my-name-is-raj

Action Research . . . first timid steps

2011-03-30T22:01:00.002+01:00

I'm glad to be back but feel like I've been in a coma for 20 years and just woken up. I feel very off the pace and its taking time to adjust. Suffice to say, I'm a little confused :( Here's a timeline that will be continually updated as the project progresses.

Action Research on Dipity.

Intermission

2010-05-16T16:15:00.000+01:00

There now follows a brief intermission of 12 months . . .

First Components of the Site

2010-03-26T20:01:00.003Z

Policy Stuff to follow:

On my Command . . . unleash Hell . . .

2010-03-25T20:38:00.001Z

Up The Hill Backwards on Dipity.

Action Plan

2010-03-07T00:36:00.001Z

Action Plan on Dipity.

The first low res test . . .

2010-02-28T18:09:00.001Z

And so it begins . . .

2010-02-28T18:02:00.001Z

Locus of control . . .

2010-02-27T17:30:00.000Z

In fact one of the best assignments from last year was a 10-minute film with the student talking to camera about her life, and where she wanted to go, making reference to some of the theoretical tools that helped gain an insight into what she needed to do.

The above is what I'm trying to do but getting bogged down once again with the 'making reference to some of the theoretical tools' bit. The stuff I've done so far sound like some of my blog posts and while I'm ok with the fact here and there that I am going against some of the theories, I get worried that I'm not being explicit enough and end up adding a chunk of 5 minutes of theory to every single point!

What I'm trying to aim for is a 10 minute piece that articulates, my hopes, my fears, my strengths, my weaknesses, my prejudices and my beliefs. The fact that I recognise Goffman at work everywhere but I am uncomfortable with it as it does nothing to question the legitimacy of our structures and feels to me like deceiving, inveigling and obfuscating. The fact that I recognise that my attributions (weiner) have been mostly external and that I need to re-centre the locus of control with me and me alone. I also don't want to negate my experiences. I know for example that some things that I have experienced really have been entirely out of my control. The fact that I have become victim to a state of learned helplessness which masks my cognitive dissonance. The fact that I want my sense of awe, wonder, passion and intensity back.

That's what I want my 10 minute piece to be about.

I have the first 3 lines down and the very last line done - and I'm back at work tomorrow!

And an add on

2010-02-22T18:18:00.001Z

An add on to the above . . . just click on the title

Up the Hill Backwards . . . It'll be all right . . .

2010-02-22T18:13:00.000Z

Having failed to get a handle on doing this top down I've decided to scratch everything and start from the bottom by thinking about possible goals that could find their way into an action plan. I've added some audio this effect - just click on the title.

SWOT Analysis

2010-02-21T21:49:00.000Z

I've been a bit down about this assignment and feel disconnected from it. In an effort to make sense of things I've decided to go back to the start and begin with a simple SWOT analysis. Click on each image for a full size view

In Image Form:

OK, here's a bit more

2010-02-18T13:23:00.000Z

Introduction:
Reflection is an activity and process that defines our age. We are encouraged as professionals, as humans, as people, as individuals, as families to reflect upon our lives and our goals and to consider the range of choices that we have made and the actions that resulted from those choices which, so the idea goes, have led us to where we are now. It then follows from this idea that the very process that led us to an understanding of our current position, needs and wants can help us to ‘move forward’ and work towards achieving our future personal and professional goals.
Throughout this there is the implicit (and indeed sometimes explicit) embedded message that an individual is the sum total of their choices and decisions and that the individual almost single handedly has the power to change any aspects of themselves or their lives that they deem undesirable, disappointing, not satisfying or indeed painful. I have to state at this point that my experiences both personally and professionally to this point lead me to conclude that individuals do not possess this limitless power (except in certain circumstances) and that for me a great deal of contemporary obsession with self reflection is indeed just another layer of control and performance.
In this work I shall be attempting to understand how I got to where I am now and to posit a potential plan as to future options that might assist me in getting to where I want to go. I shall do this with the aid of Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle and Learning Styles Inventory in relation to my own experiences. I selected Kolb, since for me the process has always been a straight line and not a cycle and it has therefore been interesting to try to view my development cyclically and to see how I have resisted doing so up until now and whether or not this has perhaps contributed to my long standing stagnation. Furthermore, I shall attempt to consider the work of Erving Goffman and his performance theory and underline the tensions within me as I seek to reconcile my needs and wants and my perceived lack of power. For me, Goffmans’ theories underline a serious barrier to any self power resulting in praxis.
Having considered these theories I shall then look at their application in key periods of my life and also their potential usefulness or otherwise in terms of affecting a seismic shift in my thinking and affording me some degree of control over my future.
Personal Reflection
Contemporary society is awash with opportunities for individuals and groups (and here I refer to groups as comprising of two or more people such as spouses, work colleagues, friends etc) to not only reflect upon their lives but also to consider their own personality types and traits. While many would consider some of the tests as found in trashy magazines, web sites and online communities as either harmless or just fun it is important to note the undercurrent of predestination that acts to secure the re-enforcement of existing ideals – accurate or otherwise. People have a need to feel good about themselves and our mass media society feeds the view that this is an accepted state and offers us consumer goods, self help, fun tests and counselling to assist in learning to feel good about ourselves. I might argue that this is little more than a coded message that allows people to accept their lot by simply placing a suitable veneer upon it that fits with the individual’s existing self perception. This Forer effect underpins the ‘fun’ personality tests that I have attempted online as well as the more ‘serious’ psychometric testing models and the self reflective theories and models that I have come into contact with. Essentially, the tests and their results are so broad and general that there is something in there for everyone and with the right language anyone can reasonably assimilate the results as referring to them independently!
Goffman suggests a dramaturgical analysis of human interaction (particularly face to face) where individuals perform roles using settings, appearance and manner to ‘control’ another person’s impression about them. In turn the person being interacted with attempts to gather information about the performer through communication that is either ‘given’ (usually through language) or ‘given off’ (non direct communication that may or may not be within the performer’s conscious control). For Goffman, this interaction occurs in what he terms the ‘front region’. The ‘back region’ or backstage is an area where the performer can shed their role out of view of the audience. It is also interesting how positive these personalities or learning styles always are and the net effect of this re-enforcement is the ideal of the powerful individual. That with some relatively minor changes you can make significant differences to who you are and the life you lead. Why for example, is there no mention of ‘laziness’, ‘greed’, ‘aggressiveness’ and so on? Would such frankness undermine existing power and social structures? Would such frankness threaten the coherence and power of the front region as outlined by Goffman? Having taken a series of these tests through the early part of this unit it became clear to me that their reflective value was virtually zero in as much as I could choose to interpret such generalisations in any way I chose. Furthermore, we are all to a greater or lesser degree sophisticated enough to know what goes on ‘backstage’. This knowledge of the back region actually feeds our need to end up with a positive re-affirmation of our uniqueness and individual wonder. Thus we quickly engage in a conspiratorial performance that involves being more actively selective about the answers we choose or give and modify our responses to attempt to guarantee an outcome that tells us how amazing we are. In the ‘digital age’ of online interaction Goffman’s theatre metaphor still has value. We may not be interacting face to face but we still perform roles or adopt a given role.
My first experience with psychometric testing occurred at my second interview for the post of lecturer in Multimedia. The test was administered half way through the day in between the first and second stage interviews by a senior HR official. Throughout it was clear that the official was uncomfortable and lacking in experience about the test.
The questions were once again general and the performance dictated a set series of responses. At this stage it was clear that the definition of the performance and the situation was actively yet unspoken being agreed by both parties and a certain degree of ‘tact’ was being employed to gloss over the fact that we both already knew the answers that I would give. However, Goffman implies a certain degree of active consent or agreement in situ – not necessarily explicitly since we as humans live by inference. Yet this ‘consensual agreement’ already existed, long before I even applied for the job. It was predestined that should I want the job that this ‘veneer of consensus’ would be adhered to as a given. Where in this process was my active agreement, the single act of conscious power that allowed me to choose to accept the definition of the performance? Yes, I could have walked out or not applied in the first place but then the job would not have been an option. Hence the idea that we can affect change through the power of the individual is not quite what it seems. Goffman suggests that when we acquire a new position we might not be told exactly how to do our ‘act’ but may instead just receive some cues, hints and stage directions. It is then assumed that we already have a repetoire of bits ad pieces of performances that we can subsequently use in a new setting. However, if this is the case then given how personality and psychometric tests invite skewed or outright false responses it undermines an individual’s ability to learn and develop through active self reflection. It implies that there are already roles in place that we can do little more than accept. It also implies the existence of stage directors and begs the question, “How do I become a stage director?”!
In terms of Kolb, this presents difficulties at the reflecting through observation stage and hampers the forming of abstract concepts since it relies of an individual being willing to accept the adoption of predetermined roles.
However, the interviewer appeard to not be experienced enough to interpret what I ‘gave out’ and what I ‘gave off’. Hence her ability to check the validity of my performance was severely compromised and this was nonetheless accepted. Just as psychometric tests aim to check the validity of a performance by juxtaposing responses against the performance it alters the relationship of the performer and audience when that ability is not exercised or possible.
In this sense, while Goffman would argue that I was qualified or authorised to perform and that both parties were consenting to the performance it was clear o me that I found the situation dishonest and utterly without value. For example in response to a question such as “Do you consider yourself to be a team player?” would anyone really respond with “No. I really don’t like working with other people and would prefer not to have to deal with them”? However, it must be said that I had complete and total belief in my performance and the answers I gave were immediate, honest and accurate.
It can thus be argued that to have gotten the job I would have to have fitted a preset range of criteria that included personality types and traits that were considered essential to perpetuating the show that the performers within the organisation put on. As Goffman himself suggest, a team of performers are more likely to select as new team mates those who present themselves as being trustable enough to perform ‘properly’.
Despite ticking all the boxes, I failed to get the position at this, the second time of asking and this major event in my life has resulted in a staggering shift in my personality and approach to the world around me. To get the job I would have had to have engaged in ‘deceit’ and ’feigning’ in Goffman terms and this I found objectionable. If, as Goffman suggests, society expects moral character, that an individual ought to be what he claims to be then what of euphemisms such as ‘tailoring your responses’, ‘hiding your deficiencies’ or ‘making the most of your strong points’?
Kolb
David A Kolb’s experiential learning theory model based upon the work of Dewey and Lewin follows a four part cyclic arrangement where each part represents a stage in reflective personal and professional development. Kolb’s work is heavily influenced by the earlier work of Carl Gustav Jung. Kolb’s work has become popular in education circles and also in organisational structures in terms of staff development policies. There are contrasting views on the meanings for experiential learning but I will for the purposes of this paper refer to it as learning through personal reflection upon everyday experience in a setting not sponsored by an establishment.
According to Kolb (1984, 38) "Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience"
Experiential learning proponents might suggest that learning is best conceived as a process, not in terms of outcomes but I now know that I have always seen learning in a straight line on a personal level rather than as an ongoing cycle ie that you begin as a child with nothing and gradually acquire knowledge and experience as you grow which then affords you great control, comfort, satisfaction, achievement and status. In my blog, I refer to my formative years and the early formation of a linear ‘action plan’ or ‘script’ through my interaction with my parents, educators, the media and to a lesser degree my peers. This ‘script’ was quite simply; BA, MA, PhD, Success – with success being measured in terms of affluence, power and achievement. While in essence this type of plan provides a clutter free approach to development it does nothing to allow for any reflective practice or indeed for the re-integration (or feedback) back into the script of experiential learning. In other words, there is no opportunity to reflect and change the script and hence it could be argued that in many ways I was the architect of my own downfall.
Again however, Kolb’s cycle seems like a closed system in another way as there is little opportunity for the actions of others to impinge upon the cycle. Goffman might suggest that the agreed definitions of the performance suggest that individuals can change from disbelievers to believers and vice versa and that such changes in approach are triggered through experiential learning. This does not though take into account the power of ‘others’ to control the range of potential outcomes afforded to individuals in any given setting. For example, countless sections of society feel disempowered, embattled and ‘kept down’. Can we really be asking ourselves to believe that they are all somehow unable to reflect upon their plight or that they are forever poor performers and therefore relegated to passive audiences or even backstage staff?
As an AS, learning for me is far more formalised and problematic in terms of self-reflection. Self reflection happens in me constantly but in two distinct ways; firstly the cyclic response to external stimulus i.e. what other people say or do and secondly an entirely closed internal world where reflection tends to re-enforce existing ideas and behaviour patterns. I will expand upon this subject later on.
Kolb’s cycle can be identified in four stages:
Concrete Experience: Learning from specific experiences and relating to people. A difficulty arises here in terms of verifying the ‘concreteness’ of any given experience and avoiding misreading. Furthermore if our dealings with others is based upon performances then is relating to people more about acquiring a wider portfolio of preset performances from which to draw from in our future social interactions? If experiences are misread then surely that invites major subsequent amplification of the misreading through the cycle and affects the ability of the individual to make sense of the experience and affect future change in new situations?
Observation and Experience: Observing before making a judgment. Here too there is the opportunity for misreading to be fed into the cycle. In the absence of ‘concrete’ information, or the inability of the individual to ‘infer’ according to the structures of any given society or the inability or unwillingness of the individual to accept a given performance or audience role, can accurate or meaningful judgements be made? It is also worth noting that such models are always deemed positive and helpful from the outset. Labels such as ‘negative’, ‘non-constructive’ or just plain ‘uncooperative’ await those that might suggest that there isn’t a possible positive outcome. Too often individuals undergoing this cyclic process of reflection are under pressure to conform or indeed accept a bad situation since the generally accepted view is that if it didn’t help you then you were obviously doing it wrong or not willing to give it a chance!
Forming Abstract Concepts: this is the point at which a form of generalisation takes place where an individual is able to understand or ‘see’ a general principle that can potentially be applied to a variety of situations or experiences rather than seeing each experience in isolation. Again if misreading occurs then the generalisation could result in dangerous generalisations being accepted. Goffman argues that society requires that matters are what they appear to be but clearly a cynical acceptance that they are not allows for generalisations that can be used to exploit situations for personal gain.
Testing in New Situations: this refers to the ability to get things done by influencing people and events. However, it seems that the key to achieving praxis is in becoming a better and more accomplished performer.
For Kolb, the learning process can and often does begin at any of the four stages and he claims that ‘ideally’ a person is involved in all four stages through the learning process – although this is not a process that we undertake explicitly. Indeed it has resonance with feedback theories in cybernetics and it may be argued that Kolb’s theory is an abstract form of biological theory.
Kolb identifies four learning styles stating that people naturally prefer or identify with a single learning style. This LSI is underpinned by three stages – acquisition, specialisation and Integration - in our development and our ability to move through the cycle improves as we move through the stages in our development.
For Kolb the learning styles are a product of two pairs of variables or choices that we make. These are:
Concrete Experience: Feeling v Abstract conceptualisation: Thinking
Active Experimentation: Doing v Reflective Observation: Watching
In other words we choose our approach to the task (through our processing continuum) or experience ('grasping the experience') and at the same time we choose how to emotionally transform the experience into something meaningful and useful (via our perception continuum)
But do we really consciously make these choices?
The four learning styles (LSI) are Diverging (feeling and watching – CE/RO), Assimilating (watching and thinking – AC/RO), Converging (doing and thinking – AC/AE) and Accommodating (doing and feeling – CE/AE).
It is important to note that Kolb does not define learning styles as absolutes but as tendencies and accepts that individuals may be able to change learning styles. Nevertheless, the thrust is that we prefer some learning style behaviours to others at any given period of our development. One of the most crucial roadblocks to my development appears to be my need to have someone ‘validate’ it. I feel the need to use ‘accepted’ analysis in order to gain validation and acceptance – i.e. I constantly need someone to tell me I’m doing things right. As an AS I need a smile everyday, I need a hug everyday and I need to be told that I am ok everyday.
Jung's 'Extraversion/Introversion' dialectical dimension here
My Experience
My current predicament about my future has had a long period of gestation but there are a number of relatively recent triggers that I want to focus on for this text. They can be summarised as follows:
The failure to get the post of Head of Design at UWN
My diagnosis for AS
A continual eradication of autonomy, respect, value and creativity at my current workplace
Looking at the first trigger it is still somewhat of a mystery to me as to how I actually became a lecturer rather than a practitioner. As a second generation Asian with a very strict orthodox upbringing it is certainly evident that drummed into me from an early age some occupations carried more gravitas and worth than others – teaching was among these although certainly not in the top half of desirable careers. Kolb might suggest that the acquisition phase of my development had led me to acquire a set of values, morals and ideas that were from the outset confused, coming as they did from a hybrid Indian-English environment and being mediated through an (as yet unidentified) AS faculty. My formative years led to a belief in the role of teachers as vessels or translators of knowledge in the same sense that in some tribal cultures the elders hold wisdom and knowledge that is then orally passed down to the next generation. The idea that ‘everyone’ has a valid point of view is one that I have always found difficult to accept. After all if everyone is special then no one is. History is littered with unbalanced equations where a great idea is weighed down by the views of those that owing to their inability to comprehend or their desire to oppress seek to nullify its effects. When I was borne, being smart, hard working and creative was desirable. By the time I was 20 it was ‘way uncool’.
The education ‘scenes’ in the script I mentioned earlier seems now to have been a classic and bizarre misreading in a Lacanian sense. I had immense hopes for my undergraduate study but this turned out to be a complete disappointment and one of the biggest regrets of my career. I was actually offered a research post combining an MA and paid teaching on the postgraduate programme at UWN immediately but so disillusioned was I after my undergraduate experience and the organisation itself that I turned it down.
The feeling for me was that the workplace could not possibly be any worse than the education setting. In this sense it could be argued that my approach to the decisions about staying in education was clearly based upon the feeling extreme of the processing continuum of Kolb’s model in that the way I felt about my experiences governed my approach to decision making in the light of those experiences. Furthermore, experiential learning proponents might argue I rationalised the meaning of my experience and made it useful through feeling and thus allowed myself to justify my decisions. In another sense one could argue that a nascent world view was being formed here based upon a misreading of the experience and that misreading was then amplified through the cycle and resulting in generalisations that ultimately were not personally useful or even accurate. For example, as a result of my experience I was convinced that all education was now a lie based upon elaborate performances.
Goffman would argue here that I could be classified either as ‘knocker’ or ‘wiseguy’ or perhaps more charitably a renegade, in that I was determined to protect my belief system and was happy to take a moral stand arguing that it was better to be true to the ideals of the role than to the performers who falsely present themselves in it. Curiously Goffman might also refer to me as a ‘deviant’ who is ‘said to let the side down’! Certainly in my experience of lecturers they had the necessary equipment of their performance roles but it became evident to me that they were simply not qualified or authorised to perform that role. Yet here they were. The same could be said of my experiences with managers at UWN. I had difficulty reconciling the fact that the only thing that mattered was ‘looking the part’. As Goffman suggests, “Similarly executives often project an air of competency and general grasp of the situation, blinding themselves and others to the fact that they hold their jobs partly because they look like executives, not because they can work like executives.”
However, the above statement raises again the concern of whether or not these models, tests and theories actually have any real significance and furthermore whether or not celebrated theories and models have any higher value than generally accepted wisdom or oft maligned systems such as horoscopes or the “R U love matched” text in options for teenagers on digital music television channels.
On a more serious note, the recent catastrophe in the banking sector which mirrors financial struggle in the education sector is the result of decisions made by performers who agree not to give the game away as it were. Given the distress, heartbreak and loss this has caused can we really afford to be so complacent about the people who we authorise to perform key roles?
I set about trying to gain work by contacting companies, talking to establishments and advertising my work on the nascent web platform and pushed the benefits of my multimedia ideas. This was one of the most disenfranchising periods of my life and the result of rejection after rejection was a decision to take up a part time teaching job – at UWN of all places - simply to pay the rent. Was I simply not an adept performer? Or was it more that some of the paraphernalia of my performances were so outlandish and new that the definition of those interactions could never achieve a ‘veneer of consensus’?
Hence I ended up in teaching!
Using Kolb it becomes evident that my experiences of ‘selling my wares’ to virtually everyone that I could gain access to (including everyone from estate agents, to educators, to doctors to plumbers to car manufacturers, to television stations to shopping malls) were not positive and through a process this time of thinking rather than feeling it allowed me to form a generalisation that the experience was based upon my being ahead of my time in some respects and not understanding the relatively conservative nature of society and the non deterministic processes by which new technology or ideas are absorbed and adopted. Through reflective observation it became possible for me to ascertain that to get to the stage of active experimentation I needed to allow some of the newer technology that multimedia involved to become more widespread. Equally, in order to exploit the future I would need to remain relevant and up to date in terms of skills and needed access to the appropriate technology and the means to continue learning. I was thus now operating firmly in the specialisation period of my development according to Kolb but the cyclic model of reflective practice was one that I was willingly employing. My experiential feedback into the cycle was still tainted by misreading and the general anger and bitterness that this naturally engenders. Thus I learned a great deal in terms of self skilling on all of the latest technological innovations but in total isolation and still slavishly following the original ‘script’ while trying to jump directly from the BA scene to the Success scene. Hence the logical choice was to ‘go back to college’ but as a staff member this time and not a student since my previous generalisations about my experiences there applied to student status. Furthermore as one of Goffman’s renegades it afforded me a mechanism for feeding my ego and satisfying the need to be different and special – I would be the one member of staff who was really authorised to perform the role and I would be true to my ideals and not any given agenda or group of people!
Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at this stage it was clear that I was operating to fulfil only the most basic physiological and safety needs in terms of a roof, food, clothing and employment while all the time craving the more advanced needs. These basic needs also led me to take up another part time teaching job at Coleg Gwent, the local FE college. Maslow might further suggest that my craving for external respect and glory masked a deep rooted insecurity and lack of self esteem that once again underpinned my relunctance to self reflect and feelings of powerlessness.
My initial experiences of teaching were positive by and large but here there was a tension in Goffman terms. Goffman argues that in any team situation such as the one with a team of staff and a team of students there must be an assurance that no individual will be allowed to join both team and audience in any given setting. While each of us may according to Goffman perform different roles in different social environments and may even be our own audience, in a team performance each member has the power to disrupt the performance and thus there is a forced reliance on each team member to ensure that the show is not given away. Equally, if one member makes a mistake then others must cover up for them.
As a lecturer I was aware of my role and the fact that I belonged to a performing team of staff but my resistance to the idea of performing and protecting the performer at all costs meant that I habitually straddled both performance team and audience. While this stance afforded me a great deal of respect and affection among my students it created an enormous amount of tension among my colleagues. In hindsight, this duality essentially sealed my fate since if a team is concerned primarily with maintaining a particular line they will select as team mates those who can be trusted to perform ‘properly’. The issue of trust here is a key one since there is the ideal of trust that is often sacrificed in favour of a trust in compliance and conformity.
In truth, I did not reflect in depth upon my removal from UWN as it was easy enough to jump straight through to the generalisation stage and suggest that since this was the scene of my dissatisfaction as a student it was thus inevitable that the same general rules would apply to me again. It re-enforced in me the idea that there were those with power and those without and the society within which I existed served to do nothing more than protect that power structure at all costs. In Kolb’s concrete experience stage It is the relating to people that I have found increasingly difficult, as I have gotten older and had an increasing number of ‘specific’ experiences. Throughout my life my reflection on my experiences has led to the concept of ‘human interference, in all things. That is, that whatever happens, happens because of the actions and decisions of another – another with more power than those affected by the incidents and events. This concept then not only fed into my subsequent active experimentation in new situations (although for me nothing could therefore ever be ‘new’ since it was predetermined by those already with power) but also insulated me from the idea that all learning is re-learning. A process to draw out my beliefs and ideas so that they can be examined, tested, and integrated with new, more refined ideas was simply in my view not possible.
Thus despite the fact that I had made a great many personal and financial sacrifies to build ‘something great’ at UWN only to find it demolished and my work ‘acquired’ by others I slavishly returned to the script and attempted exactly the same thing at Coleg Gwent. The self reflection process was limited and the generalisation above allowed me to attribute my failure to the actions and decisions of others. This generalisation was ironically e-enforced by my first line manager at Coleg Gwent who showed immense faith, trust and respect for me and my abilities and views. I was given essentially a free hand to create what I stood for and this for me was an actualisation of self in a narrow sense. It also re-enforced the idea that the amended ‘script’ with the missing scenes was now back on track. The feelings of powerlessness, invisibility and worthlessness remained and it is sometimes sobering to think that I have spent an immense amount of time and effort trying to build a physical representation of me that cannot be ignored, moved, affected or destroyed. My four proposals for a ‘High Energy Magic” building are nothing more than proposals for a 100 foot tall ‘Raj’.
With the forced retirement and subsequent passing of my line manager I lost a mentor and a friend. It is through a process of reflection that I now understand that this is something I have always sought and have continued to try to replace – unsuccessfully. The need to have someone tell you that you are special has never really been something that I have questioned until much later.
In 2005 I was diagnosed with AS.
Experiential Learning also requires the resolution of conflicts between dialectically opposed modes of adaptation to the world. This is a key issue for me and in my own experience I now ‘feel’ far more about the world than I ‘act’. It is also interesting that I now see the world as being distinct from me – separate, other, hostile. This is in no small way a facet of AS but my current belief system cannot be attributed solely to this – especially since this mode of thinking is for me less than 20 years old.
While some might argue that learning results from synergetic transactions between the person and the environment, the nature of these transactions is for me still a source of much confusion and distress and the level of consent and relative power structures appear also to be not clear. Have I really actively chosen to undertake a series of actions, choices and decisions that have led me to a point in my life diametrically opposed to any sense f my original aims and goals? How is it actually possible for an individual to do everything that takes them away from their goals? It is here that perhaps a closer examination of Freire, Goffman and Foucault might help.

