multicast

(or, Social Media circa 1994)

(or, Happy 20th Birthday, My Home Page!)

Thanks to the rigorous use of backups, I’ve just noticed that it is the twentieth anniversary of my personal home page. In the spirit of commemoration, I’ve uploaded the original version (c. 1994). For reasons I don’t remember now, I named it “booger.html.” A screenshot:

I stumbled upon this file while looking through my backups for something else. I also found all kinds of other interesting stuff. For example, I found my personal list of “hotlinks” (as we called them then).

It’s very hard to reconstruct what the Web was like then. The Internet Archive had not begun operation yet. All of my old links to things are now dead, but it’s still interesting to try to remember how we were social with computers. Yes, there were “social media.” I’ll explain:

• Apparently I was in a Webring.
• I found my PGP Public Key. (No idea where the private key is.) I made my PGP public key available so people could send me a PGP encrypted message at any time. However, in ten years no one ever sent me a PGP encrypted message. But I was ready. (Take that NSA.) As long as I could find my PGP private key and remember the password from ten years ago, that is.
• My preferred search engine was Web Crawler.
• Later in the year I was very excited about Hot Wired, the first commercial magazine on the Web (an online version of Wired Magazine). It had its own URL then, which still works: http://www.hotwired.com  Everything was prefaced with “hot” back then. That is a hotlink to HotWired.
• I spent a lot of time doing ytalk with my friends. Screenshot (found on the Internet — not mine):

• I exhorted people to look me up on whois and to “finger me.” I regularly updated my .plan and .project files, which were status updates. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg basically ripped off the finger protocol from 1971, then added a facility to help Harvard men look at Harvard women (the “Facebook”) and “poke” them. Great job. Here’s an example finger query (not mine, found on the Web):

A lot of being on the Web in 1994 seems to be about just being on the Web at all. For instance:

• I used the HotDog Web Editor for my HTML. Apparently because the logo was so cool. (I don’t think I used it for my first Web page — booger.html though because the HTML is terrible.)

• I appear to have been on an obsessive search for new “icons.” I bookmarked a bunch of icon sharing sites, all now defunct.
• I was very interested in how to interlace GIFs.
• Does anyone else remember Carlos’s Forms Tutorial at NCSA? I spent a huge amount of time there and looking at the CGI documentation on a server named hoohoo (the link is a capture from 1996). I spent so much time on it that I memorized the URL, and we didn’t believe in short URLs then. UIUC loomed large in my imagination purely because of its Web stuff. Little did I know I would go on to work there and genuflect at the monument to the Web Browser every single day.

The ephemera above remind me that the Web was so exciting that a friend went to the DMV and got the California personalized license plate “IDOWWW“. I thought this might be the coolest thing anyone had ever done. In fact, I still think it is.

It’s hard to believe twenty years have passed since booger.html. I want to keep the nostalgia going. Does anyone else remember anything about social media in 1994?

(or, Are We Social Insects?)

I worried that my last blog post was too short and intellectually ineffectual. But given the positive feedback I’ve received, my true calling may be to write top ten lists of other people’s ideas, based on conferences I attend. So here is another list like that.

These are my notes from my attendance at “Algorithmic Culture,” an event in the University of Michigan’s Digital Currents program. It featured a lecture by the amazing Ted Striphas. These notes also reflect discussion after the talk that included Megan Sapnar Ankerson, Mark Ackerman, John Cheney-Lippold and other people I didn’t write down.

Ted has made his work on historicizing the emergence of an “algorithmic culture” (Alex Galloway‘s term) available widely already, so my role here is really just to point at it and say: “Look!” (Then applaud.)

If you’re not familiar with this general topic area (“algorithmic culture”) see Tarleton Gillespie’s recent introduction The Relevance of Algorithms and then maybe my own writing posse’s Re-Centering the Algorithm. OK here we go:

