Tag Archives: New Media

Mongoliad, nanotech novelists: Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, and e-lit futures

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Kit Eaton at Fast Company recently featured  some information about a ‘new’ novel (both in form, it’s an app and in content, it’s being written by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and others). From Eaton’s May 26, 2010 article,

Late yesterday in San Francisco, at the SF App Showcase, a sneaky little startup company called Subutai demonstrated some of the tech that’ll be going into the Mongoliad app. This oddly-named creature is actually what we’re interested in–a reinvention of the novel as a serialized publication through a dedicated app. Stephenson isn’t the only one taking part, as both Greg Bear and Nicole Galland will be writing too, but Stephenson is really the core of the project.

This is exciting, as anyone who’s familiar with his [Stephenson] Diamond Age novel will attest: This book imagines a future where a super-smart, partially artificial intelligent book is created, and acts as a young girl’s life guide. The hope is, obviously, that Stephenson uses his imagination to leverage novel and unexpected aspects of smartphone or tablet PC tech to transform the resulting publication into something surprisingly new … possibly even more of a transformation than paper-based magazine publishers are attempting as they rejig their content models towards the iPad. Words like “para-narrative,” “nontextual,” and “extra-narrative” certainly suggest this.

Both Stephenson (Diamond Age, 1995) and Bear (Blood Music, 1988) wrote, at a fairly early stage,  stories/novels that featured nanotechnology. For example, Diamond Age’s  ‘partially artificial intelligent book’ is made possible with nanotechnology. Unfortunately, no details about the novel’s content were revealed either in Eaton’s article or on the company’s, Subutai, website. Eaton’s article does offer this,

Speaking at the SF event yesterday Subutai’s CE Jeremy Bornstein revealed that there would be gaming and social media events wrapped around and inside the novel, and even demoed a user profile page that included a measure of a user’s “standing” in the Mongoliad community. There was also scope for users to “rate” portions of the story as it progresses. And while it seems that user interaction won’t play a role in the actual text of the publication, it’s going to be such a blended-media thing that this means user’s inputs still affect the overall performance.

This doesn’t sound like anything outside of the ordinary community-building exercise that many authors and media publishers are engaged in these days but, as you can see in the first excerpt from Eaton’s article, they’re hoping Stephenson will come up with an unexpected way to exploit the capabilities of mobile technology.

As for the show where Mongoliad was announced, here’s a little more information about it (from an article by Daniel Terdiman on CNET’s geek gestalt blog,)

On Tuesday night, Socolow and Dale Larson, his partner in a consulting firm called SF App Studio, hosted the sixth iteration of their app showcase, the SF AppShow. And before a packed house of more than 200 people–their biggest crowd so far–at the famous 111 Minna Gallery here, the two gave a series of app developers the chance to get up on stage and take six minutes to explain their projects.

Part DiggNation, part Demo, and part real-world App Store front end, the SF AppShow seems to have a growing influence in the world of app development–be it for Apple’s iPad or iPhone, Google’s Android, or the BlackBerry–and the people who create the mobile products and evangelize them.

This all brought to mind Kate Pullinger, a writer who works both in the traditional media (she won the 2009 Governor General’s [in Canada] award for literature, The Mistress of Nothing) and is well-known for digital novels such as Inanimate Alice. This is from her April 29, 2010, posting titled, A Writer’s View of the Future of Publishing,

Over the past ten years I’ve been deeply enmeshed in discussions about the future of writing, and the myriad ways in which the new technologies have the potential to change literature. My interest is in text, and what happens to text when you put it on a screen alongside the full range of media computing offers. I write ‘digital fiction’, works that are not digital conversions but are ‘born digital’, using text and multimedia to tell a story that is meant to be viewed on a screen.

However, as well as digital fiction, I also write books – novels and short stories – and have been functioning as a writer within the traditional publishing industry for more than twenty years. I’ve watched as the publishing and bookselling industries have struggled to come to terms with the new technologies and what they have to offer to both readers and writers. I’ve had many discussions with agents and publishers about what the future will hold. I’ve stumbled down my share of blind alleys, waking up to discover that last night’s certainty (fiction for UK mobile phones!) is this morning’s well-that-was-a-dumb-idea (fiction for UK mobile phones!).

Kate first wrote this piece for The Literary Platform (from their About page),

The Literary Platform is dedicated to showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology. It brings together comment from industry figures and key thinkers, and encourages debate.

…

The key word circulating in book publishing at the moment is ‘experiment’. The showcase will demonstrate how traditional publishers and developers are experimenting with multimedia formats, how established authors are going it alone, how first-time novelists are bypassing publishers and how niche literary magazines are finding wider audiences.

Getting back to Mongoliad, I look forward to following the project’s progress especially in light of Kate’s comments about fiction for mobile phones, “last night’s certainty (fiction for UK mobile phones!) is this morning’s well-that-was-a-dumb-idea (fiction for UK mobile phones!).”

Two final comments. First, I was a student of Kate Pullinger’s at De Montfort University’s Masters of Creative Writing and New Media programme, which is now defunct. Second, I got curious about Subutai and it turns out it’s the name for a Mongolian general (from the essay on New World Encyclopedia which, in turn, has been modified from an essay originally found on Wikipedia)

Subutai (Subetei, Subetai, Sübeedei; Classic Mongolian: Sübügätäi or Sübü’ätäi) (1176–1248), also known as Subetai the Valiant, was the primary strategist and general of Genghis Khan (Temüjin) and Ögedei Khan. The son of a blacksmith, he rose through the ranks and directed more than 20 campaigns during which he conquered (or overran) more territory than any other commander in history. He gained victory by means of imaginative and sophisticated strategies and routinely coordinated movements of armies that were more than 300 miles away from each other. He is most remembered for devising the battle plan that destroyed the armies of Hungary and Poland within two days of each other, by forces almost a thousand miles apart.

I am amazed that someone who didn’t have telephones, telegraphs, or any other form of communication (pony express?) that could have traversed 1000 miles within two days to give updates and deal with changing conditions managed to destroy two armies at that distance from each other.

New media (the social kind) at the Vancouver Olympics, is it cohesive or isolating?

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There is a passage in The Diamond Age Or, A Young lady’s Illustrated Primer a 1995 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson that states this,

Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’. (p. 37, Bantam Books, trade paperback, Sept. 2000 reissue)

It’s haunted me since I first read it about three years ago while preparing to write an academic paper I titled Writing Nanotechnology; first investigation where I was linking my nanotechnology interests to my writing and new media interests.

As I followed these interests, I discovered that the period of the Industrial Revolution was, in addition to being a period of tremendous interest and discovery in science and technology, a period of great upheaval amongst purveyors of the written word. For example, Sir Walter Scott, known today as a writer of historical novels such as Ivanhoe, was too embarrassed to have his name published in his first books. At the time, Scott was known foremost as a poet and writing novels was considered beneath a poet’s dignity. From Frankenstein; A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock,

Meanwhile Walter Scott, already revered for poems that sang of his native Scotland was suspected of being the author of Waverley. What a shock if it were true—that a popular poet would descend to write a novel, a new and not altogether respected literary form. (p. 24, 2007, W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, NY & London)

There are some striking parallels between the 19th century, during which much of the Industrial Revolution played itself out and which is also known as the Victorian period, and our own time. We too are obsessed with science and finding new ways to tell stories. Both of which occurred to me during Andy Miah’s session at the Fresh Media Olympics Conference I attended on Feb. 22, 2010 in Vancouver at W2 Culture + Media House.

During the discussion about the impact that social media (part & parcel of what is sometimes called new media) is having on the games and the discussion about the games themselves. I’d estimate 40 – 50 people were there, most of them part of the social media/citizen journalist community and/or academics.

Apparently the Vancouver games are becoming known as the Twitter Olympics. Andy Miah, an academic, who has been following and researching the Olympic games since the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia) asked (paraphrased)  if we thought that the social media we use creates ‘silos’. (For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, the word silo in this context means isolated group.  e.g. a business where the engineers exist in their silo and the sales team in their silo with virtually no communication between the two)

I found it to be a thought-provoking question which returned me to the The Diamond Age passage I quoted previously  and that led me to reframe the question this way, Is social media going to be a cohesive force or an isolating force? At this point, I can make a case for both using the information and comments shared at the conference.

Earlier in the conference Andy suggested (paraphrased) that the friction provided by the official games story and the reporters and IOC (International Olympic Committee) structures is useful and necessary for the unofficial games stories and social media as promoted by activists. In this case, social media provides cohesion for the activists and a means of distribution.

Social media can also be isolating. As one participant noted (in another context not meant to support the case I’m building), it is your responsibility to find and develop your networks for information (as opposed to turning on the television or radio at the right time). It seems to me that this responsibility could be a problem when you need to extend past your natural networks.

In real life, extending beyond your personal network can be very difficult. Yes, there are times when it’s easier, i.e., going to a new school, starting a new job, moving to a new place are all situations where this happens naturally or you’re forced to do it. But in the general way once your networks are established there’s not much need to extend past them and it’s not easy to do. Academics tend to know other academics; scientists know other scientists, business owners know other business owners.You may have multiple networks (work, neighbourhood, friends from high school, etc.) but they don’t intersect. These kinds of silos exist in social media too. For example, there’s a Linked In network, a Facebook network, a Twitter network and these all breakdown into every smaller networks within networks. Plus there’s the assumption that you know it exists. How do you connect to network if you don’t know it exists? Or, you suspect there’s something out there but you don’t know how to find it.

Now, I want to add another element to the mix. One of the participants discussed how she uses Twitter and used as an example (as best I can remember) a fire near where she lived. She saw the fire, tweeted the info. and within minutes her followers sent pictures and shared stories about the building that were burning and the people who lived there. The next day, the local paper accorded the incident a single paragraph. What struck me about her story wasn’t difference in what she valued as news as opposed to a traditional outlet valued but rather how individual her experience was and how dependent it was on her network.  Another person with different followers would have had a different news experience and that may or may not be a good thing as suggested in The Diamond Age.

Finally, a comment I registered (but didn’t immediately place in the context of media,  social cohesion and isolation) was made by someone discussing the reasons for why the activist communities in Vancouver have not been more effective at working together (a situation I was unaware of). If the activist groups have not been as effective as they could have been, I wonder whether or not part of the issue (in addition to the suggestions the participant made)  might be the social media used to organize those networks.

I suspect social media  is both cohesive and isolating to a greater degree than the older broadcast media. In some odd way (I am being poetical here), I don’t believe it’s an accident that we are refining our understanding of matter at ever more infinitesimal scales (e.g. micro, nano, femto, and atto scales) and that we seem to be experiencing increasing fragmentation (e.g. tweets are called micro-blogging).

Enough now, I’m off to do some more thinking.

Tomorrow: NSERC gives SFU (Simon Fraser University) some money.

Miah and the Olympics; birth of the buckyball

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Given that the Winter Olympics are due to open later this week in Vancouver (Canada), there is a  flurry of interest in gene doping and other means of enhancing athletic performance. (I’m mentioning this because developments in elite athletics find their way into consumer markets and because of my interest in human enhancement.) For example, the University of British Columbia (UBC) is hosting,

Sport, Ethics and Technology: Is High Performance Sport Inconsistent with Ideals and Ethics?

Date/time: Monday, February 8, 8 p.m.

Location: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
University of British Columbia
6265 Crescent Road, Vancouver
For a map and closest parking, visit: www.maps.ubc.ca?130

As the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games approach, Olympic athletes will come under close public scrutiny.  New technology will offer unexpected advantages that will challenge the boundaries of what is considered a level playing field.

And given those challenges, how do we determine what is ethical and fair? These questions are explored with Richard Pound followed by a panel discussion with Jim Rupert, Beckie Scott and other participants.

*Richard Pound is a former Olympic swimmer, McGill Chancellor and World Anti-Doping Agency Chairman.

*Jim Rupert is an associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics at UBC. His research looks at future trends in doping and doping control as it pertains to genetics and “gene-doping.”

*Beckie Scott is a former Olympic cross-country ski racer who currently serves as a member of the IOC.

This event is one of five provocative dialogues presented by UBC’s Sport and Society series during February and March. Find details at: http://bit.ly/9LuMXO

Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, the lead article in Section B of The Vancouver Sun by Margaret Munro was (print version), Gene Doping; The latest way to boost performance. The article noted that Andy Miah, at the University of the West of Scotland, in contrast to Olivier Rabin and Theodore Friedmann, the experts (whose study was just published in the journal Science) quoted in the article, suggests that gene doping may be safer than current methods of enhancing performance.

I have mentioned Andy before (here in my series on human enhancement and here regarding a book he edited on art and the future). His response to the Rabin/Friedmann concerns is here. An abstract of Rabin and Friedmann’s article is available here but the full article is behind a paywall.

Andy was also featured in an article in The WestEnder (a Vancouver community newspaper) by Jackie Wong titled (in the print version), New-media [sic] centre seeks to democratize Olympic coverage. From the article,

“We can say that Vancouver 2010 is the first truly digital Olympic Games,” says Andy Miah, chair in Ethics and Emerging Technologies in the School of Media, Language, and Music at the University of the West of Scotland. Miah has been researching new media and the Olympics for 10 years, at six Olympic Games.

Andy has written an essay about new media and its role at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics at Huffington Post. From the essay,

…. perhaps the most interesting dimension of Vancouver’s media culture is the rise of three other media entities, the first of which is the W2 Centre on Hastings, led by Irwin Oostindie. W2 is a cultural and arts infrastructure, serving the independent sector. It will run an extensive programme of art, debate and cultural experiences, some of which will have buy in from the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), while other elements will be more independent. To this end, W2 will serve as a bridge between the privileged participants and the critical commentators around Games time. For example, they will host the Legal Observers programme, headed up by the Pivot Legal Society and BC Civil Liberties Association, which will monitor the operations of Olympic security during Games time. It will also host a cultural collaboration between the London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiads, as part of the UK’s Abandon Normal Devices festival, led by England’s Northwest.

You can read more here.

I’ve now mentioned the two areas that Andy sees as the two major controversies from the Vancouver Olympics, doping and new media activism.

One final note on this, Andy will be bringing a team of about 10 students from his university in Scotland who will be blogging from this site, Culture@tO Vancouver 2010. I’m not sure what the start date will be, presumably Feb. 12, 2010 when the games open.

Bucky balls are the popular name for the buckminsterfullerene (aka fullerene). Named for Buckminster Fuller, the molecule resembles one of Fuller’s geodesic domes. (There’s a geodesic dome in Vancouver which houses our local science centre and during the Olympics it will be home to the Sochi [host for 2014 Olympics], Russia pavilion.) The fullerene was first discovered at Rice University in Texas and this year marks its 25th anniversary and what many describe as the birth of nanotechnology. In celebration, the university is hosting a technical symposium.  From the news item on Nanowerk,

On Oct. 11-13, the best minds in carbon nanotechnology will gather at Rice University for a technical symposium during the Year of Nano, a series of events at the university celebrating the 25th anniversary of nano’s big bang.

Hmmm … I may have gone a little ‘link happy’ today. Tomorrow I should be looking at nano sponges and patents. Later this week I expect to be posting my interview with Dr. Cheryl Geisler, the new dean for Simon Fraser University’s new Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology (FCAT).

The other side of the multimodal discourse coin

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Bill Thompson has an article, Giving life a shape, on BBC News which touches tangentially on approaching the world in a multimodal fashion. He takes a kind of digital approach i.e.when he uses the word technology he actually means digital technology and his examples come from social networking, Second Life, social gaming and other activities mediated through the Internet and computers. From the article,

… because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.

They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.

Different modalities (audio files, graphics files, animation (Second Life), and others are referred to indirectly in the course of Thompson’s article, which is why I’ve picked up on it. In  light of the Kay O’Halloran interviews (on this website blog July 3, 6, and 7, 2009) Thompson’s description of how “artists help find us new ways to think about things” reveals the other side of the multimodal discourse coin.

While O’Halloran and her colleagues develop a framework for analyzing and understanding multimodal discourse, it’s artists (I define that word broadly) who enact and explore that discourse through their work.

One quibble, I think Thompson’s definition could be broadened so that technology  includes nanotechnology, biotechnology, synthetic biology and other emerging technologies. Now back to Thompson and a comment that works no matter how you define technology,

One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.

Metaphors came up in the O’Halloran interview (July 6, 2009 posting) too and I got this in the comments (from inkbat),

I was struck by the point on metaphor. When you come right down to it, isn’t it sad that so many of our concepts are the result of some designer or advertiser or whoever deciding to create some kind of shortcut for us .. which would work if it was just in the one instance but then it takes on a life of its own and suddenly we no longer think of the heart AS IF it is a pump but as though it IS a pump. Or the brain as a computer. …

Unfortunately as inkbat points out, we forget we’ve created a metaphor and we treat it ‘as if it were so’ to results that can be disastrous. Still, I think that creating metaphors and then having to ‘break’ or ‘see through’ them ultimately discarding the old metaphor and developing a new one is part of the human condition.

Back to my nanotech ways tomorrow.