Sam and I have been working again on the eigenvectors paper - trying to get an analytical hold on the design principles that operate on (digital) media and mediation.

see my comments on digital humanities last year

Archaeology - looking at the design of things, in time, history, in relation to materiality.

Made some breakthroughs
- we had begun with the aim of developing some media eigenvectors - independent summaries of complexity and variability - we now realize that the notion of eigenvector (as an independent summary) is not right for what we are doing - we are developing a set of interrelated elements
- digital media are material processes (operations performed, such as computation)
- that an archaeology of media involves a focus on this materiality, in a genealogical frame

Hopefully this comes through in what we have written here.

Aims

to discuss and describe media in the abstract, that is as distinct from technical and material properties
to develop a set of terms and methodologies for proactive design of media forms - tools for product design

These terms will also function as components of a history of media and of (media) design.

Premise and timeliness - media and design in the light of the digital

Design is here seen as heterogeneous engineering (that is not presupposing any particular definitions of materiality, virtuality, the technical or the cultural) and not presupposing anything about the components (people, materials, values, concepts).

The aims imply an analysis of the components of product design today in a digital world - creativity, collaboration, research, analysis, styles, and with the digital involving an erosion of conventional distance between the real and the virtual.

The digitization of media removes artifacts from material culture. This allows a more rigorous and abstract analysis of media forms and a more deliberate construction of them for specific tasks. The goal is to put forward a set of well-defined terms and methods for doing this analysis and construction.

Alternate way of expressing this: the digitization of media replaces the media artifacts of material culture with different artifacts of digital culture.
(See also the Metamedia Lab discussion document on digital media as modes of engagement)

Definition of medium

A medium is a formalized method for conveying structured information to some participants (known or unknown). The manner in which this happens is subject to control and negotiation. Usually there has to be some agreement over encoding and decryption. Historically the notion of medium has been intimately associated with and constrained by material and technology, e.g. paint, paper, etc. And also certain institutional forms that controlled the technology. Now it’s becoming less constrained because of the increasing digital nature of communication. More worldly information is becoming fungible and therefore amenable to computational processing and therefore transformation between media forms is accelerating.

In this regard it is better to think of medium as process of mediation, and as mode of engagement and symbolic manipulation.

More and more parts of society and culture are becoming available to computation and therefore can be considered as media - as mediation, as modes of engagement.

The digital does not just mean static information - it is about computation - process, actions performed, temporal structure, context,
(the equivalent of archaeology in the digital realm is to understand these processes - to track back from digital form - perform genealogical analysis).

All digital media are trivially reducible to binary data. There is no literal materiality at this level. Materiality is in the algorithmic context of the media form - the compression, encryption, interaction, latency, redundancy and temporal context of the media form. This is the digital equivalent of materiality - the context in which the content of a digital media form has to be understood, manipulated and transformed.

This grounds the ideas here in the traditional study of culture.

Conventional terms/definitions/components

Media Studies are well established as a branch of cultural studies. Topic - cultural production.
Consider also the importance of the theme of creativity - creating in a cultural sphere.
(And here culture is often oppposed to material infrastructures in that it is seen to consist of ideas, values, images/representations.)

Components of such a cultural studies

technology - eg TV
tools as extensions of the person and the group
material form - paint, film, paper
rules and norms
qualifications for entry
archives/storage
gatekeepers
organisational architectures - TV studio, movie studio
groups, communities, producers, consumers, institutions, organizations
relations of cultural production
power relations - access, control
ideology critique - mass media as ideological state apparatuses
semiotics - communication - signifier-signified-referent
narratology and applications of literary theory/cultural theory
media history

media components/parameters - ELEMENTS

Latency

The delay from changing information to it being consumed by other participants. E.g. IM is extremely low latency, email has this weird asymmetric latency - it’s fast to respond but may be slow to read. Newspapers are very slow. Blogs are very fast. Most digital media have low latency. Except eg digital layout for conventional print media.
People notice latency.

Latency is often relative to expectations within the task at hand. A 10 second delay in the context of IM is noticeable and annoying, but in the context of web publishing, is nothing. Hydra is another good example of this.

