Christopher Butler

“Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.” (James Gleick, Faster, 286)

…which is probably why futurism is dying right now. But I should probably qualify that, because words like future and futurism seem to be used all the time. The kind of futurism I’m talking about is the kind that involves imagination of the long-term variety, not the kind that involves relatively short-term predictions of things with relatively short-term impact—things like who will seek the Republican nomination in 2012, what the next iPhone will look like, etc. I’m not the only one who feels this way; I posted back in October a short note about how we’re distracted by the now as a result of this kind of short-term futurism, which was actually just a “hear, hear” to Matthew Sheret’s post, The Future is a Blank Canvas Pinned to a Brick Wall. (Note to self: I need to get more creative with my blog post titles.) And Sheret’s post was really just a response to a quote from William Gibson.

In any case, my main point back then was this:

What’s happening, as far as I can tell, is that our imagination is being inhibited. We’re so focused on the now—that email, text message, instant message, Twitter DM or @, Facebook post, you know what I mean—that our sense of the “next” is being squeezed down to the momentary rather than something larger…there’s no data to prove this. But I do appeal to our ability to sense what is clearly happening. The reduction of the scope of our imagined future from years, to seasons, to moments. Sure, there could be other factors at play, such as loss of hope due to global conflict, economic collapse, environmental issues, general entropy, but amidst that is a significant shift in the pace of life that has stolen the quiet moment of reflection from us. (me, here)

This seems related, so… I was chatting with a colleague this morning about the various bad news (political/social strife, natural disasters, economic struggles, etc.) and he mentioned that there’s an old rule of thumb for stock traders—that 80% of people forget about news after 3 days, but then the rest forget after 21 days. Not exactly a long-term perspective. But given the volume of news today—the 24-hour news cycle—you can’t really blame us for dumping our news cache, can you?

Maybe it’s another one of those strange examples of existential time-dilation, related to what the Directorate of Time said about how “the more we have experienced, the faster time flows.” So the more we experience, even peripherally, the more distorted our sense of now, then, and later will be. Add to that the fact that we’re complicit in allowing rumors about possible entertainment gadgets (not to mention “reports” of such-and-such a celebrity being seen wearing something-or-other at someplace) to qualify as “news,” occupying the same level of importance as a dispatch from a war-torn country. If some guy’s musings about an unreleased cellphone’s feature set is news, then some kind of time-dilating, imagination-suppressing phenomenon must be to blame…

Posted at 8:00am and tagged with: time, seeing time, longreads, two column,.

April 6th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 5

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(Now that I’m on to a fifth installment of this series, I realized I can just provide a link to all of them by linking to the tag, Seeing Time.)

“The printed word began as advanced technology for rapid transmission of data into the brain. In terms of bits per second, there was no better way to get information, or a story, or facts, from out there to in here.” (James Gleick, Faster, 283)

Here’s my question about this idea: if the printed word accelerated the transmission of data into the brain, what did it do for the retention of data by the brain? As I read this, I thought of how information was transmitted throughout ancient history—much of it orally, which is a method we no longer depend upon, not to mention a skill we no longer have.

So once we gained the ability to write down information, we began storing it anywhere but our own brains—cave walls, stone and clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, vellum codices, and so on. We outsourced our memory, even then, to technology, which is interesting to consider as this concept of cyborgification (so to speak) is all the rage right now because of how we’re doing the exact same thing only with digital media and computers. I suppose the really pertinent question is not whether we are outsourcing our memory to technology—we are, just as we have been since we first learned to write—but whether we are doing so to a reliable storage agent. All that we know of ancient human history is the result of the reliability of the stone, clay, and paper storage units for information. Yet, digital media is much more vulnerable. The volatility of file formats, proprietary (and therefore hazardous) database structures and languages, rapid succession of devices, and, of course, the market forces driving technological innovation today, all contribute to a poor substitute for analog storage methods—perhaps even oral tradition—in light of the retention of cultural knowledge.

