archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Using the automotive industry and an analogous variety of software mega-packages with three-letter acronyms as examples, we’ve been discussing the death of the traditional enterprise for a few weeks. We’ve observed that enterprise efforts relying on massive top-down approaches become inefficient and wasteful, if not counter-productive. They also either fail to support the health of the individuals or groups involved – customers, users, sellers, employers – or in fact directly reduce the relative health of these parties. With Conway’s Law as a guide, we discovered that the structure or form of an organization influences or determines the nature and quality of the things the organization creates.
This all concerns the past: so now it’s time to look ahead, at the new enterprise. Of course, scrying the future inevitably relies on a mixture of hand waving, vague pronouncements, and the occasional “it’s not possible yet to do what this implies” to point the way forward. What’s often lacking is a present-tense example to serve as clear harbinger of the future to come. I came across an example today, drawn from the debate surrounding the proposition that the U.S. Army is close to a breaking point. In an episode of On Point titled Are US Forces Stretched Too Thin?, several panelists (names not available from the program website yet) made three telling points about the Army that show it as an organization in transition from the old model enterprise into a new form, albeit one whose outlines remain fuzzy. I’ll paraphrase these points:

To support this practice, company commanders created a forum for sharing innovations amongst themselves, called CO Team: CompanyCommand. The description reads, “CompanyCommand.com is company commanders-present, future, and past. We are in an ongoing professional conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. The conversation is taking place on front porches, around HMMWV hoods, in CPs, mess halls, and FOBs around the world. By engaging in this ongoing conversation centered around leading soldiers, we are becoming more effective leaders, and we are growing units that are more effective. Amazing things happen when committed leaders in a profession connect, share what they are learning, and spur each other on to become better and better.”
It’s the third point that gives us a clue about the nature of the new enterprise. CompanyCommand.com is an example of a ‘knowledge marketplace’ created and maintained by an informal network within an organization. Knowledge marketplaces are one of the components of what McKinsey calls The 21st Century Organization. Knowledge marketplaces allow knowledge buyers “to gain access to content that is more insightful and relevant, as well as easier to find and assimilate, than alternative sources are.”
McKinsey believes that these markets – as well as companion forms for exchanging valuable human assets called talent markets – require careful investment to begin functioning.
“…working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better. These conditions don’t exist naturally – a knowledge marketplace is an artificial, managed one – so companies must put them in place.”
On this, I disagree. CompanyCommand is an example of a proto-form knowledge marketplace that appears to be self-organized and regulated.
Moving on, another component of the new enterprise identifed by McKinsey is the formal network. A formal network “…enables people who share common interests to collaborate with relatively little ambiguity about decision-making authority – ambiguity that generates internal organizational complications and tension in matrixed structures.”
In McKinsey’s analysis, formal networks contrast with informal social networks in several ways. Formal networks require designated owners responsible for building common capabilities and determining investment levels, incentives for membership, defined boundaries or territories, established standards and protocols, and shared infrastructure or technology platforms.
My guess is that CompanyCommand again meets all these formal network criteria to a partial extent, which is why it is a good harbinger of the forms common to the new enterprise, and a sign of an organization in transition.
Can you think of other examples of new enterprise forms, or organizations in transition?
In the next post in this series, we’ll move on from the structure of the new enterprise to talk about the new enterprise experience, trying to track a number of trends to understand their implications for the user experience of the new enterprise environment.

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A few months ago, I put up a posted called Tagging Comes To Starbucks, in which I attempted to make the point that it’s bizarre when a product’s metadata *overwhelms the experience of the product itself in it’s customary real world setting*.
My example was the metadata encrusted packaging of madeleines – “petite french cakes…” – at Starbucks. Like the famous toothpick instructions Douglas Adams immortalized in So Long and Thanks For All The Fish, this is a strong discontinuity of experience (though not necessarily one indicating things gone awry at the core of civilization) that implies new cognitive / perceptual phenomenon.
New experiences and frames of reference usually lack descriptive vocabulary, which explains why I can’t pin this down neatly in words. But this is surely something we can expect to encounter more in a future populated with findable things called spimes.
The balance hasn’t shifted so far that we’re living inside Baudrillard’s ‘desert of the real’, but we are getting closer with each additional layer of simulation, abstraction, and metadata applied to real situations and objects.
After all it is impossible to interact (smell, touch, taste…) directly with these very ordinary pastries without experiencing the intervening layers of metadata packaging.
Madeleines in situ:

The labeling:

From SLATFATF: “It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization I could live in and stay sane.” ~ Wonko the Sane

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What happens when this classic vernacular interjection meets linguistics, data visualization, and the Web?
The Aargh page, of course. (It should really be The Aargh! Page, but this is so fantastic that I can’t complain…)
Here’s a screenshot of the graph that shows frequency of variant spellings for aargh in Google, along two axes:

Note the snazzy mouseover effect, which I’ll zoom here:

Looking into the origins aargh inevitably brings up Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in several Disney productions based on the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. I remember seeing the movies as a child, without knowing that they were the first live action Disney movies broadcast on television. So do plenty of other people who’ve created tribute pages>.
Aargh may have many spelling variations, but at least three of them bear a stamp of legitimacy, as the editorial review of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Paperback) at Amazon.com explains, “If you’re using the 1991 edition or the 1978 original, you’re woefully behind the Scrabble-playing times. With more than 100,000 2- to 8-letter words, there are some interesting additions (“aargh,” “aarrgh,” and “aarrghh” are all legitimate now), while words they consider offensive are no longer kosher. “
There’s even International Talk Like A Pirate Day, celebrated on September 19th every year. The organizers’ site offers a nifty English-to-Pirate-Translator.
Most random perhaps is the Wikipedia link for Aargh the videogame, from the 80’s, without pirates.

