Category: Family and friends

Learning from my children… and Radiohead

I’m blessed. I have three children, born early 1986, late 1991, mid 1998. There is so much I learn from them.

My daughter, the eldest, told me all about Facebook in 2004, and even became my first friend there after I received an invite from Dave Morin, now at Path. Before that I’d done things like watch her converse across multiple MSN Messenger channels in parallel (forcing me to have Microsoft in an Apple-only house!), seemingly while doing her homework and while watching television. It reminded me of the time she was just a few years old, watching TV while reading while eating while playing with toys. I would gently walk over to the TV with the intention of switching it off, only to be stopped by a plaintive “Dad, I’m still watching it”. She was three when the web was written about, five when it became real. And it was a joy to learn about the web through her eyes, the sites she visited, the sites she knew about, the tools she used and why.

She was about 14 when she got her first mobile phone, to give you an idea of how long ago it was. Imagine a 13 year old without a mobile phone now. And SMS was in her DNA, all the way from the start. [While I can’t take credit for it, I do love the definition: “A teenager is someone who can send a text message without taking her phone out of her pocket“]. She was extolling the powers of eBay and YouTube to me before she was old enough to have a credit card. And her choices of phone were (in chronological order) Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. She now has an iPhone.

She’s now a schoolteacher, and it’s a real privilege for me to learn, by watching her and talking to her, how teachers use the web to build their class and course plans and material. A few weeks ago, when she was visiting us, I had the chance to observe her at work in the living room, preparing her material while the TV was on in the background, and it all came flooding back.

Next up was my son, who was less about Facebook and more about Bebo, as social networking did its Benjamin Button thing and went younger. And skateboarding. And cameras. So the sites he took me to were different: it was through him that I discovered places like daily dose of imagery and metacritic, as examples.  His first phone turned up when he was about 12, and his choices were different. Nokia to begin with, Samsung soon after (influenced by camera quality), and then settling with the Nexus One. Android is very important to him.

And then came my youngest, and she introduced me to stuff like Stardoll and Club Penguin, as social networking went younger still. This had its dark side: as the age by which children engaged with such technologies dropped, there appeared to be an unwelcome consequence, that of increased cyber-bullying. So my wife and I found ourselves having to learn about the dangers of formspring and “underage” facebook, a hard time to be parenting. Nothing in our past prepared us for the environment; yet we had two advantages, the older children, there to advise and guide us while not interfering or participating themselves. Parenting was our job, not theirs.

She was 10 when she got her first phone, and it was an iPhone. A hand-me-down. From me. She stayed with that for a while, and then, exactly as predicted by my old boss Ian Livingston at BT, she went all “BBM” on me and insisted on a BlackBerry. [A couple of years ago, as the first commercially available Androids were coming out, and I was telling Ian about the preferences my son had shown, he’d predicted that the next child would be a glutton for BlackBerry Messenger, given her age. He was absolutely right.]

During their lifetimes I have seen the fat TV disappear completely, the CD become a shiny plastic relic to place in the same category as “desktops”,  the mobile phone become a prosthetic device, and the laptop a fashion accessory. Their facility with sound and picture and video, the ease with which they navigate cyberspace, the way they put all this to use and create value from it….. all reasons to make a dad’s heart sing. Of course I’ve had to learn about how to help them combat fraud, how to avoid going to the wrong sites, how to protect their privacy. But largely they’re the ones doing the learning and the teaching, not me.

Except for one or two things. Many children seem to believe that printers get cartridges replaced and paper restocked the same way clothes fly off floors, get washed and ironed and turn up in their bedroom wardrobes. Something needs to be done about this. But that’s a different post.

Where was I? Oh yes, learning from my children. Today my son came to me to tell me about the latest Radiohead album, and to ask whether we can order it.

So we went to the site, pictured below:

EMI may be in trouble, the dinosaur BPI and IFPI may bleat and rant about Numbers of Mass Distraction, but, despite all that FUD,  there is still a lot to like about the way the music industry is going. Because some people are really trying to do things differently. [Ed: enough with the TLAs, JP!]

