Article: 1425 of sci.virtual-worlds From: randy@xanadu.com (Randy Farmer -- A survivor of the Lost Patrol) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: 2Cyberconf: An article Date: 10 May 91 17:00:03 GMT Organization: AMIX, The American Information Exchange The Second International Conference on Cyberspace: Literary Criticism Collides With Software Engineering by F. Randall Farmer This April saw the Second International Conference on Cyberspace; it was even more colorful and controversial than its predecessor. The collected abstracts listed 98 papers, covering a wide range of topics like implementation, representation, 'wiring up', AI, hermaneutics, artistry, religion, sex, fractals, cinema, anthropology, cychology (sic), ghosts, mummies, architecture, post-modernism, jazz, supercomputing, photorealism, dimensionality, space and time. Only 15 papers were actually presented. And, as you might expect, the content, style and state of preparation of the papers varied widely. Over half the presentations were given by software engineers about the cyberspaces they were building and what they learned from them. These talks were relatively clear, even if sometimes a little disorganized. Some of them contained technical material, often prefaced with the disclaimer "I'm sorry, but I'm going to get technical for a few minutes". I saw some eyes glaze over in the audience until the jargon was over. The remainder of the papers were presented by academics, in the traditional language of the literary critic, examining everything from cyberspace as master narrative to a character by character analysis of Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy. I'm certain these presentations were professional enough, and I truly believe that there were some points they were trying to get across, but, frankly, I couldn't figure out what they were. After talking with other software engineers, I discovered that I was not alone. The title of one of the papers helps to illustrate my confusion: "Cyberspace and the Proprioceptive Coherence: A Proposal." This sent me scrambling for my dictionary as soon as I got home. The language of literary criticism left me playing catch-up with the presenter, and falling three words further behind every paragraph. One programmer quipped that to his untrained ear these presentations sounded like "polysyllabic word salad." So, these two worlds collided due to confusions in purpose, language, and even in the definition of cyberspace. The software engineers were looking for information about where to go, and what to do next. I presume (and hope) that the literary critics were trying to bring artistic, literary, social, and humanistic concerns to cyberspace. It is clear that both groups will benefit from understanding the purpose of the other. But understanding the purpose is useless if the message itself is not also understood by the audience. I am one of the many software engineers in the audience who was bewildered by the language of the literary critics at this conference. Perhaps an explanation of how we think might shed some light on why. I'll use myself as an example. I am one of those lucky few who have actually implemented a cyberspace system and survived to tell the tale. Like many others, I have a few years of college, and lots of hands-on experience. Like many others, I don't spend much time studying the humanities or arts or reading the great French philosophers. My thought processes are instead dedicated to debugging. Debugging is usually defined as finding the failure points in a computer program, but software engineers also debug concepts and their implementations. Our emphasis is on finding an adequate initial design, and modifying it based on feedback until we get one that works--not a something perfect, just one that is functional. The advantage to this approach is that we can start working right away, and therefore have a working prototype done more quickly. Of course this also means that we are prone to make mistakes early on, and unlikely to get a solution that is optimal or even correct. In complicated systems, it is a fundamental reality that perfect solutions are a practical impossibility anyway. So like the scientist, we need gobs and gobs of input early on, to shape our systems, and help us improve them over time. Software engineers want input! This is very important to us because we are building cyberspace now. We want insights from people who are non-engineers: artists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, archaeologists, historians, and philosophers. This kind of communication is essential if cyberspace is fulfill its potential as a powerful medium for interpersonal communications instead of becoming just another rich boy's toy, sold to the wealthy consumer through places like "The Sharper Image Catalog." However undesirable we find this latter outcome, it is a very real possibility because cyberspace systems are consumer products: they want to be built, packaged, and shipped. As in the development of all consumer products, time is a most precious commodity. Time is so valuable that several well known cyberspace implementors have stopped attending conferences--except when they can be used as advertising vehicles--in favor of getting their systems built. This trend is likely to continue if the conferences don't offer something tangible. Presentations in the style of the literary critic aren't very tangible to us because the language used is not concrete enough for swift or accurate comprehension, extension or refutation. In short, software engineers can't debug literary criticism, so we don't get it. We can't even tell if there is any 'it' to get! Conferences are for sharing information and insights. They should be very important to the cyberspace researcher. It is this assertion that led me to write this article. But at this year's conference we didn't share very well. We collided with each other, confused in purpose and in language. So, given that software engineers debug systems, are busy building cyberspace now, are still making efforts to hear others' concerns, and given that literary critics are ready to offer their insights on how worlds work, how can we bridge this communications gap? Perhaps we could try using one or more of the tools that other conferences have found effective for dealing with these problems. The community could create 'Conference Submissions Guidelines' requiring clear statements, in plain language that avoids jargon, of both the paper's purpose and applicability to current or future cyberspace systems. The guidelines committee should encourage diversity: the request for clarity is intended to make papers understandable across disciplines, not to restrict the participants to a single style or approach. The chief drawback of this proposal is