THESIS:

Developing a web-based New Media channel for pleasant and diverging exploration of information spaces

Abstract

The information inherent in web media objects is constantly changing as new knowledge gets published and reacted upon. However, people still access pages with frequently changing contents in a discreet fashion and navigate them from pit-stop to pit-stop often returning to search engines and link lists to contextualize or search for elements of their interest. We aim to build a dynamic media channel that harvests media objects from web sources according to a channel’s interest formula, and then dynamically passes these objects to its spectators. The latter’s interests contribute to the channel’s interest formula by interacting with appealing objects through an interface that segregates between zones of direct and peripheral attentions. Direct attention is devoted to a certain centralized group of objects while objects of relation, similarity, or of providence keep surfacing in the contour, creating a sense of divergent exploration and discovery [kerne]. Pleasance is achieved by using calm technology principles in designing for reflection and concentration rather than efficiency [weiser, sense&sensitivity].

THESIS: Definitions from Wikipedia

Channel, in communications (sometimes called communications channel), refers to the medium used to convey knowledge from a sender (or transmitter) to a receiver, while Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and/or video signals, (programs) to a number of recipients ("listeners" or "viewers") that belong to a large group. Hence a broadcasting channel is medium that connects a transmission center to a wide group of recipients to distribute information.

Knowledge is information of which someone is aware. Knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject, potentially with the ability to use it for a specific purpose. In the realm of Epistemology, knowledge has been assumed to have at least the following three properties: justified, true, and believed.

Intimite is an adjective that means Familiar; near; friendly; confidential.

Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed", because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities; it is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience.

A conceptual model is a theoretical construct that represents physical, biological, or social processes, with a set of variables and a set of logical and quantitative relationships between them.

Multimedia is the use of several different media (e.g. text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity) to convey information. Multimedia also refers to the use of computer technology to create, store, and experience multimedia content. Multimedia is also a pleonasm as media is the plural of medium, hence it is a double plural. As the information is presented in various formats, multimedia enhances user experience and makes it easier and faster to grasp information. Presenting information in various formats is nothing new, but multimedia generally implies presenting information in various digital formats.

THESIS: Defining "New Media"

The term of New Media is generally associated with the web. The web itself is not a media, it is an infrastructure upon which medium(s) can be hosted... New Media is a broad concept as it appears from a small literature search I recently did which included readings in Manovich's The Language of New Media. There is a lot of evidence that such term does not designate a specific type of media or a media genre as does the term cinema or television, by rather a type of media production that is governed by the following characteristics:

- Digitalization, or the numerical representation of media elements.
- Modularity, or object-oriented structure, since large scale media works are assembles from independent media elements each having his own identity and independence.
- Automation, or the ability to generate, shape, and regenerate media elements by using algorithmic processes.
- Metamorphism, or the capacity of a media work to change structure and content hence potentially having an infinite number of versions.
- Reproductivity, or the potential of media elements to be reproduced and reintegrated freely by the people using the same tools of their production.

What is "New" about New Media?.... although this type of media is obviously new to the media culture, my inquiries about an explanation of the origin of the term came out almost blank. My own interpretation is that whenever a new type of media comes along, it pretends having the power to replace older types of media. For example, when the newspaper established itself as a new type of media, many people thought that it will eventually replace the book. The same is true with the internet and newspapers... It is true that new types of media might affect old ones, but I can't find an example in history where one type of media abolished pre-existing types... Another perspective to look at the adjective "new" is to replace it with "new age", where the meaning of New Media become the media produced by using the new age of technologies (Digital). This definition seems more reasonable that the previous one...

An interesting website that might have a cutting-edge presentation on how people are working with digital technology to produce popular democratic media can be found at New Media Musings. Such productions are still elements or objects of New Media and do not transcend to a media by themselves. The mediums currently used to host, publish, and share New Media elements may be limiting their potential, especially in terms of aggregation capacity and interactivity... To clarify the first limit I will give the example of web Foraging. When we create new media objects (documents, webpages,presentations,...) foraging for media elements such as images and text on the internet is a common activity. Despite the fact that the internet is a over-populated with such elements, and that the existance of elements of high interests is very probable, the process of locating and extracting such elements is sometimes difficult and time consuming, hence leading people to consider developing such elements from scrach as a pragmatic option. That addresses the aggregation weakness inherent in the hosts of New Media elements. Interactivity leads us to consider influencing the media production process of others by participating in it. Although such type of interactivity thrives in some types of media like blogs, it still relies on the discrete nature of them.

