The Importance of History?

As another entry in what is becoming a general theme, I have been wondering about the importance of tradition and history in the transmission and creation of knowledge. This comes from a few different sources, primarily two books I've finished or about to finish: Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (a history of the development of the Pencil, and of engineering in general), and Blue: the Murder of Jazz. In particular, to me, is this question: does the reliance on tradition and history ultimate advance or impede the development of new ideas and innovations?

By inclination and general assumptions, I want to first come down on the side of tradition. I mean, my personal training is in Fine Arts Printmaking, and can trace my heritage back a few hundred years. This tradition informed the techniques and methods I learned, the influences I absorbed, and the art I subsequently created. Like a traditional guild artisian, I learned the craft under the hands of "masters" (in these days called "professors"), who passed on general knowledge and personal techniques for success. This is how knowledge was passed down for hundreds of years - masters who took younger craftsmen under their wings and created an environment for them to be indoctrinated in the mysteries of the craft. Our modern school system, in general, is simply the institutional extension of the apprentice relationship. At least, it was till the last 50 years or so.

However, both Blue and Pencil show flaws in this structured learning. Pencil illustrates the problems and roadblocks caused by this tradition in pencil innovation: the blind adherance to old, outdated methods, the use of secrecy to prevent expansion of the industry, and the rejection of new ideas based on traditional preferences. Blue portrays a more scathing picture: that of a jazz community so committed to its tradtional past that it was losing the innovative qualities and attitudes that made it so vital to 20th Century American culture. While both books do celebrate the repective traditions, they also show that over-adherance leads to stagnation and marginalization.

So, where does the most innovative paths lay? Certainly, it seems that those who push a medium forward are those who break from tradition and try "the unthinkable" (as Buddha says, kill the teacher). Yet without a tie to one's past, one can blindly muddle forward making the same mistakes as one's predecessors. So how does one walk the tightrope between repecting the past while breaking with it to explore the new? Any ideas?

A Digital Responsibility?

Just finished a book on tape, IBM and the Holocaust. It describes the measures taken by IBM to secure, and then hide, cotracts with the Nazi Reich - all for the cause of profit.. The author posits, probably quite correctly, that the extermination of millions of Jews and dissidents would not have been possible without the computations of IBM punch-card machines. Hitler didn't make the trains run on time, IBM did.

I found this book disturbing, of course, for many reasons. But chief of these, for the purpose of this blog, is that this means that our digital inheritance is partially built on the ashes of victims. When I build a database, compile statistics, or construct a mail merge, I am inadvertantly following in the footstep of SS officers as they constructed and indexed the round-up lists for the death camps. The tattoo on each arm wasn't just a number; it was the key value on each victim's punchcards.

And here we are, fifty years removed, helping both public and private enterprises gather data on us. Every credit card purchase, every online form, every questionaire is remembered somewhere. Sure, it would be a monumental undertaking, but the lesson of IBM and WWII is that there's always someone who can organize the immense, for the right price. IBM touted itself as the "solutions" company; it seems our responsibilty (the digirati) to ensure our callings never again provide "final solutions."

And in terms of fair reporting, here is short article on ABC News where IBM internally warns employees about the book.

Quick Link on Digital Design

Here's a quick link to an article by Bill Joy, Chief Scientest for Sun. He begins to articulate a vision where we design digital devices in terms of compatibility and flexibility, preparing for the era of "pervasiveness" in computing. I have always found Joy's ideas visionary and energizing; hope you enjoy!

Travel Blog

From August 7 to August 10, I will be in Denver for a wedding. Unfortunately, it probably means I'll have plenty of time to think for the blog but no way to publish it. Sg I thought I'd keep these notes while gone and publish them all at once. Enjoy!

Darn Airport Security - Day One

Well, survived my first run-in with the TSA, with no lasting bruises. Actually, I have to admit that I've never had a problem with them. Sure, I've been stopped for the "random" searches many times (something about a goatee and metal briefcase), I've never had any real trouble. But I do need to remember to take off my watch before hitting the metal detectors.

The strange thing is that when I pulled my MP3 player from the carry on, it was completely blank. As you can guess, this is not how I left it; I had expected some Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. Now, since my Palm and Digital Camera weren't affected, it could be that the player is on the fritz. But still, fine before the checkpoint, blank after.

Which gets me thinking again to how fragile all this digital info really is. I mean, all our snapshots on the trip will be digital. My link to home, the cell phone, kindly remembers all my numbers digitally. This wonderfully rambling narrative isn't really "written" anywhere; it's all just magnetic states stored in silicon. So today it's the MP3's, what will it be tomorrow? Or to put it another way: I haven't actually touched a tax form in three years. Scary, no?

