2Cyberconf: An article
J C Lawrence
claw at under.engr.sgi.com
Thu Mar 12 17:31:57 CET 1998
Randy Farmer was one of the principles in the habitat project along
with Chip Morningstar:
http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/communications/papers/habitat/litcrit.txt
Article: 1425 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: randy at xanadu.com (Randy Farmer -- A survivor of the Lost Patrol)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: 2Cyberconf: An article
Date: 10 May 91 17:00:03 GMT
Organization: AMIX, The American Information Exchange
The Second International Conference on Cyberspace:
Literary Criticism Collides With Software Engineering
by F. Randall Farmer
This April saw the Second International Conference on Cyberspace;
it was even more colorful and controversial than its predecessor. The
collected abstracts listed 98 papers, covering a wide range of topics
like implementation, representation, 'wiring up', AI, hermaneutics,
artistry, religion, sex, fractals, cinema, anthropology, cychology
(sic), ghosts, mummies, architecture, post-modernism, jazz,
supercomputing, photorealism, dimensionality, space and time. Only 15
papers were actually presented. And, as you might expect, the content,
style and state of preparation of the papers varied widely.
Over half the presentations were given by software engineers about=
20
the cyberspaces they were building and what they learned from them.
These talks were relatively clear, even if sometimes a little
disorganized. Some of them contained technical material, often prefaced
with the disclaimer "I'm sorry, but I'm going to get technical for a few
minutes". I saw some eyes glaze over in the audience until the jargon
was over.
The remainder of the papers were presented by academics, in the
traditional language of the literary critic, examining everything from
cyberspace as master narrative to a character by character analysis of
Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy. I'm certain these presentations were
professional enough, and I truly believe that there were some points
they were trying to get across, but, frankly, I couldn't figure out what
they were. After talking with other software engineers, I discovered
that I was not alone. The title of one of the papers helps to
illustrate my confusion: "Cyberspace and the Proprioceptive Coherence: A
Proposal." This sent me scrambling for my dictionary as soon as I got
home. The language of literary criticism left me playing catch-up with
the presenter, and falling three words further behind every paragraph.
One programmer quipped that to his untrained ear these presentations
sounded like "polysyllabic word salad."
So, these two worlds collided due to confusions in purpose,
language, and even in the definition of cyberspace. The software
engineers were looking for information about where to go, and what to do
next. I presume (and hope) that the literary critics were trying to
bring artistic, literary, social, and humanistic concerns to cyberspace.
It is clear that both groups will benefit from understanding the purpose
of the other. But understanding the purpose is useless if the message
itself is not also understood by the audience.
I am one of the many software engineers in the audience who was
bewildered by the language of the literary critics at this conference.
Perhaps an explanation of how we think might shed some light on why.
I'll use myself as an example.
I am one of those lucky few who have actually implemented a
cyberspace system and survived to tell the tale. Like many others, I
have a few years of college, and lots of hands-on experience. Like many
others, I don't spend much time studying the humanities or arts or
reading the great French philosophers. My thought processes are instead
dedicated to debugging. Debugging is usually defined as finding the
failure points in a computer program, but software engineers also debug
concepts and their implementations. Our emphasis is on finding an
adequate initial design, and modifying it based on feedback until we get
one that works--not a something perfect, just one that is functional.
The advantage to this approach is that we can start working right away,
and therefore have a working prototype done more quickly. Of course
this also means that we are prone to make mistakes early on, and
unlikely to get a solution that is optimal or even correct. In
complicated systems, it is a fundamental reality that perfect solutions
are a practical impossibility anyway. So like the scientist, we need
gobs and gobs of input early on, to shape our systems, and help us
improve them over time.
Software engineers want input! This is very important to us
because we are building cyberspace now. We want insights from people
who are non-engineers: artists, psychologists, sociologists, economists,
archaeologists, historians, and philosophers. This kind of
communication is essential if cyberspace is fulfill its potential as a
powerful medium for interpersonal communications instead of becoming
just another rich boy's toy, sold to the wealthy consumer through places
like "The Sharper Image Catalog." However undesirable we find this
latter outcome, it is a very real possibility because cyberspace systems
are consumer products: they want to be built, packaged, and shipped. As
in the development of all consumer products, time is a most precious
commodity. Time is so valuable that several well known cyberspace
implementors have stopped attending conferences--except when they can be
used as advertising vehicles--in favor of getting their systems built.
This trend is likely to continue if the conferences don't offer
something tangible. Presentations in the style of the literary critic
aren't very tangible to us because the language used is not concrete
enough for swift or accurate comprehension, extension or refutation. In
short, software engineers can't debug literary criticism, so we don't
get it. We can't even tell if there is any 'it' to get!
Conferences are for sharing information and insights. They should
be very important to the cyberspace researcher. It is this assertion
that led me to write this article. But at this year's conference we
didn't share very well. We collided with each other, confused in
purpose and in language.
So, given that software engineers debug systems, are busy building=
20
cyberspace now, are still making efforts to hear others' concerns, and
given that literary critics are ready to offer their insights on how
worlds work, how can we bridge this communications gap? Perhaps we
could try using one or more of the tools that other conferences have
found effective for dealing with these problems.
The community could create 'Conference Submissions Guidelines'
requiring clear statements, in plain language that avoids jargon, of
both the paper's purpose and applicability to current or future
cyberspace systems. The guidelines committee should encourage
diversity: the request for clarity is intended to make papers
understandable across disciplines, not to restrict the participants to
a single style or approach. The chief drawback of this proposal is
that it introduces the problems of a review process.
