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Craig Mod has just published a thoughtful, insightful, and beautifully-presented essay on the future of books in the digital era, using the emergence of devices like the Kindle and the iPad as his focus:

This essay could usefully be cross-referenced with Part 2 of Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics from 2000. In other words, some of what’s on offer here is not that new. However, the distinction between Formless and Definite Content is new (to me, at least) and provides a convincing armature around which the essay revolves. And if you need convincing about the inevitability of the move away from printed matter, here it is.

An excellent piece of work, highly recommended. The page must die!

Soul Trapper is a very well-produced application for the iPhone that developers Realtime call an ‘audio adventure’: you experience it as if you were listening to a radio play, but at certain points you have to interact with it, giving it a game-like dimension as well.

The story, set in modern-day Los Angeles, plays out as a cross between the 1940s detective novels of Raymond Chandler and, say, Ghostbusters. This rather unlikely combination actually works rather well and after an initial acclimatization period I truly found myself getting involved with the characters and their Hellish plights. It’s more pulp than Chandler ever was, but the dialogue is littered with Marlowe-esque wisecracks and mannerisms and the locations are classic Chandler: missionary churches, surf-spattered coastlines, Cahuenga Boulevard, horseshoe-boothed bars. It’s a world where tough guys don’t drink their whisky, they inhale it.

There’s not much going on graphically. Each of the 23 chapters is simply represented by a single stark image. You’re listening. In fact, you find yourself listening really hard because many of the cues are quite subtle. In order to support this need for detailed listening the quality of the audio is very high throughout, and you’re best off with a decent set of headphones: many of the tasks would simply be unplayable over the iPhone’s speaker.

There are some great audio set pieces later in the game. Whilst in Hell (!) you play the hero swordfighting with a demon and you have to parry his strokes by listening to which side they’re coming from, and then very quickly parry them using onscreen buttons: very Luke Skywalker. Later, whilst recovering from this ordeal, you have to ‘centre your chakras’ by remixing synth tones in real-time. Brilliant, intuitive, fun.

It isn’t perfect: some of the voice acting is a bit cheesy; certain sections of the dialogue are merely functional; and in places the interaction isn’t all that meaningful or productive. But, overall, Soul Trapper is well worth the admission price and good value-for-money at £3.99.

So why am I reviewing Soul Trapper exactly? Well, here’s a couple of reasons:

Firstly, I am intrigued and fascinated by the idea of telling a story using only audio. In our Internet-driven world the default communications strategy privileges images and, in particular, moving images. It is a relief, therefore, to come across a developer willing to attempt something different.

As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, media exist on a continuum between hot and cool (where by ‘hot’ he means high resolution, narrow bandwidth, requiring total concentration from the user, total involvement). By focusing on audio to tell their story, Realtime have exploited these characteristics of a hot medium to excellent effect.

Secondly, I am also intrigued and fascinated by the interactive narrative elements. The plot itself is not open to manipulation by the user: about the most you can do is effect the order conversations play out, or the way in which the protagonist moves around the limited maps. However, to make up for this, the story fair motors along, and you’re recompensed by some unusual interactive game-like elements (as mentioned above) that crop up in most chapters.

It really is quite an interesting and cost-effective solution to the problems presented by any type of interactive narrative. I shall be interested to see how Realtime develop these ideas in future releases.

To sum up: an excellent release for the iPhone. Highly entertaining and very interesting.

Last June I discussed the print version of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is The Massage. However, along with the print publication of it in 1967, there was also a “long-playing record” of the same name released by CBS.

L > R: Jerome Agel, Quentin Fiore, McLuhan, and John Simon of CBS.

The whole thing is presented as an audio collage focused around McLuhan’s own voice reading parts of the book. There are other “character” voices—’the old man’, ‘the Hippie chick’, ‘the Irishman’, ‘Mom’, ‘the little girl’, etc.—who utter McLuhanisms, snatches from Pop culture, and excerpts from Finnegans Wake and The Iliad. Weaving amongst these is a very 1960s selection of jazz, classical, and psychedelic pop musics. This is all topped off with incursions from the recording engineer, backwards tape effects, sped-up and slowed-down voices, ambient recordings, and a whole jungle of other Foley and sound FX. Crazy, man!

Perhaps the worst part of it are the character voices: some of them really are quite bad. Why is that when producers want ‘an old man’ they don’t just get a real old man; it’s not like they’re in short supply. But, no: rather than use an old man to read these parts, we’ll get someone to imitate an old man! Sheesh. Why bother? As my old man used to say: “If you’re going to do a job, do it properly.”

So there we have it. I’m not sure what these recordings add to the McLuhan ouvre, other than to highlight this one point: McLuhan works very well as speech. His public speaking was an important facet of his professional life, and his capacity for talk was legendary. Most of his books were dictated. He’s a very oral person.

