A few years before the web.

Though most of my recent thought has been turned towards the future of the Internet, much inspired by Kevin Kelly's TED talk called "The Next 5,000 Days of the Web, it's impossible to focus on that without some reminiscence about the past. Not only have I been thinking about the last 5,000 days of the web, but also the last 5,000 days before the web, which seems like a completely different world from the one we inhabit today, let alone tomorrow.

Another thing that brought this all to mind was a recent article in the New York Times, entitled "Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes," which told the story of a recent funeral held at an audiobook publisher's offices for the good old analog cassette," that ubiquitous friend of the 80's and early 90's.  Audio tapes never offered the sound quality of either the phonograph records which proceeded them or the Compact Discs that followed them, but they had some endearing qualities worth remembering. Before the cassette, there wasn't much in the way of portable and personal music for the car, though that is admittedly before my time.  In my early driving years, we mostly had tapes in the car, and CDs at home.  Car CD players existed, but were out of my range. Tapes were cheap; when the CD came out the price of new music purchases doubled, if you chose the new format. Quality was appreciably better, and the skip track function was a marvel, but there were downsides, too. Along with the ability to skip from track to track came the tendancy to skip at the tiniest scratch or stain.  For that reason the CD was never really ideal for the car, since it's hard to handle them with the gingerness required, while driving the car. They landed on the passenger seat, found their way to the floor, and then the underside of the passenger seat, possibly rendering our favorite track unplayable. It was never the crappy track that got destroyed by a scratch.  The tapes had an amazing feature, which was that they still played after rolling around under the passenger seat for a week, possibly somewhat degraded, but they didn’t get stuck in a skip and refuse to play on.

We also could not copy CDs, at least not onto other CDs. This probably had as much to do with the price of them as anything. For the music industry, it was a return to the secure intellectual property model of the phonograph record.  We did, of course, copy them onto tapes, and by the mid 90s I hardly saw any new tapes, just copious copies. 

The mix tape was an art form, and a long labor of love, even if mixing a tape from a stack of CDs was somewhat less labor intensive than mixing them from other tapes. Some people have waxed poetic that a mix CD is just not the same, especially the ones which pass so freely in many relationships, since one can just throw it together in iTunes and burn it. It simply lacked the hours of effort and dedication to properly symbolize the love the old mix-tape conveyed.

If I can shed a tear for some of the finer qualities of the cassette, no such love is lost for the card file at the library.  Though some librarians may remember them with fondness, the rows and rows of sliding drawers filled with index cards are hard to miss, in light of the sleek efficiency of the computers used to search the local library, and additional, all the other ones available through inter-library loan.  The web will, however, have to tear the actual paper books out of my cold, dead hand.  Finding a book through the web is one thing, reading a book through these devices is another entirely.  Then again, I haven’t tried the Kindle, supposed to be an eBook without all the pain and discomfort, and I may find that while I miss books in a poetic sense of antiquity and charm, that they are eventually better replaced by these new electronic paper devices, once they reach a certain level of ubiquity and the bulk of our paper resources are available for immediate download.

As a writer, I still have two typewriters, and use them to this day.  There is something linear and fluid about these undistracting, simple machines. The computer always threatens to lure me away from the task at hand with some internet surfing, or a quick came of mah-jongg, or a thousand other opportunities to task switch and waste time. 

One thing I will never miss is the time we spent sitting around the house, waiting for a phone call.  The cell phone can be a truly liberating device, if you can teach yourself how to manage it.  For more people than not, it seems like it’s as much a strangling leash as a source of freedom, but I try not to let my contacts expect immediate responses and answers all the time.  Though the always connected nature was initially alluring, I have become a big fan of silent mode, and use my phone more as a voicemail I keep in my pocket and can respond to from anywhere, at liberty; I will not however lose my wandering time to the thing.

