Working the system

The buzz word back in the late 90’s when I entered the workforce for real was “networking”. Curious enough, for ICM501 we just had to read a paper by Ronfeldt and Arquila about Netwars and networking among our terrorist enemies of the state.  One of the positive outgrowths of assembling a network of individuals with whom you are acquainted across industry boundaries means that there’s going to be some times when you can pull rabbits out of your hat just because you know the right people.

I know some people who know people.

And this time, I’m working the system to try and arrange a guest speaker from Adobe, Inc. to come up from their Manhattan office or else telecommute in for a session sometime in October or November. The purpose? Get the industry leaders at Adobe on campus and talking about their products and platforms, and in doing so recognize the leadership potential of the Master’s Program here at Quinnipiac. 

I still have to talk to Rich Hanley, chair of the department, to make sure that the idea is kosher. But I reached out to my old supervisor and interactive tech friend Sam Moore from TracyLocke. Back in the day, I was part of a group that was invited by Adobe to come down and talk about how Flash was going to be repurposed after their then-recent acquisition of Macromedia to enable application-level development using the single most ubiquitous program on the market… the Flash player.

CS3 is here now and we’re seeing the integration of Flash within CS3’s platform. I remembered the contacts and connections that were made in the meeting at Adobe in Manhattan, too. We were all different points of contact within the corporate and marketing structure for either IT or enterprise-level web innovations support.

I figured, why not see if they had anything to say to graduate students about their position within the marketplace, up and coming products or development platforms, etc. I remember the competitive advantage that I enjoyed because of TracyLocke’s involvement at that Adobe meeting. I could amaze and astound fellow techies at dinner parties and wilder gatherings by passing along the strategic vision that Adobe had shared with us back then, doing my mini-evangelist best to get Adobe’s word out.

I hope this all comes together. I’ll let everyone know in more detail as things pan out. I can’t imagine that there’d be opposition from the school, but then again, I’m a stranger here myself right now. There could be some very good reasons for not solidifying a relationship with Adobe. I’ll find out, and pass the word along.

Assistantship

Crazy, I know, but on top of coursework and freelance design gigs during the workday, I’m also taking on a Graduate Assistantship. It means that I’m now at the disposal of the department’s needs for various things. 10 hours of work a week, and what makes me an attractive candidate for them is that I come to them already a professional graphic designer. Don’t think they aren’t already putting me to work in that capacity, either, because they are.

But despite it all, it feels actually fun. I’m happy to have skills that can be useful to the department, and I’m happy to receive the three free credits a semester to help alleviate some financial stress. But this is such a great investment. So worthwhile. Who knew I’d ever follow my geek heart and end up becoming relevant to a hot new career field? Well, an older one, but this kind of preparation is invaluable.

Of course, it’s all in what you do with it. And even if I’m just designing the posters and brochures for the work of the other professors, I’m still involved with it creatively. Nothing like also extending my assistantship term of service to future credits associated with the academic community, either.

Makes me wonder idly whether it would be worthwhile to continue on for a PhD in any kind of professional sense in this, and just what course of study that would be. Well, something for later consideration. Let’s make it through the first semester first, and see how my enthusiasm withstands the harsh reality of grades and performance measures like papers.

ICM508 – Media Imaging and Sound Design

Video. Digital Video and motion graphics editing, as well as sound recording and design. All on a Saturday afternoon. Professor John Tanski teaching, and the rest of the class already starting to develop connections with each other. Or maybe it’s just that there are some familiar faces from my other classes, and we’re starting to recognize each other around campus.

I’m looking forward to this class as being my one ‘fun’ class of the semester. Not to say that the other courses aren’t enjoyable simply from the act of learning. But rather, this is one class where I’m not so concerned. I’ve got a pretty decent eye for composition already, I take certain artistic elements into account. I need to work to translate them again to the camera lens, but I think that I’m going to actually enjoy the work and production time that goes into this class.

In many ways, any one of the courses that I’m taking this semester could (and has!) unlocked tons of business ideas and hinted at new perspectives that really rearrange the old gray matter upstairs. I’ve said it before to my friends, this program hasn’t so much opened my mind’s doors but rather blasted them off the hinges… and it’s only the third week of classes. Undergraduate studies for me were a lot of coasting, a couple of epiphanies, and general academic programming. But not a connection like this. Before I was in school for the community and the social aspects of it. I needed to connect with peers and work out the interpersonal aspects of my social development more. Now… now it feels like the lid has been gently unscrewed and the data dump has begun. Not a mind scramble, but lots of little connections between past experiences and future applications.

