ (57) and its ‘members have a tendency to equate provisional solutions to particular problems with deep truths about the world’ (59). Then, with new technologies, the profession that seemed ‘like a fixed and abiding category … turns out to be tied to an accidental scarcity’ (76).

‘Two things are true about the remaking of the European intellectual landscape during the Protestant Reformation: first, it was not caused by the invention of movable type, and second, it was possible only after the invention of movable type’ (67).

‘small group communications and large broadcast outlets all exist as part of a single interconnected ecosystem’ (99). ‘When people talk about user-generated content, they are describing ways that users create and share media with one another, with no professionals anywhere in sight. Seen this way, the idea of user-generated-content is actually not just a personal theory of creative capabilities but a social theory of media relations.’ (83)

‘Every web page is a latent community.’ (102)

‘Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. … a tool … has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.’ (105)

‘What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.’ (149)

‘social tools don’t create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. … This is why many of the significant changes are based … on simple, easy-to-use tools like email, mobile phones and websites, because these are the tools most people have access to and … are comfortable using in their daily lives’ (159–60). (Cp Chris: ‘Tools are zuhanden — ready to hand. They should disappear in use, they aspire to be forgotten, but are absolutely necessary and useful.’)

‘To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others. With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly.’ (171)

*****

Cognitive surplus. Clay’s talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (transcript here), which was given after his book was published but is of a piece with it, was at first received rapturously and was publicised widely online. Its argument needs no rehearsing here. The criticism of TV — as a mask for the cognitive surplus, as something watched mindlessly and passively — is bound up with an apparent attitude to consumption that has itself been criticised effectively by (for example) Chris in his post, everything i.e. anything: ‘Nothing is worth creating if it isn’t consumed (yes, yes, there’s gain in the process of making, or craft, also). … It would be great if people did create more, and especially felt empowered to create, change, edit, curate, but we can’t expect them to do that without consumption and reflection’. (See also Tom’s Consumption is also about choice: ‘the world Shirky describes as preferable to the constant passivity of TV is not one of constant production, constant creation, but one where “passive” and “engaged” are two ends of a sliding scale - and that it’s the inner of that scale, not the edges, that is most commonly inhabited’.)

(In fact, I don’t think Clay is anti-consumption, but the language he uses can, again, create an after-effect that isn’t justified by the full text: ‘media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share’.)

And TV? Was watching it always such a lonely, passive thing? As Ian points out, until multiple sets appeared in homes watching TV was a family affair. (That could, and did, cut both ways. I came to find family viewing frequently oppressive.) This is a good place to recall something Warren Ellis wrote back in 2006:

Nigel Kneale died today, at the age of 84. Best known for his creation of the four QUATERMASS serials, Nigel Kneale, along with producer Rudolph Cartier, essentially invented adult science fiction and horror on television. He was also a clever and sensitive adapter of other works for tv, such as 1984 and LOOK BACK IN ANGER, and a brutal and pioneering satirist in his plays for television, perhaps most famously for his YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS, predicting the “Big Brother” shows from 1968. ... It’s hard to imagine, now, the impact that the first three QUATERMASS stories had. For six weeks, the country would go home on QUATERMASS night. Pubs would empty out. In those early days of television, an unapologetically adult, complex and weird piece of speculative fiction was common culture. When tv people in the States tell me that the masses “just don’t get” science fiction, this is what I tell them: that before the cast of THE X-FILES was even born, Britain used to shut down on QUATERMASS night, and it’s all people would talk about the next day. And that was down to Nigel Kneale, last of a generation of writers for British television who were determined that this common culture should always be entertaining, intelligent, challenging and groundbreaking.

(Can social tools make TV social again? The Twitter backchannel.)

My own memory of TV from my childhood is so close to Douglas Adams’ view of it (‘during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment’) I want to try very hard not to overlook what television did, and can still, achieve. (Ian again: ‘I’d take issue with the whole idea of TV programmes as something monolithic and deadening. “Cosmos”, deadening? “Life on Earth”? “Civilisation”? TV can be massively inspirational’). Everyone should read Stephen Fry on the future of public service broadcasting (video; audio). Describing his TV during his school years, ‘a cultural revolution of astounding depth, variety, imagination and dynamism’, he concludes:

Many of us are likely, whatever our professions, to have an attachment to the kind of broadcasting we grew up with, a fierce pride in the staggering history of quality and innovation that has characterized British television and radio for fifty years.

As for Clay’s talk, I think Ed Cone has it right in his comment on Nick Carr's Gilligan’s web (comment dated May 16, 2008 09:05 AM):

Clay made a clever if hyperbolic argument about the creativity unleashed by the web. Nick wittily pointed out some of the hyperbole -- but one needn't be a kool-aid drinking web theologizer to recognize the cleverer parts of Clay's argument. So, yes: on the scale of world-healing goodness to which we all so clearly aspire, giving blood to the homeless trumps contributing an article to Wikipedia, which may have more social value than watching Gilligan's Island, which itself is roughly equivalent to giggling at lolcats or pursuing this particular thread much further.

Enough. I’ll be commending and recommending Clay’s talk for a long time to come. He’s a born, and inspiring, story-teller who knows how to exhort and you need to take this in that spirit:

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment … just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. … when people ask me what we’re doing … that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I'm betting the answer is yes.

*****

Whither? 2005, Yochai Benkler, in Open-source economics, ‘explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they're paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants’.

My belief is that Wikipedia’s success dramatizes … a change in the nature of authority, moving from trust inhering in guarantees offered by institutions to probabilities created by processes. — Clay Shirky, Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise (2006)

This is new. We have never before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it. The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label ‘media’. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can’t be fit into the old mode of “content”, where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I’ve discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and re-combinability of all the patterns together … — Clay Shirky, at the Penguin blog (2008)

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right – “Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up.” It’s not easy to set up a conference call, but it’s very easy to email five of your friends and say “Hey, where are we going for pizza?” So ridiculously easy group forming is really news. We’ve had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we’ve only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we’re just finding out what works. We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things. — Clay Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (2003)

Our future can be kept generative only if we can continue to see the Internet’s invitation to be participants in its use, rather than consumers of it. The path forward is illuminated by the coupling of technological tools – like wikis – that have promoted openness, with social customs and law – like those of Wikipedia – that solicit people to take an active part in building the world they want, rather than simply paying for it and expecting others to do the rest. — Jonathan Zittrain: The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It (2008)

To put this metaphorically, we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidly and monotonically down a route determined by the environment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in. — Clay Shirky, Folksonomies are a forced move: A response to Liz (2005)

The dramatic improvement in our social tools … makes our control over those tools much more like steering a kayak. … The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has already happened. — Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (p 300)

My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. — Jeff Jarvis (2008)

(Interactive TV, then — but not as we’ve known it.)

*****

Douglas Adams: ‘We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing. Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.’

Technorati tags: Clay Shirky, groups, economics, hope, open source, participatory culture, cognitive surplus

3 x 3 = 9x

2008-06-20T22:35:18+01:00

The diagram comes from John Gourville’s paper, Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers (2006), and is one iteration of what he calls the 9x problem. I’d not come across Gourville’s work until yesterday, when I read Andrew McAfee’s 2006 post, The 9X Email Problem. Andrew’s post is so good, I hope I may be forgiven for reblogging a substantial part of it here:

A while back I heard John Gourville, a colleague in HBS's Marketing department, talk about his research investigating why so many new consumer products fail to catch on with their intended audiences despite the clear advantages they offer over what's currently on the market.

His explanation was fascinating, and very insightful. He said that we need to stop thinking about consumers as highly rational evaluators of the old vs. the new products, lining up pros and cons of each in mental tables and then selecting the winner. Instead, we need to keep in mind three well-documented features of our cognitive 'equipment' for making evaluations.

We make relative evaluations, not absolute ones. When I'm at a poker table deciding whether to call a bet, I don't think of what my total net worth will be if I win the hand vs. if I lose it. Instead, I think in relative terms -- whether I'll be 'up' or 'down.'

Our reference point is the status quo. My poker table comparisons are made with respect to where I am at that point in time. "If I win this hand I'll be up $40; if I lose it I'll be down $10 compared to my current bankroll." It's only at the end of the night that my horizon broadens enough to see if I'm up or down for the whole game.

