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Mobspots In The News

More good news from world of mobspots. First, MoveOn.org has announced an open, peer-reviewed competition for the creation of an anti-Bush mobspot, with the winner getting actual television airtime: "You don't have to be formally trained in the art of filmmaking, just ready, willing and able to create an ad that tells the truth about George Bush. All eligible submissions will be posted on this web site and rated by visitors. The top rated ads will then be voted on by our panel of esteemed judges, includingMichael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, and Gus Van Sant. The winning ad idea will be broadcast on television during the week of Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, and the winner will receive a recording of the ad as broadcast."

Secondly, the Dean campaign opened up a less formally structured thread for supporters to come up with a slogan for their "victory days" in New Hampshire and Iowa. That's good news, but the even better news is the slogan that got selected: "Because democracy is not a spectator sport." Compare that to the usual slogans dreamed up by traditional political consultants: "Real Solutions For America," "Building A Bridge To The 21st Century," etc. The Dean slogan is edgy, funny, but still completely accessible and entirely "on message," as they say. There's more where that came from.

Rush and Courtney

The other day I was reading some of the appalling stories about Courtney Love and her take-your-daughter-to-your-overdose parenting strategy. And suddenly it occurred to me that this latest Love scandal was perfectly -- one might say deliciously -- timed. Just as all the Dittoheads are coordinating their message that Rush Limbaugh was only using "prescription medication" and thus wasn't some kind of debased drug addict, the ultimate incarnation of everything Limbaugh hated in the drug-addled, Hollywood long-hair, rock-n-roll, 'dead doper' milieu -- Courtney Love, god bless her -- goes and overdoses on the very same drug that Limbaugh was abusing. If people who've had a long dalliance with heroin, and who no doubt could get their hands on some if they wanted to, are nonetheless choosing Oxycontin, you know there's something more than just "prescription medication" at play here.

It's just too rich.

Search Inside Your Library

A quick late-night post to point you to my rapid-response Slate piece on Amazon's new full-text search tool, "Search Inside." My take is basically this: it's brilliant, but we should also be able to use it to search our own private libraries of books we've already purchased. (And we should be able to publish those libraries for others to search as well.) Also, don't miss Wired's more in-depth look at the "search inside" tool and its pre-history, written by one of my all-time favorites, Gary Wolf.

Breaking The News

My new column in Discover is the latest installment in a continuing obsession of mine: how lower-level changes in interfaces, and particularly in collaborative interfaces, alter the overall cultural ecosystem. I talked about this near the end of my first book, Interface Culture, with regard to the pioneering collaborative filtering tool Firefly, wondering what would happen to the music industry if people grew increasingly dependent on personalized recommendation software in deciding what to buy. Would it become more or less top heavy in terms of superstars and mid-list artists? Emergence developed these themes in a number of different directions (in fact, when I was writing that Firefly chapter in IC, I thought to myself: you could do a whole book on this subject!)

At any rate, the new column is looking at the same question applied to news. What happens to the general prioritizing of news when the editorial decisions are being made by the masses, and not editors? I took the venerable approach of those classic New Yorker articles that analyze the top ten charts of various media to generate some kind of understanding of the broader culture. In this case, I did a compare and contrast exercise between CNN's headlines and those generated by Technorati's Breaking News. ("Breaking" may be the word for it, as it seems to be down a lot lately.) The ultimate point is that all the early controversy about the "Daily Me" turned out to be misguided, because what's really developed is a "Daily Us": not ultra-personalization, but group decision-making. In a lot of ways, the exact opposite of the Daily Me. I suspect that's a good thing, on the whole, but it's still very much an open question...

Smiling For The Camera

I don't know how many of you have seen the footage that has been airing lately of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who is once again being artificially fed thanks to a last-minute intervention by Jeb Bush. It's a pretty fascinating tape, in light of some of the brain science topics that I've been talking about on the blog over the past few months. You see her sitting with her head propped up, eyes wide-open and blinking regularly, a broad smile on her face. She doesn't really do anything other than that: doesn't shift her pupils around, or change her expression at all, or move her head. But the blinking eyes and the smile are powerful to see, and I suspect the whole controversy ultimately revolves around the effect of seeing them.

Schiavo is apparently cognitively brain-dead: not only is she incapable of any real movement or complex thought, she mostly likely is unconscious. (You can't really tell, of course, but you can make a pretty good guess by looking at brain activity in fMRI scans.) The smiling and blinking are apparently just an accidental byproduct of the way the original heart attack (and I assume blood loss to the brain) damaged her motor systems. But what you realize watching the tape is how we compulsively have to assume a conscious, emotive state when we see that particular configuration of the facial musculature: we see those blinking eyes, and the broad grin, and we demand that there be a happy, aware person behind the face. Intellectually, I have total confidence in science's ability to determine whether someone is brain-dead on the inside, but even with that knowledge, I couldn't watch the tape without projecting a conscious self into that poor woman's brain. Imagine how hard it must be for her relatives.

