The first forms of government and rule began essentially with sharecropping. Farmers did not own the land but rather farmed on it for some landlord who maintained control through force. This was extended into what Alvin Toffler would call the second wave of civilization in which the property owned was extended by the capital necessary to engage in manufacturing. Here again, the laborers did not own the capital and while they did not pay “tithes” Karl Marx argued rather well that the difference between wages and the capital owner’s profits were pretty much tithes.

So here we are in the throes of the third wave of civilization, what has alternately been called the information age or communication age or the computer age and one of the day’s most significant debates is whether ideas can be considered property. To some extent the copyright debate was never really about that. It was about your ability to reproduce someone else’s framing of an idea. The idea was free. I could write about the idea and as long as you didn’t use exactly my words you could write about the idea too.

Gradually the debate is shifting, however, towards the concept of actual intellectual property–that the idea belongs to someone. The mere introduction of the phrase “intellectual property” into the common lexicon has illustrated the true change in the debate. The patenting of software is an important example of this. The debate in the media about music and movie distribution is another facet of the debate.

[Sidebar rant]

Frankly it’s something that really grinds me about CEO pay in the United States. If you listen to a lot of these financial barons (note the similarity in the terminology with regard to a baron with a fife and a financial baron with resources) they seem to think that they have a right to the enormous wealth they’ve gained. I don’t mean they argue that they’ve earned it. They argue that they have a right to it. As I’ve already stated, all property is theft. They have no right to it and the belief that they do helps them to completely igonore the fact that they built their company on the backs of laborers. (This, incidentally is one of the only reasons I’ve ever had to like Microsoft. But in general, the tech sector really has turned over more profits to employees.)

[end rant]

It’s also interesting to note that there is a rising creative class in the US. In Richard Flordia’s book The Rising Creative Class he talks about a large number of Americans that are beginning to make their living off of their ideas. From the jacket: “The author estimates that this group has 38 million members, constitutes more than 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and profoundly influences work and lifestyle issues.” So if there is a new class of workers coming up in society, wouldn’t it make sense that a new property debate would emerge?

The truth is, throughout history, the owners of property have held sway and control over those who did not and the current debate about intellectual property is crucial because it will ultimately determine who has control over the domain of your mind. None of us should underestimate the desires of some to attain that level of control. We have territorial instincts that are balanced only by our ability to maintain resources for survival. Remove limitations on that balance through the use of technology and some humans will exemplify the maximum of their instinctive greed (and greed and greed).

Technorati tags: intellectual property, creative class, economics, copyright, anti-corporate

The media has accomplished this feat with the help of an evolutionary force known as the meme.  The meme is a concept originally created by Richard Dawkins as a theoretical example of a replicator and a unit of evolutionary cultural transmission.  A replicator, in some sense, is Nature's most basic form of life.  In fact, even referring to a replicator as life is a stretch.  They are exactly what they sounds like: something that can copy itself.  Genes are replicators, as well as viruses and prions (infectious proteins).  Like genes, memes copy themselves and migrate from environment to environment and possess the qualities of copy fidelity, fecundity and longevity. [1] All that will be covered in greater detail because there is much more to it than that.  Very little yet is understood about memes, but as we will see here, it is clear that their force that can be monitored and measured and that they have a serious influence over the human mind. 

Specifically, they have an incredible influence on the neocortex of the human mind, the portion of the brain that allows for our ability to abstract and gives us perceptual recall over time. [2]  We have a relational capacity that creates a mental environment in which perceptions can be compared and combined, situations can be sussed out in advance or contemplated after their occurrence. [3] That particular talent is shared with many species and many, as we shall see, are also capable of being influenced by memes.  However, our unique ability to create artifacts within the physical world, or media, have given memes greater channels by which to migrate from mind to mind. It is this aspect, this parallel evolution of our tool use adaptation and memes can explain the incredibly rapid advancement we have seen in human culture in the last 10,000 years.  It is this parallel evolution that has created all of our technology and given us more control over our environment than any species before us.

Symbiotically with the genetic adaptation of tool use, abstractions within the homo sapiens mind have been allowed to enter the physical realm.  These artifacts are what we refer to as media (though most of us just mean the television by that phrase). [4]  What media really are is extensions of mankind's physicality.  Marshall McLuhan championed this idea in the 70s as well.  He easily saw media as a bridge between the mind and reality but in an overarching fashion and not in a memetic sense.  And although his observations were exacting, he did not present an underlying theory as to how media gained its influence over us.