And I have to admit, I love the way that every course interconnects. I’ll walk away from this semester having taken a broad survey of the history and current topics of interest in the field of Interactive Communications from my Intro course, ICM501. I’ll know how to code or at least speak to coders intelligently when talking about ActionScripting from ICM504. This class will allow me to shoot my own digital film and edit for content and music. And ICM512 seems to be aimed at teaching me about the concerns and considerations that need to be taken in order to correctly guide the development of any online project.

I can’t wait for next semester. If I stay in the Connecticut area, I might just take a couple of classes beyond graduation if they’re topics of interest and potential use.

The video will be fun, if only because as I get my homework done, I’ll be sharing with you, gentle readers, any of the work I do. After all, it’s not only a blog, it’s also a portfolio!

ICM504 – Information Animation, a/k/a “ActionScripting”

Even though this blog has been dominated by my ICM501 Intro coursework so far, I am actually taking other classes. I will be posting about them here as well.

One of the classes which just started last weekend was ICM504: Information Animation, with professor David MacCarella. I admit that I was quite surprised when he told me that we were going to be learning ActionScripting in his class. Actually, ’surprised’ doesn’t quite cut it. ‘Mortified’ was more the initial reaction, followed by a slight case of ‘awed’. I mean, I just got done with a failed stint as a creative recruiter. I know that ActionScript is one of the ‘advanced’ technologies for the web, and I also know that a designer who can learn it has just doubled their salary for freelance gigs, at any rate.

There’s a little saying I learned when I first took Drawing 101 in Community College. “You don’t take a class for what you already know, you take a class for what you need to learn.” I decided not to stress out about the class, but instead just get right down to business and try by damnedest. I mean, I might not end up with any sort of proficiency in this scripting skillset, but I do know that this is the technology on which much of the future of Rich Internet Application development will be based. I may not need to master it, but I gain much in the way of respect just by understanding the fundamentals of it and being able to communicate with the actual bona fide genius developer-types.

Then again, I don’t give up the hope that I’ll suddenly become a scripter-savant and just take off with the technology. Either way, it’s going to be an interesting class. And I’m just happy to have a class where I don’t need to worry about writing more papers this semester. Although I have to admit — I harbor absolutely no illusions that writing lines of code will be any easier. On the contrary, this is one class where I am going to have to work, and work hard, to make any sort of progress.

We’ll see. More about it as the class develops.

RSS aggregator

Another assignment this week was to select an RSS aggregator and add four blogs to it. I added the whole class (at least, everyone linked to the page on introinteractive’s facebook entry) so I could peruse what my worthy classmates were doing without having to flip through different web pages or keep referring to a central list of bookmarks (much as I like del.icio.us, I’d rather just read something gmail-esque and manage my subscriptions that way.

I haven’t poked around too much more, although I did add the required four blogs. Please rest assured I’ll be delving into this wonderful tool much more when I get a new computer (soon!) and restore home internet access. Yes, I’m running around back and forth from friends’ houses and the school campus just to do my reading homework. It’s getting old.

However, I did add a Xinet User’s Group run by my former supervisor. For those who don’t know about Xinet, I’ll be happy to evangelize for you in person, but it’s a web technology solution which has been around for a while now and making life wonderful for those companies who’ve decided to install it. Data Asset Management is just the tip of the iceberg. Just check out their site.

The user’s group is a subscription-service blog meant to allow different xinet users to keep in touch and stay on top of the latest tips and tricks for the technology. Also to foster a community, because there’s some pretty amazing stuff you can do with Xinet. If you’re interested, you have to work through a reseller, so I’d recommend contacting Kenny Kirsch as part of NAPC. Tell him I sent you.

I also added a couple of other blogs. One about Flex development for Adobe’s new development tools for applications, (if I’m recalling correctly… I chose this one to get back up to speed on Adobe’s latest and greatest, especially now that I’m learning how to code ActionScript.) Another for a friend of mine, Anthurian.com (although he’s been ‘under new development’ for a while, when he gets back up and writing I want to be alerted to it).

There was one more about different examples of online short films using Flash, coldhardflash.com. And of course, Zeus Labs as well. Just starting to stretch the RSS wings, trust me. Just waiting for some time to indulge my curiosity. If anything is going to enable us to ‘go beyond the minimum’ in Alex’s ICM501 class, Google Reader and the RSS aggregator (combined with the Technorati blog search engine) will be it.

Unite, ICM graduates, and take over the world! Bwa-ha-ha!

Referencing:

Ronfeldt, D. and Arquila, J. (2001) Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future. FirstMonday, 6(10).

Beniger, J. (1986). Control Revolution, Introduction (pp. 1-27). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

I’m with Andy’s post. I personally read Ronfeldt and Arquila’s ‘Netwar’ article (2001) and found myself thinking that there has never been a war of any kind in the history of humanity which hasn’t depended upon a social network. War cannot be waged by one individual except hyperbolically… to have a war, you have social conflict of some level, and that requires a network of individuals to bring it about.

