Live from Radio City

For those following the Critical Code Studies discussion taking place this month, it is definitely worth checking out the video Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay, which is an interesting example of the video essay as an emerging genre.

Code Read

Check out the call for proposals for the Critical Code Studies working group, which already includes important media scholars like Wendy Chun and N. Katherine Hayles on its roster and indicates that this subfield is preparing for some serious scholarly writing to follow up on its earlier manifesto.

The call makes an appeal for response from collaborators and offers mentorship to graduate students:

The time for debating the possibility of critical readings of code is now over. It is time to begin the business of reading code.

The Working Group will offer an opportunity to produce methodologies and readings for Critical Code Studies. It will be organized around a series of hosted discussions and presentations about reading code launched weekly.
Publication: electronic book review

Electronic book review will be publishing curated threads from the Working Group discussions.

We are also planning a mini-conference after the Working Group. Details to follow.

Interested graduate students will find application information on the Critical Code Studies blog.

Beyond Good and Evil and the Humanities: Nowcasting II

In a talk that I gave at this year's Digital Humanities conference on "Hacktivism and the Humanities," I argued that political action and human rights advocacy should be a critical part of the digital humanities, even though it might seem contradictory to the hermeticism of its recent history of devotion to text-encoding initiatives. Among the hacktivist humanists that I talked about, Trevor Paglen seemed an obvious model.

Today at the Nowcasting conference, Paglen, who is perhaps best known for mapping extraordinary rendition flights and then publicizing the trajectories of these aircraft on billboards, presented a talk called "The Other Night Sky: Secret Satellites and 'Geographies' of Orbit" that began with a description of a drifting DSP F23 orbital and led to an extended analysis of the ideologies of space conquest. He explained now satellite trackers who could "decode telemetry from passing spacecraft" with the skills to be able to pull images from Soviet weather satellites found themselves decoding a mystery with uncomfortable policy implications.

It was a talk that I couldn't help but love. Readers might remember that I took my longest hiatus from blogging while on a solar eclipse astronomy cruise in the Mediterranean where I met a satellite optics specialist who now makes camera obscuras, that I named one of my children after a famous astronomer, and that I regularly plug the cosmology tutorials of Virtualpolitik pal Ned Wright.

One of the unlikely heroes of Paglen's story was Greg Roberts, who found himself visited by South Africa's intelligence service because he had been reporting on classified satellites in online listservs. Paglen showed a cosmic image that included two points of light drifting closer and explained why that celestial image was frightening, since it also spoke in a "language about geopolitics and verticality." Although some "think of space as an inhospitable void," Paglen argued that, like the Pullman transfer points, there could be "military chokepoints" in the Geostationary orbit that functioned as "strategic high ground."

He asserted that like the terrestrial spaces being analyzed by contemporary geographers, "the space of outer space is produced." This interest in ideology points to a key feature in contemporary geography that has been encouraging a number of digital humanities agencies and programs to include geographers in the mix. Our session of the NEH-supported "Broadening the Digital Humanities" included a number of people working on mapping projects, Alexander Tarr's New Deal geography project, and Nicole Starosielski's work on the cultural geography of undersea data cables.

Paglen noted that "spacecraft structure our everyday lives in many ways" that include supermarkets connected to warehouses, television programming, weather forecasting, phone connectivity, and bank transactions. He reminded the audience that satellite telephone conversations date back to a discussion between John F. Kennedy and the Nigerian prime minister at the time. He also noted that these information relays also include transactions involving the military, such as communication with drone aircraft, and that the military has both its own dedicated information structures and a customer relationship with a number of commercial contractors. Another character in Paglen's satellite story, John Locker, had previously captured unencrypted live streaming military data from the terrain in Macedonia.. Furthermore, 80% of the communications from the war in Iraq are handled by commercial satellites, according to Paglen.

Paglen's narrative about communication, media, and military infrastructure focuses on the highest vertical position from which to exert power without risking entry into a "graveyard orbit" or losing a prime place in a GSO that is "getting crowded." As he talked about SimCom 2 in drift, he explained that there was a lot of accumulated debris in the GSO, where there were 1,120 objects larger than 60 cm but only 300 of them operational. Paglen unfolded a project about "territorialization and military operation" in a "stealthy and deniable occupation of the heavens that involved the MiTEx program for small and highly mobile satellite destroyers from a suspect DARPA initiative that was supposedly doing old-school space science. Paglen claimed that the presence of these satellite-killers was a "physical manifestation of radical shift in space policy" for internal sovereignty over the GSO, which Donald Rumsfeld had called "space security management."

Paglen also talked about one of my favorite federal agencies for digital rhetoric, the National Reconnaissance Office, which has produced strange online videos and weird children's pages, along with the deception and denial in the "5 D's" that Paglen described. He argued that this was "unlike other kinds of occupation" in that it was "invisible," even as it represents the "closing of a frontier," because it is unlikely that humans will go beyond this ring, since it is the "infrastructural limit of earth’s geography" and inscribes the "conditions of own confinement."

In responding to questions, Paglen argued that the U.S. was exercising a "politics of imperial extraterritoriality" and that China was only indulging in "spectacle" and "monument"-building in its space program. Much as many not the possibility of wars fought over the Internet in both senses, Paglen contemplated "wars fought in space not just from space." He also, not surprisingly, informed his audience that "nothing is changing under the new administration" and that he was only finding support for his "thesis that these things don’t change from administration to administration." Audience member Paul Dourish observed that Paglen might be able to make an analogy with Antarctica, which is also a site of militarization and interference by scientific amateurism, and made comparisons with which Paglen agreed based on the fact that outer space treaties are often modeled on international agreements governing Antarctica.

At Nowcasting, there were also a number of talks about how the design past informs the design present. Jeffrey Schnapp looked at a history that includes "Futurism and Futurology" by questioning if yesterday was today and citing 1970 as a golden year that has been "reanimated during the web era." Like Lunenfeld, Schnapp looks to the publication of The Medium is the Massage as a key event in design cultural history. (Fans of the book can listen to this amazing audio at UbuWeb.) His talk focused on "backstage players" such as Jerome Agel to ask "how much do the new modes of making make a difference?" in exploring the history of the paperback original and its links to radical therapy, psychedelia, happenings, alternative publications like Books, xerography, copyright policy, literary gossip and commentary on pop culture, cut-and-paste essays, and "decide for yourself" campaigns. Agel embraced the role of the "producer" rather than "author" in publishing and thought of successful projects as "hits" rather than "bestsellers." Often he teamed up with Quentin Fiore, who also did design for University of Michigan Press and the alphabet on a standard Bell telephone after training in Europe under the tutelage of Grosz, Hoffman, and Nagy. (Fiore's oeuvre also included a disquisition on manual paper-making.) Although the digital humanities might seem to be on the periphery of Schnapp's talk rather than at its center, he argued that this "vision of design thinking" that stretched "from the Burroughs corporation to William Burroughs" touched at questions at the center of "historical scholarship and science" and invited reflection about how to "honor the strengths of linearity" in the digital age. There were also some nice geek visuals that included Ted Nelson's sketch of "ordinary teaching" and "computer instruction" and an image that developed fishnet stockings as a metaphor for informational friction "when information is brushed against information." Schnapp wasn't the only one looking back to the past in the day's sessions: Jan-Christopher Horak gave a beautiful presentation on Saul Bass and his influence on contemporary motion graphics which pointed to analogous images from the Bauhaus.