Finally, there is a need to provide a definition model for the new age of Media compatible with the potentials of contemporary digital technology. I am currently working on this task and will provide a primary sketch in my next post. Such model should encompass the life cycle of new media elements, their containers, and their environment at each step during the cycle.

Minimalism in Interface Design

I remember a professor of mine comparing web design to sushi, colorful, tasty, fresh, and presented in small portions or chunks. I take this notion for design in general, and I wil be talking about Minimalism as a general strategy for interface design, whether for web, software, or information interfaces, or others.

Minimalism should not connotate a lack of functionalities or a weakness in the power of the interface as Wren and Reynolds point out in their Paper (pdf) . They argue that minimalism diminishes the cognitive demands on the users by inhibiting the set of behaviors associated with the interface's functionalities. What it does in short is make the interface more transparent and more Calm.

I actually searched for a formal definition of interfaces on the net without finding one that pleases me or that addresses the general notion of it from a philosophical point of view. Interfaces are border lines between two entities. They define the area of interaction or exchange between them. Interaction itself engenders changes in both entities. They act and react according to the events and happenings hosted by the joining interface.

People spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to operate complex interfaces. Designers actually regard interfaces as their works of art, their creations. Most of them devote lots of time trying to show off their competences in designing interfaces, making the latter more elaborate and mazy. From my experience, I believe that interfaces should be as transparent as possible like the side of a fish tank, so people can interact with the information and components of the system directly rather than through the interface tools and commands. Transparent interfaces can render interaction "natural" by eliminating the border lines themselves, or at least some of them...

FLUXUS

Fluxus is a contemporary art movement that rests on blending different artistic desciplines. The father of Fluxus, George Maciunas, defines the art movement in a set of manifestos of which the oldest seems the most general and well-based.

Fluxus is a movement that promotes abolishment of social teers and cultural determinism, the artifical and the objectified. It considers itself a purging movement that brings the artist to the simplicity of his/her spectators. Fluxus art must be reproductive in the masses, i.e. all people should be able to understand it, reproduce equally-good versions of it. Fluxus artists are known for their humbleness and pacificity. They try to fuse "cultural, social, & political interests into one medium, and use various means of expression, sometimes simulteneously to promote their thoughts.

In short, I see that the Fluxus movement fights formality where it makes no sense, classifications where it segragates, divisions between actors and reactors. in Fluxus, rings replace teers, people acquire a freedom lost for conventions and totalitarian social and scientific notions. Fluxus is like dada, it revolts against conventionalism and recreates a free space for creativity at its basic levels wherever needed.

Information Visualization and the form of information.

Information visualization is par excellence a form of information-driven contemporary aesthetics. As a descipline, it seeks the composition of abstract forms of information to aggregate data into one representative media element.

The theme upon which rests the imersive age of information has been designated as " Informationalism" byManuel Castells, a sociologist who focuses on the social and economic implications of Internet. Manovich argues that the shift from modernist to informationalism is being accompagnied by a shift from form to information flow where the dynamicity associated with the flux of data and subsequently information is proven to be overwhealming.

In this context, information visualization tackles the bulk of "available" information on a granular level by taking a representative set distributed in an interval in time, focusing on specific sources or types of information. If everything around us (including us!) is becoming data-driven, than is Information Visualization yielding the proper tools to understand it? Or can it formulates the proper forms to encapsulate whirling fluxes of data and information collectively?

The question becomes a question of granularity. Information Visualization academics ask, sometimes insecurely, "where is the data? What type of Information?"... On the macro level, chaos rules the world of information, and no transient form does yet exist for shaping the types of information sources in a transitive manner. We tackle source by source and type by type, rarely relating them or merging them into one form.