that it introduces the problems of a review process. Alternatively, the conference could split into a number of tracks. This would allow more papers to be presented, published, and would not require any standards of language. This would allow attendees to customize use of their time, but would not increase inter-disciplinary communications. It could also reduce the intimacy that the conference has enjoyed thus far. These measures are a matter for the cyberspace community to discuss and decide upon. To that end, I propose a multi-disciplinary panel for discussion of these and other suggestions the community may have. The Usenet newsgroup sci.virtual-worlds might well serve the purpose, considering both the origins of this conference and the wide dispersion of the participants. Last year, I was able to take at least some germ of an idea away from each and every presentation. Sadly, that was not the case this year. If this article touches the community in the way it was intended- -to encourage open and plain communications--I eagerly look forward to next year's conference in Montreal. Article: 1431 of sci.virtual-worlds From: benedikt@vitruvius.ar.utexas.edu (Michael Benedikt) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: More on Cyberspace Conference 2 Date: 14 May 91 18:05:12 GMT Organization: University of Washington Open letter, in reply to Randy Farmer's review of The Second International Conference on Cyberspace Dear Randy, Out of town most of last week, I just read (and re-read) your piece about the Santa Cruz Conference. For the most part I think it is spot on, but I would like to offer my own perspective. First let me say that I share(d) your frustration, not only because I have (for better or worse) relatively well constructed models of parts of cyberspace worked out now, some technical know-how, and some real opportunities to build them, and not only because I did/could/would not present these models at the Conference for fear of the appearance of program committee nepotism, but because I too was dismayed--though not surprised--at the gap between the software engineers (SEs) and the "literary critics" (LCs), as you call them. (This leaves out, of course, the architects, artists, film makers/students, communications theorists, mathematicians, CIS managers, etc, that are neither SCs or LCs. I, for example, actually move in both worlds and understood over half, I think, of what both the SEs and the LCs said!) I guess where I disagree a little with your observations, in so far as they generalize to participants, is that I thought the clash of worlds was often also a creative one. I heard as many bewildered SEs somehow pleased that they had heard and thought something other than SE talk and SE problems, and as many LCs realizing that they needed more technical expertise and a more constructive mind-set if they wanted to continue to contribute. Things could have gotten ugly but didn't. Things could have gotten self-congratulatory and clubby but didn't. For the scene of a major mix of paradigms I felt a lot of "this hurts good" vibes rather than outright rejection, although clearly there was indeed a little of the latter. As for your suggestions, again, I think they are well made and well taken. As a program committee member this year, I should tell you that every submission was judged and scored out of 25 points on five criteria by each of the six people on the committee. My own score sheet reflected far more representation by VR and on-line system builders, CS theorists, programmers, and creative artists than literary, political and anthropological thinkers; but then, I assume that, counted with the others' scoring, my judgments were fairly moderated. Also, you must realize that making judgments from abstracts is a risky business. The alternative is to ask for complete papers, as does SIGGRAPH etc. I believe that in few years, when the volume of detailed and ongoing cyberspace projects picks up and when the cyberspace conference series converts its newness into earned prestige, it will become both possible and necessary to choose presentations this way. Judging the abstracts, one had either to choose between insightful overview but no real research or creative work, and real research/creation but in a fragment--say some scientific visualization, simulation, or a multimedia project. Finding presentations that would contain elements of both, that were in some sense "large," was difficult. By way of remedy, for me, the breakdown of papers should not be along SE vs. LC lines but along general/specific lines. For me, the very act of identifying "fragments"-- projects that were perhaps not chiefly motivated by the notion of cyberspace as such--and collecting them for a conference ("re-troping them" as the LCs would say, "re-contextualizing" them elements of cyberspace as the rest of us would say) is in the project of cyberspace itself. Now, perhaps you would disagree, but from where I sit I don't see very much progress in the field on a year to year basis. Not in networking, not in VR, not in games, graphics, CSCW, CAD, or on-line life. This is part of my frustration. Implementation and progress is always slower than desire and the imagination, and for cyberspace, inherently visionary, this is particularly true. Of course, an increasingly short-term-market-driven computer industry in the U.S., much of it on the ropes today, does not help. Nor do our universitys' shrinking research budgets. The hype around VR, which is what most people think cyberspace is, has gotten old, and the appetite generated for virtual experiences and applications is considerable. Given this, constructing conferences about cyberspace may well entail admitting visions, criticism (literary and otherwise), fragments, re- iterations, as well as reports from the "trenches"...for a little while yet. One alternative, I have sometimes thought, would be for the conference to go biannual. Then there would be sure to be technological as well as theoretical and critical on each occasion. But I think this scheme will let things get cold. It will also fail in its mission to provide and hold open a cross-disciplinary, face-to-face forum that is grwoing steadily, and filling with new faces. C. P. Snow identified the "two cultures" of the humanities and the sciences over 30 years ago. Seperated, they are both alive and well, of course, but earlier in the century the split was not clear or vindictive, as Don Byrd pointed out in his review of the Santa Cruz conference on this newsgroup a week or so ago. The absolutely amazing and infinitely valuable thing about the topic of cyberspace, and the conference series that bears the name, is the way in which the two cultures have finally to meet each other again over a very large idea, one large enough to shape the electronic future of our society. This, surely, is as it should be. I hope this begins the kind of dialog you call for, Randy. And I hope you will participate in the planning of the Montreal Conference. Best wishes, Michael -- AMIX Debate--Worlds Collide: Lit Crit vs. Software EngineersPubl: RandyFarmer $1.00 On Delivery Articles folder Text--William Bricken amplifies Randy's thoughts.. 127 lines 11/01/91ΚΚ4:06pm Article: 1465 of sci.virtual-worlds From: williamb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: 2ndCyberspace Conference Date: 20 May 91 06:52:01 GMT Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Here are some comments to amplify Randy Farmer's very diplomatic posting on 2ndCyberSpace: Damn it, Cyberspace *is* a technical subject. No one should have to apologize for sharing the technical details, that is what conferences are all about. And good cross-disciplinary papers at Cyberspace conferences will enhance our knowledge both of our central interest in the virtual and of a speciality domain which intersects with the virtual. My puzzlement at 2ndCyberspace was "How come no one is talking about the same thing?" Why was *the virtual* so different across disciplines? Is cyberspace really so amorphous that it readily incorporates models of society as mummies? So ill-conceived that it is defined by some minor characters in a small work of science fiction? So ambiguous that photos of the Iraq war combine with clips from a Walt Disney movie to anchor its essence? This is what I tell my Virtual World Development class: If you are not an implementer, you must express your worlds formally in order to be understood. Try this example: Imagine a virtual cube in space. Grab a pair of diagonal vertices with each virtual hand and pull. What happens? The point is that the answer is not consensual. Strongly held intuitions vary across people. What happens is task dependent. What happens is idiosyncratic. What happens is computational. A common ground for what happens can be negotiated across participants. Negotiation requires a common language, but the *computational process* implementing cyberspace constrains the choice of languages. Which is to say: If you want to talk about cyberspace, and hope to make sense, then you must be prepared to talk mathematically. (Yes, I believe programming is specified by mathematics, in its broadest and most intimately imperfect sense.) The painted-into-a-corner test: Can a literary or social critic say anything about cyberspace? 1) An existing cyberspace could be evaluated as a literary experience. It would have been great to see Virtual Seattle analyzed for dramatic tension. 2) Responses to cyberspace experiences could be described sociologically. It would have been great to see the 200+ VR articles analyzed for ethnic biases. 3) Cocktail party stories about cyberspace could be criticized literarily. It would have been great to know just how much misinformation is embodied in the urban folklore of cyberspace. If "cyberspace" is defined as all media and all literature and all imagination and all sorts of things, then let's meet after the circus to talk about the work. If it is not all things to all people, then let's define taxonomies, let's focus on communal definition of what it is that we are spending our lives building. What we heard a lot of at 2ndCyberspace was contempory criticism of , and that fill-in-the-blank happened to be "cyberspace". The philosophical position was more important than the content, so it really didn't matter if we didn't develop a group understanding of cyberspace, so long as our politics matched. Now, I believe that cyberspace is something to be explored and experienced. Something that will require conceptual pioneering, to dwell, to learn, to report. I believe that the cyberspace is more important than current theories of criticism, that it will redefine criticism as we explore it. We really need information, not analysis. I'd suggest focusing the content of the next conference on the definition and mutual understanding of the subject matter. The central idea is a convergence of vocabulary; the important point is that presented papers should help the convergence by paying particular attention to the *intersection* of fields. Here is one possibility: DEFINITIONS Cyberspace: electronically mediated experience. Virtual Reality: broad bandwidth first-person participation in cyberspace. Artificial Reality: third-person virtual reality. Virtual Worlds: virtual reality configured and presented for natural perception. Virtual Body/Virtual Environment: the coupled subjective/objective components of virtual worlds. Presence: the goodness measure of experience in cyberspace FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS Participant: environmentally interactive sentience. Inclusion: subjective experience of environmental closure. Information: comprehendible symbolic structure. Using this vocabulary, cyberspace is electronic information which mediates by inclusion the experience of participants; it is being inside symbolic structure. William Bricken Article: 1478 of sci.virtual-worlds From: eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: 2ndCyberspace Conference Date: 22 May 91 01:06:38 GMT Organization: Cognitive Science Lab, Princeton U. In article <1991May20.090324.9906@milton.u.washington.edu> williamb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken) writes: ; ; ; ;Damn it, Cyberspace *is* a technical subject. No one should have to ;apologize for sharing the technical details, that is what conferences ;are all about. Damn it, how soon we forget. Cyberspace *is* Gibson's metaphor for the universe of communication. The technical implementation of cyberspace, if you mean the neurotechnical interface, is potentially eons away, and the technical implementation of virtual reality is hardly in the same league as the much greater question, what to do with the damned thing. And that is not so much a "technical" issue as a problem of extending the imagination, inventing new strictures of information and experience that go beyond our presently impoverished concepts of the nature of any reality at all. The "hand in your face" concept of virtual reality is, after all, just one of many possible ways of enclosing a subject in a computer-generated universe, and probably not one of the more interesting ways. Article: 1482 of sci.virtual-worlds From: williamb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Bricken) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: 2ndCyberspace Conference Date: 23 May 91 00:43:37 GMT Organization: University of Washington, Seattle I posted the commentary on 2ndCyberspace to initiate a discussion of what it is that we are consensually hallucinating about. So here goes: In article <1991May22.185610.4614@milton.u.washington.edu> eliot@phoenix.princet on.edu (Eliot Handelman) writes: >Damn it, how soon we forget. Cyberspace *is* Gibson's metaphor for the >universe of communication. I am not a Gibson scholar. I disagree with the above generalization. From reading the Gibson books, he seems to be presenting a fantasy of neural interface to digital data which is experienced as a reality. The universe of communication includes real world interaction. My goal, however, is to identify just what is meant by terms like "universe of communication". Where are the delimiters which make the concept comprehendible? What is *not* cyberspace? >The technical implementation of cyberspace, >if you mean the neurotechnical interface, is potentially eons away, There is a community of folks currently implementing cyberspace. No, we do not know a symbolic structure for biological cognition. I personally do not believe such a structure exists (see Putnam's Representation and Reality). Is it possible to talk about Cyberspace from a perspective of actual work in the field? >and the technical implementation of virtual reality is hardly in >the same league as the much greater question, what to do with the >damned thing. And that is not so much a "technical" issue as a problem >of extending the imagination, inventing new strictures of information >and experience that go beyond our presently impoverished concepts of >the nature of any reality at all. I believe that the technical implementation is tightly coupled to questions like what it is and what can we do with it. To be redundant: Just what is the *it* that we are doing something with? Neurotechnical linkage? (no) Science fiction stories? (no) Implementations? (perhaps). Implementation is the byproduct of generative theory building, a methodology which expects you to be able to demonstrate what you are talking about. In all the implementations I have been involved with, extending the imagination, defining new strictures, and studying closely the apparent nature of reality is a central focus. It's just that in a realm as treacherous as metaphysics, we have found it necessary to be as clear as possible, in particular to express ideas as implementations and then to experientially validate the ideas within the VR implementation. I believe that the new strictures will arise out of experience within implementations. What is irritating is hearing various parties expound the rules and limitations and character of cyberspace without direct experience in VR. The choice of the word "stricture" (an abnormal narrowing) is apt. I believe that cyberspace has laws. If we can find consensus that cyberspace is expressed computationally, then we know where to look for constraint: cyberspace is digital and algorithmic. One of the first things you learn from watching many people experience VR is that cyberspace is a relation between a sentience and an algorithm. Physical reality is a similar relation, between a sentience and a set of laws. VR provides the first tool of metaphysics, it permits us to ask comparative questions between two relations, coming to a more eclectic notion of reality. I share Eliot's apparent desire to find more satisfactory definitions of reality. The central problem is that *representation*, particularly in the form in the form of words, abstracts reality, and that abstraction denies reality (see Korzybski, Spencer-Brown, Watts). So I have a great difficulty finding guidance about the nature of reality from streams of tokens. Fortunately, VR provides access to experience that both has a digital substrate and does not require linear symbolism. This dual capability (transparent representation) allows us to experiment with symbolic experience, to form new regimes of semantics. So that's my response to "what to do with the damned thing". Define it as what exists, and use that as a tool to guide us to an understanding of the reality of the virtual. As we construct different generative theories, new ways to in-form, we can explore the new possibilities. So, a final lobbying effort: Programs are words, science fiction is words, discussion is words. Which words describe cyberspace? If cyberspace is electronically mediated experience, then we must minimally address the words that constitute the electronic implementation. More directly: It is the words of the implementation which define what we can experience as cyberspace. Words that are not implementations can guide the construction of implementations to the extent that they are stated formally. william Article: 1487 of sci.virtual-worlds From: zippy@gumby.Altos.COM (Tim Mcfadden) Subject: Re: 2Cyberconf: An article Date: 23 May 91 01:31:44 GMT Organization: Altos Computer Systems, San Jose, CA This is a specific recommendation for the format of cyberconf3. Its goal is to is to express a concrete suggestion and a vote from a concerned cyberpunk. It's based on the ideas from the similar postings of Farmer, Benedikt, and Bricken. They have already made comments on the "Two Cultures" we live in and the format of the conference. --------------------- Why we need to change -------------------- Timing is everything. There does not exist a cyberspace yet of the sort we wish to build, so unless we change our priorities to encourage builders as presenters we will not attract them. The heavy weights (except for some current VR people) in the applicable fields (AI, computer networks, distributed systems, etc.) are not being featured as presenters. If we are not the forum for the cyberspace engineers, then we can only talk about what the furniture of cyberspace might be like and won't be listened to during planning and early implementation (the next decade or so). ------------------- Recommendation ---------------- Establish two sets of independent standards for presenters, with roughly equal presentation time or perhaps more presentation time for category 1 (muli-tracks are a similar proposal): 1 | alpha ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nuts and bolts of cyberspace engi- | Humans *in* cyberspace. The experience neering, e.g., distributed | of cyberspace, the politics and systems, VR in cyberspace, etc.; | sociology of cyberspace. Who will all the usual engineering and | pay for cyberspace and who will scientific topics as set out in | control who gets into cyberspace? the syllabus. | The philosophical problems of "bottom up." | cyberspace; mind/body problem, etc. | "top down." | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ Defense --------------------------- "Timing is everything" - Musashi Myamoto Musashi was a humanist (perhaps a homicidal maniac by our standards) who tried to learn as much as he could from every craft. The explicit purpose of the recommendation is to gather implementors around the banner of "cyberspace" in the next few years. This is a new