fishers, surfers and casters

A couple of weeks ago, the Tech Weekly podcast offered a pretty good introduction to the range of conversations, aspirations and fears about Apple’s iCloud service to be offered to Mac and other iProduct owners in a few months.

When it comes to Cloud computing services, Apple is arguably a late starter. Many organisations have relied on Google services for years, while mere individuals have benefited from free services like Dropbox. Even Microsoft offered free online and sharing services for users of Microsoft 2010, which I think is a really good system, as long as you have the cash to install its expensive software on everything you use, and the local library’s or Internet cafe’s browsers are up to date (which you can never really expect). The word is though, that iCloud, together with new iOS for Apple’s mobile devices, will mean that the company will catch up pretty quickly, offering users online storage of music, documents, mobile apps, books.

Apple’s catch-up will represent a real turn in the way all operating system creators and service providers will assume its marketplace to be. Not long ago, say, early this century even, these creators (MS, Apple and the like) invested in development that allowed ordinary people like me to move their media hub from the lounge room shelf to the desktop in the study or the laptop on the coffee table. Digital natives grabbed that bull by both horns. Spaces in the home that housed CDs and DVDs became free space (or replaced by data storage drives), to the extent that listening to CDs has almost become a new definition for “old guy”.

We could expect that in the 2010s the new turn will be away from the household computer to remote storage. Could it be that soon owning a computer with a large storage space and tower in the study will be the new definition for “old guy”?

Our new reliance on access to cloud services has implications that could keep any dinner-table conversation for a little while, and there are debates in the media. One such conversation is over Apple’s “iTunes Match” service, where, for a subscription fee, a copy of any music stored on your computer that wasn’t bought from the iTunes store will be kept in your iCloud storage service, then synced to all your devices. If you’ve obtained that music illegally and it was matched by Apple, some believe this means that Apple has aided and abetted piracy. I disagree with the tone (and indeed the language) of the article that I just linked to, and I think it’s a fair enough comment that doesn’t warrant such an attack.

However the claim may perhaps contain a slight misconception of the culture of illegal media file sharing and distribution. This article, I think, paints a more accurate picture of everyday use and distribution of illegal/unlicensed material, far beyond the hype that pirates are insidious characters who are conspiring to rob people of incomes, take down companies, and launder profits from theft. In any case, music companies are starting to see more investment value in live performances and merchandising than fighting piracy.

This post could be titled “I like the way you filter” or “Do you think my information is sexy?”.

It seems that less than eight years ago, few people would associate the term "social networking" with computers. Now everybody does. But 2010 saw a couple (among thousands) of programs that would challenge the association of the term to computer programs, and may introduce something new.

If you have iTunes version 10, you would have quite a few messages from the program asking you to join up to Ping, its embedded social networking site. When first seeing it, I wondered why Apple would want to set up another social networking program, but given the demise of Myspace, on which many emerging musicians had depended for gathering an audience, there may be a space opened up for the idea. Initially Ping was criticised for connecting people to music only available through large labels, preventing the introduction of music from the independents, but the update offered through iTunes 10.1 may have started to address this.

I was surprised when I found out about Ping. There are so many stand-alone social networking sites out there. Why would a music player application want to have one of its own? I’m reminded of Castells’ study of cable television back in the day, where he saw a multitude of channels quickly coming about, that were tailored to specific topics and genres. Castells recalled McLuhan’s adage, "The medium is the message," and thought that now the message has become the medium.

We know that Amazon wants to set up a cloud-based music player system, and hear around the traps that Apple and Google are looking in that direction too. The capacity to keep all your music in an online server can allow for a lot of sharing (once all DRM debacles are sorted) between users. A social networking system like Ping would allow for those connections to be easily created, manipulated and contained by users.

Then there’s Flipboard. Designed for the iPad interface, the program arranges posts, status updates and messages sourced from the user’s Facebook, Twitter and blog reader accounts, into blocks on a page, as if you were reading articles from a magazine. Furthermore, if one of your Facebook or Twitter friends posts a link to a web page or video on their profile page, Flipboard will present the video or a preview of the linked page.

Web browsers, when pointed at URLslike facebook.com, tend to privilege the profile, and therefore we see information arranged according to who has sent it. Flipboard, on the other hand, privileges content over the source, arranging information according to either/both the time it arrived or/and the type of content (image/words/video).

