Norman Mailer hated television. He distrusted email. He even hated plastic. Marshall McLuhan was probably right, to some extent, to suggest that Mailer had a Victorian attitude towards technology. Other critics, past and present, will probably find sympathy with Mailer’s assertion that man’s relationship with technology is some kind of Faustian pact. You can watch them arguing about it all – two minds running on autopilot, having two different conversations – online after reading this article, on a web-based magazine, of a book I read as a PDF. Chances are, Mailer would hate all of this too, and we can probably guess his reaction to his books being available on Kindle. But chance, guesses and that repeated ‘probably’ are the key to the (e-)book under review; as Future Media is a collection of sci-fi fiction and non-fiction all concerned with the effects of media on its users and its ultimate potentialities – and is, thus, a collection more in the school of future, rather than media, studies.

There are several problems with this; predicting the future might be ‘fun’ but those predictions are very often wrong. Think of Herman Kahn and nuclear disasters or think, more pertinently, of McLuhan’s theory that technology would ultimately cause man to – somehow – revert back into a form of tribalism. As a lay reader of media studies, it’s hard to see how this relates to his other famous theory of the ‘Global Village’. Future Media is book-ended, appropriately enough given his lasting influence on media studies, by McLuhan’s work, but this is not enough to give a clear picture of what McLuhan was actually getting at. Often misunderstood even when read at length, in such small doses as this his work simply leaves you wondering whether either you’re to dumb to grasp the ideas or if he was a mere peddler of jargon.

This raises a question about Future Media itself: who is the book for? There’s no general audience for a collection of, on the one hand, science fiction – Huxley and Bradbury are here – and, on the other, non-fiction about media. However, if it’s for media studies students, and I have no idea how those departments are run, are they permitted to quote sci-fi stories in essays?

A collection like Future Media is the book equivalent of a search engine: chapters culled from their original body to prove/illustrate a point instead of immersing yourself in the original work – much like looking for information online. Information overload and the disposability of this information are just two consequences of the pact with technology – as Norman Mailer (again) said, “if you want to learn something, get thee to a book”. Yet the benefits of technology are so apparent that need not be mentioned here. Mailer’s point, however, is discussed in Future Media by Nicolas Carr in ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ This is one of the standout (non-fiction) pieces and describes the “chipping away [of] my capacity for concentration and contemplation” – something which most people will surely be able to relate to. Who isn’t a wizard when it comes to collecting snippets of information on anything from here and there and piecing them all together to suit our purpose, rather than spending valuable time reading a book? Carr informs us that this is known as “power browsing” and is fast becoming the dominant way in which users access information. He also highlights that due to this rapid information gathering – which includes text messages, emails, etc. – we are all probably reading more than ever before in history.

This is, of course, a different type of reading. The Kindle was mentioned earlier and indeed it, and any other ‘reading device’, is a more superficial form of reading. It may be convenient to have hundreds of books on one device but once you’ve got your free complete Shakespeare downloaded next to your other holiday-reads, will you ever look at them? Harold Bloom, the great literary critic, called digital books the “death of education” and in an age when reading is more and more superseded by television, video games and the internet, digitalisation will make books even more disposable – just as the MP3 killed the album.

Future Media has a lot of interesting work in it but probably – dare I say? – nothing you couldn’t find with a search engine, if you were interested. The ultimate trouble with futurology, besides the low success-rate, is that most of the things predicted are never as wondrous, elegant, or, even, horrific as the ultimate product. Consider the future idylls conjured up by the sixties; jet packs, flying cars, homicidal robots, computers bigger than the underwater houses they serve? You can keep them. I’ll stick with my iPhone.

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Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer take on the future

Last month, the non-profit organisation Worldreader held a video contest. The first price was a trip, but instead of the five star hotel one would expect for a price, Worldreader took the winner to Ghana to do some volunteering work.

Contesters were asked to submit a video that answered the question “Why do you want to help Worldreader bring ‘Books to All’ to the developing world?” This was great PR for the NGO, which has found much praise lately for its work of using e-readers to teach literacy in the developing world. While we take our access to technologies for granted, it is easy to forget that we are part of the mere 25% of the world’s population who have a wonderland of information at their fingertips – access to the internet. Mobile network connections, health data collection software, things that are such a vital part of our lives that they have started to seem trivial, are missing in the developing world as huge steps towards the end of extreme poverty.

Few NGOs, such as Worldreader, have started to use new technologies to tackle global development and humanitarian challenges. Worldreader aims to “put a library of books within reach of every family on the planet”, so the organisation decisively writes on its website. The idea itself has nothing to do with technology: books have been the basis for education for thousands of years, the information source that has been driving the human race in its development towards what we have accomplished today. Without books to learn from, we would be pretty stuck. At the Orphan Aid Africa school in Ghana, where Worldreader had the first trial of their concept in March 2010, kids were studying without having books available. It’s no new idea that we need books to learn, but it is new to have the technology to access a whole library with one single device not bigger than a paperback. With e-readers, we are reducing the cost and complexity of providing reading material even in the most remote areas. Thus we can teach literacy, increase the level of education and consequently boost a country’s economy through better educated graduates. With the cost of digital content falling quickly, the shipping being a mere fraction of what it would cost to take the same amount of material in books, it seems rather simple. Writers the likes of Cory Doctorow and Daniel Pinkwater are donating their work to make the content available on the donated readers even more diverse.

“The world is a better place when people have access to more information. The goal of universal access to all human knowledge is a noble one,” Doctorow says about his involvement with Worldreader.

Noble it is, but is it realistic too? The challenges of this cause can not be underestimated. Although the prices are falling quickly, e-readers are still expensive. They may seem easy to use, but for students who have never had access to a computer it requires time-consuming training to teach them how to use their new gadgets. Yet these are all issues that can be more or less easily dealt with compared to the two biggest challenges: a) you can’t download books without internet access and b) you can’t charge a battery-powered gadget without access to electricity.

Trying to fund a solar cell and satellite internet access suddenly take things to a whole new level – and quite a disillusioning one at that. Internet access is a luxury that organisations like the Web Foundation are trying to make a given for everyone, but this is far from being achieved. Instead, it has been mobile technology that has been giving NGOs the chance to provide tools that make a significant difference. The area that has profited most from this little revolution is health care.

“Very few technologies have scaled down to even the remotest village in sub-Saharan Africa. Cars haven’t, fridges haven’t, literacy hasn’t. But mobile phones have,” says Joel Selanikio, co-founder of US-based social enterprise DataDyne. He would know: DataDyne’s open-source, mobile data collection tool EpiSurveyor has tackled one of the main weaknesses of healthcare in developing countries. The lack of tools to gather time-sensitive health data quickly and systematically is a disaster when it comes to disease prevention, consultation, diagnosis and treatment. That is why the systematization of the collection of health data has absolutely boomed in the last ten years. Using mobile phones as a database and writing easy-to-use software has helped to fight malaria, diarrhoea (which is, sadly, globally seen still the leading cause of illness and death) and reduced the number of deaths from measles in Africa by 90%. All this just because health workers suddenly have the possibility to access a database of information, without an internet connection, to find out about disease treatment guidelines, essential drug lists and patients’ records within minutes, in remote, resource-poor areas miles away from the next hospital.

By using PDAs to transmit and receive data via cellular networks, US-based NGO Satellife connected 175 remote health facilities serving more than 1.5 million people in Uganda to a data collection platform. As the program was brought to scale, the health officers’ knowledge of health care needs increased significantly even in the most remote areas. They aim to improve. Advanced platforms like recently released GATHERdata are being launched, making the aggregation of data speedier, the software easier to use, the analysis more sophisticated. GATHERdata provides digital forms for the collection of relevant data and sends it wirelessly to the district health office and ministry, into one central database. The information collected will immediately be scanned for anomalies. If any are found, the ministry can notify public health officials within seconds by text message – the time saved saves lives.

“GATHERdata is made up of ‘best of breed’ software elements and we are constantly evaluating possible tools for incorporation or substitution into the platform. One of the key drivers behind this is trying to make GATHERdata easier for end users to employ in their projects,” Satellife’s Associate Center Director Andrew Sideman tells Spike. Training the end user to use a system has proven to be a challenge in any attempt at imposing new software in development projects. Even the least complex programs are difficult to adapt by health workers or citizens who have often never used a computer or mobile phone before in their life. Making systems simpler means less necessary training, ergo less time and less money spent. Andrew, who has led the development of GATHERdata, found that training was necessary even though the system is virtually the same as a paper-based version.

“There are invariably differences of interpretation on the part of end users. We always hope that pre-testing of the form will have resolved any questions related to language, as in what the questions on the form are actually asking for, and logic, like how the questions are ordered.”

GATHERdata involves built-in business intelligence modules, which are used to automatically send messages to authorities to alert dangerous situations – a vital feature to prevent often occurring pandemics. Software like this can be implemented in many other areas than ‘just’ health care. Like it has been used in Mali, to track school construction projects as part of an education system decentralization program. Or in Liberia, to survey school facilities and assets. Working towards constant improvement, GATHERdata is fully exploiting what java-rosa based forms make possible.

“We are developing and will deploy in Bangladesh a system using SMS to notify end users that a form is available for their use with a link to a web page,” says Andrew. “End users will access the form and use their mobile phones to fill out short web-based forms. Data will be stored in the GATHERdata back end to allow aggregation with data gathered or integration with other data sets.”

