Saturday 22 March 2014

LOOKING GOOD!

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog231 - 06/10/2013

The reception of Apple's iPhone 5c and 5s models nudges me to revisit a previous theme of this column: the almost obsessive-compulsive way that looks have come to dominate the world of electronic gadgets. Most of the Apple faithful were aghast at the horrid plasticness of the iPhone 5c: totemic phones, just like Gollum's "precious", need to be shiny and metallic. Let's forget that quality plastic is a far more practical material for phones, less dentable and scratchable, as demonstrated by the fact that virtually all iPhone owners immediately cover up their precious with a plastic case.

I'm not a phone fan anyway, but I am a keen, Flickr-bothering photographer, and I can see the same process at work in the field of cameras. Pocketable compact cameras have improved astonishingly over recent years, with 20x or even 30x zoom lenses and 18+ megapixel sensors, so that unless you're a professional sports or wildlife photographer, and if you mostly put your pics online and don't make large paper prints, they can pretty well replace an entry-level DSLR. Problem is they don't look good, or rather they don't make *you* look good, that is, like a professional. The camera manufacturers' marketing departments soon spotted this vulnerability, and a new breed of retro-styled camera is now flooding onto the market.

Made to look as far as possible like 1930s Leicas, some of these cameras feature interchangeable lenses while others have full-frame sensors and fixed focal-length (that is, non-zoom) lenses: what they tend to share are price tags that push up toward £1000, at a time when seriously capable compacts cost below £250. The founding moment of this trend was probably Olympus's 2009 ad campaign for its retro-styled E-P1 model, under the slogan "Don't be a tourist". There you have the rationale stated barely: this is no longer about how convenient or capable the device is, but how it makes you look to other people. Gadgets as badges of status, symbols that can distinguish you from the rest of the crowd.

This is becoming a matter of life and death for the electronics industry. Camera manufacturers were facing a dramatic sales drop for compact, point-and-shoot cameras, as most young people prefer to use their ever-more-capable mobile phones as cameras. There's a flourishing industry in add-on lenses and imaging apps for the iPhone, while Instagram completely displaces Flickr for the iPhone generation, and none of this generates any revenue for Canon or Nikon. Commanding a premium price for these retro cameras that make people look like professionals could become a life-saver.

It goes without saying that this domination of the aesthetic has been the rule in other consumer sectors for many years, in the case of the garment industry for centuries. Luxury cars nowadays are all capable of broadly similar performance, so high that it can't possibly be unleashed on public roads, only on Top Gear. Hence they are chosen mostly on looks, the prestige of their brandname and a reassuringly huge price tag. And I won't even try to analyse the women's handbag sector, where some devices can cost even more than a Leica M9 (and they don't even take pictures).

I've always been a modernist in the field of design, a believer in Louis Sullivan's dictum that "form ever follows function", a lover of everything spare, elegant and mass-produced. I ride a Vespa PX125, I play a Fender Stratocaster and I own a Parker 51 that I pick up around once every five years to discover that the ink has dried up. The electronics industry is of course the ultimate expression of such modernism: the economics of the silicon foundry depend on huge production runs, while VLSI chip layouts are beautiful examples of spare necessity, with every wire routed rationally. There's therefore a sort of irony, but also an inevitability, about the way that laptops, tablets, phones, cameras and other devices built using such chips are becoming subject to fashion in much the same way as clothes.

The irony exists in the fact that it's computer-aided design and 3D-printing that will make it increasingly possible for us to have various different cosmetic outer shells, in small production runs, masking the same set of internal silicon "organs". Love it or loathe it, the iPhone 5c with its handbag-matching colours is a step along that road. But were I working for Microsoft or Dell or Sony, which thank God I'm not, my every waking thought right now would be devoted to discovering how to make laptops and ultrabooks look *less* like tablets or coloured sweeties and more like things that a professional might take into the jungle or a war zone (HINT: just painting the case khaki won't do it...)

Wednesday 5 March 2014

EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 230 06/09/2013

Richard Dawkins' meme theory has always interested me as a metaphor, though I only partly accept it. Ideas do propagate from mind to mind and certainly they can mutate during that passage, certainly some do survive while others perish. It's the nature of the selection process I'm not sure about. Simple ideas like "the world is round" can be related directly to physical reality but big ideas like "Christianity" or "Islam" can't, and what's more they're too big, various and vaguely defined to even be treated as coherent entities. (Even so, the horrible fate of his concept - appropriated by giggling netizens to describe pictures of talking cats - seems a bit harsh). 

There is however a class of very simple meme that fascinates me and that is the cliche or verbal tic: a phrase like "back in the day" that appears from nowhere and enters ubiquitous usage for a few years before fading away again. It seems to me that such phrases can be analysed to reveal useful truths about peoples' attitudes to the world. My current favourite tic is "it's not  perfect". If I had a quid for every time I've read this phrase in reviews and online comments over the last two years, I'd perhaps have the deposit on a small hybrid automobile.

What does "it's not perfect" tell us about the way people are thinking? Two things really. Firstly they may believe that perfection exists and is worth seeking out (which is most likely untrue). Secondly, and far more importantly, that they not only know the object under review has flaws, but they're desperate to let everyone *know* that they know. That's because they will be judged and mercilessly ridiculed if they fail to mention a single flaw. They may be accused of being naive, sloppy, biassed, even a "fanboi" or a "shill", by the online masses, who are all experts and feel they could have written the review better themselves.   