Anyway, judge for yourself:

The Medium Is The Massage, Side 1 (26.6MB MP3)
The Medium Is The Massage, Side 2 (31.7MB MP3)

Eric Havelock’s Preface To Plato is a book I’d come across often: McLuhan frequently cites it, as does Walter Ong in Orality & Literacy. Well just before Xmas I got round to reading it, and I’ve just re-read it this week. I have been deeply impressed by the book because of its wealth of ideas, its deep sense of scholarship, and because it is so well written: for a book on such a relatively obscure and ancient subject it is a surprisingly good read. Despite being an overtly academic text it manages to provoke a deep sense of wonder about ancient Greek culture, and offers a tantalizing glimpse of the unfathomable alien-ness of their ways of thinking.

The book begins by asking why Plato makes such a sustained and vehement attack on poetry in The Republic. Havelock suggests it is because ‘poetry’ for the Greeks at that time—around 360 BC—bears almost no relation to the rather ephemeral art form we now know, but was an “encyclopedic” repository for the culture’s storehouse of knowledge. It was central to the preservation of the culture’s history, traditions, belief systems, social mores, and technology. It was as important didactically as it was for entertainment.

Because this culture was primarily an oral culture, memorization was achieved through repetition. This is because sound is an ephemeral medium where each utterance disappears the moment it has ceased, and it is only through ritualistic and incessant repetition that information can be maintained in the group consciousness. This creates a hypnotic, trance-like, mental state that Havelock likens to indoctrination, where “the task of education could be described as putting the whole community into a formulaic state of mind”. It was this that Plato was railing against.

Havelock’s argument is that Plato represented a new type of man: the literate man. Literacy allowed information to be stored externally. This “preserved knowledge” broke the spell over the hypnotized oral culture and allowed new means of expression, categorization, abstract thought, and the creation of ’subject’ and ‘object’. That is, rationalism, and the “supreme music” of philosophy. Havelock goes on to say that Plato, and later Aristotle:

… created ‘knowledge’ as an object and as the proper content of an educational system, divided into the areas of ethics, politics, psychology, physics, and metaphysics. Man’s experience of his society, of himself and of his environment was now given separate organised existence in the abstract word.

 
This then is the conceptual core of Preface To Plato. It’s a marvelous book. Along the way there’s lots of good stuff about narrative, performance, the relation of performers to their audience, and plenty of interesting textual analysis of The Iliad.

However, although I do basically agree with Havelock’s position, I think he has overstated the influence and importance of epic poetry as an oral culture’s means of storing knowledge (which in this particular context means overstating the importance of Homer). There are certainly other ways of remembering things without writing—images, song, ritual, plays, sculpture, and story, for example. This criticism is borne out by critics such as Halverson.

Nonetheless, wholeheartedly recommended.

References
Halverson, J. (1992) ‘Havelock on Greek Orality and Literacy’ in the Journal of The History of Ideas.
Havelock, E. (1963) Preface To Plato. Cambridge, London: Belknap Press.
Ong, W. (2002) Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.

Earlier this week my colleague John Hill and I attended this year’s D&AD Xchange 07 conference at the London College of Fashion. It was very well organized, very interesting, and we met a lot of nice people. Here’s my notes from the event:

Carlos Segura is a designer with his roots firmly embedded in old-school typography. He has an enviable track record of graphic design, a portfolio of which can be found at Segura Inc. This also includes links to his typography site T.26 and designer blank media site 5″ (amongst others). For me the highlight of his presentation was his work for stock photo company Corbis, especially the Crop series: rather than just present examples from their library in standard thumbnail format, he created large-scale diptychs printed on various high-quality papers where each pair of images tells a little story:

The juxtaposition of images was humorous, provocative, and sometimes outright shocking. I love this sort of thing, where meaning resides somehow in the space between the images, or as McLuhan would say, in the resonant interval. Best quote:

By doing what others do, you become invisible…

I also found Segura’s presentation interesting because of his use of background music. Normally I would advise students not to use music in this way at all, and I did find it intrusive (despite it all being chilled-out electronica). But in places it was successful: he started off the presentation with a couple of amusing anecdotal stories and these worked with the music, quickly establishing a very strong mood. Never say never.

Ulrich Proeschel of TBWA presented a case study of their marketing of Adidas during the 2006 World Cup Finals. He explained how the whole thing was based around a single idea, +10, and how this was extended out in a deliberate attempt to involve everyone in Germany (especially as the team was playing so badly before the tournament). The highlights of their campaign were a massive Oliver Kahn bridge over the autobahn leading away from Cologne airport:

And, rather than a billboard campaign, just a single huge image on the ceiling of a railway terminus based on the Sistine Chapel:

Needless to say, there was much discussion amongst the delegates about the worldview that sees branding and advertising as culture, a point which was driven home by Ulrich’s classic quote:

The World Cup was really a battle between Adidas and Nike, not 32 football teams.

Paul Priestman gave a presentation which showed off Priestman Goode’s fascinating work on large projects such as the interiors of luxury aircraft, cruise liners, and airport terminals.

Wayne Hemingway came across as a likable, intelligent, humorous, and very down-to-earth guy. However, he’s very much a one-off, and it was very difficult to take anything away that would be more generally useful: you had to be there. Best quote:

It’s all about being a human being that thinks!

Of particular interest was his discussion of our physical environment and the effect it has on behaviour, and his observation that most modern housing developments are simply the “slums of the future.” Hemingway’s design studio is here, and it includes links to his various other enterprises including the delightfully-named retro design resource, Land Of Lost Content.

Andy Hobsbawm and Ben Felton from Agency.com gave a presentation on their work for Ikea. As with Ulrich Proesel above it offered a fascinating insight into the advertising industry, but in this case it was all online stuff. Andy Hobsbawm kicked off with a run through Ikea’s ‘8 core ideas’ about their company identity, and he came across very well, talking intelligently and fluently about a range of new media issues. Best quote (which he acknowledged was from someone at Xerox Parc):

Technology is only technology for people who were born before it was invented.

Ben Felton then showed off some of their work, which to be honest I found a little dull, and a colleague found the “Brussels Sprout slider” on one of their Flash micro-sites quite hilarious. They also came in for a fair bit of stick from the delegates during the Q&A session for their unquestioning attitude to new media dogma. True believers.

There we have it. There were some other very good speakers, and I’ll be doing a couple of follow-up pieces on them individually. Ciao!

I recently bought Marshall McLuhan: Escape Into Understanding, a biography by W. Terrence Gordon. Originally published in 1997, the book has become available again due to the Gingko Press’s laudable and long overdue McLuhan reissue programme.

However, before reading it I decided to re-read the first McLuhan biog, Phillip Marchand’s Marshall McLuhan: The Medium And The Messenger. This was originally released in 1989 (but again remains available in the form of a 1998 MIT reissue with a new introduction by Neil Postman). I read it sometime in the early 1990s—a long time ago—and my getting the W. Terrence Gordon book seemed like an ideal opportunity to revisit it:

It’s a very good book: it’s written very clearly and really does attempt to get McLuhan’s difficult ideas across in plain English. The facts of McLuhan’s life are presented in a straightforward narrative, and in particular his difficult relationship with his influential mother really leaps off the page.

Gordon’s book is quite different. Although the basic narrative remains the same—the facts of McLuhan’s life seem unproblematic—the emphasis is quite different. McLuhan’s mother barely registers, whereas the relationship with his wife is touchingly and convincingly portrayed.

Far more of the book is given over to McLuhan’s ideas, which is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand Gordon really does try to (say) fillet out and summarize the complex ideas in Understanding Media in a compact form, but on the other hand his explanations can be as confusing and as jargon-laden as the ideas he’s trying to explain. As a linguist and semiotician he’s far too immured in his own academic discourses.

The two books have many similarities. Both are written by ex-University of Toronto students. Both begin with almost identical opening sentences that unfold into stories outlining the authors’ initial contact with McLuhan. And as I’ve said, their basic narratives of McLuhan’s life are almost identical, albeit with different emphases. Perhaps the biggest difference between them, therefore, is the fact that the Gordon book comes from the Internet age whereas the Marchand book just precedes it. In those intervening ten years McLuhan’s ideas gained new currency as a result of the profound integration of computer networks into society, and the resulting (and ongoing) reconfiguration of all levels of society that this provoked. Gordon’s book therefore reflects this current re-analysis and re-evaluation of McLuhan in ways that Marchand’s book simply cannot.

For myself, I came away from these books with a renewed respect for McLuhan, and—ironically—a sense that I understood his work less than I did before. However, what this really means is that I’ve discovered new levels of meaning that I didn’t even know were there: McLuhan’s work on the Trivium (and the implications of this); his in-depth understanding of ideas like ’cause and effect’; the origin and effects of his compressed and aphoristic writing style; metaphor; etc.. I’ve discovered that even many of his most obvious and oft-used ideas are not straightforward: for example, what exactly did he mean when talking about ‘acoustic space’? Why is ‘visual space’ three-dimensional and ‘acoustic space’ only two-dimensional? And finally, is McLuhan a linguist? A communications theorist? Surrealist poet? Not that he would have cared what you called him, but you get the idea…

Truly fascinating stuff.

There’s a 1968 TV show called The Summer Way that has been posted online by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation featuring Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan in conversation.

Fabulous it is too: two intellectual heavyweights delicately tip-toeing around one another in front of a live audience and, presumably in those days, also broadcast live. Mailer looks very nervous early on and is clearly at sea, and in the end just muscles his way out of trouble. McLuhan is very calm, very cool, and seems completely in control. He just flies loops around Mailer, and the amused looks on his face at some of Mailer’s comments are absolutely priceless.

It’s about half an hour long and is pure historical gold. Because it’s on Google video I can’t embed it on this page, so clicking here will bring it up in a new window. Enjoy!

In designing all functions and all data structures, a computer programmer tries always to use variables rather than constants. On the level of the human-computer interface, this principle means that the user is given many options to modify the performance of a program or a media object, be it a computer game, Web site, Web browser, or the operating system itself. The user can change the profile of a game character, modify how folders appear on the desktop, how files are displayed, what icons are used, and so forth. If we apply this principle to culture at large, it would mean that every choice responsible for giving a cultural object a unique identity can potentially always remain open.

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.

Back in January I had a good look at the iPhone and Jefferson Han’s work on multi-touch interfaces (here and here). And for those of you looking to gain some kind of contextualization on this fascinating and highly topical area of interface design I’ve recently come across Bill Buxton’s historical overview.

I casually mention these only by way of introduction to Microsoft’s (ahem) “new paradigm in computing”, the Surface computer. Here’s one of Microsoft’s own promotional videos:

For something a little more illuminating, and that briefly includes schematics showing the innards of the Surface:

And for the inner geek, here’s a full 18-minute test-drive of the thing:

Yes, it’s pretty impressive (although the thought of that bog-standard PC running Windows Vista hiding inside is a bit off-putting). Some thoughts:

1. It’s not clear how the security issues will work. I mean, have you ever transferred data from one device to another without generating security prompts? As these will be public devices it seems inconceivable that security will not be a huge issue, and yet not once do we see anyone even inputting a PIN number in any of the videos. As if!
2. Will all manufactured objects become ‘tagged’ in the near future to allow interfacing with surface computers?
3. If so, will there develop a universal tagging language that will be understood by all “surface-compatible” products?
4. Can we predict a new job description: Surface Designer?
5. I do think there is a certain inevitability about this type of product.
6. The ability of the Surface to act as a ‘docking station’ for mobile devices calls to mind one of McLuhan’s Laws of Media: if you push a technology to an extreme it flips over into it’s opposite. In other words, as mobile devices have gotten smaller and yet more powerful, the tendency for miniaturization flips over into single large device that many of them can simultaneously attach to like a Mother Ship.
7. Doesn’t the Microsoft Surface remind you of those black glass-topped gaming tables you used to find in pubs? Space Invaders, anyone?

Of course there are those who quite rightly question Microsoft’s presumptuous and overblown claims for their product: British multi-touch interface designer Andrew Fentem has a reasonable and well-argued critique of both Microsoft and Jefferson Han here. Fentem’s own Spaceman Technologies website is well worth checking out by multi-touch aficionados.

Finally, irresistibly, if only to puncture the corporate pomposity of Microsoft:

A couple of weeks ago, in an idle moment, I picked up The Medium is the Massage again and read it from cover to cover. It took me about an hour. Since then, I’ve read it cover to cover twice more, and am constantly dipping into it. I love it.

The Medium is the Massage wasn’t actually “written” by McLuhan:

The book had in fact been composed by Jerome Agel, who had written a profile of McLuhan in 1965, and Quentin Fiore, a first-class book designer. The two selected or commissioned photographs to accompany excerpts they culled and reshaped from various writings and statements of McLuhan’s. [...] McLuhan contributed the punning title and approved the text and layouts. Agel and Fiore evidently did their work well: McLuhan changed only one word. Their mix of text and visuals was indeed a virtuoso feat. They used arresting photographs and artwork and performed interesting experiments with type, laying it upside down, on the slant, or in mirror image, switching its size from page to page, switching between regular and boldface, and so on.
Agel referred to the result as a “cubist” production. McLuhan recognized that it was an effective sales brochure for his ideas. (Marchand 1989, p.192)

Exactly forty years on, the book stands up well: it’s very digital media. The book is a riot of collages, visual puns, voice prints, excerpts from newspapers and magazines, cartoons, abstract patterns, extreme close-ups, black- and white-negative space, and runs the whole gamut of typographical experimentation. It’s the sort of thing that would be quite easy to do now, but was probably very difficult in 1967.

Set against and around this visual feast are expertly chosen and edited nuggets of McLuhan’s writing. The text bounces off the images, argues and agrees with them, works in concert and opposition. It resonates. It’s metaphoric.

The Medium is the Massage remains McLuhan’s bestselling book, and it’s easy to see why: the brevity, the condensation, the humour, the life offered by the interplay between text and image. It’s deep and entertaining. As an introduction to McLuhan it is second to none.

References
Marchand, P. (1989) Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. New York: Tickner & Fields.
McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. (1967) The Medium is the Massage. San Francisco: Hardwired.