Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Fear is the absence of networks

Once upon a time, vast networks of communication and power were the enemy. But now, as my teacher and friend Eric Rabkin notes, they are sometimes benevolent.

This development is based in part on a shift from transportation to communication functions, but read the whole thing, as they say, to get the idea. Eric's writing is, as ever, a marvel of economy, and resists easy extraction.

Which reminds me of this fine video collection, horror/suspense movie scenes when coverage failure spikes the fear:

Blog zine DNA

Fanzines are a crucial antecedent to blogs, says Roger Ebert.  It's a fun and well-written piece, as one expects from Ebert. 
Hasn't someone else made this connection?

A few notes on Associated Press history

  This O'Reilly post notes several nice bits of the history of the AP, a useful topic for anyone interested in media or information history. 

First comes the 1850s creation of the enterprise, including some practical collaboration to share news. 

Next is a brief note on the teletype.  I appreciate the section on teletypespeak:

"--30--" meant "end of story" or "end of transmission." It's a convention that many writers continue to use today. "--73--" meant "thanks" and "--88--" stood for "love and kisses." Add telex jargon to the odd history of abbreviated communication that today includes emoticons and SMS acronyms.

Blogs versus New York Times, 2002-2007: neither wins

In 2002 a bet was placed: five years hence, in 2007, the top Google search results on selected topics will either be blog posts or New York Times articles.  This week one blogger determined a winner. Roger Caidenhead calculated that blogs nudged out the NYT in the majority of 5 cases, 3-2.  Victory, blogosphere!

However.
1. Neither Gray Lady nor Blogistani Republics lead the results.  The Wikipedia, which emerged over the long bet's lifetime, came in far ahead of both.  Heh:

our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.

As another blogger writes: "Watch out for secondary characters with more interesting stories than your protagonist."

2. Mainstream media articles from sources other than the NYT led blog posts.

3. The blogosphere has emerged more as a source of commentary and linking, than as reportage.  Dave Winer sees this.

4. Those leading blogs aren't individual amateurs, but corporate-owned groups, often enough.

5. The New York Times' opening of archives should boost their results, as Jason Kottke and others note.

Unusually good article on reading

"Twilight of the Books" is a much better article than the title suggests.  Caleb Crain isn't an alarmist, doesn't rely on the NEA study, nor does he target the internet.  Instead this New Yorker piece examines the history of reading and literacy, and is well worth the read.

It offers many nice touches, such as framing the issue internationally, rather than as an American problem (at least at first, and the piece is clear about its scope when focusing on the US).  Rather than flailing at the internet or bashing the general specter of electronic media, Crain returns to television critique, then embeds that within internet critique, disaggregating web video from the rest of the net.  And he summons up this wonderful nineteenth-century exchange about reading versus conversation:

Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It’s much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is “to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”

The center of gravity for the article is a mix of Walter Ong's orality theory with Maryanne Wolf's recent book, Proust and the Squid.  Crain follows Wolf's neurological argument, arguing that reading becomes powerful when the process is easy, rather than challenging.  This then heightens Ong's description of cultural and psychological differences between oral and post- (or secondary) oral societies.  It's the most sensible recent argument I've seen for cultural divergence on reading.

It would be fascinating to apply this model to coding.  Would Wolf see programmers thriving on that passage from dorsal to ventral pathways, initial difficulty giving way to easy fluency?  And would the proportion of people who code eventually be statistically similar to those who read a good deal?

I'm disappointed in the final argument about print and identity, which really deserves an article for itself.  Crain touches on the echo chamber idea, offering a tantalizing suggestion:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.
Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely.

But this begs engagement with several fields, notably 20th century propaganda, comparative media (consider radio versus film versus tv on this score), tv criticism, and fan studies.

Programmer archaeologists

A fine information literature post crossed the nettime list transom this morning, concerning a recent sf novel:

Vernor Vinge (Hugo-award winning SF writer, and a computer scientist in a previous life) came up with the concept of "programmer archaeologist" in "A Deepness in the Sky". The book is set very far in
the future, and to cut a long story short, the idea behind the programmer-archaeologist is that most programming problems have already been solved in one form or another. So a large part of the task of the
programmer-archaeologist is finding previous solutions to the problem, and then stacking up emulators to make those programs work again.

The book is uneven, but the good parts are excellent.  There are several fine revenge plots, a scary social organization, and an interesting augmented reality extrapolation.

Web 2.0 in the 1400s: Perotti's complaint and the communal enterprise

A Renaissance story has some fascinating anticipatory echoes of current Web 2.0 debates.  A Fathom course* on humanism and printing describes a certain problem with textual quality, as perceived by a critic who would certainly recognize Wikipedia or the blogosphere:

[P]apal curialist, Niccolò Perotti, Archbishop of Siponto... had thought the advent of printing was an inestimable boon to mankind until he set eyes on Bussi's 1470 edition of Pliny and realized that men of slight learning were now in a position to publish whatever they liked in hundreds of copies, without any sort of editorial responsibility or control. He proposes as a remedy that the pope should appoint a competent scholar (he thinks of himself) to supervise texts printed at Rome.

"without any sort of editorial responsibility or control" - how often do we hear that these days?  Notice, too, that Perotti argues from a position of authority, being an archbishop.

Then one response brings to mind social filtering and the wisdom of crowds:

[Giovanni Andrea] Bussi saw his task as getting the material into print, and then correction of outstanding difficulties could follow as a sort of communal enterprise. Years later, in the Greek Theocritus of 1496, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius took a similar complacent (or resigned) line, to the effect that something is better than nothing, and a text once printed can at least find many correctors where a manuscript can only receive occasional and individual emendation.[emphases added]

The Fathom article's author, Martin Davies, then quietly adds in agreement:

This, of course, is true in the long run.

Perotti's complaint not an exact parallel, of course, for all sorts of reasons.  Web 2.0 grew up in countries with freedom of speech and separation of church and state.  Comparative numbers are far different, in terms of the ratios of manuscripts to early print versus modern print to the web.  The great publisher Mantius is resigned to this "communal enterprise" over time, rather than evangelical about it.  And the outcome of this ideological contest was only a fizzle, as James O'Donnell notes ("[Perotti's censorship] appeal was unavailing, and de Bussi became Vatican Librarian").  But it's fascinating to see a rough similarity of argument, five-six centuries later.

This might be a useful account to consider, too, in order to offer a different argument from the classic Gutenberg->Protestant Reformation line of thought, given when it occured.  The text quality issue returns with a vengeance in the late 1600s, according to Adrian Johns' superb The Nature of the Book.  That's whence British copyright law emerges, among other things.

There's a 1988 article on the Perotti-Bussi story.  I can't access it from the road, so will look for it when I next hit a JSTOR-subscribing campus.

*Fathom.  Now there's a name to bring us back to the 1990s, and universities trying out new ways to mobilize the web!

"Future Reading" and the history of information: The New Yorker

"Future Reading" begins by glancing at book digitization in 2007, then races over print history to grapple with antecedents.  There are some chestnuts in the article, like the Library of Alexandria, Dewey, and microform, but also some unusual (for a general audience) touches. 

For example, Grafton mentions the printing career of Giovanni Andrea Bussi (but not his role in the first modern censorship case).  He touches on Jeremias Drexel, who apparently wrote an information guide ("Goldmine," which I haven't found yet).  Thomas Harrison appears, and his cabinet connected to Leibniz (but not to the latter's computing experiments, oddly).

Soviet-bloc interactive film

A Czech film project offered audiences choices of paths through stories, back in the late 1960s.

The film, a comedy called Man in His House, is repeatedly stopped by an actor who appears on stage in front of the screen at key moments and acts as a kind of master of ceremonies.
At one point for instance for instance he halts the projection just as the film's main protagonist has been flagged down by a traffic policeman while in hot pursuit of his enraged wife in a taxi. Audiences push a green button if they want him to hit the gas, or red if they want him to stop.

Kinoautomat is being revived now, apparently.

(via BoingBoing)

Majority of humans are not now farmers: study

For the first time in millenia, the majority of human beings are not farmers, according to a new study.

A related question: how much of the history of information has been shaped by the divide between urban and rural ways of life?  For example, have many of the great libraries been associated with towns and cities?  Have rural information systems - the Incan quipu, the Australian songline - had the same status as urban ones?

(via Instapundit)