stevenberlinjohnson.com

I told you we should have called it semi-colon!

I've been enjoying the new Sigur Ros record, which sounds something like a cross between Radiohead and the Chariots of Fire soundtrack. But I've been enjoying something else about this record even more. Sigur Ros, as you may know, are the ultra-hip, too-cool-to-translate-our-lyrics-into-English Icelandic band. As part of their art rock mystique, they decided not to name any of the songs on this new record, and gave the album itself the enigmatic -- and unpronounceable -- name ( ), presumably as a way of thumbing their noses at the marketing/promotional machine.

But as it happens, a couple of months before this record came out, the networking company Level 3 began running a national campaign promoting their generally pretty obscure services, and the campaign revolves around a massive 3D-rendered version of the company logo floating around real spaces -- crossing bridges, being loaded onto cargo ships, etc. And the company logo happens to be a set of parentheses!

They can't be sleeping well in Reykjavik with this development. Here Sigur Ros goes to all this trouble to give their album a name that you can't actually pronounce, just to show how far removed from the star-making apparatus they are, and before the album is even released there's a huge television campaign by a giant network communications company that looks for all intents and purposes as though it's a campaign for their album. It's like Prince changing his name to a swoosh the week that Nike introduced their logo...

Why is that man clicking at me?

I loved Tom Vanderbilt's paean to the wi-fi network that's been set up in Manhattan's brilliant Bryant Park, from this Sunday's Times. (In case you don't know the back history, Bryant Park was one of those classic urban decline stories where they actually just boarded up the park for years, rather than let it be dominated by crack dealers. It's now a complete jewel, and teeming with wi-fi bandwidth to boot.) But the thing that struck me in Vanderbilt's piece was this aside, which has nothing to do with wireless access:

The park has kept track of its Internet users with the same vigor with which it sends two employees with clickers (one for men, one for women; a close male-female ratio is vital to its vision of a vibrant public place) to measure park attendance each day at the peak hour of 1:15 p.m.

Is this customary practice for park officials? They sound more like zookeepers, no? I don't remember ever noticing that the male-female ratio was particularly balanced during my visits to Bryant Park, but perhaps it has had an unconscious effect, given my love for the space. My real question, though, is what they do when the gender ratio is out of whack?

The Two Threads

Just got back from day one of a pretty fascinating two day session on social software, organized by the ultra-connector Clay Shirky. I'll blog more tomorrow, but a quick note on the format: twenty-odd people arranged in a large circle in a Chelsea loft, all but two or three of them sitting with a laptop in front of them. (50% iBooks and G4s running OS X.) There's wi-fi in the room, and as people talk and give informal presentations, there's a simultaneous chat going on, restricted solely to the people in the room. The chat is being projected onto a flat screen visible to everyone, so the ten people or so who aren't participating in it can follow the threads as well. The chat turns out to be a mix of follow-up observations and related-reading-style URLs, as well as the usual snarkiness that you'd expect (dampened down a bit by the fact that everyone can read what's being posted.)

It was a pretty intoxicating mix -- carrying on two simultaneous group conversations with the same group. You felt like you were pulling down a lot of data: the real-world conversations grounded things, and the chat let the room riff a bit more. But also intoxicating in the dizzying sense. There are a number of cog-sci studies of our ability to follow two verbal conversations at once (we max out above two), but I wonder if the carrying capacity is any different if one conversation is spoken and one is text.

The most interesting thing that I noticed sociologically is that the setup sucked all the jokes out of the room and into the chat. I mentioned this at one point near the end, as we were discussing the format, and someone said that having the jokes in the virtual world made it better in a way: the jokes were there for all to see, but they didn't interrupt the flow of the conversation. It was an interesting idea, but only if you think the point of the jokes is the humor, rather than the laughter. (I'm just in the middle of writing a long piece on the neuroscience of laughter, so I've been thinking about these issues.) The jokes are fun, of course, but laughter does a lot for the general tone of the room. At the end, when Clay asked us to close our laptops, and reflect on the day a bit, the space was quickly reverberating with group laughs -- to use one of Clay's great phrases, it totally transformed the social weather. There was something refreshing in that change, even if I missed the multitasking.

Homeowners!

Thanks to everyone who wrote in with good wishes about our house closing yesterday -- I'm happy to report that we are in possession of a 100-year-old brownstone right off of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. It needs quite a bit of work, but we're pretty thrilled. Anyone who has ever lived in New York City will understand that the most amazing thing right now is contemplating the idea that we own something with 1) a backyard, and 2) a basement. I may actually have to learn how to use power tools without injuring myself just to live up to this new space. You can click here for a picture of the front if you're so inclined.

Trackbacks

I've been pretty much swamped with inane last-minute details related to the closing of our new place in Brooklyn, which will happen tomorrow if various wire transfers and check certifications don't screw everything up at the last minute. But I wanted to suggest some further reading that I've stumbled across following the trackbacks over the past few days.

First, thanks to Peterme for pointing me to the thought-provoking connectedland essay, which wrestles nicely with some of the issues of the post-Google era:

From a world where people's main issue has been managing information we might be thus evolving to a connected world where problems will also come from managing interaction. With content. With other people. With the devices that allow us to interact with content and people.
A world where fluidity of interaction with information will be at least as important as information itself... A world of interaction anxiety.

