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ON MY MIND: The Social Life of Information
IN THE MEDIA:"SAM: Stop Acronym Madness"
INFORMATICON: Robert Lee Hotz on the human genome
CYBERSPEAK: The meaning of "EMOTICON"
SITE OF THE DAY: Salon's "Brilliant Careers"

I've been fascinated with the power of the Internet since before I knew its name, from the time I did my first electronic database search, more years ago than I care to count. It's not information technologies in and of themselves that capture my imagination -- in fact, I'd be hard pressed to give a simple, accurate explanation of how computers actually send, receive, and manipulate data.

It's the Internet as a social phenomenon that has me hooked. For good or for ill (on balance, as I see it, more for good), we're all profoundly affected by the scope, speed, capacity, and unanticipated consequences of linking so many people together in time and virtual space.

I've observed a troubling tendency, though, to divide people into those who resist information technologies and those who embrace them, those who love bits and those who love books, those who love content and those who love connection. It seems to me that most of us fit all of those descriptions at one time or another, often simultaneously. So I was interested to discover the perspectives of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, colleagues at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in their recent book, The Social Life of Information.

Here are two researchers steeped in the culture of Silicon Valley who believe that information technologies cannot be designed or understood in a vacuum. Information technologies must be considered in the context of their "social periphery," the "communities, organizations, and institutions that frame human activities." In a series of essays, Brown and Duguid reflect upon the social context of information and draw inferences for a more humane design of information systems.

Both their insights and their vocabulary are so compelling that I find myself taking this book at a very slow pace: rereading passages, poring over endnotes, and ticking off a growing number of entries in the bibliography.

I have no doubt that I'll be featuring this book again on metaforix.com and in this e-letter. Meanwhile, let me whet your appetite with a quote from the book's introduction:

"Tunnel design . . . ignore[s] the clues that lie beyond information," producing "technologies that create as many problems as they solve," or technologies that "'bite back.'

"If badly designed technologies bite back, the good ones often fight back. Well-designed technologies, that is, refuse to retreat meekly in the face of tunnel design. Futurology is littered with the obituaries of tools that nonetheless continue a robust and healthy life. One of our own favorite examples is the hinge."

Stay tuned.

Cordially,

Lois C. Ambash, Editor

"SAM: Stop Acronym Madness,"
Scot Petersen, eWeek, August 7, 2000

Columnist Scot Petersen, who admits to using too many acronyms himself, issues a tongue-in-cheek call for "a moratorium on the creation of any new acronyms." This piece is worth reading not just for the kernel of truth it holds, but also to bring yourself up to speed on some ubiquitous elements of the online "alphabet soup."

To read the full article, click here.

"Ewan Birney, a leading computational biologist in England, earlier this year challenged his sober-minded colleagues to gamble a dollar and some incalculable measure of their reputations on their best estimate of the true number of human genes. So far, 228 geneticists and biocomputing experts have put their money on numbers ranging from 28,000 to 200,000 genes ....

"Many biologists are concluding that the biological construction kit for humankind has far fewer genes than previously believed .... If the lowest guesses in the human gene sweepstakes are correct, it means that it takes only twice as many genes to make a person, with an average of 100 trillion cells in the human body, as to make a worm or a fruitfly."

Robert Lee Hotz, "$1 Gets You Into This Gene Pool."
Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2000

"EMOTICON": An "emoticon" is a sideways picture made up of punctuation marks and other keyboard characters. It is used in e-mails and chat room postings to express emotion, like this :-). (The colon is two eyes, the dash is a nose, and the parenthesis is a mouth.) Because the most common emoticons represent smiling faces, the terms "emoticon" and "smiley" are often used interchangeably.

Emoticons are a form of "ASCII art" -- images created by combinations of the 128 standard computer codes that are used to represent letters, numbers, and other keyboard symbols. ASCII, used around the world, stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange."

To see a long list of emoticons and other examples of ASCII art, visit www.netlingo.com.

SALON's "BRILLIANT CAREERS"

Salon, the Webby-winning daily zine, consistently offers savvy commentary, excellent writing, and sparkling graphics. It would be hard to choose a favorite among its channels, but "Brilliant Careers" is certainly high on my list.

Sponsored by Lexus and published weekly, each “Brilliant Careers” column profiles the personality and achievements of someone who has significantly affected Americans’ experience of the world. The choice of subjects is wide-ranging. Cultural icons like Aretha Franklin, Martha Stewart, and Mr. Rogers coexist within an eclectic mix of artists, writers, performers, sports figures, and lesser-known but just plain interesting people -- such as Ina May Gaskin, the woman credited with “almost single-handedly inspiring the renaissance of midwifery in the United States,” or Robert Moog, inventor of the electronic synthesizer that has “radically changed the way music is made.”

The photo accompanying each profile, along with a bit of the text, is transformed into an electronic postcard and archived on the site. (The full text of the article is archived, as well). If you enjoy keeping in touch with colleagues and friends through e-cards, take it from an e-card connoisseur: the cards are as fabulous as the profiles.

To visit this site, click here.

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