Idées Fortes
You Are What You See
"The Internet has the potential of leading you to increasingly superficial interactions with more and more people." - Danny Hillis
Rara avis means "rare bird" in Latin. But if you access the Rara Avis Web site (www.uky.edu/FineArts/Art/kac/raraavis.html), you can have a visual experience that is becoming increasingly common on the Internet. The site presents images captured by a digital camera in an Atlanta art exhibit, where the camera was embedded in the head of a parrotlike "macowl" figurine. Through this electronic eye, you could watch the visitors watching you. You could experience the exhibit from the parrot's point of view.
Computer graphics is showing itself to be a technology for generating points of view. For decades, the computer has been used to study the world through numerical analysis or comment upon the world in text. It is now becoming literally a way of seeing the world. The computer has something in common with earlier perspective technologies - painting, photography, film, television - but it is unique in its capacity for interactivity. In immersive virtual reality and even certain games, the computer gives the user not only a point of view but control over that point of view. This control allows the user to define her- or himself by choosing a place in the virtual world. Computer graphics isn't just about morphing objects; it's about morphing the view and the viewer.
Email, newsgroups, chat rooms, MUDs, and MOOs are worlds created out of words, and in these domains our identity is not fundamentally different from what it has been in the world of print. We define ourselves by what we write, just as we have done for hundreds of years in letters, diaries, and printed books. In computer graphic environments, however, we define ourselves by what we see when we look out through electronic eyes.
Visual media are now threatening to take over a crucial cultural task that until now has belonged to verbal media. Conservatives like William Bennett want children to read classic printed books so that they will adopt appropriate points of view (he calls them "virtues"). Conservatives see television as the destroyer of these virtues, and they're right, in a sense. But it is not the implied sex or violence of MTV that poses the threat. It is the schizophrenic POV camerawork, which rejects the consistent verbal identity of the age of print. In this respect interactive computer graphics pose a far greater threat than MTV. Both gentle Myst and violent Doom subvert the values of print more than does a music video by Madonna, who is herself just a caricature of traditional values. Myst is really about superseding, even destroying the book and along with it tradi-tional verbal identity. Action-adventure games, too, are exercises in visual identity, encouraging users to think of themselves as a moving and changing point of view.
Interface designer and cyberspace enthusiast Meredith Bricken has written that with VR "you can be the mad hatter or you can be the teapot; you can move back and forth to the rhythm of a song. You can be a tiny droplet in the rain or in the river; you can be what you thought you ought to be all along. You can switch your point of view to an object or a process or another person's point of view in the other person's world." Bricken celebrates the fluidity of virtual, visual identity. Visual identity is not as stable as verbal identity. On the Internet or on paper, you write much the same prose at 70 that you write at 20. MUD players think they can become different people in different games merely by changing their names and their descriptions. But their underlying written voice, their verbal character, is often hard to disguise. On the other hand, you don't "express" yourself in defining your computer graphic identity. Instead, you occupy various points of view, each of which constitutes a new identity - whether of a parrot or a flying logo. You adopt these identities one at a time, but you don't need to (and aren't likely to) keep any one for long. Unlike characters in 19th-century novels, you don't make fateful, lifelong commitments. You change identities with the same playfulness with which you click through pages on the Web.
This fluidity creates a new type of freedom, at first defined in spatial and visual terms. But as with all freedoms, there are corresponding responsibilities. Visual freedom obliges us not just to sympathize, but to identify with other people. We do this by occupying their point of view technologically - by walking (or flying) a mile in cyberspace wearing their headmounted display.
Television already performs this function in our culture. Television puts you on the scene of every natural and technological disaster and insists that you watch and feel the victims' pain. Interactive computer graphics can vastly improve on television's ability to put you there. The CNN Interactive Web site provides recorded audio and video for its regularly updated news reports (frequently disasters and sporting events, which are always invitations to empathize). Meanwhile, digital cameras on the Internet monitor professors' offices, students' dorm rooms, and congested expressways. All such sites are invitations to share an experience. A Web page from the University of Washington (www.cac.washington.edu:1180/) allows everybody on the Internet to experience the current reality of Seattle weather. Then there are the cameras trained on pets: goldfish, guinea pigs, cockatiels. These sites too are exercises in identification. The camera seeks to put you in close, empathetic contact with the animal. It is a short step to the Rara Avis site, where the camera fully occupies the animal's perspective. We can't be far away from "live" Internet video of a natural disaster - the world from the point of view of a hurricane or tornado.
Freedom in the age of print was the freedom to write and read, also called freedom of the press, indicating its connection to the technology of printing. We might also call it "freedom of verbal point of view," because what the age of print valued was the right to define one's identity and beliefs through speaking and writing. That isn't to say the older freedoms of expression are not worth protecting on the Internet. They are. But they matter most to those whose values were formed in and by the age of print.
Those who have opposed the Communications Decency Act argue that the Internet is more like a printed book than like television. For them, the Internet is a world of newsgroups and chat rooms discussing issues like breast cancer and abortion, and so it deserves the same First Amendment protection accorded printed materials. The government has argued that the Internet is like television, a cascade of images - mostly, authorities seem to think, pornographic images. For our visual culture, images are more immediate than words and therefore more dangerous. So our culture censors pictures more vigorously than words, and moving pictures more vigorously than still images. In this respect those who wish to censor the Internet are right in their assessment of where the power is. With Java and VRML, the Internet is going beyond television to foster a new culture of visually realized point of view. The CDA case will probably go to the Supreme Court, the most print-bound institution Americans have. It will be interesting to see whether the nine justices recognize the Internet as a new kind of book or as television out of control.
