Wes Anderson, Metadata, and Susan Sontag on Filter Failure

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

Susan Sontag

Interpretation is Like So Industrial Age

I've been thinking recently about Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation, which seems today both entirely uncontroversial and extraordinarily ahead of its time. Published in 1964, the piece suggests that our standard approach to criticism -- interpretation -- focuses too narrowly on the idea of extracting a meaning from a work of art. This approach, Sontag argues, under-privileges the sensory experience that exposure to art allows us (and indeed requires from us).

In Sontag's formulation, criticism's job should instead be to

make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

The thrust of the essay is that an intellectual revolution in criticism is required; Sontag's insouciant self-assurance that she is the smartest person in the room is the only thing that keeps it from becoming a polemic. But her essay seems so non-controversial today because it would become a mainstay of Postmodernism 101 reading lists. The central point itself -- the rebellion, at least, against artificial division between content and form -- lacks any sort of bite now.

Filter Failure Goes Two Ways

But it seems so visionary and ahead of its time because it touches on the problem of 'information overload'. In 1964 the techniques of industrial mass production had been applied to art for long enough to begin changing popular culture in radical ways. But the surfeit of information that she describes is even more characteristic of digital distribution than it was of the narrow period in which Sontag was writing.

Sontag argues that in an age of cultural over-production, the approach to criticism she recommends is necessary because of the volume of sensory input to which we are exposed:

Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life -- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness -- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

In short, criticism should help our filters, not by constraining our inputs but by widening our ability to process them.

An Erotics of Art -- Brought to You by iMovie

That leads to the second way in which the essay seems so ahead of its time: adoption of the approach it recommends is so dependent on tools which have only recently become widely available. Criticism that explores the sensory richness of the work it describes needs to be able to interact directly -- concurrently with -- the work itself. It needs to be available within and during the experience -- not outside and alongside it.

Sontag called for "acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art... essays which reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it."

Matt Zoller Seitz's superb series of essays on the influences and style of Wes Anderson seem to me to epitomize exactly that approach. It's curious that the Moving Image Source have laid out the text of the essays more prominently, because it's really in the video accompaniment (available for each installment by clicking the small 'video' thumbnail below the image on the right) that the approach shines. And does so in a way that suggests the promise of the kind of 'segmented metadata' that we have outlined here in the past.

The essays are supple, thrilling explorations of the surface of Anderson's work; they augment the pleasure that can be derived from viewing them. In a very real sense, they use technology -- in this case, presumably, some relatively widely-available video editing software -- to enrich the place of art in our lives.

Superb work, fascinating viewing. Highly recommended. And good for you. Who are you to argue with Susan Sontag?

Why Margins Are No Longer Wide Enough for Marginalia

... or, Charles Dickens Wants to Show You London

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

1. Arguing About Reading

Nathan and I had one of those "we're not as smart as we think we are" / "thank god we aren't crazy" moments at BookCamp Toronto last weekend while listening to Peter Brantley talk about the possibilities of "the networked book".

When your regular conversations about the implications of digital distribution tend to be vociferous discussions about publishing -- intellectual property, maintaining cost structures, etc. -- it's easy to find yourself thinking far less about the implications for reading. But the discussion that Peter initiated was an exciting tease about some of those possibilities (before it veered, perhaps inevitably, to the "safe ground" of industry change). And it was reassuring that they are some of the things that we Datachondrians have been kicking around for a little while, in particular about technologies that will enable granular user-generated metadata.

But let's zoom out for a moment.

2. Getting Content to Audiences

Suppose you could tour London in the company of Charles Dickens or Samual Pepys. See the Yosemite Valley alongside John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Read Invisible Man while listening to the jazz that Ralph Ellison heard while writing it.

The 26th President's memoirs...