But much of the conversation of this day was about Johanna Drucker and her talk "From Data to Capta: Diagramming Interpretation." Her recent book SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing was also part of the surrounding commentary. She opened by making comparisons between her talk and Paglen's, since she announced, "I am going to talk about weather -- weather, visualization, space, speculative activities" and by doing so engage in "situating humanities activities." She emphasized how "the need to create humanities tools in humanities environments" often became a "capitulation to techno-computational sensibility" that denied the "rhetorical form of encounter between humanities and computing" and to always "make explicit what had been implicit" while denying the "manner of doing work as interpretation." She advocated questioning why humanists must "submit to the disciplinary exigencies of computational specificity," even if it generated a species of "intellectual excitement" that she compared to "S&M," since this form of "computational discipline" also turns the humanist into the colonized. She also contested the notion that these pressures were only recent ones, since the humanities "comes out of the Renaissance" but soon must respond to the historical pressures created by the "notion of rationalism and empiricism" that it had spawned. "The humanities can never be grounded in certainty," Drucker asserted, because it is about the "partial, contingent condition" of human experience that engages with "conditions and situations not objects and spaces."

Drucker complained that how this subjectivity was "mapped, charted, or understood" was often perverted by attempts to reduce its complexities to information graphics. For her, subjectivity was defined both as 1) position (in relation to whatever we perceive, know, experience, etc.) and 2) individual inflection (notion of affect). She then went on to discuss "time, space, text, data, archive, network, and stochastic systems" with "some of the most ugly graphs that you will ever see."

There was an explicit critique of information graphics guru Edward Tufte in her talk, but there was also criticism of how digital humanists weren't much better than those who presented a "representation of data that they have mined" that was dictated by "desktop tools." Tufte's "idea of representing" in which "form follows data" spurred Drucker to ask, "What is this data?" She explained that "data comes from the word 'given'" and generally follows a "construct of empirical methods that can be taken by various metric means." However, she argued that in practice, in answering a question like how temperature should be measured, researchers were confronted with "instances of capta" that provide a set of thermal phenomena without a single master measure possible. She denied that she was a relativist at this point, since "phenomena exist," but she insisted that they are also "captured, taken" "according to an agenda." Too often, she claimed, humanities diagrammers assumed "that there are user-independent phenomena." She also argued that these diagrams are too often unreadable, as in the case of a time table of the Population of History of England 1450-1750 provided by John Hatcher, which she compared to Camillo’s Memory Theater.

Her own research has grappled with representing affective states that are more complicated than the "mood maps" of Liz Miller. In particular, she has strived to represent "how do we reconceptualize time" so that it is not simply "unidirectional, continuous, and homogenous," as it appears in an infograph about human civilization that goes from fishing and hunting small game to hunting large game and herding reindeer without any attention to the "affective metrics of parameterization" and how those populations might have experienced time from their own subjectivities. To make her point humorously, she displayed a USA Today graphic about "how people spend their vacations" from which you could infer that they "get smaller when coming back." One of her students created a kind of word cloud in which she weighted activities in the day by color (to indicate if these were relaxing or stressful activities), by size (to indicate duration), and by bolding (to indicate perceived significance), since "not all days are the same. Thinking about what she called her "temporal modeling project," she gave the example of the "2 seconds before a paper is due" and "2 seconds of brushing teeth."

Then she announced: "Now I would like to destroy space." More properly, she stated that she wanted to "replace space with spatiality," which would be like "replacing time with temporalilty." Too often, she argued people produce "something that looks like air traffic," even though "no distance is the same" and different "inches on map" might be "very different to move through," since "maps make us believe that the world is structured a certain way" without recognizing how water and mountains might impact mobility. She called on "cognitive mapping and children’s drawing" as a way to understand affect and also cited the Situationists and their ideas about psycho-geography as relevant to her research.

As part of her assault on Tufte, she questioned how much the famous Snow chart of victims of the cholera epidemic tell us about how these deaths functioned in relation to other things in their lives, beyond the water pumps that were Snow's fixation, since these dots can't represent the complex social networks impacted by each death. (Perhaps something more like Phil Ethington's Ghost Metropolis or this Dutch digital monument to Jews killed in the Holocaust would be closer to answering this need.) Drucker also wanted to indicate the differences between "perceived time and actual time" in her work with students that incorporated "blue clouds of anxiety" and questioned the norms established by "conducting business in a bureaucratic administrative culture."

Her talk also grappled with questions of scale and reading and how enormous corpus projects go from the space of a page to a file to folder to a collection to entire archives. She asked why we "believe that we need structure," when we "forget what it is that we do by reading," since we "produce an event, and "reading is a performance" and "transformative," much as in a movie everyone in the audience performs a different version of the film. She argued that much had been done in the print environment to facilitate techniques of navigation, as in the case of the Talmud and its four lines of interpretation around the text, and also credited experiments like the film of "Jenny's bookmak" that Anne Burdick had shown earlier in the day, since reading was about how we "selectively recreate, and "a book is not an entity but a probabilistic" construct. She then -- in a lighter moment -- showed a chart of the "activity of a humpbacked whale" and asked how we might envision the "deep space of reading." Like Gerard Genette, she argued that we don't always read linearly and pointed to her group's previous work with the online game of the novel Ivanhoe. After showing an image of 100,00 cancer literature abstracts, she said that she was "not such a big fan of the giant rolodex in the sky" and said that we should "continue to relocate ourselves in humanistic activity of reading." She said that we should think about the notion of weather not as a modeling of thermodynamics but as the starting point for complexity theory, since humanistic inquiry is "highly specific and always changing" and thus better understood with a stochastic model that grants it is "not even a stable system."

Warren Sack took on Drucker head-on as a video from his talk on "Discourse Architecture" played in the background. He argued that her book The Visible Word, which lamented that textual scholars don’t pay attention to issues in visual communication design "was already persuasive 15 years ago," and that it had the courage to have named names, as she did by taking on Derrida and his disengagement with the materiality of the concept of writing as trace. He alledged that he current book avoided the "unpleasant business of naming names of Humanities scholars."

