Did you see that?

Bob Greene posted an interesting piece about the impact of instant replay upon our experience of life, using yesterday's Super Bowl to make a larger point about today's media saturated experience. While his historical trajectory from television sports to video-centered weddings is a bit threadbare, Greene nonetheless spins a good yarn.

His article reminds readers of an era before the constant presence of the instant replay, when if you missed the field goal, you missed it. Then in 1963, he says, a CBS sports director used fledgling video tape technology to repeat a touchdown during a televised Army-Navy game. Greene recalls the announcer shouting, "This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!"

The article makes a broader point that instant replay helped foster the kinds of technology that dislocate us from reality, transforming time into a mutable prop. For Greene, "there is this nagging feeling that real life has been converted into a series of moments that are no longer expected to be here and gone, but instead are regarded as first run-throughs: performances that will be witnessed repeatedly, on demand." It's no surprise, I should add, that "On Demand" is the wave of our media future.

We live much of our lives as directors, aided especially by now-ubiquitous mobile phone technology. We establish shots, call action, crop excess, and loop meaning. Add the persistent scrutiny of security cameras and, as Greene notes, "you're on stage more constantly than Milton Berle or Lucille Ball ever were in the early days of television." [Of course, I'm even more amazed that readers under 20 may not even recognize those names.]

Watching yesterday's Super Bowl, amid the dawning awareness that the Saints would deploy gutsy plays to crush an opposing Colts team that had been widely favored to win, I observed much of Greene's argument in action. Lounging in my easy chair with an open laptop on my legs (my feet anchored by a heavy sleeping cat) I fiddled with Facebook, followed some trending news items, and read a few online articles I'd stored from the week. The Super Bowl was just another piece of stimulus.

The game was on - vivid on my flatscreen and pumping through the speakers - but I watched with little intensity. Heck, with the amount of times I used DVR to rewatch an interesting commercial, I often sought the reassurance of my clicker's "Live" button to confirm my in-sync status with the world. And even then, the experience was remote.

Bob Greene is right. The control we get from these devices, the on-demand reality they convey, is fleeting at best.

Read the entire piece: Curse of the Instant Replay

Friday Fun Post: Batman & Robin Comic Generator

It's Friday. It's been a long week. It's time to create a Batman comic!

Try it for yourself - Point your browser here: http://www.batmancomic.info/

Attack of the Demon Sheep

Carly Fiorina's ad-tack on Tom Campbell, a rival for her GOP primary bid to become California's next governor, is the funniest campaign video I've ever seen.

And I remember the 1992 Georgia ad that featured Marjorie Goode Lopp sitting in a rocking chair and singing "Put Paul Coverdell in the Senate and kick Wyche Fowler out" before delivering the perfect zinger in pure southern drawl: "He's just like Ted Kennedy."

That spot was my favorite for its "Oh my God-I can't believe they aired it" goofiness (Coverdell won, by the way)... until today.

So far, I think Twitterer Todd Zeigler [link] puts it best in his description of Fiorina's attack on Campbell: "it is the spinal tap of campaign videos." See for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo7HiQRM7BA.

Oh, and wait for it... wait for it. You think it starts out strong, but wait until you learn the secret of the sheep.

Remember Your First Time? (Part 3)

I just had to figure out something called HTML...

My first chance to create a website came when I was an Ohio University grad student, receiving a message from the campus email system. Each student had been allotted a megabyte of space to store web content; they figured we'd like to know. Though written in blandly functional prose, the email nevertheless reminded me of Roy Neary's discovery in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: "This means something. This is important." Hunching over my keyboard, I got busy - wanting to join the revolution I'd read about and begun to see on campus.

I don't remember exactly how I learned enough hypertext markup language (HTML) to get started, but I surely used the Lynx browser that came with OU's telnet-based email system, scouring the web for an online tutorial. Then I set about constructing the creaky beams and girders of my site. One problem with that approach? I had no idea what I was doing. Lynx was (and is) text-only, which meant I could "read" the web but couldn't see it. Only the hours spent playing with Mosaic on campus allowed me to visualize the thing I hoped to build at home.

The process wasn't too hard, though, just a matter of using the Pico editor on the campus PINE system to initialize a public folder and add files to that domain, documents sufficiently "marked up" with HTML to be readable as web pages. The mouse was useless for that job, by the way; Lynx was a keyboard-only app. As I churned through my training, I called the email-system help desk at least once or twice, likely provoking a wry smile among the dedicated campus computer nerds. In 1994, most people still didn't know what the internet was, and I was determined to complete a website that afternoon.