Another follow on bit

2010-02-17T15:58:00.001Z

Add to the last bit:

Using Kolb it becomes evident that my experiences of ‘selling my wares’ to virtually everyone that I could gain access to (including everyone from estate agents, to educators, to doctors to plumbers to car manufacturers, to television stations to shopping malls) were not positive and through a process this time of thinking rather than feeling it allowed me to form a generalisation that the experience was based upon my being ahead of my time in some respects and not understanding the relatively conservative nature of society and the non deterministic processes by which new technology or ideas are absorbed and adopted. Through reflective observation it became possible for me to ascertain that to get to the stage of active experimentation I needed to allow some of the newer technology that multimedia involved to become more widespread. Equally, in order to exploit the future I would need to remain relevant and up to date in terms of skills and needed access to the appropriate technology and the means to continue learning. Hence the logical choice was to ‘go back to college’ but as a staff member this time and not a student since my previous generalisations about my experiences there applied to student status. Furthermore as one of Goffman’s renegades it afforded me a mechanism for feeding my ego and satisfying the need to be different and special – I would be the one member of staff who was really authorised to perform the role and I would be true to my ideals and not any given agenda or group of people!

An added on bit

2010-02-17T15:27:00.000Z

This bit is meant to follow the previous post:

My Experience
My current predicament about my future has had a long period of gestation but there are a number of relatively recent triggers that I want to focus on for this text. They can be summarised as follows:
The failure to get the post of Head of Design at UWN
A disastrous period as Academic Leader at my current workplace
A continual eradication of autonomy, respect, value and creativity at my current workplace
Looking at the first trigger it is still somewhat of a mystery to me as to how I actually became a lecturer rather than a practitioner. As a second generation Asian with a very strict orthodox upbringing it is certainly evident that drummed into me from an early age some occupations carried more gravitas and worth than others – teaching was among these although certainly not in the top half of desirable careers. I had immense hopes for my undergraduate study but this turned out to be a complete disappointment and one of the biggest regrets of my career. I was actually offered a research post combining an MA and paid teaching on the postgraduate programme at UWN immediately but so disillusioned was I after my undergraduate experience and the organisation itself that I turned it down.
The feeling for me was that the workplace could not possibly be any worse than the education setting. In this sense it could be argued that my approach to the decisions about staying in education was clearly based upon the feeling extreme of the processing continuum of Kolb’s model in that the way I felt about my experiences governed my approach to decision making in the light of those experiences. Furthermore, experiential learning proponents might argue I rationalised the meaning of my experience and made it useful through feeling and thus allowed myself to justify my decisions. In another sense one could argue that a nascent world view was being formed here based upon a misreading of the experience and that misreading was then amplified through the cycle and resulting in generalisations that ultimately were not personally useful or even accurate. For example, as a result of my experience I was convinced that all education was now a lie based upon elaborate performances.
Goffman would argue here that I could be classified either as ‘knocker’ or ‘wiseguy’ or perhaps more charitably a renegade, in that I was determined to protect my belief system and was happy to take a moral stand arguing that it was better to be true to the ideals of the role than to the performers who falsely present themselves in it. Curiously Goffman might also refer to me as a ‘deviant’ who is ‘said to let the side down’! Certainly in my experience of lecturers they had the necessary equipment of their performance roles but it became evident to me that they were simply not qualified or authorised to perform that role. Yet here they were. The same could be said of my experiences with managers at UWN. I had difficulty reconciling the fact that the only thing that mattered was ‘looking the part’. As Goffman suggests, “Similarly executives often project an air of competency and general grasp of the situation, blinding themselves and others to the fact that they hold their jobs partly because they look like executives, not because they can work like executives.”
However, the above statement raises again the concern of whether or not these models, tests and theories actually have any real significance and furthermore whether or not celebrated theories and models have any higher value than generally accepted wisdom or oft maligned systems such as horoscopes or the “R U love matched” text in options for teenagers on digital music television channels.
On a more serious note, the recent catastrophe in the banking sector which mirrors financial struggle in the education sector is the result of decisions made by performers who agree not to give the game away as it were. Given the distress, heartbreak and loss this has caused can we really afford to be so complacent about the people who we authorise to perform key roles?
I set about trying to gain work by contacting companies, talking to establishments and advertising my work on the nascent web platform and pushed the benefits of my multimedia ideas. This was one of the most soul destroying periods of my life and the result of rejection after rejection was a decision to take up a part time teaching job – at UWN of all places - simply to pay the rent. Was I simply not an adept performer? Or was it more that some of the paraphernalia of my performances were so outlandish and new that the definition of those interactions could never achieve a ‘veneer of consensus’?
Hence I ended up in teaching!

Another waste of time

2010-02-17T14:35:00.000Z

New Timeline

2010-02-16T23:19:00.000Z

A Life Less Ordinary . . . or not . . . on Dipity.

Giving Up . . . or not . . .

2010-02-16T22:14:00.000Z

I feel at a cross roads right now and am not too sure what to do. I feel too tired to keep motivated and frankly would like to just give up and do the minimum. I want to do things, and take risks and be creative on the MA but I feel like I'm making it hard for myself and just being the same fool as always where I try to do what I think but in the end am no better off for it - an MA is an MA right?.

At the moment I feel like just giving up and taking the attitude that I have 4 units left to go which equal 4 lots of books to read, 4 essays about the books which will all lead to a piece of paper that says MA on it.

I haven't touched my interactive piece since I started to write up my evaluation and found that I still couldn't understand what the MA regards as the difference between explicit and implicit. I'm probably going to abandon it now since I cannot see how I can write and make in the time I have left. Once again I've found myself in the same boat - ie I will end up writing thousands of words in a short space of time then spend the last week or two chopping bits out to meet a word count. That process does not lend itself to evaluative, critical or analytical thought so I know I won't be happy with the result. Hence it then becomes even harder to get motivated for it.

Added to this is the wretched paperwork for the coming inspection the week after the hand in date. I have 9 x 34 lesson plans to rewrite, a 34 page scheme of work for each course I run, a 120 page student profile, 3 class profiles, 360 student progress reviews, self evaluations and ILPs plus 4 lever Arch files worth of paper for each course I run! - on top of teaching and assessment.

I just have to be doing something wrong. I just can't figure out what. I'm heading towards a stark choice: give up my job and concentrate on the MA in which case I can't pay my mortgage or give up my MA and be stuck in this crap job. But then I refuse to give up my MA (admittedly at this precise moment the reason being that I've paid for it).

I'm so angry that I haven't figured this out yet! I have only just started this assignment and Jon's post about 'Hopefully by now you'll have 1500 words already written . . ." took me completely by surprise! My immediate first horrified thought was "When was I supposed to have started that?".

I had it set or so I thought. I knew what I was doing. then as soon as I started to write up my notes on the theories I found myself wedging loads of needless crap in because I can't figure out if my 'informed' reader is what I think he/she is. I read Goffman today and again I'm trying to figure out how to write up my 8 pages of notes so that together with Kolb they don't get over 4000 words. I've already decided to leave out Freire, foucault, giddens, schon, lewin and dewey - which means that its not what I thought so my original interactive piece now has lots of useless visual elements in it!

I've been scouring the net for examples of explicit writing versus implicit meaning and not really getting anywhere. I mean in the Kolb stuff, do I have to explain each stage of the cycle and give examples for every aspect of the LSI or would an 'informed' reader pick up the link to my own experience?

IOW can I write:

"My recent job applications have highlighted the extreme tensions in myself between the processing continuum and the perception continuum."

or would I have to write:

"My recent job applications have highlighted the extreme tensions in myself between the processing continuum which Kolb defines as . . . and the perception continuum which kolb defines as . . . . For Kolb the tension between these two is . . . . and as a result . . . Both continuums have two extremes which are . . .."?

I had a similar experience on the first year of my BA. The result was that I went into myself, stopped reading, stopped attending lectures and just did what I 'felt'. Mind you, I came out of it with a First . . .

Anyway, I'm not doing anything else tonight as I'm too wound up. No college work, no reading, no writing, no coding, no graphics. I'm just going to try to sleep and see if I feel better about it tomorrow.

Part 1: Evaluation

2010-02-16T15:46:00.000Z

David A Kolb’s experiential learning theory model based upon the work of Dewey and Lewin follows a four part cyclic arrangement where each part represents a stage in reflective personal and professional development. Kolb’s work is heavily influenced by the earlier work of Carl Gustav Jung who XXXXXX
According to Kolb (1984, 38) "Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience"
I’ve actually decided to look at Kolb’s theory for a variety of reasons:
It was the one drummed into me during PGCE in the late 1990’s.
I have a feeling that I have always seen learning in a straight line on a personal level rather than as an ongoing cycle in the sense that you begin as a child with nothing and gradually acquire knowledge and experience as you grow which then affords you great control, comfort, satisfaction, achievement and status. I have a feeling that I have been going round in circles for some time and even the most ardent supporter of merry go rounds will want to get off sooner or later!
In terms of control, I will return to some of these ideas later when discussing Goffman, Freire and Foucault.
The cycle seems like a closed system and there is little opportunity for the actions of others to impinge upon the cycle.
As an AS, learning for me is far more formalised and problematic in terms of self-reflection. Self reflection happens in me constantly but in two distinct ways; firstly the cyclic response to external stimulus i.e. what other people say or do and secondly an entirely closed internal world where reflection tends to re-enforce existing ideas and behaviour patterns.

Kolb’s cycle can be identified in four stages:
Concrete Experience: Learning from specific experiences and relating to people. It is the latter that I have found increasingly difficult, as I have gotten older and had an increasing number of ‘specific’ experiences.
Observation and Experience: Observing before making a judgment. This is a stage that I often find myself heavily situated in and my attempts to make sense of the world have lead me to quite difficult periods of my life where stagnation occurs. Through a judging of experience through vicarious experience of others’ experiences coupled with my own experiences has meant a complete halt to my learning cycle. As an AS I struggle to decipher meaning in any given social setting and will retreat into the internalised world where the power to transform it has no limitations or ambiguity. Perhaps I have been too preoccupied trying to understand the meaning of things and instead should look to simply adapting to fit?
Forming Abstract Concepts: this is the point at which a form of generalisation takes place where an individual is able to understand or ‘see’ a general principle that can potentially be applied to a variety of situations or experiences rather than seeing each experience in isolation.
Testing in New Situations: this refers to the ability to get things done by influencing people and events and in my experience this is a stage that I have very limited experience to draw upon. Most of my adult life has been spent feeling powerless to influence and to being beholden to the power of others. As a result at this stage new experiences do not occur which then feed into the next stage of the cycle. My generalisation at the previous stage has been one that has led to a belief system that re-enforces the sense of powerlessness and thus prevents active experimentation. In this sense my Kolb cycle is perhaps a far more limited cycle based upon the first two stages?
There are however contrasting meanings for ‘experiential learning’ which can loosely be stated as:
a) Involving a direct encounter with what is being studies rather than just thinking or reading about it
b) Learning thru personal reflection upon everyday experience – this definition is usually not sponsored by a formal education setting. In this form primary experiences are equivalent to sense experiences. ?
For Kolb, the learning process can and often does begin at any of the four stages and he claims that ‘ideally’ a person is involved in all four stages through the learning process – although this is not s process that we undertake explicitly. Indeed it has resonance with feedback theories in cybernetics and it may be argued that Kolb’s theory is an abstract form of biological theory?
Kolb expanded upon by identifying 4 learning styles and went on to state that people naturally prefer or identify with a single learning style. This is something I find hard to reconcile given that in my own personal reflection it is evident that I tend to straddle a number of different learning styles and that these styles vary and can be influenced both internally and externally.
But Kolb also identifies 3 stages in our development and he claims that our ability to move through the cycle improves as we move through the stages in our development. His 3 stages are:
Acquisition: where basic skills and abilities are defined. At this stage it is clear that my development was dominated by familial influences.
Specialisation: from school through to early personal and employment experiences. Kolb argues that the main influences here are: social, educational and organisational and that these influences shape our own specialised learning style. It is perhaps curious that my own learning style was far more open and varied than it is now. The imposition of ideas, values and norms was counter balanced by the greater sense of freedom and power that felt as a child. I felt no pressure to conform to anything that I felt was disingenuous and as such was far more open to new ideas and methodologies.
Integration: the adoption of a non-dominant learning style in both work and personal life, which occurs from mid career onwards. This does not reflect me at all!!!!
For Kolb the learning styles are a product of two pairs of variables or choices that we make. These are:
Concrete Experience: Feeling v Abstract conceptualisation: Thinking
Active Experimentation: Doing v Reflective Observation: Watching
In other words we choose our approach to the task (through our processing continuum) or experience ('grasping the experience') by opting for 1(a) or 1(b):
1(a) - though watching others involved in the experience and reflecting on what happens ('reflective observation' - 'watching') or
1(b) - through 'jumping straight in' and just doing it ('active experimentation' - 'doing')
And at the same time we choose how to emotionally transform the experience into something meaningful and useful (via our perception continuum) by opting for 2(a) or 2(b):
2(a) - through gaining new information by thinking, analyzing, or planning ('abstract conceptualization' - 'thinking') or
2(b) - through experiencing the 'concrete, tangible, felt qualities of the world' ('concrete experience' - 'feeling')
But do we really consciously make these choices?
The four learning styles (LSI) can be summarised as follows:
Diverging (feeling and watching - CE/RO)
I am/can / like to / believe: sensitive, watch, gather information, use imagination, have broad cultural interests, emotional, receive personal feedback.
I am not / cannot / don’t like to / don’t believe: Look at things from different perspectives and consider them equal, work in groups, listen with a completely open mind, interested in people
This could be me? Or is this what I want to be?
Assimilating (watching and thinking - AC/RO)
I am/can / like to / believe: ideas and concepts are more important than people, require good clear explanations, organise, having time to think things through
I am not / cannot / don’t like to / don’t believe: exploring analytical models, be thrown into the deep end
In terms of learning, this is definitely me! I don’t like being thrown in at the deep end and find that without some clear instruction that is unambiguous I can often struggle. Whether this is an aspect of AS I am as yet unclear.
Converging (doing and thinking - AC/AE)
I am / can / like to / believe: technical tasks, solve problems, specialisms, experiment
I am not / cannot / don’t like to / don’t believe: people and interpersonal aspects
This could also be me!!!
Accommodating (doing and feeling - CE/AE)
I am / can / like to / believe: intuition, hands on
I am not / cannot / don’t like to / don’t believe: using other people’s analysis, have new plans or challenges, rely on others, work in teams
This is the least like me!
It is important to note that Kolb does not define learning styles as absolutes but as tendencies and accepts that individuals may be able to change learning styles. Nevertheless, the thrust is that we prefer some learning style behaviours to others at any given period of our development. One of the most crucial roadblocks to my development appears to be my need to have someone ‘validate’ it. I feel the need to use ‘accepted’ analysis in order to gain validation and acceptance – ie I constantly need someone to tell me I’m doing things right. As an AS I need a smile everyday, I need a hug everyday and I need to be told that I am ok everyday.
Jung's 'Extraversion/Introversion' dialectical dimension here
Experiential learning proponents might suggest the following as relating to experiential learning:
Learning is best conceived as a process, not in terms of outcomes. This is where I diverge from this in the sense that for me it was far more of a straight-line approach – education or learning was a means to get to an end and that end was affluence and power.
All learning is relearning. Learning is best facilitated by a process that draws out the students' beliefs and ideas about a topic so that they can be examined, tested, and integrated with new, more refined ideas. This again I have had issues in terms of adapting to and accepting. My formative years led to a belief in the role of teachers as vessels or translators of knowledge in the same sense that in some tribal cultures the elders hold wisdom and knowledge that is then orally passed down to the next generation. The idea that ‘everyone’ has a valid point of view is one that I have always found difficult to accept. After all if everyone is special then no one is. Would some of our greatest accomplishments as a species have been made had everyone had the same level of ‘voice’ as those responsible for these great leaps in our development?
Learning requires the resolution of conflicts between dialectically opposed modes of adaptation to the world, i.e. reflection and action - and feeling and thinking. This is a key issue for me and in my own experience I now ‘feel’ far more about the world than I ‘act’. It is also interesting that I now see the world as being distinct from me – separate, other, hostile. This is in no small way a facet of AS but my current belief system cannot be attributed solely to this – especially since this mode of thinking is for me less than 20 years old.
Learning is a holistic process of adaptation to the world, not just cognition but also feeling, perceiving, and behaving.
Learning results from synergetic transactions between the person and the environment. The nature of these transactions is for me still a source of much confusion and distress and the level of consent and relative power structures appear also to be not clear. Have I really actively chosen to undertake a series of actions, choices and decisions that have led me to a point in my life diametrically opposed to any sense f my original aims and goals? How is it actually possible for an individual to do everything that takes them away from their goals? It is here that perhaps a closer examination of Freire, Goffman and Foucault might help.
Learning is the process of creating knowledge. My understanding of learning is that it is inextricable linked with acceptance.

A first mock up

2010-02-13T23:14:00.001Z

THis is the current feel. All the graphics are either free or made by myself and the content will probably appear in floating windows? audio? video? not sure yet. anyway my books haven't arrived yet so I'm taking a break until Tuesday.

I'm going to be reading some Freire shortly altho I'm away for a couple of days now. I've been playing with Flash but its not moving fast enough for me so I might have to revert to something else instead to get something done in time. Altho I now I'm really up against it and still worried about whether or not I've stuffed myself again with regards to making things explicit, I have to admit I am a little happier not writing!

Barnum's Panopticon

2010-02-11T22:00:00.000Z

I'm thinking of going for a simple theatre style look with perhaps paraphernalia that you can interact with. I'm having to scale back immensely after talking to you and also after the huge amount of paperwork that landed in my inbox this week - we have Internal inspection from 15th March - perfect

So far I have the idea of:

objects that convey my thoughts on some of the tests we've been exposed to
objects that convey my thoughts on some theories (Goffman, giddens, Foucault, Freire?)

A narrative based on my experiences and reflections using the Kolb Cycle as I mentioned over the phone

An object that acts as an action plan

Oi Vey! The Things they say!

2010-02-09T07:52:00.000Z

In response to Richard:

When I was an undergrad, I was told that I was 'ignorant at a high-level of consciousness'.

Beat that.

Sir, I accept your challenge! Ready?

The following have all been said to me at some time or other by various professionals in the education world:

"You are by far the most unsettling creature I have ever come across"

"Don't worry about what to do for a career, when you're 21 we'll all come and work for you"

"I can't quite decide if you are simply the most gifted person I've ever met or just the best looking stupid one"

"Frankly Raj, you are an enigma. You put me in mind of a theoretical patchwork doll"

"The most impressive thing about you is your dress sense"

"That is the best first piece of writing I've ever seen from a new first year student. What on Earth possessed you to come here?"

"Your problem is not your ability which nevertheless seems to somehow present a problem for me"

"Raj, mark my words, your naive idealism will be your undoing. This Internet business you keep wasting your time on, artists using computers for God's sake. Wake up and smell the coffee"

and my personal favourite:

"Raj, if we ever finally meet God and find out that after all this time he's just a child, he'd be just like you"

Beat that!

Response to Sladjana's Post

2010-02-08T08:04:00.000Z

Sladjana,

your post resonates very strongly with me and what I've been considering in this Unit.

On a practical level, one important change in my professional development is the way that I see people in positions of power. At this point it is useful for me to use Freire's concept of critical consciousness and what he aims to achieve with The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, with which I strongly identify.

I too am focussed on power relationships and structures in as much as how positions of power have eluded me. Freire is one of the few links that I found some indentity with

My consciousness of my class position and my relative disadvantage (granted, that is how I thought of it then; now I see my upbringing as a huge advantage)

This too also resonates for me although I was wondering in what way you now see it as an advantage? For me its almost like the old Rock band idea of 'paying your dues'! Silly, I know!

So, I have always conceived of my path in a narrative of struggle. This has a lot to do with my working class upbringing too, no doubt: migrant parents with a formidable work ethic who constantly reinforced the “us” (the oppressed) and “them” (the oppressors) divide: we have to work hard for a living, they can play with us however they like, they are in control while we, the poor old working folk, work all our lives to make money for them.

This is where I diverge from your narrative. Yes, my parents did have an us and them attitude that filtered down to me but there's was was predicated on a pragmatic approach. Some people were born to be in power. Coupled with this was the idea that a strong work ethic, morality, goodness and integrity were the lynchpins of this right. Hence politicians were in government because they were the role models for us to follow (Can you believe that?!!!!).
I grew up with the idea that if you strove to work hard, to be different, to inspire to be smart then the corridors of power were a natural place for you to end up. Thus my echo-ing of your parents' views came much later in my life.
It is interesting that today having just retired my father is now proud of his achievements - not because of the grace of the people in power but in spite of them.

One of the most important aspects of my professional development is questioning the nature of the oppressed/oppressor dichotomy. Growing up, it was always a given (in acknowledgement from my family, etc) that my we belonged to the former camp

The first line is central to me. Every last experience of my life has re-enforced this - heavily. In the case of the second line we too had this belief but there were ways - education being the main one - that would allow us to join the latter camp where we would could affect change ie remove oppression

Yet this narrative is as limiting as typographical self-reflection in many ways in the sense that if previous chapters set the tone for the present, then you can’t escape your past.

what if this is not possible - at least without violent struggle?

So the oppression dichotomy is helpful in that it enables me to question whether in fact this is the dichotomy through which the world is actually played out; and then, questioning how to move, as Freire writes, from a position of oppression to a position not of oppressor, but of freedom.

For me its now a mixed question. At times I know struggle to see the difference between Power and Freedom. I would almost certainly take Power over Freedom. Freedom for me has always been an unattainable goal, a myth that oils the wheels of the oppressed/oppressor dichotomy. If in a mass consumer society everyone is so free then why do so many people do, buy, say, like, believe the same things? (massive generalisation I know!!!)

I'm tied up at the mo with work stuff but I'll hopefully be posting back again by mid week.

BTW if you find anything helpful on Foucault and Marx I'd be appreciative of a link!

40 Days and 40 nights Pt II

2010-02-03T20:10:00.000Z

I joined Coleg Gwent in the early 90s as a part time lecturer just delivering a couple of hours a week of DTP. Coleg Gwent was an FE college in Newport and I worked in the Engineering Department under a man named David Nelms. David Nelms is the only manager I have ever met in my life who possessed no hypocrisy, no malice and had a genuine desire to help people. Towards the end of his career (blighted too soon by ill health) as the face of FE education was changing into the mess it is now he would fight tooth and nail for his team. As a former engineer he was smart, organized and a craftsman. he didn't really understand the potential of computers, nor did he have any idea about art, graphics or multimedia. But, he had a sense that a change was coming. Talking to him once he remarked that he felt I was made for great things (I have heard this so often its bizarre). He often told me that he thought I would become principal before I hit 30. (my teachers variously had told me that I would make my first million by 18, become the first asian prime minister by 35 and on one memorable occasion rewrite history before hitting 30 - I cannot comprehend what would make seemingly sane, educated adults say things like this to a child, least of all me)

The most brilliant part of his character was that he would turn to those who did know and those he could trust. David Nelms' greatest talent was his ability to spot the genuine article among a sea of phonies. I was on 2 hours a week and he asked me to begin creating what I had talked to him about - new interactive future. I wrote several courses, hundreds of units (in fact at one point a former head of OCN remarked that over 90% of all OCN units in creative media being delivered in Wales were written by me!). I bought Macs, software, cameras - you name it. I created the first multimedia studio in an FE institution in Wales - all as a part timer. In the meantime a full timer had been appointed in graphics that even he didn't know about. Later on he told me that he had found out, after a great deal of shouting, that the college was getting money from Europe to run courses to promote getting women into technology. As a result college managers had demanded that a woman be employed - not me. Still I continued to build - my week was now approaching 60+ hours and I was being paid for 24!

In the late 1990s the college found itself in serious financial problems (to the tune of several million) through what was alleged to be mismanagement, fraud and incompetence - it all blew up after some lecturers had anonymously blown the whistle to newspapers. The result was a massive restructure. It was also the time I left the union. the union had agreed a deal to safeguard most of the full time jobs - at the cost of massive cuts in part time hours. I was a union member too but a part timer - they stiffed us.

The restructure led to a new Section of Art and Design being created and I applied for the post of Section Head. I didn't get it.It turned out that the successful candidate was a close personal friend of the head of the faculty and despite having demonstrated no ability was preferred to me. I stayed on and decided to carry on what I was doing.

Around the same time I had finally managed to persuade the Head of Campus at the time that my concept for a state of the Art Multimedia building should be taken on. I had won the argument about multimedia and even my fiercest critics could not argue with my belief that games, mobiles, web, interactivity were the future. I sat in the Director's office talking him through lans, sketches and designs for the building (the same one I had pitched to UWN some five years earlier - with an estimated cost of £18m. I was virtually laughed out of the boardroom for suggesting something so 'ludicrously expensive'. A year after UWN dispensed with my services they had a new building built on the campus for the art faculty - it was smaller, less innovative, had no integrated technology and cost over £4.5m more than mine)

It all looked like finally things would happen. Yet, more financial woes had been unearthed and less than 6 months later - just a few months before the bulldozers would have started work on my building - the land for it was sold off to Aldi.

This is the point at which I felt I couldn't go on. It was also the first time in my life when I genuinely felt sub-human.

There was another restructure and I couldn't apply for Head of School since the posts were now ring fenced.

Now I am programme leader (although my deputy head of campus refers to me as 'just' a lecturer) of multimedia and watching the rapid destruction of the everything I had once built. I still have a studio but creativity no longer flourishes. I spend the best part of my week both in work and out completing needless paper work that does nothing but hide the deficiencies of managers. I have no autonomy. I get told what to teach, where to teach, when to teach, how to teach and what with. I'm not even allowed to put an ink cartridge in my studio printers. I can't purchase anything anymore so we keep buying crap technology that it wholly unsuitable. Teaching and Learning has become secondary to the management of teaching and learning. I have no voice. I have half a million pounds of hardware and for the past 2 years neither final cut pro, motion, CS2 Suite or DVD STudio Pro has worked. All my cameras today are £300 Argos consumer type jobbies, I've been waiting for 3 years for game development kit and I now use more square footage of space for storing administrative files than student portfolios. My studio is in the corner of the engineering workshop block. Most days my Mac Pros are slower than the 10 year old G4s they replaced. Squeezing anything to do with Welshness and Wales into the kids' daily routine is more important than encouraging creativity. In short, I've failed again.