Alternatively, the conference could split into a number of
tracks. This would allow more papers to be presented, published, and
would not require any standards of language. This would allow
attendees to customize use of their time, but would not increase
inter-disciplinary communications. It could also reduce the intimacy
that the conference has enjoyed thus far.
These measures are a matter for the cyberspace community to
discuss and decide upon. To that end, I propose a multi-disciplinary
panel for discussion of these and other suggestions the community may
have. The Usenet newsgroup sci.virtual-worlds might well serve the
purpose, considering both the origins of this conference and the wide
dispersion of the participants.
Last year, I was able to take at least some germ of an idea away
from each and every presentation. Sadly, that was not the case this
year. If this article touches the community in the way it was intended-
-to encourage open and plain communications--I eagerly look forward to
next year's conference in Montreal.
Article: 1431 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: benedikt at vitruvius.ar.utexas.edu (Michael Benedikt)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: More on Cyberspace Conference 2
Date: 14 May 91 18:05:12 GMT
Organization: University of Washington
Open letter, in reply to Randy Farmer's review of
The Second International Conference on Cyberspace
Dear Randy,
Out of town most of last week, I just read (and re-read) your piece about
the Santa Cruz Conference. For the most part I think it is spot on, but I=
20
would like to offer my own perspective.
First let me say that I share(d) your frustration, not only because I have=
20
(for better or worse) relatively well constructed models of parts of
cyberspace worked out now, some technical know-how, and some real
opportunities to build them, and not only because I did/could/would not
present these models at the Conference for fear of the appearance of
program committee nepotism, but because I too was dismayed--though not
surprised--at the gap between the software engineers (SEs) and the
"literary critics" (LCs), as you call them. (This leaves out, of course, the
architects, artists, film makers/students, communications theorists,
mathematicians, CIS managers, etc, that are neither SCs or LCs. I, for
example, actually move in both worlds and understood over half, I think, of
what both the SEs and the LCs said!)
I guess where I disagree a little with your observations, in so far as they
generalize to <all> participants, is that I thought the clash of worlds was
often also a creative one. I heard as many bewildered SEs somehow
pleased that they had heard and thought something other than SE talk and
SE problems, and as many LCs realizing that they needed more technical
expertise and a more constructive mind-set if they wanted to continue to
contribute. Things could have gotten ugly but didn't. Things could have
gotten self-congratulatory and clubby but didn't. For the scene of a major
mix of paradigms I felt a lot of "this hurts good" vibes rather than
outright rejection, although clearly there was indeed a little of the latter.
As for your suggestions, again, I think they are well made and well taken.=
20
As a program committee member this year, I should tell you that every
submission was judged and scored out of 25 points on five criteria by each=
20
of the six people on the committee. My own score sheet reflected far
more representation by VR and on-line system builders, CS theorists,
programmers, and creative artists than literary, political and
anthropological thinkers; but then, I assume that, counted with the others'
scoring, my judgments were fairly moderated. Also, you must realize that
making judgments from abstracts is a risky business. The alternative is
to ask for complete papers, as does SIGGRAPH etc. I believe that in few
years, when the volume of detailed and ongoing cyberspace projects picks
up and when the cyberspace conference series converts its newness into
earned prestige, it will become both possible and necessary to choose
presentations this way.
Judging the abstracts, one had either to choose between insightful
overview but no real research or creative work, and real
research/creation but in a fragment--say some scientific visualization,
simulation, or a multimedia project. Finding presentations that would
contain elements of both, that were in some sense "large," was difficult. =
20
By way of remedy, for me, the breakdown of papers should not be along SE
vs. LC lines but along general/specific lines. For me, the very act of
identifying "fragments"-- projects that were perhaps not chiefly
motivated by the notion of cyberspace as such--and collecting them for a
conference ("re-troping them" as the LCs would say, "re-contextualizing"
them <as> elements of cyberspace as the rest of us would say) is in the
project of cyberspace itself.
Now, perhaps you would disagree, but from where I sit I don't see very
much progress in the field on a year to year basis. Not in
networking, not in VR, not in games, graphics, CSCW, CAD, or on-line
life. This is part of my frustration. Implementation and progress is
always slower than desire and the imagination, and for cyberspace,
inherently visionary, this is particularly true. Of course, an
increasingly short-term-market-driven computer industry in the U.S.,
much of it on the ropes today, does not help. Nor do our universitys'
shrinking research budgets. The hype around VR, which is what most
people think cyberspace is, has gotten old, and the appetite generated
for <new> virtual experiences and applications is considerable. Given
this, constructing conferences about cyberspace may well entail
admitting visions, criticism (literary and otherwise), fragments, re-
iterations, as well as reports from the "trenches"...for a little
while yet.
One alternative, I have sometimes thought, would be for the conference to
go biannual. Then there would be sure to be technological as well as
theoretical and critical <advances> on each occasion. But I think this
scheme will let things get cold. It will also fail in its mission to provide
and hold open a cross-disciplinary, face-to-face forum that is grwoing
steadily, and filling with new faces.
C. P. Snow identified the "two cultures" of the humanities and the sciences
over 30 years ago. Seperated, they are both alive and well, of course, but
earlier in the century the split was not clear or vindictive, as Don Byrd
pointed out in his review of the Santa Cruz conference on this newsgroup a=
20
week or so ago. The absolutely amazing and infinitely valuable thing about
the topic of cyberspace, and the conference series that bears the name, is=
20
the way in which the two cultures have finally to meet each other again
over a very large idea, one large enough to shape the electronic future of=
20
our society. This, surely, is as it should be.
I hope this begins the kind of dialog you call for, Randy. And I hope you=
20
will participate in the planning of the Montreal Conference.