What mobile networks in combination with simple Java software have achieved is impressive on its own. Compared to the technologies available to us in the western world it is, of course, ridiculous.

How long until we bridge the digital divide in internet usage and use the technology we have to create a connection between all parts of the world, allowing access to the same network of information to everyone? It seems like the obvious next step after the mobile phone wonder. Making e-readers available in schools with the possibility to download books, sending and accessing health data via WiFi, are just two concepts which could make current efforts easier, faster, richer in information. The Web Foundation believes that making certain information available could enable local entrepreneurs to build up businesses relevant to their country, or help farmers trying to grow vegetation in harsh environments. The latter became the Web Alliance for Regreening Africa project, an attempt at growing trees and crops in the desert by spreading the knowledge to do so to thousands of farmers. This knowledge is mostly local. When serious droughts severely damaged farming conditions in many rural communities in West Africa in the 1980s, a number of innovative locals in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali developed techniques to rehabilitate large areas of degraded land. With this kind of knowledge already existing, it is the sharing of it that comes as a challenge. The project tries to achieve an efficient sharing of ideas by exploiting the available infrastructure of internet cafes in larger towns, mobile phones and radios.

Is this the way to use information technology in development work? For now, yes it is. Making good use of the technology already available to share information is the most efficient way to make an impact. It is basically the spreading of knowledge that is successfully fighting some of the developing world’s most urgent challenges. Diseases, fought by aggregating health data. Bad education, fought by providing the invaluable content of books. Hunger, fought by sharing knowledge to grow crops. The key word in this kind of help is ‘sustainable’ – sharing knowledge isn’t charity, it is setting the basis for self-help. NGOs around information technology are certainly working towards using the tools they have in the best possible way. But until the technologies we take for granted have become truly ubiquitous, the divide in information access will stay insurmountable.

Further Resources:

• Worldreader: Books for all
• DataDyne and EpiSurveyor
• Cory Doctorow’s Craphound
• GATHERdata at AED-Satellife
• W4RA at World Wide Web Foundation

Mike Essex has really hit a nerve. One post on UK-based digital marketing agency Koozai’s blog had authors, journalists and publishers jump up in shocking revelation and created a wave of ‘oh-my-god-look-at-this articles’ all over the web. The big epiphany was ebook content farms. While ebook platforms like Amazon’s Kindle store, Apple, Smashwords and Lulu have given aspiring authors a chance to publish their work quicker than ever, they are also making life worryingly easy for scammers. With little or no copyright detectors, no barrier stands between someone else’s content, the copy-and-paste function and an upload button. These online stores are full of plagiarized content.

It is hard to believe just how quickly and easily stolen content is up online and ready for sale. Even more unbelievable is how little attention has been given to the problem. The concept of content farms is old hat since Google ‘fought’ the likes of them with its now infamous algorithm update Panda, yet the farms’ business re-location has left ebook vendors unimpressed. The spam-attack could not have come as a surprise, Mike Essex tells Spike in an interview about his views on the issue.

The search specialist says, “it would have been naive for Amazon and other providers to not predict that their systems would be manipulated, as any open system that allows anyone to add content will always be ripe for manipulating. Amazon have to fight con artists everyday through their marketplace by trying to stop people selling counterfeit goods, so they are already aware of many of these problems via this channel.”

Content farms are companies which create thousands of pieces of low quality content each day, targeted to search engines. Their profit is made from advertising revenue. The content farm issue became a real trend last year with the rise of Demand Media and Answers.com. The system works just as well with ebooks, as long as nothing hinders “farmers” from pumping out books filled with content stolen from blogs, Wikipedia or other ebooks and submitting it without being scrutinized.

“I think the issue has remained hidden so long because people tended to look at content farms as a means of getting advert revenue and links to a website. For ebooks the only benefit is to gain revenue from ebook sales,” Mike explains. He suggests that the sales factor will make the liability to quantity over quality even worse than it was with conventional content farms. Some spam authors flood the stores with thousands of low quality books, selling their copied and pasted rubbish for 99p each and gaining considerable profit from it. Searching for Manuel Ortiz Braschi in the Amazon Kindle store, for example, will provide you with 3,162 results for strikingly useful titles such as How to Take Care of Your Pet Iguana, How to Adopt a Baby or – my personal favourite – 30 Writing Tips for ebook Authors: how anyone can become a better writer by following time tested writing strategies. He might actually have some insight on that last one.

“It’s the exact same model as with content farms, but at least with content farms readers didn’t get conned out of any money. This is actually much worse,” Mike tells Spike.

When the content farms seemed to be taking over the web’s search results, Google reacted with Panda. Panda is a change in Google’s algorithm which is meant to punish search rankings for websites that produce low-quality content. The search engine strives to scan the web for original content and to present that before any duplicates. “Without the system other people who copied the content would outrank [the original], and that’s the risk that the ebook marketplace faces if it doesn’t enforce a similar set of checks.” Mike compares Google’s fight against content farms with the dangers for the ebook market: “Original authors will be beaten by stolen versions of their content.”

The only warnings to rely on are negative reviews by ripped-off customers, but complaints are rare for purchases of merely 99p. The really efficient way to tackle the countless amount of undetected scams in the ebook marketplace lies with the providers.

“As a bare minimum, providers should automatically scan the web – or work with a company like Google to do the scanning – to identify the instances of stolen content.” Mike also suggests the use of brand monitoring to the sites selling PLR content. PLR (Private Label Rights) content implies the right to use content written by somebody else as if it were your own. “This problem is driven by sites that sell PLR content, which lets you bulk buy low quality articles. [ebook vendors should] either get them shut down or block the content from being sold on their stores.”

That all providers do have options to report books on their stores for low quality or stolen content raises the question of their responsibility towards legitimate authors selling in their stores. Ultimately the authors are those who suffer from an easily manipulated system. They are not only being pushed back in search results, but also losing potential readers who are disappointed in low quality purchases and lose trust in ebook channels.

On the other hand, authors themselves might just lose patience with ebook providers Mike claims. “Another possibility is that authors will simply move away from large aggregators of content like Amazon, and will sell their content via their personal website instead. This removes you from the competition and gives authors a much better place to prove their content is good and not just mass produced garbage.”

An ebook author himself, Mike Essex’s book Free Stuff Everyday Guide is available on the Amazon Kindle store. His advice for young ebook writers: “If authors do decide to stay on aggregators, they will need to do more to stand out. As their content is digital they should send as many free PDF copies out as possible in order to get a buzz going. This will lead to reviews on the aggregators – which add authenticity to the book – and real people writing real coverage of the book on other websites”.

Readers are more likely to search online for information on a book before purchasing it, as their trust in cheap ebooks is increasingly declining. Despite the channel’s problems, giving new authors a chance to be published and discovered is certainly a system worth keeping, given that ebook providers themselves begin to protect their platforms and their authors.

Further Resources:

• Are ebooks the new content farms by Mike Essex
• Koozai Digital Marketing Agency (with great blog posts on digital issues)
• Mike Essex @Twitter
• The Blagman Blog by Mike Essex

Chances are high that you have already used Google today. As you typed in what you were looking for, scanned through the results and clicked on the link you needed, you provided Google with plenty of valuable information. To an extent, you have influenced which links are to show up further up or down on the page the next time someone has a similar query as you. This is a big part of how one of the biggest web companies of its time works: through learning from you.

It is true that your data is everywhere. With every website you visit, every article you read, every Twitter update you write, every click you do on the web, you leave behind a trace of information. Remember the Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel? Well, you are like Hansel, laying a trail of pebbles as you walk, able to track every step you took. Just that we don’t call it pebbles, we call it exhaust data. This is the sheer unfathomable amount of data left behind as a matter of course by on- and offline activities. The value of this information is yet to be understood, but we know that it is one of the great concepts that will influence our future in unimaginable ways. What can it tell us? If we use it the right way, most anything. As Google’s chief economist Hal Varian told The Economist recently, “Data are widely available, what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.”.

Data big enough that one has to think about how to store it, let alone how to make use of it, lends enormous advantages to those who can make sense of it. Just as Google has understood how to turn what they’re learning from users into a system which became the key component of their success, a sophisticated usage of exhaust data will help other industries evolve beyond their current capacities.

As digital devices soar and prices plummet, sharing information is becoming more accessible, improvements in algorithms are driving apps forward and the processing power and capacity of storage devices is constantly improving, it is safe to say that the business of data exhaust is about to explode.

Quick to pick it up was, as usual, the advertising industry, which has been bombarding users with targeted ads chosen through passively collected information for years. Whether you approve of this system or not, the industry is growing. Radium One, an organisation that uses social analytics and data to create targeted ad campaigns, has raised $21million in Series B financing only a few weeks ago. They have become immensely popular through their trademark ShareGraph technology, which analyses how users communicate with their closest connections. The business of information management, the collecting and processing of data for commercial purposes, is in fact growing twice as fast as the software business as a whole: at an impressive 10% per year. The industry is estimated to be worth over $100 billion. If you are looking for a change of careers: data scientists are highly needed.

