digitaldust

Over the last couple of days I’ve had the strange experience of people (who are not Heather) talking to me about my blog posts. Mostly about the cats, even someone on the other side of the world coming up and asking me if we had a name for Burton. Yep, we do, he’s an explorer, named for Richard Francis Burton. And it’s quite apparent that no one comments on or talks to me about the turgid attempts at high brow posts I put up… those just seems to scare people. Just goes to show it’s the human angle every time, reality TV, not docs. Also, I’ve put some a couple of posts up in a bit of an un-reflective and unprofessional way, without thinking how they might be read from other points of view and in my new context as a lecturer. I took them down. So I’ve become painfully aware of the public nature of my blog. Only a very small public, I’m not claiming fame, just unfortunate recognition. I suppose that’s what one wants when blogging, but I had always sort of assumed that the only people who read my blog were Heather, Ed and my Mum… Hi Mum.

On top of that has been some discussion with a couple of people about what I would use Facebook for. Facebook (as well as many other social networking or social blogging tools) allows selective privacy/publicity. So I could limit my audience to people who might get obtuse jokes or forgive me for obsessive cat postings. However I consciously chose to join Facebook as a tool I could use to connect with students, not as something to keep up networks with friends.

But all of this raised again for me the whole social construction of knowledge thing. How meaning is constructed in a social context, and with very little to do with the content of the message. I’ve been thinking about both Facebook and the blogosphere in these terms over the last day.

Profile/Social Networking sites, like Facebook, run on this concept of social constructivism. The so called content is light, but they are not about that, they are about links to other people or saying what movies one likes. From the constructivist angle these profiles, when filled out, become very rich nodes in the framework due to their relationships, but not because of any unique or creative content. And from that point of view you cannot treat the individual nodes separately, you must always be addressing the whole. Or addressing big chunks, which is inherently difficult as there are no logical boundaries in these networks.

The same goes for the blogosphere. Most of which is not filled up with unique, new, creative content. Much of it is links other posts, which again are links to further posts, which might end up in some unique content.

So to me both these experiments in closed social networks and the open knowledge networks out there on the web seem to prove and should be read as socially constructed and intrinsically hermeneutic knowledge.

Heather and I got two cute little balls of fluff over the weekend. We hyped ourselves up to such an intense level of kitten madness that we just had to get some last week. I wasn’t too sure about these little guys when we first looked at them, but now I’m addicted to the kitty crack. Can’t stop looking in on them.

The one of the left is Flynn, he’s suave, acrobatic and has a small mustache. Flynn is a reincarnation of an 18th Century pirate. We’re still circling around names for the one on the right. Maybe Burton because he’s a gentleman explorer with Victorian sensibilities, or maybe Choo because he has a shoe fetish.

Ed pointed me at this post by Dave Pollard yesterday. It’s all about how technology has ultimately made things worse for humanity. Every supposedly good thing that comes along has an even worse dark cloud with it. Now this is not a new meme, it comes up again and again, usually as some sort of support for returning to a more glorious time before we invented [insert recent technology here], where everyone lived in harmony. But I remember reading texts when I did Egyptology where 5000 years ago the egyptians were saying the same thing.

The other thing that always comes out (as it does in the comments) is the opinion that technology is not inherently evil, it’s the people who use it. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

All of this I think is a bit naive. Now I’ve been thinking quite a lot about technology recently for various reasons, and one certain thing that I am now a firm believer in is that any discussion about technology as a concept is inseparable from a discussion about ethics. I say unfortunately because ethics is a messy business and I would much rather be thinking about some kind of clean ontology of technology.

Technology is what defines us as human beings, without it we wouldn’t be human. Our species and the ones leading up to us used their knowledge in practical ways, and with ever increasing sophistication. It’s as much a part of us as breathing and eating. So trying to simplify the ethical debate down to a discussion of whether guns kill people or people do is wrong. The separation is both wrong and distracting. Technology and humanity are a unity, not separable phenomena to be examined.

This is also massively a question about viewpoint. It’s easy to sit in a comfy office and write on a computer that technology is evil. Whereas right now 6 billion or more people are actively engaged in various forms of technology use to survive, and most of them are not thinking about their actions or their own ethical stance when using it. Also from who’s viewpoint is it bad? From the viewpoint of other human beings? From the viewpoint of someone holding a gun? From the viewpoint of someone on the receiving end of the gun? (For gun read any other technology, from slavery up through concentration camps and up to nuclear weapons). Or is it from the viewpoint of the planetary ecosystem? It’s very easy to anthropomorphism the planet and wish for a world where we didn’t exist, but this doesn’t solve the problems of the here and now.

If you look at this from an empirical viewpoint then technology must be good, because it has helped us support an ever increasing population (a bubble that may burst), where there are more people alive today than have ever lived. So all the death dealing technologies are massively outweighed by the power of agriculture and medicine. This simplification is not something I buy because it’s purely historic and has no concept of possible future occurrences, also it in no way takes into account people’s personal perspective.

I’m reminded of of Nietzsche’s Will to Power, which was a human and intentional evolution of Schopenhauer’s Will to Survive. I think that this intentional approach to survival and effecting the world around you is what we see in technology. It is also therefor an intrinsically ethical and intrinsically personal activity. Just as a note the Will to Power can be misread as either a desire for power or as something about dominating other people. It’s not, very simply it’s about being able to affect the world around you and see effects of that.

I have always found this Nietzschean approach profoundly invigorating. Coupled with the inseparableness of humanity and technology this puts us firmly in control and also firmly in the world we inhabit. Technology is not inherently evil, it’s inherently what makes us human, but through this we can exert more control over the world around us. And that activity will also impinge on other people because we all live on the same planet, so that activity must be controlled by some ethical standpoint. So ethics and technology, no matter if that tech is seemingly harmless (and none of them are), go hand in hand. Damn, that makes it messy, I’ll have to go back to meta-physics to get some nice clean philosophy.

Just gave my talk on Quantum Mechanics and Web Design, at Reboot. It all starts with particle physics and ends up with phenomenology, sociology and linguistics in there.

It felt like it started off a bit shaky, but I got into it. Said quite a bit, left out quite a lot, but I think I got the message across. Riccardo said I spent too long on the phenomenology, but hey, it’s what I was trying to get across.

I’m talking at Reboot next week in Denmark. My topic is Quantum Mechanics and Web Design: GUTs, Strings, Architecture and Theories of Everything. And I quote myself…

The story of modern physics is one about the search for a Theory of Everything. Researchers are striving to have one explanation for everything that happens in the real world, all the way from galactic black holes down to the underlying quantum foam. Along the way bizarre theories are spawned, some work, some fail, some survive by just being too weird to even test.

When designing and building stuff for the web we use a whole variety of approaches, theories, processes and methodologies. Is there a Grand Unifying Theory to link all aspects of web design together? Is there a Theory of Everything for the Web?

Heh heh, I’ve never quoted myself before. I hope it doesn’t become a habit.

I was also just interviewed about this for a podcast by Nicole Simon.

The Watershed filmed me whilst I was talking about Web Design and I’m now available to watch as a streaming quicktime movie.

The slides dont come out very well in the movie, so you can maybe download them and click along with me.

But not forever. I should so be playing Alice Cooper right now!

I made it through to the end of the teaching year, I’ve just given my final lecture and tutorials. Mind you I still have about 2 weeks of marking ahead of me

Weirdly it feels anticlimactic. I had thought that there should be a big bang at the end of the year and a bit of shouting going on, but it’s all just sort of fizzled out. The jungle is very quiet! Too quiet! The natives might be restless… but I think they’re all just quietly studying. Or lying in the sun as I used to do in the weeks leading up to exams.

I’ve not blogged much recently, though I’ve been intending too. The workload of the last few months has just wildly overtaken me. Far too many nights working till 3am, far too many weekends worked… But enough navel-gazery and meta-blogging. I have a summer of fun ahead of me, good working hours and that mysterious thing called Research to discover. I’m all tingly and excited, but first I have to go and quietly sit in the sun.

On Monday night I gave a rambling talk about how phenomenology, complexity theory and real human emotions need to be taken into account when designing web sites.

Here are the slides ~20Mb (sorry it’s big, but it is colourful!)

Ed Mitchell asked me a few moons ago to give a talk on designing the web, not web site design and that has been sitting at the back of my mind since then. Then in my typical fashion I realized a couple of days before I was meant to talk that I had nothing prepared. So I had to quickly distill everything that was floating around into this. It’s a bit rough around the edges but it does get the key concepts across. I’m working on a version 2 now which might be a bit more understandable.

So what was I on about? I’m going to put up a fuller discussion of this at some point. But the basic gist is this.

Human experience is an emotional, experiential and multi-varied thing (Hence complex). Current Web Design (and by this I don’t mean the graphic design of the web) and that thing that gets called Web 2.0 is trying to build the web to support these people. However in many cases they are trying to produce the complexity within the system and reduce the human experience of the system. Also a lot of the sites being built are clean and mechanical. I believe that the experience of the system should be human, and that the complexity should be left up to the humans. Simply put, simple tools, humans are the glue and build emotion into the system so that it can be engaged with on many levels.

After only a short hiatus as a house coach Heather has got a new job. She’s joined the exciting new world of new nu meja for a new job as new project manager… well they’ll all be new projects to begin with. So from now on she’s doing fun and funky stuff down with the guys at Team Rubber.

Knowing that they have a people working on city wide wireless coverage makes me glad I’ve moved to Bristol.

St Werburghs ‘joins’ the backbone.

It is all the little things going on like this that makes Bristol seem so exciting. It has a great mix of creativity, bunches of people with tech know-how and a crusty/hacker/maker ethic underlying it all. And the BW folks live just down the road in the community centre. Pity I can’t seem to get on to this node though.

Update: Oops, it’s just the backbone there. So not likely to get on that. Still, I can see you’re WCC node down the road, just can’t get on