Fiddling around with all those new "tags" (weird stuff like IMG SRC and A HREF) took two or three hours, but somehow I completed my first draft, which included a link to someone's "Under Construction" graphic, just to test the process of adding images to my page. I'd built a website, but I couldn't see how it looked. It was a weird feeling.

Flustered, and not wanting to drive from our rural apartment back to campus, I phoned a pal who lived in Arkansas, reasoning that he - more of a would-be netizen than I - was the only person with easy access to Mosaic's graphics-friendly browser. Practically shivering with anticipation, I asked him to visit my site.

Here's the address, though don't look for it; it's long gone:

http://oak.cats.ohiou/edu/~aw148888

What do you see?

Uh, hold on, it's loading. OK. I see an "Under Construction" sign.

I beamed with pride.

I made that!

It wasn't all that thrilling, I suppose. All the same, the pieces were coming together. The next step was to plan a website around some sort of project, something more useful than a mere "I am here" billboard. The open nature of the web allowed me to build pretty much anything I wanted. There were no gatekeepers and few reviewers, no risk in thinking big.

Since I was interested in utopian literature, I decided to call my site "Andy Wood's Center for Utopian/Dystopian Studies" and then began crafting pages to gather primary sources, cool links, and some pictures of imagined communities throughout history. My page was an ambitious effort - later renamed the "Center for Utopian Studies" - though hardly a professional venture. No matter. CFUS was one of the earliest sites to take an academic look at utopianism. Believe it or not, I received occasional emails from people wanting to work at my "Center."

Along the way, I tried to share my enthusiasm for the web with Jenny. Sure it wasn't scintillating, this clickable internet. It was simply a network designed to deliver knowledge by way of computer (and modem, and browser, and some degree of tech-savvy). At this point, the World Wide Web was the province of a strange few. Yet there was something elemental and profound in its potential. All Jenny needed was to see Mosaic; then she'd know.

I remember driving onto campus one day to visit the computer lab. Among those rows of boxy PowerMacs, I sat Jenny down and made my announcement: "We're going to visit The Louvre." I said it again with flourish, "The Louvre!" With a hush, I typed the web address and we watched the opening graphic slowly assemble itself, line by line. I asked with a proud smile, "So where do you want to go?"

All those links to all those paintings... I figured that Jenny was overwhelmed. She set silently and just looked at the browser and its tiny thumbnail pictures. At last, she rendered her verdict:

"This is it?"

"Of course this is it," I exclaimed, "and it's amazing! It's like watching television for the first time. You're seeing a revolution here. The World Wide Web will change, well, the world!"

Jenny wasn't impressed. And maybe she was a little embarrassed for me, getting all worked up over something so obvious. "I figured that computers could always do this," she explained. And that was it. She'd finally seen the web that I'd been gushing about, but she found it to be less than earth-shattering, if only because it was so inevitable. She asked, what else would computers do but communicate with each other? And pictures? Sure, they'd have pictures - movies, too, right?

After a while, Jenny would admit that this web stuff was actually pretty cool. And in the following year, 1995, she caught enough of the vision to join me in creating Motel Americana, an online homage to roadside Mom and Pop lodging. The site's quirky nature earned plenty of praise in those early years: a notice on USA Today's "cyberlistings" page, a Wall Street Journal shout-out by Walt Mossberg, and even a coveted listing on the original "Cool Site of the Day." We ran Motel Americana (our home page was naturally called "the lobby") for about ten years, managing to publish two books on the topic before moving on to pursue new adventures. It's now an archive that we rarely visit.

In fact, most of my old web pages have disappeared, except for occasional bits and pieces that somehow got saved in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine [link]. By the time I took a position as a communication studies professor at San José State University, I'd let most of my early pages fade into oblivion. The only real souvenir from those days is a 1996 or '97-era logo from my Center for Utopian Studies. For some reason, an Italian website maintains the image on its servers, like graffiti waiting to be wiped clean.

I'm glad to find some of that history floating around today, because my initial experiences with the web launched a research agenda that led to my current job, indeed to my livelihood. More importantly, those old pieces of detritus remind me of a time when everything - really, no hyperbole here - everything was changing. Many web historians are even willing to lump the early WWW alongside the Gutenberg Bible as an example of transformational technology.

With a broader perspective, we may reveal deeper layers of strata that connect other points of memory, coming to see the web as little more than a middle-ground between broader epochs not yet named. And yet, I still take pleasure in remembering 1994-1995 as a time when I wandered an open frontier of potential and forged worlds of my own on the World Wide Web. That's a memory worth storing.

How often can we say I was there, when anything seemed possible?

Remember Your First Time? (Part 2)

It took one click, and then...