But one thing seems certain. The Supreme Court justices won't recognize the real threat (that is, to the old culture of the Enlightenment, which gave us our constitutional republic in the age of print). If they did, they wouldn't worry about banning pornography, certainly not written pornography. Instead, they would ban inexpensive digital cameras, graphic accelerator boards, 3-D rendering software, and, above all, the freedom to merge your point of view with that of a raindrop. This freedom, to which the Founding Fathers were oblivious, is giving us a new definition of the self in cyberspace.
Jay David Bolter (jay.bolter@lcc.gatech.edu) is VP of strategic marketing at Open Text.
We're Not Evolving
It's a common misconception that biology says species are always evolving. Take the suggestion that poorly designed keyboards will favor natural selection of "those �ber-arms of our future," that "evolution will yield comfort." Nope.Babies of cultures that have been circumcising males for centuries are not born without foreskins. And we will not evolve arms better fit for typing from doing lots of it. Our evolution is more likely to occur in the context of a miserable, dying humanity, bereft of its protective technology. The result may be not the large-cranium creature of science fiction but a nonsentient, carbon-dioxide-adapted monkey. Evolution does not correspond with our notions of "better." Survival is survival. On the other hand, there's genetic engineering ...
Jef Raskin (jefraskin@aol.com)is best known for creating the Macintosh project at Apple. He is now building a cardboard pipe organ in Pacifica, California.
Type Held Hostage
Typewriters produce a "signature." The mechanical process of striking a key causes deformations that leave a distinct imprint; the ribbon and platen also hold information about what has been written. As a result, investigators have long been able to trace typed ransom notes to specific typewriters. Criminals, in turn, began making ransom notes by cutting and pasting letters from newspapers and magazines.
Though computers provide none of the typewriter's clues, it is often possible to trace trash marks left by defects in a printer's drum or toner cartridge. Spectrophotometry or chromatography can identify which manufacturer's toner was used for laser-printed output, but these processes destroy the original. Electronic ransom notes can be made anonymous, though they may provide a network trail.
In any case, computers have made cutting and pasting an everyday activity, allowing designers - and criminals - to leave as little evidence as possible. Though the PC pushed the development of new fonts, without the typewriter ransom-note type would likely never have been invented.
Steve Jones is chair of the communication department at the University of Tulsa and author of CyberSociety*.*
Behind the Curtain
Inaccessibility is the cornerstone of power. The heroes of our imagination inhabit fortresses of solitude rather than more public spaces. Those who have access to the powerful and celebrated are the modern hierophants, the priests and courtiers inside the castle walls. To communicate with the exalted, you used to have to know someone, or pay someone. You still do, but the packets of data traversing the Net are hammering at the walls. When the dust has cleared, we may find that with access comes a diminution of our political and cultural icons, as happened when Dorothy pulled back the curtain to reveal the little Wizard of Oz. Perhaps the 15 minutes of fame Warhol predicted for everyone anticipated the shift from trickle-down, representative democracy toward something more egalitarian.
Tom Claburn (tom@wired.com)is production coordinator at Wired*.*
Singapore Sling
Liberty-loving webmasters should append the following short message to the bottom of every page they serve: "The government of Singapore sucks." Why? Because those five words fall foul of Singaporean standards of political correctness, and their poxy proxy servers would be prevented from letting anyone in Singapore access any page that carried it. If Singapore won't let the whole of the Web in, the whole Web shouldn't let Singapore in.But why bother when the Singaporean experiment is doomed to failure anyway? The free flow of information on the Internet has nothing to do with dirty words and everything to do with power. And it's time governments got the message about where power now lies. Freedom of information enhances the spread of political freedom and economic freedom - because information, power, and money are the same thing. In other words, free your Internet and your ass will follow.
Matthew Doull(mdoull@suntimes.com)is president of Hollinger Digital, but his views are his own.
One-Way to Mars?
The hard part of an expedition to Mars isn't getting there, but coming back. More than three-fourths of what is launched to Mars is the return vehicle, supporting equipment, and fuel: 136 metric tons to return a crew of four.
So why bring them back?
That isn't as silly as it sounds. You might think, Well, we can't send people up there to die ... But everyone dies eventually. If the members of the crew are about 35 years old, with good medical care and a bit of luck they can expect to live another 40 years. Why not spend them on Mars?
To do so, the crew needs air, water, food, and spare parts. Mars has water, and an atmosphere that can be chemically processed to produce breathable air. The main problem is food, and that's about a kilogram per day per person. With spare parts plus odds and ends, the supplies we have to ship from Earth are perhaps half a ton per year per person.
That means 40 years of supplies is only about 20 tons per person; a fully fueled return vehicle is about 34 tons per person. It's actually easier to send a lifetime of supplies! We also eliminate worries about contaminating Earth with Martian bacteria: no return trip means no contamination.
Would people volunteer to spend the rest of their lives exploring a new planet? That question was asked at the recent Case for Mars technical conference - and about one-third of the audience said they would.
Henry Spencer(henry@zoo.toronto.edu)is an author and a consultant in both computing and spaceflight.
One Way to Mars
There's a one-word answer to paying for a one-way trip to Mars: television. Any guess what, say, Rupert Murdoch might part with for exclusive rights to the greatest epic in modern history? Telegenic crew. Life-and-death drama. Live video from 25 million miles out. And the first landing on another planet - an easy bet for the most-watched event ever.
NBC is laying out US$715 million for the 2000 Olympics, a two-week event. For a one-way Mars mission, the price tag starts around $15 billion - $500 million a year for a 30-year run. And we haven't even talked about which shoe company gets its logo on the first foot to touch Martian soil. Just do it.
Spencer Reiss (spencer@wired.com)is all set to watch.