This is the monetizing side of the coin, the one that creates a we-know-your-secrets mood. It tends to make us uncomfortable, the idea that we are being followed by a system and having databases created about us. Who are they to stalk me with an ad for lingerie just because I looked at underwear on Amazon? For marketers, this is like a massive all-you-can-eat buffet with gourmet food. For us, it’s a bit irritating. Wanting to protect their privacy is natural for people, as is worrying about it being intruded. But before going into the controversy about the dangers of handling data overload, it is worth focusing on something that’s much more interesting than the business aspect. That is, the individual. What’s in it for us?

We leave behind little bits and pieces of ourselves and let it go to waste, while there are plenty of ways to turn them into something valuable. We are facing the possibility of learning more about ourselves than we can imagine. The immense proliferation of the information age is turning social sciences upside down by making the analysis of human behaviour on a population level a task involving completely new and more complex methods of communication. In the thousands of possibilities of interpreting the data available to us, there lies a path to deeper self-understanding. Let’s step away from the digital for a moment to emphasise this. There are many mysteries about ourselves that we could solve with the help of a map of our behaviour we create through… everyday living. Given that we document it. Max Winter Osterhaus has been doing exactly this, since he started creating charts and tables about his consumption behaviour (see below). Max, a product developer based in Wisconsin, USA, has been documenting literally every purchase he has made over the past five years down to the different kinds of fruit or bread. By tracking this with a meticulous attention to detail, he has recorded an incredible amount of data about himself – manually. Max spoke to Spike about the value he feels to be gaining from this, and described his goals as “visualising disparate components of a complex existence” and as “coming to terms with the realities of our needs, desires and propensities”.

This is an exceptional example of consumption tracking and the knowledge that can be built upon it. How much does each of us effectively know about their consumption behaviour? More importantly, about what it means? This doesn’t have to be about finding out that 5% of your savings last year went into buying cheddar cheese. It could be about where your high cholesterol level is coming from. Health care is a big part of the data exhaust concept, seeing as this (uncollected) information about ourselves has the invaluable potential to help predict the onset of diseases before the symptoms emerge, of identifying the most effective treatments for you and your individual needs and to spot unwanted drug interactions. Creating software to help us develop an accessible and interpretable dataset of our everyday behaviour might just be the next big step in health care. We are already close to reasonable ways of collecting this information. Think about online and mobile phone payments, a principle which could soon lead to scanning our purchases automatically and sending the information to a third base. This is indeed a very realistic concept and on the doorstep to entering our lives.

Much anticipated health instrumentation service Green Goose takes a slightly different approach in connecting health issues and the ‘Internet of Things’ (what we call the networked interconnection of everyday objects). The company has developed a game-like system to stimulate healthier behaviour. The product is a set of tiny sensors and accelerometers on stickers and credit cards, designed to track certain behavioural patterns. The stickers would be placed on, for example, your toothbrush and recognise the movement of the object when you brush your teeth. This information is sent to the Green Goose base station, which you will have placed somewhere in your home, and added to your online record of activities. The same stickers could be put onto your running shoes, bike, water bottle, pill box and literally hundreds of other objects related to the part of your life style you would like to improve. The system basically documents your everyday behaviour automatically, with the goal to encourage a healthier lifestyle and to help you keep track of it. It makes sense – chances are you will find yourself surprised at how little water you drink or how rarely you ride your bike to work, as these things aren’t something we tend to notice. It is left up to you how to interpret this information, which is still the most difficult task. More sophisticated programs could do exactly that for you and potentially connect to your doctor’s database.

And there is much more we can do with exhaust data. How about a resumé made from passively collected data, as a less manipulable insight into our lives than the little narratives we create ourselves today? Way ahead of you. Technical forum StackOverflow is doing exactly this for its users since the launch of its Careers 2.0 service in February. Users’ contribution to the site through technical answers and questions they have submitted can be turned into valuable information for potential employers, giving a genuine insight into the users’ expertise. Undoubtedly, this system is perfectly applicable to all kinds of business areas. In the near future, we may expect a platform for employers and applicants where part of the application consists of data collected from the potential employee’s online activities, be it social media, blog posts or even the online articles he/she reads. With ever more information available after all, why should employers keep relying merely on what the CV – consequently the applicant – tells them?

These are just few examples of ways to create value from exhaust data. It comes down to an often made point: devices to gather and contain the information are available; how to make sense of it is the true art. It is worth keeping an eye on the hardware, which doesn’t yet offer enough storage space to capture and process the full quantity of information available. The quantity of data grows much faster than the ability of the network to carry it, although the processing power and storage capacity of computer chips is doubling every 18 months, according to Moore’s law. And yet, music website Last.fm knows what we listen to, Kindle technology Whispersync knows what we read, and brilliant iPad app Zite collects our information to give us individualised magazines with articles we like. Our data is everywhere and it is being stored.

It raises questions of privacy and security, like all upcoming concepts involving personal information do. As deep an insight as it gives us into human behaviour, the desire to protect the captured data is a priority that has to be considered when handling it. The so-called Locker Project, brainchild of open-source guru Jeremie Miller, is an exciting idea that focusses on storing data while protecting it from third parties. Any user is encouraged to download a data capture and storage code to run it on their own server, or alternatively to sign up for a hosted service. After this, the Locker Project will pull in and start to archive all data accessible on- and offline: pictures, videos, click-stream, check-ins, twitter updates, data from real-world sensors like heart monitors, health records and transaction histories. The data extracted will be stored in your personal, private ‘locker’. Everything seems to be done right here: permissions, privacy, storage. Having access to such an extensive dataset about yourself is interesting as it is, but the room for contexts to view it in is even more immense. The team behind the Locker Project is aiming at cross-references with other sets of data, in order to make patterns in it visible which would otherwise be missed. This could reach from food recommendations back to the pre-diagnosis of medical conditions.

Until the Locker Project is launched, you can always do what Max Winter Osterhaus did and have a closer look at your life without the help of digital means. “The record keeping is less important than the analysis and I definitely believe that everyone should do this.”, he tells me about his life-map. “Not everyone wants to come face to face with the truths of their life, but I see it as an essential stepping stone to deeper understanding.”

In the age of information explosion, we are just teaching ourselves how to make action from what we are learning. And everyday we are finding out more.

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A presentation by Max Winter Osterhaus on his personal consumption tracking maps and methods:

“YouGov is the authoritative measure of public opinion and consumer behaviour. It is our ambition to supply a live stream of continuous, accurate data and insight into what people are thinking and doing all over the world, all of the time, so that companies, governments and institutions can better serve the people that sustain them. YouGov is the most quoted research company in the UK, so by joining our panel of over 350,000 members and taking part in our surveys you really can get your voice heard. Panel members are sent regular surveys on a whole host of topics from politics to brands, finance to shopping, and we want to hear your views.”

01 YouGov – What the world thinks: The London-based online market research firm was launched in May 2000 by Stephan Shakespeare and Nadhim Zahawi. Digital polling radically reduces the cost of polling, allowing a much greater sample to be canvassed. This, in theory, makes for much greater accuracy. Panel members are recruited from targeted sources such as non-political websites or via specialist recruitment agencies. A detailed profile is completed, enabling YouGov to select a representative sample of electors for each survey. The general public can also join the panel through the website, although this sample is generally excluded from published political polls. A 40% response rate is usually reached within 24 hours and 60% within 72 hours. Each response is rewarded with an incentive of between 50p and £1 per survey, paid out as a lump sum of £50. The organisation claims their members and methodology constitute enough demographic information to represent the electorate as a whole.

02 Services and international sites: Obviously this data is valuable and YouGov offer a full range of research-based services. In addition to bespoke projects, there are a number of off-the-shelf products. BrandIndex measures daily shifts in public perception around 850 consumer lines. Last year, YouGov launched SixthSense, which aims to give a near-real time overview of different market sectors. Nine broad consumer areas are offered, such as ‘Health and Beauty’ and ‘Technology Market’, which are then broken down into focus areas, including ‘The British Mindset’, ‘Ethical Living’ and ‘Breakfast’. These reports can be bought individually, generally for £1750 each. Since the company was floated for £18million in 2005, it has been on something of an acquisition spree. In 2005, it acquired Siraj to focus on the Middle East (offices around the Persian Gulf, panel of 140,000). Polimetrix followed in 2006 (Palo Alto, New York, and Washington CD, panel of 1.1million) and 2007 saw Psychonomics (Cologne, Berlin, and Vienna, 120 researchers and consultants) and Zapera (offices across Scandinavia, panel of 140,000) join the YouGov family. The move hasn’t been particularly successful with resistance to the online methodology in the US and losses in Germany. Since 2010, the company has declared an interest in exporting the model rather than attain international influence through acquisition.

03 Subject areas: YouGov’s public website is an interesting variation on the newspaper, creating stories through survey findings. Broadly speaking, these are divided into ‘Life’, ‘Consumer’, and ‘Politics’. The range of reports in quite wide and may use data from sources outside of YouGov. There is also an archive of reports, which demonstrate sample size and questions, and a full breakdown of statistics. Sometimes the results are surprising, such as the 3% in the product placement report who claim never to watch television or films (rising to %5 in Scotland). Other recent surveys have included ‘Libya Intervention’ and ‘Ghosts’.

04 Main stories: YouGov are regularly commissioned by newspapers to (very accurately) predict the results of Pop Idol and X-Factor. This is obviously great advertising for the brand and the website retains something of a tabloid feel, rather than the more solemn identity we might associate with polling and research. The articles themselves are written by a small team and usually reflect the overall conclusions of research quite accurately. When consensus is overwhelming, the author may extrapolate what this may mean for key trends. But it is just as likely that the article presents a full range of opinions, when the results are more evenly weighted.

