“A book can be read through the Dynabook […]. It need not be treated as a simulated paper book since this is a new medium with new properties.”
Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay: “Personal Dynamic Media”, via The New Media Reader

2010:

The effect of simulating turning pages is very popular online, especially with web sites that want to appear like magazines.

Typical demo, typical implementation.

The only really good application though is Rafael Rozendal’s colorflip, abstract, useless, primitive, absurd but totally immersive experience.

But now the new contender for most absurd use of page flipping on a screen is the e-book reader on the iPad (see animation above). iPad shows only one page. When you flip, print on the backside of the paper becomes visible — as if you’re about to see a double page next. However, this backside vanishes immediately, leaving you with the impression that you missed a whole page of your e-book.

Nelson’s newest book Geeks Bearing Gifts (2008/2009) is devoted to uncovering the real history of What We Got. It provides an alternative computer history, a sarcastic time-line: from a prehistory rooted in ancient religions to modern computing starting in 1970 with UNIX. And sort of ending (or going in to the totally wrong paper direction) from 1974 on with the PARC User Interface.

In March 1974 the Xerox PARC Alto and its operating system was officially released. In the fall that year, Alto computers were connected to the Scanning Laser Output Terminal and started to print. “[…] it worked perfectly. In fact it worked so well that it quickly ended any fantasy about ‘the paperless office’.” writes M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book The Dream Machine. (2001, p.385, don’t mix it up with Dream Machines by Nelson)

Actually the paperdigm could be traced back to two years earlier, 1972, when Chuck Thacker outlined his preliminary design for the Alto. It included a display about the size and a shape of a standard US letter sheet of paper, which would produce black characters on a bright background.

In Geeks Bearing Gifts Nelson writes PUI where others would say PARC User Interface or GUI. This not very nice sounding abbreviation is repeated many many times, only in negative contexts, becoming a sort of swear-word: P not for Palo Alto Reasearch Center, but P for Paperdigm and damn Paper.

“…a bunch of windows on the screen is called a “desktop metaphor”, since it looks to some people like paper on a desk. […]What matters is the best way to detail the virtuality, not finding a relationship to anything that came before. The best new virtualities will have no antecedents.” (p.69)

In 2005 Peter Morville unmasks the Navigaton metaphor* on the web as limiting and counterproductive in his book Ambient Findability. There is “no there there” and thats why there is no sense in drawing a map the web. Web maps are popular as subway map style posters or as interactive dots connected with thin lines in the form of a flash animation. But they do not give more than pretty pictures.

Morvile claims:

“The exploration of new metaphors and the courage to design beyond metaphor are both critical in innovation in web design.” (p.38)

There is no cool sports metaphor for typing keywords and getting search results. So it is prosaically called googling.

Eight years ago, on the peak of the blogging revolution, Henry Jenkins suggested that blogging is as awesome as snowboarding, but this brave comparison didn’t make it into the urban dictionary. (Read my older post on why it wouldn’t work outside of California.)

2009 skateboarding introduced as a metaphor. Skate the Web! — The idea comes from the circle of internet art, but is articulated by representatives of different generations and is therefore filled with different meanings.

Being cynical

Webcrash visitors.

JODI are Net Art veterans. Their recent project — SK8MONKEY — was an event when people could skate on keyboards mounted on wheels. The keyboard were damaged but still functional, connected to computers logged on to Twitter. So you were tweeting by skating. Or in other words, to skate the web is to fill it with content seamlessly and mindlessly.

Being confident

Flayer for Skate the Web show.
Tobias Leingruber, “add-on artist”, author of many great Firefox extensions and curator of the artzilla platform, just published his Skate the web! manifest. An excerpt:

“[…] Open source web browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome allow you to influence the way you access websites. Through additional software, called add-ons or extensions, based on the web browser client, you can completely rearrange the way you experience the internet.

Users no longer have to access information like the architect or designer of the web service wants them to. You want a black background on google.com? Change it to black. You don’t want to see any online advertisements anymore? Install an ad blocking extension to your browser and they are gone. The owners of that website might not like it, but there’s not much they can do about it. They could temporarily disable your code by making it technically more difficult to access their content, but since hackers love those kind of challenges, they’ll always a solution.

