I think this means it’s autumn now.
…after 7 years or so of trying to name my variables Colour instead of Color I just gave up and switched to using the American version. It’s just too confusing to have 2 different versions of the same word all over the code and most programmers seem to believe that it should be spelled color these days any way. It seems kind of stupid that I should be fussy about spelling in this instance when pretty much no one else will ever see it whilst my general standard is so slap-dash but still I feel slightly defeated by the whole thing.
…or whatever the writing equivalent of silence is. I’ve just been really busy and ill. I’ve got a kind of semi-new job - basically my old job plus some extra bits - which has radically cut back the amount of time I can devote to filling the internet with nonsense and doing any productive work (I’ve had my current (potentially quite excellent) project open all day and haven’t written so much as a semi-colon).
Also as I was saying to Neil the other night, Facebook is kind of killing the rest of the web for me, soaking up its nutrients (people’s attention) like a kind of cultural Japanese bindweed. So I’ve been inclined to spend less time online. Also my massive backlog of email and rss feeds is kind of off-putting.
Being someone who does quite a bit of information visualization type stuff for a job this article about “modern approaches” to the craft has popped up on my internet radar several times over the past few weeks. I’d like to have more time to write about this stuff but you know, work etc. suffice it to say the quality is variable. When I’m looking at an info-graphic or a piece of data visualization I always think of this from the first page of the first Tufte book.
Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity , precision and efficiency. Graphical displays should
- show data
- induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic-design, the technology of production, or something else
- avoid distorting what the data have to say
- make large data sets coherent
- encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data
- reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure
- serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration
- be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of the dataset.
Graphics reveal data.
Point two is particularly salient. It’s tempting to get caught up in a new toy and I think a lot of examples of the modern approach draw the viewer towards the technology of production rather than the substance of the data. There’s nothing wrong with making nice visual displays but it’s not the same thing as elucidating data, making it accesible or improving peoples understanding of it.
A massive shot of nostalgia via Jude Rogers’s weblog. There’s massive amounts of Chart Show content on You Tube. The indie chart that Jude embeds is a bit before my time in 1991 I was 100% about the rock chart. I only got into indie around the time of the chart below (1993) before which point the indie chart was always a source of dissapointment in our house esp. if it had the Soup Dragons on….
Singer Tanya’s nickname of “T” comes from a childhood habit of sucking herbal teabags!
… anyway, I was of the opinion that Tanya Donelly was totally hott. Amazingly she now has a website where she’s posted the original demos that went on to become Star the first Belly record which is really great. I remember skating around Altrincham ice rink on Paul’s birthday listening to Feed The Tree.
The chart I most looked forward to was the dance chart, I was totally captivated by the cheapness of it all and the massively over the top aesthetic that some of the videos displayed, none of the tasteful artiness of the indie chart or the ‘darkness’ of the rock chart instead you get juddering strobe cut footage of people wearing stupid clothes crudelty video toastered on top of swirling, palette cycling, Mandlebrot sets. Of course there was also a lot of that kind of light garage stuff, but just check out the brief snippet of the Altern8 video in the chart below, how cool is that?
SL2’s latest fan is Paul Mcartney who heard this track whilst listening to London’s Kiss FM!
For some reason there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of rock charts on the site.
I knew if I waited long enough some one else would say it better than I could. Basically I’ve had a kind of unease about the way social spaces in the Web 2.0 world are being sold in terms of business goals, of efficiency and the free market (treated as unquestionably a good thing as ever) etc.
Anyway…
The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0
What has changed is that these otherwise secluded and organic realms of social interaction are now the focus of obsessive technological innovation and commercial interest. The same technological zeal and business acumen that once was applied to improving the way we buy a book or pay our car tax is now being applied to the way we engage in social and cultural activities with others.
In short, efficiency gains are no longer being sought only in economic realms such as retail or public services, but are now being pursued in parts of our everyday lives where previously they hadn’t even been imagined. Web 2.0 promises to offer us ways of improving the processes by which we find new music, new friends, or new civic causes. The hassle of undesirable content or people is easier to cut out. We have become consumers of our own social and cultural lives.
…
a crucial aspect of human relations … is missed out and threatened as a result. This is that the means by which people discover, choose or access something can very often contribute its value. People are not only outcome-oriented.
Obviously the comments in response to the article are mainly variations on the standard “technology == neutral” type nonsense. Technology obviously isn’t neutral it’s designed with a function in mind. For some reason people seem to confuse technology with the laws of physics. I think this is a similar problem to the one mentioned in the article above, kind of an interpretive scale mistake (there must be amore elegant term); trying to explain a phenomenon at the wrong scale - like trying to explain natural selection at the level of chemical reactions, or technological change at the level of physics, or social benefit and quality in terms of number of connections made, messages sent or otehr such metrics.
Treating techology as morally neutral and an inevitable product of nature is, I guess, the kind of position that leads to the idea that because something is technologically possible it must be permissable, a view which is totally pervasive in tech culture (extremist objections to copyright etc.), it ignores the fact that plenty of stuff that’s possible isn’t permissable, acts of violence etc.
Anyway, enough digression. Lets look at something that Bertrand Russell back in the day (1937):
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy.