Window Shopping 2.0

The Modern Materialist. Guys. Seriously. Check it out.

Photo: Bicycle in Pink

pink bicycle, harvard yard, originally uploaded by galacticsupersleuth.

Video: The Ghost of Mario, or, How I Learned to Type

Mario's Ghost: How I Learned to Type from Diana Kimball on Vimeo.

So! Besides trundling around on the Internet and digging up the life stories of ancient amateur magicians, I also have another hobby, and that is: making videos for the fantastic Digital Natives project at the Berkman Center. Well. I guess it's sort of my job, but it doesn't feel like a job, because it's so interesting. A job-hobby. A jobby?

Anyway!

Today, I shot the first few clips for an upcoming feature on typing. We're less interested in the mechanics, though, and more interested in the miniature anecdotes surrounding memories of technology. And! In the spirit of this endeavor, two of my interviewees were kind enough to record my own reckless memories on the topic.

Note: In this video, I am somewhat squished. Also, at some point I declare that I am "twenty, too," but obviously this sounds exactly like "twenty-two." Homophones, blech!

So: watch at your own risk. And if you're brave and gullible enough to jump in on this, there's still time! Just shoot me a line at diana (dot) kimball (at) gmail (dot) com.

It's Easy to Love Apple

David Pogue has a great post up today, about the vagaries of industrial design. I'd actually read it, marveled over it, and dropped it this morning, all before nickd pinged me out of the blue. (As he is wont to do!) Same article. His reaction: "This is one of the most taut and well-reasoned summaries of industrial design that I've seen in years. And it came from a tech reviewer, not a designer or purported expert."

So true. And as I said at the time, "Something's very wrong with that picture. Or else, something's very right." Hard to deny that Pogue's onto something. Money quote from the article:

The only question, then, is why manufacturers don't actually bother doing what's right. I'm sure they have all kinds of excuses for compromise: "That would cost money," "That would set us back a month," "That would limit sales in Eastern Europe," whatever.

But you don't have to have an M.B.A. to understand that refusing to compromise on design, for any reason, can lead to fantastic commercial success. Look at Apple, Google, Sonos, R.I.M. (makers of the BlackBerry), or (in its glory days) Palm.

There's no excuse for bad design. Or rather: there are plenty of excuses, but none of them are worthwhile. I think this is abundantly clear when you look at web 2.0. Everyone starts with the same tool set (if not the same skill set) of available coding technologies. Bandwidth, server space, etc. are all pretty commoditized. So how do sites differentiate themselves?

Through design. Since it's easy to erase, start over, retract, and amend—especially for sites in Perpetual Beta—the best of them do exactly that. Yes, it's harder for companies who make physical products. But the incentives are clear. Intuitive design doesn't always make you the market leader (see: Apple), but it often makes you a consumer darling (see: Apple.) Good design leads to emotional connections with products. It leads to evangelization. Windows Mobile machines have, in some respects, fuller feature sets than iPhones. But few people care. Because with an iPhone, you know exactly what to do with it. It's a pleasure to poke around, play around, and discover. Without good design, this process of discovery ends up feeling more like an ordeal. And if there's one thing consumers aren't in the market for, it's an ordeal.

At any rate: very smart post from Pogue. Thanks to nickd for reading my mind! I'll be thinking about this for a long time to come.

Photo: Baseball Shirt, Brother's Closet

baseball shirt, originally uploaded by galacticsupersleuth.

...I'm developing an alarmingly large collection of photographic fabric swatches.

Making Mischief

This is why I love the Internet. Two days ago, I posted a dusty fragment about amateur magicians. Today, I heard from my friend Oliver. He'd dusted off the fragment, and made the connection I'd been longing to. I knew it was there, but it was somewhere just out of my reach. So Oliver, brilliantly, made it for me.

You see: Oliver was a teenage hacker. In the best sense of the word. These days, he is a very respectable Protector of Computers. But he still retains an air of imminent mischief, and that's something I like in computer-protectors. It keeps things interesting.

Anyway! Oliver handily drew a parallel between the culture of amateur magicians at the turn of the twentieth century and hacker culture in the 1990s-early 2000s. With his a-okay, I've pasted the text of this observation below:

Just read your post on magicians and I find a striking parallel with the hacking scene. Real hacking isn't magic and there are no single "give me all your password" commands. It is simply attainment of a superior level of knowledge about some niche in computing. One simply needed to be obsessive enough to devote the time and study. Given the current economy it is actually possible to become rich and, somewhat, famous. And there is good money in providing script kiddies, read amateur magicians, with tools and tutorials. Especially if you stretch this
analogy to include IT administrators of every flavor of Fortune 500 company as the amateurs.

What really drew me in though was the idea of information exchanges. The "scene" was the life blood of the hacker. The free flow of information was incredible in the 90's when there wasn't as much commercial success to be had. If only you knew where to look.

