I love this. Especially the fact that you can’t stop it repeating itself.

Interesting, slightly elegaic piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, reflecting on the life and career of Doug Engelbart and the networked world that we have inherited.

networked computing technology has had a similar privileged spot in American life for at least 30 years. Networked computers democratized! Anyone could have a voice! They delivered information, increased the variety of human experience, allowed new capabilities, and helped the world become more open and connected. Computers and the Internet were forces for good in the world, which is why technology was so readily attached to complex, revolutionary processes like the Arab Spring, for example.

But a broad skepticism about technology has crept into (at least) American life. We find ourselves a part of a “war on terror” that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a “business record” that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding. 

The disclosure of the NSA’s surveillance program is not Hiroshima, but it does reveal the latent dark power of the Internet to record communication data at an unprecedented scale, data that can be used by a single nation to detriment of the rest. The narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was. 

If you’re inclined to see the trails of information Bush imagined future scholars blazing as (meta)data to be hoovered up, if you’re inclined to see PRISM as a societal Memex concentrated in the hands of the surveillance state, then perhaps, we’re seeing the end of the era Bush’s article heralded.

At the very least, those with the lofty goal of improving humanity are going to have to explain  why they’ve chosen networked computing as their augmentation platform of choice, given the costs that we now know explicitly exist. The con side of the ledger can no longer be ignored.

He’s right about one thing: the narrative of the networked age will never be as simple as it once was.

I get lots of emails like this one, which just popped into my inbox.

Dear Mr. Naughton,

I am an intern in [name of publication] and am writing an article about
Google Glass.

Could you please be so kind and answer my following questions, so that I can
metion it in my article?

I suppose you have already watched this video

with first fight and arrest captured on Google Glass. Do you think it is a
start of new citizen journalism?

Can Google Glass affect our everyday life? In what way?

Thanking you in advance.

What always takes me aback about queries like this is the nature of the request. I’m not sure what exactly it signifies — some combination of naivete, innocence, laziness or ignorance, perhaps.

My reply is always a variant on the same theme.

Dear xxx

Thank you for your inquiry.

I’m afraid I’m not going to respond to it for two reasons: (1) your question is too broad and unfocussed, which (2) suggests to me that you haven’t done much research on the subject yourself.

What do you mean by “citizen journalism”, for example? Do you mean “citizen media” or “user-generated content”? This topic has been a major one for nearly ten years. There are lots of interesting books and publications — online and offline — about it.

(Journalism isn’t just about posting something to the Internet — it’s about fact-checking, corroborating, evaluating, doing quality-control on information before publishing etc.)

I suggest that you first do some research into Google Glass yourself (after all, that’s what the Internet is for) rather than expecting experts to do it for for you. Then, if you have identified some focussed questions for which you really do need expert answers, by all means come back to me.

Best

John

Another interesting thing about today’s inquiry is that I don’t think the inquirer had seen this blog. If s/he had, then s/he would have noticed the post immediately below this!

The least one should expect is that people who ask questions of someone should Google them first.

I’m not being deliberately snooty, by the way. When students (or interns) write to me with carefully thought-out questions, or if they provide some convincing evidence that they have tried and failed to find something, then I try to be really helpful. But I am not doing donkey-work for some rich kid whose daddy has arranged a nice cushy internship for him or her.

OK, I know you’re busy, but if you have eight minutes to spare, given this a play. (And skip the ad.)

Thanks to Desmond Hanlon for the link.

After Doug died, when I was thinking about a topic for my Observer column, I asked my editor if I should do a piece on him. His recommendation was that there would be lots of obits on the Web, so better to do something else. So I did.

But reading through the obituaries, I was struck by the fact that many of them got it wrong. Not in the fact-checking sense, but in terms of failing to understand why Engelbart was such an important figure in the evolution of computing. Many of the obits did indeed mention the famous “mother of all demonstrations” he gave to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968, but in a way they failed to understand its wider significance. They thought it was about bit-mapped, windowing screens, the mouse, etc. (which of course it demonstrated) whereas in fact that Engelbart was on about was the potential the technology offered for augmenting human intellect through collaborative working at a distance. Harnessing the collective intelligence of the network, in other words. Stuff we now take for granted.

