This lecture concerns the mundane (Multimedia applications) and the sublime (ultimate purposes of humankind and cyberspace.) Its mundane parts are based on Wu Chapter 11, and its sublime parts, if any, are based on surfing the web for sites that promise eternal salvation .... of various kinds.
Whether for money or other reasons, everything that happens on the web (or with any media tool whatsoever) is a form of information transfer service, which falls into one of these categories:
- 1) the user is looking for some piece of information
- 2) some provider has made (or will make) it available, but
- 3) it may not be anywhere that you can find it, and
- 4) if you DO find it, you may not know what it is. And if you find
it,
- 5) you may need more than information. You may need HELP or actual
work done.
These objectives generate five classes of services:
1. Query Formulation
2. Provision of Information
3. Searching and Indexing
4. Analysis and Critique
5. Service and Support
Query Formulation is the "front end" of the search process. There are two fundamental ways this is done: via portals and via search queries. The portal (e. g. www.netscape.com) offers a structured set of links to previously prepared hierarchies of resources. Search queries, on the other hand, require that you provide keywords and therefore that you have some idea how to describe what you want. This is an underdeveloped component of the Web - it is a role played very well by live reference librarians.
David Gillette (an English professor) describes these two approaches as Ouija Board and Burrowing Down approaches, respectively. Ouija board means a broad shallow hierarchy, such as one usually sees on a portal. Burrowing down means a deep search, from which you have to back out and re-descend to pursue other ideas.
Provision of Information includes posting web sites, selling (but not providing) services such as online registration, online sex, encyclopedias, online magazines, etc. as well as cable TV, weather, news. This is the biggest category of activity in today's web.
Searching and Indexing are complementary activities, necessary to support the queries. But you can use searching for more than query formulation - you can gather statistics about the Web's use, about how many companies are doing x or y or z, how many are using Javascript, etc.
Analysis and Critique are vital functions - www.zdnet.com is an excellent example, as are many car buying price guides. These sites don't just gather data, they provide human insight into what's the good stuff. It's strange but true that opinions are usually worth more than facts - if the opinion-giver is wise and trustworthy.
Service and Support is sometimes free (if you want to wait in a long queue) or can be purchased if the free information isn't enough. For instance, many commercial products now sell tech support by the hour or incident when you need more than the free service can provide. To date, the Web mostly just advertises S&S (although live interactive video sex would be considered a service rather than information, I think.) As the medium gets better, many other services will be provided through the Web itself rather than via telephone or in-person.
Consider, for instance, a robotic car-repair mechanic who could work on your exotic 1957 Saab direct from his Swedish workshop. Or a psychotherapist who could work in Albanian, to help a refugee in Los Angeles deal with a crisis back home. There are many remote services yet to be invented.
This category fuzzes off into the distance. For instance, a plain old word processor provides a service. We would distinguish the general category of 'tool' from 'digital media tool' by the proviso that media tools relate specifically to information, whereas a shovel relates to dirt and holes (for instance.) So the word processor is a media tool, but not (usually) a multimedia tool. If it's dealing with pictures AND words (as a sort of a bastard page layout system) then it's beginning to get to be multimedia.
(To be REALLY multimedia it needs to have at least one isochronous component, according to some authorities.)
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The above taxonomy is, of course, arbitrary. You could slice the world up differently, e. g. by categorizing analysis as a form of service. But, we're going to use it anyhow in our first Query.
Query 27.1: Describe the following activities in terms of the above taxonomy. Which category (or categories) does each activity involve? In what ways does the activity go beyond the simple categories provided above?
- composing a song on a sequencing system (e. g. software on a PC) and
playing it on a MIDI synthesizer.
- asking 555-1212 for a phone number in Anchorage, Alaska.
- using the French minitel system to get a phone number
- accessing a minicam to see what the weather is like today in San
Jose, CA
- trying to find the Turkish word for "fuzzy".
Query 27.2: Make up an activity for each of the above taxonomic
categories, which does NOT now exist as far as you know. What are the obstacles
to its existing? Who would benefit from the activity? Who might pay for
the activity?
In the 1920', a Catholic theologian and anthropologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote books about the idea that humankind was moving toward a new kind of consciousness - an "Omega Point". He talked about the world which consists of a lithosphere (stone), hydrosphere (water), atmosphere and noosphere - "sphere of knowing".
MSNBC has a brief article about religion on the web, which mentions Chardin. You may have to download the MSNBC plug-in to see it. There is also a brief biography of him, on a site that quickly fades into the astrological.
There are several ideas competing for attention here. They concern how humans relate to the universe, to the planet, and to one another. Is the Internet going to impact religion in the ways that radio and TV did - that is, as a new medium for recruiting people to old beliefs? Or might it play an entirely different role, and enable entire new belief systems to be born that transform life for us all?
Here are the ideas I want to discuss today.
Self-Replicating Systems: The Selfish Meme
A meme is an idea that contains the means to replicate itself.
A neat article about memes
in media
is a good place to read about these ideas. Other memes include biological
genes, fads, and evangelical religions.
Query 27.3: Read the above article, which is about how magazines that succeed become "self-replicating" entities, or memes. Write a brief story drawing an analogy between the magazine-meme and an animal species. What are the animal's equivalent to advertising, editorial/content, and circulation?
Query 27.4: Computer viruses are an obvious example of the meme in computing. Find at least one or two other examples and explain why they are memes.
The Gaia Hypothesis
A British atmospheric scientist named James Lovelock was studying the gases that make up the atmosphere - particularly the feedback loops that regulate the Earth's temperature. He became convinced that biological process play an active role in maintaining homeostasis. That is, without plants and sealife taking an active role in consuming and hiding carbon (and, moreover, a dynamically adaptive role), the planet would undergo heat death like Venus apparently did; or undergo other climatic disasters.
There is an analogy here: living things maintain homeostasis. So some people started to say "the earth is alive". Gaia is the name of an ancient earth-goddess, and so her name was attached to this analogy. This spawned an extensive religious/mystical response, which is still going on. (Search for Gaia and you'll get lots of astrology and new age mysticism.)
But as science, how good was the idea? Biologists generally hated it. Why?
Living things are distinguished from non-living things by
This seems to me to be the big one ... the "main event" to which we should all be paying attention. We're in a car hurtling down a road that might lead toward a cliff, but we aren't driving, and we don't know whether whe we ARE doing might screw up the auto-pilot - if there is one.
So, if there is to be a noosphere, a "giant brain" for humankind, this seems like one of the right problems for it to be working on. The feedback loops involve politics, economics, ecology, materialism, and how you spend your weekends.
Memes and the Environment.
Two meme-based stories will be told in class: making Australia's desert bloom, and the Great Rabbit Fence.
Query 27.5: Explain how the rabbits provide a cautionary tale about the "water bottle creatures" as a means of bringing water to the Australian desert.
Query 27.6: Brainstorm with friends and develop at least two ideas about memes which could be propagated through cyberspace and which might have a profound effect on the future of humankind ... or even on the planetary ecosystem.
was an anthropologist who studied how people think, and how ecosystems work, and who wrote a wonderful complicated book called Steps to an Ecology of Mind. With many sidelines and details, the essential message is this:
we gotta learn to think differently, and soon, or we may not be around much longer.
Bateson actually offered a number of concrete suggestions about what the right kind of different thinking would be. They're not the obvious "consume less, recycle more" kinds of ideas. Rather, they offer a variety of metaphors relating how the environment adapts, to how ideas grow (memes again.) For instance
Go read about them!
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