speed

The world’s fastest bike ride: 132 kilometres/hour. Wow. A pity Wired classified the article under ‘cars’.

Secondlifelike

I’ve been exploring Second Life for a teaching project at Aberdeen. There are a staggering number of good and helpful people and resources out there, and it would be immoral not to record them as I encounter them.

This is a very thoughtful essay by Diane Carr of the London Knowledge Lab on adapting to Second Life as a teaching environment.

NPRIL (see the blogroll o’er yonder) is a wonderful demonstration of what new things a virtual environment can offer.

Sadly, I have not yet encountered a sustained critique, in the vein of political ecology, of Second Life. The underlying trans-Ayn-Randy capitalism is depressing in the extreme: I know of no way to link, say, a farmers’ co-operative to economic practices within Second Life. It’s funny how the internet community has, as one of its underlying social behaviours, the assumption that everything should be a commodity. Taussig would be thrilled.

Subversion, Conversion and so forth:

I’m on the train home after an intense conference on using anthropological and design tools to thwart planned obsolescence.

Another view of the conference used ThoughtMesh to build a picture based on the abstracts, and yet another was Daria Loi’s beautifully designed response, but neither of those is online yet. There were a number of good sessions and a few extraordinary papers and discussions. Precisely because it was a strongly interdisciplinary conference there were places where I lost the thread (and David Turnbull wants me to think about threads very carefully). I hope other views of the conference emerge that help make sense of it.

One of the simplest rewards for me was seeing projects that succeeded. I worked with lots of people and collectivities through the 80s and 90s to wrest control of ICT from defence and financial networks and give it to those people whom it usually served to disenfranchise. Jerome Lewis gave an understated presentation (here’s the paper) on icon-based PDAs for non-literate Congo Basin hunter-gathers that enabled them to negotiate with multinational logging interests and even to record illegal logging. The image of three young Mbengele gathered around a elderly man, all working together as they use the tool to protect the forest: perhaps not revolutionary, but it gives hope.

Some of these successes were also theoretically subtle. Jim Enote talked about the work that A:shiwi and the Cambridge Museum are doing together began with Jim talking about how much of the inventory being catalogued was set aside, not for public viewing. When he came to talk about the A:shiwi mapping project in Zuni, one of the initial decisions was which places and names not to put on the map. Marilyn Strathern, in her opening remarks, contrasted ICT networks to kinship networks. This useful tool was reused several times during the conference.

• Resistance to neo-liberal flattening commodifying ‘openness’ that treats all records as equal and all nodes as the same
• Attending to locality
• Kinship-like networks rather than ethernet-like networks
• Noncoherence (a useful notion introduced by Helen Verran : not incoherence, which is simply a species of coherence, but purposeful recognition of incommensurability, diversity, and resistance to global systematicization. See this article by John Law.)

…these topics resurfaced and were reworked and tossed back into the pot.

The thing/use or material/social divide resurfaced over and over again, and when overtly noticed it was refused. So too, the model of ICT as a (neutral) technology providing (free) access to (passive, external) information (whether that access is being mobilized by producers, consumers or prosumers (!)) was made visible and criticized. The best criticisms of the social/material or access-to-content models were not the discursive ones (like mine); people who really attended to the problem used the mode or style of their presentation to expose and interrogate the problem.

Thus the opening of the conference was a water ritual of connectedness, offered by gkisedtanamoogk, was offered through iChat from John Ippolito and Joline Blais’ home in Maine. He chose water as a ritual block in order to attend to the distance and its connectedness. Drinking water at the end of his ritual he remarked that even though we could not actually drink the water with him, it would eventually come to us. In the background of the iChat window people moved around, noises emerged and people in our room wondered if the sounds were here, there, intentional, accidental in the best Cageian tradition. That accidentality took the apparently controlled iChat sociotechnical frame and tore it open. Participants at both ends of the pipe did not know whether they were participants, did not know where noises were coming from, in exactly the same way that a shared space is defined by shared environmental uncertainties.

Laura Watts performed her presentation—well, all presentations are performances, aren’t they—but she read a poem in four parts against the slides moving by themselves. Given the locality and intimacy of the Orkney places and communities she was describing it worked very well. As she pointed out later, there’s an active poetry writing community in Orkney.

