Writing and the Digital Life

iPod crazy?

I'm in Toronto at the moment and it seems that the local area is going "new media" crazy. In the Arts & Life section of the Toronto Star Sunday newspaper there is a full page spread dedicated to the "iPod age." There are various ways to listen to new music, the example in the paper cites a trade between two unlikey candidates: Jeanne Lamon of Toronto's Tafelmusik (classically trained musician and world authority on music from the 17th and 18th ceturies) and Maestro (Scarborough's - i.e. Toronto - very own rapper-turned-actor). If you are unlucky and have no such friends there is the "iPodiatrist" who "cheerfully offers replacement songs to provide new (improved) music for tired ears.  Instead of Norah Jones one might listen to Corrinne Bailey Rae, instead of Elvis why not try Campell Brothers.  Also, for those interested in using their iPod for fuctions other than listening to music why not "pimp my iPod?" This article lists ten (possibly risky) uses for your iPod.  Some of the most curious ideas include adding 300 gigs of memory (risking an entire reformat of course is things go wrong) to create the "all-in-one dream device." (why not just buy a new version Blackberry?) You can also log in to ipodwizard.net to change fonts, graphics, and text so that you can personlise the display. If you're (hrm...what's the technical term, ah yes), silly, you can also turn your iPod into an (admittedly very pricey) ashtray or create your very own amp. Is this the "new wave" in digital life?

Myspace - creative space or Hobbesian morass?

The ever-interesting Nicholas Carr adds his $.02 to the increasing controversy over MySpace. He complains that:

When I look around MySpace I don't see much that's "strange and wonderful" - or "deeply disturbing," either. I wish I did. What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts.

Of course this is not surprising - not everyone has the skills to express themselves in a creative and interesting fashion and if they don't, of course they will fall back on pre-digested tropes and the 'content' that requires the least effort for the largest potential effect - the display of their own bodies. But the interesting point I feel is that at least these people are being encouraged to try to express themselves and that this may at least encourage and enable a small minority of those that try to hone and refine their skills and become genuinely creative (or at least more self-aware).

English teachers have tried to encourage this sort of thing with diaries and self-reflective fiction for years but this arena (unlike the classroom) has peer pressure behind it and offers the producers the potential for peer reinforcement if they can produce something compelling.

Not to say that there aren't considerable dangers as well, of course!

Reality Cyberspace Life Swap

Interesting post from Jim Benson which I quote here at length:

Netiquette used to be a pervasive set of social standards that the Cyberspace of today has nearly tossed out the window.  The days of Usenet-dominated cyberspace was rather like a Victorian-era society. People were welcome to join, if they could conform to a certain set of criteria.  One of those criteria was, more or less, not to be an idiot.

One reason for this was that then there was little one could do to protect themselves from the ill manners of another.  So the netizens had to protect themselves via social convention more than via technological fix.

We sort of fast forwarded from the Victorian era to the Punk Rock era.  Today, we rarely hear of netiquette.  Today we hear that we can block spam, splogs, phishing, and so forth using our technological wizardry.  That we can keep our little corner of cyberspace safe from the Net-Huns.

This act of protecting ourselves adds to the concept of a space. While traveling in Cyberspace one needs to be innoculated from diseases that can be found there. continue

He ends by saying that 'another way that Cyberspace may be dead is in its assumption that all of Cyberspace is Cyberspace'.

This reminded me that recently I was listening to an interview about Second Life and it struck me very forcibly that the interviewee, a Second Life expert, sounded exactly like anyone 10/15 years ago who had just discovered MOOs, MUDs, even just plain ole IRC. The same excitement etc. But today what used to be the domain of students, programmers, and artists, often very poor, rather strange, and living on the edge of 'normal' society, is now a multimillion $ marketing effort. In one way this is fine, but what disturbs me is how adolescent it is. In Hello World I write about how growing up in cyberspace is like growing up in the real world - you learn things by experience and mature as a result (hopefully). But each individual who comes new to cyberspace has to go through that maturation process, and it's important to remember that much of the current excitement around online interaction in places like Second Life is coming from people who are very young in cyberspace years. Rules of netiquette were usually devised by those who were relatively adult in terms of cyberspace 'age'.

How about a little Life Swap experiment? Arrange for some Second Lifers to swap virtual homes with some LambdaMOOers?  Forget Reality TV - that would be Reality Cyberspace!

Debating Matters

Recently I was asked to be a judge in Debating Matters, an interesting series of school debates organised by the Institute of Ideas. Last week I was in Sheffield, tonight I'm in Nottingham. It's great to see teenagers being encouraged to express themselves in this way. When I was a teenager I was passionate, idealistic and completely incoherent. The school students I heard last week in Sheffield were much more impressive and I look forward to tonight's debates too. I've been wondering, though, about the differences between holding a debate online and offline. I confess that although I enjoy online discourse you can't really beat good old-fashioned eye to eye contact between opponents...

The death of cyberspace - response to Sue and Jim

Two very useful comments. Thanks each.