05 Leader Board: TellYouGov is a move into the real-time arena. Users can engage anonymously on any topic via a range of means, including email, SMS, Twitter or directly through the site. You can add a topic (a ‘Tyg’ as they call it) or comment on an existing one with a plus or minus. Topics then rise or fall accordingly and there are various ways to read the data. The results are rather depressing, consisting of blunt attacks on politicians and celebrities, and generally negative opinions on trending issues. YouGov claim they remove offensive remarks but a few homophobic comments were visible. It would be interesting to know how this data is used.

06 Government Trackers: This is YouGov’s daily log of voting intentions and government approval ratings. Attitudes to the domestic financial situation are also tracked. Although YouGov’s accuracy is hard to establish on a day-to-day basis, they highlight their success in specific circumstances, such as the 2008 London mayoral election and their record on general elections is generally strong. Various claims have been made over party political bias and ‘push polling’, such as an emotive weighting of questions concerning the Liberal Democrats, but it is hard to find sustained evidence to support.

07 Commentaries: In addition to key YouGov staff members, a small range of commentators engage with research to present a deeper analysis of (mainly) political trends. These try to explain shifts in public sympathy and also stray into consumer issues. The BBC’s John Humphrys is a regular contributor.

08 Other aspects: Despite the compelling economics of online research, YouGov has struggled financially. Following the recession, there was a collapse in profitability during 2008 (just after the company had expanded its overseas portfolio) and shares remained correspondingly low. However, shares have begun a modest climb throughout 2011 and the board continues to report a healthy balance sheet with £11million in net cash. Last year, The Register published a story about a YouGov feasibility study to see whether users were prepared to install tracking software on their computers. Sophos said it would classify the software as a ‘potentially unwanted application’.

Further Reading:
British homepage for YouGov
The TellYouGov Leader Board
YouGov SixthSense consumer reports

Chances are you saw this beautiful Spotify device that was all over the internet a few months ago. The player makes novel use of RFID tags to create exchangeable playlists linking back to the Spotify service. Although haling from Barcelona, 27-year-old Parra relocated to Sweden in order to get his industrial and interactive design chops up to scratch. I wondered whether training in design had influenced the way Jordi lives his life. He was happy to answer with the following caveat: “Your questions are a bit tricky. I do like minimalism, but it’s not necessarily a philosophy of life to me. It’s definitely good in certain contexts, but there’re things that have to be complex too. But well, there’re a lot of products and services out there that could be way more simple and easier to use, of course”.

Has interaction design taught you anything about living?
What I’ve learned so far is that design is about empathy, about listening to people. Everybody can design stuff if they understand the problems of a certain task. Designers used to make things beautiful and functional, nowadays I think it is more about providing what people really need. Sometimes it’s obvious, others you really need to talk to people to understand what are the real problems. Guessing what do people need on your own can be risky if you don’t have a good understanding of the context.

Some people cannot afford to hire a designer, how do you advise they introduce better design into their projects?
Small companies still don’t see the added value of investing on design. Some people still think design is just about making beautiful objects and don’t want to pay extra money for that, they think they can do it themselves. This can work sometimes, and others won’t. Designers are probably more interested in listening to the people using the product while people with less experience tend to fall in love with their ideas. It’s quite common that small companies have a vision of what they want, and sometimes they’re right, but it can also happen that a company is too much into their business and they loose perspective about what are the final users really expecting from their product. In that way, a design team has a broader perspective. It is really important not to fall in love with ideas, explore other options… Designers can help businesses have a better perspective and find out about problems and opportunities that were not so obvious at first.

Dieter Rams famously has 10 principles for good design, do you have any extra ground rules to add?
I don’t think I have experienced enough to add my own rules on top of Dieter Rams’ principles. He’s a big reference to me and I’m still in a learning stage. My background is engineering and I have only spent 3 years working in the industrial design field. Dieter Rams principles might seem obvious, but that’s the beauty of them. Writing down the obvious in such an understandable way is a big challenge. If I had to add something, it’d be that designers have to talk to people. Test. Get feedback. Sometimes users don’t really know what they want, but talking to them can be the catalyst to come up with great solutions.

You went back to university when you wanted a change, should everyone go back to school to find a new direction?
I went back to school because I didn’t feel I had the skills enough to move from Engineering into Design. I wanted to give it a try and it felt like the right option to me, but not everyone will feel the same way. I have known really talented people that didn’t even study design. It’s something very personal and becoming good at something doesn’t always require a college degree. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that dropped out from college or didn’t ever start.

Is there anybody whose work (in any field) you’ve recently been raving about?
There’s a lot happening nowadays. Even though my work is not into arts and installations, I do enjoy all the work from that field. Karsten Schmidt is doing amazing stuff. He is pushing the use of code as a design tool and the results are amazing. London’s scene is really big in that field. There’s a lot of computational art and installations happening there. Timo Arnall and Berg (the second, a consultancy, also in London) are also doing beautiful work visualising the invisible amongst other projects. Timo is working as a researcher on NFC communications in Oslo and it is really interesting the way he is visualising things that we cannot see, while Berg is a design consultancy with really fresh ideas. Besides that, there’s a lot of people working in the open-hardware and DIY community. It is growing incredibly fast. Thanks to them we have the Arduino and other resources to make electronics and design more accessible to people from all backgrounds. The fact that a lot of people are contributing on stuff like that makes it easier for people like me, with no previous experience with electronics, to explore and play with new stuff is amazing. Now it’s easier than ever to merge design and technology, we’ve to be really thankful to all the people contributing.

Jordi Parra’s official site

Mariko Mori: Miko no inori (Link of the Moon): 1996: digital film, 61 x 71 cm

“I demand that he who still refuses… to see a horse galloping on a tomato should be looked upon as a cretin” – André Breton

Two peculiar forms of exploration narrative concerned with determining what makes us human came into being int he beginning of the 20th century. Both claimed territory that was terrestrial but not earthy; embodied but not visible to the naked eye. In 1900, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a book he described as containing “the most valuable of all the discoveries it is my good fortune to make” (1). The Interpretation of Dreams was not only key to Freud’s entire oeuvre but to the identity of the 20th century itself, revolutionising and determining how human beings would approach the production of meaning, symbolisation, and psychic life from that point on. In other words, the wild symbolisations of humans – not just hysterics (Freud’s object of study in the 1890s) – were now interpretable through science, not just myth and poetry (although the ‘science’ of psychoanalysis has been called into question in the latter half of the century returning Freud’s contribution to the realm of art) (2). This newly charted area was a privileged zone, one that only humans were capable of possessing, not birds, boxes, or plants. “I’m only human” infers error, ambivalence, the unpredictability of the unconscious erupting at any given time. This is precisely what signified HAL’s dip over the edge from predictable computerdom in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He started to err; to engage in irrational conduct, even to act out an Oedipal relation to his mentor. In other words, HAL was a computer that had developed an unconscious (and hence had to be terminated).

In 1900, another key system for delimiting the contingent ingredients of the human came into being, one that would rise along with psychoanalysis (and in opposition to it) to become the primary science for understanding the individual and “life itself” (3). Genetics, like Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, was actually a rediscovery of the 19th century gardner-monk Johann Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance formulated from observing wrinkled versus smooth skin passed from generation to generation of the pea plant. In 1900, Mendel’s laws were rediscovered, setting in motion modern genetics. (The word ‘gene’ was used for the first time in 1909) (4). Since that time, genetics has passed from through its own history, spanning the eugenics-based studies of racial purity and inheritance of the early 20th century to the hybridised model of seeds and animals of mid-century to the polyorganic transgenic fusions between plant and animal to the late 20th century (5).

It is this recent stage – from the mid-70s to the present – where as suggestive reanimation of one of psychoanalysis’s most loyal movements seems to be occurring. Transgenics, more commonly known as genetic engineering, involves the cross-fertilisation of genes from once distinct and unrelated organisms resulting in hybrid beings on the molecular level that were impossible to imagine as ‘real’ before 20th-century genetics. Surrealism meets hard science in descriptions such as the following: “I find myself especially drawn by such engaging new beings as the tomato with a gene from a cold-sea-bottom-living flounder”, says Donna Haraway in her book Modest_Witness, “which codes for a protein that slows freezing, and the potato with a gene from the giant silk moth, which increases disease resistance. DNA Plant Technology in Oakland, California started testing the tomato-fish antifreeze combination in 1991” (6). Such images of new beings made up of fish/tomato/antifreeze combinations sound more like the free associations of the surrealists. Soluble Fish was, after all, the name Breton gave his novella published the same year as the First Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. Indeed Haraway uses the phrase cyborg surrealism to describe both the method and the “peculiar” territory of advanced capitalist techno-science she explores in Modest_Witness. In this sense, the “beauty” (that is, the convulsion of reality) of Lautréamont’s famous hero, Maldoror, “as handsome as the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, pales next to the wonder (and ambivalence) induced by transgenic constructions such as the mouse who glows in the dark or which is bred genetically to develop skin cancer – now readily available and, even in the case of the OncoMouse, obsolete within biotechnical laboratories (7). Blue-tipped mermaids such as those populating Mariko Mori’s Empty Dreams are no longer mythological creatures so much as signifiers of this new transgenic body, the fusions between animal and human that have become the living dreams of cyborg surrealism.