Persistence

How robust the medium is, how long the data persist without active maintence. Email is fairly persistent, IM is not. Documents are mostly about persistence.
issue here of materiality and curation - in relation to archives
matter here of the archaeology of media

Redundancy

Persistence is related to redundancy. Digitization gives us the choice of how much redundancy we want, and this is an economic choice and we always choose the short-term most economically efficient path. So, we tend to have very ephemeral digital media, because there’s no (economically acceptable) way to choose robustness.

Temporal Redundancy - data can be redundant across time, as in a source code control system where a given document has an existence in a timeline (tree), and its relationship between other versions and branches is as important as its current state. ie it has a significant genealogy. Archives are an aspect.

Spatial redundancy - local and distributed. Local means, how high a degree of error correcting is in the actual format. Distributed means, how many copies of a given bit of media are there in the world. - The latter meaning is typically ignored in most modern systems, except for specific applications.

Format redundancy (algorithmic or combinatorial) - a good example of this is error correcting codes - the data can be locally redundant, so small damages to the data can be repaired. DNA is a good example of this as well. This property is definitionally in opposition to compression and efficiency, and is typically referred to as entropy in information science literature.

Visuality

‘realness’ - richness - how close to human senses the final output is. Email (text) is artificial, not really directly experienced, but cerebrelly experienced. Video or sound is more directly experienced. A medium is said to be “rich” if it facilitates a more direct experience for the end user, ‘poor’ if it does not. Richness is often a sideeffect and not inherent in the medium, e.g. sending images via email. This is an unique vector - it is subjective, and not an inherent property of the medium.

Raw email text may not be very rich - is very flat - a haiku may be very rich - layout may increase the richness of text.
NB McLuhan?s hot and cold media

I (MS) think of this as something to do with people liking naturalistic media.

Complexity

In an information sense this is related to entropy (how much disorder is there?) eg a string of digits is non-entropic because it can be easily compressed - compression is about finding non-entropy/order - and high entropy looks like random noise.

Digital media can be more complex - they are more entropic - more difficult to compress. But, this is not inherently true. The previous sentence is much easier to compress as ascii text than as an analog waveform (spoken text). Digital media are often more capable of describing complex structure, though even here there are challenges from the analog world (e.g. the fractal nature of physical items).

Encryption

- compression is related to encryption (the encrypted form looks highly entropic)

A painting therefore doesn?t look very complex - eg digitally curating the Mona Lisa might result in a high res compressed file of 10MB - but this is not very redundant.

Network topology

- the nature of the transmitting community and audience addressed. Perhaps this might be more generally described as the nature of the communication network (graph). This gets even more complicated with things like dark nets where the nodes are connected, but hidden from each other. (NB Latour on black boxing).
A broadcast factor (1-1, M-M, etc)
Node-link balance
how much priority is given one over the other
dendritic - hierarchical/linear/distributed structures

Transparency

can you see who you are talking to?
why does it matter?

Computational accessibility and Structure/formalism

Text vs video vs paint vs XML - eg trying to create semantic webs - semantic computation as a project that ignores (usually) the sociology, the culture
a new factor is available computing power - Google has lots of computing power

Programming language, HTML, vs raw text, etc - the degree to which it is parsable (and is therefore computationally accessible). Going back to digital materiality, this is how well you can describe the desired mode of interaction with the content. E.g. an HTML parser is rigidly describable, a parser for english text is not. This can also have a social element, depending on how much cultural data the reader needs to decode the content.

Structure and CA, are often at odds with people. This can be solved, and is more and more, with additional computation. eg Google. Or, my ‘mood indicator’ on my email program, etc.

Lots to think about here with respect to grammar and formal anaylsis.

NB also langue/parole

Forgivingness

How well a message has to adhere to the agreed format to be accepted. HTML is a not well specified media form, so the browsers are typically forgiving. But, JPEG is well specified, and the JPEG parsers are not forgiving. Because most programmers have programmer mind and are themselves rigid, most digital media to date has also been rigid. HTML isn’t only because of the intrusion of lots of non-programmer minds into the medium.