[…]

… street skateboarders, just like street artists, see amazing opportunities in public space while others might see nothing but boring concrete. Skaters are on a mission, and they have style. The streets belong to them. When you skate the streets, you use public architecture in ways the creators didn’t expect it to be used, and a lot of times don’t want you to.

[…]

If you enjoy grabbing a skateboard to hit the streets and turn public space upside down, you might as well grab some browser code and SKATE THE WEB.”

Or in other words, to skate the web is to write and install add-ons, to make the web belong to you.

Sounds appealing. To compare skateboards and add-ons is smart, modern and legitimate. Both are tools to misuse the given space. Trouble starts when one gets more general and compares add-on art with street art. As my colleague Mario Doulis noticed during Tobias’ final project presentation**: “Street art much is about boarding public space, about leaving an individual statement as common mark, visible for everybody. It’s there - whether we notice it or not, whether we can decipher it or not, wether we want it or not. Nothing to be prepared or installed.”

It makes me think about the very beautiful Project X. In 1996 British artist Heath Bunting started to write an unusual chalk tag with a URL in public spaces around the world.

The middle of the 1990’s was a time when people were very curios about URLs. They would type irational.org/x when they’d come back to their computers. To find out that they are actively participating in the survey of “graffiti street internet interface” and its their job to fill this location with meaning.

Bunting skating.
–
*http://nastynets.com/
http://www.spiritsurfers.net

** “Skate the Web” manifesto is part of Leingruber’s final thesis.

Firefox security icon on the security page. (08.04.09)

Vatican’s coat of Arms.

Browsing with Firefox now I’m not only feeling safe, but I’m certain that I’m doing the The Right Thing.

As the title suggests, it is full of analogies. Indeed, he compares Stalin with Hitler, Cobol with Neanderthal language, Porsche 911 with Roman Pantheon (both are funny), Florence of the 15th century with New York of the 20th. Good hackers with Leonardo and Jane Austen, and bad hackers, who are too lazy to start a startup, with cows who still believe in current running through fence. And of course hacking with painting and architecture.

My attention was attracted by the following metaphor:

“Computer Science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.” (p.18)

Graham hates the idea to throw mathematitians financed by DARPA, algorithm historians and hackers into the same department, because its intellectually confusing. And most of all because hackers shouldn’t be doing science and research, but “designing beautiful software.” It’s an interesting idea to educate hackers as painters, and probably Graham means that as soon as hackers are independent from computer science they will get rid of research and become artists.

“Perhaps one day “computer science” will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. It might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.” (p.19)

Let’s hope that when the Federal Republic of Computer Science will break up, Hacking will manage to come out like Slovenia, not like Kosovo or Bosnia.

To explain what is so evil about New Browser Windows, Nielsen says:

“Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet.”

Terrible sales people, who come without invitation and difficult to get rid of; New Browser Windows are terrible in the same way. And now think about Zombie Links, they are like the same Vacuum Cleaner Sales Person appearing every time you open a door or a window or a closet.

When will Nielsen finally pillory them?

Norman’s latest book The Design of Future Things introduces the state of today’s relations in between smart vehicles and their once smart drivers. And though he almost exclusively writes about automobiles, it reads like an outline for HCI in general. After all the automobile is a computers on wheels, and quite in front of other environments awaiting total augmentation. “What is in the automobile today will be in the kitchen, bathroom and living room tomorrow.” (p.157)

In Future Things Norman mentions the H-Metaphor. Here is a paper The H-Metaphor as a Guideline for Vehicle Automation and Interaction, delivered by the German Frank O. Flemisch during his research at NASA, that introduces and explains the new term. The H-metaphor stands for a new approach in user-vehicle interaction and vehicle automation, where the automobile instead of being computer on wheels is seen as a well trained horse, a horse on wheels — intelligent, aware, responsive constructions, that are more safe and more fun to drive.

That’s a very reasonable and promising concept. But a sad one as well. There are two things that are not right.

First: the Upper Case H, that for 50 years belonged to Human in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction, is going to be given to the Horse.

Second: Flemisch specifies: “It would be premature to think that we will be able to build something so wonderful and intelligent as a horse.” (p.11)
I think it’s really bitter. While we are still in hope that AI scientists will build a computer that will be as wonderful and intelligent as Human, they confess that they are not able to build a Horse.

“Proprietary software is like Kentucky Fried Chicken. Open source and free software is like Kentucky Fried Chicken sold with the “original secret recipe” printed in bold on the box.”

