Sentiencity

"Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?" --Dhalgren

Bronze Waterfall

Back of building in London, near the cigar building. The front doesn't look like this. A shame to hide these lines in the back.

Literary Lookup

The Oxford English Dictionary is my favorite reference tool in the world. My second favorite is a particular kanji dictionary. After the OED, a good thesaurus comes in handy (actually, I have yet to find what I consider a good thesaurus).

Another linguistic reference which some might find handy is one which allows you to specify a noun, and be presented with a list of verbs which commonly act upon it. Or specify the verb and get nouns. Or nouns and adjectives. The point is to be able to specify related and/or surrounding words, rather than the word itself. This is for when you have a sentence in mind (or even written) save for one word, which you know you know, but can't recall. I know I'm not the only one.

Do I even need to point out that this is a slam-dunk job for Google, who already has a zillion sentences indexed?

Popularity vs. Value

The recent action at the New York Times to make their flagship columnists available online only to paying subscribers is a good case example of a tactic that is repeated elsewhere, by many different types of service and product providers, from time to time. The logic runs like this:
-the NYT wants additional revenue
-it justifiably considers the fact that their online readership exceeds their print readership, and tries to leverage that demographic
-their op-ed columnists are by far the most consistently emailed and linked features
-so...charge for the most popular content!

The overall reaction seems lukewarm at best. The Times has yet to announce any subscription numbers, which implies underperformance. But this should come as no surprise. Jay Rosen neatly sums up the particulars of the case:

The value proposition there is muddled...do we value Nicholas D. Kristof's column more if he's an "exclusive?"

We don't. In fact, it's probably the reverse. If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If "everyone" isn't, less of a must. "Exclusive online access" attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist's power.

Perhaps the NYT is mistaken as to their own importance. Rosen's business analysis is apt, but doesn't speak directly to customer action. I think there's a more general principle that can be extracted here.

The powers at the Times obviously have equated popularity more or less directly with value. The columnists are popular and widely read, therefore they must be of value to the individual, right? Sometimes this is certainly true--Harry Potter has made a hobbyist housewife into a billionaire author. But this relies on social networking effects for its strength. Many schoolkids (and adults) can't bear to not be part of the in-group when the topic of Harry Potter comes up. They'll pay; not just for the pleasure of reading the story, but also for the social potential it brings.

Within the chattering class, this may hold true for NYT op-ed columnists. But what percentage of the readership numbers do they account for? I suspect that most people reading and even emailing these articles could do without them--although the NYT is betting that they can't. The flip side of this value equation is the value of the individual's time. Many of us have amounts of time here and there which we don't value very highly. In modern life especially, this can come in small chunks. Idle minutes at the office between tasks is a daily reality for many workers. Many of us read favorite sites online during this time. If a lot of those people read the NYT columnists, it is not necessarily because they are deemed important, but that they can quickly and cheaply fill some quick, cheap time. If either the time or the reading is no longer cheap, the pattern dissolves.

This behavior also applies to larger chunks of time. I've played more than one free MMORPG, and enjoyed the hours I've spent on them. But when they become premium services, I won't pay for them. This is not because I'm so poor or cheap that I can't--but they're just not worth it to me. In other words, I use the service because it is free, not because it is a valuable service. It is a good match for my cheap time, when I have it, but a premium service, even if higher quality, would force me to recoup my losses, so to speak, with greater time investment that I'm just not willing to give.

Hyperhouses

Interesting temporary urban art in Rotterdam where a block of houses marked for demolition has been painted bright blue. To me, the building looks like a hyperlink amongst a row of plaintext houses. Makes you want to click on it and see what it contains. Which, while not the artist's intended metaphor, does seem to be his intent.

Social Scaffolding

Infrastructure:


Ultrastructure:


I was looking for a word which was the opposite of "infrastructure", and playing the Latin root game instead found an obscure biology word. Ultrastructure refers to the fine-grained, minute cellular structures that comprise tissue and such; sort of infrastructure's infrastructure. Seemingly the opposite direction I was intending.

But the diversion allowed me to more carefully consider infrastructure. The other word I'm looking for is for the human (inter)action with the built infrastructure. The social scaffolding into which infrastructure is built and operates. The complement without which the infrastructure has no meaning. For now I'll call it "amphistructure", because this structure should have two sides, one which interacts with the infrastructure as necessary, and the other which interacts with the social structure. Interactions can happen on either side, or may require connections from one side to the other, and back again. I suspect that a circular model might be more appropriate, but I just don't see it yet.

And it may be that ultrastructure is what connects the amphistructure to both sides. The technical ultrastructure pictured above is what we interact with at a human level. Likewise, the social ultrastructure that Erving Goffman and other sociologists examine connects the other.

An interesting implication of this way of thinking are the points of contact between the structures. It allows for different conceptual analyses of socio-technical use. Rather than seeing the mobile phone as a tool through which social relations are (more or less) transparently carried out, we can see the phone as the ultrastructure connecting amphi- and infra-. The infra- then connects back to the amphistructure at a different location, creating a gateway to the sociostructure to complete the activity. The infrastructure thus expands the range and points of contacts available from within the amphistructure for all those interactions not available strictly on the sociostructure side of things.

Still sounds a bit muddled. Maybe diagramming it out will help. The ultrastructure seems to be where the interesting things happen.

Philip Morris hates Vodafone

A report from last month indicates that mobile phone use may be responsible for sharp declines in teen smoking. The analysis focuses entirely on economics: mobile phone bills are expensive, teens have limited cash, talking is more important than smoking, so they pay the phone bill rather than the Marlboro man. Nice and neat, and surely a fair enough assessment.

But I can't help thinking that this explanation is incomplete. After all, teens especially are not the rational actors that most economists pretend people to be. There's another important angle here: mobile phones are cigarette surrogates.

Think of the conventional wisdom for quitting smoking. Hold a pencil in your hand (to give your fingers something to hold). Chew gum (to keep your mouth occupied). Now the mobile phone: fits in hand, can be held aimlessly for hours? Check. Gives your mouth something to do? Check. Smoking also helps you look cool (my theory on this is that smoking makes you seem cool because it gives you an object with which to ignore the immediate surroundings. But it's just a stage prop. The truly cool don't need the object), and similar posturing can be achieved with proper phone usage. The phone can likewise lend an air of mystery or rebelliousness, depending on its use.

So my guess is that the economic angle is well and good, accurate so far as it goes. But it's not complete, and it so happens that the mobile phone replaces cigarettes more than just economically. Is an SMS an equal tradeoff for a smoke? Is a quick chat worth 2? Is pulling out your phone an acceptable alternative (in terms of social positioning) to lighting up, in the high-pressure world of teen politics? My guess is yes, yes, and yes.

Inhuman Agency Insufficient: Counterpoint

I'm a pathological Google user, and I'm quick to praise the company and its tools. But even the excellent search engine rewards (and occasionally, requires) finesse to find the desired results. Understanding that [cook bake pie] and [pie bake cook] will bring up similar results, but differently ordered, is important. This is precisely the catch-22 of all abstraction layers: they can make information more accessible, but less accountable for its origins. Because the Google search engine second guesses my intent, I have to second guess it in return when I form my query. This is not a complaint; because the Google engine is constantly adapting its output to the human use of information, rather than the information itself, I suspect that the Google method has more promise in this area than the major proposed near-future companion technology--the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web, for all of its interesting propositions and potential benefits, has a major weakness in this analysis. By making more information machine-readable, and proposing (necessitating, actually) that machine agents then assume a greater role in information search/retrieval/presentation, it removes a critical aspect of quality control. The visual presentation of a web page provides countless subtle clues that inform our assessment of its quality, reliability, and authenticity. There are a thousand shoddy-looking scam sites out there for every rare convincing one. Likewise, by stripping the immediately desired information from the flow of presentation in a particular source, important context clues are removed. Even the most paranoid alien-conspiracy sites will occasionally have a bit of sane-sounding output, if removed from the source. But the source is important, and many of the most important qualities of a source can't be analyzed with metatags.

This is not to suggest that in some way, the SW won't happen, or that it shouldn't. But it won't be a magical cure for the world's information organization problems. Google, of course, will be among the first to usefully utilize new semantic metadata, which will probably be a big help. And of course the two methods aren't mutually exclusive. But the Google approach says: let us have a look at everything, however arbitrarily arranged, and we'll make it useful by observing how it is used, and basing our output on that. The SW says: follow our recommendations for how your information should be marked, and if everyone complies, then the information will automatically be more useful. But metatagging everything won't, on its own, make information organization easier, and certainly won't ease quality assessment. On the contrary, it will require ever-expanding infrastructure to manage it. The lengthy debate over HTML use and misuse (re: standards) will simply be moved behind the markup. Human, contextual assessment will remain the final judge of information's value, and we should be careful to not (accidentally or intentionally) try to remove it from the picture, in the name of simplification, efficiency, or usability.

Inhuman Agency Insufficient

It seems that in the short-to-mid-term future, information--on everything from the trivial to the global--will be easily accessible, and in staggering quantities. From one perspective we are already at that point, but I believe that in the near future, more and more information will be meaningfully metatagged, allowing more meaningful results than today's simple web searches (how and if we get to that point is another discussion entirely, the realization of which will be largely taken for granted here).

The question is what will become of all this information. I'm thinking more broadly than just information presentation at the HCI or cognitive psychology level; but what ways can vast amounts of data be sifted on demand to create powerful results, in an intuitive form? The important difference is between already existing tools for specialized and power users, and tools for the average user. The 'digital divide' of the future won't be between those who do and don't have simple access to the internet--the meaningful difference will be between those who have the ability to *use* the staggering quantities of information (already) available to them, and those who are simply 'surfing' the net.

I would argue that this has always been the case, from the beginning; access to IM and email admittedly makes available new habits and lifestyles; but the simply communicative applications of the present--meaningful as they are--are already becoming a social commodity. The next step will be to allow the individual to make the world (the world's data) work for them in ways that are comfortable: social, intuitive, responsive ways. At the heart of this notion is the idea that 'smart' or 'intelligent' or 'agent' systems of the future (at least the mid-term future) will not be able to deliver their much-speculated benefits entirely on their own. Problems concerning human agency, context, and classification may not ever be entirely automated. Thus the person who understands the conceptual background and organization of the world's information will always have an (increasingly larger?) advantage--socially, economically--over the person who is at the mercy of such systems' recommendation.

The question to be considered: can incisive (social and technical) understanding combine with good design to create power-user tools for everyone? To what degree can "knowledge in the world" compensate for the expert's understanding, of both subject background and technical mastery?

Daydream

"Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams." --A Pattern Language