Apple: An end to skeuomorphic design?

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC Future column takes a look at Apple, the future of operating system design, and the vexed term “skeumorphic design.”

Why do most smartphones make a clicking noise, like a camera shutter closing, when you take a picture with them? Why do the virtual pages of a book on a tablet appear to turn as you swipe across the screen?

The answer is skeuomorphic design, from the Greek words for a tool (skeuos) and shape (morph). It means designing a tool in a new medium that incorporates some of the features of its antecedents. These no long perform any necessary function but – like the unfurling of virtual paper across a digital screen – forge an intuitive link with the past, not to mention being (hopefully) attractive in their own right.

Though it sounds obscure, skeuomorphism is everywhere around us – from “retro” detailing on clothes to electric kettles shaped like their stove-top ancestors. It’s also a topic of much hand-wringing and angst in the tech world, thanks to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to shake up the design principles of his company’s iOS mobile operating system – one of the world’s touchstones for digital appearances. Continue reading →

Why do tech neologisms make people angry?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

I’ve recently been writing a number of pieces linked to my new book about technology and language, Netymology. Below is the start of a feature for the BBC magazine about the history of tech neologisms – and the passions they can arouse.

From agriculture to automobiles to autocorrect, new things have always required new words – and new words have always aroused strong feelings.

In the 16th Century, neologisms “smelling too much of the Latin” – as the poet Richard Willes put it – were frowned upon by many.

Willes’s objects of contempt included portentous, antiques, despicable, obsequious, homicide, destructive and prodigious, all of which he labelled “ink-horn terms” – a word itself now vanished from common usage, meaning an inkwell made out of horn.

Come the 19th Century, the English poet William Barnes was still fighting the “ink-horn” battle against such foreign barbarities as preface and photograph which, he suggested should be rechristened “foreword” and “sun print” in order to achieve proper Englishness.

Forewords caught on, but sun prints didn’t, instead joining the growing ranks of outmoded terms for innovations – a scrapheap that by the end of the century ranged from temporarily mainstream names like velocipede (meaning “swift foot” and used to describe early bicycles and tricycles) to near-unpronounceable curiosities like phenakistoscope (an early device for animation, meaning “to deceive vision”).

I’ve spent much of the last year writing a book about technology and language and, today, the debate around what constitutes “proper” speech and writing is livelier than ever, courtesy of a transition every bit as significant (at least so far as language is concerned) as the Industrial Revolution.

Read the rest of the piece on the BBC website here

Home truths for online falsehoods

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC column takes a look at social media and the fine art of lying – and how the inevitability of online untruths plays out around breaking news and the notion of expertise.

As Mark Twain once said, a lie can be half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on. Or was it Winston Churchill, or James Callaghan, or Terry Pratchett? The internet is undecided. It seems likely that all of the above were paraphrasing an old proverb – but, depending on where you search and who you ask, you can more-or-less pick your own truth.

When it comes to current affairs, the power of digital falsehood can count for a great deal. Earlier this month, a false message posted by hackers to the Twitter account of the Associated Press – which read “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured” – temporarily wiped 150 points off the Dow Jones index, and led to an FBI investigation. In the appalled aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings, rumours and conspiracies were almost impossible to avoid, ranging from allegations against an innocent Saudi witness to a digitally manipulated hoax clip from the cartoon series Family Guy.

Yet perhaps the most intriguing online untruth of recent weeks – and the most telling indictment of rapid-reaction social media habits – was not a tweet or an attribution, but an entire person: Santiago Swallow. Continue reading →

Bitcoin and the illusion of money

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC Future column, reprinted here for UK readers, takes a look at Bitcoins, speculative bubbles and the future of money.

Dubai. Greece. Spain. Portugal. Italy. Cyprus. Ireland. The list of countries needing financial bailouts seems to go on and on. And that’s before you include those banks in the US, the UK and beyond which were “too big to fail”.

As well as revealing the fragility of the global economy, the current crisis has also raised some existential questions about the nature of money.

Can any government really promise to protect the value of its currency and be taken at its word? And how – other than by hiding gold bars under their mattresses – can the residents of a country in crisis hope to safeguard their wealth? As a controversial economist once noted, there are times when all that seemed solid can melt into air. Continue reading →

Who owns the meaning of words?

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC column takes a look at controversy over the “official” meaning of ogooglebar, the friend/unfriend phenomenon of reversible language, and how far search engines can shape what we say and mean.

How do you say “something that cannot be found on the web using a search engine” in Swedish? Until this week, you could have said ogooglebar, a term sanctioned by no less than the Language Council of Sweden, and roughly equivalent to the English speaker’s mouthful “ungooglable.”

Unfortunately for search-challenged Scandinavians, Google didn’t like the idea of its name being part of a general term for online search, and suggested amending the definition to describe only searches performed via Google. The Language Council – which is dedicated to documenting the emergence of new words in Swedish – didn’t think much of this, or fancy a lengthy legal process. So the word was removed from the official list of new Swedish terms.

Whether absence from this list will make much difference to Swedish speaking habits remains to be seen, although it seems unlikely. As the Council put it in an online statement on 26th March – at least so far as I can tell, courtesy of none other than Google’s translation service – “Google has namely forgot one thing: language development do not care about brand protection. No individual can decide about the language.” The grammar may be iffy, but the point is clear. Courtesy of the internet, the furore around ogooglebar is likely only to spread its usage.

There are larger concerns at stake here, however. I’ve spent much of the last year writing a book about language and technology, and the rise of “ungooglable” and its international equivalents marks one of the most characteristic linguistic evolutions of our age: binary vocabulary. Continue reading →

Cyborg Dreams

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

I recently wrote a long essay for Aeon Magazine on one of my favourite topics: technology and intimacy, and the strange ways in which we are shackled to the screens surrounding us. The first few paras are pasted below, while you can read the whole piece on their site.

Today, depending on your favoured futurist prophet, a kind of digital Elysium awaits us all. Over millennia, we have managed to unshackle ourselves from the burdens of time and space — from heat, cold, hunger, thirst, physical distance, mechanical effort — along a trajectory seemingly aimed at abstraction. Humanity’s collective consciousness is to be uploaded into the super-Matrix of the near future — or augmented into cyborg immortality, or out-evolved by self-aware machine minds. Whatever happens, the very meat of our physical being is to be left behind.

Except, of course, so far we remain thorougly embodied. Flesh and blood. There is just us, slumped in our chairs, at our desks, inside our cars, stroking our smartphones and tablets. Peel back the layers of illusion, and what remains is not a brain in a jar — however much we might fear or hunger for this — but a brain within a body, as remorselessly obedient to that body’s urges and limitations as any paleolithic hunter-gatherer.

It’s a point that has been emphasised by much recent research into thought and behaviour. To quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, ‘cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain’. Yet when it comes to culture’s cutting edge, there remains an overwhelming tendency to treat embodiment not as a central condition of being human that our tools ought to serve, but rather as an inconvenience to be eliminated…

Read the complete essay at Aeon magazine

Is it time for wearable computing?

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC Future column – reprinted here for UK readers – takes a look at the possibilities of wearable computing in the light of Apple’s putative “iWatch”.

There’s nothing the internet likes more than rumours about Apple products – apart, possibly, from cute cuts. In the last few days, it is the former that has preoccupied countless netizens.

Specifically, it was rumours about the possible appearance of an iWatch from the Cupertino tech giant. The frenzy of speculation was sparked by a piece written by interface expert and ex-Apple employee Bruce Tognazzini, who argued that a watch would “fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem” and herald a new phase in how we interact with technology.

The article offered no proof that Apple was working on a watch – or that the device that was rapidly christened an iWatch was even a timekeeper (could iWatch be the name of the long awaited TV from Apple?). But the story – true or not – offers a fascinating insight into the rapidly emerging field of wearable computing.

Continue reading →

When smart is not so smart

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC Future column, reprinted here for UK readers, takes a look at the risks of the “smart” present – and why it might make for a fragile future.

Google’s “chief technology advocate”, Michael Jones, recently made an astonishingly bold statement.

“Effectively, people are about 20 IQ points smarter now because of Google Search and Maps,” he told the Atlantic magazine. “They don’t give Google credit for it, which is fine; they think they’re smarter, because they can rely on these tools”.

One of the original brains behind Google Maps – a tool whose latest innovations include some of the first ever detailed maps of North Korea – Jones is better placed to justify such a claim than most. Through technological tools, he argued, a “kind of extra-smartness is coming to people”. And it’s being delivered so seamlessly that most people only notice it when things go wrong – at which point “they feel like a fifth of their brain has been taken out.” Continue reading →

Graph Search and gaming our ‘likes’

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

Republished here for UK readers, my latest BBC Future column took a look at some of the potentials of Facebook’s Graph Search the day after its launch.

When Facebook announced its much-anticipated Graph Search, two questions above all underpinned most commentators’ responses: will this make a lot of money, and can it beat Google at its own game?

So far as the first question is concerned, the stock market response – an initial dip of around three per cent – suggested caution verging on disappointment. On the second front, however, there has been greater optimism, not least because Facebook seems to have invented a whole new game of its own: the world’s first truly social search function.

As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained at the launch event, while search engines like Google are all about links, Graph Search is about answers: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers… Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, not give you links that might provide the answer”. Continue reading →

Digital distractions: time to pay attention

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Tom Chatfield

My latest BBC Future column (re-posted here for UK readers) looks at phantom phone messages and the perils of attention depletion – via Jaron Lanier, Daniel Kahneman, and the New York Times.

Have you ever received a “phantom” text message or email? If you’ve been convinced your phone is vibrating or ringing when it turns out to be nothing, the answer is yes. And you’re not alone. According to Pew research, recently reported by the New York Times, 67 per cent of American adults in a national survey experienced the same thing. With almost 37 per cent stating that they “couldn’t live without” their smartphones, the world in 2013 is a place in which ubiquitous computing can increasingly be taken for granted – and where our bodies are every bit as involved as our minds.

In my case, phantom messages sometimes arrive when I don’t actually have my phone. I usually keep it in my left trouser pocket and, even when it isn’t there, I sometimes feel a silent-message-style buzzing in my thigh muscles, as if an email has been sent directly into my skin. It’s a disconcerting feeling, and suggests an unwelcome degree of physical conditioning, not least because of the invariable accompanying rush of blood at the thought of someone or something wanting my attention. Continue reading →