Through media (speech, writing, pictures, etc.) memes migrate from one environment to another, each of these environments being an individual human mind.  That is to say, it is not the original meme that actually migrates, but that a copy of the original meme emerges in the new mind and constructed of that minds' perceptions.  If the perceptions (and other memes) present in the new mind cannot support the copy then it will not exist.

It is critical to note that the existence of the meme in the new mind has nothing to do with a subjective critique of the idea but rather with the fitness of the meme.  Everyone has had a song stuck in their head, repeating over and over and they may even despise the song.  Here again, the meme for the song is based on certain already present features of the mind, such as an understanding of patterns in Western music in this case.  If the media were transmitting an ancient aboriginal folk song that had no similar cadence, no similar pattern, it may not be perceived as music at all, but rather noise, and the creation of a new meme would not occur.  In this sense modern media can be seen as a spore-like explosion of memes attempting to migrate through an artifactual network to as many various environments as possible and the best memes, those with the greatest fitness spread.

It is this complete lack of a subjective critique that can make memes so dangerous.  Some memes are, in fact, life threatening. For instance, imitating the behavior of Wile E. Coyote can be bad for you. In the case of memes such as this the mind's other parts (such as instinctual behaviors of protection or self-preservation located in the Medulla Oblongata) can be entirely overrided.  The instinct to reproduce can be overrided.  And I would argue that the instinct to preserve our natural habitat, an instinct that can be shown that all mammals possess, can also be overridden and has been overridden to a dangerous degree.

When Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message" he meant that often what the media is doing to our culture is not in the message carried by the media.  The media don't deliver memes to you -- there are no memes outside minds.  But the media deliver the perceptions necessary to form a new copy of a meme.  The chaos of media surrounding us today allows for a total expansion  of meme replication in the interest of memes as opposed to in the interest of humans.

[1] Dawkins, Richard. “The Selfish Gene” 1976

[2] Hawkins, Jeff. “On Intelligence” 2005

[3] Experiements have shown that a rat (a mammal with a neocortex) can travel through a maze by memory after having solved it once. A lizard, with no neocortex, cannot accomplish this feat ever.

[4] McLuhan, Marshall. “Understanding Media” 1964 — McLuhan referred to everything from the alphabet to money to the wheel to television as media because they were all physical extensions of the human mind. They all also are not possible without our genetic adaptation to use tools and our capacity to utilize memes.

However in his 1964 book (prior to the mainstream spread of the Internet) he could not have been more prescient when he wrote, “there is a new electric technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet. Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participatorial spoken word over the specialist written word.” This observation was somewhat premature. Although McLuhan discusses the extension of the tactile sense in his work he didn’t foresee our direct manipulation of information in the public forum of the Internet. I have argued before that interactivity can be considered the extension of the tactile sense into media. With this extension, the broadcast linear model of media is changing into a nonlinear exchange and it is this participatorial exchange that is challenging the role of the specialist. If the information is “out there” then specialist lose their monopoly on it and with their monopoly on information goes a great deal of their credibility.

The linear broadcast model lead to a fevered pitch of expert soundbytes sorely lacking in real debate or deep discussion. As Steven Johnson pointed out in his eloquent work “Emergence” the broadcast model originally based on a top-down specialist system of a hierarchy of editors and journalists began to undergo systemic changes when CNN arrived on the scene and made all of its news feeds available to local affiliates. Suddenly what had previously been a command control economy of information became a cacophony of stories dictated by ratings and not by news editors. This was the first step toward a more participatorial media and the first attack on the bastion of experts at the network news operations. Johnson also pointed out that this systemic change created a system based solely on positive feedback. To use his analogy a system based only on positive feedback is like an electric guitar leaning on an amplifier.

However, this attack on the specialist had little more effect than removing editorial control. The systemic change had not yet harmed the credibility of the news organization. Their credibility would come under scrutiny only with the development of a negative feedback system, a balance, as it were, and this balance (at least in part) has turned out to be the blog community. A single blog taken on its own is no threat to anyone’s credibility, but blogs, seen as a system for evaluation, do potentially represent a shift in credibility. The media can show a spectrum of opinions if it likes but it has very little capacity to synthesize information and let the most important facts bubble to the surface the way the blogosphere can because while the mainstream media may appear large there are actually fewer reporters in the field than there used to be.

