Even I Must Weigh In On Google+

You might call me a Google 'fanboy', akin to the completely zealous Apple counterparts, but it's not because I find sublime joy in using Google products (some would say this is the *main* problem with Google).  It's because the products simply work well for the type of online life I lead.  I have an Android phone (Epic 4G) and use Gmail for all my correspondence- even this blog is hosted by Blogger!  All of these services play well with each other and that makes me a happy user indeed.

Yesterday Google unveiled their new take on the social scene- Google+, the new uberproduct that will, hopefully, change the way you engage with the web.  I won't go into a breakdown of what Google+ is and is not, mainly because I have yet to receive an invitation so evaluating a service I can't even see doesn't seem prudent.  Yet the response generated by the announcement justifiably brought out some questions and concerns.

I would like to look at one particular opinion (provided via Daring Fireball, thanks!) espoused by Dave Winer on his blog, Scripting News.  Here is a quote from his post:

The thing that makes Facebook great is that it incubated in the market with real users. It was made by real users. It was formed by actual use. One day at a time, one feature at a time, in public, every home run visible, and every mis-step.  Products like the one Google just announced are hatched at off-sites at resorts near Monterey or in the Sierra, and were designed to meet the needs of the corporation that created it. A huge scared angry corporation. What little is left of the spark that created it in the first place is now used to being Number One, and wants to feel that again. It's being created to make that person feel better. 

Well I can't disagree with the first statement.  Facebook has, for better and mainly worse, made several changes in the midst of actual use by actual users.  Not that they care much what people think, as every design change (and there are *so* many changes made all the time) is implemented via fiat and there is little opportunity to push for any significant deviations from what they set out to accomplish.  There have been very minor kerfuffles over privacy issues, but those are almost always supported by the technology intelligentsia and, without fail, do not catch on with the larger public.  I agree with Dave above, that Google+ has not been developed with real users and might suffer fatally from the echo chamber effect.  But to say that Google will fail because it hasn't developed amidst user involvement is quite simply wrong.  Despite the kudos from Dave above, Facebook has several issues that plague its use for me everyday.    

Here's the deal- Facebook isn't much more than over-glorified email. Sure, it used to be a wonderful way to connect with people over large geographic distances or among those with shared interests- but now so many other services have cropped up- including smart phones a la iPhone and Android- that Facebook is becoming about as useful as a yellowpages telephone directory. Twitter has, for all purposes, supplanted Facebook for my gathering of news and interesting links.  Thanks to better data connections and front-facing cameras, I can Skype and connect with anyone.  Photos are probably the only thing I use Facebook for, but even this has largely degraded as many of my friends cannot post anything close to how they live their real life, thanks in large part to corporate sniffing and HR managers who are willing to judge candidates solely on their posted pictures instead of basing an evaluation on the skills and expertise of the candidate presented.


Another problem I have with Facebook is that the very nature of the service means that I must share my 'profile' with anyone I select to be my friend.  I'm currently finishing my PhD studies in Russian History and have given a lot of thought to how I'm going to use social technology to engage my future students.  One issue many academics possess with Facebook is that they do not always want to share their thoughts and activities with any 'students' who might be their 'friends'.  They make a choice- either they censor what they post or they simply don't allow students to friend them.  This seems like hardly a choice to me, especially given the numerous advantages social networking technology can bring to the higher educational setting, but this issue alone has kept many I know from entering the brave new 'social' world.

Do I use Facebook?  Sure- to communicate with older people who, understandably, are not hip to Twitter or Smartphones.  However, even this is slowly falling away.

Now Google+ may suffer from all the same issues I have with Facebook.  But I'm willing to check out a new, perhaps innovative way to engage in the ever popular 'social networking' scene, if only because Google already works well with the services I use.  Because Facebook, as it stands now, holds very little appeal to me.   