goal for the conference, but, if it is not met, there may be no point in having cyberconf4. Benedikt's comment about timing is that we may have to have biannual cyberconfs, because of the rate of engineering development - facts are not being created fast enough. "Cyberspace" may have to be renamed "playing around with data goggles on several computers at once." and our chance as cyberspace implementors, designers, pundits, flaneurs, etc., may be lost. This is not a "humanist bashing" proposal. There are far more forums for humanist comment in this area than there are forums for cyberspace. I also can to speak of Eintein, Jung, Pynchon, Minsky, and Merleau-Ponty in the same sentence. <<<< see ? For all of us, it is a matter of sailing with the morning tide or waiting for someone to invent the hovercraft. The first question I asked at cyberconf1 was, "how do we make room in cyberspace for those who like to fly like eagles and those who like to analyze things with diamond sharp tools?" -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Fall on your decks cyberpunks, we jacked in at Austin and you were not there". All opinions expressed here are mine and not necessarily those of Acer-Altos. Tim McFadden - Acer-Altos Computer Systems Article: 1532 of sci.virtual-worlds From: sstone@weber.UCSD.EDU (Allucquere Rosanne Stone) Subject: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies! Date: 31 May 91 02:42:42 GMT Organization: University of Washington WORLDS COLLIDE REDUX Allucquere Stone Chair, 2Cybercon Randy has raised a bunch of issues at the same time, without clearly identifying all of them, so I'm going to start off by listing the ones I see. I have no doubt that people are going to come right in behind me and list others, but these are the ones I want to mention first. First is the way Randy describes what he saw and heard at 2Cybercon, which was to divide up the talks into two groups--software engineers and literary critics. This is going to upset the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, and businesspeople who also presented at the conference. I think their invisibility is not accidental; it's built into the way Randy saw things, and it's important to what I have to say. I find Randy honestly puzzled, but I also think that the kind of analysis that he does in his letter points toward a part of the problem that he doesn't see. Put it this way: I don't think there were two worlds at 2Cybercon. There were many worlds, each with its own approach, each with its own way of speaking. But somehow, everything that wasn't software engineering looked like literary criticism. Why do you suppose this is? (You can tell I've got my back up, because I also presented about 10 minutes of my own stuff. It wasn't software engineering, but if there was literary criticism in it I'll eat the podium. :-) Now I'm just going to talk about software engineers and literary critics for a bit, leaving out the multiplicity of fields and professional languages that were spoken and that Randy either accidentally missed or chose not to see or report. My shtick, if I have one, is code-switching. So I speak most of the languages that were being spoken at 2Cybercon. Barbara Joans, who spoke last, specifically addressed one of the problems of groups that don't see each other equally well. My hit on what happened is similar to hers, pretty much, which is that the SEs jargon (and I include myself in that group) is transparent to SEs; and further, LCs (I'm in that group too) are not trained, as are SEs, to know how to say "Now I'm going to get technical". As a social scientist (yes, I'm also one of them) I see that cultivating jargon is important for any group in order to create group identity group identity and cohesion. I also see that SEs and LCs have different ideas about how jargon works, what purposes it serves, and in particular how to deploy it. And from my vantage point, I would suggest that one of the things I might have done to improve communication was to have better explained to the LCs the extremely wide diversity of the attendees' backgrounds and disciplines, and to have suggested that they also be prepared with a kind of general-language version of their work, as I usually do with my own stuff no matter which jargon it's written in. But part of the problem rests with the SEs just as it does with the LCs, because SEs are so used to swimming in the heady waters of the SE community that communication is just so *easy*, and communicating ideas about computing and graphics is second-nature. This is very much like being a tourist in Mexico and just naturally assuming that people who interact with you are going to do it in English. Remember the "ugly American" and "why don't these natives learn to speak properly?" Let me say that another way: If you *really* want the advantages of interdisciplinary conversation--and I mean REAL interdisciplinary stuff, not just different segments of the same large field--then you are going to have to WORK at it. Because it is not easy. Star Trek to the contrary, talking across worlds is never easy. But if you put out the energy to meet people from *really* different worlds (and for the sake of this argument let's say I mean LCs) anywhere near halfway, you may discover that their ideas help after all. And by work I might mean for openers nothing more strenuous than asking "Could you explain that again, a bit more simply?" Speaking as a codeswitcher--someone who lives in those boundaries I keep writing about--I heard great stuff being said by both SEs and LCs. I also heard frustration. And I also heard arrogance...on the part of some LCs, who assumed that everybody understood them, and on the part of many SEs, who assumed that it was naturally the LCs' job to learn how to speak like "normal people"--which is to say, them. Are the SEs willing to meet the LCs halfway? How do you think worthwhile things are going to happen if BOTH sides don't learn something about the other's jargon? Why *didn't* the SEs use more technical language? Maybe what happened was that the people we are calling LCs were more willing to get seriously down and dirty, and more into the deeply technical side of what they do, than the SEs were. Maybe they expected more from the SEs. Maybe they took the SEs by surprise. And if so, why didn't the SEs take advantage of the moment and say "I don't understand a thing you said?" What was accomplished by not asking and going silently away? Maybe we all might have been enlightened by a little fast footwork on the part of some of the speakers in the general direction of codeswitching--that is, talking across disciplinary boundaries. I want to emphasize this again: There is really no middle ground of language in which everybody is equally intelligible to everybody else. The unhappy truth is