Best wishes,
Michael
--
AMIX Debate--Worlds Collide: Lit Crit vs. Software EngineersPubl: RandyFarmer
$1.00 On Delivery
Articles folder
Text--William Bricken amplifies Randy's thoughts.. 127 lines
11/01/91ÊÊ4:06pm
Article: 1465 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: williamb at milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: 2ndCyberspace Conference
Date: 20 May 91 06:52:01 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Here are some comments to amplify Randy Farmer's very diplomatic
posting on 2ndCyberSpace:
Damn it, Cyberspace *is* a technical subject. No one should have to
apologize for sharing the technical details, that is what conferences
are all about. And good cross-disciplinary papers at Cyberspace
conferences will enhance our knowledge both of our central interest in
the virtual and of a speciality domain which intersects with the
virtual.
My puzzlement at 2ndCyberspace was "How come no one is talking about
the same thing?" Why was *the virtual* so different across
disciplines?
Is cyberspace really so amorphous that it readily incorporates models
of society as mummies? So ill-conceived that it is defined by some
minor characters in a small work of science fiction? So ambiguous
that photos of the Iraq war combine with clips from a Walt Disney
movie to anchor its essence?
This is what I tell my Virtual World Development class: If you are not
an implementer, you must express your worlds formally in order to be
understood.
Try this example: Imagine a virtual cube in space. Grab a pair of
diagonal vertices with each virtual hand and pull. What happens?
The point is that the answer is not consensual. Strongly held
intuitions vary across people. What happens is task dependent. What
happens is idiosyncratic. What happens is computational.
A common ground for what happens can be negotiated across
participants. Negotiation requires a common language, but the
*computational process* implementing cyberspace constrains the choice
of languages.
Which is to say: If you want to talk about cyberspace, and hope to
make sense, then you must be prepared to talk mathematically. (Yes, I
believe programming is specified by mathematics, in its broadest and
most intimately imperfect sense.)
The painted-into-a-corner test: Can a literary or social critic say
anything about cyberspace?
1) An existing cyberspace could be evaluated as a literary experience.
It would have been great to see Virtual Seattle analyzed for dramatic
tension.
2) Responses to cyberspace experiences could be described
sociologically. It would have been great to see the 200+ VR articles
analyzed for ethnic biases.
3) Cocktail party stories about cyberspace could be criticized
literarily. It would have been great to know just how much
misinformation is embodied in the urban folklore of cyberspace.
If "cyberspace" is defined as all media and all literature and all
imagination and all sorts of things, then let's meet after the circus
to talk about the work. If it is not all things to all people, then
let's define taxonomies, let's focus on communal definition of what it
is that we are spending our lives building.
What we heard a lot of at 2ndCyberspace was contempory criticism of
<fill-in-the-blank>, and that fill-in-the-blank happened to be
"cyberspace". The philosophical position was more important than the
content, so it really didn't matter if we didn't develop a group
understanding of cyberspace, so long as our politics matched.
Now, I believe that cyberspace is something to be explored and
experienced. Something that will require conceptual pioneering, to
dwell, to learn, to report. I believe that the cyberspace is more
important than current theories of criticism, that it will redefine
criticism as we explore it. We really need information, not analysis.
I'd suggest focusing the content of the next conference on the
definition and mutual understanding of the subject matter. The
central idea is a convergence of vocabulary; the important point is
that presented papers should help the convergence by paying particular
attention to the *intersection* of fields.
Here is one possibility:
DEFINITIONS
Cyberspace:
electronically mediated experience.
Virtual Reality:
broad bandwidth first-person participation in cyberspace.
Artificial Reality:
third-person virtual reality.
Virtual Worlds:
virtual reality configured and presented for natural perception.
Virtual Body/Virtual Environment:
the coupled subjective/objective components of virtual worlds.
Presence:
the goodness measure of experience in cyberspace
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS
Participant:
environmentally interactive sentience.
Inclusion:
subjective experience of environmental closure.
Information:
comprehendible symbolic structure.
Using this vocabulary, cyberspace is electronic information which
mediates by inclusion the experience of participants; it is being
inside symbolic structure.
William Bricken
Article: 1478 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: eliot at phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: 2ndCyberspace Conference
Date: 22 May 91 01:06:38 GMT
Organization: Cognitive Science Lab, Princeton U.
In article <1991May20.090324.9906 at milton.u.washington.edu> williamb at milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken) writes:
;
;
;
;Damn it, Cyberspace *is* a technical subject. No one should have to
;apologize for sharing the technical details, that is what conferences
;are all about.
Damn it, how soon we forget. Cyberspace *is* Gibson's metaphor for the
universe of communication. The technical implementation of cyberspace,
if you mean the neurotechnical interface, is potentially eons away,
and the technical implementation of virtual reality is hardly in
the same league as the much greater question, what to do with the
damned thing. And that is not so much a "technical" issue as a problem
of extending the imagination, inventing new strictures of information
and experience that go beyond our presently impoverished concepts of
the nature of any reality at all. The "hand in your face" concept of
virtual reality is, after all, just one of many possible ways of
enclosing a subject in a computer-generated universe, and probably
not one of the more interesting ways.
Article: 1482 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: williamb at milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: 2ndCyberspace Conference
Date: 23 May 91 00:43:37 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
I posted the commentary on 2ndCyberspace to initiate a discussion of what
it is that we are consensually hallucinating about. So here goes:
In article <1991May22.185610.4614 at milton.u.washington.edu> eliot at phoenix.princet
on.edu (Eliot Handelman) writes:
>Damn it, how soon we forget. Cyberspace *is* Gibson's metaphor for the
>universe of communication.
I am not a Gibson scholar. I disagree with the above generalization.
>From reading the Gibson books, he seems to be presenting a fantasy of
neural interface to digital data which is experienced as a reality.