Spot on about the potency of friendship, Sue. I hadn't thought of it so clearly and am grateful. I am often deeply offended by the familiarity with which they approach me only to proposition - and such propositions, money as materiel in a battle, sex as a form of violence and self-king-making. But the offence caused, as opposed to personal disinclination, is to do with the betrayal of tones of intimacy, abuse of the desire for friendship, as you say, the potency of friendship.

Jim, I didn't find what you said banal. I don't think though that I am arguing for cyberspace being a kind of unconscious; though when, later, you spoke of cultural unconcious, I wasn't so ready to object if only I am not so sure what that might be,

Is a cultural unconscious like a collective unconscious? I have never been sure I accept *that.

I doubt I expressed myself clearly yesterday. I was certainly being simplistic, limiting myself to two states, awake and dreaming, because I wanted to stress the constant changeability of the waking state at least and, potentially implicitly, a denial of the idea of _the personality of x_. I do not have a scientific theory here, not my field, just a diy set of beliefs about individuals as federations which gets me to - possibly by unintentional bootstrapping - the line spoken by an individual as also being multivoice

And after that I start muttering rapidly, showing you several thousand typescripts the way some people show holiday pics

It does seem to me, however, that a great deal of the unconscious needn't be that unconscious. We may only get to it by means of indirect pointing, but it's there. This morning, passing a flowery garden, what I think of as an evening scent, though I can't name it, doubled my world with a memory of childhood, crosslinked if ever there was a crosslink, with no beginning or end. I was trying to give directions to someone, but there were almost two of me, one 50 years younger, standing in I think the gardens of Cotehele House on the Tamar while the adult calculated where the road must lead though I had never been down it. Is that the unconscious cutting in?

Cyberspace seems to me too accessible for that name, and too contingent

The window of our attention can be trained. External demands damage it; but that is something else. Whatever we do of course we are going to remain in the metaphorical; it's a matter of degree.

The window of our attention can be trained to make more and more knowable to us... and as a matter of course (perhaps like adding RAM) or as a special effort (killing some processes in order to get a very large file to print)

Making a jump, because at present I only have doubts about and interest in what you say, seeing Alan Sondheim's films made with location sensors at West Virginia Uni, apologies to those who haven't seen them, certainly accessed parts of my responses I didn't have fully documented. I mention it here because it was digitally produced; but finally the response was to a work of movie art.

I think that we can, at least at present, keep subjectivity out of cyberspace. I was serious in my suggestion of us being intelligent nodes off a file server. We can do our own thing. So far.

The death of cyberspace - response to Sue

Stream of words! Yes. I should have put in some paragraph breaks.

I can do it.

You see.

I've got it in my head that starting a new post is the best thing to do... I am recalling, trying to recall, what I have learned of logspace while I have been mentally otherwhere

The reference to the quill reminds me of a Tom Sharpe novel - _Grantchester Grind_ (not that good) where the crooks get thrown off course by the apparently archaic ledger system of Porterhouse College and take it into their heads that the dons use quills... From which follow all sorts of false assumptions...

I wouldn't like to use a quill myself, though mss suggest that people did rather well with them, accommodating themselves to the cons. (In the last few days, on another list, someone wrote to say she felt she had lost the ability to write poetry away from a word processor!) Quillspace may have contained rather few people anxious about time... Recalling the need to blot one's work quite frequently, etc, implies something like necessity to compose what one is writing before committing it to paper... Such skill as one had in that direction seems to have been lost.

My first grown up (infants) writing was with a steel nib. I recall ballpoint pens being frowned upon; and the sufferings attendant upon fountain pens... I keep meaning to remark somewhere, and now will do, how the efficiency of pens of all sorts has improved at the same time as word-processing tech in its widest sense - palms etc - has improved.

There are some kinds of writing that I really can't do away from the keyboard i.e. writing that is at least facilitated by the machine, though it goes further than that. But much, for me, still needs the notebook, usually at the early stages where I am working out to some extent what it is that I am doing... Because seeing it on the screen, for me, makes me believe in it a little, whereas what is in a notebook, especially the horrible cover colours that you get from woollies, is ready for crossing through

And that is to do with all sorts of things which... And at that point I run out of... I think it's vocabulary

You speak of what cyberspace could be. Indeed. But what is it? That was an unasked question in my earlier post.

I think of that finely off the wall question you asked at the last Incubation - where is your mental hard disk? or words to that effect...

I distinguished earlier between dreams and waking, but of course its far more than that. I've been watching a good friend running into operational difficulties over the last year or so as her memory goes. Just her memory. Her logic is fine. As memory gets thinner, her deductions as to what's going on have more and more drastic effects. On the one hand she lives in an increasingly permanent state of negative capability, reconstructing shared narratives each time the sharer enters her field of vision; on the other there is often no real negative capability because there is nothing in the other mental hand; so she cannot evaluate any deduction. It leads to some confusion; and I am fascinated to know (but only second hand thank you) what _space_ she is in when she is misconstruing.

