The Aleph, Cyberspace and Google

"The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe." - Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Upon reading Borges' short story, I was struck by the similarities between the Aleph and Google's mission. Google state that their mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Just like the Aleph, the Google search bar is about an inch wide, and brings the user into a space containing all spaces: streetviews, image searches, video searches, book searches, product searches, web searches, map searches, satellite images, web cams, live traffic, 3d representations of the oceans, the sky, the moon and mars, and the human body.

In the short story, Borges goes on to exclaim: "I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity."

Many of our reactions to tbe "unimaginable universe" being served up to us by Google likely mirror those experienced by Borges. How can we not feel wonder, pity, excitment, amazement, fear and hope when non-proximately doing something as intimate as exploring the alleyways of a neighbourhood on the other side of the planet?

The Aleph is not quite here, and we cannot yet see every corner of the universe. But the rapid increase in networked information shadows and the desire of one very powerful company to organise of these data, move the Aelph from the realm of fiction to the realm of the imaginable.

Visibility and Google Street View in Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Greece

Why has Switzerland recently decided to ban Google's Street View service? In fact, Greece, Germany, Japan, and a number of other places have also raised objections to the service. In most of those countries people are free to take photographs in public places and are even free to set up surveillance cameras. Furthermore, as far as I know, none of those countries take issue with detailed maps or satellite images of cities being made publically avaialble on the Internet by companies like Google. So, why is Street View such a sensitive issue?

The objections seem to be related to the idea that Google is capturing a very important part of our sense of place (the visual sense of walking around a city) and making it unviersally and freely available to anyone on the planet. An important component of the places we live in goes from being just 'here' or 'there' to being 'everywhere.' Google have without a doubt pulled off an amazing feat with this project, and there are many positives to be taken away from it (for example, I just spent almost a wonderful hour 'driving' around and exploring New Zealand from my home in Oxford). But the explosion of place, and the fact that soon anywhere might be visible from everywhere is also a somewhat scary and worrying thought especially when we consider the privacy implications of a for-profit company controlling this very important information.

Twitter and Geo-tagging

According to the Twitter blog, the micro-blogging service will soon allow users to add lattitude and longitude to any tweet. This development will provide people with the ability to map and measure the movement and intensity of trends, thoughts, and ideas in both real-time and real-place. Exciting possibilities. As soon as the service goes live, expect analysis both here and at the floatingsheep blog.

Everyware and Ubiquitous Computing

“computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. They’re just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They’re melting into the texture of everyday life...even the word ‘computer’ sounds backward and dumb” (Greenfield 2006: 93).

I recently finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. This collection of 81 brief theses outlines how ubiquitous computing has changed and will change society, and explores the ways in which its emergence can be shaped. The term everyware refers to a paradigm of “invisible computing” that is coming into being: computing that is not linked to specific personal devices, but is everywhere, not just in all places, but also in all things.

In everyware, broad networks will link together a variety of embedded systems: “what we’re contemplating here is the extension of information –sensing, -processing, and –networking capabilities to entire classes of things we’ve never before thought of as “technology.” At least , we haven’t thought of them that way in a long, long time: I’m talking about artifacts such as clothing, furniture, walls and doorways.”

A related, and extremely useful, concept introduced by Greenfield is the idea of ambient informatics. The term signifies the “state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it, generally to support a specific decision.” In other words, information is no longer tied to physical things or places. Information instead becomes infinitely accessible from anywhere, using any tool or device. Everyware is therefore not limited to the “woodwork” of a given, bounded place. It is rather circumambient in the world.

These are far-reaching and powerful predications, and Greenfield devotes much of the book to carefully outlining the specific ways in which everyware will be brought into being. He proclaims “it is coming – and as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are nontechnical, nonspecialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know it even exists.” One reason why a state of everyware seems inevitable to Greenfield is the logic of convergence. Everything can and will connect because all things will share the common language of “on and off, yes or no, one and zero.” “Everything that can be digital, will be” and everything that is digital can be meshed, mashed, and connected. Greenfield further argues that everyware is structurally latent in several emerging technologies, and that these necessary technologies are becoming cheap and accessible.

