December 18, 2006: Another Triumph for Virtuality

It would appear that Time has now lined up behind all of the other lemmings trying to escape reality. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of Web 2.0 propaganda and named as Person of the Year the new Digital Everyman who locks out reality with his iPod earbuds, neverending cellphone activity, and a desperate search for companionship on Second Life. To reflect on a much older cover of this magazine, the question is not whether God is dead but whether, at least in the Time view of the world, reality is dead!

December 06, 2006: The Digital Highway just got more Hazardous!

Last month it was motorists wearing iPod ear buds while driving. In the American tradition of one-upmanship, we now have a CNET report of a motorist in Washington tapping into his BlackBerry while driving on Interstate 5 (presumably at Interstate speeds). Paying more attention to the BlackBerry, this motorist failed to notice that the traffic in front of him had stopped. Caroline McCarthy delivered the punch line for CNET News.com as follows:

The result was a five-vehicle crunch that included a 28-passenger Community Transit bus and a car that was carrying a woman and her 5-month-old son.

As of this writing, seven indignant comments have already come in for Ms. McCarthy's report; but one has to wonder how many of those indignant writers are fully focused on driving when they are behind the wheel!

November 30, 2006: Does Music Have a Future?

I decided to do a Google phrase search on "future of music." I got 1,970,000 hits. Pride of place under the current page-ranking algorithm went to the Future of Music Coalition. These guys have a manifesto, which was written and published on June 1, 2000. It starts off with wonderful manifesto-like language, which we do not encounter very much these days:

The history of the American Music Industry is a disheartening one, which largely details the exploitation of artists and musicians by opportunists and those without the musicians' best interests at heart.

For too long musicians have had too little voice in the manufacture, distribution and promotion of their music on a national and international level and too little means to extract fair support and compensation for their work.

So what we are really talking about here is the future of the music business, particularly the commercial survival of people wanting to make a living as musicians. This is also the focus of a recent book entitled The Future of Music. The cover is pictured above and is hopefully clear enough to show that this book also calls itself a manifesto; and its manifesto is also about music as a business.

Now I do not have anything against professional musicians (particularly since my kid brother is one). However, all this trafficking in manifestos probably needs to be examined in the context of my recent attempt to get below the surface of the iPod phenomenon. See, as soon as the manifesto writers get on the bandwagon of a digital future (which is definitely the case with the aforementioned book), then it is not long before the iPod is paraded out as the wave of the future. At this point it is important to remember that iPods now provide content other than music, so any examination of the technology must take content such as video and podcasts into account. Consequently, if we buy into the argument I have been trying to promote, which is that the iPod is, above all other things, a convenient mechanisms for detaching from reality, then the fact that it provides music as content becomes relatively incidental.

At the end of the day, if there is a "digital music revolution," then it has precious little to do with music; and the primary reason for this is that the technology behind this revolution is solidly locked into what Noam Cook and John Seely Brown call an "epistemology of possession." The iPod is a handy little toy that provides us with a new way to acquire and manage old possessions, and it delivers those possessions as a cocoon to protect us from the cruel world out there. However, if we want to talk about music, we have to recognize that music (as opposed to the music business) is more about practice than about possession. Those practices involve not only making music (composing or performing) but also going to performances and playing recordings. Cook and Brown argued that talking about practice requires a different epistemology from talking about possession; and they envisage a "generative dance" that engages both epistemologies.

My fear is that if the only talk we hear about the future of music has to do with possession, then practice may drop out of even our peripheral vision of the world of music. Unfortunately, I am "old school" enough to believe that you cannot have music without practice. Thus my choice of headline: If we embrace the manifestos of the "future of music" with too much enthusiasm, the consequence may be that music has no future at all!

November 21, 2006 (2): The Hazardous Digital Highway

Today's E-Commerce Times includes an article by Christine Laue of the Omaha World-Herald explaining that iPods are becoming as big a road hazard as cell phones due to the increasing number of motorists wearing ear buds. Maybe it is time for us to take stock of what is really going on, whether it is on the sidewalks or the highways. What cell phones and music players have in common is how convenient they make it for their users to detach from reality (and, given its connotation in the drug world, the noun "user" seems more appropriate than ever). This, of course, goes hand-in-glove with the related attraction (addiction?) to virtual social environments, such as Second Life. Where this all points is to a "community" of individuals who cannot take their reality any more, whether it is too much traffic, pedestrians trying to cross the street where they want to make a turn, or just too many people in any setting. We have now provided these individuals with a means to "turn off" reality, just as Chance (with his television addiction) tried to do in Being There (a subtly ironic title for anyone who has read Heidegger). People who drive under such an "influence" are as dangerous (if not more so) than those who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Do we have to wait for another incarnation of MADD before anyone does anything about this; and, if we go after the "dealers" where drugs are involved, should we not consider doing the same with these technologies?

September 25, 2006 (2): Libraries without Librarians?

One of the contributors to the latest discussion about search on Confused of Calcutta was astute enough to recognize the value of librarians. What made the contribution so valuable was the recognition that librarians are not “repositories of information” (at least not primarily). A librarian is primarily a “point of contact,” based on the premise that a visit to a library is a social engagement. Take away the social engagement and you take away any opportunity to get at the motives on which a search is founded. Take away an understanding of motive; and it no longer matters whether or not you get an answer to, “Did you find what you were looking for?” (which, of course, is seldom a yes/no answer). In other words any conversation about "customer satisfaction" can never be anything other than vacuous.

Now I still remember that librarians were almost entirely absent from the first digital libraries conference I attended over ten years ago. It became quickly apparent to the few brave enough to attend that the discourse of the conference was not going to address any of their concerns. I do not think things have improved very much (if at all). As far as I can tell, the compensation librarians receive for their efforts is on a decline (at least relative to the general economy); and the techno-centric ideal is still trying to purge them from “the loop.” In this setting it hardly makes sense to ask if our academies are doing a good job of educating the librarians of the future. To paraphrase the ultimate bad-taste commencement joke (delivered at Stanford about five years ago), the only question graduates of such a program will need to answer is, “Do you want fries with that?”

Perhaps one of the reasons I continue to be skeptical about social software is that it continues to push away critical issues of person-to-person engagement in favor of solving the “technical problem du jour.” At the end of the day, there is not that much difference between an effective person-to-person engagement with a librarian and one with a car dealer; and, in both cases, technology seems to be doing a great job of impeding how these people know how to get the job done. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which included a sub-headline to the effect that “we may become pets of robots.” Well, if Web 2.0 creates a world in which we can no longer deal in effective person-to-person engagements, that may be all we shall be good for!