Accessability

If normal people can author a media form directly, it tends to be more forgiving (e.g. HTML vs JPEG).

Temporal structure

The ability to capture, index, retrieve data over time.
also - synchronous communication/concurrence - also NB speech and text, image v movie
also genealogy - tracking changes in a wiki

genealogy is a crucial component in new digital media

genealogy (tracking changes in a text eg) has become cheap

Transactional costs

- go down across the board with computation and digitization. E.g. painting with oil vs painting with Painter Pro. wet plaster v Epson printer - NB the sociology of this and matters of democratization/ status/prestige goods/media) WWW has low transactional costs v TV (with its studios, licenses, organizations)

Maintenance costs

- are related to compression, richness, redundancy, and even the physical form.

Network effect/stickiness

- how easy it is to transfer content from one media form to another. ASCII text is easy, it’s an open, simple format with a lot of tools. Word is hard, they deliberately obfuscate and complicate the format, and change it often. There’s a high barrier to entry to write any kind of transfer tool.
eg everyone uses Word, and hates it, and Powerpoint doesn’t work.

Centralization

how ditributed, controled
part of network topology, and more

Interactivity

Personal accountability/anonymity - whether a participant is known or anonymous, affects the structure and nature of interaction.

notes

What we’ve found is that media always has a social context, even when there is no physical manifestation.

We need some vectors with more social/political implications - control, accessibility, hierarchy.

NB cross linkages
persistence/robustness/archive - related to complexity, entropy
Examples, with their vectors
- email
- Hydra
- blogs
- video
- instant messaging
- google
- newsgroups
Analytical methodologies

event engineering - this is partly what the new media do
and media are now so evidently about social/cultural groups making themselves via things/interactions/information transfers - as they always were
what does it mean now to invent a new medium?
eg - is this blog a medium?

Media|Archaeology

Sam and I have been talking about his thoughts on media and archaeology, and about the Metamedia lab for a few months now - I have pulled together some of the highlights.

The main point is about setting up a dialogue between Sam’s world of information science and software design, and mine of archaeology and material culture.

An idea for Traumwerk

Traumwerk is our wiki.

Monday 11 Nov 2002

Sam to Michael

BTW - I had another idea for all this: do some kind of text analysis on each entry you type in to try to find ‘matching’ entries in some sense, richer than just matching on single words. The idea being to have the system spot people who are talking about related things or things from the same point of view, and bring them together automatically. Some of this might just come out of the organization of the data itself, but I have a suspicion that there are more interesting ways to look at the text coming in and correlate it.

This might be a bit for this abstract as well - the idea that this is a framework for exploring different ways of correlating information and communication, and mapping that correlation on to either a topology or a community, or both. In fact, an interesting ‘meta-community’ idea would be to allow some kind of programming of the ‘correlation engine’, so a community of developers could use this tool to explore even more creative kinds of correlation. Like…image recognition correlation, lexical analysis of the text entered to discover ‘readability’ and thus connect people at like levels, etc.

One other idea that comes to my fevered brain sitting here is that we should try to connect this to the larger world somehow - maybe the pages can be used to do intelligent google queries and import data (an example - the lists feature google has could be used to look for and complete lists of ideas being developed within the community, and to develop links between the various lists identified). I like this a lot, because it means you can turn this system loose, tell it to restrict to your domain when looking at google, and it will organize your data for you as you add data. Lots of leverage for the entering of your data…this is a cool idea.

New media?

Thursday 27 March 2003

Sam to Michael

Another thing I thought about on the way home…for ‘old’ media, we had sets of rules about how to build documents (sentence, paragraph, etc). Many of these rules have cultural impact (”how do I interpret this painting?”) some are practical (”what the hell is this newspaper article about?”). The new media need new rules for and new techniques for discovering the rules - this is an aspect of the study of this center. For example, imagine a living document meant to act as a resource for, say, doctors. It’s not enough to just make it a rich document, you also have to have an idea in the structure of the document of the validity of the information, timeliness, reputation of the doctor, etc. The structure of the medium and the tools to create it would need to reflect this. You’d want a theory of documents to fall back on when designing this (middle layer), and some methodology to test, build and refine it (bottom layer).

