David begins his talk about explaining the mistake of conflating “the Web” with the economic opportunities that the Web represented. First, he points out, he has many more friends since the Web exploded into our lives; he knows more people, and he knows people who can connect him to other people. Second, we now can safely assume that we can get more information about any topic. Whereas before, our access to information was heavily restricted and heavily mediated; now, there’s always another source, another site where we can learn more. Third, every day David receives suggestions about interesting and amazing things from others who passed word along. A global recommendation system has sprung up, making us interested in things we never knew we would be interested in. While there’s value to straining toward objectivity, the Web provides a massively interlinked intersubjective network, giving some of the weight that objectivity always used to have. Fourth, the Web has enriched cooperation (among David’s daughter and her friends, anyway) on homework and other such endeavors. The Web has effectively brought about social learning. Fifth, a generation of kids has grown up expecting that they can make their voices heard in public: in Amazon reviews, in weblogs, in chat rooms.
So the Web is a big deal. The Bubble was just money.
The Web is a weird place, but also really familiar. ItÕs a conundrum, since weird things usually donÕt succeed, they donÕt get adopted Ņ but the weird Web hasnÕt stopped increasing in adoption rate. ItÕs weird, because we relate to our 2-dimensional monitor screens as though they were genuine Ōportals.Ķ Likewise, the key metaphor for Web information is the page Ņ but these pages both invite you to go elsewhere, and try to hold your attention.
So the Web is so weird that categories that make real sense in the physical world donÕt work the same way with hyperlinked communication. This bizarre, weird place feels familiar to us.
Why is it familiar?
The Matrix: Reloaded opened today. (David thought The Matrix was anti-Heideggerian; our beliefs about our world are so out of whack with relation to the way we are in the real world, that our way of life now defines alienation.) The fact that we even understand the concept of The Matrix of how alienated we are. Something that used to be embedded in human experience has been ripped out, withered and dried, and thatÕs Ōknowledge.Ķ ŌKnowledgeĶ started out in genuine human needs in the Greek polis; over time, knowledge has been thinned down to the point that it amounts only to the least robust senses of our humanity. For example, Ray KurzweilÕs Age of Spiritual Machines waxes techno-philosophical on the timing of the trans-human transition, when weÕll be able to download a human brainÕs information into a silicon medium. David proposes that we think of a different binary medium: beer cans (up means 1, down means 0). If you think about a hundred million beer cans being flipped up and down in synchronous patterns, you can replicate the binary data on the silicon chip Ņ but if we look at a vast sea of flipping beer cans, weÕre a good deal more resistant to a romantic transhumanist vision. ThatÕs because weÕre more alienated from our knowledge.
One consequence of this alienation and confusion is the naive belief that we recreate in our heads a picture of the world the way it is, and if it corresponds to reality, weÕre sane, and if it doesnÕt correspond, weÕre deluded. Bad, bad, bad. Knowledge is not the same thing as information processing; when you kiss your beloved, you're not processing information about pressure on your lips and thermal changes, youÕre kissing someone.
[Here David embarks on a long story about buying a washing machine. Kenmore or Maytag? Why did David choose the machine he did? He chose the one he chose because of what he found out about the two models in question from the Web; he would never, ever, have found out the knowledge that influenced his decision from salespeople. The knowledge that influenced David was real, embedded, human knowledge Ņ not the dessicated information that passes as knowledge in our alienated culture.]
So David loves the way voice and knowledge are connected, which has always been the case until we got self-conscious about knowledge, so that knowledge had to be the same no matter who says it. On the Web, we can speak in our own voices in a new public setting. Our voices are passion-based, theyÕre experimental, theyÕre deeply social. Contrariwise, institutions strive to restrict voice and rhetoric.