The trouble is, all it takes usually is the presence of someone she knows to roll her back to her previous back up point and then all the false suppositions vanish - if it weren't for my own failing memory I'd quote Prospero

But where we are mentally is a total state. I'll say that another way. Where I am mentally may be a total state, but what I mean is we are moving through a mode of three dimensional mental movie, which is constantly varying its parameters...

So, cyberspace... is unlikely to be truly shared. We are networked nodes on a file server - or it'd be more like the heavenly choir all singing glory be together, which can hardly be consensual this side of legal stimulus

So cyberspace is a story we tell ourselves maybe (the maybe there is wild and can be inserted at whichever syntactical point you wish in the sentence), like the C prompt - or on my portable hard disk E prompt, which is an F prompt in Greater London - it's all changing

But unlike waking and dreaming in all their multiplicity, it's a construct as well. In the last couple of hours, someone wrote in Another Place (the comfy, easy to use listserv) that when we create new cyberspace we try to make it as natural as possible; and that seemed as relevant to what I had written here as it was to what I had written there

As it is though, such cyberspace creations, if we evaluate them for natural verisimilitude, are a bit like empty buildings turned into clubs by strategic lighting

The death of cyberspace

The death of cyberspace. I wonder... For a start, re "One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it connects people so they can effortlessly participate in fluid conversations and dynamic information sharing", that is what is hoped for and / or what is claimed. It may not be so. There remain those who are unhappy expressing themselves remotely.. One friend is really only happy physically talking, though she can manage phone; another needs to be there with you... Maybe technology will catch up with these needs, but it's a long way to go. And that raises the ever present difference in equipment and connection. Physical meeting and conversation is riddled enough with one-uppersonship - some learn to command quicker than others; some eschew it - and a hierarchy exists now in electronic communication which is separate from the content and importance of the information being exchanged. I don't see that permapresence and convergence actually alter the fact that we are looking at cyberspace through a window. We still are. 2 examples - 1. I can't remember the details but I was once in a fix whereby I had to boot and then march some way without that window, without anything on the screen, and was able to - unsurprisingly - because I knew what it would be doing. 2. As long as I remember where I am when I wake, and find myself in one of the several places I know well, I don't always turn the light on when it's still dark. Because I know where I am... In both cases, my relationship to reality is the same - in the latter I am an animal shivering in the dark autumn morning; in the former I am an extended human being front-ending a hideously complex logic system dreamed up by my fellow animals through an electronic story book. I don't feel particularly in cyberspace when I am at the keyboard. I am aware of the details of the town outside, of the neighbours next door - who appear to be driving a tractor up and down stairs - and so on. I am aware of my cup of tea, waiting for the steam to subside, a very here and now non cyber sign; and I am wondering whether to revisit last night's leftovers when I know putting on a jumper will take care of the urge to eat. Put a headset and goggles on me and ok, I am there; but I am not wearing a headset and goggles. What I am doing is not, in this context, very different - ok in some ways - to where I was in 1962, when I got my first typewriter and watched my words slowly scroll away and curl into a roll of foolscap white paper... The differences beyond that are of course enormous. I can change this as I go and it will be read perhaps within minutes around the world, god help you all. But *that is where the cyberspace happens. A permanent point of presence wouldn't actually alter that necessarily. I'm guessing that the taxi button connects the presser to a taxi near by, using the phone as a gps. And that's why I mentioned the possibility of using a computer without a screen - the processor doesnt need a screen, just input - if one has been attentive to the exchange between human and human extension. Pressing a button doesn't put me in cyberspace anymore than phoning for an ambulance. Someone remarked something (!) along the lines that unfamiliar technology will be experienced as magic. And familiar technology is accepted as part of the way things are (turn off your electronic catflap and watch your cat do a hanna barbera routine as it butts an unresponsive door. "I tell you yesterday I could walk through this door!" "Sure," says the cat next door, who relies on scratching the paint off its) When we press a button, it's no more complex than ringing a door bell, or using an automatic garage door mechanism. The taxi button is, as far as I am concerned, a high price to pay for wearing an electronic tag. Surveillancespace. Last night, searching for something of my own on the net I found a web page that said "if you know Lawrence Upton tell him there's a page for him and he can update it" and then there were facilities (at a price) to run a credit check on me, know about recorded misdemeanours etc - though one knows these facilities are there, to have it labelled that jeering way was very uncomfortable, like living in one of those prisons with an all seer at the centre or being brought up to believe St Peter is writing down even the most casual of sinful thoughts. Reality being an individual construct as much as anything else, I am doubtful about the integration of cyberspace and reality. Maybe cyberspace is becoming more insidious. Access to it is certainly becoming more speedy. But that's it. I am not in it any more than, most of the time, I am in my own dreams. When I start getting spam there, I'll believe

Said with some trepidation

Lawrence

Links section

The panels of this blog are a bit crowded which is why I have resisted adding a links section, but we really should have one, so I plan to add it in the next few days.

Please comment on this post to tell us who WDL should be linking to, and why?