reassembling information - part 2a

Last week I suggested that our relentless fragmentation of information had perhaps eroded our sense of the whole. That filtering the information we want piece by piece is all very well, but that we could be in danger of losing 'thingyness' to wrap it all up in.

I must confess, I'm a little nervous about setting up this second part as though I have the answers. I don't. In fact, I've barely begun to grapple with this and the following will be riddled with holes and contradictions.

What I do have is some questions, a metaphor I rather like and a comments button, which I would love you to click.

Turns out I had more to say than I thought, so I've broken it into four parts:

i. Thingyness
ii. The mountain & the raindrop
iii. Reassembly
iv. Efficiency vs value


i. Thingyness

“The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.”

Those are the words of Richard Dawkins. He was referring to the physical world, but it's a good place to start. Because whether physical or otherwise, humans need to apply 'thingyness' to handle all the information around them.
Whether it's a man-made name or a cluster of atoms, the same thing is true: We can only tame the world with a sense of thingyness to solidify the endless data. This is put a little more eloquently on the inside cover of Michael Frayn's The Human Touch:

"[Mankind] has had to fashion from its transitory contacts a comprehensible world in which action was possible."

ii. The mountain & the raindrop
In discussing what makes a 'thing', Dawkins refers to The Matterhorn and a raindrop as examples of permanence and commonality, respectively. The Matterhorn is as permanent as anything you're likely to encounter. And raindrops, while short in lifespan, fall reliably enough to require a consistent label.

The mountain and the raindrop represent the two extremities of thingyness, from the "ok, we're stuck with it" to the "it's gone - oh here comes another."



When we move from the physical world to the digital world, the basic principals of thingyness remain: Lots of information, organised into human-facing 'things'. The key difference with thingyness digitally, is the concept of permanence. The internet - anything pixel-based, really - is generally more raindrop than it is mountain. (Bit of poetic license here - Amazon and Google are mountains in lots of ways)
The transient nature of digital thingyness is set up nicely by these words by Frayn:

“[…] the world is shaped by the traffic that passes between us and it in that one single shifting instant. From that tiny blur of contact we have constructed the universe and ourselves.”

And millions of people spend most of their days trading in fleeting digital raindrops - each one helping to shape that moment. From the vastness of the internet we filter tiny droplets of information we like and spray them out again in new clusters.

The result of this culture is that the type of information we seek out changes. We snack. We peck away at tiny pieces of larger thoughts and longer articles rarely get a look in, as Matt Webb discusses during his piece on Peak Attention. Is putting these pieces back together part of the answer? Does everything need to be chopped into chapters?

It seems appropriate that I should now say: To be continued... tomorrow probably.

pdf to mp3?

God, I'm on fire today.

I tell you what we need, a bit of software (of course) that turns pdfs and word docs into mp3s/podcasts. I've still got Faris' IPA thesis to read, but it's 60 bloody pages. I can't read it on-screen and I feel slightly guilty about using the printer where I'm freelancing for that much paper.

Anything out there that can do that?... Faris, maybe you could read it out Willie Rushton-style and record it..

digital recycling

I think most intelligent people would agree that there's way too much stuff in the world. Too much marketing, too much choice - and more specifically, too much repetition. We've become more sensitive about all this for several reasons. Climate issues have caused us to demonize physical excess (packaging and waste) and our ability to flit effortlessly between alternative content online has heightened our awareness of unnecessary digital repetition.

There's good news though.

Recently, Open Social has promised to demolish the brickwork around so-called walled gardens, meaning programmers only need to build one version of their applications, mobile phone manufacturers have agreed to standardize power plugs and wiki-apps have allowed us to work together on single documents rather than create a dozen versions. I also like Zeus Jones' cheeky website - which hijacks existing services, rather than building a new interface to talk about itself.

And why not? Must everyone that wants attention create something entirely new? It seems crazy. (Although it didn't stop Microsoft from creating Virtual Earth and doubling up on thousands of man-hours of programming started by Google)

I've been obsessed with this idea of digital/cultural recycling for a long time and just came across a wonderful example. It seems fitting that I stole it without asking from Nathan. It's called Recaptcha.


Recaptcha cleverly uses the human input needed for security Captchas to digitise books. Brilliant. Here's a better explanation of how Recaptcha works.

There is huge potential for this kind of thing. When millions of people are tapping away at computers every day: filling in forms, clicking links, forwarding emails, there is energy and effort that can easily be re-used if we're smart about it.

Has anyone got any other good examples of this kind of thing? I'd love to hear them and it saves me from sitting here trying to think of hypothetical ones.

The Reality

Continuing to debate what is 'virtual' and what is 'real' these days is about as worthwhile as watching the third installment of The Matrix. Unless of course you want to lose yourself in a philosophical bog that by comparison will make Keanu Reeve's performances seem like an uplifting escape.

More and more examples of this blur between the physical and the otherwise pop up every week. The most fascinating - and remarkably simple - I came across recently was This Spartan Life.


This Spartan Life is a chat show like no other.
Damian Lacedaemion meets his guests, not in person, but within a live, networked game of Halo.

Instead of a casual chat on a couch, the interview is conducted as they hurtle around, returning enemy fire and hijacking tanks. The other players are unaware an interview is going on as they attempt to gun down our host in mid-flow.
This is a unique way to meet and converse with someone, but somehow makes total sense. These are the places we spend time, so they make as good a meeting place as any.

Another success story is Jennifer Grinnell, furniture delivery dispatcher by day, in-game fashion designer by night. Her shop exists in Second Life, where she sells her designs to the various characters that inhabit that world.


Grinnell's success as a pixel stylist meant she could quit her day job to pursue it full time - earning more money in her Second Life boutique than she did selling physical items.

Property is another money maker. One gamer got himself in the news by spending thirteen grand on an island in 'Project Entropia'. He has since made his money back leasing parts of it to other digital entrepreneurs.


It's all getting a bit serious really. Qiu Chengwei, the man who murdered a fellow gamer for selling his "virtual dragon saber" (hmmm) will probably agree as he sits out the rest of his life sentence, having exchanged his MSN buddy list for a cell-full of rapists.

Sorry Qiu, that sensation is most definitely real.