The use of social geography in this Toyota ad in Time is interesting as a compound metaphorical representation of multiple spaces compressed into a single image. Here we have a space, the interior of a vehicle, which contains entertainment, domestic, storage, and play space. Van as “locations.” Van as abstract mapping of place “onto.”
Malcolm McCullough’s Digital Ground begins this way
How do you deal with yet another device? How does technology mediate your dealings with other people? When are such mediations welcome, and when are they just annoying? How do you feel about things that think, and spaces that sense? You don’t have to distrust technology to want it kept in its place.The new field of interaction design explores these concerns. The more that interactive technology mediates everyday experience, the more it becomes subject matter for design. Like the electric light that you are probably using to read this book, the most significant technologies tend to disappear into daily life. Some work without our knowing about them, and some warrant our occasional monitoring. Some require tedious operation, and others invite more rewarding participation, as in games, sports, or crafts. These distinctions are degrees of interactivity.
McCullough’s writing is quick, direct, precise, and reminds me of the writing of Yi Fu Tuan, who I would imagine influenced the writer’s content and considerations of human geography and ecology. It’s a hard book to put down thus far. I’m hooked.
In the Fall New Media Perspectives course we talked a lot about “degrees of interactivity” as a general criteria to describe not just new media but buildings and books. But here’s something of a nice, tight flavor as it concerns “new media”
Software engineers think they know what they mean by design, and so do architects. When information technology becomes a part of the social infrastructure, it demands design considerations from a broad range of disciplines. Social, psychological, aesthetic, and functional factors all must play a role in the design. Appropriateness surpasses performance as the key to technological success. Appropriateness is almost always a matter of context. We understand our better contexts as places, and we understand better design for places as architecture (3).
This sounds exactly what we’ve been talking, writing, and teaching about in New Media Communication.
This one’s for John Timmons and Bill Kluba
The use of the term interaction design instead of interface represents a cultural advance in the field . . . Interaction designers claim to know at least partly what is wrong with information technology, and that overemphasis on technical features and interface mechanics has been a part of the problem. By turning attention to how technology accumulates locally to become an ambient and social medium, interaction design brings this work more closely into alignment with the concerns of architecture (19).
It’s bulb, corm, and perennial planting day. I’m using Storyspace to “remember” the garden.
Then there’s Externality.
This from John is too interesting to leave in the comments section. He writes:
The term ‘topology’ has always intrigued me since it became a significant aspect of photography in the 1970s. We can think of the word as referring to the narrative of any given space: the effects of time on space. The topology of a story is speaking to the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ it came to be the way it is at the ‘present.’ The Little Red Cap project works at two levels: to remediate it from one form to another and also to record its topological evolution.
Then, while perusing the dictionary, this appeared: “The art of, or method for, assisting the memory by associating the thing or subject to be remembered with some place.” Is it also topology when we ask “*Where* have I known you before?” or “We’ll always have Paris.”?
I’d say that placing someone in time and space is always an “act of topological positioning” and an act of interpretation. Memory is a vast organic and dynamic database, thus also a dynamic storyspace, whose plot waits for the making. Links, paths, strands, and narrative all suggest mental and brain-organ space, I would think.
What does it take to put together a broken pot? No, the answer isn’t glue. In Cadre’s Photopia, readers in Contemporary Fiction fashioned the work according to colors, names, desires, inputs, and “x self.” This is the lingering text, the aura of what stayed in the mind.
Thanks John.
Here’s a portion of the Nightline transcript via Lexis. The speakers are Koppel and Stewart
TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) Different group of people, different narrative. That’s the slice, so what I’m trying to get to here is, what is going on that is different now with these literally, I don’t think it’s even hundreds anymore, there are maybe close to a thousand outlets here.
JON STEWART
It’s that, the partisan mobilization has become a part of the media process. That they’ve realized that, this real estate that you possess, television, is the most valuable real estate known to rulers. If Alexander the Great had TV, believe me, he would have had his spin guys dealing, you know, Napoleon would have had people working. The key to leadership is to have that mouthpiece to the people, and that’s what, and that’s what this is. You guys are, this is a battle for the airwaves. And that’s what we watch, and that’s what’s so, I think, dispiriting, to those at home, who believe that, I think, there’s a sense here that you’re not participating in that battle and there’s a sense at home watching it of you’re absolutely participating and complicit in that battle, in the sense of this.
TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) Go a little further, go a little further on that.
JON STEWART
I’m a news anchor. Remember, this is bizarro world. And I say, the issue is healthcare. And insurance, and why 40 million American kids don’t have insurance, 40 million Americans are uninsured. Is this health insurance program being debated in Congress good for the country? Let’s debate it. I have with me Donna Brazile and Bay Buchanan. Let’s go. Donna. I think the Democrats really have it right here. I think that this is a, a pain to the insurance companies and to the drug companies and I think it’s wrong for America. Bay. Oh, no, no, no. That’s incorrect. What it is is, and then she throws out her figures from the Heritage Foundation and she throws her figures from the Brookings Institute, and the anchor, who should be the arbiter of the truth says, thank you both very much. That was really interesting. No, it wasn’t. That was Coke and Pepsi talking about beverage truth. And that, that game is what has, I think, caused people to go, I’m not watching this.
JON STEWART
(Off Camera) All right, so you have found an answer, through humor …
JON STEWART
No. It’s not an answer.
TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) … no, well, a truth, an answer in the sense that through humor …
JON STEWART
I found an outlet. I found a catharsis, a sneeze, if you will.
TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) But it’s not just a catharsis for you, it’s a catharsis for your viewers. Those who watch say at least when I’m watching Jon, he can use humor to say, BS. You know, that’s a crock.
JON STEWART
But that’s always been the case. Satire has always been.
TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) Okay, but I can’t, I can’t do that.
JON STEWART
No. But you can say that’s BS. You don’t need humor to do it, because you have, what I wish I had. Which is credibility, and gravitas, this is interesting stuff. And it’s all part of the discussion, and I think it’s a good discussion to have, but I also think that it’s important to take a more critical look, you know? Don’t you think?
TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) No.
The example Stewart uses above is I think interesting and the point he makes at the end of the snip makes good sense. There’s also a sense of the confusing of basic questions: what is news, how should news people distinguish themselves from their guests, and how should they mold their questions for the benefit of a public who needs to know. Part of the context goes to the “purpose” of news as essential to information in a democracy. Satire in its way meets the need for truth gathering and analysis, but in media space where markets are competative, then info and opinion become commodities, and thus that info and opinion must be “styled” to gather and keep an audience. The purpose therefore changes when hundreds of markets are being created: from truth seeking, exposition, analysis to “taste” and “demagoguery.” News space to market space.
Yes, Ted Koppel could do his homework and cut through the BS, but then the liar wouldn’t come back onto the program, yet that would serve us well, I think. From the above it would seem too much to ask.
So much for Neptune’s rings.
An odd theater went down on Nightline yesterday. Ted Koppel was having a discussion with John Stewart of the Daily Show, Stewart getting lots of air time as the convention proceeds. I’m starting to look at JS with a keener eye and the conversation was intersting but strange. I’ll have the trnscript up soon to mark some areas of interest.
Mainly the issue was media, markets, and the nature of the Democratic Party Convention as presented via media outlets. On TGH, we’ve talked a lot about media, journalism, and media space. The Daily Show, hosted by John Stewart, really has an edge over mainstream media, such as ABC news or Nightline. Why? Because the show is satire, a rhetorical tradition that goes back thousands of years. One of it’s goals is to “reveal” or attack human weakness, excess, failure, and other things that “hide” behind the public mask. Consider A Modest Proposal in this light, Swift’s works meant to “reveal” through irony, hyperbole, and metaphor.
Stewart made an interesting point about the convention and about media programming, describing a typical “scene” on CNN as an example: 2 partisans come on stage and sell their “ideas” and the anchor or host dismisses them after their time with a “thank you for your views, an example that also describes Nightline (which didn’t seem to rub Koppel the right way). The point of the example is that “news” has become part of the narrative of the “selling” of opinion (and candidates) to audiences. Stewart’s criticism came down this way: “Why doesn’t the anchor or host tell the partisans that their both pedalling BS”?
More on this later. There are important point to be made here. Horace can help.
This really goes to the space issue, but I’ve been muddling over what needs knowing, especially since I’ll be teaching Shakespeare in the Fall and wish I didn’t have to include Midsummer in the reading list, but will anyway. (I’m not a great fan of the play, but so what?)
Big tv, same-sex marriage, Iraq, 9/11 report and its influence . . . issues in the radar.
But what should people, just the average me and you, really worry about?
That’s the question I can’t answer with a standard that doesn’t include “context” in the answer. But are there things that need to be known such that if they go unknown, ignored or missed the missing and he ignorance can have dangerous consequences?
In my mind, we have major issues with how we do politics in the institutional US, which may even include conversations over coffee, since coffee houses were invented “for” something. All space, all our circles of experience, has value if valued, used for a meaningful purpose and not a frivolous one. Is this what Turner is getting at below, really?
Aura describes a sort of horizon, a circle of definable space but whose detail and reach is ambiguous. In IF a room is structural device: we know we are in rooms, as in the space outside an Inn. This is a room, but it isn’t experienced as one. As noted, there is the suggestion of distance, a hint at an ability to penetrate, but what does the distance look like: is there a wood line, evening clouds, breaks in the snow. We have an Inn, a post, a few directions.
Aura is what we add to fill in the picture on our own, the spatial fill-ins we bring to the digital world.
I perceive a larger space because of the aural mix, the growl of engines, the screech of tires, the aggressiveness of the opponents machines rushing up, coming beside, or going past. This design gives an impression of behind, sideways, and ahead just as a silent window in a room gives a greater sense of perspective to an otherwise abrupt space.
In T.I.M.E. – Early American Anomalies a work of interactive fiction by Christopher Coonce-Ewing, the player is a history corrector whose mission is to prevent disturbances to the American time-line. As with most IF, the space of the world is designed in text and code, in this case TADS, rather than with graphics. The IF world is programmed into existence for functionality and usability on the computer and the player/reader must engage the world with simple commands, such as go north, and interact with objects in the environment to ascertain an objective. Interaction with the space of IF can lead to multiple readings of a narrative and multiple re-readings depending on the choices a reader/player makes.
Here is an example of such a designed area from Coonce-Ewings work, the initial Chamber area
The Chamber
This is the T.I.M.E transport room, called ‘The Chamber’ by those who work here. The room is stark with harsh light falling from the ceiling. The far wall is a curtain of shimmering quicksilver.
Sitting on the metal table is a mission briefing, a temporal timepiece, and a silver coin.
.Here the stark Chamber avoids topographic vividness in its description for practical, we might call them kairic reasons. The description or placement of objects in the room is more kin to an architectural blueprint or a 2 (I could even argue 3 dimensional) map than a typical description in fiction. The room has orienting depth and stretch. The quicksilver wall is at a distance from the position of the first person player yet the position of the table is indefinite. Thus the rooms topology is amorphous. The room may or may not be square. The player thus orients to the objects in an amorphous Chamber but can gather some spatial orientation via the description of place and position.
In another area inside the primary world of the game where most things happen, we confront a different textual design of (digital) space.
Outside the Inn
You are currently outside an Inn, in what looks like the early evening. A light snow covers the ground. The wooden sign creaks in the gentle evening breeze. A lone hitchpost (currently unused) stands in front of the Inn. The road goes north and south, the Inn is to the east and a field of corn to the west. The sounds of people come from inside the inn.
Interestingly, in this space we have aura and object. The aura comes from early evening. The objects are the hitching post, Inn, the road and the wooden sign just to name a few, and not to mention the object that the reader has to probe for. Aura and object form a part of the space here, but a sense of distance forms an added shape to the written world. North is distance. Distance allows for the ability to move, which is what the reader will perhaps do. In fiction, north may simply provide a sense of direction (an orienting point) or placement, but in IF north is orientation, placement, and penetrative or a path through or into. North says you can go there.
Today’s supreme court ruling comes as no surprise to me. Legal space, like a fog, will and should extend into the legal issues around warfare. This is essay at SSI (links to pdf) has some relation, but I’d claim two issues:
1. The supreme issue today about war is not how to fight, but when to fight.
2. Defining war is also key to number one: here the war simulation is relevant. I don’t think you can have a war on terrorism, which is part of the locus of the court’s ruling against the administration. There is a spatial question here. War is a circle (theater) and a modus and a force. But how to define it from the point of view of al Qaeda?