Elevate me!

I had a delightful experience today using an elevator in a recently-opened building. Like many modern elevators, this one included voice annunciation to call out each floor. But unlike many automated voicemail systems hereabouts, this one seemed to have an accent somewhat uncommon here in North America--to my untrained ears at least, it sounded like Scottish English.

Which of course, is a lovely opportunity to share a bit of gratuitous elevator humour, from the Scottish comedy show, Burnistoun:

Meditation on mediation

All this talk on mediation of late has me thinking about, well, mediation. Beyond media ecology, mediation has meaning in the world of negotiation. But is media-mediation so different than negotiation-mediation?

Sherry Turkle's TED talk Alone Together includes a brief mention of the problem of communication technology addiction: that the metaphor of addiction is inappropriate because the only way to deal with addiction is to stop using that 'substance' and that's something no one is seriously going to do with our modern communications networks such as the Internet, social networks, or smartphones.

"These technologies are our current partners in the human adventure. The notion of addiction with its one solution that we know we won't take makes us feel hopeless and passive," Turkle says.

While our smartphones might be packed jam-full of gee-whiz apps and capabilities, they aren't actually smart in the way a sentient being is smart. Yet I wonder whether using negotiation tools such as BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Settlement) and ZOPA (Zone Of Possible Agreement) might be useful in assessing and negotiating the type of relationship we want to have with our technologies?

We're a long way from our technologies being 'smart' in the sense of having a personal say in this negotiation yet these technologies do mediate our interaction with others across all spheres, including professional and personal. Is navigating technology enough, or do we need to be active negotiators?

Mediated life: digital afterlife

An entertaining and surprisingly (disturbingly?) familiar look at what the future might entail:

Who upgrades the upgraders?

Mediated writing: the writing ball is a thing like me

Nietzsche was famously noted to change his writing style as he adopted a mechanical typewriter instead of writing longhand or dictating to an assistant. The typewriter mediated--changed--the way he communicated, a change rejected by Heidegger as unwanted.

Nietzsche even wrote a short poem for his 'writing ball':

The Writing Ball is a thing just like me: of iron
And yet easy to twist, especially on journeys.
Patience and tact one must richly possess
And fine little fingers to use us.

Schreibkugel ist ein Ding gleich mir: von Eisen
Und doch leicht zu verdrehn zumal auf Reisen.
Geduld und Takt muss reichlich man besitzen
Und feine Fingerchen, uns zu benuetzen.

Underscoring some of the vagaries and quirks of the machines themselves, Hammacher Schlemmer's description of the typewriter they sell is absolutely marvellous:

The Wordsmith's Manual Typewriter.
This is the manual typewriter that recalls the thoughtful, well-written correspondence of yesteryear. Devoid of technological crutches such as spell-check and deletion, each of its 44 keys requires a firm, purposeful stroke for a steady click-clacking cadence that encourages the patient, considered sentiment of a wordsmith who thinks before writing. Using a 10-characters-per-inch Pica 87 font, it faithfully reproduces the eclectic printed impressions of its forebears—variable kerning, subtly ghosted letters, and nuanced baseline shifts—imparting unique, personal character to every letter, piece of prose, or verse of poetry. Updated with a lightweight yet durable ABS housing and carrying case for easy portability.

... and of course, don't forget that unlike word processing software, users must use a double-space after the monospaced period.

Mediated art: Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing (1972), an engaging series by John Berger, opens with a look at how mass reproduction of paintings mediates a different relationship with a painting than a person seeing the same item in its original environment, whether on a moveable substrate such as canvas or as part of a particular building.

The first part of the first episode is here:

The notions discussed in the first episode are credited to an essay by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935).

The series' content is fascinating, but so too is the meta of the medium, seen from a 2013 perspective.

Berger explains what we're viewing both for what's in a shot as well as how the shot is being broadcast and the ways the medium changes the content of what we're viewing. This meta-narrative is deliberate: Berger is making visible aspects of viewing we often fail to notice or forget is present.

The precise framing and carefully choreographed camera movement of each piece seems sedate compared to typical video today. Our gaze is directed at each step, and only late in the episode is music introduced for a particular purpose that further aides in mediating the meaning and experience of the images we view.

