ACQUIRED TASTES AND THE FOG OF SOCIETY
So let’s talk about ideas.
Every day I see hundreds of entries from various design related websites and blogs. I supersaturate my mind with imagery of design from the web. Someone asked me the other day how I keep up with so many and the answer is simple. I don’t. I can move quickly through dense mass of posts and zoom to the ones I like and move past those I don’t because I’m not looking for pretty pictures, I’m looking for ideas; and they’re easy to spot.
Tonight I came across this link, and if ever there was a case where it easy to spot the idea through the imagery this is it.
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/14385/habits-make-us-blind.html
Let’s look through this for a moment; through that perfect amount of retro/modern that Legos seem to have. The idea here is clear. Many of us, especially urbanites, experience areas of disuse in the built world every single day and don’t think twice about it, be it abandoned city blocks or abandoned big box retail centers. I’d be interested in the types of responses these images conjure in people who have not studied urbanism and architecture. These areas are rich in character from their history and adaptive and continued use, whether those uses are marginalized or not. The scenes in these images, even without the Legos, would be beautiful spaces ripe for the proper and responsible kind of development and use.
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A few months ago a friend recommended a book called Ishmael to me, by Daniel Quinn. The book itself represents some very bold, well considered ideology concerning how we as a society conduct ourselves in contrast to the beliefs of those many of us put our faith in. If you haven’t read it you should, if you have, then this will make even more sense to you. More than anything the book is about seeing things differently and therein lies my connection with it.
For a long time now I’ve been making an effort to remove myself from the whispers of “mother culture” as Quinn terms it. To remove from my mind the bounds placed there by the collective expectation of the world around me; to see things different. A goal I think I must have in common with many artists and designers. I’m beginning to get there. The ability to see these expectations that are not our own, that are in fact tastes we’ve acquired over years of repetition, of pressure on our minds.
I’ve seen flashes of it, when seemingly familiar things have become foreign to me, even if only for an instant. This quality of unfamiliarity in the inane and ubiquitous is incredibly important to foster. It’s not about understanding that things are but why they are.
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I recently started a new job. The only way to get there is an hour plus commute through suburban sprawl; there’s no way to get there by highway that isn’t massively circuitous. As someone who’s made a necessitated transition from living without a car to commuting via highway to commuting via two to four lane roads I’ve found the new route even more infuriating than the highway commute; and that response is appropriate. I have noticed, because of the inevitable and inherent traffic dictated by the paradigms of sprawl, that many of my fellow drivers have adapted driving habits to suite the conditions.
Everyone’s frustrated. And it shows. Yet rather than adapt the necessity of the system itself we adapt how we fit within the system; we just accept the conditions and move on. We have acquired a new taste.
This is a stark example, but the scenes in “habits make us blind” are so wonderful because they are less obvious and because they illicit such a mixed response. These spaces are beautiful, dangerous, playful, artistic, exotic, familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time. They are the visual representation of this acquisition of taste that we all suffer from, highlighted by contradiction, something that is so generic that it often goes entirely unnoticed. This is the challenge, to see past the pretty pictures and find the ideas; to find clarity in the vague outlines of the fog of society.
Dhaka
I got back from an eleven day trip journey to Bangladesh and India on Monday night. It was an intense experience for me and my first real trip out of the country. I’m not sure what many people think of when they here the term “Third World” but it should almost certainly be the city of Dhaka. The city has a population density second only to Beijing and an unofficial population of 20 million (which puts the number of slum dwells at nearly 8 million). It is, as a city, as different from Philadelphia as is possible. The most prominent thing that transfers between the two different urbanisms is the lack of accountability inherent in any large semipermanent gathering of people.
Given that, the city of Dhaka is in a sense not a city but more of a conjunction of many massive, overflowingly large, sub-villages. The transition between rural farmland and the highest density urbanism in the world is in effect almost nonexistent. Where people gather, be it the large cities of the country/region, or in the rural villages, the density of life is great; there is no in-between, no sub-urban condition. I suppose though, that at the edge between city and farm exists the brick kilns, hundreds of them throughout the country. Each of which produce upwards of 10,000 bricks per day (see photo above). The so called global recession has seemingly been restricted from spreading into the more “third world” countries; the construction industry in Dhaka is booming, and not to accommodate the brick industry.
Thousands of people move to the city every day. Thousands. The local government (the country’s government is decentralized for better or worse) handles only 20% of city services, while in most countries local governments handle 80%. Since 80% of Dhaka’s services are handled by separate, non-communicating groups much of the city’s growth goes unchecked and unplanned for. Zoning laws, if they do in fact exist, cease to be usefully entirely as developers, who are largely not local by the way, plan haphazardly for the growth. Millions of dollars are made from the citizens by such outside corporations and NGO’s every year, very little of which gets put back into the city. Why you might ask? The general strategy of capitalism there is perhaps more tribal than it is in the west; most money that is made is hoarded by the rich and powerful, leaving many of the city’s residents to poverty.
Many of the country’s rural residents seem happy, despite their apparent impoverished conditions. It is all they know, and they know how to appreciate what they have. Citizens in the city, however, seem to realize what they do not have, and their general attitude reflects this. It was my experience in being there that the only smiles I did see from Dhaka’s residents were at my female colleagues. Aside from that I saw happiness only from children, who often play in garbage and highly contaminated water. I got the feeling that soon though, their attitudes would come to reflect those of their elders.
In addition to these problems the country is in the ongoing process of what some might call a “brain drain.” That is, what few citizens that manage to obtain a higher education do so with only the goal of leaving for greener grass (and cleaner water). Very few of them remain behind to fight what seems to be an unwinnable war against Dhaka’s every growing problems.
I made the trip with the hopes of answering some of my questions concerning my research (I’ve been studying the city’s sanitation systems looking for ways to improve it for almost 3 months now) but I only found and ever deepening ocean of questions. The residents exist in such a system, a network, yet they do not seek to change it. Only to continue an existence where the only goal is to stave off starvation and disease. They see each other as problems rather than the network itself, and they are proud people. What can anyone from the outside really do to improve such a place?
aswartzell: wireless possibilities.
Is amazing really. He was talking about wireless power and image transmission in 1900 and the closest his peers could get was radio. If not for lack of funding he might have done it too. To quote that NY Times article referring to why Tesla’s only major contributer J.P. Morgan pulled his funding;
“Margaret Cheney, a Tesla biographer, observed that Tesla had seriously misjudged his wealthy patron, a man deeply committed to the profit motive. “The prospect of beaming electricity to penniless Zulus or Pygmies,” she wrote, must have left the financier less than enthusiastic.”
Capitalism wins another one. And the systems of control fall into place around it. Tesla’s dream of free electricity for the world was crushed by opposition, those with the control, Edison and the power companies. His reputation, and hence his ability to get funding, was damaged by smear campaigns by said parties. Even today the system would meet mighty opposition from those in the economies of energy. Unfortunate indeed.
andrewhaney:
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Great article on a really promising technology. Here’s a related article about Tesla’s lab on Long Island that I dug up from the New York Times archive: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tesla.html
Tesla was working at the height of Foucault’s disciplinary…
Sidebar: Physical Digital Network
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527461.300-unplugged-goodbye-cables-hello-energy-beams.html?full=true
Thought this was pretty interesting. The creation of a new type of network seems possible in the near future. Nikola would be proud. Too bad this is about a century too late.
(Efficiency is an issue)
The Flux of the Internet
(Increasing Entropy)
flux; noun:
1 : a flowing of fluid from the body
2 : a continuous moving on or passing by (as of a stream)
3 : a continued flow : flood
4 a : influx b : change, fluctuation <in a state of flux>
5 : a substance used to promote fusion (as of metals or minerals); especially : one (as rosin) applied to surfaces to be joined by soldering, brazing, or welding to clean and free them from oxide and promote their union
6 : the rate of transfer of fluid, particles, or energy across a given surface
(Merriam-Webster)
The causal relationship between society and the internet is somewhat more complicated than previous models of organizing knowledge. The key difference between the internet and the book, or perhaps it is more appropriately a library, as a means of storing information, comes down to what we might term “flux”. That is, the levels of permanence between the internet, and nearly any other means of recording information, is almost the opposite. Books are essentially permanent repositories of their contents, of which revision is impossible, aside from physically manipulation or destruction. Books are also “hardware” to the internet’s software. The internet, by design, represents a continuously changing and flowing digital body of information. It can be labeled as distinctly intensive, in Deleuzian terminology, and can be likewise compared to body of energy with constantly shifting entropy. Individual components of the internet, websites, are designed to be edited, revised, or reformatted; to change constantly. Thus is the nature of the medium.
