Do Rainbows End?

I found this book to be fascinating. This book overlays the digital onto the physical world in a way that raises a lot of big issues that are tied up with our newfound digitality. Here are my highlights:

1. On page 33, Roberts comments on the watching other people flail around as they are communicating with other people virtually, or are experiencing a virtual overlay that Roberts can't yet see. He calls this "a parody of cellphone discourtesy." The term that I've heard used for this sort of public discourse is "mobile privacy." Personally, I hate talking on the cellphone on the bus or in a crowded place, but it's become a common occurrence for us, and one that we are expected to ignore or, at best, tolerate. I think this gets back to my first post about who is blogging and why, and how it seems we're becoming a culture where are lives are "in view" on a constant basis. I believe much of this has to do with the technology (simply having the ability to be on the bus and talk with someone who isn't on the bus with you). But is this "mobile privacy" based on our constant going, our need to squeeze productivity into every moment of our lives only now facilitated by the technology? Or, did the technology raise our expectations for productivity?

2. Mobile privacy is predicated on the notion that everyone else around you doing the same thing; they are also always connected and plugged-in. That brings me to the next point of interest from Vinge's book, the idea of "crowdsourcing." Vinge construct this notion in two parts. First, on page 214, as Tommie is talking about how he came up with solutions for getting them into the biolabs, he effectively says that he sent the information/problem out to the whole web community, but he broke it up and had it solved piecemeal. This is a fantastic idea. But I think that it is part two of Vinge's crowdsourcing that really makes waves. On page 189, Vinge reverses the idea of sending information out to be solved when he brings up the idea of a single person collecting the information. The Mysterious Stranger says to Robert, "Knowledge is piled metaphorical light-years deep. Given that, the truly golden skill is the one I possess--to bring together the knowledge and abilities that make solutions" (189). This sounds like a page out of Lev Manovich's work on the role of the database. As I recall, for Manovich the database is the foundation of new media. Rather than new media or new technologies creating new experiences for us, now new experiences will come from the indexing of millions of pieces of information and our role in sorting them and putting them together into something coherent. We as individuals will have the power to customize any and all based on our proficiency in databasing. This speaks to my initial post as well, in that knowledge has now become an issue of filtering. It is rapidly becoming the case that information is no longer hard to come by, but rather we need to be able to sort and process these mountains of knowledge and distill them into something manageable and usable.

3. Along with my interests in space and place, I was interested by Vinge's discussion of the physicality of the university and of the library itself. For example, on page 116 when Vinge paraphrases the bible, "What shall it profit a university, if it shall enroll five hundred thousand, and lose its own soul?" And later on 268 when, during the virtual battle, the library "decides" the victor. In my other class this semester, Visual Narratives, we've been looking at Dada and Surrealism and, of course, have come across Duchamp and his readymades. For Duchamp, it was the idea of the artist "nominating" a bottle rack, a urinal, a piece of junk as art. The artist had the power to proclaim anything art despite what the rest of us saw as artful. The reason I bring Duchamp up is that I'm curious how "spatial nomination" works in Vinge. If a person can overlay any sort of virtual covering onto a physical space, does that space lose its sense of meaning? What happens to the notion of "place" when a person can "experience" it from anywhere? Robert's caveat it similar to my own about the blending of virtual and physical space: if we all see what we want to see, how do we see, and more importantly, be collectively? Doesn't the joy of physical places come from sharing the same experience?

4. My last point is more of a question for the class. On page 39 Vinge notes that, "For Robert Gu, real creativity most often came after a good night's sleep...'sleeping on it' worked for him." Much later on page 277, Vinge says, "Rabbit was not always fast...he had to sleep on it." Wow! What are we to make of this? At first I thought that Rabbit was somehow Robert's disconnected creativity or soul. Going back to Dada and Surrealism, is this Vinge positing a commentary on the separation of mind and body in the new digital age? Why do these two characters share the same process for creative problem solving when it is something that seems very personal and unique? I put this out there for anyone with any ideas on the subject. I'm stumped and am excited to hear what others have to say.