Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Alan Kay on learning and technology, San Diego 2006

Alan Kay is giving a talk over lunch, here at ELI.  Among other things, this line he attributes to a British educator:

Americans have the best high school education in the world.  Too bad one has to go to college to get it.

After arguing that education's purpose is to teach non-universal truths, Kay showed a clip from A Private Universe.  The point here was not only scientific ignorance, but to illuminate a problem of compartmentalizing knowledge.

Another great line, this time his:

Feedback is a way of making progress when you don't have enough information.

I've been Strugatskyized

Is this egocasting?  Brian and Alan turned me into one (of a pair) science fiction writer for the all-devouring hunger of their Flickr-ized presentation this morning.

Levine and Lamb Flickrizing

Alan Levine and Brian Lamb are presenting now, using a fun technique: via Flickr.
I like the loving sf riff of the images.

Discussion covered a lot of ground, anchored ultimately on frustrations about academic culture's refusal to engage social software, and the grounds of resistance.  Questions of demographics, passion, peer review, cultural practice as heritage.

Nice observation by Alan: he checks his RSS reader before email.  Me too.

ELI 2006 has a very positive, convivial mood so far.

Arrival in San Diego and tagging many friends

I've arrived in San Diego for the ELI conference.  As I vowed earlier, presentations and running of games are happening.

It's grand to see a bunch of smart, exciting friends: Diane Oblinger, Alan Levine, Jon Breitenbucher, Brian Lamb, Gardner Campbell, Catherine Young, Cyprien Lomas, Brian Hawkins, Marc Prensky, Sondra Smith, David Berque, Uli Rauch, Andrea Nixon, Carol Smith, Colleen Carmean, so many other NITLE campus friends, and so many others.  And still more to look forward to, like a lunch talk by Alan Kay.  I can't wait to meet the wonderful Pew Internet and American Life (required reading) project's leader, Harrison Rainie.  Croquet vows an update. 

Before the conference began, I ran into a fascinating, somewhat surprising meeting with Apple evangelists, who were focused on "enhanced podcasting."  While at first I thought this meant files including a soundtrack with images, I learned it meant (surprise) specifically AAC files laced with images, and obtained through iTunes.  Apple prefers folks to use Garageband to make them.  The idea's been around for a while, but seems to have legs now.
Katherine Schedoni would have been in great company.

Tagcloud yourself

Turn your site's tag cloud into a badge, aimed at a t-shirt, via the good folks at Snapshirt.

(via Geekymom)

The Kinks Lost an ARG

Another Lost ARG-thing: Marvin Candle has text that describes the experience of being on that island, but, apparently, draws on Kinks lyrics.

(thanks, Jesse)

ARGs as narrative: two authors describe their experiences

Alternate reality game writer Sean Stewart reflects on ARGs as storytelling.  Some good reflections there, including this important note on collaboration, which seems right to me:

The audiences that we built for those campaigns are having a different experience. They’re having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn’t really have an analog that I’ve been able to think of in the arts, although it does in another place.

The Royal Society analogy is very exciting.  And this is a neat formulation:

storytelling as archeology—or, possibly, the other way around

BoingBoing, where I found this, also points to sf writer Walter Jon Williams' blog entry on his experience working on an arg.

The genre keeps evolving, after five years of play and development.  We now have a history, multiple social groups, practices growing in response to older practices.  I think we're ready for the first print anthology, the first major controversy over a presumed ethical problem, the first security panic, and widespread use of ARG tactics by other media, among other things.

US information warfare document aired by BBC

The BBC reports on the "Information Operations Roadmap", a US Department of Defence document obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.  The pdf has some blacked-out passages, which tantalize, of course, but much of the document is readable (but not text-selectable, harrumph) (here's the GWU copy).

Several interesting pieces.  One is that it's an overview of many information warfare venues, rather than focusing on one or two, as is common.  Slashdot, GWU, and others focus on the traditional propaganda/Psyops element, but the report also goes into network defense and offensive hacking, Web-based propaganda ("bloggers beware!" is the Beeb's lede), and electromagnetic warfare.  The report also insists that understanding this full range of IO become a core competency for US military commandera.

Also interesting is the formula "fight the net".  The report introduces this in terms of network-centric warfare, which isn't shockingly new, but I'd expect to see this slogan recur.  It seems to be both transitive and intransitive - fight with the net, as a weapon; fight against the net, as a target.  The latter does seem desperately doomed.

Lastly, I share the Beeb's supervillain awe at this visionary passage:

the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

The GWU Archive page has good resources for further context and exploration.

(via nettime)

Google is the help menu: towards the social, away from the desktop application

"Google is the help menu," proclaims one design site.  Great phrase.  If you assume people are unlikely to consult an application's help files, and quite likely to hit the Web, then:

Local help simply can't compete with internet search. I'll go even further-- if you are building local help files for your application, you're wasting your time. And more importantly, you are wasting your users' time.

Smart developers will stop wasting time on useless local help and build community around their product on the internet.

I'll go further in two directions: first, isn't a sizable chunk of users (outside the US, especially) more likely to use mobile phone queries than Web?  Second, this is a digital divide issue - if you're on a dialup, you're less likely to hit the Web casually, especially the open Web with its vast population of rich media in imminently clicked content.

(via Channel 9)

Welcome Caleb Navidson

For the curious, or those heading to San Diego, a short story has apparently begun to unfold.
Please be gentle.  And help us find Kate?