Nothing much happened.

In an earlier draft of this note, I wrote something about seeing the web for the first time in 1994 and knowing that everything had changed. Of course that's not true.

I'm pretty sure that the first website I saw was the home page for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications - and believe me, it didn't make a good first impression. It was little more than a "You Are Here" site with some "Suggested Points for Internet Exploration" in a sea of gray, that then-ubiquitous background color selected by the practical nerds at NCSA to reduce eye strain. [click and scroll for an archive image].

So, that's the web, huh?

At first glance, the early web was a real snooze. Even worse, it offered little sense of orientation. Supposedly, I was looking at a "page" of text, as if from a book, delivered from a computer server somewhere, but I could see no correlation between this page and the thousands of others available somewhere else. Eventually, some wag would upload a farcical "last page of the Internet," [link] reflecting the unbounded experience of this strange domain, a place so otherworldly that only William Gibson's literary concept of "cyberspace" could offer some degree of coherence:

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding."

Despite Gibson's literary flight of fancy, the early web was a small collection of scientific and university sites, each a sort of cul-de-sac or Walled Garden of disconnected content. Getting from "here" to "there" was difficult and time consuming, unless you knew where you were going. Without some means of orientation (a map? a directory? and index?) you had to click from link to link, searching for a few bread crumbs scattered by searchers who'd already surveyed the territory.

Early guides to the web allowed for little of the creative randomness that would later appear with keyword search engines. Like the first automobile road guides, which offered a few maps but mainly page after droning page of "turn here, then turn there" directions, the first web directories were organized by category and subcategory, with links listed according to the idiosyncratic schemes of their collectors.

Those first explorers created bookmark lists to induce some shape to the web, following the same altruistic impulse that inspires some folks to leave food and even build shelters for travelers making their way along cross country hiking trails. With these guides, it became easier to find "cool sites of the day" that offered more than some grad student's list of clever light bulb jokes. Easier, that is, but hardly easy.

That was the beginning of the web for me. A dim but dawning awareness that this network of homebrew pages could shatter the formerly intractable divide between mass media producer and consumer. Indeed, I quickly realized that if some of these yahoos could build a webpage and further shape this consensual hallucination, then maybe I could too. I just had to figure out something called HTML...

To be continued...

Remember Your First Time? (Part 1)

Do you remember your first experience with the World Wide Web? Saying it now, sounding out those ambitious syllables, reminds me of the early '90s when it seemed we'd discovered a strange and exotic place. Indeed, I'll bet there's a fine cultural history project underway somewhere that collects narratives about the first time people saw the web - and really understood what it meant.

Part of the fun is renewing the wonder we felt at the unfurling of a revolution in communication, computer software, and cultural exchange, a social tsunami that's all the more remarkable for the speed it washed over us. So soon, the once wonderful web has become commonplace. Almost boring. A generation that has never known a world without the World Wide Web is now finishing high school and starting college. This is a story of their lives.

Of course in the early 1990s, the web wasn't everywhere like it is now; it was somewhere out there, a foreign country you could visit only with a special visa and some tolerance for technical hassles. Before the first browsers, a few pioneers encountered the web through telnet applications. They learned arcane text commands and sometimes searched for servers operating after sunset, hoping to avoid the snarl of business traffic.

Those early surfers found a mishmash that was variously banal and bizarre: supreme court rulings, ASCII porn, the top 40 reasons why Kirk is better than Picard... stuff like that. It didn't matter. The kick of the whole thing was the illusion that you could fly your computer around the world and seemingly hack into someone's database. The illicit high of breaking and entering, slipping into houses of data under cover of night.

Without such dramatic imagery but nonetheless recognizing the limitations of the early text-based universe, the supercomputing nerds at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign released a graphical interface to the web in 1993. Their Mosaic web browser opened a world of images, sounds, movies to anyone who could click a mouse. The relatively tiny internet community knew this was cool, but the endlessly clickable continuum that stretched forth thereafter, that ever-sprawling Encyclopedia Humanis that we now take for granted, wouldn't burst into public consciousness until the following year.

In fall of 1994, I launched my grad school years by getting an email account (wooda@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu - yep, I can still remember my first online address) and playing with the PowerMacs in the computer lab. I'd heard of the web, but I'd never seen it. Then one day I saw the icon for Mosaic on the friendly Apple desktop. It took one click, and then...

To be continued...

Read More: Check out Gary Wolfe's breathless coverage from Wired, October 1994

Friday Fun Post: Crush the Castle

Given the recent drubbing I dropped on the iPad, there's little risk I'll be confused as an Apple shill for giving props to my newest favorite iPod app: Crush the Castle.

