Andy’s New Media Blog

I think one of the most interesting aspects of considering computers as a creative medium is the fact that unlike other creative mediums, it is also a highly commercial product.  It’s true that books, magazines etc. are commercial products as well, but the computer is the first medium that allows me to read/watch/hear about something, buy it and have it sent anywhere I want without having to stand up.  That’s why I thought it was interesting how McLuhan links the progress of literature and media to the progress of technology and industry.  Until he pointed it out in his essay, I never really considered the Gutenberg press as being a fundamentally mechanical way of expressing ideas, but looking at it in this way makes reading the printed page seem just as remote and technical as a computer screen.

This is really interesting because computers could potentially be the medium that alters the creative direction of humanity in the same way the written word did.  McLuhan makes a good point when he says that the potential is there, but I think at this point we have to agree that its mostly still just potential.  I feel that one of the main hindrances to the fulfillment of this potential is the fact that computers are complex mechanical and commercial products that are still constrained .  As it stands right now, I feel that computers are essentially just taking past media and making it more convenient to access and enjoy.  The fact that I can quickly access information from Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that is far larger than any that could possibly exist in print is an obvious example.  I can also quickly watch television shows, listen to music, write a document with perfect handwriting, but these are just extensions of things I can do without a computer.  I’m not suggesting that there haven’t been innovations, the internet alone is a massive leap forward, but I definitely don’t think we’ve seen the full creative potential of computers realized yet.

Although most of the people we’ve read thus far in the semester have had some interesting insights into the future of computing, many of which are currently in common use.  That said, one thing that I’ve noticed a lot, especially with the new reading by Kay/Goldberg is that they seem to put a high premium on user’s ability to make personalized and useful programs for themselves.  It would be unfair to say that this turned out to be completely untrue since it is technically possible to use a computer to make whatever kind of program you want, but I think by and large the average computer user is not innovating their computer experience in any way.

For instance, one of the draws of the Dynabook is the ability to use it to make programs that can assist musicians.  I suppose it would be possible now to do something like that with enough training, but 99.9% of computer users are just going to get on Google and download Audacity.  I guess it’s worth pointing out that someone out there had to make that program and that proves that people are really making innovative software on their own, but that doesn’t change the fact that very few people are truly making new and useful things with their computers.  I don’t think this is a problem of creativity, but rather one of complexity.  So many of the mainstay programs that we use (including our operating systems themselves) are made by massive teams of programmers and are far more complicated than anything  even a star computer science student could do on his or her own.  As a result, it seems like the small projects we’re seeing the most of are small things that add on to already massive projects such as Firefox add-ons, or Facebook apps.  It will be interesting to see whether some of the things Dr. Campbell showed us in class such as Yahoo Pipes do anything to change this pattern.

It’s hard to sit here at my desktop computer and not be struck by not only how much more technologically advanced it is than anything in Engelbart’s research center, but also how ridiculously common this technology is. Still, despite the fact that Engelbart was still limited by the technology of his time, it still seems like the research center was an incredible achievement. What I found most interesting while reading the article wasn’t any one aspect of the center, but rather the fact that so many disparate parts and ideas were all brought together so successfully. It’s even more awe inspiring when you think that a good amount of the things he describes all had to be invented and created separately, but also are integral to the overall success of the project. One particularly cool part of the reading was the television that essentially allowed for computing and video chat simultaneously. This is something that is only now coming into regular use, so it’s cool to see how Engelbart’s ideas are still being mined by the computer manufacturing and software companies.

Unlike the editors, I did not find Engelbart’s article on Augmenting Human Intellect to be either “stirring” or “prescient.”  This was by far the most dense reading we’ve had so far in the semester and I’d be lying if I said I understood it completely.  That said, I think Engelbart has some really interesting ideas that seem to be a natural progression from what we heard in Bush’s As We May Think.

Bush’s article was mostly interested in linking potentially relevant bits of information together in the hopes of quickly and intuitively gaining knowledge.  Engelbart on the other hand seems more interested in the specific ways computers can be used to increase our comprehension and understanding of that information once it is acquired.  He seems to be mainly concerned with how computers can be used to break up information into separate pieces that can each be dealt with in their own way.  Engelbart makes it as confusing as possible but I think alot of what he’s talking about can be accomplished with a simple word processor since they essentially allow you to quickly edit and take notes on things on the fly.  Engelbart’s article does a good job of pointing out some of the seemingly obvious aspects of computer use that are completely ingrained in people like me that grew up with computers, but were revolutionary new ways to process information only forty years ago.

  I found last class to be really productive in terms of getting a group together and deciding some basic areas of interest for our project.  Before class I was doing some random exploring on del.icio.us and found a site called The Daedalus Project which does psychological surveys of vast numbers of massive multiplayer online games (MMO).  I’ve been a World of Warcraft addict since pretty much the very beginning, so doing a project on the social and psychological effects of online gaming would be really interesting to me.  The site has a great amount of information as well as links to academic articles about online gaming.  I also thought it would be a good starting place for project ideas because Abbie, one of my group members is a psychology major and will hopefully be able to add an extra level of insight to our work.

