podgnosticast

Why Not Apply the Geneva Conventions to Video Games?

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:37:26 PST

This post is in reaction the wonderful questions raised by Zachary Sniderman's article on Mashable.com "Should the Geneva Conventions Be Applied to Video Games?" posted Dec. 02, 2011. Original header and attribution included below.

Should the Geneva Conventions Be Applied to Video Games?December 02, 2011 by Zachary Sniderman

Once one gets beyond the heart of the matter - that games are precisely that because they exist outside of the “real world” and in a consecrated space¹, and once one realizes the faulty logic behind suggesting that war games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 abide by the Geneva Conventions, then the suggestion, nonetheless, brings to mind some untapped possibilities for the design and purpose of war games as a genre.

Nowadays, gaming has become a recognized venue for instruction or concrete work in the sphere of social good or in humanitarian issues. Sniderman notes in his article that, “After beating a game, no player wants to then sit through a mock war trial for the civilian they accidentally shot in the first mission.”

But is that really true? Certainly in the current context of how these games are designed, it would certainly fall out of the ken of what these games attempt to simulate - the part of warfare that deals with tactics and teamwork which is, essentially, the thrust of most first-person shooter games. But, what if these games had to abide by the Geneva Conventions?

At first glance a whole bevy of character classes or sub-games could be created for just that very purpose. Consider a sub-game modeled after a Farmville/Sims-style game that allows players to administrate the prisoner camps or that new ranks of player-characters populate the game world such as "Judge" "Ambassador" or "Prime Minister" and which are only granted to players who have advanced significantly in game missions and whose overall kill stats more closely reflects the rules of engagement stipulated by The Geneva Conventions.

That is, for the privilege of and for the game network clout of presiding over the “mock” war crimes trials conducted on fellow players by other players, one could imagine yet another instance of “motivational design.” Not only do these roles grant a player a certain amount of authority and prestige within the gaming network - a core reason people play games in the first place and which underwrites things such as leader boards - but also the so-called courtroom becomes the crowd-sourced forum for fair-play, best practices and community self-regulation wherein senior members of the gaming network act as the standard for the rest of the gamers as they debate how to adjudicated the “war crime.”

There could also be a “peacekeeper” or “Military Police” character class that not only must be unlocked through specific actions by the player, but also this creates opportunities for additional, high-value missions such as a Saving Private Ryan-style mission for bringing a suspected combatant back to the so-called halls of justice.

First-person shooters are generally testosterone-filled, jockish exercises in muscle, fraternal brotherhood and technical skill. What about a first person shooter that also includes the brainy training in a social good or achieves a richer simulation of other aspects of warfare such as diplomacy and rules of engagement?

Granted, this what if scenario probably involves game design and coding beyond the capacity of the game systems that run them at this time. It would be no small feat to be able to realize such an idea.

However, the addition of game systems that process the ethical standards of the Geneva Conventions not with built-in coding, prohibitive algorithms and game design, but instead by the creation of sub-games, earned character classes and in-game sysop privileges and that these systems that process ethical issues are administrated and enacted by the gamers themselves, then suddenly games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 achieves some of the didactic and community building functions² that satisfy more completely why human beings are wont to play games in the first place.

¹ Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (p. 3).Boston: The Beacon Press.

²Bowman, S. L. (2010). The Function of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Podgnosticast 006 - Aina Abiodun: Who's Who in Transmedia

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:24:30 PDT

Aina Abiodun, founder and co-organizer for the Transmedia NYC Meetup group shares her experience raising her organization from a small crew talking Transmedia in pubs to a full-fledged institution sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center with liaisons to Trasnsmedia meetup groups worldwide.

A big thank you to Les Blondettes for graciously providing the musical interludes. To listen to their music or for booking information, please visit: http://www.myspace.com/lesblondettes

LISTEN NOW:

Definitions: Gamification vs. Motivational Design vs. ... Play?

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:20:27 PDT

To be sure, Jesse Schell has become a hero to me, and I'm not one prone to having heroes at all. And, the profound admiration for his work and his public speaking was born not via his landmark 2010 D.I.C.E. Summit talk. I hadn't even heard of it or of him when I cued up the next episode in a podcast I had already been listening to avidly: S.A.L.T. (Seminars in Long Term Thinking produced by Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation). The episode Schell delivered was dubbed, Visions of the Gamepocolypse, and I've been a fan of his ever since.

Based on the introductary remarks, this lecture was to be the full exposition of the insights Schell only introduced in the one delivered to the D.I.C.E. audience. Over the course of the hour-long podcast, he revealed with remakable clarity what he dubbed "The Gamepocolypse," but beyond his bullet points of sensors, devices, and all the hardware advancements and Web ecosystems that would permit the end of the world as-we-know-it through gamification, two of his talking points made a lasting impression on me.

The first of these was somewhat ego-serving; he couched the beginning of his lecture on the presumption that if you pay attention, it is truly possible to forcast the future or at least have a really good guess at possible ones. It's not only a presumption I agree with as the title of this blog can testify to, but also it's likely the statement that rendered him, there on the spot, a hero to me rather than another thought-provoking listen on a podcast I had already come to love.

The other thing that, literally, put goose pimples on my forearms was his classification of the competing factions in this Gamepocalypse. He classifies them as such:

The Pursuaders:
"All these guys care about is making money ... They want to get the money and get out."
The Artists:
"They want to advance their medium. They wanna get something new out there ... for its own sake."
The Humanitarians"They want to make things that will make people's life better ... To help us improve metally, physically, spiritually."
The Fullfillers:
"These peoples want to fulfill peoples wishes, their dreams, desires, and hope."

About a month and a half later, a Google Alert I had put on Schell delivered to me another one of his speaking engagements, and yet again he closed this talk (which was on different topic altogether) with the same formulation: the artists, the humanitarians, the persuaders and the fulfullers.

This verified to that it was an important point in Schell's ideas, and it is. What to make of this, my meditations on gamification have yet to yeild a practical application for it, other than knowing it could potentially be the framework on which to base a business model for the capitalization of a Transmedia production.

Now, yesterday morning, I got around to watching a taped interview he gave while participating in the For the Win symposium which convened on Aug. 8 of this year. Perhaps it was the nature of the symposium, or that the conference room in which it was filmed was too drab in decor and conducted by an uninspired interviewer, but, for once, a wedge appeared in Schell's rhetoric that I, humbly, think aught to be addressed.

Also, to be fair, after watching the opening debate of that same symposium, I suspect that the event was rather stifling. In my imagination, and had I been in Jesse Schell's shoes at the time, I likely would have had my hand curled into "the bird" underneath the table while doing this interview. So, though I have my personal critique of this particular interview, I suspect that Schell had more things on his mind at the time than to be careful with his rhetoric. Regardless, his statements were thought provoking and merit a more thorough examination.

To a large extant, the interview questions and answers revolved around the topic-kernel of what is or what do we really call this "gamification" thing. At the 8:30 mark (the in-a-nutshell moment) Schell states:

"I think what people are really trying to talk about is the notion of motivational design, even though they don't always use those phrases. When I press people about it, it really is what they're talking about. They're talking about 'How can I create a system where you care; you actually care more about completing certain tasks within the system whether that system be trying to get you to fill out forms about car insurance, or trying to care about your own education, or an excercise program ... is it possible for me to create a system so that you care."

Personally I think that kind of recasting of gamification into "motivational design" has value from the standpoint of "The Pursuaders." That is not only the language Schell's persuaders use to talk to each other, but it is, in fact, what they're out to do - to make the banalities of things like insurance forms something we care about just as much as they do. Their job and their industry depends on us caring about their needs.

But, for anyone who has lived in New York City for any stretch of time knows first-hand is that the amount of caring anyone can sustain for anything that is constant and unrelenting (I'm thinking about the daily, almost hourly, solicitations by vagrants, alcoholics, self-anointed messengers of The Lord, and troupes of Mariachi bands dressed up as vaqueros) drops to nil just before it goes straight into outright contempt for even the suggestion of yet another "entertaining" performance.

Incidentally, as of late the Mariachi's have done a bit of their own "Motivational Design" to their act. Now they're being accompanied by what we hope is truly their wife and infant child and not their sweet cousin from down the block for whom they'll cut a piece of the pie in what she manages to score in the collections basket while they're are freed up to pump their accordion to La Bamba, again.

I think we will care the first or second time, but soon we will learn to resent the design of their act for the bad faith it uses in appealing to our treasured sincerity in a motivation that most healthy adults carry: to try our best to lend hand to the sick, suffering and those in a state of lack.

Again, to be fair, I believe that a better venue than this recorded interview - one that would permit Schell a full treatment to the question of what "gamification" is - would yield that his views are much more comprehensive and thorough than this nine-minute clip taken alone would suggest. Regardless, for just this, particular clip, I would have to say that gamification is not mere motivational design. It is that, but only amidst the persuaders.

In the middle section of this clip, Schell takes the tack that motivation is a well understood discipline whereas human pleasure remains a mystery even to those whose science aught to have a ready answer: the academic psychologists. I think at the end of the day, psychology will play a strong role in understanding pleasure, but so too will biology. But when it comes to gamification per se, and how it unites motivation and pleasure, there is already a thriving science and discipline to understand how it does so.

Specifically, I invoke the emerging sub-discipline of the social sciences dubbed ludology (the study play in human beings and in groups of people). Already the research has made thorough investigations of gaming cultures and the research has measurable dynamics of game systems such as MMORPG's, Fantasy Table-top role playing games, and game play as a whole¹.

Once one starts surveying the essays, the studies and the literature that the science of ludology has already produced, it becomes clear that the artists, the humanitarians and the fulfillers should not only be invited to sit at the round conference table occupied by the pursuaders, but are, in fact, required to be there; to contribute to the discourse of gamification if the whole project has any hope of staving off the contempt that has descended on Facebook and the like. That is, if we, the general public (the users), are going to care about games, and that this caring is going to be a sustained one rather than subject to the tapering off that Schell describes in this clip, then Gamification ≠ Motivational Design. Gamification = Play.

And, if there is going to be a good discussion at this round conference table on how to package, produce and deliver play for a profit, (and why we will all ultimately care about it) then let's, at least, give an honorable mention to one of the foundational texts to the study of Ludology: Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.