In this game, you don't have to worry about complex strategy or convoluted controls. You tap the screen, then tap it again, and that's it. What happens? You control a gloriously old-school weapon called a Trebuchet, which is basically a giant slingshot that hoists huge rocks against a fortified pile.

Sometimes the castle is made of wood, sometimes stone, and sometimes metal. Which is fine, because the more you play, the better your arsenal becomes, starting from tiny stones and growing to an avalanche of pain. All you do is select the your payload, release for maximum damage, and pulverize that sucker.

Technically you're measuring for speed, distance, and velocity, while assessing how various structural elements like beams and fulcrums can best be knocked down. But really you're just laying waste to a kingdom of pixels that can stand for anything bugging you. Oh, and there's a king, a queen, and plenty of hapless guards in the line of fire.

Even if you slept through your high school physics course, you'll quickly become master of the Trebuchet, raining all sorts of mathematical mayhem on your foes. Before long, you'll eagerly eye the map for your next conquest, your next territory, and your next increase in firepower: bigger rocks, then groups of rocks, then bombs that sizzle as they arc through the air and drop onto shrieking foes (then things get kind of freaky).

It's so easy. Just set, release, and watch as the walls come tumbling down.

Play for free at the Armor Games website. Then download the app. Crush the Castle is a fun medieval timesuck for only two bucks.

2010 State of the Union

It's hard to react to last night's State of the Union speech, because it fulfilled its expectations so thoroughly and - I fear - so pointlessly.

Once more, President Obama delivered a broadly scoped, reasonably detailed, and occasionally artful address that said many of the things that must be said. I particularly appreciated the president's respectful yet direct engagement with the Supreme Court - some of whom were sitting feet away from him - just days after they handed down a singularly disastrous decision that further cedes our country to corporate control. The sum of Obama's speech was a reality-check for the nation and its new leader, a frozen moment of America's increasingly difficult dialogue about its future.

Last night's address introduced us to Obama chastened, a leader forced to profess empathy for fickle voters who seem perplexed that an economic crisis built over the past decade has not somehow vanished by the snap of his fingers. The government will cinch its belt, he promised. Better yet, bailout-banks will start paying the same late fees that cash-strapped Americans have long endured. And we will once again pledge to shrink the debt that has transformed our nation from powerhouse to poorhouse, like an alcoholic swearing off the juice when morning comes, just as we always promise.

Along the way, Obama admitted that comprehensive health care reform, that shimmering Brigadoon of the American imagination, will once again vanish into the mist. Abandoning hopes of universal coverage, the president ushered the nation down the well-groomed trail of compromised incrementalism. We may see a few improvements in health care delivery - apparently the First Lady is tackling childhood obesity - but the systemic faults that profit the insurance industry while plundering American budgets will almost surely remain.

You can bet that the wingnuts on both sides of the political spectrum will continue calling the president a fraud or a fascist, either because he does too little or too much. They didn't need to see the speech to know where they stand. Yet I imagine that most listeners recognized the president's efforts to define some kind of middle ground in American discourse. During the speech, Obama challenged the assembled Congress to think past its prejudices: "We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let's show the American people that we can do it together."

Did his speech do any good? It's hard to say. But judging from reactions and broader political realities, I don't think so.

Republicans generally set on their hands whenever the president veered from generically popular themes such as tax reduction or troop appreciation, when they weren't otherwise smirking to themselves. And Democrats were little better. Yes, they stood and applauded. Glowingly, supportively. Still, I'm certain that members of the president's party mostly daydreamed about their own concerns. Even as they clapped and cheered, they seemed to peer past the peaks of Obama's oratory, fixing their eyes into the abyss of a suddenly vicious election cycle. Holding congress is the highest priority for a permanent political class.

Thinking back to the Massachusetts debacle, many Dems were thinking to themselves, even as the president called for a new national consensus, "Yeah, but when is the next former nude model who drives a pickup gonna appear on the scene? And will he come gunning for me?" Solving the problems of a generation means less to these folks than fundraising for 2010.

So President Obama delivered another fine speech. As usual, I watched and listened and marveled about how wonderful it is to have a national leader who reflects the complexity of our national aspirations: vision and practicality, confidence and humility, forbearance and courage. While many of my friends on the Right seem hellbent on transforming the president into a bumper sticker caricature, I still believe he's the best person for a lousy time.

Thus, to me it seems less a question of whether our nation can be saved. In an era of partisan bickering and popular disengagement, the question is more fundamental: Do we deserve to be saved?

The iPad has landed - with a thud

Yep, I dedicated my morning to watching the Big Announcement from the comfort of my easy chair, resting an aging MacBook on my lap and nestling external speakers on either side of my legs. On one side of the screen: CrunchGear's often cringe-inducing live coverage. On the other side, NYT's live blog coverage, requiring occasional refreshes for updates. In the middle, Twitter coverage generally dedicated to either mocking the lameness of CrunchGear's John Biggs and Meghan Asha's repartee or demanding with increasing intensity: how much will the iPad cost?

There's much to like about this thing. I dig the flash memory (flashing back to memories of several crashed hard drives), the potential for immersive, interactive media, and the sheer audacity represented by a device meant to create an entirely new category of tech toy/tool. But some stuff just doesn't make any sense - starting with the price. $499 (and way up) is a couple hundred above my pricepoint for a something I'm not sure I actually need. Beyond that, I've got a few gripes:

Practicality issues: I'm trying to visualize how I'd integrate this device into my life. I regularly hear that the device is meant to be placed on your coffee table and passed from family member to family member. Well, we don't have a coffee table. OK, you can attach a separate tactile responsive keyboard to the device for, say, writing on a plane without mashing your fingers against the glass. This seems oddly regressive from the perspective of the laptop I'm using right now. More importantly, how rugged can the iPad be? I visualize a thriving market for third-party iPad protectors, which is a shame. Apple products shouldn't require ugly covers to guard their screens.

Software hassles: The iPad lacks multitasking ability. In other words, with a few exceptions, you only run one application at a time. How does that compute for you? How often do you find yourself watching a YouTube video, checking your email, and maybe checking a website simultaneously? OK. Maybe not all that frequently. But when you can't multitask, you really wish you could.

Missed Opportunities: The one potential selling point of the iPad (for me) would be a two-way videochat option that works anywhere. Talking with a pal via live video, on a large enough screen to see the subtleties of emotion, would be cool - especially if you could collaborate on documents on another part of the screen - working together in different locations on the same thing. But this version skipped the chance by failing to include videocamera features.

Name regrets: iPad represents one of the dumbest branding choices Apple could have made. Only someone caught up in the Jobs Reality Distortion Field would recommend a name that inspires images of sanitary napkins (tackiest tweet I saw this morning: "Waiting until Apple releases a bigger version of the iPad: the MaxiPad"). My vote? Ditch the i-prefix, call it the "Tab" (after dealing with the owners of the seventies-era diet drink). Oh well, no one ever confused me for a professional brand consultant.

Oh, and one more thing...

No phone: Douglas Rushkoff writes, "The iPad - contrary to the way most people thought about it - is not a tablet computer running the Apple operating system. It’s more like a very big iPhone, running the iPhone operating system." OK. Fair enough. I love my iPhone. And bigger is better, right? Except, this "Maxi" Phone ... doesn't even have a phone! Sure, there's always a work-around (especially for those folks developing an appreciation for Google Voice). It'd certainly require VoIP and a wireless headset (can you imagine crooking a tablet to your head?) but the resulting blur of communication modes might be worth the price. Still, really: No phone?

So after about 11:30 PST, the announcement wrapped up with Steve Jobs waxing eloquently about how Apple stands on "the intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts." As a participant/observer of both domains, I have absolutely no idea how Jobs relates that grand vision with this underwhelming product.

Would I play with the iPad? Yep. Could I fall in love with the product? Maybe. Will I buy it? Probably not anytime soon. Now the wait begins... for version 2.0.

Waiting for Apple (again)

Apple will unveil its new tablet device tomorrow, and gadget freaks shall rejoice - or cringe.

For months, the insanely secretive company has dribbled out rumors and strategic half-truths: The tablet will rescue the newspaper industry! The tablet will be a gamer's paradise! The tablet will create an entirely new consumer need! The tablet will cost between $700 and $1000...

Leaked schematics, faked prototypes, and breathless reports of insider information - Did you hear? A Chinese supplier of widget covers reports that they're creating a new antigravity polymer that can bend time and deep-fry ice cream! - have led finally to the imminent launch of the iPad (or iSlate or iTablet or iWhatever).

As someone all too easily prone to overdoing my enthusiasm for this kind of thing, I'm forced to remember previous media frenzies that fizzled. I'm looking at YOU, Segway. And YOU, Windows Vista. And don't think you can hide your shame, Snakes on a Plane.

Still, it's kind of cool to finally see what Steve Jobs, expressing himself in typical understatement, has announced as "the most important thing I've ever done" (better hide that "World's Greatest Dad" mug, Steve). Fact is, if any company can change everything, it's, well -

Yeah, I'll be hanging on every word tomorrow.

Update: ...And then, tomorrow came!