I'm not just talking about reviews of consumer electronic items here. One of my more pathetic weaknesses is inhabiting the Comment Is Free forums on the Guardian website, mostly those on political topics (where I pick my way gingerly through the ferocious troll fights) but also those on science. For example the other day the paper carried an account of new research on a possible connection between the increasing incidence of Alzeimer's Disease and improved public hygiene (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/04/alzheimers-disease-link-hygiene), all to do with reduced immune efficiency.

I don't want to discuss the quality of that research, but rather the quality of the debate in the attached CiF forum. A large proportion of the commenters had their own theory or critique of this research, 99% of which I'm guessing were based on no actual laboratory or library research, nor any medical qualifications, nor even having read the original paper. Typical first lines ran like: "Actually Alzheimers is linked to medical stupidity"; "The scientists might be onto something here"; "Yet another poorly thought out piece of research"; "I don't buy this theory at all".

Actually this theory isn't for sale, it's being put forward for peer review by people qualified in the field (after a decade or more of scientific training) but once it makes it onto the web, courtesy of the Guardian's Society section, it gets exposed to the bracing winds of our new anti-elitist, hyper-democratic intellectual virtual world. Or to mix metaphors more thoroughly, it's all becoming one big intellectual rugby game in which everyone feels entitled to run with ball for a while, regardless of stature or agility.  

The easy availability of information on any subject whatever - via Google, Wikipedia and the rest - fosters this delusion that we're all now entitled to criticise anything, anywhere and have our critiques (noun, not verb, please) treated as equally important. We second-guess the designers of computers, architects of buildings, medical researchers, based on no real evidence but a raging egoism inflated by promiscuous online reading. To be sure, at the moment it's all just harmless hot air confined to the sphere of online forums, but one can't help worrying what effect it might have in future if kids grow up believing that professional training, peer review and other such institutions designed to protect the quality of information are just oppressive elitism.

Worse still they may come to regard knowledge itself as a competitive game of "I know more than you do". We humans are a fundamentally social species, but this net-reinforced individualism tends to make us into an anti-social species who see life as a zero-sum game with everyone else as a competitor. Actually knowledge is a team game in which you have to learn rules, collaborate with others and practice regularly.

I COMMENT, YOU TROLL, THEY HATE-SPEAK

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 229  02/08/2013

I've been reading a lot of anthropology recently. Not sure why, something about the current state of the world makes me want to know more about the workings of the pre-civilised mind. David Graeber's excellent paper "Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value" has a fascinating section about the ancient Maori and their worldview, in which I found one  item particularly provocative. That Maori custom of sticking the tongue out during their haka war dance, so familiar to all Rugby fans, always strikes us as a gesture of cheekiness or insult, because that's what it now means in most European cultures. That isn't what it originally meant to the Maori though: when aimed at an enemy during a battle it meant "You are meat, and I'm going to eat you", and true to their word, if they defeated you they might well have done so. For some reason this put me in mind of internet trolls.

There's recently been a surge of outrage about trolling on Twitter, sparked initially by rape threats against Labour MP Stella Creasy and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, then amplified by bomb threats against various female journalists including the Guardian's Hadley Freeman. This stuff plays directly into those debates about internet censorship (Cameron's anti-porn filters) and freedom of speech, all of which constitute such a moral quagmire that one enters it very cautiously indeed. I've always been largely in favour of the freedom to robustly criticise, in any medium at all, since to take the opposite view would mean to shut up and toe the line, to accept things the way they are.

However in recent years this issue has become very much more complicated after various laws against "hate-speech" have been enacted. These laws make certain kinds of speech, most often racial insults, into prosecutable crimes, and that raises two very difficult points: firstly is it permissible to ban any form of speech, as opposed to action, at all (the pure freedom-of-speech argument); secondly, how do you gauge the degree of offensiveness of a speech act (necessary in order to decide whether it's prosecutable or not)? 

The pro freedom-of-speech argument can be defended in abstract philosophical terms, but in effect it always depends upon the old adage that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me": that is, that verbal threats are not the same as the actions which they threaten, and do not cause the same damage. That's certainly true: the threat of rape is not as harmful as the act of rape and the threat to bomb doesn't kill or demolish buildings. However that's not to say that they cause no damage at all. One result of the recent revolution in neuroscience is confirmation that fear and anxiety do indeed cause physical damage to people. These primitive emotions are very useful from an evolutionary point of view: fear keeps you from stepping off cliffs or picking up rattlesnakes, while anxiety forms part of the necessary binding force between mammals and their highly-dependent offspring. However both operate by releasing corticosteroid hormones that have all kinds of nasty long-term effects if repeated too often, high blood pressure, hardening of arteries and much more. Like fire-extinguishers they're necessary and welcome during an emergency (putting out a fire) but they make a mess of the furniture and are not to be played with.  

Trolling is precisely playing with the fire extinguishers. It's meant to induce anxiety, fear or confusion in order to dissuade the victim from some attitude or action of which the troll disapproves. To that extent it's a form of politics and to that same extent is of a kind with terrorism, since both seek to achieve political ends by inducing fear. The crucial difference is that terrorists don't just speak but act: they don't just stick out their tongues but really do eat you. None of this is news of course, because bandits, tyrants, robber barons and military officers have known for millenia that you can bend a population to your will by terrorising them.

In fact there's now a whole new discipline that views our efforts to manipulate each others' emotions as the driving force of history. We manipulate our own emotions with music, dance, art and drugs: why else would alcohol, tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, opium figure so highly in the history of trade? We manipulate others' emotions with scary stories (religion), clever rhetoric and the threat of violence. Democratic governments insist that we delegate the actual use of force to our police and army - and whether or not they can demand we also give up the threat of force remains a very fraught question - but never believe that threats do *no* harm.

SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday...