“criticism”
93 posts under this tag.
Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.
Before
Now
I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.
Much Much Before
Much Before
Before
Now
Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.
(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)
Ok, yes, I’m sorry, it’s yet another looong quote. But it’s worth it. Read it if you want to see Steven Johnson, a most lucid man, at his most lucid, at his most techno-lyricist. Read it if you want to know how interfaces are our culture’s cathedrals, why interface design is the art form of our century, and why I’ll spend the next decade trying to master it. Read it as a favor. To me. To you.
And yet against all that dislocation and overload and multiplicity there is the interface. Most of the time we talk about the graphic interface as though it were a logical culmination of the digital revolution, its crowning glory, but the truth is, the interface serves largely as a corrective to the forces unleashed by the information age. Whenever I find myself being swayed by the fragmentation jeremiads, I like to sit down at my computer and go through the usual routines—check my e-mail, rearrange my desktop, log on to the Web—and concentrate all the while on what is really happening as I do these things. Because what is really happening, not on the screen but down in the innards of the machine itself, or out on the great expanses of the Internet, what is happening in that world is literally unimaginable. What is happening is that billions of tiny pulses of electricity are hurtling through silicon conduits, like an entire planet’s worth of digital automobiles making their way across the grid of a single microchip. And all those pulses self-organize into larger shapes and patterns, into assembly codes, machine languages, instruction sets. Some of these ethereal languages then transform themselves into flashes of light, or audio waveforms, and depart en masse from my machine into the sprawling backbone of the Net, where they disperse into countless separate units, and then thread their way through thousands of other microchips, before reuniting at their destination.
But what happens on the screen is this: a window pops open, a dialog box appears, a bright, cheerful voice tells me that I have mail.
No news here, of course, but something profound nonetheless. The great surge of information that has swept across our society in recent years looks genuinely innocuous next to the meticulous anarchy of real bit-space, that netherworld that lurks in our microchips and our fiber-optic lines. But we see almost nothing of that universe because we have built such sturdy mediators to keep it separate from us, translators that make sense of what would otherwise be a blizzard of senselessness. It is undeniable that the world has never seen so many zeros and ones, so many bits and bytes of information—but by the same token, it has never been so easy to ignore them altogether, to deal only with their enormously condensed representatives on the screen. Which is why we should think of the interface, finally, as a synthetic form, in both senses of the word. It is a forgery of sorts, a fake landscape that passes for the real thing, and—perhaps most important—it is a form that works in the interest of synthesis, bringing disparate elements together into a cohesive whole.
Seen in this light, all that ranting about the fragmented consciousness of the digital age sounds a great deal less convincing. After all, critics have bemoaned—or championed—the accelerated pace of the present, its dislocations and divided selves, ever since the industrial age powered up in the early nineteenth century. Think of Baudelaire losing himself in the shimmering, half-lit streets of Paris, becoming a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Think of Joyce’s characters bouncing back and forth between biblical references and advertising jingles. Think of Marinetti’s poetry, renouncing “the ‘I’ in all literature” for the speed of the race car and the destructiveness of the machine gun. Conceptual turbulence—the sense of the world accelerating around you, pulling you in a thousand directions at once—is a deeply Modern tradition, with roots that go back hundreds of years. What differentiates our own historical moment is that a symbolic form has arisen designed precisely to counteract that tendency, to battle fragmentation and overload with synthesis and sense-making. The interface is a way of seeing the whole. Or, at the very least, a way of seeing its shadow illuminated by the bright phosphor of the screen.
When I think about the gap between raw information and its numinous life on the screen—something I try to avoid doing, because it is a dark and difficult thought, more than a little like contemplating the age of the universe—the whole sensation has a strangely religious feel to it, that sense of the mind trying to reach around a vibrant (and convenient) metaphor to the wider truth that lies beyond. Cathedrals, remember, were “infinity imagined,” the heavens brought down to earthly scale. The medieval mind couldn’t take in the full infinity of godliness, but it could subjugate itself before the majestic spires of Chartres or Saint-Sulpice. The interface offers a comparable sidelong view onto the infosphere, half unveiling and half disappearing act. It makes information sensible to you by keeping most of it from view—for the simple reason that “most of it” is far too multitudinous to imagine in a single thought.
