You Are Here Page 22

  My first use of the Internet for anything other than to read in newsgroups about the future promise of the Internet was to settle a debate that I was having with my wife about the rules of cribbage. I entered “cribbage” into the rudimentary search engine of the day (does anyone remember Gopher?), waited for what would by current standards be an intolerably long time—long enough now to download a full novel—and there, to my astonishment, sat before me on the screen a simple text document outlining all rules of cribbage. The only thing that fascinated me more than that the search engine had been able to turn up this document from somewhere within the network was that somebody had bothered to write the document and to make it available to all.

  Contrast my early fumbling efforts with the present-day deep penetration of Wikipedia, Google searches, and YouTube in our home and even our working lives. Anyone within reach of an Internet portal has at their fingertips an astonishing mass of text, image, and sound that can be delivered to their screen in milliseconds.

  Radio and television networks are mostly owned by large economic stakeholders who maintain a firm grip on what is and is not presented to their audiences. The Internet, at least for now, is not only accessible from almost anywhere in the world but also simple enough that any garden-variety user can post content. Even when repressive governments attempt to control what content is available to their citizens, clever users quickly find ways to skirt around such restrictions (witness the recent efforts of Internet users to publicize the efforts of the Chinese government to quash unrest in Tibet). It is this interactivity and collective ownership of the content of the Internet that so distinguishes it from other types of mass media, and these are also the features that fill it with potential to have a positive transformative effect on our relationship with physical space.

  In a way, the Internet poses the same space-squashing conundrum as any other form of electronic communication. The enormous expenditures of energy that underpin the computers, servers, fiber-optic cables, air-conditioning, cooling fans, and service vehicles driving around on freeways to repair chewed wires and broken switches enable us to be completely shielded from the real distances that are involved when we press a button on a keyboard and suddenly find ourselves looking through a live webcam at a lion dozing in the sun in Kruger National Park.

  In fact, navigation from website to website by a series of clicks mirrors the way that our mind processes space. Internet sites are connected to one another as nodes in a topology. When we click on a link, we normally have no idea of the distances or directions that separate the sources of the sites that we’re viewing, nor do we care about them. This is just a more extreme version of our tendency to collapse the geometry of space to a simple topology as we navigate our way through our everyday lives, and it may be one of the reasons why point-and-click Web browsers are so intuitive and easy for us to learn to use. I’ve watched my 80-year-old father and my two-year-old son master browsers with equal facility, and, like everyone else, I’ve seen them become tangled in a thicket of distracting visions, losing track of where they started and where they were trying to go. (Tech watchers have an official name for this behavior: WWILFing, for “What was I looking for?”) This ability of websites to engulf and “lose” us in content is even something that Web designers strive to include in a site. Just as casino designers or shopping mall architects might try to build physical spaces that make it easy for us to enter and hard to leave, cyber-architects have as much social control (and presumably economic benefit to gain) when they tap into the way that our minds compute virtual spaces.

  The main difference between the Internet and more passive electronic media is its capability for personal interactivity. Though many websites are set up to be simple digital versions of print media (some newspaper websites are a good example), others are designed to encourage users to willfully and actively navigate to different parts of a site, building the shape of their overall experience on the fly. Just as we may wander from room to room in a gallery to gaze at the offerings on display, we can do the same kind of thing on the Internet by choosing which parts of a site to visit and how long to linger. Many sites also allow us to structure our experiences according to more complex user inputs than simple mouse clicks on links. We might be asked to answer questions, for example, and our answers might be used to steer us on a particular path through the content of a site. So although electronic communication via computer networks distorts space in the same way as any other technology that allows us to move our virtual selves at light speed from one place to another, there is much more potential for involving the user in a richer mental experience than simply gazing at a centrally controlled flow of images. This means that there are real prospects for using this technology to effect positive changes to human mental states, including our conceptions of the organization of space and the connections between ourselves and other parts of the world. These prospects have been enhanced considerably in the last decade by the widespread availability of geocoded data on the Internet.

  GEO-EVERYTHING

  In 1995, the United States announced the completion of a remarkable project that had evolved slowly over the previous three decades. The deployment of 24 space satellites composing what was called the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System made it possible for an electronic device on the surface of the earth to calculate its location to within a few meters.5 One of the main motivations for the system was its envisioned military uses, and for the first few years of its existence, an error was deliberately introduced into the GPS signals offered to civilians so that these signals could be accurate only to within about 30 meters. During the Gulf War, a shortage of military-grade GPS receivers prompted the U.S. military to remove this source of error so that more widely available commercial GPS receivers, bought mostly by boaters and hunters, could be used on the battlefield. Since that time, the distorting error has remained inactive, and GPS signals have become a mainstay of air and marine navigation. Indeed, though the military retains the capability of blocking the GPS signals from reaching any part of the globe, to do so would probably lead to catastrophe. Today, the evolution of remarkably accurate and tiny GPS receiver chips (about the size of a pinkie fingernail) has meant that these signals are widely available in a variety of consumer products, including laptop computers, pocket computers, cell phones, cars, and digital cameras. The wide availability of GPS-enabled devices, along with geographic software that is useful for professionals but user-friendly enough for casual users, has led to sharp interest in tagging objects with information about location. Google’s stunning free software Google Earth, which enables users to view everything from a snapshot of the entire globe to detailed street-level views of major urban centers, has led to a craze for what some refer to as “geo-everything.”

