At the Libre Graphics Meeting, a four day event bringing together open source developers and graphic professionals.
Correction @ 4:52: the Open Baskerville project has been initiated by Simon Pascal Klein from Australia (not Pascal Simon Klein from Germany). Apologies!
Video originally on http://river-valley.tv/content-centric-architecture-and-distributed-versioning/
I’ve watched this talk a couple of times now
My strongest first impression was the sense of confrontation that was instigated, not in the content per se but as evident from the two questions: “Distributed versioning control has been around for a long time”; then, the perfunctory comment on Eric’s pants. Both times I think the response was very admirable. The stance is important, and even political. It reminds me of feminism. And I suppose its the direct reply to that ‘geeky’ fear we have.
Some other thoughts it brought up:
I’m writing this on a Mac and before choosing to buy one of these a few years ago I read a review of a Partrick Wolf show in which he sang on stage just with his Mac as the backing band - the computer was described by the journalist as a ‘white knight’. This image stayed with me, and may have been a crucial factor in me, like lots of other people from an arts background, choosing Apple; I’m bringing it up since that transaction frames my approach to the talk / blog etc - technology as a commodified appliance rather than as a platform whose means of production are understood and truly exploited by the users. I don’t think this is a good thing, culturally.
I’m inclined to feel embittered that institutional biases and, for me, a lack of ‘humanity’ or empathy for non-enthusiasts in the communication of ideas (rough expression I know), as well as - and most decisively - self-disqualification, keeps those of a similar background to me from participating in the creation of technology (rather than creating via technology, which we do all the time via constant usage of web apps, if nothing else). The barrier is cultural as much as anything, as Eric points out.
In my daily work this divisive wall manifests itself in the great gulf between myself as a facilitator of technology with a customer service ethos (I’m training as a librarian, and that’s the likely future role of library employees) and those who actually have a hand in the functioning of that technology (the IT department). The latter lack a customer service ethic and sometimes, in my personal interactions with them, a sense of social common ground or even a wish to establish this.
Perhaps I’m too sensitive! - as well as too lazy to learn. That’s why I think the stance here has great relevance to people like me (and there must be millions if not billions of us!). . . . ?
Reply
Thanks for your comments Peter.
This plays out at different levels: I am honestly concerned with the benefits of distributed network architecture, and the font project I show. At the same time, I suppose you also see me trying to remain true to what is dear to me, within a context that is foreign.
Funny you mention feminism. My students had to make a social web application. We did a shared project at our faculty in which the students had to work with clichés, as they manifested themselves within their own personal world. This is where the borders between private and public become questionable, as the outside manifests itself on the inside. (I never read Foucault but if I understand correctly he maintains that we are not controlled from outside, but rather by an order we internalize and then afflict upon each other. Which I think is the case.) I figured it made sense to show them visual artists who had managed to work with the outward projection of inward clichés. I found that all the artists I would mention were women, except for Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The art activism of the Guerilla Girls, the appropriation of verbal and visual cliché by Barbara Kruger and the truisms of Jenny Holzer that always seem to precipate between worn cliches and individual confessions. (Jenny Holzer is also a good example because she will readily use any medium available for dissemination).
I started to see a relation to a principle that first has been articulated in feminist thought: the personal is political. Hanisch says what manifests itself as a political struggle in public life, manifests itself as private struggle in our private life as well. And the other way around.
Reply
On appliances: I am not sure if I have anything against them, as long as you can crack them open. At least on the software level. On your Mac you can go to applications > accesoires and launch the Terminal, type in
python(return) thenprint 'hello world'(return) and you just programmed your own computerI do not think everyone needs to be a programmer all of the time, but I do believe everyone should always have the potential to interface with the computer in all the different roles this device can offer. You do not want a company to make these decisions for us: allowing one person to be a developer, while another can be a content producer, while another has to be a consumer. (This is more or less the reasoning of Cory Doctorow in Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either))’.
Apple has started to make appliances that are more problematic now. The iPad runs the operating system of the iPhone. You can only run apple approved software. That rules out software that is comparable to Apple’s software: Firefox would not be allowed, because it is like Safari. Also, you can not install software that is able to interpret software code itself. So you can not install a programming language, and you could never do the little python programming I described just now. This is really costing Apple credibility with programmers who flocked over to Mac in droves in the last decennium.
Computer literacy is important. Like you say one of the biggest obstacles is that most of us with a background in humanities fear that we are not good at anything that has to do with computers and code.
With gender you can always end up with the nature nurture debate: are differences between men and women biological or cultural. For some things its easy to see that the basis is really biological: men are more often colour-blind, for example.
But do girls take less mathematics classes because they are worse at mathematics, or is it the cultural stigma that they are bad at it that makes them think they are bad at it? In the same way one can ask if people in the humanities forego coding because they are no good at it, or because there exists a cultural bias that they should not?
A mathematically inclined predesposition for structure is an advantage for programming, but not a necessity. My experience when teaching is that students expect to be horrible with code, but find that it is not all bad when they get confronted with it… Getting over fear of geek is a challenge we can manage.
Reply