James Burke touches on this at the outset of his series, The Day the Universe Changed, too…

By the way, I spent a few minutes Googling around on the history of communications technology and found some interesting stuff. For instance, the World History Site has a very long categorized timeline of dates in the history of cultural technologies. While browsing there I made a serendipitous discovery. The timeline lists:

1824 Peter Mark Roget proposes theory of persistent vision.

Apparently, this is the same Roget for whom the Thesaurus is named. Interesting!

There’s more where that list came from, by the way. Here’s a clearing house of information on communications technologies and world history. You could always hit up Wikipedia’s landing page on the history of technology. There’s a ton there…

Posted at 8:00am and tagged with: seeing time, one column, longreads, technology,.

April 5th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 4

8 notes |#

For those late to the free-association party, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 have been hastily dashed off to the web with little regard for coherency or an overall game plan. The nonsense continues here…

“You are aware that the director of the Directorate of Time is something of a philosopher. He has written, ‘We experience time intervals as much shorter than when we were young.’ He even has equations for this: ‘Delta t(s) ~ Delta Exp/Total Exp’ and ‘dt(s) ~ dt/t or integrated t(s) ~ In(t),’ by which he means, the more we have experienced, the faster time flows. Depressants like alcohol slow time, because the brain receives fewer inputs per second. You may feel, as so many do, that your life could be plotted on a scale where the years from age ten to age twenty seem as long (as eventful) as the years from age twenty to age forty or from forty to eighty. Exponential growth at its most damning. On this scale, the moment of birth is at negative infinity, and as for death…someone else might quote Woody Allen, but the director favors Epicurus: ‘Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’” (James Gleick, Faster, 279-280)

As soon as I turned 30, I began spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about how my perception of time has changed. In particular, I began noticing exactly what the Directorate of Time describes—that the decade from age 10 to 20 seemed far longer than the following one, which brought me to 30. In some ways, the changes in my life were equally intense in both decades. Between 10 and 20, one doubles one’s age, which in and of itself is significant and isn’t as quickly done in later years. But also, one goes from childhood to early adulthood, experiencing hormonal and brain chemistry changes that greatly affect one’s sense of self. In the next decade, I experienced much more circumstantial volatility, but I suppose my sense of self was a bit more consistent. In any case, the distortion makes 40 seem as if it’s far closer than 9 years from now.

Incidentally, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was recently interviewed on an episode of PRI’s To the Best of Our Knowledge on Memory, Mind & The Self about the role of memory in the development of selfhood in human beings:

“The critical thing in relation to human consciousness is not only the development of mind and the development of self, it’s the development of a self that has biographical characteristics. I think that that is really the passport into big-time consciousness of our kind. What you have there is the possibility of, of course, expanding memory so that it is not just a memory about categories of things, like say animals, mountains, and bodies of water and such, but also the possibility of having memories about specific individuals, specific events, including the events that have happened to you. Once you start having that kind of memory, then you have the possibility of creating some kind of record of what you have been. And eventually, once you get language, then you’re essentially creating the beginnings of culture.”

It seems that he is saying that one’s sense of distinction from other entities is the root of selfhood. I suppose that seems a bit obvious or circular, but it’s different from saying that one’s sense of self is (and always has been to humans) inherent to the experience of being alive. Damasio seems to be saying that our sense of self—the human sense of self—originates with our ability to recognize that we are not something else, that we have individuality in a categorical sense, before we had personality-individuality in the way we tend to see it today.

I wonder, back to Gleick’s passage (and my “I’m-30-now-and-running-out-of-time” feelings), whether my ability to forget enables the sense of time dilation the Directorate calculates. What might that dilation feel like (or would it exist at all) for a person with hyperthymesia? (Incidentally again, that same episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge includes an interview with Jill Price, a 46-year-old resident of New York who has forgotten virtually nothing since the age of 14, and whose case in particular led to the official diagnosis of hyperthymesia.) It’s tragic—the entry for Price notes that hyperthymesia is characterized by a propensity for “spending vast quantities of time thinking about one’s past,” which must be torturous given the detail available. Price confirms this in her interview, which makes me feel thankful for my smaller dispensation of torturous autobiographical recall…

Is anyone out there experiencing psychological time dilation…or perhaps real time dilation?

