Some links

Last week we talked about some fairly scandalous phenomena like Carrier IQ and Siri's curious pro-life choices. I've since run into a couple of links that help explain both situations... and in Siri's case it shows the linguistic weaknesses of AI present in a program touted for being an advanced, thinking bit of software.

How to Talk to Siri

What is Carrier IQ

Rainbow's End

Vernor Vinge doesn’t create a world as much as he augments our own – and in this way we experience a differently mediated augmented-reality like the citizens of 2025 San Diego.  Technology is such that the world is experienced through digital interfaces and much of what we’ve talked about regarding web 2.0 is woven seamlessly into the everyday lives (and clothes) of every citizen (with few exceptions among technophobes who opt out of those experiences).

In this reality the concept of literacy shifts so that those who are most capable with technology are the most literate which contrasts well with our protagonist who stands as a fading relic of what was once considered the apex of literacy. Robert Gu is an interesting main character with some dynamic experiences: a world-renowned poet who’s mind decays and voice is silenced by Alzheimer’s until he is eventually called out of his coma and hyper-healed by the kind of technology that makes him as irrelevant as he was while in his coma. After some resistance (and clinging to a 30+ year-old operating system) he finally begins to embrace and enjoy the technology that he once feared (even making advancements in certain areas) – reclaiming his literacy.  

For me, the most interesting themes in the book were those that seem to be nearest: superintelligence and augmented reality. Superintelligence might seem a long way off, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t being actively pursued. In the Nick Carr article that we had to read, he included some quotes by the founders of Google:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Augmented reality, on the other hand, already exists in very primitive forms. In some sense our ability to experience locations through check-in programs like Foursquare, Facebook, or Google augment our reality in various ways. Applications like Google Goggles give us a digital lens through which we view the world and gather information about it. Furthermore these programs often give various awards for using them which encourages users to experience digitally-mediated realities.

This is a far cry from the kind of augmented reality that Vinge describes (which reminded me of Minority Report in a lot of ways), but there are early attempts at more significantly augmented realities. Lego and Sony have experimented with augmented reality and have come up with some pretty interesting results. And, under the banner of creepy coincidence, the University of Washington is workingon HUD contact lenses and they are testing them on… rabbits(!).

I surely hope that Karl Pilkington isn’t right about the rest his ideas for the future:

UPDATE: Here is a deeper look into the AR contact lenses: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0

On Pond Skating and Scuba Diving

I wasn't exactly sure how to navigate the many links that were provided for us, but with respect to the few responses to Carr's article that I did read, I think Clay Shirky raised some important points. Addressing Carr's claim that there will be (and already has been) some cultural sacrifices that have been made with the changing "media landscape," Shirky writes:

...the question we need to be asking isn’t whether there is sacrifice; sacrifice is inevitable with serious change. The question we need to be asking is whether the sacrifice is worth it or, more importantly, what we can do to help make the sacrifice worth it. And the one strategy pretty much guaranteed not to improve anything is hoping that we’ll somehow turn the clock back. This will fail, while neither resuscitating the past nor improving the future.

While I appreciate a lot of what Carr has said about the internet's overall effect on the way we think and read, I do think that he approaches the subject from a certain kind of golden-age orientation (not unlike Postman), which ignores the fact that change has already happened and there isn't any going back. At this point the only hope that Carr has is to attempt to subvert the medium and use it to encourage "deep reading" (which has been done to some respect with long-form, online journalism).

Interestingly, I tried to follow a link to something Andrew Sullivan (easily my favorite journalist) had written on the subject and found this page. Sadly it seems that this "news wall" has fully embraced the pond-skater format and uses visuals to attract and direct viewers (and not necessarily readers), to important stories. There does seem to be some disconnect between a visual index and a typical news story.

In the end I was able to find a quote from Sullivan on the subject that I think takes a moderate approach to the issue that would be worth exploring:

“...are you still reading this, or are you about to click on another link?...We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them.”

A Few More Interesting Links

• The digital revolution has brought about new media genres including the supercut - a genre that I think may have appeared in Postman's nightmares. 
• An interesting look at the design of the future and the functionality of digital tools.
• Hashtagging and collective intelligence.

