Dahlia Lithwick is one of the best writers on legal matters today, as she demonstrates once again with her piece on the argument over the Miguel Estrada nomination.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.
I study people, technology, and the worlds they make
Month: February 2003 (page 1 of 2)
The trip to Seoul is delayed a week. Which is good, because that gives me more time to work on the various presentations I’ll be giving, and try to work out a little “deep hanging out,” as John Markoff calls it.
It’s also good because my daughter is now sick. I’m staying home with her, which hardly counts as a “sick day” for me, because basically I just have to give her medicine, change to videos on a regular basis, then go back to my e-mail, cell phone, and various readings. Fortunately I don’t have to do it often, but I hardly feel like I lose much work when I stay home with one of the children.
The other reason I wanted to get the WiFi card is that I’m going to Korea on Sunday, to do some work for a client, but also to try to get a sense of the wireless / cyberculture / broadband scene. It’s a pretty short trip, but I wanted to maximize my chances of being online throughout.
I finally got an 802.11b card for my laptop, and also turned my iMac into a base station. We’re doing a project at the Institute that involves looking at wireless, and in addition to having a craving for WiFi, I needed to see how tough it is to set up a network, get online, etc.. After two trips to Fry’s and one to the Apple Store (because I can handle only so much Fry’s in a day), I’m up and running. And I’m not going back!
Ten years from now (free prediction coming!), wires are going to seem totally primitive. Bluetooth and 802.11x will be where it’s at; you’ll also have a hard time finding devices that don’t have one or both of those.
I mentioned getting a little good-natured ribbing over my deep dive in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition last week. This morning my sister-in-law e-mailed today, saying, "Maybe your readers should have a picture of why you were being mocked…"
All right, so maybe I deserved it.
“September 11, 2001, has had all kinds of unintended consequences. One of the least tragic, but most irritating, has been an explosion of absolutely terrible writing.” Neal Pollack, Just Shut Up…. That goes double for poets
The kind of piece you don’t actually agree with, necessarily, but which is still fun to read, and makes a couple serious points- like Thomas Mallon’s amazing “The Mourning Paper.”
Having finished reading “Pattern Recognition” (in a marathon that earned me considerable mockery from my immediate family and in-laws, particularly when I carried it with me on a family walk), I’ve taken up William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s “Cradle to Crade: Remaking the Way We Make Things.”
It’s a very interesting book, and I don’t just mean that in terms of the content: the artifact itself is quite something. It’s about twice as heavy as a regular book, but it turns out that it isn’t made of paper: it’s made from some kind of new plastic. Apparently it’s also waterproof. As they explain in the introduction,
It is printed on a synthetic “paper” and bound into a book format developed by innovative book backager Charles Melcher of Melcher Media. Unlike the paper with which we are familiar, it does not use any wood pulp or cotton fiber but is made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers. This amterial is not only waterproof, extremely durable, and (in many localities) recyclable by conventional means; it is also a prototype for the book as a “technical nutrient,” that is, a product that can be broken down and circulated infinitely in industrial cycles- made and remade as “paper” or other products.
So the book itself exemplifies some of the qualities it is going to be talking about. A nice little parallelism there.
I’m reading it mainly for work- biomimicry, emulation of natural processes, and all that is going to really take off at the nano level, I think- but also for the Groxis project, as background. I have the feeling that ecological thinking, and thinking about sustainability and technology, is important in some deep way to understanding Groxis, and so I’ve got to get up to speed on the subject.
After some effort, I finally got the comments counter (the little thing under this entry that probably says “Comments (0)” working. It used to be the case that it wouldn’t refresh unless I rebuilt the entire site, and I knew that other MT-driven sites (like Steven Johnson’s) had counters that updated themselves more easily.
It turns out that there was a patch to take care of the problem. More or less at random, I stumbled across it on the Movable Type Web site.
I’m glad I found it, but you pretty much have to be a regular poster to the Movable Type user discussion boards, and a member of the community, to figure out that this kind of thing exists, and is available. It’s certainly great that the technology exists to make it so easy for users to put their minds together, and for some technologies that’s become a very important thing: the Apple Newton is now sustained by its users, long after Apple itself pulled the plug. And since MT is basically a single room of people, so far as I can tell, it’s amazing that they get any programming done at all. But this takes the notion of “users as part of a community” a little too far, in my view, by devolving responsibility for keeping track of updates, patches, etc., onto the community. A discussion board and search engine become a substitute for a well-written manual with upgrades, when in fact it never can be.