One day recently I woke up and found that I was 40 and my life had gone. I hadn't even noticed. I don't know what I want to do or even what I can do. I don't trust my talents or abilities and doubt them regularly.

I do know though that I have to leave. taking on this MA is the first step. Beyond it I can't see anything. My BA turned out to be as worthless as I feared and I can't dismiss the possibility that one of the reasons that I am struggling to consider a future plan is the nagging suspicion that after graduating with an MA I might find history repeating itself. so why put too much hope on the future?

I've thought about maybe looking at creating iphone (or even ipad!) games. I could lock myself away with just a mac and an internet connection and work - never having to see another human again. I need to do some serious upskilling in coding for this tho. I can handle Lingo, Javascript and a little Actionscript, but I haven't touched C for nearly 8 years now. I have good skills in 3D, Graphics, Video, DVD and interactive authoring. I can also write fiction ok - although I've never tried to get anything published.

As a child I thought it would be a good thing to grow up and change the world - make it a better place in the sense that children think of. I always felt like the world was in trouble - I don't know why - and that someone should save it. I grew up trying. Now I don't care if the world becomes better or not. It doesn't want to be saved. Only my monumental stupidity and arrogance wouldn't let me see that.

If I get my MA I might feel better. if I can get a new job or career out of it that would be better. if I could become successful enough to bulldoze UWN and Coleg Gwent, salt the earth and carve my name into the ground then maybe I might finally be able to sleep at night.

40 Days and 40 nights

2010-02-03T18:23:00.001Z

I've been trying to figure out how I got where I am today and a couple of things kept cropping up in the back of my mind. Firstly, "where" am I? and have I actually "gotten" anywhere? Secondly Its hard to do because if I try I just get the feeling that I've been sleepwalking and suddenly turned around to find that I was 40. The in between seems at times like 40 seconds and others like 40 lifetimes.

I graduated from UWN in 1992 (or it might be 1991 - I can't even remember) and found myself completely at a loss. Hypercard and multimedia had given me the glimmer of hope of a career but there was no such thing really as the Multimedia Industry, few courses, creative jobs were very traditional and people generally viewed computers in a very different way. I was actually naive enough to believe that if I explained to people the potential of Multimedia as I saw it that they would welcome it with open arms!
I applied to RCA to do an MA even though I really didn't want to study any more - not after UWN. Maybe this was because I still had this hope that there was something better and that UWN was just an aberration? Maybe because I didn't know what to do? Maybe because I felt my BA was worthless and that I needed an MA to feel good about myself again? I just don't know. Suffice to say, that I didn't get accepted and decided that academic study was just another posh exclusive club - with a big sign on the door that read "People like you - Keep Out".

I was still living above an indian restaurant (how ironic) in Newport but I started applying for jobs in graphics, art, media, games etc all over England and Wales and despite a great many applications never got a single interview. I then went to design employment agencies who were only too keen to have me but never actually found me any work! I remember catching a train up to an agency in Birmingham and when I was being 'personally profiled' was asked by my 'personal career liaison' what 'interactive' meant and whether I wouldn't be happier looking at becoming an art therapist. I got book after book from the library about applying, writing CVs - all to no avail.

In the meantime, my head of faculty (the one I'd met the first day I'd gone to see the campus) asked me if I fancied doing a few hours teaching on the BA programme. I'd never really thought about teaching as a career although I'd spent a great deal of time thinking about technology and education. I'd always imagined myself going on to develop education technology and methodology rather than actually teaching. But, hey, it was cash and I had rent to pay.

I started straight off and since many of the second and third year students knew me I was actually very popular and sought after. Despite the resistance from the rest of the faculty the students seemed to share my ideas and demanded that multimedia be an option. I had a sometime ally in the Director of Computing (which actually meant something very different to that which the title refers to now) and I put forward to him some of my ideas. Suddenly I felt like I had found a real opportunity. Here was a barren planet waiting to be terraformed. Here was the world that would shape. The next couple of years were a blur of frenzied activity. I sacrificed everything to build the foundations of what I intended to be a new Multimedia faculty with Mac rooms studios, net access, complete interactive engagement.

I felt like I could actually build something - make a great many of the things that had been rattling around in my head for some time real. I had the autonomy, the respect of my students, the skill and will to do it. I knew that I had critics higher up who saw making videos on a computer or creating interactive electronic sculptures or games as some kind of heresy but I genuinely believed that through sheer persistence I could eventually win even them over. I was only being paid for around 12 hours a week but it had now become a 50+ hour a week job that I threw myself into. There was now a waiting list of weeks for students to see me. It culminated in the student body pushing forward a petition to the College to have me as a full time programme leader for MUltimedia in what became quite a public campaign - none of which I encouraged.

In the end the College opted to put out an ad for the job I was doing and some of my colleagues slapped me on the back and told me how they couldn't wait for me to come fully on board. I applied and got through all stages of the interview. I couldn't believe my luck when I met the other candidates ad they were so hopelessly unsuitable that any minor fears I had were dispelled in seconds - I think my nearest rival was a former formula one pit man!

What happened next shook me to the core. The college turned around and said that no-one was perfect for the job and so they had decided not to appoint anyone! I was bewildered but still too green to figure things out - or maybe in denial.
The job was re-advertised a couple of months later and I applied again - for the job I had created and was already doing. Again, I got through all stages of the interview - leaving me and just one other candidate. I should have known something was wrong when I asked the Principal during my third interview what his hopes were for a possible Multimedia faculty - to which he replied "I really don't care".

A month later, I was called into the Dean's office to speak to the Dean and the Head of Design (who just two years earlier had been a visiting lecturer!). They told me that I hadn't got the job because - get this - "Your CV was an Industry CV and not an academic CV"!!!!!
I don't remember what I felt - I just could not comprehend the situation. They gave the job to a white, middle class, middle aged, bow tie wearing candidate who knew nothing about Multimedia! I was subsequently told that my services were no longer required. The successful candidate was so lacking in any idea about Multimedia that he was given a manual on HYpercard and Director to learn some software and they actually had him working in the admin office as a secretary (on full pay) for months while the fledgling department lay dormant!

The heads of graphics and art came to tell me how they couldn't believe what had happened. During my interview process I had to give a 30 minute presentation on the future on technology, the internet, creativity and education. At the end of mine the lecturers stood and applauded. One programme leader came up to me, shook my hand and told me that he had never heard anything like it (my presentation) in his life, adding "NIce one, its in the bag!".

Something inside me broke.

Since that time I have applied to UWN on no less than 10 occasions - lecturer, senior lecturer, programme leader, head of design - you name it. All unsuccessfully. I even had the indignity of former students of mine beating me to the jobs I applied for only to leave in less than 9 months as they were in way over their heads! In the meantime the organization has struggled to find a replacement for me in over 15 years with a turnover of lecturers in multimedia unparalleled anywhere. About 3 years ago I applied for the once again vacant poison chalice of the lecturer in Multimedia. I got an interview, did well but didn't get the job again! I was told that I didn't have enough HE teaching experience. The successful candidate this time around was another former student of mine (who was taking over from the previous incumbent who was ALSO a former student of mine!!)
who had less HE teaching experience than me! I also found out that this candidate (an internal candidate and part time lecturer) was allegedly at the time under investigation for alleged serious sexual misconduct with a female student!

He was in post for 1 year before being promoted to programme leader, leaving the lecturer job once again vacant. I applied but didn't even get an interview! The successful candidate was less qualified than me and struggled to cope with the job before leaving with 'ill health' in a year!

Last year was the last time I applied - this time for Head of Design (the part time lecturer above who became senior lecturer, then programme leader then acting Head of Design was now Head of Design - and leaving!)

I applied but got no response. I rang them and they said they'd get back to me. The following day I got a letter to say that my application had been rejected because it had been sent after the deadline. I emailed them and stated that I had proof (which I did) that I been well within the deadline. Two days later I got a letter that thanked me for my application but that after due careful consideration of my application it was decided that there were other more suitable candidates!

I wrote and asked them why I hadn't been considered. They wrote back and said that it was because I only had HE teaching experience at 'foundation' level. I wrote back and sated that actually I was teaching on 'their' undergraduate programme and assessing on 'their' BA Hons. They wrote back and told me that it was because I did not have an MA. I write back to them and stated that the previous incumbent did not have an MA either and that not only was thins not an issue for him but that it was a clear indication that an MA was not mandatory! I also asked them if they operated a blacklist. They replied by saying that they could not discuss the suitability of other candidates. I wrote back and asked them again if they operated a blacklist. They wrote back and said that they did not operate a blacklist. They also then incredibly wrote in the same letter that they had an Academic Leader's job at the Uni which was well suited to me and they would welcome an application from me for the post!!!

Why would I apply for a job I already had? (I was academic leader at my current employer at the time - a fact that was in big letters on my application). It was just an attempt to put something in writing to fend off accusations in any possible legal action. they could always just say - "look, we can't possibly be blacklisting him or prejudicing anything. After all here, in black and white we've actually invited to him to apply for a job with us!"

Why do I keep doing this? Why can't I seem to let go? I don't know. I guess that I've always believed that while I might not exactly be einstein I'm pretty smart - yet I cannot find any explanation for any of it. I can't understand why any of it happened and I guess until I do understand then I cannot get closure. It has haunted me for the best part of my adult life. If people are genuinely genuine as all the reflective tools seem hell bent on implying, If organisations are not all bent, If people are not conniving, two faced wretches then there is something that clearly I don't understand.

if on the other hand the above is wrong and people are genuinely evil then I've been royally raped - many times over. So why should I be the one to live my life in shame? Why should I allow them to profit from it? I'm not like some people you read about who can suffer incredible misfortune at the hands of others and still find it in themselves to forgive and move on. I wish I was but I'm not.

I hate my job . . . my MA gives me hope . . . I hope . . . I hope . . . I hope . . .

2010-02-01T21:17:00.000Z

So,

you might be thinking:

"Oh for God's sake, stop whining, grow a pair and get out there and do something"

And I should, I really should. Yet I feel totally incapacitated. I don't trust my own abilities and never feel good enough any more for any job interview. (Did you know that in over 165 job applications in my life I have only ever been successful in 2 - and one of them is the one I have now?). I'm struck by the varied careers and job switches that my classmates have had and I can't comprehend how its done.

I can't get excited about new technology like I used to - because I now know that it won't ever change the world or anything at all. It won't even get used except to give people another way to access the X-Factor.

One thing I do know is that once I get my MA (and no matter what, I WILL get my MA) I never want to work in FE again. I might consider HE but never at the bottom rung of the ladder.

I'm thinking of setting up in business for myself actually. Then I'd have no-one to blame but me if it all goes belly up.

(the title of the blog BTW borrows from a bizarre one hit wonder by Karel Fialka called "Hey Matthew")

"I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another 'Fuck you' on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world. It's impossible."

"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetary, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say 'Holden Caulfield' on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'Fuck you.' I'm positive, in fact."

'Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. and I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.'

-Holden Caulfield

I hate my job . . . my MA gives me hope . . . I hope . . .

2010-02-01T21:09:00.000Z

I'm still not quite in sync. I'm not usually this morose (or maybe I am?) but after yet another week of the most abjectly soul destroying cr*p preparing for inspection when words are bandied about like 'excellence', 'quality' and 'standards' the definitions of which according to those uttering them bear absolutely no relation to any definitions I've ever had it takes its toll.
Hour after hour. I get up at 7, start working. get to work for 9. teach till 4. get home. turn on my mac. start working. 1am stop working. and so it goes on and on.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire (Critical consciousness):
"The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed". Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom"
Now this makes much more sense to me - even when taken out of the context of Freire's work with underdeveloped societies. Everywhere I look I am subject to 'oppression' or perhaps 'suppression' is a better word. Only it now wears a suit and has legitimacy since our language is re-appropriated and not our own any more. have you noticed how when a politician is engaged in bribery and corruption it is either not bribery and corruption or somehow this particular bribery and corruption is not as bad as 'real crime'?
"the "banking" approach to education -- a metaphor used by Freire that suggests students are considered empty bank accounts that should remain open to deposits made by the teacher. Freire rejects the "banking" approach, claiming it results in the dehumanization of both the students and the teachers. In addition, he argues the banking approach stimulates oppressive attitudes and practices in society"
My experiences seem to lead me to understand that 'banking' happens to everyone - educated or not. How come everyone just accepts that which they deplore? (me included). Only like modern financial banking this is far more sophisticated. Our behaviour seems to function like an internal automated telephone service - we just choose the appropriate number.
Freire doesn't seem to offer me a positive hook to explore unless anyone can help out?

Baxter Magolda:
"Absolutist –knowledge is certain or absolute;
I like teachers who will give you as much as you need and not just leave you with a little small idea and have you talk it out. I like it when they give you a lot of information. Then you can discuss it"
I actually agree with this as it strikes me as being at the heart of what a 'teacher' is or should be. I don't mean spoon feeding or anything of the like but someone who just knows lots of stuff and is willing to impart it so that you can either stand on the shoulders of giants or strike them down with your catapult. Its my experience of the opposite at UWN that brought me to my first truly crushing experience. Lecturers would say, "Today is about dealing with a client. Now, what would you do? And my immediate thought would be "Why are you asking me? Don't you know?" There is a lot of talk about this in education today but frankly its always polarised - lecture bad, groupwork good. Again language is bastardised. We have 'guidance' from staff now on BAs that amount to around an hour a fortnight. would you use the same word as a parent if you only consented to 'guide' your children for one hour a fortnight?
"Transitional knowing – There is partial certainty and partial uncertainty:
. . . And I though, well, why would this person teach this subject this way and be successful and at the same time there’s a person teaching it in a different way but still being successful? It begins to change you a bit"
Now this I can honestly say I have no real experience of. I observe countless lessons every year at various levels (1 yr olds to undergrads) and am completely nonplussed at how they are often described by others as examples of the above statement when to me they are clearly identical. Just because one tutor uses plastic boxes and another uses laminated card to do the same activity it doesn't mean that they taught it in a different way! They both recounted 3 aims and objectives in the first 5 minutes. they then both made H&S statements for 1 minute. They then both split the lesson up into 3 x 20 minute chunks with a chunk involving group work, a chunk involving Q&A and a chunk involving individual differentiated project work. They both then ended the lesson recapping for 5 minutes. Yet they are described as different ways of teaching and the two are successful. if a tutor lectures one session, had group work the next, does a seminar the next, has active project work the next, does distance learning the next then he/ she is not successful because they are NOT following the preset ideal!
"Independent knowing – Learning is uncertain – everyone has her own beliefs . . .No-one has the right to decide ‘this has to be your truth too’"
Yet this is done every single minute of every day - even amongst so called creatives and academics. Do we ALL just ignore the ways in which we are imposed upon and simply content ourselves with that small corner of our lives that we 'do' have control over.

Goffman:
"A major theme that Goffman treats throughout the work is the fundamental importance of having an agreed upon definition of the situation"
How and when does this agreement happen? What happens if you don't agree? Are these definitions imposed? For example if I went to a meeting and told a colleague that they were full of sh*t then, no matter how justified I believed I might be I would probably be criticized for being 'unprofessional'. Yet if I'm the head of a multi billion dollar global company I can do this and its not unprofessional. So at what point did we agree the parameters of professional performance.
"For example, when a lady who is attending a formal dinner—and who is certainly striving to present herself positively—trips, nearby party-goers may pretend not to have seen her fumble; they assist her in maintaining face. Goffman avers that this type of artificial, willed credulity happens on every level of social organization, from top to bottom."
What happens if you don't pretend? You get demoted to 'bit part player' (crewman number 5 for those of you that have ever watched 'Galaxy Quest')

Giddens:
"A stable self-identity is based on an account of a person's life, actions and influences which makes sense to themselves, and which can be explained to other people without much difficulty. It 'explains' the past, and is oriented towards an anticipated future.
'A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though this is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual's biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.'"
This I'm resonating with a bit. But again, I just don't feel that it is 'self' driven. I keep seeing too many external influences, chance and favour affecting the biography. Most reflective thought as pushed by those that need you to reflect begin from the position that 'life is what you make it and that by changing the way you think you can change your life - absolving anyone or anything else of any responsibility. Yet this is clearly NOT the case. At least not in my experience anyway.

Foucault:
I've been trying to read this and am having difficulty so forgive me if I've got this wrong.
"At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination"
This I can see. heirarchical observation takes all forms. We are watched, literally, electronically and through 'mentoring', progress evaluation, job satisfaction, PPRDs. We are judged through the documentation we are forced to employ and that which exists as a record of our compliance. We are examined when attempting to reach higher. The exam only has one question - will you do what we want, whether you agree with it or not?
"according to Foucault, the new idea that the mad were merely sick (“mentally” ill) and in need of medical treatment was not at all a clear improvement on earlier conceptions (e.g., the Renaissance idea that the mad were in contact with the mysterious forces of cosmic tragedy or the 17th-18th-century view of madness as a renouncing of reason). Moreover, he argued that the alleged scientific neutrality of modern medical treatments of insanity are in fact covers for controlling challenges to a conventional bourgeois morality. In short, Foucault argued that what was presented as an objective, incontrovertible scientific discovery (that madness is mental illness) was in fact the product of eminently questionable social and ethical commitments.
He further argues that the new mode of punishment becomes the model for control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern prison"
This resonates with me too, but . . .
"We should not, however, think that the deployment of this model was due to the explicit decisions of some central controlling agency."
This is where Foucault and I part company and this I feel is at the heart of my troubles. I (yes, Richard, just like Fox Mulder - only without a Badge and gun) am shouting to heavens and railing against an unseen all powerful controlling agency. Only they aren't unseen. How I got here I'm not sure. Perhaps its the result of a lot of internalisation, self pity, disappointment and doubt?

I guess the real question is how I shake this off and move forward for the future. I wanted to change the world once and more importantly to me I actually believed that I had it in me to do so. That I really could make a lasting contribution to a better world.

Now I don't. Its maddening. My ex students who have gone out into the world sometimes come back and tell me that they have subsequently never met anyone as skilled or knowledgeable as me (altho I'm pretty sure that none of them would ever tell me otherwise anyway!!). And it should make me ultra confident and not a little arrogant. It would have once. Now it doesn't. I go to conferences and meet flash gurus, photoshop wizards, director coders, 3D magicians who are no better than me. First I automatically feel inferior and not up to scratch. Then as soon as anyone says a single word that I haven't heard before it changes:

There was a time when I would have ben intrigued, excited and gone up to them to strike up a conversation so that I could learn about it from them and then go and explore it.

Now I feel hopelessly deficient.

I guess I'm still trying to find a theory I can apply and some way of driving a plan for the future. I have no intention of allowing this project to become "The world of woe according to the Courageous One"

I hate my job . . . my MA gives me hope . . .

2010-02-01T18:54:00.000Z

I'm not really sure.

I mean, i'm more than a little lost - more than usual and more than a little. In fact I'm a little more lost than usual. I've been reading everyone's forum posts about reflection and reflective approaches and the general positivism makes me feel completely inept - and wrong. I stopped for awhile. Partly because I'm drowning in the madness of beauracracy at work and partly because I just needed to stop and do something that felt like me.

When I came back I read Jon's post with interest:

I like writing. I like its discipline, I like its ability to transform the imaginary into something more real. In fact, writing, for me, makes things real, concrete.

The trouble is that I am at that point in my life where I can't even say what I like any more. The truth is that right now there is nothing I like - except nothingness and even then I'm not exactly sure I 'like' it. I'm not even sure what 'like' means anymore.

I do write things down and make lists to help me remember and I do try to organise to help me to externalise what I'm feeling and thinking - to test what I feel through interaction with the 'outside' world. But I don't like writing. I'm not even sure that I find it helpful. My head buzzes and then stops. It buzzes and then stops. Continuously. When it buzzes I can't write, speak or type fast enough to keep up (like now). When it stops, there is nothing and that which was buzzing is gone. Its maddening.

I guess Karl might say that a straight jacket of fatalism has descended upon me. Like Jon and everyone else I am exposed to all manner of ideas, thoughts, narratives and opinions about Multimedia (and everything else) but I don't find that anything now seems to dislodge my views (and I don't really think that they are 'my' views anyway). Its not that I believe that I have it all sussed (at least I hope not or we are all in trouble) but that for me nothing ever changes, nothing is ever different, nothing ever gets better.

So, I write, and when I do, stuff floating around in my brain is suddenly forced into a kind of order. I have to transform free-form thought processes and abstract notions into words, put them into order, give them structure.

This, for me, is the importance of writing in a learning situation. Writing is a transformational activity - by forcing yourself to turn your jumbled thoughts into a form that someone else will (hopefully) comprehend, you transform your own understanding, see things that you didn't know were there, and express things that, before, you could only 'feel'.

I have a real problem nowadays expressing what I feel in a such a way. Usually it comes across as closed minded, narrow, cynical, pessimistic, perhaps even uninformed. I have a horrible feeling that the language I need to interface with those around me doesn't exist.

And yet I wasn't always this way (apparently). When I look at the odd bits of stuff that people who knew me (old teachers, 'friends', acquaintances) many years ago have written, its like reading about someone else. I get that Holden Caulfield detached look and can't believe they (and me) ever got taken in by such a phony.

I'm back online now and have been going thru the links that Jon posted and have tried to get a grip on the theories listed. I end up with a mash-up that seems to lack coherence. Here's just a sample of things that stood out and my immediate reactions - see if you can spot a pattern developing:

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:
"Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction"
This used to be true for me - I craved deeper, philosophical debate, understanding, meaningful multiway way interaction (its what attracted me to school, to hypercard, to art, to the web) - but now I prefer 'no' interaction
"Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it 'from the inside' and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved."
I'm with this up until the words "considering the needs. . .". Yet there was a time when this might have summed me up
"Skeptics criticize the terminology of the MBTI as being so "vague and general" as to allow any kind of behavior to fit any personality type. "
Isn't this 'true' of just about everything?

Kolb and Experiential Learning:
If I had to draw the Kolb Learning cycle from my own experiences it would look something like this:

Kolb and Me on Dipity.

"the learner must be willing to be actively involved in the experience"
In my experience this tends to mean that you MUST accept what you are being told, you MUST interact in a set way and you MUST never question the reasons behind the experience.
"the learner must be able to reflect on the experience"
I get submerged in self pity and doubt
"the learner must possess and use analytical skills to conceptualize the experience"
I'm told that I can do this fine
"the learner must possess decision making and problem solving skills in order to use the new ideas gained from the experience"
I have a problem with the implication (and insistence) that every experience presents you with skills, ideas etc that you can employ. IOW no matter what you are doing and whether you enjoy it or hate it the implication is that somehow you are 'gaining' from it. Nothing is ever seen as potentially damaging or harmful - or if it is then its your fault for seeing it that way!

Carl Rogers:
"All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the centre."
My world of experiences doesn't seem to be a continually changing one. Is that because of my own fear of action, change and subsequent inactivity? Or is it that it really doesn't change?
"Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself.
Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences."
Some people would say that the above two sums me up. I would argue that the world I exist in and observe is summed up by the above two. IOW everyone and everything seem to have the above two in common. In my own work, anything I've tried to initiate over the past couple of decades has always been rejected - only to be subsequently made safe and introduced years later by someone else! To give an example from today we are about to go with electronic registers next year and yet I have a copy of presentation in the attic I made to both my current employer (and a former employer) in 1995 suggesting a model for electronic registers - complete with tech breakdown of how to impliment it. I reckon by 2099 we might buy a couple of used second hand ipads. Don't get me talking about the current drive for differentiation, active learning etc
"The Fully Functioning Person . . they move away from defensiveness and have no need for subception "
Again the implication that defensiveness (or rather the definition of defensiveness as any unwillingness to conform) is a sin.
" . . .living each moment fully – not distorting the moment to fit personality or self concept but allowing personality and self concept to emanate from the experience. This results in excitement, daring, adaptability, tolerance, spontaneity, and a lack of rigidity and suggests a foundation of trust. "
Am I distoting the moment to fit my personality or is my personality under pressure to distort to fit the 'moment' - as if the moment was somehow deterministic. The moments we have experience of don't seem to be our choice.
" . . . they trust their own judgment and their ability to choose behaviour that is appropriate for each moment. They do not rely on existing codes and social norms but trust that as they are open to experiences they will be able to trust their own sense of right and wrong"
I can't say that I've ever been able to do this for long. I have undergone in my life periods of immense activity, fluidity, confidence and trust in myself but I always end up having this ended
" . . . not being shackled by the restrictions that influence an incongruent individual, they are able to make a wider range of choices more fluently. They believe that they play a role in determining their own behaviour and so feel responsible for their own behaviour."
I haven't felt like I had choices or any sense of determination in my life for a very long time.
" . . .Creativity – it follows that they will feel more free to be creative. They will also be more creative in the way they adapt to their own circumstances without feeling a need to conform"
I can feel creative. when I'm with students or doing my own stuff I can feel totally immersed and driven by it. But I can't say that I feel more free to 'be' creative anymore.
" . . .Reliability and constructiveness – they can be trusted to act constructively"
Again a preset definition of 'constructively'. Like pointing out that a particular process that is being discussed will result in massive waste, enormous cost and no benefits is now not being constructive - even when you suggest a viable alternative!
" . . . he describes the life of the fully functioning individual as rich, full and exciting and suggests that they experience joy and pain, love and heartbreak, fear and courage more intensely"
Do people who feel pain, heartbreak and fear only lead a full rich life? BTW Indians in the same family never refer to themselves by their names. We are always known by nicknames given to us when we are young. So no-one in my family ever refer to me as Raj or Rajinder. My nickname is hard to spell using our alphabet but it means something like "Courageous One". Apparently, my parents said that they gave me this name after talking to the extended family because growing up I was insatiably curious, hungry, fearless and driven - always keen to learn something new, always keen to try to shape my world.

Donald Schon:
I used to be fully able to deal with both reflection in and on practice. This 'was' me. Now my reflection 'in' is clouded by my reflection 'on' which basically amounts to "See? I knew it!"

