Writing and the Digital Life

Web 3.0

Last night I was talking to a friend about  the Web 2.0 phenomenon and we wondered if it wasn't about time for at least the beta of Web 3.0 to hit the streets.

It seems Jay-z himself (that's Jeffrey Zeldman) has already been thinking the same thing.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/web3point0

The End of Cyberspace? (reprise)

In October I reported here that Dion Hinchcliffe had written about J LeRoy's post  describing Alex Pang's open space discussion on the topic of the death of cyberspace, held at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.

Now Alex has started a new blog called The End of Cyberspace for further discussion of the subject, and one of the first posts links to WDL via my October post mentioned above.

Is there some accuracy in the notion that the concept of cyberspace is on the way out? What do you think? Remember - 'cyberspace' was conceived of by a writer. Maybe it is up to us now to imagine its successor. (More on this from me anon.)

Vacancy for Postdoctoral Researcher in social software and narrative - advance notice

I'm delighted to announce that I have been awarded an AHRC Speculative Research Grant for a one year project investigating the interdisciplinary applications of experimental social software to the study of narrative in digital contexts.

Time is very tight. We will be advertising in January for a one year post-doctoral researcher to start in March/April 2006, so I am publicising this information before the Christmas holiday for the benefit of potential applicants. The post is based in Leicester, UK, at De Montfort University and the project will be supervised by myself, Professor Sue Thomas supported by Simon Mills, who is currently devising a PGDip in Publishing & New Media at DMU.

Flickr slideshow of Web 2.0 images

Thanks to Richard McManus at Read/Write Web for the link to this beautiful Flickr multimedia montage slideshow by Leigh Blackall.

The changing economics of creative work

This article by Nicholas Carr at his blog Rough Type is now a month old - sorry for the delay in linking to it - but it's a must-read critique of Web 2.0, the Wikipedia debate, and issues we discuss here at  Writing and the Digital Life. He writes:

The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices.

and at the end:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

read the whole post

Talk at the Café Scientifique, Leicester, UK, Tue 8th Nov, 7.30pm

I'm giving a talk at the Café Scientifique in Leicester, UK, on Tuesday 8th November, at 7.30pm. Please do come along. I'll be talking about transliteracy, blogging, Web 2.0, and my book Hello World. More information at http://www.cafescientifiqueleicester.com/ Hope to see you there.

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

Web 2.0 as rainforest

Another metaphor for Web 2.0. Can anyone contribute more?

Software upgrades promise to turn the Internet into a lush rain forest of information teeming with new life
By Steven Johnson at DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 10 | October 2005

And a discussion about the article at O'Reilly Radar

What does Web 2.0 have to offer us offline?

Ah the wonders of the blog. This morning I checked the Technorati link of this blog (see right hand panel Blogs that link here) to find out who has been linking to us lately. And through that I find Udo Schroeter, who mentioned my post about stone soup in the footnote of a post about his concerns relating to the buzz around Web 2.0.  Also in that footnote was a link to a post by David Hornik at VentureBlog expanding on said misgivings and suggesting that an unhealthy side effect of Web 2.0 or as it is called there Bubble 2.0 is that 'there are a large number of "companies" being created again for the express purpose of being acquired.' That's what the 'bubble w.0' is about - that we could be heading for a second dot com boom and bust. Hmm. I find this depressingly likely....

Most interesting though was another link in Udo's blog to a previous post of his: Web 2.0 Or: 'that's great but how can I use it offline?'  in which he points out the obvious:

Label this Web 2.0, or whatever, it's just great to see it work. But there is an obvious drawback. It doesn't matter how great a web app is, you can obviously only use it while you're online.

And of course this extends to the fact that you can also only use it (a) when you understand what it is and how it works and (b) you are part of a culture which uses it. At the moment, this group is pretty tiny, and its future size likely to continue to be limited for some dozens if not hundreds of years. I'm one of the most cyber-optimistic people I know, but just occasionally my feet touch the ground, and this is one of those moments :)