Idle Speculation

A few months ago, I think my mom must have googled me and spent some time going through my blog and website. She was reading up on my research and such, and then she sent along a couple of lengthy emails asking all sorts of questions about the future of communication technologies—questions I’m not qualified to answer, necessarily.

I told her I’d try and answer some of her questions, even though my responses would amount to little more than idle speculation. Then I thought it might be neat to simply publish her questions and my answers on the blog, and she was thrilled by the idea. So here goes…

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Subject: “What do you think?”

Hi Son,

Hope that you and your family are doing well and all back at school with all the scheduling that involves. Enjoy your web/blog site and check frequently to see all the wonderful things you are doing. You know that I am so proud of you and all the hard work you have done has certainly paid off. I have a few theoretical questions for you…

Considering the almost universal usage of cell phone technology to tweet, “like” instantly send msg, pix and ideas as we have seen in the countries that have overthrown dictators, would you say that this will be the methodology for future history making/changing events? Do you think that the centuries old idea of “war” as we know it will change?

So, my mom starts off with a huge question, one that I feel woefully unprepared to answer. This is the kind of question that Clay Shirky routinely answers, and I’d consult some of his stuff for viable insights.

But just thinking through the question, I wouldn’t say that mobile technologies necessarily will be central to future “history-making/changing events.” Certainly, it seems inevitable from our current perspective, but who could have predicted 5 years ago the role that something like Twitter would play on a global scale?

So while all signs point to SMS and our current iterations of mobile communications playing a significant role in the coordination of human activity, there’s no telling what might be available to us in 5 or 10 years.

As for the notion of “war,” well, yes. I think our understanding of this construct is always in flux. Look at the role of drones in contemporary warfare, for example…

Now we have the ability to take a blood test from a sick child in Congo and send samples to laboratories in the USA or any where else. The samples are tested, the results emailed/tweeted back, best practice treatment is administered and the child is well. What do you see as the future of medical technology to help alleviate suffering utilizing this means of communication?

Again, I’m so unqualified to address this question that I hesitate to respond. One of my graduate school colleagues, Lucia Dura, is doing interesting and important work in areas like this, and one of my Ball State colleagues, Kerry Anne McGeary, is leading our new Global Health Institute in an effort to explore similar problems.

I also know that this question is related to the previous question in that SMS is increasingly used to facilitate health care decision-making in places where computing technologies are scarce, but mobile technologies are ubiquitous.

As for the political arena, now that everyone has access to modifying, altering and sending images, how will that effect the truth of what we see and believe?

There’s nothing new under the sun as far as this goes. Just differences of scale…

What do you think is the solution to cyber bullying and those who hide behind their keyboard/ texting to decimate the life of others?

This is an area where I haven’t done much thinking, but I know that folks like danah boyd are actively researching in this area, and the work that she and her colleagues are doing is helping to shape public policy…

Subject: “One more…”

Do you think that since tweeting has created a sort of new language to fit in 140 letters/symbols we will eventually evolve to a phonetic only language?

thx 4 yr insite, luv u, ma

Here’s one I can answer! I needn’t just provide my thoughts, since we know that the constraints of SMS—and by extension, Twitter—have resulted in many neologisms that have been adopted in more traditional communication genres.

The word “tweet” itself is a prime example. It’s now a verb that basically means “to broadcast a short, public message using the microblogging service Twitter.”

As for a “phonetic only language,” well, our language is already phonetic, but I think I see where she was going with that question… I think she was asking if written forms of our language will contract in some way, in order to better meet the constraints of SMS.

I’d say the answer is probably yes and no. In the short term, neologisms for shortening written forms of language will prosper. But again, we don’t know what our communications media will look like in 5 years. Even now, for example, Apple’s iMessages is pushing back against the constraints of SMS, affording text expansion within a given mobile message.

Who know’s what we’ll see in 5 years? A renaissance of epistolary communication is not out of the realm of possibility!

