A Commonplace Book

I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.

[N]ew techniques and technologies often aim to remove a surface constraint (objects, organizations, practices, institutions) without appreciating their submerged resourcefulness.

...So while paper may seem a constraint on the circulation of information, readers and writers have made it a powerful resource for making, shaping, warranting, interpreting, and even protecting information. The example of paper suggests to us that, for design more generally, before an apparent constraint is dismissed, it's important to consider the social resource that people may have developed around it.

Conversely, designers might look at ways to turn constraints into resources.

It is often assumed that technology shapes society without itself being subject to profound social influences. Supposedly, the most efficient configuration of technical resources will be discovered by technologists and will then determine social evolution. But this assumption is now challenged in technology studies. We have learned that technologies are the products of society through and through, that they meet the demands of various social actors and that they reflect rather than determine society.

[Leon R. Kass, professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics] has stated that a commonly held view is that technology is "the sum total of human tools and methods, devised by human beings to control our environment for our own benefit." People who hold that view define technology as purely instrumental. The problems that can arise from technology, then, are problems of human practice and implementation that can be dealt with by regulation. Kass argues, however, that such an attitude "holds too narrow an understanding of the nature of technology, too shallow a view of the difficulties it produces, and too optimistic a view of our ability to deal with them."

What's the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can't exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don't want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad's beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that's not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

In the long run, each media revolution offers people an entirely new perspective through which to relate to their world. Language led to shared learning, cumulative experience, and the possibility for progress. The alphabet led to accountability, abstract thinking, monotheism, and contractual law. The printing press and private reading led to a new experience of individuality, a personal relationship to God, the Protestant Reformation, human rights, and the Enlightenment. With the advent of a new medium, the status quo not only comes under scrutiny; it is revised and rewritten by those who have gained new access to the tools of its creation.

Unfortunately, such access is usually limited to small elite. The Axial Age invention of the twenty-two-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town square to listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium's real potential.

Likewise, the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance led not to a society of writers but one of readers; except for a few cases, access to the presses was reserved, by force, for the use of those already in power. Broadcast radio and television were really just extensions of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite at the center. We don't make TV; we watch it.

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them on our websites, blogs, and social networks. But the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming -- which almost none of us knows how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our text in the appropriate box on the screen. We teach kids how to use software to write, but not how to write software. This means they have access to the capabilities given to them by others, but not the power to determine the value-creating capabilities of these technologies for themselves.

Like the participants of media revolutions before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us. And so we, too, remain one step behind the capability actually being offered us. Only an elite -- sometimes a new elite, but an elite nonetheless -- gains the ability to fully exploit the new medium on offer. The rest learn to be satisfied with gaining the ability offered by the last new medium. The people hear while the rabbis read; the people read while those with access to the printing press write; today we write, while our techno-elite programs. As a result, most of society remains one full dimensional leap of awareness and capability behind the few who manage to monopolize access to the real power of any media age.

The French writer Jean-Phillipe De Tonnac says "the true function of books is to safeguard the things that forgetfulness constantly threatens to destroy." It's precisely because it is not immediate - because it doesn't know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen's apartment - that the book matters.

...We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys - but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.

Elevators also raised new questions of etiquette. According to [Lee] Gray [a columnist for Elevator World and an associate professor of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte], the author of a 2002 book on the early history of elevators, one big issue was whether a man in an elevator ought to remove his hat in the presence of a woman, as he would in someone's home or a restaurant, or keep it on, as he would on a train or a streetcar. The question, says Gray, reflected a basic uncertainty about what this space really was--a mode of transportation, or some kind of tiny moving room.

That was only one of the peculiar uncertainties that came with riding elevators. Another was that they felt simultaneously public and private, taking people out of the broader world while locking them into a narrow, self-contained one alongside a random assortment of colleagues, neighbors, and strangers. By bringing together people who often only kind of knew each other, elevators created vague expectations of interaction--a smile, a nod, even a bit of small talk to acknowledge that everyone on board lived or worked in the same building.

When Bernard began researching his book, he was interested in finding the moment when all that anxiety and ambiguity finally went away. "What I wanted was to go directly to the threshold, where it changed from this alien thing, to something which is completely normal," he said. But after years of research, he came to a surprising conclusion: That moment of normalcy never came. "It turns out we still live on this threshold," he says.

Is he [a New York stocks trader] motivated by greed? "Definitely. Do I have any existential or moral issues with that? I don't. We're not seeking to improve the state of technology -- we push the envelope to seek profit. The way I redeem it is seeing the benefit it has for my child and my wife."

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us"

The quote "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us" is often mistakenly attributed to Marshall McLuhan. It does NOT appear ... in any published work by McLuhan....

The quote was actually written by Father John Culkin, SJ, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York and friend of McLuhan... in an article by Culkin about McLuhan: Culkin, J.M. (1967, March 18). A schoolman's guide to Marshall McLuhan. Saturday Review, pp. 51-53, 71-72. The idea presented in the quote is entirely consistent with McLuhan's thinking on technology in general.

[from postulates that help understand Marshall McLuhan:]

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. These extensions of our senses begin to interact with our senses. These media become a massage. The new change in the environment creates a new balance among the senses. No sense operates in isolation. The full sensorium seeks fulfillment in almost every sense experience. And since there is a limited quantum of energy available for any sensory experience, the sense-ratio will differ for different media....

We shaped the alphabet and it shaped us... And once a culture uses such a medium [print] for a few centuries, it begins to perceive the world in a one-thing-at-a-time, abstract, linear, fragmented, sequential way. And it shapes its organizations and schools according to the same premises. The form of print has become the form of thought. The medium has become the message.

But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

[T]he media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.

We have trained the algorithms to feed us more extreme content every time. The algorithms are designed to work that way. We change YouTube and Facebook, so YouTube and Facebook change us -- and not for the better.

How we live significantly determines how we are, what we become.

Submission to our systems amounts to an erasure of personal independence.