Indeed, I hold that the concept of ‘netwar’ is nothing new at all. The vast history of human government is replete with examples of a small network of individuals gaining control of various resources and seeking to impose some kind of order or control upon the society that depends upon those resources. Combine the ideas of Ronfeldt and Arquila’s ‘netwar’ with the writings of J. Beniger’s Control Revolution (Introduction. 1986. Cambridge: Harvard University Press), specifically his assessment of the rise of the bureaucracy as a means for social control as a preliminary reaction to the industrial revolution’s impact on our culture.

Let’s look at it this way. According to Beniger, the industrial revolution led to social changes that caused the model of government to become a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy asserted control, and divorced the individual serving as a functionary from the office and duties with which she was charged. You can’t get mad at the system, because even if this one individual wants to circumvent the process, that functionary is emminently replaceable, so the role or governmental position which they fulfill completely overshadows who they are as people. Or so the model of bureacracy seems to work to me. Don’t believe me? Go visit the DMV without the right paperwork, and try to get the individual on the other side of the desk to give you a driver’s license, and see how far you get.

In a perfect world, the individual operating inside the construct or framework of the bureacracy would be supervised closely and unable to exert personal control. However, the bureacracy—whether it be the government, academia, or the great corporate engine—doesn’t quite work that way. There is always discretionary power of some level from each higher rung of the hierarchy. And there are always opportunities for the bureacracy to slow itself down, all in the name of (perfectly correct!) procedure and process. If an upper rung of authority wants to get certain things done by the lower rungs, then there will always be shifting networks of individual loyalties at work to allow, hinder, prohibit, or encourage different projects from coming to pass. We call this ‘politics’, and it’s the way that bureacracies get things done. How easily you achieve the desired result depends upon how you align yourself with the sub-network of ‘office’ politics which happens to be in control of that asset.

This is pretty commonplace, so I question why Ronfeldt and Arquila need to be so down on the concept of networks. We’ve seen them used in the French Resistance during World War II. We see them used in terrorist cells. I can also see them at work at Quinnipiac. It would be folly to think that we’re not going to come out of this program without some serious network connections in this field. One of the benefits for taking this masters to me is that I’m already getting to know a lot of current and future professionals across the different industries and applications that the Interactive Communications Masters brings. I could try to analyze specifically which structures will make the ‘Masters connection’ qualify as netwar, since after all we are going to be moving forward with intention to cause a desired result… Beniger’s “Crisis of Control” made real (1986).

Of course, to us, we’re just going to be trying to improve the standards of the interactive communications industries, and demonstrate a certain level of flexibility and professional preparedness in the face of this new and sometimes baffling communication technology. Over time, we’ll eventually see some graduates of this program in hiring positions (indeed, many of my classmates already are!), and climbing the ladder in roles in media, PR, advertising, web development, and content management. Are we to be termed ‘economic-elitists’ (or terrorists?) if we look first to each other when it comes time to reaching some consensus or attaining some lofty future goal?

Ronfeldt and Arquila make precisely that kind of assumption with their bias against networks of priority-aligned individuals in their 2001 article, Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future. FirstMonday, 6(10). I personally feel they might have done a better time of pointing out that the organization model is not the culprit of any antagonism, but rather the prevailing conditions, actions, and reactions which have led to the same.

A response to Ruth’s comment

 Glad to see you on and about, Ruth! This is a post inspired by my friend Ruth’s comment.

Exactly my point with the different structures of thought. It can be havoc to sit down at a computer after someone else has messed up your preferences and settings, let alone trying to follow the thought chains of people as they’re ruminating.

But then again, this is the inherent balancing question that stems from Bush, Engelbart, and Licklider’s articles for me. Whenever we make a movement to empower the individual we have to keep one eye on maintaining minimum standards.

I guess that my point to all of this is that there always needs to be some balance point, where the free associative indexing of the individual can be carried out in relative peace with a minimum amount of outside-imposed strictures (to capture the innovative and unique perspective of the individual) … and yet there also needs to be a way of translating that technological personal gnosis, as it were, into something that approaches at least a minimal level of structure to allow for sharing. We’re always allowed to smash the temple walls of community standards and expectations in the name of free thought and innovation, but once we do that we are necessarily forced to reinvent a platform or set of standards in order to communicate on any sort of wide level -at all-.

All the way to grad school and I’m staring squarely at the issue of how to find the balance between community standards which empower communication and the individual’s need for disorganized freedom in developing their own symbiosis with their own technological tools. It seems to be a recurrent theme in my life, no?

Only this time, we’re working off of technological assumptions instead of social or mystical ones. I can sort of cheat because we’re all living with the ‘memex’ that Bush described(1945). And we’re also living with the knowledge of what came next, or concurrently, as the internet was developed…. the data communication protocols which empowered networked sharing; namely TCP/IP.

Which all ties in nicely with Engelbart’s conceptual model of the H-LAM/T system (1962)… something I’ll endeavor to render in diagram format in the near future. Basically one of the interdependent portions of how we formulate complex thoughts has to do with first providing a Language, the ‘L’ in the H-LAM/T. In Engelbart he wrote about the Language in terms of the individual building conceptual and symbolic structures in order to facilitate complex thinking using things that were meaningful and intrinsic to the individual.

My point is that it also extends outwards. We can’t begin to assemble the bits of personally inspired data into meaningful relationships to make it into information (a concept introduced to me in ICM501 course lecture, Alex Halavais, 8/30/07) on any sort of scale unless we’re all writing with the same language first. Language tends to influence thought patterns, and in Augmenting Human Intelligence, Engelbart (1962) points out the theoretical school of cognition that holds that if the language we use to think with doesn’t allow a certain conceptual structure then we’ll never actually think in those terms.

I look at the Language element of the H-LAM/T model and wonder what concepts or conceptual structures we’ve already selected out during the initial phase of coming up with the foundational concepts and terminology which have resulted in the Interactive Communications Technologies (ICTs) in the first place.

 I’ve run into problems that are motivated by differences in individual outlooks before in my role as a Web Producer for TracyLocke. Let me introduce the case study we found ourselves in to highlight exactly what kind of ‘communicatus interruptus’ I’m nodding at when you start dealing with individuals who have self-organized around a vastly different conceptual and methodological model (the H-LAM/T scenario, briefly, states that Human intellect operates based on Language, Artifact use, and Methodology, in which they have been Trained. H-LAM/T.)

Case Study: Aprimo’s-  vs. TracyLocke’s mindset

TracyLocke is an advertising giant which has lasted for over 94 years in the industry. They directly influenced our culture by naming and branding 7-11, Tostitos, and for the Haggar brand they coined the term ’slacks’ to describe dress pants that weren’t jeans or part of a suit.  They’re not just a company with a history either, they’re a company with forward thinking about technology and the way to use it to augment the traditional roles of marketing and advertising processes.

Part of that technological focus happened while I was employed as a Web Producer with them. TracyLocke had purchased a web-based proprietary software solution to help them manage their projects. Up until that point TL relied upon an outdated database and a cadre of entry-level “Project Managers” who ran around the building literally, chasing jobs down and trafficking hard copy bags and folders. TL was getting to a size where this was prohibitive, and they had purchased a solution called ‘SmartPath’.

SmartPath was only one technology provider for this kind of technology, and given the money and time which was invested in this enterprise-level project, rest assured that senior management had done exhaustive research and due dilligence to make sure they were purchasing the best solution for their needs. One of the competitive products which had been evaluated and ultimately decided against was a company named Aprimo. As it happened, after TracyLock had signed the contract with SmartPath, Aprimo acquired the SmartPath company and rights to its technology. TracyLocke had chosen SmartPath over Aprimo, but now they were dealing with Aprimo directly once again.

I won’t disclose the nature of -all- the agreements between them, since I’m sure I’ll get a nice lawyer’s email if I do, but essentially what happened is that as a condition for going forward with the SmartPath purchase and installation, TracyLocke maneuvered themselves into a unique position… Aprimo was working on the latest release of their own product, Aprimo 8 I believe, and TracyLocke was invited along with a few other select companies in a similar position to provide direct feedback to the development team for Aprimo.  I don’t know the truth to it, but I was under the impression that Aprimo had a significant market share in accounting firms, traditional business offices, engineering firms, etc. Left brain market share, is how I thought of it. Again, I never saw data or numbers, so this is simply hearsay.

SmartPath, however, allegedly had a significant share of what I’ll call ‘Right brain market share’, appealing to creative agencies, media companies, advertising and promotions agencies, etc. Aprimo was sincere in wanting our help. They knew that TracyLocke had, for whatever reason, decided consciously not to move forward with purchasing the Aprimo product. They knew that TracyLocke was a good representation of the right brain market share they were allegedly looking to attract. And there was a contractual clause between TracyLocke and Aprimo that will remain undisclosed just out of courtesy, but basically TracyLocke was in a position where Aprimo not only invited their feedback, they had to at least consider it seriously.

As a member of the larger SmartPath implementation team, I was part of the large group of users who was given a ’sneak peek’ at the Aprimo product. And I gagged when I saw it.

