Eggblogg

Two heroes for Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when bloggers worldwide are invited to write about a woman in technology or science who has inspired them. It's a small way of celebrating the many women who have shaped our world, often unseen and unacknowledged.

The first of my women heroes is Grace Murray Hopper (1906 - 1992), who has perhaps had more publicity lately than when she was alive. An American US naval officer (she retired as a Commander and accrued many honours and distinctions over the years), Grace is credited with developing COBOL, one of the first programming languages that was closer to English than to machine code. When you think about it, that was the first step towards making computing more accessible, taking it from the lab to the living room, and at a time when for women to be successful in their field they had to be exceptional. (Some might argue that's still the case to a certain extent.)

I first came across Grace Hopper when I was doing my Digital Media MA in 2000, when I had no idea there were female pioneers in computing, despite having studied computing and artificial intelligence at university in the 1980s. (Then again, I'd never heard of Vannevar Bush, either, so I can't put that down to sexism.)

Woman hero number two is a personal one - my maths teacher Mrs Ward (funny how I never knew her first name). She had such a relaxed manner, and the gift of making pure maths seem very natural. Solving a quadratic equation became an absorbing task, and lessons passed so quickly I wondered where the time had gone.

I think Mrs Ward stimulated in me the joy of intellectual pursuit - giving yourself the time, space and quiet to think, allowing your mind to go wherever it wishes. To this day, to spend time in quiet work still feels to me like the ultimate indulgence.

Who were the early internet 'thought leaders'?

I've recently had the pleasure of discovering some excellent and thought-provoking people writing on the subject of social media and the future of the internet.

It's made me go back and look again at some of the earlier internet 'thought leaders' who had such a great influence on me in the late 1990s, such as Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. His 1995 book 'Being Digital' was one of those reads that sent my head spinning - so many ideas and possibilities of how technology was to change the way we communicate.

I went on to read Esther Dyson, another great web visionary. She foresaw the role of peer recommendations, content sharing and co-creation long before social networking was around. Similarly, Sherry Turkle's pioneering work Life on the Screen was a huge influence on me when I was first drawn to the idea of online community.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was another internet milestone that set the scene for the advent of social media. For me, this publication signalled the beginning of the end of traditional marketing. This has a poignancy as it came out at the same time that I left corporate, 'offline' marketing for good and moved onto the internet. I admit I don't remember the authors' names, but you'll find that out if you follow the Wikipedia link.

Going much further back, I must mention an article I only came across in 1999 although it had been written in 1945 - 'As We May Think' by Vannevar Bush. I can't describe how thrilling it was to read this for the first time. Bush was a US scientist at the time when technology was being developed for one purpose only - to wage war. This paper is his call for scientists of the future to apply new technology to non-military purposes, for the good of all, and in so doing he conjures up a digital future that is visionary, extraordinary and elegant.

Do you agree? There have been so many waves of internet pioneers in its short life. Who were the ones who influenced you? I'd love to know.

Also, who are the exciting thinkers of today, those who'll be remembered, not just for being the biggest names, but for their vision and influence? I have my list! But I need to stop reminiscing now and do some work. So that's for another blog post.

Photo: Grace Murray Hopper, early computer scientist and inventor of COBOL. Credit: Computermuseum.li

New technology needs time to take root

Reading the latest 'Twitter is a waste of time' post on Econsultancy made me think yet again about how long it takes for new technology or new tools to take root. In particular, outside of the inner sanctum of early adopters. One of the complaints about Twitter is that it's only used by online media types, journalists and (lately) aggressive sales types. What's the point of it to greengrocers, car manufacturers or reflexologists?

I came across this wonderful 1910 book 'The History of the Telephone' by Herbert Casson which, if you can see past the quaint style of writing, gives a great insight into how it was first received by the business community. Basically, they hated it. What was the point? How could it be used in business? What was the value of it?

Casson tells us the telephone didn't 'grow big and overspread the earth' until around 1896. That's nearly 20 years after the first regular phone line was constructed in the US.

Twitter has been around since 2006, and it's only been this year that the 'man in the street' has started to hear about it via the mainstream media, significantly since certain celebs have been using it. (A sad indictment of our national press that it only takes note of something new when there's a 'celebrity angle' - but that's another post!)

Yes, there's a great deal of hype about Twitter. But the fact that we can't stop talking about it must be an indication that there's something really exciting about it. I wish we could just all give it time, rather than be quick to 'pronounce' on its value to the world - can we really know that yet?

 

Ways that the internet is ruining children's brains, number 37

It used to be TV that was said to make mush out of children's brains, but now that role is passing most definitely to computers and the internet.

Baroness Susan Greenfield recently voiced the opinion that there could be a link between the attention span of children, the rise of attention deficit disorders and young children spending lengthy hours in front of the computer. It could be that the 'sedate pace' of school, or even of reading a book, has become alien to a generation of kids used to 'pressing a button and getting rapid responses from the screen'. [Rapid responses? I wish. Where exactly are those lightning speeds we're always being promised by the broadband providers? And has Susan tried doing anything on Second Life lately?]

I do sympathise with this view. However, wasn't it Susan Greenfield who a few months ago was putting her weight behind MindFit computer games, said to 'prevent the onset of cognitive decline ... and could in the long-term provide an alternative to drugs'?

Nicholas Carr asks whether Google is making us stupid. His recent essay in Atlantic Monthly sets out the argument that the medium shapes not only the way the message is presented, but the way our brains process that message. His worry is that the internet is moulding our brains into nothing more that information processors:

"In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive."

Is the human brain really that vulnerable? Is it possible that those monolithic, frustration-inducing, rubbish-riddled search engines are going to re-model our thinking processes in their likeness? I remember taking a course in Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s: I went in with so much excitement, so many expectations, and came out thoroughly convinced it wasn't going to happen. Not in my lifetime, for sure.

Kids who have grown up with technology aren't going to stop using it, so there doesn't seem to be any point worrying about it. But rather than being taken over by it, I can see them growing with it. Which I think will mean that future generations will be not just more familiar with a computer-driven world, but they'll have a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of it all, and the cultural role of what we still call 'new media'. They'll become more naturally discerning about information they encounter, will be better equipped to ask questions, carry out research and make the most of the social web for both personal and professional growth. Most of all, they'll take for granted all the stuff that still amazes us. 

Let's not forget that when the telephone was first invented there were dire warnings from sociologists and assorted experts who feared it would destroy the fabric of society. There were also those who said it would never have any application outside of the business world. Technology, schmeckmology.

A re-reading of 'As we may think'

I met with a prospective client the other day and in talking to him was reminded of all those serendipitous moments that happened to me about ten years ago, the start of my love affair with the internet.

One of those moments was reading 'As We May Think' by Vannevar Bush. It's an extraordinary essay, written in 1945, in which the author (who worked for the US military during the war) talks about his visions of the future of communications, from a proto-internet which he called a Memex, to micro computing, digital cameras and more.

It's written very much a period style, with references to 'roomfuls of girls' operating keypunch machines. I wonder if Bush was envisaging today's computer-dominated world when he mused on the possible applications of technology beyond mere number-crunching: "Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine."

Re-reading it today I still find aspects of it amazingly fresh. Do check it out if you've not read it.