Although Mori has been quoted as saying the women in her work “appear to be happy because they are cyborgs, not real women” (8), anyone who has seriously considered Haraway’s often cited Manifesto for Cyborg (written almost exactly 60 years after Breton’s manifesto) knows the distinction between real women and cyborgs is itself an outmoded fiction, a hangover of unrepentant humanism. Cyborgs are never essentially happy nor sad but like all of us products of history and complexity, woven of unconscious and conscious drives, desires, and elaborate emotional territories. Haraway’s formulation, presented in the form of an ironic manifesto, uses the science-fictional figuration of the cyborg as a way to account for the very real transformations that have occurred within the technosocial, technoscientific landscape of the late 20th century. In other words, Mariko Mori’s women are real cyborgs.

And yet the question remains, as genetics breeds beings made up of increasingly complex and ‘impure’ molecular origin, beings who blur the boundaries between nature and culture, human and the non-human, is there a different kind of unconscious emerging from this increased intimacy between the machines, humans, animals, and non-physical territories? Is there an unconscious produced in the wake of the seeming wild juxtapositions of Freud’s contemporaneous publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and the foundation of modern genetics? I would argue there is and it is exactly what Haraway means by cyborg surrealism. In other words we live in a world where the once fantastic image of the sewing machine and umbrella coming together on a dissecting table seems, on the molecular level, to have come to life. And now we can wonder what kind of unconscious imaginings such beings themselves might harbour.

In his essay ‘Across the Morphic Fields: The Art of Mariko Mori’, Paul D. Miller invokes surrealism to account for Mori’s high-velocity condensations of santo (Japanese term meaning large metropolis) with Japan’s hybrid history of cultural transmutation – the manner in which Japan is woven of Chinese culture, Buddhism, Shinto religion, Christianity, and Western high-tech capitalism. In other words, Mori’s surrealism has little to do with the unconscious but everything to do with the new global culture with which Japan has become synonymous; it is cross-cultural (or intra-cultural), a product of “the two-way conditioning between the imagination and its environment”, just as Mori herself is “at home at any place in the global village, yet still rooted in the traditions of Japan” (9).

But what of the unconscious in this context, particularly since it is the unconscious and not the imagination through which surrealism re-engineers reality? At the end of Modest_Witness, Haraway calls for the theorising of an “unfamiliar unconscious, a different primal scene where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction” (10). Asked to elaborate, she emphasises that “the word is to be taken literally. An ‘unfamiliar’ one is not of the family. Etymologically speaking, the whole notion of the familiar means the family, and the kinds of things that blindside us today aren’t necessarily familiar in the sense of familial. In other words, all these new kinds of relationality we presently experience between the organic and inorganic, physical and non-physical, animal and human – relationalities that shape who we are and that we in turn shape – need to be rethought in terms of an unfamiliar unconscious. I don’t know how else to put it” (11).

It is this production, or at least the allusion to this site of the unfamiliar unconscious, that Mori’s art ultimately presents us with. Tropes of surrealist art surface from the unfamiliar spiritual, cross-cultural, environmental, and the psychic “mutualities” (Miller’s word) she produces. “Cyborg surrealism” is, then, a more precise description of what Mori is up to. It is as well an apt description of the seeming unconsciously inflected potency and lunacy of much ‘90s art, from the emoting techno-angst mannequins of Tony Oursler to the mutant hero narrative and reproduction myth of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle, or the ‘euphoric enthusiasm’ of Jeff Koon’s celebration of materials. The power of this art is the evocation of what feels like the unconscious (hence the term surreal is often loosely attached to such work) but it hardly derives from the same universe or gene pool of a René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, or Dorothea Tanning. The fin de siècle works of an Oursler or Barney do not so much evoke a realm of the human unconscious but rather produce one from its merger with many of the things that are, frankly, ‘unfamiliar’ to it. Such is the near archetypal cyborg surrealism of Mariko Mori. Neither dream nor stream of consciousness, free association nor automatic writing, the images and worlds she creates – and inhabits – carry the sense of an uncanny psychic projection fashioned not merely from her own individual subjectivity but one created from her fusion with technology, science-fiction myths, and the euphoria of late capitalist culture (what Frederic Jameson terms the hysterical sublime). In such works as Empty Dream (1995), Last Departure (1996) or Entropy of Love (1996), she presents herself as an offspring of this universe, indeed as an emerging icon of it. After all, her family romance is of the Tokyo-bred cyberqueen thrust from the brow of a high-tech inventor father. One of his inventions, the Hamawari (sunflower), is a “rooftop honeycomb device… that uses chromatic aberration to separate ultraviolet and infrared radiation from sunlight and then transmits this purified light indoors via a fiberoptic cable” (12). In other words, the Himawari is a high-tech illumination device bred of organic structure (the honeycomb): a machine that purifies “natural light” (sunlight) to be used inside an artificial, man-made indoor environment. It too is a cyborg, perhaps best understood not as an invention of Mori’s father’s but her paternal figure (13). Inventions both, the daughter and the illumination device circulate as offsprings of a world where genetics hails psychoanalysis and surrealism the unfamiliar unconscious of the cyborg. Neither is only human, except of course where conscience might make them so.

1. Also of note is Laplanche and Pontalis’s statement that, “If Freud’s discovery had to be summed up in a single word, that world would without doubt have to be ‘unconscious’.” J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973(c)1967), p.474.
2. See Alan A. Stone, M.D. ‘Freud’s Vision: Psychoanalysis failed as science, Will it survive as art?’ Harvard Magazine, Vol.99, p.3.
3. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp.131-171 for a discussion of “life itself”; p.247 for genetics and its relation to definitions of the human.
4. Horace Freeland Johnson, ‘A History of Science and Technology Behind Gene Mapping and Sequencing’ in: The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, ed. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.38.
5. Haraway, op. cit., p.227.
6. ibid., p.88.
7. ibid., p.98. Discusses various kinds of custom-made transgenic mice.
8. Mariko Mori in: Dike Blair, ‘We’ve Got Twenty-Five Years’, Purple Prose, July 1998, pp.96-101.
9. Paul D. Miller, ‘Across the Morphic Fields: The Art of Mariko Mori’, in: New Histories (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996), pp.138-145.
10. Haraway, op. cit., p.265.
11. How Like a Leaf. Donna J. Haraway interviewed by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. (New York: Routledge, 1998)
12. Lisa Corrin, ‘Mariko Mori’s Quantum Nirvana’, in: Mariko Mori, ex. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1998, p.21.
13. A tear-drop shaped opalescent bulb glows as a result of this device for a few hours each day in Mori’s New York studio.

This essay originally appeared in Parkett 54 (1998/99). Many thanks to Thyrza Nichols Goodeve for permission to republish.

Paul* M. Kaestner: Metamorphose Varcavellensis, 1994. 9.8x13.7", 12 pages, mixed media on cardboard

This essay was originally written by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve for the exhibition catalogue One of a Kind: An Exhibition of Unique Artist’s Books, curated by Heide Hatry for Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Spring 2011.

One of a Kind continues at the HP Garcia Gallery, Chelsea, NYC, from 19th April-14th May, 2011.

Many thanks to the author for permission to republish

Speed now, Book, and make yourself known wherever the winds blow free.
Never before has your like been printed.
A thousand hands will grasp you with warm desire
And read you with great attention.
– Broadsheet Anton Koberger, printer of Hartmann Schedal’s World Chronicle, the Nuremberg Chronicle 1493 (1)

Where, your act is always applied to paper; for meditating without a trace is evanescent…
– Mallarmé, Divagations, 1887 (2)

“What Will Happen to Books?”
– New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006

If I look at them with the eye of a stranger, they resemble an abbey that, even though ruined, would breathe out its doctrine to the passer-by.
– Mallarmé, Preface to Divagations (3)

Prologue: A word about the text
In the beginning, yes, let us agree: The book is and was and will be, even though, according to book historian Frederick G. Kilgour, we are now in the “Fourth Evolution” of the book – electronic publication. (4) Here, our experience of “the book” as we have known it as a physical object is undergoing a major transformation, one that whispers in the ear of any artist’s book even if the artist’s project is ostensibly about something else. (5) For instance, Tatana Kellner’s 71125: 50 Years of Silence (1992) is not about the metaphysics of the book the way Buzz Spector’s books are. It is about her mother’s fifty years of silence in regards to her imprisonment in a German concentration camp during World War II. But in order to “write” this book, she could not limit herself only to conventional pages of text and image but had to go beyond the book. Her intent was not to write the story into public consciousness but to embody the experience of dehumanization and fragmentation of the camp by incorporating a three-dimensional reproduction of her mother’s tattooed “71125” forearm inside the pages as a die cut – as the core or “spine” of the book through which the reader reads her story.