He opened his talk by addressing the "well-formed business" of depicting a "clash of value systems," such as CP Snow’s "two cultures" essay that opposes literary scholarship and scientific research. In attempting to "put humanists in dialogue with technology design," he gave a number of examples of computer scientists engaging in fundamental humanities questions, beginning with Seymour Pappert. Although Plato wrote over his door "Let only geometers enter," Sack noted that the classical trivium and quadrivium brought together "rhetoric and mathematics" and "logic and music." For Sack, computers were not just "literary machines" (as Ted Nelson would have it) or instruments for logic or mathematics (as Herbert Simon described them). He commented that consummate computer science textbook writers Sussman and Abelson pointed out that not only was computer science not a science, but also that the computers themselves were not required. For Sussman and Abelson it was about a "revolution in what we think" as a form of "procedural epistemology" that mattered and an "imperative not declarative point of view" in which "computation constitutes a new way of thinking."

Sack also cited Edward Dijkstra, who was known for his conception of "radical novelty" in computer science teaching, to understand how this computing tool and might have an influence on thinking, which might include reshaping children's educations by teaching programming very early. He also mentioned Knuth's ideas about "literate programming" and seeing "programming as essayistic," so that "computing is a new form of writing." To demonstrate his point, Sack showed a version of LOGO in javascript to explain why some might find "graphical thinking more amenable" and to present how this "search for a more perfect language," which dates back to Aristotle continues to be important today. In contrast, he reminded the audience of Adorno’s insistence on the priority of the object and the fact that for this Frankfurt school thinker there was no function of identity, since Adorno asserted the singularity of material and historical conditions. He analyzed Drucker's work in how it handled the dichotomy between ASCII characters and the specificity of fonts, color, paper, and typesetting and seemed to find her level of theorizing lacking.

At this point Sack shifted to situating his talk in the Sophistic movement and its implication sfor Socratic technique, since Socrates himself appears to be a Sophist who uses anti-logic techniques, inconsistent answers, and dialogues that close with participants in a state of aporia. To understand the conceptual difficulty that he was presenting, he pointed to the figure of elenchis and how a given statement can produce two statements that are contradictory. At this point he showed a slide of the famous rabbit-duck (see above) before explaining his project that was the supposed subject of his talk: interactive social mapping. As the video in the background showed, Sack explained why he was interested in "design for very large conversations." His chief product, the Conversation Map, which was part of a recent show at The Art of Participation 1950 to Now in SF MoMA (and had also been on display at the Beall) was certainly different from the diagrams that Drucker presented in her own work with students, but he argued that his research had led him to believe that "the social graph is a chimera" that is "never truly a duck or a rabbit," because as Sherry Turkle had noted "our identities aren’t stable." And even though Facebook users try to "squeeze out fakesters" the "logical fiction and marketing dream" of LinkedIn and Facebook ignores the readity of "who is speaking with whom." In working with e-mail and listserv postings, he displayed the example of associations with Israel and Palestine and Israelis and Palestinians to see where they are treated as synonyms and where they are not. Bolter had been cited earlier in the day, so he reminded the audience about Bolter and myth of transparency discussed in his work with Diane Gromala on discourses at SIGGRAPH that was included in Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. In closing, Sack insisted that the "thing we call computer science is a longstanding project in the humanities"

Drucker herself noted how rhetoric functions as a kind of return of the repressed in Sack's talk and that Wittgenstein, after the publication of the Tractatus, was banned from teaching logic and only allows to teach rhetoric. To Drucker's defense of rhetoric and poesis and "what it has to offer," Sack initially made a surprisingly lame equation of serious games with noted critic of them Ian Bogost. But soon he recovered himself by discussing Turing and imitation game and how Plato's ethical criticism revolves around a rejection of mimesis. Turing presents a "way of replacing a problem with a game," the Wittgenstenian problem of what is thinking, which was largely dropped by AI but still plays a major role in movies of an uncanny aesthetics where identity is in question, as in the case of films about replicants that could be seen in the tradition of a Sophistic imitation game.

Lev Manovich gave the last presentation in the day, but earlier he had asked Drucker if analyzing and visualizing subjective cultural experience were really mutually exclusive, particularly since the "cultural industry and knowledge production" presented "new ways to combine the two rather than oppose them." Given the "statistical ability to capture on a massive scale," he suggested that we might be "moving toward a synthesis," although Drucker said she was "a lot less willing to compromise," since she asked if it would "have enough rhetorical tools" and characterized herself as resistant to being "colonized."

Manovich's own talk began with Google Analytics, which showed how results for "humanities computing" were in decline and how "digital humanities" was on the rise. He also noted that according to Google's results "LA is where it is all happening," and "we are at the epicenter." He then showed excerpts from his "annual report" on his Cultural Analytics project. as annual report. Manovich argued that suppliers of cultural data, such as humanities scholars could prepare the data for processing relatively easily with methods his team "can teach you how to do in ten minutes." In trying to catalog the "diversity and variability of culture," Manovich described a number of discrete stages: 1) description, which may be manual (annotation, tagging) or automatic (the focus of his group), 2) data analysis (statistics), which he described as an "optional step," 3) data visualization (reduction, summarization) and data mapping (expansion, outlining, layering), and interpretation.



Several of his examples had to do with one of my favorite films to teach, Vertov's classic Man with a Movie Camera. They ranged from simple spreadsheets with shots and components to more complicated scatterplots and bar charts created by Mondrian software to catalogs of components from colleagues in Vienna ("washing," "wheat," "woman") to new Flash/Flex/Flare database suites to NERSC visualizations. As Manovich explained with this example, existing software was "good at representing data" but didn't accommodate a "need to represent data in its original form," so that users were "unable to see images, sounds, videos, or other cultural objects." He also showed as visualization with TIME magazine covers where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is hue, saturation, and brightness, as well as a data set of Mondrian paintings 1905-1907, along with an assortment of Google logos. (When I suggested later that the TIME magazine covers might be more interesting organized according to the cost of securing rights of reproduction as an actual index of value, he explained that many of their data sets simply came from Google releases, such as the LIFE photo archive, since even working with ARTstor could be difficult. Because the original data could be seen, he described these as projects of "anti-visualization" that was focused on "augmentation and expansion" rather than "reduction, summarization, and abstraction." He also tossed out examples handled with media imaging software from SIGGRAPH 2009, the text of Anna Karenina with automatic outlining to indicate the speaker, song scenes from fifty years of Bollywood cinema, cartoons, ten million manga images, and Bush and Obama ads. (He said that Republican commercials are much more visually aggressive.) He also that he argued that this software could be useful to scholars who "need to work with interactive media." He pointed out that his group analyzed thirty different videogames, so that a "particular instance of someone playing a game" could show "how people play the software system" that captures a range of experiences that include kinetic interactions and waiting. To possible objections Manovich said that "quantitative analysis of culture" had always been important in film criticism, if only implicitly. Of images, such as the one above, Manovich asked, "How did we ever talk about media without it?"