  At first blush, geo-coding, in which our activities, snapshots, phone calls, and blogs are tagged with precise latitude and longitude information, might seem like something that would interest only a thin segment of the technophile population, but there is something compelling about connecting the moments, thoughts, and glimpses of our lives to actual rock-and-brick locations. Is it possible that technology is slowly but surely helping us to turn full circle and to find ingenious ways to reconnect ourselves to physical place?

  There are countless practical reasons for the public’s fascination with geo-coded data. It’s clever to be able to reconstruct a vacation by opening a beautiful cartographic image on a computer that is overlaid with catalogs of photographs. It’s handy to be able to dial up a map of the 10 closest coffee shops to one’s home, with a personal ranking of the quality of the java on offer at each of them. But beyond the practicalities, being able to tag our experiences with a carefully measured where, especially if it is beyond our dulled senses to pick up location more directly, seems to satisfy a deep craving for place that we’d forgotten we had.

  One of many interesting developments in the use of the Internet to connect us to one another came in the form of social network
ing. Some applications, Facebook being perhaps the best known of them, allow users to sign up for free accounts and post messages to virtual locations that can be read either by anyone who stumbles across their site or only by those who have been explicitly selected as friends, depending on the privacy level that is chosen. Social networking sites allow users to share messages, images, sounds, or really any kind of digital content. What such social networking applications accomplish is that they make each user a kind of node in a network, and permit users to make their connections to other nodes transparent and readable either to the general public or to a select few. Though social networking applications at first appealed to a small segment of the population—mostly university students trying to keep track of rapidly evolving social lives not always tied to physical places—their popularity has skyrocketed with the general public. The possibilities for wider applications, including some marketing of products, and the availability of much custom software designed to enhance the features of social networking sites, are now beginning to come to fruition.

  Some social networking applications offer the added feature of location-based service, usually designed to allow one to post brief messages from mobile devices. These messages can be either location coded by hand (“I am now in my kitchen making dinner”) or automatically geo-coded using GPS data. A quick browse through a representative sample of public messages posted using such applications as Twitter (which is not location coded) or Brightkite (which is) suggests that most users post very ordinary messages about the mundane details of their daily lives—hardly the stuff of a Tolstoy novel. But to discard the potential of such virtual networks based on current usage would perhaps be to make the same mistake that I made about 15 years ago when I assumed the Internet was useful only for looking up the rules of card games.6

  One interesting twist that will soon be more generally available will allow your networked friends to access continuous information about your spatial location based on an encoded GPS signal. This will make it possible to, for example, set up proximity alerts that will inform you of the nearby presence of friends, creditors, and perhaps even ex-lovers. Such capabilities will engender new ways in which technology can produce electronic proxies for our understanding of geographic space.

  In a way, computer-based social networking can be considered the modern equivalent of ancient tracking methods used by desert Bedouins riding camels or Inuit hunters crossing the land on dogsleds. The main difference is that the skill set required of users has changed considerably. Whereas an ancient tracker might need to learn how to read camel dung or dog footprints to extract social history, his modern equivalent is able to access such information directly. The key to both ancient and modern social wayfaring is that both geo-coders and Inuit hunters are engaged in a pursuit that is helping them to connect a network of human activity to a physical landscape. The connection of narrative to geography is a time-tested method for throwing our connections to places into sharp relief.

  THE DEEP GREEN CALMNESS OF UBIQUITY

  GPS receivers are only one example of compact computing devices that give us mobile access to significant information about our relationship to the world. Sensors can also read other environmental variables such as pressure, temperature, wind, UV radiation, air quality, and noise. In addition, more complicated derived variables (stock market trends, approaching weather systems, road traffic patterns) can be streamed to remote devices via wireless Internet connections. All such sensors and devices could be deployed throughout our environment to shroud us in a kind of distributed intelligence as we went about our daily business. This approach to embedding intelligence in our environment, termed “ubiquitous computing” by techno-pioneer Mark Weiser, is the inverse of virtual reality. Whereas the intention of a virtual environment is to produce a painstakingly detailed simulation of a real environment that engages all of the user’s sensory systems, the ubiquitous computing approach throws the intelligence offered by computer designers out into the world, relegating even desktop computing to more of a background role.

  In a brilliant exposition of the potential of ubiquitous computing to revolutionize our relationship with our environment,

  Weiser, along with his collaborator, John Seely Brown, described how computing devices could fill our lives with what they described as “calm technology.”7 In contrast to focal computing devices like desktop computers or BlackBerrys that demand our full attention, calm technologies work in the background, engaging the periphery of our senses to inform us gently about states of the environment that might not otherwise be obvious to us. One low-tech example of a calm technology is the inner-office window that connects the occupant of an office with the outside world, the people walking past in the hall, the intended visitor who has peeked in a few times, waiting for a chance to enter. The window doesn’t fully engage focal attention, so it doesn’t enrage or annoy, but it does provide an ambient source of information about goings-on in the world outside the room.

  Weiser and Seely Brown describe another beautiful example of calm technology that comes in the form of an artistic installation piece by Natalie Jeremijenko called The Dangling String. The piece consists of a 2.5-meter length of plastic string that is connected at one end to a small motor. The motor receives inputs from an Internet connection. The vigor of the string’s movement, ranging from a gentle wave to a frenzied dance, correlates with the amount of network activity. Ambient Technologies, an offshoot of MIT’s Machines That Think laboratory devoted to ubiquitous computing initiatives, has developed some products that embody calm technology principles. The Ambient Orb, for example, is a spherical light whose glowing color can be made to correlate with virtually any value that can be streamed from the Internet, such as air quality, pollen counts, or stock tickers.8 An orb placed in a room can provide us with a gentle background monitor of some useful piece of information that never demands our full attention but helps to fill in a greater context and can potentially ground us to the larger environment.

  What I find most interesting about Weiser and Seely Brown’s argument for calm technology is that, in many ways, the language they use to describe their approach to embedding intelligence in the design of everyday settings is much in accord with the language used to explain how natural environments can be attractive and restorative to the human psyche. In explaining the attraction of devices that inform gently from the sidelines rather than blaring headlines from front and center, Weiser and Seely Brown say, “The periphery connects us effortlessly to a myriad of familiar details. This connection to the world we called ‘locatedness,’ and it is the fundamental gift that the periphery gives us.”9 Is it possible that the artful deployment of technology in our everyday settings will not only help us to connect ourselves to places but will also help to ease the attentional overloads produced by chronic exposure to busy and chaotic urban settings?

  VIRTUALIZING THE REAL AND REALIZING THE VIRTUAL

  Advocates of ubiquitous computing approaches have been quick to dissociate themselves from the world of virtual reality, but it is hard to envision a technological future that does not include some measure of virtual life. In a way, whenever we talk on a cell phone, thumb a message on a handheld device, or listen to an iPod, we are producing a fracture between our physical and our virtual locations. Though architecture and appliances that inform us of the ambient state of the wider world, or even respond to our individual moods as we enter or move close to them, may help to bring our focus back into the here and now, our unique cognitive architecture, tailor-made for leaping continents with a single mental bound, would be impossible to rein in completely. A better approach might be to find fruitful ways to combine our virtual worlds with a physical reality studded with ambient computer intelligence into a rich form of mixed reality.

  Recently, providers of the Second Life metaverse, in yet another risky move, decided to go “open.” Stripped of cyber-speak, this means that Linden Labs has made available to the public the computer code that genera
tes the software that allows Second Life to run on a personal computer. This is no small thing. What it means is that knowledgeable programmers can enhance the Second Life software to bring additional features to it. One possibility that occurred to many groups as soon as the decision to open the software was made was that Second Life and first life—the real and not the virtual one—could be brought into closer contact than ever before by employing mixed reality designs.

  What if a user’s behavior in the real world could, through an appropriate interface, be reflected in the virtual one? If the output of a skin-temperature monitor attached to a user could be jacked into the metaverse, perhaps the user’s avatar could be made to blush. If a weather-monitoring station’s wind speed measurements could be entered into Second Life, perhaps virtual leaves could shimmer in real breezes and virtual tree limbs could bend.

  The unanswered question is whether such a convergence of the real and the virtual would exert an effect on the sensibilities of the user. If we could visit a simulated location in Second Life, say a boiling desert in Northern Africa, and witness the effect of an overheating climate on local events firsthand through the eyes of an avatar, would it increase our understanding of the connection between drought, famine, and starvation and the level at which we set our home air-conditioners? Making such connections would be difficult for all of the reasons discussed earlier. While hyper-voyages through the Ethernet remain a sporadically experienced curiosity available only to those with the money and the technological savvy to carry them off, they will be amusing, perhaps even informative, but hardly transformative. In fact, such crazy-quilt electronic adventures may only serve to exacerbate the frailty of our connections to real space by offering all places to us in an instant, all on an equal footing, a horizontal electronic plain in which physical distance was as meaningless to us as it ever has been in the realm of rapid communication.