A Life less ordinary

2010-01-28T22:37:00.001Z

A Life Less Ordinary . . . or not . . . on Dipity.

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3. . .

2010-01-26T07:56:00.000Z

I've just been going thru a few tests and I have to admit that my preconceived dislike of such quantification of people, ideas and feelings makes me feel very uneasy when doing this sort of thing.

I tried the Jung one first and found it ludicrous. Like Karl I was bored but also struck by how leading and either/or the questions were. For example:

"Objective criticism is always useful in any activity".
this may be true in some situations but it depends wholly on the actual interpretation of objective and who is doing the interpretation. iow quizzes like this are divorced from actual existence. Power relationships and structures define what is objective.

"You get bored if you have to read theoretical books".
yes I do if its a load of old tosh but if its not then I'm riveted!

My 'score' came out as INTJ which I'n not quite sure how to interpret. Clicking on the link brings me to a page that keeps mentioning 'Mastermind' - (I'm shopping online right now for a white cat, nehru collar silver suit and a second hand underwater criminal base - all for 1 meeelion dollars!). the bit that caught me was :

"In their careers, Masterminds usually rise to positions of responsibility, for they work long and hard and are dedicated in their pursuit of goals, sparing neither their own time and effort nor that of their colleagues and employees"

Nope. Sorry!

The more I think about it, the more I dislike these tests. They are so simplistic (especially the emotional intelligence one)! And all of them are biased!! There are all these assumptions beneath each of these tests- there is always a 'normal`, a standard way... as an individual

I agree with Kayo here but would go further. My instinct tells me that this is a mechanism for control to ensure that only those that will not threaten the status quo can ever achieve positions of authority. I know it sounds like a totally personal opinion (and ironically how could you ever prove any such thing?). But, ask yourselves, how come every manager/politician/finance holder looks, sounds and behaves the same? Next time there is an article on the news on telly about the recession, just as a banking head or senior executive is about to come and say his piece, close your eyes and see if you can imagine what he looks like. turn off the sound, write down what you think he's going to say and then check on iplayer. How come we almost always get it right?

Ah, but that's maybe the point - are we all being put in boxes?
You did seem to find the results flattering, but as you admit, a lot of this can be self-fulfilling. So, if a test says you're hard-working, do you put in that extra effort to prove it? Are these really just more methods of control?

I'm troubled by a society that has no qualms about taking a human being or group of human beings and reducing them to something that can classified, categorised and easily referenced. Its just a stone's throw away from creative, emotional and intellectual genocide. The systematic eradication of difference. Think about it.

I also think the quantification process is important now to employers - as it is to us educators

I'm not sure about educators (employers most definitely). Its not important to me or, when I asked them today, anyone else on my team!

At work I'm inundated right now with peer obs, teaching and learning style tests, PPRD, PMAR and a zillion other 'reflective tools for self development and evaluation'. what they all have in common is identifying anything 'non conformist' about me and labelling it as somehow undesirable.

The FIT one gives me some weird results but again I found the questions bizarre. In the genital category apparently:

you appear to have a conventional, closeminded, and regressive outlook on life. Change is an inevitable and positive part of life, learn to contribute to it, not fear it or oppose it

This is for me bizarre. yes, I can be a little difficult to dissuade from some of my views at times (altho in my defence I need to experience something persuasive rather than be told that I must afford something that status regardless). However there is no questioning of what 'change' means. who defines what changes and what doesn't. is all change necessarily good? One of the biggest problems I have had in my career is working for people who won't change! People who can affect change but don't.

the same test also gives me for the anal score (this sounds so much like a 1980's gay pron movie!):

you appear to have a good balance of self control and spontaneity, order and chaos, variety and selectivity.

go figure.

I am struck by how my mood and feelings can affect my perception of myself and those around me. I've taken IQ tests many times and my score veers between 116 and 164. today I got 126 but recognise that I've not had a good day and don't feel good about myself.

Quantification of employees must help when the Investors in People people come round

I got interviewed by the ILP people and they asked me what I thought the college needed to do. I told them that we needed to sack the entire management spine and relieve the board of governors. The other 5 people in the room with me agreed and the floodgates literally opened! yet our input didn't affect anything. The college still got the ILP status and went on to state boldly that the award proved that staff felt highly valued! Does this mean that the feedback from 6 people gets dismissed as rogue data or anomalous results? Troubling.

Big Brains

2010-01-21T07:49:00.000Z

Brains and Games

I like this quote in particular:

The findings should not however be used to support a determinist view of the world in which everyone simply had to accept the brain they were born with, nor as paving the way for a brave new world in which people's brains were regularly measured to predict their ability, Prof Kramer said.

Isn't it amazing how some things are always more true than others . . .

2010-01-21T07:45:00.000Z

Training scheme was mismanaged

The Train to Gain scheme was launched in England in 2006 but, according to the Commons Public Accounts Committee, it was "mismanaged" from the outset.

but

Ministers said thousands of employees had benefited from the scheme. . . Skills minister Kevin Brennan defended the scheme, saying it had benefited thousands of workers.
"Train to Gain has increased the productivity of businesses, and given tens of thousands of employees the opportunity to improve their skills," he said. . .
"We don't agree that our targets for Train to Gain have been unrealistically ambitious. . . Evidence shows employers and employees alike value the programme."

Phew! that's all right then . . .

Front End and Back End . . .

2010-01-21T07:34:00.000Z

Tim Berners Lee helps us

Well, if its Tim then I guess it must all be ok . . .

How to lose Friends and Alienate People . . .

2010-01-20T20:14:00.000Z

For me I think the interesting thing is the implication that individuals play a role or in some way contribute or ‘choose’ to function in any given context. I mentioned Goffmantm in my first assignment (a fact that is now troubling me a little . . .) and unless I’m reading it wrong I was struck by the implication that the front constituted a necessary construct within which to engage in social or even introspective interaction while the back somehow represented the ‘reality’. Or light and dark. Or good and evil. Or wave and particle. Or any kind of duality.

I come from a very strict Asiantm Indiantm family (my parents were first gen) who embraced some (stereo?) typical norms and values. Chief among them was the belief that the British Educationtm system was the pinnacle of human achievement and that to gain access to it and excel within it constituted an almost holy representation of self betterment and empowerment. I was subsequently indoctrinatedR with these views.

As a child I learned to inhabit a wide range of constructs including the ‘home’ construct with its normstm and valuestm, the ‘white’ construct with its own norms and values (which BTW were and to a degree still are mutually exclusive to those of the ‘home’ construct) and a myriad internally fabricated constructs which represented my responses to external and internal stimuli (biology, the media, others, experiences, words, pictures, sounds) in an attempt to somehow model a world view within this complex arrangement. (I was once told by a psychiatrist at the Bethlem in London that the reason so many Asians succumbed to schizophrenia was the trauma of ‘existing in two worlds’ ! – go figure).

I yearned to go to UNi, to do my MAtm, to get my Phdtm. Why? Because this was guarantor of success. Because through this the few stood apart . Because it was the ‘right’ thing to do’. Because it would define the individuals who would go on to shape the world. Because . . .

I did well at school – very well. Usually though with the same pattern. I would be totally lost initially before going on to excel at everything (except curiously PE – go figure). I got my O’s and then started my A’s but I had already by 13 started becoming uneasy about the world I lived in. I think I always knew from early childhood that something was very wrong but in the best of traditions I lived in denial and chose to believe that if I worked hard and just carried on being uniquely brilliant (!) then the world would be my oyster (You won’t believe how often I’ve heard that!). For someone struggling for a sense of self worth (I felt hemmed in - my family controlled EVERY aspect of day to day existence and claimed mastery over my future, I felt apart -it was the era o skin heads and paki bashingtm, I looked apart – we were a very poor family – back when we had a more absolute definition of being poor), being good at school, the new found control, the respect, the way people looked at you, it was all intoxicating.

I believed wholeheartedly back then in a TD (Copyright – everyone who has ever had a vested interest in screwing the little guy) view. (that did not last tho!) Computers would revolutionise the world – I wanted in. I also wanted to be creative. I had dreams about technology that I couldn’t describe and I wanted to make them real. However I opted to go for a Business ITtm BSc . Why? Because it would allow me to work in ‘computing’ while keeping a sheen of legitimacy in the eyes of my family and thus I could continue to straddle both worlds.

I fell ill tho and missed application. Despite my teachers fears I got my As (Just) and for the first time in my life I found myself in limbo with an enormous sense of shame and self loathing at failing to be in the hallowed land of Uni. My arttm teacher suggested I did a foundation art course rather than go on the dole for a year.

I did

I found it to be a welcome and invigorating period. In fact it sparked a creative and productive part of my life that I’ve only managed to reproduce once since. I painted, sculpted, photographed, filmed, composed, wrote, constructed, performed, researched. All I needed was technology.

I applied to UWN to do Fine Arttm. Not because I wanted to do fine art but I need a space where I could explore computer technology, video, sound, image without any limits and fine art seemed like somewhere I could possibly fit in – after all, that’s what the weirdo’s do right?

Why UWN? Because I visited several and they were the only ones who had any computers (4 Mac 28ks) and a TV studio (Ah, U-Matic tape). As soon as I got off the bus I bumped into the Faculty Head (an old style visionary) who grabbed me and spent the afternoon waxing lyrical about the plans for the new building – I was sold.

My interviewtm 4 months later was bizarre. I was in a room with a large boardroom table and every member of the faculty sat on one side (I kid you not, it started with 14 of them and within an hour they kept popping out to get more staff members to hear me talk – it ended with 27 of them facing me across the boardroom table in 3 rows!) with me on the other. Get this, they even employed the old ‘sit in front of the window with the interviewee on a lower seat’ routine!!!

I had an arrogant swagger about me not helped by the fact that I had the coolest (and cheapest – although they didn’t know that) suit in the room. As far as I was concerned, I was brilliant and an unstoppable force. I hadn’t even bothered to apply anywhere else – after all who in their right mind would turn me down? GodR knows what would have happened to me had they said No!!!!! The interview took 4 hours after which they offered me a place and I finally felt like my life was beginning – I was there.

I genuinely in my naivety had this idea that I would be surrounded by like minded individuals eager to drown in knowledge and guided by brilliant tutors who would open mu mind to things I hadn’t even dreamed of (and I can have some astonishing dreams).

The reality was different.

I have had some truly horrific things occur in my life (and I do not exaggerate here) but I can honestly say that my time at UWN was the most awful, soul destroyingtm, harrowing, impoverishing experience in my entire life. It also defined the path of my life since.

I was smarter than my teachers. I was smarter than my peers. Worse still everyone seemed ok with that. I actually gave more tutoring to my fellow students (requested by them) than the entire teaching team did combined. The staff seemed to care more for their own research and see students as mere nuisances. The institution was just a faceless corporation and ‘education’ now meant conforming to one world view. I had my first head on experience of a type of humantm that I had never encountered before – the ‘manager’, the ‘consultant’, the ‘accountant’. The ultimate soldiers of the laws of suppression of radical potential. (Go, team Winston)

In the first year, I just did what I thought they wanted. I was desolate. The world I had glimpsed as a child was coming to pass and God I hated ittm. I rang my dad for the only time in my life and asked permissiontm to quit. He told me that in life you cannot walk away and must always finish what you start – an idea that has haunted me ever since. So I stayed. By year 2 I had decided to give everyone the finger and do what I wanted and dared them to challenge me. I started to play with the Mac and HyperCard became my right arm. Technology with absolutely no limits. I was asked to leave many times but finally got a 1st. It was just so surreal at times. I once programmed a Mac to appear to talk. My head of year came into the room once and stepped on the sensor that triggered my toy and the Mac started to greet him. He then stooped down and began to have a chat with it! (I had built it to express general statements that could give the illusion of intelligent* communication and response).

For my Final project I was assessed by a team of 8 people over a period of a day. When they got to me they entered my room and I stood out in the corridor with a ciggie watching them. To the left was the Mac II with my work. To the right was some old computer junk that hadn’t been binned yet. They all started to inspect the junk and began critiquing old boxes of power supplies, a broken oscilloscope and two keyboards – I kid you not!!! I walked in, pointed to the far corner of the room and said “Ladies and gents, my work happens to be over there – the screen with the animation running that took me 4 months to perfect”

It was clear. Undesirables had to be suppressed (love 30, Winston). Our spirit had to be crushed. And to keep up the ‘front’ of a system that claims to empower anyone if they want it they allow a few of us each year to come out with a good but ultimately meaningless grade.

I think all the students went to the pub that night to celebrate completing their degree. I remember just staying home and staring out of the window until the sun came up. I just held onto the edge of my rickety chair and spent hours trying to dampen the urge to run into the street and shake anyone and everyone I could find while screaming “Wake UP!, Wake UP!”

Being so adrift I had no option but to give it one more go so I applied for an MA at the RCA. They turned me down after informing me that they did not receive my demo CD which contained a virtual house you could interact with and therefore could not accept my application. (Curiously two years later, the RCA got a 250k euro grant to produce multimedia work. Their submission consisted of a house that you could interact with which funnily enough had the same layout as mine, the same rooms as mine, and even some of the same furniture as the one in my allegedly missing demo – go figure).

So, here I was, a Graduate without a Cause.

Tune in tomorrow children for episode 2 ; a tale of shocks, betrayal and misery. With a guest appearance by the Fonz.

* may or may not actually exist. Terms and Conditions Apply. Always seek medical advice.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

2010-01-15T00:09:00.000Z

Assignment 1 is done!

in a week or so's time I'm either gonna feel great or be reaching for my coat . . .

Big Trouble in Little China . . .

2009-12-13T22:50:00.000Z

I've been having real trouble this weekend trying to get a handle on what I'm supposed to do. Firstly I tried starting again from scratch but since I still didn't really understand what I was doing in the first place that led to a day of wasted time. Then with the clock in mind I read some more and started to modify what I already had. I didn't really get too far but below I have posted what I have right now. I've added a couple of starting sections to try to articulate what I want to say (badly) and have tried to begin reworking what I had done earlier to start moving it from a history to eventually a critical analysis (although I'm not sure quite what that means - I know its a strange thing to say but bear with me). Its now 11pm and I'm exhausted and still nowhere. I'm starting to battle against feeling at odds with the MA - something I don't want to feel at all! I guess I just didn't expect an online course called Creative Media Practice to be just about reading and writing - I'd much rather make stuff and experiment and play with things.

anyway, for what its worth (BTW I know the headings are cr*p, they're just temporary):

The Greatest Story Never Sold (NB all references are currently missing awaiting formatting)

Introduction:
There is a persuasive argument and one that sounds so simple to a contemporary society that it almost represents common sense that can be (crudely) summed up as follows:

“We live in a rapidly changing Information Age where computer technology will change all our lives for the better and forever”.

While this is not a new idea by any means it is the argument most likely to be recognized within society at all levels and the one most regarded as being ‘True”.

We live in a technologically deterministic society – socially, economically and politically and while the theory has now undergone a considerable critical review and re-evaluation with a great many revised theories or indeed opposition theories now gaining greater credibility, it remains popular and persuasive – in or out of academic circles.

During the scientific eras of the 18th and 19th centuries the idea of technological determination while not articulated was underpinned by a general belief in the notion of a ‘linear forwardness’ that was articulated as progress. Coupled with an overarching positivism about Man’s place in the world and the Earth we were ‘handed’ to explore and gain full dominion over, it was our duty to extend the reach of Man, to gain mastery over the natural world, the feed our natural inclination towards adventure, invention, risk, acquisition and creativity.

The post second world war era with its atomic weaponry saw pessimism creep into the minds and souls of society as a distrust grew over the power of science to deliver a brave new world and the motivations of the scientific research itself.

The counter culture of the 1960s coincided with the early semiconductor based computer developments around the world and provided a heady mix for the kind of people who would ultimately be identified as key protagonists in the emergence of what would come to be variously trumpeted as the Information Age or the Computer Revolution amongst other headline grabbing titles.

Even today, we are informed that technology will liberate us – or perhaps that should be 'deliver' us? - from evil. All our sins can be absolved and forgiven by the technology that ‘we’ control and choose to make part of our lives.

Technological determinism in its strictest sense operates on a solely linear cause and effect approach where technology develops independently of the society in which it ultimately exists and this view implies the inevitability of technological invention and its subsequent effects on society. Technology is the cause, social change is the effect.

This should mean that all technologies should prosper or at the very least surely the best technologies, he greatest inventions should guarantee success and major positive change within society? Yet ‘history’ is littered with the ghosts of a million ‘inventions’ that failed or were forgotten along with the names attributed to them.

Surely the children of the counter culture, armed with a head full of technical knowledge and a heart full of revolutionary passion could bring forth a technology that once unleashed could bring about a technological utopia?

This text is about the story of one such technology. A technological artefact that if technological determinism was to hold true should have led to a radically different society from the one that allows you to read this today.

This is the story of HyperCard.

It should be stated from the outset that any narrative concerning HyperCard is fraught with difficulties and obstacles from the outset. There is for example a very real danger of relying too much on anecdotal or experiential information owing to the cult, myths, conspiracies and misinformation that has been circulated, written about, analysed and critiqued since 1987 about this product. In my own research I have had to tread a fine line between what I can verify and what I believe I ‘know’ – despite actually being there at that point in history right in the thick of it as it were there is always the danger of romanticisation of events, activities and ‘facts’.
I would also like to state that while my aim is to be persuasive with regards to the story of HyperCard and theories that I have employed in this analysis I recognize the inherent difficulties in ascribing the word ‘Truth’ to any aspect.
For this text, while I shall aim to consider technology in its broadest sense from time to time the word shall be used to consider computer or digital technology within the context of this narrative.

This text is about HyperCard, what it ‘perhaps’ was, what possibly led to its release, what it was used for, what its potential was, what happened to it and what it left behind.

I shall do this with recourse to a discussion centred around the idea of technological determinism and will seek to outline how technological determinism cannot be a valid representation for the creation, development and use of technology within (or without) society. I shall also endeavour to identify some of the key moments in HyperCard’s history, some of the key players and use relevant theories that might explain or frame those events in a meaningful way to shed light on the way technology and society ‘co-exist’.

Theory outlines:
This text will make considerable reference to the theories of Brian Winston and in particular the ideas put forward in his book “Media Technology and Society”. I shall endeavour to use Winston’s work to illuminate some aspects of the HyperCard story but where appropriate I shall put forward other more relevant or persuasive theories by a host of academics or by myself.

(This bit sounds so sh*t and I cannot figure out how to write this. I want to briefly explain each of the theories or ideas I want to play with before getting on to the story proper. I don’t know if I’m supposed to do this in advance or introduce each one as they crop up in the main text? So lets for now just list (most of) them).

For Winston specifically there is a renouncement of the Mcluhan-esque approach to technological determinism and his approach can be summarized as follows:

Winston’s model is structured in stages where scientific developments lead to eventual diffusion through prototypes, ideation, and "invention". He takes exception to the long held idea of the “Inventor’ and maintains that societal forces and in particular socio-economic forces impact upon technology and technological change far more than technology changes society – a point that my text will echo to a degree. One of the key ideas that I wish to explore is Winston’s ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential, which he uses to refer to a process whereby there are brakes for the impact of technological development. They prohibit the disruptions of social or corporate status quos.

I also wish to look at some of the pronouncements of McLuhan in terms of technological determinism and in particular the idea that it is not what you do with technology or media that impacts upon society but the fact of its use that initiates social change.

I wish to make a distinction between hard and soft determinism (and will explain them) and argue from a partly soft determinism angle in that my argument is that the way the story began vindicates some of the technological determinism theory but has to give way to the idea of society, politics and economics being key factors by the end.
I will also touch upon technological utopianism, Marxism, technological autonomy, neutrality, Reductionism, mechanistic models, reification (briefly), the technological imperative, technological evolution, economic determinism and hegemony – (and maybe some Gladwell?).

I will argue that HC was born out of a complex and diverse environment of concerns both technological and social with the protagonists that are credited for its invention unfettered in themselves with ideas about potential economic models. Indeed I will make the point that one of HyperCard’s legacies is an awareness of the power and value of economic models of supply, distribution and consumption and their interpretation and implementation that lead to eventual diffusion.
This text will seek to articulate how HyperCard's release was motivated and triggered by technologically deterministic thinking on the part of its creators and owners with a firm belief that the superiority of their technology would in a causal relationship result in the massive diffusion of their products throughout society. Underneath these motivations lay the ideals brewed in the counter culture of liberation, self-determination and freedom. HyperCard’s story is entwined with that of its owner ‘Apple’ and the perpetuation of the Myth of the Information Revolution. The machine was the utopian angel. Its autonomous development and inevitability would result in a new world free of the older inequalities and social ills.

I shall seek to articulate how its early adoption relied on a range of parallel developments both technological and societal and how the stalling of its further adoption led to a crisis in thinking and undermined technological determinism thinking - arguing instead that powerful social and economic forces acted to suppress its diffusion. Those early adopters that took HyperCard to their bosoms illustrated the way in which contrary to the views of its originators and a great many observers and commentators the use to which a technology is actually put cannot necessarily be easily predicted and thus may or may not be inevitable or indeed neutral.

HyperCard is born:
Set against the war between MS and Apple for control of the desktop (the prevailing paradigm in a society that was comfortable with the idea of centralised i.e. local data/information rather than distributed data/information) just prior to the launch of windows 3.1 when the Mac OS was the only viable GUI in town. The Mac had originally been reliant ironically on programs like VisiCalc (spreadsheets) but the growth of the DOS based PC market heralded oblivion (?). The arrival of Aldus PageMaker and the nascent DTP market ‘saved’ the platform (?) but more importantly enshrined it as an artist / designer’s extension. It found a home amongst creatives and educators alike who were more likely to use it in unorthodox ways. Thus it can be argued that the platform already attracted a small but loyal following that were not averse to thinking critically about their use of technology or about the everyday pronouncements from political and economic interests (not to mention a great many social commentators and academics) about the onrushing Computer Revolution. With such a large proportion of its user base within artistic or academic environments it was a fertile space for the adoption of technology that seemed to herald in this new digital future.
Postmodernism entered the public consciousness on the express train of mass consumerism and in the UK the shift in the public sphere is demonstrated by the gradual ineffectiveness of public debate in effecting political change (This lady really wasn’t for turning). The US also sat in a conservative fog under the Reagan administration.
The majority of people had no access personal computers (figures needed) but were increasingly becoming used to their integration ‘behind the scenes’ of transactions and interaction in a capitalist structure. Also, more and more it was becoming possible to come into first hand contact with them at school and work – although at school in the UK it primarily BBC micros which shared more in common with the original games console based machines such as the Ataris, Sinclairs et al. (Explain why here)

Computers were for work. They were expensive, serious tools for the processing of increasingly complex and vast information problems. (Says who? How? Why was This?)
The human genome project / Jurassic Park / Quantum Physics / CGI
Vs
Stock control / human resources / payroll / personal information / financial transactions
There is a real link here to the basis of Winston’s Model that scientific development is the trigger for his model of the life cycle of technological development and computer technology up to this point was considered by many to be a direct and inevitable result of scientific advances.

HyperCard was born in to this world in August 1987

Some stuff will go here about:
What people were doing and drawing parallels with Winston’s run up to ‘invention’.
Changes brought about by the new consumer society
The background to HyperCard’s development and in particular that while HyperCard was created and released with a technologically deterministic approach, its creators were a product of two social environments – the counter culture of the sixties and the Deterministic Age of the so called ‘Computer Revolution’. In essence its creation was a triggered by people who absorbed the radical views of the counter culture in the societies of the 1960s so its creation can be argued to be a result of those social ideals and the resulting needs it suggested and its release was a result of a decision made within social and (latent) economic pressures to a) not get left behind by the Computer Revolution juggernaut and b) sell more units.
Equally since the software (and also the Macintosh itself) was a product of those views it can be argued that the technology was loaded with those ideals and its form was a direct consequence. If you want to ‘stick it to the Man’ how co-incidental is it that the software you have just created undermines traditional technological, economic and political ideas about control, ownership and empowerment? At this stage it seems clear that the software was totally misunderstood by its owners and this led to an indifference that smacks of the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. A lack of vision that leads to indifference is a suppressor as much as any active obstruction to diffusion and although HyperCard needed its masters to find a suitable economic model they did no such thing. From a technologically deterministic stance they perceived its success and eventual diffusion as inevitable. (Need some citation here about what was going on at apple at the time). This was hardly surprising given that the economic model for the entire industry revolved around models translated from the manufacturing and industrial era where what was primary was the shifting of units of commodities – in this case computer hardware.

Early adopters (or what Gladwell describes as Mavens) included artists, designers and educators. The attraction of non-linear interaction and the ability to ‘write as we read’ offered the promise of redefining what it meant to be an author/designer/artist/educator/student/audience/user – this is a deterministic position and one that underpins not only a belief in the inevitability of technology but also to a degree its autonomy in the sense that HC and Hypertext technology in general would almost change relationships between creator, content and consumer without any human agency at all. Technologically deterministic language such as “offered the promise of” also underlines a deterministic stance. Furthermore, there is a question of whether this indicates that the technology itself is neutral. It also through its ease of use and the fact that HC was designed with the creator as well as the end user in mind meant that no specific prior knowledge was required to master it. HC was not built for programmers who were very much an established field and fiercely protective of their domain. HC was also not designed for geeks. A basic understanding of computer technology was all that was required. In essence the tool appeared to come out of nowhere (Kay’s Notecards, Engelbart, Bush, Nelson of course all lead to this and as Winston points out as in other areas the development can be seen as the result of a great many disparate developments shaped by social, cultural and political forces over a long period. Memex, Xanadu were prototypes while Notecards, given what was happening in Apple Labs was seemingly already redundant) which seemingly (and falsely) gives credence to a deterministic interpretation.