Erkki Huhtamo's presentation probably inspired the most hunger, although I found it most interesting from his intended perspective of encouraging reflection about the nature of contemporary forms of automation and interactivity.

Wearing an actual yukata, Huhtamo argued that sushi could be understood "as a system of consumption and (im)mobility" and that the rotating sushi bar was intimately tied to particular notions about technoculture involving mechanization, (full) automation, and interactivity. He defined mechanization as constituted by a 1) hierarchy of standardized parts, 2) a continuous assembly line, and 3) a Taylorized workforce. Ironically, he noted, these procedures actually began with the "disassembly line" of the nineteenth-century slaughterhouse. He also talked about Taylorism as a scientific theory of work and The Principles of Scientific Management, which dates from 1911. Of course, he observed that Taylorism was admired but also ridiculed, as it was in Chaplin's Modern Times in 1936. Automation, he claimed, was best described by the Bell preface The Age of Automation and in Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society. In visual culture this could include images of the daguerreotype photographer able to nap, as well as those laboring at a frenetic pace. As for interactivity, he referred his audience to Stewart Brand's The Media Lab, Inventing the Future at M.I.T..

As one noted for his work on "media archeology," Huhtamo also questioned the basic assumptions of a "Culture of Interactivity," since not only were its origins debatable but it also was often taken as "identical with a 'self-service' society" in which the ATM functions as displacement of office work, and "freedom of choice," "customized consumption," "pay per view," "individual users," and "citizen initiatives" mask fundamental relations of "power and consumerism." He also pointed out that this pressure fofr streamlined production went all the way back to 1939 and an edict forced the closure of street stalls, which prompted the institution of the "sushi bar." Since then, efforts to industrialize and streamline the production of sushi have progressed to Kaiten-zushi establishment with RFID tag that Huhtamo argued mimicked the cultural logic of trains, escalators, moving walkways, and exercise motion cycles.

To demostrate the functioning of fast-rotating sushi and "Shinkansen sushi," Huhtamo showed a number of YouTube videos, although none were as impressive as the clips of sushi robots on which he lingered. Given the difficulty of automating cutting fish, automation might be hampered, but expectations of low social interaction set by pachinko parlors encourage computerized ordering schemes for hamazushi in which the chef is no longer visible and even zura-zushi slot machine games with plates as tokens. Here, Huhtamo made -- via the Giga Rensya game that could be "reintegrated in interactive play" -- a connection to online computer games about assembly madness, and industrialized food production, such as Stand O’ Food and many others.

In his "(Non)conclusion," he raised the history of the human/machine relationship, the question of culture specificity, and the issue of the eventual preference for the "human touch," the "robot touch," or the "robo-human touch." Audience member Paul Dourish pointed out the importance of the work of Gary Alan Fine and how this kind of constrained interactivity might also function in the "occupational rhetorics" of haute cuisine and the managed and regulated emotional performance of waitstaff. As ex-Google employee Lilly Irani rightly observed, automation isn’t just a thing that machines do. (One of the later chapters of the Virtualpolitik book deals with labor, interactivity, and book digitization.) Irani reminded Huhtamo that Wendy Chun had looked at the man-machine coupling of Enniac in which the woman and the machine were collapsed. Finally Manovich inserted a mention of the relationship between automation and creativity represented by the extension of the paradigm of the search engine and its history in practices from World War Two involving reacting to situations. For Manovich, interactivity was a way to reintroduce the human, even if Huhtamo argued that such actors were positioned by an invisible framework.

Huhtamo looked at some of the literature about Taylorism that I have been thinking about in connection with my new book project about universities as digital media makers, since "scientific management" was the actual subject matter of the lecture in which the "baked professor" had his famous online video distance learning breakdown.

One Flu Over the Cuckoos Nest

Okay, who can resist a game about clinical virology and killer flu? As Ian Bogost explains at Water Cooler Games, the game presents two related arguments: 1) "pandemic flus are rare and unusual strains that are far harder to spread than popular discourse might make it seem" and 2) ordinary seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year. Like many serious games, such as Operation Pedopriest or the ReDistricting Game, players play from the position of the bad actor by trying to infect likely carriers with mobility and connections to concentrated populations who work, live, or study together best suited to spread the disease. By making the game particularly hard to play in H1N1 mode, because infection is dependent on genetic compatibility, the game design itself reinforces the pedagogical message. Unlike public health games like Outbreak at Watersedge that rely on the online tutorial format, game play exploits the excitement of racing the clock.

Lenses of Contact

As someone generally interested in raising awareness of "architectures of control," I've been a big fan of Dan Lockton's Design with Intent blog for a while, because it draws attention to how our experiences of consumerism and urbanism involve interactions with designed systems that reinforce particular kinds of rules. Today, at the Persuasive 2009 conference, Lockton presented part of his Design with Intent Toolkit, which outlined six possible "lenses" through which to see the design process. Given this toolkit, Lockton's work is also obviously relevant to my own interest in government persuasion around the four trends that I followed in the Virtualpolitik book: public diplomacy, social marketing, risk communication, and institutional branding, as political institutions move away from print-based media and toward computational media platforms.

Lockton began his talk with a series of behavioral contradictions that compromise energy efficiency as consumers buy energy-efficient light bulbs but leave them on all night, never explore other settings on their washers, leave water running while brushing teeth, and -- in his own country -- indulge in unnecessary overfilling of teakettles that if not wasted would provide almost enough energy to power all the street lights across the UK.

In looking at the level of "simple interaction with an everyday product," Lockton suggested a number of obvious conundrums, such as "What level do I work at?" in relation to the interface or "Whose side am I on?" in relation to ethical boundaries. As he put it, "Is it still user-centered design if we are trying to change behavior rather than accommodate it?"

To try to visualize these questions, Lockton provided three diagrams that represented 1) motivating behavior, 2) enabling behavior, and 3) constraining behavior. As an example of the motivational category of persuasion, he pointed out the presence of the EcoButton in the attendees' conference swag bags and briefly explained how the gadget worked. He also cited a number of influences on his work. For example, in explaining the role of "reduction" and "tunneling," he payed homage to B.J. Fogg, who was sitting in the second row, and he also praised the aesthetic of simplicity epitomized by John Maeda. He also displayed a number of quotations that emphasized the larger philosophical dimensions in these kinds of design activities. He noted the continuing influence of Buckminster Fuller as well, particularly in regard to making modifications in the environment to "get man moving in the right direction." (Fuller was also an important figure in Fred Turner's talk at U.C. Irvine last week.) In acknowledging influences on his thinking, Lockton wasn't afraid to air some of the potentially disturbing aspects of persuasive technologies that might actually remove options for users, which runs contrary to the principles of those like Heinz von Foerster who only want to maximize liberty through invention. As he pointed out, hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson once cynically defined technology as something that somebody wants someone to submit to, and Cory Doctorow similarly noted that no customer woke up this morning wishing to do less with his or her property. He also gave a plug for the book Nudge and the work of Richard Thayler.