that what looks like a middle ground to one person is somebody else's jargon. In this case it happens to be *our* jargon--fairly well-educated, mildly techie, and dare I add, white middle-class jargon. Which is why everybody else seems unintelligible...and why everybody else sounds like an LC. Put another way, if you aren't one of the faithful then you're an infidel. That's not meant to be nasty, just to point out that that's the way we all usually think. Okay, now listen up. This is your 1991 Chair speaking. I never promised you a rose garden. If you want the goodies, you have to work for them. All of this is new stuff to lots of us-- in particular having so many people from so many *really different* disciplines, with their own jargons, in one room. Randy suggests parallel sessions. Parallel sessions are a great idea, but intimacy and the kind of communication intimacy fosters are more important...to this particular conference. As a partial consequence that means that Cybercon is always going to be small, and again next year more people are going to want to come than we can fit in. That's part of Cybercon's charter, and it is not a decision we made lightly. An interdisciplinary committee is also a great idea. That's why we have a Program Committee. We had a Program Committee for 2Cybercon too. Michael Benedikt, in his reply here, mentioned something about how the committee works, but let me summarize it again. We had people from many disciplines, including several people who are active in the technical end of VR. They read every abstract, and on paper the abstracts looked interesting and challenging and presented no difficulties with language. The committee voted on each abstract, and the total vote determined which papers were presented. As with many things in the cyberspace business, things didn't turn out quite as we'd planned. With participants' reactions to 2Cybercon in mind, as well as our own perceptions of what worked and what didn't, the torch gets passed to the 1992 committee. The 1992 Program Committee has people on it from the industry, from research institutions, from universities; we even have a science fiction author. We have SEs *and* LCs *and* others. (You think you can do it better, eh, Randy? Where were you when I called for the 3Cybercon committee? You could be sweating at this very moment, just like the rest of us.:-)) And we are very interested in suggestions and feedback from the cyberspace community. But please remember that hindsight is always 20-20. We will make more mistakes, guaranteed. That's the fun and the challenge, as well as the pain, of breaking new ground. Next year's conference is not going to be a piece of cake. Good fun is not cheap. Cheap fun is not good. This will take REAL THOUGHT, folks. Editing for language will almost certainly not be enough, and if it is, there is probably something wrong. To reap the bennies of meeting people from widely diverging areas of expertise, widely different experiences, we have to be willing to stretch. That's one of the things that make Cybercon different. Let's get started. ------------------------------------------- That's it. p.s. I noticed William Bricken saying something about what "we" heard at 2Cybercon. That's pretty smarmy, for someone who wasn't there. Zots, Sandy -- Article: 1536 of sci.virtual-worlds From: tmaddox@milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Maddox) Subject: Lack of communication between VR commentators and everyone else. Date: 31 May 91 08:02:22 GMT Organization: The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Tom Maddox replies to some strong feelings expressed on alt.cyberpunk regarding discussion of virtual reality. Please excuse the base language employed here. It is necessary to understand the virulence of the emotions felt by some. I hope that the discussion on sci.virtual- worlds can be conducted on the plane suggested by Tom. -- Bob Jacobson] In article <10232@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes: >[Referring to Cybercon2] ... given that we can't seem to get >any information about these talks, in part because these f***ers >refuse to disseminate their ideas in a form congenial to the topic at >hand, ie, on the f***ing net, in part because those who report on >these conferences can't understand what the f*** these people are talking >about -- given this, all we can conclude is: very poor information >transfer. Granted--a series of mystified references to literary types does not constitute a summary of a conference, and it is absolutely necessary to hear what (whoever it was) had to say. Did the proceedings volume that was supposed to come out of last year's conference ever surface? I haven't seen it. And of course not a single one of that crowd ever replied to your asking why they couldn't post it all on the net. >Hmmm? Original definition of "cyberschmuck": "a pontiff of information >who hasn't heard of USENET." New definition of cyberschmuck: "a pontiff >of information who wants to curtail possible venues of information, or >who hasn't heard of USENET." Wait, are you saying that anyone posting on Usenet *can't be a cyberschmuck*? That notion had never occurred to me; in fact, I thought of Usenet as "Home of Cyberschmucks"--not that it's the only home of same, or that everyone here (easy, folks) is a cyberschmuck, but . . . >The world, though boring, is a big place, and information encompasses >its bigness. If the techs and crits can't "exchange" information, >can't, at the very fucking least, get a buzz out of each other, and >even seem to be bored by each other -- if the information is too >big, or too abstruse, or too unrelated, then the need to narrow >this bigness, the need to bring this narrowing under the technological >wing, OUGHT to be at least as expressive as the technology they hope >for. Granted, again. I was just responding through my fear & loathing regarding many of my brethren in Christ the academic f***ing literary theorists, many of whom have had their thought and speech centers entirely taken over by one virus or another--language is a virus from outer space, indeed, but it's found a home on Earth. >Of course, it's inevitable that the crits will go their way and the >techs theirs. They won't be able to resolve their differences, and >VR will ultimately be about perspectives of virtual cubes. But >it's nice to think, all the same, that the subject of "reality" >tried, for a while at least, to accomodate perspectives for which >a descriptive or encapsulating language lacked. Well, you're making me feel as if this in the words of Strother Martin "failure to communicate" has downright tragic implications, because you're right--this is a brief window of *possible* information transfer, and even it is clouded badly by mutual incomprehension, insularity, self- regard, and