spimes and blogging affordances

July 11th, 2011 • 4 comments library, tech
Tags: affordances, blog, boingboing, bruce sterling, conversation, cory doctorow, design, foursquare, google, individual, jokes, libr559m, location, module 1, school, shaping things, social media, spime, storytelling, twitter, writing

An excellent book about the design of technology and how things work is Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. It’s one of my favourite nonfiction books and it’s all about what our tools allow us to do and make us do. The idea is that technology has moved through different stages through history, affording us different roles.

From Cory Doctorow’s review of the book on BoingBoing:

Sterling traces the history of tools from artifacts (farmers’ tools) to machines (customers’ devices) to products (customers’ purchases) to gizmos (end-users’ platforms) and to the future, which is defined by what Sterling calls Spimes.

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe, and it is the use of this information that informs the most exciting part of Sterling’s argument.

The book came out in 2005, but as Foursquare and all the other locative services continue to gain traction, that spimey future looks a lot closer.

In regards to the specific affordances of blogging I find it funny that as Twitter gets taken up, blogging is where people are going to express their lengthy thoughts. Blogging as the means of talking out serious issues instead of just tossing off a couple of one-liners with a good hashtag isn’t something I expected when I began. But blogging is a platform for putting different subject matter into. Twitter is awesome for jokes and conversation. Way better than a blog where you have to go through the monumental effort of publishing your text. It takes multiples of seconds to log in and pick New Post and all that. So terribly slow. (And seriously, as qwerty keyboards on phones are replaced with touchscreens the annoyance of typing out anything more than 140 characters at a time does make Twitter more attractive.)

And then there’s this interesting post on how Twitter beats Google+, which twists the idea of expressing complete thoughts from a single brain further. The thesis there is that G+ isn’t a new enough medium, because storytelling there feels too much like blogging, and isn’t as collaborative as the exquisite corpseishness that is Twitter.

But maybe I’m just a stick in the mud with wanting things to come from one mind and human’s fingers (ignoring the publishing machine behind everything. I like the myth of the heroic individual that’s enabled by the culture of blogging. What about you?

book review: the curtain

October 10th, 2010 • books
Tags: agelast, art, confrontation, europe, history, jokes, kafka, milan kundera, nonfiction, novel, pretentious, review, sacrilege, school, the curtain, writing

Reading Milan Kundera essays about topics like Art and The Novel and such always makes me want to be a better writer than I am. To be a bit pretentious because that’s a way of faking yourself out into thinking that maybe you’re doing something worth a damn.

To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional – thus, not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious – is contemptible.

The Curtain is a short book-length essay about art and history and how history has no taste.

The more attentively, fixedly, one observes a reality, the better one sees that it does not correspond to people’s idea of it; under Kafka’s long gaze it is gradually revealed as empty of reason, thus non-reasonable, thus implausible.

And part of what I love about a book like this, even though it’s so European and also so snobby is seeing bits of me reflected in there, like someday I might not make something that’s a piece of shit.

For if agelasts tend to see sacrilege in every joke, it’s because every joke is a sacrilege. There is an irreconcilable incompatibility between the comical and the sacred, and we can only ask where the sacred begins and ends. Is it confined just to the Temple? Or does its domain reach further, does it also annex what are known as the great secular values: maternity, love, patriotism, human dignity?

An important book for me to read. I feel more at odds with this whole idea of being at school learning to do something that’s almost the opposite of art, but being at odds with something is good. Keeps me from being complacent.