(Editors Note:  Upon reflection I realize that my reference to Facebook being where I interact with 'older people' came across as insensitive and perhaps rude.  This was not my intent when writing that statement- I should have extended my remarks to state that Facebook is the popular choice now because it is familiar and widespread, so that is why I continue to find value in its use.  There are certainly numerous people, old and young, who use Twitter or have Smartphones- I just wanted to make the point that new social network platforms, providing a diverse set of services, are becoming more widespread and used by an increasing number of people.) 

Watching a Flashmob Develop...on Twitter

I am big fan of Twitter.  Right before the Egyptian Revolt really took off on mainstream media outlets, I saw tweets from journalists and others I follow indicating that something was really taking-off in the streets of Cairo.  Today I participated in a 'Twitter Seminar" started/moderated Adam Winkler, a specialist of Constitutional Law at UCLA, on the recent Supreme Court decision that video games were protectable under first amendment rights.  There was an interesting cross-section of ideas and contributions- it really was precise and  concise thoughts on the topic at hand that was as informative as many pieces on the ruling already posted on the various blogs and websites.  It was information, engaged in a high-speed circulation process that produced mutations of the overall product many times over.  It would have been one of the best 'cultural effects' I'd seen Twitter produce.
  

Would have been, that is, because yesterday I saw a tweet by LeVar Burton (@levarburton) that, it would turn out, sparked an intense reaction of something I called pure joy.

That's right, a Reading Rainbow Flashmob.  It started off as just an innocent, frivolous twitter request.  But it grew, over the course of hours, into an actual reality.  People everywhere wrote in asking about what cities it would occur in and generally giving a 'hells yeah' shout-out.  How could you not?  This tweet all but sealed the deal.  

I was lucky enough to see this Twitter effect unfold in real-time.  Watching the sheer variety of people who voiced their hearty support grow with every tweet, I realized that when this flashmob occurs it will be a testament to the powerful effect of public television on the cultural education of a whole generation of American youth.  In a time where cuts to the publicly funded arts and media are being bandied about as a means of scoring political points, here will be an event that, through its very spontaneous creation and implementation, will demonstrate that real good is being done through their offering- that the love Reading Rainbow cultivated went beyond political ideologies and, instead, instilled a sense of improving one's self through reading and education.

You can sign up for more information here. 

Fragments of the Gaze

Earlier I posted about my ongoing research into the settlement of Russian Old Believers in Woodburn, Oregon.  The Oregon Historical Society provided me with some very interesting material related to the Old Believers, although from a source base I would not have originally thought to investigate- the records of the now defunct Valley Migrant League.  Part of the much larger 'War on Poverty' initiative begun under President Johnson, the Valley Migrant League (VML) was one of the first projects of its kind to be funded through an Office for Economic Opportunity grant.  The VML initially sought to provide migrant laborers, then streaming into Oregon during the spring and summer months, a means by which they could improve themselves via adult education, health information, and establishment of child care facilities to take care of the migrant's children.

While the primary ethnic group the VML concerned itself with was the growing Hispanic migrants, curiously the Russian Old Believers also came into the new bureaucratic organization's gaze- this despite the fact that the Old Believers were certainly not a migrant population and their numbers paled in comparison to the Hispanic 'majority-minority' group.  Mostly they were farmers, who practiced their craft in some of the poorest conditions in Brazil and Turkey, and had no tradition of engaging in migrant labor patterns as found, then,  in the United States.  Nevertheless, the Old Believer immigrants shared some common characteristics with Hispanic migrant workers that made them visible to the eyes of the VML; few spoke english, few possessed skills (at least in the appraisal of the VML) that would lift them out of subsistence farming, and they almost all practiced an insular lifestyle that would keep them (again in the estimation of the VML) from truly integrating into American culture.

Often in the VML documents I surveyed, there is the expressed desire to provide all needy populations in the Woodburn area with opportunities to advance themselves, but often these desires were tempered around a belief that economic empowerment would transform these populations into good 'tax-paying' citizens and speed along their acculturation process.  Yet transformation of a group from one set of cultural norms to another is an especially difficult process, particularly if the assimilating group has little to no knowledge of the culture with whom they are attempting to transform.  The VML, to this end, commissioned a few reports on the Hispanic and Russian groups then living in their intended work area.