Lockton then quickly reviewed the six lenses that constitute each "worldview on behavior change." They include the Persuasive lens, which includes "self-monitoring" and "kairos," the
Cognitive lens that addresses heuristics, structures of bias, and constructs of self-interest, which includes "social proof" and "framing," the Errorproofing lens, which includes "defaults" and "interlock," the Architectural lens, which includes "positioning" and "layouts," the Visual lens, which includes "prominence" and "metaphors," and finally the Security lens that less ethically seems to use components to coerce, which includes "surveillance" and "atmospherics." However, he pointed out that using classical music to drive away younger users was in practice not much different from using the smell of fresh-baked bread to draw customers in. Furthermore, in response to the constraints of the errorproofing approach, he asserted that when it came to nuclear safety or preventing medical error, few would advocate for the user's liberty.

For Lockton, these categories were often mixed, so that the same design choice could be read through multiple lenses. For example, Amazon's feature that informs users of what others who bought the same product also bought served both "social proof" and "kairos."

He then ran through a series of designed scenarios from a sign over a lightswitch reading "your bonus depends on this" to a two-color switch that seems visibly disorded when switched on. He even described a system created by a designer from the University of Chicago that dimmed lights as appliances and lights were turned on to raise awareness about excessive energy use.

Procedures and Networks

This week I watched homelessness begin, much of it from the window near where I am writing this blog entry.

I was at work for the actual moment of its inception, when -- on a cloudy Wednesday morning -- the sheriff came, and the locks were changed on an apartment unit near our alley. It had been occupied for over thirty years by a person who was now our former tenant, one whose mental illness had frightened and exhausted his neighbors in recent years.

Those who lived near him had endured months of blood-curdling shouting of threats and obscenities the in the middle of the night, smashed mailboxes and gates, torn-up paychecks and notices, stolen packages, disabled hot water heaters, and urine and human feces in the walkways. They were the audience for ugly confrontations in which their deranged fifty-eight-year-old neighbor would announce that he would kill them on their door stoops if they protested that they were in the right about issues of civility involving everyday conflicts about shared public space and the details of lights, garbage cans, and parking places.

I became practiced in making small talk with the police, who would knock on our door on a weekly and sometimes nightly basis. One time it was a mustachioed detective, who came with a dossier of photographs under his arm. I could see that there were shots of a woman's body covered with bruises.

Of course, we had delayed the inevitable as long as possible, because it was obvious that there were some organic factors involved. At first these changes made him docile and childlike. He wrote apologetic notes on legal pads expressing his fears that he may have neglected to pay his rent. Sometimes we would open our mailbox and there would be a half-dozen such notes crammed together with checks, as though he had forgotten each one as soon as it had been deposited in our box.

In the beginning, his expressions of helplessness were a welcome relief: he had always been a curmudgeonly presence in the neighborhood, the lone Republican in a block of liberal Democrats, who was likely to be drunkenly abusive to those who came to his door, especially women or people of color.

But, even during what now seems a honeymoon period, there were signs that we might not be able to handle his demands. He called to express outrage about the poor security conditions in the building. He reported that someone had broken into his apartment and had stolen his television, and he wanted repairs and perhaps even compensation. There was a broken window to support his claim, but we were puzzled when we found the television set in the garbage can. Later it came out that he had broken into his own apartment and had loudly announced his intentions before doing so, even when the other tenant-spectators pointed out that he could just wait a few minutes and enter through the door without causing any damage if he just made an emergency call to management for a key.

As his condition worsened, medical people and nurses came and went. Sometimes he seemed drugged. He shuffled around the bungalow courtyard as if puttering at imaginary chores. His car acquired more dents and then disappeared from the street entirely. We accepted the idea of having a premature senior citizen as our doddering and forgetful tenant.

Then he he began to send the home health aides away, and it was as though he had returned to being his former obstreperous self. He began to talk long striding walks in which he would glare contemptuously at street people and those he called "crackheads." When we would pass him during our own promenades, he clearly knew us and addressed us by name dismissively. He seemed alert and impatient during our attempts at neighborly interchanges.

Then he began to harass the other tenants, as if hoping they would move out and leave him in peace to perform what were becoming increasingly strange rituals. He threatened to shoot his neighbor across the way and bragged of owning "three guns." He threw himself and heavy furniture against the wall that he shared with another neighbor and would scowl at him menacingly when he stole his newspaper in the morning. They were afraid of him, but they were also afraid of what he might do if they called the police to file charges.

It took the better part of a year to evict him, despite a file of pleading letters from the other tenants. Before that, we spent a year trying to get him the full-time in-home care that he seemed to need. It was no use. He had turned away everyone we sent: a social worker, a health inspector, an entire psychiatric emergency team. Although we often felt like his victims, we even filed the paperwork to treat his case as possible elder abuse, in hopes that an investigation would get him the medical care and housekeeping assistance that he so obviously needed. Adult protective services told us that they couldn't help him if he refused care. Anyway, they said, he was fifty-eight and the cut-off for eligibility was sixty.

On the day of the lockout, no one came. His brother and caregiver were notified; they responded with outrage and obscenities but were no shows when it really mattered. He came back to try his key in the door. It rained. He came back again. It rained again. Like a caged animal, he tore up newspapers and made a bed for himself in them. He hiked down his pants and urinated in the greenery. It rained again. Every day the police were called. They had procedures too. We collected their business cards and slips with the incident numbers. One time, I watched him be cuffed on an outstanding warrant with his back turned obediently toward them. Another time, I watched the officers run into the alley to apprehend him after he had torn off a window screen and was bashing it up into a tool for more mayhem.

It made me think about computer games that purport to be games for change. The same kind of playable computer simulations for generating multiple outcomes from multiple factors that are currently used to raise consciousness about hunger, illness, and injustice could dramatize how homelessness begins as well. After all, homelessness can be seen as the product of the aggregation of rules and, as Ian Bogost might say, epitomizes the principles of procedurality. Too young to be judged senile, too old to be ruled dependent, too seemingly nonviolent for longterm lock-up, too violent for family living.

His lack of social networks also obviously played a role, since there was no one to come for him on the day that the locks were changed on his apartment. He had lived a solitary life: worked at home, never married, and avoided the church congregations and civic organizations and neighborhood associations that might have helped him when his behavior began to deteriorate.

My point is this: learning about distributed communication and computational media isn't just about gadgets and new technologies; it's about being able to model social dynamics as well and maybe even understand possible solutions to complicated and seemingly intractable problems like homelessness.

From my perspective, it's too late for this particular person. We're installing new gates. We're turning our address into a fortress. But this experience of seeing how homelessness happens in slow motion over the course of years makes me see people on the street differently and makes me wonder if the process is as inevitable as it can seem.

The Train Wreck in Outer Space

Reader Michael Thomas sent a link to this YouTube video, "Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion," which skewers NASA's bureaucracy in a Law and Order send-up that also makes a serious point about proceduralism and the ways that "optimal solutions" can lose out to the "technical feasible." Those interested in information design will appreciate the fact that at one point in the video real labyrinthine NASA project plan flowchart serves as the backdrop to a scene.

Thomas pointed out that the video was actually cited in this entry on one of NASA's official blogs. The rhetoric of the introduction by Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale is particularly interesting, in the way that he situates himself as a speaker as an agent of reform:

I've got a video that you need to watch, but first I need to explain why you need to watch it and what lesson I hope you will take away.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board said that NASA - and specifically the Space Shuttle Program - stifled dissenting opinions which might have prevented the accident. Particularly the action was pointed toward the Mission Management Team. As the new Deputy Program Manager, I was assigned the task of restructuring the MMT and providing means for listening to dissent. Somewhere along the way I acquired the informal title of 'culture change leader'. I took this to heart and changing the culture to be more welcoming to alternate or dissenting opinions was a task that took a lot of my time and attention.

The build-up continues for several paragraphs until the writer gets to the following viewing instructions: "So now, watch the video, then come back and lets talk about what I think we really need to do about it." A link appears and then there is more second-person direct address to the reader and instructions for viewing.

Are you done with it? Maybe you should go back and watch it a couple of times. I did.

I feel like the early civil right pioneers must feel; the overt bad behavior is gone underground. People say the right things in public discussion of how they should act, then behave in the bad old ways in small or private settings.

In the Virtualpolitik book I've written about how nonfiction online videos on YouTube perform whistle-blowing functions, but it is interesting to observe how this fictional scenario is designed to be persuasive and to dramatize private power plays for public viewing.

On NASA Watch, a blogger suggested that the video should run on NASA TV, where the delivery of lines isn't much better than the wooden acting on "Barriers. In the satiric video, the young female engineer meets with the characters of "Supervisor," "Bureau Chief," "Project Office, and "Director" who respond with stilted dialogue that emphasizes the scripted quality of collegial interactions. On Transterrestrial Musings the reaction of NASA officials to the video is compared to Claude Rains saying he was "shocked shocked" to discover gambling in Casablanca.

The Ru135 of the 64M3

This is the best evidence against the games=learning argument that I have ever seen. Contrary to the claims of the serious games movement, note how this contestant gets worse at mastering the rules the longer she plays.

(Thanks to evil genius Kembrew McLeod for the link. McLeod also has a great new trailer for his film Copyright Criminals well worth checking out.)

Junior Lawmaker

There are a number of online games intended to explain the deliberative processes of government to schoolchildren. California's Your Idea Becomes A Law may be one of the weakest examples of the genre, since most of the game "action" is essentially hitting a "next" button on the screen, as the player passively watches his or her bill move through votes in committees and the assembly and senate floors to reach the final step of signing (or vetoing) on the governor's desk. Except for choosing your committees and answering a trivia question about the number of votes needed to pass legislation, there is not much to do after you write up your description of your dream legislation. The bill itself doesn't matter and there's no rewriting and revision process shown. For example, no one seemed to object, even in the state's health committee to my proposal to raise test scores by serving children coffee in kindergarten. Drink up kiddies!

What Constitutes a Normal Conversation?

During the holidays, I've probably engaged in at least a hundred different conversations, many of which are with people that I am meeting for the first time, friends of friends about whom I know nothing. In many videogames, creating convincing conversational interchanges is considered to be an essential dramatic problem. Another season of small talk has convinced me that this is indeed a real rhetorical challenge for those who want naturalistic exchanges with nonplayer characters in games and simulations. For example, today one conversation began with a discussion of watching people sleep and ended with a discussion of earwax: topics covered in between included religion, politics, sex, and money.

The Death and Life of Great American Election Videogames

In Ian Bogost's remarkable essay, "The Birth and Death of the Election Game," points out that although the 2004 election "marked a turning point" in which "candidates and campaign organizations got into games, using the medium for publicity, fundraising, platform communication, and more," 2008 had been a failure in producing meaningful or engaging games about the campaigns, so that "video games played a minor role" in representing the political contest that was consuming tens of millions of Americans with other kinds of .

Of course, as I've noted here on Virtualpolitik, voters have pursued many kinds of rule-driven forms of interactivity involving computational media this election season including online issue quizzes, interactive electoral maps, and tax calculators.

But it is true that the absence of good election games represents a notable omission in the nation's logical patterns of digital media production. Just the fact that there are winners and losers who accrue points in a relatively complex system of rules makes the U.S. presidential election seem to be much more logical subject matter for a serious game than Shakespeare's plays, lunar exploration, environmental protection, or other similar experiences that are less likely candidates to be modeled successfully by a computer.

As Clive Thompson suggests in "Democracy, the Game," after playing The Political Machine 2008, perhaps "American democracy really is a game — and maybe that’s the best thing about it."

What, after all, is a game? A game is a set of rules that gives players a set of goals but also constrains their behavior in striving for those goals; it architects their behavior in an interesting and hopefully enjoyable way. A really well-designed game is “balanced” and self-correcting. In a game of pool, for example, if you take an early lead by sinking a ton of balls, you quickly discover that — whoops — the game gets harder because your opponents’ balls block all your shots. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, different classes of players do different things; as a result, no one class can run roughshod over all others.

As the election clock ticks down, Bogost has also been trying to cover late additions at Water Cooler Games, including Debate Smash 2008.

Tea Party

An interesting example of a meditation on what Ian Bogost calls "procedural rhetoric" has to do with reflecting on the seemingly straightforward process of making tea. Joe Davis's stretchtext piece, Telescopic Text, provides its own kind of electronic tea ceremony as the individual components of a cup of tea are expanded upon. Over the years I've seen several versions of Ted Nelson's concept, from the Tinderbox Stretchtext Template to an opening of file-folders version of "He Began. She Ended." by Jeremy Douglass, but this was a particularly interesting connection of the content to the form. After all, I used to carpool to work with a philosopher who once studied assembly language, although he felt that his most memorable project was an algorithm for making tea.

(Thanks to Dan Lockton of the always readable Architectures of Control for the link, where you can also learn about health-conscious salt shaker design in fish and chips shops in the U.K.)

Art Imitates Life

Honorarium is "an autobiographical art game" from game studies academic star Ian Bogost, which has the following objective: "Assemble lectures to present. If you do well enough, you can unlock invitations to travel and speak."

As a pixelated Bogost character performing simple pattern recognition tasks, you pick up and assemble the blocks that match the given electronic slide on the screen. In the game, you can give talks at home or in various cultural capitals and experience all the fun of Bogost's appearance at a recent Software Studies pecha kucha event.

Collision Detection or Why Europeans are Better at Cheek-Kissing

I consider myself to be a patriotic U.S. citizen, but there are certainly some shortcomings in the nation’s vernacular body language that are hard to ignore. For example, in this country, people are far worse at cheek-kissing than their European counterparts. It's safe to say that even the most socially awkward European is likely to be a better cheek-kisser than the most suave American.

So, on behalf of my countrymen, I offer the following analysis that breaks the problem down into a series of conditional tests to avoid the most common pitfalls in this amicable nicety and to try to explicate what I see as the rules of this particular social interaction.

To do so, I'll use the construct of "collision detection," which may be unfamiliar to readers who've never taken a videogame design class like the basic one I'm taking now, but they can think of it as an algorithm that checks for the intersection of two solids. Contemporary versions of classic games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and many others are built with the understanding that the impact of one programmed object on another determines how the game’s action unfolds. (“Collision Detection” is also a title of a popular blog by Clive Thompson, which you may notice on the Virtualpolitik blogroll.)

From the recipient's perspective, the collision of a typical cheek-kiss can be broken down into three basic aspects: the location of the impact, the type of object encountered, and a report of damage after the event.

Location is generally the first mistake made by a U.S. native. Near the ear, neck, or mouth are not acceptable targets. A good cheek-kisser does not get extra points for aiming at more tricky locations. For something that represents boundaries and social convention, stick to the basics and avoid the arcane. A smooch near one's nostril is particularly unwelcome.

Second, there are many errors made in the actual cheek-kiss itself, which makes what could be a clumsy moment considerably more so. I say, if the objective is to kiss the cheek, kiss the cheek. Do not pucker so much that you seem to be avoiding the close contact that you've already initiated. On the other hand, clenched-lipped mashing in which an offending nose drills into the victim's cheekbone or eye socket is also wrong.

Finally, there is the matter of the impression that you leave behind when you withdraw. A slightly damp cheek is fine. Adults are perfectly capable of not drooling or slobbering, and an utterly dry physiological calling card is a little too reminiscent of a robotic uncanny-valley type of encounter that leaves no trace. Obviously, however, a bruise is a bad memento.

In other words, this procedural rhetoric probably deserves more attention from Americans. What should be a gesture of warmth and affection is too often treated as a perfunctory exercise of patriarchal decorum, and -- like mechanically opening a door or pulling out a chair -- there are ways that this incursion into another person's private space can be executed so that it is perceived as a sort of hostile act.

I use a trivial example to make a serious point, one that is worth keeping in mind in our era of jostling modernity, which Walter Benjamin once characterized as composed of "a series of shocks." Gestures of welcome and leave-taking should ideally ease those jolts rather than contribute to their repercussions, something to which continental sensibilities may be somehow better attuned. Moreover, a collision-detection reading of the norms of daily etiquette can be applied to many other situations as well.

I'm working on a paper now about Cruel 2B Kind, the alternate reality game created by Ian Bogost and Jane McGonigal, in which common forms of effusive politeness, such as giving compliments and blowing kisses, can actually serve as weapons in their game of "benevolent assassination." Unlike the cheek-kissing case, the rules that are in play involve interactions between strangers, but -- as I indicate in this snippet from the abstract -- the game also facilitates a kind of useful defamiliarization of all kinds of standard operating procedures at work in civil society.

Alternate reality games or ARGs are interactive narratives that use the real world as a platform for community activity to tell stories that may be affected by participants' concepts or responses. These games frequently equip players with resources from computational media, distributed networks, and mobile technologies in order to coordinate events and actors in real time.

Because these games are generally staged in the built environments of cities, ARGs frequently comment on other, less obvious forms of “mixed reality” that are present in invisible architectures of control that dictate how social roles are assigned, economic resources are allocated, physical distance between human beings is maintained, and rules governing the general strategies of cooperation and competition appropriate for urban dwellers are formalized.

So I guess I'm interested in games because, as McGonigal says, "reality is broken." Too often I feel that my colleagues in literature departments see games merely as quaint or cool objects of academic study that can be divorced from their own behavior and the social conventions that they accept. But, as I previously argued in "On Procedurality," maybe the lesson of game studies is that we should all be analyzing our neighborhoods and personal interactions instead.

Update: Bogost points out that The Wall Street Journal ran a related article on this subject, "Americans Learn the Global Art Of the Cheek Kiss."

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

Last month I wrote about voter survey websites that promise to match voters to the best candidate based on their answers to online quizzes that rank and respond to issues that have been prominent in the election and national life. The problem with many of these websites, I argued is that the black-box mechanism that determines who you should be matched with may be weighted in ways not immediately apparent to the user. These surveys were often designed to proffer political entertainment as well and used forms of online interactivity borrowed from online dating sites or political whack-a-mole games.

Yesterday, I learned that CalIT2 is supporting a university-centered site of its own, MyElectionDecision.org. Although the final chart could use an information-design overall, in that the more compatible candidates aren't in a logical descending order, mousing over the score brought up the policy statement and a reminder about whether the voter said he or she agreed or disagreed.

A position paper from Robert J. Beck of Lawrence University explains the site's rationale and its intention to target "college students." Although Beck cites research that shows a "synthesis of entertaining games and substantive information is necessary for election handbooks to influence the development of civic attitudes among youth," I'd have to give the website relatively low points as an interactive experience that is either "entertaining" or game-like. This press release describes the system's debut at a town hall meeting on my campus.

(CalIT2 did, however, offer t-shirts at their booth, which were actually available in women's sizes. Yipee! I'm actually wearing my t-shirt as I write this, unlike the drawers of unwearable tech shirts that I never don. For more on "what conference t-shirts can tell you," go to this much forwarded link here.)

On Procedurality

I've been thinking a lot about procedurality lately, and an incident today showed the relevance of these theoretical speculations in the world of lived experience as well.