All things being said (for now), it is hard to miss too much about the analog world, but some of its alluring advantages should not be forgotten as we hurtle forward into the new world of amazing access to information, and each other, but also a world that moves at light speed, leaves little space for the accidental free time borne of waiting but probably essential to our sanity, and the alone time that can be completely lost in the web of facebook, text messages, e-mails, and phone calls.

 

First they recreated the internet, now Google finally improves the browser.

Google released their first browser today, called Chrome. I jumped on it the moment I read about it's availability, and I already love it. It addresses a number of issues that have annoyed me about other browser, so neatly that I almost feel as if they interviewed me personally and wrote me a browser.  Favorite features include the sparse and uncluttered interface, which seems to take up considerably less screen real estate, always in short supply, especially on compact road warrior laptops. Also notable are the ability to create a Desktop or Start Menu icon for applications such as gmail, which then opens them in a window with no browser buttons or menus at all, cleanly displaying the web app alone.  Perhaps the single most welcome feature is the arrival of Ctrl-Tab, to cycle through open tabs within the browser window much as Alt-Tab cycles through open windows on the computer.  Since I frequently get dozens of tabs open, I have longed for this feature, and searched for it in all other browsers, somehow unable to believe that it did not exist.

Chrome is also very fast, and appears to be very memory efficient.  Surprisingly, it is not based on the Mozilla foundation's browser components, despite the fact that Google has been the single biggest funder of that foundation and it's Firefox browser.  Instead, it is based on WebKit, most notably used as the core of Apple's Safari browser.  If I recall correctly, WebKit was originally based on the browser components developed for the KDE user interface system for Linux computers, and Safari has always been impressively fast.  Honestly, it's not that surprising that WebKit was used, just given the resulting speed and efficiency gains.  I've been a firefox user for years, but was greatly underwhelmed by the 3.0 release, which didn't seem to address any of the issues which bugged me about version 2, ether in interface enhancement or performance improvement.

Speaking of performance improvement, the biggest claim Google is making regards stability.  The technical details were released in cartoon form, but the long story short is that each tab should run in an independent process, so a failing chunk of javascript or a dying plugin should not crash the whole browser and the other 30 tabs open.  We'll see about that. 

Chrome is released open source, and Google's stated intention is not to enter the browser market, but to spur development forward, and I think they may have succeeded in changing the standards by which browsers are judged. An ideal situation might be to see Firefox 4 move heavily towards this new code, greatly improving that excellent but somewhat languishing project.

If our children had our computers, would they need teachers?

The One Laptop Per Child project is not fresh news, by any means. For those who are tuned into the technologist blogosphere, there have been several years of discussion and anticipation about the project, spearheaded most notably by Nicholas Negroponte, most recently of MIT's Media Lab and a noted architect and proponent of the future of computing. OLPC would seek to place a laptop (and more significantly, internet connectivity) into the hands of every child in the world, focusing its efforts, naturally, on the children in developing nations who have little chance of acquiring such advantage without some sort of deliberate framework amongst technologists in the developed world.

There are numerous questions raised about the applicability and efficacy of this program. The first, and perhaps most significant question, is this. ‘Who is going to teach these children to use the computer, and the internet, and even teach them some relevant language for access to the global information store?’ Not only do these kids not speak English, they often do not speak any language which has significant installed base on the network. They don't speak Spanish, or Hindi, or Cantonese, but rather localized indigenous languages with relatively tiny populations and almost no written presence on paper or in digital form. How can they use the Internet, which is primarily English, and otherwise dominated by a few other languages with a large installed base of connected users? Before we can even get to that, who will teach them to use the computer itself, the interface of which is, in any language, much like a language of its own?

Sugata Mitra offers surprising answers to these questions. His talk at TED 2007 was based on a project he called, 'Hole in the Wall.' (Sorry, requires RealPlayer, works on Winders, others unknown.) The genesis of this project was to embed a PC in a wall surrounding an urban slum in India, with a touchpad and a web browser connected to a search engine. Within hours, their group was able to witness children using this machine. An 8 year old boy was teaching a 6 year old girl how to browse the web, despite the fact that this was presumably that boy's first exposure to the internet.