Global releases. Simultaneous releases. None of the cowpath-paving regional carving-up of territories or times. All formats in one bundle, without the evil of salami-slice torture thrown in. A distribution process that is in keeping with the modern world, all designed and executed by people who appear to have read Kevin Kelly’s fantastic essay Better Than Free and, more importantly, appear to have understood it and taken it to heart.

Of course there were, and continue to be, glitches.

The site was too busy to take the load 14 minutes after the announcement of the album, brought to me by my son quoting Pitchfork. My order wasn’t going through, I was getting a false “decline”. But there was a way to ask for help, an email address. Which I wrote to. And got a reply forthwith saying that the site was very busy, the “decline” was likely to be a function of that volume, and that I should try again in a few hours. Which I did. Successfully.

I’m not a fan of cookies, and bristled at being told “in order to buy any product you must have cookies enabled”. But I could live with it, in the expectation that things will get better.

I had to pretend that I lived in China, just to see what happened. Nothing. If I clicked there I went precisely nowhere. Everything just went quiet. Ominous.

The £3 price differential between MP3 and WAV was enough for me to feel “why don’t you include the MP3 in your WAV bundle then?”. But I didn’t make a big deal of it. Radiohead have done so many things right in this venture that I can live with the rest. Not perfect, but continuing, positive proof that there’s a better way to improve the music business than the nonsense engaged in by people like BPI and RIAA.

I hope Radiohead break the record for money collected on pre-order for this album. Pour encourager les autres.

It will show others what is possible, following on from the brilliant work done by people like Nine Inch Nails, and for that matter, Radiohead themselves, earlier with In Rainbows.

In the meantime, I continue to learn from my children. And will remain ever grateful at having been given the opportunity to learn from them

Thinking about social objects

You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

Andrew Largeman, a character in Garden State, a film that was written and directed by Zach Braff some years ago.

A group of people that miss the same imaginary place. That phrase really stuck in my head when I saw the movie, and it’s stayed there ever since. Go see the film if you haven’t already, you won’t regret it. [And you don’t have to take my word for it either. An IMDB rating of 7.9, spread out over 90,000+ votes, nearly a thousand reviews, that’s some going.]

It wasn’t long after that when Jyri Engestrom started riffing with the idea of social objects, and when Hugh MacLeod picked it up and spoke to me at length about the concept, part of me was still completely stuck in the Andrew Largeman mindset. The same imaginary place.

And that’s part of the reason I share some of the things I do via twitter: The music I listen to. The food I’m cooking or eating. The films I’m watching; the books I’m reading; the places I go to. Sometimes what I share is in the immediate past, sometimes it’s in the present, sometimes all I’m doing is declaring my intent. Because, paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

When we share our experiences of sights and sounds and smells, we recreate the familiar imaginary places we share with others. We use these digital objects as the seed, as one dimension of the experience to flesh out the rest of that experience. So we take the sound or image or location or even in some cases the smell, and we extrapolate it into a rich memory of that particular experience. Which is often a worthwhile thing to do, for all the people who shared that “imaginary place” with you.

This has become more valuable as a result of phenomena like Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, that have made it easier for you to share the digital objects with the people you shared the original experience with. Which is why any tool that helps you capture what you’re watching or reading or listening to or visiting or eating is worth experimenting with.

This is something I’ve been doing for some time now, playing with every tool that comes on to the market, trying to see what it gives me that others didn’t. [When I started doing this, I had to come to terms quite quickly with the fact that some people don’t like being on the receiving end of all this “sharing”. More than once, I thought long and hard about segmenting my stream so that people could tune in or tune out of the particular segment. But I’ve stayed “whole” nevertheless. More on this later].