While the expert may still yet reign in highly specialized fields like Physics, news and opinion and the deluge of information they represent are better processed by a group mind. For that matter, so is entertainment.

[coming soon in Part 2: The Entertainment inustry and Information as an Asymptote ]

Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.

I personally, would replace the word “participation” with “cognition”.¹ One of McLuhans’ other points was that media are often contained within media. Speech is a medium that is contained in print. Speech is also extended by the telephone. But he says that whereas typographic print is a hot medium, the telephone is not. So what does that entail for video on the mobile phone? Is a cell phone a hot or cool medium? The answer is, it isn’t

Just as McLuhan was trying to get world to recogize that the effects of media were not within its “content”, McLuhan missed a critical factor in media as well. Even though he often posited that media were extensions of man’s senses he still framed his discussion of media around the machines that made them. But the reason I bring up the mobile phone is to show just that — the machines don’t matter any more, the media has escaped them. The cell phone is a cool medium when used as a phone, and hot medium when used as a TV. The computer is similar, as is the video game console. They are multimedia machines and the last of their kind.

As I have argued before:

For example, audio-video is an extension of your vision and hearing. Audio is merely an extension of your hearing. The television, quicktime, windows media players, iPods and computer monitors are all mechanisms for the delivery and manipulation of media. This is why I think that referring to the internet or the computer as a medium is a [mistaken categorization]. The truth is, you can’t sense anything about the Internet. It’s really just a delivery mechanism for information that becomes media once it is formatted in a way in which you can perceive it. The web is a medium and in fact can be referred to as multimedia because of it use of various media such as text, video, and sound.

Discussing media without discussing the restrictive nature of the machines that create them illuminates two intereting points. One is that McLuhan was more right than he knew. The medium is the message, but the medium is not the machine. The media are freeing themselves from a physical construct and we will soon see a day when media are ubiquitous and the machine is nowhere to be found.

Blaze says,

The one group that has emerged is the information architect/interaction/experience designer, a set that seemingly seeks obscurity through a constant renaming process. There is no question though this is a subculture, and they tend to focus on a space Johnson quite accurately brought to the for, text as interface. But as an “interface subculture” I find them rather lacking.

He couldn’t be more right about the constant state of flux of names in this particular design field. Just to add to the information architect/interaction/experience designer pile, I’ve also heard of interaction designers, virtual architects and interface architects. Many people aren’t seeing what I see due to this very over-atomized or over-categorized concept of media and interface. Let me briefly deconstruct the way I see the world of media and then I’ll try to give some good examples of where I think the interface avant-garde are in operation.

The first concept that needs clarification in my mind is media. I’ve heard the internet referred to as a medium, as well as the computer. I don’t think either of these categorizations are quite correct. Media was originally defined by Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media quite simply and elegantly as “extensions of man”. For example, audio-video is an extension of your vision and hearing. Audio is merely an extension of your hearing. The television, quicktime, windows media players, iPods and computer monitors are all mechanisms for the delivery and manipulation of media. This is why I think that referring to the internet or the computer as a medium is a mistake. The truth is, you can’t sense anything about the Internet. It’s really just a delivery mechanism for information that becomes media once it is formatted in a way in which you can perceive it. The web is a medium and in fact can be referred to as multimedia because of it use of various media such as text, video, and sound.

If you begin with the notion that media are merely extensions of human senses then you can begin to see where interface comes into play — generally speaking interfaces allow for the manipulation of media. Interaction with media is most often an extension of the tactile and visual senses through a graphic user interface (GUI) and this particular interface is the direct manipulation of perceived objects in the visual and tactile media. Looked at in this fashion, the concept of the interface is not at all limited to a graphic user interface. As I have argued before, I believe that bots are re-establishing an old kind of interface, one that I refer to as the Language User Interface (LUI). After all, McLuhan defined speech as humanity’s earliest medium. A speech-based interface for the maniuplation of any medium would seem a natural occurrence and in fact I would say that though the language was somewhat obscured, the command-line interface was the first interface (for computers, at least). Generally speaking then, there are media, they can be combined in presentation, contained within one another and there are various interfaces for their manipulation.