Posted at 7:41am and tagged with: seeing time, time, two column, longreads,.

April 4th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 3

8 notes |#

…Part 1 was on Sunday, and Part 2 this morning. I’m just going to keep going with this until I’m sick of it. First, another quote from James Gleick’s Faster…

“‘The historical record shows that humans have never, ever opted for slower,’ points out the historian Stephen Kern. We fool ourselves with false nostalgia—a nostalgia for what never was. Whenever we speed up the present, as a curious side-effect we slow down the past. ‘If a man travels to work on a horse for twenty years,’ Kern says, ‘and then an automobile is invented and he travels in it, the effect is both an acceleration and a slowing…That very acceleration transforms his former means of traveling into something it had never been—slow—whereas before it had been the fastest way to go.’ Until the futurist Filippo Marinetti began talking about speeding up rivers, ‘the Danube had never seemed so deliciously slow.’ Peering back through history, we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.” (277-278)

Sure, there’s a distortion of perception that happens when some new technology changes how we do things today and think about how we did them yesterday, but it’s not always just about speed. For instance, texting is not necessarily faster than a phone call. A text-based conversation could elapse over a longer period of time than a phone call, but it feels faster because we don’t have to focus on that conversation in the same way we do when we’re talking, live, over the phone. With texting, you can quickly send a message and then stop thinking about it until you receive a reply. Ultimately, it probably requires the same overall amount of attention, but in a less concentrated way. But texting is another available method that we didn’t have before. It gives us the choice of communicating one way rather than another. We once had only letters. Over time, our choices have multiplied: telegram, telephone, fax, email, instant message, text message, etc. I guess that means that, in light of Gleick’s passage, acceleration is one consideration and distribution is another.

The last part about speeding up rivers made me think about a slideshow I saw recently documenting Lost Rivers, which “depicts places poised between loss and beauty, acknowledging the price of urbanization while seeking to reclaim a sense of connection with these natural spaces.” It seems that attempting to “speed up rivers,” or in general, messing with nature to accelerate industry, is not a good idea…

But back again to slow, because the rivers made me think of the opening scene of Andrei Rublev, which depicts a group of 15th century Russian monks launching a hot air balloon. Some run along a river, making their way to the launch point. As the monks prepare, many references to time: Hold on a second. Come on, quick! Come on, fast! We won’t have enough time. Just a second. And then, spectacular footage shot from the balloon as it slowly crosses the landscape and eventually makes landfall near a horse—the contemporary vehicle of travel—by the river. Beautiful.

Posted at 9:18pm and tagged with: one column, seeing time, time, longreads,.

April 4th 2011

Seeing Time, Part 2

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(…my last post being Part 1. I grabbed several quotes from James Gleick’s book, Faster, as I flipped back through it the other night, which is where this assembling series is coming from…)

“Your sense of acceleration has not blinded you to the brevity of the present moment.” (273)

This is the first sentence of the last chapter, titled The End. I’m still not exactly sure what it means. Sometimes I feel quite the opposite—that much of what we do only makes sense given a denial of our transience on this planet (building projects, storing up wealth, the way we spend the time we do have, etc.). I’ve often had this realization while waiting on line in stores, where I’ll be looking around at the people around me and wondering, “what are we all doing here when we’re all going to die?” On the other hand, perhaps Gleick is right—that our ambitions and daily toil are also just as motivated by the awareness that we won’t be here forever, so the simple fact that we have desires validates what we are willing to do (standing on line, for example) to achieve them…

Meanwhile, last evening I watched (thanks to Frank’s recommendation) the first episode of Ways of Seeing, in which John Berger points out that the way we perceive a painting is changed by its surroundings—the sound around us when we’re looking at it, the wall behind it, whether it’s been reproduced and displayed somewhere else, etc. He meditates quite a bit on the pace of seeing, which caused me to marvel that even in our rushing about to do all we might do in life before we no longer have it, we still stop to look at things.