Found via Infotopia by Cass R. Sunstein. On page 165 he mentions this comparison as “illuminating”. In my eyes it’s only offensive if anything.

Sunstein himself uses a better example of proprietary product: Coca Cola and and its open source embodiment — Open Cola.

Open Cola is a proper product of the Open Source Age. But there is more — Free Beer — a true gift for those who followed free and open source discourses for the last 15 years and know by heart Richard Stallman’s glorious analogy When we speak of “free software”, we’re talking about freedom, not price. (Think of “free speech”, not “free beer”.)
Lessig writes about it in his blog:

We’re now at the stage where (at least some) the RMS conception of “free” is clear enough so that even “free beer” is “free as in free speech” such that a price running with the free beer seems (again, to a select set no doubt) perfectly natural.

However the Free Software Community is still waiting for a GNU tent on Oktoberfest.

Since the beginning of time, in a typical network diagram the Internet is shown as a cloud. in 2008 this fact was brought to our attention to explain the new trend — The Cloud.
The Cloud came to replace the ugly Web 2.0. But not only. It’s happily used as a new name for the Internet and shows a new understanding of what the networks of networks should be.

The new buzzword is indeed beautiful, you can’t compare it with the techy sounding Web 2.0, though this time we actually deal with a quite good defined technical term, meaning “computing provided as online utility”. But The Cloud — is charming and, I’d even say, sedative.

Cloud gained its positive image with Internet users in times when they were the person of the year. It stands for an Internet of peers. Cloud is the Internet that belongs to us, because we build the network with our good enough content, powerful enough computers and valuable enough data. It is programmed by us and that’s why “it’s even more personal than the PC on your Desk” as Nicholas Carr writes it in his great book The Big Switch.

Tag clouds stay for folkxonomy, Infoclouds for distributed knowledge, and so on. In their 2006 paper Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not, Geert Lovink and Anna Munster brought the positive meaning of the cloud to its extreme suggesting

[w]e should be wary of techno-contractions like “social software” that suggest technology glues us humans together (again). Instead, we should read – and enjoy – networks as info-clouds that cover the sun. They disperse the bright light of broadcasting media.

In The Big Switch Nicholas Carr is very aware about The Cloud’s (or World Wide Computer’s) potential of control, alienation and exploitation, but at the same time he, quoting Google’s CEO, gives the following description of what The Cloud is:

Back in the 90es Sun Microsystems coined the Marketing slogan “The Network is a Computer” […] Today Sun’s slogan suddenly makes sense. It describes what computing has become, or is becoming, for all of us. […]
Eric Schmidt, who was still employed by Sun back when it came up with its prophetic slogan, has a different term for the World Wide Computer. He calls it “the computer in the cloud”. What he means is that computing, as we experience it today, no longer takes a fixed, concrete form. It occurs in the internet’s ever-shifting “cloud” of data, software and devices. Our personal computer, not to mention our BlackBerry, our mobile phone, our gaming console, and any other networked gadgets we use, is just another molecule of the cloud, another node in the vast computer network. Fulfilling Napster’s promise, our PC have merged with all the other devices on the Internet…. ( p.113)

This scenarios can be translated back to a network diagram like this (we are the cloud):

But, paradoxically, The Cloud means exactly the opposite. The best sign of this paradox is Chris Anderson’s flaming speech: In the editorial of July’s Wired issue he stated that we live in the Petabyte Age, that Petabytes don’t fit on hard disks and disks arrays and that we ran out of organizational analogies. Two years ago his solution was to use the power of users and their computers (in the book The Long Tail), now the answer is The Cloud. And The Cloud is not YOU or your tail, but the cluster of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including IBM’s Tivoli and open source versions of Google File System and MapReduce.

Translated back to a network diagram:

What we witness now is a shift in the interests of IT giants towards providing IT capabilities online as an utility, and their intention to put equal signs in between Internet and their service. Internet = Google’s Cloud, Internet = Apple’s Cloud, Internet = Facebook’s cloud. Amazon allows customers to rent virtual computers on which to run their own applications with their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Apple draws their collection of online services and software as a Cloud.

Erick Schmid is quoted in Business Week saying that “Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would interact with every day.” Nicholas Carr thinks about Google’s browser project that Chrome is the first cloud browser.

With Web 2.0 the question was what is it. With The Cloud, who will it be.