Colin Ellard - You Are Here

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?

Sacred Cambodia

I'm keen to soak up a little more of Singapore today, as my trip is waning now to a matter of hours and I still have a few more things on my list.  But while they're fresh in my mind, I wanted to get down a couple of thoughts.  One of the main reasons I wanted to come to Cambodia was to see at Angkor the design of ancient architectural spaces in Asia.  I'm a beginner at understanding the influences of culture on how we build buildings and cities, but I know enough to understand that there are some key differences between what could work in a European or North American setting, and what works here.  That's just as true in a spanking new city like Singapore where it isn't that easy to find any old neighbourhoods now as it is in places that retain more of the traces of their early origins.  I know that some of these kinds of differences stem from religious beliefs and other kinds of societal influences -- relationships between the sexes almost always play a large part in the organization of spaces ranging in size from the house to the city.  But I also think that some of the differences in how the world is perceived may contribute to built forms.  Some psychological experiments have shown differences in how Asian people use visual attention, for example, as they seem to have an ability to de-focus, become more attuned to context, than modern North Americans, for example, who are burdened with an almost painful laser beam focus on the glimpse of the moment.  I think that one way this manifests itself in ancient religious architecture in Asia is the careful wedding of site and plan.  One big element of this is the organization of a building, its corridors, roofs, openings, and stairways, with astronomical dimensions, such as the path of the sun, but there also seems to be a more subtle and natural fit between the location of a temple and the shape and appearance of the landscape.  Even though much must have changed in the thousand years since these temples were built and when I'm seeing them, there's still an obvious, natural, and intuitive fit between the design of a temple and its setting.

My other off-the-cuff observation was that, again, though I'm certain that the appearances of the buildings and their ornamentation as can be seen now must be vastly different from when they were teeming with hundreds of thousands of busy Khmer, it's still not hard to feel the power of the spaces.  The perfect alignments, the long, straight walls of bas-relief oriented in such a way that an observer walking past them feels a divine juxtaposition of story and place is, I'm certain, no less powerful now than in its heyday.  Along with the potency of the spaces I found a marvelous clarity to them.  Unlike a shopping mall or a suburban neighbourhood, I never felt lost for a second in these temples.  The combination of symmetry, order, logic, and careful arrangement of sightlines from one place to another and to the outdoors made it easy for me to keep track.  This came foremost to mind when at one point my tuk-tuk driver dropped me off at the western gate of a large temple and suggested he meet me at the eastern gate to save me some walking time.  I told him I'd rather he wait where I left him so that I'd have a better chance of finding him again -- an idea that filled him with loud and embarrassing mirth.  After an hour wandering and crouching through every tiny hidden chamber of this massive place and never once losing a strong sense of the cardinal directions, I understood why he had found me so amusing.  Funny to find that a building that works -- one of the best places I've ever been -- was put on the ground by monks and elephants more than 1000 years ago.

Brief check-in from Cambodia

I've much to tell about the most recent phase of my worldwide quest for happy and interesting spaces.  I've spent the last two days exploring the sacred spaces of thousand year old Buddhist temples in Angkor, near Siem Reap.  My setup here is rather crude, though, so I'll save the pictures and maps for my return to Singapore.  Not only could I not afford to post any images from this hotel computer, but I'm not sure I could muster the concentration for the process, for I have just discovered a fundamental truth of travel:  there may be nothing louder in the world than a cavernous hotel lobby filled with a busload of effusive Korean tourists who have just discovered the joys of those gigantic bottles of Angkor beer. Only one thing for it.  I'm going to join them.  GPS logger is now turning off.

I'm here. At Singapore's Chinese Garden.

My posts have slowed down while I cope with a little bug.  Nicely timed for my departure for Cambodia tomorrow.
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Important mixology research

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Hong Kong International Airport

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Flying away eve

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If Google can't find you, are you really anywhere?

I'm such a ridiculous techno-groupie that even though I now literally have hours left to sort out a very complicated office exit strategy for this trip,  I'm hidden away trying to make all my gear get along nicely.  So I've got my groovy little Qstarz GPS logger poised perkily on my sunny office window and my  earnest little smart phone flashing away on my desk trying to bluetooth to it so that it can tell my Google Latitude friends where I am.  Oops, I had no idea how many bluetooth devices are beaming into my office.  But Google can't find my logger and so it's telling my desktop that I'm in "location unknown."  Jeepers.  If Google doesn't know where you are, then you're surely in some strife.  And the plane hasn't even taken off yet.

Where I am now

To travel along with me and participate in my geo-adventure, follow my tweets at this link (also in the sidebar).  We'll see what we can find out about life in ultra-high density and perhaps have some cyber-scavenger hunt fun along the way.