Then I thought, what if someone were to choose a painting, say for instance Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (Berger talks about it at length in the first episode) which has been placed in many different locations since it was first painted in the late 15th/early 16th century, and create a sonic story of its life so far? The image would never change, but the sound we hear would. Early in the piece, you might hear the echoing goings on of the Milan church for which it was painted. Then you’d hear the sounds of transport as it made its way to England. You might hear hushed conversations of spectators around it, perhaps the bragging of its owner of the time. Eventually, more transport sounds, installation in the British National Gallery, etc. It would be a purely sonic version of Noah’s Everyday, and rather than the brooding soundtrack he deftly chose—which turns mundanity into something more dramatic—the sounds of mundanity would bring life to the painting, which would remain still. Someone should do this…

This makes me think of a book I had as a child—The Little House, which tells the story of a house as its surroundings radically change over time. The image above, by the way, comes from a brief article comparing the storybook image to a real-life example of a house that refuses to give in to the pressures of progress. Anyway, The Little House is kind of an analog version of Everyday, isn’t it?

Posted at 7:50am and tagged with: one column, seeing time, time, longreads,.

April 3rd 2011

Seeing Time

7 notes |#

Today I was flipping through a book I read sometime in the last two years: Faster, by James Gleick. It’s been on my mind since I just started reading his newest book, The Information. This passage, in his Afterword, resonated more with me in this pass (apparently) than the first time I read it:

“We struggle to perceive the process of change even as we ourselves are changing. After all, flux is our style, if not our destiny. We don’t exist in a steady state, and we don’t have a motionless platform from which to observe the changing world around us. Sometimes we fail to perceive profound transformations that we’ve been staring at; sometimes we blink and we notice a revolution. The most profound comment on this is still Richard Feynman’s; he was sitting outdoors in New Mexico, looking up at a blue and turbulent sky and talking about the evolution of his field, theoretical physics. ‘It is really like the shape of clouds,’ he said. ‘As one watches them they don’t seem to change, but if you look back a minute later, it is all very different.’” (287)

As soon as I read this, I immediately recalled a few picture-every-day type projects I’d seen on the web. They’re the sort of thing that only the late 20th century could have produced; the technology necessary for that much documentation was just not available or practical beforehand. Here’s one that began way back in 1976 and continues to track a family’s appearance each year. Here, of course, is the famous Noah-takes-a-picture-of-himself-everyday-for-six-years video that was later spoofed by the Simpsons. I am sure there are many, many more… This one is the most recent I’ve seen, and perhaps the most stunning. The subject photographed himself every day between 1991 and 2007, and animated the images (which, incidentally, also track the position of the Earth relative to the Sun). I had to watch it several times in order to really process the physical change he experienced over 17 years. Even at such a rapid speed, you track with him and lose sight of the earlier images. By the time you reach the last image, you know he looks older, but you can’t exactly describe why. The last time I watched it, I also noticed how the intervals between haircuts grew much smaller as he aged.

But I also wonder if the relationship between the availability of that technology and the output of that kind of condensed observation project is parabolic—that maybe we’ll get to the point of an overwhelming amount of immediacy of media that nobody cares anymore to mine the insights that condensing it produces.

But then I think of a couple of other stories—one book and one film—that push this idea of constant/ubiquitous surveillance even further. The film is The Final Cut, the story of a “cutter,” a sort of life-editor/sin-eater of the continuous footage our lives produce via implants who creates the final cuts screened after one dies. The book is The Light of Other Days, which tells the story of the radical societal impact of a time-viewer, which is just as good at showing you an event 100 years in the past as it is one less than a second ago, which is to say that it makes everything, everywhere, everywhen available.

Anyway, this stuff is just on my mind. What do you think?

Posted at 8:22pm and tagged with: seeing time, time, two column, longreads,.

March 31st 2011

21 notes |#

Alice Gregory

(Source: nplusonemag.com)

Posted at 9:32pm and tagged with: quote, digital-literacy,.

“

It’s hard not to think “death drive” every time I go on the internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember. You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.

”

March 30th 2011

Ideas of March

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I’m on board. Chris asked for it and Frank responded, which is how I heard about it.

