8pen Inaugurates a New Kind of Gestural Text Entry

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.

Collecting in the Cloud: Apple’s server farm at Maiden, NC

Site of the new server farm?

Most analysts have connected Apple’s recent purchase of Lala, a startup music streaming company, to their $1 billion North Carolina data center in development since this summer.  The server farms will perhaps appear here, as various sources have reported, in sites along route 321 and the town of Maiden in particular, where Apple’s presence already appears in a quick Google maps search.  Putting Lala and Maiden together, all signs point toward the possibility of cloud storage for iTunes–perhaps along with some subscription-based model–which would stream all your music from this future location.  If Apple is at the forefront of a sea change here, as they usually are, this move prefigures some massive realignments not only to habits of listening but–more drastically–to collecting.

One could perhaps find signs of this some time ago.  I remember a conversation I had with my undergraduate advisor about five years back, sitting in his office surrounded by painstakingly organized–never alphabetized–media of every sort, and comparing our respective listening habits.  At that point I had a 120GB iPod, and he ventured that surely I couldn’t have listened to every single song stored on there–and of course I hadn’t.  This was the case for the majority of my classmates, and it was pretty clear that our modalities of collecting music, our means and reasons for it, had been fundamentally altered during the movement away from physical media.

But this was also a time when I was listening to more than I ever had before, thanks to a campus wide Direct Connect (DC++ to be exact) hub.  Networks were small and slow enough to preclude absolute totalization–one certainly couldn’t find everything, and users took pride in the organization and scope of their personal archives, with the tree file structure of each individual user preserved as a part of the interface.  On the other hand, we had enough speed to download the entire back catalog of Beethoven, for instance, which I did over the course of a few days.

[Students gathering at Rutgers New Brunswick to protest the administration's shutdown of a campus-wide Direct Connect hub. People revealed their usernames and boasted how many gigs they had shared. The address and pass for a new hub was already circulating through the crowd. 4/29/04]

While we were downloading faster than we could ever possibly listen, we were storing these files in a manner that expressed something of the collector.  The user leaves traces on these obscene amounts of data if only through the act of collecting the fact of access to a particular spectrum of material, rather than collecting the fact of the songs themselves.  Because none of us can actually own or intellectually encompass such a collection (>250MB of audio), the curation, the interface, the display of this collection becomes all important, as Susan Stewart recognizes:  “Any collection promises totality.  The appearance of that totality is made possible by the face-to-face experience of display, the all-at-onceness under which the collection might be apprehended by an observer.  This display of course marks the defeat of time, the triumph over the particularity of contexts in which the collected objects first appeared” (“Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Wilson Peale” 185).

Enter this new dispositif–collecting in the cloud–and we must rethink what kind of work a collection of access points does in the (local) absence of the data itself.  Without material ownership over the data, what do we display our access to?  This complete dissociation of the interface from the archive will certainly open up the potential for new modalities of self-fashioning so important to the practice of collecting.  But streaming music at something like the $1 billion scope Apple appears to have in mind, personal collections would stand as little more than permutations at 10¢ a piece of the totalizing mega-archive housed at Maiden, NC.  If for Benjamin “the collector is the true resident of the interior,” she now inhabits a steady dissolution and condensation of this cloud whose absolute ubiquity is predicated on a mere 183 acres pulsing with 20 megawatts annual power consumption and thousands of feet of water line to maintain an operating temperature of 68ºF.  An economy of scale must be retained between the imprint of the collector and the “appearance of [a] totality” that is not reducible to Maiden, NC.

InterNyet

Attended a talk today titled “the Free Market Failure of the Soviet Internet” at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The speaker, Ben Peters, described the fascinating ways in which the political ideology and the institutional structures of the Soviet system influenced the construction of an ultimately unrealizable data communications network–a top-down, hierarchically centralized network that never fully took off in the way that the distributed organization of ARPANET did in the United States.

According to Peters, the Soviets attempted to build their data network as if it were an economy. It’s data center was physically located in Moscow (though outside the city center to avoid missile attacks), with secondary nodes located in strategically placed locations, each feeding the rest of the country.

He also argued for a complicity between these designers’ plan for the computer allocation of resources (a factory reports its production rates, depots and stores report their inventories) and the dream of the eventual triump of socialism becoming communism. According to one of the Soviet scientists, economics was “a scab on the healthy workings of the political body” that a cold computer logic would correct. See also this article by Slava Gerovitch.