I've taken the liberty of posting at the end of this argument the first eleven pages of this book graciously made available for preview on Google Books. But, to summarize the essence of the entire opening chapter, Huizinga makes the following points:

Play is significant

Play is a serious activity (think of how serious two chess players can be about their game).

Play is a voluntary activity. (If it's forced, it is no longer play, it's work. He equates play to freedom itself). "Here, then, we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom" (8).

Play is bound by space; it occurs in a sanctified "playground"; it is somehow outside of the ordinary or real world. (Think: chess board, sandbox, a frame (as in fine art), a stage or a football field as the playground or, a better word, arena).

Play is bound by time. (There is a clear moment when the game starts and end, and it's iterative process (to play the game again) is a foundational part of play. You see this at work in Foursquare, for instance, when the leaderboard resets every week)

"it creates order, is order" (10). (Think that every game has clear rules from which intrinsic order arises in gameplay because of it. Think first down, second down, third down, your turn, then my turn, etc.).

Play is tense. "The player wants something to 'go', to 'come off'; he wants to 'succeed' by his own exertions" (10-11). (i.e. there are stakes involved and one can win or loose).

As an aside, Huizinga takes this framework of play and then analyzes some very adult activities such as philosophy, sport, art and fashion, and even war based on these criteria. Modern ludologists have already come to the conclusion that adult play is a vital component in community building, and it is evident that the Web or a particular Web page/platform like a forum, a user group or a social network thrives in accordance to how well the community (your community) is present and has clearly defined its rules of engagement with little to no users trying to "game" the system and be, in Huizinga's words, a spoil-sport.

And so, in this context, it's not too far of a stretch to see why and how motivation and pleasure unite in games and in the forthcoming gamification of the Web. On the one hand, people, like that old cyberpunk adage, "want to be free." And pleasure is a lot of things, but one ingredient of it has to do with getting what you want. There's pleasure in getting what you want so long as you don't have to give up too much of something else you also want to get it.

Also, in a world that is almost always ambiguous, clear order is a gratifying experience in so far as there's pleasure in understanding the "why" of things. This dynamic plays out in movies, TV shows and novels where we feel like we know the "why" in the character's actions and behaviors better than we know ourselves, our friends and our family.

Motivation dovetails into play specifically at Huizinga's point #7: in that striving for something to 'come off' and to work towards something where stakes are involved.

Elsewhere in the introduction Huizinga points out that play and games are "engrossing" and absorb the player (during his exposition of point #4). In a Ted talk, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi presents an compelling explanation of how complete absorption in a task - what he calls "flow" - engenders a state of temporary bliss or euphoria. He studies artists, but presumably the results of his studies apply equally to gamers.

There is, in my opinion, sufficient evidence to construct a robust theory of how gamification can satisfy both motivation and pleasure. The task at hand is to design a competent study that can accurately measure how and when a game achieves this.

Ultimately, I think that what gamification is as a cultural movement and a trend is nothing more than an effort to reunite what has been for a few generations the separation between work and leisure. It is the means, the vehicle, and the pathway whereby those two activities unite once again.

French philosopher Henri Lefebvre does an outstanding treatment in his first volume of Critique Of Everyday Life of unpacking the factors and forces since the industrial revolution that separated work and leisure for us into two distinct realms. However, another industrial revolution is in our midst which Schell recognizes at the For the Win symposium - a revolution in communication technologies and automation - and now, work and leisure are primed to become one again because of it or through it.

Gamification then, in my humble opinion, is a manifestation of this cultural imperative. It is the thing that will ultimately make it okay to hang out on Facebook while sitting at your work-place, and the thing that will make it okay to work from home and at night or on the weekends. We're all guilty of complaining that this is happening already, and, frankly, we're overwhelmed by it in the current context. Now comes gamification, and suddenly, if all goes well and all players - the artists, the humanitarians, the persuaders and the fulfillers - do their job right by hashing out a fair compromise between them then gamification could possibly ameliorate this problem. Then, maybe, just maybe, what we all have to look forward to is that life for us and our children will be characterized by constant play.

On the other hand, if the persuaders, and the persuaders alone, have their way as they did with social media, the result of the gamification process could result in a commensurate increase in alienation and exploitation. This united work-leisure model for modernity will not have the quality of play. And so, like with all brand new technologies, we, as a civilization, are once again entrusted with the responsibility to put these new technologies at the service of progress and a better tomorrow while minimizing the intrinsic risk in their introduction.

Based on what I've already seen, read and learned from him, I'm confident that my hero, Jesse Schell, will fight the good fight in the arena of persuaders in making gamification a worthy new facet of not only my life, but all of ours.

¹Waskul, D. D. (2006). The Role-Playing Game and The Game of Role-Playing: The Ludic Self and Everyday Life. In J. P. Williams, S. Q. Hendricks, & W. K. Winkler (Eds.), Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games (pp. 19-38). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Jeff Wirth: Virtual puppeteer brings the future to the present

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:46:35 PDT

Photo by Brian Fountain

@fountain www.brianfountain.com

And I thought I was "way out there" with being able to hold intelligent discourse about a future that is present here and now in our midst, but luddite and virtual puppeteering architect, Jeff Wirth, has me beat.

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending his brief presentation where Wirth, author of Interactive Acting and former head of the University of Central Florida's Interactive Performance Lab, revealed some details about his current project, built upon his extensive work in virtual puppeteering and based on sci-fi thriller, The Diamond Age, to those gathered at The Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center. But, while his muse is drawn from a futuristic narrative, his work is real, it's here, and it's way out there in a future we can only pretend is in the distance. But, it's not.

For those who aren't in the know, and I was amongst them before Wirth took the podium, virtual puppeteering is the craft of animating virtual characters or avatars through the actions, keystrokes and chatter produced by real people at the helm of a console-like interface. Think World of Warcraft, but your avatar's actions are limited only by your imagination and personality, not the pre-programmed list of emotes compiled by the game designers. Instead, Wirth's work has you breathing life into your virtual characters, literally bringing human consciousness and free will the the digital world.

To that end, he has produced a comprehensive field guide for prospective developers and pioneers like himself entitled VPS Interface Design. To be sure, slides at the presentation revealed that the document, like all other documents produced for the cutting, cutting, very cutting-edge, is a strictly a technical read with graphs, labyrinthine charts and precision specifications. You can be sure that Tim Berners-Lee's early writings into URIs, HTTP and HTML, likewise, were equally not ready for print in something like the For Dummies series.

Suffice it to say, Wirth is definitely one of those keywords to add to your Google Alerts. In the meantime, you can follow his own explorations and ruminations on the emerging immersive Web on www.interactiveapple.com. And come on, people! Where's the Wikipedia entry?

QR Codes as more than graphic URLs

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 06:13:08 PDT

The city streets and subway platforms of New York City are littered with QR Codes. Most, if not all that I have encountered and scanned, convey nothing more than a URL. They generally add no more information than is already evident on the paper or poster they are printed on. While they can convey just about anything the imagination wills into it in the form of text, where are the QR Code haiku's? Where's that nugget of movie trivia or a producer's peek-a-boo when scanning near the butt of a revolver in The Mechanic (2011) poster?

The beauty of these Borg-like boxy glyphs is the discovery that could happen when, between starting your smartphone's barcode scanner app and it registering the information, a new world ... a new dimension opens up into your screen. Where the naked eye sees a relatively random pattern, your mobile device sees syntax and delivers or translates it into effective meaning.

Better yet, code itself is capable of rendering an action or interaction like sending an SMS or making a phone call. Say hello to a graphic-turned-vehicle-for-communication. QR Codes represent doorways to the experience of connecting to someone else or some other idea. And yet, thus far, in my humble experience of them, they have not yet offered up anything more than a Web address. Boring!

Well then, I submit to you my own little portal to another dimension. It's one in the process of creation. But, scan this and hit send and you will be marked, flagged and recorded as having "crossed over." Then you can just sit back and enjoy the show. Are you bold enough to explore?

Brainstorm: Designing Custom Android ROMs as Transmedia Game Consoles

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 14:22:42 PST

As a newbie it took a little research on forums and youtube in order to learn how to root and instal a custom ROM to my Android phone, but the process resolved a lingering question I had had over the bevy of apps that I would have to ask an audience to install in order to experience a Transmedia Narrative I have been developing, The Coop.

A Green Lantern-themed custom Android ROM

inspires a vision of turning mobile devices into

Transmedia game consoles.

In coming across a superhero ROM it occurred to me that designing an Android ROM preloaded with apps and whose theme was consistent with the narrative would forego both the having an audience member search the marketplace for the app, download the media and suffer the learning curve.

As it's being written, The Coop's media artifacts would be deployed in both real and virtual space. Traversing and experiencing the story's media would take place on one's mobile device. That is, a smartphone would be the game console for the Transmedia Narrative.

One media experience that's being developed, however, is an Augmented Reality dungeon which contains inside of it booth music and ebook downloads. It will include links to other Web portals. The dungeon itself would load into an AR Browser such as Layar via the scanning of a QR Code, and to discover the code's location, one would need to use the phone's GPS to navigate to its location.

Finally, interaction with the community of audience members would include the standard fare of social media such as Twitter and Facebook as well as the official game app that tracks achievements, experience and progress in the narrative.

That's a lot of apps to ask someone to install simply to enjoy one media artifact. A rough count here is that the mobile device would utilize at least eight apps to experience the narrative. While all the apps are currently listed as free in the Android Marketplace, there a certain amount of break in the suspension of disbelief while the appropriate app is downloaded to continue through the AR dungeon.

In the process of evaluating the different custom ROMs I might install on my Android phone, thought, it seemed to me that if one could have a "Green Lantern" ROM for one's phone, one could also develop a ROM specifically tailored to the Transmedia Narrative - apps and custom icons pre-loaded into the GUI.

Just a thought.

Reflections of 2010 NY Comic Con: The Aborted Birth of an Avatar

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 09:10:06 PDT

Amid a dozen of computing stations arranged for Final Fantasy XIV at the New York Comic Con this weekend held at the Jacob K. Javits Center, one had been left unattended, displaying an incomplete stage of avatar creation. A progress meter on the upper left hand part of the screen showed that no less than four steps remained before the nascent creature could enter the world and engage other player-characters.

The fantastical figure was identified as originating from the "Hyur" race and equipped with armor indicating the it was of the class, "Descipline of War." It stood proudly on glowing disc awaiting the selection of its guardian deity - its in-game astrological alignment. A description on the lower left half of the screen described the qualities the character might possess or champion with the current selection. The right hand side of the screen indicated other possible selections were available, each with their own properties and each pregnant with the notion that, once selection had been made, one's experience of the game would be, unalterably, unique.

The booth was empty - waiting for human choice to complete the circuit. I engaged it, but unfamiliar with what choices had already been made till this point, I clicked the "previous" button, undoing the work the person who had occupied the station prior to my arrival. I was soon at the fist step - race and gender. I went with my gut, or more precisely, with the spirit of, "If I could represent myself in any way I choose within the boundaries of this game, how would I want to be related to by other players."

I chose one of the taller breeds, the "Elezen" - proud, angular, pointed ears and overall sylvan in nature. I debated over being male or female. Why constrain myself to an Earthly allotment that had been beyond my control for my own life? Here I could rewrite myself. Ultimately, I went with what I knew - male and not one of the short half-ling "Lalafell" or human-like "Hyur" or brutish ogre-like "Roegadyn."

At each stage my avatar seemed to emerge as something uniquely me and from my psyche. I chose to be a roguish "Discipline of the Land," - a ranger class. I chose the kind of hair style I would wish to have had if the tides of fortune had not made me bald in my mundane existence. I put blue highlights in it. Felsh tone - off-pallid. Height - on the short end of the species. Quite deliberately I did not want to be an imposing figure to other player-characters when I released my creation into the game world.

Towards the end of the sequence, it was not only quite clear that I had made innumerable choices, even selecting my avatar's date of birth, but also that my avatar did, indeed, express something of myself. My creation gave me winks and nods of approval between each stage of its creation, equally satisfied by who he would be in his world.

Finally, my avatar was ready to be placed amid others, and here again there were was a choice. There were multiple worlds it could engage. I selected the least popular based on ratings others had ascribed to it. Could my creation be the big fish in a small pond?

My progress was stalled when it came to giving my avatar a name. It would seem that the demonstration at the Comic Con had its limits or that the names I was selecting were taken.

A Final Fantasy XIV representative approached me at this point, cautioning me that, for the purposes of the demonstration, my selection of a "Discipline of the Land," would be somewhat inappropriate. His admonition - this class and the "Discipline of the Hand" were makers and foragers - passive roles not active ones. The limited time I would have at the kiosk would not find my character with much purpose. The demonstration - or limited game play time at The Con - would not be exciting in his opinion.

I was somewhat disheartened. He also advised me that for the purposes of the demonstration, participants were encouraged to name and select worlds that were listed in a print-out tapped to the kiosks counter under the computer keyboard.

I had felt a sort of kinship to the choices I had made thus far. My avatar seemed to have approved of my selections for him. In my heart, I had hoped to release my creation fully realized and then go home, buy the game and find him awaiting my direction.

When I realized that The Con's demonstration had its limitations and that my work would be washed away and I would have to start the process over again, I stopped playing. My avatar, still proudly awaiting my final actions on a glowing disk looked back at me, and I felt no connection to it anymore. I would not name him Steve as the paper suggested, and I would not throw him into a world not of my choosing. I turned away from my console, and my creation, in the last reduction, still-born.

Game over, man. Game over.

There was a sense of attachment, not necessarily to the game or the graphical character that would have been my avatar. There was an attachment to the choices I had made - my work. Those choices were particularly me and, likely, no one else could claim the presumption to neither know why those choices were made nor be able to re-create the Logos behind each decision. That avatar was a tangible record of my will, and once released to the game world, its fate would have been shaped by the time I had spent on its creation. The game world and other players would react to what I had done.

I was attached to that, and was saddened that, were I to install the game at home, I would, likewise, be unable to remember all the choices I had made. Strange to think that to re-engage the game again, this time with the privilege and equipment where my authorship would be stored, would set up a whole new set of conditions; it would be another avatar with a disposition befitting the mood of my abode.

The existential probabilities are ungraspable, but I guess, as with all things that relate to identity, that's life - real or virtual.

A Satisfactory World For Reasonable People

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:24:20 PDT

A reaction to Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget and the growing clamor for how the Web has gone "wrong."

It must have been lonely to be gifted with genius of the caliber of Socrates, Aristotle, Newton or Einstein. To be sure, Jaron Lanier's intellect ranks within that crowd. His contributions, particularly in the founding of computing and the Web-as-we-know-it, are unequivocally, as deeply profound and significant for changing the course of humanity as those philosophers of yore we've all learned about in our history class.

Sadly, while Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the long lineage of Western great minds have at some level bequeathed an iron-clad philosophy of virtue that has been the bedrock of civilization for millennia, Lanier, while gifted creatively and intellectually, reveals within the opening chapter of his recent book, You Are Not A Gadget that he is, at best, a second-rate philosopher.

Lanier has joined with the growing chorus of intellectuals and pundits that are defining the digital counter-movement. Lanier, perhaps, is the most passionate among them, subtitling his book, "A Manifesto." But while others like, Nicholas Carr who is author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains, and who has made recent news in an article published in The Atlantic is making the claim that while the digital world is compromising human concentration that it doesn't represent, like with Lanier, the end of civilization as we know it. Carr states in an interview with NPR that, despite the loss of this critical aspect of the human mind, new opportunities in the human enterprise might open up as well.

Lanier doesn't bother with all of that. His adjectives and verbs are slanderous to the Social Web. His brush strokes and terminology include labels such as "cybernetic totalism" and pejorative observations such as the arising of "hive mentality."

Even where he credits the Web and computing as a whole for making "a step in the right direction," they are but a mere hedging of his argument and a brief pause before he resumes whacking the piñata he's put before us again.

So let's take a moment to address just one of Lanier's rhetorical observations:

Lock-in:

It might be observed that Lanier, at heart, is a musician. While his contribution in pioneering the World Wide Web has been where he has shined most, he did, after all, want the whole enterprise to benefit “the artist.”

In a video interview with Aleks Krotoski of The Guardian, Lanier states his motives clearly,

Long ago […] some friends and I had this thought that, perhaps, the Internet would be such a fountain of wealth and opportunity that it would be entirely open […] and the opportunities they would get in return would be huge […] Unfortunately, I’ve come to believe that was a huge mistake as I look at the real world of musicians and writers, I see that it isn’t working. I see that we’re not finding these legions of new middle class musicians who are making it without the studio system.

To that You Are Not a Gadget begins by making observations that computing as a whole suffers from a notion he calls “lock-in.” In short, it is his pejorative way of stating that standards have arisen in how computing takes place.

One example he uses for his argument is that file systems (or more precisely, that computers organize artifacts into files and folders) have “locked in” and removed the possibility for the exploration of new ways of organizing one’s stuff. As a musician, he addresses the fact that MIDI, a standard widely used for representing music for computers, have narrowed or clipped the breadth of sound – locked out innovations in engineering sound on computers.

In his appraisal, he worries that design and interface influences usage, and that usage, in turn influences people and their decision. It’s certainly true that this occurs, but, taking a step back for a moment to see a broader picture, it is known that one’s language, like English, influences how people think and what choices they might make. A person is, inherently, “locked in” to a systematic way of engaging their culture, and it certainly excludes the freedom to construct one’s sentences using Verb-Object-Subject when relating to one’s peers.

Human beings inherit mores and values of the culture they are brought into and this is a form of “lock-in.” We also are locked in by biological constraints such as the likely fact that a flat-footed person will likely not pursue a career in athletics. What makes Lanier’s position towards the Internet so vital or disheartening is that not only does he recall a time when it was a nascent aspect of civilization, but he also made direct contributions into how it was shaped at various stages till the present. That is, he recalls a time when it was an undiscovered country, where the doors were wide open; he recalls a time where it did not exist. Now that the Internet is a facet of the modern world bestowed with cultural norms in design, interface, and interdigitated with commerce and art he seems to be stricken with a deep nostalgia for a world he left behind.

Michael Agger comments in his article “The Geek Freaks: Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become,”

As near as I can make it out, Lanier's view is that the Web began as a digital Eden. We built homepages by hand, played around in virtual worlds, wrote beautiful little programs for the fun of it, and generally made our humanity present online. The standards had not been set.

Agger closes his argument against Lanier by sweeping under the rug what Lanier had focused most on, Virtual Reality. His article takes a jab, stating, “It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It's time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.”

But Agger misses a point in saying that Lanier is lost to the human enterprise – out of touch. His voice does have some merit, and he is, perhaps, taking the banner on a human need that has and will be endemic to the human discourse – the yearning for a millenary kingdom.

Julio Coráztar sums up this very human yearning in his book, Hopscotch.

Basically, what is this story about finding a millenary kingdom, an Eden, another world? […] These types believe along with other madmen that we are not in the world, that our venerable parents have set us on a course in the wrong direction and we have to get off it if we do not want to end up as an equestrian statue or transformed into an exemplary grandparent, and that nothing is lost if one maintains as his end the value of proclaiming that everything is lost and that we have to start all over again […] Until now this century has been running away from all sorts of things, it has been looking for doorways and sometimes it gets to the bottom of them. What happens afterwards no one knows; some may have managed to see and have perished, instantly erased by great black forgetfulness, others will have conformed to the small escape, the little house in the suburbs, literary or scientific specialization, travel.

Lanier qualms revolve around the loss of personal individuality. His eponymous book asserts that human beings are not their gadgets. He laments the loss of a millenary kingdom, an Eden when individuals were not required to assert themselves on social networks. To be sure, if Lanier is to be the voice of something worth listening to is that, perhaps, the scope of the word “individual” has to be expanded to include one’s social sphere. But, here again, Coráztar picks up that thread and contextualizes it without the artifice of cataclysm. He states:

The kingdom will be made out of plastic material, that is a fact. And the world will not have to be converted into an Orwellian or Huxleyan nightmare; it will be much worse, it will be a delightful world, to the measure of its inhabitants, no mosquitoes, no illiterates, with enormous eighteen-footed hens most likely, each foot a thing of beauty, with tele-operated bathrooms, a different-colored water according to the days of the week, a nicety of the national hygiene service […] That is to say a satisfactory world for reasonable people.

And what of the likes of Lanier in this “satisfactory world for reasonable people”? Coráztar answer:

And will any single person remain in it who is not reasonable? […] Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking (sic), perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

The digital age came about with remarkable swiftness. Those that created its charter, like Lanier, will have a potent connection to the nostalgia of the millenary kingdom; they will carry the nostalgia for a time when communications as a whole was slow going. Their clamor will swell for a return to an Eden while Digital Natives, as the generation following those born after the early 90s are now being called, will sweep them and their qualms away without hesitation.

Will it be an Orwellian nightmare? Probably for the likes of Lanier, but it will also likely be a satisfactory world for reasonable people.

The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 04:24:20 PDT

This post is from ongoing research notes for a paper under current development for a class at NYU entintled, "Self in a Ludic, Digital Culture."

PERSONAL STATEMENT:

As my high school graduation was drawing near in 1990, the pep-squad published a lighthearted document for the yearbook. It listed all of my classmates, 62 of them, and it ascribed to them qualities such as "Most likely to become ...," and so on. It was a sort of tabulation of what one's status and image had been percieved to be in the school.

Granted, it was a small, private, prep-school in Miami, FL, but even then, I recognized that, while there weren't many of us in each class, there was nonetheless a representation by all of the social strata one thinks of in any American high school. There were the jocks and the popular kids. There were the nerds and the debate team. There were the band kids, and so on. Most of us had to occupy several roles, but we all enjoyed the privilege of being the vanguard in one of them. We each were totemically the representative jock or nerd or band kid and so on. When I read that document in the yearbook, it struck me that I had held the privileged status as the totem role-playing gamer for my class. I was the kid who does stuff like Dungeons & Dragons. Next to my name, it read "Most likely to become a Jedi Knight."

I was neither shocked nor upset. Truly, I could say with all earnestness that in my heart of hearts, I was saying that refrain Luke Skywalker utters to Obi-Wan-Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope, "I want to be a Jedi Master!" I really did want to be one, and later on, I persued the idea vigorously with immersion in Buddhist scripture - the closest approximation I could find to the ethos of the Star Wars Trilogy. Months after my graduation, I was enrolled in Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and one of my perfunctory classes, Intro to Sociology, included a professor whose curriculum had us survey high school archetypes. His conclusion: you are not an American unless you attend secondary school here in the United States, and that you carry your sociological role throughout the rest of your life, both personally and professionally.

To be sure, while I most of my social interactions were through the music department as the school's official electric bass player and as an orchestra member since middle school, I had been, indeed engaged in role-playing games with my fellow classmates in graduating classes of 1991-1993. I was the only one representing my class, and our society drew from the entire school, including those in the institution's middle school. We were few, but proud.

Suffice it to say and despite a strange obliviousness to the notion (I always thought of or attempted to be one of the "cool kids"), I am and have been considered a gamer - a ludite. I embrace it now, and to that end, am hoping to document the social value, perhaps even the necessity, to be a gamer in the modern world. Gaming is a form of literacy. I believe it will be a kind of literacy that is and will become increasingly important as the years progress.

CLAIM OF FACT:

There is evidence to suggest that American culture is currently undergoing a paradigm shift much in the same way that it shifted from a primarily agrarian society to an industrial one on during the First and Second Industrial Revolution. The First Industrial Revolution was characterized by the advent of steam power and mechanization - work, production and labor being done by machines rather than merely tools in human hands. The Second Industrial Revolution was characterized by the advent of mass production, interchangeability of parts, and the arisal of consumer goods. Both of these historical events brought broad-sweeping changes in the very fabric of civilization whose reach extended into state-craft, war, the evolution of new economic models and so on. These events also brought along with them new problems and social issues such as the redressing of labor laws such as the problem of child labor in a mechanized society. Ethical issues were raised, and social problems were created such as city slums. Work and leisure were separated. Mass production has led to globalization. A new paradigm solves issues of its predecessor but opens doors to new ones.

HYPOTHESIS:

The advent of and the widespread proliferation of the World Wide Web and innovations in consumer electronics have, in short, laid the foundation for a new paradigm through a revolution in communication technologies - a Third Industrial Revolution, so to speak. Successful navigation of a highly connected, digital world will require a great degree of literacy, education and specialization. Literacy in a digital environment will likely take the shape of one's aptitude for engaging one's community through the mechanism of role-playing or game mechanics. However, some are already clamoring, particularly Jaron Lanier, that personal identity, the self and individuality are being sacrificed in the process. His reaction is that of introducing terms such as "hive mentality" and "digital maoism."

This paper will make a brief survey of the modern concept of self and individuality that arose concurrent with the first and second industrial revolution. It will discuss the "community building" aspects of role-playing games. It will analyze the how work and leisure were separated by mechanization. It will attempt to show that revolutions in communication technologies are reuniting work and play, and it will explore not only the potential for the creation of digital slums, but also the ethical quandaries of the usage of tabulated data these technologies have made available. Ultimately, it will explore how individuals can constructively create personal identity in their community as the ludification of culture progresses.

New York Television Festival reveals that Transmedia Entertainment is not yet ready for prime time

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:41:48 PDT

At a panel discussion that included the leaders television industry, the conversation reveals that their definition and appraisal of transmedia entertainment does not yet include the critical component of reactivity

Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion at the SVA Theatre, 333 W. 23rd St., New York, whose title was "NATPE Presents: Building the World -- Multiplatform and Transmedia Storytelling." The talk one of the many offerings of the New York Television Festival, and its panelists were leaders in the television industry, including Craig Engler, Senior Vice President and General Manager for SyFy Digital, and a director of Bravo TV. The brochure, included the statement: "The PGA's recent decision to create a 'Transmedia Producer' credit was recognition of the growing importune of expanding stories and brands across multiple media." One would think that the television industry, by now, would be informed and educated about this emerging form of narrative, and that they would be implementing complex Transmedia campaigns. That was not the case.

The event was remarkably dull. There was a wide spectrum of differing opinions when it came what each of the half-dozen panelists defined "Transmedia" to be. Granted, they all agreed it was an emergent phenomenon, but, it is now legitimated into the canon of television production. If there is, now, a transmedia producer credit for their productions, each channel would, at this time, be ascribing a different.

With the exception of the presence of Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, the was a remarkable absence of enthusiasm for transmedia as a whole. Gomez proselytized that is was a "paradigm shift," while others marked it as a kind of curiosity. Engler had a curmudgeonly stance on it as if it was nothing more than a fancy term applied to an already existent practice of the industry.

To my reckoning, and based on careful reading of a dissertation by Christy Dena entitled Transmedia Practice: Theorizing the Expression of a Fictional World Across Distinct Media transmedia entertainment is the union of narrative technique with game mechanics. What makes it unique as a form of story telling is that, on the one hand, it is not so much a product of the possibility for interactivity to exist in media, but reactivity. That is, the narrative reacts as it is being told to its audience and it unfolds as a co-created narrative. It is a mass media equivalent to a bard or live storyteller who embellishes, creates hyperbole or dilates the pacing of her performance based on "energy" of how the audience is receiving the story as it is told.

Modern mass media now has the capacity to do this - especially when it permits its audience to contribute to the cannon of a story. The panel discussion revealed that, aside from Gomez, industry leaders in television do not permit that to be the case. They are deploying their narratives already through social media tools such as Foursquare and SCVNGR, but they have not yet opened the doors of reactivity.

American culture is its media. The panel discussion revealed that there is a gap or wedge at this time where, while producers are actively engaged in interacting with their audience, they are not yet willing to react to them. As such, this emergent phenomenon, while embraced, still has a while to go before it penetrate the mainstream and shape it in a ludic way. Reactivity requires game mechanics. Modern mass media requires an education in gaming.

Lehrer: Merging Art and Science; The Ludic Self: Merging Wisdom Schools and Technology

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 20:41:22 PDT

This post is from ongoing research notes for a paper under current development for a class at NYU entintled, "Self in a Ludic, Digital Culture."

In reading through Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist, it strikes me how he has applied his training in neurobiology to classical literature. In the prelude to that work, it's clear that, for him, the concept was a novel one, stating, "I would often bring my copy of Swan's Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences."

It would seem, his venture into classical literature was a newfound experience. To be sure, there was some prompting from his profession to begin an exploration into fiction, but that it would lead to a broad-sweeping, interdisciplinary conclusion that artists, in fact, had been privy to the secrets of science long before a modern laboratory had been build was a revelation for him. His book testifies to the awe and reverence such an epiphany can have.

Likewise, the "Ludic Self in a Digital Culture" will present a similar "revelation." That is, long before science came to be considered the definitive source for the metaphysical claim, "This is how we know that we know," - epistemological truth - the Buddhists of pre-literate civilizations had already done an exhaustive inquiry into the nature of self. It's doctrine is about "the self." There conclusion is stated succinctly as the concept of anatman or non-self, and scores of scripture document their proof that the self is an illusion.

Ludology, the study of play and a new academic discipline, likewise, is addressing the concept that the self is plastic in nature. There are, to be sure, social roles, personality/persona's (a concept dating back to ancient Greece), and a reason to believe that self does exist, but only within a sociological or ritualistic contexts. That is, the academic discipline is attacking or undermining the objective notion of self as a static, continuous entity.

Jean-Paul Sartre's famous discussion of the Parisian café waiter in his book, Being and Nothingness, alludes to the notion that the waiter's generalized sense of self is temporarily displaced by a person playing a waiter with all the mannerisms, rituals and customs that implies. He undermines self in the conflicting triumvirate of being - being in-itself, being for-itself and being for-others - in the irreconcilable notion of self that exists in a perpetual state of what he labels "bad faith." Post-modern, western philosophy has taken several whacks at the piñata of modern concept self as well.

Like Lehrer, who unites the findings artistry and empirical science together, perhaps in defining the Ludic Self in a Digital age, what will be required is to broaden the scope of the lens beyond just mere scientific, academic research, but also include both occidental and oriental philosophy and dogma in our inquiry as well.

Let's blend wisdom and technology. Let's unite our belief systems with social systems . Let's play.

Podgnosticast 005 06.24.10: #WalkAndTalk - Experiments in transforming Twitter to Talk

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:56:35 PDT

Drew Anderson, author of blog, www.mohdi.com, talks about his recent hash-tag experiment with Twitter. For several weeks he has been posting his phone number and tagging it #walkandtalk on his strolls through Brooklyn. His tweets have yet to fetch a caller despite an admirable 589 follower. Drew is currently working on drafting a summary of his Twitter experiment. We'll stay tuned to see what his results are.