... will not fit into your North Face Jester backpack

There is a vast amount of content out there that already exists, but is barricaded behind forms -- whether physical items like books or intellectual concepts like genres -- that prevent it from reaching its natural audiences. Exposure to a larger audience is always a win-win situation: more readers, more reading experiences, and an exponential increase in contacts to even more audiences. That isn't just more entertainment value or more revenue: there's an obvious gain to society when more people are exposed to more ideas: those ideas can be put to better use, often in ways not imagined by the original authors. As the exhaustive discussion about long tails and fragmented markets has shown, we've already seen tremendous progress in bringing content to previously unrealized audiences. But to some extent the physical forms and intellectual conception of cultural items like "the book" and "the film" remain obstacles. The weekend visitor to Yosemite might love to hear what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about Half Dome, but doesn't necessary want to read through (still less carry) his diaries alongside essential camping gear. Why not direct them straight to the paragraphs that matter to them?

There is, of course, a lot of institutional resistance to breaking down these units and releasing this content, which would essentially to allow readers to make use of it in whatever ways they can imagine. Some of these forces are legal (copyright); some are economic: what business model would continue to allow the production of value that the publishing industry is currently structured around? Some forces are more purely conceptual: what is the role of the author? Where does the involvement of the author -- their original idea, their intent, their control of presentation, their control of interpretation -- end? Where, for that matter, does it begin?

But there are tremendous countervailing forces -- namely the interpretative processes that readers already employ while consuming content. Readers, listeners, and viewers already associate the content they experience with memories, relationships, and other pieces of content. In the past these have been primarily personal associations. They have been communal only in the narrow set of situations that technology allowed: discussions among friends, within book clubs, and so forth. But they have been there, obscured somewhat by the fact that they left no physical mark upon the transmitter of the content (although many of us treasure a particular edition of a book because of the emotional associations that it carries: who gave it to us; what we were doing while we were reading it). As more than a few participants in the BookCamp conversations pointed out, some of the most meaningful "reading" experiences we have had were due to the conversations that they provoked with colleagues and friends, or the access to memories that they allowed.

All this, now, is possible to a degree and in methods hitherto unimaginable. You can already see it taking place. Set up a Twitter search for the title of your favourite novel and you will see, in realtime, the ways in which it is slotting itself into other people's lives. In doing so it is enriching those new readers and (since it is happening in ways so different from your own experiences) actually enriching the book itself as an amalgamation -- a touchstone -- of collective experience. For the first time, books are visible not just for what they contain but for what they release.

And users, given the tools, will enable, organize, and share that universe of possibilities.

3. A World of Associations

So what could that look like?

Suppose that users could geotag passages of text, works of art and design, pieces of music, audio clips, moments of film. This would allow you to engage in tours of cities, landscapes, and parks with a variety of contextually relevant materials (further reading, illustrations, maps; music and artwork inspired by these locations). Art galleries and museums would not only be augmented by those now ubiquitous curated audio materials, but by user-generated recommendations and commentary on what to see, how to look at it, and what music and writing has been inspired by or associated with it. As these user-generated elements age, they become instant historical tours, sitting alongside (for example) the impressions of Samuel Pepys, Thomas de Quincey, and Charles Dickens to enrich your experience of Oxford Street or Charring Cross Road.

There are obvious business applications -- the links to real-world and online goods and services, where you could purchase a poster of that William Turner painting, that reproduction of Harry Beck's first underground map, or a copy of the Dickens novel that you where just listening to an excerpt from.

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Then there are the in-your-armchair experiences. Suppose you could write a soundtrack for your favourite novel? Suppose you could read Blood Meridian with in-text prompts to the music it has directly inspired, to the music that people have associated with it? Inline explanatory footnotes and historical information; photographs and contemporary artwork; moments from classic Western movies that illustrate its spirit and landscape?

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Imagine purchasing a work of literature with an interwoven ‘annotation’ pack to provide explanatory material -- or a ‘translation packs’ for ESL students? A book club pack that could allow groups of users to share tags and embed conversations about specific passages. Imagine a book at which -- within the text -- the author and readers were staging a real-time discussion on specific passages. Imagine if cookbooks would suggest similarly-tagged recipes or dishes appropriate to a menu, and point to the location of a local specialty store for cooking materials.

In short -- imagine everything that can happen to content if it can be broken into distinct pieces which can be rated and evaluated on the basis of their contextual usefulness, rather than only on their relationship to ‘the rest of the book’.

