Where are personal computers going?
Questions about clouds
Since XX century ICTs
demonstrated to be able to spring changes in almost every sectors of
society. Meanwhile, we have had a quite imprecise ideas about resources
and tools enforcing their power, a fact that helps the rise of a
mythological aura around them. On the other side, we were increasingly
involved by these machines even only as simple users. Indeed, ICTs
involved mass-users only with the internet of 2000s, both infiltrating
their tools and languages into common life and
requiring some technical alphabetisation. More precisely, the
democratisation of computers in terms of real availability
and ability to friendly manage and program began for an increasing
group of people in the 80s. They started a process that spreads ICT
knowledge/resourses and their subtraction to public and private
monopolies. The diffusion of personal computers resulted an
indispensable prerequisite for what we now define “software culture”.
Initially developed as mere platform of data elaboration, networked
personal computers became parts of a communicative territory of
proposal, elaboration and aggregation of individual and group projects
where hw/sw procedures/materials combine continuously each other to
feed new forms of languages and cultures. As the lawyer and economist
Yochai Benkler well explained, technological and legal constrains in
terms of freedom and ability to manage and program ICT
resources are determinant to design the possibility of new economy and
new forms of communication and expression. What once was possible only
centralizing competence and resources using huge capital, it
can be otherwise obtained with a
re-aggregation of the same fragmented/distributed
components in a cooperative way . Then, the process redefines the terms
of production and consume into the many fields where data elaboration,
memorization and transmission are essential. These changes
involve deep effect on all those centres/powers that influence the
ability to accumulate huge resources in order to build and manage this
kind of services. Among them there are media, a vital sector
for its function to create and maintain the circulation of
ideas and news. Re-storation
At the beginning of new millennium, a series of continuous technological progresses is changing the very way to concept, design and delivery ICT stuff. The incredible increment of data capacity on wireless and cable systems at the core and edge of networks causes an enormous re-organization of ICT resources/services. The increasingly power of network links not only brings instantaneous data exchanges but even a new organization of ICT basic components where computers and storage place into big and remote silos remaining easily reachable for worldwide (even mobile) users. As in the case of electric supply, where centralized plants have substituted autarchic user generators once grid was available (a historical analogy frequently recalled), computers and memories are now be able to dispatch “information energy” throughput our broadband sockets. Briefly, these new architectures get a complete de-materialization of computer services becoming not only negotiable but even completely tradable through the network, the apotheosis of a pure economy of access (Rifkin, 2000). Paradoxically, even the computer, a virtualizer for excellence, was subjected to the destiny Marx intuited for many devices of modern realm that - behind the incessant work of processes of abstraction typical of complex societies - transforms “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx, 1848; cfr. Berman, 1982).
In effect, the new philosophy of computing has the clouds as main metaphor. Its image evokes lightness and ubiquitous presence about services delivered by a distributed architecture that doesn’t require some sort of individual investment in terms of knowledge. It should free us from any ICT incumbencies for a fraction of total ownership cost in order to develop our real interests. The new paradigm has many impacts: on user side, for the modality of delivery and utilize services/resources; on infrastructure, for the ownership, organization and management of hw/sw goods; on service side, for the creation, development and operation of applications.
However, such development begins to rise many questions about a return to an old, centralized architecture, a very different path from all novelties - first of all, openness and freedom to elaborate services - brought by Net. To be clear, we are not victims of a pre-organized plan to restore old dominances. Rather, we are living a condition in which many ICT actors try to consolidate its own position exploiting some global trends: the economic crises and the huge internet success in terms of users, groups and business expectations or the natural dynamics of monopolies based on network externalities, as well as the scarce success of alternative business models than advertising. On the other hand, critical questions come along with the rising acknowledgment about the intrinsic values that digital technologies represent for every human spheres. As noticed by the same inventor of web Tim Berners-Lee in a recent and alarmed interview about the logic of walled garden and application asymmetry between centre and hedges, the success of web application risks to undermine internet although web is only one of its possible applications.