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We rely on many ways of rec­og­niz­ing peo­ple, near at hand or from afar; faces, voices, walks, and even the scents from favorite colognes or per­fumes help us greet friends, engage col­leagues, and iden­tify strangers.
I was in high school when I first noticed that everyone’s key chain made a dis­tinct sound, one that served as a kind of audi­ble call­ing card that could help rec­og­nize peo­ple. I started to try to guess who was walk­ing to the front door by learn­ing the unique com­bi­na­tions of sounds — clink­ing and tin­kling from metal keys, rat­tling and rub­bing from ceramic and plas­tic tokens, and a myr­iad of other noises from the incred­i­ble mis­cel­lany peo­ple attach to their key rings and carry around with them through life — that announced each of my vis­i­tors friends. With a lit­tle prac­tice, I could pick out the ten or fif­teen peo­ple I spent the most time with based on lis­ten­ing to the sounds of key chains. Every­one else was some­one I didn’t see often, which was a fine dis­tinc­tion to draw between when gaug­ing how to answer the door.
There are many other audi­ble cues to iden­tity — from the clos­ing of a car door, to the sound of foot steps, or cell phone ring tones — but the key chain is unique because it includes so many dif­fer­ent ele­ments: the num­ber and size and mate­ri­als of the keys, or the lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent key rings and sou­ve­niers peo­ple attach to them. A key chain is a sort of impromptu ensem­ble of found instru­ments play­ing lit­tle bursts of free jazz like per­son­al­ized fan­fares for mod­ern liv­ing.
The sound of someone’s key chain also changes over time, as they add or remove things, or rearrange them. That sound can even change in step with the way your rela­tion­ship to that per­son changes. For exam­ple, if they buy a sou­ve­nier with you and put it on their key­chain; or if you give them keys to your apart­ment. Each of these changes reflects shared expe­ri­ences, and you can hear the dif­fer­ence in sound from one day to the next if you lis­ten care­fully.
And like those other ways of rec­og­niz­ing peo­ple I men­tioned ear­lier, which all reach the level of being called sig­na­tures when they become truly dis­tinc­tive, the sound of someone’s key chain serves a sort of audi­ble sig­na­ture.
Until now, the sound of a key­chain was per­haps the only truly unique audi­ble sig­na­ture that was not part of our per­son to begin with (like the voice). Now that Jason Free­man has cre­ated the iTunes Sig­na­ture Maker, we may have an audi­ble sig­naure suit­able for the dig­i­tal realm. The iTunes Sig­na­ture Maker scans your iTunes library, tak­ing one or two sec­ond snip­pets of many files, and mix­ing these found bits of sound together into a short audio sig­na­ture. You choose from a few para­me­ters such as play count, total num­ber of songs, and whether to include videos, and the sig­na­ture maker pro­duces a .WAV file.
I made an iTunes sig­na­ture using Jason’s tool a few days ago. I’ve lis­tened to it a few times. It cer­tainly includes quite a few songs I’ve lis­tened to often and can rec­og­nize from just a one-second snip­pet. Cal­lig­ra­phers and graphol­o­gists make much of a few hand­writ­ten let­ters on a page: music can say a great deal about someone’s moods, out­look, tastes, or even what moves their soul. I lis­ten to a lot of music via radio, CD’s and even live that isn’t included in this. I’m not sure it rep­re­sents me. I think it’s up to every­one else to decide that.
But what can you do with one? It’s not prac­ti­cal yet to attach it to email mes­sages, like a con­ven­tional .sig. It might be a good way to book­end the mixes I make for friends and fam­ily. I can see hav­ing a lot of fun lis­ten­ing to a bunch of anony­mous iTunes sig­na­tures from your friends to try and guess which one belongs to whom. There’s real poten­tial for a use­ful but non-exhaustive answer to the inevitable ques­tion, “What kind of music do you like?” when you meet some­one new. Along those lines, Jason may have kicked off a new fad in Inter­net dat­ing; this is the per­fect exam­ple of a unique token that can com­press a great deal of mean­ing into a small (dig­i­tal) pack­age that doesn’t require meet­ing or talk­ing to exchange. I can see the iTunes sig­na­ture becom­ing a speed-dating req­ui­site; bring your iTunes sig­na­ture file with you on a flash drive or iPod shuf­fle, and lis­ten or exchange as nec­es­sary.
At least the name is easy: what else would you call this besides a “musig”. Maybe an “iSig” or a “tune­sig”.
Unique ring tones, door chimes, and start-up sounds are only the begin­ning. Com­bine musigs with the music genome project, and you could upload your sig­na­ture to a clear­ing­house online, and have it auto­mat­i­cally com­pared for matches against other people’s musigs based on pat­terns and pref­er­ences. Have it find some­one who likes reggae-influenced waltzes, or fado, or who lis­tens to at least ten of the same artists you enjoy. Build a cat­a­log of one musig every month for a year, and ask the engine to describe the change in your tastes. Add a musig to your Ama­zon wish­lists for gift-giving, or even ask it to pre­dict what you might like based on the songs in the file.
You can down­load my musig / iSig / tune­sig / iTunes sig­na­ture here; note that it’s nearly 8mb.
I’ll think I’ll try it again in a few months, to see how it changes.

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At least accord­ing to the Boston Globe arti­cle titled Don’t under­es­ti­mate the value of social skills, in which Pene­lope Trunk quotes an HBS fac­ulty mem­ber as fol­lows:
’In fact, across the board, in a wide vari­ety of busi­nesses, peo­ple would rather work with some­one who is lik­able and incom­pe­tent than with some­one who is skilled and obnox­ious, said Tiziana Cas­ciaro, a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Busi­ness School. “How we value com­pe­tence changes depend­ing on whether we like some­one or not,” she says.‘
I guess this explains how we ended up with George W. Bush as President…

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A few months ago, I put up a posting on Mental Models Lotus Notes, and Resililence. It focused on my chronic inability to learn how not to send email with Lous Notes. I posted about Notes, but what led me to explore resilience in the context of mental models was the surprising lack of acknowledgement of the scale of hurricane Katrina I came across at the time. For example, the day the levees failed, the front page of the New York Times digital edition carried a gigantic headline saying ‘Levees Fail! New Orleans floods!’. And yet no one in the office at the time even mentioned what happened.
My conclusion was that people were simply unable to accept the idea that a major metropolitan area in the U.S. could possibly be the setting for such a tragedy, and so they refused to absorb it – because it didn’t fit in with their mental models for how the world works. Today, I came across a Resilience Science posting titled New Orleans and Disaster Sociology that supports this line of thinking, while it discusses some of the interesting ways that semantics and mental models come into play in relation to disasters.
Quoting extensively from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Disaster Sociologists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hurricanes, but Will Policy Makers Listen? the posting calls out how narrow slices of media coverage driven by blurred semantic and contextual understandings, inaccurately frame social responses to disaster situations in terms of group panic and the implied breakdown of order and society.
“The false idea of postdisaster panic grows partly from simple semantic confusion, said Michael K. Lindell, a psychologist who directs the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University at College Station. ‘A reporter will stick a microphone in someone’s face and ask, ‘Well, what did you do when the explosion went off?’ And the person will answer, ‘I panicked.’ And then they’ll proceed to describe a very logical, rational action in which they protected themselves and looked out for people around them. What they mean by ‘panic’ is just ‘I got very frightened.’ But when you say ‘I panicked,’ it reinforces this idea that there’s a thin veneer of civilization, which vanishes after a disaster, and that you need outside authorities and the military to restore order. But really, people usually do very well for themselves, thank you.’
Mental models come into play when the article goes on to talk about the ways that the emergency management agencies are organized and structured, and how they approach and understand situations by default. With the new Homeland Security paradigm, all incidents require command and control approaches that assume a dedicated and intelligent enemy – obviously not the way to manage a hurricane response.
“Mr. Lindell, of Texas A&M, agreed, saying he feared that policy makers in Washington had taken the wrong lessons from Katrina. The employees of the Department of Homeland Security, he said, ‘are mostly drawn from the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and from police departments. They’re firmly committed to a command-and-control model.’ (Just a few days ago, President Bush may have pushed the process one step further: He suggested that the Department of Defense take control of relief efforts after major natural disasters.)
“The habits of mind cultivated by military and law-enforcement personnel have their virtues, Mr. Lindell said, but they don’t always fit disaster situations. ‘They come from organizations where they’re dealing with an intelligent adversary. So they want to keep information secret; ‘it’s only shared on a need-to-know basis. But emergency managers and medical personnel want information shared as widely as possible because they have to rely on persuasion to get people to cooperate. The problem with putting FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s like an organ transplant. What we’ve seen over the past four years is basically organ rejection.’
If I read this correctly, misaligned organizational cultures lie at the bottom of the whole problem. I’m still curious about the connections between an organization’s culture, and the mental models that individuals use. Can a group have a collective mental model?
Accoridng to Collective Mental State and Individual Agency: Qualitative Factors in Social Science Explanation it’s possible, and in fact the whole idea of this collective mental state is a black hole as far as qualitative social research and understanding are concerned.

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Getting coffee this afternoon, I saw several packages of tasy looking madeleines sitting in front of the register at Starbucks. For the not small number of people who don’t know that shell shaped pastries made with butter are called madeleines – not everyone has seen The Transporter yet – the package was helpfully labeled “Madeleines”.

Proving that tagging as a practice has gone too far, right below the word madeleines, the label offered the words “tasty French pastry”.

Just in case the customers looking at the clear plastic package aren’t capable of correctly identifying a pastry?
Or to support the large population who can’t decide for themselves what qualifies as tasty?

User Research can be so relentlessly earnest and purposeful that it gets to be a bit stifling. After a few dozen well-crafted personas work their way purposefully through a set of mildly challenging but inevitably successful scenarios for the tenth time in one week, a diligent user researcher is likely to be hungering for something a bit more satisfying; something akin to the persona, but more fully-rounded; something that conveys the ambiguous complexity of human character with honesty; something not only insightful, but consistently forthright across a multiplicity of aspects. Perhaps even something that is genuinely malapert.
Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, And Other Creatures Unique to the Republic is that something. Written by Robert Lanham, it’s a hilarious collection of idiotypes – stereotypes outside the design world, personas within – couched as the outcome of serious scientific inquiry whose method is called idiosyncrology.
I advise reading with humility close at hand, since it’s likely you’ll find yourself inside, and it’s only fair to laugh at everyone if you’re included…

Here’s the description:
Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook and creator and editor of the Web site www.freewilliamsburg.com, extends his anthropological examination of Americans beyond trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods to the entire country, where Yanknecks (“rebel-flag-waving rednecks who live outside the South”), Sigmund Fruits (“people who insist on telling you about their dreams”) and others have existed thus far without being formally studied by “idiosyncrologists” like Lanham and his team. Presented with the authoritative tone of a serious anthropological study, complete with an Idio Rank Scale that assesses the weirdness of each type, many of Lanham’s profiles are hilariously accurate descriptions of co-workers, family members, friends and other acquaintances that almost every American has encountered at some point in their lives. There are the Cornered Rabid Office Workers (CROWs), who “claim to be poets or playwrights” when discussing their work with strangers, “even if they just spent the last nine hours doing data entry on the McFlannery acquisition,” and Hexpatriates, Americans who decry everything about America yet never actually leave the country (and who “refer to the Loews multiplex at the mall as ‘the cinema’ and the Motel Six by Hardees as ‘the pensione”). Illustrations by Jeff Bechtel, depicting the fashion sense of Holidorks (people who wear holiday-themed clothing) and Skants (women with shapely butts who always wear spandex pants), enhance Lanham’s characterizations.

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I went to the 4th of July con­cert on the Esplanade this past Mon­day, for the first time in sev­eral years, expect­ing to show some inter­na­tional vis­i­tors gen­uine Boston Amer­i­cana. After all, 4th of July cel­e­bra­tions are sin­gu­larly Amer­i­can expe­ri­ences; part sum­mer sol­stice rite, part brash rev­o­lu­tion­ary ges­ture, part demon­stra­tion of mar­tial prowess, part razzle-dazzle spec­ta­cle as only Amer­i­cans put on.
I sup­pose a unique Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence is what we got: in return for our trou­ble, we felt like unpaid extras in a tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion recre­at­ing the hol­i­day cel­e­bra­tions for a remote view­ing audi­ence miles or years away. It was — de-centered — hol­low and inverted. It’s become a sim­u­lacrum, with a highly unnat­ural flow dri­ven by the cal­cu­lus of supra-local tele­vi­sion pro­gram­ming goals. The cen­ter of grav­ity is now a national tele­vi­sion audi­ence sit­ting in liv­ing rooms every­where and nowhere else, and not the 500,000 peo­ple gath­ered around the Hatch Shell who cre­ate the cel­e­bra­tion and make it pos­si­ble by com­ing together every year.
Despite all the razzle-dazzle — and in true Amer­i­can fash­ion there was a lot, from fighter jets to fire­works, via brass bands, orches­tras, and pop stars along the way — the expe­ri­ence itself was deeply unsat­is­fy­ing, because it was obvi­ous from the begin­ning that the pro­duc­tion com­pany (B4) held the inter­ests of broad­cast­ers far more impor­tant than the peo­ple who come to the Esplanade.
There were reg­u­lar com­mer­cial breaks.
In a 4th of July con­cert.
For half a mil­lion peo­ple.
Com­mer­cial breaks which the orga­niz­ers — no doubt trapped between the Scylla of con­trac­tual oblig­a­tions and the Charyb­dis of shame at jilt­ing a half-million peo­ple out of a sum­mer hol­i­day to come to this show — filled with filler. While the com­mer­cials aired, and the audi­ence waited, the ‘pro­gram­mers’ plugged the holes in the con­cert sched­ule with an awk­ward mix of live songs last­ing less than three min­utes, pre-recorded music, and inane com­men­tary from local talk­ing heads. We felt like we were sit­ting *behind* a mon­i­tor at a tap­ing ses­sion for a 4th of July show, lis­ten­ing while other peo­ple watched the screen in front.
I bring this out because it offers good lessons for those who design or cre­ate expe­ri­ences, or depend upon the design or cre­ation of qual­ity expe­ri­ences.
Briefly, those lessons are:
1. If you have an estab­lished audi­ence, and you want or need to engage a new one, make sure you don’t leave your loyal cus­tomers behind by mak­ing it obvi­ous that they are less impor­tant to you than your new audi­ence.
2. If you’re enter­ing a new medium, and your expe­ri­ence will not trans­late directly to the new chan­nel (and which well-crafted expe­ri­ence does trans­late exactly?), make sure you don’t dam­age the expe­ri­ence of the orig­i­nal chan­nel while you’re trans­lat­ing to the new one.
3. When adding a new or addi­tional chan­nel for deliv­er­ing your expe­ri­ence, don’t trade qual­ity in the orig­i­nal chan­nel for capa­bil­ity in the new chan­nel. Many sep­a­rate fac­tors affect judg­ments of qual­ity. Capa­bil­ity in one chan­nel is not equiv­a­lent to qual­ity in another. Qual­ity is much harder to achieve.
4. Always pre­serve qual­ity, because con­sis­tent qual­ity wins loy­alty, which is worth much more in the long run. Con­sis­tent qual­ity dif­fer­en­ti­ates you, and encour­ages cus­tomers to rec­om­mend you to other peo­ple with con­fi­dence, and allows other to become your advo­cates, or even your part­ners. For advo­cates, think of all the peo­ple who clear obsta­cles for you with­out direct ben­e­fit, such as per­mit and license boards. For part­ners, think of all the peo­ple who’s busi­ness con­nect to or depend upon your expe­ri­ence in some way; the con­ces­sions ven­dors who pur­chase a vend­ing license to sell food and bev­er­ages every year are a good exam­ple of this.
For peo­ple plan­ning to attend next year’s 4th of July pro­duc­tion, I hope the expe­ri­ence you have in 2006 reflects some of these lessons. If not, then I can see the head­line already, in bold 42 point let­ter type, “Audi­ences nowhere com­mem­o­rate Inde­pen­dence Day again via tele­vi­sion! 500,000 bored extras make cel­e­bra­tion look real for remote view­ers!“
Since this is the sec­ond time I’ve had this expe­ri­ence, I’ve changed my judg­ment on the qual­ity of the pro­duc­tion, and I won’t be there: I attended in 2002, and had exactly the same experience.

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Prompted by curiousity, and a desire to see if interactive art really is irritating, I took in several exhibits for the 2005 Boston CyberArts Festival, at the Decordova Museum this weekend.
Sarah Boxer’s review of Trains – a landscape made of tiny model railroad buildings and figures, adorned with movie images from famous movie scenes, and populated by passengers that appear only on the video screen of a Gameboy – offers several stellar insights about the emotionally unhealthy states of mind brought on by attempting to interact with computerized interfaces. Boxer says:

Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima’s “Trains,” at the DeCordova Museum School Gallery, in the Boston suburb Lincoln, which is a model train set guided by cellphone.

It’s clear from this that the emotional or other content of the art installation itself was obscured by the user experience Boxer had to negotiate in order to engage with the piece. Boxer’s expectations for user experience quality might have been lower if she were trying out a new spreadsheet, or Lotus Notes, but that’s just an example of how the software industry has trained customers to expect abusively bad experiences. See photos of Trains here.
One of the more usable – if that judgement applies – is Nam June Paik’s “Requiem for the 20th Century“. Requiem – photo here – according to Boxer is less annoying “…a relief to just stand there and watch the apocalyptic montage! No interaction. No instruction. No insults.”
Once past the interface, I found Requiem elegiac as expected, but unsatisfying for two reasons: first by virtue of concerning mostly Paik’s work in video art, and second by being strangely empty at heart (or was that the point?). The svelte physicality of the Chrysler Airstream art-deco automobile contrasted sharply with the ephemeral nature of the video images showing on it’s windows, in a clear example of concepts that were well-thought-through, but in the end, this is another example of art (post modern and/or otherwise) that is clever, yet incapable of engaging and establishing emotional resonance. “Requiem” is not even effectively psychological, which would broaden it’s potential modes of address. To ameliorate this weakness, I recommend obtaining the audiobook version of J.G. Ballard’s “Crash“, and listening to it’s auto-erotic on headphones while taking in the silvered spectacle.
From the description: “Requiem sums up the twentieth century as a period of transformative socio-cultural change from an industrial based society to an electronic information based society. The automobile and the television figure as both the most significant inventions of the century as well as the most prominent signifiers of Western consumerism.”

The most interesting installation was a wiki based soundscape, the first example I know of in which information architecture becomes both medium and art.
From the official description of the festival:

The creative connection between two of Boston’s most vital forces – the arts community and the high-tech industry – is once again in the spotlight, with more than 70 exhibitions and events in and around the Boston area from April 22 through May 8. It’s the first and largest collaboration of artists working in new technologies in all media in North America, encompassing visual art, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.

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