Radar Waves

Another victim of digitization

Saw this on the sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights this morning, on my daily walk to work (teaching a class on Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"): a complete and pristine set of the Encyclopedia Americana, tossed in the rubbish heap.

Score one more for Wikipedia.

Aram and Joanna Demers talk music sampling at the ACC

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Annenberg Center for Communication, based on the research I've been doing into sample-based music for my doctoral dissertation. Musicologist, musician and all-around cool human Joanna Demers (author of Steal this Music) also spoke, about the aesthetics of electronic music.

There's a WMV video of the event here, and an MP3 here. Howard Rheingold also blogged it here.

Many thanks to the Annenberg Center for giving us the opportunity to present our research, and to all the people who came to hear us.

Incidentally, Marissa and I will be presenting related research, based on our recent consumer survey about configurable cultural practices (e.g. mash-ups, remixes, machinima, etc.) at MIT5 in Cambridge later this month, and at ICA in San Francisco next month.

Vidal vs. Buckley

Last night I attended a wonderful lecture at the skirball center with gore vidal, interviewed by david ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. he was his usual brilliant, partician self and I thought in a time of outrageous reality TV squabbles and histrionic political debate that, despite the shrill cackling of pundits and politicians, never actually addresses issues, it would be fun to link to this footage of the famous gore vidal/william f buckley debate at the 1968 political conventions. vidal comes out swinging, and buckley loses his cool. enjoy.

(and just in case the sound is garbled vidal calls buckley a "pro-crypto Nazi" and Buckley responded, "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.")

Forget WWE Smackdown -- It's all about the nerdfight

Larry just forwarded me a link to this: Chomsky vs. Foucault on GooTube. I love the hairy 70s intellectual in the background of this screenshot:

Future media tech: remote control brain implants

Ohboy, I love stuff like this. Nature just published an article describing a new device called BrainGate, which allows people who have lost the use of their limbs (and, I would guess, people who can still use their limbs as well) to operate machines just by thinking about it:

MN [test subject] opened simulated e-mail and operated devices such as a television, even while conversing. Furthermore, MN used neural control to open and close a prosthetic hand, and perform rudimentary actions with a multi-jointed robotic arm.

Of course, it's important to let the technology be used first to help disabled people live more independently, but you can see where this is going. Fifteen years from now, the Pentagon announces thought-controlled drone airplanes and battlebots (incidentally, before Firefox was a browser, it was actually a lame Clint Eastwood pic about though-controlled planes... I saw a few minutes of it on the big screen because I was too grossed out by the earwigs in The Wrath of Khan to stay put in my own theater). Then, thirty years from now, we finally get the payoff: trickledown to the consumer market, where the PS9 wages a market war against the WiiBox12 for thought-controlled MMORPG fighting action. And VonageSprintATTBellizonGoogle charges an extra $295 per month for thought-to-voice messaging.

Or maybe I'm wrong and porn once again leads the way. Maybe the big thing will be thought-controlled StripperBots^TM [shudder].

Or maybe I'm waaay wrong, and we consumer-types end up on the receiving end, rather than the giving end, of the thought-control machines [super-shudder].

Maybe it would just be in everyone's best interest if this technology stayed in the healthtech sector. Even better, a robot from the future and a renegade madwoman with a whiny teenage son should destroy it before it evolves any further.

Net neutrality wars: Is the outcome a foregone conclusion?

The battle over net neutrality finally seems to be piercing the American consciousness (with the stagmires overseas and the economic and civil liberties issues on the homefront, it's got some stiff competition), largely thanks to the folks over at SaveTheInternet.com and like-minded members of the MSM and blogosphere.

What's interesting is that this isn't (necessarily) a partisan issue; with liberals and libertarians joining hands across the aisle to fight for neutrality, it's shaping up to be more of a fight between consumer and media and pro-free-speech interests on the one hand, and telecom and anti-free-speech interests on the other. (If you have any doubt about this, check out the sponsor organizations for SaveTheInternet.com vs. the sponsor organizations for astroturf telecom lobby site HandsOffTheInternet.com.)

Anyway, tomorrow's a red-letter day: a Congressional committee vote on the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, or COPE Act, which, as it is currently written, doesn't give the FCC much power to regulate or police incursions against net neutrality.

Things are not expected to go well, based on the earlier subcommittee vote. Yet, even if net neutrality supporters somehow win this battle, I fear they will lose the war in the long term. I've recently taken part in some closed-door discussions between high-level representatives of telcos, current and former regulators, spectrum-savvy academics, and consumer advocates. Without giving away specific details, I can tell you that I was shocked at the degree to which a "tiered internet" (read: non-neutral network) was considered the foregone conclusion of our deliberations, by virtually all parties.

