Composing Spaces

Readers of this blog will recall posts from several months ago that touched upon Martin Kevorkian’s fascinating book, Color Monitors: The Black Face of Technology in America. Jim Brown pointed me to it and I decided to add it to the syllabus of my graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities. We are reading it this week. The book is based on Kevorkian’s astute observation that black males have, since the mid-1980s, been cast in the role of the technician or computer systems analyst. Think Miles Theo in Die Hard (the guy who has to break into the vault) and Ving Rhames in the Mission Impossible series (and, though not mentioned, the same kind of role in Entrapment). One might also think of the entire Orc population of Lord of the Rings as fitting within this representation.

In chapter 2, "Lost Worlds" Kevorkian begins looking at the representations of black children in corporate and philanthropic advertisements and annual reports. He locates their images within the narrative of the digital divide which he see as "the desire for [the fusion of the young black body with new computer technology]" (p. 39). He observes that in

popular usage, the phrase "digital divide" tends to serve as a polite shorthand from which explicit reference to race has been omitted in describing the gap between technological have and have-nots. Of course, the degree of technological access does correlate to a range of categories, including geography, income, and ethnicity. But attempts to depict the access situation in its true complexity run up against the strength of established perception: when people hear "digital divide," they tend to think in terms of black and white.
    People think that way about the gap because that is, quite literally, how they see it. In image after published image, the face of that gap is black. (p. 39)

Kevorkian continues for several pages referencing advertisements and annual reports that showcase the black child with a computer. His examples include The Computers for Learning Project, IBM, EDS, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. He argues that the "digital gap media campaigns suggest that the computer has been deployed in this fashion in part so as to cast the computer in a positive role. In these instances of tech-sector public relations, the affirmative action is technological: the placement of small colored people next to the machines forms as association for the advancement of computers" (p. 43). Reading that last phrase—"for the advancement of computers—I could not help but think of the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One campaign and this image:

This image of a black child balancing a computer on her head is a recasting of the image of the black person balancing on her head a basket of food or crops or other essential item.  In it we see Kevorkian’s observations affirmed in a new setting. As well, the computer is now savior, providor of the new form of sustenance (propagated by all media in this country): information, knowledge, access. Information has become more necessary for survival than food.

Now, I must say that I am a tempered supporter of this program. I jumped at the opportunity to participate in the By One Give One campaign and am happy that a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda now has access to computing technologies. I am excited with how the program has progressed in certain countries, and I hope all nations embrace the open computing ideas upon which OLPC is founded. However, ever since reading Lila Abu-Lughod I am wary of asserting technologies on others.

Kevorkian’s text raises significant concerns about how the program is showcasing the computers in local environments on its web sites. The participation page of the OLPC Foundation illustrates the white-black rich-poor dyad of which Kevorkian suggests by having a photograph of Negroponte and another white male signing something and the three following images being of happy, dancing, healthy black children. The implication is, of course, cause and effect: the men signed the paper and the children became happy.

Other similar images abound. In all of them dark-skinned children are happily sitting at the computer, smiling the computer, staring intently at the computer. This is not just for geographic reasons. According to the web site, trial locations include non-African, Asian, and South American countries. Indeed, the United States is included as a trial country.

The OLPC program raises heated emotions on both sides of the issue: those that see it as the west thrusting its values on other cultures and those who is it as a benevolent attempt to bring technologies to children in countries that otherwise could never afford it. Indeed, a hotly contested and sometimes nasty discussion recently threaded on the techrhet list over this very issue. And though I support Negroponte’s goals, I have to wonder about the program overall when the web site is representing success in this way.

ReadWriteWeb recently had two posts on information visualization. Marshall Kirkpatrick addresses the question of information overload by looking at how new visualization media are adapting from gaming interfaces. Sarah Perez lists The Best Tools for for Visualization by breaking the tools into several categories: Visualize Social Networks, Visualize Music, Visualize the Internet, among others. The number of tools, applications, and plugins that are now available, combined with the increasing importance of being able to become critical readers and composers of visual information, suggests that we are going to start to seriously rethink (more than we have already) the place of information visualization in our curricula and its placement in composition as a whole.

(I will soon be making an argument to my department that the course that I (and a few others) teach, Writing, Research, and Technology, needs to be transformed from one in which students consider visual rhetoric and compose multimodal essays (at least in my sections, I’m not sure what happens in others—another issue to be addressed), into one dedicated to a critical understanding of information visualization. I’m still not sure the kinds of assignments that I would like to see or the applications considered, but I would like students to compose Adobe Flex applications that interact with XML data and/or engage with mapping in Google Earth, and/or one of the many useful APIs, and so forth. One question, among many, is how to ensure that such a course coevolves with current visualization technologies. Perhaps what we really need is an information visualization certificate where students take classes ranging from visual rhetoric to mapping and cartography to composing their own apps. Lots to think about.)

