The Age of Wonder

I was born at the dawn of the Space Age.

It was also the dawn of the Information Age, the Age of Aquarius, and the Age of Other Cool Things Too Numerous To Mention. That last category includes Peace, Love and Music (later, Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll).

This period, the second half of the 20th century and the first smidgen of the 21st, brought many social changes and technological innovations. We can now carry TV sets in our pockets, and we have even more ways to waste time with them. There are new, even more boring kinds of lettuce. We have remote control voting machines. And we can now talk to our appliances, eliminating the onerous task of pushing buttons.

We eat health food out of single-serving plastic containers. We drive around in hybrid cars that reduce the CO₂ emissions of going across the street. And we can share our most intimate secrets and deeply held beliefs with Mark Zuckerberg and hundreds of people we don’t know through the charm of social networks, the next best thing to being there.

We are now much more accepting of lifestyles and cultures that differ from our own, as long as they don’t appear in public. We have new gender categories undreamt of by our forebears. We have hate crimes in addition to crimes of niceness.

Truly we are living in an Age of Wonder.

Technology and Magic

Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Certainly technology can do things that would once have been considered magic.

One of the things I’ve waited a long time for is technology that lets me create drawings, cartoons and illustrations as expressively and intuitively as pencil, paper and other traditional media. Keep in mind that I’ve been studying and creating art technology for ... well, quite a few years. I’ve observed the technologies at Walt Disney Feature Animation and the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, most of whose talent later became Pixar. I’ve collaborated with researchers at the MIT Media Lab and the artists at Paws, Inc. (makers of Garfield) on tools for animation and cartooning. I’ve seen early uses of frame buffers and digitizing tablets back when these were highly specialized and expensive equipment.

And in all that time, I had not seen anything to replace paper and pencil.

Until now.

I just got a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2, a device that combines high end digitizing technology with a Windows tablet, so it can run Photoshop, Painter and other real graphics software, and lets you draw and paint right on the display screen. In just a few minutes, I did this rough blue pencil sketch.

And then inked it with a pen tool.

All while watching Jeopardy.

I was going to write something fiendishly clever about technology and the magic of Penn and Teller, but that can wait. I’m having too much fun with these tools.

Art?

I’ve always been interested in the question of what art, or Art, is or isn’t. Certainly there are loads of things presented as art that many of us would consider more in the category of crap. Now I don’t have a good definition for Art, but in my view, it has to say something.

It’s conceivable that you could find some junk in a dumpster, put it on a pedestal, and it would be art. But it would have to be junk that, at least in the context of sitting on that pedestal, gets a response from people experiencing it. Oh, and that response has to be something more than “Hey, cool piece of junk on a pedestal!”

More specifically, it has to say something about our human-ness. An organization chart says something. It says “Look who’s boss!” But that’s not art. At least, it’s not capital A Art.

I’m reading Walter What’s-his-face’s biography of Steve Jobs, and I’m struck by how frequently he refers to Jobs as both an artist and a technologist.

Steve Jobs was certainly a rare and gifted individual, but ...

Some years ago, I had the good fortune to see the late George C. Scott starring in Death of a Salesman. I’ve seen a lot of plays and musicals, of course, but this is the only time I remember the audience being too stunned to applaud during the curtain call. Seriously. The curtain call was half over before people started clapping, and I’m sure it was because they, like me, were completely in shock. (Post-dramatic stress disorder?) We felt we had just come face to face with TRUTH ... with incredible insight about the characters in the play, but also about everyone, everywhere. How we spend our lives pursuing dreams, often failing because of our own shortcomings, but always holding on to the phantasm of utter fulfillment. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

Now THAT was Art.

But a cool looking iPod?

Fall Season Preview

The Vision Thing

There are basically three ways that technology companies develop and maintain their “vision” of the future:

1. Let engineering drive.
   
2. Use marketing/product management to gather requirements, feedback, etc.
   
3. Have an all-knowing dictator.

The first approach tends to produce incremental improvements of the same basic products. The engineers all know how to improve what they’re already building, but not necessarily how to completely blow it away. Many such companies tend to engineer themselves into oblivion. Anybody remember DEC?

The information gathering approach is probably the most widely espoused (if not necessarily used). Theoretically, this leads to building what customers want, but the results tend to be very conservative. Customers don’t necessarily know what they want, and modest proposals achieve consensus much more easily than radical new ideas. Some companies start out being very innovative, and then settle into this how-can-we-help-you model. I suspect Google, the king of Web analytics, fits this category.

The all-knowing dictator model, at least as exemplified by Apple, is obviously very successful … if you have such a person. Pretty tough to pull off otherwise.

There’s actually another model: copy other successful companies. Microsoft has managed this, occasionally adding a bit of innovation, throughout its history. Windows came from Xerox (via Apple). C# was Java. Windows Phone was Windows Mobile was … whatever else they’ve called it … back to the original smart phones they copied from. XBOX was Nintendo or Sony or whoever’s gaming system.

Maybe there's yet another model to consider: crowd-sourcing. Just give everybody the tools to make their own cool things, and see what emerges. The mobile app industry may ... just may ... be going in that direction.

Attention Deficit

Harry Potter Magic vs. Technology, Part 1

Harry Potter Magic	Technology
Floo Network fireside chat	Skype
Broomstick	Zipcar
Priori Incantatem (Show previous spells)	Undo
Portkey (Touch to travel instantly to a pre-assigned location)	<a href=""> ... </a> Web page link
Pensieve (Relive memories)

Techno-Crap

Progress?