In a way, it is reasonable to think that current developments are a logical, next step of the typical client-server architecture of web. It was finally extended beyond the classic linking and publishing of static contents, involving the basic needs of computing/storage operations. So, we can see now the major ICT players address two kinds of strategy: centralizing computing and storage; implementing all techniques capable to streamline graphic rendering/computing of real-time complex formats (text/image/audio-video) flowing in user terminals. There is a huge rush to elaborate user-friendly and neutral graphic-user interfaces working on different personal equipments ready to accept services that super-computers of Net delivery - news, searching, editing, computing, maps, remote storage folders, etc. Preferably, they should consume little resources of personal devices since the main workload and complexity have been transferred to the centre which manages hw/sw stuff, updates and maintains data and application, and even bears the delicate task to create/develop new features.
Yet, it should be reductive to not mention the role played by the demand and solutions for elaborating services that are increasingly articulated, ubiquitous and global.
Dis-semination
Nowadays almost every kind of information has finished or is going to fall into some sort of cloud. This is certainly true for consumers while companies are more diffident to give their data and applications in outsourcing for privacy reasons. However, being on some social network means to utilize cloud technologies, as well as having mail account such Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. or using micro-blogging as Twitter, blog as Wordpress, video-sharing as Youtube or DaylyMotion, but also posting or looking at photos on Flickr, ranking on Yelp and TripAdvisor, using docs and applications such Google Docs, sites for social-bookmarking as Delicious or e-commerce platforms as eBay.
The American institute of research PEW - specialized to inquire Net activities of American citizens - issued recently an essay on cloud technology involving many ICT experts (Pew, 2010). Underlining the effectiveness and sophistication of new services in using remote and local resources, PEW notes how the core of future services will inevitably shift toward an external centre that works as an “internet operating system”. The fact that applications hosted by our personal devices use local resources (computing, data, sensors) is a small part of process. «It's easy to think that it's the sensors in your device - the touch screen, the microphone, the GPS, the magnetometer, the accelerometer - that are enabling their cool new functionality. But really, these sensors are just inputs to massive data subsystems living in the cloud. When, for example, as an iPhone developer, you use the iPhone's Core Location Framework to establish the phone's location, you aren't just querying the sensor, you're doing a cloud data lookup against the results, transforming GPS coordinates into street addresses, or perhaps transforming WiFi signal strength into GPS coordinates, and then into street addresses. When the Amazon app or Google Goggles scans a barcode, or the cover of a book, it isn't just using the camera with onboard image processing, it's passing the image to much more powerful image processing in the cloud, and then doing a database lookup on the results. Increasingly, application developers don't do low-level image recognition, speech recognition, location lookup, social network management and friend connect. They place high level function calls to data-rich platforms that provide these services» (The State of the Internet Operating System, 2010).
So, the implementation of new services resembles to a patchwork links different and indipendent domains once these decide to not close own doors (see walled garden policy) to share activities/data generated by their users. A such kind of services is possible only through both federation and powerful data centers. Yet, the lack of individual control on whole architecture remains the main question point.. The risk has been warned many times but nobody thought it could be happened involving very popular services supported by big players. Inside high-tech sector crises can suddenly arrive - for competitive reasons or failures of alternative business models to the classic “free” supported by advertising. The probability to failure is very high for small company not integrated in other synergetic organizations. But there is much surprise when failure involves big commercial entities even if nothing could contrast private decisions about decommission of social network platforms during bad time. «The new fate of Delicious and its sister Yahoo services yields a lesson about cloud computing that is likely familiar to anyone who tracked the rise of SaaS (software as a service) a few years back: If you decide to turn to a third party to host a service for your business, you run the risk of your provider pulling the plug on that service at any moment..... In this case, said lesson is all the more jarring in that we aren't talking about a fly-by-night provider no one has ever heard of. We're talking about Yahoo, a well-established Internet denizen» (Yahoo's offloading of Delicious a reminder of cloud risks, 2010).
Another problem regards monopolies that - in a classic network system where information externalities and economics of scale count (benefit to be networked each other using services based on marginal costs) - have many chances to success. Despite of variety and multitude of actors, monopolies seem to involve even internet, at least in two specific points of its value chain. At level of connectivity, gathering users that want to access internet, or at level of contents offering add-value services capable to attract huge audience without concerns about network resources given the internet ability to support end-to-end services – over-the-top logic. A recent survey finds out that 30 internet companies generate 30% of global internet traffic. Only two years ago the number of web companies that generated 50% of Net traffic was 5.000 – the same percentage of traffic is now managing from 150 companies (Atlas Internet Observatory 2009 Annual Report, 2010).
