User:Max/rwm/bridge
Predictive Text
The first text message was sent in 1992 from Neil Papworth, a former developer at Sema Group Telecoms. Mobile phones did not have keyboards at the time, so Papworth had to type the message on a PC. Papworth's text — "Merry Christmas" — was successfully sent to Richard Jarvis at Vodafone. Most early GSM mobile phones did not support sending SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and only Nokia supported the sending of SMS text messages. Like often with new technology (Link to M McLuhan) the initial growth was slow.
0.4 SMS were sent per month per person / customer in 1995. In the year 2000 customers sent 35 SMS per month. Then in 2007 for the first time there were more text messages than phone calls per month.
Writing text messages on mobile phones was always hard. Because the available space on a mobile phone is very limited keyboards are not very convenient. A mobile phone in the early days had 9 number-keys, the first common method of commercial texting was "multi-tap", which means that each key displayed three to four letters. For example the key "3" holds "D", "E" and "F". To select the letter "E" you would have to tap two times the number-key "3". "Multi tap" was not very efficient.
In the 90s Tegic Communications developed a system/technology to simplify keying: T9. T9 stands for Text on 9 keys and was one of the first predictive text technologies. Instead of selecting each letter by tapping multiple times on the number keys with T9 the word gets formed by a single keypress for each letter. The groups of letters on each key are connected to a dictionary of words and the telephone looks up in this dictionary what words can be built out of the typed sequence. For example pressing "4663" will typically be interpreted as the word "good" (alternatives like "home", "hood" and "hoof" are also valid interpretations of this sequence). By offering words it speeds up the process of writing texts. It was also possible to extend the dictionary with individual entries and phones could learn to adapt to the user (= feedback loop, Norbert Wiener).
Full keyboards on mobile phones was first introduced in 1997 with the Nokia 9000i Communicator. It became a popular feature in the late '90s to early '00s.
In 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone which had a multi-touch interface with a virtual keyboard. Other companies followed soon. The virtual keyboards supported auto-correction, later also auto-completion. In 2014 with iOS 8 then Apple introduced the predictive text keyboard QuickType. It is a row with three words (word proposals) above the virtual keyboard. The more you use QuickType, the smarter it will get as it learns your style of writing and choice of words. Very similar predictive text keyboards exist on Android and Windows Phone devices.
My Current Work
In my work Love Letters (currently a working title) I will take use of these current predictive text algorithms to generate text messages. In the (eventual) performance there will be two phones lying side by side. One phone belongs to me, the other one belongs to my girlfriend. Both phones are turned on and ready to use. The display will show a text message application. A primitive robotic arm will formulate a text message by clicking self-acted on one the three word suggestions offered by the phone over and over. After a certain number of words, the robot will send the compounded text to the second phone which then starts answering the same way.
What happens if human interaction is removed from originally emotion driven actions? The "output" of the performance might be a text of an intimate conversation, constructed by personalized phones and dictionarys we use every day to communicate.
The work deals with the increasingly automatization of our communication and the the constructed reflection of our identity in our communication devices.
McLuhan
“Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace has large implications for the future of language”
In his famous book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man ” Marshall McLuhan examines the impact of media on societies. He states that every new technology changes our somehow our society. One example he gave is the railway which "did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure." (p. 8).
The medium itself has more fundamental and long-lasting effects than the more overt content (to which people normaly direct their attention). It follows that the dominant medium of a particular age, like print, radio or television has a huge impact to human relations.
The media also changes the way we communicate and in turn, this has effect on human relations (p. 33, beginning of chapter 3). As I wrote earlier in the paragraph "Predictive Text", it was in 2007 as for the first time users of mobile phones preferred writing a text message (hot medium) instead of making a phone call (cool medium). McLuhan thinks "the oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings" (p. 50), whereas the in more literary societies the "practical man has long ago eroded or suppressed [feelings and emotions] within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality" (p.50).
While media circulates it changes our society and our communication. Also the media itself changes and also if it interfers with a new technology (what Marshall McLuhan uses as a synonym for media I think). It is like a loop that feeds back from society to the medium.
Norbert Wiener
While McLuhan saw kind of feedback loops in human societies, Norbert Wiener (who defenitly influenced Marshall McLuhan) wrote about the similarities of circulations in "the animal and the machine". ("Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" was written by Norbert Wiener and published in 1948.)
"Feedback is everywhere in biology, from neural circuits to hormonal pathways to gene expression loops, maintaining homeostasis or amplifying signals like those that control embryo development" (Agapakis, 2011). Norbert Wiener began to see the connections between control theory and biology when trying to build systems for shooting down airplanes during World War II. Feedback was necessary to constantly figure out how far off the system was from the plane and adjusting accordingly.
"Feedback means that certain processes, having both a beginning and ending point, should be able to receive new input about their surroundings throughout their duration" (Gallowy, Protocol, p. 59). His research in the '40s was very important for all following developments in the filed of computer machines. Also the predictive text technology is full with feedback loops. