Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Subversive GPS

I really liked this story of the Swedish couple who typed "Carpi" into their GPS when they meant to type "Capri".  Thanks to all those who tipped me off right away -- it's nice to have friends who know what you like.  The couple stopped at a tourist office in Carpi asking where the Blue Grotto was, not knowing that they were about 400 miles off course.  The stories I've read didn't give much detail as to what happened next, but one can imagine the astonished expressions, and then either some laughter or maybe some cursing.  What saddened me a little about the end of the story was the report that when the couple realized their mistake they got back in their car and headed south.  I would have liked to read about these adventurers saying "Carpi?  Who knew?  What's here? Let's go explore!"  I've never been to Carpi, which sadly is being characterized as a Northern Italian Industrial Town, but I'm sure there's much more to it than that.  Every place is brimming with secrets and delights.  I bet there's a nice cathedral and a fantastic place to have lunch.  I understand there's a large and attractive piazza there as well.  When I was on the radio last week (CBC's The Current) talking about the influence of GPS on our understanding of space, this is exactly the kind of thing we were discussing -- the risk that we can become slaves to the machine and so miss out on the pleasures of becoming lost.  So when the machine fails us (or in this case we fail to serve the machine as it demands) we can meet disaster.  But on vacation, getting lost is not a disaster!  It's the goal!  So I wonder -- is there a justification for a kind of subversive GPS system that messes with you a little?  I can imagine a machine that drawls in a voice a bit like HAL in Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001", "Dave, I don't think you really want to go this way.  Why not try it like this?  Let's just sneak down this little avenue and see what's at the end?  Trust me, Dave, I will lead you astray in the most delightful way."  Maybe not a huge market for a toy like this, but I'd line up for it.  But then, I've lined up for an hour for a cupcake. And also, why not imbue the GPS with personality?  Sure, you can customize the voice, but what about using a little AI to go beyond voice.  Imagine:  "would you care for the sprightly, playful unit or the strong and insistent model?"  If you and your partner are going to have a techno-menage-a-trois in your car, you ought to be able to conduct interviews.

Electronic porches

I've been thinking about porches a lot this week.  One reason for this is because ours is tiny, inadequate, almost unusable as a social space in part because part the house's original porch has been co-opted as entirely needed mudroom space (when we built this space, I had this grand delusion that we would be able to use it as a nice hybrid indoor/outdoor space).  I'd conveniently forgotten that six children each need to have 14 pairs of shoes.  84 shoes don't leave much space for front yard levees.  But I digress.).  The conclusion of our own recent porch discussion was that we can't afford a new porch, so we're lucky that we have friendly neighbours with a beautiful porch and we'll just have to share with them or, if they don't feel like having us all loll on their comfy furniture then we'll have to encourage them to go on vacation a lot (they're really nice neighbours so I suspect this will all somehow work out).

As these things seem to go, as soon as you start thinking about something, the whole world suddenly seems to rotate around it.  So on Friday night, while visiting a more distant neighbour with a beautiful set of Victorian porches, upper and lower, we were talking about how her porches were crumbling and becoming unsafe.  The bill for repair would be almost as high as building a new modest little house, so they're in a holding pattern right now.  But she told me something about her porches that I'd never thought about before.  The lower porch, she said, was a great place to sit to participate in the social life of the street.  People walking by would notice you, wander up and chat, perhaps even sit with you.  The upper porch was more private and intimate.  It was a great place to sit and observe the life of the street while at the same time being a bit more inaccessible -- announcing with that bit of extra distance and elevation that your eyes were on the street but your soul was feeling a bit more private.  Multiple porches as a way of spatially regulating your on-the-street social life.  Very clever.

Yesterday I was reading Avi Friedman's fantastic little book Room for Thought.  This is a collection of marvellous essays about domestic spaces and influences of the city plan on social life, among other things.  In one essay he bemoaned the absence of porch life in certain kinds of homes and neighbourhoods, and he argued that our electronic lives have taken the place of our porches.  I'm not sure I agree completely with that statement, but it does make it interesting to reflect on different types of social networking tools and upper and lower porches.  In Facebook, for example, unless you take the time to tweak settings a little bit, the default is a lower porch.  Anyone you've previously befriended can wander up, take a look, and see via a little green dot whether you're on the porch.  If you are, they can not only peek in your windows but they can ping you with a bit of chat.  A Twitter account seems to me a bit more like an upper porch.  Except by prior habits of use and a bit of guesswork, nobody can really tell when you're on the porch looking out.  You can sit and watch the passing parade or, if you're so inclined, you can lean over the porch and holler out.  In face-to-face social life, we use a rich palette of body-based cues to signal our availability and focus of attention.  In electronic social networking, the rules are very different.  Our presence, though I'd argue no less real, is ephemeral and very highly mediated.  

I'm not letting go of my book

I'm really trying not to obsess too much on the imminent release of my first book, but it's an odd feeling to understand that a set of thoughts and ideas you've spent so long with is about to be frozen in time, stamped onto paper and sent out into the world.  I know there's nothing new and noteworthy about these feelings - it's all been said before.

But here's something fresher.  With the help of some tech-savvy friends and a fantastic electronic marketing guru at HarperCollins named Cory Beatty, I think I may have come up with a way to never have to completely let go of my book.  Details are still coming together (but doing so very nicely I think), but the most important part of it is that if you buy my book, or even pick it up in the store to have a look, you'll discover that it contains a somewhat cryptic link to me.  If you happen to have a cellphone with a camera, you'll be able to point it at my book, the physical thing, the dead lump of paper and ink, and make instantaneous contact with me.  It's honestly not that complicated an idea, but it still seems like magic to me and I'm still working through all of the implications.

If you read this blog, you know that there's open commenting and that if you decide to chime in and say something to me then you can do so.  It doesn't happen very often, but the opportunity is always there.  But you also know that there's a funny sense in which this blog doesn't really exist anywhere.  You can call it up to your screen as a bunch of electrons whenever you like, and then you can make it vanish just as quickly. 

A book is a different kind of object.  When this thing goes out, there will be lots of identical copies of my words that will (I hope!) land in all sorts of wondrous places.  Some will sit on nightside tables.  Some will travel on buses and trains.  Some will be used to prop up unsteady legs of rickety tables.  The big difference is that there will be no way to click on a button and make these books disappear in a flash (though a few may end up tossed into fires -- maybe during wet camping trips in Algonquin park when the kindling runs low).  I don't know why this fascinates me more than the fact that I never really know who is reading my online words at any point in time (though I do have a few tools to track this).  Somehow, though, the physical book makes a more intimate connection to me, perhaps only because it is more difficult to bring into and to remove from existence.  So given that feeling of intimate connection between me and these physical copies of my thoughts, I'm tickled to death to think that each copy contains (on its back), a special little Shazam code that can be used to call the mothership.  If you use the code, you and I will be connected.  You can talk to me if you want to.  Or just listen.  Or maybe even win some kind of a prize.

The Macintosh of maps?

It was a happy coincidence that on a long flight from Hong Kong I stumbled upon an article in the International Herald Tribune  about location tracking that was so much up my alley that a slightly more sleep-deprived and jet-lagged traveler might have suspected he was being set up by some shadowy Matrix manipulator.  The first part of the article argued that there is an avalanche of new location-based applications for smart phones -- which is true.  And there's a suggestion that Google's new Latitude service will be a powerful force in the commercialization of location information.  Too soon to tell.  My fumbling efforts with Latitude left me less than thrilled, but conditions were not ideal -- I was struggling with a GPS logger bluetoothed to my smartphone -- according to my tech advisor on all things GPS this is a recipe for bewildering hocus pocus that may or may not work and either way you'll never really know why.

It's fairly obvious why a comprehensive database describing where people go and what they do there (=what they buy there) could be of interest to those in the business of doing business, though given that only 10% of people use phone maps, there's a bit of market penetration that has to happen first.

But for me the most interesting and perplexing part of this somewhat scattered article had to do with the argument that map-based applications like this are so powerful because the human brain has some kind of natural affinity for map-based information.  Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO is quoted as suggesting that "Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective" which given my own bias that humans are pretty middling navigators took me a bit by surprise.  I've always believed that an important contributor to the geo-everything fascination is the fact that most of us spend much of our lives not really knowing where the heck we are.  There's just something deeply fascinating about being able to use a little chunk of electronics linked up to space satellites to follow one's own movements through large scale space with the same precision that a desert ant calls on to find its way home across a wide span of desert.  Sure, we have maps in our heads, but they're not much like Google Maps.  They're more like squishy sheets of rubber with a quirky labelling system that sometimes works well and at other times causes us to make the most astonishing errors.

So yes I think there's something deeply interesting about our love affair with mapping, location-based services, GPS, geotagged photographs and all the rest of it, but I don't think that what's happening is that all of this technology is awakening some slumbering set of powerful navigational abilities in us.  On the contrary, I think it is all so interesting because it is giving us access to a precise toolkit for locating ourselves that's very much akin to what some other animals possess but nothing like what we use to limp around in space.

Paul Mercer, another source for the article suggests, intriguingly, that the great mapping interface, the Macintosh of Maps, akin to the Windows breakthrough for personal computing, has yet to be made.  The idea that there may be some powerful, intuitive map based interface that will revolutionize our use of handheld devices to connect with the physical world kept me awake for the first few hours of my flight.  Imagine if substantial numbers of us lived in a kind of perpetual state of spatial attunement to one another and to the world in which, without a second thought, we always knew which way to turn and how far to walk or drive to connect with someone we knew (or didn't) or with some kind of resource.  I imagined spending my waking hours wired into some kind of ambient computing device that placed me on a map with everything I cared about.  If substantial numbers of us had that kind of connection to place, how much would change?

Annotating space with augmented reality

Following my discovery of QR tags, I'm continuing to wander down the road of bleeding edge technological developments that will influence not only the way that we find our way through space but also how we connect with locations and the things that they contain.  With the advent of cheap and accurate GPS and accelerometry and the continued development of sophisticated mobile computing for the everyday user, the possibilities are quite staggering.  As if I wasn't excited enough yesterday by the development of an entire store full of QR tagged merchandise related to my forthcoming book, I now discover the remarkable Enkin:

Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

Imagine it. You're out on the street in a new city, hopelessly lost. Pull out your camera phone and point it at the closest building. The fun here would be that not only could the device tell you where you are (which a simple GPS device could already handle easily), but it could be used to provide annotation. A simple application would be something like a cyber-walking tour, but much more fun could be had by embedding something like this within an extended augmented reality game. Location-based games are already nicely underway in some quarters, but this seems like a way to jack up the graphics content of such games to make a more compelling hybrid of the real and the virtual.

Cyber-geotagging

Plans for some fun activities connected with the launch of my book are now beginning to ramp up, so I've been spending a fair bit of my time this week poking my nose into some new (to me) tech areas.  I've been looking for excuses to spend time with the avalanche of new interest and applications relating to geo-tagging and GPS for some time now, and my chance, happily has come.  I've even managed to astonish some of my tech-savvy children with my new found expertise-- something that doesn't happen every day.

Much more to come on this in the days ahead, but my most interesting find of the day has been the QR code.  Somewhere in the back closets of my muddled brain, I knew about these things, but I had no idea that they were a. so easy to generate, b. so easy to read, and c. so potentially powerful as a means of connecting real places to the cyberlandscape.  So here's a quick primer:

1.  If you have a camera phone with a web browser, start by going here

www.i-nigma.mobi

to download a nifty piece of software that will allow you to read QR codes.  Test by reading this:

Just run the software, point your camera at this image, and amaze your friends.  If you'd like to generate your own QR codes, it's just as easy.  Go here:

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Can you see how much fun could be had with this?  For some reason this simple technology for joining the mobile web to real world objects seems uncommon here, yet is more widely used in other parts of the world.

Many thanks to my friend Richard, who is leading me, not so much kicking and screaming, into cool new hardware and software territory these days. 

 

New website

At long last I have a proper website.

Social Cyber-Segregation

I've been playing with social networks over the past few months, thinking a bit about how a network of cyber-friends compares with friends in real space.  One of the most interesting things about these networks is that physical distance disappears completely, which is a part of the point -- we don't have to be together to be together -- but I think what interests me more  is the all-or-none-ness of that togetherness.  In real life, I have close friends whom I would tell essentially anything, work colleagues whom I would tell certain things, and acquaintances whom I would tell much less. Unless I'm missing something (possible...I haven't really looked under the hood of these applications as much as I'd like), it's hard to make these subtle distinctions on most  social networks.  There is the capacity to send private messages, but other than that there's no real way to  set up different "levels" of friendship***.  It's as if my Facebook friends, no matter where they came from, are all in the same room with me, all of the time.  And unless I decide to completely seal the vault, my Tweets are available to all who stumble by.  At a deep psychological level, I think that's part of the appeal.  These networks may be satisfying cravings for something we've lost -- more about that another day.  I think there may also be a certain little thrill -- a cybernetic frisson of something like exhibitionism that comes from putting something out there, sometimes something deeply personal, while surrendering control of the audience.  I think there are also reasons for an increase in that urge--again perhaps a topic for another day.

For me, these distinctions between different levels of cyber-intimacy have mostly come into sharp relief with family members -- my children in particular.  Three of my children have Facebook accounts, but I'm only friends with one of them.  I see photos of her with friends at parties. She sees my idiotic status updates.  I hardly ever look at her pages  (unless I'm worried about her) and what strikes me is how much, when I go there, it feels like days when we were all younger when, struck with the same kind of parental concern, I'd go for a wander through her room.  Not prying, opening drawers, reading diaries, but just taking a little tour, looking at the topmost layer, seeing what books she had out, what photos she had been looking at.  Getting--essentially--a status update.

Before cyberspace, we managed our connections with people largely by artful arrangement of time, space, and physical walls.  Now, with the expression "behind closed doors" becoming less and less meaningful, we seem as though we're all on the way to putting ourselves into a gigantic auditorium where all voices can be heard at the same time, and every awkward moment, panic attack, angry outburst, and pathetic sob can be witnessed by all.  Sometimes I think there's something wonderful about that, but I wonder whether we should be spending more time thinking about the electronic equivalents of walls and doors, how they might be made to work in cyberspace not so much to send our kids to their rooms (which is now almost impossible to do anyway), as to actually facilitate human engagement by putting the walls just where and when they're needed.

I don't want to see my kid drinking beer at a club, but it is nice to have another way to find out whether she's ok.

***UPDATE:  Now that I've skulked off to my office on a holiday Monday to have a better look at some Facebook features, I stand corrected.  In fact, for certain kinds of content on Facebook (photographs for instance) it is possible to tweak exactly who sees your content, so it is theoretically possible to sculpt one's public persona.  It's interesting, though, that a brief browse through the photo collections of people I DON'T know suggests to me that this might not be done very often.  Interesting that the default condition is to allow photos to be visible to all.  What is this saying?

Extreme texting

I can't even think of much to add to this story, other than to say that perhaps like GPSers crashing into trains and urban tourists wandering into jungles, texters on horseback are perhaps more evidence that our minds are so spatially disconnected from our real locations that sometimes we seem to have no clue how ridiculous, dangerous, or even lethal this can be.

The future of reading

The chatter is increasing about the influence of new technologies on the basics of how we read and otherwise parse information.  This article, justifiably, is receiving a lot of attention.  The premise is that our exposure to Internet technologies, and the alternative methods they give us for gathering information, may actually be changing the structure of human cognition, giving us what Cory Doctorow called an "outboard brain."  Now, the New York Times is chiming in with an in-depth series on the future of reading beginning with an article written by Motoko Rich (free registration with NY Times required to read this) and published this past weekend.

There are many important issues to be worked out here, and the articles linked above serve as a pretty good primer for some of them.  As an educator and a scholar, I find much to like in the recent exponential rise in the availability of good quality information in digital form.  In some ways, my job has become much easier.   In the past few years, the direction of my research has undergone a radical shift -- I've had to try to imbibe entirely new areas of knowledge in a dizzyingly short period of time.  I know there are gaping holes in my knowledge base, but I also know how to fill them quickly and efficiently from my desktop (which can be anywhere ranging from my office at the university to my backyard Muskoka chair to (much to the disgust of my little son and boon companion in "bear country") a twinkling smart phone beside a campfire.  As the Times article points out, with the loss of the careful editorial control of content that happens in the chaotic Internet, we've learned to rely on the rules of swarm intelligence to assess the patency of what we read.  Wikipedia, for all of its warts and wrinkles, seems to me to be right more often than it is wrong.  When 10 different websites say much the same thing, one can be ever so slightly more confident that one is at least circling the neighbourhood of a "fact".

One of the main criticisms of the Internet Information Age has to do with its potential to erode our span of attention and this, to me, seems like a more serious concern.  I had a short e-chat with a textbook editor friend of mine last week about this, and she felt that it had become more difficult for her to immerse herself deeply in text.  I feel the same tug of resistance to this kind of immersion myself.  When I read a novel, I often do so with a notebook computer close at hand so that I can both write notes to myself and check facts or follow up on random ideas, as I read.  I can't remember the last time I became so immersed in a book that I lost track of space and time, yet I know this used to happen to me on a regular basis.

On the weekend, Karen and I visited the Stratford Festival to take in a production of Taming of the Shrew.  When we heard that the running time was just shy of three hours, we both blanched a bit, yet this is not the least bit unusual for a Shakespeare production.  Looking around the half-filled auditorium, it was hard not to notice that the demographic spectrum of the audience tilted toward the aged, in spite of the aggressive marketing of the festival designed to bring under-18s into the auditorium.  Is full scale live theatre also a victim of the electronic age?  As I sat through what turned out to be a pretty solid production of an interesting play, I found myself struggling to maintain attention at times.  This never used to happen to me.

The night after our theatre expedition, I sat in our large family room and looked around at all of us--together in the same room yet each in their own space.  Only my four year old son lay on the floor immersed in a book (well, an Archie comic still counts....).  The rest of us stared at screens.  I tried an experiment.  I pulled a copy of Oliver Twist from the shelf (significantly, purchased at least five years ago and yet unopened until Saturday) and began to read aloud.  Soon, I had a litter of children at my feet (Karen too), lying on the carpet each with one ear facing me.  After a couple of chapters, I stopped, fearing that everyone was asleep.  One little head popped up, and then another.  My teenaged daughter, Jessica, asked "Can we read more tomorrow, Dad?"  It might not happen--we might not get through the whole book any time soon--but it was great to think that it might be possible.