Ken's Blog

I reached into my pocket after lunch today to grab my little case of dental floss. Looking down at my hand, I realized I had actually pulled out my cell phone.

Which got me thinking. Why do we combine some functions into a single pocket-sized box, but not others? We now have one device that handles phone conversations, text messaging, email, and surfing the web to find the nearest restaurant.

Why don’t we have a phone that helps you floss your teeth? Is this merely due to a limitation of technology, or is there some unconscious cultural resistance to taking that final step, one last valiant stand against putting every aspect of our existence into a single miniaturized plastic case?

I have spent most of this past week at the Game Developer’s Conference, and have realized that the main cultural topic of conversation here is “Dammit, we are not movies, we are games. We are, in our own right, a legitimate part of the means of cultural production!” All this accompanied by much indignity and metaphorical foot stamping.

Which is all fine, I guess. But it leave me wondering why such defensiveness is necessary. After all, people in the movie biz don’t spend a lot of time arguing that movies are not computer games.

The only thing I can conclude, if I can make an analogy, is that computer games are to movies more or less what Canada is to the United States.

As I write this, I am attending a talk by Sid Meier, the creator of the game “Civilization”, who is discussing his creative process. He keeps going back to the phrase “find the fun”, as a guiding principle.

I find myself thinking about Robert Sherman, who co-wrote many of the greatest Disney songs with his brother Richard, including the songs in “Mary Poppins”. In particular, I’m thinking of the opening lyrics to “A Spoonful of Sugar”:

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun.
You find the fun and Snap!
The job’s a game.

Sadly, Robert Sherman passed away earlier this week. Ever since I was a child, his song lyrics have had a special place in my heart. There is a bright cheerfulness to the songs of the Sherman brothers, and yet there is also often a deep undercurrent of sadness running just below their surface, almost a feeling of dancing on the abyss. For example, “Chim Chim Cher-ee”, with its minor key and surprisingly mysterious lyrics:

Winds from the east
Mist coming in
Like something was brewing, about to begin
Can’t put me finger on what lies in store
But I feel what’s to happen, all happened before

seems to suggest an old dark magic just out of frame. And the haunting “Feed the Birds” makes me feel like crying every time I hear it.

In a way Robert Sherman’s work is like that of J.D. Salinger. It’s all bright shiny surfaces and cleverness, yet with a terrible sadness lying just beneath our view, such as the inner struggle of the soldier in Salinger’s story “For Esme, with Love and Squalor”, and the haunting tragedy of Seymour Glass.

As it happens, these two well known wordsmiths, painters of dazzling verbal pictures, had something very specific in common. They were both among the very first Allied soldiers to enter the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II, suddenly confronted by a nightmare for which they were completely unprepared.

We cannot know in full measure the demons that must have haunted Salinger or Sherman in the wake of such an experience. But it’s not surprising that an individual with the soul of a poet, when faced such devastating horror, will do everything he can to beat back the darkness, devoting his talent to trying, heroically, to find the fun.

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I recently posted some experiments in creating geographic landscapes over the space of novels such as “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice”. Like any maps, these are potentially spaces upon which people can overlay shared commentaries, links, histories, or interesting routes and connections.

The game changes somewhat if the landscape is built from a play, such as, for example, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the case of theatre, we not only have the original written work, but also specific embodied performances. One can imagine a geographic landscape of the play as a map into a performance, and as a space for people to discuss aspects of that performance (or even from which to compare different productions).

I have a sense that this sort of shared landscape can have a richness that goes beyond what we can do with novels, since the liveness of theatrical performance adds depth and dimension to the discussion. It would be interesting to see whether we could apply an adaptation of my narrative geography to the problem of building a community of thought and commentary around an particular performance of a play.

We could also do the same with movies, yet somehow I find theatre more appealing for this process, because the connection is so much stronger and more essential between the original sequence of words in the script and the resulting performance.

When you hit the “Send” button on email, your thoughts have just sailed into the world. If you have something like Google “undo” installed, there is a short period of time when you can change your mind. But after that, it’s all over.

This is usually fine, but every once in a while we all find that we’ve sent out a badly worded email, or one which accidentally contains factual errors, or sometimes, (sigh) an email that we shouldn’t have sent at all.

It seems to me that the last moment to change our minds should not be moments after we’ve hit the “Send” button, but rather moments before the intended recipient has read our missive.

Yes, it’s true that shortly after we hit “Send” the underlying sendmail protocol has already delivered our first email, and soon our original message has been copied into a spoolfile somewhere in the recipient’s file system. But so what? Modern mail programs contain layers of functionality over this raw base level. Surely they could deal with an “edit earlier email” meta-email.

So why don’t email programs allow us to continue editing, up until the moment the message is actually open and read?

At some point technology will advance to the point where we will be able to see and hear distant friends and colleagues through augmented reality glasses, in a way that closely approximates the experience of sitting across a table from them.

At that point, perhaps a new kind of restaurant will emerge, one which caters to a clientele that enjoys sharing conversation over a good meal with distant friends, but seeks to avoid the time, expense and inconvenience of air travel. Perhaps at some point even the waiter will be virtual, appearing to serve food that is actually delivered to your plate by robot.

Remember feeling that buzz of sparkling conversation all around you, the last time you had a great time in a fine restaurant? Maybe, just as eBooks might replace paper and ink, the experience of going out to a restaurant might end up being something we will one day enjoy in the comfort of our own homes.

Over lunch today, the topic came up of how things that we take for granted as being limitations in the physical world gradually give way as technology advances.

My recent discussion about the horseless carriage and the eBook are just two examples of technologies gradually dissociating from their more physically bound forebears. Another notable example is the Web itself. Initial web interface metaphors were all based on pages of paper documents. We still use the word “page” when talking about the web, but the look and feel of such sites as YouTube and FaceBook are radically different from anything you’d see on paper.

Only ten years ago it was considered radical and risky when Valve Software built their “Steam” software for delivering PC games over the internet (rather than making people go to the store to buy something in a box). Now we simply take such things for granted.

The same thing has happened with music, with movies, and with just about every consumable information object. Actual physical embodiment is increasingly being consigned to the role of generic player of content (e.g. the iPad), rather than anything content specific.

I wonder whether this trend will extend to embodied social interaction. After all, once we are all wearing those A.R. glasses, you will be able to hang with your friends in the same apparent physical space, even share a “meal” at a restaurant, with no actual physical presence required.

And when the transition has happened, will we even notice?

I wrote yesterday’s post about cyber-cloaking while thinking about the recent article in the New York Times claiming that Google will soon be coming out with augmented reality glasses.

A.R. glasses are essentially a form of client/server technology. As you walk around in the world, you are the client, and a remote server that knows your location is downloading content into the wearable computer that drives your display glasses. In that sense wearable A.R. is not all that different from the client/server architecture we use every day when we browse the web.

Except that A.R. cloaking attacks could be a lot more interesting and scary. Imagine somebody being able to hack into your very perception of the world around you. For example, you and your friends are walking down the street together, all wearing the latest and greatest designer A.R. shades, checking out cool virtual sculptures, store displays, interactive movie ads. What you don’t know is that a clever cloaking attack is targeting just you, so that you only think you are seeing what everyone else is seeing.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine what such a perception attack could be used for. The possibilities, I’m afraid, are endless.