The current situation could be linked to the success of cloud architecture because high levels of data traffic hide big web farms at server side. The maintenance and expansion of new services require huge investments – to say, last data centers developed by Microsoft or Apple have a budget of billions of dollars. Moreover, the actual economic pressure is so high that analysts forecast many operations of merging among indebted providers that risk to miss these mass-market dimensions (The danger of the coming 'big cloud' monopolies, 2010).
Google story
We end these brief reflections trying to better understand the genesis and force of the new forms of concentration that, although the sudden evidence, have had much time for growing up. Google’s story will be our guide. In effect, Google represents the ideal-type of network computing philosophy having developed from the early internet both ICT knowledge and infrastructures thought and implemented in a distributed and, at the same time, unitarian logic. It started collecting and indexing the increasingly amount of internet contents in order to permit a fast search services. Through the building of search functions Google gained a vast audience capturing big shares of online advertising market, the very stabilized business model of internet as well as of many cultural industries. Yet, the ability to synchronically organize, coordinate and manage a huge amount of hw/sw resources in an interrelate and modular way served also to develop and support other new services as web mail, maps, photo sharing, news, video, docs, storage, etc., improving the economics of scale of its infrastructures. With a such panoply of resources Google continues to feed an unstoppable cycle of innovative projects advancing even only through the simple method of “trial and error” – in the words of technologist Clay Shirky, that speaks explicitly of quality that grows from quantity, with the method of «publish then filter» (2008).
While we used to acquaint with the simplicity of its portal interface, Google built a powerful and sophisticated network of infrastructures around the world. Utilizing the same basic technologies of normal users – but its PCs run only open source software to avoid royalties – it assembles over 1 millions of servers filled into many networked silos distributed across the globe, strictly protected by no-disclosure policy for marketing and security reasons. The IT expert and critic Nicholas Carr makes the parallel with the production of power supply: as the modern nuclear power station, these super-computers pump data and applications to millions of houses and offices (2008a). Industries and users find convenient to have cloud services without bearing the total ownership cost of hw-sw devices paying the real utilization at one tenth of their costs. For Carr the centralization of ICT resources resembles the end of autarchic production happened 100 years ago with the distribution of power supply thought grid. The big plants of few electrical companies operating on large scales succeed to supply energy paid on consumption (2008b). Ready to enlarge the distribution and consumption also to households, and starting a crescent spiral of social utility, the big plants offered energy at very low incremental costs. Indeed, the parallel in terms of propellant between electrical energy and information is an effective metaphor of our post-industrial age.
Of course, in line with every epochal passage there are many warred thoughts about the articulation of changes because the re-modulation involve not only industry and trade but even “entertainment, journalism, education, even politics and national defence. The shock waves produced by a shift in computing technology will thus be intense and far-reaching. We can already see the early effects all around us – in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in people’s growing sense of affiliation with “virtual communities” rather than physical ones, in debates over the value of privacy, even in the growing concentration of wealth in a small slice of the population (Carr, 2008a).
As last considerations show, the analogy works quite well but seems too much limitative. In effect, information - with its symbolic nature - is never something of neutral. It has a power that declines itself in each phase of its life, engraving and shaping in a deeper way the life of things, people, groups and communities in social system where distance relationships increase and goods are designed, produced and consumed with/by knowledge-based networks/devices.
Bibliography
Atlas, 2010, Atlas Internet Observatory 2009 Annual Report.
Benkler, Y., 2006, La ricchezza della Rete. La produzione sociale trasforma il mercato e aumenta le libertà, Milano, Egea, 2007.
Berman, M., 1982, L'esperienza della modernità, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1985.
Carr, N., 2008a, A revolution is taking shape, in “The Financial Times”, 29 gennaio.
Carr, N., 2008b, Il lato oscuro della rete. Libertà, sicurezza, privacy, Milano, Etas.
Marx, K., Engels, F., 1848, Manifesto del partito comunista, Milano, Mondadori, 1978.
PEW, 2010, The future of cloud computing, 11 giugno.
Rifkin, J., 2000, L’era dell’accesso. La rivoluzione della new economy, Milano, Mondadori.
Shirky, C., 2008, Uno per uno, tutti per tutti. Il potere di organizzare senza organizzazione, Torino, Codice, 2009.
The State of the Internet Operating System, 2010, «O’Really Radar», 29/3.
The danger of the coming 'big cloud' monopolies, 2010, «InfoWorld», 20/10.
Yahoo's offloading of Delicious a reminder of cloud risks, 2010, «InfoWorld», 17/12.
March 2011
Luciano Petullà
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Break of Jazz
Every
time great changes or peculiar innovations related to communication
media involving speedily (historically speaking) a vast part of
population, the probability to assist to a debate on their dangerous
effects and consequent pros and cons discussion rises. As Umberto Eco
admirably indicated in an essay dedicated to pop culture (1964), the
phenomenon relays on a consolidated logics in which apocalyptic and
integrated face each others. On a side there is people look at new uses
and practices as the advent of “Barbarian”, on the other side people
read them as signs and proofs of a more viable ways to tackle otherwise
untreatable issues or flourish suppressed sensibility with more
effective and expressive savoir. Sometimes clashes can even occupy newspaper front pages involving different personalities that have to face complex processes shrinking them in little lines. It happened lastly in Italian newspaper «Il Sole 24 ore», but even in USA and England with «New York Times», «Wall Street Journal», and «Guardian». Guided from the typical pragmatism characterized Anglo-American culture, the terms of debate can be also reduced to stupidity and smartness. [...]
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How internet "core" is changing
As
the place of premise, first lines can contain some
acknowledgements about the extraordinary meaning that the Net has for a
relevant part of worldwide people, namely a treasure of great cultural
and intellectual vivacity, of incommensurable usefulness,
expressivities and intelligence. But, after this admission, we have to
do some reflections on how this whole of contents is physically
supported and how network structures are shaping to respond in a
sustainable way with respect to its evolutions.
Given the
numerous factors involving into the process and their “environmental”
dynamics (in internet actions acquire exponential speed), it
is
never easy to underline the right trends, above all from a quantitative
point of view. We can individuate many signals about certain
processes of consolidation and a passage to a “2.0” phase
more
focused on Services as a Software, with utilities covering an
extended range including entertainment for leisure time and
business tools for labour market, products landing immediately (from a
cloud computing) on a mobile/fixed hyper-connected
user. But which kind of reshaping are physical infrastructures and their managing business companies involving in? What is the new state of art of “core” internet? [...]
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Learning at the age of digital remix
If
we should indicate an electronic device that, other than cellular
phone, has a great chance to be carried inside westernised people’s
pockets, we would not be wrong answering a small
usb-device. Diffusion and adoption of pen-drivers and
sophisticated audio/video players to maintain and transport
programs/files or the loved personal playlists due to the amazing
developments of microelectronic and the success of usb standard
interface. The plug-socket system named Universal Serial Bus
seems to be maintain the promise hailed by its name becouse,
in its normal or mini version, it is present upon almost all electronic
devices wanting to ease digital interconnection in a prompt “plug ‘n
play” logic. In this way, data and programs utilised in diverse
activities and circles - products and sources of personal projects -
glue themselves with the other our whole of intelligence and
sensibility tying us with hardware and software of computerized
machines distributed in our vital environments. [...]Full article
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The experimental man
The nature of each form of delegation involves the creation of a
distance between
expectation of originating will and the outcomes achieved by delegate
that, people or systems, can otherwise mark characteristically the
effective phase through their own skills or lacks. Generally, delegating to someone or something the control or fulfilment of will, actions or plans is a way of thinking and doing typical of people live in complex and large societies. As described by many sociologists (for example Anthony Giddens) people need to establish trusted links with a large number of “expert systems” to be able to live and make their activities. On the other side, that is part of a precise strategy defined “reduction of complexity” characterizing environment of biological and social life (Nicklas Luhmann).
Yet, in our time there is a matter that seems completely irreducible to a more simplistic affair, up to refuse a normative way to fix a delegation if it doesn’t contain a mechanism that can anticipate the ungovernable impasses, finally resolving them respecting the originating will. [...]
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When phone meets the edges of world
Icts adoption in emerging societies and its social, cultural and economical impacts
Years passed since we reasoned about possibilities to arrange a peculiar field of study for the telephone. Meantime, it has been written very much on topic, and many scholars added the group, focusing both general aspects and specific ones with essays that did not quite neglect anything, and the “quite” saves us from any next surprise.