For today's post I would like to look at some fragments from one particular report drafted in 1966 by Paul F. Griffin PhD and Ronald L. Chatham PhD, entitled "Comparative Analysis of the Mexican-American and Russo-American Migrant in the Willamette Valley, Oregon".  It is a hybrid sociological/anthropological report, focusing on the cultural traditions of the populations surveyed.  It is 216 pages long, with the Russian component of the report containing 70 of those pages.  Again, it is interesting to note that the Russian immigrants took up one-third of the report despite being a very small group as compared to the Hispanic presence.  Forty-five of these pages are devoted to three areas: case histories of two specific Russian immigrant families, some perceptions of the American citizens in the area of the Russians and a listing of known Russian immigrant families.  While the two case histories and the listing of Russian immigrant families are invaluable sources for my continuing research, the responses by American citizens really piqued my interest.

Take this response, given by a 23 year-old clerk at the U.S. National Bank branch in Woodburn:

This type of complaint was common among citizens quoted in this report.  What strikes me in this comment, easily one of the more virulent, is that the 23 year-old clerk assumes that learning American culture is 'even more simple' than engaging in monetary transactions.  

Not everyone was so quick to judge, or assume that the Russians immigrants would remain ensconced in their isolation.  This next response, from a 26 year-old teacher, was one fragment among many I found in educational materials that indicated the teaching profession was much better informed as to the history and tradition of the Russian Old Believers- indeed, this teachers acknowledgement that the Russians practiced a different form of Christianity was one of the first instances I came across in which the distinction was even made:

Note how the teacher states that Russian children are picking up english with greater rapidity than 'Spanish background children'- other sources I came across made similar comments in that the Russian immigrants were quick to pick up some aspects of American culture, such as the language and acquisition of material goods, while still managing to hold on to their religious beliefs.  The 'flexibility' in cultural practices of the Old Believer's, a characteristic noted in their history but largely missing from the early 60's assessments, came to the fore in Woodburn over time.

The first two fragments presented above were from the Urban standpoint- if you could call the small town of Woodburn in the 60's urban- while this last selection comes from a member of the community who probably had the most in common, in terms of work and lifestyle, with the Russian immigrants:

This was one of the few responses found in the report that actually engages in some empathy.  Many responses centered on the 'unclean' nature of the Russian immigrants- that they 'stank' or did not manage to keep their property in tidy order.  Few actually concentrated on seeing the issue for what it was- this was a new group of immigrants whose experiences beforehand differed greatly from that encountered in the United States.  The farmers last comment, that "we would maybe look bad in Russia", was certainly not indicative of many respondents attitudes.  

What makes these observations so interesting is that this kind of information is what the VML would base its 'engagement' policy upon towards Russian immigrants.  Since the perception was that the Russian immigrants were 'dirty', programs that targeted distributing health information were emphasized.  Adult education classes, held at night, attempted to get Russian adults to enroll in order to learn english.  This report, and several others commissioned by the VML and the local government, not only helped fix the gaze of the bureaucracy on the Russian immigrants but they also gave indicators towards directions where the gaze could shift.  However, like many of these early reports, little attempt was made to reconcile the larger questions regarding the practice of Old Belief and the assimilation of these practitioners into American culture.  In failing to do so, acculturation  programs would be met with little enthusiasm and, in some areas like education, outright conflicts developed.  

Next time I would like to take a look at an education source- the 'Manual for Educators of Old Believer Children', drafted by the Marion County (where Woodburn is located) Independent Education District.    

