The time element
We're not great at standard, everyday ways of using the graphical, networked screen — blog posts are just text, and they disappear below the fold; pictures get posted, but you have to know the tag or run through huge slide shows to find anything — all in all, many ordinary user applications seem pretty primitive.
Between applications that display overwhelming amounts of aggregated data presented as colors and lines and balloons (which you gawk at — the only reaction is “wow, that's interesting”) and applications that display simple text, there isn't much.
So I was pleased to run across Dandelife on Ross Mayfield's blog. I like the idea of creating a timeline of a life — it could be about an imaginary life, it could be about an idea (an intellectual history), it could be about a writing project (”how my book came to life”), it could be about a building. It's a way to visualize information that is just a little richer than what we have now.
Tinkering with old cars
In 1987, the Santa Fe Institute and Citicorp lined up ten leading economists to talk to ten leading physicists, biologists, and computer scientists. Luminaries on both sides.
The physical scientists were astounded by the economists' old-fashioned equilibrium-based approach to problems. One of the physical scientists later said that talking to them was like taking a trip to Cuba, where the streets are full of old cars. The cars can be kept going by hard work and ingenuity, using salvaged parts. But the entire system is out of touch with the modern world.
It's a great image, isn't it? An entire discipline, cut off from the rest of the world by a sort of self-created intellectual embargo. Very skilled minds can be hard at work, fixing the Packards with care and thoroughness. And the cars will continue to work for a very long time.
As communications converge, continuing to have categories like “broadcast,” “radio,” “cable,” and “telephony” makes less and less sense — these categories are like the Packards. We can tinker with them, believe in them, but the world will have moved on. The system to be dealt with (all-IP, all-online) is a complex, evolving environment, characterized by nonlinear dynamics and self-created order. How do you regulate that?