Interface Culture
I heart culture jamming: Sniggle Net has lots of good stuff, including a bit on one of my favorite culture hacks ever, the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO).
Apparently rigid gender-stereotyping is OK again, as embodied in the pre-xmas interface over at Target.com: 
Funny how “Music” is the only overlap, though I suspect the girls’ side may be all about booty-dancing in the boys’ videos.
I hate to be negative, especially in the midst of so much web 2.0 circle-jerking that’s going on, but I’m not so happy that I have no control over where my stuff might appear. I just went to 43things (for the first time in months) and was surprised to see my flickr photo feed right there on the page. Is that not “commercial” use (which is prohibited by the “Non-commercial share-alike” license I used)? I don’t really mean to single 43things out, and in fact don’t really mind the feed being there, but this does raise the question of the consequences of all this “openness” everyone’s so fired up about.
Well, the Veronica Mars season premiere was last night and unfortunately I couldn’t watch it (that’s bad) because I was out on a date (that’s good). In the past, I would have Tivoed it, but since I’ve moved back to my house I no longer have cable or satellite. I’ve been debating whether or not to pay the 60 or 70 bucks a month for hundreds of channels of crap (that’s bad) and I think my mind just got made up (that’s good). You see, even though I can only get like 4 channels via the airwaves (that’s bad), I took a quick look for the show I missed this morning (the next day!) and there it was all patiently waiting for me (that’s good). An hour or so later (I didn’t notice because it was downloading in the background) and there it is on my desktop. So, Comcast, DirecTV, Tivo, et all: Screw you guys, I’m going home (and watching what I want when I want). A side note to the above mentioned companies: I’d happily pay let’s say $25/month for a box that sat by my TV and gave me a nice interface onto all those shows out there on BitTorrent. You’d have to do some work to make sure the files were high quality, etc, but since you have the originals that shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe there’d be a cap on how many I could download. Heck, with TV I’d even be willing to submit to relatively stringent DRM since I have no real desire to “own” the shows outright.
File under there-should-be-a-standard, Steps for finding a human on various phone systems. Some of them are pretty amazing, such as Delta, where you say ‘agent’ four times until it finally gives you an agent. This is firmly in that part of the Venn diagram where business needs fail to intersect with user needs.
This Rugby Logotype Comparison is a great “illustration” of the way Flickr facilitates an ongoing visual conversation.
My own private SFO: a personal geography is Mike’s map of a “place” he’s spent a lot of time in over the past year. Love it!
There seem to be two distinct approaches to the collision of space and information. The first is to create a new view to some portion of the world by collecting and organizing “reality” (photos, timestamps, GPS data) into a coherent information space. Examples include mappr, Mike’s own PhotoGeoBlog, and other 21st century variants on what is at heart a travelogue. The second is the reverse: layering information (annotations, reviews, links) onto real space. Examples here include HIPS, Vindigo, and lots more.
But I’m guessing the really interesting stuff happens when you drop the self-consciousness of either approach and build things that are what they are by virtue of knowing where they are and, further, where location-awareness is only one facet. So, for example, you’re driving to a family dinner in the next town and your car is low on gas and it knows that if you don’t stop and fill up over at that Shell station by the onramp you’ll run out of gas before you get to Aunt Vida’s house, so it tells you. I’m sure there are plenty of less-cheesy examples, but you get the drift.
Microsoft has posted a parent’s primer to computer slang, which will do them no good but is pretty amusing.
Rajat describes the “digital photo effect” (That his ability to produce and acquire has far outstripped his ability to consume), which leads to a state where it’s difficult to enjoy/savor/experience any one photo. I’d add that, with this impoverishment of attention, organization takes the place of interaction as the locus of pleasure. We take delight in seeing the patterns in the data or in rearranging our collection so it looks different or seems more meaningful.
So, is this a bad thing? Well, I think it’s mixed. I think the loss Rajat points out is a real one, though not a new one: Walter Benjamin was talking about the the loss of “aura” way back in 1936. And, as far as I can remember, he was somewhat ambivalent about it, chronicling a profound change in the production and reception of art, pointing out both what was lost and what was gained.