4. Liberating Content

Much of the challenge will of course be about the interface design -- a theme underlined, in a variety of contexts, in a number of Saturday's sessions. What is the physical product design, and the information design, that would enable this reading experience? As Nathan pointed out, we should not assume that this need be a traditional book-based reading: a device should allow 'media switching' to let you to continue to enjoy the content regardless of your current physical activity. Should each chapter, point, paragraph, sentence, or word contain 'hooks' on which readers could hang associations, discussions, and other aspects of metadata? Should this entire question, as we have argued before, be available for constant redefinition in whatever terms make sense for the "reader"?

These appear to be narrowly technical points, although there is a big conceptual debate behind them. As Peter Brantley suggested, the recent Google book search settlement, by entrenching the concept of "the work" as a unitary entity defined by authorial intent, may reinforce the legal and conceptual walls mentioned above.

But the possibilities here are enormous, and the pressure may become unstoppable to liberate content from the old physical forms we built to allow its distribution. Ultimately, if our legal, economic and conceptual receptacles cannot adapt, then writers and readers may simply opt out of the system. Their cultural works will emerge independent of the copyright/publishing system and immediately sit in an open-source universe alongside Antony and Cleopatra and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, awaiting the arrival of content from a historically narrow period -- the period in which copyright held sway and books were closed from the designs of their readers.

Last.fm and the Fear of Accidental Exposure

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

I enjoy Last.fm a great deal. That's less, I think, for its admittedly rather limited utility to me at this point, and more for its set-it-up-and-forget-about-it aspect. There's a silent promise that it is taking note of what I'm listening to, and that at some point in the future this information may be of some use to me. In the meantime it's all going into the communal pot to help other people. If you can make your peace with companies storing a great deal of information about you in this way (and if you can't, I'm afraid that you may not enjoy the rest of your life very much), there is a definite social good that can come of it. By telling Last.fm what I listen to -- what the pathways of my taste are -- I am contributing to someone else's enjoyment. Indeed, the more people like me share their listening tastes with Last.fm, the higher the chance that it will allow me to discover something genuinely new which thrills and excites.

(There is also, of course, the danger that we travel in packs and never discover anything new outside our particular cultural envelope, a trend which Oliver Burkeman discusses in his latest Guardian column.)

There is at least one more immediate benefit to society, however, and it's one that at first blush seems horrifying. It dispenses with the guilty pleasure -- the ability to listen to a track, watch a movie, or enjoy a book without the knowledge of others.

The guilty pleasure allows you to maintain a distance between your carefully constructed public identity (perhaps the face you show to friends alone; perhaps the profile you showcase in front of some wider public) and the things you enjoy by 'slumming it'. I'm certain that much of the work of cultural discovery -- finding unknown artists or writers, chancing upon sounds that refresh popular music -- happens by accident or by exposure to works under the liberating cover of anonymity.

But it's also an inhibitor of cultural development, building walls around blocks of content believed to be discreet and in some way -- usually unrelated to their artistic merits -- antagonistic to one another. One doesn't listen to Tosca and Tosca side-by-side.

When I picked up Kylie's Fever a few years ago and listened to it obsessively for a weekend, a friend emailed to make the observation, with a great deal of mockery, that it didn't exactly fit with the avant-garde jazz and austere IDM that I had been listening to for the preceding few weeks. Had my critical faculties been replaced by those of a thirteen year-old?

Well, it's no good being ashamed about these things any more. Shame requires the ability to hide, and Last.fm doesn't let you do that at all. The exercise of snobbery as a substitute for critical faculty is going to become very much harder, because everybody's cultural preferences -- their true preferences -- are that much more visible. We're one step closer to the democratization of taste.

So here's a challenge: if you're a music critic, why not make your Last.fm profile public for all to see?

Negative Data

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

Kudos -- again -- to LibraryThing for introducing a very nice little feature called "will you like it?"

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This looks to be another quick way of using their very intelligent recommendations algorithm. But the name of the feature itself is another little nudge in the direction of leveraging "negative data" -- what we hate as well as what we like. Why do companies and services not make more use of information on what we spurn, as well as that which we actively seek to consume?