In formal terms, the book is comprised of printed pages which have been die cut to accommodate a sculptural element – a life-size cast of an elderly woman’s arm… The arm sculpture lies on the inside back cover of the book so that it remains the center of the reading experience. Because the pages are die cut through- out the arm never goes away, and as the pages diminish, its dimensionality is increasingly apparent. (6)

Kellner transforms the book while using its basic format and as Joanna Drucker states, The transformed book is an intervention. (7)

Today the physical book is turning from solid into air, from matter into light, a mass of electromagnetic signals – photons – transformed into code. If this is its future, what is the book as we have known it? What is its metaphysical legacy – that dream thing Mallarmé so famously said everything exists to end up in? For him it was both the ultimate destination for writing and yet a vague ultimately never-to-be completed project. It is significant, and not often mentioned, that he himself left instructions not to create “the book” from his papers after death. Though the situation may have been ambiguous in the case of Kafka, here it is perfectly clear. Mallarmé died unexpectedly. …M spent his brief respite writing his ‘instructions concerning my papers.’ He wanted everything destroyed. ‘Burn, then: there is no literary legacy here my poor children. (8) In other words, all that he had existed as, was not to end up in a book because for Mallarmé, the book was everything the physical object was not. He dreamed of it as a radical form, inspired by the complexities of verse rather than the conventions of the codex with columns and sequential sentences or the newspaper, which he ranted against quite vigorously. The book was the dreamscape for textual complexity, made of a precise architecture (chance was not encouraged). Yet he still called it the book. It is no accident, and not too much of a reach, that many have looked to him as a source for cyberspace. He defined the book as a series of relations – Hymn, harmony and joy, a pure cluster grouped together in some shining circumstance, tying together the relations among everything (9) – rooted in the page, yet, as he envisioned, more like a force out to shatter the page completely with thinking: “to spend a whole life toward a multiple outburst – which would be thinking: or else, using the means available now – journals and their whirlwind – to send a force in some direction, any direction…” (10) Because the book, the sentence, the representation, for Mallarmé, as Blanchot puts it,

is not simply projected linearly. It opens out. In this opening, other sentence and word rhythms emerge, space themselves out and regroup at varying depths – words and sentences which are interrelated by definite structural affinities though not according to common logic (the logic of subordination) which destroys the space and standardizes the movement. Mallarmé is one writer who can be said to be deep… because what he says presupposes a multi-dimensional space and can only be understood at various levels. (11)

It is why Mallarmé is the link between the future and the past, the present that is modernity in its multi-dimensional evolution, perfectly fit as the theorist of the artist’s book, the trace evanescent, ever unfurling because for him, the book is a thinking thing.

Part I: The book: a short history

I am concentrating here on understanding what a book is when it functions as a book, when it provides a reading or viewing experience sequenced into a finite space of text and or images. (12)

The book is the lap it rests in, the hands in which it is held, the fingertips that scan and flip pages forward and back. I rejoice if the passing wind half opens and unintentionally animates aspects of the book’s exterior. (13) The book is the pair of eyes that scan and absorb this page, looks up (the moment of true reading according to Roland Barthes) and pauses.

The book is the space of writing. To lean, according to the page, on the blank… (14) Yet the picture book was there from the beginning: The Palette of Narmer, from the first Dynasty, a little more than two feet high, is inscribed on the verso with a design that shows two long-necked catlike animals, which have been taken to represent Upper and Lower Egypt, being held apart from attacking one another. (15)

It is both sacred and profane. At once clean, pious and unforgiving, but most itself when dirty, in use, something to spill on, tear, and mark up.

On a certain shelf in the bookstore are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear. Those of them which originally possessed gilding have had it fingered off, each of themselves at places wherein I have been happy; each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant scribbled on their margins. These favorite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have I singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. (16)

The book is our intimate, the friend in the future that doubtless will be there. In Edward Bellamy’s Victorian utopia, Looking Backwards written in 1887, but set in the future, there is no doubt that the book will still exist in the year 2000. In fact, they were given to Julian West as friends…

Here are your friends,” said Edith, indicating one of the cases, and as my eye glanced over the names on the backs of the volumes, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal fulfilment would have been a disappointment. She had introduced me to a circle of friends whom the century that had elapsed since last I communed with them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit was as high, their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as contagious, as when their speech had whiled away the hours of a former century. Lonely I was not and could not be more, with this goodly companionship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped between me and my old life. (17)

The book keeps us company. It is who we are. It has been written in sand, on skin, across the crushed membranes of trees and now in light. It has been soft and pliable, hard and unforgiving, a dream space to take us out of our world. The book, total expansion of the letter, should derive from it directly a spacious mobility, and by correspondences institute a play of elements that confirms the fiction. (18)

It began as a rock (clay and stone tablets), turned into skin (parchment), into rags (rag paper) and eventually became a scroll made of mashed pieces of plants (paper). But the book as we know it and think it is the fold and the cut, pages stacked and bound between two covers. The codex.

The greatest benefactors of mankind are unsung and unknown – the inventor of the wheel, the deviser of the alphabet. Among their number we should place the inventor of the codex. In this form of book the sheets and papyrus or of cut and treated skin are not pasted or stitched together to form a long roll but are superimposed on each other, folded across the middle, and then secured by stitching so that they open into pages. The outside pages can be protected by binding covers and the whole ensemble then forms a durable sturdy book, easy to store, easy to open and refer to, easy to carry about, and withal capacious since it uses both sides of the writing material. (19)

An instrument of needle and thread, the book was first sewn just like our clothing, until glue was convenient, ubiquitous, and readily available. Adhesives are advantageous for joining thin or dissimilar materials, minimizing weight, and when a vibration dampening joint is needed. A disadvantage to adhesives is that they do not form an instantaneous joint, unlike most other joining processes, because the adhesive needs time to cure. Egyptians used glue made from animals to “adhere furniture, ivory, and papyrus. (20)

The book is an extended moment of time. It takes curing.

Yet the essence of the book is born of our exponential addiction to speed: It was the need for speed which transformed hieroglyphic to hieratic to demotic. As it is speed which pushed from hand to print to mass to electronic. (21)

The book is therefore binding in time. Each manifestation sprouts a new epistemology. Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking. Nietzsche wrote this on a typewriter, rather than by hand. And now we are told… different forms of writing required different applications of the brain’s original structures and in the process helped to change the way we think. (22)

So the invention of the codex was not just a simple restructuring of writing and images in shape and form but a revolution in thought: A codex allows for different sorts of reading. Where a scroll is intended for consecutive reading, a codex can be browsed. As the reader can move from one part to another in a manner of their own devising, forwards or backwards, this encourages reflective thought. (23)

…this encourages reflective thought, what is this thought? Especially when, The convention of the book is both its constrained meanings (as literacy, the law, text and so forth) and the space of a new work (the blank page, the void, the empty place). (24) And, here in an instant: In October, 2004, without the permission of publishers and authors, Google announced that, through its Google Books program, it would scan every book ever published, and make portions of the scans available through its search engine. (25)

Is it therefore a piece of hardware we work as a machine or is it pure metaphor, the software program that mimics the book, embedded in the past, a prehensile tail? (26)

The book is a program (Apple iBooks), an algorithm that allows one to tap the corner of the “page.” It is called a “touch scroll,” i.e., electronic mimesis of the old volume even to the point, if you so choose, of turning yellowed “pieces of paper” that curl at the edges. The Kindle offers no such mediation, no frills, just straight text absent of the visual fiction (bookshelf, page, dust jacket). It is not sentimental, it does not lie. But Anna Karenina or anything by Henry James, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo or even Stephen King on a Kindle or Nook, is no longer a book but a tablet where one is reading by scroll as did the ancient Egyptians. And so one asks, does this disable reflective thought? …I do wonder whether typical young readers view the analysis of text and the search for deeper levels of meaning as more and more anachronistic because they are so accustomed to the immediacy and seeming comprehensiveness of the on-screen information – all of which is available without critical effort, and without any apparent need to go beyond the information provided. (27)

Yes, the book is a social organism, the fall-guy and locus of rapture. Will the constructive component at the heart of reading begin to change and potentially atrophy as we shift to computer-presented text, in which massive amounts of information appear instantaneously… when seemingly complete visual information is given almost simultaneously, as it is in many digital presentations, is there sufficient time or sufficient motivation to process the information more inferentially, analytically, and critically? (28)

Online, it has become our reflection, our face and profile, the place where we make and remake friends out of strangers, old loves, new affairs, affective bonds defined in a moment: “Confirm,” “Deny,” “Remove.”

How will we let the book of light and air know how much it means to us? The way we can tell whether we really like a book is, do we find ourselves writing our name in it. (29) And what accidental fragments from it will remain? Obviously there is not much papyrus that has survived but there are some fragments. Among them gynecological and veterinary texts. (30)

Spill on the ebook, and it is the end of the book. Blanchot as science fiction. (31)

In truth, the book is a drug, a hankering for interiority, a form of palliative care. (32) It is the web the spider has spun, a labyrinth, hall of mirrors, black hole with a head, a mouth and ears, whose tongue is supple, sweet, and always ready for more. The book is a bed where we dream and lay our head, always a newborn that we raise as we read. Mallarmé was correct, it should be left alone to grow as it wishes rather than to fit the human yawn. (33) Because books are all appetite. “ … always different… furling unfurling…” (34) They happen to be where we join.

Part II: The “rare or auratic” artist’s book (35)

An artist’s book should be a work by an artist self-conscious about book form, rather than merely a highly artistic book. (36)

The singular artist’s book is the ultimate act of intervention in the age of electronic publication. Joanna Drucker calls these “the auratic or rare book,” the playground of the haptic even if many are too delicate to touch. They invoke the unique and unprecedented, a dwelling and space of exploration manifested in worldly materials, concepts, aesthetics and one-of-a-kind moments of creation. They are objects in a room or in the case of Bodo Dietz, even the dividers of a room.