The trouble was that, in 1968, there was no network (the ARPAnet was just being built) and the personal computer movement was about to get under way. The only way Engelbart could realise his dream was by harnessing the power of the time-shared mainframe — the technology that Apple & Co were determined to supplant. So while people understood the originality and power of the WIMPS interface that Doug created (and that Xerox PARC and, later, Apple and then Microsoft implemented), they missed the significance of networking. This also helps to explain, incidentally, why after the personal computer bandwagon began to roll, poor Doug was sidelined.

The only blogger I’ve found who has picked up on this in the wake of Engelbart’s death is Tom Foremski who wrote a lovely, insightful piece. He recounts how he went to a Silicon Valley party for the launch of John Markoff’s book about the PC revolution.

The event was supposed to be about the book, but it quickly turned into a tribute to Doug Engelbart, as John Markoff, and many members of the Homebrew Club, and former colleagues of his spoke about his incredible influence on their work, ideas, and how he changed their lives.

It seemed as if he was the Buckminster Fuller of Silicon Valley in terms of how insightful and how brilliant he was, in story after story shared by people at the event. Others compared him to Leonardo DaVinci.

I was astounded when an elderly man sitting behind me, was given the microphone and started to speak. It was Doug Engelbart. I’d assumed he had passed away a long time ago by the way everyone spoke about him in the past.

I was invited to a post-event dinner for the speakers and press at a local restaurant. I was late in arriving and everyone was already seated. Everyone had crowded onto a large circular table trying to be as close as possible to where New York Times reporter John Markoff was sitting.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Over on another large circular table, half-empty, sat Doug Engelbart. I asked him if I could sit next to him and we talked for hours. I walked out with a great story, a story that no one had written before, a story of a genius whose work was largely killed by the personal computer “revolution” and how he’d spent decades trying to find companies to fund his work and research.

It’s a story that shows Silicon Valley’s ignorance of its own history and its disgraceful treatment of truly inspired visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, in favor of celebrating PR-boosted business managers who say they are changing the world but don’t come close.

Yep. As it happens, I also told this story in my History of the Internet. You can find the relevant excerpt here.

No comment needed.

My favourite newsagent has begun selling coffee. Today, a sign has appeared outside his premises. It’s headed “Coffee Solutions!” and includes a list of the various kinds of coffee on offer inside. Which led me to think about what kind of problem is it to which coffee is a ‘solution’? Sleepiness? Boredom? The need for a break from work?

Of course, in a literal sense coffee is a solution — defined as “a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase”. But I don’t think that’s the sense envisaged by the person who composed the newsagent’s notice. S/he was simply parroting the almost-ubiquitous abuse of the term in contemporary commercial life. Once upon a time, people sold products or services. Nowadays they sell only solutions.

And ‘solutionism’ (to use Evgeny Morozov’s term) is everywhere in the tech industry.

If a ‘solution’ is “a means of solving a problem”, then often it isn’t really a big deal. Many years ago, Donald Schön, in a wonderful book entitled The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Arena), pointed out that, in the grand scheme of things, problems are not the biggest difficulties that confront us. That’s because, in essence, a ‘problem’ is a pretty straightforward thing: a perceived discrepancy between a known present state and a known desired state. It may be difficult to find a ‘solution’ but at least in principle it’s clear what needs to be done.

Most of the really difficult, intractable things in organizational, political and ordinary life, however, do not fit that description, because we usually are unsure or in disagreement about where we are, and even more so about where we want to go. They are not ‘problems’ but something else: messy, unclear, contentious. And what professionals do, Schön argued, is to take these messy difficulties and do some work on them to extract some of their constituent ‘problems’ for which known solutions exist.

So, for example, if I want to write a Will that will be fair to my children from different marriages and wish to minimise the amount of inheritance tax that they will pay, I take that to a lawyer who will analyse my current situation and my (vague) wishes and suggest some legal ‘solutions’ (perhaps Trusts) which will meet some of my needs or desires.

In Schön’s view, therefore, professionals are not problem-solvers, but problem-creators. Reading his book changed my life, because it made me look at the occupational world in an entirely new way.

And, having written all that, I definitely need a coffee.

Extraordinary piece in the Guardian, based on what an Australian palliative care nurse learned from listening to terminal patients. According to her, their five “greatest regrets” are:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Coming in August.