Tom Reviews Small Pieces

And what a review it is. Two weeks before publication and we’ve already hit our critical highwater mark.
Thank you, Tom. I am ready to have your babies now.

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The 5 Stages of Homeland Security

The announced rationale of the new national alert system is to enable the nation’s security forces to coordinate their actions better. If they need a color-coded system to do that, we are in deep shit: “It’s gone from orange to yellow, guys. You can those Arab-looking teenagers put their clothes back on.”

If you need any convincing that the War on Terrorism is 5 parts PR to 1 part action, just take a look at the Homeland Security Archive page. Press release after press release announcing Ridge’s travels, his press briefings, his photo opps … and an occasional action. If it weren’t so terrifying, it’d be a joke.

Office of Homeland Security: Color-Coding Your Fears for the Illusion of Control

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Email Pong

The text-based version of Pong is a funny idea, but I’ve always wanted to play an email-based version of it:

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: MailPong Move #23

The ball has been served to you
Velocity: 10px/second
Angle: 32.85

Please indicate the parameters of your move
(All measurements in pixels)
Top edge of your paddle:
Point of impact:
Speed of paddle:
Velocity of paddle:

Hit Reply to send.

Now that would be fun!

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What about the Body?

Kalilily, in part spurred by my comments on the Web as Utopia, writes:

And so, while David is right that we are at out best when we are social and connected, we need to remember that passionately connecting minds is only half what we humans need to feel truly alive.

As the inhabitant of a gradually decaying body parked about 14 hours a day in front of a computer — ay caramba, that sounds like a symptom, not a lifestyle — it’s easy for me to ignore the little fact that we are our bodies. And, yes, I do tend towards the intellectual side (although I as a child I once enjoyed the sensual thrill of Vicks VapoRub). So it’s always good to be reminded of this.

FWIW, in my upcoming book (which I’m thinking of re-titling “My Upcoming Book”), I make a weird argument that the Web returns us to the sort of rich, messy, fat knowledge that comes from having a body, as opposed to the anorexic knowledge and bodiless selves that our culture has been favoring.

And I’m sure it’s merely a coincidence — yeah, that’s what it is — that it’s another woman, Halley, who raises the same issue in her blog. Halley, though, sees the disembodiment of the Web as liberating because it removes the threat of bodily harm.

By the way, I found Halley’s plain-spoken account of a day in her life to be oddly moving. Or maybe it’s not odd at all.

Steve Giovannetti blogs about the importance of the Web’s tie to physical space, warning us that the single greatest threat to the Net comes from system administrators with plumber butts. (Ok, so maybe I’m mischaracterizing his comments for comic effect.) And it’s good to be reminded of the material nature of the Web. But there’s also a sense in which the Web “place” (as I think of it) isn’t located anywhere in the real world (while remaining dependent on the real world for its existence). Not all worlds that are spatial are in a specific locality. For example: the past. You can’t show me where the past *is*. (There’s something very screwy about this example. If it tweaks your flame knob, I preemptively withdraw it.) I don’t think there’s any real incompatibility between what Steve is pointing to and what I’ve been on about. Complementarity.

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Poetics of the Web

Akma has gathered a superb collection of blogs that discuss alternatives to the spatial metaphor of the Web, continuing a blogthread I accidentially initiated. I particularly like blkros‘s raising time, not space, to our attention; one of the commenters at the site refers us to a Darren Tofts‘s essay on cybertime vs. cyberspace. In fact, there are a whole bunch o’ links there that sound well worth following. (I have the space this morning, but not the time.) And I also like AKMA’s suggestion that Tom‘s piece on the music of the Web is a richer invocation of the Web’s temporality.

Two meta-comments on the question of new metaphors for the Web:

First, it feels to me like this conversation, while highly stimulated by its blogginess, would profit from a more interactive form … such as being in the same room together. We’re disagreeing with one another often based on differences that could be worked out in person: “Oh, when you say ‘space’ you mean …. and when you say ‘metaphor’ you mean …”

Second, although anything is possible (except for what isn’t), in my heart I don’t believe that any discussion of new metaphors can surface a new metaphor. I accept AKMA’s plea that we be open to the “more” that hasn’t been thought yet:

But an ocean is lapping at our toes, and it hasn’t yet dawned on us to swim in it. After all, we experience the ocean by walking in it, “walking” is necessary, right?

(Now there’s a metaphor that works!) But I don’t think a conversation about metaphors is likely to produce new metaphors. That’s the job of poets. And, in this case, I think it’s more likely to come from a poetic engineer who creates a new piece of software that shows us the world through its eyes. After all, that’s how 2D vertical computer screens became desktops and resizeable rectangles became windows.

