Wednesday 8 April 2015

TELE-ABSENCE

Dick Pountain/Idealog 244/06 November 2014 10:04

Hello. My name is Dick Pountain and I'm a Flickrholic. Instead of interacting normally with other human beings, I spend too many hours slumped at the computer, Photoshopping photographs I took earlier to make them look like mad paintings (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain). Then I fritter away my remaining time probing the complete works of Bill Frissell, Brandt Bauer Frick and Bartok on that notorious online service Spotify (a villainous outfit which steals food from the mouths of Taylor Swift and Chris Martin). For a while I was a Multiple-Service Abuser, enslaved also to the hideous FaceBook, but that addiction cured itself once the user experience deteriorated to a point where it turned into Aversion Therapy. Yes folks, it's official, the internet is bad for all of us. In South Korea you can get sent on a cure. Here the Guardian runs stories every other day about how it's driving all our young folk into mental illness: cyber-bullying, trolling, sexting, and ultra-hard-core violent porn. We all live in terror of having our identities stolen, our bank accounts drained, or our local sewage works switched into reverse gear by shadowy global hacker gangs.

I'm going to exit heavy-sarcasm mode now, because though all these threats do get magnified grotesquely by our circulation-mad media, there's more than a pinch of truth to them, and mocking does little to help. An anti-digital backlash is stirring from many different directions. In a recent interview Christopher Nolan - director of sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar - expressed his growing dissatisfaction with digital video. Obsessive about picture quality, he feels he can't guarantee it with digital output (the exact opposite of orthodox opinion): “This is why I prefer film to digital [..] It’s a physical object that you create, that you agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind of controls aren’t really possible in the digital realm.” Or consider Elon Musk, almost a God among technophiles, who's recently taken to warning about the danger that AI might spawn unstoppable destructive forces (he compared it to "summoning the demon"), and this from a man who invests in AI.  

What all these problems have in common is that they occur at the borderline between physical reality and its digital representation. My Flickr addiction is pretty harmless because it's just pictures (pace Chris Nolan's critique), while Musk's fears become real when AI systems act upon the real world, say by guiding a drone or a driverless car, or controlling some vast industrial plant. And the problem has two complementary aspects. Firstly, people continue to confuse the properties of digital representations with the things they depict. I can repaint my neighbour's Volkswagen in 5 minutes in Photoshop, but on his real car it would take several hours, a lot of mess, and he'd thump me for doing it without permission. Secondly too much absorption in digital representations steals people's attention away from the real world. As I wander around Camden Town nowadays I'm struck by the universal body-language of the lowered head peering into a smartphone - while walking, while sitting, while eating, even while talking to someone else.

If you want a name for this problem then "tele-absence" (the downside of telepresence) might do, and it's problematic because evolution, both physical and cultural, has equipped us to depend on the physical presence of other people in order to behave morally. The controller of a remote drone strike sleeps sounder at night than he would if he'd killed those same people face-to-face with an M4 carbine: the internet troll who threatens a celebrity with rape and murder wouldn't say it to her face. And "face" is the operative word here, as the Chinese have understood for several thousands of years (and Mark Zuckerberg rediscovered more recently).

Maintaining "face" is crucial to our sense of self, and "loss of face" something we make great efforts to avoid. But we can't make face entirely by ourselves: it's largely bestowed onto us by other people, according to the conscious and unconscious rules of our particular society. Tele-absence robs us of most of the cues that great theorist of social interaction, Erving Goffman, listed as "a multitude of words, gestures, acts and minor events". We've barely begun to understand the ways that's changing our behaviour, which is why criminalising trolling or abolishing online anonymity are unlikely to succeed. Safety lies in hanging out online with people of similar interests (Flickr for me), but at the cost of reinforcing an already scary tendency toward social fragmentation.

