Yesterday, I read David Weinberger (as always, and then and went back to the archives for some more cool, deep stuff from the past), and read “Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat” (in Clay Shirky’s sidebar on BoingBoing). It was heady. Oh, and I scanned some publicity for Macromedia’s new Contribute application (actually, this piece by Norm Myerowitz helped trigger what I say below.)
Then I dipped my toe back into the Game Neverending, where (yesterday) a group of revolutionaries had taken control of the one bank in the game, and were charging a small toll to enter and exit. If you didn’t pay the toll, they evidently would stab you with a marshmallow dagger. It doesn’t sound bad, but people seemed very upset by it, and when I briefly passed through the area, I paid the toll, so I can’t tell you what the penalty was like.
But the confluence of Weinberger’s wisdom and the description of Lucasfilm’s precursor MUD and the experience of public outcry at the innovative (if inconvenient) rebellion in Stencilton turned my mind to see something that I hadn’t seen before. You all, being unusually discerning and thoughtful web surfers, are probably way ahead of me on this. I’m sure, for instance, that David has said it before somewhere.
I was struck by the fact that the revolution in Stencilton had to make do without grafitti on the walls. There is no user-alterable landscape feature in the game, apart from moving objects from one place to another.
I was struck by Meyrowitz’s description of the one-way-ness of web-page composition.
I was struck by David Weinberger’s persistence at pushing a spatial/“place-ial” metaphor for the Web (this time, I’m not quibbling about that metaphor, so readers can heave a sigh of relief).
And the penny dropped, and I saw the Web as a vast MUD, but one in which the only thing players can do is read their ways from one poster-covered wall to another. Some of us devote energy to plastering more and more onto our walls; others just browse. But despite all the breakthroughs we’ve made in transforming the media landscape, we online grafitti artists each stake out our turf, and visitors stay on the far side of an electronic velvet rope. At most, our compositions refer from one wall to another with hyperlinks. That’s a big change from the three-TV-network, one-or-two-local-newspaper, various-radio-station, broadcast media environment (now anybody who can sit at a terminal in a public library can have a weblog, their own (sponsored) patches of wall on which to speak their minds)—but it’s very far from a fully-realized interactive online environment.
Comments—which I resisted until they came packaged with my Moveable Type installation—are a first step toward something like a more fully interactive Web, but they’re still highly limited (and many of us who host comments are glad they’re so restrictive, and others of us won’t go even so far as to host function-restricted comments). I can’t pile up bouquets of pixellated memorial bouquets at the Paul Wellstone web page. I can’t watch the Duke basketball team practice (and I usually can’t see them play). I can see (mostly “read”) much more than I ever could before, but (in contrast to what users could do in the Lucasfilm Habitat, in contrast to what players can do in the Game NeverEnding, in contrast to what may be opening up on us in Macromedia Contribute) I can affect the online environment in very few ways.
But the pressure is building; the that more people play massively multi-player online games, the more that people get accustomed to being able to leave comments, the less “special” and “different” the online environment begins to feel, then the more people will bring their physical-environment habits and expectations to online interactions. And interesting as things are now, that time is when they really begin to take off.
[I was trying to think of the application that promised a way for viewers to mark up, comment on, interact with the pages they view. Kevin reminded me that it was called “Third Voice.” I’d post a link to their site, but there evidently is no site for them any more.]
Posted by AKMA at November 14, 2002 05:01 PM | TrackBackComments are a first step; trackbacks take it even further, by creating bidirectionality. I think widespread implementation of trackback--even beyond the blog environment--could have a significant impact on how we use and perceive the web.
As to the ability to put up graffiti...seems to me that would require shared spaces to accompany the private ones. I don't particularly want visitors redecorating my blog, any more than I'd want them redecorating my living room. (Although this brings up interesting visions of some kind of "Trading (blog)Spaces.")
Posted by: Liz at November 15, 2002 07:03 AMApparently I dreamed about this topic last night. Woke up and needed to respond again. :-)
Joi Ito has renamed his blog a "conversation with the living web," and there's something in that phrase that resonates with me.
I was thinking about what exploring the web has felt like to me since I started blogging. And it's very different now. I'm not just reading the walls--I'm responding to them. And more importantly, they're changing in response to my input. When I come back the next day, not only has my comment been incorporated, but the "owner" has modified the decor to work around it.
Beyond that, the "walls" speak back to me, directly. I comment, and suddenly there's e-mail in my mailbox. The walls speak back--the walls are inextricably bound up with their owners. The space is truly alive, in a way that invites interaction and shared ownership of ideas.
Posted by: Liz at November 16, 2002 09:26 AMAll these poitns are quite on the mark. I don’t want people grafittizing my home—but I wonder whether the restricted economy of online conversation won’t have to change as online objects and implements attain a currency that now seems only fantastic (though not long ago, the idea of a conversation-ecology of blogs would have seemed a visionary dream).
There’s no intrinsic reason we might not have conventionalized online objects the way we developed smileys: flowers, coins, onions, trophies, posters (we already have something like certificates in the “Five Star Shakespeare Sites” sort of sticker-links). How would some such online furnishings change our behavior in blogs and even on static pages?
Posted by: AKMA at November 16, 2002 10:22 PMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Everard at January 13, 2004 08:46 AMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Beatrice at January 13, 2004 08:46 AMEach Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.
Posted by: Marian at January 13, 2004 08:46 AM