In a comment to Sarah Perez’ post, a reader pointed to Twingly’s screensaver: “Our screensaver is a visualization of the real time web… more precise a visualization over the blogosphere, real time, as a world globe.” The creators see this application as an evolution of the RSS Reader: “Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.” The installation is quite simple and can be run as a stand-along application as well as a screen saver. They include this video (there is no sound):

The Twingly screensaver compliments Jonathan Harris’ work (which I posted about below) but unlike Harris, whose applications segment out information based on preset conditions that often give an artificial sense of wholeness (for example, “We Feel Fine” only includes passages from blogs posted in English and therefore, despite his earnest ideals, only maps the “human emotion” of the English-speaking world), Twingly presents all posts in multiple languages from across the planet. As a result, we get a more authentic (re)presentation of the dissemination of the ideas of those on the planet who have a blog and care to share them.

Very quickly, from The Chronicle of Higher Education (some comments later in the week when I have a chance to relax a bit):

I strongly recommend the Chronicle Review’s Architecture Issue (March 9, 2008), with which I am just getting started.

Via information aesthetics, The Onion reports on "a series of centric circles [that] have begun emanating from [a] glowing read dot in the big blue area over [the newscaster's] left shoulder." One of the funniest Onion videos ever, and a thoroughly wonderful comment on symbolic representation and the spectacle of news inforgraphics.

If:book points to points to WikipediaVision—an application by László Kozma that maps Wikipedia updates geographically in (very close) to real time.

A student in my graduate course blogging at Famous in My Own Head points to this news release from Lewiston, Maine:

A large, mysterious blob has taken over a major sewer line in the city of Lewiston, leaving public works crews stumped as to how to budge it.

The best part of the story, however, is the Google quickmaps iframe embed they have included, and the label "Location of Blob":

Jonathan Harris’s TED talk from March 2007 discusses three of his recent mapping projects: "We Feel Fine," "Yahoo! Time Capsule" (which will re-open in 2020), and "Universe."

It is interesting viewing this presentation—which is essentially asking if there is universal human identity—after having read Marshall McLuhan’s 1977 interview with Mike McManus (under the chapter heading "Violence as a Quest for Identity") which is included in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan (MIT Press, 2005). In the interview they discuss McLuhan’s ideas on the "global village" which, contrary to what most would think when they see that phrase, is not friendly, but savage, violent, unrelenting:

McManus: But I had some idea that as we got global and tribal we were going to try to—
McLuhan: The closer you get together, the ore you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve heard of. When people get close together, they get more savage, impatient with each other.
McManus: Well, why is that? Because of the nature of man?
McLuhan: His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people are that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of . . . very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. (p. 265)

Harris’s graphical representations in "We Are Fine" that are the direct result of his "passive observation" suggest that the global community (or the community writing in English from which his data set draws) is inherently interconnected, an array of colorful dots and squares floating in the ether. It is, indeed, a thing of beauty. We get a similar portrait in "Universe," where words shape themselves into multimodal constellations of information and representation. And, yet, I wonder just how many of these feelings (how people classify their feelings, that is) and words are the direct result of some form of violence, some form of identity quest. McLuhan argues:

[A]ll forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody. Therefore you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody, and so you become very violent. And so identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? Ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. Sit it’s only the threat to people’s identity that makes them violent. Terrorists, hijackers, these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.

 Another question I have is whether we can see this play out at all in Web 2.0 identity construction. Do we find, for example, on Facebook, seeds of any form of violence in the construction of our online virtual spaces?

Updated 12/8/07, 9:48am. The New York Times continues its tradition of mapping traumatic spaces in its remediation of the shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, where Robert A. Hawkins killed eight people with an assault rifle.

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Soon after my engineering students sat down in front of the computers in the computer classroom that we are “squatting in” (so sayeth the Assistant Dean) in Education Hall, one of them brought up the Kindle, and pointed to this image:

He was just enthralled with how well the pencil shows the Kindle’s size and shape. I agreed that it was an excellent example of scaling and mapping. I think Tufte would agree, too.

Frank Taylor over at Google Earth Blog points to a new animation by The National Snow and Ice Data Center that maps the melting of the Arctic ice cap between September, 1979, and September, 2007. Screen shots I took of the animation in Google Earth of September, 1979, and September, 2007 (click on the images for full resolution):

September, 1979	September, 2007

The animation shows that since 1979 there has never been a time when there has been less ice in the Arctic cap.