This piece re-connected me to Eric Scheid's wonderful pages on Emergent Architecture, which partially build on some ideas in my last book, but do a much more thorough job of exploring the parameters of emergent systems. And then there's Doug Miller's My Library Of The Future which manages to collide squarely both with my growing distaste for real-world bookstores and my obsession with note-taking software. He's a Tinderbox user, too, which reminds me to thank Mark Bernstein for showing up in the OneNote thread only a few hours (well, fifteen, but who's counting) after I wondered aloud what he thought of the Microsoft announcement.

If all goes well, when I next post here, I'll be the owner of a lovely brownstone in the fine neighborhood of Park Slope. Wish me luck.

OneNote to rule them all

I think this is one of the most interesting things to come out of the Office group in a long while: Microsoft OneNote, announced yesterday at Comdex. Here's the elevator pitch: "OneNote combines the freedom and flexibility of paper notes with the efficiency and power of digital organizational tools, enabling you to work with your notes and information more productively."

Now I have to confess that I have almost no interest in all the handwriting/Tablet PC functionality that they're touting here. (When I write with a pen for more than five minutes, I feel like my hand is about to fall off.) But I think there's something very smart in the premise here, which is that note-taking is as distinct an activity as creating a spreadsheet or a presentation, and thus deserves its own application.

Right now, I have about four separate ways that I take notes: reading notes from books I've read as research; quick notes of phone numbers or addresses; story or book ideas; interesting bookmarks of things I've found on the web with commentary. Right now, I use four different applications for those four tasks: I store my research notes in a special format that's searchable online (more about that in another post); I jot down quick notes in my email client, because it's always open and is organized by time; I keep my writing ideas in Word documents; and as of this week, I keep my web findings here in MovableType.

I would love to figure out a way to consolidate all of that into one application (or perhaps two: one for taking the notes, and then something like MovableType for publishing.) If Microsoft really implemented this well, I could see myself switching over to using my Windows box more than my Mac -- it's that killer an app for me.

Origin of the specious

Very frustrating review of Pinker's Blank Slate by Louis Menand in the New Yorker this week. Menand's as smart as they come, and his dismantling of Pinker's theory of modern art is dead-on. But he's much slipperier on the tougher political questions, and way too easy on the academic left's assault on "biological determinism." (Both of which I tried to address in my Nation essay.) There are a number of cutting lines that sound very clever when you read them, but when you take a few minutes to unpack what they're really saying, they're either misleading or meaningless. I've annotated a few for those who are following the debate…

That attack was simply spectacular!

I think the easiest way to lower the fear level in the US would be to have someone monitor the use of adjectives coming out of the Homeland Security press releases. Consider this from CNN:

Al Qaeda may be planning "spectacular attacks" in the United States that will cause "mass casualties" and "severe damage" to the economy, according to a federal law enforcement bulletin.

Reminds me of a story Richard Dawkins tells in one of his books about a bored newspaper hack who one day had to sub for the horoscope writer. Just to amuse himself, he wrote an entry for the Geminis that read: "All the sorrows of yesteryear are nothing compared to what will befall you today."

Googleshare it is

Thanks to Gene at Atomiq for suggesting a better monicker for my Google idea. (Apparently "lexical penetration" was a little too raunchy-sounding.) So I hereby declare that "googleshare" is the official term. Recommended usages as follows:

Clay Shirky has a 5% googleshare of "social weather."

My googleshare of "lexical penetration" is 100%.

Who has a larger googleshare of "psychoanalysis" -- Lacan or Jung?

Just to make it interesting: I'll send a signed copy of Emergence to whoever comes up with the most informative googleshare analysis...

Updated 11/16, 11:30 AM: You gotta love the web. I come up with a wacky idea on Thursday, and by Saturday morning we have a great name and working code. Thanks, Rael. (Note that you need a Google API key to use Rael's form.)

Updated 11/16, 1:30 PM: Make that two versions of working code! Ed George also wrote a version, this one with a nice graph of percentages. I won't link directly to spare his Google API key from abuse, but the URL is in the comments section.

Fun With Google, part one

Okay, this will soon become one of the site's recurring themes. Like many of you, I'm obsessed with Google, and particularly obsessed with what Google can tell me about me. I'm sure someone has done this before, but it occured to me today that you could use Google as an interesting yardstick for measuring how much a given word had come to be associated with a specific person, as in the tired saying, "You look up 'selfish' in the dictionary, and there's a picture of you."

Basically, all you do is search Google for a specific word, and get back the total number of results. Then you search that set for someone's name. Divide the second number by the first, and you get a percentage that shows you how much the person "owns" the word. Call it semantic mindshare. Or lexical penetration. Or whatever.

At any rate, I tried it with three case studies: "emergence" and "interface" with "Steven Johnson"; and then, just because I blogged him earlier, "deconstruction" with "Jacques Derrida." I'm happy to report that Derrida is soundly kicking my ass. Let's go to the tape...