Michael to Sam

Right.

What your are thinking through is a theory less of media and more of what has come to be called discourse (in a Foucauldian rather a than common sense notion), with discourse subsuming different media, but including performatives, communities, hierarchies, gatekeepers, archives, rhetorics, and a whole lot more.

The difference - taking on digital implications from an insiders/designers view.

Sam to Michael

I suppose that’s true. I thought that a major theme of your work was that the line between discourse and media is blurred, at best.

Michael to Sam

As we were saying yesterday - the old notions of media are quite outmoded - so yes a blurring, but also both terms need radical rethinking (the key is the need for detailed theorising of the relation between media, events (temporality, process), and clients/communities/networks/cultures.

Sam to Michael

Agreed.

We are going to need some new words.

Here’s a question for you - is the internet a test bed for new document types, as we discussed yesterday, or is it, itself, simply a single new form of media? In other words, is a chat group analogous to a paragraph, or to television?

And here’s another thought about a form that has evolved out of the structure of a new media - the emoticon - the smiley. A classic example of how the parameters of a meduim (the lack of emotional bandwidth of email coupled with the low cost and latency) lead to a need (the ability to communicate emotional content) and an emergent standard form (particularly fascinating is that the form was emergent - there’s probably a Ph.D. or two in just analyzing how networked groups develop document standards in new media without centralization - you could do this for all kinds of new media - newsgroups, comments in source code, blogs, etc).

Monday 31 Mar 2003

Sam to Michael

An article today in Salon ? it isn’t really about what we’ve been talking about, but the first page of it muses on some modern digital effects. A good quote:

“Now it seems that the project of science is not primarily to represent the natural world with language but to reconfigure the natural world as language, so that it can be composed, transformed, and manipulated in the ways our minds are equipped to operate upon knowledge itself. “

Another good quote:

“The computer is seen in quantitative terms, as a large dose of the exact ideas brought about by the print revolution three centuries ago. “

Michael to Sam

When we talked the other day about semiotics meeting information science we raised a whole load of baggage about the nature of language, its paradigmatic status and what it has to do with communication (information etc etc) - there have been a few books that have brought critical theory together with information/cognitive science, but all are very much theory.

Sam to Michael

We don’t have to get stuck on anything raised in that conversation. I think we’re undergoing a new round of finding a common language to discuss our concerns. Think of that as the seed crystal…I would like to get to a charter for the meta-media lab sooner rather than later, but it ought to be the right one.

New discourse?

Tuesday 1 April 2003

Sam to Michael

You said something yesterday about “now we’re getting into a theory of discourse”. It stuck with me as being wrong somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I have it:

Before modern technology, there was “discourse” and there were “documents”. This division represented a choice between two tradeoffs. Either you could have immediate, fluid connection with someone, without any recording of the conversation (a play or lecture, for example, is only recorded in one direction, conversations etc are not recorded at all), or recorded conversation that was not fluid or alive (a book, cultural discourse in the form of a painting, etc).

Now you can pick any of (recorded, not recorded) and (fluid, static) in any medium you want (and mix and match - kids today can record your lectures, render them into text via speech recognition, and make all kinds of manipulations on that - fluid, but also preserved, searchable, linkable, etc). In fact, the idea of the eigenvectors paper is that you have even more choices beyond that (and, I’m realizing as I write this that we must also believe that these choices will continue to subdivide forever, according to our charter).

So that idea (the blurring of the distinction between document and discourse) is in the ‘middle’ layer of the MML. It’s not the whole layer, it’s just one specific theoretical instantiation of the more general abstract idea that “more computational power is makes a qualitative difference in the practice of all the arts and sciences” (our most abstract charter), in a specific field of knowledge, discourse.