Now, please understand that Aprimo was incredibly feature rich, and from what I understand still is. A veritable technology leader for its industry niche. I’m not in any way panning their product. But I was invited to give critical feedback, so I did. And as it turned out, I ended up getting called on it to defend myself with specifics and particulars. Not only that, under the advice of a reseller of the Aprimo product, I was invited to write a long email which specifically addressed why the agency world would never buy into the Aprimo product as it stood at that stage of development, which I did.

Why did I pan it? Simply, the user interface was atrocious. Nothing made sense, everything was nested nicely in little logical schema which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. There were appalling visual cues for how to proceed, icons which didn’t match with commonly expected functions, unclear at every turn. The application -was- powerful. Immensely so. But we couldn’t even begin to approach how robust it was because the creative agency team couldn’t understand how to use it.

Communication Attempts

I not only wrote an email, but I redesigned their UI to show them in visual terms just how I would have taken where they had ended up and moved forward with it to make it not only appealing, but also consistent with standard interface conventions. I worked dilligently at it for a week, and wrote several drafts of the initial email. When I was done I thought, “At last! They’ll read this and be able to understand exactly how to approach this market.”

They didn’t. The Aprimo team wrote back that all of my recommendations were nice, but non-essential. The software worked, who cared how it looked or how folks were interacting with it? After all, Aprimo would train folks how to use their machine, so no worries about not knowing how.

A complete miss in communication terms. Here we had two completely different groups of individuals, focused on two completely different areas, which made tremendous sense to each of them individually, but which failed completely to connect with the other group. We were all talking about user interfaces for web-based technology, a bona fide Interactive Communication Technology. 

 It took us two weeks of back and forth discussion and debate over email before we finally began to understand that we were talking to the wrong people in the organization. We were talking to the engineers. From a social discourse level, of course they wouldn’t care about how things looked… that was secondary to the functionality of it. I argued back (because it actually sort of devolved to me phrasing the emails for the team in this one specific arena) that the most amazing tool in the world is not going to do much if no one will use it. TracyLocke already had one imposed solution for this kind of job tracking and project and process management software. It was largely ignored because using the tool was inefficient and didn’t improve upon the basic tasks or processes of the agency. No one understood it, so no one used it.

In the end what bridged the gap between our two sides of the conversation was an email of mine where I tried a different approach. Instead of talking about the Aprimo suite of software in question, I described my workplace. The open architecture, the television sets hanging from the ceiling every few feet. The buzz of energy as a converted warehouse space was used by many different teams to work on creative projects. The personal decorations around everyone’s desk. The fact that we all used Macs and that the majority of employees in the building were art directors who spent every waking moment thinking about image, brand, identity, and the customer/user experience.

Not about functionality. Art Directors don’t need to worry over much about functionality because they have an entire department at their disposal called ‘Studio’ who takes their artwork and figures out how to reproduce it exactly, yet in a way which will allow it to work and be printed. No one worried about how robust their applications were because Photoshop and Illustrator are so powerful that there isn’t a user alive who is expert in every possible way to utilize them. (Or if there is, she’s spending way too much time on the computer.)

When I was able to frame the work environment, the daily tasks, and the overall feel of the agency world as we knew it and lived it at TracyLocke (I miss Beer Cart Fridays and Bagel Wednesdays still), suddenly the connections started firing. The engineers were making a simple mistake, and so were we in the agency. We each assumed that because -we- felt at home and ‘normal’ in our environment, that -we- must represent at least a significant portion of the target audience. After all, we were normal, right? So everyone else must be, too.

This was a communication breakdown which needed two weeks of time before it was identified and resolved. In the business world, that’s an eternity. In those two weeks I was spending a large portion of my time working on that problem instead of actually developing the Rich Internet Applications which were my primary function (before the budget reforecasting took away my bottom line, that is… ah corporations!).  In both scenarios, we were both focusing on Interactive Communication Technologies. We had developed a rapport and a set of expectations which were unique to us as individuals between how our minds worked and how we used our computers.  But we weren’t starting from the same page.

Two individual mindsets had developed their own unique symbiosis in order to handle the processing and furthering of complex thought, yet we were moving to opposite ends of an ideological spectrum and still assuming we stood at center. Not only that, because of those unseen individual expectations we were starting to reach a place where our common language (English) was no longer facilitating the sharing of conceptual structures. Without those conceptual structures in place, we were unable to transfer concept to mental structure (internalize things).

Looking back on it in terms of Engelbart’s conceptual framework of H-LAM/T, we were both trying to achieve the end goal of empowering or augmenting higher intelligence in workers. But they were focusing on the specific artifact repertoire (what the machine could do by itself) and we were looking at the integrated human/artifact relationship as a whole.