There actually is a larger story that I hope one day to tell: about the rise and fall of technical writing. At the very least, I want to do a piece about how the growth of hypertext and CDs changed the way that technical documentation was written and read; I would also like to trace the technical writer community in Silicon Valley, as it’s had some pretty interesting people pass through it. I remember Caroline Rose, who was documentation head for the Macintosh project, tell me that hypertext had more or less completely changed the game of tech documentation, and I’ve always wanted to follow up on that. It also struck me that, more than any other literary genre, it was one that had been hit by a transformation that literary theorists say will affect all writing one day. Technical writing is one of those places where the future is already here.
Just finished William Gibson’s latest book, “Pattern Recognition.” It’s very good, though Gibson will always suffer from the same problem that afflicts John Keegan and some other notable writers: their first books were so extraordinary, so important for redefining the genre, that nothing they ever do again is likely to have the same impact.
Nonetheless, “Pattern Recognition” is a very interesting read, though it’s got lots of the kinds of things we’ve come to expect in Gibson: a central character who’s tortured and in difficult straits, a rich and unpleasant patron who gives makes her an offer she can’t really afford to refuse, travel to various parts of the world, and a last-minute attempt to break free from the patron and commune directly with That Which She Has Sought.
Still, it’s not a bad formula, and it’s certainly less predictable than, say, Michael Crichton, whose “Prey” was ostensibly about nanotechnology, but was “Jurassic Park” with very very tiny velociraptors. (I suppose somewhat the same thing could be said about “Rising Sun,” with the dinosaurs in this case being…. oh, never mind.)
I’m in the early stages of a new project at the Institute that is turning into a test of my notion that
I’m proceeding on the assumption that one thing you need to do in order to make reasonable scenarios is an understanding of how the field of nanotechnology has evolved: specifically, what its institutional landscape is like, where the funding comes from, how specialties have been defined, how boundaries are constructed and maintained, and what kinds of moral economies govern work and careers in the field. Why is this worth knowing? Simply put, money, institutional arrangements, and moral economies help shape what people work on, what problems are defined as critical, and what resources are devoted to solving them. They also influence what technologies and processes make it into the market first (though not necessarily those that prove most important in the long run). This is an approach that blends Thomas Kuhn, Joseph Ben-David, Robert Merton, Lou Galambos, Robert Kohler, and a little Edinburgh School.
Will it turn out to be a useful technique? Obviously I think so, but knowing whether you’re right as a futurist is no easier than knowing if you’re right as an historian. Just as you can’t go back in time to see if your arguments were accurate, you can’t skip ahead to the future to see if your projections have come true.
Another interesting aspect of the nanotech world that has some historical resonance is this: it’s divided, broadly, into two camps. There are those who see nanotech as a kind of very advanced industrial chemistry or materials science, turning out buckyballs and carbon nanotubes to strengthen plastic composites. On the other side are the visionaries, who want to create 10,000-mile tall carbon nanotube elevators into space, develop “utility fogs” of swarming nanobots that can become anything from a house to a car to an airplane, and inject cancer-seeking nanobots into their bloodstreams. Two very different visions, in other words: not unlike the vastly contesting nineteenth-century visions of evolution or electricity or natural philosophy or mesmerism that Adrian Desmond, Alison Winter, Iwan Morus, and James Secord have studied. And, like the radical and conservative evolutionist camps of mid-Victorian London, these are connected in some interesting ways: the visionaries are useful as publicists to a degree and they give out a major prize for research in nanotechnology (the Feynman Prize)which tend to go to established, academic researchers.
Perhaps an even better comparison would be between the Renaissance Neoplatonists, Paracelsians, or Rosicrucians, all of whom had a strong interest in what we would see as mathematical tools and experiments, but who ultimately saw the world quite differently than the likes of Galileo or Bacon. This first group saw a universe that was equal parts natural laws, magic, and mathematically-shrouded mystical forces; they would have agreed with Galileo that the book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics, but differed greatly on the translation.
Another way in which this Renaissance world seems to have some resonance with the current world of nanotech: One of the hottest areas in nanotechnology is fabrication. Hot not just in terms of commercial potential, but in terms of scientific opportunity: it seems that you can do some real science when you’re working on fluidic self-assembly, or other processes. Renaissance mechanics, optics, metallurgy, and a few other fields were places in which serious scientific questions, knotty technical challenges, and high-value commercial processes overlapped.
I wonder if it might be worth exploring all this in an article. A piece that is partly about the field of nanotechnology, and partly about how my research on the ecology of the discipline informs the Institute’s efforts to chart a nanotech-enhanced future. A couple friends who read “
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The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul
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ratings: 316 (avg rating 3.53)