So true! When I first wrote that paper about amateur magicians, I got the nagging feeling that I was looking at one tiny corner of a larger phenomenon. Little did I know that this phenomenon manifested itself most recently in a world of empty pizza boxes and Surge soda.

If you draw any clever parallels of your own, be sure to let me know! Claiming some "American cult of the amateur" may have been timidly audacious of me, but I'd love to be proven just a little bit righter. Or wronger.

Thanks also to Jason, who wrote me a very nice email today about the delights of esoteric history. The short version of our exchange: Esoteric history! It's delightful!

That said, I'm thinking that historians and hackers should maybe forge some sort of alliance. We could make all sorts of marvelous mischief. Any takers?

Brother Grimm

brother grimm 1, originally uploaded by galacticsupersleuth.

I'm taking a course on children's literature this spring. It may be called "Childhood: History, Philosophy, and Literature," but mostly it just means I'm going to get to read Matilda again. And I'm pretty incredibly happy about that. To celebrate, I thought I'd post this photo of Brother Grimm, the slightly unsettling porcelain mailman who lives on my bookshelf.

Practical Magic and the American Cult of the Amateur

Once upon a time, I wrote a paper about amateur magicians. It was titled "The Man With the Marvellous Hands: Practical Magic and the American Cult of the Amateur, 1897-1915." The word "marvellous" had two l's because magicians at the turn of the twentieth century were so great that a single l could not communicate their sheer greatness. That is, if you believe all the old magicians' magazines I read.

I am inclined to believe them. Because the magicians? They were really pretty great.

I talk about this paper quite a bit; it's one of the many far-fetched projects I can't believe I've been lucky enough to work on here at Harvard. There I was, a first-semester freshman, and one Professor John Stilgoe was kind enough to accept my audacious claim that I would learn everything about amateur magicians and their networks of information exchange at the turn of the twentieth century.


I did not learn everything.

But I did learn a surprising amount, huddled in the Harvard Theatre Collection with yellowing magazines arrayed before me. And as I was thinking about what new Internet trend I could gossip about today, I realized that magicians' magazines have taught me at least as much as BoingBoing has about shared interest networks and the passions that make communities come alive.

It's true. This, too, is far-fetched. Far-fetched ideas, though, are occasionally useful! In the process of going far to fetch them, you are likely to encounter something interesting along the way, right? And so, I give to you: amateur magicians, in the form of a brief and, I hope, somewhat tantalizing excerpt.

...The driving force behind the magical craze [at the turn of the twentieth century] was not a polite and appreciative general public, but a throng of fanatically ambitious males. For these men, magical performances were to their ambition what girly shows were to their libido: tantalizing visions of what would be attainable if only one knew how to go about attaining it. [The famous magician] Herrmann’s biography noted that the successful magician at the turn of the twentieth century was “applauded for his deftness, for his ingenuity, for his scientific attainments and his general cleverness, and he becomes famous just as the successful physician, the able lawyer, the brilliant writer, the clear statesman, the bright inventor, and all others who attain high places in any respectable and helpful calling.” The magician’s apparent cleverness and ingenuity – absolute prerequisites for success in any realm of male achievement – were what left his ambitious male audience starstruck and wanting more.

As demand for magicians’ acts increased, fueled by the attentions of these spellbound men, the diffuse coterie of isolated magicians began to realize that they might benefit from commiserating and exchanging knowledge with other like-minded people. However, since the magicians were linked not by locality but by an eccentric and highly individual profession, a traditional club complete with meetings and refreshments would have been an ineffective initial organizing device. Instead, a niche publication emerged onto the scene. Entitled The Sphinx: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine Devoted Exclusively to Magic and Magicians, it served as a structuring mechanism for the burgeoning ranks of magicians. It was a monthly periodical, yes, but it was also the de facto clearinghouse for all information regarding magicians; in effect, it created the magical community. This structure, in organizing professionals, also built the bodies of knowledge, resources, and connections necessary to attract and absorb what turned out to be the most lucrative group of all to the magical industry: the wealthy, would-be amateurs for whom magic was a fantasy hobby.

Amateur magicians poured their energy – and money – into this fantasy hobby because it offered them everything their humdrum careers did not: novelty, power, and the instructions for success. The democratization of magical knowledge through The Sphinx, the magnanimity of its dissemination by the postal service, made parlor magic an even more popular pursuit for the particularly industrious man. In place of a secret society, it created a society of secrets; in place of an impenetrable hierarchy of the elite, it built an accessible meritocracy...

And it goes on. And on. If you are of the two-l school of magical greatness, you should write to me! And I will send you the rest, and we can talk about how truly marvellous all those magicians really were.

Maybe next week I will talk about my research on fallout shelters and consumerism! I've got a huge collection of crazy history papers, kids, and it's not getting any smaller. Brace yourselves, is all I'm saying.