None of which is meant to imply that she shouldn't be allowed to die, particularly after eleven years in this horrible state. But it's a fascinating reminder of the way the semiotics of facial expressions can sometimes be so powerful that they override our logical assessment of the world. We know there's nothing behind the smile, but still the smile speaks more clearly to us.

The Other California Story

I told you I might not show up here for a few days, and sure enough it's been almost two weeks. Feels like about three months, mainly because my trip to California was so intense. I was out there for a five day small retreat on the topic of "Emergence and the Evolution of Consciousness" -- part of the Evolution series being hosted by the Esalen Center for Theory and Research. Esalen, in case you haven't heard of it, is the now 40-year-old commune/spa perched on a cliff over the Pacific. It has a reputation for New Age zaniness, but I had an absolutely exhilarating time. It doesn't hurt that it was literally the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. The first night I was there, I wandered out with a glass of red wine after the others had gone to bed, and discovered that there was a near-full moon setting over the ocean. Then I noticed that there were stairs heading down from the deck of the house we were staying in. I followed them down in the moonlight, and they led to a smaller area almost cantilevered out over the surf fifty feet below. (The whole process felt a bit like playing Myst.) I sat and watched the moon for about thirty minutes -- it seemed almost incomprehensible that I had awakened that morning in Brooklyn, and somehow was ending it in this magical spot. Each night I'd return to my little discovery -- I took a picture during the morning of the last day to remember it by. Not bad, huh?

The conference was as energizing as the place itself. There's something intrinsically fascinating about putting a ten or fifteen super-smart people in a shared environment for a few days: letting them do formal presentations, but also riff over dinner or early morning coffee. It's amazing not just for the ideas, but also in seeing the different styles of thinking -- each mind a little different from the next. I got to meet some people whose work I've always admired from afar -- complexity-theory god Stuart Kauffman, Symbolic Species author Terry Deacon, the Global Business Nework's Jay Olgivy, astrophysicist Dave Deamer, Esalen's founder Michael Murphy, among others -- and I made some new connections that feel like they might last for decades. It was also very moving to see hear how many people had been inspired by reading Emergence, even in a crowd that had been thinking about complex systems for far longer, and with far more rigor, than I ever have.

My only regret is that this poor little blog was so deserted for the last ten days. Fortunately, the comment spammers were keeping the site active while I was gone. I've particularly enjoyed the "free Viagra" conversation -- thanks to all of you who so generously contributed to the site. I hope all your underage teen photo sites are thriving!

Disappearing Act

Lucky me -- I'm headed off to a small conference on emergence and consciousness being held in lovely Big Sur, California. I'm told it's more hot springs than wi-fi hotspots there, so my connectivity options may be limited. I'll try to post during the week, but if I don't show up here for a few days, it's not because I don't care...

Can Email Be Saved?

I've said here before that I think David Gelernter is one of the most fascinating people to hear talk about software, and he's got a wonderful piece in the Weekly Standard that re-affirms that belief. While everyone else seems to be talking about how spam my be the death of email as we know it, Gelernter decides to tackle what he sees as a more vexing problem: dealing with the ever-increasing volume of real mail, mail that you actually have to respond to, and not just filter out. He's got a very interesting idea of adding a new email convention, basically separating out acknowledging a message and actually responding to it:

1. THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT RULE: Acknowledge in haste, respond at leisure. When you receive an email, acknowledge it within 24 hours if you can; take a week if you must, but more than that is (ordinarily) too long. An acknowledgment is not an answer. It's a one-liner, something like "thanks for your note; I'll be in touch soon." It tells the sender that his message has got through and that you plan to answer it some day. Once you've acknowledged a message, you should answer within (say) two weeks of sending the acknowledgment.

2. THE RESEND RULE: If an acknowledgment or (later) an answer doesn't arrive in good time, resend your message verbatim. The receiver's time limits dictate the sender's. If your message hasn't been acknowledged a week later, resend it. If the acknowledgment arrives but no answer has materialized two weeks after that, resend. So you get (at the outside) two chances to restart a sputtering conversation--and that's it. (When you resend a message, a discreet "2" or "3" in the subject line should be enough to let the receiver know what's going on.)

Reading this piece reminded me of an idea I've had for years now, that perhaps someone has implemented in an email client somewhere. It would be a huge help to me if my email software would automatically organize incoming messages based on 1) whether I've responded to the sender before, and 2) on average how quickly I've responded to the sender in the past. So what I imagine is a kind of fuzzy inbox: a message from a complete stranger would stay in my inbox for a week, before getting bounced to the archives. A message from someone I once responded to would stay for two weeks, while a message from a regular correspondent wouldn't leave the inbox until I removed it myself. Effectively, what I want are filters based on the history of my email interaction with specific people: prioritize mail from people I always respond to immediately; demote mail from people I ignore. Has anybody seen software that will do this?