I must not be very well connected to things because when I hear the “blogging is dead” claims, I wonder what they mean by “blogging” and “dead.” I love blogs, and they’re very much alive as far as I can tell. I find more new material of interest on blogs than I have time to read. There are so many people out there that are inspiring me with the stuff they post to their blogs—I even posted a list last month of 12 particular blogs that I called “the good stuff.” But there really should be about 10 more on that list. Like (in the unintentional order in which my brain is spitting them out right now) Michael Babwahsingh, Kevin Kelly, Tim Maly, Geoff Manaugh, and, well at least 6 more…

The blogs I read and love are the ones that relocate me. As I read them, all that is happening around me falls away. There’s a purity to what they offer—usually a sense of true wonder for the world. An inquisitiveness that is vulnerable and inspired and not show-offy in the least. They’re not about polished, professional writing (though some of them are written by those who do the polished thing elsewhere, like myself), they’re immediate and un-fussy. I try to make my blog about that, knowing that I probably fall short most of the time.

So here’s my pledge to blog more, and in doing so, maybe even transport you somewhere.

Posted at 3:25pm and tagged with: ideasofmarch, two column,.

March 30th 2011

6 notes |#

My latest article for Newfangled is up. Here’s a clip…

Prototyping for Designers

Over the past month, I’ve been conducting interviews with many of our agency partners, clients, and colleagues to gather their feedback and deepen our understanding of the industry we serve. The things I’ve been hearing are both affirming and challenging, and I’m excited to begin to apply their insights to a variety of things, from how we work to the kinds of content we create. While I’m naturally cautious and unlikely to rush into things, I don’t want to waste any time in acting upon feedback if there’s something I can do differently right now. In fact, I’m starting with this article, which I’ve written in direct response to some particularly wonderful feedback I received from our friends at Callahan Creek in one of these interviews just a couple of weeks ago.

The gist of it was this: There is still come confusion about how designers should interpret prototypes, resulting in many unanswered questions up front. What, exactly, is the role of design in prototyping? Once a prototype is approved, which aspects of it should designers take literally and which are more flexible? As I listened to these questions, I realized that, despite having plenty of content about why we prototype and how the process works, we needed to answer them with material directly addressing the relationship between prototyping and design.

So, without further delay, here it is. Just a heads-up: this article is quite long and includes many visual examples that I hope will clarify the prototyping and design relationship. It doesn’t need to be read in one sitting, but if you do want to tackle it all at once, you might want to top off your coffee and find a comfortable spot…

Read the rest here >

Posted at 8:00am and tagged with: design, prototyping, web-design, longreads,.

My latest article for Newfangled is up. Here’s a clip…
Prototyping for Designers Over the past month, I’ve been conducting interviews with many of our agency partners, clients, and colleagues to gather their feedback and deepen our understanding of the industry we serve. The things I’ve been hearing are both affirming and challenging, and I’m excited to begin to apply their insights to a variety of things, from how we work to the kinds of content we create. While I’m naturally cautious and unlikely to rush into things, I don’t want to waste any time in acting upon feedback if there’s something I can do differently right now. In fact, I’m starting with this article, which I’ve written in direct response to some particularly wonderful feedback I received from our friends at Callahan Creek in one of these interviews just a couple of weeks ago.The gist of it was this: There is still come confusion about how designers should interpret prototypes, resulting in many unanswered questions up front. What, exactly, is the role of design in prototyping? Once a prototype is approved, which aspects of it should designers take literally and which are more flexible? As I listened to these questions, I realized that, despite having plenty of content about why we prototype and how the process works, we needed to answer them with material directly addressing the relationship between prototyping and design. So, without further delay, here it is. Just a heads-up: this article is quite long and includes many visual examples that I hope will clarify the prototyping and design relationship. It doesn’t need to be read in one sitting, but if you do want to tackle it all at once, you might want to top off your coffee and find a comfortable spot…
Read the rest here >

March 27th 2011

5 notes |#

Robert Heinlein

(Source: kk.org)

Posted at 7:47pm and tagged with: quote,.

