Google Knows t-shirts

Google already knows that I blog for Google but now I’ve almost completely gone Google. I recently switched from Netvibes to Google Reader, from the GTD-app Things to the online web service Remember the Milk and I moved a lot of my e-mail correspondence from Mail.app to Gmail online. While I’ve been fairly reluctant to store the main part of my data/information with one provider up in the clouds I have now been convinced.

Netvibes » Google Reader

I’ve been a fairly happy Netvibes reader for over a year but Google Reader has added some great features since I last tried to find a cure for my RSS exhaustion. I started using Netvibes modules as a way of keeping track of my scattered self online but after a while I got rid of the modules but I now prefer simple bookmarks in my browser.

In Netvibes I managed all my subscriptions with tabs but switching between tabs and individual feed subscription items cost too much time. On top of that scrolling through all the items is not possible, only through a single subscription.

The main reason I prefer Google Reader over Netvibes? The fantastic scrolling features and the “Mark Everything Read” button (in Netvibes you can only mark everything read per subscription or tab). Google automatically marks an item as read once you scroll past it. Love it.

Things » Remember the Milk

Yes, I know Remember the Milk is not a Google product (yet) but it perfectly integrates with Google Reader, Google Mail and Google Calendar. I signed up for a RTM account even before I downloaded Things but I never got the hang of it. Things is an excellent application to manage your to-do items in a flexible GTD-style. However, I did not use half of its features and it felt too much like a standalone application that did not integrate with my calendar.

Remember the Milk offers a tight integration with Google Mail, iGoogle, Google Calendar, Twitter and many more. Forgotthemilk.net wrote a GreaseMonkey script that integrates RTM into Google Reader. Now I can access my todo list from all the applications I use to get things done!

An iPhone application has already been released for Remember the Milk and over 167 users have requested a Symbian application, including me. The mobile website of Remember the Milk is pretty good but I would love an official application for my N95.

Mail.app » Gmail

Hitting Archive and/or starring items is the best way to keep my inbox clean and empty with Gmail. The Better Gmail Firefox add-on adds “useful extra features and skins to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, macros, file attachment icons, and more. ”

The main reason for moving my e-mail to Gmail is the excellent application for my N95 phone. It is far superior to the pre-installed e-mail application in both speed, ease-to-use and functionality.

So what’s next?

I have no idea, please tell me!

This review of the Software Studies Lexicon was written in June 2007 after Matthew Fuller was kind enough to send me a sneak preview pre-publication copy. I sent the PDF of the Software Studies Review to Fuller to which he replied with some insightful remarks on my suggestion for a digital working environment, see update below.

Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2008.

334 pp. $28.00 USD. ISBN-10: 0262062747

Reviewed by Anne Helmond. June 2007, University of Amsterdam

Software Studies, a forthcoming lexicon edited by Matthew Fuller, consists of thirty-nine entries from mostly different authors. The title refers both to the object of study and the form of the project consisting of numerous short studies. Each of the “software studies” in the book stands on its own and Fuller celebrates the multi-disciplinary diversity of the authors. They come from different fields of study including art and design, literary theory, computation and free and open source software. Fuller has not gone as far as to attempt to start a new field of study but instead Software Studies calls for new theorizations of software from areas that “have not historically ‘owned’ software” such as media studies. The fields that are currently concerned with culture and media could contribute to a new approach to software with their critical perspectives on politics, society and matter.

Fuller states that he has chosen the form of a lexicon because it is provisional, scalable and contains pathways. It is provisional because it serves for the time being because software is not a static object and is therefore hard to pin down. Relations in and around software are constantly changing and a lexicon can serve as a temporary overview. Unlike a dictionary a lexicon is scalable and it does not strive to be complete and this incompleteness is “a virtue” according to Fuller.  The entries can be seen as different pathways into software that do not strive to depict a whole. Connections between these pathways are made by the various authors but can also be constituted by the reader itself. In short, both software studies and the Software Studies lexicon can be seen as a specific approach whereby each entry is a pathway into thinking about software.