Wednesday Videos: The Future of Books

Update: I've posted two additional videos of TechCrunch interviewing Gleick about his work, The Information.  They are shorter in length (around 10 minutes total) so if the hour long talk just below isn't your cup of tea, keep scrolling and watch the two shorter videos)

Today's selection for 'Wednesday Videos' is author James Gleick speech given at the conclusion of the Sydney Writers' Festival on "The Future of the Book".  I posted a little review of Gleick's most recently published work, The Information, and it's great to see him here articulating his views on a subject near and dear to my heart.  Personally, I have been increasingly thinking of buying an e-reader seeing as how I've actually just finished my first e-book- and I read it on my phone!  It was Tom Clancy's chock-full of Cold War nostalgia 'The Cardinal and the Kremlin', and I'm currently reading Gleick's Chaos in e-book form thanks in large part to Amazon's 'deal of the day' = cost me a total of three dollars.  But enough of my reading rambling- watch the video below, provided so kindly by The Monthly and its 'SlowTV' collection of videos.

A Response to Federico Giordano's Essay, 'Almost the Same Game'

Photo by jrmyst 

As a historian in training, my ultimate measure of success will depend on an evaluation by superiors as to the efficacy of my skill in surveying the vast holdings of disparate archives, fermenting then distilling their cherry-picked contents into a discernible narrative.  It is a curious thing to pass judgement on words, some faded greatly by age, in a manner that declares one set to be valid while another is scuttled, outside the scope of inquiry, relegated back to the climate controlled shelf often deep in the bowels of a building, a different sort of catacomb whose devotees religiously seek both preservation and pursuit of the past.  Yet for all their wondrous illumination, those documents- and now videos, webpages, blogs, even tweets- are only shadows of the events they purport to capture.

There is worry, voiced by some in hushed tones over half empty glasses or wine or strong beer, that the future will cease to produce these documents at all, and, even worse, what will remain will be all but scrutable, an imperfect fragment that does little to surrender the mystery of its creation, or the time of its creation, or the person(s) who created it.  Even though the digital means of archiving brings the promise of perfection in the copy to the fore, it comes with the curse of hubris such promises often entail.  There is no such promise with analog, no strained illusion or myth-making surrounding its imperfect archival potential.  Yet with digital as it is perceived now, it is the opposite- what is stored is complete, transferable, seemingly permanent despite its reliance on impermanent man-made electricity and computers.  "Seek and ye shall find- only that escapes which never was pursued!' cried Tiresias to Oedipus, a fitting line for both the potential and pitfall of blind digital faith.  

Federico Giordano, in his essay 'Almost the Same Game', provides many salient points against the belief that digital archiving can capture the full meaning and experience of an artifact.  He uses the example of video games as the vehicle for his argument.  It is a wonderful essay, and I highly recommend taking a moment to read his thoughts.  However, while I agree with many of the statements made by Giordano there is one slice of his argument I would like to re-examine, that being his insistence that Video Games are a decisive break from other previous forms of media, defined by Giordano as 'cinema, television, technological parks, board games or role-playing games, and even panoramas and dioramas.'  

It is my belief that boardgames should not be so quickly lumped among the larger media-scape, although they certainly are a prominent entity, as the analog counterparts to digital games can provide, in their own way, a deeper understanding of how the digital/analog divide in the larger spheres of human activity manifests itself.  While it may sound counterintuitive, the primary difference between board games and video games is that the former has very high mobility potential while the latter does not.  The same questions asked by Giordano of video games and their archival potential, which is meant to hint at the larger questions of digital archiving in general, simply cannot be asked of board games namely because the mobility potential difference between the two is greater than it first appears.  Part of the reason lies in confusion with the digital meaning of transfer, while another part hinges on the possibility of modification.  Together these two points express some of the main differences in the digital/analog divide, especially in the realm of games.