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Best and the Rest of Human Nature

Dave Rogers points out that when I said that the Web is a reflecton of our best nature, I must have been smoking jimson weed. Heck, one look into my inbox on any random morning would show you that the Net is 70-80% a reflection of the desire of co-eds named Tiffany and Crystal to party with me via a webcam and a credit card.

So, yes, the Web is a reflection of our nature, not our best nature. It is a purer reflection than the real world is for so much of the real world is beyond our control. We made of the Web what we wanted. And are still making it.

So why did I say “best nature”? Because the part of the Web I don’t delete from my mailbox or click the back button on is a relection of the caring, curiosity and humor that makes me proud to be a human. I’m so happy about that part of the Web that the rest is just the static on the line.

[Yeah, I know the difference between the Web and the Internet. I just choose to ignore it.]

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The Girl with Green Eyes

The National Geographic photographer who took the 1984 cover photo of the young Afghan woman with the beautiful green eyes has finally located her again.

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Place, Space and Music

In writing about responses to my piece on the Web as Utopia (which have turned into a discussion of the Web as a place). I somehow forgot to point to Tom Matrullo‘s densely beautiful musings on music as a metaphor for the Web. Sometimes reading Tom is more like swimming than like reading, and I mean that in the good sense.

And on the same topic, the last thing AKMA wants me to do is agree with him. But, darn it, I do. He is worried that the familiarity of the spatial metaphor will keep us from appreciating what is new and important about the Web. As he says, the shoe can begin to pinch:

The weird part is the Web I want to explore, and I don’t want to have trouble recognizing it because I’m wearing “space”-colored glasses.

Absolutely! It’s the ordinary about the Web that’s most extraordinary. New metaphors – new poems – are essential if we are to illumine the parts that have either been in the shadows or were too close to us to be visible. But – and here’s where AKMA and I actually disagree, at long last – I don’t think spatiality is a metaphor the way that, say, “Links are like caesuras,” as Tom suggests, is. Space isn’t a way of thinking about the Web. It is (in its weird webby permutation) how we experience the Web. You can’t replace a deep metaphor like that with even the most piercing and achingly true similes. It can happen, but only over time as language and its accents and dialects change.

Daniela at LivingCode writes beautifully about the meaning the Web place has for us. It’s filled with bloggable lines, such as:

…With all due respect Dave Winer is a place, more specifically the town square.

…I watch the destruction of communities, the mobility we have achieved, the shaken roots both of trees and people, how we have put a price on every step we take, how we are forgetting to do the part that we are really good at doing (being human) …

…Here at Livingcode (which is another spacial representation) we see Utopia as a transitory place, because nothing stays with the good intentions it was built on. That is the “real” web for me: Building spaces of honest and good intentions in which to perfect ourselves….

In the course of the blog entry, she points to InvisibleCities, a collaborative site that seeks to encourage being creative as an alternative to being entertained.

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<EOM>

Mike O’Dell writes, in full:

So how come the Instant Messaging conference lasted several days?

And Jacob Shwirtz writes:

The verb: SURF
The nouns: superhighway and web

How do you put on your body suit, wax your board and surf something weaved by a spider? How do you surf asphalt?

Mike O’Dell also writes: “the entire psychogenre of ‘dancing pages‘ is a new
revelation in self-display.” The page he sends us to is like a catalogue of annoyances.

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Web Space and Place … More

A number of really interesting responses to my
blog on the Web as Utopia came in, especially on the
nature of the Web’s spatiality, which AKMA had
blogged about.

Jason Thompson of MuseUnlimited has a fascinating spin. He
thinks we see the Web as space because we’re so
desperate to find a utopia to save us from the real
world: “In other words, we strive to design the Web
as a space, another world safe from necessity.” What
a great way of putting it. It says compactly what I
struggle to say in the last chapter of my upcoming
book.

John Peters of Competitive.com writes in response
to AKMA’s call to come up with a metaphor for the
Web that is non-spatial:

On the face of it, I don’t think
that I could conceive of the web as anything but a
space. It’s connected, ordered, has measurable
dimensions (number of hops required to jump between
points, with points defined as URLs, time to
transition between URLs…) The measured dimensions,
however, squirm about constantly. It’s not a fixed
space, not even in the relatively short term. …
Anyway, let me try a new definition of space:
something that can be explored. This the Web
satisfies. Just don’t ever expect to be able to get
back home.

Oddly, I get to the same conclusion through the opposite reasoning. I don’t think the Web feels spatial because its measurable or ordered. Rather, I think that because the Web feels like a set of navigable places (not abstract, measurable dimensions) it feels like the real world. It could, of course, be both. Or neither.

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