Both the fact and ideation of ubiquitous computing and its characteristic embeddedness has driven the need for an exploration of new human-computer relations, shifting, in one description, the research motto from ‘proactive computing’ to ‘proactive people’ (Rogers et al., 2006). The shift arises not only from a new conception of human/machine symbiosis – of the sort originally theorized and supported by Licklider (1960), towards mutual proactivity – but also from a challenge from within the field of computer science itself. Essentially, this shift has been accompanied by a transformation of the understanding of what computation is and how it might be done, dislodging a model in which computation is seen as a series of fixed functions that are outlined to achieve a certain specified goal. Computation as something ‘centralized, sequential and result-oriented’ and primarily focused on the execution of calculation, moves tentatively or eagerly, but perhaps inexorably, towards an understanding of ‘computation as interaction’ (Stein, 1999: 1). Here, dynamic relations become key. A computation does not simply equal the achievement of a result, measured by an ever increasing metric of acceleration towards that result, but tends towards a collaboration with the user or other elements in a wider ecology, understood through a connective multiplication of the capacities of each entity in the computational composition.

~ Matthew Fuller & Sónia Matos @ Fibreculture (via)

In 2005 I set out to follow a hunch that cyberspace is permeated with the language of nature. Six years later my notebooks are groaning with proof that I was right, but until very recently I still couldn’t explain why we do this. However, I now suspect that the biophilia hypothesis might hold the key. Furthermore, as my forthcoming book will show, cyberspace is as drenched in biophilia as any other human environment, and that leads me to tentatively propose a new term built on Wilson’s original theory. I call it technobiophilia, ‘the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology’. It’s a somewhat clunky word and perhaps rather too stylised for its own good. I may yet change my mind about using it, but for the moment I’m offering it up as a way of getting to grips with the phenomena I’m working hard to understand. And time is pressing — the manuscript is due very soon….

~ Sue Thomas

Sun sets on Second Life

Perhaps video games are preserving our experience with the environment. In a landscape polluted by smog and litter, box stores, fast food chains, more subdivisions and ever more streets it becomes harder and harder to find parks and patches of woods preserved for our enjoyment. Many of us spend twelve to fourteen hours a day working inside, and by the time we actually have time to enjoy the sweet chirping of birds, it is too late in the day. But, I can turn on my Xbox and ride my horse for hours.

@ Not your mama’s gamer

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

~ Walter Benjamin

This blurry, distanced, vaguely self-loathing experience is recognizable to anyone who has surfed the Internet. Studies, such as those cited in Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” have found that we do not truly engage in online content, preferring to “power browse.” We scan the headlines for information or search for items of temporary entertainment value. Our minds are working to become more like search engines, repositories of facts and images that are neither connected by argument nor weighed down by sentiment. Though there is plenty of potential interest to see and listen to online, the absence of our other three senses and the closely related sensory activity of movement prevents digital experiences from engaging us and becoming meaningful in the way that physical places and real-world interactions can and do.

~ Jennifer Acker @ The New Inquiry

As wholeheartedly as I agree with Acker’s endorsement of singular, focused reading and on the ground presence as crucial means of engaging the local and immediate (both a place itself, and how we as bodies and minds occupy that place), I wonder if the online/offline divide needs to be so absolute. That question of how the two might overlap was one of the driving questions of The BLG — when the web becomes our primary lens for viewing the world, are we always “online,” even when far off the grid? But while a goofy little story about a hermit doesn’t have much practical use, work by my colleague and friend Eric Gordon and his various co-authors does: rather than always distract us from place, a ubiquitous web can enhance and embolden our sense of place, sparking and supporting local, embodied action and awareness.

And I think that double (dis)placement is creeping into literature, too: a novel like Tom McCarthy’s C, for instance is both richly descriptive of place and constantly aware of the wireless ties that bind one place to another and one body to all the other places it might also be (even in disembodied fashion) at that same moment. And the transcontinental cellphone conversation in Toussaint’s Running Away (so wonderfully discussed on Bookworm).