End Run for Resolution

We resolved the matter by escalating things from the engineering team to the Vice President of Marketing, who already shared the vocabulary of ‘branding’ and ‘brand experience’ with the agency side. I don’t know whether or not the engineering team ever came around fully to appreciate why a decent user interface was necessary (that’s not really fair — I’m sure they felt it necessary, but we disagreed on what ‘decent’ meant). In my wicked inside self I have to admit I sometimes imagine a cobwebbed and decrepit group of software engineers whimpering softly in some conference room somewhere that they’ve been locked.  But the example is a perfect one to illustrate the broader problem.

When we begin to approach a society of empowered individuals, especially networked and empowered individuals who are able to transcend the limitations of time and place and connect with like minds and sympathetic people all over the world, we start seeing a breakdown in the overall communication efforts. We begin having to augment what previously would have been a simple exercise in language skills by framing them in our own particular frame of reference. We have to not only share the idea through a medium on its own, we have to continually remind ourselves that the key to effective communication in a society of ‘disorganized individuals’ we must also be clear to a lesser or greater extent about how we have arrived at these conclusions or ideas ourselves.

It’s something I can only see increasing in complexity. Since the H-LAM/T system of Engelbart’s is not only interdependent but regenerative and most importantly, compound, the tiny changes in the interaction between individuals nowadays of dissimilar perspectives will only continue to require more and more attention in order to achieve even the preliminaries of a true exchange of ideas.

References

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July.

Engelbart, D. (1962). Augmented human intellect study, Conceptual framework (Part II, pp 8-46). SRI.

Licklider, J.C.R. (1968). Man-Computer Symbiosis. Science and Technology.

Full classes starting up

Because of the Labor Day weekend, full classes are finally going to be started. At first I was annoyed by the delay, but it’s been a good thing. ICM501 started with the reading and writing, and ICM512 also had some, although I haven’t posted here yet. Between freelance work assignments starting up again with the end of August (the month of death to freelance assignments, usually), and now adding in a graduate assistantship…. I don’t anticipate breathing until the weekend of December 15th when my last final is done.

And now we add in two more classes to the mix, Saturday classes both of them: ICM504 – Information Animation, and ICM508 – Media Imaging and Sound Design. Sound, video, and online animation. All communications-based, to round out the theory of online work and survey of ICM501 and the online course of ICM512 – Online Development.

Egads, I’m going to be busy.

Class Wiki

Given the initial responses, I think I’ll be starting up the wikipedia for ICM. I’m not sure exactly how to roll it out, though. How will the authors work together? Do we need a final editor/moderator type? I’m not going to be signing up for full moderatorship but I’m more than happy to use the wiki since it was a study idea for myself. Best just to have a place to pool all of our reactions to the course materials.

I -really- need to sit down and hash this out so I can answer questions and have something approaching a plan for class tomorrow night. Guess it’s going to be a late night in the library again tonight.

The whole point

For those who might not understand, the whole point of starting up an online wikipedia for collecting ICM thoughts is precisely because a) this is an emerging field of study, so any basic information presented on it provides a starting point for other scholarship, b) we’re all undergoing a master’s level course of study aimed at communicating via interactive media, so perhaps it would be wise for us to put our money where our mouths are even as early as school and really start developing online presence and communication skills, and c) where else are we ever going to find this much new content thrown at us at once? I mean, this is a Master’s program.

The logistics that come into include handing it off or maintaining it, deciding whether or not we begin with just the survey class of ICM501 (an excellent beginning point to be certain) or try to open it up to any and all Master’s classes. I’m also trying to figure out whether or not this is violating any kind of sharing or information rights. I keep reminding myself that publishing online is still publishing, so there must be clauses to allow this, but in today’s hyper-rights-aware world I’d rather find out beforehand whether or not we’d be infringing on some kind of school trademark by utilizing the coursework for the Masters as the fodder for the wikipedia.

How do you cite a course lecture? Is it cheating for those students who are going to take the courses in the future to have this corpus of knowledge speficically aimed at them to be available at the click of a mouse? How does education deal with this kind of thing? Back in the day 13 years ago, this wasn’t really an issue… my first college “email” account was on the SUNY Potsdam VAX mainframe, SPOTVB.

Anyway, I’ll have to read up on things tonight. Alex has offered to post a MediaWiki for us, but I think that this should be at least open to group discussion if the class is going to adopt this media. Is this a class media project or is this independent? In an online attitude of sharing, what happens to credit? Is credit important anymore?

Interesting thoughts for future coursework, methinks. More later.

