So Gen X were slackers and Gen Y are kickin’ it? There are some nice statistics on Steven Johnson’s blog that show that our new Web medium is encouraging participation and entrepreneurship. Kids rule! —give them video games. And maybe Johnson is right in his tome “Everything Bad is Good For You” that this development has more to do with a generation that has grown up with interactive mediums (i.e. video games and the web) than a generation that grew up with a passive medium (i.e. television).

On a slightly related note, Mr. Johnson just came down here to Clemson to give the opening talk to the freshman class, who were required to read “The Ghost Map” over the summer as their first assignment as Clemson University students. I’ve seen Steven Johnson speak before up in New York, and his style (and level of nervousness) have really improved. I thought the points that he made about what went into the book were enlightening beyond the text, and from what I’ve gathered from the faculty here, there are quite a few students who now intend to go into sanitation engineering—you know, at least for the next 14 months or so. Freshman—you’ve gotta’ love ‘em.

I have to confess that I have not read “The Ghost Map” just yet—still slogging through Pinker’s Book (and being made fun of by the rest of the Psychology department for it). But even without reading it, I suspect it may be one of his better books. I’ve read them all, with the exception of said historical narrative, and the last two, Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good For You had the information but not insight—the big insight. I don’t know how else to put that. Both Interface Culture and Emergence literally changed my world view. They influenced where I was heading with my own academic pursuits.

Let’s put it this way, great ideas are obvious after the fact. Once you see all the connections, it just becomes very obvious to you, that yes, this is the way things work or function. And I have to say that having worked with computer interfaces all my early adult life, I was still surprised when Johnson pointed out just how much influence the GUI had on society. It was astounding, and I think most people still don’t realize the impact. And it was equally astounding when he revealed how simple automatons could create immensely complex systems. I am still influenced by that particular work when I look at something like Danny Hillis’ Freebase.

Of course, Johnson isn’t inventing any of these theories or ideas. A lot of people complained in the case of Emergence that he really hadn’t explained the matter of emergence deeply enough. ((Although his critics all equally failed to explain what exactly they themselves were talking about)) But the critics really miss the point here, and it’s something he discusses in interface culture (somewhat) and discussed a great deal in his lecture. We live in a world of experts, and we need synthesists—people who don’t just understand the theories of the day, but that can reach across disciplines and what he calls the Long Zoom in order to pull these theories together and find revelations in the matrix of the information. I do think he generally accomplishes that. It would appear (from my mother and father’s reactions to the book) that he also did that with The Ghost Map.

My father is a mathematician here at Clemson, and I used to look at my father’s generation and think that we really needed more people like Steven Johnson, synthesists who would pull the data together. But something else that Johnson mentions in Emergence about the web has gotten me thinking slightly differently. My father’s generation really did need big visionaries who could see across wide swaths of disciplines, but this next generation, growing up on the web—they all have that ability already. Granted, watching them use Facebook in the library, I’m not particularly given over to a utopian optimism about the future of science, but you have to think that the nature of an interactive medium in the lives of these young scientists is going to make them a lot more aware of what is going on elsewhere in their discipline and in science in general. And that will make them synthesists inherent.

One of the other, to me, interesting results of discovering relationships like this Baseyian model for learning points to another critical area of cognition. Namely, what happens when you know you’re engaging in a Bayesian process to make a decision. This feedback, this knowing about Bayesian decision-making that comes to us through mediated information, gives us a new ability (a new circuit almost) to avoid critical kinds of mistakes. Think of it this way: if you know you are engaged in making a decision that you are making based on experience, then an intelligent thing to do would be to consult research that shows you where experts differ in their decisions when compared to novices. In a sense, understanding how this kind of decision-making occurs, and knowing what biases exist allows us to ask the question “What mistake am I going to make when I engage in Process X?”

Maybe that doesn’t seem totally revolutionary. We’ve always had experts to turn to when we weren’t sure what we were doing. The point is more subtle than that. Jeffery Schwartz discusses obsessive compulsive behavior (OCD) in The Mind and the Brain and shows how they can benefit from being aware of physical properties of their brain that illustrate their mental difficulty. Dr. Schwartz would literally show his patients MRIs of their brain in order to show them that their obsessive thoughts were in fact due to a malfunction. This awareness made it easier for them to begin to identify and dismiss those thoughts that were obsessive compulsive. In doing so, with practice, they literally change the structure of their brain, creating a new “circuit” between the prefrontal cortex and the caudate nucleus, overcoming the obsessive compulsive thoughts that come from the Orbital frontal cortex and its connections the caudate nucleus and the cingulate gyrus. They physically change their brain structure and likely do so in a way similar to how bayesian learning “programs” us in the first place; therefore, allowing us to re-program ourselves through conscious reflections on events and facts.

