__ Idées Fortes __
__ Mutual Reality __
A physical or metaphysical place inhabited by two or more sentient beings who are most likely interacting. Benjamin Britton, an electronic artist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, literally stumbled upon the expression while repeatedly explaining interactive Internet experiences ranging from avatar chat rooms to collaborative CAD. "I was saying 'multiuser virtual reality' too damn fast," Britton recounts, "and it came out as 'mutual reality.'"
The key to mutual reality, Britton explains, is that "the participants are aware of each other." Depending on whether you're a literalist, a C++ programmer, or a Hollywood media mogul, the expression could describe two friends conversing in a café, an intensely immersive MUD, or a state-of-the-art computer-generated world like Britton's current project - a mutual reality Moon landing slated for 1999, the anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic "small step."
__ Meme __
A unit of cultural transmission (rhymes with "cream"). The archetypal meme "meme" was launched by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 mind grenade The Selfish Gene.
Derived from a Greek root meaning "to imitate," meme describes how ideas mimic the behavior of genes, propagating not from body to body, Dawkins wrote, but "by leaping from brain to brain." Memes range from scientific hypotheses to slang words, TV commercials to conspiracy theories. A fertile meme, Dawkins further explained, parasitizes the brain "in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." Once you're infected, you tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, just like the old Jhirmack shampoo ad (itself a long-living meme).
Apart from its commercial applications, studying these "viruses of the mind" has emerged as a serious academic discipline, spawning evolutionary approaches in fields such as political science and cognitive psychology and heady periodicals like the Journal of Memetics.
Still, the most celebrated memetic engineers are usually advertisers. Their job, after all, is to create brand recognition, making meme warfare akin to brain-side product placement. The biggest battleground: television.
"It's not called 'programming' for nothing," says author Douglas Rushkoff, whose 1994 book Media Virus! further popularized the notion of memes. "The hardwiring of human beings together through a global interactive media has led to the mass transmission of memes, which, instead of infecting individuals one by one, attack the entire cultural organism."
__ Productivity Paradox __
The disparity between the pervasiveness of computers and their minimal effects on macroeconomic measures of effectiveness, best summarized by 1987 Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow: "We see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics."
From 1948 to 1972, US economic productivity was on a rapid rise - then, at the dawn of the digital age, the increase slowed down. "As compared with the tools and machines of prior economic revolutions - industrial, agricultural, communications, and transportation - computers haven't been designed to do sufficiently useful things in the service economy," maintains Thomas Landauer, psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity. "The design process has focused on the machines themselves and the tricks they can do, rather than on how well they actually improve intellectual work efficiency."
Landauer also points to incompatibility issues, unreliability, and steep learning curves as factors that decrease the efficiency computers are expected to provide. So does that mean everyone at the office is using desktop PCs just for bouts of networked Quake?
"Well, we really don't even have a handle on what true productivity is to begin with," admits Erik Brynjolfsson, an associate professor of management at MIT now visiting Stanford. "There's some very bad mismeasurement at the level of the whole US economy. In particular, things like quality, variety, timeliness, and customer service don't get counted well in our output statistics."
For a closer look at the discrepancy, Brynjolfsson surveyed managers on what they hoped to gain from investing in information technologies. At the top of their wish lists were improved customer service, flexibility, variety, and new products - factors not accounted for well in productivity statistics. In fact, Brynjolfsson's research reveals that firms that combined IT with more advanced management structures and business strategies had higher productivity growth on average. On the other hand, Landauer counters, "companies taking market shares from other firms is very different from widespread productivity gains."
The bottom line, Brynjolfsson says, is that we need a better ruler. "But the more the economy becomes an information economy, the less you can measure it. Perhaps that's the real paradox."
