Whisky Tango Foxtrot
"The future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed." - William Gibson
Shel accused me of techno-snobism when I LOLed at last Sunday’s Dilbert. Domain specific snobism isn’t news of course; it permeates higher education, but it seems to me that when domain specific knowledge, particularly geek specific domain knowledge, inserts itself into the mass media and popular culture it raises the question of what counts, or should count as ‘common knowledge’.
The implications of this get’s hammered home by Charles Stross’ Halting State. Here’s a clip from Book Marks Magazine:
Reviewers expressed shock and awe at Charles Stross’s imagined future, because it’s just a bit too probable. Even his minor details, such as clothing with RFID tags that can speak to washing machines, are mind-bending. Overall, Halting State is a fast-paced, tightly plotted, and highly intelligent novel. While some of it may read as gibberish to a less in-the-know crowd (it’s helpful to know such gamer slang as "nerfed"), the tech-savvy will rejoice. One reviewer thought the plot became convoluted at the end with a too-neat resolution. But others, like Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing, commented, "This is a book that will change the way you see the way the world works."
‘Nerfed’ is the tip of the iceberg; this from the CD review:
This is the apotheosis of Stross — a book chock-a-block with great ten-minutes-from-now technology (big hunks of the plot hinge on anonymized digicash, onion-routers, FreeNet crypto, and GNU Radio), RPG humor straight off Phil Foglio’s old Dragon Magazine strip, and an impassioned series of valentines to Edinburgh, Charlie’s adopted hometown.
Here’s the Halting State Prolog which got me totally hooked; the book is the literary equivalent of discovering Pandora and the new music that I like that’s being made. Science Fiction that I like; thank you Mr Stross.
My point, you may have been wondering, is that Adams & Stross are talking about things that matter in the modern world in language that that much of the modern world doesn’t understand. When academics say things like:
The fundamental premise of so-called ‘location-based learning’ is that, as
geographer and spatial-information specialist Anja Kipfer expressed it in a
2006 article, ‘building a spatial and thereby visual or haptic connection between a learning object and the learning content stands for a better cognition and remembrance’ [sic]. (The location-based rubric subsumes mobile interfaces Emerging technologies for learning – volume 3 (2008) 49 to local content, as well as a class of systems that architects are increasingly beginning to think of as ‘situated technologies’, that is, installations or interfaces otherwise permanently embedded in place.)
to choose a good example, or:
Many support methods based on learner’s learning behaviours and
psychological states have been proposed with the progress on Web-based
learning. However, the learning in real world is the most important part in
one’s learning. Researches on learning support methods in real world become possible and necessary with the progress on the ubiquitous techniques. In this paper, we propose a hierarchy of zones, by which the position information and learning actions of learners can be correctly caught, and the services can be easily provided to learners. And a method to analyze learners’ learning patterns from learning histories based on learning orders and reactions in hierarchical zones, and provide supports to learners by using Rule-Based Reasoning (RBR) in order to increase learning efficiency and help learners to bring up good learning (life) rhythms.
which is not so good*, we can assume with some grace that others in their discourse universe know what they are talking about. Just as we can assume that they are intentionally talking to those who share their DU. But what happens when the nerf-world finds itself playing fast-pitch?