Colour is also intriguing. Berger as narrator stands in front of a blue screen that only serves as a backdrop that contrasts reasonably well with his clothes and skin, not as part of special effects. The final credits also point out that the item is BBC Colour, further reminding viewers of today that colour wasn't necessarily a universal given in video or film footage.

The opening title is static over footage of television production equipment: no swooping animations or other visual noise (... but for the sake of reminiscing, here's a nifty Flash re-build of several historical television logos). Paintings are depicted without additional title overlays: we need to listen to Berger's narration to know what we're viewing if we don't already recognise the painting.

Additionally, the opening includes a selection from Dziga Vertov's film, The Man With a Camera, ground-breaking in many ways that could appear quite familiar to modern audiences. Vertov's full-length film is also available here in a re-scored (1996) edition:

Some of these things might not be like the other

The other day I watched a TED talk by Pattie Maes on a technology dubbed 'SixthSense'. The video is here:

It's an interesting concept, but one part of the presentation troubled me: the comment about a user possibly preferring to purchase a product that was not as "ecologically responsible" as some other product. Would a technology like this actually allow us to know which product was most 'ecologically responsible' or would it merely re-iterate corporate greenwashing?

Bad omen

I'm in the market for a lightweight, portable keyboard for all the usual reasons someone who actually knows how to touch type might not want to deal with the frustrations of the on-screen keyboard on iOS devices. While the Mac wireless keyboard works perfectly fine, it's a lot larger and a bit heavier than I want to carry.

Imagine my happiness at finding what appeared to be a tiny, compact board with actual, pressable keys. Over the years, I've successfully worked with keyboards so small that the home row could be adequately demonstrated by simply placing your fingertips in a line, touching together. On that board, due to the extreme compact placement of keys, I had to slow down a bit, but I could achieve between 40-60 wpm, with excellent accuracy.

A well-designed small board has well-demarcated keys (often called a Chiclet keyboard, after the candy-coated chewing gum). A well-designed keyboard has keys in places that make sense--commonly used items such as punctuation shouldn't be assigned to some apparently random place.

The first clue that my newest acquisition might not be up to the task was the simple question of how much does it weigh? Carefully inspecting the package provided no enlightenment. Expecting the manual to contain this information, the store manager helped me to open the package: nope, nothing. The manager went online and managed to find a product specification sheet, not linked here because I can't find it anywhere--the website has minimal information on the product specs.

In any case, the product specs she found and gave me to me on hardcopy included all the typical information of description, reorder number, pack size, brand, system requirements, compatibility, etc. The bad omen arises when you see the answer to my question about the product weight.

This answer is a classic blunder, one that's shown up in some fairly spectacular examples. As you know, we get fabulous data about Mars regularly from the Mars Climate Orbiter. Wait--you don't remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? Maybe you remember this: it didn't get to Mars, at least, not in one piece, possibly not even in particularly tiny pieces thanks to disintegrating. Why might that happen, you wonder? A simple problem--the spacecraft operated on metric, while the ground-based software back on Earth operated in Imperial. When it comes to manouevring, this discrepancy is disastrous.

According to the keyboard specifications, the weight is 7.23 oz (3.28 kg). I don't use ounces, but I understand they're pretty light. I do, however, use kilograms and something that weighs more than three of them is pretty hefty. One kilogram is one thousand grams, and one gram is about the weight of a paperclip. Google's conversion feature shows that 7.23 oz should be nearly 205 paperclips, which feels about right.

Despite being much lighter than claimed on the specification sheet, I won't be keeping this keyboard. Again, the whole point of having a keyboard is so that a touch-typist can, well, touch-type. After giving it a thorough workout, it's clear that the problems go far beyond merely getting used to a new board. These problems are not surmountable simply by continuing to use it--fundamental design problems make the board no better than the problems that already exist using built-in iOS on-screen keyboards. Others have reviewed the downsides of this item at length, I'll just add that given the strange position of the spacebar relative to the letter keys, I have to wonder whether the designers themselves actually know how to type.