So, too the current change. I may no longer put together a photo album every 5 years documenting important events in my life (losing a tooth, first day at school, senior prom), but now I am using photographs to take part in an ongoing visual piazza. Something lost, something gained.
Still, Rajat’s post made me stop and think about the loss. I want to preserve some of that contemplative time, in which as Benjamin put it “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it.” So, I hereby resolve to contemplate something every day; to give it my full attention, if even only for a few minutes.
10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time is a snapshot of the moment in words and pictures culled from major news sources. A step away from Jonathan Lethem’s beautiful idea of “musical news” from Gun, with Occasional Music:
The feeling was there before I tuned in the musical interpretation of the news on my bedside radio, but it was the musical news that confirmed it: I was about to work again. I would get a case. Violins were stabbing their way through the choral arrangements in a series of ascending runs that never resolved, never peaked, just faded away and were replaced by more of the same. It was the sound of trouble, something private and tragic; suicide, or murder, rather than a political event.(via)
So I’ve been spending way too much time obsessing over my fantasy baseball team (Is Smoltz fully recovered from surgery? Will playing in Chicago boost Derrek Lee’s power numbers? You get the picture.) The funny thing I’ve noticed is that the net has done to being a baseball fan what it’s done to being a music listener. I no longer think in terms of albums and teams; it’s all about individual songs and players. And, poetically at least, it makes perfect sense that a communications medium based on individual bits and objects would emphasize the individual over the collective. Not that I’m making any big claim that this is inherent to digital media, but….
It’s about time we got speech-to-speech translators; they had ‘em on Star Trek like 40 years ago! Plus there’s a great opportunity for hackers to mess with people’s conversations from the inside.
A great post on the nature of memory as mediated experience and the virtue of forgetting.
Nice Steven Johnson column on David Gelernter’s concept of mirror worlds. The idea of a data layer that lives in parallel to physical space has many wonderful applications. One of which is the lovely HIPS project in Sienna.
It must say something about the state of contemporary culture that the Corbis home page devotes equal real estate to professional and personal users. (Links under “for personal use” include “Crafts Pictures” and “E-Cards”). What’s interesting to me here is something about the democratization of visual communication—the idea that more people are communicating graphically (not to mention via animation) than ever before. Only a generation ago, choosing a font was an esoteric task for a specialized caste of professionals. Now, Corbis sees a viable consumer market for stock art.
Apparently people are recording alternative commentary tracks for DVDs.
Sven has a great collection of culture jamming links and a thesis on culture jamming and the role of humor. Right on!
Group think: I’ve been thinking about weblogs (like most people with weblogs), and I’ve been amused at how various links are passed around from log to log. (Think constructor or the Web economy bullshit generator). Obviously different weblogs have different purposes (and those change over time: I started antenna as a way to archive all the HCI and design links I saw on other weblogs but without all the chatty bs, but over time I’ve come to find it more useful to myself to add my own chatty bs because it helps me think things through). But why does every single weblog have to link to the same thing that we’ve all seen already? It’s downright wasteful.
Anyhow, I’m interested in how we can push weblogs somewhere closer to email or usenet (not all the way, but closer). I think blogger’s permanent links is an obvious step in this direction. This thread is a perfect example.. taylor has been talking about related things, such as interface culture as a tribe and the relationship between weblogs and usenet. If interface folks are a tribe, then where’s our agora? Maybe we need some kind of XML-based talking stick!
While I share a lot of the fears of this suck column on skins, I think a lot of good can come of them. First of all, it’s been noted that we are stuck in an imperfect UI paradigm, and I think it will be very hard for HCI professionals to break free without some pushing. Christina Aguillera skins notwithstanding, putting control of the entie UI in the hands of anyone with a text editor will certainly do some pushing on our notions of what is acceptable human-computer interaction. Second, by putting full control of the chrome in the hands of developers, XUL effectively does away with the browser as browser. Mozilla is a web-based application platform, and that is very interesting to me. Anything that gets me away from building every damn function on a site as a wizard-like loop is welcome at this point. The trouble is that (as usual) it’s not cross-platform.
The California Department of Corrections has a new web site up! One of the most appealing things to me about culture hacking like this is that it changes what we normally think of as a one-way medium into a two (or three?) way interface.