HC required a rethink about how information was organised and accessed – with the key issue here being ‘your’ information. All software prior to this had, in an illustration of remediation at work, taken the paradigm of the piece of paper – the document. You create a document, fill it and then print it. HC files were called stacks comprised of at least one card. These cards essentially were containers for ‘stuff’ – in fact Hypertalk’s variables themselves were called Containers. You added cards as required and placed ‘content’ onto them. The really intriguing aspect of the process was the mechanisms you created in order to access that content or to put it another way to navigate through this digital construct. Whenever you launched HC it took you to a home stack where a series of buttons existed that would allow you to jump off to other stacks. These buttons/links etc were fully customisable and predate the modern home page or web portal. They also predate the document styles start-up panels now almost de rigour for contemporary software. The home stack was your Grand Central Station.
This is important as it implies that HyperCard was not autonomous by nature but rather that the user became autonomous through interaction with it.

The use of HyperCard began at the ground floor with individuals first in the US and then quickly in the UK creating stacks to handle something they needed it to do. Winston might argue that early adopters were employing existing paradigms to use the software to handle tasks where a stack of cards made sense – in effect using the software for interactive texts of some kind with the software acting like an easy to use database – and I would agree that some early users were doing little more than word processing with linked passages of text. Apple Inc viewed the product from a deterministic stance believing that the increased functionality of the Mac with HyperCard preloaded would inevitably lead to greater sales of the hardware – HyperCard was just another ‘insanely great’ feature of the Mac hardware. However, it could be argued that the software was in need of a supervening necessity to allow it to gain traction in terms of adoption.
Initially, much of this was text based and incorporated some buttons to allow navigation. People created stacks to keep a database of their Music and VHS collections, stacks for playing text based role play games, stacks for holding their bibliographies and much more. The interactive nature of the HC product coupled with its Nelson based origins in Hypertext and Hypermedia led to academics and students alike creating interactive essays and dissertations where the references and quotes could be immediately expanded via clicking on key words (this predates the Mosaic web browser). In fact I made my first interactive essay in 1989.

This adoption by educators and their charges led to an increase in HC’s use as an education medium since users could produce anything from essays to PhD texts in full interactive form with little or no computer knowledge – the absence of IT at a time when then industry was pushing a new hegemonic idea to the population – that of “IT”. Stacks started to appear that helped you learn about anything from the periodic table through to the general theory of relativity. The newfound interactive teaching material ‘fit’ (in the Winston sense) into the cultural and social transition to ‘engaging learners’ and adopting interactive, ‘fun ‘ ways of delivering material in an education setting – ‘what we have to learn we learn by doing’. In addition to this stacks started to appear that assisted teachers and professionals themselves including HC timetabling stacks, grading stacks and attendance registers.

It needs to be re-iterated that the driving force behind its use was a rag tag band of early adopters who found themselves in tune with a technology that even they did not understand. At the moment this sounds terribly technologically deterministic. However I am arguing that any technology that is not created for a specific use or ‘market’ can if left unmolested be deterministic in the sense that it finds an evolutionary symbiosis with the society in which it exists. Mackenzie and Wajcman [3] believe that technology is only neutral if it's never been used before, or if no one knows what it is going to be used for (Green, 2001). In this sense HyperCard was neutral from the perspective and experience of the end user (at the early adopter stage) and would only lose that neutrality through potential eventual acceptance and standardisation of use.
HC facilitated the creation of interactive content by people who were not traditionally ‘computer people’ because it presented an associative way of storing, linking and ‘playing’ and provided a framework for building products/artworks/technologies. As a result the uses to which it was put were staggeringly broad and seemingly often unconnected. However HC was pitted against its own nature – the very same flexibility that made it so powerful also ensured that a great many people didn’t use it at all through a complete confusion about what it was supposed to be for.
While the concept of ‘computer literacy’ was now be coming a standard subject at school level it was delivered from a completely deterministic standing with the public encouraged to view the computer as the latest in a long line of technological marvels that would usher in a new era of prosperity and human superiority over natural power. In effect the computer was autonomous and all future digital technology would remove us from the tedium of daily life. Worse still was the growing trend for corporate interests, newly freed by legislation to broaden their scope within media industries and technologies to portray themselves not just as purveyors of technology but also as experts of this future. This future was too complex for the public to deal with and it needed a new class of individual and organisation to deal with the technological future approaching. It needed a new “IT” superclass. In short, the pubic were supposed to become used to the idea of technology doing things for us – through the new IT superclass. We were not supposed to consider what we ourselves might choose to do with it. HyperCard represented a clear and present threat to the status quo and the laws of suppression of radical potential was in evidence through the propagation of a myth about the need for gatekeepers of the new digital age. Later on this would encompass ideas that would strike at the heart of public fears about safety online, identity, pornography etc.
Apple Computer Inc. was developing a range of ‘new’ technologies that would further advance their platform and here lies one of the key separations of the time. The Mac OS was developed as a way of doing things in an interactive, intuitive and visual way. The ideology of the organisation and its key protagonists was geared towards creating ‘the next insanely great thing’. MS by comparison when furtively working on Windows 3.1 saw this as a mainly cosmetic exercise. This can be evidence over the next few years by the fact that Mac technology such as QuickTime, TruType, QuickDraw, and Extensions etc were all integral parts of the OS. Windows by comparison laid a GUI over DOS and each new technology effectively functioned as an application. QT on the Mac was a fundamental core technology of the OS, DirectX for windows was not.

It should be stated very clearly here that the prevailing belief in the computer industry (even after the beginning of MS’s destruction of IBM via DOS) was that the hardware was everything. Software simply ran on the hardware – but it was the hardware that needed to be sold in large quantities.

This system wide technology approach allowed HyperCard to simply hook into anything the Mac could handle. Suddenly HC could incorporate QT as in Video, Audio and Animation. It could use Plaintalk that allowed speech integration. It could use QT to access and control MIDI data. It could also using the nature of Mac files and applications now also talk directly to other applications. The hardware of the Mac relied on these integrated technologies so in turn HC could use the hardware directly. HC could access printers, scanners, the serial ports and DSPs.

Now all of a sudden HC could be used for far more ‘Multimedia’ orientated work. This led to the first batch of interactive titles (many originally on Laserdisc) including ‘The Complete Maus’, “Guernica”, “Mozart” and many more. The emphasis of these products was not on accessing information but on ‘exploring’ the subject (semantic web). You could start and end anywhere and two people could find themselves having two very different experiences. In other words the act of interacting created explicit meaning.

At this time the growth of the CD market while still not dominant was large enough to suggest it as a medium for the delivery of interactive content and the ‘media public sphere’ had presented this as an indestructible, robust and future-proof vehicle. The only thing we had to worry about apparently was miniaturisation – the CD would be around for years so we were informed, it would just obviously get smaller.

The VHS market was now mature and the eighties saw the rise of the visual pop star. No longer was it enough to hear the music, you had to see the music. The music video became a potent weapon in the music arms race to the coveted number one slot and many bands of the era owed their initial popularity to the portrayal of their look via glossy, challenging or quite simply ‘cool’ videos. I myself decided to get into a creative field rather than an IT field after seeing David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video on Top of the Pops!

Atari STs had long been used by the music industry in music production so the software to create music was not new. Equally, for the first time software such as Adobe Premiere allowed for the editing of video (albeit via very expensive additional hardware) via a computer (again ONLY a Mac initially).

The games industry had moved away from dedicated consoles (although the Atari 800 can still do some things that are impossible on my £3000 Quad Core Mac pro!!!) as computers and were developing instead ‘games consoles’ that were gaming machines. While the Mac enjoyed 8bit colour courtesy of the Mac II family with its fully integrated graphics engine, PCs had long been restricted to a limited graphics capability that gradually changed with the introduction of graphics cards based on VESA standards that allowed some level of compatibility and interoperability. These were becoming cheaper trough the use of far eastern manufacturing plants and games manufacturers could realistically consider the PC a potential gaming device. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein et al hinted at a hitherto unused potential of the beige box sat in the corner of the living room/bedroom.

But here now in HC was a way of melding sound, vision and interaction.

The increasing digitisation of media types and the consequences for the once separate industries that centred around each one was again hyped up within the ‘media public sphere’ as evidence of a new grand meta theory – that of convergence. It smacked of an attempt at some kind of grand unifying theory of media. (?!!)

HC was never used to create the content but rather to author it. It spawned a class of software applications that would later come to be known as authoring packages.

Now Rock stars and bands such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and the Residents were creating interactive CD ROMs that merged their music products, with associated visuals and the element of ‘play’ and ‘explore’. The Enhanced Audio CD standard appeared to pave the way for a new generation of ‘Media’ stars who simply created content in many media – all they needed was a tool to author it all together.

The above examples were ALL created in HyperCard.

It seemed that the massive consumer entertainment industry might provide a supervening necessity for HC. The need for the public to be entertained and to have access to entertainment not governed by schedules, linear access or (?) was being serviced to the tune of (a huge amount of money!!?). Could the computer be a plaything? A leisure activity? An entertainment mechanism? A means to sell via?

This also underlines another key separation.

Personal Computer (i.e. PC) = Computer with all the ‘history’ baggage that comes with the term. The architect of the wave taking us to a new digital future.

Mac = Toy

The pinnacle of this stage of HyperCard’s History came with the release of a groundbreaking game – Myst. Myst, a fantasy adventure involving puzzles in a seemingly immersive and highly detailed graphic environment went on to become at the time the fastest selling game of all time – no mean feat given that it was strictly Mac only!
Now ideas about spacial awareness and networks were becoming important given how complex some of the work produced with HC was becoming. Ideas such as having a home or moving ‘Back’ or ‘Forward’, changing the cursor when anything clickable was rolled over, audio and visual feedback cues and much more started to develop as a language and hesitantly conventions started to appear and become slowly adopted within this cult market.

What it demonstrated again was the sheer breadth of what was possible with HC. Ironically, the strength of Myst sales may have prompted the beginning of the end for HC.

HC was now starting to be noticed by individuals and organisations outside the Apple Mac design fraternity. Universities, schools and colleges were beginning to consider HC as a viable option for the creation of learning material. The first education shows in London that I visited were completely dominated by interactive products created in HC. NASA were expressing an interest in using HC as a means of creating an intuitive front end for its complex technology. Various companies were now investigating its use as a technology for creating interactive content. All this and HC was still essentially black and white!

Apple computer was still bundling HC free with All new Macs (indeed for a while you could download it free for an older Mac) but by this point there was a real desire to turn this niche product with its cult following into a commercially viable money making enterprise. Despite this, arguments still raged over exactly what it was. Users had been clamouring for the addition of colour for some time but from the point of view of the hardware this simply did not make sense to Apple. The majority of people who owned Macs owned one of their All in One models – almost all of which had a built in black and white screen with a fixed resolution of 512 x 356. The expensive modular (and colour) Mac made up a tiny minority of hardware sales. Apple, therefore promoted the in built extensibility of HC and encouraged its users to extend and in effect drive its evolution.

The early adopters of HC, in particular, those within academic environments had access to the Internet via primitive technologies such as Telnet. What then flourished was a small but passionate global network of HyperCard stacks for people to download and use – some were free and some monetised. Universities such as Dartmouth uploaded their stacks for anyone to freely download. HyperCard could be extended by the use of XCMDs and XFCNs that were written in a high level programming language such as C or Pascal. The early adopters who came from a technical background began creating large numbers of these add-ons that extended the capability and reach of the software. If there was something you wanted to do and HC couldn’t facilitate it then somewhere online it seemed that someone would have written an XCMD for it.
One of these XCMD suites was AddColor an impressive HC extension that finally allowed for the integration of colour into HyperCard.

This last technology (i.e. XCMDs) became the catalyst for HC now being used in a physical sense. HC was being used to control machinery, equipment, audio visual technology, ground satellite dishes, domestic heating and lighting systems, TVs and Hi-Fis (in a move that predates the domestic media player/centre).

HC was also network aware in the sense that it could utilise the AppleTalk protocol embedded into all Macs. While the majority of local area networks were employing the IBM token ring it hardly seemed to matter that HC spoke AppleTalk given that it was an Apple only environment anyway. I personally created a stack that allowed several users on a network to paint and draw on a stack at the same time on the same network. HC could via XCMDs talk TCP but more of this later.

HC’s broad interfacing meant that it also encouraged some early adopters to play with the very nature of interfacing with the computer and or the content on a fundamental level. Thus touch screens, electronic sensors and many such devices were created albeit more from a curiosity value rather than a desire to create a marketable product. In the early 90s I created HyperCard stacks that were controlled by a variety of mechanisms including moving bodies, the human voice and alpha, beta a theta waves directly from the brain. I was not alone in this endeavour. Far from it, a growing number of enthusiasts and artists began experimenting with HC as a means of creating interactive art or public space pieces. In 1993 I set up a laser matrix (like the stereotypical laser lines guarding the proverbial priceless jewel!!) in a darkened room connected to an interface card and driven by HC. A rectangular block was then used to move through the air and cut the beam which then triggered some content. In other words you could control something on the screen by waving a piece of plastic around.

Despite all this, despite the apparent existence of supervening necessities – HC floundered and ultimately died.

HyperCard finds some friends:
With MS Windows still yet to get off the starting blocks the Mac platform with its GUI and relatively seamless integration of Media became the primary platform for the creation of interactive content and HC the key software to enable this. A killer market was still eluding the company and despite the growing popularity of the software Apple Inc remained almost unaware of or indifferent to the potential or the value of their creation.

Apple had already identified the education market in the US as a potential market for their hardware (with virtually no thought given to the software) and was attempting to market a technology to a then conservative audience. It should be noted here that it appears that Apple, in common with a great many technology innovators/creators did not at the time concern themselves with what people did with the technology once they had acquired it. This is an attitude that pervaded almost all areas of society with many governments seemingly unconcerned about what this pervasive technology was or could be being used for. “War Games” and Matthew Broderick aside, it was home Video technology that was bearing the brunt of political social and economic attempts at control and limitation under the banners of public taste, exploitation, piracy and child welfare.

This set of attitudes resulted in HC being bundled free with each new Mac as a way of selling hardware – the content in essence was irrelevant since, according to this view of technology, it was up to individuals to create and have the content they so wished. Borne of the counter culture and a radical interest in liberation, spiritualism and empowerment of the individual HC represented the pinnacle of the technology as individual empowerment mechanism.

Thus educators were offered the hardware on the basis of its superb handling of sound and graphics – two vital weapons in the quest to devise education strategies that were based upon the use of teaching / learning materials that engaged students and allowed for interaction giving learners a degree of autonomy and self determination within their studies. This move towards active and interactive learning while not new owes its “technologisation” to the Information Age myth propagated within the ‘media public sphere’. Computers would allegedly define the next great age of mankind and popular culture began to promote the wonders of learning through technology in a way that resonated with the public’s own perception of the ‘state of the art’. In the same way that today huge sums of money are being spent on items such as Smartboards in classrooms with little or no real analysis of their worth in a specific scenario so computers were starting to be pushed at educational establishments as more than just tools for learning about Computing and IT – they could be educators or ‘learning facilitators’ too. It wasn’t that there was a demonstrably evidential range of benefits inherent in the particular technology – it was simply that everyone was going to be doing it – after all; this was the future right now. The Medium is the Message.

The education market became HC’s largest single market although the vast majority of this material was created by individuals and used or distributed freely with no direct monetisation or apparent economic model. A number of enterprising companies sprang up to service the need for educational material for those non computer literate educators unable to use even the intuitive HC. However, quality of product varied wildly as did the relative pricing models employed. Added to this was the fact that most commercial material was only available through mail order in specialist or niche publications with no opportunity to ‘try before you buy’.

Hence within Education and the entertainment industry it could be agued that supervening necessities were in evidence. It could also be argued that a third, namely the desire to have individual control of the technology and therefore to ‘ride the digital wave’ was also present. However, HC’s power was also a major contributor to the ongoing confusion about what it was and what it was supposed to do. The range of uses that it was put to are too numerous to go into in detail here but I will attempt to outline just a few in addition to those already mentioned above.

As a result of HC’s card based metaphor it became popular as a pseudo database style development tool with the added advantage of having a toolset capable of creating virtually any front end. Renault, the French car manufacturer was using HyperCard in 2002 for its inventory system.
In the same year HC was running part of the lighting system for the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – a superb comparison of scale given how many people were using it in the US to control the heating and lighting systems in their own more modest houses!
As I have mentioned above games were a mainstay of the HC community, not just glorious graphic wonders such as Myst but many far more graphically basic games such as text based role play games and it was here that HC enabled ordinary individuals with a great idea to put together a game that could then be distributed and enjoyed by others – whether freeware, shareware or commercial. In addition to this game players could create their own levels or worlds by creating new stacks and further distribute those – a clear predation of contemporary games such as WoW.
HC essentially gave application development power to ‘the masses’ and found another niche, this time amongst developers in the Mac fraternity who used the software as a rapid prototyping tool for software development. Software developers on the Mac platform were in small numbers starting to see HC and multimedia in general as a way in to the as yet untapped education markets.
Interactive educational or encyclopaedia type products were also another growth area with companies such as Voyager, Grolier and later Dorling Kindersley quick to recognise and take advantage of an emerging market – a market that was later to be owned by MS by default. Publishers saw CDROM as a way of repackaging existing content that they already owned. Print publishers however lacked the skills required to produce interactive content and the early 1990s saw collaborations between publishing houses and software developments companies to produce interactive content.
In tandem with the growth in stack creation and distribution there was a symbiotic growth in the development of XCMDs and XFCNs that extended the reach of the software still further.
However, this versatility continued to defy Apple’s attempts at marketing and hence monetizing the software and its potential. Was it a visual environment for developers? If so then how come non-professionals could also create useful programs with it? Was it a database engine? A prototyping tool? An introduction to object-oriented programming?
Apple, like the rest of the counter culture inspired computer start-ups of the 70’s were inherently technologically deterministic in their approach. The technologies built in their labs (sometimes with a clear purpose but more often than not in the early days the direction of which was driven by the desires and whims of individuals) were created within this Information Age aura where each technology was seen to logically naturally lead onto the next best thing. What was being created here was the future while the dying embers of grand Meta narratives cooled in the distance.

HyperCard Leaves home:
In 1984 and 85 a small Chicago based Mac software developer was selling SoundWorks and VideoWorks, two simple audiovisual creation packages for the Macintosh. In 1987 Videoworks was renamed Director and now took the form of an essentially linear presentation and animation tool. HC was by now the foremost (albeit within a relatively small market) tool in a nascent interactive multimedia authoring market and 1988 saw the addition of interactivity to Director via its Lingo scripting language. Director, while in many ways remaining far more limited than HC, operated in full colour and used a timeline based non-static metaphor for its production – something that was relatively easy for existing animators and video makers to grasp.
However, such was HC’s perceived dominance that Lingo was at first 100% compatible with HyperTalk and Macromind (then Macromedia) went to great lengths to ensure that even HC externals (XCMDs) could be seamlessly embedded into Director ‘Movies’ to allow full functionality. This idea of embedded plug-ins within an interactive host first started by HC then adopted by Director is now a mainstay of web browser technologies.
There were other products quick to follow – most notably new tools that were designed to offer some of HC’s power within the now rapidly growing MS Windows market. HC was always single platform and one of the key obstacles to its acceptance and prevalence was its limitation of being restricted to the Mac OS. While this was fine for content creators, artists and designers who represented the bulk of Mac users it severely restricted the potential market for and therefore income from any products made with it.
One of the first cross platform tools was Spinnaker Plus – a basic HC clone that functioned on both Mac and PC albeit with a restricted functionality. Plus was incorporated by Oracle into Oracle Card – a version of Plus (and by implication a derivative of HC) that was actually designed to look more business like and less ‘cute’ in order to appeal to ‘serious’ developers and the business community. Oracle were also keen to exploit their large scale database technologies for business by using Oracle Card as a relatively easy to use front end creation tool.
A more notable competitor came in 1989 in the form of the Mac only Supercar from Silicon Beach Software (in an ironic twist, SuperCard was bought by Aldus, often credited as one of the saviours of the Mac platform through PageMaker and Freehand who were ultimately acquired by Adobe who in turn bought the cross platform Director through the acquisition of Macromedia and ultimately through this acquired Director’s successor; Flash). Supercar was notable for its extension of the card metaphor and merging with it some more conventional programming and development ideas such as separating compilers and tools. SuperCard was also full colour from the ground up (or at least 8 bit). Like Director before it and in a nod to HC’s superiority great lengths were taken to ensure complete compatibility (without translators) with HC Stacks.

HC was falling victim to the ‘laws’ of suppression through the inability and inaction of its owner to capitalize on its promise and the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. The development industry as part of the new “IT” industry relied on its existence on the fact that technological control remained outside the grasp of the many. Hence although the vast majority of end users could happily purchase a computer package to teach their kids about pet care or to keep their CD collection in order, few of them knew how or had the means to create the software themselves. HC was potentially a game changer and a major threat to that orthodoxy. Apple itself apparently recognized the problem and responded by referring to HyperTalk coding officially as Scripting and not Programming in an attempt to deflect hostility – both outside and inside Apple.
The 1980s and 1990s had also seen a massive upheaval in ownership of media concerns be it in terms of content production, distribution or licensing with new laws on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to relax controls and restrictions of cross ownership. These new megalithic organizations were now increasingly powerful and thus politically and economically influential. Unlike Apple Inc. they were sensing an emerging content driven era (an idea in part self propagated through the ‘media public sphere’).
What was plain to the likes of MS was that hardware was increasingly a marginal business with standardized components ultimately killing off the specialist hardware economies of the past. The new markets were in content generation and ownership and MS (amongst others) set on a path of aggressive and expensive takeovers of publishing outfits, digital photo libraries and media banks.

In response, Apple spun out the development and responsibility for HC to its Software arm; Claris who at the time controlled MacWrite and Filemaker. The decision appears to have been taken almost entirely on a business level ad Claris had no experience of dealing with content generation and interactive multimedia and worse still had only limited success at pushing Apple’s other software tools. It has been argued by some that those on the board who heard the word ‘database’ during presentations by the HC team latched onto it and thus justified its inclusion in the Claris portfolio next to their ‘other’ database flagship; Filemaker.

Since figures pointed to the alarming (for Apple) fact that the bundling of HC free was having little or no effect on hardware sales of the Macintosh platform, Claris set about turning HC from a beloved ‘curio’ to income generating product. The strategy involved creating two separate forms of HC. One would be the normal full version of HC, hitherto bundled free but now priced at $99. The other was a limited HC Player that allowed for the playing of stacks but not their creation or editing. The player would continue to be bundled free with all new Macs. Thus Claris would at a stroke remove a defining set of Mac only capabilities right out of the box while at the same time making no effort to find a way to market HC in a way that would entice consumers and developers alike.

HC languished at Claris but saw an incremental release in HC 2.0 which boasted some improvements including extending HC’s ability to communicate with other applications, greater HyperTalk capability and the ability to work with a wider variety of network protocols.

By now HC’s card based metaphor with each card representative of a page or screen all based around a starting point or ‘home’ stack were becoming an underlying principle for interactive media. Its organizational structure and its linkage of media and content gave rise to various structural ideas for information based content products – from ordered hierarchical organization to more freeform and complex web structures.

1985 had seen the launch of Windows version 1 for the PC and 1988 saw the launch of the now pivotal lawsuit by Apple against MS for infringement. While the legal case was being fiercely contested at great cost (and often in public for the titillation of a public hungry for news about the computer industries first two celebrity organizations), MS subsequently launched Windows 3 in 1990 – astonishingly without any legal bar. While Windows 3 (and following it Windows 3.1) was little more than a graphic shell that sat atop DOS, the ‘media public sphere’ drove the notion of the Information Revolution and pitched this as a full interactive intuitive OS. Developers were encouraged by MS to see the PC as being a viable platform for Multimedia content delivery and interaction (if not, as yet, creation). The problem remained the hardware – PCs were notoriously problematic in terms of guaranteeing audiovisual hardware and peripheral compatibility.

On December 2nd 1991 Apple Computer would launch QuickTime and reveal glimpses of technologies that focused on a connected world. In 1993 Microsoft would win the lawsuit and in 1995 MS would release Windows 95.

Meanwhile in March 1989 Tim Berners Lee put forward a proposal paper for a technology based on earlier Hypertext concepts . . .

Contact:

By 1989 the concept of Hypermedia structures had been around for several decades with a great many groups and individuals researching and experimenting with each successive, incremental technological ‘improvement’ but the means to produce real world artefacts that appeared to make good on the promise of Hypertext had only been in the wild for 2 years. In that time as we have seen it had drifted onto the radar of technologists, artists, researchers, educationalists and scientists – those that had ready access to the technology and the technological means to share the fruits of that technology.
Tim Berners Lee had as far back as 1980 considered a Hypertext system designed to facilitate the sharing of scientific information across systems and even went as far as creating a prototype (ENQUIRE). It was not though until 1989 that Berners Lee, having put forward a proposal to build a “"Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers", using a client-server architecture” and set about trying to gain support for his ideas. When this support was not forthcoming he took it upon himself to create the necessary pieces to realize the project.
On August 1st 1991 Berners Lee set up the worlds ‘first’ web server on a Next Machine (ironically at the time built by the new company formed by the recently ousted head of Apple, Steve Jobs who was at Apple when Atkinson was creating HyperCard), coupled with the first web browser WorldWideWeb. One of the most interesting aspects of this browser was the fact that it was a web editor as well and this is a topic that I shall return to later.
Lee had not been alone in considering the potential of Hypertext as he had like others been influenced by a body of research and invention that spanned back to Nelson, Englebart and Vannevar Bush. The crucial difference here is that whereas the majority of efforts had focused on the use of Hypertext to provide a way of authoring or accessing by the individual (the exception is Nelson although the technology simply did not exist for Nelson to suggest an alternative), Berners Lee had considered Hypertext as separate from the individual and existing more as a nebulous (but structured) environment where information existed in nodes linked together. Individuals contributed nodes to this web and Berners Lee saw the existing technology of the Internet as the conduit for the existence of the environment. Thus his insight was the fusion of Hypertext and the Internet. Berners Lee was not alone through this in that he was working with a fellow scientist Robert Cailliau whose key contributions included the development of the HTTP protocol – Cailliau has suggested that his implementation of the HTTP protocol had in part been influenced by HC and the notion of unidirectional links that underpinned their WorldWideWeb had first been glimpsed through HC’s linking of cards and the information on them. Through this insight the technologies now taken for granted (the URL, HTTP and HTML –although the latter is in effect an incremental change and development from existing SGML technology) were created to facilitate his prototype. It was not however an overnight success and still required further technological innovation to (scientific competence) allow it to fulfil existing social and economic needs. These needs included a greater business drive towards global communication and control of companies spread via merger across continents. It included the active teaching movement geared towards developing engaging and interactive forms of teaching and for whom the information Revolution represented the natural and inevitable progression for teaching and learning. It also included economic imperatives for reaching out to global markets for the exchange of new goods and services while bringing the mechanism of contact and therefore ‘exchange potential’ to a greater consumer mass. Berners Lee’s prototype while meaningful and useable by the scientific community for which it was originally proposed (although not by any means by everyone in the scientific community) did not represent a technology that could ‘fit’ within the existing social environment. It was not easy to use, non intuitive and required a specific mode of employment and interaction for it to be of use.
HC had by this time garnered a good deal of enthusiasm and support as an idea if not as a product or technology in its own right. Just as there were fervent supporters of its liberating and creative power so there were those dismissive of it as merely a flat, non object orientated database on steroids. Many observers (curiously the majority of whom were not known to be heavy HC users or creators) pointed to its relatively high technological requirements and non conventional approach to programming. Worse still was a growing resentment almost of it as being indicative of a closed system – something that not only ran purely within the Apple eco-system but also existed in isolation were individual (Mac) users created stacks for their own purposes and not for social or economic advancement. In other words HC users were merely using it to enrich their own lives and empower themselves through the creation of custom technological artefacts that allowed them to define how they used their own (as in ‘purchase owned’) technology.
The ‘media public sphere’ was at this time a place where the technological revolution was a deterministic and inevitable path that would lead society to a richer, freer, more prosperous and better educated plateau. The Information Revolution as perpetuated by economic, political and scientific interests was about society becoming technologised – it was not about the empowerment of the individual. Technology defined social change according to the interests influencing ‘public debate’ and individual responsibility ironically meant using the technology in a way that benefited society – not the individual.
HC (by now in version 2) was still plagued by a number of ‘weaknesses’ as defined by its detractors. Firstly was the fact that at its heart it was still essentially a black and white medium. Colour functionality had been added via the integration of third party XCMDs called AddColor. This was an early example of development being shared across parties with a major player opting to integrate the functionality developed by another rather than seeking to ring fence the product’s development in house. It could be argued that Apple, not realising quite what they had, considered HC not valuable enough to devote significant resources to innovating further – the indifference a clear indicator of a form of the ‘laws’ of suppression. A more charitable view might be that this development of HC predates the model subsequently employed in the development of contemporary software – the only difference being the now customary financial acquisition of the third party in order to assimilate its technology. This contemporary assimilation is also another indicator of the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential and it is quiet possible that had at the time Apple been an even smaller concern, or had anyone realised HC’s potential that Apple Inc itself might have been acquired, assimilated and a ‘defanged’ version of HC released by the new owners.
The second and most serious of the flaws in HC was its static, disk based, local model as opposed to having a connected architecture. Bill Atkinson, himself has remarked that if he had only realized the power of network-oriented stacks, instead of focusing on local stacks on a single machine, HyperCard could have become the first Web browser. In fact I believe that Atkinson, while correct was actually still not quite able to grasp the nature of his own creation in the same way that (phone / gramophone).
It must be said at this point that HC itself was not totally insular in the sense that it was not able to work across networks or even the internet. Indeed a great many stacks existed with built in XCMDs created by HC’s loyal hypermedia fan base that allowed for the use of HC across networks and also to access material on the Internet. I myself built a network game than ran over AppleTalk and IBM Token Ring LANs. I also created a HC stack that allowed a number of users to simultaneously work on a screen based art piece across a LAN before clicking on a button and using FTP protocols to upload the resulting ‘artwork’ to a remote server.
It is therefore overly simplistic to suggest as some observers have done that HC’s eventual demise can be attributed solely to the rise of Berners Lee's World Wide Web which as we shall see appeared to offer some of HC’s functionality without the lack of connection. Indeed it would be some considerable time before the World Wide Web acquired enough functionality to even rival HC’s broad (and extendable) feature set.
The final key flaw identified is perhaps the one that invites the greatest argument and passion – namely that HC was a wholly proprietary technology that required individuals to move into the Apple eco-system. Fundamentally, at the time of HC 2.0 Apple, in keeping with most other tech companies, saw everyone and everything else as a competitor and rival. Thus for HC to have been a success and achieve diffusion of its technology, society as a whole would have had to walk willingly into planet Apple.
The evidence suggests that Apple were at the time aware of this seemingly impossible scenario and, prompted by the prototype from Berners Lee, were finally beginning to understand the potential of HC. The ‘media public sphere’ was engulfed in a quest for moving images – video. Indeed the quest for the conquering of video was a central and recurring theme of the Information Revolution – everything from computer enhanced video to video phones. Apple was developing a technology to not only handle video but also redefine the way media and system related. This, they called QuickTime.

HyperCard Dies:
Apple clearly at this time had plans for connected technology as can be evidenced by their work on e-world (with a nod to Compuserve and AOL), Hot Sauce, and the John Scully driven Knowledge Navigator programme which would culminate with the ill fated Newton project. Although not the only emerging audio visual technology, QuickTime was unique among the competing technologies of its kind in a number of ways. Firstly it represented a environment or a wrapper as opposed to a single technology or file type. In short a .Mov file was just an audio visual file that was handled by the QuickTime architecture. Secondly, and in another example of Apple’s deterministic approach it was integrated into the Mac operating system as a core piece of technology as opposed to its competitors’ products that all took the form of separate software running atop the existing operating system. QuickTime, like HyperCard was bundled free with every new Mac.
Berners Lee’s defining decision regarding his fledgling WWW project was to allow the technology to be totally license free and OS free. Hence, while like HyperCard the technology was in itself without cost, the WWW was totally platform and hardware independent from the ground up. HyperCard’s proprietary technology was now rapidly becoming what Winston would describe as redundant in the face of Berners Lee’s “invention’.
In the context of the Mac platform QuickTime was a stunning success and buoyed with the response from its consumer base (and the expansion of the platform into the nascent desktop video market to add another media type to those already associated with the platform), Apple, it is alleged, finally began to see the potential of HyperCard in the context of the QuickTime architecture and development of the software was spun out to the QuickTime development team. It is at this point that the HyperCard story becomes difficult to grasp in terms of separating fact from fiction.
It is held by some that the purpose was to develop a new technology called QTI which would be the fusion of HyperCard and QuickTime to create a brand new Audio Visual interactive technology that would not only handle all digital media local to the machine but also afford online interaction. In essence HyperCard stacks would become interactive QuickTime Movies with QuickTime acting as a wrapper for the content. The enormity of this possibility cannot be underestimated. What in effect this would represent is a fully audio visual web browser that functioned as an intuitive web editor and creator at the same time. Such a technology would clearly have predated technologies such as online forms, Google docs, Google chrome, facebook et al.
At the same time the team were working on HyperCard 3 as an intermediate stage and showed off a prototype of the technology that allowed the functioning of stacks within a browser environment.
Neither technology was ever publicly released and Apple (in a move now familiar to its loyal consumer base) became silent over the future of HyperCard.

Some stuff here about the MS war including Avie Tevian being told to “Knife the Baby”, MS threatening Apple with the removal of Office, MS ramping up efforts to install IE as the de facto browser and the belief amongst some that Apple effectively sacrificed HyperCard (the only potential threat not only to IE’s ascendency but also to the MS and “IT” superclass hegemony) to keep QT and survive as a company.

Legacy:
what it left behind – to come

Conclusion:

To come!

One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest . . .

2009-12-07T23:53:00.000Z

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

With MS Windows still yet to get off the starting blocks the Mac platform with its GUI and relatively seamless integration of Media became the primary platform for the creation of interactive content and HC the key software to enable this. A killer market was still eluding the company and despite the growing popularity of the software Apple Inc remained almost unaware of or indifferent to the potential or the value of their creation.

Apple had already identified the education market in the US as a potential market for their hardware (with virtually no thought given to the software) and was attempting to market a technology to a then conservative audience. It should be noted here that it appears that Apple, in common with a great many technology innovators/creators did not at the time concern themselves with what people did with the technology once they had acquired it. This is an attitude that pervaded almost all areas of society with many governments seemingly unconcerned about what this pervasive technology was or could be being used for. “War Games” and Matthew Broderick aside, it was home Video technology that was bearing the brunt of political social and economic attempts at control and limitation under the banners of public taste, exploitation, piracy and child welfare.

This set of attitudes resulted in HC being bundled free with each new Mac as a way of selling hardware – the content in essence was irrelevant since, according to this view of technology, it was up to individuals to create and have the content they so wished. Borne of the counter culture and a radical interest in liberation, spiritualism and empowerment of the individual HC represented the pinnacle of the technology as individual empowerment mechanism.

Thus educators were offered the hardware on the basis of its superb handling of sound and graphics – two vital weapons in the quest to devise education strategies that were based upon the use of teaching / learning materials that engaged students and allowed for interaction giving learners a degree of autonomy and self determination within their studies. This move towards active and interactive learning while not new owes its “technologisation” to the Information Age myth propagated within the ‘media public sphere’. Computers would allegedly define the next great age of mankind and popular culture began to promote the wonders of learning through technology in a way that resonated with the public’s own perception of the ‘state of the art’. In the same way that today huge sums of money are being spent on items such as Smartboards in classrooms with little or no real analysis of their worth in a specific scenario so computers were starting to be pushed at educational establishments as more than just tools for learning about Computing and IT – they could be educators or ‘learning facilitators’ too. It wasn’t that there was a demonstrably evidential range of benefits inherent in the particular technology – it was simply that everyone was going to be doing it – after all; this was the future right now. The Medium is the Message.

The education market became HC’s largest single market although the vast majority of this material was created by individuals and used or distributed freely with no direct monetisation or apparent economic model. A number of enterprising companies sprang up to service the need for educational material for those non computer literate educators unable to use even the intuitive HC. However, quality of product varied wildly as did the relative pricing models employed. Added to this was the fact that most commercial material was only available through mail order in specialist or niche publications with no opportunity to ‘try before you buy’.

Hence within Education and the entertainment industry it could be agued that supervening necessities were in evidence. It could also be argued that a third, namely the desire to have individual control of the technology and therefore to ‘ride the digital wave’ was also present. However, HC’s power was also a major contributor to the ongoing confusion about what it was and what it was supposed to do. The range of uses that it was put to are too numerous to go into in detail here but I will attempt to outline just a few in addition to those already mentioned above.

As a result of HC’s card based metaphor it became popular as a pseudo database style development tool with the added advantage of having a toolset capable of creating virtually any front end. Renault, the French car manufacturer was using HyperCard in 2002 for its inventory system.
In the same year HC was running part of the lighting system for the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – a superb comparison of scale given how many people were using it in the US to control the heating and lighting systems in their own more modest houses!
As I have mentioned above games were a mainstay of the HC community, not just glorious graphic wonders such as Myst but many far more graphically basic games such as text based role play games and it was here that HC enabled ordinary individuals with a great idea to put together a game that could then be distributed and enjoyed by others – whether freeware, shareware or commercial. In addition to this game players could create their own levels or worlds by creating new stacks and further distribute those – a clear predation of contemporary games such as WoW.
HC essentially gave application development power to ‘the masses’ and found another niche, this time amongst developers in the Mac fraternity who used the software as a rapid prototyping tool for software development. Software developers on the Mac platform were in small numbers starting to see HC and multimedia in general as a way in to the as yet untapped education markets.
Interactive educational or encyclopaedia type products were also another growth area with companies such as Voyager, Grolier and later Dorling Kindersley quick to recognise and take advantage of an emerging market – a market that was later to be owned by MS by default. Publishers saw CDROM as a way of repackaging existing content that they already owned. Print publishers however lacked the skills required to produce interactive content and the early 1990s saw collaborations between publishing houses and software developments companies to produce interactive content.
In tandem with the growth in stack creation and distribution there was a symbiotic growth in the development of XCMDs and XFCNs that extended the reach of the software still further.
However, this versatility continued to defy Apple’s attempts at marketing and hence monetizing the software and its potential. Was it a visual environment for developers? If so then how come non-professionals could also create useful programs with it? Was it a database engine? A prototyping tool? An introduction to object-oriented programming?
Apple, like the rest of the counter culture inspired computer start-ups of the 70’s were inherently technologically deterministic in their approach. The technologies built in their labs (sometimes with a clear purpose but more often than not in the early days the direction of which was driven by the desires and whims of individuals) were created within this Information Age aura where each technology was seen to logically naturally lead onto the next best thing. What was being created here was the future while the dying embers of grand Meta narratives cooled in the distance.

In 1984 and 85 a small Chicago based Mac software developer was selling SoundWorks and VideoWorks, two simple audiovisual creation packages for the Macintosh. In 1987 Videoworks was renamed Director and now took the form of an essentially linear presentation and animation tool. HC was by now the foremost (albeit within a relatively small market) tool in a nascent interactive multimedia authoring market and 1988 saw the addition of interactivity to Director via its Lingo scripting language. Director, while in many ways remaining far more limited than HC, operated in full colour and used a timeline based non-static metaphor for its production – something that was relatively easy for existing animators and video makers to grasp.
However, such was HC’s perceived dominance that Lingo was at first 100% compatible with HyperTalk and Macromind (then Macromedia) went to great lengths to ensure that even HC externals (XCMDs) could be seamlessly embedded into Director ‘Movies’ to allow full functionality. This idea of embedded plug-ins within an interactive host first started by HC then adopted by Director is now a mainstay of web browser technologies.
There were other products quick to follow – most notably new tools that were designed to offer some of HC’s power within the now rapidly growing MS Windows market. HC was always single platform and one of the key obstacles to its acceptance and prevalence was its limitation of being restricted to the Mac OS. While this was fine for content creators, artists and designers who represented the bulk of Mac users it severely restricted the potential market for and therefore income from any products made with it.
One of the first cross platform tools was Spinnaker Plus – a basic HC clone that functioned on both Mac and PC albeit with a restricted functionality. Plus was incorporated by Oracle into Oracle Card – a version of Plus (and by implication a derivative of HC) that was actually designed to look more business like and less ‘cute’ in order to appeal to ‘serious’ developers and the business community. Oracle were also keen to exploit their large scale database technologies for business by using Oracle Card as a relatively easy to use front end creation tool.
A more notable competitor came in 1989 in the form of the Mac only Supercar from Silicon Beach Software (in an ironic twist, SuperCard was bought by Aldus, often credited as one of the saviours of the Mac platform through PageMaker and Freehand who were ultimately acquired by Adobe who in turn bought the cross platform Director through the acquisition of Macromedia and ultimately through this acquired Director’s successor; Flash). Supercar was notable for its extension of the card metaphor and merging with it some more conventional programming and development ideas such as separating compilers and tools. SuperCard was also full colour from the ground up (or at least 8 bit). Like Director before it and in a nod to HC’s superiority great lengths were taken to ensure complete compatibility (without translators) with HC Stacks.

HC was falling victim to the ‘laws’ of suppression through the inability and inaction of its owner to capitalize on its promise and the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. The development industry as part of the new “IT” industry relied on its existence on the fact that technological control remained outside the grasp of the many. Hence although the vast majority of end users could happily purchase a computer package to teach their kids about pet care or to keep their CD collection in order, few of them knew how or had the means to create the software themselves. HC was potentially a game changer and a major threat to that orthodoxy. Apple itself apparently recognized the problem and responded by referring to HyperTalk coding officially as Scripting and not Programming in an attempt to deflect hostility – both outside and inside Apple.
The 1980s and 1990s had also seen a massive upheaval in ownership of media concerns be it in terms of content production, distribution or licensing with new laws on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to relax controls and restrictions of cross ownership. These new megalithic organizations were now increasingly powerful and thus politically and economically influential. Unlike Apple Inc. they were sensing an emerging content driven era (an idea in part self propagated through the ‘media public sphere’).
What was plain to the likes of MS was that hardware was increasingly a marginal business with standardized components ultimately killing off the specialist hardware economies of the past. The new markets were in content generation and ownership and MS (amongst others) set on a path of aggressive and expensive takeovers of publishing outfits, digital photo libraries and media banks.

In response, Apple spun out the development and responsibility for HC to its Software arm; Claris who at the time controlled MacWrite and Filemaker. The decision appears to have been taken almost entirely on a business level ad Claris had no experience of dealing with content generation and interactive multimedia and worse still had only limited success at pushing Apple’s other software tools. It has been argued by some that those on the board who heard the word ‘database’ during presentations by the HC team latched onto it and thus justified its inclusion in the Claris portfolio next to their ‘other’ database flagship; Filemaker.

Since figures pointed to the alarming (for Apple) fact that the bundling of HC free was having little or no effect on hardware sales of the Macintosh platform, Claris set about turning HC from a beloved ‘curio’ to income generating product. The strategy involved creating two separate forms of HC. One would be the normal full version of HC, hitherto bundled free but now priced at $99. The other was a limited HC Player that allowed for the playing of stacks but not their creation or editing. The player would continue to be bundled free with all new Macs. Thus Claris would at a stroke remove a defining set of Mac only capabilities right out of the box while at the same time making no effort to find a way to market HC in a way that would entice consumers and developers alike.

HC languished at Claris but saw an incremental release in HC 2.0 which boasted some improvements including extending HC’s ability to communicate with other applications, greater HyperTalk capability and the ability to work with a wider variety of network protocols.

By now HC’s card based metaphor with each card representative of a page or screen all based around a starting point or ‘home’ stack were becoming an underlying principle for interactive media. Its organizational structure and its linkage of media and content gave rise to various structural ideas for information based content products – from ordered hierarchical organization to more freeform and complex web structures.

1985 had seen the launch of Windows version 1 for the PC and 1988 saw the launch of the now pivotal lawsuit by Apple against MS for infringement. While the legal case was being fiercely contested at great cost (and often in public for the titillation of a public hungry for news about the computer industries first two celebrity organizations), MS subsequently launched Windows 3 in 1990 – astonishingly without any legal bar. While Windows 3 (and following it Windows 3.1) was little more than a graphic shell that sat atop DOS, the ‘media public sphere’ drove the notion of the Information Revolution and pitched this as a full interactive intuitive OS. Developers were encouraged by MS to see the PC as being a viable platform for Multimedia content delivery and interaction (if not, as yet, creation). The problem remained the hardware – PCs were notoriously problematic in terms of guaranteeing audiovisual hardware and peripheral compatibility.

On December 2nd 1991 Apple Computer would launch QuickTime and reveal glimpses of technologies that focused on a connected world. In 1993 Microsoft would win the lawsuit and in 1995 MS would release Windows 95.

Meanwhile in March 1989 Tim Berners Lee put forward a proposal paper for a technology based on earlier Hypertext concepts . . .

One sided . . .

2009-12-02T21:44:00.000Z

I've been trying to read and think thru a haze of being annoyingly ill . . .

1 Million Years BC

Something here about competences?
The motivations of Atkinson, Apple, PARC, Kay etc?
The computer landscape – ie the domination of hardware over software
A generation brought up on Tomorrow’s world and with a modernistic outlook that embraced grand meta-narratives
The full force of the emerging global consumer society
The illusion of the (Habermas) public sphere where corporations and economic concerns invade the sphere and create a new media sphere that fuels the belief in the ‘Computer Revolution’.

All leading up to August 1987 – The launch of Hypercard

The Matrix

Set against the war between MS and Apple for control of the desktop (the prevailing paradigm in a society that was comfortable with the idea of centralised ie local data/information rather than distributed data/information) just prior to the launch of windows 3.1 when the Mac OS was the only GUI in town. The Mac had originally been reliant ironically on programs like Visicalc and WingZ (spreadsheets) but the growth of the DOS based PC market heralded oblivion (?). The arrival of Aldus Pagemaker and the nascent DTP market ‘saved’ the platform (?) but more importantly enshrined it as an artist / designer’s extension. It found a home amongst creatives and educators alike who were more likely to use it in unorthodox ways.
Postmodernism entered the public consciousness on the express train of mass consumerism and in the UK the shift in the public sphere is demonstrated by the gradual ineffectiveness of public debate in effecting political change (This lady really wasn’t for turning). The US also sat in a conservative fog under the Reagan administration.
The majority of people had no personal computers but were increasingly becoming used to their use ‘behind the scenes’ of transactions and interaction in a capitalist structure. Also, more and more it was becoming possible to come into first hand contact with them at school and work – although at school in the uk it primarily BBC micros which shared more in common with the original games console based machines such as the ataris, sinclairs et al.

Computers were for work. They were expensive, serious tools for the processing of increasingly complex and vast information problems.
The human genome project / Jurassic Park / Quantum Physics / CGI
Vs
Stock control / human resources / payroll / personal information / financial transactions

Hypercard was born in to this world.
At this stage it seems clear that the software was totally misunderstood by its owners and this led to an indifference that smacks of the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. It was the only game in town but, what to do? What to do?

Early adopters (Mavens) included artists, designers and educators. The attraction of non linear interaction and the ability to ‘write as we read’ offered the promise of redefining what it meant to be an author/designer/artist/educator/student/audience/user. It also through its ease of use and the fact that HC was designed with the creator as well as the end user in mind meant that no specific prior knowledge was required to master it. HC was not built for programmers who were very much an established field and fiercely protective of their domain. HC was also not designed for geeks. A basic understanding of computer technology was all that was required. In essence the tool appeared to come out of nowhere (Kay’s Notecards, Engelbart, Bush, Nelson of course all lead to this and as Winston points out as in other areas the development can be seen as the result of a great many disparate developments shaped by social, cultural and political forces over a long period. Memex, Xanadu were prototypes while Notecards, given what was happening in Apple Labs was seemingly already redundant).

HC required a rethink about how information was organised and accessed – with the key issue here being ‘your’ information. All software prior to this had taken the paradigm of the piece of paper – the document. You create a document, fill it and then print it. HC files were called stacks comprised of at least one card. These cards essentially were containers for ‘stuff’ – in fact Hypertalk’s variables were called Containers. You added cards as required and placed ‘content’ onto them. The really intriguing aspect of the process was the mechanisms you created in order to access that content or to put it another way to navigate through this digital construct. Whenever you launched HC it took you to a home stack where a series of buttons existed that would allow you to jump off to other stacks. These buttons/links etc were fully customisable and predate the modern home page or web portal. The home stack was your Grand Central Station.

The use of Hypercard began at the ground floor with individuals first in the US and then quickly in the UK creating stacks to handle something they needed it to do.
Initially, much of this was text based and incorporated some buttons to allow navigation. People created stacks to keep a database of their Music and VHS collections, stacks for playing text based role play games, stacks for holding their bibliographies and much more. The interactive nature of the HC product coupled with its Nelson based origins in Hypertext and Hypermedia led to academics and students alike creating interactive essays and dissertations where the references and quotes could be immediately expanded via clicking on key words (this predates the Mosaic web browser). In fact I made my first interactive essay in 1989.

This adoption by educators and their charges led to HC’s use as an education medium. Stacks started to appear that helped you learn about anything from the periodic table through to the general theory of relativity. The newfound interactive teaching material ‘fit’ (in the Winston sense) into the cultural and social transition to ‘engaging learners’ and adopting interactive, ‘fun ‘ ways of delivering material in an education setting – ‘what we have to learn we learn by doing’. In addition to this stacks started to appear that assisted teachers and professionals themselves including HC timetabling stacks, grading stacks and attendance registers.

It needs to be re-iterated that the driving force behind its use was a rag tag band of early adopters who found themselves in tune with a technology that even they did not understand. At the moment this sounds terribly Technologically deterministic. However I am arguing that any technology that is not created for a specific use or ‘market’ can if left unmolested be deterministic in the sense that it finds an evolutionary symbiosis with the society in which it exists. HC ‘led to’ the creation of interactive content by people who were not traditionally ‘computer people’ because it simply presented an associative way of storing, linking and ‘playing’ and provided a framework for building products/artworks/technologies. As a result the uses to which it was put were staggeringly broad and seemingly often unconnected.

Apple Computer Inc. was developing a range of ‘new’ technologies that would further advance their platform and here lies one of the key separations of the time. The Mac OS was developed as a way of doing things in an interactive, intuitive and visual way. The ideology of the organisation and its key protagonists was geared towards creating ‘the next insanely great thing’. MS by comparison when furtively working on Windows 3.1 saw this as a mainly cosmetic exercise. This can be evidence over the next few years by the fact that Mac technology such as Quicktime, TruType, QuickDraw, Extensions etc were all integral parts of the OS. Windows by comparison laid a GUI over DOS and each new technology effectively functioned as an application. QT on the Mac was a fundametal core technology of the OS, DirectX for windows was not.

It should be stated very clearly here that the prevailing belief in the computer industry (even after the beginning of MS’s destruction of IBM via DOS) was that the hardware was everything. Software simply ran on the hardware – but it was the hardware that needed to be sold in large quantities.

This system wide technology approach allowed Hypercard to simply hook into anything the Mac could handle. Suddenly HC could incorporate QT as in Video, Audio and Animation. It could use Plaintalk that allowed speech integration. It could use QT to access and control MIDI data. It could also using the nature of Mac files and applications now also talk directly to other applications. The hardware of the Mac relied on these integrated technologies so in turn HC could use the hardware directly. HC could access printers, scanners, the serial ports and DSPs.

Now all of a sudden HC could be used for far more ‘Multimedia’ orientated work. This led to the first batch of interactive titles (many originally on Laserdisc) including ‘The Complete Maus’, “Guernica”, “Mozart” and many more. The emphasis of these products was not on accessing information but on ‘exploring’ the subject (semantic web). You could start and end anywhere and two people could find themselves having two very different experiences. In other words the act of interacting created explicit meaning.