(@MoHDI)

Call 917-379-3437 - next 30 minutes #walkandtalk

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:16:57

A case for keeping input and display separated

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:40:48 PDT

As interfaces become more "immersive," engaging our bodies as we work with our screens, let's keep in mind human error and their fallibility when designing our interfaces

To be sure, the capacitive touch screen has done wonders for improving not only the quality of the computing experience, but also the intimacy between man and machine. But, in these days when our interfaces are quickly replacing keystrokes with gestures, man has yet to out-think random chance and some problems involved in joining input and display on devices.

Case in point: today, I drafted a proposal for implementing social media tools for a university club's Web site twice. Both were deleted. In the process of drafting, good practices of frequent saving of the document were implemented, and yet, hours of work have been washed away two times.

I was working on an iPad. The document took shape as an e-mail in the gadget's pre-installed mail app since that's how the document was to be delivered. In the first attempt to save my work, I e-mailed the draft to myself that was at near completion.

For unknown reasons my e-mail client (gmail) received the e-mail with an error that the text was unreadable. Attempts to recover the draft via the "sent" folder said that the message was gone, and while a prior draft was still available, it was far from complete.

Angry, I started over - this time in a Web browser. After each paragraph, the "Save draft" button was pressed, even while I knew the browser would periodically auto-save it for me. Unfortunately, while penning in the closing statements into the e-mail on the on-screen keyboard, my thumb glazed the "Discard draft" button, and gone.

Since getting an iPad - my first experience with using a screen-based keyboard - thoughtful responses on Facebook, 500 character inputs into Web forms, emails, comments to news articles and so on have been wiped away not by intention but by merely by regripping the machine.

I've gotten into the habit of periodically "selecting all" and copying text to the clipboard every couple of sentences. It's saved me my time and my ass a few times. But the clipboard can only do so much - one save at a time. On Web forms with multiple fields like an application process for joining a group on Meetup.com a gesture refreshed the Web page, and I said to mysel, "Ahh, I'd rather not join it anyway." Lord knows what kind of adventures and close relationships that might have formed are now lost because it's just too heartbreaking to try to remember all the love that went into the application process.

Interfaces are getting more sophisticated, and before the decade is out our computing experience will resemble immersive environments similar to that of the movie Minority Report;. Before that happens, it would seem that app and Web designers aughtta remember find a way for one of the first principles of computing to remain sacred - press save, press save, and keep pressing; and as interfaces get more intimate, at least for now on the iPad, for Godsake, put a toggle feature to give users the ability to make the screen inactive while the keyboard is open!

God forbid that there come a time when we're using our whole body to interface with computers and designers don't pre-think that the Tom Cruise character might have an itch in his toe and by scratching it, he ends up accusing the wrong person for crimes he has yet to commit.

Podgnosticast 004 04.30.10: The Foundations for the Immersive Web 3.0

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:58:59 PDT

Foundations of the Immersive Web 3.0 from J.C.Martinez-Sifre on Vimeo.

An exploration of the convergence of several New Media vectors forming a crucible for a new artistic medium in an experience-based economy. This video essay is a mashup of media on YouTube and TED.com.

TAKE AN IMMERSIVE TOUR OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL NOW

A Kin to Something I Might Actually Want

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:11:58 PDT

Product launches are so often slimy in their approach to WOW or be cool, especially when they are looking to out hype their rival. Sports drinks and video games are unabashedly manipulative, but when talking about tech products, it gets even hairier. Which is why I was so impressed today when I followed a simple click through for the Kin. Now, I am an iPhone user and probably won't be switching anytime soon (especially not with the new 4G double camera model coming out sometime before 2020), but I am interested in all the devices that I acknowledge as better than the iPhone in many ways. The Kin campaign, known from here on out as "the journey," got my interest immediately.

First noticed on the iLike site (after uninstalling the iLike sidebar for reasons that I told the website redirect were related to it slowing down my system) which redirected me to MySpace, a little website that used to, I guess, service the social networking crowd, I clicked play and watched the first trailer. I must admit, the tag on the whole campaign really caught my interest. It speaks to a philosophical question that is both timely and wise to explore: Who are our online friends and are they really friends? You then look down and see Rosa looking up at you and she is your daughter or girlfriend or neighbor or what have you. Identifiable, archetypal.

The journey examines many of the faces that are our social network. The ex, the flirt (the word "stalker" is currently unacceptable after Kelly Oxford rocked the tweet and got lashed from some concerned folks with dried up humor reserves), the mom or quirky adult figure, and, well, that's it for now. I believe they are releasing 2 episodes a week for 8 weeks until the official product launch. I have a read several ad blogs and branding blogs and they all seem to be just as impressed as I am with the campaign. The gist being that "the journey" doesn't hit you over the head with either branding or product placement. It is coming at you with a strictly webisode style promotion, like: "here's Rosa, she's sweet, she's real, she's got a KIN and we're taking her around to answer some questions about where we are at with social networking." It's perhaps not a new approach, but it worked for me. Just watching some of the very well placed shots of the KIN doing things and running applications made me want one. It actually did its job without having to try to suck my soul through a straw.

Apparently, agency two fifteen (formerly T.A.G) has signed on with Microsoft to really push in a new direction. If they do end up sucking my soul through a straw, then, well played, agency two fifteen. Your oddly all-numeric new name is creepy enough to bring back some X-Files imagery, but you are doing the job that needs to be done without making me feel owned. In the meantime, I'll be waiting for the next installment of Rosa's Big Adventure.

I have reached out to Rosa on Facebook to see if she might be up for an interview on the campaign and will follow up accordingly.

Gone are the days of a/s/l

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:27:49 PDT

One of the early virtues of the Web back before its widespread adoption was the notion that you could be anything or anyone. That is, it was somewhat understood that you could represent yourself in whatever form you pleased.

In 1990, your best bet for a social Web were text-based chat rooms. Even when AOL was emerging, it was likely your identity was crafted out of your screen name rather than your personality. My first screen name, "elo," was chosen simply because I liked how the letters sounded together. I found out as time went on that using the screen name repeatedly by way of forging an online brand for myself in the rooms that I should have been a fan of the Electric Light Orchestra. Those were the folks - fans as well - who were drawn to engaging in chat with me. When I replied "Huh?" it was a conversation breaker.

It was some years later that I finally listened to the music I had been assumed to champion. Thankfully, I had already noted that any future screen names should try to capture my essence a little better. "Elo" was not me - not in the slightest.

In the "Hot Tub" chat room, it was not uncommon to get asked a sizzling question: "a/s/l?" That was short-hand for age, sex, location. Most of the time, I answered truthfully, and the calls to my screen name at the time had me idle in the chat room i.e. no one cared to chat with a dude. The techie ladies - the presumed minority demographic - were too busy clamoring with the roosters' calls to pay me any mind. I timed out of the chat room scene, and a common refrain those days from my buddies was wondering if the "sexy" photo that was e-mailed after a particularly salacious private chat was a real representation of a new found cyber love affair. The ones sent by my buddies to their online partners certainly weren't.

In one, final stab at trying to get a buzz - just one good gab where I (with a capital "I") was the center of the room; the life of the party ... I checked into a room called something like "Hot Sex" with a screen name that had "grl" in it (back in 1993 when AOL was paid for by the minute over a 24k connection). Behold! the question came almost instantly - a/s/l? -, and I replied to it saying that I was a buxom teenage girl from France or Sweden or someplace exotic like that. The hot and bothered geeks were vying to have me reply, and I was, for better lack of a word, a capable, transgender cyber sex partner. I got into character and rather guiltlessly got their keyboards all gluey with insinuations of an erotic journey. The ecstasy was punctuated by odd ASCII characters, and I promptly logged off when telephone numbers were to be exchanged.

Even screen names were disposable back then. It was the wild, wild west of the world wide web. A chat room was kind of like some ugly rendezvous at the back-stall of some out of the way truck stop on the information super highway; didn't matter who or what the deed happened with, just that the conversation went on. Imaginations were ablaze. Those were the days, I suppose.

Today that anonymity or misrepresentability has, for lack of a better term, become civilized. Since participation in the social Web includes adding gender, location and age as part of the sign-up process, nothing short of a concerted campaign to create and sustain an alter ego - one that will post updates with a fair amount of consistency and have a back-story that matches the message - is going to make anyone a believer of that online personality. And who has time for that anyway if you want your "real" identity to get it's fair shake of connection to friends and family through these tools?

To a degree, those days of vetting indiscriminately are over. God forbid a real-time Web search reveal a compromising set of comments linked to your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Google and so on's screen name. Your online identity and screen name is, truly, an extension of your real life relationship with friends, employers and the world-at-large. Opprobrium and disgrace in the real world are certainly a civilizing force to what was once a free-for-all of what you might be able to be in cyber-space.

These days you might be able to get by with a flattering photo of yourself taken five years ago as your profile image, only to be betrayed by a friend's "mobile upload" of last-weekend's BBQ. You were tagged in it. Identity revealed.

Forget privacy issues and who or what agency is tracking you online, my friends. Every status update is a paper trail that can't get shredded, and heaven help those whose social sphere is flagged for a thorough investigation by any sort of agent.

Truth of the matter is, if you don't regard your online activities as an extension of your "public self" (whatever that may mean to you) then whatever you say or do can and will be used against you by someone whose opinion you care about sooner or later.

The only privacy left these days are all those wonderful, haunting ideas and visions that remain, respectfully, shut in one's mind.

Podgnosticast 003 02.26.10: What Gives With Google Buzz

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:56:57 PDT

David Chehebar and J.C. Martinez-Sifre broadcast from somewhere in between New York City's streets and South Florida. While they discuss the interweaving of all of Google products in lieu of the newly implemented Google Buzz, they explore that space from which their broadcast might just be taking place: the Virtuo-Reality zone.

Editor's note: The promised, real-time Foursquare feed mentioned by J.C was pre-empted due to the conflict between the podcast recording and the EvDo transmitter on his mobile device.

Cloud OS, bringing back the blue screen of death

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:03:38 PST

I crashed Mozilla Firefox. It would seem that over-enthusiasm with all the plug-ins made the thing inoperable. That is, it just wouldn't load the Web pages any more, and if it did, browsing was deathly slow.

As browsers become branded as operating systems rich with apps and plug-ins - and open sourced, for that matter - one might wonder if we're just going to repeat the past and have the same clunky issues that made Vista an unusable experience.

The Cloud OS of the future, with all the sexiness that comes with knowing that it doesn't matter what computer you jump, you'll get the same hay ride on your main machine ... they'll sooner rather than later run pray to the same forces which spawned the "blue screen of death."

I'm running Chrome now with its promise of "fast" browsing. I have elected not to load it with too many additional bells and whistles.

I had once thought, "A browser's a browser. What does it matter which one I use," but I'm not convinced of that anymore.

As most of what I do during screen-time is through a Web browser with only graphics and video editing happening on the local drive, I wonder, if this next wave of computing - cloud-based - is going to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Likely, it'll be much like it was before with the tide-and-true computing ethics of back-up, save frequently, and practice safe computing by making sure you trust what you download, view, plug-in or click. These will be the enduring maxims of a digital world.

Web 3.0: The Immersive Web

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:34:21 PDT

CES 2010 has come and gone, but from it, it was clear that this year marks the beginning of the era of 3D entertainment. Before Hi-Def TVs have infiltrated, thoroughly, into every home, watch out! Here comes a new format that companies will say is a "must have."

The conspiri-sensationalist will brush it off, saying that Big Corpoate is at it again, trying to capitalize on the success of "Avatar." They (with a capital "T") are going to be hell-bent on duplicating it, trying to cash in on the hype. For that we'll all have to upgrade our home theatres yet again, while the Illuminatti gloat in their capacity to provide "bread and circus" and make a buck off of it, too.

Didn't we just finally get our first set of Blu-ray disks into our media library, and now we gotta shell out more bucks (which frankly, we don't have in the Bama Bust days) just to keep up with the Jonses? Even the tech pundits who thive on breakthroughs talk wearily about yet another vector in the format wars.

But, all the misgivings aside for the dopped-up, hyper-innovation atmosphere where every step is a leap for mankind, CES 2010 - and the companies' showcase of their R&D jewels - marks the end of Web 2.0 and the beginning of Web 3.0. For better or for worse, the world will never be the same again.

Let's take a moment to observe how we're using the Web today. In other words, why would companies feel confident that the introduction of a programming-deficient 3D TV is ready for prime time at this particular moment in the digital revolution? It's not just for the sake of finding yet another way to keep getting consumers to buy at top prices - though that's part of it. It's not because people aren't able to shell out the cost of going to "dinner and a movie" and that production houses are looking for new angles to retain the popcorn-munching audience - though that's part of it. It's not because precocious engineers one day woke up after a Da'Vinchi-esque dream and suddenly realized the elegance of a motherboard that could handle computations for 3D on an LCD screen. It's not even that The System - in a Noam Chomsky-ish way - has some grand, providential plan for us little people in their machinery - though that's part of it.

Really, what's happening with 3D TVs and their entrance into the consumer electronics catalogue is that the Web 2.0 world has reached that critical moment when the gears are so revved up that it's just begging that the cluch gets pressed while the stick gets put into a higher grear. The pistons of Web 2.0 and it's transmission is giving it all she's got, and you just know in your gut, as the driver, that to get to 60 mph, you gotta get higher gear into the mix.

Web 2.0 was a phenomenal success. It made interacivity, crowd sourcing, collaborative work spaces and user-generated content as staples of the World Wide Web. It also produced, in the process, what one author succinctly labels Wikinomics, or open-sourced knowledge for the sake of crowd-sourced innovation.

Well, if most of us who have chosen to go the route of being plugged in are being good about it, we all have our little "audience space" in the form of a social networking account like Facebook and a blogging or micro-blogging tool like Twitter or Tumblr. At the very least while we, individually, reap a sense of connection and chamaradery with these tools, and we also, inadvertantly, add value and spurn innovation to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and so on. Without us, the user, these sites would be meaningless, and that's where the Web 2.0 made its sociological breakthrough. It convinced us that we wanted even craved to connect to our friends, family and strangers through these tools.

They've open-sourced content production, and in return the crowd has produced it - in an over-abundance. In the business of being Facebook, we have to love adding the tags for our photos that ultimately produce targeted ads. This Wikinomics, in short, puts the "experience" into the service. And for the plugged in, mind you, it's become effortless. It's not just a way of life; it is life! or at least a part of it like going to the mall or the bookstore or go bowling or to the ice cream parlor are all a part of life.

In addition, Web 2.0 has treats with such value the voice of the individual - my voice and your voice - that products/restaurants/retail stores/you-name-it reviews are also becoming a part of life. Hell, eBay has made reviewing vendors and your purchase experience almost obligatory. And, with geo-location games such as Foursquare and Yelp making you "mayor" or a location-go-to consultant based on how many times your thumb depresses the capacitive touch-screen's pellet ... Well, it's pretty evident that Web 2.0 has completed it's circuit of, generally getting everyone to pitch in and make the Web a dynamic, living thing.

But, what about these 3D TVs? Well, even Google Earth has it's own pipeline for user generated content. It's always been rather perplexing that this offering of Google has remained in the mix and rather highly billed whereas stuff like Google Notebook has been canned. What can you do there, or what has anyone seen of this app beyond some cool images and a way to contribute more peices of the puzzle? Why not just ditch Google Earth and make the "street view" or the newly unveiled "store view" of Google Maps the last stop for virtual walk-throughs of this 3rd rock we're already trying distract ourselves from by staring at a computer screen all day long.

Now here comes the 3D TVs and the goggles to enjoy them with. Suddenly, Google Earth is no longer a fashionable geek toy, but an immersive landscape - the first virtual world that somehow seems eerily like our own. Come this year, we will increasingly be able to sit on our couch and gaze into our next vacation with an experience infinitely better than any IMAX show.

And, if we've truly learned our lesson well with Web 2.0, we will demand and pound our fists from the get-go that we will be allowed the "right" to graffiti on the walls of, or create new experimental social models for that virtual patch of real estate in Google Earth for which we are the Foursquare Mayor in the real world. Shouldn't we have that right? After all, we were the ones who contributed the photos of the "interior" or private spaces that has yet to be defined in this virtual world. We put the sweat and hardwork in, and now that is now accessible to anyone's avatar in an immersive way, shouldn't we be able to own are intellectual property? Aren't we the ones who added the sound effects to make it authentic? Didn't we tweak out the design of the space with our own artwork splashed with some AdMob to make a buck or two out of our labors ...

* * *

Prometheus has brought fire to the mortals in CES 2010, and there's no turning back.

The Gods tremble, powerless to watch as we, collectively, build and shape the Web - a world - in our own image. The Web is no longer merely an information super-highway, it is a vast universe of our own, personal design - a place for humanity to congregate and express it's deepest nature.

But before we rest in our collective hubris that we have surpassed the Gods themselves - that the Web has achieved its apex - we are still at the very beginning of this journey. The personal computer said "Let there be light!" And it was good. Then came HTML, and from this firmament, the waters were separated into day and night. Then the TCP/IP protocol invoked the formation of earth and the sea. And Web 2.0 is mearly the arising of the creatures that populate the garden. Man has yet to be fashioned out of clay, nor has Eve been made out of his rib. But, despite the absence of Man from his own creation, this genesis is in full swing. We are only a couple of years from inhabiting a universe - a new one that's ours, fashioned in our own image and built on pure human reason.

This is going to be cool!

Stick to Big Bird not Tweet Bird, Lady

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:32:49 PST

It's chilling to read the story of a mother who twittered before, after and throughout her child's drowning. Toddlers are lightning quick - and so is disaster. To make sense of this tragedy, we've taken the liberty of putting what happened into a little bit of context concerning the limits of a human's capacity for attention span.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a world authority on happiness derived from a state of "flow," notes in his TED talk:

... actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you.

While there are no studies that say how many bits of potentially hazardous information a toddler is putting out per second, I would dare say that they seem to be flirting with death or disaster in just about all of them. A toddler requires, from my own personal experience at least 80 to 90 bits for safety to be in play. From my own personal experience a text message requires at least 40 bits for a person like me. I can hear you, but can't respond while texting.

However, no matter how the math works out, generally there will be no personal screen time or cell phone use while a toddler is around. At best, a phone call or a quick reply will put safety in question, and while I'm not one to advocate a dictum or a hard-and-fast rule, I would say, at best, the screen better be playing Dora the Explorer or something like that.

* * *

This week, my 22-month-old got a semi-broken iPhone of her own. She knows how to work the thing better than most adults I know who own one. It's been set up with a Sponge Bob app, some Stevie Wonder in the iPod app, an Animal Sound Machine, and a flashcard app, and she's already fine with identifying the icon that suits her fancy. She gets bored, and a home button gets pressed, and the next episode of Dora is playing. She's a pro.

There is the temptation to check my phone's calendar or to do list or to shoot a quick twitter while she's absorbed in her own device. I thought that's what I would get if she had a smartphone of her own.

No dice.

She's too squirmy to be doing anything but watching with her. At best, I can pick kids programming and iTunes Store apps that are fun for both of us to play if I really have the urge to do a gesture or two.

At the end of the day, the learning curve for these amazing gadgets goes in reverse. Kids will intuitively excel at incorporating them into their daily affairs, but adults, new to these machines and what they can do have a steep climb before they "intuitively" know how it's supposed to fit into their lives.

At the very least, the recent news says pretty clearly: The Pretty Bird on Twitter should be stowed in favor of Big Bird when a toddler is around.

Social Media and The Parenting Thesis Project

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:27:34 PDT

As social media is now ingrained into the strata of our daily activities - that is to share and post and share some more - a natural outcropping might be that parents of the digital age may stumble onto a new resource to bestow on their progeny.

Here's a nifty idea (or new tradition) for all of you new parents of the next gen, especially those of us armed with an arsenal of recording devices: The Parenting Thesis Project. Now that our pockets are likely primed for directing and producing blogs, video, podcasts, photos and the like; now that the culture honors those who post and keep posting; now that our Facebook friends are sick and tired of our "Mobile Uploads" album being solely for the benefit of our newborns and toddlers; now that even GPS locatios are tagged onto every one of our media outputs ... Well it's an environment ripe for not only recording our children's progress in the world - from start to empty nest - but also, for the diligent parent, a fantastic resource for your children in understanding themselves and your intentions for them.

A close friend and new father, @enri_zoltz, has decided to snap at least one photo-per-day of his newborn boy - especially in the same or similar pose. His goal after 365 photos over 18-years was to compose a time-lapse video of his boy growing from infant to young adult. This would be his Parenting Thesis Project.

Yours truly, has set up a blog for his daughter, where I post a missive to her about twice a month. My thesis is that by the time she finishes college, she'll have a handbook of the moments that led up to her adulthood (from my perspective). It would be a sort of tome or reference book for her to decipher my intentions in certain developmental matters like why it was important not to let her own a smartphone at the age of ten, or what lesson was meant to be learned when I didn't salvage her credit when she ruined it with shopping sprees in her teens. It'll be a manual for her, of sorts, about who she is and what significant moments might have shaped her as she matures. It will be a multimedia manual with pictures, photos, movies and original songs. And, in the meantime, the blog serves as a place where friends and relatives can order prints of slideshows posted there and watch videos that are too large to e-mail.

The Parenting Thesis takes devotion - at least 18-years of it, but nowadays the ease with which one can capture and share their lives, digitally archived for posterity, makes the endeavor not a matter of doing it - since we're doing it anyway - but more a matter of developing a repository to collect the multimedia research material. One generation ago, it was the thing of scrapbooks. Photos glued onto archival paper; ribbons and scribble-drawings littering boxes in the attic. Now that whole venture can be archived in the cloud, annotated, tagged, published, and even printed down the road.

And, if setting up a blog, twitter feed, Flickr, Youtube and such account seems overwhelming, you can check into a service like LIFEmee that just launched in September to keep track of your kid's progress. Tech Crunch has this to say about the service:

To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their "lifestream" (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.

New parents I have met recently all seem to have concocted some sort of digital record-keeping for their family. It's as if the gestalt of the time calls for it.

Few might go the distance with their Thesis project, but doubtless we'll all children of the next gen will have a significant digital paper trail. Parents of the digital genration will probably still have access to the ones and zeros their creating in every "status update," and the only thing we don't know in this equation is if will be accessed from storage devices like, say, crystals.

I for one watched a DVD last week of my parent's attempt at archiving my birth and growth. They had digitized some High-8 footage - film - that they took of my brother and I's birth and growth into toddlers. The film strips were edifying while my father, now in his sixties made the voice-over commentary to the silent video feed. Cameras back then didn't encode an audio track on the cellulose.

At any rate, these are exciting times to be born in. Our Parenting Thesis tools might look archaic from our children's standpoint by the time they get to absorb it, but, it's likely that the tools that will be there to submit our thesis for review will be nothing short of doctoral material.

Flashback - 1983: The Darwinian Evolution of the Domain Name System

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:03:43 PST

Creator of the Domain Name System (DNS), Dr. Mockapetris likens his invention as "the emergence of mammals" in data sharing on an NPR podcast. It's worth taking a pause to listen as he describes the stone age of the Web: 1983. Mockapetris' system is petrifying as a new dominant species of URL emerges in this new Twitter ecology: the Short URL.

Google and Facebook have muscled their way into the Short URL game. Bit.ly, responds with offering its pro members the ability to create their own, custom short URLs. At a time when we might see folks trying to secure, and buy up the "beach front property" of the much more limited permutations of the short URLs, it would seem that the domain name will backbone of a new species of links - the ones that can thrive in a Twitter ecology.

Is the traditional domain name going to be left in the shadows. Will they be preserved in museums as towering strings of characters to the more nimble tiny, but super-smart tiny URL? Will saavy namers secure some small names to sell to the highest bidder? Will it be stolen from them?

This the next iteration of the rise and fall of another Web civilization. Hmmm....

Google: Evil Empire or WYSIWYou've come to expect?

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:03:29 PST

As cloud computing and the open source movement rolls into high gear, its biggest champion, Google, faces a gloomy outlook given to companies remiss in crossing their T's and dotting their I's

While I'm a big fan of Google, gobbling up just about every feature it releases while still in beta, they seem to be running the same path befitting developers of platforms. That is, while Microsoft established the first standard for what we've come to expect in a computing experience with Windows, Google is well poised for the same position for defining for us the same experience in "the cloud." And while in the pioneering days - 1998 - Microsoft overran all its competition, dominating the market with its products, and almost decimating into oblivion what we know now as the mighty Mac Book, Google seems to be the likely choice for holding the title and presiding with kingly stature over the Web 2.0 proving grounds.

And what had made Microsoft so formidable was that the PC world was, by-and-large, an open platform. Both hardware and software manufacturers were given the opportunity to designing and engineer for it. While Microsoft and Windows' contribution was the OS that tied all these diverse threads of market competition together, its product increasing in value when a plethora of software and hardware choices dominated the puny shelf spaces of Apple or Linux, it was heralded for a time as our savior. It launched a stock market boom, and gave rise to the term Tech Stocks. It formed the cornerstone of the IPO boom. It made us believe that anything was possible, as if our generation had traveled to the Moon as well. It was a Golden Era, but the enthusiasm, as with all things, didn't last.

Bill Gates at this time became the image of national Evil long before Bush came onto the scene. His fickle audience - the one who thought that a comuterisized utopia aught to be at hand - criticized Microsoft for not only for violating anti-trust laws, but also for being negligent at delivering a reliable product that didn't crash. The computerized world had, rightly, become paranoid that, because no one could touch this juggernaut devouring small upstarts that soon became a piece in their Start>Accessories bar, there would be no check or balance to their mighty dominion.

Well, no one knew at the time that, while the fear that unstable computing was becoming a norm, that a simple search box on a nearly blank page, Google, would become the David to this Goliath.

But Google seems to be repeating the mistakes of the past. Apple, even on its death bed, was still touted as having a better, more robust computing experience. It did so since Apple had a heavy hand in coding for its operating system. While Windows had gone the route of a free-for-all and developers-run-amok with the fine print of "compute at your own risk," Apple's saving grace was the claim that no virus or buggy warez could even make a beach head on its virgin desktop.

But while Google has built its temple and is in full stride with its mighty empire; while Google has, recently, done what most in the Microsoft days would reckon is the unthinkable: divorced itself of even the need to have an internet connection to use some of its products; while their competitors - Yahoo and Microsoft are still clamoring for their piece of the Web 2.0 market share; while Google has championed the "open source" movement in the form of its arsenal of gadgets and its incursion into mobile communications with the Open Handset Alliance, it has fallen prey to the same forces that disappointed once proud owners of a PC - the bugs; the pesky failures because, when code is so freely given and manipulated, a platform opens itself up to potential hazards. The header for Gmail "labs" projects informs you:

Gmail Labs: Some crazy experimental stuff.

Gmail Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren't quite ready for primetime. They may change,break or disappear at any time.

If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you're having trouble loading your inbox, there's an escape hatch. Use http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

In other words, like with Microsoft, "compute at your own risk." That's fine and dandy when it's declared that these projects are not "ready for primetime," but Google has, unfortunately gone a step further with their business model that defies even the reckless gobbling up of small Web developer projects and including it in its kingdom. Their platform is built and patch together in a more haphazard way than Microsoft ever dared to do. Here's what Google declares about one of its recent additions to its pre-loaded OS:

Tasks: the first graduate of Gmail Labs
Available in Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle and on your mobile phone, Tasks is the simple to-do list that's with you everywhere you go. Click "Tasks" above your chat list to get started (no need to turn it on from the Labs tab anymore). Learn more

'

The key word here is "graduate." That is, Google has finally moved it from the its "compute at your own risk" to the the mainstream of its platform's offerings. But there's one catch. Unlike Microsoft or Adobe or any other software developer of note (and Google is now is in their league if not dominating some of them), Google has not gone the distance of standardizing some critical features for its products.

Some notable and egregious omissions are are that, while a lot of its products use the "tag" concept to organize information, it's mysteriously missing in both Google Docs and Tasks. Feedburner does not readily integrate with Blogger - both Google products. Picasa loads on your machine rather than operating in the cloud. You can toggle which of your multiple calendars to view, but only the default task list in the can be viewed Google Calendar agenda if you're running multiple sets of tasks. Google Notebook was discontinued and whose operation has been absorbed into Google Reader with the assumption that users can hack a feed reader into doing operations that Notebook handles so effortlessly. Updating your Google Profile doesn't update your blogger profile. Google Desktop is nearly unusable with some of its "official" gadgets not allowing you to even re-size their windows on your screen. The list is surprisingly rather substantial for such a powerhouse in the computing realm.

In short, this quilt that is Google, designed and developed around a simple search page have some serious short comings when it comes to working together and manipulating data across all of of Google's offerings. While they're keeping busy with adding more stuff, they seem to be extraordinarily remiss in finding ways for their new, graduating labs features to have a continuity or uniformity in operation. And to boot, Google is sponsoring an initiative called the Data Liberation Front (DLF) who is devoted to tackling this same issue that they're responsible for creating. Even Microsoft's millions of applications have a set of uniform keyboard shortcuts or methods of cross-polinating your records between various applications.

At any rate, what this amounts to is that Google, while the banner carrier of innovations in Webware and a likely candidate to become the next Behemoth in the new architecture of the computing experience, both in the cloud or natively on your desktop or mobile phone, it has a lot to learn from the past. Microsoft and Yahoo are still just trying to keep up, but when the gloss and gleam of Google as the heralded of a new age in this story of the World Wide Web starts to loose its sheen, it will, if it doesn't check itself, become the next Evil Empire- one noted for its rather peculiar disdain for its buggy nature and shoddy workmanship.

All this said, I still am a big fan, and would hope that Google doesn't leave it up to its Labs projects or grass-roots movements like the DLF (which might just be yet another one of its Lab projects) to figure out how it can gain its integrity. I would hope that Google takes a moment of pause to put a trim and backing and fluff to its patches-yet-made-into-a-quilt. I suppose that if Google doesn't slow down a bit to bring order to its kingdom, it will soon face the ire of the community that depends on that. And, an empire that is divided won't last for long.

The Ultimate iPhone Killer: iTself

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:48:15 PDT

The buzz word is, what, if anything, could ever compete with Apple or produce the sought after "iPhone Killer"? The answer is: no one. But, will apple crumble under the weight of its own empire?

History and Nature run rampant with examples cultures and creatures who, as the undisputed top of the food chain, become their own worst enemies. The biggest threat to the Roman Empire was its own corruption. A human being's natural predator is other people. The Church during the middle ages found that one of its own priests, Martin Luther, was the one to tear it apart, and when new adult lions take over a pride, they often kill the young and thus eliminate the chance of any rivalry against offspring he later fathers.

The catch-word in the world of smart-phones is who or what could stand up to the marvels of the iPhone and shine brighter than it. Who or what could stand against its resplendent coolness and utility and garner the favor of the public. What, if anything, will be the "iPhone Killer." The answer is nothing will, I think.

After all, it is undeniably sleek, inexpensive (not counting service fees) and easy to use. Most Web ware is disigned specifically for its screen. It is the bench mark. It has no other natural predators - not even the Blackberry - or at least not in the same way.

But an ill wind is blowing through the social sphere for Apple. It would seem that the Mac world without any natural predators, and perhaps without the demanding vision of an ailing Steve Jobs, they've seemed to start showing little cracks and chicks in their armor, especially in their hallmark of out-thinking or defining design and ultra-no-brainer-usability.

When my wife had to call upon Apple Care to replace her 15" Mac Book Pro, her model had been discontinued and was sent the latest "upgrade." A stickler for form, she opted to haggle her way to whatever the warehouses still had in stock that resembled her older model. In the end, she fell in-line with the clamor and debate that said, "Why didn't Apple offer a matte screen when releasing the next version of their line of laptops?"

While we’ve come to accept that today’s LCD displays, particularly on notebooks, are mostly of the glossy variety, Apple took it a step further with a glass sheet on top of what already appears to be a glossy LCD screen. The affect is an unsettling double-reflection from a display that’s mirror-like.

"We’ve spent a considerable amount of time with the full range of Apple notebook displays, from the matte and glossy from the previous generation MacBook Pro to the “glassy” unibody MacBook. And we’ll be the first say that the aesthetic designs of the new unibody MacBooks are worthy of a museum, but in terms of usability, the glass-covered screen is a pain to work with even when indoors". - "MacBook Pro Glossy vs. Matte FIGHT!," February 26, 2009 by Marcus Yam http://www.tomshardware.com/

At the end of the day, she "settled" on a 17" version that was selling in 2006, despite what she could have had with up-to-date hardware and processing power. She, the epitome of Apple's target audience that is characterized by an overarching attention to form over function, was happier with an older machine.

A month ago this popped up in my Facebook feed:

"I want to punch the dumbass at Apple who designed the latest shuffle. New shuffle is about as useful 40 lb sack of deflated footballs. Not only do I want a refund, but I now officially want Apple to get swallowed by an 8-track and Etch-a-sketch revival." - September 4, 2009 (Name withheld out of courtesy).

Presumably, the issue here was that the new shuffle has no buttons. Controlling its playback happens through controls on the headphones.

A few days later of Facebook:

"Adam P. officially hates his iphone." -September 16, 2009

A followup comment to someone considering buying an iPhone vs. continuing with a Blackberry, the same user said this:

"I'd stay stick with it. The iPhone offers the best user interface of any smartphone on the market. It's a joy to use, when it works. Unfortunately, it's tied to AT&T's decrepit network. 3G is frequently unusable, voice quality is poor, and I can seldom get through a call of more than ten minutes without having it drop. A fast car on poor roads makes little headway, while continuing to cost a lot."

This user makes a living as a computer professional, and granted he's quoting issues with his cellular carrier, but when there's only one option Apple has given for using its "fast car" then the utility of its gadget is united with the mobile carrier that supplies its pipeline. In short, it's no use pardoning the shortcomings of the iPhone because the affairs of AT&T is out of its hands. Presumably the folks who designed it dreamed, hoped and prayed that the success it has garnered is what we see today. They want to have everyone want one and own one without thinking that their options for service aught to be sufficient to accommodate infinite demand for their product.

Furthermore, it's a really swell idea and truly characteristic of Apple to have the iPhone's synchronize with iTunes. It's a really swell idea, in theory. But, anyone who has had to take their computer in for a service repair and had it returned empty and at factory condition knows that it's nearly impossible to restore iTunes back to the state you had it.

iTunes is a poor excuse for a synchronization software. Data is gold these days, and though Apple is known for removing as many buttons and extra screens as possible, having access to how and when and in which direction your data is being moved or stored is critical. It's not something to keep behind the closed doors of buttons, and certainly a task that should have more real estate than to mingle on the same patio as a juke box or a media shopping mall.

Ask anyone who has lost all their contacts when a reloaded iTunes automatically syncs and overwrites its empty library to your iPhone and you're looking at one miserable socialite.

Furthermore, if you, say, want to synchronize your contacts and calendar items with anything but iCal or MobileMe, you're in for quite a hacking adventure. Apple has yet to recognize (and it never did since that is its underlying ethos, and perhaps its beauty) that nowadays people are forming gadget ecologies. That is, when every gadget you own, touch and double click is made by Apple, there is harmony, style and perfection, but throw in a free radical like Microsoft Entourage and your whole Device's OS collapses.

Finally there are some strange hardware omissions to Apple's next generation of mainstay products. The new iPod Touch doesn't have a camera, while the iPod Nano does - but only for video. There's been a lot of speculation on why Apple, who has done the miraculous over the years with making the mouse a mainstay, creating (or at least making it commonplace) the Web app industry, for taking our mobile devices to the next level in the form of the first release of the iPhone, and in short, always being the pioneer, but now it would seem that they are becoming insincere with their fans.

Gizmodo.com has a full treatment on why their next generation of products has, not just fallen short of what we have all come to expect from Apple - miracles, but also some of their peculiar decisions on both form, their strongest suit, and function. Here's the concluding thoughts from Gizmodo's article, "Why There Is No Camera In the iPod Touch and Why That Sucks" by Jesus Diaz:

"• Feature Evolution: This, to me, is the most reasonable explanation. Apple is getting oh-so-lazy. Or, better said, greedy. They are the number one player in every single category. They own the market. And they know the competition is just catching on. So instead of releasing an iPhone that is way better than the previous model, they release the modest upgrade of the iPhone 3GS. And instead of releasing an iPod touch with a nice camera, they just slap some new software, slightly updated guts and more memory.

That's what you get when a company owns an empire, and the other tiny people are trying to catch up with an already phenomenal device. The company gets slow and complacent, and does the minimum to keep its products ahead."

And so, it would seem that Apple has a finally found its match: iTself. It's hard to imagine those years when Apple was a lame and crippled company; when there was no hope that it would ever survive, much like the word around town is shouting the end of Palm. It's hard to remember that Microsoft was hot and not an "Evil Empire," but behold! They passed the baton back over to Apple.

It may very well be that Apple continues to hold its dominance for many years to come, but, it's hard to conceive of that happening. See, Apple, at its core, loathes diversity. It thrives when all of the apples in the barrel are freshly provided by their orchard. Stick anything not grown by them and their bushels rot with from that one bad apple.

It's competition - particularly next generations of Android and WebOS - will have on its side, not only a coalition of mobile providers and Goolge's army of free products to draw from in the case of Android, but also an army of pasty faced youths who have a small learning curve ahead of them in designing for WebOS. In short Apple has fallen, already, way behind in what is the zeitgeist of Web 2.0: namely, open sourcing and open platforms.

They're miserly with their products and shun any incursion into their territory.

Frankly, that will be their undoing, and their time in the sun as the undisputed top of the food chain will fade.

Note to Self: OS, Abstracted

ijcmartinez@gmail.com (J.C. Martinez-Sifre) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:23:11 PDT

The idea of an OS, as an abstract concept, goes beyond what makes the "thing" turn on and house its warez. What makes something an OS, as an abstract concept, is its way of mediating the human intellect and the Will with the device(s) or object(s).

We have to start thinking about an Operating System (OS) not just as something pre-loaded on a computer or a gadget that makes it turn on, but as an ecology of interconnected hardware that functions as our platform of connectivity.

It's not so much any more that we choose a Blackberry vs. an iPod vs. Android vs. Web OS as the system that runs our phones; it's not so much any more that we choose Mac OSX vs. Windows vs. Linux to run our desktops and laptops; it's not so much that we choose Gmail vs. Hotmail vs. Yahoo mail to host our PIM information and e-mail; it's no so much anymore that we choose Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Linkedin to manage our relationships; and, it's not so much anymore that we choose Flickr vs. Photobucket vs. Tweetpic to host, share or print our memories. The versus go on and on like with iTunes vs. Windows Media Player vs. VLC player. It's really mind boggling ... gaming systems; oh boy, here I go again with the versus.

What it's really all about is that the mathematics that combine all of these options together in, G-d help me, I can't count how many ways, says that each variant produces for the individual their unique operating system - specific to the person that utilizes them in what could be considered, seamless integration.

The idea of an OS, as an abstract concept, goes beyond what makes the "thing" turn on and house its warez. What makes something an OS, as an abstract concept, is its way of mediating the human intellect and the Will with the device(s) or object(s).

When these devices and objects are made for and eager to be interconnected i.e. networked together and utilizing content off of each other rather than merely syncing, then the OS-as-ecology of diverse things becomes a real and tangible, if not critical thing to consider.

Will my new phone (iPhone vs. Android v. Web OS) be compatible without researching its ability to communicate with a Sony Vaio notebook be a consideration for either ditching Google OS or making my next purchase a Mac Book Pro? Will Windows 7 continue dominate my gadget ecology or is an Unbuntu netbook a way to transition my operating system to the next wave? Will the need for a thumb keyboard be supreme, despite the touch input rally becoming the norm?

This is the stuff of the old Adam West Batman series, and certainly, each and everybody's OS is in a continual process of thwarting the villains of being outmoded or ineffective for one's productivity.

The folks over at gdgt.com have come up with novel widget to add anywhere in your online presence that announces your current and past OS. The widget is simple enough - a list of gadgets you've have. have had and want. Presumably, since their Website and podcast is a gluttonous play-by-play discourse at every new gizmo under the sun, they behoove themselves by letting their subscribers gloat in style about their collections of them.

However, beyond the mere surface of announcing to the world gadgets you own, gadgets you should be owning, and gadgets you used to own, on a deeper level, the widget begins to describe your electronic ecology - your OS of social connectivity. In short, society has its tools to bind and glue us all together. Take a look at your OS and see if it crashes on you or if its set-up is so seamless that you don't notice it's running in the background much like you don't notice your toe until its stubbed or your eyeball until it itches.