The rhetoric goes something like this: in the consumers' and publishers' perfect world, the Internet would continue to be neutral (assuming it already is, which is problematic); in the telcos' perfect world, the Internet would be a totally private highway, and both users and publishers would have to pay fees for every bit exchanged. Therefore, the logic goes, the best compromise would be a tiered Internet, with a fee-based "fast lane" and an old fashioned, lower-speed neutral "slow lane."

Don't believe a word of it. As soon as service providers segregate revenue-generating bits from non-revenue-generating bits, the latter tier will rapidly disintegrate to the level of non-functionality. The higher tier will thrive on new standards and technologies, which will be exclusively supported by new software (IE10, for example, would probably only support the "fast lane" traffic), and the whole process would snowball. Before you could say "Tom Paine," the Internet we've come to know and love for the last decade (or more, in some cases) will go bye-bye, to be replaced by the world's largest and most expensive taxpayer-subsidized TV and telephony infrastructure. Goodbye blogosphere, goodbye grassroots politics, goodbye remix culture. The clock strikes midnight, and we all turn back into a bunch of couch pumpkins with remote controls in our hands but no real control to speak of.

UPDATE: The Markey amendment for stronger regulatory oversight died in committee today. Super-bummer. But, as Kos points out, there's still the Senate. Keep your fingers crossed, and keep your Senator on speed-dial.

New new media: tongue-based VR

First read about this a year or two ago, but now that DARPA's investing, it seems like it'll become a reality: scientists are using the tongue as a computer interface. The initial app I read about was helping vision-impaired people to "see" by delivering video information encoded as bumps on the tongue. Now DARPA's delivering infra-red vision through the same method, and allowing soldiers to control devices sans fingers.

The reason they can do this, apparently, is because the brain has its own form of machine code, and all sensory experience can be reduced to this level. This means that ANY sensory experience can be transcoded into ANY other sensory experience.

Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Let's see, how do all new media technologies get their start? First, you get a bunch of academics trying something out. Then the military invests. Then, early consumer adoption is driven by... Anyone?...

We're folding up our shutters, selling our stocks and putting everything we've got into tongue-porn. Imagine the possibilities! Seriously, though, this is way cool. Except for the goofy green hat and the mile-long tube sticking out of the user's mouth. Someone call Apple and start them working on the iTongue.

Web 2.0: Newsweek misses the point

I'm feeling very torn about Newsweek's new cover story on Web 2.0 (possibly the worst neologism, most meaningless buzzword ever): on one hand, its good to see some of these concepts getting mainstream exposure - social networking as a form of self-expression, the "wisdom of crowds" (but no mention of its failures), organizationally efficient companies with minimal staffs, maximum content. but I'm still left with the nagging feeling they're leaving too much out, or just missing the point. reading it, all we really learn is that yahoo makes some pretty smart investments (I've been arguing that for longer than I care to remember).

instead, take a look at this article, called academic by some, but actually fairly theory-free and chock-full of practical analysis. the comparison between myspace and friendster provides much greater detail on all of the above ideas, and how encouraging user innovation is ultimately smart business - creating a culture of mutual respect. and an boyd argues, innovation (and the subsequent content, hacks, easter eggs, etc) eventually usurps more traditional notions of "productivity" and technological perfection. an excellent read on the mechanisms needed for social networking to thrive.

Wikitanniwhocares??? Google killed the encyclopedia star

Yet more sparring between Britannica and Wikipedia. You have more mistakes than us. Well, you cost too much. Well, your editors suck. Well, your contributors are a bunch of pimply 13-year-old boys in their parents' basements.

Yaawwwwwnnn.

The saddest thing about this argument is that it just doesn't matter any more. The golden age of the encyclopedia, which started back in 18th-century France with Diderot, D'Alembert and that whole pre-revolutionary posse, is OVER. Google killed it. In an age of an infinitely expandible, archivable, and searchable information commons, the idea of a sequestered information preserve is as absurd as an aviary in a rainforest. How did I manage to pull Diderot and D'Alembert out of my butt? I sure as hell didn't look up "encyclopedists" in Britannica or Wikipedia. I GOOGLED THEM!

There's always a trade-off between volume of information, quality of information, and price of information. And these three reference resources occupy very different positions on the curve. But Google wins out for two reasons: (1) the sheer volume of information they index puts any encyclopedia -- distributed or edited, free or commercial -- to shame; and (2) readers get increasingly savvy and skilled at sorting wheat from chaff every day, undermining the necessity for information hand-holding. I wish the press would just let this feud die.

Memes revisited

Edge is hosting the transcript and MP3 of a panel discussion hosted at LSE last week, featuring Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other fascinating books about the genetics, information, and human society.

In this book, published 30 years ago, Dawkins introduced the notion of the "meme" -- a discrete piece of information that competes, mutates and thrives in the environment of human culture, much as genes do in their biological environment:

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

You don't have to be an Internet guru to see how this idea is infintely more provocative in an age of global networked media than it was 30 years ago. What's amazing is the degree to which the concept of the "meme" has become a powerful meme in its own right, especially in the blogosphere.