Yes, I know it’s pretentious. But you just wait and see. Let the quote sit on your mind for some weeks and when the brain fart comes, let’s talk.
Es francamente increible el poder de la prensa para moldear una noticia. La portada de La Jornada de hoy, por ejemplo, dedica practicamente toda su primera plana—75% del area de contenido—al “noticion” de que carteles pro-peje fueron rasgados por la noche.
Notese el nada sutil entrejuego de los subtitulares. Despues de una lectura apresurada, en la memoria queda solo el desapruebo de (gulp!) los intelectuales; la frase “actos fascistas y autoritarios”; las palabras “ataque”, “vandalismo”, “navajazos”, “al amparo de la oscuridad”; y el enojo ante el cinismo de Abascal de decir, ahora, justamente ahora (y justamente abajo), que hay “plena libertad de expresion”, y de Fox y su “eleccion de Estado”. Sin decir nada de la validez de sus motivos, concentrandonos solo en la forma y el peso que le decidio dar a la noticia, puede alguien decir que La Jornada no anda de calientahuevos?
En la misma portada, en la esquina superior derecha, hay otra noticia con un titular interesante, especialmente cuando se contrasta con el titular que tuvo la misma noticia en la portada del Publico de ayer.
El titular de La Jornada pareceria a primera vista imparcial, mostrando prominentemente numeros, citas, y nombres de instituciones, pero es interesante como escoge no decir que las casillas en cuestion fueron casillas impugnadas, un detalle sutil pero absolutamente crucial. Sin el, uno puede asumir, uno es invitado a asumir, que si hubo “votos de mas” en 2 mil 873 casillas cualquiera, que marranadas no habra habido en las 127, 604 restantes? El resultado del conteo “reajusta porcentajes en la eleccion presidencial”, segun La Jornada, mientras que en el subtitulo de Publico (del articulo en si, ya no de su titular en primera plana), se afirma que “los resultados no cambiaron de forma significativa, dice Rodrigo Morales [consejero electoral].”
Lo primero que salta a la vista en la portada de Publico, en cambio, es el gran peso que le otorgo este a la noticia y como se esfuerza en asegurarse de que recordemos quien “gano” el rencuentro. Aqui si se menciona prominentemente que se trataba de casillas impugnadas, quejosas, pues la insinuacion es clara: ahi’sta pejistas, si ese fue el resultado de examinar las casillas problematicas, cual es el punto de examinarlas todas? Lopez Obrador se antoja pequeño como su subtitulo; canson, terco, y autoritario, “exigiendo” renuncias una vez que las impugnaciones no le favorecieron (por cuanto? por que no se aclara en portada lo minima que fue la diferencia con Calderon? por que no se aclara que mas que ganar, Calderon fue el que perdio menos votos?).
Y ya paranoiqueando, no es curioso que en el articulo de La Jornada sobre el reconteo de votos, al dar los cambios porcentuales de los candidatos solo se usa la palabra “subio” para Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, siendo que fueron tres los candidatos que subieron (bueno, al parecer ellos “pasaron” de un porcentaje a otro)?
En términos porcentuales, Calderón pasó de 35.868 a 35.893 por ciento; Madrazo de 22.261 a 22.257; López Obrador subió de 35.290
a 35.310; Campa de 0.968 a 0.961, y Mercado de 2.699 a 2.701.
Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
I just finished reading Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Put simply, I’m floored. They were both deep, beautiful books, and, particularly interesting for me, both were superb criticisms (of, respectively, information design and comics). They both self-consciously embarked on the hard task of developing taste, of teaching how to see.
Charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, guides, instructions, directories, and
maps comprise an enormous accumulation of material. Once described
by Philip Morrison as “cognitive art,” it embodies tens of trillions of
images created and multiplied the world over every year. Despite the
beauty and utility of the best work, design of information has engaged
little critical or aesthetic notice: there is no Museum of Cognitive Art [yet].