“

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

”

March 25th 2011

(Very Specific) “Linkouts,” Part 2

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My first dispatch was back in August. Here’s another:

Michael, here’s a pretty good “Oh, Snap!” from Nicholas Carr on Google and the life of the mind. And while we’re wagging fingers at Google, here’s a video of Douglas Rushkoff speaking to Google. His message: “Don’t give up on the humans.”

Silas, you know you want to watch Lady Gaga’s exclusive interview with Google.

Able, for you, soundscape ecology. Teaser clip: “add the sounds of plants, molds, and root networks, of soil itself and groundwater, of shifts in air pressure and humidity and even the underlying deep geologic structures that support all that living terrain in the first place, and an intensely interesting sonic portrait of terrestrial ecosystems takes shape, mutating through complex blurs and inflection points over time, its parts weaving in and out symphonically.”

Keith, meet Mr. Rogers.

Aaron, Kevin Kelly says your attention is cheap ($2.50/hour).

Jason, here are some 1975 artist renderings of what a silicon-based ecology on Mars might have looked like.

Martin and Tripp, this Guardian piece about memorization reminded me of the lost abilities our Classical ancestors had to memorize large amounts of text. Have you developed new memory skills in your studies? Also, unrelated, is this 15 minute audio interview with Sarah Blackwell on Montaigne.

Dave, a recounting of one man’s year at sea.

Mark, this is the AdAge post I mentioned about data angst.

Posted at 2:28pm and tagged with: reading, two column,.

March 24th 2011

4 notes |#

Slide from the presentation I gave today on the mobile web. Full deck and write-up here. Here’s the text from this portion:

Economic Oligarchy
This is, admittedly, more of a political issue I have with the apps marketplace setup. There are two companies that control almost the entirely of app-related commerce—Apple and Google. And while most app developers I know are excited about the 70% of the revenue they receive from the sales of their apps, the economic conditions will always drastically remain in favor of the verrrrry tippy top. See, there are 400,000 unique apps available today. Since the launch of the app marketplaces, there have been over 10,000,000,000 downloads (yes, billion). That is a huge amount of activity, and an even more huge amount of revenue. So all the app devs must be doing great, right? Well, not exactly. The average price of an app is only $1.65. So, unless you are incredibly prolific, an individual has a much lower number to pine for than the owner of the entire marketplace. Add to that the fact that Apple and Google have tight control over what makes it into their inventory and you have a system that is not exactly an innovation breeding ground. The real innovation has already happened—the creation of the marketplace itself. The next likely source of game-changin innovation is much more likely to come from outside the app marketplace, like the web, where less control and economic control factors are in place.

(By the way, I’ve exceeded my use-of-the-word-innovation quota. I promise I won’t use it again for a while.)

Read the rest >

Posted at 7:48pm and tagged with: mobile,.

Slide from the presentation I gave today on the mobile web. Full deck and write-up here. Here’s the text from this portion:

Economic OligarchyThis is, admittedly, more of a political issue I have with the apps marketplace setup. There are two companies that control almost the entirely of app-related commerce—Apple and Google. And while most app developers I know are excited about the 70% of the revenue they receive from the sales of their apps, the economic conditions will always drastically remain in favor of the verrrrry tippy top. See, there are 400,000 unique apps available today. Since the launch of the app marketplaces, there have been over 10,000,000,000 downloads (yes, billion). That is a huge amount of activity, and an even more huge amount of revenue. So all the app devs must be doing great, right? Well, not exactly. The average price of an app is only $1.65. So, unless you are incredibly prolific, an individual has a much lower number to pine for than the owner of the entire marketplace. Add to that the fact that Apple and Google have tight control over what makes it into their inventory and you have a system that is not exactly an innovation breeding ground. The real innovation has already happened—the creation of the marketplace itself. The next likely source of game-changin innovation is much more likely to come from outside the app marketplace, like the web, where less control and economic control factors are in place.
(By the way, I’ve exceeded my use-of-the-word-innovation quota. I promise I won’t use it again for a while.)

Read the rest >

March 21st 2011

Seeing Time, Part 6