[Dick Pountain sometimes wishes his shaving mirror supported Photoshop's Pinch filter]

YOUR INPUT IS ALWAYS WELCOME

Dick Pountain/Idealog 243/10 October 2014 15:42

Last month I wrote here about my recent infatuation with voice input in Google Keep, and now this month Jon Honeyball's column discovers a web source for vintage and superior keyboards. For consumers of media content output may be the more interesting topic (my display is higher-res than yours, my sound is higher-fi than yours) but we at the coalface who have to produce content have a far deeper interest in input methods.

It was ever thus. During my first flirtations with the underground press in the 1970s I used to write my copy longhand with a Bic ballpoint pen and hand it straight to Caroline, our stoical typesetter. Upon elevation (?) to the IT biz on PCW I was firmly told by our late, lamented chief Felix Dennis that he wasn't having any editors who wrote longhand, and so he'd signed me up for a Sight & Sound course. That was perhaps the most surreal week of my life, huddled in a darkened room at a manual Imperial typewriter with blanked-out yellow keys (pressing Shift was like lifting a house-brick with your little finger) touch-typing endless streams of nonsense words. I emerged capable of 35 words per minute, then graduated immediately to a CP/M computer running Wordstar and thus bypassed the typewriter era altogether.

In those days computer keyboards were modelled on mainframe terminals, with deep shiny plastic keys with inlaid characters on their caps, satisfying travel, resistance and click. They had few special keys besides Esc (which CP/M didn't recognise anyway). After that keyboards slithered down two separate hills: in 1982 Clive Sinclair launched the Spectrum with its ghastly squashy keys, probably made by Wrigleys, which became the archetype for all cheap keyboards to the present day; then in 1985 IBM launched the PC XT whose keys and layout largely persist on Windows computers today, Ctrl, Alt, function and Arrow keys and the rest. Jon remembers the IBM AT keyboard fondly as something of a cast-iron bruiser, but I had one that made it look quite flimsy, the Keytronic 5151 (http://blog.modernmechanix.com/your-system-deserves-the-best/). This brute, the size of an ironing board and weight of a small anvil, corrected certain dubious choices IBM had made by providing full-width shift keys, separate numeric and cursor keypads, and function keys along the top where they belong. I loved it, typed several books on it, and kept it until the PS/2 protocol made it redundant in the early 1990s.

It was around then that I suffered my one and only bout of RSI, brought on largely by the newfangled mouse in Windows 3. I fixed it using a properly adjustable typist's chair, wrist rests, and a remarkable German keyboard I found while covering the 1993 CeBIT show, Marquart's Mini-Ergo (see http://deskthority.net/wiki/Marquardt_Mini-Ergo). It was the first commercial split-keypad design, with twin spacebars and a curious lozenge shape reminiscent of a stealth bomber or a stingray. Marvellous to type on, and I carried on using it until I gave up desktop PCs and bought my first ThinkPad (a definite step backwards input-wise). Since then it's been all downhill, at increasing speed. My various successive laptops have had shallower and shallower chiclet-style keys (for added slimness), with less and less feel and travel. My latest Lenovo Yoga compounds the offence by making the function keys require a Fn shift. And on every laptop I've had since that first ThinkPad, the key labels for Right Arrow and A have soon worn off, being merely painted on.

What to do? On-screen tablet keyboards, however large they may become, have little appeal, even though I've gotten pretty quick nowadays at Google's gesture/swipe typing. And I most definitely *won't* be going back to writing in longhand. I may have been one of the earliest Palm Pilot adopters, and I may indeed run Grafitti Pro on both my Android phone and tablet, but writing with a finger is tiring and those pens with squashy sponge tips are pretty horrible. But another, possibly eccentric, solution just occurred to me. It was while ambling through the seething online casbah that is Amazon's Cabling and Adapters section that I discovered, for £1.99 an AT-to-PS2 adapter, followed by a small black box that's a PS2-to-Bluetooth converter (for another £19). It struck me that these two gizmos put together should enable me to use either my Keytronic or Marquart keyboards with all my current devices, phone, tablet and Yoga PC. How amusing it would look to deploy the Yoga in its "tent" configuration as a monitor. Best of all, this arrangement might provide me with plenty to do on cold, dark winter evenings, trying to get a bloody £ sign in place of the #, just like the good old days...






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...