I finished reading Elements of Typographic Style a couple of weeks ago now, and I’ve not stopped raving about it since. It’s truly a stunning book – a bible of technique – that encompasses the whole range of typographical behaviours from the appropriate use of hyphens, the most functional and effective page layouts through to a detailed examination of elements of individual type-faces, glyphs and the art of being respectful to the writing you are type-setting… More importantly, I think it gives a degree of insight into a man’s belief in the integrity, intelligence and quiet dignity of artisanship – which is something that may sometimes seem inflexible and uncreative, but which is a sure mark of absolute and total quality. Very much recommended.
Must-read interaction/community techblog of the moment is City of Sound, a site that I found initially via the Slipknot be-hoodied Matt Jones. Our two otherwise independent vectors of interest have recently collided quite heavily around MP3s, list-making and social software, with – I think – some quite interesting results. Our latest interaction is around the issue of social capital – which is a current hot topic of debate around government and online community circles, and which I’ve been working on (in a kind of weirdly indirect way) on UpMyStreet Conversations. Dan (the author) has taken me to task quite reasonably about this statement that I made recently:
“(P)eople in cities are talking less and less to one another. In fact most of us barely communicate with our neighbours at all. And the vast majority of the social spaces that we all used to share have been dismantled or evaporated. So how can we expect communities self-organise? And how are they expected to join together politically? How can they protest about problems where they live?”
In Dan’s response he suggests that technology has already started to rebuild these communities of geography and that I was being over-dramatic to talk about all communication in cities being in a process of freefall decline. He is of course, completely right – and I have gone into astonishingly dreary detail over on his site in response. In fact when I clicked ‘submit’ it occurred to me that I’d written so much that it might have made a better post on plasticbag.org – so I’m going to append it below in full. Forgive any typos or bad grammar – I’ll have a second look at it tomorrow and fix the most obviously horrific mistakes…
Actually you’re completely right, but I think if we look at these things in terms of their recent history alone we might lose some perspective. I’m going to go for a bit of a trip on a hypothesis-rocket now, so please bear with me if it seems based on completely anecdotal and speculative evidence – I’m about to read Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” about the decline in social capital in the States. Maybe that that point I’ll be in a better position to talk about this stuff…
At this thing on social capital and social software that I went to the other day with Matt Webb from Interconnected.org people were talking about this decline in interactions in cities and urban spaces. People were debating the reasons for it, the connections between take up of “virtual online communities” and “interest communities” and the like – and some were in fact debating the existence of such a decline.
I’m going to contend that there has been such a decline in interactions and the extent to which we know our neighbours, but I’m going to argue that this isn’t an effect of technology like the internet – it’s an effect instead of technologies like television, technologies like the car and having a more mobile work-force. I’m also going to argue that it has something to do with population density and the impermanence of habitation for some people. So essentially I’m pushing this decline back over the last hundred years or so, rather than the last ten years. And I wouldn’t want to argue that everyone has experienced it either – I grew up in a village in the countryside where everyone knows everyone. So it’s not universal. But I think certainly in urban spaces it is a very real fact…
From what you’ve written above, it looks like my statements have been interpreted to mean that I think such a social decline is an inevitable effect of the technologies we’ve been using and that UpMyStreet Conversations represents (finally) a solution. But actually that’s miles from what I think. What I would argue is that rather than exacerbating the social decline, the internet (unlike many one-to-one communication technology) has finally started to reform the social fabric – to bring back communication between people on the basis of interest groups (and what could be a greater interest group than people interested in the area in which they live – now available to people without the social danger and anxiety of actual and immediate physical interaction). In fact I think I’d argue that the take up of this technology – of the community stuff of the internet – reflects a gap in our lives – a need for it – that previous decay in social capital has created.
In a nutshell… Social interactions based on neighbourhood have been deteriorating for decades – particularly in highly transitory urban areas. New technologies have connected us with huger, but more distributed interest communities, and have recently begun to facilitate and enhance those limited local geographical interactions that we still have left. And there is now a tremendous human need left unfulfilled that we can now meet. And UMS Conversations is one way for us to help do that… I think..
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Do you wear clothes?
This was pointed out by a friend of mine. It seems now that Amazon is so worried about offending it’s naturist clientele that it refuses to even imply that all its customers might be wearing clothes. More worrying is the concept that you can buy unclean underwear from the web’s largest online store. And perhaps more disturbing still is that the customers who buy this stuff are the same customers that decided to buy Licence to Kill on DVD. The image of Bond-watching, clean-underwear-sniffing, spy-lovin’ naturists is almost enough to put me off my fascinating daily workload…
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Web design masterclass…
So I’ve been being all creative recently. First I redesigned Venusberg.org for Dan, and then Phil and I helped out Mr Webb with his CSS. Designing Dan’s site was particularly interesting for me – it’s my first design that’s based entirely around typography (although of course that doesn’t mean that some of the typography isn’t rendered as an image). Mostly I’m very happy with it, except a few irritations have crept in – there aren’t enough date formats for me in Blogger, so that doestn’t look as classy as I might have liked – and there are some irritations with the way it translates line breaks as well that meant I couldn’t do the half-em paragraph breaks that I wanted. But otherwise, I’m pretty happy with it and I hope he will be too… My favourite part? The font for the logo is based on the letters at the base of Trajan’s column…
This relates to my earlier post today, particularly with reference to the Gore Vidal article which a friend and colleague was reading out loud to me. The friend concerned finished reading out a particularly horrifying bit and then said, “And it’s Gore Vidal… Gore Vidal!” At which point, for some reason, in a completely flat and apparently innocent tone – with nary a trace of eyebrow flicker, I replied, “I rather think that gay people should restrict their opinions to interior design and clothes and leave matters of international politics to heterosexual men, don’t you?” The fraction of a second of stunned silence was truly transcendent.
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The Gore Vidal Observer Article in full…
I’m posting a link to the Gore Vidal Observer article that was published a few weeks ago. At this point I’m going to take the cowardly option and declare up front that I’m not posting it because I either agree with it or disagree with it – in fact, on the vast majority of key points I’m far from able to confirm or deny any of the facts or opinions stated – but simply because I have as yet not seen it published anywhere online. Again – it may have been put online by someone weeks ago, and I may have simply missed it. So here it is: Gore Vidal on the enemy.
I don’t know whether to be delighted or grumpy about iBlog – the new weblogging software package for Mac OSX. I’m delighted because I’ve been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. And I’m grumpy because I’ve been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. Do you see how that works? In fact, I spent a good couple of days working on a design / concept mock-up of how I thought such an application should work. This work is now essentially useless. Still never mind.
Nonetheless, here are some of my thoughts about desktop weblogging applications:
- Firstly, an application of this kind should allow people to design modules and interfaces for the various packages, services and softwares already in existence (Blogger, Movable Type etc).
- Secondly (and related to the first point), the application should be able to function as an interface to an online service where posts could be stored centrally , Blogger-style. This would allow a web interface which is a crucial part of the whole ease-of-use weblogging aspect. The application could sync with the most recently updated or created posts, which can then be worked on and edited offline without compromising that sense of possession and security that comes of having the files locally.
- Thirdly, Apple should be building an application of this kind as an iApp because it extends the ability of the less web-savvy, web newcomers and the people who turn to Apple because of clarity and ease of interface. They should also be doing it because it could potentially add substantial value and utility to the .mac service.
- Fourthly, Apple controls a vast amount of other information which can be published to the web or specifically to .mac services – from iCal diaries, address book contact information and iPhoto albums. Even iTunes has spawned applications designed to make it easy to place what you’re listening to online. I makes total sense to organise a potential central point where you could bring all this information together – just as personal weblogs have been doing for the last few years.
- Fifthly, Apple made a terrible mistake in allowing other people to use the brushed metal finish which has been associated with their core applications. The metal made them seem stable, solid, reliable and core to the operating system – ie. trustworthy and reliable. This piece of branding genius is now inevitably going to be compromised….
- Sixthly, I much prefer the name iJournal, myself…
For more debate and discussion e-mail me or post a comment to the Blogroots thread, which I will check on regularly…
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God Bless You, Mr Vonnegut…
One of my favourite authors is Kurt Vonnegut. One of his favourite authors is Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout is what Kurt Vonnegut would be if life was a ludicrous joke and reality was one of Kurt Vonnegut books. Kilgore Trout writes stories. Mostly they’re quite short. And thanks to a link from a nice chap on Metafilter you can now read all of Kilgore Trout’s stories without the laborious time expenditure of reading Kurt Vonnegut’s short, devastating and brilliant novels. My favourite goes like this:
In 2BR0TB [Kilgore Trout] hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D’s. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too.
All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s. There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door.
And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination.
One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, “Certainly, honey.”
And he said, “I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here.”
“What’s that?” she said, strapping him in.
“What the hell are people for?”
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Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends…
The Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends (number 17): “This buddy of mine who works in San Francisco – he knows this guy who worked for a DotCom company that wrote a business plan, broke even, cut costs, and is on the road to profitability!” [via Mr Webb]
I’ve just stumbled upon a fascinating piece by Dan Hon which goes into considerable detail about the way in which the UK weblogging scene evolved a community of sorts – a community that not every UK weblogger is a part of, but a community of and for webloggers anyway. To my knowledge, this is the first time this micro-history has been written down and published on a site and it may be of interest to anyone who cares about the ways in which stuff that happens online solidifies into matter and then collapses into real-life communities. One of the most interesting aspects of the article is that it posits that often the community (or the potentiality for community) radically predates the tool or forum used to facilitate it. Related posts: I talk about what it means to be part of a community | Meg writes about community versus community tools.
From Dan: “Would anyone say that a community existed? Possibly. Maybe not quite just yet. What you would be able to say, though, is that there existed an arbitrary set of people, say, people who write blogs and live in the UK, who were on the tentative cusp of actually starting to talk to each other on a regular basis – they hadn’t yet got organised.”