bibliostructures

I long for a feature I’d call the ZEN FEATURE STRIPPER, that goes through and cuts back the visuals and the features to nothing … just what I need, and I’d have a feature (with a minimal line drawing of a fox terrier) called FETCH. When I ask the phone to do something it doesn’t have the software or protocols for, it can decide whether it goes onto the net to borrow it (and I give it an allowance to decide how much it can spend on it, if it costs money) or acquire the feature.

I’m exhausted by visual noise.

I loathe the sound of my new Nokia 3G phone: with the advent of the ringtone business there are few ringtones bundled with this phone and they all sound like the kind of musical spackle that used to exist between dead-end recorded messages on customer service lines: ”your call is important to us, please hold the line. For billing enquiries please press 3, etc.)” I tried to download a free Mexican Grey Wolf howl, as a ringtone, from a place that’s trying to help endangered species, but I expect there’s some chafing between Australian and American standards, so it never arrived.

There’s a related point-of-view expressed in the Circuits Column in the New York Times about noise cancelling headphones.

So for today’s column in The Times, I reviewed noise-canceling headphones. It’s not a new category, but it’s a topic I’ve wanted to cover for years, and had never had a moment. The summer lull seemed a perfect opportunity. Surely, I thought, readers would forgive this one less-than-heart-pounding column.

Holy cow, was I mistaken – about the heart-pounding business, I mean. No sooner had the column appeared last night on the Web than my e-mail box began to fill up. Evidently, noise-canceling headphones are VERY exciting to a lot of people!

David: I was delighted to see you write a column about affordable noise-canceling headphones, but you do not seem to address my personal problems. Engine noise – airplane or train – does not bother me; I’m thoroughly used to it. I find it relaxing; sleep-inducing.

“No, the problem that drives me to distraction is the sound of other people’s music or TV, the bass pounding through the floor, the movie screens in planes with the speakers embedded in your seat top, the cellphone conversations and noisy music makers in the next seat.

As I write this it’s 4.30 in the morning in Australia (I rarely sleep) and either the groundskeepers for the State Library across the road from me, or the shopping centre next to it – like they do every morning at around this time – spend half an hour grooming the area with those noisy leaf blowers that I think were outlawed in California. There’s an electronics store whose alarm goes off, pretty regularly, at 6.30 a.m. and a truck that idles and growls for half an hour, around 8.30 am, while replenishing the stock for a fast food store on my block. I love city noise too. But these noises are aural spam.

book-on-table, Photograph by markb at Flickr

Whenever I’ve been mulling over the schematics for an electronic book in my mind I’ve thought of the interface and all of the mechanisms as literally invisible: no buttons or cursors or pens. I’ve thought of it as an essentially touch screen model, that parts, or all of the screen surfaces would be responsive to approximations of regular world reading activities (dog earing a page, underlining).

I thought about this as I was reading a story on the industrial design site, Core 77, about Apple’s invisible interface for the new touch-screen i-Pod.

Although touchscreens are apparently the wave of the future, there’s one design flaw no one’s yet addressed: when your finger’s on the screen, it’s obscuring the very elements you’re supposed to be interacting with. Leave it to Apple to come up with a workaround. Although still only in patent form (ostensibly slated as an iPod feature), Apple’s new interface design is undeniably clever. The entire front face is a screen with elements or buttons on it. To interact with them, you place your finger on the rear of the device, which is touch-sensitive (but not a screen), since the rear is where your fingers would end up anyway, simply by virtue of holding the thing up.A cursor on the screen on the front indicates where your finger is, as if the device were transparent. When the cursor gets where you want it, you press the rear of the device, and it registers visibly in the front. Core 77

I’ve been re-reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter, and it’s given me fuel for the idea that the electronic book can seem, initially baffling or inscrutable, because those of us used to getting caught up in electronic experiences through games, or following mysterious and layered storylines in films and television will have some kind of … I don’t have a word for it … perhaps ‘bafflement threshold’. If something doesn’t initially yield all of its instructions or suggest how it works, it isn’t automatically tossed aside or a failure. As much as the single screen it’s the buttons and controls on an electronic bookreader, even something with the pale, discreet beauty of Sony’s libri-e, that distracts from the reading experience for me.