I've no doubt that some of the better recommendation engines do indeed use this data, but the fact that it isn't foregrounded means that users aren't inclined to, for example, apply low ratings to things that they actively hate. Indeed -- the entire conceptual language of our user interfaces is geared against this. When I'm rating items in Amazon or iTunes, I'm not inclined to give any stars at all to something that I hate. I want to banish it, not apply the most meagre of rewards.

What songs do I never listen to? Which songs do I skip away from within the first 30 seconds? When I'm browsing a newspaper website, which writers do I always fail to read -- suggesting that I'm deliberately avoiding them? Which websites do I always refuse to click through to?

What books have I started but never finished? Wouldn't it be nice if Amazon could tell me I have only 50 percent likelihood of finishing Finnegan's Wake?

Companies do everything they can to push highly viewed or rated content to customers -- but toxic content doesn't get pushed out of the way with quite the same enthusiasm. As anyone who has been involved in merchandising will tell you, bad content isn't just a "dead zone" around which good content can exist without impact. It risks infecting everything around it.

Metadata and its Discontents

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

​Like everyone else, I've been tremendously excited about the possibilities of user-generated metadata for some time now. I mean, I've been up nights with this stuff. I've watched the inspirational videos (enjoying with a feeling of smug superiority the utopian Austrian downtempo music that I was prescient enough to have purchased when it first came out). I've enjoyed David Weinberger's wonderful Everything Is Miscellaneous. And I've been thrilled that some social networking sites (I'm looking at you, LibraryThing) have been imaginative in exploring the technology's implications, even though their innovations -- like 'tag mirror' and 'tag mash' -- have occasionally been somewhat limited by resources available to a small startup competing against land-grab services like the Amazon-funded Shelfari.

In short, there are a lot of exciting ideas out there. Tagging, semantic markup, microformats, faceted browsing -- all technologies that bring the possibilities of digital categorization to the armchair user.

Unfortunately, it's still incredibly hard to make use of all this potential functionality. That's because most businesses have done exactly what you'd expect: buried their heads in the sand or gone to market with half-hearted implementations because they want to look like they're part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Many of these efforts have been failures. Amazon's attempt to get users to tag its wares failed to ignite, just as you'd expect if you invited users to conduct an inventory count at their local store. These offerings have usually been under the hood of awkward user interfaces that obscure, rather than reveal, the possibilities of the technology.

Tagging in disguise

True, there have been some honest attempts to bring this technology to users -- but they have typically relied on conceptual models inherited from previous media. Gmail is a great example. 'Labels' allow you to tag your email in as many combinations as you imagine -- but most people use them just as they would use a paper-based filing system: no more than one label per email.

Let's just put that in perspective. We're still organizing our correspondence in the same one-place-per-item system that would have been available to Babylonian scribes working with clay tablets. In spite of the fact that technologies to allow us more powerful systems are now abundant. We're doing this out of habit. Which usually means that our interfaces, both graphic and conceptual, are holding us back.

You see the same thing with iTunes playlists. Playlists essentially are tagging, but are restricted behind the wall of each user's own library. And the mix & match possibilities of tagging, though possible via 'smart playlists', are basically hidden behind the pretense that users are building something just like a radio playlist or a cassette mixtape.

Metadata is not macrodata

The result of these outdated conceptual models is to put digital classification back in the box. Users believe that metadata is 'higher' data: a summary of the item in question. They can put a song in multiple playlists, classify a book with multiple tags. And that's as far as the revolution goes. But that's the crudest form of metadata possible -- in fact, it's not much more than a user-generated classification schema.

As a result, users tend to be pretty conservative. Here, for example, is a snapshot from my LibraryThing account:

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Really? That's all I could come up with? Sure -- because that's what most people do with their tags: use them like shelf labels for their personal libraries.

But tags -- even at this higher level -- promise far more freedom for idiosyncrasy. Tags should allow you to indulge your own personal responses to a book, song, film, or object, rather than slavishly follow the conventions of classification that we've inherited. Here, for example, is a first stab at what is admittedly the most taggable book ever written:

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Tags really do promise an animals belonging to the emperor kinda world.