The amount of flux or the rate of change is directly determined as a result of interaction between humans and the internet itself; how much or how little, location, time, amount of time, etc. (This relationship exists in some form in the relationship between readers and publishers though with far more in between) Not unusually, the most successful websites on the internet are generally those that allow simple access to the largest variety of information, i.e. search engines. In fact, they’ve been the most popular websites on the internet for more than a decade now. Many of these sites have branched out over time in an attempt to become an all inclusive portal for the rest of the web and the rest of our lives, including email services and other associated applications. The most successful sites tend to be those that transcend the medium and become a tool for the rest of our lives. Social networking sites are one such example, as they can exist in no other medium and are unique tools that naturally give us access to information normally found outside the internet. This might be termed informal information, which the internet is ideal for cataloguing and propagating.
Social networking sites are so popular because they constantly contain new information and hence encourage frequent visits by patrons. There content is user generated by nature and all owners need to worry about is maintenance and interface. User generated content is not new nor is the idea of “open source” software development. Open source content, aside from undermining capitalism and any Fordist system, encourages creativity and implies that people will do things because they want to, rather than because they’re paid to. In many cases, user generated content is developed on the same level as that which is professionally developed (Apple’s App Store is a good example of this). Open source content also allows a wider range of people to contribute and interact on a deeper level with the net. Essentially, the internet represents societal changes and shifts, but how closely those shifts are represented is dependant levels of interaction. A deeper level of interaction by a greater number of individuals means that society and the internet will more closely align.
Witchcraft and Other Such Sorcery
(“The Baptism of Christ” Aert de Gelder, 1710)
Imagine yourself in Rome in the 15th century. The church is absolute, (or is it?) the best artists (whom so happen to also be the best scientists, a term that doesn’t exist yet) are gathering in Rome, called to provide some decorative touch to the Vatican, though some are secretly supplanting its power with hidden information in their work. Now imagine someone begins describing to you a source of near infinite information, with limitless capacity that can be accessed from almost anywhere on the planet (or around it for that matter) and requires only a conduit to access, rather than an exact physical form. They might spontaneously combust on the spot from the mere thoughts of anyone listening.
The topic of free flow of information (brought up this week through Nicholas Carr’s “From the Many to the Few” in which Carr discusses the democratization of knowledge through the various capacities of new data storage systems; namely, the internet) is a point of high interest through history. Major shifts in epistemology continuously have a deep and diverse affect on society, and hence on numerous other things that society effects, until the next major shift comes along. These epistemological shifts happen occasionally throughout time but perhaps the most important historical shift should be discussed first; the printing press, which had the largest affect on the spread of information and knowledge in history until now and led to things like the development of the “middle class” (or the proletariat) and widespread advances in science.
The printing press was the start of a shift in power from religion to science. A shift from who controlled information. Until the renaissance Europe the church controlled every piece of information it could, seeking to proliferate and prolong its waning power at whatever the cost; power that both sustained and asserted that control. The printing press, originally attributed to Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, was the early start of what would eventually become the Renaissance. Relative to the context of the 15th century the spread of information thanks to this invention was rapid. The church saw it as an opportunity to begin the semi-mass production of bibles, in an effort to expand Christianity. It was of course eventually used to spread the word of science, literature and art.
The printing press is in this way directly comparable to the internet. Where as previously nearly any piece of information could be found in a book, any piece of information can now be found on the internet. In either case it can be said that the information can be gained provided one has the skills/knowledge to retrieve it. The internet represents, however, far more than it remains to be physically; which is another important distinction. The tangibility of a book is, while remaining to be less than that of say hieroglyphs, is one hundred fold that of the internet. (In another twenty-five years what will be left over to preserve and curate from our time?) However, it is the lack of inherent physicality embodied in the internet that allows it to be so effective.
Its physicality is only as great as the conduit through which it is accessed. It is a digitized, unintelligent hive-mind in a way. The collective un-consciousness of society; a self perpetuating cycle of the knowledge people seek and the knowledge which is popularly available. The correlation between these two distinct categories is something to be explored. Does society affect the internet or does the internet affect society? The truth, as it usually is, is somewhere in between. However, one might hypothesize that something like the Pareto Principle might apply; that is, 20% of the information on the internet is accessed regularly through popular websites, while the remaining 80% of the information is not regularly accessed (or at least, not by a large audience). This brings me to my next topic; the flux of the internet.