The empowered, disorganized individual and the next challenge for ICTs

After reading Bush, Engelbart, and Licklidder, I found my head spinning with different sorts of thoughts, not a whole lot of which have gelled yet. While it was definitely interesting to see the conceptual seeds which historically affected the evolution of interactive communication technologies (ICTs) I found myself smiling appreciatively at how far we’ve come moving toward the dream reality of ICTs which directly impact and augment humanity’s efficiency and communication patterns.  When we’re tapping our foot impatiently as we log in to our accounts and sighing in exasperation at all the ‘wasted’ time waiting for internet applications to boot up it becomes clear that we’ve lost perspective on the time, manpower and labor which used to be involved in some of even the simplest interactions done in the course of any given project or complex task now relegated to computers and ICTs. We are definitely standing at a different vantage point now than was envisioned by our three authors when they wrote, but there are still organizational and conceptual issues that need to be resolved as we approach the ‘optimal future’ described by our three visionary writers.

I’m especially drawn to one of the concepts that both Englebart and Bush touched upon, and it has to do with the role of the individual in the process of learning. Bush (1945) talks about how the new technology for communication must present a way to preserve something he terms, ‘associative indexing’. In an associative model the individual makes mental connections between different and sometimes disparate entitites which help the individual to build up to a complex idea or relationship. It’s put forth by Bush in his article How We May Think as a means for describing the ‘natural’ human means for thinking about objects. Instead of thinking in terms of structured and rigid hierarchies of thought which require thinking in terms of what today we would call ‘file paths’ (Animals->Mammals->Cats->American Housecats->My pet housecat ->Fluffy) humans just make a connection between different items that have meaning to the individual way of thinking. (Cats <–> Fluffy <–> My pet)

Engelbart also takes some consideration to the way that the individual intelligence works through these associative patterns. In his Augmented Human Intellect Study, Engelbart (1962) makes the point that we’re struggling to adapt our learning and intelligence models to the disorganization naturally occurring within the human concept and symbolic structures. In fact, Engelbart spends a lot of time outlining the overall conceptual framework for human learning systems specifically in an attempt to demonstrate how altering the component systems of his framework is necessary if we’re going to actually approach augmenting the intelligence capacity of individual humans.

 My concern with all of this has more to do with the role of the individual within the greater realm of ICT-enabled communications. As a child of the 80s and a graphic design professional, I believe wholeheartedly that we have achieved Licklidder’s called-for ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’. However, there are some previously unforeseen organizational paradigm shifts and attendant cultural effects which have already begun to unfold for us as denizens of the digital century. Last year Time Magazine named all of us (“you”) as their person of the year (December, 2006) to reflect an awareness of how each of us is now empowered and enabled individually as a result of the cultural adoption and development of ICTs (although to be fair, Time did not use that term, but did list several ICTs as prime examples).

The point about needing to approach a level of individual disorganization by creating a technology that was flexible enough to allow it (Engelbart, 1962) was well stated. We can see directly how the internet alone has yielded a tremendous amount of apparently disorganized content, and it continues growing every day.  Bush’s dreams for a system that made for easily retrievable data has been partially realized, but in creating just such a tool that balanced the need for allowing individuals to create their own symbolic and conceptual structures (Engelbart, 1962) and the need for easy location, selection, and retrieval (Bush, 1945) has resulted in an explosion of content beyond the wildest dreams of either author.

All three authors seem to be looking for a mythical ‘optimal interface’ for individual users, and both Bush and Engelbart seem to be approaching the matter with a significant deal of optimism, operating under the assumption that there would still be some modicum of training and some level of minimum standards. I hazard a guess that a scientist in 1945 like Vannevar Bush would be a bit surprised to find published ’information’ which grew out of the level of augmented individual disorganization yet which failed to meet minimum academic standards that the 1945 US culture might have expected from any published work.

It’s this optimistic assumption of responsibility that serves as an unspoken given in both Bush and Engelbart, and to a lesser extent in Licklidder as well, although Licklidder’s bias applies more specifically to the rose-colored dreams of artificial intelligence than it refers to the individual’s responsibility within any ICT-enabled efficiency system. I don’t believe that it’s any kind of error in the judgment of these men, but rather just an extension of the fact that it’s impossible to accurately foresee the way in which any social change will carry itself out. Especially since as Engelbart points out, the model of learning is an interdependant system and a regenerative one with vastly compounded results (1962). It would be natural for anyone to assume that the positive standards which enable a change would not be altered by future events.

Yet that’s exactly what seems to have happened. We have been given tools that more closely enable us to generate spontaneous symbolic and conceptual structures in such a way as to allow us as individuals a greater degree of flexibility. We are able to customize our learning patterns in such a way that provided we have enough training to use the ICTs in the first place, we are able to organize data into relationships in a manner which more closely approximates the ‘associative indexing’ put forth by Bush.  More importantly than the customization of these learning patterns, we are in a position now where we are also running into a slight setback in the communication process having to do with how decentralized and individualized our individual processes have become.

