The Undiscovered Continents of Human Potential
We can think of media technology as a grand exploration of unimagined human potential. Another way to say this is that when we innovate in media technology, we are also exploring parts of the human brain that haven’t been given a chance to demonstrate their full capabilities in the past. This might sound like too ambitious a way to think about people and technology, but it can be supported by examples. For instance, this year we will for the first time see consumer electronics products that can track the full body motion of people as they interact through networked video game consoles. (This is Microsoft’s XBOX Kinect.) The obvious way to use this capability is for a person to turn into an avatar in a game, such as an athlete in a volleyball tournament. But the possibilities go much, much further than that. In previous decades when special body suits were required in order to achieve the same effect, I was able to work with children who turned into avatars of the subjects they were studying in school. For instance, a child studying chemistry would turn into a molecule. The child would then squirm and dance in order to learn to dock with another molecule. The reason this is important is that it brings a huge part of the brain devoted to somatic cognition into the process of thinking about science. Somatic intelligence is real but poorly understood. For instance, when you learn to improvise at the piano, a time comes when your hands seem to solve complicated problems in harmony faster than your conscious mind can. While it is impossible to say which undiscovered continents of cognition will turn out to be important for the future of human experience, it is almost certain that some will be, and the tools find out which are finally appearing.
Can Soulful Music Survive Digital Epistemology?
Lanier claims that many people have the wrong idea about "Digital Information" and how to use it, and that a tough reassessment of computation could get us unstuck so we can have new musical styles and be soulful again. According to Lanier, pop music in America is in a bizarre state. This is the first time since electrification that a new musical style hasn't appeared with a new generation. Hip Hop, weird attitude rock, and so on, are in many cases the music of the grandparents of today's undergraduates. Meanwhile, the term "Soulful" has been applied to music more frequently since the rise of digital metaphors and computational challenges to the very idea of "Soul." "Soulful" music is typically pre-digital, with old blues recordings being the canonical examples; New music described as "Soulful" is usually nostalgic. Making everything fungible gradually reduces the differences between things. This is what happens when all music is digitized, easily available, and remixable. Shouldn't ideas, including musical ideas, be anti-entropic? Is remixing enough? Digital objects have more explicit boundaries than other objects. Do we have enough self-knowledge to know where the boundaries of music are? A clarinet is made of matter but a computer is made of ideas, and ideas might never be good enough for music making. Do computers confine us to eternally re-digesting the ideas of programmers, even when we are the programmers? Definitions of music and personhood tend to gain and lose transcendental components together. Does attitude about "Soulfulness" matter? His talk will include brief musical examples and performances.
The Future of Libraries
The only way for libraries to remain relevant in the long term is to simultaneously develop in two ways that are almost opposites, although they are quite compatible. On the one hand, it is essential to emphasize the human side of the library. A research librarian is the only sort of entity who knows more than Google about what content (of a non-trivial nature) is out there. That expertise has typically been underplayed and made anonymous in the past, but cannot be in the future. On the other hand, there is a need for frameworks in which scientific and other types of scholarly data can be stored and reused, so that the scientific method can be extended into the Internet age. When someone uses a simulation in research these days, there is no standardized concept of re-use analogous to the replication of results in pre-computational experimental science. Some institution will have to step up to play the role of maintaining important digital artifacts like simulations that will tend to become forgotten or unusable without proper care. This would be a high tech recreation of the role libraries originally played when books were expensive and rare.