Photo by PseudoGil 

Giordano asks the question, what is lost in archiving a video game?  The core of his answer directly addresses the first point made above, that confusion hovers over the meaning of transfer and storage in the digital realm.  There is a tendency to view all digital code as essentially reducible to numbers, and this is not wrong in the strictest interpretation.  However, as Giordano points out, the mere act of transferring the code of a video game from its original console (be that NES, SNES, Sega, Wii, XBOX, etc…) to an archival state that can later be 'ported' or transferred to work on another system, an emulator, may produce the form but not the 'experience' contained in the original work.  This is because, according to Giordano, "games must always be 'experience' - peculiar ways of relating between the player, an interface and a text, as well as the expression of a give social context", and thus cannot be reduced to a simple text or programming code.  "Emulation… is not the same as 'storage'," says Giordano.  The reason is that games, both analog and digital, involve the complex process of playing.   It is impossible to recreate the sensations involved in playing, for example, the NES game Kid Icarus, now available on Wii, without using the original NES controller or inserting the original 8-bit cartridge into the grey, rectangular NES console.  For Giordano, this inability to capture the experience of playing a video game is the crux of the problem in archiving those games today.  He concludes, towards the end of his essay,  "it can be stated that a complete, philologically credible form of game storage -- especially one which recreates the original conditions of the game experience -- is almost impossible.  In the case of video games, the numeric data underlying digital media does not allow, as Manovich presupposed, a transfer without some loss of quality."  You can seek and you will find, but what escaped truly never was pursued.  

I ask, does the same questions and concerns apply to board games?  It would be folly to say that the issues raised above do not matter in the analog world-  indeed the issue of capturing the play experience is also central to the question of archiving the board game.  However, while Giordano rightfully worries over the 'dissonance' created by the emulation of digital games, the same concerns do not exist in such immediacy with analog games.  This leads me to my second point, highlighting the difference between digital and analog games; the 'dissonance' in emulation is a product of the low mobility potential found in many digital artifacts, while analog games, and board games in particular, almost universally embrace a high mobility potential.  A brief explanation of 'mobility potential' is warranted here, beginning with an example provided by the father of Information Theory himself, Claude Shannon.

Claude Shannon with his 'electronic mouse'

Photo via Ars Electronica

Shannon came up with the, then, revolutionary take on a concept ubiquitous to our modern world but just coming into form in the 1940's- information.  Concerned with finding a way to mathematically express the informational content of any given object- a picture, for example- Shannon devised a curious twist on how information would be defined.  Stated simply, a message contains information so long as it can not be predicted.  Predictable outcomes do not constitute information.  This can be expressed in simple questions over number series; if I show you 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and asked what the next number of the series would most likely be, you would probably reply with '8', but this answer does not contain information as Shannon defined.  Only when the series has an unpredictable outcome can we say that it contains information.  

Let's take this concept one step further- if change is what constitutes information can we say a message has informational content if it is never shared, never transmitted?  My answer is no, because a fundamental quality of information is that it is shared.  However, when information is shared it undergoes a process of circulation, assimilation, mutation and then re-circulation.  Objects in the analog world span a surprising variety of mobility potentials.  Books, perhaps the most successful analog creations of information distribution, have very low mobility potential despite their ease of physical transfer.  Let's say I read a book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.  It is a fantastic work of fiction, one that engages me in various thoughts on my own life.  Yet I cannot change the message the book delivers, as the words are immutable.  The same opening sentence on the first page will continue to exist no matter how much I will it to change.  The book can inspire me to write my own work, or create a new interpretation of its meaning- but it will not fundamentally change in its informational content, in its message, via the process of transmission.  When a message undergoes little to no change through its transmission, it can be said to have low mobility potential.  The ability to engage in modification, or mutation, is the primary factor in determining an object's mobility potential.