Online Searches: Quantity vs. Quality

An interesting look into internet-literacy and the younger generations (in)ability to discriminate within search results. An introductory excerpt:

High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

Google and Online Journalism

This is an interesting update that Google is making to its online journalism. It seems to show an appreciation for news-oriented ethos, while reducing the friction between user and information:

Great journalism takes more than facts and figures -- it takes skilled reporters to knit together compelling stories. Knowing who wrote an article can help readers understand the article's context and quality, see more articles by that person, and even interact directly with them. Whole communities can form around prominent contributors, which is why we started showinginformation about content creators next to their material in Google Search.

Accordingly, Google News is rolling out more information about journalists over the next several weeks, starting with English-language editions. When reporters link their Google profile with their articles, Google News now shows the writer’s name and how many Google+ users have that person in their circles. For the lead article for each story, Google News also shows that reporter’s profile picture and enables readers to add them to their Google+ circles right from the Google News homepage.

Social Networks and Teenage Maturation

I enjoyed reading danah boyd's piece on social network sites, and while it focused primarily on MySpace, she makes some relevant points that should be considered in a discussion of Facebook (since MySpace is practically dead for everyone who isn't in an indie-band). She raises a lot of important issues but I found the "Why There?" section most interesting. The question basically asks why do teenagers flock en masse to these social network sites - and the answer seems to be: because we've kicked them out of every other public space and those that they are allowed to participate in are adult-regulated. There used to be spaces (malls, rollerskating rinks, etc) where teenagers could enjoy the company of their peers in a relatively unregulated, public place, but as boyd points out these places have either fallen off the grid (e.g., rollerskating rinks) or restricted access to teenagers (e.g., malls and movie theatres). With nowhere left to turn, teens have flocked to the internet and populated online communities.

There were some interesting commonalities between these spaces and their digital replacements. A heavily modified profile and online persona isn't unlike the teens who would bring a change of clothes to the mall that their parents wouldn't let them leave the house in. While these places were commercially-oriented, they did provide a relatively accessible space wherein groups of friends could be themselves with one another for a period of time without the explicit pressure to conform to the structures inherent in the institutions (e.g., groups of friends could walk around the mall for hours without buying anything, and once you paid to get into Skateland, you could just sit at a table and talk for three hours). Likewise a social component to a dieting site allows likeminded people to talk about television shows and parenting tips. In the end, it doesn't matter where you are but who you are with (and who is watching).

What interests me, however, is not the similarities but the differences between online and these "physically-oriented" communities. Who you hung out with at the mall or which friends you invited skating could create a significant amount of drama at the lunch table on Monday. At the time when boyd wrote this article, that kind of tension existed in social network sites (e.g., MySpace's top 8 friends). But as Facebook and Twitter have clobbered all other social networks, they've eliminated a lot of those politics. boyd talks about teens maturing through trial and error on these sites the way they would have in physical spaces before - but I wonder if the stakes are really as high. Comments can be deleted, profiles can be changed, and what is private and public can be changed with a click.

This gets into something I'm working on for my independent study regarding frictionless online experiences. In sum, the heavy hitters in the digital world want to make online experiences as "frictionless" (their word) as possible - significantly reducing the kind of resistance that real-world experience might offer. At the most basic level, for example, writing happy birthday on someone's wall is significantly easier than buying and sending a birthday card (and rather than watching a calendar, Facebook will notify you when a birthday is coming up). This kind of friction-reduction allows a user to maintain far more relationships than one could hope to cultivate offline. So my question is: does this kind of community or public space really offer the kind of trial-and-error-experiences that boyd suggests are so important in teenage maturation and socialization? And what about the explosion of adult participation in Facebook? Eventually going to Skateland became uncool - but largely because I had other things to do. But with the ease of accessibility and the integration with commonly used tools, will a person who started using Facebook in high school decide it isn't cool six years later? I'm "friends" with enough Facebook users entering into proper adulthood to suggest otherwise.