Eight Questions About Algorithms and Culture

1. Are algorithms centralizing? Algorithms, born from ideas of decentralized control and cybernetics, were once seen as basically anti-hierarchical. Fifty years ago we searched for algorithms in nature and found them decentralized — today engineers write them and we find them centralizing.
2. OR, are algorithms fundamentally democratic? Even if Google and Facebook have centralized the logic, they claim “democracy!” because we provide the data. YouTube has no need of kings. The LOLcats and fail videos are there by our collective will.
3. Many of today’s ideas about algorithms and culture can be traced to earlier ideas about social insects. Entomology once noted that termites “failed to evolve” because their algorithms, based on biology, were too inflexible. How do our algorithms work? Too inflexible? (and does this mean we are social insects?)
4. The specific word “algorithm” is a recent phenomenon, but the idea behind it is not new. (Consider: plan, recipe, procedure, script, program, function, …) But do we think about these ideas differently now? If so, maybe it is who looks at them and where they look. In early algorithmic thinking people were the logic and housed the procedure. Now computers house the procedure and people are the operands.
5. Can “algorithmic culture” be countercultural? Fred Turner and John Markoff have traced the links between the counterculture and computing. Striphas argued that counterculture-like influences on what would become modern computing came much earlier than the 60s: consider the influence of WWII and The Holocaust. For example, Talcott Parsons saw culture through the lens of anti-authoritarianism. He also saw culture as the opposite of state power. Is culture fundamentally anti-state? This also leads me to ask: Is everything always actually about Hitler in the end?
6. Today, the computer science definition of “algorithm” is similar to anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture in 1970s — that is, a recipe, plan, etc. Why is this? Is this significant?
7. Is Reddit the conceptual anti-Facebook? Reddit publicly discloses the algorithm that it uses to sort itself. There have been calls for Facebook algorithm transparency on normative grounds. What are the consequences of Reddit’s disclosure, if any? As Reddit’s algorithm is not driven by Facebook’s business model, does that mean these two social media platform sorting algorithms are mathematically (or more properly, procedurally) opposed?
8. Are algorithms fundamentally about homeostasis? (That’s the idea, prevalent in cybernetics and 1950s social science, that the systems being described are stable.) In other words, when algorithms are used today is there an implicit drive toward stability, equilibrium, or some other similar implied goal or similar standard of beauty for a system?

Whew, I’m done. What a great event!

I’m skeptical about that last point (algorithms = homeostasis) but the question reminds me of “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts,” part 2 of the 2011 BBC documentary/insane-music-video by Adam Curtis titled All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. It is a favorite of mine. Although I think many of the implied claims are not true, it’s worth watching for the soundtrack and jump cuts alone.

It’s all about cybernetics and homeostasis. I’ll conclude with it… “THIS IS A STORY ABOUT THE RISE OF THE MACHINES”:

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace 2 from SACPOP on Vimeo.

P.S.

Some of us also had an interesting side conversation about what job would be the “least algorithmic.” Presumably something that was not repeatable — it differs each time it is performed. Some form of performance art? This conversation led us to think that everything is actually algorithmic.

Here’s a quick post containing eight ideas that made it into my notes from today’s “Feminism, Technology, and the Body” FemTechNet dialogue at the University of Michigan. It featured  Alondra Nelson, Jessie Daniels, Lisa Nakamura, Sidonie Smith, Carrie Rentschler, Sharon Irish, and a bunch of other people I didn’t write down. What a crew!

Eight Ideas About Feminism, Technology, and the Body:

1. Early ads for the Internet wouldn’t work today. We no longer aspire to leave our bodies behind. Or we can no longer imagine it.  Remember this ad?  (c. 1997)

2. If we’ve theorized the Internet and the body, what about social media and the body?

3. Is  the selfie inherently anti-feminist?

4. Are there “feminist data?” What are they?

5. “Just add women and stir” won’t work — mixing women and tech together is not in itself progressive. (cf. bell hooks)

6. Whatever happened to the emancipatory cyborg? (Haraway) Is a woman’s body still a trap?

7. Don’t forget where all this comes from. Facebook was born in a sexist moment. It was meant to make Harvard women available to the male gaze.

8. Forget the MOOC, it’s time for the DOCC.(*)

(* – Distributed Online Collaborative Course)

(or, Simulating a Simulation)

This is the second post in a series on teaching about games in higher education. See also: the first post (Writing the Casual Games Syllabus).

As you’re making your way through the end of the first level of Bioshock [2007] (one of the most critically-acclaimed video games of all time and one that defined its own genre: objectivist FPS), you’ll be abruptly trapped in a small room when your enemy (Atlas) slams a remote-controlled door.

The lights go out. (Dramatic!)

Through a wall of safety glass windows, a television monitor lights up and delivers a preening speech from your antagonist–a speech worthy of a James Bond super-villian in a closing scene. He says:

So tell me, friend, which one of the bitches sent you, the KGB wolf or the CIA jackal? Here’s the news: … Andrew Ryan isn’t a giddy socialite who can be slapped around by government muscle, and with that, farewell, or Dasvadinya -– whichever you prefer.

At the speech’s conclusion, a gang of “splicers” (think: zombies) runs up to the other side of the safety glass and starts pounding on it and screaming. (Very dramatic!) You’re still trapped in the room, and if it is your first play-through you probably don’t want to fight this mob.

Then the glass starts to crack. (Ultra dramatic!)

They’re breaking through! in BioShock [2007]
(Click to enlarge.) 

When I played this, I frantically searched for something to do. I guessed that the game wouldn’t kill me outright at this point… but who knows? So it was with a rising sense of panic that I scoured the walls, desperate for a tooltip, for escape, for anything.

Luckily, just as it felt like the splicers would break through, the sometime-ally and narrator (Atlas) managed to open the locked door of my trap by radio or something and I was free to run away. Whew. That was close.

But was it close? If you stay in the room you’ll quickly discover that the whole thing was a sham of interactivity. The door opens on a timer. The splicer/zombies never break through the glass. They’re on a short loop of repeated banging and screaming that it is easy to see, if you stand and look. It’s actually a cut-scene disguised as gameplay. 

It’s the same situation in State of Decay, the open-world zombie apocalypse survival game that has broken all sales records since its release on Xbox 360 arcade last June. It is an excellent game that has also reviewed well. I evaluated it for my Play and Technology syllabus (see the last post). I like the game, it is a terrific achievement.

 
Why are people excited about it? It gets a lot of credit for emphasizing gameplay as opposed to wordy narrative (cf. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead [The Game]), and many reviewers have praised the basic concept of a “zombie survival sim.” As Tom Chick writes in praise of this game at Quarter to Three:

The best type of storytelling in a videogame is the type of storytelling that makes videogames unique: me in a sandbox of possibility, making stories out of my own choices.

I agree! Sounds great!

Also, the idea of a “zombie survival sim” is itself an achievement. Simulation is a fascinating and important topic in relation to games. So, I thought: Why not teach about simulation with a zombie survival sim?  Seems like a novel approach that would usefully get us away from SimCity. And State of Decay looked good — in the words of the producer, “The game is basically a giant simulation.”

Forget SimCity — there’s no tame discussion of municipal zoning rules here! State of Decay [2013] (Click to enlarge.) 

Certainly everything else in State of Decay isn’t novel. Every concept in there is ripped off from some other zombie media franchise, sometimes with a wink (Twinkie snacks! Rule #1: Cardio!) and sometimes not. The achievement here, as is true for many other popular games like Grand Theft Auto, is really in execution — bringing together a lot of things that have existed in games before, but getting them to work well together.

As I eagerly waded into my second play-through, I hit a speed bump. After a while, my ally and narrator Lilly told me: “I really don’t think we should be getting into bed with the Wilkersons.” She goes on in this vein for some time.

For me, this was a jarring bit of NPC dialogue.

Wait, I thought, I just told the Wilkersons to go to hell! Doesn’t Lilly realize that?

Unlike my first play-through, I had done everything possible to be against the Wilkersons. I was the anti-Wilkersons. Yet Lilly’s dialogue was the same as in my first playthrough, when I was pro-Wilkersons. As I was puzzling over this, the Wilkersons gave me some gifts. It seems like the story in “State of Decay” is continuing on without me at the helm.

At first I thought this surprising non-interactivity only applied to the hypertext, or what gamers call the “story line missions,” but I was surprised to find that the enforced linearity of the plot also applies to the open world elements and the simulation components as well — in a very ambitious way.

In a sentence, this game is presented as Night of the Living Dead meets Lemonade Stand. Check out the resources screen:

Here’s part of the map:

So far so good, right? Any sim gamer is drooling, let me assure you. It screams, “sim! sim! sim!”

Here are the stated rules if you care for that sort of thing.

It’s a great formula, I’m itching to play it. Because, you see, I thought that I was playing it when I played State of Decay but it turns out I was not. Most of the information in the box above comes from in-game dialogue and explanatory text. And it’s mostly false. The game told me that was how the simulation worked, but how does it actually work?

Let me show you:

In the game, Sgt. Tam told me to “stockpile resources” — now I see why the NPCs have to say these things because it actually doesn’t matter if I stockpile them or not. It’s not just that these are score points with no consequences, they aren’t even score points as they are disconnected from my actions. It appears to be impossible to deplete some of the resources very much. I decided to not collect any resources at all and learned that resources can vary in a manner that I experienced as random. Some of them will decrease to zero, but when they do, no one even mentions it. Then they’ll go back up as the NPC gather them for you.

