“Creative computing” magazine

Recently ran across this curious magazine called “Creative Computing“, one of the earliest covering the microcomputer revolution (published from 1974 until December 1985). Readers interested in this can have a look at the some articles.

With titles such as “Is breaking into a time-sharing system a crime?”, “Why Supermarkets Are Going Bananas Over Computers”, “Videodiscs – The Ultimate Computer Input Device?” or “How Much Privacy Should You Have?”, the magazine is definitely an intriguing read today. The topic addressed there ranged from artificial (and “extra-terrestrial”) intelligence, computers in education, languages and programming theories, BASIC scripts, upcoming technologies, games and fictions (with “art and poetry”).

For people interested in current “trends” such as DIY or privacy, there is plenty to explore in order to understand some underlying roots. See for instance “amateur computing” or How One Computer Manufacturer Looks at the Data Privacy/Security Issue

Why do I blog this? sunday afternoon hops on the internets always lead to curious material. Possibly useful to show students some examples of computer culture history.

Delicate protection

An interesting assemblage observed recently, certainly influenced by the length of the iPhone charger cable.

Widget-ized wristwatch

Circulation of the widget-meme into *other* touch-interfaces.

List for time-travelling

(via) Oh, and btw, an highly important tool for 2010: a reminding list of important stuff in case of time-travelling:

Why do I blog this? It’s always curious, as a thought experiment, to think about what one would put in this sort of list. Perhaps asking my students “What pieces of knowledge and artifacts would you like to bring in the past, in case you can time-travel?” would be a good brief (to start off a discussion about what would change accordingly).

Studies of the impact of the media on people have not produced stable results

Great read tonight: Studying the New Media by Howard Becker (Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2002).

The author focuses here on the studies about the “impact of the media on people”, the sort of stuff you see popping up in the press on a regular basis (be it about tv, video-games, comic-books or the interwebs). Becker shows that these studies have not produced stable results, because they operate with an unrealistic view of people. He describes how inaccurate the “impact” paradigm is and the fact it never produced any solid findings about the good or bad effects of XXX (where XXX stands for arts experience/TV/video-games, etc.):

“The idea that you could isolate a unique influence of such a thing as TV or movies or video games is absurd on the face of it. Social scientists, operating under the best conditions, have enough trou- ble demonstrating causal relations between any two variables—to tell the truth, I don’t think they ever do, just maybe hint at it. Studying the effect of a commu- nication medium which operates in the middle of ordinary social life, with all its complications, is not working under the best conditions, and the demonstration of cause and effect is, practically speaking, impossible.
(…)
The “impact” approach improperly treats the public as an inert mass which doesn’t do anything on its own, but rather just reacts to what is presented to it by powerful (usually commercial) organizations and the representatives of dominant social strata.“

He exemplifies how “the image of an inert, passive mass audience is a gross empirical error” with various cases where other researchers had shown that “ordinary people” aren’t passive: TV-viewing (where “users” explored imaginatively the possibilities of adult relationships), the creation of internet website, or the writing of homosexual pastiches of the Star Trek stories or pornography:

“One of the first uses of any new communication technology has always been to make pornography. Photography was no sooner invented in the mid-nineteenth century than people were using it to make and distribute dirty pictures. (…) I’m talking about the “amateurs” in this field, of whom there have always been a lot. (…) In other words, pornography is a major area of use of digital technology by ordinary folks.“

Why do I blog this? reflecting on past paradigms and approaches I used to be taught.

Sit on the snow

A basic trick to sit on the snow, seen in Geneva yesterday. Snow season here, quickly replaced by heavy rain tonight.

Naming conventions and usage

Naming digital devices such as music players or car-navigation system is always intriguing and it’s often curious to see which terms are employed by people. In a world where artifacts do not necessarily rely on existing technical lineages, companies need to create new terms. Eventually, theses names are not the one that make it to the surface.

Two examples that I like:

The story of a kid who has been “saved by The GPS” (or in French “Le GPS”). GPS which refers to car-navigation assistants that generally use this positioning technology to locate the vehicle. In this case, the name of device emerged from the enabling technique itself.

Another great examples that is commonly used in the swiss press is “Le MP3″, i.e. the music player that allows to play audio files. In this case, the name of the device emerged from the file format itself… even if the artifact play different file format (such as .AAA).

Why do I blog this? Just though about this while reading one of my student‘s dissertation draft. Naming conventions are always interesting and it’s curious to follow what terms are picked up by people. This echoes with other trends from the past for which we had obvious examples such as “Frigidaire” (a brand name used as a generic term).

Visual interpretation of A Thousands Plateaus

via, this highly curious drawings by Marc Ngui as interpretation of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari:

Why do I blog this? sunday morning venture on the Interwebs often leads me to this sort of inspiring content.

Ubiquitous obama representations

Following Julian, different forms of Obama representations that I refer to as “Obamania” in my Flickr stream.

The “Obama” pizza in Paris:

Street graffiti in Saint Etienne and Geneva:

An ad poster in Paris:

Why do I blog this? these iconic representations are quite interesting in terms of diversity and the meaning it certainly evokes to people. A sort of meme that finds it way onto the urban fabric. Nothing really new here but it’s always curious to spot this.

The evolution of the “amateur” figure

Raw notes from a presentation by André Gunthert at the Geneva University of Art and Design the other say:

Amateur photography appeared around 1880, after the transition between silver to silver-chloride… which led to photojournalism and scientific photography such as the work of Albert Londe. Curiously, Londe always referred to his work as an “amateur”, although he was the medical photographer at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and perhaps one of the most famous chronophotographer with Étienne-Jules Marey. Gunthert’s claim is that the reason why a photo expert such as Londe referred to him as an amateur was because he lived in a transitional time between the Daguerreotype and the new popular activity of photography. Claiming to be an amateur was a peculiar stance, an avant-garde choice that aimed at showing others that “he was on the other side, a promoter of the new technique”.

The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of the new figure of the amateur, through Kodak’s release of their camera (“You press the button, we do the rest”). To be an amateur at the time would be described today as being a “user” and it’s because of the arrival of this stance that amateurs has been opposed to professionals.

However, it’s only around 2005-2005 that amateurs became a threat to professionals. Gunthert traces this back to the London subway bombings. This event in July of 2005 can be seen as a turning point in global news coverage; especially because the news (BBC) asked survivors/witness to send them images (taken with cameraphones)… simply because they could not go there.

In parallel, Gunthert describes how the Web started to build its own mythology around the amateur (“We the Media” by Dan Gilmor, citizen journalism, the web2.0 slogan by Tim O’Reilly, etc.)… and eventually services such as YouTube in 2005 were explicitly built (and valued) for their capability to be based on “user-generated content”.

To him, the best example of this trend is Be Kind Rewind, a sort of testimony to the notion of Amateur culture. Gunthert describes this movie as the nicest way to depict user-generated content because it shows HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. A sort of YouTube were viewers will act as participant and create their own videos. This kind of expectations of course lead to laws and measures taken by governments in certain countries to help the the cultural industry… because lots of people believed in this myth.

But this vision did not materialize. He described them as self-fulfilling prophecies proposed by web gurus and showed that most of the content on platforms such as YouTube are not creations. There is indeed a great shift from television to platforms like YouTube but it’s mostly an archive of past productions (with tons of copyright infringements). It’s not only an archive but there are also ads and new forms of communication proposed by companies (see the Evian roller babies campaign).

He concluded by stating that most of the interest by researchers/media has been drawn
so far to the production part of usage and that he is more interested in how people use these platforms. YouTube is now the second the web search engine and people access it to look for answers (e.g. how to fold a tent). To Gunthert, we are in 2009 in a situation close to the one people in the 20th century encountered with sound recording devices. At the time, inventors and industrial companies has high expectations about these machines, they were supposed to help produce content and store memories of people. But it did not happen and it was mostly employed to listen to music. Nevertheless this does not mean that people were passive and there are lots of interesting and active practices with regards to sound recording devices.

Why do I blog this? my notes here are a bit messy and incomplete. I tried to translate this roughly into English but I was quite interested by his approach. Of course, some other things could be added about the DIY culture and perhaps my transcription is a bit shaky but I found it intriguing to deconstruct the notion of amateurs and usage.