Subject: “Re: One more…”

Just thinking of the possibilities with these new methods of communications – visitors from another planet describing earthlings “2 feet, 2 legs, a torso topped by a head and 1 arm and an angular appendage on the other side of the torso that connects to the ear on the head. “ (cell phone user) Or –” 2 feet, 2 legs, torso, 2 arms, 1 head and talks to the air” (blue tooth user)

Medical issues – already seeing “text thumbitis” –(Will the thumb evolve to twice its present size and the other fingers shrink?), greater number of young people with major hearing issues (ear bud use with volume too high), neck cervical issues (always bent over keyboard of cell phone checking or sending text msg), major increase in stress levels and blood pressure due to the 24/7 involvement in constant communication, major increase in eye problems due to small print on text msg and/or computer social network connections, or the really tragic one “accident involving multiple cars due to driver texting while behind the wheel.” New law in CA has already been placed into effect – “no texting while driving – fine at least $350.00.”

Psychological changes – future generations unable to form deep friendships or other personal relationships. Every individual continually on blue tooth or texting while attempting to have conversations with companion, neighbor, friend, spouse etc, greater population of patients with major insecurities/depression and feeling disconnected from life due to loss of cell phone, spending time in “dead zones” etc.

Two really interesting popular audience articles come to mind when reading about changes to personal relationships. This first is Clive Thompson’s excellent, almost magisterial piece on “ambient awareness”.

The second is more recent, and explores the “Joy of Quiet”.

Both articles make compelling arguments, and both are substantially “right.” It’s not either/or, but both/and.

Future of communication? – cell phone type implants in the brain (sort of like a cochlear implant now in use for the deaf) so no actual cell phone or accessory needed? Also no battery needed as communication device powered by neuron synapses of the brain. The possibilities for future communication methods and effects on many areas of our lives are mindboggling ! Fun to speculate.

Definitely fun to speculate! Thanks for your contribution to the blog, mom, and thanks for making me think!

Considering Charles Mudede

My feed reader is mostly all business. I read items in the order they arrive--not by topic, not by blog--oldest to newest, in a great big tangled mess of interestingness.

The usual suspects are there: every major tech blog you can think of (and some you probably can't), stuff on ubicomp and mobile computing, academic blogs from colleagues in my field and someday colleagues in other fields, and feeds from architecture, urban planning, design, and computer science. There are, however, a few feeds pointed in other directions, mostly toward popular culture.

Of these "other" feeds, one of my favorites is The Stranger's SLOG (and its musical accomplice, Line Out). I read The Stranger for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I find the writing entertaining and because I love Seattle.

Charles Mudede is an associate editor at The Stranger, and a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University. He's also a key reason why I read SLOG with interest.

Mudede's posts are anomalies to a certain extent; they stand out by virtue of their juxtaposition to the mass of posts published each day on SLOG. This is not to say that the other posts aren't entertaining, informative, and even heady; they often are--perhaps just as often as they are not--and I am often inclined to celebrate both eventualities.

But Mudede's posts are something different, and they always stand out within the feed. In this sense, his posts benefit from the juxtaposition.

Take Marxism and Insects for example. In between posts on Seattle politics or sex advice from Dan Savage, Mudede surfaces with a post that cobbles together Capital, the machinations of queen bees, Iranian politics, and Althusser's notion of the Ideological State Apparatus.

His posts are often pithily thought-provoking. Ideology Today contends that the national fuss over identity theft keeps us stridently and earnestly focused "on the least of [our] worries."

And then there's one of my favorite posts in recent memory, The Difference. A brief meditation on philosophy and representation through the forgotten Foucault and the remembered Foucault.

To consider Mudede in the midst of the madness is to consider a sharp arithmetic of cogitative concision: 2 fragments + 2 photos + 2 sentences = Foucauldian heuristic.

That commenters often seem befuddled, frustrated, and pissed off cements my admiration.

Long live Mudede, and long live SLOG.

4 Reasons Why Twitter Resonates with Generation X

Have you noticed the recent spate of articles about Twitter user demographics? For example, one of my Twitter contacts, @dreig, pointed me to a Reuters piece which suggests that "you could be forgiven for thinking that Twitter was the latest example of youth culture," noting its increasing popularity with those in more, well, advanced demographic brackets ("Twitter Older than it Looks"). Then there's a similar CNET post which points out that "the majority of Twitter users are 35 or older" ("Why Facebook and Twitter are aging gracefully").

Assuming the accuracy of the ComScore numbers that both articles cite, what are some of the factors influencing Twitter adoption among the 35+ demographic? I'll discuss here four of the key features that I feel have contributed to Twitter's popularity with Generation X (full disclosure: I'm 35).

1. It's Dead Simple

Twitter is flexible. Twitter is agile. Twitter is mobile. Usability, thy name is Twitter. These properties could easily have been listed as adoption attributes in their own right for those 35+, but I've chosen to gather them under the rubric of "Dead Simple" here, because collectively they contribute to the fact that Twitter just works (occasional sightings of Fail Whales notwithstanding).

For a generation in college at the dawn of the web, finding unfettered, dead simple, web-based applications is particularly noteworthy, since that same generation has seen so much that didn't work over the years. And as David Weinberger notes, "twitter is an app that scales as a platform." Twitter's flexibility and agility have enabled user-generated innovation and robust third-party development; mired for so long in virtual walled gardens, users 35+ can uniquely appreciate the relative freedom of information circulation that Twitter enables (remember, one can grab an RSS feed of any public Twitter user without ever signing up!). Which leads us to point number two. . .

2. It's Distributed

Since it scales as a platform, Twitter realizes some of the potential of distributed knowledge work. I want to make a distinction here that this isn't necessarily the same type of distributed communication found on social networks like Facebook, where symmetry is enforced and past relationships--now distrubuted--are reinforced.

There is some sense of distributed communication with far-flung social ties on Twitter, to be sure, but the affordances for distributed knowledge work are also more easily leveraged (meaning that I can find and follow someone like Valdis Krebs, for example, without having an algorithm tell me that someone else I know is following him too). And since many of those 35+ are especially inclined to make use of such affordances--say, for professional reasons--Twitter easily enables distributed connections based upon self-identified shared interests, rather than a shared past or location.

Adina Levin argues that Twitter's dynamic asymmetry enables "discovery [of other, distributed users] with low social expense" ("How Asymmetry Scales"). It's easy to find and follow on Twitter, regardless of preexisting knowledge, relationship, or spatial proximity. As a distributed platform, then, the 35+ crowd can selectively receive information from others all over the world more easily than even an RSS feed.

3. It's Public

In a recent Microsoft Research talk, danah boyd argues that "social media continues to be age-graded. Right now, Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no" ("Social Media is Here to Stay ... Now What?"). She then explores why this is the case, and hits upon something that has been largely ignored: "the culture of Twitter is all about participation in a large public square ... many are leveraging Twitter to be a part of a broad dialogue. Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends..."

In my field, we approach this "participation in a large public square" from the perspective of civic rhetorics, of discursively contributing to culture at large. Those who are 35 and over are well-positioned and uniquely inclined to participate in civic rhetorics for personal, professional, and social reasons.

On a personal level, the 35+ user is likely to feel that age and experience lend a certain viability to their public voice. In professional terms, the 35+ user can leverage the distributed, public knowledge work noted above, while also deploying Twitter as a space to shape professional image. Finally, in social terms, a recognition of shared interests and a desire to shape shared futures allows the 35+ user to contribute publically to political discourse.

4. It's about Communication

In a certain sense, Twitter is really not a social network. The barriers to participation are tremendously low, and the primary--really the only--unit of social connection is discourse (isn't it nearly always so?). Twitter is about talk, and it's dead simple platform makes such talk travel and scale in ways that those 35+ are especially positioned to appreciate.

Generation X came of age with email, and likewise saw email's transition from novelty to nuisance. This morning when I checked my inbox, I found 40 things I didn't want; when I similarly checked my incoming tweets (on my mobie), I found 50 more things that I had explicitly asked for. And those tweets are incredible pivots for social interaction, for simple, agile, distributed, public connections with others that foster ineraction in ways that walled social networks and email simply cannot broach.

Infrastructures of Ambient Research

As I've noted elsewhere, I use Twitter and other SNSs primarily for research and conversation about research. This post details a core approach to the kind of research one might pursue in leveraging the potential of ambient communication.

Defining Terms

Ambient research is precisely what one might expect it to be: a framework and approach to research that is enveloping, atmospheric, ubiquitous, and unflinchingly mutable. What I want to do in this post is briefly sketch the parameters of ambient research as I currently understand them, discussing the infrastructures that enable legitimate and productive research activity that is streaming, aggregable, searchable, and conversational. In a follow up post, I'll also consider the potential of ambient research for generative productivity and cognitive recursion in my own field and beyond.

Mobies

My oldest daughter's 11th birthday is this Saturday, and we're very excited to give her a new computer. Of course, she already has an older Windows XP desktop in her room, and she has frequent access to both Ubuntu and OS X laptops. But this is a computer that she can hold in the palm of her hand, that's wifi ready, and that she can use to text her friends via IM. This isn't a "computer" as we've come to understand the term, but instead a mobile computing device that can do more (better) than the laptops of just a few years ago. She's getting an iPod Touch.

Ambient research is predicated upon the growth and development of such devices, as ambient communication requires ubiquity and mobility. How, for example, can communication be ambient if there's no means for consistent contact--contact that occurs beyond the traditional screen? But even more to the point, ambient research at its most basic level is predicated upon the infrastructure of not just wifi or data enabled devices like my daughter's iPod Touch, but by the SMS capability found in standard mobile phones.

"Smart" phones are fine, but relatively new (and growing) communication platforms that leverage SMS technologies have significantly lowered the barriers to ambient communication, and therefore, research. The combination of mobie + SMS + always-on communication platform (such as Twitter, which I discuss below) represents the fundamental infrastructure of ambient communication.

While this infrastructure is enough to support ambient communication, enabling a framework of ambient research requires an initial strategic outlay of intellectual capital in the deployment of three critical forms of information flow (Push, Pull, and Streams), and the eventual engagement of such frameworks in the form of conversation. Additionally, the initial parameters will need continual adjustment, depending, of course, on the nature of the research area and the ongoing effectiveness of incoming data. Like a growing tree, the forms of information flow will need consistent watering and pruning.

Push

Let's say that you're interested in researching "serendiptious search." One of the first and easiest means of systematically acquiring information on your topic is a Google Alert. Periodically (each day, for example), Google will index sites that contain the phrase "serendipitous +search" and deliver that information to you via email. This is basic "push" information retrieval.

When Apple recently announced the release of iPhone OS 3.0, much of the buzz centered on the platform's "push notification model." As my friend and former colleague Shawn Miller notes, "push gathers info from other servers and pushes out notifications to apps in iPhones." And as Paul Golding recently argued, "a push notification service is a MINIMUM level of platform support to achieve the level of ambient communication that [applications like] Twitter brings."

In short, push notifications for data enabled phones raise the bar for real-time data streams in applications like Facebook, Twitter, Google Calender, et al. Instead of running the Tweetie app in the old iPhone OS, as Golding notes, push notifications bring the data to you--immediately. But what about SMS? This is where Twitter serves as a fascinating example. Tweets received in real-time via SMS aren't technically "push notifications," as they aren't reliant on relationships to individual apps (other than Twitter itself, of course). SMS tweets are more akin to the streaming information I'll discuss below.

Pull

RSS feeds are certainly not new, nor are they even necessary to develop a "pull" framework of information delivery based on one's interests. In fact, many have simply abandoned RSS in favor of the information streams of platforms like Twitter and FriendFeed. But the widespread adoption of RSS through tools like Google Reader have validated the importance of pull--of establishing and maintaining an aggregable and searchable "feed" of information specifically tailored to one's interests.

Whether one uses Reader, Pipes, or a similar aggregator, feeds--and the sharing of feeds--are an essential component of ambient research. In fact, both push and pull have explicit communicative components, as these aggregators are social, and work best when shared and discussed. For example, the work of Peter West in creating "living bibliographies," and subsequently sharing such work with others through platforms like Twitter, embodies the both/and proposition of ambient research. It is the combination of push, pull, streams, and conversations that make such a framework viable--not the reliance on any one form in isolation.

Streams

If you've ever used Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or MySpace, then you've dipped your feet into the flowing currents of real-time conversation streams (or perhaps you're already an avid swimmer). Much has been made of the recent Facebook redesign in the image of Twitter, and influential technologists like Robert Scoble have espoused the flexibility and potential of FriendFeed. For the present discussion of ambient research, these platforms all share certain essential characteristics.

First of all, they are platforms. This seems rather obvious, I know, but this is a tremendously important distinction. Certainly all four simultaneously enable and constrain, and like any communication environment, there are agency/structure dynamics that must be critically considered. But the reality is that a platform is mainly flexible (within reason)--one can use it to catch up with friends (as in the case of Facebook and MySpace), share interesting finds and photos (FriendFeed), or share peer-reviewed journal articles in knowledge management (as in the example of Peter West on Twitter, mentioned above). It should be noted that Peter's work is particularly expansive in scope, with timely links to recently announced books, conference proceedings, and articles in a variety of scholarly and professional areas. The platform enables the widespread dissemination of such work.

Secondly, these platforms only work when multiple connections are made. Having two contacts on any of these sites will not enable a stream of conversation and connection. Having 500 Facebook friends or following 200 people on Twitter changes the game. These contacts--and the frequent conversations they engender--are the key to ambient communication and research.

Finally, like "pull" information flows, these platforms are aggregable (to varying extents). Twitter is not only aggregable, it is impressively searchable, both through Twitter's proprietary search algorithm and through Google (which, as John Battelle has noted, seems to love indexing tweets). Moreover, Twitter's "favorites" function, much like "starring" posts in Reader, allows selective and strategic aggregation.

Twitter is the platform I know best, and it is the form of ambient communication I have most readily in mind when I envision currents of information streams. David Weinberger's recent post "4.5 Things Twitter teaches us" is worth referencing at length here to emphasize the power of Twitter as a platform and as a stream of information.

He notes that Twitter's web UI "assumes we're ok with not keeping up with abundance. Tweets are going to scroll by when you're not looking, and you're never going to see them." This is the nature of streams--you're going to catch some things, while others float on by--and that's just fine, because the communication event is fundamentally ambient. You can never take it all in.

"At Twitter, the people you follow are not necessarily the people who are following you." This is an important difference between Twitter and Facebook as platforms, and it's one of the core reasons that I believe Twitter is growing exponentially. The reality here is that people like Tim O'Reilly and Kevin Marks and Clay Shirky do not follow me, and I'm okay with that because Twitter is a public forum, and they still provide me with tremendous information, sometimes even engaging in conversation. Twitter would be drastically less effective if follow ratios were exactly one-to-one. (See James Governor's post on Asymmetric Follow for an insightful approach to @ replies and social scaling within Twitter)

"Twitter is an app that scales as a platform." Weinberg is right to note that Twitter is an application, but this simply reinforces the point I've been making all along, that as a platform, Twitter enables robust connections, conversations, and information sharing in ways that few other platforms can.

Adding SMS functionality to your tweet stream only enhances scalability. SMS is the key feature of Twitter for ambient research; it means that anyone with an SMS enabled phone and at least occasional access to a computer can combine push and pull (via more traditional means) and streams (via real-time tweets) to enact ambient research. (As I'll discuss in the follow-up post, this has tremendous implications for curriculum and pedagogy in a variety of content areas). Someone with a high-end mobie (like an iPhone or Pre) can engage ambient research collectively (push + pull + streams).

Wading at the Confluence of Push, Pull, and Streams

As an activity, ambient research is subjective in more ways than I have time or space to consider. We're all researching different things, and we all engage the information we encounter in different ways. That said, I'd like to share a few principles that have helped me effectively wade and grasp at the flows of information that comprise much of my online research.

First of all, I'm a wannabe polymath. I'm profoundly interested in the disciplinary discourse of my field, but I'm also doubly lucky to study what is essentially a metadiscipline, as virtually every human pursuit involves communication, and a great many involve writing. In this sense, I'm always interested in the environments where writing and rhetoric occur, which leads me to follow others on Twitter with diverse backgrounds, and subscribe to feeds and notifications that are sometimes flagrantly extradisciplinary. In this sense, effective streams are necessarily cross-disciplinary and often cognitively dissonant. This is a good thing.

On Twitter, I follow others in my discipline, and I'm continuously learning from them. But I also follow as many (or more) outside of my discipline, because I'm interested in what the software developers, information architects, sociologists, and business professionals are doing, and how they are communicating about their fields. I'm interested in the research they share with each other. And I'm engaging much of this information ambiently.

The benefit of this approach to ambient research is found in collision, bricolage, and aggregation; cross-disciplinary dialogue and information sharing accretes and collides in the streams of ambient research, and it is in this collision (and resultant bricolage) that new knowledge is born. These collisions leave traces, and over time a kind of reverse hypertie emerges, connecting researchers in digital environments and beyond.

In a follow up post, I'll tie the notion of ambient research to work on recursion theory and rhetorical invention/innovation. I will also explore some of the implications of ambient research for issues in Rhetoric and Writing Studies.

(The tweets above that mention "PolyContextual" refer to my previous Twitter name, which I recently changed to @bmcnely.)