So I’m thinking about this relationship between economic policy and network architecture, and then I read the following from Nicholas Carr’s recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Commenting on the fact that we now tend to Google a piece of information two or three times rather than choosing to remember it for ourselves, Carr writes,

On the Internet, we seem impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link. And this is precisely the behavior that the Internet, as a commercial system, is designed to promote. We are the web’s neurons, adn the more links we click, pages we view, and transactions we make–the faster we fire–the more intelligence the Web collects, the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off. (228)

Net Neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine

In order to speak about what I want to during the extraordinary and utterly insane times of this presidential election, several apparently disconnected points must first be made in order to build up a semblance of neutrality and approach a point. That is to say, this post is for now a dump of disconnected points and links that I’ll probably come back to later.

First, let us attempt for a moment to aggregate the critiques of fair journalistic practices coming from both the right and left by positing that “the mainstream media” (MSM) refers to all televised news (ignoring on the right both support of Fox News and critique of the New York Times), while online journalism–not only the blogosphere but not the whole of the internets either–can be posited as an entity over and against the MSM (ignoring critiques on the left of talk radio). I apologize for being so reductive, but it appears these are the lengths one must go to to make sense of things.

Second, in order to get at the structure of this momentary fiction I am setting up as new media journalism, an entity existing over and against the MSM, we should recall the recent comments by Geert Lovink on the profitability of distributing digital information: “venture capitalists openly admit there is no money to be made in content. The business plans that make sense are not so much content creators as aggregators and filters” (from Zero Comments, p. xxvi). However, content aggregators have become not only the most profitable business model for Web 2.0–to the point where some now speak of the content economy becoming the ‘link economy’–but content aggregators have become the mouthpiece of choice for both the far right and far left in a network environment: Drudge Report and Huffington Post, respectively, to the point of total saturation. Many more could be named, and even old media are now beginning to test the waters of link journalism.

Third, this past month FCC commissioner Robert McDowell stated that the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine–which many prominent Democrats (including Sen. Obama) have been advocating–cannot rightfully be considered apart from arguments pushed by the same Democrats for the institution of net neutrality legislation. The Fairness Doctrine, in effect between 1949 and 1987, required FCC licensed broadcasters to “to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced.”And the net neutrality movement has been pushing legislation to forbid any bandwidth restrictions by internet providers on its subscribers based on their network usage.

McDowell argues that several mental backflips are required to reconcile simultaneous support for the Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality–how can one advocate limits on journalistic content while arguing for complete removal of controls on the reception of content? The debate over the Fairness Doctrine has been framed on the right as a full on assault on the freedom of speech. Check out the forums on the news aggregator Digg on this article, “Liberals Poll Against Free Speech”. And I must admit, I think twice every time I reflexively go to click “bury” on comments such as, linuxdad: “Talk radio will move to web a place where the FD [fairness doctrine] can’t touch them. The reason to squelch free speech is that you do not have the balls to handle what they say, or argue against it.” (my citation of this comment has omitted its racist undertones and threats of a populist revolution if Obama is elected)

objects-on-demand

Cory Doctorow’s introduction to his recent SF short short story “Printcrime” explains that it stems out of a talk attended by a friend at which a British recording industry exec talked of the “industry’s great and hysterical spasm.” It’s assumed by this that he means the gradual chipping away of DRM by consumer dissatisfaction and lagging sales, and the inevitable formation of a new form of intellectual property law/media copyright. The recording exec claimed that this “great and hysterical spasm” of the recording industry would become the template for virtually every other industry that deals in trademarks or patents once the development of rapid prototypers (wanna know how to build one?) and 3D printers becomes viable. For those who don’t want to click through the links, these are machines, in existence now and being developed for personal use, that “print” actual objects. That’s right, just like the replicators on Star Trek.

Doctorow, really one of the most interesting SF authors–among other things–working today, finds the connection between music copyright and 3D printers incredibly strange. In one of his characteristically witty historical analogies, he says that to worry about the future of trademark and patent law in the face of object-on-demand technology is “as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.”

Perhaps this is a problem today with SF and futuristic thought in general. Politicians began using phrases like the “information superhighway” (Al Gore’s pre-global warming pet project/marketing campaign) ten years ago. When SF concepts and the discourse of speculative thought enter the political and popular domain outside of any traditional generic conventions, what is there for SF to do? When advertisements for new technologies have the strange ability to prefigure or even simulate our interaction with these as yet unreleased tools, how can SF react with counter prefigurations of future technologies? And how does any futurist deal with objects whose complexity can only be explained by teams of tech people?

Steampunk, a subgenre of SF that deals with Victorian-era technologies, seems to serve as a valve for some of these frustrations in many interesting ways, especially the challenge of dealing with overdetermined technological complexity. Steampunk Magazine is one online magazine working with this stuff. It looks back to a moment when technological objects were still intelligible as objects, when their development and evolution could be seen as moving in many different directions, when one didn’t have to read through an entire wiki in order to build a tool that made more objects.

(P.S., the lolbladerunner was done by Jamais Cascio)