Photo: Like the View from an Airplane in Spring

blue, teal, lime, originally uploaded by galacticsupersleuth.

Fact: these are actually socks.

Seman-tics

Not too long ago, Facebook banished the mandatory "is" from its status updates feature. Now, the "is" is optional.

Panic!

In my experience, grammars of the internet evolve around the constraints at hand. Before we had yellow emoticons, we had typographical ones. When technology itself evolves to accommodate these grammars, we get strange backwards-compatible tics. Like in MS Word, whenever you type ":)", it will auto-correct to an upright smiley face. This is strangely disconcerting to me. What was wrong with colon-end-parenthesis?

Nothing. Nothing was wrong with it.

And so I feel about Facebook's much-celebrated abolition of "is." Used to be, you would have one choice: fill in the blank. In my case, it would have been "Diana is"..., and I would have supplied some vaguely witty and obscure sentiment. Every now and then, I mean.


The constraints of this system led to some creative adaptations. The mandatory presence of "is" meant that everyone accepted workarounds. "[Blank] is sandstorm," I read one day, and I knew just how she felt.

Sure, the grammarians of Facebook pushed hard for "is" to disappear; I seem to remember an impressively persistent petition on behalf of this change. Sometimes, they argued, you are not "is." Jedediah is not "is wanting hamburger;" he just wants it.

With this, I can sympathize. I believe in grammar. But I also believe that there are different grammars for different occasions. And so I felt a strange, and miniature, sense of loss when Facebook made the "is" optional. One day, soon after the switch, one of my infrequent urges to update my status struck. "Diana," I wanted to write, "is hang on, siobhan." Well. Okay. I still wrote it. But since the "is" was no longer part of our shared automatic grammar, I had trouble justifying leaving it in.

Incidentally, I felt a similar (and similarly miniature) sense of loss when I realized that my cellphone had an apostrophe after all. For months, while text messaging, I had secretly reveled in the fact that no matter how many times I pressed the "1" button for punctuation, I could never uncover an apostrophe. It was not a choice, and so I did not have to apologize for it! "im in the lobby," I could type, care- and apostrophe-free!

And then. I discovered an entire menu of punctuation. Since the constraints had changed, my grammatical expectations had, too. I retreated from the vernacular future, and went back to my habits of complete sentences.

But maybe, someday, technology will truly turn around, and then it will be back to the future. If no one uses apostrophes, then why put them on the main menu? If people can adapt their sentiments around an "is," creating a new vocabulary, why go backwards?

I know these things are small. This post is entirely about miniature matters. But, as Facebook's anti-is petition shows, people do notice, and a few of them even care. Through arbitrary limits, technologies gently shape what seems possible. And whether that's a timid grammatical leap or a braver advance in imagination, that process is worth noticing.

Motorcycles and Egregious Flashes

motorcycle on porch, originally uploaded by galacticsupersleuth.

One month of daily photos, and strange things will start to seem urgent. Running around, late at night, brushing teeth and thinking about sleep, I will stop. Oh no. The photo.

As usual, January began with wide-eyed optimism and a remarkable faith in calendars and plans. In fact, you can read all about these plans here and here, and you will find that I was excited to finally became a camera person, Someone Who Takes Pictures. (Incidentally, I am very fond of the way that Erin articulated a similar idea, the bold wish that photography was What She Did.)

I certainly do take pictures, now, but here is how it goes:

Okay. Time to take a picture. It is very late at night.

That sure is a nice set of socks right there. They are different colors.

Okay. I will photograph them at different angles, very very close up so that they fill the frame. Hmm. They are blurry. Okay! They are artistic!

And then:

Oh no! What was it that I decided, again? One of my pictures every day in January had to contain a human? Do I count? Is that against the rules?

Wait, I made the rules!

Okay. I will take a photo with egregious flash, camera held at arm's length, and smile widely.

This happened actually just about every day. So now I have many, many close-up photos of household objects, and also many, many pictures of myself smiling widely and bathed in the harsh light of a strong flash.

Sometimes, though, I did go outside. These timid steps into the great outdoors yielded photos like this one, of a black motorcycle on a porch. The railing was light blue, and the concrete was light gray, so it all seemed very right.

(I go outside often, actually, but the eleventh hour right before I sleep is normally spent indoors. And the eleventh hour is when I take photos. Thus: socks, dinner plates, file cabinets.)

As I wrote on that second day of January, I love looking at the world through a photographer's eyes. Maybe the motorcycle was my bravest photograph of the entire month—the owner of the house backed his car out of the garage just as I scuttled away, shy of capturing his belongings on imaginary film. It was not very brave, I mean. But I wouldn't have taken the photo otherwise, and I was very happy that I had a reason to notice an old motorcycle on a porch, and to take it with me.