Interestingly, the book devotes some space to a discussion of bridges between atoms and bits. Greenfield argues that ”the significance of technologies like RFID and 2D bar-coding is that they offer a low-impact way to “import” physical objects into the datasphere, to endow them with an informational shadow. An avocado, on its own, is just a piece of fleshy green fruit – but an avocado whose skin has been laser-etched with a machine-readable 2D code can tell you how and under what circumstances it was grown, when it was picked, how it was shipped, who sold it to you, and when it’ll need to be used by (or thrown out). This avocado, that RFID-tagged pallet – each is now relational, searchable, availableto any suitable purpose or application a robust everyware can devise for it.”

A number of worrying points are also made in the book:

• “...everyware functions as an extension of power into public space” Thus, our notions of what counts as public cannot help but be changed.
• “The passive nature of our exposure to the networked sensor grids and other methods of data collection implied by everyware implicates us whether we know it or not, want it or not.”
• Everyware is problematic because it is difficult to see. We thus cease to see some tools as technology and their effects can become naturalised. This shields us from a fuller understand of the power-relations embedded into each situation and action.
• The design of ubiquitous systems and everyware shapes the choices available to us in our everyday interactions with the world.
• “Where everyware is concerned, we can no longer expect anything to exist in isolation from anything else.” Facts acquire immortality, but we traditionally we have relied on exformation (information leaving the world).
• “With everyware, all that information about you or me going into the network implies that it comes out again somewhere else – a “somewhere” that is difficult or impossible to specify ahead of time – and this has real consequences for how we go about constructing a social self”

The book concludes with some suggestions for ways that everyware should be designed and structured in order to avoid some of the most worrying aspects of ubiquitous computing. The prescriptions are all well thought out, but it is hard not to get the sense that many of these ideas will never actually be implements by the engineers who knowingly or unknowingly are designing systems that will fundamentally alter the human experience. For example, we are told that “everyware must be deniable.” Few would disagree with this statement, but one struggles to imagine just how feasible this idea is. Isn’t the whole idea behind everyware that it is everywhere? This is perhaps then the most concerning aspect of this book. Although a clearly deterministic argument is being made, it is difficult to see how the logics of convergence and cheap and accessible information technologies, for better or worse, will not bring about some form of ubiquitous computing in the future.

Ethical Consumption and Production through Web 2.0: A Call for Participation

I have just finished writing a Call for Participation that will be published in the Autumn 2009 Development Geographies Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers newsletter. The purpose behind the short piece is to encourage geographers to contribute their expertise about any node on any commodity chain to the wikichains project. We already have a small amount of content in English, Spanish and French, and so it would be nice to only have more English-language content, but also content in any of the eight languages supported by the site. A section of the CFP is posted below:

There are isolated cases in which the media have brought issues such as child labor and poor environmental management to much of the world’s attention. For instance, TNCs like Nike, Mattel, and Shell have been forced to alter their production practices in Vietnam, Sumatra, and the Niger Delta due to sustained media pressure. But what forms would economic development take if information about many more sites of production was made easily available through the Internet and Web 2.0 frameworks? It is conceivable that both the production and consumption of commodities would become fundamentally altered. As such, a wiki website (www.wikichains.com) has been set up with the aim of encouraging a different type of globalization: a globalization of knowledge that will harness the power of the Internet and cloud collaboration in order to allow consumers to learn more about the commodities that they buy. By doing so, it is further hoped that altered consumer behavior will translate into improved economic, social, and environmental production practices in the Global South.

The basic framework of the website has now been implemented using the Mediawiki software (the web-based software also used by Wikipedia). Wikichains thus allows anyone with an Internet connection to create, alter, and challenge information about any commodity chain. Furthermore, the website currently supports eight languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish), with the possibility to add more in the future. Some basic representations of chains have already been created (e.g. coffee, silk, and illegal drugs); however, we need are in need of much more content in order to bring about the critical mass necessary to get people from around the world to upload information about the nodes on chains that they are familiar with. Thus this contribution to the 2009 DGSG newsletter invites all geographers with an interest in the goal of this project to not only upload information about any node on any commodity chain that they are familiar with, but also to share the site with friends and colleagues that may also have an interest in contributing.