I’ve written about social objects a few times, even touched on the topic of something analogous to a graphic equaliser for an individual lifestream, yet I felt it was worth while in discussing them further in the context of “a group of people that miss the same imaginary place”. This time around, I want to concentrate on the ecosystem, on the tools and conventions we will need. Because that’s how sharing of experiences can become simpler, more extensive, more valuable.

I think we do five things with digital objects:

  • Introduce the object into shared space
  • Experience (and re-experience) the object
  • Share what you’re experiencing with others
  • Place in context that experience
  • Connect and re-connect with the family that has the same shared imaginary place

So to my way of thinking, once I start going down this road, every music site, every photo site, every video site, every audio site, they’re all about helping us introduce digital objects into shared space.

Many of these introducer sites also double up as experiencer sites: so you can watch the videos, hear the music and so on.

Every community site then becomes a way of sharing the experience of those objects: every review, every rating, every post, every link, every lifestream, all these are just ways of sharing our experiences, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without.

As more people get connected, and as the tools for sharing get better, and as the costs of sharing drop, we’re going to have the classic problems that we’ve already learnt about from the web in general. There are too many firehoses. It becomes hard to know what is out there, harder to find the right things. Errors, inaccuracies, even lies abound. (Digital objects are easy to modify).

So metadata becomes important. Preferably automated, so that authenticity is verifiable. Preferably low-cost and high-speed. Preferably indelibly associated with the digital object. Preferably easy to augment with tags and folksonomies and hashtags. Times, places, people. Names and descriptions. Devices involved, settings for those devices. History of views, listens, access, usage, editing. The edits themselves.

Authenticity becomes even more important. Watermarking the object while at the same time allowing copies of the object to be modified.

Search tools have to get better. I’ve been reading and re-reading Esther Dyson’s The Future of Internet Search for some time now, linking what she’s saying to what I’m thinking about here. Esther has been a friend and mentor for a long time; when she has something to say, I shut up and listen.

Visualisation tools also have to get better, which is why I spend time reading stuff like Information is Beautiful, why I visit feltron or manyeyes.

Sometimes many of these things happen in one place, elegantly and beautifully. That’s why I like Chris Wild’s Retroscope, why I like How To Be A Retronaut. It helps us place into context some of the things we share, some of the things we used to share.

Sometimes the tools for doing some of this move us into new dimensions, as in the case of layar and augmented reality, or for that matter AR spectacles. Noninvasive ways of overlaying information on to physical objects, ways that allow us to share the imaginary place more effectively.

As a young man, I was an incurable optimist. While time has tempered that optimism, my outlook on life continues to be positive, so positive that people sometimes claim I’m almost Utopian. Yet I still remember two quotations that were like kryptonite to the Superman of my optimism.

The first was Thoreau’s: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. And the second was Burke’s: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing“.

There are many things we have to get better at, and many people working hard to make sure that, collectively, we get better at them. Feeding the world, eradicating poverty and the illnesses associated with poverty. Making sure every child has access to basic education. Improving healthcare, moving from cure to prevention, moving from symptom to root cause. Being better neighbours. Being better stewards of our environment.

I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally lonely; I have never found it easy to accept that so many people are fundamentally depressed. And I have always wanted to do whatever I can to prevent these things from happening.

The tools we have today can help us eradicate loneliness and depression in ways that pharmacology can only dream of. Those tools can and will get better.

Of course there are things that come in the way, things we have to deal with first. Concepts like intellectual property rights have to be overhauled from the abominations they represent today, rebuilt from the ground up. Concepts like privacy and confidentiality have to be reformed to help us bring back community values that were eroded over the last 150 years or so. Human rights have to be reframed in a global context, the very concept of a nation re-interpreted, a whole new United Nations formed.

But while all that happens, we can help. By continuing to create ways that people remember the familiar shared imaginary places, by reminding ourselves what family means.

Family is not about blood alone, it is about covenant relationships. When something goes wrong in a covenant relationship, you don’t look for someone to blame, or even sue. You look for ways to fix it. Together.