And Traumwerk is a specific practical implementation of that middle piece of theory - a deliberate exploration of the connection between document and discourse, in a living setting, with an eye towards the changes and effects that occur as the parameters are changed (oh, and here’s another one for the future: when we get enough power in the programming language, the parameterization of the tramwerk will become self-referential: the participants will be able to make changes to the configuration as part of their discourse. We could actually do some of this now in a more hard-coded way, e.g. links to a chat room, online meeting, etc, but it would be fun to explore this idea further).

So that’s our conversation by the fountain, rehashed.

(BTW, I like “Computational Semiotics” better than “Semiotics in the information age”).

Michael to Sam

This is one of those issues of vocabulary of our different fields - we are actually in precisely the same space and I agree with everything you are saying here - I was using discourse in a technical sense - so when I say we are getting into a theory of discourse, it is one that is making just these points about materiality, form, relationality, institutionalization and more.

The concept of discourse, in this specialized sense, I think, offers a way of bridging social sciences/humanities/cognitive science/information science.

And the very neat thing, is, as you say, that the likes of Traumwerk is both based on such thinking (about discourse), but also allows refinement of the thinking in its use and development.

I have a section about discourse in one or more of my books, but I can’t remember where!

Sam to Michael

Ah, I understand now. I’m sure this will be a challenge going forward…actually, one of the things the Metamedia lab can do, possibly, is develop this kind of rigorous language that the disparate disciplines can use to communicate…who knows?

Media and archaeology (and social evolution)

Wednesday 7 May 2003

Sam to Michael

So…I’ve been reading your nemesis, “Guns, Germs and Steel”. Jared Diamond makes an argument that I’ve heard before, and I’m sure you have, about the reasons behind the rise of societies. But, this time I’m seeing it in the context of the MML, and there’s perhaps an interesting conclusion to it now.

The story about why we have centralized societies goes basically like this: we shift from hunter-gatherer to food production basically because of accidental selection of domesticable species. Food production means more frequent birth schedules and thus denser populations, which means more food production, etc. When the group is clan size or below (couple of hundred people), everyone knows everyone, and the societies are typically egalitarian. But as soon as the group gets big enough to have strangers in it, you begin to need central authorities to manage conflicts, etc. These authorities eventually get selected for the ones who tell the most compelling stories about why they are in power (i.e. religions), advantage their clan appropriately, etc. Eventually this autocatalytic cycle carries you up to the size of states. This is why all successful societies are centralized, have some kind of religion, etc.

I think the *new* conclusion to see in this is that the original problem (getting strangers to communicate and be organized) is basically one of, you guessed it, communications medium bandwidth. In other words, early societies never had enough bandwidth to effectively communicate and self organize past a few hundred people, so they had to invent heuristics (religions and laws) and implement them (churches, courts) to function.

But…and here’s the cool thing…we are now beginning to have that bandwidth. A trivial example: consider the communication that happens in a chat room (bunch of people who’ve never seen each other, don’t even know where they live, communicating about a shared topic) from the perspective of a primitive society - it’s absolutely fantastic, and we take it utterly for granted because it’s now ‘easy’. So now, we can communicate in large communities (web pages, news groups, slashdot, google, automatic trading networks, etc, etc) without having central organization. In fact, this kind of self organization is one of the more exciting things going on right now.

I firmly believe that we now have a literally unprecedented ability to communicate, record, and organize ourselves without central control, and that we are just at the very beginning of figuring out how to use this, largely because we’re just mired in old habits. Someone will figure out new ways of being a community and a society that are more effective (see the Bruce Sterling story “Manki Neko” for example) and all of a sudden things will change. It will seem obvious in retrospect when it happens.

So this is cool, I think. It connects the media work to your archaeological work, but from a different angle - instead of seeing archeology as a media event or document, this is more an archeological view of media and how it impacts (or could impact) physical and social culture.

If you want to be really grandiose, you could say that we want to embark on the new realm of non-physical archeology in the digital domain - examining the digital artifacts of communication to understand the underlying virtual communities. That would be an almost literal mapping of archeology onto the digital age, except that I think you are contemporary with what the society being examined, and may even look ahead of it and affect it.

Michael to Sam

Origins of farming? Actually it wasn’t really like this at all - the old distinction between h/g and agriculture has been overdrawn - it is much more of a continuum - this is where Diamond is still very nineteenth century in his thinking. (And notice his realtor’s view of history - all that matters is location, location, location.)

But this does not detract from the comments you make about bandwidth.

Sam to Michael

Ah, I should have know I was bringing coals to Newcastle. This makes sense. This notion of self-organization is, for me, the really interesting issue.

Michael to Sam

I actually think that some early communities were large AND self-organizing - we do have examples of egalitarian communities with extensive range and the capacity to organize large labor forces (early farmers in the Near East and Europe).

Sam to Michael

This is very interesting. I’d like to understand more about these communities, and why they failed. Perhaps bandwidth isn’t the whole picture - there’s always a strong element of natural selection and effectiveness. So, yet another way to look at the modern era is with a biological analog: a new biosphere has been opened up by the internet and we are just beginning to try to exploit it. It may or may not be the case that some organizational strategy more fit will arise from the new configuration of the biosphere (”mediasphere”), we have to wait and see.

I firmly believe that we now have a literally unprecedented ability to communicate, record, and organize ourselves without central control, and that we are just at the very beginning of figuring out how to use this, largely because we’re just mired in old habits. Someone will figure out new ways of being a community and a society that are more effective (see the Bruce Sterling story “Manki Neko” for example) and all of a sudden things will change. It will seem obvious in retrospect when it happens.

Michael to Sam

Maybe unprecedented, I would emphasize the ‘mired in old habits’.

Sam to Michael

I think the cheapness and low latency of distance communication is unprecedented, literally, and also the ease of recording and searching old communications (think “oral traditions” - this is an important task for all societies). The massive, cheap availability of all these is unprecendented, and I make the claim that this quantitative change will in fact turn out to be qualitative.

So this is cool, I think. It connects the media work to your architectural work, but from a different angle - instead of seeing archeology as a media event or document, this is more an archeological view of media and how it impacts (or could impact) physical and social culture.

Michael to Sam

Right - an archaeological view of media - media with history and legacy.

And a material view of media - in that media have material form and effect.

And in fact media are not ‘media’ per se (coming between, mediating units that are given, a posteriori, primacy), but are intimate aspects of the socio-cultural fabric - media as modes of (socio-cultural) engagement.

Sam to Michael

Yes. I like this a lot, actually. I had been looking for this connection.

If you want to be really grandiose, you could say that we want to embark on the new realm of non-physical archeology in the digital domain - examining the digital artifacts of communication to understand the underlying virtual communities. That would be an almost literal mapping of archeology onto the digital age, except that I think you are contemporary with what the society being examined, and may even look ahead of it and affect it.

Michael to Sam

Well I’m right with you here - you’re beginning to see the archaeological everywhere! - and yes, as the MATTER of information science.

Sam to Michael

An interesting way to put it.

I’ve never heard of anyone make this connection, actually. Basically, archaeology is active and vital in the digital age, and may, in fact have connections to a more proactive (instead of observational) science, due to the changing nature of the media forms it’s examining (i.e. the digital forms are fast and malleable enough that you can do archaeology in ‘realtime’ instead of thousands of years in the future. This becomes some kind of engineering discipline that is active instead of passive). Writing this up might be one of our medium term goals - we might think of the projects we do in the lab in terms of generating good material to expose this thesis.

We should have a sit down one of these days.

The fitness of new media

Sunday 11 May 2003

Sam to Michael

I want to get back down to more practical ideas, if we can. Or at least brainstorm some.

An interesting aside, first: I read a quote today in the Merc about how people spend time doing things like being in a chat room instead of being out of the house, and that, while most people think this is not good, it’s hard to stop. I think this is an interesting phenomenon, the chatroom media (in this example) is being selected for in some sense. This fits in, to some degree, with our earlier conversation about fitness of the new media and the concurrent changes.