So David wants to talk about books and authority. He asks about the Wikipedia (this is beginning to reiterate what we talked about in Nashville). The effect of wikis generates social interactions that actually build up information, knowledge, and productive educational material. Is this knowledge anarchy? Any Bozo on earth who wants to can vandalize this encyclopedia; this is the death of knowledge. But David argues, instead this is the emergence of multi-subjective, personal, knowledge unlike anything weÕve seen before. Wikis and weblogs replace the gatekeeper functions that restricted access to authorized knowledge with a filiated cacophony of passionate, vital opinion. Now heÕs on about books and experts again; IÕm glad that the Vanderbilt faculty isnÕt here to get edgy all over again.
The Web is a web of pages, but more important, itÕs a web of links. Tim Berners-Lee thought that scientists would use links for dynamic footnotes; he was right, except itÕs everyone using links for dynamic connections, not footnotes. ItÕs an economy of generosity. People are making pages for others because they care. The Kenmore page that tries to trap you on their site, that links only to other Kenmore pages, but everyone else provides links that attract you away from their sites. ThatÕs small Ņ but it means something; it shows humans demonstrating generosity to one another. This web of sociality makes the Web (Ōworld wideĶ style) an exemplar of whatÕs best about humanity, and thatÕs what makes the Web look familiar: it shows us ourselves at our best.
Jim McGee asks David about voice and knowledge: he sees in himself (post-blogging) a greater willingness to let his voice back into other things he does. Does David? David sees mixed signals. Customers hate it when they talk to robots at customer care centers, but industries hate to let their customer service departments off script. But heÕs found more and more clients that are willing to let their customer care reps talk with human voices.
If the Web were interviewing for a job, where would it want to be in five years? Commercialism or idealism? David says, he doesnÕknow; if he had a clear idea, it wouldnÕt account for the wildly innovative texture of the internet. He cites the end-to-end argument: take all the stuff out of the communication part of the network, and put the stuff at the ends. The internet has shown the innovative power of the edges. The [built-in] openness of the internet will ensure that weÕll be surprised by what comes next. HeÕs excited about Open Spectrum.
Trevor picks up on DavidÕs characterization of knowledge as embodied. When he goes online, what kind of body does he leave behind, and what kind of body does he take with him? His experience on the Web is really embodied in a certain way; what kind of way? Does David see our notions of ŌbodyĶ changing? David agrees that this is one of the hard ones, harder than thinking about our selves on the Web. The flip side of our alienation from knowledge is an alienation from our bodies, which become an inessential substrate for information. So itÕs incredibly hard. He cites a weird line of thought that he cites in Small Pieces: if you go up a level of abstraction from physical bodies and try to explain what itÕs like to have a body, what we do online is a lot like what we do in the physical world. We have points of view, we care about what is proper to us, all represented in a non-bodily space. That idea misses the point that bodies refuse to be abstracted Ņ and David doesnÕt know what to do with that. Trevor mentioned that ŌtouchĶ is absent from these discourses; though we may devise haptic technologies, these are still alienated from whatÕs most important about touch.
Tripp suggests that the body is abstracted (in one mode) and communicated identity is embodied in ways that enrich one another. David responds hesitantly. Jane responds that embodied relationships canÕt be complete, full relationships without physical presence. It reveals and shares some stuff that physical presence doesnÕt, but it isnÕt sufficient in and of itself. Heather adds that her reading of friendsÕ blogs is enhanced by knowing people physically. David isnÕt sure. Ruth notes that as David pointed out, we have different voices in different settings; our online voices add another context for voice, not necessarily better or worse, complete or incomplete.
Intense theological wrassling ensues, about which IÕm too involved to keep typing.
Posted by AKMA at May 15, 2003 07:39 PM | TrackBackWhen I read the final line of this post:
Intense theological wrassling ensues, about which I'm too involved to keep typing.
I thought "Ah, man, I'd love to know what some of that was. So, if you recall any, I'd love to continue reading more of what you were recounting before, as it expands into "theological wrassling".
Dale
Posted by: Dale Lature at May 17, 2003 02:57 PMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Annabella at January 13, 2004 11:22 AMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Chroseus at January 13, 2004 11:23 AMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Sarah at January 13, 2004 11:24 AM