At this time the growth of the CD market while still not dominant was large enough to suggest it as a medium for the delivery of interactive content and the ‘media public sphere’ had presented this as an indestructible, robust and future-proof vehicle. The only thing we had to worry about apparently was miniaturisation – the CD would be around for years so we were informed, it would just obviously get smaller.

The VHS market was now mature and the eighties saw the rise of the visual pop star. No longer was it enough to hear the music, you had to see the music. The music video became a potent weapon in the music arms race to the coveted number one slot and many bands of the era owed their initial popularity to the portrayal of their look via glossy, challenging or quite simply ‘cool’ videos. I myself decided to get into a creative field rather than an IT field after seeing David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video on Top of the Pops!

Atari STs had long been used by the music industry in music production so the software to create music was not new. Equally, for the first time software such as Adobe Premiere allowed for the editing of video (albeit via very expensive additional hardware) via a computer (again ONLY a Mac initially).

The games industry had moved away from dedicated consoles (although the Atari 800 can still do some things that are impossible on my £3000 Quad Core Mac pro!!!) as computers and were developing instead ‘games consoles’ that were gaming machines. While the Mac enjoyed 8bit colour courtesy of the Mac II family with its fully integrated graphics engine, PCs had long been restricted to a limited graphics capability that gradually changed with the introduction of graphics cards based on VESA standards that allowed some level of compatibility and interoperability. These were becoming cheaper trough the use of far eastern manufacturing plants and games manufacturers could realistically consider the PC a potential gaming device. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein et al hinted at a hitherto unused potential of the beige box sat in the corner of the living room/bedroom.

But here now in HC was a way of melding sound, vision and interaction.

The increasing digitisation of media types and the consequences for the once separate industries that centered around each one was again hyped up within the ‘media public sphere’ as evidence of a new grand meta theory – that of convergence. It smacked of an attempt at some kind of grand unifying theory of media. (?!!)

HC was never used to create the content but rather to author it. It spawned a class of software applications that would later come to be known as authoring packages.

Now Rock stars and bands such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and the Residents were creating interactive CD ROMs that merged their music products, with associated visuals and the element of ‘play’ and ‘explore’. The Enhanced Audio CD standard appeared to pave the way for a new generation of ‘Media’ stars who simply created content in many media – all they needed was a tool to author it all together.

The above examples were ALL created in Hypercard.

It seemed that the massive consumer entertainment industry might provide a supervening necessity for HC. The need for the public to be entertained and to have access to entertainment not governed by schedules, linear access or (?) was being serviced to the tune of (a huge amount of money!!?). Could the computer be a plaything? A leisure activity? An entertainment mechanism? A means to sell via?

This also underlines another key separation.

Personal Computer (ie PC) = Computer with all the ‘history’ baggage that comes with the term. The architect of the wave taking us to a new digital future.

Mac = Toy

The pinnacle of this stage of Hypercard’s History came with the release of a ground breaking game – Myst. Myst, a fantasy adventure involving puzzles in a seemingly immersive and highly detailed graphic environment went on to become at the time the fastest selling game of all time – no mean feat given that it was strictly Mac only!
Now ideas about spacial awareness and networks were becoming important given how complex some of the work produced with HC was becoming. Ideas such as having a home or moving ‘Back’ or ‘Forward’, changing the cursor when anything clickable was rolled over, audio and visual feedback cues and much more started to develop as a language and hesitantly conventions started to appear and become slowly adopted within this cult market.

What it demonstrated again was the sheer breadth of what was possible with HC. Ironically, the strength of Myst sales may have prompted the beginning of the end for HC.

HC was now starting to be noticed by individuals and organisations outside the Apple Mac design fraternity. Universities, schools and colleges were beginning to consider HC as a viable option for the creation of learning material. The first education shows in London that I visited were completely dominated by interactive products created in HC. Nasa were expressing an interest in using HC as a means of creating an intuitive front end for its complex technology. Various companies were now investigating its use as a technology for creating interactive content. All this and HC was still essentially black and white!

Apple computer was still bundling HC free with All new Macs (indeed for a while you could download it free for an older Mac) but by this point there was a real desire to turn this niche product with its cult following into a commercially viable money making enterprise. Despite this, arguments still raged over exactly what it was. Users had been clamouring for the addition of colour for some time but from the point of view of the hardware this simply did not make sense to Apple. The majority of people who owned Macs owned one of their All in One models – almost all of which had a built in black and white screen with a fixed resolution of 512 x 356. The expensive modular (and colour) Mac made up a tiny minority of hardware sales. Apple, therefore promoted the in built extensibility of HC and encouraged its users to extend and in effect drive its evolution.

The early adopters of HC, in particular, those within academic environments had access to the Internet via primitive technologies such as Telnet. What then flourished was a small but passionate global network of Hypercard stacks for people to download and use – some were free and some monetised. Universities such as Dartmouth uploaded their stacks for anyone to freely download. Hypercard could be extended by the use of XCMDs and XFCNs that were written in a high level programming language such as C or Pascal. The early adopters who came from a technical background began creating large numbers of these add-ons that extended the capability and reach of the software. If there was something you wanted to do and HC couldn’t facilitate it then somewhere online it seemed that someone would have written an XCMD for it.
One of these XCMD suites was AddColor an impressive HC extension that finally allowed for the integration of colour into Hypercard.

This last technology (ie XCMDs) became the catalyst for HC now being used in a physical sense. HC was being used to control machinery, equipment, audio visual technology, ground satellite dishes, domestic heating and lighting systems, Tvs and Hi-Fis (in a move that predates the domestic media player/centre).

HC was also network aware in the sense that it could utilise the Appletalk protocol embedded into all Macs. While the majority of local area networks were employing the IBM token ring it hardly seemed to matter that HC spoke Appletalk given that it was an Apple only environment anyway. I personally created a stack that allowed several users on a network to paint and draw on a stack at the same time on the same network. HC could via XCMDs talk TCP but more of this later.

HC’s broad interfacing meant that it also encouraged some early adopters to play with the very nature of interfacing with the computer and or the content on a fundamental level. Thus touch screens, electronic sensors and many such devices were created albeit more from a curiosity value rather than a desire to create a marketable product. In the early 90s I created Hypercard stacks that were controlled by a variety of mechanisms including moving bodies, the human voice and alpha, beta a theta waves directly from the brain. I was not alone in this endeavour. Far from it, a growing number of enthusiasts and artists began experimenting with HC as a means of creating interactive art or public space pieces. In 1993 I set up a laser matrix (like the stereotypical laser lines guarding the proverbial priceless jewel!!) in a darkened room connected to an interface card and driven by HC. A rectangular block was then used to move through the air and cut the beam which then triggered some content. In other words you could control something on the screen by waving a piece of plastic around.

Despite all this, despite the apparent existence of supervening neccesities – HC floundered and ultimately died.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Indecent Proposal

2009-11-12T21:54:00.001Z

I'm trying to get there! How about?

1. Assignment title :

It came from Hypertext!!
The greatest story never sold.
??

2. My critical incident/s is…

The decision to Bundle HyperCard free on all new Apple Macintoshes (and the [w]hole its demise left)

3. I chose this incident/s because… (list at least three reasons)

it led to artists and designers (and not just computer scientists) creating interactive content with the computer as control mechanism, transformation engine and display vehicle.
It gave flesh to the idea that once disparate media types could be integrated and the acceptance of the idea of MULTI-media i.e. using content seamlessly across media types and industries
It led to ideas and paradigms some of which underpin how we interact with our systems today
It allowed for experimentation that would lead to fusion between content, interaction, relationship and interface
Ordinary people were the target audience with a distribution model that evolved rather than being designed
It created a genre of software that allowed for the creation of products and systems that challenged the relationship between the creator and the user

4. I’m going to use the following theory to help explore the incident/s

Technological Determinism? Diffusion of Innovation, Tipping Point, Hegemony

5. These are some of the things I’m going to analyse in the assignment…

The origins of Hypercard
The steps that led to the decision to release it
The uses it was put to and how it spread
the growth of content creation tools?
The relationship between creator and user | art and science
Why it ended
the (false?) idea that its successors (web 2.0?!!) democratises? gives power back? gives real choice?
That new technology which threatens established order and vested interest is quickly mutated and assimilated to make it harmless
That we are no happier

6. The incident has lead to the following change in current practice…

The proliferation of technologies for creating content - interactive or otherwise
The notion of interactive authoring
The rise of the era of engagement, interaction and active teaching
The idea that media itself has no intrinsic form but can be fluidly warped(?) to suit

7. These changes are important to me personally because…

It underpins my view of the world
I'd like to see a new Hypercard develop by some enterprising independent outfit.
The teaching profession is now obsessed with engagement, differentiation, active learning, interactive teaching, distance learning, 360 etc
I feel that modern gaming perhaps owes its evolution more to this than to traditional arcade gaming

8. In January I’m going to hand in…

I'd like to either create some kind of video essay or better still something interactive. I was hoping to spend some time this first unit attempting some Actionscript 3 and Object C but frankly other commitments and illness might have put paid to that.
I can't quite picture what form an interactive piece might take but I'll keep on it.

9. These are the references I'll be drawing upon (books, reports etc)

Currently I have in front of me to read:

A brief history of the future: John Naughton
The media in britain: Jane Stokes
Multimedia & Hypertext: Jakob Nielsen
Understanding media: Marshall Mcluhan
Once you're lucky twice you're good: Sarah Lacy
Key themes in media History: Dan Laughey
Fractal Dreams: Jon Dovey
Multimedia: Richard Wise
Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point

Various TED lectures

I'm trying to get hold of some Barthes and foucault as well but I must confess I still can't get the hang of sifting through the library!

Anyway, that's the latest revision - I know there's not much change but I'm trying to pin this down - albeit slowly

'A' Critical Incident or 'The' Critical Incident?

2009-11-12T07:37:00.001Z

Hi All,

still struggling with a migraine so apologies.

anyway, in response to your post Richard:

Quote:
I'm not sure you could argue that before Hypercard, there was no related practice. For example, I could argue that cinema is multimedia, being a radical innovation made up of pre-existing incremental ones. See aso the first videogames etc. In fact, go and take a look at Charles Babbage's Difference Engine in the Science Museum - although it never worked, but it did in theory (!!).

I agree with you that 'multimedia' (or perhaps more accurately its ancestors/siblings) existed in a variety of forms prior to Hypercard but the word I'm focussing on here is 'Practice'. I cannot find an example of a freely available tool/mechanism/vehicle/something else, that allowed creative individuals to cross media boundaries freely, to create interactive content without heed to existing computer science norms or prior knowledge, to view media types in an equalitarian way, to consider creating products comprised . . .

You could argue that videogames prior to Hypercard were the prevailing interactive media practice since essentially you were creating content behind an interface that allowed people to interact with it for entertainment and occasionally education. However, this required a far more in depth knowledge of computer technology, programming in Basic, Pascal, Machine code etc and where was the consideration of human computer interaction? or human to human interaction? did videogame designers really pore over questions of interface, feedback, community, user as creator?

I guess maybe they did?

Perhaps I'm talking more about empowerment? More about destroying the old Creator - User/Viewer relationship in a very concrete sense?

The Difference Engine is an example of genius! Personally I believe that we exist in a kind of "ideas and feelings" space time which like Einstein's rubber sheet model is curved. Every now and again something comes along (usually by individuals that somehow feel connected to this but disconnected from everyone else - and usually get persecuted for their troubles) that cause space time to curve and therefore defines our understanding of ourselves. The DE is one of those things. Imagine existence being bent by these items/creations/ideas/critical incidents?! But again, the DE (or the AE for that matter) uses the power relationships of its time and is not something that a painter could pick up and create 'new' art forms with. (although I suppose you could pickle it in formaldehyde . . .).

In 1986 to make cinema you did a cinema degree, to paint you did a fine art degree, to make software you did a computer science degree ad nauseum.

In 1987 someone who was trained as a sculptor could now create an interactive digital piece of work that explored form, balance, volume, narrative by authoring media types together.

Am I completely wrong here?

Critical Incidents

2009-11-12T07:36:00.000Z

In response to Jon's latest Blog Entry:

1: He describes the context of a given area of practice as it was before the 'critical incident';

I'm a little fuzzy here as I'm taking the position that prior to Hypercard this 'given area of practice' didn't exist. Yes there were disparate pockets of research going on (There were other applications with similar metaphors prior to Hypercard but these were in the main research projects), yes we had computer games, software and 'art' but did we really have Hypermedia/Multimedia/Interactive Multimedia/Interactive Media?
Am I wrong?

2. He then goes on to describe the critical incident;

The Bundling of Hypercard for free.

3. He provides a brief analysis of what changes occurred because of the 'critical incident'.

Creatives, programmers, educators, curiosity seekers, early adopters, 'ordinary' people et al could now create interactive content via an interface that did not seek to limit the use of the technology behind it. Since Hypercard had no hard intended purpose, the reality was that it offered a glimpse into the use of computer technology to creatively construct ways of communicating, entertaining, educating, amusing, puzzling with virtually no walls. You didn't need to be a computer scientist - or even an artist per se. You could create interesting 'toys', interactive flights of fancy or content with more direct purpose. We 'ordinary people' started to question notions of truth, knowledge, media, author, creator, interaction. . . .
I need help here to prevent my spectacles taking on a rosey tint.

4. He even drops in some 'theoretical frameworks' that might help us understand the nature of the changes occurring ('relativism' vs 'correspondence theories of truth', not to mention the essentially ideological campaign to protect the status quo - an example of a Marxist critique).

Maybe I'm going to argue against TD? (Once I get the Williams book). some diffusion of innovation? I'm definitely intrigued by Gladwell - it fits in with what I already believed back then - or am I utilising what fits into what I already believe?
Just as there are no truths any more we cannot talk about 'change' any more as some kind of 'thing' that happens. In many ways change never occurs in a way that has any meaning to our species. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Control is always one way. Dissenters are persecuted. Difference is eradicated or assimilated.
yet we continue to allow it. No change. The technology, the art, the literature, the theories are all the latest packaging for the same cereal we bought last week - only its now called "New" Creative Media Bites - now with added Mcluhan.
To enslave a man you don't have to tie him up, take away his rights or imprison him. You just need to make him believe that he is free.
Maybe change is one of those things where you have to live for a billions years to notice? Or you have to be a singularity?

Timeline 2

2009-11-10T01:07:00.001Z

As I start to look into this I'm using the timeline to keep track of where I've been and where I need to go back to. this will continue to update throughout the Unit:

The History of HyperCard on Dipity.

When you first jump in its all cold and you feel like you're going to drown . . .

2009-11-09T23:20:00.000Z

I've ben battling a b*st*rd of a migraine and trying to do some reading and research. Its sporadic and its painful but perhaps sadistically deep down somewhere in my soul there is a tiny light starting to turn on - ever so slowly. I've been watching videos, reading PDFs, book,articles, sending questions to people all over the world for the past 3 hours and right now I have 43 pages of rambling notes - I hope I can remember what they were for tomorrow (those of you who suffer from migraines will know that I mean).

Anyway,

I'm going to be posting stuff on here more regularly as I make those links between what I find and my assignment. First off, here's a video link that talks about TV and the web and also curiously mentions Hypercard and its its use:

Secondly,

here's a talk on the birth of Wikipedia:

A Response to Jon - first sketchy thoughts

2009-11-08T21:33:00.000Z

In reply to my post on the forum Jon posted:

Great...that sounds fine and good. So...lets unpack hypercard a little further. Where did it come from...what was it originally designed to do....did it bring about the change they intended or something else?

What else was happening at the time Politically, Socially, Technologically....do some reading / thinking...and write me a three or four paragraph answer

The second bit I'm finding trickier. I was there but I need to do more than recount my own opinions!

So, by way of a temporary response:

Bill Atkinson (creator of Quickdraw, MacPaint) and influenced by Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay and Smalltalk created Hypercard starting in 1985 (originally Wildcard) with Dan Winkler supplying the language Hypertalk in 1986.

It was initially released in August 1987, with the understanding that Atkinson would give HyperCard to Apple only if they promised to release it for free on all Macs. Apple timed its release to coincide with the MacWorld Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts to guarantee maximum publicity. HyperCard was a huge hit almost instantly.
Apple could not define its purpose, place in the product range or even market. The products endless capabilities seemed to potentially cut into the margins for ordinary shrink wrapped products. Even Atkinson has expressed surprise not just at its success but at the uses people were putting it to - see this link for some examples listed including renault

In its first year, one million copies of HyperCard were sold - in the previous year US computer use was 30m

HyperCard is a descendant of two ideas – a combination of a give away rolodex programme to keep track of his own journal articles plus his own research into searching and compressing algorithm for the future.

Atkinson is quoted as saying that:
“HyperCard is much more open and much more ambitious (than macpaint). . .
. . .HyperCard is something that you build on top of - It's going
to open up people because there are so many things you can do with it. . .
. . .It's certainly the largest thing I've attempted, and I
think its the most significant in terms of what it will do to the
computing community as a whole.”
“All the people with great ideas or specialized knowledge of
information won't need access to a professional Macintosh programmer with
time on his hands to express themselves. Making stacks is no big deal.
It's easy. The great ideas that are yet to come in the Macintosh
world are mostly going to be from people who aren't programmers but who
have great ideas. HyperCard is going to enable them.”
“
“The Macintosh dream has really been putting the power of the
personal computer into an individual person's hands.
HyperCard, acting like a software erector set, really opens up
Macintosh software architecture to where individual people can make
their own customized information environment, and interactive
information and applications without having to know any programming lan
guage. It takes the creation of software down to the level of MacPaint
images that you like, then pasting buttons on top of them to make them
do what you want. HyperCard puts this power into the hands of any
Macin tosh user. “

“. . .The most exciting thing for me is when
I see people amazed and pleased at the newfound power they got from a
program-when they say, ''Wow, I can do this!'' That's the feeling
people got back in 1984 when they saw MacPaint and started using it.
It's the same kind of feeling that is going to happen here with
HyperCard. But that feeling will be magnified, because the amount of
power you get out of HyperCard is really so much greater. HyperCard is
going to open up the whole meaning of what personal computers can be.”

“I think if we look a year from now, I'll bet there will be 20
times as many people making interactive inventions for the Macintosh as
there are now. A lot of people are going to get opened up, enabled,
empowered to control their computer. That's really what we're trying
to do. It's the same dream. Nothing's changed. It's the original
Macintosh dream of making the power of personal computer accessible to
anyone. HyperCard is just unfolding another layer of Macintosh. It
touches all the people who now own Macintosh computers, and a lot of
people who are going to own them because of this”

Technologically:
1984 – Macintosh
1985 – Windows
1986 Aldus Pagemaker
1987 – Hypercard
1987 Apple spins off application software business as Claris
1988 CDs outsell vynl for the first time
The introduction of Pagemaker in 1986 cemented the Mac as the core system of choice for Creatives with the emergence of the DTP market and the corresponding predictions of digital documents, paperless offices and the introduction of digital technology to print at the creative end. Correspondoingly Windows 1.0 would open up the PC platform to a greater number of people (albeit slowly) as the GUI took hold over the CLI. The idea of windows, menus, interactive regons on the screen, objects etc became part of the accepted computer experience whether Windows or Mac (PC users had to wait till windows 3.1 to really get this). Hypercard allowed creatives/educators/resrachers/tinkerers/geeks/ordinary Mac users to create products using these paradigms.
At the same time the CD was fast becoming the media vehicle of choice giving Hypercard products a new mechanism for distribution beyond the floppy.

Politically:
Thatcher Era in full swing – conservatism in the UK and the US – Thatcher re-elected
Privatisation at the forefront
Media organisation buyouts and mergers
1988 Liberal Democrats formed
The governments opposition to state control and group/community based decision making had now resulted in the first generation born into a world view where the needs of the individual are paramount.
The miners’ strike had all but killed the trade union movement and dealt a blow to the ability of the lower classes to influence political change and decision making.

Socially:
1987 Stock market collapse (Black Monday)
1986 Public Order Act
1987 Murdoch buys Herald & Weekly Times group, Harper & Row and South China Morning Post
With the needs of the individual paramount, those needs quickly become assumed fundamental rights.
Loadsamoney!
The beginning of the end of streaming in schools and the start of the ‘prizes for all’ culture. With the demise of individual political power, public attention focussed on other areas to assume some level of power/control including creation of media and the attainment of celebrity.
Post modernity replaces modernity as the prevailing view.

more to come . . .

Taking the Plunge - Hypercard is Introduced to the world

2009-11-08T21:30:00.000Z

I'm in favour of the Bundling of Hypercard as for me its the start of Interactive Media as we (I?) understand it. The ability for artists and designers and creative people in general to create content in any media type that had to be interacted with, had to be mediated via a computer and had to be accessible. What existed in this vein before that?
It removed a great deal of the scientific and technological mystery that enveloped the computer industry and for the first time there was a tool aimed at creating content (no-one really knew what to do with it) that used language, forms and ideas not shrouded in techno language. The content and the means of working with that content merged. A single person could do both back end and front end with a view to creating something engaging. Was this possible before? It aimed to bring the machine closer to us as opposed to the prevailing view that we had to become closer to the machine. It gave rise to the rebirth of the renaissance man idea.
We take stuff for granted now that at the time was quite revolutionary in the context of where it was i.e. in the hands of anyone who had a mac - which back then essentially meant creatives.

Struggling

2009-11-08T14:35:00.000Z

Assignment title : No idea as yet

2. My critical incident/s is…

not sure:

the end of free Hypercard?
the birth of Hypercard?
The rise of the religion called "IT" and its high priests

3. I chose this incident/s because… (list at least three reasons)

it led to artists and designers (and not just computer scientists) creating interactive content
it led to interactive content being created
Artists and designers created interactive content using language not couched in Science
It led to ideas and standard being created for interaction
It led to the development of people called MUltimedia Authors
It led to the acceptance of the idea of MULTI-media i.e. using content seamlessly across media types and industries
Ordinary people were the target audience
It created a genre of software that allowed for the creation of products and systems that challenged the relationship between the creator and the user
I wasted 25 years on it and wonder why
Don't know about any of the above

4. I’m going to use the following theory to help explore the incident/s

No idea?

5. These are some of the things I’m going to analyse in the assignment…

Not sure
The developments at Cern maybe?
the growth of content creation tools?
the (false?) idea that it democratises? gives power back? gives real choice?
That new technology which threatens established order and vested interest is quickly mutated and assimilated to make it harmless
That we are no happier
That we are even more enslaved and the technology has not freed us.

I'm reaching here

6. The incident has lead to the following change in current practice…

Not sure
It feels like we have gone backwards. Artists do the front end and developers do the back end stuff.
we see computers as tool again - not as extensions of self
I'm not even sure what current practice is any more

7. These changes are important to me personally because…

I feel stuck in a time warp
I'm puzzled as to why things have turned out this way
I constantly challenge people's blind use of technology, their fear, their acceptance of authority - and it gets me into trouble
I'd like to see a new Hypercard develop by some enterprising independent outfit.
The technology is far more capable than we ever get to use (or allowed to use)

8. In January I’m going to hand in…

No idea

9. These are the references I'll be drawing upon (books, reports etc)

Currently I have in front of me to read:

A brief history of the future: John Naughton
The media in britain: Jane Stokes
Multimedia & Hypertext: Jakob Nielsen
Understanding media: Marshall Mcluhan
Once you're lucky twice you're good: Sarah Lacy
Key themes in media History: Dan Laughey
Fractal Dreams: Jon Dovey
Multimedia: Richard Wise

I know these are quite old but I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. For the past 10 years I have had to put my own practice on the back seat in order to spend 70 hours a week making lesson plans and schemes of work to differentiate between those that can read and those that can't but would like to be the next George Lucas. Reading the posts of other people on this course has really opened my eyes so I suppose that's a positive thing.

Trying Desperately to get closer to an idea . . .

2009-10-29T12:43:00.000Z

So it looks like I'm going to go with the Unbundling of Hypercard as a free do-it-all system around 1992.

Up until then it existed a tool for creating interactive content that was never meant to be simply printed or viewed but 'had' to be interacted with.

Early developers included artists and designers as well a people for who software development had previously been a subject shrouded in mystery and seemingly exclusive with overtly complex ideas and techniques acting as barriers for most people to get involved with.

Its true that the early BBC Micros, Sinclairs and Ataris had programmes free in magazines that you could type in and voila! get yourself a game - but, ultimately people simple typed these in rote and didn't really know what they were typing in - I know I did!!!

Hypercard came at a time (post modern) when we were re-evaluating our relationship to content and questioning the idea of a passive audience/spectator. A mini 'industry' grew up (with virtually no money changing hands!!) where thousands of people world wide were using it to create interactive content for education, art, design, information and entertainment. The key word here is interactive. were they laying the ground work for a future where interacting with content and media would become common place and second nature? Here was a technology that seemed to have no limit relative to our understanding of interactivity and content at the time. However, did it, in a determinist way, change our society/way of looking/thinking/acting/interacting? If so then why was it such a relative failure?

In 1992 Apple Computer Inc placed development of the software with Claris with a view to trying to find ways of monetising this software. IOW how on earth do we make money out of something we cannot seem to understand or easily categorise? Hypercard was not at this time dead - but the full software was no longer available and bundled free - you now had to buy it. Apple bundled a crippled Hypercard Player only instead.

This period coincided with the birth of the WWW, Mosaic and the rise of competing (non-free) software such as Director and Supercard. Incidentally the first 'major' web browser was violaWWW which ironically was based on Hypercard:

Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, who at the time was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard which he first discovered in 1989. Gillies and Cailliau quote Pei-Yuan Wei on this discovery: "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac...and I didn't even have a Mac" (p.213). Only having access to X terminals, he (in 1990) created the first version of Viola for them: "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in X-windows[sic]"

As ViolaWWW developed, it began to look more like HyperCard:
It had a bookmark facility so that you could keep track of your favourite pages. It had buttons for going backwards and forwards and a history feature to keep track of the places you had been. As time went on, it acquired tables and graphics and by May 1993 it could even run programs."