Now let's assume that Murphy and his followers are right - anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Given enough time, trouble finds us all. So do you have back-ups of everything? Does your doctor? Your business? The IRS? Just as you can expect to be involvep in a car accident or a minor fire once in your life, expect to lose digital data; we're all one checkpoint away from losing it all...

Photograph and Memories - Day 4

Well, Day 4 is here, and you can see how productive I was! It seems like the time to write was on the airplane; think of the frequent flyer miles I'd rack up if I were a novelist. Oh well...

So, at the rehersal dinner (and later the wedding reception), a photo-montage detailing the growth of both groom and bride played to light Christian pop. And during the ceremony, a bevy of cameras (traditional, video, and digital) sprang to life at each highpoint of the ceremony. This, naturally, got me thinking about photography and the nature of reminiscence.

As the critic/philosopher Walter Benjamin posits, a photograph can be seen as time travel, capturing forever the particulars of a place at a time. While the first decades of the medium saw it treated as a novel form of painting, the Twentieth Century saw it concenrate on the particularities the medium afforded. And if you look at everyday, amateur photograph, I believe you'd find "candid" shots dominating the developer's tanks. These attempts to not only capture but freeze our memories in place is so pervasive as to be invisible.

Yet this is not the only means of preserving memories. My example would be the memento, an object or heirloom to which one attaches personal memories. The advantage to this is that the memory is not tied to a particular time and place. For example, when I graduated from college my father presented me with a pocketwatch. This watch was passed down through four generations of sons; it has accompanied me to all subsequent memorable events: weddings, funerals, graduations. I already look forward to presenting it to my son, completing the circle and moving to the next generation. Although the watch doesn't actually "work," it keeps personal time through the Stevens' family.

Now, I don't mean to condemn photos over mementos; rather I encourage the cultivation of both forms. Photographs (digital or otherwise) are, by nature, public; they are easily duplicated, shared, dropped in a frame, and placed on the mantle. Mementos, in contrast, are private (stored in everything from sock drawers to safe deposit boxes). My belief is that by cultivating different forms of "memory," you build a richer tapestry of personal culture for your family and you.

A Word of Warning

To go along with the continuing theme of Matrix paranoia that I so love to indulge in, Wired.com features an article today that posits our replacement in the workplace by robots starting around 2030. Now, usually I'd put this in my "ah, okay" bin, but the author is kind of interesting: Marshall Brain, author and founder of HowStuffWorks.com. You know, the guy who makes the books that show how a machine, auto, or dark-age's castle is constructed through snazzy, cut-away illustrations. Cool guy, and not one to go off half-cocked. Not like me, anyways...

And remember, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you aren't right...

Nature of the Future

I've just finished a book detailing the work process and innovative methods of IDEO, one of the world's leading industrial design firms (made things, like, the Palm V, the Handspring Visor, portable defibrilators, the Apple and Microsoft Mice, etc., etc...). I can probably guarantee that you've handled, if not currently own, something that came out of their shop. An inspiring book about how to take their methods to incorporate more creative thinking in your business. Now I desperately would love to work there, or somewhere just like it!

However, the end of the book got me thinking: they not only assert that their methods can help you innovate, but can actually help you predict the future of business enterprises. No, they don't mean in some mystical, meditation way; they mean by staying in tune with current trends and encouraging creativity, it is inevitable to find the "pulse" of whatever you are involved in, making prediction easy (although they admit no one is 100% right all the time).

Now, I found myself very skeptical about this. For the longest time, I've been very taken by the writings of Arthur Danto, a philosopher and art critic. In this case, it reminded me of a lecture of his I once caught which explored his ideas about utopias and the projection of utopias. To condense the lecture into a sentence or two, he posits that when we (people in general) try to project the future (utopian, distopian, or otherwise), we inevitablely project it in terms of our own current struggles and situations. Yet when the future arrives, it arrives as a genuine surprise. A computer example would be the rise of the personal computer; experts in the field in the 1960's, and the businesses that believe in them, believed the future was in large computer mainframes plugged into many, many workstations. Yet it was a few hippies at Stanford that formed the Home Brew Computer Club that began building small personal computers. This spawned Apple Computers, which inspired Windows, which is probably what you're using to read this right now. Unless you new these guys or their friends, you didn't know what was coming next (admittedly, this is a simplified version of computing history, so let me know if you want any other examples).

Now, while the IDEO theory commits one to keeping an ear to the ground at all times (so, presumably, that you'd run into the next group of future-builders), they say that knowing the future is possible while Danto says that the future is, by definition, unpredictable. So these are the thoughts I'm having - what do you think?

Of course, I'm still pulling for Stephen Hawking to figure out how we can look forward as well as backwards in the dimension of time; I mean, we can already do that in the first three dimensions! Now wouldn't that be cool?