Families don’t just share a past, they share a present. And a future. Social objects are, similarly, not just about the past, they’re about the present, they’re about the future.

We’re on the start of a whole new journey, and so we spend time learning about sharing by declaring past and present experiences. Soon we will get better at sharing intentions.

Soon we will get better at sharing imaginary places that are in the future, not in the past or present.

Soon. to paraphrase the prophet Joel,  our old men shall dream dreams, our young men shall see visions.

My grandfather’s teeth

This is a story about my grandfather’s teeth, and about the house where he took them out after meals. He died nearly fifty years ago, when I was 15 months old, so I don’t remember much about him myself. What I do remember is what I’ve been told, and sometimes it’s hard to separate the truth from the tissue.

I’m sure you’ve all had people coming up to you over the years and saying “I knew you when you were knee-high to a grasshopper” (or its cultural equivalent).

Things were different for me. People used to come up to me and say “I used to live in your house, in Lower Circular Road”. Which was a mite disconcerting, considering that there were literally hundreds of them, all claiming to have lived in the house where I was born. I used to think of them as The Hundreds, my personal and private nickname for them.

I have no idea when the family moved in to the house where the Hundreds stayed. I have a faint suspicion that my father wasn’t born there, nor were his siblings, that they might have lived in Ballygunge Circular Road at the time. [I guess I could check by calling my aunt, but it’s the wrong time in Madras]. I know that they were living in Lower Circular Road by 1946, when Calcutta was ablaze with Partition riots.

I remember stories about the house being used to shield Muslims, of battering rams being used to try and break the great door down, of cars being set on fire in the small courtyard in front of the house. [I know this to be true. In the mid-Sixties, when I used to go there occasionally after school to wait for my father, one of the cars was still around, serenely fused to the courtyard.]

So this much is known: that the family lived there for maybe 20, 25 years, and a lot of people, the Hundreds, stayed with them. My grandfather’s “Hindu Undivided Family”, which meant his siblings, my grandmother’s siblings, and all their spouses and progeny. And the same again for the next generation. Which sort of explains the first couple of hundred people who claimed to have stayed at “Lower Circular Road”. But there were more, foreigners from many lands, people about whom I didn’t know much.

We moved out of there in 1962 or so. It might have been a little earlier, but since I have musty memories of actually moving to 70C Hindustan Park Road, I have assumed I must have been at least 4 when it happened.

But the property, 116A Lower Circular Road, stayed in the family for another couple of decades. It was a huge place, maybe 120 feet across and 250 feet deep, with three floors, a terrace and a basement. At least that’s what it felt like.

Initially there were still a bunch of relatives and friends who stayed in the upper floors, while the family business took up the ground floor and basement. To be more accurate, the magazine offices were on the ground floor, while the staff canteen and printing press were in the basement. There was a large central courtyard, open and rectangular. The upper floors were built like an array of minstrel’s galleries around that courtyard, with maybe 10, 15 rooms per floor.

Memories can be hazy, so there’s much I’m hesitant about, much that I’m unsure of. A lot of what I remember is influenced by stuff I heard while I was growing up, and you know what that means. We all remember things our own way, fashioning our own realities, air-brushing our own histories with aplomb. Twisting and turning the tales we hear.

And it is with all this in mind that I relished finding this:

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The extract above is taken from a publication entitled “Glimpses into the Past: Memoir of an Irish Anglican” written by someone called Roddy Evans. It’s the first contemporaneous account I’ve read by one of the Hundreds, those people who claim to have stayed in the house I was born in.

And it’s just like I imagined it was. A meal that begins with dentures extracted from a plastic soapbox; a meal that ends with the teeth left for cleaning on a plate, like shoes outside the door of a hotel room. A meal simple yet ceremonial, with family and friends and even strangers.

Thank you Mr Evans, for helping me figure out what was true, and for giving me a taste of what it was like to be one of the Hundreds. [If anyone reading this has any more to add, feel free].