This approach does not seem to have a shared methodology except for creating new pathways into software. This could be due to the different backgrounds of the authors who all contribute to the discourse of software studies from their own perspective and paradigm. This is both the strength and weakness of Software Studies: at times the lexicon seems uneven with an overemphasis on computing which is a neglected aspect of software according to Fuller. However, in order to bring back this neglected aspect too many entries fall in the lexicon back on Turing et. al.

Software Studies builds on Fuller’s previous works Behind the Blip and, to a lesser extent, Media Ecologies. Behind the Blip consists of several essays on the topic of the culture of software. In the opening essay of Behind the Blip Fuller argues for a “software criticism” that moves authors writing about computers away from the performance of software towards a more critical approach. This new critical approach is not concerned with detailing the functionality of a particular piece of software but is rather concerned with the question how software consists of different elements that are embedded in a dynamic web of relations.

An excellent example of this critical approach is the essay ‘It Looks Like You Are Writing A  Letter’ that critiques the popular word-processing software Microsoft Word revealing that “software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used.” Fuller argues that software can be seen as a synthesis, a form of amalgamation or assemblage, of different layers that do not imply a static whole. This dynamic synthesis is also the subject of Fuller’s book Media Ecologies that uses a materialistic approach to identify three forces of objects in media ecologies: affordances, material substrates and memes. In a sense, software is described as having a vitality; it derives its energy from these forces that cause collision, (dis)connection and interaction underwriting their unstable and dynamic nature.

Lev Manovich previously addressed the importance of studying software in The Language of New Media in 2001. He states that media have become programmable and that we need a new field of study to address the issues that arise from this turn in our culture. Not only has software quietly penetrated our daily life but it has also become invisible. The ubiquity and so-called transparency of software renders it invisible but at the same time it points out the importance of studying it. Manovich has studied software from a formalist approach by taking terms and categories from computer science and applying them to new media that have become programmable.  According to Manovich five principles distinguish new media from the older media  namely, numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding (27-48). These principles point to the relation that new media and software have with code.

Adrian Mackenzie takes issue with Manovich with an interesting take on code and software in Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (2006) and notes that software is a very mutable object that is entangled in a web of relations. Mackenzie sees software as a social object and process that is intrinsically linked to code as a material and practice. He points to the problems of Manovich’s formal analysis because it abstracts software from practices and contexts surrounding coding and reduces it to “relations and operations (such as sorting, comparing, copying, removing) on items of data.” (Mackenzie 2006) These relations and operations are seen as quite stable forms and are often directly transferred from the field of computer science. Instead of abstracting and formalizing software Mackenzie argues for an ontology of software that deals with its mutability. This mutability arises from the agential relations indexed by code of the social web that software weaves. Mackenzie, as one of the authors of the Software Studies lexicon, contributes to software studies by arguing that we should render software visible and notice the agency it provides, generates and distributes:

At stake here is an account of software as a highly involuted, historically media-specific distribution of agency. This account diverges from a general sociology of technology in highlighting the historical, material specificity of code as a labile, shifting nexus of relations, forms and practices. It regards software formally as a set of permutable distributions of agency between people, machines and contemporary symbolic environments carried as code. Code itself is structured as a distribution of agency. (Mackenzie, 19)

So what is next for the field of software studies? After having finished reading Software Studies it has not become quite clear what is to be done since it does not provide a unified approach or methodology. However, the lexicon is an excellent starting point for those who wish to be introduced into software studies. But what about those who wish to contribute? Even though a lexicon is provisional, scalable and offers pathways, in a printed form it still implies some kind of a finished whole. Software as a shifting nexus of relations is in a constant flux and pathways into software may disappear, change or be added. The print form is not fit to adjust to such changes because once the text has been printed there is no way to adjust it. Revising is a possible solution for this problem. Recently, the famous lexicon Keywords by Raymond Williams has been revised by several editors resulting in New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society. Original entries of the lexicon were updated and new entries were added twenty five years after the original publication.

A more fitting solution for Software Studies would be supplying a digital environment in which changes in entries can be made without losing the original entry and can be tracked. Such environments are currently known as wikis which might be an ideal work form for software studies. Like software, wikis are often seen as a shifting nexus of relations that contain provisional, scalable pathways into other topics. A wiki, or another hypertextual environment might render the different pathways into software and their connections more visible thus expanding the knowledge about software and its relations. To perceive a better understanding of software we need to create more pathways. Would software studies benefit from using software to create these pathways and write about its studies?

