Alan Kay on Marshal McLuhan and the Personal Computer

There’s a book titled The Art Of Human Computer Interface Design that I got for 2 bucks at my College a few years back. In it is an essay by Alan Kay. There’s an excerpt where he mentions Marshal McLuhan and his interpretation of the great prophets work and how it relates to computers. I find McLuhan hard to understand partly because I’m just not that smart. Alan Kay on the other hand…

This is an excerpt from his essay, User Interface: A Personal View (1989).

I read McLuhan’s Understanding Media and understood that the
most important thing about any communications medium is that message receipt is really message recovery: anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be “subtracted” out to leave the message behind. When he said “the medium is the message” he meant that you have to become the medium if you use it. That’s pretty scary. It means that even though humans are the animals that shape tools, it is in the nature of tools and man that learning to use tools reshapes us. So the ‘‘message” of the printed book is, first, its availability to individuals, hence, its potential detachment from extant social processes: second, the uni-
formity, even coldness, of noniconic type, which detaches readers fiom the vividness of the now and the slavery of commonsense thought to propel them into a far more abstract realm in which ideas that don’t have easy visualizations can be treated . McLuhan‘s claim that the printing press was the dominant force that transformed the hermeneutic Middle Ages into our scientific society should not be taken too lightly-especially because the main point is that the press didn’t do it just by making books more available, it did it by changing the thought patterns of those who learned to read. Though much of what McLuhan wrote was obscure and arguable, the sum total to me was a shock that reverberates even now. The computer is a medium! I had always thought of it as a tool, perhaps a vehicle-a much weaker

conception. What McLuhan was saying is that if the personal computer is a truly new medium then the very use of it would actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization. He had certainly been right about the effects of the electronic
stained-glass window that was television-a remedievalizing tribal influence atbest. The intensely interactive and involving nature of the personal computerseemed an antiparticle that could annihilate the passive boredom invoked by
television. Rut it also promised to surpass the book to bring about a new kind ofrenaissance by going beyond static representations to dynamic simulation. Whatkind of a thinker would you become ifyou grew up with an active simulator con-
nected, not just to one point of view, but to all the points ofview of the ages represented so they could be dynamically tried out and compared?

Pretty interesting stuff eh? I just want to note that Alan was trying to find a correlation between the Personal Computer with the thoughts and ideas McLuhan had. I read that Kay had the vision that his Dynabook would be networked but I don’t think he had a total grasp of how networked computers could itself be a new medium in view of McLuhans thoughts. Interesting and confusing stuff.

If you want to read the essay, you can access it here.

Anton.

Update:

There’s an informative discussion on this post from the audience at Hacker News. You can view it here.

Nacker on HN posted these links which might be informative as well:

http://marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/introduction

In fact, McLuhan put most of his emphasis on warning of the dangers of technology rather than being some design guru.

http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html

Stick to your First Principles – Part 2

During the time I spent working on this lab I learned a lot, created a lot and broke a lot of things. I would like to share with you some that stuck.

I started prototyping the platform in February 2012 with a language called Coldfusion. It’s owned by Adobe and not many people use it. Fortunately, it is probably one of the easiest programming languages to get up and running. By June 2012 I had enough. I had a more concrete idea of what I was creating and I really wanted to use a language that had a strong community behind it, was young, and that I would be using professionally when working at a small development shop. I chose Ruby on Rails, also because I had learned so much from 37signals – the creators of Rails.

One advice of theirs that stuck with me was the idea of being a curator. You should be extremely selective with the features or functions that you add to your application. This can also be applied to any domain too. The goal is to widdle it down to just the best and fewest pieces. If you’re creating an album, choose less and only the best songs. If you’re making a movie, cut out all the unnecessary scenes and only add the best scenes. That is what will make your work great.

 

 

It is so easy to add features to an application, feature creep, and bloat the application until it’s so fat that it can’t even move. You don’t want it to end up like this

 

Homers Car

 

The difficulty for any creator is really choosing which things to keep and which things to leave out. We all have that grand vision for creating something that will awe and shock the world but that is just running against the current.

When embarking on any project you are literally on a race against time. There is only one difference between the successful and unsuccessful here. The successful ones are able to ship. It’s as simple as that. If you can’t ship, people won’t get to see what you’ve created. More important, they won’t get to play with it and you won’t get any feedback so you can improve it. If you take too long to ship you start losing motivation, which ultimately leads to no work being done at all. This is especially true when you’re starting a venture of your own. In the beginning you have no one but yourself answer to. So ship it and get it out there!

With Kokotop I had a lot of grand visions. I wanted it to be a music player that you can share music with your friends. I wanted to attach the Raspberry Pi to it so you could have a central location for all your files as well. At one point I even built a email module because I wanted it to be a hub for your communications

 

Email Module

 

The question that always came back to me was: Who am I building this for? What is the main job that it’s going help accomplish? And lastly, what are my first principles?

Out of the three, I believe sticking to your first principles is the key to being successful with your goal. And it’s obvious why.

There are a ton of startups and applications that have similar functionality to yours. If there aren’t any applications that help you accomplish the job, trust me, if it’s an important one there will be a bevy of similar apps out there in the future. So it’s important to always stick to first principles because no one can ever out-compete or take away from you. Your first principles are very personal.

My first principles from day one has been to use this opportunity to learn the technologies that I’m interested in and have ownership of the work that comes out of this lab. My first principles was also to use the work that I’ve created as a portfolio piece when looking for paid work. And lastly, it was to remind myself why I enjoyed creating things. The majority of creators don’t create things for money or accolade – although it is a good motivation in that it gives you the means of having the freedom to do what you want to do – they build to bring joy to themselves and to others.

In other words just Keep It Simple Stupid.

That’s it for now.

Anton.

Kokotop: How I Got it Started

A little more than a year ago I was working as a Programmer at the University of Toronto building applications for the Faculty of Medicine. I was handed a project called UTMedFiles, which in short is an application that allows Lecturers to upload their files to the cloud so they can download it later at the podium right before their lecture. I liked the concept a lot and decided to expand on it. KokoTop (named after the sign language talking Gorilla) is the current state after iterating through a few prototypes (which were codenamed EclipseDownload, DeathStarLocker, TurtleTop, and KokoWare!).

UTMedFiles

Every now and then I go on some crazy adventures. A few years back a friend asked me if I wanted to fly from Toronto to Ft. McMurray just so we could drive all the way back to Toronto 5 days before Christmas. I did the trip and we ended up sleeping in the car, having the car on literally for the entire duration of the trip (4 days), and having no spare tire.

I had been inspired by three talks: This one by Steve Jobs, this one by KRS One,  and lastly pretty much all talks by Terence Mckenna. The message I got from these talks was that from time to time you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone or routine. I decided to do something a little wild. 5 cities in 3 weeks. From Toronto -> Las Vegas -> Los Angeles -> Hong Kong -> Manila -> Hawaii -> Toronto. I came back from that trip with a lot of energy and inspiration and went to work.

Enter DeathStarLocker

I really liked the idea of being able to share files on the web and asked myself. What job would I want it to do and how would it work? DeathStarLocker was a little project that attempted to give me some sort of answer. Naturally, I built a music sharing application that allowed my friends and I to upload files onto the cloud so we could access the catalog of uploaded music. It was an ok prototype, no one really used it, so I scrapped it.

Enter TurtleTop

TurtleTop

I had planned to work at the University for the next 10 years. But the trip around the Pacific changed my worldview. I realized that there was a huge amount of opportunity out there (don’t listen to the naysayers or pessimists, listen to your heart and your ambition) and I was simply wasting my time building yet another student enrolment system. So 9 months ago I decided to quit. My goal was to get this thing to beta in 6-8 months, learn as much as I can, and use the application as the beginning of a small business as well as a portfolio piece when I look for work.

At this point I had an Idea of what I wanted to build. I really liked the idea of being able to connect things together through the web. These things really are just pieces of data (or information. It is called IT for a reason!). URL links, Files, even communication is just data. My goal was to create a tool that handles data in a way that allows someone to get their ideas across to another person in real time. I wanted to create an application that allowed me to communicate and collaborate with my friends or team even if we weren’t in the same room.

The Beginning

TurtleTop Messenger

I travelled to Vancouver and started working on this application full time. The challenge I gave to myself was to build an entire application from the ground up. Mockups, ERD’s, Front End, Back End, Design, etc… I had to do it all by myself. I also wanted to learn Ruby on Rails.

It took me around a month just to get used to the intricacies of Rails by then I was on a roll. There were problems though: How would the interface look like? What features would it have? I didn’t feel like customer development was necessary at this point because I was simply building this for myself and more importantly my main motive was just to learn learn learn.

TurtleTop Build in Progress

As the build was coming along, my attention kept switching. Was this a cloud storage service like Dropbox? or Was this a Messenger service like WhatsApp? I was building something a little different. I really liked the idea of the interface being a “desktop in the cloud” mainly because that would allow me to add or tear down things without taking the feel of the application away. It was my interpretation of the Hacker Way.

TurlteTop Web Desktop

At this point I came across a great book by Marshall McLuhan titled, “The Medium Is theMassage“. I can’t say I understand much of it, but the idea of Hot Media and Cold Media really resonated with me. Another book that I drew inspiration from was “Rework” from the folks at 37signals.

With McLuhan and 37signals, I realized that there is a difference between the many modes of communication and that each has its own unique usefulness.

Face to face communication would be defined more as cool media. It requires an active participation from the user. Text Messaging would be defined as hot media, as it requires less active participation but emphasizes one sense over the other (it’s much more analytical and logical). There are also differences in the form of lag. Face to Face communication requires you to respond right away, whereas communication through text is not time sensitive. Networked Computers give us an ability to handle the many modes of communication that exist. Even crazier, with the advent of Social Networks, new forms of communication can be invented!

With this realization, I felt I had something here that I wanted to focus on but I had to keep it as narrow and simple as possible. My goal was now to simply to build a communications platform for small teams.

In the next post I’ll go through some of the technologies and issues I have run into during this stage of the build.

P.S. Many thanks to Imtiaz, Clariss, Mark, and Terence for all the feedback you have given me these last few months.