Category Archives: Culture: new media

MySpace vs. Facebook

Reader Joe sent me a link to a fascinating story on NPR’s Website — Facebook skews towards white people; MySpace skews towards non-white people:

“I have friends who are white,” says 19-year-old Diego Luna. “They are my white people friends and they are mostly on Facebook. That’s why I use Facebook. My brown people are on MySpace.”

The class laughs nervously at his description, and then they agree. Benito Rodriguez, 16, adds, “Not to be racist or anything, but there’s more white kids on Facebook.”

Furthermore, Facebook skews towards more affluent people. MySpace, on the other hand, attracts more artists and lots more musicians.

Anybody want to guess how many Unitarian Universalist churches have MySpace pages?

Improved communication tools…

Google is trumpeting another revolution: Google Wave, a new online communication tool. This video makes Google Wave look pretty good — the best of email, Facebook, online collaboration, SMS, etc., all rolled into one user-friendly package. But Wave is still in development, and we’ll have to wait and see if it turns out to be the real thing, or just another clunky dead-end.

Even if Google Wave turns out to be crap, I will say we are overdue for some kind of improved communication tool. Here in the Palo Alto church, we do a fair amount of online collaboration and communication, and we’d be hard-pressed to function without it. Non-profit organizations have to make increasingly efficient use of staff time and volunteer time (and I think the Great Recession has accelerated this process), but the tools we currently have available to us feel clunky. Email is essential, but we all know how awkward email can be. Google Docs and other online collaboration tools work well, but they are very limited. Texting works for me, but the only people who text are people my age or younger, and texting does not easily lend itself to conversations involving multiple people. Blogging is another great tool, for those of us who read and/or write blogs. Most of all, I do think it would be nice to have something that integrated all these disparate communication tools, and the real genius of Google Wave might be the idea of having all these different communication tools integrated into one place.

Update 4 August 2010: Google has announced it will no longer continue to support Wave. This comes not long after Facebook passed half a billion users.

Books and libraries

We haven’t completely unpacked yet, but we are mostly done. The bulk of my possessions consists of books, and I have most of my books unpacked and placed into book cases.

By Wednesday, I had gotten most of my professional books into the bookcases in my office at church. On Thursday, I noticed that I started thinking differently: I was thinking about a work-related problem, and I knew part of the answer was to be found in a book that I owned, and I walked over to the shelf and pulled that book out. A week ago, I would not have been able to find that book; and a week ago, I simply ignored that problem.

The theory of distributed cognition suggests that tools contain a measure of accumulated wisdom. A crosscut panel saw, for example, contains accumulated wisdom on one way of cutting wood (whereas a coping saw contains a somewhat different accumulation of wisdom on cutting wood). I used to work for a cabinetmaker, and saws and other tools shape both your body and your mind: using a Western-style crosscut panel saw strengthens certain muscles, and makes your mind think about wood in certain ways; if you then try to use a Japanese-style pull saw, you find that you use different muscles, and you also find that you have to think about wood in a different way.

But it’s not just individual tools which contain distributed cognition. When I worked for the cabinetmaker, over time I came to realize that the layout of his shop also contained accumulated wisdom: the way he organized his workbenches and big machines shaped the way we thought about making things, and shaped our work physically as well. Not only that, but the toolboxes that he carried to job sites were also a form of distributed cognition. Thus, tools which are in themselves a kind of distributed cognition can be assembled in arrangements which are yet another layer of distributed cognition.

A library, whether a personal library or an institution’s library, is a form of distributed cognition that is similar to the cabinetmaker’s shop. An individual book is one form of distributed cognition (obviously); but a library, the way it is arranged, the books that are in it and the books that are not in it, is another form of distributed cognition. I learned how to lay out my personal library both from spending a great deal of time in institutional libraries, as well as from looking at the personal libraries of friends and mentors in my field; another influence on my personal library has been syllabuses from graduate school courses. The Library of Congress cataloguing system and the Dewey Decimal system offer ways to systematically arrange human knowledge (as it is contained in books); and each profession has its own ways of organizing the knowledge essential to that profession. Professionally speaking, I think more clearly when I can get at my professional library.

One of my frustrations with Google Books is that the books within it are poorly organized; Google wants you to browse its online books using its search engine, but search engines contain very little in the way of distributed cognition. Books and libraries are highly evolved and subtle technologies; by comparison, today’s e-books and e-libraries are in many ways crude and clumsy technologies.

Yes, this is big.

Forget the accusations that George Bush planned the war in Iraq from his earliest days in office. The really big news was released yesterday on the Official Google blog:

[T]oday, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome [Web browser] — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

That sound you just heard was Microsoft’s lawyers figuring out how to prompt anti-trust regulators to take action against Google. That other sound you just heard was everyone else in the world sniggering at the thought of Microsoft cooperating with anti-trust regulators.

Aside from the sniggering, Google’s new OS has the potential to really change the way we think about the Web. Imagine an operating system that is fast, small, stable, and extremely resistant to online security threats. And imagine that operating system is opensource so that a community of programmers can keep it safe, and develop new functionalities for it. If Google can actually deliver such a product, this really could be a big deal.