two cultures xenophobia. I just realized that my experience of all this is badly skewed by a one-day experience: a tour of MCC,Inc. (American's cockamamie answer to Japan's even more cockamamie Fifth Generation project) a year and a half ago. Gibson, Sterling, Shiner, Cadigan, W. J. Williams, Ellen Datlow, and I got a series of demos, a tour of the joint, a lunch, some free drinks; and in return we did a panel of sorts (at which, for some reason, John McCarthy was in the audience). The whole experience was vaguely depressing, not least because try as we all might on both sides, there was very little real information exchanged. And regarding the panel, they seemed to expect a bit of trad sf cheerleading for High! Technology! but got instead several kinds of cautions about it all ranging from glum to antagonistic. Some folks went back last year, but I haven't really talked to anyone about it; maybe things went a bit better, especially as there were some folks who might have the proper tecno-politics, such as Vernor Vinge (no knock on him; he seems a genuinely smart and nice guy). Anyway . . . so there was all this mutual lack of real connection, and I got the sense that most people there would liked to have been of help to one another, but no one could really find a way. And the reports I've had from this front (the various vr dog and pony shows, for instance) also indicate little success here. I feel that trying harder isn't the answer. We, that is, the non- technoids who have some sort of compelling interest in this stuff, and they, the folks who build the hardware and write the software, have got to find some semantic space in which to talk to one another. Otherwise, as you say, it's back to cyberspace as purely technical enterprise, which will be to all our detriment. -- Tom Maddox tmaddox@milton.u.washington.edu "It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences." -- Hugo Ball Article: 1650 of sci.virtual-worlds From: randy@xanadu.com (Randy Farmer -- A survivor of the Lost Patrol) Subject: CyberConf2: A reply Organization: AMIX, The American Information Exchange Date: Fri, 31 May 91 19:19:15 GMT A reply to Round One of the Cyberspace Conference debate: First let me say a huge THANKS to all of those who have responded to my initial call for debate. And let this message be a further invitation for more replies to this thread. I am especially looking for replies from literary critics. A. Stone and M. Benedict point out that I over-generalized my initial argument by breaking the conference into two groups: The software engineers and the literary critics. I concede the point. I did this on purpose, to avoid getting more specific about exactly which presentations fell into which category. I found I was able to understand the presentations of everyone EXCEPT the literary critics. I understood the anthopologists, the artists, etc.. A. Stone says the software engineers are as bad at communicating clearly as everybody else. Again I agree, and thought I pointed this out in my original article. If anyone cares to tell me how *my* presentation might be better understood, I'll gladly make changes. Is this true for the literary critic? She also asks "Why didn't the SEs say ''I don't understand a word you're saying?''". I've got lots of excuses here (maybe not good enough, but here they are) 1) I was in shock 2) I thought it was *my* fault 3) The speaker had already run over time and lost me in the first 5 minutes 4) It'd be RUDE! Now I know better, I'll risk being rude. I don't accept that language can't be made 'mostly' plain. Sure, some stuff won't be able to be translated, fine! Just as long as I can follow your thesis, premise and conclusion, and pick out a few supporting arguments along the way. I must address the question "Where were you when the call went out for the 1992 Conference Comittee?". 1) Giving a demo of Cyberspace and 2) Very confused about what was going on with this conference. It took me over a month to get my thoughts together on this subject. I'm ready for the tap now, if'n you really want me. Lastly, I never said I could do better. I said WE could do better, and that we MUST do better. Sandy, William sat behind me at the conference. I think you owe him an apology ;-). Article: 1539 of sci.virtual-worlds From: chalmers@europarc.xerox.com (Matthew Chalmers) Subject: Re: CyberConf2: A reply Date: 2 Jun 91 12:17:59 GMT Organization: Rank Xerox EuroPARC, Cambridge, UK In article <1991May31.191915.1712@xanadu.com>, randy@xanadu.com (Randy Farmer -- A survivor of the Lost Patrol) writes: > And let this message be a further invitation for > more replies to this thread. I am especially looking for replies from > literary critics. > > A. Stone and M. Benedict point out that I over-generalized my initial > argument by breaking the conference into two groups: The software engineers > and the literary critics. > > I concede the point. I did this on purpose, to avoid getting more > specific about exactly which presentations fell into which category. I > found I was able to understand the presentations of everyone EXCEPT the > literary critics. I understood the anthopologists, the artists, etc.. > > A. Stone says the software engineers are as bad at communicating clearly as > everybody else. Again I agree, and thought I pointed this out in my original > article. If anyone cares to tell me how *my* presentation might be better > understood, I'll gladly make changes. Is this true for the literary critic? I came away from CyberConf2 equally bemused by many of the presentations by (to carry on the acknowledged generalisation) the literary critics. I think that the point should be made, though, that one of the sources of confusion was the difference in presentational style between the two camps. In talking with the 'social science types' here in EuroPARC it seemed that this generalisation about the LCs might be true: they usually present papers as opposed to doing presentations. To clarify: it seemed to me at the time that the LCs would step up to the lectern with a fistful of densely typed sheets, and would then read the text of what was essentially their full paper. In contrast, the SEs would step up with some comparatively brief slides and would then use these as a rough guide as to what they wanted to say. It seemed as if the LCs read out texts which they actually expected the audience to read for themselves at some later date, whereas the SEs described the work which might also be covered in more detail in a paper somewhere and sometime. I suppose this reflects the different levels of esteem for (and centrality of) deftness of language use in the two fields. Each camp also tended to refer to its own bodies of basic work, bibliographies and 'personal bibles': just babble to the other camp, of course. Maybe this