More questions than answers were created by this initial experiment, not least of which was, 'Did anyone teach them?' In search of this answer, Mitra and his group took the basic model of the 'Hole in the Wall' experiment further and further into undeveloped India.' In less than 10 minutes, a 13 year old school dropout in a remote village, of which Mitra says, 'I had been assured that nobody had ever taught anyone anything,' had discovered the hyper linking nature of the web, and by that evening over 70 children were surrounding the machine and exploring the internet.

The next question was about language. At the time, Mr. Mitra describes, people were concerned that the principal language of communication was English, to which he asked, 'What are we to do? Translate the entire internet into some Indian language? That's not possible, it has to be the other way around.'

They then took the Hole in the Wall to the further removed village of Madantusi, which, as of the time of the experiment in 2000, did not have an English teacher. This assured that these children encountering a predominantly English internet, by means of an English computer, were entirely on their own not only regarding the use of the computer but in the discovery of the language by which this technology and it's information were delivered.

He left the computer there, with 'lot's of CDs,' now having moved the project so remotely that delivering Internet was impossible or unfeasible in that year. They returned 3 months later. As he reports, as soon as the children saw him, they said they 'needed a faster processor and a better mouse.' Astonished, he asked, ‘How did you know what was going on there?' Their reply? 'Well, you left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English.’ By his measurement, they were using 200 English words between each other, mispronounced, but used correctly. Unsurprisingly, he lists the words 'File, Stop, Save, etc,' but notes that they were using these words not only in regards the computer but in their daily lives.

The project eventually gained enough funding to be expanded significantly across India, which offers a range of social, linguistic, and economic hurdles to education. In doing so, they faced significant technological problems; many regarding making these comparatively primitive computers withstand climates well outside the operating range, in weather both too cold and dry in the Himalayas and too hot and wet in southern India.

In many cases, they found the younger children teaching the older ones how to use the machine. Often the earliest places the children would seek out would be those sites which explain the Roman alphabet, essentially prerequisite to Western language acquisition.

They found that 6 to 12 year olds could self instruct in a connected environment, 'irrespective of anything they could measure.' Social position, economics, even demonstrable intelligence seemed to be impossible to correlate to the results. The clear factor was that it had to be in groups. The number of children and machines were such that each individual could only have had minutes actually in command of the computer, but great clusters of children gathered around the machines, and together were able to discover how to use it, going so far as to learn the English language to gain access to the web’s vast stores of knowledge.

So, 700 words later, we return to the topic of the OLPC project, in the hopes that Mr. Mitra’s talk will shed some light on questions surrounding OLPC. The primary question seems to be, ‘who will teach the children to use the computers?’ If this project is any indication, the children will teach themselves, and each other, collectivizing and sharing knowledge as it is gained so rapidly that their ability to use the machines may well be more rapidly acquired without instruction than with it. Some of the other questions postulated may well be solved by the answer to the first. Who will maintain and repair these systems? The kids will likely become experts in the care of OLPCs and their supporting technologies at an astonishing rate, much as the generations in the developed world who have grown up around computers display amazing skill in using and manipulating the machines which took generations of adult scientists many years to create.

It seems clear now that these children will learn simply because the information is available, and they will be able to navigate our digital world intuitively if only they have access, overcoming all of the obstacles which seem insurmountable today. If Mr. Mitra’s groups could collectively understand the interface in groups of 70 children to one screen, we can only guess what might happen in the near future amongst those exposed to Mr. Negroponte’s project, in which each child in a village would have their own window into the web of collective information which we in the developed world so have so easily taken for granted.

What the addition of all of these young minds to Kevin Kelly’s one machine might be, I’ll leave to another article.