The universe of communication includes real world interaction. My
goal, however, is to identify just what is meant by terms like "universe
of communication". Where are the delimiters which make the concept
comprehendible? What is *not* cyberspace?
>The technical implementation of cyberspace,
>if you mean the neurotechnical interface, is potentially eons away,
There is a community of folks currently implementing cyberspace. No,
we do not know a symbolic structure for biological cognition. I
personally do not believe such a structure exists (see Putnam's
Representation and Reality). Is it possible to talk about Cyberspace
from a perspective of actual work in the field?
>and the technical implementation of virtual reality is hardly in
>the same league as the much greater question, what to do with the
>damned thing. And that is not so much a "technical" issue as a problem
>of extending the imagination, inventing new strictures of information
>and experience that go beyond our presently impoverished concepts of
>the nature of any reality at all.
I believe that the technical implementation is tightly coupled to questions
like what it is and what can we do with it. To be redundant: Just what
is the *it* that we are doing something with? Neurotechnical linkage? (no)
Science fiction stories? (no) Implementations? (perhaps).
Implementation is the byproduct of generative theory building, a
methodology which expects you to be able to demonstrate what you are
talking about. In all the implementations I have been involved with,
extending the imagination, defining new strictures, and studying closely the
apparent nature of reality is a central focus. It's just that in
a realm as treacherous as metaphysics, we have found it necessary to
be as clear as possible, in particular to express ideas as implementations
and then to experientially validate the ideas within the VR implementation.
I believe that the new strictures will arise out of experience within
implementations. What is irritating is hearing various parties expound
the rules and limitations and character of cyberspace without direct
experience in VR. The choice of the word "stricture" (an abnormal
narrowing) is apt.
I believe that cyberspace has laws. If we can find consensus that
cyberspace is expressed computationally, then we know where to look
for constraint: cyberspace is digital and algorithmic.
One of the first things you learn from watching many people experience VR
is that cyberspace is a relation between a sentience and an algorithm.
Physical reality is a similar relation, between a sentience and a set of
laws. VR provides the first tool of metaphysics, it permits us to ask
comparative questions between two relations, coming to a more eclectic
notion of reality.
I share Eliot's apparent desire to find more satisfactory definitions
of reality. The central problem is that *representation*, particularly
in the form
in the form of words, abstracts reality, and that abstraction denies
reality (see Korzybski, Spencer-Brown, Watts). So I have a great
difficulty finding guidance about the nature of reality from streams
of tokens.
Fortunately, VR provides access to experience that both has a digital
substrate and does not require linear symbolism. This dual capability
(transparent representation) allows us to experiment with symbolic
experience, to form new regimes of semantics.
So that's my response to "what to do with the damned thing". Define
it as what exists, and use that as a tool to guide us to an understanding
of the reality of the virtual. As we construct different generative
theories, new ways to in-form, we can explore the new possibilities.
So, a final lobbying effort:
Programs are words, science fiction is words, discussion is words. Which
words describe cyberspace? If cyberspace is electronically mediated
experience, then we must minimally address the words that constitute
the electronic implementation. More directly:
It is the words of the implementation which define what we can experience
as cyberspace. Words that are not implementations can guide the
construction of implementations to the extent that they are stated
formally.
william
Article: 1487 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: zippy at gumby.Altos.COM (Tim Mcfadden)
Subject: Re: 2Cyberconf: An article
Date: 23 May 91 01:31:44 GMT
Organization: Altos Computer Systems, San Jose, CA
This is a specific recommendation for the format of cyberconf3.
Its goal is to is to express a concrete suggestion and a vote
from a concerned cyberpunk.
It's based on the ideas from the similar postings of Farmer,
Benedikt, and Bricken. They have already made comments
on the "Two Cultures" we live in and the format of the
conference.
--------------------- Why we need to change --------------------
Timing is everything.
There does not exist a cyberspace yet of the sort we wish to build,
so unless we change our priorities to encourage builders as presenters
we will not attract them. The heavy weights (except for some current
VR people) in the applicable fields (AI, computer networks,
distributed systems, etc.) are not being featured as presenters.
If we are not the forum for the cyberspace engineers, then we can only
talk about what the furniture of cyberspace might be like and won't
be listened to during planning and early implementation
(the next decade or so).
------------------- Recommendation ----------------
Establish two sets of independent standards for presenters, with
roughly equal presentation time or perhaps more presentation time
for category 1 (muli-tracks are a similar proposal):
1 | alpha
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nuts and bolts of cyberspace engi- | Humans *in* cyberspace. The experience
neering, e.g., distributed | of cyberspace, the politics and
systems, VR in cyberspace, etc.; | sociology of cyberspace. Who will
all the usual engineering and | pay for cyberspace and who will
scientific topics as set out in | control who gets into cyberspace?
the syllabus. | The philosophical problems of
"bottom up." | cyberspace; mind/body problem, etc.
| "top down."
|
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------ Defense ---------------------------
"Timing is everything"
- Musashi Myamoto
Musashi was a humanist (perhaps a homicidal maniac by our standards)
who tried to learn as much as he could from every craft.
The explicit purpose of the recommendation is to gather implementors
around the banner of "cyberspace" in the next few years. This is a
new goal for the conference, but, if it is not met, there may be no
point in having cyberconf4. Benedikt's comment about timing is that
we may have to have biannual cyberconfs, because of the rate of engineering
development - facts are not being created fast enough.
"Cyberspace" may have to be renamed "playing around with data goggles on
several computers at once." and our chance as cyberspace implementors,
designers, pundits, flaneurs, etc., may be lost.
This is not a "humanist bashing" proposal. There are far more forums
for humanist comment in this area than there are forums for
cyberspace. I also can to speak of Eintein, Jung, Pynchon, Minsky,
and Merleau-Ponty in the same sentence. <<<< see ?
For all of us, it is a matter of sailing with the morning tide or
waiting for someone to invent the hovercraft.
The first question I asked at cyberconf1 was, "how do we make room in
cyberspace for those who like to fly like eagles and those who like
to analyze things with diamond sharp tools?"
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Fall on your decks cyberpunks, we jacked in at Austin and you were
not there". All opinions expressed here are mine and not necessarily
those of Acer-Altos. Tim McFadden - Acer-Altos Computer Systems
Article: 1532 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: sstone at weber.UCSD.EDU (Allucquere Rosanne Stone)
Subject: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies!
Date: 31 May 91 02:42:42 GMT
Organization: University of Washington
WORLDS COLLIDE REDUX
Allucquere Stone
Chair, 2Cybercon
Randy has raised a bunch of issues at the same time, without
clearly identifying all of them, so I'm going to start off by
listing the ones I see. I have no doubt that people are going to
come right in behind me and list others, but these are the ones I
want to mention first.
First is the way Randy describes what he saw and heard at
2Cybercon, which was to divide up the talks into two
groups--software engineers and literary critics. This is going
to upset the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists,
artists, and businesspeople who also presented at the conference.
I think their invisibility is not accidental; it's built into the
way Randy saw things, and it's important to what I have to say.
I find Randy honestly puzzled, but I also think that the kind of
analysis that he does in his letter points toward a part of the
problem that he doesn't see.
Put it this way: I don't think there were two worlds at
2Cybercon. There were many worlds, each with its own approach,
each with its own way of speaking. But somehow, everything that
wasn't software engineering looked like literary criticism. Why
do you suppose this is? (You can tell I've got my back up,
because I also presented about 10 minutes of my own stuff. It
wasn't software engineering, but if there was literary criticism
in it I'll eat the podium. :-)
Now I'm just going to talk about software engineers and literary
critics for a bit, leaving out the multiplicity of fields and
professional languages that were spoken and that Randy either
accidentally missed or chose not to see or report.
My shtick, if I have one, is code-switching. So I speak most of
the languages that were being spoken at 2Cybercon. Barbara
Joans, who spoke last, specifically addressed one of the problems
of groups that don't see each other equally well. My hit on what
happened is similar to hers, pretty much, which is that the SEs
jargon (and I include myself in that group) is transparent to
SEs; and further, LCs (I'm in that group too) are not trained, as
are SEs, to know how to say "Now I'm going to get technical". As
a social scientist (yes, I'm also one of them) I see that
cultivating jargon is important for any group in order to create
group identity
group identity and cohesion. I also see that SEs and LCs have
different ideas about how jargon works, what purposes it serves,
and in particular how to deploy it. And from my vantage point, I
would suggest that one of the things I might have done to improve
communication was to have better explained to the LCs the
extremely wide diversity of the attendees' backgrounds and
disciplines, and to have suggested that they also be prepared
with a kind of general-language version of their work, as I
usually do with my own stuff no matter which jargon it's written
in.
But part of the problem rests with the SEs just as it does with
the LCs, because SEs are so used to swimming in the heady waters
of the SE community that communication is just so *easy*, and
communicating ideas about computing and graphics is
second-nature. This is very much like being a tourist in Mexico
and just naturally assuming that people who interact with you are
going to do it in English. Remember the "ugly American" and "why
don't these natives learn to speak properly?"
Let me say that another way: If you *really* want the advantages
of interdisciplinary conversation--and I mean REAL
interdisciplinary stuff, not just different segments of the same
large field--then you are going to have to WORK at it. Because
it is not easy. Star Trek to the contrary, talking across worlds
is never easy. But if you put out the energy to meet people from
*really* different worlds (and for the sake of this argument
let's say I mean LCs) anywhere near halfway, you may discover
that their ideas help after all. And by work I might mean for
openers nothing more strenuous than asking "Could you explain
that again, a bit more simply?"
Speaking as a codeswitcher--someone who lives in those boundaries
I keep writing about--I heard great stuff being said by both SEs
and LCs. I also heard frustration. And I also heard
arrogance...on the part of some LCs, who assumed that everybody
understood them, and on the part of many SEs, who assumed that it
was naturally the LCs' job to learn how to speak like "normal
people"--which is to say, them.
Are the SEs willing to meet the LCs halfway? How do you think
worthwhile things are going to happen if BOTH sides don't learn
something about the other's jargon? Why *didn't* the SEs use
more technical language? Maybe what happened was that the people
we are calling LCs were more willing to get seriously down and
dirty, and more into the deeply technical side of what they do,
than the SEs were. Maybe they expected more from the SEs. Maybe
they took the SEs by surprise. And if so, why didn't the SEs
take advantage of the moment and say "I don't understand a thing
you said?" What was accomplished by not asking and going
silently away? Maybe we all might have been enlightened by a
little fast footwork on the part of some of the speakers in the
general direction of codeswitching--that is, talking across
disciplinary boundaries.
I want to emphasize this again: There is really no middle ground
of language in which everybody is equally intelligible to
everybody else. The unhappy truth is that what looks like a
middle ground to one person is somebody else's jargon. In this
case it happens to be *our* jargon--fairly well-educated, mildly
techie, and dare I add, white middle-class jargon. Which is why
everybody else seems unintelligible...and why everybody else
sounds like an LC. Put another way, if you aren't one of the
faithful then you're an infidel. That's not meant to be nasty,
just to point out that that's the way we all usually think.
Okay, now listen up. This is your 1991 Chair speaking.