situation will diminish as the amount of work presented to mixed audiences (such as that at CC2) increases, and more lastingly, as the amount of work *published* within a wider - but still mixed - audience increases. Still, the culture gap was obvious, and I really don't know whether it might ultimately be bridged. I hope it will before the SEs slope off towards CHI, CSCW and SIGGRAPH, and the LCs slope off towards Chiba (wherever the hell that really is). Regards, --Matthew Article 1567 of sci.virtual-worlds: From: wex@pws.ma30.bull.com (Alan Wexelblat) Subject: Re: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies! Date: 5 Jun 91 15:59:23 GMT Organization: Bull HN, Inc. Billerica, MA. Pardon me for jumping in late here. I haven't seen any of the preceding articles and Sandy doesn't directly quote other people, so I can only get her sense of what they said. First, some background: I've been at Cyberconf 1 & 2; I'm the book that resulted from the first conference and I'm on the program committee for the third one. (Does that mean I know anything at all? No, but it looks impressive as heck in print. :-) In article <1991May31.050056.10025@milton.u.washington.edu> sstone@weber. UCSD.EDU (Allucquere Rosanne Stone) writes: First is the way Randy describes what he saw and heard at 2Cybercon, which was to divide up the talks into two groups--software engineers and literary critics. This is going to upset the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, and businesspeople who also presented at the conference. An old joke: There are two kinds of people in the world, those who think the world can be divided into two kinds of people, and those who don't. I will let Randy speak for himself, but let me tell you why I tell people there were SE's and LC's there. The dividing line for me was text versus ideas. The SE's were those who wanted to talk about the ideas of cyberspace, inspired by Gibson's book or Kreuger's or something else. For us (and I freely admit to a bias well on the SE side), the important thing is that there is an interesting set of ideas here -- a way to see the world and maybe change it. The LCs on the other hand, were concerned wtih the text. Gibson's text was paramount. It was dissected, deconstructed, analyzed, taken as a metaphor, criticized, used as inspiration, etc. The important thing is that there is a literary text which can be compared to other texts, that projects a kind of future, that can inspire new ways of thinking, etc. [...] somehow, everything that wasn't software engineering looked like literary criticism. Why do you suppose this is? Because the LCs were constantly talking about Gibson and his text. Most of the SE talks didn't mention Gibson at all, let alone NEUROMANCER. My hit on what happened [...] is that the SEs jargon (and I include myself in that group) is transparent to SEs; I'm surprised to see you in our group, Sandy. I wouldn't have bet on that. Personalities aside, I think our jargon is, in a sense, more transparent. That's because we're on the techno bleeding edge and that edge has (in this century at least) had a disproportionate effect on the evolving language. How many people knew what a "hacker" was before Robert Morris hit the front pages? Or before the rise in BBS popularity. Nowadays, I bet you can stop 10 random people on the street of any major city and all will know the word (even if they have different definitions). But that's not to defend our (SE's) pig-headedness. See below... [...] explained to the LCs the extremely wide diversity of the attendees' backgrounds and disciplines, and to have suggested that they also be prepared with a kind of general-language version of their work [...] That might have helped. But I'm not sure it's possible. I have some LC background, and I know how hard a time I have explaining stuff like philosophy in non-technical terms. I have to do it all the time with computers (as, I suspect, do all SEs), so it's a bit easier. I think SEs are just more used to talking to general audiences. But part of the problem rests with the SEs just as it does with the LCs, because SEs are so used to swimming in the heady waters of the SE community that communication is just so *easy*, and communicating ideas about computing and graphics is second-nature. Truth. My opinion is that the LCs (and by this I mean all the non-techie types) made greater strides than the SEs at the conference in terms of putting up with our kind of talk. They went more than half-way, if you will. We SEs more or less sat in our own corner and expected the world to come to us. The other problem we have is that too few SEs can cross the line. Too few of us have LC background/training. There is a significant part of the LC community that has SE credentials (and more every day). And I also heard arrogance...on the part of some LCs, who assumed that everybody understood them, and on the part of many SEs, who assumed that it was naturally the LCs' job to learn how to speak like "normal people"--which is to say, them. Guilty as charged. I guess it comes from the society we live in. It rewards us SEs these days much more than the LCs, both in terms of money and prestige (and power, for that matter). We've got the world in the palm of our hand; it's a little hard not to feel like gods and goddesses. Now I'll make the most biased statement I can think of: from the extreme SE point of view, it looks like we're doing work which will shape the world for decades, both in personal and global terms. What are you doing that compares to that? Why should we pay attention? Even the Soc/Anthro people usually can only analyze in retrospect. It's rare that they can deal with modern culture in any way. Sandy is something of an exception. Why *didn't* the SEs use more technical language? Because we're used to getting called on the carpet for it. Plus, we want our stuff to be as widely understood and used as possible. I know LCs who are happy if they produce a paper that can only be understood by 1000 people in their particular specialty. Article 1578 of sci.virtual-worlds: From: eliot@phoenix.princeton.edu (Eliot Handelman) Subject: Re: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies! Date: 8 Jun 91 20:53:39 GMT Organization: Cognitive Science Lab, Princeton U. In article <1991Jun6.150900.11787@milton.u.washington.edu> wex@pws.ma30.bull.com (Alan Wexelblat) writes: ; We've got the world in the palm of ;our hand; it's a little hard not to feel like gods and goddesses. Now I'll ;make the most biased statement I can think of: from the extreme SE point of ;view, it looks like we're doing work which will shape the world for decades, ;both in personal and global terms. What are you doing that compares to ;that? Why should we pay attention? Because everything is more fun with an intellectual pedigree.