Why? Because with a free OS, you should be able to buy a netbook for a couple hundred bucks. That netbook will be smaller and lighter than your current laptop, so you won’t care if it gets stolen (and if it does get stolen, all your data will be online, not on the netbook). So you’ll leave your current laptop at home, and when it’s time to replace it, you’ll buy a less-expensive but more powerful desktop machine (and you won’t have to worry about transferring data from the netbook to the desktop machine because the netbook’s data will be online). Or if all you have right now is a desktop machine, you will be more likely to get a netbook.

At this point, all the Linux fans will rear up and point out (rightly) that the Google OS is little more than a stripped-down version of Linux. This is true, but lots of people are already using GMail and Google Docs (and who would never use Linux because of its geeky reputation), and they will just assume that Google’s OS is going to be easy to use.

So this is big. It is not huge, nor will it threaten Computing As We Know It. But it’s big.

Indexing

I am deep in the process of creating an index for this book project I’m working on. Who knew indexing could be so much fun? It’s just as much fun as mapping out all the links in a fairly large Web site — for after all, a book with an index is merely another kind of hypertext, using slower technology.

Media consumption habits

I live in a city which is very, shall we say, traditional. Many people do not bother with computers, unless they have to use them at work. Whereas all my media consumption happens online. Here’s a conversation I had recently:

Other person: So did you watch the inaguration?

Me: Yeah, I watched it on the BBC Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads. Pause. Other person: Oh. So, um, did, you hear Obama’s speech? …obviously assuming I had not…

Me: Oh, yeah, great speech, loved it.

Yet while I spend hours each day online, I never watch broadcast television, I don’t play video games, I don’t go to movies, and I hardly ever listen to the radio. As a result, my media consumption is pretty much out of synch with the surrounding community. Another typical conversation:

Other person: So why don’t you ever print up copies of your sermons?

Me: I put nearly all my sermons up on my Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads.

Me: Um, you can get to them from the church Web site.

Other person looks at me like I have two heads.

Me: Um, just call the church office and tell Linda which sermon you want, and she’ll mail you a copy.

Other person: OK, thanks!

Me, sotto voce: I’m such a geek.

Paper no longer

Dan Kennedy reports that the Christian Science Monitor will move to a Web-based publication in a few months. They’ll still produce a weekly paper version for them that wants to pay for it, but the main publication will be online only. Why the switch? If you don’t have to sell ads, Web publishing is cheaper.

Over here in Unitarian Universalist land, I fully expect that UU World magazine will be primarily Web-based within a few years. Given the state of the economy, and the probably drop in income from this year’s Annual Fund, the person we elect as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association in June, 2009, might choose to make that switch sooner rather than later.

Monty Python and cultural commentary on American politics

Seesmic, the video microblogging site, has decided to move into political commentary — sort of. Well, really we should call it cultural commentary.

Seesmic did an interview with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, during which they asked him his opinion of Sarah Palin. You don’t have to be a member of Seesmic to watch — they’ve posted it on Youtube. Cleese is not an acute political observer, and it’s clear that because he doesn’t agree with her politics he gives her no credit whatsoever. But this interview isn’t political commentary, it’s cultural commentary. By listening to Cleese in this interview you get a sense of what a skilled professional actor sees when he looks at an American politician. Here’s a transcript of the relevant portion of the interview:

“People watching her [Sarah Palin] on television, can they not see that she’s basically learned certain speeches? And she does them very well, she’s got a very good memory. But it’s like a nice-looking parrot. The parrot speaks beautifully, and kinda says ‘Aw, shucks,’ every now and again, but doesn’t really have any understanding of the meaning of the words it is producing, even though it’s producing them very accurately. And she’s been in these training sessions with Cheney’s pals, and she’s learned these speeches, and the extraordinary thing is that so many people are taken in by it.”

Once you remove the ad hominem bits and his obvious political bias, Cleese’s cultural critique of Palin is quite interesting. He’s basically saying that she’s very good at making her hearers feel that she knows what she’s talking about. But Cleese forgets that this is exactly what every politician does, and has been doing for thousands of years; this is simply the nature of political rhetoric, and has been at least since the time of Aristotle. Here’s some of what Aristotle has to say about political rhetoric:

“Since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions — the hearers decide between one political speaker and another… — the orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind. Particularly in political oratory, but also in lawsuits, it adds much to an orator’s influence that his own character should look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings toward his hearers; and also that his hearers should be in the right frame of mind. That the orator’s own character should look right is particularly important in political speaking…. When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity….” [The Rhetoric, Bk. 2, ch. 1, 1377b21-1378a1, trans. Richard McKeon]

So a deepeer cultural commentary on contemporary American political discourse has to take into account that all the tricks used by today’s politicians are really thousands of years old. Political rhetoric is used to sway the emotions, in order to cause people to make decisions. Today politicians use mass meida to reach more people, but the basic principles remain the same. Reading through Aristotle’s Rhetoric has been making me calmer in this very stressful presidential election season — I can see that politics is not much different now than it was in ancient Greece.

Fat cat

And no, the fat cat to whom I’m referring is not Richard Fuld, the former president of Lehman Brothers who received obscene amounts of money for driving that bank into bankruptcy. I mean a literal fat cat, who goes by the name of Mosby. Mosby is trying to lose weight, and he is keeping a blog of his progress.

Well, actually, he’s keeping a blog of his lack of progress because he can no more resist eating kitty treats than Richard Fuld could resist taking home tens of millions of dollars in spite of incompetent performance. The URI of Mosby’s blog is walkingottoman.blogspot.com/ — and yes,Mosby does indeed look like a walking ottoman.