I never promised you a rose garden. If you want the goodies, you
have to work for them. All of this is new stuff to lots of us--
in particular having so many people from so many *really
different* disciplines, with their own jargons, in one room.
Randy suggests parallel sessions. Parallel sessions are a great
idea, but intimacy and the kind of communication intimacy fosters
are more important...to this particular conference. As a partial
consequence that means that Cybercon is always going to be small,
and again next year more people are going to want to come than we
can fit in. That's part of Cybercon's charter, and it is not a
decision we made lightly.
An interdisciplinary committee is also a great idea. That's why
we have a Program Committee. We had a Program Committee for
2Cybercon too. Michael Benedikt, in his reply here, mentioned
something about how the committee works, but let me summarize it
again. We had people from many disciplines, including several
people who are active in the technical end of VR. They read
every abstract, and on paper the abstracts looked interesting and
challenging and presented no difficulties with language. The
committee voted on each abstract, and the total vote determined
which papers were presented. As with many things in the
cyberspace business, things didn't turn out quite as we'd
planned. With participants' reactions to 2Cybercon in mind, as
well as our own perceptions of what worked and what didn't, the
torch gets passed to the 1992 committee. The 1992 Program
Committee has people on it from the industry, from research
institutions, from universities; we even have a science fiction
author. We have SEs *and* LCs *and* others. (You think you can
do it better, eh, Randy? Where were you when I called for the
3Cybercon committee? You could be sweating at this very moment,
just like the rest of us.:-)) And we are very interested in
suggestions and feedback from the cyberspace community. But
please remember that hindsight is always 20-20. We will make
more mistakes, guaranteed. That's the fun and the challenge, as
well as the pain, of breaking new ground.
Next year's conference is not going to be a piece of cake. Good
fun is not cheap. Cheap fun is not good. This will take REAL
THOUGHT, folks. Editing for language will almost certainly not
be enough, and if it is, there is probably something wrong. To
reap the bennies of meeting people from widely diverging areas of
expertise, widely different experiences, we have to be willing to
stretch. That's one of the things that make Cybercon different.
Let's get started.
-------------------------------------------
That's it. p.s. I noticed William Bricken saying something about what
"we" heard at 2Cybercon. That's pretty smarmy, for someone who wasn't
there.
Zots,
Sandy
--
Article: 1536 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: tmaddox at milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Lack of communication between VR commentators and everyone else.
Date: 31 May 91 08:02:22 GMT
Organization: The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington
[MODERATOR'S NOTE: Tom Maddox replies to some strong feelings expressed on
alt.cyberpunk regarding discussion of virtual reality. Please excuse the
base language employed here. It is necessary to understand the virulence
of the emotions felt by some. I hope that the discussion on sci.virtual-
worlds can be conducted on the plane suggested by Tom. -- Bob Jacobson]
In article <10232 at idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
(Eliot Handelman) writes:
>[Referring to Cybercon2] ... given that we can't seem to get
>any information about these talks, in part because these f***ers
>refuse to disseminate their ideas in a form congenial to the topic at
>hand, ie, on the f***ing net, in part because those who report on
>these conferences can't understand what the f*** these people are talking=
20
>about -- given this, all we can conclude is: very poor information
>transfer.
Granted--a series of mystified references to literary types does
not constitute a summary of a conference, and it is absolutely necessary to
hear what (whoever it was) had to say.
Did the proceedings volume that was supposed to come out of last
year's conference ever surface? I haven't seen it. And of course not a
single one of that crowd ever replied to your asking why they couldn't
post it all on the net.
>Hmmm? Original definition of "cyberschmuck": "a pontiff of information
>who hasn't heard of USENET." New definition of cyberschmuck: "a pontiff
>of information who wants to curtail possible venues of information, or
>who hasn't heard of USENET."
Wait, are you saying that anyone posting on Usenet *can't be a
cyberschmuck*? That notion had never occurred to me; in fact, I thought of
Usenet as "Home of Cyberschmucks"--not that it's the only home of same, or
that everyone here (easy, folks) is a cyberschmuck, but . . .
>The world, though boring, is a big place, and information encompasses
>its bigness. If the techs and crits can't "exchange" information,
>can't, at the very fucking least, get a buzz out of each other, and
>even seem to be bored by each other -- if the information is too
>big, or too abstruse, or too unrelated, then the need to narrow
>this bigness, the need to bring this narrowing under the technological
>wing, OUGHT to be at least as expressive as the technology they hope
>for.
Granted, again. I was just responding through my fear & loathing
regarding many of my brethren in Christ the academic f***ing literary
theorists, many of whom have had their thought and speech centers entirely
taken over by one virus or another--language is a virus from outer space,
indeed, but it's found a home on Earth.
>Of course, it's inevitable that the crits will go their way and the
>techs theirs. They won't be able to resolve their differences, and
>VR will ultimately be about perspectives of virtual cubes. But
>it's nice to think, all the same, that the subject of "reality"
>tried, for a while at least, to accomodate perspectives for which
>a descriptive or encapsulating language lacked.
Well, you're making me feel as if this in the words of Strother
Martin "failure to communicate" has downright tragic implications, because
you're right--this is a brief window of *possible* information transfer,
and even it is clouded badly by mutual incomprehension, insularity, self-
regard, and two cultures xenophobia.
I just realized that my experience of all this is badly skewed by
a one-day experience: a tour of MCC,Inc. (American's cockamamie answer to
Japan's even more cockamamie Fifth Generation project) a year and a half
ago. Gibson, Sterling, Shiner, Cadigan, W. J. Williams, Ellen Datlow, and=
20
I got a series of demos, a tour of the joint, a lunch, some free drinks; and
in return we did a panel of sorts (at which, for some reason, John McCarthy
was in the audience). The whole experience was vaguely depressing,
not least because try as we all might on both sides, there was very little
real information exchanged. And regarding the panel, they seemed to expect
a bit of trad sf cheerleading for High! Technology! but got instead several
kinds of cautions about it all ranging from glum to antagonistic. Some
folks went back last year, but I haven't really talked to anyone about it;
maybe things went a bit better, especially as there were some folks who
might have the proper tecno-politics, such as Vernor Vinge (no knock on him;
he seems a genuinely smart and nice guy).
Anyway . . . so there was all this mutual lack of real connection,
and I got the sense that most people there would liked to have been of help
to one another, but no one could really find a way. And the reports I've had
from this front (the various vr dog and pony shows, for instance) also
indicate little success here.
I feel that trying harder isn't the answer. We, that is, the non-
technoids who have some sort of compelling interest in this stuff, and they,
the folks who build the hardware and write the software, have got to find
some semantic space in which to talk to one another. Otherwise, as you say,
it's back to cyberspace as purely technical enterprise, which will be to
all our detriment.
--
Tom Maddox
tmaddox at milton.u.washington.edu
"It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences." -- Hugo Ball
Article: 1650 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: randy at xanadu.com (Randy Farmer -- A survivor of the Lost Patrol)
Subject: CyberConf2: A reply
Organization: AMIX, The American Information Exchange
Date: Fri, 31 May 91 19:19:15 GMT
A reply to Round One of the Cyberspace Conference debate:
First let me say a huge THANKS to all of those who have responded to my
initial call for debate. And let this message be a further invitation for
more replies to this thread. I am especially looking for replies from
literary critics.
A. Stone and M. Benedict point out that I over-generalized my initial
argument by breaking the conference into two groups: The software engineers
and the literary critics.
I concede the point. I did this on purpose, to avoid getting more
specific about exactly which presentations fell into which category. I
found I was able to understand the presentations of everyone EXCEPT the
literary critics. I understood the anthopologists, the artists, etc..
A. Stone says the software engineers are as bad at communicating clearly as
everybody else. Again I agree, and thought I pointed this out in my original
article. If anyone cares to tell me how *my* presentation might be better
understood, I'll gladly make changes. Is this true for the literary critic?
She also asks "Why didn't the SEs say ''I don't understand a word you're
saying?''". I've got lots of excuses here (maybe not good enough, but here
they are) 1) I was in shock 2) I thought it was *my* fault 3) The speaker
had already run over time and lost me in the first 5 minutes 4) It'd be RUDE!
Now I know better, I'll risk being rude.
I don't accept that language can't be made 'mostly' plain. Sure, some stuff
won't be able to be translated, fine! Just as long as I can follow your
thesis, premise and conclusion, and pick out a few supporting arguments
along the way.
I must address the question "Where were you when the call went out for the
1992 Conference Comittee?". 1) Giving a demo of Cyberspace and 2) Very
confused about what was going on with this conference. It took me over a
month to get my thoughts together on this subject. I'm ready for the tap
now, if'n you really want me.
Lastly, I never said I could do better. I said WE could do better, and that
we MUST do better.
Sandy, William sat behind me at the conference. I think you owe him an
apology ;-).
Article: 1539 of sci.virtual-worlds
From: chalmers at europarc.xerox.com (Matthew Chalmers)
Subject: Re: CyberConf2: A reply
Date: 2 Jun 91 12:17:59 GMT
Organization: Rank Xerox EuroPARC, Cambridge, UK
In article <1991May31.191915.1712 at xanadu.com>, randy at xanadu.com (Randy
Farmer -- A survivor of the Lost Patrol) writes:
> And let this message be a further invitation for
> more replies to this thread. I am especially looking for replies from
> literary critics.
>
> A. Stone and M. Benedict point out that I over-generalized my initial
> argument by breaking the conference into two groups: The software engineers
> and the literary critics.
>
> I concede the point. I did this on purpose, to avoid getting more
> specific about exactly which presentations fell into which category. I
> found I was able to understand the presentations of everyone EXCEPT the
> literary critics. I understood the anthopologists, the artists, etc..
>
> A. Stone says the software engineers are as bad at communicating clearly as
> everybody else. Again I agree, and thought I pointed this out in my original
> article. If anyone cares to tell me how *my* presentation might be better
> understood, I'll gladly make changes. Is this true for the literary critic?
I came away from CyberConf2 equally bemused by many of the
presentations by (to carry on the acknowledged generalisation) the
literary critics. I think that the point should be made, though, that
one of the sources of confusion was the difference in presentational
style between the two camps. In talking with the 'social science
types' here in EuroPARC it seemed that this generalisation about the
LCs might be true: they usually present papers as opposed to doing
presentations.
To clarify: it seemed to me at the time that the LCs would step up to the
lectern with a fistful of densely typed sheets, and would then read
the text of what was essentially their full paper. In contrast, the SEs would
step up with some comparatively brief slides and would then use these as a
rough guide as to what they wanted to say. It seemed as if the LCs read out
texts which they actually expected the audience to read for themselves at some
later date, whereas the SEs described the work which might also be covered in
more detail in a paper somewhere and sometime. I suppose this reflects the
different levels of esteem for (and centrality of) deftness of language use
in the two fields. Each camp also tended to refer to its own
bodies of basic work, bibliographies and 'personal bibles': just babble
to the other camp, of course.
Maybe this situation will diminish as the amount of work presented to mixed
audiences (such as that at CC2) increases, and more lastingly, as the amount
of work *published* within a wider - but still mixed - audience increases.