There’s probably a complexity of the writing that matches the complexity of the device. I’ve been reading reviews of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, Divisadero, which is being criticised because it doesn’t hold together as a linear reading experience. It gives us only fragments of a story, shards of people’s lives, stories about stories and within stories and people wanting to get lost in stories. But there’s a powerful symbol, that organises thoughts. Two of the three main characters are connected by a Tibetan prayer flag: one Anna threads along Coop’s balcony. The other main character, Claire, seems to be shut out, only really coming to life when she’s riding her horse, but the name of this horizontal prayer flag translates to “wind horse.” The prayer flag isn’t meant to touch the ground, to fly above the ground. Claire is the person who hovers above them all, a kind of prayer flag, who saves the others when they fall to the ground, Coop literally owes his life to her, twice. And it’s Claire’s voice that Anna, who never sees her after the violent incident that separates them, writes in. This story is a world, not a sequence of events, or even a path through this world. As William Gibson says, “there are no maps for these territories.”

Michael Ondaatje’s writing is always poetic and symbolic and expresses the inexpressible: it makes sense as a sequence of writing. The writer’s logic for construction, the way he’s arranged it, how many pages there are, etc. are important, it’s just that we, as readers, don’t perceive the structure like this, as we may have with linear books.

Steven Johnson looks at how computer games work, not their content, not the storyline, just how they affect the brain, how it is they engage. Michael Ondaatje’s book engages a changing world, where our storytelling mediums are mutating. “Adapting to an ever-accelerating sequence of new technologies also trains the mind to explore and master complex systems,” writes Steven Johnson. “When we marvel at the technological savvy of average ten-year-olds, waht we should be celebrating is not their mastery of a specific platform — XP, say, or the Game Boy — but rather their seemingly effortless ability to pick up new platforms on the fly, without so much as a glimpse at a manual. What they’ve learned is not just the specific rules intrinsic to a particular system; they’ve learned abstract principles that can be applied when approaching any complex system.”

Criticisms of Divisadero centre on how the characters of Coop, Anna and Claire are torn from us. We never really know what happens to them. We get a shard of their stories and then it’s over, and we’re drawn into a long, fantastical story about a French writer of spectacular romances in which people are dramatically saved, in the manner of the tales of the Three Musketeers. This is the point I think, we’re looking for stories to make us whole, and they disappoint, there’s no ground beneath them.

Manhattan at Twilight by Razorbern at Flickr

Several things I’ve read in the past couple of weeks have had my mind spinning and my hands clutching at the empty space where a multi-page/flexible screen electronic book reading device should be. The news about thin flexible screens that display in colour, from Philips LG and Sony means that the final technical piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. I still don’t have the resources to build one of these bibliostructures, a real working model and not a simulation, but now somebody does.

And this has turned my thoughts from the hardware to the realities of the software, of what, exactly, I want this shifting reading experience to be. I’m moving to Sydney from Melbourne at the end of the month. My dreams of a workshop binding protypes of electronic /paper-hybrid books in Calcutta remain undimmed but they’re now augumented in a way I hadn’t expected, co-existing with time spent in Sydney as a freelance journalist, which is a life I’ve lived before, and liked.

Who to write for is the burning question: the newspapers and magazines I’ve written for in the past aren’t anything I feel connected to any more, although I intend to see if there’s a small corner of the Sydney Morning Herald I could feel comfortable in. There’s a story from May 29, a conversation between Margaret Fulton, who introduced Australians to the idea of fine food, with environmental scientist Tim Flannery, over a meal made from organic ingredients by Justin North at his restaurant, Becasse. This notion of a story as a conversation, over a fine meal is EXACTLY the concept that appeals to me most. And lately it’s Tim Flannery’s voice that’s been saying the things that interest me most. Reading his environmental history of Australia, The Future Eaters, and his thoughts on Australia’s cultural history, Beautiful Lies, I’ve been able to find a part of the country’s story that I can relate to: a sophisticated, enlightened spirit of humanism amongst the early European settlers and their mutually curious, calm relationship with the group of indigenous Australians that inhabited what is now Sydney’s centre, the area I’ll be living in.

I’ve applied for a job with Yahoo! Australia as a news producer. I’m not sure what this means. The tabloid-like home page with entertainment and lifestyle news and curious factoids isn’t something I read (or could write) but as I was writing up my application it became apparent to me that in a subtle, entirely subconscious way Yahoo! has become central to the way that I gather and experience the news I read, and how I illustrate and make coherent the things I write. The first thing I read every day, over my first coffee of the day, is the Australian Associated Press newsfeeds on the home section of my Australian e-mail account, after I’ve logged in. I’ve expanded that to include RSS feeds of local news from the various Australian states. In fact the news reports on agriculture and food production in Australia I’ve been writing for The Ethicurean began with a story that I wrote at Yamazaki’s Notebook on the plight of Australian farmers suffering through the drought, was in response to newswire stories I was reading every time I’d open up my e-mail.

I have four Yahoo! accounts: two in the American zone, one in the Indian zone and one in the Australian zone. My Indian e-mail account is where the newsletters and e-mail updates that I subscribe to arrive, and it’s my second destination. Third is the American e-mail account where my New York Times ‘Times Select’ announcements arrive, third is the Calcutta Telegraph, and finally the New York Times itself.

One of my American Yahoo! accounts is almost dormant now, an archive rather than something I actively use. I first used it as a scrapbook, to store copies of news articles, but then came de.licio.us. Now that e-mail account is only something I use to store copies of things I expect to have a short shelf life (newswire reports, newspaper articles that don’t have permalinks). I have a de.licio.us file for articles I want to keep for reference, and another, listed as a tag cloud (with highlights running down the right hand side of the page you’re reading now) that indexes all of the articles across my publishing empire. And 99 and some-large-fraction-of-that-last-one-percent of the photographs that accompany my posts are from Flickr!

This afternoon I spent an hour or so configuring my ‘My Times’ page at the New York Times, after receiving this e-mail this morning, an invitation for me to ‘personalise’ NYTimes.com, “…with guidance (if you want it) from Times reporters and editors.
http ://my.nytimes.com.  you’ve already tried My Times, you’ll find a lot of  improvements. The response is much faster. You can now create multiple My Times pages, to group your sources by category or interest. The search results have been improved. And there are new widgets that let you add weather, New York Times crosswords, local movie show times, Flickr photos and other information to your page.”

It’s essentially the same as My Yahoo!, a collecting of news feeds. My Times allows for story summaries, and there’s a more diverse and unusual set of feeds to choose from, picked by New York Times correspondents (not the ones that I read, however, and whose reading material I would have been interested in bookmarking).

I played around with My Yahoo! a couple of years ago and abandoned it. I want to sign up for something as the whim takes me: the setup factor on both My Times and My Yahoo!, minimal though it is, isn’t something I’m interested in spending time doing. And I want the feeds home-delivered, there’s only the difference of a click or two in going from my inbox to My Yahoo (and I can see my new mail there, if I want to) but it feels enormous: the difference between staying home and reading the newspaper, or going out and grabbing the shared copy at a cafe to read over coffee.

It was a suprise to me how deeply Flickr and de.licio.us have infiltrated the media. My Times has a tricksy set of photos pertaining to the news stories on its front page that relate to tags on Flickr:

This Pipe [note: a Yahoo! feed aggregating service] takes the New York Times homepage, passes it thru Content Analysis and uses the keywords to find Photos at Flickr.

This has the fluffy feeling of infotainment. It’s entirely different to the way that photographs of the fire that destroyed Griffith Park in Los Angeles, that were being posted in real time on Flickr and linked to through the L.A. Times, and local blogs collated by zipcode on outside.in were making visual the news as it was happening.

Many of the magazines and news sources one can subscribe to through MyTimes run listings of articles they find interesting as de.licio.us links.

But the drawback of My Times is that it’s enclosed, it has no air, it’s one way content. Reading the sources that the people I’m reading are reading is something I’m increasingly valuing: I keep adding to my de.licio.us network. I measure what I’m interested in against voices I trust, those of Dayna Bateman (who has a de.licio.us file list at her blog, Detritus), who reads much the same things as I do, but is a more careful and discerning reader and finds treasures I miss. I find it easier and faster to save reference materials flagged by The Ethicurean from its de.licio.us file than tagging the stories from the website. I’m interested in the density of BldgBlog and the wide-reach of the sources it draws from.  I’ve set my My Times file for feeds from the New York Review of Books and serious scientific journals, things I want to read slowly, to carry around in my bag every day and take weeks to read, digesting the articles in bite size chunks.

I think it’s only a matter of time before stories routinely add a “geotag at outside.in” flag along with digg, and technorati, and de.licio.us flags. This week one of outside.in’s founders, Steven Johnson, introduced a new feature on the site, maps that show the shifting movement of stories clustering around a particular place through time: there are maps for particular places and particular writers.

Steven Johnson is a writer and theorist I measure my ideas and observations against. He is a living footnote, able to think clearly about technological changes as they’re happening, note their value, and link them to culture and philosophy and art and society and science. Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad is Good For You: How Popular Culture is Making You Smarter, looks at computer games and entertainment, not for their content, but their methods and tools, how considering how they work which makes us draw upon “…disciplines that don’t usually interact with one another: economics, narrative theory, social network analysis, neuroscience.”

The first and last thing that should be said about the experience of playing today’s video games, the thing that you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage, is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard. The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused or disoriented; you may be stuck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problem you’ve been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this is mindless escapism, its a strangely masochistic version. Who wants to escape to a world that irritates you 90 percent of the time?

It mostly feels to me that the New York Times is trying to do everything, and be everywhere and cover all bases for everyone, running down every angle, trying to be in on every game, and making the experience clunky. I don’t value the New York Times for how easy it tries to make things for me, and how it tries to bend itself to serve up the news I want to read. With news I value the things I have to struggle to understand, to confront images I’d rather look away from — funeral pyres of animals during the foot & mouth epidemic in Europe, hollow-eyed souls from Darfur — and delve into long analyses of race, or (from the L.A. Times, the series of stories about the state of our oceans), the science stories fascinate me but require me, often to look things up in order to comprehend them, to define terms. I want the New York Times home page to remain panoramic and be dictated by some overarching editorial idea of what’s important, I want to be suprised, led into something I didn’t know or didn’t think I’d be interested in.

At first I was suspicious of Times Select. It seemed mighty thin and empty for something that costs me $7 a month, but Maira Kalman’s illustrated column was the bait I took, and I’m glad I did. There have been guest columns from Steven Johnson, thinking aloud about the sophistication of local news and how it could be compounded by being interlinked and mapped, somehow, as he was developing and launching outside.in. A column from Michael Pollan, on what we eat and why we eat what we eat, and the dangers, sometimes, of eating what we eat.

Times Select is becoming more subtle, unusual and engaging. There are collective columns, where several voices address the same topic. Campaigning for History: Reflections on the American Presidency in a Political Season, is written by four historians and a colAnd, now columns with a visual dimension that’s becoming more complex. There’s a game called Food Import Folly, on food contamination and poisoning, with an accompanying list of articles from the New York Times archive.

MY PROPOSAL FOR YAHOO!: A SOPHISTICATED, DEEPLY INTELLIGENT  MAGAZINE

an EXQUISITELY BEAUTIFUL DESIGN TEMPLATE to display posts from NEWS FEEDS alongside PHOTOGRAPHS from FLICKR footnoted with DE.LICIO.US LISTINGS.

What Yahoo! has the resources to do, that the New York Times doesn’t have either the tools or perspective for, is to create a deeply engaging news magazine with a fluid content that is absolutely editorially neutral, able to be compiled from the RSS feeds already coming into My Yahoo! home pages or e-mail inboxes. It could be read through an ingenious design template, that weighs up a series of design cues that take into account the screen size and dimensions and colour properties of a individual’s displays, weighed against design decisions culled from questions asked of the Yahoo! user, and design preferences of the magazines and newspapers the original content is drawn from.

A NEW KIND of Yahoo! news content.

To extraordinary images gleaned from Flickr, and footnotes and references from de.licio.us Yahoo! could create a new kind of news indexing, that could be found by applying de.licio.us tags to a map — conceptual maps of ideas and concepts, as tag clouds are, or actual maps, with ideas and events and analysis pinned to particular locations, that are alive in the way that Outside.in’s maps are, perhaps fed onto a map through Yahoo! Pipes.  

The opportunity exists to create a new conversational kind of reflective news analysis, where Yahoo! editors find connections between stories and link ideas, that have a longer timespan than fast moving headlines, and the same gravity as magazines and features, while remaining fluid.

And a NEW KIND of advertising.

Advertising and editorial coverage of businesses are at heart community issues. Advertising takes on the role of the town crier. Editorial coverage is independent verification of a company’s claims products and services. Before outside.in compounded local coverage and gave a neighbourhood a global reach without diluting its local qualities, community newspapers were bounded by the few blocks they covered and limited to a few voices. Now, calling up any location, in any zipcode can bring up a multiplicity of voices, from near or far, that are commenting upon a place or an event taking place in a particular location, from a number of blogs and publications. This has created a new business opportunity at Outside.in.

On his blog this week, Steven Johnson wrote of seeking help to think through these new business opportunities.

Obviously, the outside.in structure is optimized for hyperlocal advertising, so that’s one piece of the puzzle. But there are many others: potential relationships with traditional media companies; national advertisers who wish to target specific zip codes; local search; international markets and partnerships; classified listings, and so on.

It’s the town crier role of advertising, applied to this smart, reflective and thoughtful type of writing and compiling of the news that excites me, the possibilities for it to become more symbolic, not “brand” building, but the kind of commissioned portraiture that artists made of rich patrons in renaissance times.

A CATALOGUE for the next SYDNEY FESTIVAL

I also have an idea — still forming — of creating a new kind of programme for the next Sydney Festival, that brings in stories about and images of artists and shows from all over the world, that exists as one of these beautifully designed magazines online, while the nuts and bolts of a show (the credits, the performers, a quick synopsis) is delivered via a mobile phone. The advantage of this kind of programme would be that it could find the links and connections between shows and how they reflect the world and our times, and how they re-inforce one another, as happened at this year’s festival, with Lou Reed’s Berlin, Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac, and dance pieces by the Holy Body Tattoo and Zero Degrees.