References

Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn, USA: Autonomedia, 2003.
Fuller, Matthew. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. New York, USA: Peter Lang Pub Inc., 2006.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, USA: The MIT Press, 2002.

UPDATE
Matthew Fuller replied to my critique on the somewhat stale format of the book in contrast to a wiki that a wiki tends to homogenize the authors’ voices. On top of that academic publishing in the form of a book is a good way to ‘register’ ideas within a certain set of discourses embedded in the book. During the SoftWhere 2008: Software Studies Strategy Round-Table Doug Sery from MIT Press announced that they were interested in publishing a series and MIT Press officially approved the Software Studies book series in July 2008.

While I was in San Diego in May at the Software Studies Institute the first bits of a digital collaborative working ground were being built. The goal is to make a Software Studies portal where current research is on display, to find researchers and to bring researchers together. This portal is still “under construction” but anything tagged with ’software_studies’ will very likely be picked up in the near future.

The University of California in San Diego (UCSD) organized a two day event in order to pioneer the emerging field of Software Studies. The first day was a public event titled SoftWhere 2008 which consisted of over fifteen short presentation in Pecha Kucha style. The second day consisted of a closed strategic session that dealt with more formal questions on the shaping of a new field of studies and will be discussed in a follow-up blog post.

SoftWhere 2008
The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere! The Software Studies workshop was organized by UCSD and most of the participants were either from the University of California in San Diego or Irvine or Los Angeles. Participants were asked to prepare a short presentation preferably in Pecha Kucha style. Jeremy Douglass, the first Software Studies Initiative postdoc, was strictly timing our presentations as each of us had either exactly seven minutes or if you followed the Pecha Kucha style of 20 seconds for 20 slides six minutes and fourty seconds. It turned out to be a great format to listen to almost twenty presentations in just one afternoon. Douglass was a great timekeeper, or rather his iPhone stopwatch that made an alarming sound after seven minutes forcing some speakers to cut their story short. In Jeremy’s own apologetic words: “It’s not me, it’s the software.” The presentations showed the diverse perspectives on software and software culture. The diversity of approaches and topics in the research may serve as an intellectual map of the people present. They may also serve to determine a common ground in the extremely diverse approaches to software studies. Liz Losh from Virtualpolitik wrote an extensive post on the “speed dating” Pecha Kucha presentations. Critical storage studies The presentations showed the diverse approaches to studying software and they also served as a showcase of the current state of research into software. However, some presentations did not deal with studies of software itself but also with the questions surrounding the field of software studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum for example talked about preservation as software studies, or what he would jokingly refer to as critical storage studies. Critical X Studies is a term used by Bill Benzon who at first was skeptical about the new field of Critical Code Studies

:

While I tend to be skeptical of any enterprise whose name takes the form “Critical X Studies,” where X is the domain under investigation, there’s certainly room to look at the cultural production of computer code and the styles of computer languages and programs.

What Kirschenbaum is referring to with critical storage studies is the fact that without preservation there is no field. If we want to establish and maintain a new field of Software Studies we should also look at the preservation of software. Emulators are only one way of thinking about storage and keeping software ‘alive’ because we are dealing with a hybrid cultural heritage. This is illustrated ‘the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project‘ that Kirschenbaum is currently working on. Taxonomy of Software Studies Critical Code Studies is just one of the many fields bordering or moving into the field of Software Studies. Mark Marino presented the pitfalls embodied within the metaphor of Critical X Studies as described by Liz Losh. However, these different fields that at some points overlap and form different layers of software form the grounds of Bogost’s taxonomy of Software Studies consisting of five levels:

1. Reception/operation
2. Interface
3. Form/function
4. Code
5. Platform

While this is not a definite taxonomy of the field it does present a useful way to think of how the existing overlapping fields operate. In this taxonomy Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s new book series Platform Studies is seen as complimentary to Software Studies. We are approaching different layers of software through both a philosophical and critical practice that may entail either the study of code or the other things (cultural studies). Part of software studies itself is turning it inside-out: What are we looking at if we study software? Which layers do we need to address and which questions and fields have previously addressed similar issues? These questions were part of the second day of the Software Studies workshop which dealt with the typical What, Where, When and How questions and will be addressed in a next post. This is the first post in a series on the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD and the Software Studies Panel at the HASTAC II Conference at UCI and UCLA. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with updates. This post was originally written for the Institute of Network Cultures who made it possible for me to attend the workshop in San Diego, CA, USA.

