Nothing in it about penis-shaped helicopters, but this Anthony Grafton piece about going to graduate school is pretty good-- the kind of combination of encouragement about the inherent
Sunday afternoon, I braved the single-digit temperature, ice on the roads, and responsibility for my dad's beloved Honda Element to go see the Hamilton Wing of the Denver
[Reprinted from my Red Herring blog, 2004]
Lists are the white noise of information. They're everywhere, and we all make them, but they're so familiar they escape our notice. What's on a to-do list is what matters; the list itself as a thing—as a way of organizing information—isn't worthy of attention.
This has been true for a couple reasons. First, lists are incredibly simple, yet incredibly versatile. They can represent anything from an inventory of goods to a set of tasks to be completed. Second, lists are functional things, tools to get a job done. It's what we can do with a list that matters, not the list itself. It's the message that matters, not the medium. Finally, lists aren't like literature. Everyone knows how to make them. There are no aesthetics of list-making, no such thing as a stylish or elegant list, no difference between a list made by Ernest Hemingway or your Uncle Ernie.
But to invoke the overused Marshall McLuhan phrase, the medium is becoming the message. In the online world, lists are starting to morph from tools for managing complexity, to tools for projecting identity. This transition reveals something about what happens when old and new information technologies converge.
[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]
Recently BBC World had an article on baby blogs-- blogs that parents will keep about their children, the digital equivalent of baby books. Coincidentally, that same day I posted my 500th entry on my blog about my children, which I started soon after getting a digital camera. Like most articles about blogs, its substantive points were mixed up with a measure of alarmism and technical naivete. Some of it was taken up with worries about what pedophiles unmentionable things could do to those cute baby pictures, and fretting over how revealing details about your child's daily routine isn't very smart. (Hello? Ever heard of password protection?)
The article also suggested that baby blogs were invasions of privacy. What if, twenty years from now, the merest acquaintance could read about your child's potty-training exploits, or their first visit to Grandma's house? Wouldn't making those details of your child's life available to people they barely know violate their privacy, and make it harder for them to get dates? (At this point in the article I wanted to pump my arm and shouted "Yessss!" My five year-old daughter is only in nursery school, and already I've guaranteed that she'll spend her college years undistracted by a social life.)
My efforts to archive my children's lives stand in stark contrast to the scanty documentation of my own past. My entire childhood is preserved in just under two hundred pictures, a few letters, and a couple yearbooks: it all fits in a single box. In contrast, I can take two hundred pictures of my daughter at a birthday party. The constantly-falling cost of digital media lower the barriers to recording everyday events, and preserving every last picture and audio file. At my current rate, each of my children are in danger of having me take 50,000 pictures of them by the time they turn 18.
Of course, parenting is one long invasion of privacy, but the idea of baby blogs coming back to haunt their subjects later in life is still an interesting one. Technology promises to take a ritual that had traditionally been a painful but very limited rite of passage-- the baby books shown to the fiance, the clever candids shown at the wedding reception-- and make it into a full-time affair.
It also shows that the relationship between privacy and technology is really pretty complex. Worries about technology affecting privacy are perfectly reasonable; but worries about specific technologies are often misplaced. To really know what to worry about, you have to think a bit more about what privacy is, and how technology can affect it.
[Reposted from the Red Herring blog, ca. 2005.]
Let me begin with a confession. I spend most of my working life in front of a computer, and I suspect a fair amount of that time is wasted. I check my e-mail several times an hour. I regularly scan my RSS feeds for new posts. I visit news sites, just in case they've updated the list of breaking new stories. I can follow hyperlinks from one end of the Internet to the other if I'm not careful.
It's all the electronic equivalent of bouncing your leg up and down, or ripping a napkin apart. And I don't need to be this wired. It doesn't help my work or thinking; to the contrary, these information-era equivalents nervous tics are just distractions. Yet I do them.
I'm hardly alone. Some of my friends lead lives that require Blackberries; others have Blackberries that take over their lives. A recent Yahoo-OMD study of 28 people forced to go offline for two weeks shows how dependent—both in the functional, and the emotional sense—people become to being connected. According to The Atlantic Monthly, "Across the board, participants reported withdrawal-like feelings of loss, frustration, and disconnectedness after the plug was plug was pulled." Indeed, "[t]he temptation to go online was so great that the participants were offered "life lines"—one-time, one-task forays onto the Web—to ease their pain." Add to this the recent Pew Internet Survey study that found that Internet users are spending more time online, and less watching TV, and you get a picture of growing numbers of people turning productivity tools into weapons of self-distraction.
It's just the latest evidence confirming the truism that we live in an age of information overload. How did this happen? And is it going to get worse?
A few years ago I wrote an online column for Red Herring. The gig was interesting, but after a change of editorial regime, they decided to stop the experiment. The pieces all kind of disappeared after a while, and I realized that some of them were actually pretty good. Heaven knows I spent plenty of time on them.
So if for no other reason than to have easily-accessible copies of them, I'm going to start reposting them here. Most were from 2004, so they might seem a bit dated; but I think some of the ideas are still worth playing with.
Knowledge is power. For a long time we thought it was something immaterial, cerebral, almost otherworldly. No less a figure than Plato argued that the world of things and appearances was but a dim reflection of another world of ideal types, more real than reality itself. But Plato's theory is too good for this world. Knowledge is also things, and actions.
One of the key events in twentieth-century philosophy was the discovery that the Platonic model of knowledge was incomplete. In mathematics, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that mathematics could never be a perfectly self-contained, exhaustively proven system. For decades, philosophers and mathematicians had worked to find the fundamental foundations of mathematics; Gödel's incompleteness theorem showed that the search was fruitless.
The critique continued in philosophy. Cambridge University's Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the twentieth century's most influential philosophical mind, argued that the meaning of language arises from its use, rather than from its logical properties. A few years later, British philosopher Michael Polyani coined the term "tacit knowledge" to describe things that we can know but can't effectively communicate. Tacit knowledge, Polyani argued, is an important component of skilled work, and even shapes activities that we traditionally have thought of as entirely logical (like science).
Historian Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions took Polyani one step further, and opened up a whole new front in the assault against traditional notions of knowledge. Structure reconceived science as a puzzle-solving activity guided by a mix of formal methods and cultural norms, and punctuated by dizzying revolutions and paradigm shifts. Sociologists of science, cultural anthropologists, literary and gender theorists, all used Kuhn as an inspiration to their critiques of objectivity.
You would think that after all this, the Platonic model of knowledge would be dead and gone. But it lives on in information technologies.
I hadn't realized how much giant, open-span main terminals now dominate airport design. Some examples I've been in recently: Kuala Lumpur, via flickr Singapore, via flickr Heathrow Terminal
I spent several hours on the plane working on the talk I'm giving at the philosophy of telecommunications convergence (I'm giving several others, but they're either completely informal
On Wednesday, during a break in the conference (they scheduled half-hour breaks between speakers, which I think was intended to give people lots of time to go look at the exhibits, network, etc.), I was walking around the entrance hall of the Suntec convention center, and taking pictures of the water sculpture-slash-fountain.
via flickr
It's hard to see, but the sculpture has water running down the sides.
via flickr
It also has lights that change color. And it's big. So it hits the triefcta of Singaporean public sculpture.
As I walking around the floor, I noticed that the tiles seemed to make a map of South Asia.
Technorati Tags: Buckminster Fuller, Singapore, travel
Occasionally you come across the work of someone you've never heard of, but whose interests curiously parallel your own. Tonight I came across Kristóf Nyíri's 1993 essay "Thinking