It almost feels to me that by empowering the individual with ICTs we have created first and foremost a change that has taken root within the composite processes of human/computer interactions, but primarily as they relate to the individual. In other words, the ICTs have empowered the individual to better suit their internal human processes to the external artifact processes that Engelbart defines. However, there is still yet another layer of interaction which asserts itself, and that is how to allow an ‘augmented’ and ’symbiotic’ individual/computer to be able to communicate effectively with another. While this is the essential challenge of all communications, the empowerment of the individual level of disorganization has created indirectly the challenge of how to find a common language or a common vehicle for communication between the elements of the “disorganized” individual units within the larger whole.

How do we communicate in the age of interactive communications technologies? Is it sufficient to simply broadcast or publish for general consumption our own personal mode of disorganized conceptual and symbolic structures? Or does there need to be established a standard mode or standard code to allow for the meaningful exchange of ideas instead of relying on the abundant exchange of data which seems to be the model unlocked for our present day?

These are very valid questions, and they resonate practically within corporations, the military, and the general public. While the technical specifications can and do find a way of being democratically adopted by either the common public end users or else the constituent members of economic, scholarly, or social organizations, there is still a sense of searching for the balance or set of standards which will allow meaningful communication of knowledge to take place. In the regenerative cycle that Engelbart describes, it feels to me like we’re stumbling for the balance point to allow the other interdependent systems to “catch up” now that the Artifact processes and structures have leapt ahead sufficiently and society as a whole works to adapt to the changes presented. In so doing, the individual users and the online and ICT-dependent communities are feeding into the next ’round’ of changes and developments.

I’m not sure exactly where the current trend is, but I can definitely see that for me it’s a most important question of how to balance the disorganized needs of the individual ICT users with the concept of group standards and accepted conventions. We’re still evolving interactive communication technologies, and we’re also developing interactive communication cultures as well.

 On to the next week’s reading.

References

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July.

Engelbart, D. (1962). Augmented human intellect study, Conceptual framework (Part II, pp 8-46). SRI.

Licklidder, J.C.R. (1968). Man-Computer Symbiosis. Science and Technology.

Reading done

I finished the assigned reading tonight and I was about to start on the reaction paper, but I want to take a bit longer to let everything sink in before I do the formal assignment. Since this is my research blog, I’m going to babble at will. I’ll come up with some categories to make the “official” stuff for classes and the “polished” and “organized” posts easier to locate, but for now I’m more concerned with just generating some content and seeing how the patterns of posts turns out.

Initial reaction to the readings was something along the lines of “Damn, that’s a lot of reading to get done by Tuesday.” I took Alex’s warnings to heart when he said that we would have to learn how to adjust our reading habits to get the most out of our assigned readings for grad school.

Strategies for Understanding

I’ve been that guy who just kind of coasts and never does the work. Well, I used to be that guy: thirteen years in the corporate world cures you of that tendency very quickly in my experience. $20K for grad school also tends to make you sit up and pay attention more, too.  So I figured out that off the bat I need to set up some decent study habits. After taking a gander at the Engelbart report, I’m glad I did.

Generally I just read along and took some notes, trying to find ways to sum up the major points and diagram out the major arguments. Along the way I found myself jotting down some noteworthy direct quotes for possible use later in class or in papers. I started skimming more and reading less, keeping an eye out for anywhere that I lost the thread of the argument so I would stop and back up then and pay more attention until I could skim again. It kind of worked. Going to have to refine the practice a bit, but it worked well enough.

I also found that about halfway through reading Engelbart (I read Bush first and Linklider last), my brain started to come up with some interesting trains of thought and reactions to the reading. I guess that’s what Alex wants us to get to. But it was more on the cognitive theory portions in Engelbart. I used my reading notes to jot down the trains of thought and inspiration too, only I blocked them off with a bracket and indented them for easier finding as I skim later.

I never used to have to take notes. Not on reading. I just read it and retained it, but this is a bit of a stretch. Especially Engelbart. If you’re in the ICM501 class and haven’t started the reading assignments yet, watch out for Engelbart. It’s the most conceptually complex and structurally confusing of the three articles so far. But also for me, one of the more inspiring ones because it provides a framework for considering and discussion of the other ideas.

This isn’t the official reaction. I want time to sleep on it and review my reading notes before I write that stuff. I’ve got some neat ideas and I have some direct experiences too, which tie in nicely with the readings to illustrate some points.

Developing an ICM Wiki

I’m also vaguely considering that in order for this blog to work well, I think it’s going to need a wiki attached. Time to look into free wiki-esque sites like Wet Paint. Anyone else from the ICM501 class that wants to jump in and make a collective wiki, let me know. I’ll be doing it anyway for my own notes, but I think that we could maybe create an ICM501-specific wiki that could help us all collect our knowedge and insights.

Any takers, let me know! (Also let me know if this particular wheel has already been invented yet or not.)