What I guess I'm heading towards in my first assignment is the way this event (which led to the demise of Hypercard) also allowed a wide range of software for a variety of platforms to emerge - all dedicated to creating interactive content. Hypercard was firmly entrenched in the physical media world of CDs, laserdiscs etc but at the end Hypercard 3.0 (never released) was being developed for online content. Future developments such as Flash, PHP, Java, AJax - even the likes of frontpage and dreamweaver would take this on and move interactive content online.

Hypercard allowed non-programmers to develop complex projects. people who had never really thought about interface, feedback, user experience, interaction etc were now free do so without needing to spend an eon learning complex technologies. However, the majority of Hypercard era content creators appear to have been graduate level educated.

Today with social networks, online communities etc the creation of content by just about anyone is something we take for granted. However, it is not quite in the same spirit. Much of the content we currently create is primarily a form of 'self celebration' - the 'look at me' culture. The value of this content I'm not sure about. I'm also not sure about whether people really do create 'content' or whether we are just constantly changing our definitions. Aren't people who spray paint on the side of tube trains creating content? Aren't the million and one school desks with "Gary 4 Tracy 4 ever" etched onto them content creation?

What does this really say about what content is and also about how we define content creators/authors/film makers? Is the difference between Transformers the Movie and a Youtube video of 3 kids pretending to be Optimus Prime simply a bigger budget?

Equally, its so much harder now to create online interactive content as the tools have once again become shrouded in mystery. Hypertalk was aimed to mimic plain english constructs within the limitations of the technology of the time. Try putting together a project comprised of chunks of Actionscript, Flex, Air and C++!!! We can create online interactive content relatively easily if we just use online templates or cut and paste bits of code from various tutorial sites. Unless of course our future as creators is one in which we generate content within clearly defined parameters to fit into a prebuilt infrastructure - a la iphone SDKs

It just doesn't seem to be the technology that is driving this. I spoke to an American Hollywood animation producer once and asked him why all ANimation software was the same? ie why were we using computers to just do what traditional animators did anyway when the technology was capable of so much more? He said, "Beats me. Every now and then we get these computer software companies coming to us and asking us what we want. We tell them what we do and they make us software that does just that!"

I'm still not sure if the birth or the demise of Hypercard is the critical incident here. I'm trying to argue that this 'new wave' of 'designers/content creators' were now creating interactive content that was designed from the start to be computer mediated. This was new - were there interactive media authors prior to Hypercard? (I don't know). It also started to put into place a lot of the things we now take fro granted online - from the humble browser back and forward buttons, to the sitemap, to the creation of content with little traditional computer skills. However, the stacks created back then feel different to what is going on today online.
I can't seem to bring myself to go with the technological determinism theory. It just doesn't seem to fit - and also every single experience in my life seems to point otherwise. Maybe someone can correct/inform/scold(!) me on this.

In terms of truths, I'm kinda sketchy here. I'm (in principle) with Kayo on the whole idea of subjectivism and there perhaps being no universal truths anyway. But:

Technology advances and we as a society adapt to and evolve with it?

The internet is free?

Stuff you find on the 'net MUST be true?

The net is democratic and gives us back some power?

Interactive is always better? If people are 'doing' things they learn much better?

Kids today are so much better with technology because they grow up with it don't they?

Everyone has broadband?

Ordinary people are creating interactive content - mashups, blogs, videos, flash sites?

If people get involved they can promote real change?

Actionscript/AJAX/Php/Flex/C++ are easy?

Standardisation is good?

I'm running out of steam for the moment.

I'm a bit ashamed to say that I feel kinda like the class dummy at the moment. I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere fast and don't seem to have moved on from a couple of weeks ago. I'm still having a hard time learning how to deal with and find things in the BU library!! I would appreciate people's thoughts.

Stuff going on today

2009-10-29T12:36:00.001Z

I've been away for a few days and now trying to get back into the swing of things. In the meantime, A couple of interesting links 4 u!

"Celebrating 40 years of the Net - according to the BBC"

Awards offered for Mash-Ups!

Science enters the age of Web 2.0

The Ramblings of a Madman . . .

2009-10-22T18:11:00.000+01:00

A few thoughts from a long time ago . . .

On Hypermedia:

“In the future everything will be fact for fifteen minutes.” - futuristic UK Magazine Cyber Times - New Computer Express, 15 September 1990

The idea of interlinked information being electronically stored and accessed at great speed from any place is attributed to Vannevar Bush in 1945.

Michael Sperberg - McQueen argues that only conventions make traditional books linear and not any inherent characteristics and many people agree that cross referencing and indexing amongst other techniques allow books to be non sequential.*1

Among them rages the debate between those who favour ‘ideal’ Hypermedia and those favouring ‘applied’ Hypermedia.*2 Ideal Hypermedia is a situation where the user browses through a system at leisure driven by his own curiosity and desire for information - such a system is characteristically visualised as a web-like structure. Applied Hypermedia is a system that is designed with the accomplishment of a specific task in mind. 'Pro-idealists' point to the availability and accessibility of a myriad choices driven solely by the user’s desire for information. The process of navigation is seen to represent ‘learning, creativity, collaboration and understanding’. Therefore Hypermedia systems should be an ideal way of learning compared to traditional methods of education.

Yet who is to make the decisions concerning what is to be contained in such systems? Could they not potentially invest themselves with more authority than the written word?

In its development, the written word acquired through the uses to which it was put the notion of truth. Even now (1989) , dictionaries are referred to in order to discern the correct way of spelling and encyclopaedias are used by schoolchildren to accumulate ‘facts’ just as a piece of metal exists in a museum in Europe that defines the exact length of a metre. This standardisation is an attempt at creating order and exercising control. Even books critical of the society from which they originate are forced to use the language and conventions of the established order.

The move to allow the user to modify systems can be interpreted as an attempt to disallow established interest from assimilating the concept thus making it possible to dissolve institutions

Users are only allowed to make the changes that the system has been designed to accept. Simply because a system appears to offer choice of information it does not necessarily follow that it is offering freedom of access and contribution. Such systems, since they allow a form of choice, appear therefore to be containers of truth because it is held that the information within them is created by people of all walks of life. As a result of there apparently being no exclusion policy, Hypermedia systems could come to be seen as unbiased, constantly updated (and therefore constantly corrected) networks of truth.

Since the system is not likely to be user created, how does the machine know what we might find interesting or useful. It merely presents its designers’ concepts and ideologies. In ‘Hyperland’, Douglas Adams’ own personal nightmare about interactive television, Adams is floundering among choices offered him by his system. Are, then, our choices being made for us? And in a consumer haven are we being sold something that we do not need?

In ‘The Missing Link - Why We’re All Doing Hypertext Wrong’, Norman Meyrowitz claims that to date all Hypermedia products are ‘monolithic and insular’*17 in that they demand the user to abandon his current computer environment in order to enter the Hypermedia space and HyperCard™ is no exception. *3

Hypermedia is seen as a metaphor for the brain’s associative networks *4. Therefore, it should aid learning since emphasis is placed upon the relationships involved and not the acquisition of sterile facts. Hypermedia systems would also engage the pupil interactively thus encouraging learning by doing and an understanding of links and relationships. . . . that gives a teacher the ability to produce interactive teaching modules - tailor made for the capabilities of their students. This could put an end to the churning out of homogenised groups of people only able to think in the ways in which they have been taught. Since no two individuals learn in the same way and at the same rate, each student can take the route best suited to his needs and capabilities whilst still remaining within a common framework. Students’ awareness of different ways of thinking can only aid development of individuality as well as nurturing negociative tendencies as more and more of their work involves collaboration. Interconnection of students could make life more accessible for those who find direct socialising difficult as well as exposing students at extremes of ability and culture spectrums to each other. Education, therefore becomes seen far more as a development of the individual and not as a saturation of things ‘they should know’. Associative learning helps the individual to constantly look for links and therefore enable him to apply lessons/ideas learnt in one part of his life to another. The process of learning by doing should be encouraged to nurture an active and willing participation in wider social issues and activities as the student assesses his position as an individual within a system of individuals. Interactive learning and the mix of media should suggest a more creative approach on the part of students and teachers increasing motivation and combating disillusionment as his study bears more relevance to their life. Ultimately the student should be encouraged to reflect how what they do affects their life and the environment surrounding them.

Information contained in Hypermedia systems to date (1989) has been of a different nature in its presentation to other forms of information. Much of this is due to the accessing of information ‘out of context’ . . . . In order to fit into the constraints . . ., information, whether it be text, sound, graphics or video, is usually presented in the form of small, short morsels or ‘chunks’. The information is thus iconic or alluding in the sense that it merely alludes to more information accessible in the system. As a result the information can often appear, ironically, to be stating the factual and lacking in any real depth or substance. . . . Information . . . is thus further ‘chunked’ to fit into a . . . experience.

By this alluding to more information, such a system itself can be interpreted as a tease in which the user gets a certain amount of information but never quite enough whilst what he is presented with hints at more ‘goodies’ within the system.

Perhaps a better system would be one where the user could explore motivated by curiosity but with a some direction and goal. Such a system would take into account the various contexts involved and languages that exist in those contexts rather than decree information to be universal, singular and discrete.

*1 Query about traditional, linear, bookbound text, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Humanist discussion group, U35395@UICVM, 24 September 1988

*2 Hypertext and Intelligent Interfaces for Information Retrieval, Patricia Anne Carlson, from The Society Of Text - Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the social construction of information, ed. Edward Barrett, MIT Press, 1989. Carlson gives these two terms in the introduction to her paper.

*3 The Missing Link; Why We’re All Doing Hypertext Wrong, Norman Meyrowitz, from The Society Of Text - Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the social construction of information, ed. Edward Barrett, MIT Press, 1989. Meyrowitz describes a project entitled ‘Intermedia’ undertaken at the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University, to develop a system allowing information in one document to be permanently linked to information in any other. The system has interlocking protocols which if implemented in new software would allow those applications to be Intermedia documents and thus be linkable.

*4 Limited Freedom; Linear Reflections on Nonlinear Texts, Joseph T Jaynes, from The Society Of Text - Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the social construction of information, ed. Edward Barrett, MIT Press, 1989.

On Technology:

Each technology has been cited by commentators and the public alike as being markedly different from any other and has given special impetus to the rejuvenation of claims regarding the inevitability of technological change, its causal effect upon society and our relationships to each other and to events and situations around us.

. . . it is much more relevant to view technology as being the product of intricate social relationships, values and interests and that one of the reasons why much of the hype concerning computers has not materialised in a concrete form is that rather than the technology being inevitable, the technology was seized upon and its uses directed by certain groups within the social structure . . .

technological determinism and symptomatic technology

. . . by Marshall Mcluhan*5 who attempts to illustrate how a new technology demands different forms of approach and sensual organisation from its predecessors and that this difference in the way that we are obliged to interact with the technologies leads us to take up new ways of organising ourselves and gives rise to new kinds of priorities.

Symptomatic technology, on the other hand is an attempt to understand the complex techno-social relationship by viewing the development of a particular technology as being a result of changes that are already taking place within society. The technology once discovered would then be accepted and put to use by society. In other words, under this view the technology does not stimulate new relationships as above but offers us media for stimulating new ways of life.

Though superficially, the two views can be interpreted as being opposite and contradictory, they do share common ground. This is most notable in the common theme of separation between spheres of Research and Development and the wider social contexts. In both views the innovations are held to originate from discrete, isolated groups of individuals who by most accounts are operating in an environment that is distinct from the wider social one.

. . . argument used by proponents of technological determinism in reference to this period is that in no way was there any evidence to suggest that a market was forecast for computers and thus it would be clearly wrong to suggest that the continued Research and Development into these machines was prompted by economic investment. Therefore, it is argued, the technology itself created the huge markets that were to appear. Certainly no-one predicted the massive explosion in demand for the machines. Thomas J. Watson Snr., the President of IBM believed there to be no market and believed that it would require only one large computer to solve the worlds computational needs.

Such major groups like, for example, the government and businesses failed to perceive the benefits of distribution of these powerful commodities to society at large and instead feared for the possible disadvantages of making them freely available. As we shall see later the computer has entered everyday life in a form that makes it difficult to use them other than for the purposes envisaged by their manufacturers.

A technological determinist would pointed out how the introduction of microcomputers into the home gave rise to the birth of many new industries and ways of looking at our relationship to ourselves and society such as increased leisure time, the drive to do things for ourselves and indeed the emphasis put on democracy itself. A symptomatic technology viewpoint would argue that the technology existed and was seized upon in a consumer environment by entrepreneurs and marketed as a commodity thus giving rise to new industries and so embodying Schmookler's statement 'Innovations are made because men want to solve economic problems or capitalise on economic opportunities'*6

Computers were now being marketed as essential to life in contemporary society as well as being the focal point of a culture promised since the sixties. Most people at this juncture still had no idea of what a computer was but were being told how the machine could help them with their finances, planning, entertainment and the education of their children; being enticed to buy computers for what they were supposed to potentially do for the way they led their lives not how they would affect them.

The gap between government and individual participation now seemed to widen, the seventies being really the last era of the major social protests against policies of government. The eighties saw a disillusionment with the way in which so much of everyday life appeared out of control of the individual or boring and tedious

Advertising was building glossy, desirable images of artifacts and lifestyles that people were persuaded to aspire to and to spend their lives searching for. It was the age of American soap operas, transsexuality and glamorous popular icons in the media and traffic jams, ‘nine-to-five jobs’ for the public. The government's idea of laissez faire was taking hold and the microcomputer emerged out of and back into a culture where it was believed that the individual must have complete autonomy over his life. The computer was cited by people often desperate to find some way of being able to transcend or improve the quality of life, as being the key to true democracy and individual control and choice since isolated microcomputers could be shown to be able to communicate over distance by being linked to a computer network. The implication was that established institutions would disappear since the connection of microcomputers made it impossible for any one concern to gain advantage. It could be said that the early computers were for many a means of owning something over which they had direct control and could alter to serve their needs. Despite a mood of growing neuroticism people could feel more creative and confident of their own identities and place in the world as a result of being able to gain mastery over these machines and come into contact with others opening up avenues of their lives. Even this itself harks back to the invention of the telephone and the subsequent communication model it was to become. The microcomputer was used as a means of furthering modes of communication that were seen as necessary by groups dependent in maintaining touch and control with a society expanding at a frantic pace but whilst using the models now accepted by telephone. The concept of its content did not at this juncture come into play.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand the implications for control, exploitation and expansion particularly by Kling’s Private Enterprise and Statist models where the organisation’s interests take priority. The development of computers is, and always has been, funded and guarded jealously by, in the main, the military, multinational corporations and governments and is carried out at high security research centres or prestigious universities which are still dominated by the higher social strata and thus are sites for the perpetuation of the domination of computer technology by those classes. It can be seen that the the private enterprise and statist models enjoyed a considerable advantage here and it is not enough to say that the computer would soon be used to any social need since the direction of innovation and the ways in which they are put to use are most likely to serve the needs of the most powerful and their needs are more likely to get priority and thus it is with computers. Thus development is dependent upon the relationships between groups and their needs rather than being inherent of the technology.

Despite a modern belief in human rights and civil liberties, the Statist and Private Enterprise views retain most direct power over computers whilst often simply paying lip service to other interests such as the Libertarian and Neo-populist models . Computers are complex in the extreme and it is not (easy) for just anyone to create one. This together with the high cost of the technology which itself can be interpreted as an attempt at exclusivity is means enough to make its actual implementation easier for the resource wealthy.

Norbert Wiener*7, the founder of cybernetics, links the concept of communication and control since control, irrespective of the object of that control, is dependent upon communication between the controller and the controlled.

The fact that everything can be digitised and sent via cables has not, as predicted, led to the crumbling of existing media and institutions. When competition is sensed the first option is to try to ban it as the press tried with radio and if that fails then option two is to buy it as is the case with the current wave of cross-ownership of press and cable television. The potential for democratic global connectivity suit primarily the libertarian and neopopulist supporters but the producers and providers of the machines see these as secondary concerns. Most existing global communication networks rely on long existing modes of communication like telephones and mail. Williams argues that in the case of broadcasting and television*8, 'It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content.' The same could be said of . . . in that the ability to globally link is available but as yet the uses of them and the needs to which they should be applied have yet to be identified and the determinist view that these facilities will generate a social structure that will centre around their inherent characteristics is clearly false. Ithiel de Sola Pool declares that the technology dictates its form but not its content of application*9.

Few of us actually have any idea how to make a computer do what we want. We have to buy a machine designed with specific capabilities by companies and then we must choose from a range of software which limits us to the confines of the parameters of the software and so even widespread availability of powerful microcomputers will not allow one to enter the telematic arena on one’s own terms. The keepers of power are hidden and so computers have been built to disallow confrontation since all use of them must be within limits acceptable to the computer’s built in repertoire. The machine does not query anything outside this, it merely rejects it as an error. Thus, one is forced to comply. We are adapting to a technology whose current structure is imposed upon us by unchallenged forces and ideologies that have been with us long before the notion of the powerful microcomputer. The machines are built with specific uses or types of uses in mind that, using Kling’s categories, support private enterprise and do not conflict with statist views whilst at least satisfying libertarian demands and being marketed as neopopulist and systems concerns. The drive to make people computer literate is not purely one feels, a distribution of skills and tools but also a dissemination of the culture and ideology embedded within this technology.

All this has been due to human beings. The machines are potentially capable of immense benefits to society as is any technology. No one doubts that telematics could potentially broaden our horizons and improve the quality of our daily lives but we must realise and be aware of the social context within which we and they exist so that the wool is not pulled over our eyes.

*5 Mcluhan, M, 'Understanding Media'

*6 Schmookler, J. 'Inventions and Economic Growth'

*7 Wiener, N. 'The Human Use of Human Beings'

*8 Williams, R. 'The Technology & The Society'

*9 de Sola Pool, I. 'Electronics Takes Command'

A Possible Critical Incident

2009-10-14T22:09:00.000+01:00

Remember the laserDisc?

Good old laserdiscs! they were rubbish but, I just used to like the way they looked - it kinda felt like you had your own rock n roll gold disc!

My introduction to Hypercard was purely by accident. I was totally lost on my BA (they wanted me to paint, hack bits of ice and generally do things that could properly be called 'Art') and happened to wander around (actually moped around) the building and stumbled on the head of computing in his office (Head of computing back then meant something entirely different to what we understand by the title today - sadly). he was unboxing some new Mac Plus's and there were packages all over the floor. I strolled in and started chewing the fat but he was clearly busy. I absent mindedly picked up the odd package here and there and gave it a lazy once over.
That's when I spotted a box with Hypercard written on it. I asked him what it was - I don't know why the name resonated with me. I think by now he was just keen to get rid of me and get on with his unboxing so he just said, "God knows. take it if you want, see if its of any use."

I took it home (why I don't know as it would be nearly 10 years before I could afford my first Mac!) but I read the manuals from start to finish that weekend and it was like a tiny light in the back of my head suddenly flared.

I want to consider the decision to bundle hypercard with ALL macs as the critical event/incident. The way that it led to countless people like me over time and all over the world doing things that hadn't even been considered by the makers.

I've currently got stuff buzzing around in my head regarding stuff like Alan Kay, Englebart, Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Dynabook, Palo Alto, Xanadu, Marc Andreason, Scripting vs programming, OOP, universal interfacing, Glick, fractal toys, the early GUI adventures!

oh, and of course Bill Atkinson!

I was just so struck back then on how powerful Hypercard was. How it didn't feel like a tool. How no-one really knew what to do with it. How it was free! How for the first time there seemed to be something for creatives to allow them to do 'stuff' on and with computers instead of just using computers to do what we already did via traditional means. How computers were not computers but extensions of ourselves, our minds and our creative impulses. How we 'negotiated with them' rather than 'used them'. How it spawned a whole generation of startups making videodiscs, Interactive CDs and just about anything you could think of.
How it questioned the very ideas we held dear about artist/creator/author and our relationships with user/viewer/interactor. How the machine became a transformation mechanism, a display vehicle and a creation engine.
How early internet acces for me via telnet allowed me to download regular periodicals like Tidbits in Hypercard form that I could query.
How it gave us the idea of extension via XCMDs and XCFNcs. How in the early stages of the web huge numbers of sites proliferated solely for the purpose of creating, selling or just giving away their Hypercard products. How ground breaking games like Myst were created with it. How rock stars like david Bowie and Peter Gabriel flocked to it to create interactive CDs. How typecast guys like Mark Hamil made new careers on interactive games built on Hypercard. Did I mention the Residents' Freakshow?

So much involved rethinking our beliefs about ownership, about how meaning is created, about relationship, about non linearity and about information that is separated and distant.

You could be an artist and create software! How astonishing was this? Beautiful code! Who would have thought?

Through all this it never felt like a tool. Perhaps this is why I have so much trouble with Flash and Actionscript. More than any other software I've ever used Flash feels like a tool. It also re-separates artists and designers from coders.

To this day I still cannot think of a single thing that Hypercard could NOT do! There was a real sense that talent and skill might in the future earn legitimate money. That talent and skill was focussed on 'lone gunmen' and not big multinationals.

did it all end in 2004? (actually, long before then). Or has it sown the seeds for what we are experiencing now and the future that now awaits?

The bit I'm kinda sketchy on is the post nostalgia bit i.e. what happened next. Would the web have worked out the way it did if there weren't already community of Hypercard / Supercard users able to grasp the new world order?

'Feel free to comment . . . but please, if you must throw things, enough with the onions already.

Some Initial Thoughts

2009-10-09T22:13:00.001+01:00

The Timeline [Continuously Updating]

2009-10-08T21:34:00.000+01:00

The History of HyperCard on Dipity.

Dick Dastardly Ate My Hard Drive . . .

2009-10-07T02:27:00.000+01:00

I’ve been feeling ill today. Actually I’ve been feeling ill for two weeks now. The worst thing is the time honoured tradition that all men have of classifying feeling sorry for yourself as one of the worst but somehow truly deserved symptoms.

Today, it kept me off work. Today my MA began. Today my favourite Lacie (now owned by brand BeckhamTM )external firewire Hard drive died. That’s 3 things. Unable to see properly, unable to breathe regularly and unable to stand on my feet for more than a few minutes at a time I added panic to my list of symptoms as somewhere in the bowl of ready brek ® that my brain had become i could see a strip of punched tape that said – you have 3 things to think about.

I dealt with this all by trying to find someone or something to blame. I had my suspicions. These were heightened when I logged onto the MA home page and saw 3 posts added – count them, 3.

I suddenly felt like I was ten again. The house would be totally quiet (isn’t it amazing how the old victorian house with holes in it you lived in when you were really poor as a kid was so much quieter than the house you now live in as a pillar of the community?) since my parents would be at work and my brothers and sisters would just stay in bed. Saturdays I would come down to the living room and turn on the black and white t.v. set to see Swap Shop with a pre Deal or No Deal Noel Edmunds. The tv set itself was a peculiarity. My dad would always go the local Rumbelows to buy an ex rental TV which we would then carry home between us. How weird that everyone in our world (ie within 3 miles of our house) knew the name Rumbelows and also where the shop was – even if they’d never had any contact with the company. We all just knew. Our communities passed down knowledge via the spoken word like some ancient native American tribes. Anyhow, The TV® would weigh around 1 tonne with the remote weighing in at a further 2. Oh, but Swap Shop! How amazing was this mash up of cartoons, swaps, programmes, phone chat, pop and films. We even thought Cheggers was cool – although some of us had the nascent beginnings of an idea that this man may be what adults sometimes referred to as a buffoon.

Anyway, Noel (www.noel.com) would speak to someone on the phone and then say something like “We’ll be right back after Wacky Races”. Then some kind of weird magic happened where real people (albeit with hair that later on I would realise contravened not only the geneva convention but also the general theory of relativity) stopped and these cartoon people started. That was the thrill. Trying to work out how it was done. Boffins. I didn’t know what the word meant but I’d read it in a few Enid Blyton novels and figured it had something to do with smart people. Years later I would have another life changing experience when I found out that television also came in colour – I was like Neo:

neo: “what’s wrong with my eyes?”

morpheus: “You’ve never used them before”

But hell, here they were Dastardly, Muttley, Penelope, the lot. I loved Wacky Races. The fact that I so enjoyed a cartoon about sabotaging other’s people’s cars in order to cheat to win a race is a little disquieting. But god, it was funny. I loved the cars. I loved the characters. I couldn’t wait to grow up and do it for real! Having been brought up in a very strict first generation Asian(asian indian, asian pakistani, asian chinese, asian japanese, asian other, none of the above) home I knew it was wrong to sabotage someone else’s chances and I knew it was wrong to cheat in any kind of competition. But god I loved it. I never really wanted Dick Dastardly to win but deep down I watched and watched to get to the bit where good old Muttley would do his trademark (TM) laugh. Every week Dick would do something to one car and when the starting gun went off there would be one car left at the start with its wheels rolling down the road and its occupants choking in the fog of the other cars now a mile ahead of them. I always kinda felt sorry for them. They never ever won – and they never figured out it was the stereotypically evil looking guy whodunnit.

Then Noel would be back and another week would separate me from Dick’s next dastardly plan.

As I logged on today there I was. Ten years old and on the starting line with all the other Wacky Racers. That’s when my beloved Lacie gave up the ghost. Right then and there. It was my favourite drive. And because it was my favourite drive I bestowed upon it a strange and utterly baseless aura of somehow being better, faster and more reliable than any of my other drives. I never backed it up. To my shame I never backed it up.

But this was my favourite drive. We’d been through good times and bad together and no way would it be so selfish as to let me down like this. I suspected sabotage. Foul play of the dirtiest kind. Foul play of the kind that only a cliched villain clad in black with a twirly mustache would dare to do. This villain had taken his wrench (having tied yet another helpless maiden to a railway track and rubbed his hands together – presumably from the rope burns) and sabotaged my drive. Sabotaged my chances!

So right now, I’m using some FBI (a subsiduary of News International) software to analyse the photos of everyone on the course in my quest to find that twirly moustache.

I know the truth (TM) now. One of you is none other than Dick Dastardly. And you ate my hard drive. You and your dog.

Or it could just all be this rather delightful medication . . .