Still, the culture gap was obvious, and I really don't know whether it might
ultimately be bridged. I hope it will before the SEs slope off towards CHI,
CSCW and SIGGRAPH, and the LCs slope off towards Chiba (wherever the hell that
really is).
Regards,
--Matthew
Article 1567 of sci.virtual-worlds:
From: wex at pws.ma30.bull.com (Alan Wexelblat)
Subject: Re: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies!
Date: 5 Jun 91 15:59:23 GMT
Organization: Bull HN, Inc. Billerica, MA.
Pardon me for jumping in late here. I haven't seen any of the preceding
articles and Sandy doesn't directly quote other people, so I can only get
her sense of what they said.
First, some background: I've been at Cyberconf 1 & 2; I'm the book that
resulted from the first conference and I'm on the program committee for the
third one. (Does that mean I know anything at all? No, but it looks
impressive as heck in print. :-)
In article <1991May31.050056.10025 at milton.u.washington.edu> sstone at weber.
UCSD.EDU (Allucquere Rosanne Stone) writes:
First is the way Randy describes what he saw and heard at
2Cybercon, which was to divide up the talks into two
groups--software engineers and literary critics. This is going
to upset the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists,
artists, and businesspeople who also presented at the conference.
An old joke: There are two kinds of people in the world, those who think the
world can be divided into two kinds of people, and those who don't.
I will let Randy speak for himself, but let me tell you why I tell people
there were SE's and LC's there. The dividing line for me was text versus
ideas. The SE's were those who wanted to talk about the ideas of
cyberspace, inspired by Gibson's book or Kreuger's or something else. For
us (and I freely admit to a bias well on the SE side), the important thing
is that there is an interesting set of ideas here -- a way to see the world
and maybe change it.
The LCs on the other hand, were concerned wtih the text. Gibson's text was
paramount. It was dissected, deconstructed, analyzed, taken as a metaphor,
criticized, used as inspiration, etc. The important thing is that there is
a literary text which can be compared to other texts, that projects a kind
of future, that can inspire new ways of thinking, etc.
[...] somehow, everything that wasn't software engineering looked like
literary criticism. Why do you suppose this is?
Because the LCs were constantly talking about Gibson and his text. Most of
the SE talks didn't mention Gibson at all, let alone NEUROMANCER.
My hit on what happened [...] is that the SEs jargon (and I include
myself in that group) is transparent to SEs;
I'm surprised to see you in our group, Sandy. I wouldn't have bet on that.
Personalities aside, I think our jargon is, in a sense, more transparent.
That's because we're on the techno bleeding edge and that edge has (in this
century at least) had a disproportionate effect on the evolving language.
How many people knew what a "hacker" was before Robert Morris hit the front
pages? Or before the rise in BBS popularity. Nowadays, I bet you can stop
10 random people on the street of any major city and all will know the word
(even if they have different definitions). But that's not to defend our
(SE's) pig-headedness. See below...
[...] explained to the LCs the extremely wide diversity of the attendees'
backgrounds and disciplines, and to have suggested that they also be
prepared with a kind of general-language version of their work [...]
That might have helped. But I'm not sure it's possible. I have some LC
background, and I know how hard a time I have explaining stuff like
philosophy in non-technical terms. I have to do it all the time with
computers (as, I suspect, do all SEs), so it's a bit easier. I think SEs
are just more used to talking to general audiences.
But part of the problem rests with the SEs just as it does with
the LCs, because SEs are so used to swimming in the heady waters
of the SE community that communication is just so *easy*, and
communicating ideas about computing and graphics is second-nature.
Truth. My opinion is that the LCs (and by this I mean all the non-techie
types) made greater strides than the SEs at the conference in terms of
putting up with our kind of talk. They went more than half-way, if you
will. We SEs more or less sat in our own corner and expected the world to
come to us.
The other problem we have is that too few SEs can cross the line. Too few
of us have LC background/training. There is a significant part of the LC
community that has SE credentials (and more every day).
And I also heard arrogance...on the part of some LCs, who assumed that
everybody understood them, and on the part of many SEs, who assumed that
it was naturally the LCs' job to learn how to speak like "normal
people"--which is to say, them.
Guilty as charged. I guess it comes from the society we live in. It
rewards us SEs these days much more than the LCs, both in terms of money and
prestige (and power, for that matter). We've got the world in the palm of
our hand; it's a little hard not to feel like gods and goddesses. Now I'll
make the most biased statement I can think of: from the extreme SE point of
view, it looks like we're doing work which will shape the world for decades,
both in personal and global terms. What are you doing that compares to
that? Why should we pay attention?
Even the Soc/Anthro people usually can only analyze in retrospect. It's
rare that they can deal with modern culture in any way. Sandy is something
of an exception.
Why *didn't* the SEs use more technical language?
Because we're used to getting called on the carpet for it. Plus, we want
our stuff to be as widely understood and used as possible. I know LCs who
are happy if they produce a paper that can only be understood by 1000 people
in their particular specialty.
Article 1578 of sci.virtual-worlds:
From: eliot at phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman)
Subject: Re: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies!
Date: 8 Jun 91 20:53:39 GMT
Organization: Cognitive Science Lab, Princeton U.
In article <1991Jun6.150900.11787 at milton.u.washington.edu>
wex at pws.ma30.bull.com (Alan Wexelblat) writes:
; We've got the world in the palm of
;our hand; it's a little hard not to feel like gods and goddesses. Now I'll
;make the most biased statement I can think of: from the extreme SE point of
;view, it looks like we're doing work which will shape the world for decades,
;both in personal and global terms. What are you doing that compares to
;that? Why should we pay attention?
Because everything is more fun with an intellectual pedigree.
--
J C Lawrence Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor) Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*) Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...
More information about the mud-dev-archive
mailing list