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March 21 2011
September 30 2010
Perfectly flawed
This is the revenge of traditional media. Even the “weaknesses” or the limits of these tools become part of the vocabulary of culture. I’m thinking of such stuff as Marshall guitar amps and black-and-white film – what was once thought most undesirable about these tools became their cherished trademark.
The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called “electric guitar.” Or think of grainy black-and-white film, or jittery Super 8, or scratches on vinyl. These limitations tell you something about the context of the work, where it sits in time, and by invoking that world they deepen the resonances of the work itself.
Brian Eno wrote about the revenge of the intuitive in 1999, but his point about the apparent flaws in our tools becoming what defines them is still valid today.
Robert Capps, writing 10 years later, reports that some consumers prefer the “percussive sizzle” of MP3s to more high-fidelity formats:
Of course, there are those who appreciate the richer sound of uncompressed files, CDs, or even vinyl records (regarded by some audiophiles as the highest-fi format available). But most of us don’t give it a second thought. In fact, there’s evidence that consumers are simply adapting to the MP3’s thin sound. Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University, recently completed a six-year study of his students. Every year he asked new arrivals in his class to listen to the same musical excerpts played in a variety of digital formats—from standard MP3s to high-fidelity uncompressed files—and rate their preferences. Every year, he reports, more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They’ve grown accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive sizzle—aka distortion—found in compressed music. To them, that’s what music is supposed to sound like.
September 29 2010
September 27 2010
September 25 2010
Baby slings & cyborgs
One of the major ways we get around the smart biped paradox is by growing infant’s head after birth… And that means that you are coping with an ever more helpless child. So the argument is that the baby sling is invented by bipedal Australopithecine females because they need that for their energy equations… Once you have solved that, it doesn’t really matter whether you keep its bum in a sling for a week, a month or a year. And therefore you have opened the way for selection pressures to actually act on increased intelligence…
[I]t’s the other way round to the way we normally think about it. We normally think about intelligence developing until we got smart enough to invent things. I’m arguing that in fact we’ve got to see very dexterous relatively small-headed bipeds doing inventing which leads to the terms of evolution changing. And that process I believe is still going on.
Archeologist Timothy Taylor argues that the invention of the baby sling lead to our ancestors evolving larger brains. More interestingly, he argues that this is still going on: we are developing technologies that change the way we evolve.
Coincidentally, the word “cyborg” was coined fifty years ago, and to celebrate Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon is curating 50 Posts About Cyborgs. I’m slowly making my way through them. Highlights so far are Tim’s own post, What’s a Cyborg?, and Kevin Kelly’s Domesticated Cyborgs.
So how did I get from baby slings to cyborgs? I’ll let Kevin Kelly tell you:
If a cyborg means a being that is part biological and part technological then we humans began as cyborgs, and still are. Our ancestors first chipped stone scrapers 2.5 million years ago to give themselves claws. By about 250,000 years ago they devised crude techniques for cooking, or pre-digesting, with fire. Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us.
We tend to think of our relationship with technology as something recent, as shiny and new as an iPhone. That’s not the case. It has been this way from the beginning, since before we became human. We like to think that we’ve created the technologies we use, but increasingly it looks as if they created us.
Also related: Your Posthumanism Is Boring Me
September 22 2010
August 20 2010
June 28 2010
October 12 2009
Against Transparency | The New Republic
How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.July 21 2009
May 23 2009
March 29 2009
December 05 2008
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