We are loss averse. A $50 loss looms larger than a $50 gain. Loss aversion is virtually universal across people and contexts, and is not much affected by how much wealth one already has. Ample research has demonstrated that people find that a prospective loss of $x is about two to three times as painful as a prospective gain of $x is pleasurable.

When combined, these three lead to what the behavioral economist Richard Thaler has called the "endowment effect:" We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute. We mentally compare having the prospective item to giving up what we already have (our 'endowment'), but because we're loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.

And Gourville points out three factors that make the situation worse for product developers who want their offerings to succeed. First is timing: adopters have to give up their endowment immediately, and only get benefits sometime in the future. Second, these benefits are not certain; the new product might not work as promised. Third, benefits are usually qualitative, making them difficult to enumerate and compare.

As if all this weren't enough, Gourville also highlights that the people developing new products are very dissimilar from the products' prospective consumers. You don't go work for TiVo (to use his example) if you don't 'get' the potential of digital video recorders and think they're a really good idea. And after working for the company for a while, having TiVo becomes part of your endowment; you think of things in comparison to TiVo, instead of in comparison to a VCR. Both of these factors make it harder for developers to see things as their target customers do.

Because of all of the above, Gourville talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."¹ The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there.² …

Email is virtually everyone's current endowment of collaboration software. Gourville's research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor everything they're being asked to give up by not using email. This is the 9X problem developers of new collaboration technologies will have to overcome.

¹Gourville, J. T. (2004). Why consumers don't buy: The psychology of new product adoption, Harvard Business School Note #504-056

²Andy Grove, Churning things up, Fortune, July 21, 2003

Technorati tags: Andrew McAfee, endowment effect, 9x problem, adoption, innovation, John Gourville, Richard Thaler, enterprise 2

Amongst poets

2008-06-15T20:42:40+01:00

Adam Foulds came in to school on Thursday and read from The Broken Word (Sunday Times review here, Guardian here). Earlier this term, I read the poem in one sitting: it’s not difficult to do this, but it was, in any case, simply not a poem I wanted to break off from reading. It is very disturbing, not least because of the contrast between the quality of the telling and what it has to tell. Hearing so much of it read affected me greatly and, in winding up the reading, I slipped and called Adam ‘Robin’ — as his reading had melded in my mind with Robin Robertson’s also dark reading from earlier in the term.

Adam talked afterwards about the LRB review which lies behind the poem. You need a subscription, but the review, Bernard Porter: How did they get away with it?, discussed two books, David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire and Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Adam spoke about how Porter’s review, and then the two books themselves, shook the sense he had grown up with that, on the whole, and despite some shortcomings, British colonial rule had been a good thing. He had, he said, shared the ambient complacency about British rule. Porter’s review put it like this: “The accepted view of Britain’s decolonisation hitherto has been that it was done in a more dignified, enlightened and consensual way than by other countries – meaning, of course, France. It will be difficult now to argue this so glibly.”

Ambient complacency is a potent phrase, is it not?

Something else — unrelated — that Adam said after the reading also struck me: novels ‘take a group effort’. (His previous book is a novel, The Truth About These Strange Times.) They are so long — they can grow so ‘thin and wispy’ — a writer needs the collaboration of others to bring a novel into the world.

Of course, every author is different. Writing in The Observer’s Book of Books (a slim volume, given away free with the paper in May this year) about how he works as an editor (and drawing on his lengthy experience in publishing), Robin made just this point. His short piece should be read in full, but I can’t find it online. Here are some excerpts:

… an editor’s eye shouldn’t pass over a text too often for fear of losing the very objectivity the writer lacks. During a first read … I’m always watching myself for the first signs of inattention; any time that I’m stopped or distracted means there’s probably a problem in the text … If any changes do need to be made, I’d always ask the author to make them. After all, it is their book, and at this stage it’s still a thing in flux … You have to encourage the writer to see the problem, not just tell them there is one. Editing is about reading and listening attentively … I’ve always considered editing to involve quite a large degree of pastoral care.

Technorati tags: Adam Foulds, Kenya, British Empire, editing, writing, Robin Robertson, attention, reading