Information Visualization successfully tackle the form of information on a granular scale, leaving gaps of "complex information" un-addressed

ESSAY: On Totalitarian Interactivity

Lev Manovich

(1996)

Manovich begins his essay with a cotation from the contemporary new media artist Alexei Shulgin who states that "the emergence of new media is characterized by the transition from representation to manipulation (of people)". Manovich reinforces Shulgin's statement by affirming throught his essay that interactive computer schemes represent an advanced form of audience manipulation, since people are asked to follow pre-programmed "objectively existing" associations.

Manovich cleverly distinguish the easter and western view on technology, where while the latter sees it as an abolishment of hierarchies and a functioning wonder, the eastern view does not believe in its redeeming powers nor usefulness. Manovich, an eastern, describes the internet as a communal apartment of the Stalin era where no privacy is respected and spying flourishes while classic components are redundantly instantiated.

The lack of flexibility in interacting with the Internet is obvious. We read and follow someone else's trails with little or no margins for manouvering. Although search engines might seem as a counter example for deterministic trails since they present their users with navigation choices, the fact remains that the choices presented stem from their own understanding of the internet content and structure rather than that of the users.

Kerne's non-traditional combinFormation uses learning agents to understand the user's interests in harvesting information and media elements on the internet. Despite such seemingly democratic gesture, combinFormation still enslaves its users to a predefined interaction paradigm to understand their interests, requiring users to "fill in missing information" through a deterministic interaction model augmented by harzard.

The type of new media sought after should not be transluscent to eliminate the ability to track people and to spy on them. Privacy should become an issue of principal importance to protect the people against all types of violations. Moreover, this media should not introduce a third party, such as learning agents or rigid interaction structures, but instead should use transparency to make its own interface disappear, leaving people to mesh with pre-inventive knowledge structures in a personal and subjective manner. Finally, the medium should have the ability of purging itself from "garbage" information as the latter accumulates.

THESIS: Grounding the work

The more I get confused about how to tackle my PhD thesis, the more I search and read and get nowhere. Finally, I began reading Dr. Andruid Kerne's thesis which is everything but a classic academic work centered in "objective academia". Kerne convinced me as he has done before that objectivity in academia does not exist. It's the tomb of creativity and the redundancy of knowledge. Knowledge itself is a subjective interpretation of discovered academic pathways. It is transient and transcendent from disciplines and between them, and hence grounding knowledge discovery in segregated disciplines could slay the formation of encompassing views or new theories. Hence, the question remains: how to ground my PhD work in scientific foundations? My advisor Dr. Josep Blat keeps asking me this question repeatedly.

When I started to read Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media (i will talk about the book later on), I realized that my work should be founded in New Media. Since my early interests in information visualization, Ambient Displays, Calm technology, Ubiquitous Computing, Human Computer Interaction, and Interface Design, I was searching for a domain that encompasses all of these disciplines, but finally I became convinced of the trans-aspect of working with all of them. In other words, New media calls for the free democratic subjective aggregation or reformulation of knowledge units in a transient fashion that cross boundaries of subjects and disciplines to the greater sphere of knowledge creation.

In their book Creative Cognition, Ronald A. Finke, Thomas B. Ward and Steven M. Smith introduced the Geneplore model of creative generation based upon a composite process essentially formulated by a generative step of pre-inventive information structures, followed by an exploratory step where these structures are interpreted, associated, and recombined. Such a cognitive model of creativity could as well apply to my definition of New Media, as well as to the formulation of new knowledge in the context of a PhD. I will try to study the generation of pre-inventive information structures for New Media and provide the environment and tools for exploring and manipulating them. By closing this process or by feeding recombined knowledge back into pre-inventive structures, I hope to create a flux of information and knowledge that fulfills the visions of a new interactive and trans-active medium, a new democratic Media where the people do not only participate in the preconception of knowledge, but rather where such process totally rests on their participation.

My own PhD work will be put to use in demonstrating the validity of such approach by using it in the formulation of my own Thesis. The environment that I will create, (The expression wall) will be the test bed for the theory that I plan to develop. I long to theorize on the catalysis of the creative process that generates the loop encompassing knowledge discovery, ingestion, digestion, and augmentation. I will also study these activities and formally define them as active components in a new bread of popular media.