Back in the quaint era known as the 1970's, our ancestors used primitive computing machines called computers.  These were clunky devices about the size of two or three refrigerators side-by-side, with disk drives the size of washing machines.  The ancients interacted with these devices by typing on keyboards, and looking at displays of numbers and text.

And what did they do with these primitive computers?  They could communicate with each other by email and messaging.  They could manipulate information in databases and spreadsheets.  They could access files on other computers, create beautiful typeset documents, manage calendars, contact lists and other personal information, and write programs to do just about anything else they needed.

In other words, they could pretty much do what we do with our gadgets today.  But now we run on smart phones and tablets with graphical displays and multi-touch interfaces.  We drag icons around and flick our fingers on the glass to carry out actions that used to require typing.

So pretty much all we've accomplished in the past 30 years is eye candy. Literally ...

Left: Mike and Ike Berry Blast candy;
Right: standard OS X "OK" button.

Sure, devices have gotten smaller and faster, but much of that increased speed now goes to drawing all the cool buttons and  handling all those multi-touchy things.  Ask yourself ... is your [computer | tablet | phone] too fast for you?  Didn't think so.

So in the first 30 years or so of electronic digital computers, from World War II to the 1970's, almost all of the key technologies of today ... Arpanet (later Internet), email, spreadsheets, databases, personal computers, the mouse, Microsoft and Apple and Oracle, video games, computer animation ... were created.

And the 30-some-odd years since then?  The Web, Google and portable devices.

So remember that next time someone says the pace of technology is increasing.

EDIT:  This post is really from May 11, 2011.  For some reason, Blogger decided to change the posting date when I edited the keyword list.

What I Want

Technology is close to solving some of the pesky problems of daily life. The big issues? No way! But a number of minor annoyances could certainly be eliminated in the next year or so. So here's what I want:

More cell phone bar code apps

SnapTell is a mobile app that uses the device's camera to read bar codes on products, and then tell you where else to buy them, on- or offline. Very cool! But I'd also like to automatically look up the product in Consumer Reports or epinions.com and see if it's even worth buying.

Better caller ID

When someone calls, I can see who it is and decide whether I want to answer. But if my wife's on the phone, I can't see who she's talking to.  Fix that. Yeah, yeah ... privacy. I'll bet Facebook knows who she's talking to.

Smarter remote controls

I have to go through about 47 levels of on-screen menus to browse through the video-on-demand movies or TV shows on my system. By the time I've found something tolerable, it's too late to watch it. I know the cable companies keep these ungodly search paths out of obligation to the content providers, but someone should make a touch-screen remote where I can add buttons that will just jump right to the set of choices I want. Click .. HBO HD movies; click again ... Showtime HD movies, etc. That simple.

For extra credit, just put all the movies in one freakin' list, and let me choose.  I really don't care which channel is so graciously agreeing to take my money.

And speaking of TV how about ...

Baysian commercial blocking

The most effective email spam blockers work by learning to recognize certain types of content as spam.  Why can't we do that for TV commercials? I could click the CRAP button on the remote when a commercial starts, and the system would learn what signals are just noise, and would blank the screen and mute the sound. Then I wouldn't have to sit through the animated boogers and the animated road kill and the animated whatever else six times in every half hour.

Better software upgrading

I have two PCs and a MacBook Pro, and I'm convinced they all spend most of their time upgrading their own software. I think they've got a little keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing going amongst themselves.  "Oh, have you seen my new Thunderbird?" How about if they only upgrade when I'm not using the computer? How about if they learn how to upgrade without having to restart the whole machine? Better yet, how about if software companies TEST their products before delivering them?

Smarter GPS

Do I even have to explain this?

What else do I want? Well, I'd like a share of anyone's implementation of any of these ideas. After all ...

The End of Art?

Paul Krugman in today's New York Times discusses the trend of making all books, music, movies, and other creative content available in digital form on the Internet. The abundance and availability of content will push prices down to near zero, so most creative media work will be free or nearly so. This means that creators have to look for other ways to make money.

Krugman suggests tours, merchandise, and other ancillary sales could help make up the difference. He also hints at the subscription model, in which such work is essentially syndicated to paying customers, and some portion of the revenue goes back to the creator.

It all sounds pretty bleak for creators. Think about radio and TV in the days before cable. Programming was expensive to produce, so sponsors paid the costs, and got the advertising in return. This meant, of course, that the content had to appeal to the advertisers, and, more importantly, to their target demographic. This is what lead to TV's becoming what Newton Minow referred to as "a vast wasteland."

There are a couple of possible bright spots:

It used to be that you had to be mainstream enough, to appeal to a large enough audience, to get published, get recorded, get broadcast, etc. Now, almost anyone can produce a blog, a Web comic, a mini-animation, a video clip, or even a digital movie. Getting an audience is, of course, a problem, but people have found ways of finding content that interests them.

Relevance-based advertising means you can get advertisers even if your content is narrowly focused, offensive or subversive. Of course, your audience may not click on the ads, but at least there's the possibility.

Premium content might still be able to command some price. There have been a number of cases of authors turning their on-line content into traditionally published books, and successfully selling them. Publishing on-line may actually help you find a ready audience, as well as helping you hone your craftsmanship.

As Alvin Toffler predicted, the pace of change keeps accelerating, so people have to adjust to more and more changes in the space of a lifetime. This certainly creates opportunities for creative artists in terms of media to work in, subject matter, potential audiences, etc.

At least, that's what I'm hoping.