It’s interesting to note that interfaces generally have to compensate for the loss of one medium or another. When all the media of reality are present in a virtual form, the interface is in its most “natural” or a transparent state. I dream of an interface that is basically my office. You walk into your office, dawn a pair of gloves and pair of glasses and a headset (for sound and voice) and sit down to your desk. When the computer boots, the documents you were working appear where you left them, in the room, on the desk or wherever. When you speak with someone, they appear in the room with you and you appear to them in their room. Of course, because we’re dealing with an interface and not reality there’s other kinds of magic that can occur. You don’t have to get up from your desk to get a reference; you gesture at the symbolic bookmark you’ve left behind once before and the reference comes to your hands. A web page link would fetch a document for you and if you needed to fill out a form, you would simply fill it out. Plus, of course, there’s the addition of the LUI so that if you couldn’t remember where you put something, you ask your bot or agent “Where is the blog entry I wrote on the interface avant-garde?” I could go on and on but what I’m merely trying to point out is that the interface is as wide a concept as media — in many ways it is media’s parallel — and the GUI, the LUI and other interface types are all facets of a single concept.

With this picture in mind, take a look at the art world. The true avant-garde of interfaces (as oppopsed to the avant-garde of media) would not be doing new things with the GUI. In avant-garde-speak the GUI is “tired”. I would argue that chatbot creators and the makers of bots such as SmarterChild are re-inventing the LUI and making it English language based. Now instead of some obscure command like grep *.mov / you can type something more like “Where are all my movie files?” or in the case of SmarterChild, “I want to see the movie The Life Aquatic.” Since it likely already knows your zip code (or you can tell it different in your query) it fetches the listings of the movie at the nearest time at the nearest theater. But as I said, this is a re-invention of an interface type — it’s not really new.

And there’s also a lot happening in the video game industry in this regard. The joystick isn’t a new tool for interface manipulation, but the combination of the joystick with the headset is. There is no doubt that going online and playing with, while talking to, friends is a new kind of experience. I can always tell because when my friends see me do it they seem baffled. “You’re talking to the game?” “No, I’m talking to Mike, my friend in Atlanta.” This statement is usually followed by a long “oooooooh.” And then they watch, generally engrossed by the fact that the other players on the screen aren’t just a bunch of programs but people from all over the country participating in a virtual place. Friends of mine who have had no interest whatsoever in video games or violence have wanted to try Halo 2 out.

So the LUI is really the re-invention of or a smarter version of the command-line. Online games like Halo are combining old interfaces into a new experience. I would call this avant-garde but I could see where others might not. Some would say that if there is an avant-garde of the interface, they have to be doing something entirely different. So if this is the definition of avant-garde then perhaps the canvas of the interface avant-garde has pretty much been used up. So far every human sense has been translated into media (even smell) and as far as I understand the concept of the interface, almost all media (except for the olfactory-based media) have tools for interaction at this point. An olfactory interface would be avant-garde but I do not know of one. Beyond that, all interface development will necessarily be some combination of existing interfaces.

This state of affairs in the “art of the interface” makes sense when one looks at a parallel situation one medium in particular: the visual. Johnson also posits in his book that the engineer and artist are closer together than they have been in the past. I think this is only due to the fact that the interaction with media was new. The tactile medium was coming into existence. Once, we would have considered an artist as both artist and engineer. They would have had to manufacture the canvas and they would have had to make their own brushes and paints. Over time, however, the “trade” of making brushes and paints was commoditized and the visual artist was left to consider only the manipulation of the media itself. I’m over-generalizing here of course, there are all kinds of anomalies but there is a general trend that shows that serious invention and modern art, the total disregard of representing reality and dimension, didn’t happen until long after the engineering of materials had generally faded into the background. To be sure, to manufacture one’s own brushes and paint is still an art but it’s not really avant-garde. In the same way, the avant-garde of modern art lies in the media but maybe not in the interface or maybe not in the interface for too much longer.

Eventually the interface should just go away. In the fictional virtual operating system I mentioned above the interface is almost non-existent. In the world of the Matrix, the interface is non-existent — or rather, totally transparent. I’ve always considered that the goal of the interface designer should be to make it transparent. For that to occur, the interface avant-garde may have come and gone and just hardly anyone noticed. Douglas Engelbart was the interface avant-garde. And as is typical with the avant-garde they only become so after the fact. From here on out, the interface and its manipulation will largely be relegated to the engineers dealing with the hardware, while the artists start to play with the new matrices of interactive media available to them through their primary tool, the code.