Tagging Experience

There's one thing that's even worse about this tags-as-summary model. It doesn't adequately represent how we interact with the world. We don't treat songs, books, articles, and films as great flat surfaces onto which one-line summaries can be slapped. We don't form an emotional attachment to a piece of music because of its unified formal merits, but instead because of the place it has in our lives: what we were doing when we first heard it, who we were with, what it reminded us of.

Often it isn't an album, or even a song, on its own, that brings these associations. Perhaps it's just a moment. The mixture of plaintive regret and warm consolation in Aretha Franklin's voice when she sings the first eight words of "Soul Serenade". The weird way in which the first 18 seconds of The Stone Roses' "Fool's Gold" filter "Shaft" (via Young MC's "Know How") and James Brown's "Funky Drummer", and yet are still overwhelmingly redolent of the Manchester scene of 1989 and the amazing possibilities of a new moment in English popular music.

We enjoy passages in a book -- phrases, paragraphs, lines of dialogue. We thrill at scenes in a movie. We want to highlight parts of an article to show to friends.

So we need the technologies that will help us share those moments and associations -- and to combine them with others in ways that produce exciting and unexpected results. High-level classification actually obscures the richness of our relationships with content, rather than reveals it. And right now that's where we're stuck.

Splice & dice classification

What we really need, then is user-generated splice & dice classification. We need the ability to go from this:

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To this:

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Data wants to mate

What are the key principles?

1. Users define the boundaries at which their metadata is be applied: For a book, I might want to tag the entire book, a chapter, a passage, a paragraph, or a phrase. Or even just a Cormac McCarthy's use of the word "bedlamites". For a movie: the entire film, a scene, a snippet of dialogue, a particular tracking shot, the cut between two shots.
2. Users define the nature of their metadata: My metadata might be textual, audio, video. I might want to impose my own classification system on Suttree to make it easier for me to enjoy the book; I might want to highlight passages that correspond to the title character's occasional but impressive use of alcohol. Or I might want to associate certain passages with songs from Tom Waits and Buck 65 and clips from Jim Jarmusch films. We've reached the point where tags don't take us far enough. Data doesn't just want to be free. It wants to mate.
3. Interfaces must be designed around the functionality, not around conceptual handrails: We may have passed beyond the point at which the conceptual models of former eras -- tags, playlists, labels -- can handle this stuff. The key concept here should not come from taxonomy but from evolution: radiation. Content must be freed to expand, evolve -- and to do so in promiscuous and profuse ways that its creators could not have begun to imagine. The interfaces we design to enable this must make the functionality extremely intuitive. It needs to be hard not to use it.

Bringing hypertext to the masses

We're pretty excited about this idea, so expect to see a bunch of posts on the possible applications. What kind of devices and interfaces will enable (and interpret) user-defined relationships between units of content? What kinds of opportunities exist with user-defined boundaries around what those units of content actually are? What tools will allow users to weave content together at the interrstices of their own choosing? How can all types of content make use of the 'atomization' of their content, freeing the smaller components -- moments, passages, phrases -- from their contexts, and allowing users to combine them in ways that make sense to them, intellectually or emotionally?

Several companies are already chipping at the edges of this -- Flickr's "notes" feature, for example, is the most high-profile current application -- but it remains to be seen whether open standards and copyright can keep pace with the extraordinary implications.

Hip-hop has thrived off this approach to content for decades, but in other genres and media it doesn't go far beyond quotation, allusion, or homage -- and none of it generated by the consumer of information instead of the producer.

Much of the original excitement about hypertext was that it would foreground the connective relationships between areas of knowledge. But the first content-management systems for the internet left the responsibility to maintain these relationships with the individual writer. Writers were expected to include hyperlinks in their texts as they published them. This was a mistake. These relationships should be available for maintenance by the consumers of content -- the crowd -- not the producer. That is how the promise of hypertext can be realized -- providing the ability for users, readers, and consumers to constantly update the relationships between tiny units of content based on what seems relevant to them now, not at the time of production. Based on what they use the content for, not what it was intended for.

That's how we interact with the world. Data should be no poorer.