Using this kind of feedback to “change your mind” incidentally is pretty widely discussed in Steven Johnson’s book Mide Wide Open. He also points to a number of other feedback mechanisms we can now use to improve our understanding of our own minds.

Technorati tags: cognition, media, crime, bayesian, mind

I think Web 2.0 is a promising concept. But then so was email and look at what happened with spam. Already two of the more interesting features of Web 2.0, comments and trackbacks, have been declared dead by many in the blogging community. Cause of death? Spam — that most adaptive and brutal hunter of efficient information systems. As we use the technologies of Web 2.0 to open up new streams and venues of information, this time we should take some precautionary measures against its abuse.

Comments on blogs could still be saved if more people required TypeKey style log-ins. In fact, I’ve always wondered why log-ins themselves couldn’t be part of a major API on the web. Why isn’t there a central network of log-ins a la domain name registration? You choose a registrar, register your email address with an associated password and web sites access this log-in registry through a web service API. You’d have one place to go to change your email or password. More importantly though, you’d have a distributed “white list” that would be inaccessible to bots and make it relatively easy to root out or ban abusers.

Every community needs a structure of trust. Secret societies have their passwords. Clubs have memberships rosters. Most of these examples seem antithetical when talking about the web because people think it should be inherently and totally open, but I think, when talking about Web 2.0, it makes sense to start thinking in these terms. And openness and trust are not mutually exclusive either. The folks over at Wikipedia know this and have gone to great lengths to fight garbage getting into their wiki while still allowing anyone and everyone to contribute. An information system’s worth is only as good as the worst information in it.

Another solution to the problem (and essentially a potential feature of Web 2.0 sites) is to build friendster-style trust networks into these programs and protocols. As a user I wouldn’t just search del.icio.us for any of its results. Instead I would search del.icio.us for only those links that have been tagged by people I know — or even people that know someone I know. (For that matter, your degree of separation just becomes a parameter of the search.)

Consider how Steven Johnson describes information traveling from blog to RSS to group blogs to other aggregate systems and APIs. Information that was bad or misleading on some static web page on the old web is now poisonous on Web 2.0. That just doesn’t need to be the case.

[1] Johnson, Steven. “Interface Culture” 1997. pg 36

I genuinely believe that the producers of CSI come from the camp of creatives that believe everyone is dumber than they are. As though only they had the capacity to investigate a profession and understand it in all its intricacies (this depsite the fact that CSI frequently gets its science wrong). Law & Order has so far mostly refused to be condescending to its audience and in that vein pulls its audience up to a level of intricacy of knowledge that ten years after it started people still find intriguing.

This is precisely where Johnon is going with his latest work. He takes a few ideas like “confusion” and multiple-threads and traces their development through television’s history, finding along the way that television has evolved new complex fictional structures and isn’t necessarily getting “dumber”. So far so good. Hopefully if “Everything Bad is Good For You” is as good as his past investigations, this should be a great read.

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 ]

On one final note, I’d just like to point out that my sister’s name Mandy (technically Amanda, though I’ve always called her Mandy) peaks out at 1971 when Barry Manilow’s hit “Mandy” came on the scene. C’mon, Mom and Dad, can you say Fad Zombie?

[ I originally found this site through an article by Steven Johnson. ]

Alon wrote software that hunts for patterns in the gene-regulation of the E. coli bacterium. What he found was astonishing: Networks with mechanisms straight out of engineering, including amplifiers and pulse generators that would be at home on a circuit board. Alon suspected that these recurring patterns, which he dubbed network motifs, may represent fundamental building blocks of all networks.

To be fair, some scientists have come out against this concept. And there is always the pervasive everything-is-not-a-network argument. I just thought it was one of those odd moments where my mind and fate are traveling at similar speeds in a similar direction.

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.

RSS services have also given us the ability to keep up with the ongoings of the niche markets and suppliers of the Long Tail. As Chris Anderson puts it:

The reason this is so important to driving demand down the Tail is that RSS feeds can provide a constant stream of links and suggestions for products and media that you otherwise wouldn’t have heard of. Best of all, they don’t have to be from conventional media and blogs; they can simply be notifications of availability or updates on what’s selling where.

Chris mentions netflix specifically and I just wanted to point out another one: iTunes [note: this link only works with the Apple iTunes software]. So now, while I’m browsing RSS feeds, looking for articles of note, I can get the latest updates on the iTunes music store. What I would rather have is updates on the bands that I like, but I figure we’ll eventually get there as well.

[1] By “atomitized” I don’t mean the Atom feed service, but just breaking-down-into-smallest-component. And obviously there are limits.