Here’s some ideas on pragmatism: I want to actively design a new media form. I would like to actually work through the eigenvectors idea a bit, in terms of contemporary examples of successful new media, specifically look at how they interact with different tasks and situations, and design some media that is more interesting. A specific example - I think that email is successful because it fills a ’situational niche’ in people’s lives - that is, it’s the right combination of behaviors (latent, asychronous, recorded, easy) to fill a role for certain kinds of communication. The role was always there (or normal human behavior always afforded this kind of media), it used to be filled by other media (e.g. letters), and those are now being displaced by email.

So…I want to design some communication tools that are well integrated with these kinds of user needs - a concrete example is a wiki/blog that is integrated well with email and instant messaging. Integrating rich media (images, voice, ink, etc) is in there too…the goal would be to create a genuinely new form of media or community or site that is more compelling to work with. We can do this within the Traumwerk project, I think.

Why email is useful

Thursday 5 Jun 2003

Sam to Steve (snewman@speakeasy.net) and Michael

Just an interesting thought - I sometimes use email as a reminder system, kind of like a mercury line. Example - I have an issue with the help stuff I’m working on. I need Claudia to answer it, so I send her an email…and forget about the issue, assuming I’ll hear back from her. In essence, the email has a tiny bit of workflow built into it - the system emergently ‘knows’ that a message is active (it’s sitting in someone’s mailbox), with very little unnatural intervention from the users other than replying to each other, and (unless the humans decide otherwise) the message will continue to propagate until it’s resolved. A very nice extension of my brain - a piece of ‘living’ data that will come back to me with very little intervention on the part of any of the people involved.

I think this is probably part of what’s so appealing about email, that it’s a tiny, tiny step in the direction of software that’s able to understand the context of human interaction and help out (it doesn’t help out much - it just remembers the sender(s) of the mail, contents, helps you store it in a natural queue to deal with, will deal with moving it back with all this information intact, etc). There’s probably a very good bit of thinking/research to be done here to expand this ability. E.g. what other kinds of context can we capture through the structure of a communications medium. I’d love to see something like email that can ‘understand’ the nature of things like unfinished thoughts, groups of related ideas, etc. This is probably a good place to start thinking about some kind of system that integrates documents with communications like email or IM - there’s probably a way to structure the system so it ‘knows’ when a piece of information should be stored in a particular online document, when it should be cross-referenced, etc.

Food for thought.

Steve to Sam

Yup. Lots of people work like this.

I tend to leave messages in my outbox until I’ve gotten a reply or otherwise know that the issue has been resolved. I wish I had a better way to track such things.

To experiment with this, I think step 1 is to create a system that has access to all of your email traffic, and as much other data as possible (maybe it’s integrated with a Wiki). Then start iteratively adding features. Arguably, to be able to do any good, the system should *be* your email client (replacing your current client). That’s a significant first step to cross, but it is tempting to try to cross it.

Sam and I have been working on some ideas - in that space between archaeology, media studies, information science and software engineering.

Here they are in draft (and written jointly in Hydra)

Aims

to discuss and describe media in the abstract, that is as distinct from technical and material properties

to develop a set of terms and methodologies for proactive design of media forms - tools for ‘product design’

These terms will also function as components of a history of media and of (media) design.

Premise and timeliness - media in the light of the digital

Design is here seen as heterogeneous engineering (that is not presupposing any particular definitions of materiality, virtuality, the technical or the cultural)

The aims imply an analysis of the components of product design today in a digital world - creativity, collaboration, research, analysis, styles, and with the digital involving an erosion of conventional distance between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’.

The digitization of media removes artifacts from ‘material’ culture. This allows a more rigorous and abstract analysis of media forms and a more deliberate construction of them for specific tasks. The goal is to put forward a set of well-defined terms and methods for doing this analysis and construction.

Alternate way of expressing this: the digitization of media replaces the media artifacts of material culture with different artifacts of digital culture.

See also the Metamedia Lab discussion document

Definition of medium

A medium is a formalized method for conveying a specific kind of information to specific participants. The manner in which this happens is subject to control and negotiation. Usually there has to be some agreement over encoding and decryption. Historically the notion of medium has been intimately associated with and constrained by material and technology, e.g. paint, paper, etc. And also certain institutional forms that controlled the technology. Now it’s becoming less constrained because of the increasing digital nature of communication.