In effect, if we would find an analogy to describe some phenomenon related to new media, and we want to be understood, we do never remain delude focusing on telephonic area. Surprisingly, the practice doesn’t work only in a way - recovering and evidencing through telephone what has just happened or experienced - but also in a projectile phase, namely following this medium as propellant for the development and re-configuration of basic social processes, whose complex societies of various Western cultures tend to lose cognitive sensibilities.
As usual, we speak of digital divide and social mobility through some recent readings. In this particular case we’ll use a dense handbook containing many essays on mobile communication by worldwide researchers. [...]
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The grasp on means and contents
Full article
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The gramophone, the world wide web and the recording systems
The history of media and the listening of time
First
audio recording (1860)
Although the discovery seems to start a dispute like that on telephone between Meucci and Bell – in effect, Scott died convinced that Edison has rubbed his idea and, as sometime Frenchmen used to do against Anglo-American people, claimed with nationalistic accents his reasons – in this case there is a wide agreement about the strong differences of the singular projects. [...]
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Our obsession for music
Daniel J. Levitin explains
what sound tells of usMusic has indubitably a special place among arts being a loyal companion of human beings: in the history we know there is not culture that was able to renounce it. As American science cognitive researcher Daniel J. Levitin says, where human beings stay together there is music: weddings, funerals, degree party, war marches, sport events, urban nights, prayers, romantic dinners, baby cradle, study, etc. Above all, music is part of ordinary life in the city and in the country, and diffusion and modalities of its consumption have reached incredible levels through the musical players of electronic era, eventually dissolved into the software and hardware of digital devices.
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession is a book explaining the appeal of music just starting from the Levitin’s peculiar love for all its forms, a passion that addressed him among diverse but original and convergent interests, all merged into an experience and career in which circularity among entertainment, knowledge, work, study, research, innovation and desire of communication comes in evidence. [...]
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________________________________________________________The voice as transit in a post-human very, but very human
Reflections
on the deep "high-tech" connaturality of our vocal medium in the age of
speaking
avatarsThe end of a translation work inevitably leaves echo of faced topic, especially if we have dealt with our ancestral medium. Indeed, publishing of Italian version of Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck operates as an irresistible invite to begin some reflections stimulated by an opera that is unique to understand human voice as process and product of a body living in close interaction with its cultural and social environments, sprouting a sonorous phenomenon at same time physical and immaterial, capable to mediate our own internal and external realm, allowing, because of its transitive nature, to communicate other life dimensions.
Summing up, it is ventriloquism the red thread with which Connor faces a so peculiar feature of human being. Contemplating of voice both naturalness and disembodied aspects – story starts from Greek oracles up to our actual condition of human beings living between, and in, mechanical and electronic systems full of disembodied voices – the book can unfold us some mediation dynamics that, fed and filtered through different socio-cultural environments, make voice such expressive tool to which we have always reserved both a careful attention and obliged and absent-minded reception.
Recalling implicitly some aspects of this seminal work, and strong of its innumerable and sophisticated observations, we’ll try to develop further reflections. The topic we would face is the challenge that new media bring in terms of permeability among different realms, putting in relation vocal dimension – our early powerful prosthetics of intermediation – with its actual applications for some new kinds of transit. In the essay we’ll help us with some actual works that, although coming from different fields, seem significantly converging in the analysis. The first part is more functionalistic while second one has a more structurally symbolic approach. [...]
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______________________________________________________________iPhone: logic and aesthetics of a multimedia telephone
by Luciano Petullà
Index:
Introduction
The logic of iPhone
Convergence
Telephonic multimediality
Personal media and telephone
Convergence and business model
Convergence and its actors
The iPhone device
Aesthetics
of iPhone
Telephonic multimediality
Personal media and telephone
Convergence and business model
Convergence and its actors
The iPhone device
Aesthetics
as experience
iPhone and the aesthetisation of information tool
iPhone and the aesthetics of network society
iPhone and the aesthetisation of information tool
iPhone and the aesthetics of network society
Bibliographical references
Introduction
American company Apple, producer of computers and personal devices – among others, the famous mp3-player iPod – has entered into mobile business with a video cell phone that has been presented and hailed worldwide with a great emphasis.In this paper we’ll take iPhone as a fresh case study to update some paths used to study video cell phone (Borrelli, Petullà 2007). It is a phenomenon particularly suited because of its success, that can be understood only at the light of a context including the logic of its technical development and aesthetical aspects, and so inevitably experiential ones, justifying a fully sociological and cultural approach to media study. [...]
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