THINK / Musings

Fred Wilson’s keynote this week at the Web 2.0 conference will be interesting. He is doing a review of the history of the internet business in New York, the slides are posted here. History is something we don’t do a lot of in our business we tend to run forward so fast that we barely look back. I shared some pictures with Fred and I am posting a few more things here.   I also found a random missive I scribed I think in 1996, its pasted below. I was running what we called a web studio back then — we produced a group of web sites, including äda ’web , Total New York and Spanker.

äda ’web’s first project created in the fall of 1994 — Jenny Holzer’s, Please Change Beliefs. This project is still up and available at adaweb. The project was a collaboration between Jenny, ada and John F. Simon, Jnr. I learnt so much from that one piece of work. I am not putting up more ada pieces since unlike the other sites it is still up and running thanks to the Walker Arts Center.

Total NY sends Greg Elin across country for the Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley tour. Greg and this project taught me the fundamentals of what would become blogging

Man meets bike meets cam … Greg Elin prepares for Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley. Don’t miss the connextix “eye” camera on the handle bar!?!

1995, Total NY’s Cosmic Cavern, my first forway into 2d+ virtual worlds, a collaboration with Kenny Scharf. This was a weird and interesting project. We created a virtual world with Scharf based on the cosmic cavern the artist had created at the tunnel night club. Then within the actual Cosmic Cavern we placed PC’s for people to interact with the virtual cavern. Trying to explain it was like a Borges novel. He is a picture of Scharf in the “real” cavern, feels like the 90’s were a long time ago.

Some other random pictures i found from that era:

Keep it Chunky, Sticky and Open:

As the director of a studio dedicated to creating online content, a question I spend a lot of time thinking about is: what are the salient properties of this medium? Online isn’t print, it isn’t television, isn’t radio, nor telephony–and yet we consistently apply properties of all these mediums to online with varied result. But digging deeper, what are the unique properties of online that make the experience interesting and distinct? Well, there are three that we have worked with here the Studio, and we like to call them: chunky, sticky and open.

Chunky
What is chunky content? It is bite sized, it is discrete and modular, it is quick to understand because it has borders. Suck is chunky, CNET and Spanker (one of our productions) are chunky. Arrive at these sites and within seconds you understand what is going on–the content is simple, its bite sized. Chunkiness is especially relevant in large database-driven sites. Yesterday, my girlfriend and I were looking for hardware on the ZD Net sites (PC Magazine, Net Buyer etc.). She had found a hardware review a day earlier and wanted to show them to me. She typed in the URL for PC Magazine but the whole site had changed. When she looked at the page she had no anchors, she had no bearings to find the review that was featured a day earlier. The experience would have been far less frustrating if the site had been designed with persistent, recursive, chunks. Chunky media offers you a defined pool of content, not a boundless sea. It has clear borders and the parameters are persistent. Bounded content is important; I want to know the borders of the media experience, where it begins and where it ends. What is more, given the distributed, packet-based nature of this medium, both its form and function evokes modularity. Discreet servings of data. Chunks.

Sticky
Some, but not all, content should stick. Stickiness is about creating an immersive experience. It’s content that dives deep into associations and relationships. The opposite of sticky is slippery, take basic online chat rooms: most of them aren’t sticky. You move from one room to another, chatting about this and that, switching costs are low, they are slippery. Contrast this to MUDS and MOO’s which are very sticky: in MUDS the learning curve is steep (view this as a rite of entry into the community), and context is high (they give a very real sense of place). What you get out of these environments is proportional to your participation and involvement, relationship between characters is deep and associative. When content sticks time slows down and the experience becomes immersive– you look up and what you thought was ten minutes was actually half an hour. Stickiness is evoked through association, participation, and involvement. Personalized information gets sticky as does most content that demands participation. Peer to peer communication is sticky. Community and games are sticky. People (especially when they are not filtered) are sticky. My home page is both chunky and sticky.