It’s also true, though, that we all listened. Various members of the conference, especially when talking as or about First Peoples, had emphasized the importance of respect. The organizers regretted that gkisedtanamoogk had not been able to come and actually begin the conference as a talking circle; but perhaps because there was heaps of good will, or because James and Lee took a huge risk in opening the conference with gkisedtanamoogk’s ritual, or perhaps because many of us had learned enough to know when respect is appropriate, we listened to Laura’s performed piece with the same care as we did the more traditionally delivered presentations.

When gkisedtanamoogk closed the conference with a ritual—a travelling song, he said—that really was the end of the conference. There was no felt need for an additional frame closure, a ‘ok now we’re turning the computer off and thank you’. We all thanked each other, including gkisedtanamoogk and that was the end. In the same way people stood up from their seats and fuffled their papers, the iChat link was turned off and Joline and gkisedtanamoogk left the conference through the dimming screen.

Old theory and not so old technophile

This is an interesting encounter. Rheingold is a hero of the technorati and was one of the first people to theorize online communities. His first-person description of trying to talk to Habermas might be ossified professor syndrome, but he might be describing a genuine failur of imagination.

http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/11/05/habermas-blows-off-question-about-the-internet-and-the-public-sphere/

anti-fix

Yesterday I finally made my daughter Tanglewest’s birthday cake, nearly a week after it should have been delivered. The fact that no one seems to have been unduly upset by the tardiness of the confection makes me think we have a cheerful and flexible household, but I may simply be crashingly insensitive.

I broke the electric chopper while making the cake. Not surprising: it was the wrong tool, far too small a device. I put hard Belgian cooking chocolate in and, fully aware of the possible devastation, pushed the button. (It’s hard to concentrate on anything here in Yeti Nivas right now as the flies are frantically copulating everywhere, including my trackpad. Is it fun if you’re that small and shortlived? Is it better with wings?) The chopper, already a battered device with worrying cracks in the shaft, splintered and ground to a noisy halt.

Now bear in mind that my obsession with clearing out an old gatepost hole drove me to ruin an old, but still serviceable, power drill last month. That’s two non-recyclables ruined. Not good.

Fortunately they still had bargain food processors in the vast-bin-of-stuff section at the local Lidl. They looked a bit tatty—boxes taped up and crumpled corners—but they were bound to be cheap and if they didn’t work, well, I could struggle to get one that did.

After a wonderful morning walking along the Don with three children and a strumpet-dog (it’s not just the flies; the dog is in heat) I plunged into Lidl and retrieved one of the last two machines. They were cheap, too, only £25. We met Bhavana on the way back and it was a happy expedition that walked back through the door of Yeti Nivas.

After a suitable pause I set about assembling the new machine, which of course didn’t work. I put the bits together in a sensible fashion, but it simply didn’t come on. I tried a different socket, checked the plug, all the usual procedures – nothing. Cheap goods, what do you expect, right? Shifting into justified consumer warrior mode, I emailed a firm message to the support centre and got the details and authorization I needed to contact another repair/replace clearing centre; and then I sent them their own firm printed letter with a crisp image of the receipt. Job done. I sorted out the children, now squabbling, posted the letter, fiddled around on the computer for another few minutes, then went into the kitchen for a coffee. While it was brewing I loitered in the kitchen with a purposeless mind and looked at the broken machine again. I looked at the manual again. I did what the manual said I should do, but this time it all worked perfectly.

How much anger and frustration? How many people’s time wasted? Who can wait for muddy water to clear? It was my expectations that were broken, not the machine.

When the dog licks your feet…

Woke up this morning with the dog licking my feet. Went back to sleep. Bad move. Came downstairs and found generous helpings of dog mess — ‘I tried to wake you up!‘—and the server boot volume almost full, for mysterious reasons.

I haven’t even had hot water yet this morning.

Unnnnnngh.

And it got worse: Eleanor woke up in a foul mood and yelled at everyone; Bhavana felt awful. Things only got better after I very carefully peeled an orange in one piece, without any tears. Would that mapmaking were so easy.