Daily Archives: January 12, 2009

The Inner History of Devices

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Interesting MIT World lecture by Sherry Turkle.

Contemporary science has done a great disservice to Sigmund Freud, suggests Sherry Turkle, who believes the psychoanalytic tradition can teach us much about the often concealed connections between physical objects and our thoughts and feelings. On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Inner History of Devices — the third in a trilogy — Turkle speaks of the importance of technology as a subjective tool, as a window into the soul.

When she first arrived at MIT, Turkle relates, colleagues viewed devices like their computers as simply instruments for accomplishing work. Turkle set out on her life’s work to demonstrate that technology serves a much greater purpose in our lives. People turn their devices “into beings, which they animate, anthropomorphize.” Her research and writing involves the ways people invest themselves in physical objects, and how those objects “inflect inner life, relationships, carry ideas, sensibilities and memory.”

Turkle’s latest work, as she describes it, brings together the artful listening of a memoirist, the interpretive skills of a clinician, and the participant observational skills of an ethnographer. Together, these enable her to dig deep into such questions as how cellphones can change people’s sensibilities, what is intimacy without privacy (e.g., texting and Second Life); and how people are starting to add robots as companions to their lives. There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.”

Digital Sharecropping Exhibition

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Here’s a conference that deserves to bomb.

User-generated content is a rapidly developing revolution in media. ‘Average Joe’ internet users now wield power over online content, and new business models are emerging in response to this shift. UGCX is the first conference and expo organized to bring together content-trendsetters and business leaders in various fields to examine how these worlds collide and what the future holds. This new mediabistro.com event will unlock the knowledge businesses and non-profits need to respond to this shift.

UGCX is part trade show, and part educational conference program. Conference program sessions will be loaded with successful case studies and business models in four tracks: social content, photography, video & gaming, and music. Our trade show floor will feature all the relevant vendors you need to connect with to gain new resources and tools to stay ahead of the social media curve.

Because face-to-face interaction will never be beat as a means of relationship building, we are stocking our 2-day event full of networking opportunities, so you can be sure to leave with lasting connections to help you create, use, and profit from user-generated content.

Needless to say — as Dave Winer pointed out — there’s not a single ‘user’ visible anywhere in the scores of companies the organisers claim are planning to attend.

How about a competition to think of the best slogan for this nauseating event? ‘Milk The Suckers’ is my entry. But ‘One Born Every Minute’ is also a possibility.

49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats

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49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats. I particularly like these:

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% – percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 – number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years.

Dell and Carbon Neutrality

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Mark Anderson is riled by media criticism (unspecified) of Michael Dell’s announcement that the company has achieved his goal of making Dell carbon-neutral ahead of the schedule he had originally set.

Following an announcement two years ago that global warming was a critical problem deserving of his own company’s focus, Dell CEO and Chair Michael Dell committed his firm to obtaining what conservationists call a “carbon-neutral” footprint.

Very few firms, in or outside the tech industry, have taken the various somewhat – complicated steps often required to achieve neutral carbon impact.

This last August, 2008, the company announced it had achieved this result ahead of schedule, and Michael Dell confirmed the achievement in a speech in September.

Since then, despite positive statements by those working as outside partners on the project, the company has actually come under fire for not doing more. The basic complaint seems to be: fine, your own company has done this, but until the entire supply chain (suppliers of parts) for each product is also doing it, you have nothing to boast about.

Where do these people come from?

I would like to personally congratulate Michael Dell and his company for, first, having the guts and vision to take a leadership position on the issue of becoming carbon – neutral as a firm; and, second, for committing the company publicly, thereby endorsing the value of this positioning; and then, most important, in following through, using a variety of techniques, from customers arranging for planting trees, to buying and investing in renewable energy sources, to achieve this goal.

Dell would appear to be the first computer company to have done this, although Apple has also been making strong strides in this direction. While this may feel like a competition, it isn’t – it is a race to maintain the climate of this planet, and for each company that “wins,” we all win.

For those weird media types who find an irresistible urge to criticize a process well-done, but perhaps not yet extended, I have a bit of unasked-for advice: why not help publicize what a great job Dell is doing in its own footprint, and then encourage the Dell keiretsu to follow Dell’s example?

It seems to me that there are no negatives here at all, only two steps in the right direction, both of them positive, that every firm will need to go through: first, make sure your own firm is carbon-neutral; and, second, encourage your supply chain to join you.

Right on!

Dell’s Limerick decision

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Astute comment in The Register about the implications of Dell’s decision to close its manufacturing plant in Limerick.

As the shockwaves of Dell’s dreaded but expected withdrawal from Limerick manufacturing reverberate around Ireland’s mid-west region, some lessons are emerging.

The big theme emerging in many reports and commentaries is that the boom in semi-skilled assembly line jobs is well and truly over. There doesn't appear to be any other business likely to come to Ireland and employ 1,000 plus workers on an assembly line. It’s cheaper to do it elsewhere, in a low-wage economy, and ship the goods to the geographies that would be served by an Irish base.

For suppliers like Dell that need a responsive assembly/manufacturing operation in the EU, the accession of Poland and other east European countries into the EU was a godsend; for Ireland, it has been a disaster. Where Dell is going other hi-tech employers may follow – Intel has a chip plant in Ireland, and HP makes printer cartridges there too.

For both of them the annual cost of an Irish worker will be more than the annual cost of a Polish worker. They too will be looking at the numbers and doing a what-if-we-moved-to-Poland spreadsheet calculation. The EU wants a level playing field, and limits what member countries do in the way of bribing businesses to come to them via grants, subsidies and tax concessions.

The conclusion is:

A dawning realisation in Ireland is that it will have to expand university and technical college education. If it’s a white collar future and not an assembly-line one, then that means the current generation of semi-skilled workers have had it. There’s more of them than the country currently needs and they’ll have to do the best they can whilst the country educates their children for the hi-tech R&D jobs.

These jobs will come in dribs and drabs, 20 here, 40 there, not in thousand-plus lumps. The IDA has got to attract many more firms to Ireland. For every Dell with almost 2,000 workers the IDA will need to attract, say, 50 businesses to provide the same number of jobs, and the Irish education system will have to provide 2000 graduates in the right disciplines to gain the jobs.

Googling vs boiling (contd)

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The Google Blog response to those stories about the carbon costs of a Google search.

Recently, though, others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is *many* times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don't reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

Thanks to Jack Schofield for spotting it.

BlackBerry redux

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Sigh. My Google phone is on its way back to T-Mobile. I write this with some regret, because I had high hopes for it. My GPRS BlackBerry (which is by far the best phone I’ve ever had) was beginning to show signs of physical collapse. And I was really tired of trying to access Google via GPRS, which was like going back to the bad old days of dial-up modems. So I thought: what I need is a proper 3G phone.

But which one? The BlackBerry Storm was considered and discarded, even before Stephen Fry demolished it. To me, it looked like something rushed out to compete with the iPhone, but without proper testing. As an iTouch user, I knew and liked the iPhone interface, but felt that I ought to make a stand because of its non-generativity (to use Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase). So how about the Google Android phone?

Research showed that it was offered by T-Mobile (my network provider). And it met Jonathan’s requirement for open-ness. So I ordered one.

It seemed slick enough at first sight. Setting it up to link with my Google account was a breeze. And it had a real QWERTY keyboard, accessible by sliding the screen up, thus:

The keyboard, though small, was useable in twin-thumb mode, just as the Psion PDAs used to be.

So how was it in practice? Answer: mixed. Very mixed. Battery life (like that of the iPhone) is abysmal if one has the phone permanently online, so I turned everything off and just synchronised Gmail when I needed to update. The camera is, well, dire. The GPS facility is good — really good, actually; but it positively eats battery-life. All of which tended to reduce the phone to a rather more humdrum piece of kit. The biggest problem was that its methods of indicating that messages have arrived was, for me, useless — especially compared with the BlackBerry’s ways of doing things. I need to know instantly when messages have arrived — especially when the phone is on silent. (I spend a lot of time in meetings.)

Composing and typing SMS messages on the G-phone is a tedious palaver. First you have to swing out the screen so that you can type. This requires two hands. So effectively texting on the move is difficult/impossible.

The Android software seems stable and effective. The Apps available on the open ‘market’ are, however, pretty tame compared with what’s available for the iPhone. This may change in time and more handsets become available and the commercial opportunities for Android Apps begins to build. But for now the first G-phone available on the UK market is IMHO just an unsatisfactory beta. If it had come out before the iPhone we would have regarded it as a small miracle. But now it doesn’t cut the mustard. What Android really needs is a slick handset from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson.

So I’m returning to the BlackBerry fold. What the episode has taught me is that easy, efficient SMS and email are the key things I need, plus occasional 3G-speed access to web sites.

Ironically, I will be acquiring a new BlackBerry just as Barack Obama has to surrender his.