But the artist’s book is not merely the artfully done book. It is an act of self-reflection. (37) Although mute, it can never be dumb, for it too, is a kind of thinking. The moment to self-consciously articulate the metaphysics of the book within the field of either poetics or philosophy. Though they [Blake, Morris, Burgess] were highly engaged with the idea of the book as a visionary or aesthetic form, they did not produce any discussion of the book as an idea in critical or philosophical terms. (38)

Kaestner and Kahn & Selesnick’s actually derive from an early interest in Blake’s illuminated books (as well as “post- modern meta-narratives of writers such as Borges and Calvino and artists such as Joan Fontcuberta”) but they use their artist’s books as an occasion for installations. In other words, it is the artist’s book that initiates the discussion of an eventual work, becoming the very centerpiece of the installation: “our desire to create artist’s books of our work strongly influences the form the work takes.” (39)

Subcutaneous Reckoning, 2011 by Jim Peters and his wife Kathline Carr, directly addresses issues of electronic publication and the necessity or definition of the artist’s book as a physical book yet they use the digital medium to produce the content. Their digital work has become an “intensely personal and romantic form of collaboration.” (40) The digital creates a space for a different kind of collaboration that is generative, fluid and entwined. It allows them to interweave their images and texts in an almost infinite 4-D environment versus say, the 2-dimensional space of the flat canvas or page (for instance the Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers collaborations). But the digital lacks the physical presence and tactility, the additional affect of the analogue book.

Rush Lee is an artist who describes herself work as “drawn to the physicality of the book, as familiar object, medium, and archetypal form,” (41) Her Pod is an example of a piece that is really only about the book. It historizes and comments in a whimsical way on the book as a spherical rather than a rectangular form, a series of scrolls glued together into an object. By using the scroll, her artist’s book comments on the structure of the codex – reading as a habitat made up in the round, circular, not manufactured on lined paper, which is all sequence and vulnerable to interruption. The scroll just carries on endlessly rather than as a piece of staccato reading, flipped page by page. Interruption is coded into the codex yet ironically, none other than Florence Nightingale warned us of the “evils” of interruption. Interruption is an evil to the reader which must be estimated very differently from ordinary business interruptions. The great question with interruptions is not whether it compels you to divert your attention to other facts, but whether it compels you to tune your whole mind to another diapason. (42)

One can’t help but reflect on our current modes of “post-codex,” post-alphabet reading, where the link and the search engine, not to mention the multitasking of everyday life, have made interruption our daily bread, i.e., embedded in the very format of reading online, as well as the quotidian rhythm of our 21st century existence. Lee’s “book” suggests the idea of reading as perpetual motion, the serpent eating its tale.

In the 21st century we can look at the unique artist’s book as a kind of revenge on Walter Benjamin’s canny insight that “aura” is lost in the age of mechanical reproduction: “the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens.” (43) This being-in-the-world is only exacerbated, and reinterpreted, in the age of electronic reproduction where data becomes a floating sea of simulacra. Today, the artist’s book and the book itself, but especially the unique one-of-a-kind book, is absolute “aura.” They take on the role of the return of the repressed, a punch to the face to Baudrillard’s “society” of simulation.

For many of the books in this exhibition, the affect of physicality is intentional and key to the work. For instance, Rachel Rabinovich’s River Library 378 with Footnotes 2011 “written with mud from the world” or Dove Bradshaw’s Indeterminacy / Equivalents, with pages treated with liver of sulfur paired with untreated opposing pages, are constructs of the physical world. Indeterminacy / Equivalents in particular is a kind of living organism because “Over time the chemically treated square affects its opposing square.” (44) The book is the record and activity of this physical process, each page is a creation of the “science of matter” (chemistry) and the work of everyday phenomenological time, the world as it “is.” Bodo Korsig’s books are also about time – “layers of text… not as pages but as aesthetic intervals of time and space” that are so much about “being there” that many are accompanied by performance.

In A Painter’s Daybook, the artist Deem also produces a physical diary of time and experience. He uses languages that he cannot read, so they are only “the letter,” i.e., the alphabet scraping against the post-alphabetic world of digital communication: Writing in this age of photographic and electronic reproduction is fundamentally postalphabetic in that it no longer relies on scripts to store and transmit information: cultural memory is becoming digital, more image than letter.” (45) He imprints the archive of “languages he can’t read” with the day’s leftover paint scraped from her palette, “Wiping the leftover oil paint across an open page.” (46) Although he also does this with languages he can read – as in Immensee where he uses Scott’s Ivanhoe and Greek Drama – the process is the same, turning the page each day so, “when it dries it creates a striated record of the colors I am using in my paintings at the time.” Over what we could call geological as opposed to phenomenological time, as much as a year, the book becomes a diary of a painter’s expressive life as literal stroke and color.

Christine Kruse’s complex diaries of her experience on the road as a fashion model are “Not exactly artist’s sketchbooks – although many of her current large-scale works are derived from their pages. Neither are they simply a personal diaries or journals – though they do provide an intimate record of Kruse’s emotional life”. (47) The diary as a purely verbal description, say the typed or hand-written diary, or even of images as in the case of a video diary, are not enough to reproduce the thickness of her experience. Made out of “small Polaroids with textured tape, watercolor ink, crayon, gouache, metallic paper, newsprint, and colored plastic gels” they are pure “aura” – presence of a life lived in the habitat of textures of feeling.

These diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casuality of the 20th century: the death of affect.
– J.G. Ballard, 1974, Introduction to Crash.

To conclude, it is not that effect is lacking in the digital realm, but the particular effect produced by our connection to the physical world is precisely what artist’s books, by definition, evoke. Even though Rachel Rabinovich’s work is “…interest[ed] in what we don’t see, or in what seems invisible,” and with “how something emerges into view from concealment,” (48) the invisible or hidden is manifested in her work as physical matter and material – mud as the metonym for the actual rivers.

In the same way, all of the artist’s books in this exhibition are a concretization of experience, the production of palpable material effect, the return or insistence of aura in the age of mechanical and electronic reproduction. Although Drucker states, the artist’s book is the quintessential art form of the 20th century (her history was originally written in 1994 and reissued with an Author’s Preface in 2004, the same year as Google Books and the Kindle), she assures us it is not going away anytime soon. (49) In fact, as the physical book itself becomes an auratic object because each choice to read something bound into a book versus reading the electronic signal embedded in a piece of hardware is a choice to maintain connection with the nuances of the haptic, the artist’s book may become even more relevant to the 21st century. Although the book is transforming from solid into air, matter into light, perhaps the moral of the legacy of the actual physical book is that the book has always been disappearing, because that’s what it does as we read or experience it no matter what form it takes, for ultimately it disappears into us, which is why Mallarmé could never manifest his own book, nor left instructions to do so. The book is always different, it changes and switches through a collation of diversity of its sections; thus the linear progression – the one-way system, is avoided in its reading. Moreover, the reading, furling and unfurling, dispersing and uniting, demonstrates its lack of substantiality: it is never there but is always decomposing as it is composed. (50) But in this new age, this fourth evolution, when the book as electromagnetic signal is literally without end, only seeming to end when turned on or off, but never ending because as Avital Ronell has so brilliantly convinced us in her unprecedented and still unsurpassed The Telephone Book (which is, no doubt, an artist’s book), technology is always on, it is the artist’s book, always seeking the auratics of new forms and new language, that beckons the future. Perhaps the unique artist’s book is the punctum of the photograph of the Future. The punctum that was for Roland Barthes both the physical sting and the mark of Time. We don’t have to be in mourning to feel time passing (as his book about photography is suffused with the death of his mother) but presence itself is increasingly taking on the quality of the thing ‘(‘that-has-been’),’ as Barthes described the uncanny sensation of the punctum. (51)

So yes, it is here, the book, and its philosopher stone, the artist’s book, in a world submerged in its own intangibility, not merely a hold-over of modernism but the secret gift in object form – of time to touch and think. (52) If the book can be said to embody the rapture of epistemology, and the artist’s book the space of critical reflection, then each artist’s book exists as a memory and a prophecy: unique in its own existence at the place where it happens to be (Benjamin), the site of the haptic engaged in self-reflection.

Jacqueline Rush Lee: Pod, 2010. 12x12x7.5", manipulated book

Further Reading:
Jacob Epstein on the Espresso Book Machine (via WNYC)

Notes:

1. Broadsheet advertisement for Hartmann Schedel’s World Chronicle, the Nuremberg Chronicle – an encyclopaedic rendering of world history from the Creation to the present (the end of the fifteenth century) with Nuremberg at the center. Quoted in Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 41-42.
2. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, Translated by Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 216.
3. “What Will Happen to Books? Reader, take heart! (Publisher, be very, very afraid.) Internet search engines will set them free, A manifesto by Kevin Kelly,” The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
4. Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): “Over the last five thousand years there have been four transformations of the ‘book’ in which each manifestation has differed from its predecessors in shape and structure… the clay tablet inscribed with a stylus (2500 BC-100 AD), the papyrus roll written on parchment with brush or pen (2000 BC-700 AD), the codex, originally inscribed with a pen (100 AD), and the electronic book, currently in the process of innovation.” 3-4.
5. Tatana Kellner, 71125: 50 Years of Silence. Eva Kellner’s Story.
6. Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995), 96.
7. Drucker, 118.
8. Maurice Blanchot, “The Book to Come,” in A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projects About The Book & Writing, ed. Jerome Rothenburg and Steven Clay, The remarkable footnote 4, 158.
9. Mallarmé, “The Book as Spiritual Instrument,” in Divigations, transl. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 2007) 226.
10. Mallarmé, “Restricted Action,” in Divigations, 215.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “The Book to Come,” in A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projects About The Book & Writing, ed. Jerome Rothenburg and Steven Clay, 151.
12. Drucker, 14.
13. Mallarmé, “The Book as Spiritual Instrument,” in Divagations, 226.
14. Mallarmé, “The Mystery in Letters,” in Divagations, 236.
15. Kilgour, 24.
16. Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp, quoted in Ex Libris: A Small Anthology, printed and bound (and sold), compiled by Christopher Morley (NY, 1936), for the First National Book Fair, sponsored by the New York Times and The National Association of Book Publishers, 1936.
17. Edward Bellamey, Looking Backwards, 1887, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/bellamy/toc.html, 58.
18. Mallarmé, Divagations, 228.
19. Eric G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (University of Philadelphia: Press, 1977), 1. quoted in Kligour, 52.
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhesive.
21. Kilgour, 39.
22. Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 24.
23. Ibid.
24. Drucker, 109.
25. “Publish or Perish: Can the Ipad Topple the Kindle, and Save the Book Business?” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.
26. “Just as the average human carries around the remnants of a prehistoric tail and a useless appendix, the tools we use also bear marks of the evolutionary process from which they arose… Designers in all fields are regularly confronted with versions of this choice: whether to incorporate cues to keep people grounded in what has come before, or scrap convention completely.” NYT, Joshua Brustein.
27. Wolf, 224.
28. Wolf, 16.
29. Trade Winds, No Author in Morley, 20.
30. Kilgour, 30.
31. In the first of two theoretical appendices to his novel Triton (1976) Samuel R. Delany famously discusses the rhetorical strategies of science fiction, which is the literalization of metaphors: “Such sentences as ‘His world exploded,’ or ‘She turned on her left side,’ as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one, of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac Rosalind, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.” Triton, Samuel R. Delany (New York: Bantam books, 1983) Appendix A, 3.
32. Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Mania, Addiction (University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
33. Mallarmé, “Displays,” Divagations, 223.
34. Mallarmé, quoted in Blanchot, in Rothenberg and Clay, footnote 7, 159.
35. Joanna Drucker’s history of the artist’s book, “the rare or auratic book” is one chapter among fourteen.
36. Drucker, Ibid.
37. It is ultimately a product of modernism, a condition of reflexivity and breaking with the past (the conventional codex). This is what Joanna Drucker means when she states, “the artist’s book is the quintessential 20th century art form.” It emerges precisely in the early to mid 20th century, with precedents in the late 19th century modernism epitomized by Mallarmé.
38. Drucker, 33.
39. Kaestner and, Kahn & Selesnick, Artists’ statement.
40. Jim Peter’s and Kathline Carr’s, Artists’ statement.
41. Rush Lee, Artist statement.
42. Florence Nightingale, quoted by P.G. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, (Letter to a Man of Business Who Desired to Make Himself Better Acquainted with Literature,) Morley, 26.
43. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1955) 218.
44. Dove Bradshaw, Artist statement.
45. Charles Bernstein, ”The Art of Immemorability,” in Rothenberg and Clay, 512.
46. DEEM, Artist statement.
47. Christina Kruse, Artist statement.
48. Rachel Rabinovich, Artist statement.
49. Drucker, 2.
50. Mallarmé, in Blanchot, Rothenberg and Clay, Footnote 7, 159.
51. From Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, “A photograph’s punctum is that accident [of photographic detail] which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me),… for me punctum is also sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a caste of the dice.” (slightly rearranged, 27) and “I now know that there exists another puntum (another stgmatum’) than the ‘detail.’ This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation. These two quotes are taken from “Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on Photograph and their relevance for photos found in second-hand shops” an online essay found at: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/array/instant.relatives/b+b.html
52. Wolf, 221.

What: A music services company and record label with an emphasis on innovative digital marketing strategies. The company blog is a stimulating source for stories about copyright and technological issues around music.

Where: São Paulo, Brazil

History: Founded 2007 by Juliano Polimeno. In 2008, the release of Cérebro Electronico’s Pareço Moderno included a free EP distributed via 50 blogs. Jumbo Elektro’s 2009 album Terrorist!? launched a Fan-to-Fan platform, a web-based affiliate scheme.

Remit: Juliano Polimeno: “Currently, the blogs represent an important interface between artist and audience. It’s through these spontaneous album reviews, links to mp3s and sites – and the concerts – that we can really assess the receptivity of the musical work of a particular artist in early career. These blogs are usually maintained by people really passionate about music, they spend part of their time reviewing discs, compressing, tagging and searching for information to express their love (or hate) for music. It is the music serving the personality of each one, acting an an identification and recognition tool for individuals with similar tastes. In short, the real ‘social network’ in which music is the aggregator”.

Artists include:
01 Druques: Killers or Strokes Brazilian style. Marcelo Mesquita’s video (below) for 2008’s ‘Não Assim’ (‘Not So’) was a provocative take on the nature of popular entertainment.

02 Luísa Maita: Phonobase offer management and booking for this 29-year-old who brings a strong bossa nova and samba influence to contemporary pop. Maita’s solo debut Lero-Lero had a European and US release last May.

03 Jumbo Elektro: There’s long been a strain of the whimsical surreal to Brazilian pop. JE’s 2004 debut was subtitled The Very Best of Jumbo Elektro and their songs have titles like ‘Dylan Sings Bowie’ and ‘She Has a Penis’.

Further Reading:
Official Phonobase site (in Portuguese)

The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture – John Battelle

See all books by John Battelle at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted history of Google, although that company looms large throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of online contextual advertising which has irrevocably changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle recognises that the real story about the search engines is actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms race between the big players: what’s important is what the very act of searching for information on the Internet means for business and consumer alike. The simple act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried out billions of times a day and in totality provides an unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access to information are also being transformed by the nature of search. Put it this way – once the Net becomes a daily part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it.

It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when discussing search engines, given the frankly insane stats generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3 billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of $300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightforward business biography of Google for the good reason that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted hundreds of interviews with every key player in the industry to piece together an excellent overview of the industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily interested in the implications of what the massive leaps in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives: how search engines organise and present information in response to our queries. As more and more of our lives moves to being managed through the Net, the companies who can correctly analyse what we are looking for and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the more users they have, the more they can analyse what’s been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Intentions, and mastering the analysis of all those billions of queries is where the money lies.

The most obvious example of the commercial gold in search queries is contextual advertising, those text ads that turn up next to your search results that are related to your query. Still in its infancy, contextual advertising has revolutionised online advertising and had a huge knock-on effect on old media. The targetted nature of contextual ads – they only get served to someone who’s interested in that subject; the ad buyer only pays when someone clicks the link – has meant thousands of businesses that couldn’t afford to advertise can now do so and, crucially, get results of real money-in-the-bank business driven by those ads. Shoestring businesses have enjoyed massive sales boosts as a result of this approach, without having to spend vast sums on marketing. The joy here is that everyone wins – the customer finds what they want, the business gets business, and the search engine makes money for connecting the two together. Advertising becomes – shock, horror – useful and even valued, rather than an irritant. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway, and Battelle provides case studies showing both the up and potentially disastrous downside of relying on search engines to drive business your way.

Contextual ads have not only helped advertisers but also website owners too. The Net’s free culture has always meant that paying for content has been a thorny issue – surfers loathe registering for access to newspaper archives online, much less paying for it. Google’s Adsense program provided a way for sites to have relevant ads to their content appear on the page and in doing so, allowed site owners to earn some handy pocket change too. (Of course, I’m biased here: in the two years I’ve been running Google Adsense on Spike, its monthly revenue has steadily increased as Google tweak the system to display more relevant ads).

As Battelle has pointed out on his Searchblog, now is a great time to be a publisher on the Net, because there are more and more easy ways of earning cash from content. Blog networks like Weblogs, Inc which earn over $2000 a day from Adsense, or probloggers like Darren Rowse who recently earned $15000 in one month from Adsense, show that there’s real money to be made from providing top quality, regular content. Indeed, Battelle has recently launched Federated Media Publishing, which will be teaming up with selected sites to manage matching ads to their content. Battelle, a former editor of Wired and founder of the Industry Standard, is already “band manager” for leading blog BoingBoing, and has considerably increased that site’s revenues since coming aboard.

As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in the industry. There’s little of the usual business pomposity about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his material but confident enough to not deluge the reader with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free.

The same can’t be said for the future of search engines. With the realisation that the potential of search has only just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership of personal information is the major concern, with some beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” moral code has also begun, with the company’s current leadership of the search field making it walk point for the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat out to find ways to counter these emergent problems, and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and mutability, it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be no clouds on the horizon.

For now, though, search remains a huge success story – Google may well be about to have its own stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the contextual ad field, each looking to get the competitive edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use their particular system. Most importantly, all three are continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice the Database of Intentions to give you what you want quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the user experience first and working backwards. In the last five years, it has continually gone its own way and managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration that within five years everything in the search world can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it probably will do again.