Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
What are computers for?  Solving problems easily.
What is the internet for?  Solving even more problems easily.
Neither is confined to any particular type of problem.
  

    
David, one thing that seems fundamental to the Internet is the need to
go get things. Stuff isn't delivered to me, like say with my TV. Or
even with one of my new favorite services, Netflix. Will the Internet
ever evolve into something that is more delivery oriented?
  

    
Andrew (#25), the Web _is_ like a dream in that nothing (well, little)
in it is brute. That also means it's like a work of literature (where
"literature" doesn't imply that it's well written). But, what "Small
Pieces" really wants to say is that that means that it's like the
world, the real world. 

It's _not_ like what our default philosophy says the RW is like: 
unspeaking, indifferent, essentially without meaning. It _is_ like the
way we live in the RW, seeing each thing within a context of meaning.
As others have said, to see is to read. In the RW, we can make the
mistake (IMO) of giving precedence to the brute nature of the world;
that's what we reserve the word "real" for. On the Web, there is no
brute nature, so we can't make that mistake.
  

    
William (#26), you're either using "problem" far more widely than I
do, or I disagree with you. And even if we do view both computers and
the Net as solving problems, there are some types of problems they're
not good for (e.g., changing a flat tire) and others that they're
better at, and it would be interesting to move up (or drill down, if
you prefer) from your attempt to find a lowest common denominator.
  

    
Eleanor (#26), Your question can be taken two ways, and I'll give not
very satisfying answers to both. 

In terms of delivering material goods -- DVDs from Netflix, pants from
LL Bean -- the market will decide what it wants delivered via truck.

In terms of my having to go to sites instead of having content
"pushed" to me, first, a lot of Internet content is already pushed.
most notably email, instant messages and, of course, popup ads. Push
has become an option in more and more places over the past few years,
including many discussion boards and weblogs to which you can
"subscribe." And then there's the middle case of aggregation services
that pull in exactly the content you want. (I just downloaded
newzcrawler last night and so far I've been enjoying it.) I think the
Net will continue to tend towards offering more choices in how stuff is
delivered.

Have I entirely missed your point? If so, sorry!
  

    
The material goods thing depends on both market and logisitics - 
delivering individual items directly to consumers is more costly than 
delivering volume of products to stores and letting individual consumers 
buy there. So I always figured we should see ecommerce, not as some 
radically new thing, but an extension of direct marketing, a way of making 
catalogs more dynamic. (Just my $.02)

David, on an email list we both follow, someone noted a specific problem 
yesterday - how in groups of people where group members have their 
different tools and venues for posting stuff (emails, blogs, wikis, etc.), 
there can be a fragmentation of discussion and it can be hard to follow 
what everybody's saying. How do we open the web to as many voices as 
possible, in a democratic sense, and still keep track of the conversations 
that are specifically relevant to us?
  

    
David, you answered my question just fine. I was in a why doesn't the
Web make my life easier mode, with a very narrow defintion of easy.
Sometimes it just seems like a lot of work to get to places I didn't
even know existed, even though I'm often glad when I arrive. The Web
has plenty of tools and pathways to help when you know what you want,
but sometimes I wish it could just read my mind!

You ask "Is the Web making us more or less social?"  I think the
question needs to be refined. "Who is the Web making more social, and
who is the Web making less social?" It's easy to look at "us", in this
case Wellperns, and see the effects. But what of the people who have no
use for the Well, or the Web in general?  Any thoughts?
  

    
Jon, I think you're pointing to a big problem. It's surprising to me
that we don't have a standard way to handle/express two of the most
important elements of the Net: groups and threads. E.g., it should be
easy to export a thread from one discussion site to another, and to
move it to and from email and IM and chat, etc. But it's not. In fact,
it's so hard that if a discussion site goes out of business (heaven
forfend!), there's no standard way to move the archive onto another
board. A couple of years ago, a few of us proposed a standard for any
type of threaded discussion, but nothing happened with it; we called it
"ThreadsML" and the now-moribund discussion of it is here:

http://www.quicktopic.com/7/H/rhSrjkWgjnvRq

On the other hand, the fragmentation of discussion is inevitable in a
medium as open and large as the Net. The best we can hope is that we'll
develop better tools for making _some_ sense of it.
  

    
Eleanor (#32), good point. I certainly meet people -- frequently
long-time users of the Net, and occasionally creators of it -- who
think of it primarily as a research tool. I think of it as generally
social. But...

Generalizations about the Net are easy to make and hard to confirm.
For example, I was at a forum at MIT this Fall where one panelist
referred to the Internet as "professional wrestling" and a debased form
of sociality because he was thinking about some of the most raucous
and thoughtless forums. So, I pointed to places like The Well. He and I
could go on all night citing stupid and smart Net conversations and
the discussion would do _nothing_ to settle the question of whether the
Net is making us more or less social, or better or worse socially. How
could one even do systematic research on this? There aren't enough
grad students in the universe!

A big problem with "Small Pieces" is that the book doesn't rest on
research so it may in fact only be relevant to me and a relative
handful of people like me. I knew that when writing it but couldn't see
how to avoid it.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Sun 16 Mar 03 13:25>
  

    
what it is.

I suppose it was about ten years ago that I wrote an article somewhere 
that mentioned the use of phone, email and FTP to replace travel, face 
to face selling and onsite support.  I got phone calls and emails asking 
me questions about this idea that we now think of as cyberspace.  

Add the browser and now we can represent our business on a website, 
dress it up the way we want it others to see it while working in our 
jeans and t-shirts.  We've got someone coming in next week for a few 
days and he sent an email asking if we wore suits or dressed business 
casual.  What's the term for jeans and t-shirts?  

I guess people who know us by our website, our cyberspace interactions
and our reputation, Cory Doctorow's "whuffle", are dressing their mental
model of 'us' up in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

Back in the early days of the web, the younger people in our customer 
base, mostly the techies, had used email and the internet while they 
were in school, so found it more comfortable than face to face meetings 
and snail mail.  As they've advanced in their careers, these people 
become the influentials and decision makers, and they are more likely to 
pay attention to what google says about you than what you say about 
yourself.  Whuffle trumps trade show marketing.  

That's a big change in the cost structure for businesses that can play 
the game.  Amazon is one of those, but so are all the sellers on EBay.

Taking this same idea into world politics, isn't George Bush's problem a 
lack of whuffle among the jeans and t-shirts people?  He's pushing is 
message over the trade show model (CNN and Fox), but he can't use those 
to set his own whuffle score, so he tries to use the courts to keep the 
suits in control.  Seems like a losing game to me, but how would he 
know?
  

    
GWB: The Anti-Whuffie.
  

    
He's a gamer.  Time to revert to the backup.
  

    
David -- another book in the works, I hope?
  

    
Howard, nope, I'm not working on a book. For about a year I've been
kicking around an idea, but I can't figure out how to turn it into a
book that anyone would want to read. It has to do with the rejection of
digital perfectionism and the embracing of ambiguity. Ironically, I
can't get it into clear enough focus, though.

But we all hope _you're_ working on your next. "Smart Mobs" was
terrific. 
  

    
>embracing ambiguity

There was a lovely article in the early years of what was then called 
CoEvolution Quarterly on learning to live with ambiguity, by Stephanie 
Mills.
  

    
Ambiguity is so contrary to The Scientific Method which we've had
drummed into our heads from the earliest of memories! Thats's a daring
subject, and I'd love to have you tackle it, because you'd bring the
right balance of philosophy and humor.
  

    
Ari (#41), thank you for the reference. Eleanor (#42), thank you for
the encouragement. My problem is finding a way to talk about it that
isn't tired and is engaging. And I haven't figured it out. But it's
what I keep coming back to. The world is messy. Enjoy it! The Web is
messy. Go forth and muss it up more!

It's a good thing that the Semantic Web will never work :)
  

    
Speaking of messy, that segues right into my next question. One thing
I've noticed is there's lots of litter on the Web.By litter I mean
broken links, sites that haven't been updated since '96, a gazillion
sites that require registration that never get visited again, just
general debris. 

Is it worth cleaning up the litter? Will the litter ever get so
prevalent that it impedes the natural flow of the Web? Or is litter on
the Web sort of like theold time predictions about our roads being
buried in horse manure: something that will never come to pass?
  

    
I'd like to add on to (wellelp)'s question and ask the same thing in regards
to spam and porn.
  

    
(Good questions!)
  

    
Yes, excellent questions! They get right at the heart of the issue.

The messiness of the Web isn't extrinsic. It's part of its nature and 
appeal (IMO). I have no more interest in making the Web orderly than I
do in filing off the rough edges of the Alps.

RW libraries are clean and orderly because every book that gets
shelved has gone through a central committee, has been classified, is
signed out and in. Forms, controls and workflows are great for a
library, but a better metaphor for the Web is: everything everyone's
talking about. Conversations are messy. They contain all sorts of
rumors and wrong information. They're inefficient. They're digressive.
Many use highly offensive language. But would you want to pay the price
for cleaning them up? Nah.

Now, obviously there are times when the messiness of the Web makes it
an unpleasant place to be. Spam stinks. Unwittingly stumbling on porn
sites that shows you (or your children) stuff you don't want to see
stinks. Spammed porns stinks squared. So, we need solutions. As per
World of Ends (www.worldofends.com), I prefer solutions that work on
the edges of the Net rather than imposing them on the center, but
that's a preference, not an absolute. E.g., I use an excellent spam
filter that runs on my own desktop (http://popfile.sourceforge.net),
but perhaps a better solution would run one step closer to the center,
on a corporate or ISP's server. 

In any case, all solutions are necessarily going to be imperfect
because so much of the strength of the Web comes from the fact that it
and we are fallible.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Mon 17 Mar 03 11:36>
  

    
Keep pushing on that idea, David. As you know, sometimes the container for 
these ideas doesn't arrive until you work at it. I love the philosopher's 
touch you bring.
  

    
Howard, you are a nice man.

I've been through soooo many containers in the past year, trying to
find a way to talk about the importance of ambiguity. I'll tell you the
one I've been thinking about lately:

I'm fascinated by how we ever got ourselves to the point where very
smart people take seriously the idea that the universe is a computer
and all that's in it is information. I can see how one could get to
that point thoughtlessly, but this theory is being entertained by
geniuses. It needs to be taken seriously. But I don't know enough to
take it seriously. It'd be fun to learn why it's plausible.