Claude Shannon, a father of Information Science, had to call the differences that move through telephone wires something. He picked “information,” a term that had meant, roughly, something that you hadnt known, or the content of written tables. Had he called it “data,” or “patterns,” or “differences,” or “Arthur,” we would have skipped right past one of the false continuities: from information to knowledge. We would have had the Age of Patterns, characterized by an abundance of patterns of difference, and we wouldn’t have thought that that has anything much at all to do with knowledge. But, because traditional information had something to do with expanding what we know, we tricked ourselves into thinking that our modern technology is about making us smarter. With an abundance of information, it seems we must be gaining more knowledge. With an abundance of patterns, or differences, or of arthurs, it would not have seemed so.

The new age is one of connection. This is less misleading, for it has us looking for its effect on how we connect with one another, how we connect our ideas, and how we connect our connections. And these are, I believe, the right places to be looking.

~ David Weinberger

The flyleaf of The Shallows, subtitled ‘How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember’ states that the book is a ‘revelatory reminder of how far the internet has become enmeshed in our daily existence and is affecting the way we think’. Carr spends the first hundred pages or so outlining the history of writing and reading along with a summary of recent neuroscience research.

It was an enjoyable survey but as I read I was also aware that something was really nagging at me. It was a beautiful late summer afternoon as my train wound its way south through the English Midlands, but I wasn’t seeing any of it because, as they say, I had my nose in a book. Green meadows and golden fields passed along my peripheral vision in a moving ribbon of countryside but I didn’t really absorb the view because I was reading a book about how distracting computers can be. In one sense you might say that I was proving Carr’s point that the wired condition makes it difficult to focus any more, but in another sense I ask myself whether that really matters.

~ Sue Thomas

One of the books I’m most looking forward to in coming months is Sue Thomas’ Nature and Cyberspace: The Wild Surmise. I returned often to her blog — where the book has been developing — while writing The Bee-Loud Glade, because this question of what it means to pay attention, and to what we should pay attention, when living in a world where nature is as mediated and complicated (and webbed!) as the web, was pretty central to the story I wanted to tell about my decorative hermit Finch and his garden.

Today’s audience does not know what to make of the colonial almanac because most people, historians included, have never really known how to talk about it. Was it a calendar? A collection of essays? A rudimentary calculator? A political commentator? A timepiece? A local directory? A diary? Uh-huh. It was all that and more. It could be different things to different people. The problem with Tyler’s assessment, and those of many scholars thereafter, was that he categorized the almanac as literature. That placed the almanac at a real disadvantage. It simply does not belong in the same category as Moby Dick. As literature, the humble annual could never measure up. A friend recently hit on a much more appropriate analogy when he likened the almanac to an iPhone. I know, it sounds ludicrous and seriously farfetched. But give me a chance to prove just how apt a comparison it is.

~ Molly McCarthy, Redeeming the Almanac (via)

The situation is now such that social networking shares the same medium as the publication of literature. This has made the relationship between reader and writer, something we’ve become very used to as being utterly distant, too close for comfort. Art, absent the ability to criticize, becomes static and unwilling to grow because it never learns what it needs to do to grow. Online criticism ends up moving toward the opposite extreme of pop culture criticism, the kind of criticism a loving mother would give to their child, self-conscious in its fear of damaging an author’s self-esteem, and saying nothing substantial about the work itself. Online reviewing exists singularly to boost egos within a community. In this environment, silence is the only real critical review.

Online publication is not a real venue for art in the traditional sense, but rather just a curious aspect of social networking for writers. It is a huge creative writing community that publishes in avenues within itself, unable, for fear of damaging itself as a community, to look at itself critically.

@ ABJECTIBLOG

My class was doing small group work, focusing on a challenging passage in Emerson’s Nature, when a student called my attention to a fiery red sunset outside the tall 19thC windows.

I turned out the lights, and in the glow of their iPads, I could see the looks on the students’ faces as they took in the sunset.

~ Jerz