Open
I want to find space for me in this medium. Content that is open, or unfinished permits association and participation (see Eno’s article in Wired 3.05, where he talks about unfinished media). There is space for me. I often describe building content in this medium as drawing a 260 degrees circle. The arc is sufficient to describe the circle (e.g.: provide the context) but is open to let the member fill in the remainder. We laugh and cry at movies, we associate with characters in books, they move us. We develop and frame our identity with them and through them–to varying degrees they are all open. Cartoons, comedy, and most forms of humor, theatre, especially improvisational theater, are all open. A joke isn’t really finished till someone laughs, this is the closing of the circle, they got it. Abstraction, generalities and stereotypes, all these forms are open, they leave room for association, room for me and for you.

So, chunky, sticky and open. Try them out and tell me what you think (john@dci-studio.com). Lets keep this open, in the first paragraph I said I wanted to discuss the characteristics that make a piece of online content interesting, I did not use the words great or compelling. I don’t think that anything online that has been created to date is great. These are still early days and we still have a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn. No one has produced the Great Train Robbery of online–yet. But when they do, I would bet that pieces of it will be chunky, sticky and open.

Ok enough reminiscing, closing with Jenny Holzer.

My old friend Don Burton has started blogging. His focus is early stage child development — specifically as it relates to his third child, Whitney. Week by week Raising Whit is becoming a wonderful resource for parents who think about applying some of the more advanced areas of developmental psychology to raising their child — he catalogues development stages and types of play with video’s. Don has spent 20 years thinking and working in this area — he is smart as can be and very passionate about his work/play. Great to see theory in application — up close, very real and personal.

I went to see Ted Leonsis’s film Nanking this week. It is a hard movie to write about, let alone see. The film documents the rape of Nanking, an event that I thought was named as a metaphor for a city that was pillaged. Pillaged it was but the people were also indiscriminately raped. It’s an awful, gut wrenching documentary of human nature and war. It is also a story of eight or so people who managed to save hundreds of thousands of lives — but there is little to no glorification of their roles, its told upfront, in your face, the words are taken directly from the diaries of survivors. Disasters of this kind are usually told from a distant, sanitized, and historical perspective. This movie does none of the above — similar to Spielberg’s Shoah documentary. Amazingly one of the people who saved so many was the head of Siemens — a Nazi. I also didn’t realize the dates of the massacre — this was 1937/38 — a full year before the start of WW2. Seemingly we leant nothing, would things have turned out differently if this history had been documented and telegraphed around the world?

A few people asked me — should I see it? I think its a personal decision that warrants a few minutes of thought. We are at war today and almost everything we see if filtered through the sanitized lens of our media — this film is about war and the depths of human depravity, its not nice and the loose ends aren’t tied up in a way that gives you any closure. The bravery of a few people is a small measure compared to the depth of evil that is documented. I never understood the degree of attention that rested on Koizumi’s decision to visit the Tokyo War Shrine. I now understand what an historical affront that was.

Finally, documenting the tools of war propaganda — so literally — was something I had never seen before. It’s clear why this history was never clearly documented or told in Japanese history books. Why the soldiers wanted the westerners out of the city before the military arrived. Seeing clips of Japanese journalist filming children getting candy from soldiers as the people of Nanking were been “liberated” — while nothing could have been closer to the truth. Even if you insist on discussing the many subjective truths that make up history — there needs to be some averaging, and history here has been seemingly devoid of any perspective. Nanking is a reminder to chew carefully before consuming any news media today. For that reason alone I think its worth seeing the film.

Broccoli season is over. Its strange and wonderful to be living in a country where vegetables are truly tied to the seasons. I am so accustomed to boundless choice available in NYC. No more broccoli for a while — asparagus it is. Spring is really here, almost 70 today.

The other day I was taking one of my children into Como. We came across some traffic, a police escort starting coming towards us in the opposite lane. I thought it must be a local dignitary or maybe the local soccer team — but after a while we figured out that the Olympic torch was coming our way. A young school aged girl was holding the torch. I took a snap with my motorola phone, not great quality but here it is.

This could become a rant about phones and how hard it is to move personal media off them, to save, share or publish but for now leaving this as a picture of a wonderful moment of happenstance.