First, some background: I live in a house that is between two hospitals on the east-west axis, between two churches on the north-south axis, and around the corner from a funeral home. As a result, it's a neighborhood in which property is not only slightly more affordable in pricey Santa Monica but also one in which elderly people are often seen wandering around on the sidewalks lost. The disoriented senior citizen problem has become particularly noticeable since one of the hospitals has been undergoing construction and has closed down its reception area, along with its main entrance.

Today, I led a man back to his wife's hospital room. She was 91, and he was 88. He had gone outside to smoke, since the rules of the hospital dictated that visitors smoke far from the building and its ventilation systems, but he couldn't find his way back to the right structure after he had finished his cigarette. To make matters worse he was apparently experiencing some side effects from the medication he was taking, which only contributed to his confusion and inability to navigate. By the time he encountered me on my morning walk, he was blocks from the hospital after an hour going in circles or in the wrong direction. Since I was one of the few people not wearing an iPod or talking into a cell phone, he approached me for help, albeit hesitantly.

What astonished me was that it soon became clear that merely leading him back to the front door of the hospital wouldn't be enough to get him back to where he wanted to go, since his journey would still involve negotiating a maze of corridors and blocked off construction areas. None of the half-dozen or so people on the hospital staff milling around the entrance seemed able to help: the security guard had to stay by the door and couldn't walk us far enough into the building to make his directions clear, and a quintet of wheelchair pushers told me they would only respond to instructions from the nurses' stations on the floors above. Eventually I got him back to the right place.

As I walked back onto the street, I thought about the fact that hospitals were highly procedural places. There were rules for everything from the moment a patient is signed in on a sheet on a clipboard to the moment that he or she is wheeled out the door. In some ways, I understand these kinds of environments; the university I work at has its own systems of seemingly Byzantine regulations and multiple decision trees. If Johnny fails Course X, then he can't take Course Y and must take Course Z. Yet, when people don't fit neatly into an if-then statement, what are they supposed to do?

If anything, the procedural character of our society is becoming more obvious. Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig identifies four forces of regulation in his book Code 2.0: the law, the market, social norms, and architectures of control. Anxieties about litigation, cost-cutting and downsizing in response to globalization, the constraints of Web 2.0 forms of sociality, and zealous protectionism of private property of all kinds -- including intellectual property -- only intensifies this focus on articulating procedures and then monitoring compliance with them.

In Persuasive Games, Ian Bogost argues that we can never really get outside procedurality, just as we can never get outside of ideology. When a company seems to be making an exception to the rules for a dissatisfied customer, stakeholders there are only following another procedure, which is designed to foster business and limit bad PR. Bogost is known for being fascinated with the procedures involved in shopping, travel, and public safety, as games he has created, such as lXtreme Xmas Shopping, Airport Security, and Food Import Folly show.

Recently, when Mark Marino came to my digital rhetoric class, he talked about his interest in "breaking" systems, which Noah Wardrip-Fruin has described as the best way to figure out how they work. One of Marino's joys in playing with the ELIZA system created by Joseph Weizenbaum, he said, was trying to input data into the simulation that would "cause it to say silly things." Marino admitted, however, that he would also try to "break" the system when dealing with a customer service representative at a call center, by finding the words that would disrupt the script that the person was reading back to him. He talked about the moral ambiguities involved when you are "breaking a person" not "breaking a system."

So what would be the programmatic solution that would correct the procedures that are causing old people to be out wandering in the street? City workers could just paint lines on the sidewalks in different colors with arrows, as they often do inside hospitals themselves to help visitors find high traffic destinations in times of crisis. St. John's Hospital could be one color, and Santa Monica Hospital could be another. That wouldn't do much for property values, but at least the neighborhood would be more colorful.

Or -- in the absence of minders and security cameras -- perhaps more elderly people should carry cell phones, preferably with GPS orienting gear, so they can reach a doctor, nurse, or loved one whenever they stray.

Yet, that seems a little cold to me. The gentleman I walked to his destination is not the only injured or lost person that I've escorted since I've lived here when I saw a need, and I tend to think that part of being civic-minded is helping those who need help, if for no other reason than we are all going to get old one day.

The man kept commenting on how surprising it was that in this day and age I was willing to go out of my way for a stranger, even though good deeds of this kind take remarkably little time and aren't particularly noble if you are just programmed to do them. He kept saying that I was behaving just as a boy scout would. He told me that the Boy Scouts of America was an organization with which he had apparently been affiliated with for forty years. I had, in fact, been a girl scout and now had kids in scouting, but isn't that also its own kind of pre-configured procedurality in that there are clearly defined paths to success and badges to earn and rules to follow?

My solution would just be to rebuild the reception area staffed with volunteers and restore the procedure that had been in place for decades. Until then then those who fall off the decision tree will keep showing up in my neighborhood.

Jumping Jack Flash

Piracy Kills Music, brought to us by the Norwegian branch of social marketing giant McCann Ericson, known for their public service campaigns against obesity and in favor of parental screening software, delivers a literally black-and-white view of intellectual property issues.

Although the spot was chosen as a featured pick on the FWA: Favorite Website Awards, where Flash developers compete for attention, I didn't find it very user-friendly. In particular, I found the sluggish, stalling loading time extremely irritating, and I found the movement of virtual objects devoid of the charm that I often associate with more dynamic Flash sites. Certainly, the gloomy monochromatic palette didn't help any. Citing a pseudo-Frankenstein-movie -- ironically as a borrowing from Mel Brooks -- may have been kind of cool for a few seconds, but the black and white scenes didn't serve any narrative purpose in the rest of the site.

The "interactive" quizzes or activities at the end of every chapter seemed particularly unimaginative. They were generally formulated as bland information graphics that could respond to input from the user's mouse. A few of these chapter reviews contain factually incorrect statements such as the claim that it is illegal to "download music from a file-sharing network" or "share music from a file-sharing network," because the keyword "copyrighted" is missing in the assertion. Furthermore, if Neil Young makes an anti-war anthem freely available on his MySpace page, or David Byrne invites users to create mash-ups on a Creative Commons site, neither the conduct of artists nor of the music fans is illegal.

I've been thinking about the ideas in Ian Bogost's upcoming book, Persuasive Games, in which he argues that "procedural rhetoric," dictated at the level of code, has the aim of persuading the player or expressing underlying ideologies. In terms of programming, I find a simple interactive program like "Dots" much more engaging than the short interactive sections in Piracy Kills. Even more fun to play with is the new Visuwords: online graphical dictionary, which may remind digital rhetoric old-timers of the Visual Thesaurus of old.

For those who want some real interactivity that conveys a lasting message about conventions of user behavior with digital copies, one that emphasizes the importance of showing respect for the work of other people, I would recommend ccMixter's latest remix contest as a way to understand how to build symbiotic models for media production without the recording industry's heavy handed emphasis on parasitic ones.