The game pop-up warns me that “Morale is low.” But so what? I dropped it to zero and I could not detect any consequence. If anything, game messages like “Grady is sad” appeared more often when my morale was high. Running out of food entirely for a long period produced a modest stamina penalty for 2-3 of my team members (“Grady is hungry”).

The premise of the game is that I have to defend my home base from zombie hordes. But I removed all of my outposts and fortifications. Then I systematically killed all of my characters that were good at fighting, while they were holding all of my most valuable weapons. I left two noobs in the base and they fought off eight waves of zombie hordes with a single frying pan between them.  In other words, the point of the game is to defend your base, but if you don’t defend your base nothing happens.

So basically on my first play-through of State of Decay I was the six-year-old on the Autopia ride at Disneyland. I had a great time turning the steering wheel right and left, sure, but I thought I was driving a car when I was actually riding a train along a track. State of Decay is attached to a metal rail and the steering wheel is disconnected. I thought I was good at the game the first time I played it (blush), but now I know this is what I deserve:

This is a daring game design decision. In a sense all games are on that metal rail, but Undead Labs has really pushed it by creating an elaborate user interface for a nonexistent simulation game. I worry that some of it may have been inadvertent. That is, some of this stuff feels like the hooks for the simulation that Undead Labs intended to build but didn’t get around to. That would explain this Friday’s release of the first downloadable update to the game, a simulation mode (“sandbox”) called “Breakdown.” I guess most players (like me) thought that we already bought that the first time, but we did not.

I thought that State of Decay would be a game I might use to teach about simulation, but actually I think it is useful as a way to teach about honesty. I took the things in State of Decay that seemed random and imagined them to be spinning cogs of an awesomely complex simulation engine I could enjoyably reverse engineer at my leisure. But the engine in the original State of Decay seems random because is consists of a few wires connected to a random number generator.

That means my teaching questions would be these: In the original State of Decay I felt a big letdown when I worked out that there was nothing to work out. Is that an acceptable game design risk to take, as long as most players never find out they were tricked? At the same time, I was happy to be tricked when locked in BioShock’s little room. Later on, I found out that Bioshock tricked me, but that doesn’t bother me. What’s the difference?

(or, Welcome to the Future)

Last night, I went to parent-teacher night at my daughter’s school. Here is a list of things I wrote down that differ from when I went to middle school. Since I’m a social media researcher, many of them have to do with technology and social media. I thought someone else might find them of interest.

Things in middle school today that differ from my childhood:

• The “loaner Kindles.”
• Everyone gets a “certificate of participation” for everything.
• Cyber-bullying prevention assembly is held once each year.*
• Giant flatscreen TV looks weird on a rolling cart.
• No recess.
• Less unstructured time.
• 20 minute lunch.
• School day is shorter.
• Along with Kleenex and colored pencils, the “teacher wish list” has software licenses.
• “No cut” athletics.
• All of the good teachers have a Weebly.
• Video lectures sent home on thumb drives “in case your broadband is slow.”
• Physical Education (Phys Ed) is optional.
• Shop classes replaced by computer classes, called “Technical Education” (Tech Ed).
• The Concussion Awareness Campaign.
• Most common use of Internet in school: YouTube.
• Most FAQ from parents: “How often do you post grades on Powerschool?” (Powerschool is proprietary courseware.)
• Many textbooks are PDFs.
• As part of a “back strain prevention program” there are two copies of the heaviest textbooks — one for school and one for home.
• When I was a kid: “school resource officer.” Today: “police-free schools.” (Yes Ann Arbor is liberal and affluent.)
• Can’t make a move without a contract that the parent and the child has to sign.
• “For safety,” students not allowed in school building before or after school.
• Student art projects come home via the equivalent of Cafe Press. We got a mug.
• Whole school smells strongly of Axe.

* — An actual quote from a handout: “Facebook, cellphone cameras and texting, My Space [sic], FormSpring, X-box live, etc. are just some of the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ that are in your children’s hands.”  

Me: “FormSpring?!”

Me: “Also, ‘My Space’ doesn’t have a space.”

Me: “Also, also, I think ‘My Space’ is over now.”

(This was cross-posted to the Social Media Collective.)