The 8pen is a new text input method designed by mobile apps developer 3qubits. Announced only yesterday, it will be released tomorrow for Android 2.2, with a 1.6 release on the way.
The problem 8pen sets out to tackle is the far too literal virtualization of the QWERTY keyboard into a two inch space that can’t accommodate two hands. Watch the launch site video to get a better sense of their solution. It includes a wonderfully condensed media history of keyboards in computing devices, and an alternate history “what if” that asks “if they keyboard was invented today for mobile devices, would it have looked the same?”
What’s so interesting about 8pen is that it mimics the “natural gesture” of handwriting without mimetically reproducing characters. So, in order to enter “G,” rather than doing this
or this
the user does this
The verb used to describe this action seems important here. Surely one doesn’t “type” G, nor do they actually “draw” G, since no physical or graphical trace is left on the screen by the finger. (In this sense, my representations above are a bit misleading). “Gesture” pops up frequently on the tech blogs in describing this new app, but that too seems inadequate. With “gesture,” one thinks of a full-bodied, or at least whole-handed, motion in three dimensional space, rather than the swipe of a fingertip across a two dimensional plane.
Also interesting is how many people used the tag “future” in their bookmark of the launch page on Delicious, considering how closely 8pen represents the rotary phone.
Television remains a blind spot for media theory. From postwar newspaper reviewers to cultural studies academics, the impossibility of isolating the scope of the televisual “text” to a single unit of analysis has posed a great challenge for many critics. In coming to terms with the fact of television, a great amount of time is spent on the effort of wrapping some sort of intelligible model around the sheer pervasiveness of the medium.
A common fallback position is to simply say that television has no attributes of its own. It is not a medium––let alone an art form––with any distinctive features. TV reviewer Richard Burgheim, in the August 1969 issue of Harpers: “Television … is not one of the arts but a mere transmitter of them. How do you love a 19-inch Motorola or a network vice-president?”
Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content. When the question of content was raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically. (18)
Content was merely an afterthought to the primary economic incentive to develop and construct a television infrastructure. “The general social definition of ‘content’ was already there” (22), providing a store of earlier social forms and events in order to serve the expansion of the broadcast apparatus: news, sporting events, debates, and techniques stolen from theatrical and motion picture language.
And yet there always seems something wrong with this tried and true fallback position. Burgheim at once poses and shies away from the exact question we should be asking: how do we love a 19-inch Motorola?
Inventor of the iconoscope Vladimir Zworykin counts the ways in the less excitingly subtitled Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940). Co-authored with his colleague at RCA G.A. Morton, this book is an important and overlooked primer for attuning narrative analysis to the specificities of a given medium. After six hundred pages detailing the physics of electrons and fluorescence, the principles of UHF transmission and reception, and several working prototypes of complete tv systems, Zworykin devotes the concluding section of the book to what is no less than a poetics of television programming––programming which did not yet exist. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been asked to be a member of the Superstruct advisory board! Superstruct is basically a massively multiplayer online forecasting game, set up by the non-profit Institute for the Future. The game designers have written the framework of a scenario that takes place in 2019, organized by five interlocking “superthreats” (disease, food distribution, power distribution, mass migration, internet attacks), in order to see trends in how players would react to these changing global conditions in the course of their everyday lives. I’ll be posting more about this as the game approaches launch on September 22. In the meantime, you can check out the game’s teaser site, or this article about it in Discover Magazine.