'Official' Duluxe version of Twilight Stuggle game board by GMT Games

Board Games, unlike their digital brethren, have high mobility potential, thanks largely to their analog pedigree.  As I've noted with GMT's Twilight Struggle (see my posts on Board Games as Complex Cultural Artifacts- Part I, Part II and Part III), the act of playing helps create a generative narrative experience that players can then reflect upon in their attempt to bring greater understanding to an event or the world of today.  Books accomplish this same task, but with more limited scope as the plot never changes and the choices the author made never veer from the original.  However, while I cannot change a book I can change a game.  Analog games are incredibly modifiable, due not only to physical wear and tear but also to player inspired additions or subtractions.  My friends and I often did this with Monopoly, creating variants, or mods, around different themes.  One variant was 'Mafiapoly' , where players purchasing a property rolled a die to determine if the Mafia had an 'interest' which equaled a 10% hike on rents generated.  It was ridiculously easy, requiring only a simple marker (a penny, I believe) to denote 'interest' and a fast calculation when landing on an owned property.  This small changed the flavor of the game considerably, not to mention also slightly shortening the total playing time due to higher rents.  Now Monopoly would be considered rather light when compared to Twilight Struggle in terms of strategy potential, theme and complexity- yet it is just as susceptible to being modified, altering not only design mechanics but also the psychic impression the act of playing creates.  One has only to look at the 'Variants' section on the Twilight Struggle entry on BoardGameGeek.com to see that not only have language translations been made of the game materials (including use of different media images) but alternate scenarios, rules, and cards have also been drafted, easily accessible, totaling, as of writing this response, 88 different ideas.

A player made alternate game board for Twilight Struggle by Guillaume Ries 

This level of modification is simply not available in the digital realm, at least not on the same scale.  True, there are those who possess the needed skills to accomplish impressive modifications of video games- but it is a very small and select elite, compared to the masses who play the games.  While some computer games come with software that allows varying degrees of modification, video games almost never allow user-created material to change the game.  But beyond this, there is the greater issue concerned with the scale of modifications permissible in the digital realm.  At the highest levels of the actual code itself there are internal rules and logics that must be obeyed for the sum total, the program, to function.  Programmers in many computer languages can testify to the (sometimes large) amount of time spent 'de-bugging' code.  So there is at the highest level of digital artifacts a level of control that cannot be violated.  For the vast majority of people, a video game is analogous to a book, at least in terms of mobility potential.  It may inspire, but it cannot allow mutation or modification.  The video game's very low mobility potential is what drives Giordano to lament the near impossibility of capturing, archiving, the gameplay experience.  When you are dealing with an artifact that cannot be modified, the true task is to capture the experience- an endlessly futile endeavor for digital artifacts.  And while analog games share somewhat in the loss of not being played in their milieu of creation, their kinetic play state and high mobility potential greatly muffle such fears and worries as registered by Giordano in his essay.  The high degree of modifications available to analog games ensures that the gameplay experience will adapt to new 'mutations' of player's desires or needs.
  
While I agree with Giordano's overall sentiment regarding the archiving of video games, I believe there is additional room to consider why such concern regarding the recreation of the 'authentic image', the experienced 'memory' of the digital game do not neatly correlate to the analog realm.  The use of 'mobility potential' to establish a differentiation is only one of many starting points to be pursued in the investigation of the digital/analog divide. 

I'm Not Dead....Yet!

Well I certainly didn't mean for the Muse to go inactive this long.  Truth = I've been very busy finishing up some essays desperately needed for my Graduate Portfolio.  I'm glad to report great progress on that front, so much so that I should be able to post drafts this week.  I have also been working on a few posts for the Muse (shock! gasp!), so if you are a frequent visitor please hang in there and know more words are coming your way.

I will, however, leave you with this little tid-bit of a review on a book I recently purchased from Powells- The Ask by Sam Lipsyte.  I'm not quite finished, but what I've read so far has me pretty impressed.  How could you not, with the main character being a all out loser-ish reject who works, gets fired from, and returns to work again at a small, mostly insignificant Art College in New York.  (Oh the soft spot I have for misguided souls locked in academia's seedier basement of the Ivory Tower)  I've never read Lipsyte before, but based on this work I would probably be inclined to pick up one of his previous works.

Here is a New York Review of Books, umm, review on 'The Ask' if you want a more official take on the novel.  I will say that if you like hijinks in academic settings, then another novel that I have read and highly recommend would be 'Lucky Jim' by Kingsley Amis.