One major obstacle we quickly realized would get in our way is the fact that most commercial MMO’s  require an extraordinary amount of time as well as a monthly fee to fully enjoy.  Because of this, we are also going to do some work with Second Life, not only because it is more accessible to casual players than something like World of Warcraft, but also because it will hopefully offer us a good opportunity to create something cool in a digital world for the creation portion of our assignment.  Although I haven’t had the opportunity to install Second Life yet myself, I feel confident that once I jump in it will be difficult to not think of interesting project topics.  I also think it will be very interesting to compare some of the major differences between commercial games like WoW which are expressly competitive and offer little in the way of user generated content, compared to Second Life or other non-competitive online experiences that generally rely on users cooperating to make interesting new locales and objects.

I remember realizing at some point during my senior math class in High School that without the help of my ridiculously over-complicated TI-83+ calculator, I would be completely out to sea. On the off occasion that I actually understood what my teacher was talking about, I needed it to do most of the basic calculations because I never bothered to learn things like multiplication tables or the method for dividing long numbers. The calculator even had a small variety of simple video games that I could play when I didn’t feel like paying attention, which was quite often. Looking back, I can see how my relationship with that calculator was very similar to what J.C.R. Licklider talks about in his article Man-Computer Symbiosis

In that particular example, my calculator was able to accomplish a set of limited tasks that I, being a lazy math hating high schooler was not.  Licklider’s article isn’t quite as forward thinking as Bush’s was, but he still puts an interesting perspective on some of the more practical aspects of computing that allow the average non-computer science expert to use computers successfully.  It’s easy to get so into our philosophical discussions about the power of computers to expand human thought that sometimes we forget that at their most basic level, computers exist to do things faster and more efficiently than a human can.  His most interesting and illuminating example of this is his discussion of the “trie” memory system, which seems to share many of the same principles that windows does, showing that user-friendliness would eventually become more important as computers got more and more complicated.

On some level I found Licklider’s article to be a little troubling when I held it up against my own experience with computers.  It’s true that computers are an extremely efficient means by which to transfer and receive information, but at some point does this relationship turn from symbiotic to infantilizing?  Going back to my example about the calculator.  It wasn’t that I was incapable of learning basic math skills, I just never had to.  I guess the main thing I’m wondering is what effect our constant interaction with computers has on our ability and desire to acquire knowledge on our own.  It will be interesting to see where things go in the future and whether Licklider’s ideas about symbiosis are used to more fully integrate computers into day to day life away from the computer desk and what further effects that might have on the human psyche.

-Andy

Although it’s always interesting to read accounts of what out predecessors thought the future would be like, many of these accounts are more humorous than they are informing.  Fortunately that isn’t the case with Bush who seems to have invented the groundwork for the internet without being able to conceive of the technology that would eventually make it possible.  Obviously he had no way of knowing that high speed computing machines would be invented long before someone got the idea of transferring information between them via phone lines.  Despite this limitation, Bush was still able to see that the means by which we acquire information and the amount of information available would necessarily increase with the increases in computing technology.  Personally one of his ideas that I found most interesting was the idea that traditional methods of archiving information would soon become obsolete in favor of following trails of informational sources that may only be tangentially related.  Bush thought this information would be contained on microfilm, but that is almost the only difference between his prediction and reality.  One of the coolest aspects of sites like Wikipedia is the ability to start studying one subject, then continuously jump around to related topics until you find yourself somewhere that superficially seems unconnected to the starting point.  Bush seems to mostly concentrate on the academic possibilities of the Memex machine, but it’s worth pointing out that this interconnectedness specific bits of information has been expanded to be useful a bunch of other things.  Some examples are Netflix which continuously links users to new movies based on their previous choices, and Youtube which attempts to find related videos to whatever one chooses to watch.

One of the aspects of New Media that intrigues me after today’s reading is the idea that computer technology has the ability to create art that interacts with and can be directly affected by its audience. Unlike print, film or television, which are only capable of showing unchanging scenarios, computer based art forms such as video games potentially allow users to directly affect the outcome of their experience. This is interesting to me because video games are obviously a form of artistic expression, but still allow for radically different things to occur each time the text is revisited. For instance, Elizabeth Bennett will always marry Mr. Darcy at the end of Pride and Prejudice but when I put Grand Theft Auto III in my Playstation, there is literally no way to know what will happen.

This doesn’t quite hold up when one considers that all the choices and actions one makes in a video game are still completely limited to the game designer’s whims. Despite this, technology is increasing rapidly and allowing for the creation of games that allow for unprecedented freedom when it comes to user interaction. One example I am particularly interested in is Spore, a currently unreleased game being developed by the makers of Sim City. It will supposedly allow players to follow and affect a species from its birth as a single celled organism through their evolution into intergalactic travelers. Only time will tell whether the game lives up to its hype, but regardless of whether it succeeds, it still shows another step towards using New Media to craft experiences that allow for multiple outcomes in ways that traditional media cannot.