Conventional terms/definitions/components

Media Studies are well established as a branch of cultural studies. Topic - cultural production.

NB also theme of creativity - creating in a cultural sphere

And here culture is often oppposed to material infrastructures in that it is seen to consist of ideas, values, images/representations.

Components of such a cultural studies

technology - eg TV
tools as extensions of the person and the group
material form - paint, film, paper
rules and norms
qualifications for entry
archives/storage
gatekeepers
organisational architectures - TV studio, movie studio
groups, communities, producers, consumers, institutions, organizations
relations of cultural production
power relations - access, control
ideology critique - mass media as ideological state apparatuses

semiotics - communication - signifier-signified-referent
narratology and applications of literary theory/cultural theory

media history

Eigenvectors - media components/parameters

Latency

The delay from changing information to it’s being consumed by other participants. E.g. IM is extremely low latency, email has this weird asymmetric latency - it’s fast to respond but may be slow to read. Newspapers are very slow. Blogs are very fast. Most digital media has low latency. Except eg digital layout for conventional print media.

People notice latency.

Latency is often relative to expectations within the task at hand. A 10 second delay in the context of IM is noticeable and annoying, but in the context of web publishing, is nothing. Hydra is another good example of this.

Persistence

How robust the medium is, how long the data persist without active maintence. Email is fairly persistent, IM is not. Documents are mostly about persistence.

issue here of materiality and curation - in relation to archives
matter here of the archaeology of media

Redundancy

Persistence is related to redundancy. Digitization gives us the choice of how much redundancy we want, and this is an economic choice and we always choose the short-term most economically efficient path. So, we tend to have very ephemeral digital media, because there’s no (economically acceptable) way to choose robustness.

Richness

Raw email text may not be very rich - is very flat - a haiku may be very rich - layout may increase the richness of text

NB McLuhan’s hot and cold media

Complexity

In an information sense this is related to entropy (how much disorder is there?) eg a string of digits is non-entropic because it can be easily compressed - compression is about finding non-entropy/order - and high entropy looks like random noise

Digital media are more complex - they are more entropic - more difficult to compress

Encryption - compression is related to encryption (the encrypted form looks highly entropic)

a painting therefore doesn’t look very complex - eg digitally curating the Mona Lisa might result in a high res compressed file of 10MB - but this is not very redundant

One-to-many-ness

A broadcast factor (1-1, M-M, etc)

Computational accessability

Text vs video vs paint vs XML - eg trying to create semantic webs - semantic computation as a project that ignores (usually) the sociology, the culture

a new factor is available computing power - Google has lots of computing power

Structure/formalism

Programming language, HTML, vs raw text, etc - the degree to which it is parsable (and is therefore computationally accessible) Structure and CA, are often at odds with people. This can be solved, and is more and more, with additional computation. eg Google. Or, my ‘mood indicator’ on my email program, etc.

Lots to think about here with respect to grammar and formal anaylsis.

Temporal structure

The ability to capture, index, retrieve data over time.

- synchronous communication/concurrence - also NB speech and text

Transactional costs

- go down across the board with computation and digitization. E.g. painting with oil vs painting with Painter Pro. wet plaster v Epson printer - NB the sociology of this and matters of democratization/ status/prestige goods/media) WWW has low transactional costs v TV (with its studios, licenses, organizations)

Compatibility/social context

eg everyone uses Word, and hates it.
Also known as network effects.

We need some vectors with more social/political implications - control, accessibility, hierarchy.

and in heterogeneous engineering the iconography is embedded in the painting - there is always the specific location of the painting that is part of its being

NB cross linkages
persistence/robustness/archive - related to complexity, entropy

Examples, with their vectors

- email
- Hydra
- blogs
- video
- instant messaging
- google
- newsgroups

Analytical methodologies

Notes

is the term medium now obsolete?

event engineering - this is partly what the new ‘media’ do

and ‘media’ are now so evidently about social/cultural groups making themselves via things/interactions/information transfers - as they always were

what does it mean now to invent a new ‘medium’?
eg - is a blog a medium?