Clinamen

Slashdot links to this story about how the brain conceives of tools: "new study in monkeys suggests that the brain's trick is to treat tools as just another body part." The researchers taught primates how to use pliers and studied the activity of 113 neurons:

The researchers first established the brain's firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used "reverse pliers" that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food.

This seems like more evidence (I'm not sure we needed anymore) for Katherine Hayles claim that "we have always been posthuman." That is, there has never been a line between human and technology, and our current technological moment is not creating a crisis of the human but merely serving to raise our awareness about what has always been.

A Company called Silicon Storage Technology will allow you to access files on your hard drive while your computer is turned off.

This enables notebook users to access content on the hard disk drive, without having to power on the computer, in order for example to listen to MP3 files, view digital pictures, access email, etc.

Link via Slashdot.

Radiohead has been teasing the music blogs and the leering press for weeks about the album they're set to release. They've finally announced the date, but the kicker is that they'll only be releasing the album on their website. You can buy the physical CD (comes with some extra stuff), or you can download from their site. The best part: you pick the price. As a friend of mine notes:

The consensus seems to be that this is a pretty amazing step, a pretty amazing fuck you to the music industry: one of the biggest bands in the world releasing an unannounced album without the support of a record company through their site for whatever price the customer chooses. Regardless of whether or not you're a fan, it will be interesting to see what kind of ripples this sends out through the industry.

Yes, that's right...you choose the price. When you pre-order the album, the price is listed as "it's up to you." You fill in the price.

Red Herring's Tomio Geron explores semantic technology as the "next thing" and a challenge to Google:

Developers of next generation search engines say their technology will “understand” the language within those queries—much more precisely than Internet giant Google’s technology.

These next generation search engines will, apparently, interpret your search question. This will mean searching the Web in a new way, and people developing these technologies are hoping to retrain Web users:

Barney Pell, CEO of PowerSet, conceded that semantic search engines must convince people to change their search behavior. But web surfers have been trained to use keywords on Google, even though that is not the way people think. So that behavior can change, he argued.

I'm extremely skeptical of technologies that attempt to shape behavior. It seems to me that the best technologies are those that adapt to user behavior. Yes, designers shape an environment (much like an architect does), but they do not (and cannot) dictate behavior. Users use stuff in weird ways. This is called innovation. I'm reminded of Lawrence Lessig's discussions of "dumb networks." He uses the U.S. constitution and the Internet as two examples of dumb networks that allow for flexibility. The minute you start building intelligence into the network, you introduce bottlenecks. This is what Net Neutrality is all about. Currently, Web servers treat all packets of information the same, and this means that all of the innovation happens at the end points of the network. If you change this, you limit what people can do on the Web.

As I spoke to my roommate about semantic technologies, he told me that Central Park was originally developed to in the 19th Century as a way to save the "depraved" working class. So, what did the working class do? They started playing baseball in the park, and this pissed off the park's designers to no end. My roommate explain this example and then described such philosophies of design as "hubris."

This is what I think we've got with semantic technologies: hubris. You can't make people use your design exactly the way you envisioned it. And even if you could, you'd be cutting out all of the myriad ways in which a technology/design could appropriated and reappropriated.

NBC recently severed ties with Apple and pulled their content from the iTunes store. Now, they're offering their content for "free." That is, they're offering it on their website for no charge, but commercials will be embedded (and apparently you won't be able to skip them.) So, I guess they've cornered the market on NBC watchers who don't have Tivo.

As a follow up to Rosa's PSU Conference shout out, I thought I'd offer an observation about the conference.

Beginning with Anne Wysocki's plenary talk, traveling through the plenaries by Jimmie Killingsworth and James Porter, and then trickling out into the concurrent sessions was the idea that rhetoricians of technology are turning their attention back to the body. Thus the title of this post: Where's the beef?

I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing Anne Wysocki's talk as an example of this kind of work. As a group of us are reading through Zizek's The Parallax View with Josh, we are noting that the body is reinserting itself in his work as well (in fact, Josh notes that we might even set The Parallax View alongside Butler's Bodies That Matter in that it is an answer to critics who are looking for more materiality...)

Wysocki's talk was concerned with the use of certain aesthetic theories to discuss the bodily experience of certain digital art installations. One such installation is "Saturday" by Sabrina Raff, an installation that allows users to place a glove to their forehead and eavesdrop on cell phone conversations via bone transducers. That is, the sound comes to the participant without the use of their ears...the sound travels through bones when you put the glove to your forehead. This is art that is in no way separated from from the body. In fact, it is impossible without a body.

Mark Hansen and other critics make use of aesthetic theories rooted in Kant to discuss the embodied experience of the those who encounter these installations. These Kantian-based theories stem from the idea that the aesthetic experience allows, say, a viewer of an artwork to see that they the "fit" in the world. Wysocki's question is this: If we no longer think that there is a world "out there" that already makes sense (she assumes that most of us don't think this), then can we really apply traditional aesthetics to such installations? Considering the lack of a given world that fits together and makes sense, how do we bridge the gap between individual aesthetic experience and collective experience. Or, as Anne says, how do we move from epistemology to ethics when discussing digital, embodied experiences. How do we move from “this is a great experience and I understand it in this way” to “this is the same experience that others have, thus I share something with them?" For Wysocki, Hansen and others don't account for this move.

And lest you think that such digital art installations have little to do with the public at large, Wysocki points us to the Nintendo Wii. How are digitally embodied experience being designed and critiqued? How are games for the Wii being designed and critiqued? Ann calls for a different way of designing digital experiences (video games) and a different way of critiquing them (reflection about what certain digital experiences mean, how they/if they point to ethical questions problems). Her concern is that if there is no world "out there" anymore that holds everything together, then we might end up w/ isolated aesthetic experience...with no move to ethics.

Wysocki, Killingsworth, Porter and others are all looking for ways to reintroduce the body into our conversations. That body isn't separate from technologies or, in the case of Killingsworth or Marilyn Cooper, separate from ecologies, contexts, or other bodies. Where's the beef? It's mixed up with a bunch of other stuff...and these folks seem to be looking for a way to make sense of that mix of stuff without forgetting that a body is in there somewhere.