The Institute of Network Cultures is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam).

Eva Kol – Hyves. ISBN: 9789021526232. €9,95

Hyves is the biggest social networking site in the Netherlands with five million members. It could be described as Myspace meets Facebook covered in with what looks like an exploded emoticon set folder. Whether or not you like an abundance of smileys, Hyves is actively used by millions of people. Hyves is a popular object of study in research on (Dutch) social networking sites. Recent research includes:

Schouten, Alexander. Adolescents. Online Self-Disclosure and Self-Presentation (dissertation in English)

Antheunis, Marjolijn en Schouten, Alexander. Hyves draait om contact met virtuele- én echte vrienden (Dutch)

Antheunis, Marjolijn. Hyves goed voor offline vriendschap (Dutch Cowboys article)

Rietdijk, Liselotte. Wat is jouw Hyves? Het communicatiemiddel van NU (Dutch)

Vos, Hanneke. Over Hyvers en ‘the networked individual’ (Dutch)

One of Hyves’ founders, Raymond Spanjar, said they applaud research on Hyves because it allows them to get to know things about the site they might not have known before. The bibliography of the Hyves book includes more research done on Hyves and social networks in general. The author of the book, Eva Kol wrote her MA thesis on Hyves at the University of Amsterdam and turned it into the first book (with its own Hyves page) on the popular Dutch social networking site.

Eva Kol started the book presentation with how she is connected to Hyves as a former employee, followed by a demonstration of the website. The main topic of the presentation and the final focus of the book is its impact on society and how Hyves reinforces existing social relationships.

The panel at the book presentation included thesis supervisor Geert Lovink who wondered if Hyves plays such an big role in Dutch society why does any form of activism seem absent? Eva responded that Hyves focuses on friends and friendships and less as a tool for organized activism. However, there are plenty of Hyves (groups on a particular topic) for NGOs and many politicians have their own Hyves profiles and groups. While the main user group is young and does not concern itself with activist issues the site could be used for it and sometimes is.

One of the founders, Raymond Spanjar, was also present and professionally shunned the “How much is Hyves worth?” question from the audience. Spanjar assured a concerned audience member that his privacy is guaranteed because Google does not index Hyves profiles. Either Google has a lot of Hyves profiles in its cache or this statement only concerns private profiles which also seem to turn up now and then. Five million people don’t seem to mind though and Hyves also has a very strong form of social control build into the system. Because friends can easily read what other friends are up to things rarely get out of hand. Users can report incidents with the “this is not OK” button as a second form of social control.

The book is not aimed at researchers but anyone interested in Hyves in general. It includes an inside view of the coming-into-existence and explosive growth of the social networking site, the functionalities use and impact of the site illustrated with interviews and stories from users.

I would recommend this colorfully designed and well priced (10 euros) book to communication studies students, new media students and anyone interested in the Dutch Hyves phenomenon (and I’m not just saying this because I know Eva from the New Media Master at the University of Amsterdam.)

More reading: Twan Eikelenboom’s report on the book presentation for Virtueel Platform.

More pictures: My Flickr set, These images may not be used without permission. Name credit: Anne Helmond // www.annehelmond.nl

In April 2007 I read on several blogs about a new magazine, the Blogger & Podcaster Guide. I remember going to the website to check it out but I left pretty quickly, somewhat frustrated. The magazine was obviously meant to be read in print form as the online reading interface was slow and full of multimedia effects and unintuitive.

The idea of a print magazine about blogging and podcasting seems a good idea. I can imagine a number of occasions on which I would prefer to read about blogging in print form over reading on my laptop. Not all public transportation is equipped with wireless internet and reading and/or listening to podcasts is a great way to spend time traveling. I’ve read The Weblog Handbook and several essays from Into the Blogosphere on the train. I also started on a collection of articles on blogging as compiled in the We’ve Got Blog book but I soon turned back to my screen again.

When reading about blogging offline you cannot follow links or look things up. I keep a notebook and write down some URLs for further reference. It seems that the Blogger & Podcaster Guide wishes to serve both ends, the offline readers and the online readers. Unfortunately, the magazine cannot be downloaded as a PDF for offline reference. Although I fully understand why this decision has been made, it one of the main reasons I initially did not return to the site. The magazine is not available in the Netherlands, as far as I am aware of, so the only way to read it is online.

And this is what I personally have experienced as problematic.

As soon as the online version of the magazine is loaded it turns into a multimedia show. It is as if every single function and object multimedia has to offer us must be shown. Advertisements automatically pop up as videos that need to be closed before you can flip to the next page. Flipping pages, which can be done by dragging page corners, is accompanied with a “woosh” sound of flipping through a paper magazine. The front page and index are neatly designed and clickable but once again there is accompanying sound.

I really wish to read this magazine as it seems to offer a great amount of content such as ‘7 Steps to a Better Blog’ and ‘To Blog is to Write,’ Scoble on Video Podcasting or the Ask Ninja’s Interview. Unfortunately, the multimedia effects are currently distracting me too much from the content. I am wondering, am I a secret print addict? Should I print the articles for offline reading?

What does Wikipedia without text and only links look like? Why don’t we recycle the content of our trashcan? Are you dreaming of a startup sound karaoke?

Last night the graphical design students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam presented us a number of projects that deal with the Graphical User Interface.

The projects arose out of the following questions:

• what are the conventions of GUI (Graphic User Interface) design
• what is fascinating or attractive
• what is good or bad design
• what is user friendly
• what kind of metaphors are used
• what are alternative ways of operating
• what is it’s history
• how deal others with the GUI conventions
• what is the relation to our human interfaces? (Wikipedia)

The quality of the projects was wide ranging but overall the projects were interesting and topped with humor. Here are a few of my favorite projects:

De-Construct

This handy application will desummarize all your files and will show you everything that makes up your single file. The application works with every single file on your computer. Do you have an mp3? It will let you hear all the different instruments. Do you have a JPG? Deconstruct it by color or lines or anything!

Super Mario Brothers Speed Competition

A videoclip of people competing in finishing Super Mario Brothers first. The most relaxed looking people finished first. The video reminds me of the work of Mr. Toledano who photographed people while playing games to reveal “a hidden part of their character.” Another interesting photographer is Robbie Cooper who photographed gamer’s alter egos.

Traces of Your Inbox

This movie shows the different traces people leave when checking their e-mail. Every user will create it’s own path and image because users will use different e-mail applications, different e-mail services, different operating systems and different e-mail checking habits. Your digital traces are translated into material traces.

GUI Labyrinth

In the age of the information overflow we are constantly distracted by e-mail, instant messaging and other applications that want our attention. It is now a task to actually get things done. This “game” turns your GUI into a labyrinth where you have to get to the exit without accidentally bumping with your mouse into one of the icons of the running applications which will launch once hit.

Emoticon Photoseries

Hey, this looks familiar! A few months ago Esther and I did a photoshoot in Brussels where we imitated the Skype emoticon set. Our set (bottom left) also includes the new Skype emoticon (los) which stands for loughing out silently. We visit a lot of conferences where we often communicate using Skype.
The (los) emoticon was born during a conference speech where someone had to lough out loud but was forced to laugh out silently. Our absolute favorite Skype emoticons are (poolparty) and (heidi) because you can use them in almost every single situation.

A lot of projects dealt with the idea of “window washing” or, in other words, stripping the GUI or application down to the minimum or the basics. Award for the best project in this category goes to: A contentless Wikipedia. Wikipedia is stripped from its text but the links are kept. I thought it was really interesting to see Wikipedia with only links. It shows the context instead of the content. Lovely!

Other great projects: Trashare, CPU Forecast, Startup Tune Karaoke, A visualization of .DS_Store and the rotating mouse pointer.

All the pictures from the GUI Play Presentations can be found on Flickr.

Sorry if I got any of the project names wrong, they flashed by in seconds. If anyone knows where I can find the project website (except for the one on Wikipedia) please share it in the comments.