I think both Flipboard and Ping present a change in the way we se social networking. The program information that we have about our friends and our online connections with them, while presented as content in Web Browsers, is treated as metadata in these programs. Our "friendships" are to these programs as RSS is to a blog reader. As more programs emerge and their usage grows, we will see the very nature of "friend" change in the context of online social networking. I will no longer add you to Facebook because I want to be connected to you, rather because I like your network and your information.

On 21 December, Richard Lawson posted an “article” on gawker.com, where he embeds a YouTube video of a child who throws a tantrum over receiving books for Christmas, alongside a Wii console and other toys. In the video the child is watched giving his best argument for why books should never be given at Christmas time, and his parents are heard calmly offering admonishment, while obviously entertained by the child’s antics.

Lawson’s argument is far less entertaining, and arguably less eloquent. He calls the child an “asshole”, an example of a country that is going dumb, a “jerk”. In the comment thread that follows, one reader wonders if a “retroactive abortion” is warranted.

In the fledgling digital age, there are some of us that lament the demise of a literate population, the slow death of a rich culture of words and their publishing. Every effort is made by them to remind us that worlds of imagination, which can only exist in the minds of readers, are sacred and must be preserved, and are under threat by the Internet and its attractive devices.

Yet I believe that a better case against the Internet lies here: where a private family event is made public, not for the enjoyment of Internet users, but as a sacrificial lamb for public moralising. And where it is deemed acceptable that a three-year old child is publicly bullied by so-called online journalists and their readers.

I’m reminded of both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, cautionary tales regarding the future of a society that delights in the public shaming of others. These books come from the same country as this posted article. Maybe Richard Lawson should do some more reading.

Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the fourth wave of research into religion online. In this wave it’s recognised that “nobody goes online anymore”, in the sense that the Internet is not something that we intentionally access, necessarily, but that it’s constantly “on” and on the fringe of our daily actions and interactions. It’s also acknowledged that, given our increased access to not just read online text, but to both create text and shape its design and structure, we are capable of making the Internet look like us. Online identities are not shaped just by what information we upload, but by the information we read, share, tag, filter, etc. Researchers into religion online should just think about religion in the religious texts that are created and dispersed in the ether. Rather they should think about what is religious about the Internet that we cultivate.

I am thinking that these issues become more salient when we think about Internet access through mobile technologies, such as phones and e-readers, yet this has been neglected in my own research. I’ve recently been given the opportunity to collaborate on a research project on the iPhone as an object through which religious experience is accessed and mediated. I have some preliminary thoughts which revolve around four key words:

Device – how does the iPhone as an object that is seen and held by its users create the aesthetic conditions for religious experience? Historically, our Internet experiences have been framed by the technology that has sat on desks in private work or study rooms, family rooms, on our laps. It shouldn’t be overlooked that the location of these devices have played a part in the total sensory experience of being online. The pocket-sized, hand-held device, then, changes that experience.

App – how does the applications’ software, based on the operating software of the device, frame the religious text that is produced, consumed and exchanged between connected users? The graphic user interface of the home computer has provided us with vehicle for interactions with others and with the technology, and there has always been an aesthetic dimension to this.

Mobility – given that the iPhone is a personal device, how do users feel a connection to an aesthetic community away from the community’s physical place? Online communities are noted for their lack of place, rather defined by shared symbols and languages than by geography. This is not new. Evidence of community formations through communications beyond place even exist in the Bible. What becomes salient for mobile-mediated communities may be the way that people interact with this sense of place. A friend who is Catholic priest told me of a baptism he conducted recently at his local church. The congregation was full of twenty-somethings, who he believed weren’t really present, given they spent most of their time at the ceremony tweeting, heads down, thumbs a-tapping. After the ceremony ended, these congregants mentioned to him what their online friends thought of what was happening during the service, through the replies to their tweets. My friend discovered there were more people at the service than he could physically see and speak with, but who were nonetheless “there”, and involved in what was going on. Mobile technologies allow people to interact online with people away from their computers and back in churches, and allows people not in churches to interact with people who are.

Cloud – to what extent is physical place known and valued to users, given that all religious text is stored in the “cloud” (i.e. on a server in an unknown location)? “Cloud” has joined our growing set of metaphors for connecting online. More and more, we are dependent on our connection to remote servers to store information and do daily tasks, in order to keep our devices small and more mobile. While the “cloud” simply refers to a computer in a location we may be unaware of, the use of the term brings many connotations that will impact on how we think and act with our devices.