Where and when

I have been wrapped in the posts of the final week of the seminar and caught under their spell.  They are a wonderful set of comments about our experience. As their spell loosens its grip there is one aspect of them I can’t agree with.  The sense of a summing up, of an ending,  Now that we have finished the weekly seminar meetings I feel, in a bit of Scott McCloudian reflection, that we have lost our skin.  There is no when or where for us now but there still is an us, as long as we continue on the web…in the blogosphere …as twitterati.  Before it was easy to ‘draw a panel’ around our meetings.  Not so any more. Just maybe now it can be even more interesting – at least fun to think about.  As we, hopefully, grow in our use of the new media in ways that are determined by us and our lives, professionally and as creative individuals,  I hope  we still return here to share our experiences.  Let’s face it there is no one else in my world I can tell I had an Englebartian moment and expect any sort of understanding.

Not surprisingly Gardner has provided us both a charge…You must change your life …and a path (the further reading at the end of the syllabus i.e. Tim Berners-Lee, “The World Wide Web”)

I have read the World Wide Web (WWW) and invite others to do the same.  My first impressions can be summarized in four observations.  First it is interesting given the changes in administration at Baylor that the rapid access the WWW provided to the Starr report was listed as an early major success of the WWW.  Second, it is always nice to acknowledge that physicists were first  Third, WWW was not the best technology .  At the ACM Hypertext conference in 1991 the author’s paper was rejected, relegating it to a poster presentation due apparently to the rudimentary use of hypertext compared to other hypertext ‘constructs’ presented.  It seems to be a repeated theme in the readings that the ideal and the practical aren’t in sync.  Timing seems to be everything.  Finally the terminal mentioned in the appendix puts this last comment into perspective.  Have you ever seen a VT-100 terminal!?!

Trying to use one of these to implement an advanced HTML system would be like putting stone tablets through a printing press.

Now for contemplating the Web, I believe in blogging but when something more visceral is possible I can’t resist.  There is a way to ‘surf’ the web.  If you have done this I hope you agree it makes you appreciate the complexity of the web. If you haven’t please give it a try. Go to the visualtrace website and type in your favorite website into the remote address box and click trace (proxy trace is my favorite) and hold on.  Note: DON’T end your address with a ‘/’

For example

‘www.google.com’ is good

‘www.google.com/’ is bad

If nothing else see what the web must do so you can check out the menu at the Pizza Hut in Moscow

http://www.pizza-hut.ru

or maybe the best museum in Florence Italy

http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it

Visual trace is not the only or the best way to do this but it is easy and free (not the best but…… Hmmm where have I heard that before)

Share your surfing and maybe even suggest what essay in The New Media Reader you would like for us to read.

Right now, I’m going to a museum in Florence

‘Ciao’

« Catching up

Catching up

I have fallen behind in blogging. And in reading.  But am finally catching up and enjoying it more as I stick with it.  A few things to get me up to date.  I will have to reread several of the articles in the future to see how the seminar has changed my approach to the material.  It is very different from much I read professionally.  Yes as a techie, a physicist, this material still seems foreign.

First I wanted to revisit McLuhan.  As Hilary pointed out in ‘Externalization of the Senses‘ we settled on the physical senses in our discussion during the seminar and had a great discussion.  The week following the seminar on McLuhan the center of Faith and Learning had a speaker, Denis Alexander, who spoke on

“The Dawkins Delusion: Debunking the Conflict between Science and Religion”

During his talk Dr. Alexander mentioned five aspects of the mind and/or  its method of apprehending, interacting, experiencing (I’m not sure exactly what word to use here but for our purposes ‘sensing’ may work best.)

These are

1. Scientific

2. Ethical

3. Aesthetic

4. Personal

5. Religious

So could these also be thought of as the senses and could the emphasis , through technology or otherwise, of one over the other change significantly our apprehension of an event, object or everything?

Where and when »« z-machine on macs

z-machine on macs

After reading about dynabook. I decided to check out the CD that came with the our text.  Nothing about dynabook, but I ran across the text-based adventures.  I remember in the ’70′s typing away instructions, on a teletype hooked up remotely to the mainframe downstairs, into ADVENTURE.  I have never in the real world taken so much satisfaction, or put so much effort into, watering a plant and watching it grow.  I still dislike any sort of twisty passages in computer games.  With all this nostalgia I couldn’t resist just a quick peek into the text based world…..only to find out that the z-machine emulator provided on the CD will not work on my Mac or any Mac that does not support ‘Classic.’  To spare any other mac users this disappointment, I have included links to two z-machine emulators that will work (or at least did for me)

1) First is

Zoom for Mac OS X

2) Second is a Java-based program so is really  a cross-platform solution

Zinc Interactive Fiction Interpreter (v1.04)

See you in text world. Be sure to bring a ZEN-like level of patience… I never did get the explosion to work right

Oh and does the need for this post  have any relevance to our discussion?

Catching up »« Musings at sea

Musings at sea

I am still looking for solid ground in this seminar.  If you want a metaphor for how I visualize most intellectual endeavors, and possibly all things in life, it is like swimming in a deep ocean with no land in sight. Occasionally, a small island appears,

you drag up on the beach, rest awhile, reflect on your achievements, travails etc, and then dive in again hoping for the next unseen island.

So here I am with no land in sight.

1) I didn’t mean what I said even when I said it – In an early session of the seminar we were talking about the internet and computing in general and began talking about how it blurred the line between say author and reader or in this case photographer and viewer.  With a digital camera and the internet, ANYONE can take photographs and post them. Does this make the professional obsolete?  Well that is basically what I said. The film and digital media expert disagreed as well he should.  I didn’t mean it when I said it but knew I had a point even though I could not express it.  So before we can grow as a group we need to grow past the first level of superficial observations to a better level of communication.  As I reflect on this I still can’t say what I meant more effectively because it gets lost.   I’m not sure I know the role of a professional photographer.  If I define it as someone who provides images of the world that express in a compelling way a story, feeling, event or thought then just like some sing better or write better there will be people who photograph better.  I never meant to say otherwise.  But is the value of a photographer or any other professional is based on a means on conveying their personal expression via their chosen medium?  Now for me here is a troublesome part, the whole seminar is about new media and as such the context by which we define out roles as professional or providers of content, and consumers of content are blurred.  Or are being redefined by the introduction of new media.  No closer to land on this one.

2) Convergence – As I thought about Doug Englebart’s approach I focused on trying to know how one decides what is worth working on and what isn’t.  Since I ‘grew up’ watching the adoption of the mouse as a standard input device I reflected on it as a guide.  I started out loving the mouse.  The freedom it gave me to move around the screen, draw things, or better yet draw once and then make duplicates was wonderful.  I could draw and piece together math symbols, this was before all the specialty fonts, as I needed them.  Cut and paste. Without the mouse the computer felt claustrophobic to me. It all just seemed natural.  The view of the mouse as a toy or inefficient totally baffled me.  Yet it was the conventional wisdom for years.  I’m still amazed that it took fifteen years before the mouse was the norm for most computers.  Yet now I mellowed as well.  Tasks that were once solely done with the mouse, I find are actually easier with the keyboard arrows and function keys.  Particularly where quick accurate repetitive placement of the cursor is needed.  This is not nearly the revolution that occurred for people adopting the mouse but I think the principle is the same.  When an immediate strong need is being met, the adoption occurs quickly whereas the more modest improvement, that doesn’t meet an immediate need, can still occur but does so incrementally.  It is interesting that the mouse serves and an example of both.  It is only the users that are different. For individuals that needed drawing for example the mouse was a game changer, whereas for many office tasks, typing spreadsheets etc, it was tantamount to having to stop your input and switch out the typeset ball in an old IBM selectric.

In time as the programs used by both groups evolved the uses of the mouse changed as well and the two groups have converged on the same tool set, keyboard and mouse (or trackpad).  Is this the best set for input?  Right now it seems to be .  The current alternatives, even if they are in some absolute sense better, only appear to provide incremental changes (although mouse/trackpad to touchscreen might be happening). For the ultimate interface game changer see the blog ‘The Ultimate Interface‘ posted by Hilary

Another example of convergence is PowerPoint.   In the past I was a member of an interdisciplinary PhD program in Materials Science and Engineering.  As such I saw presentations from members of different fields.  The style differed dramatically.  Most engineers, and also biologists, use pre-made slides and carousel slide projectors for their presentations.

We physicists tended to used transparencies and overhead projectors.
vs             

The slides where slick, professional and unwieldy.  Presentations flowed effortlessly but the question and answer sessions were a mess. Whenever a past slide was needed again it would take several minutes to find it and project it.  The transparencies, on the other hand, often looked homemade, tended to smear and they yellowed with age.  But they were flexible. Retrieving one for use later was relatively easy and if an unexpected point was brought up a plot or math derivation could be presented on the spot.  PowerPoint type software has eliminated the old forms not by eliminating the utility of the old forms but combining them.  This combination however is not the convergence I am referring to.  The convergence of the users is the key.  So this is my island.  Not a particularly big island but I need the rest.  Just what is the island?  Well, instead of having to think through all of this again, whenever I starting swimming, I will ask, ‘What groups will be brought into convergence by this new media, in what ways will they change and benefit in doing so.”  Hopefully this will guide me to another island before its too late.

z-machine on macs »« First Blog 2nd printing

First Blog 2nd printing

This is a test, a test of the blogger subsection of dwightprussell’s augmented intellect system.  If this were not a test there would be some actual intellect contributing to this post.  As it is, this being my first, this post is quite self conscious and awkward.  Thanks to Gardner’s talk at the last meeting for inspiring me to dive in and get this first blog out of my system. If this really gets online then it is a success.

Musings at sea »