This book could serve as a partial catalog for such a collection.
My current appreciation (read infatuation) of criticism has been long coming but perhaps inevitable. As far as I can now grok, there are two and only two genres of education: education in skill and education in taste. Every other truly educational book is a critique.
School would do well to acknowledge this. Skill is how to do, criticism is how to see. Both are pointless without one another and a great mistake of modern education is to concern itself only with the former. It doesn’t generally think of pupils as criticism-capable, which is bollocks, and, much more harmfully still, it perverts criticism by trying to cast it as a skill. That’s how you get to rote equation solving or sickening memorization of periods of literature and its important figures.
A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).
I’ve been fiction-starved long enough now.
Erasmo wants to kill the man, I want to do him (I fell in love the moment I read his “The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”).
Wondrous book. Truly. I’m buying these 3 extra copies just to pester friends (and family) with.
The only Ender book I’m missing.
I’d read Mencken’s quotes before, of course. But I just became aware of him a couple of weeks ago through, of all places, a Gilmore Girls episode. I couldn’t be more ashamed of my tardiness. I’m diving into economics these next couple of months.
“This is a book in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work—and against ‘education’—learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear.” I’m fascinated with education these days.
I dig the Austrian School of Economics (or rather, I think I will, when I know more about it).
Frankly, that Edward Tufte’s wife mother wrote this was enough for me, but just think about it: a syntactic critique of 1000 exemplary sentences. This promises to be a jewel.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” ( Dylan Thomas). For those late deathnights… “[Oliver Sacks’s writings] has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of ‘the human mind.’” (Amazon.com review)
I want to be a libertarian.
I’ve been a fan of Andy Grove ever since that Fortune feature on him.
A wildcard.
Just how would a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government, look?
I guess this is just book gluttony, but I skimmed this book in the New York Public library one rainy afternoon and it’s a happy memory.
Foreign aid debunked. I somewhy feel I need to read this now. I need to know this stuff. I guess a happy byproduct of feverishly reading The Economist is to think of yourself as someone with vast geopolitical and economical impact ;). His Art of Loving became an instant personal classic some months ago. “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
George Soros, long known as “the world’s only private citizen with a foreign policy,” is a most interesting man.
Mindfulness. The title alone was almost enough to buy the book. What a beautiful word.
Yup, I know these children education books are a weird choice but I have a hunch they’ll have much to tell me.
I haven’t read much science lately. The science spark needs some help.
“What would happen if children who can’t do math grew up in Mathland, a place that is to math what France is to French?”
I admire Starbucks.
”Buffet has the strangest of powers in that he comes across as a homespun billionaire. Now that’s different from just being homespun, the way Sam Walton was, or just being a billionaire, like Bill Gates. Buffet flaunts his wealth and his professional love of money, all the while expressing essential, eternal truths in simple, earthy phrases. When I saw Buffet speak at business school he tapped on the microphone to test it and said ‘testing, testing, one-million, two-million, three-million.’” (Marc Cenedella, Amazon review)
“The need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But it’s better than napping through life.”
“Without a single gesture toward an explanation, this novel recounts the story of a man and a woman mysteriously given the ability to live their lives over. Each dies in 1988 only to awaken as a teenager in 1963 with adult knowledge and wisdom intact and the ability to make a new set of choices. Different spouses, lovers, children, careers, await them in each go-round of the past 25 years, as well as slightly altered versions of world events. Their deep commitment to one another continues through the centuries of their many lifetimes.” (Library Journal review) I haven’t read this book and I love it already.
Believe you me, I’ll be the first to distrust this bluntly titled book, but I’m floored by who and how many people recommend it.
Supongo que uno no es realmente un blogger hasta no publicar un error en los MSM, asi que aqui les va uno que encontre hoy en la portada del Publico de ayer Sabado 8 de Julio.
