archive.Joe Lamantia.com

In addition to the customary joys of DIY life in the new mediaverse – contending with opaque and incomplete documentation, reconciling conflicting content models and templates, and the seemingly endless repetitive labor of manually naming, tagging, and reviewing migrated items – changing publishing platforms means the opportunity to explore what it will be like to be an Information Archaeologist in the future.

Operatively, this means digging deep into the many layers of cumulative information strata beneath the gentle orange user experience that greets visitors to JoeLamantia.com. When performed on a website you’ve created and maintained for almost 10 years, the experience is a mix of cleaning out your attic, workshop, or garage, and excavating the foundations of a former residence.

Such an effort yields a rich assemblage of digital artifacts:

• dozens of orphaned HTML pages comprising a design portfolio, created by hand using deprecated markup and tags
• “multi-ethnic” style-sheets cross-bred and reused for so many different site looks or designs over the past ten years that deleting style references is like playing russian roulette with your user experience
• four or five derelict publishing package installations (MT, WordPress, etc.), spanning technologies from PERL/CGI to PHP RUBY – the Infoverse equivalent of a collection of abandoned and decaying rust belt factories
• hundreds of half-empty shell pages populated with dummy content, created during tests of publishing tools
• multiple sets of overlapping archives, accumulated over generations of upgrades to blogging tools. the trend here is toward increasingly human-readable output files, away from the raw database style naming of early blogging platforms
• a score of miscellaneous documents, audio / video files, and MS Office format files stored on the server for temporary download, now comprising a retrospective of outdated resumes, drafts of deliverables for long-over projects, and backups from system crashes long-forgotten
• numerous design tools and templates, now linked from external publications, and indispensable to unknown thousands of downloaders

Just like the older layers of cities and habitations uncovered during new construction, these cumulative information castoffs tell stories within a larger context: changing career plans and jobs, new technologies and tools, shifts in business and economic climates, life events, aspirations and interests, hardware failures.

What will the information archaeologists of the future find when excavating our virtual habitations and workplaces? How will they map and understand what they find? What meanings will they make, and what insights into our lives will they draw, from the information (waste? pollution? byproducts?) we create at such stupendous rates?

Like so many life forms before us, we are very busy living in the moment, not thinking overly much about the vast deposits of information detritus we leave behind in the course of saving dozens of versions of text files, booking air travel, sharing photos, or obeying regulatory compliance directives for medical archives.

But in the long view, all this will matter in some way. Witness the fact that 10% of the land area of the former Soviet Union is contaminated with radioactivity or industrial pollution.

What is the difference between pollution, waste, and recyclable and reusable matter in the infoverse?

Can we make use of these vast deposits of information in new ways?

The Garamantes of the Sahara relied on deeply buried reserves of fossil water to sustain a brief empire, a culture that flowered and perished entirely in line with it’s ability to exploit finite reserves of irreplaceable groundwater (paleowater)stored in aquifers.

Living off the fruits of past accumulation is a habit we’ve not shaken yet in North Africa (Libya’s Great Man Made River project supplying 6,500,000 m³ of freshwater per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere is the largest engineering effort in the world), or here in the United States, as we drain the enormous Ogallala Aquifer – that supports nearly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle produced in the United States – at an alarming rate.

As (it seems, always…), Sterling has visited this future, in his novel Holyfire, which mentions wildcatters who get rich discovering lost landfills rich in plastics and other rare materials, in former Eastern Europe.

Moving past the archeological horizon brings us to the geologic time scale.

Will future virtual economies depend on the industrial style extraction, processing and mass consumption of these new informational strata we are laying down today, in the same way that we depend upon fossilized forests of the Carboniferous era to power our new hydrocarbon age?

The vast oil and coal deposits that power our economy exist because the bacteria and other decomposer organisms of the time were unable to effectively break down plant cell materials. We recreate this cycle by mining assorted fossil fuels, turning them into plastics that existing decomposers are unable to break down, and then dispersing these new proto-fossilized non-degrable materials widely throughout our own environment (yielding contemporary phenomena such as plastic micro-particulate contamination of tidal waters, and dating of landfills by the plastic materials preserved in them.

Over at uiGarden.net Don Norman clarified some of his ideas regarding Activity Centered Design originally published in the summer of 2005.

I’d like to be comfortable saying that I’m with Don in spirit while disagreeing on some of the particulars, but I’ve read both the original essay and the clarifications twice, and the ideas and the messages are still too raw to support proper reactions or to fully digest. Maybe Don’s working on a new book, and this is interim thinking?

That might explain why the contrast between Norman’s two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things – which also is a sort of design philosophy / manifesto – is so dramatic. Halfway through Shaping Things, I’m left – as I usually am when reading Sterling’s work – feeling envious that I wasn’t gifted the same way.

Sterling is speaking at ETech, which this year focuses on The Attention Economy. No surprises with this matchup, given that Sterling’s devoted a whole book – Distraction – to some of the same ideas proponents of the Attention Economy advocate we use as references when designing the future.

Looks like Dave Sifry at Technorati has drunk the Clay Shirky Koolaid on tagging and social bookmarking. Here’s something from Dave’s posting State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags, that shows he’s clearly joined the academy of received ideas.
“Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out…”

I’m disappointed to see this. The quality level of Shirky’s thinking and writing related to tagging is generally low; too often he’s so completely off the mark with much of what he’s said about tagging, social bookmarking, and categorization in general that his main contribution is in lending a certain amount of attention by virtue of name recognition to a subject that used to be arcane.

There’s little need to rehash the many, many individual weaknesses in Shirky’s writings, just one example of which is his establishment of a false dichotomy separating structured categorization systems and social tagging practices. Broadly, his approach and rhetoric show strong influence from anarchism, and utopian social theory.

From Shirky:
“There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else’s needs, interests, or requirements.”
Further, “…with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something “should” be tagged.”

Building back on the criticique of computerization, it’s clear that Shirky uses rhetorical strategies and positions from both technological utopianism and anti-utopianism.

Here’s Professor Rob Kling on technological utopianism:
“Utopian images are common in many books and articles about computerization in society written by technologists and journalists. I am particularly interested in what can be learned, and how we can be misled, by a particular brand of utopian thought — technological utopianism. This line of analysis places the use of some specific technology, such as computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies — like pocket computers which understand spoken language — as “utopian gadgets.”

Technological utopianism does not refer to these technologies with amazing capabilities. It refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti-utopianism examines how certain broad families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order.”

That Shirky would take speak from this standpoint is not a surprise; he’s identified as a “Decentralization Writer/Consultant” in the description of his session “Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata” at etech, and it’s clear that he’s both technologist and a journalist, as Kilng identifies.

Regardless of Shirky’s bias, there is a bigger picture worth examining. Tagging or social bookmarking is one potential way for the community of social metadata system users to confront problems of individual and group information overload, via a collective and nominally unhierarchical approach to the emergent problem of information management across common resources (URIs).