As I said, today I’m happy and since my father isn’t coming to dinner (he has some appointment) and I’m home alone, I’m off to give myself a treat. I’ll go buy the previous-week Economist, which looks to be quite something (Inequality and The American Dream is the cover article, and the edition’s suvey is on logistics—need I say more?) and read it under a tree somewhere after eating Hindu rice at this very nice restaurant on Lopez Cotilla.
Next day update: Dinner was great, not so much for the rice (Biryani Hyderabad), which was a bit too spicy for my taste, but because I got to some interesting talking with the restauratrice, who gave me some very useful advice on my Honda: I could get almost free service checkups at Centro Magno’s agency, and they actually give free tours of the Honda plant here in Guadalajra (where they supposedly build a car in under two hours). I’m baffled at the incredible amount of local knowledge available if one will only listen.
They didn’t have the previous-week Economist at Galerias’ Sanborns so I had to settle with the previous-previous-week one, to which I gladly agreed once I realized it contained the 26-page technology quarterly. I gobbled up some it at the restaurant and then the rest up until late at night at Minerva’s Starbucks (it was too rainy outside for a tree and anyway, outdoors are heavily overrated). It was a wonderful edition—I was laughing so hard at times I got quite a few surprised looks. It felt like talking with a very witty, very sharp ole friend. And I found out two important things: I’d much rather read the day away than go watch a movie (and they cost about the same) and The Economist is far and away my favorite magazine.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge its silliness but who cares, I’m just wowed. I finally downloaded the entire 50GB 6-seasons 127-episode Gilmore GirlsWP series. Frankly, when I begun this I was not (yet) a gilmore-zealot, my point in downloading it was rather to test the limits of my current technology—and, of course, to smugly marvel at how much these limits have receded. I remember when 5mb made for a humongous download. It was something akin to those news one often hears about some university or other breaking some telecommunication’s limit or other (Gazillion Number of Terabytes Per Second Achieved at Gung Ho University). I was merely exploring the digital frontier of the amateurishly possible.
But that was then. I only just watched the first season (~20 hours) with my sisters and loved it. I’m a fan. The “intricate, extremely fast-paced dialogue, with numerous modern pop culture references, along with many other references to politics and high culture.”WP was the initial hook for me but the more I immersed myself into the series the more I was surprised. The show is really girly, really, really different to me, to my everyday experience, to what I’ve lived. And yet I really like it. I think I would be one happy girl (or daughter or mom)—and it’s starting to rub off on me. I’m starting to talk fast and witty (that was a joke), empathy has gone thru the roof, I understand so much more why my mother acts like she does sometimes, Rory has rekindled my geek, bookworm, naive-I-want-to-learn-everything pride, and last night I caught myself speaking like Lorelai. It’s a shame isn’t it? Life’s so short and we’re so fixed in our roles.
And this train of thought has led me to ponder just to what extent we (as in we) are social constructions. It’s a cliche that Shakespeare invented the modern introspecting human and I recently read some lines
Salvo los más instintivos, todos nuestros goces son aprendidos, es decir: imitados. Copiamos nuestros placeres, añadiéndoles apenas un toquecito personal (lo que suele llamarse «perversiones», el único estrechísimo y culpabilizador margen de originalidad de que somos capaces). La Rochefoucauld aseguró demoledoramente que nadie se enamoraría si no hubiese oído hablar del amor. Aún menos nadie escribiría, pintaría o compondría música si careciese de los indispensables modelos jubilosos.
Fernando Savater, Mira por Donde
that, bizarre though they felt at the moment, are looking truer with every minute. I wonder, to the chagrin of some feminists I know, up to what extent is gender a social construction?
You can laugh (and I do), but I feel much more feminine and talkative since I watched GGs, and years of Friends have deeply influenced who I am and how I want to live, and I just read about this guy who thinks that Seinfield has simply made him a funnier person. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, one part of the holding power of TV in particular, and fiction in general, is that it allows us some degree of flexibility in choosing what constructions we want our selves to be molded with. Granted, usually we simply reinforce our worn ways, but at times, like this one, there are nice surprises.
Through the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable… soon..
But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.
My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.
I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.
It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.
Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.
I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.
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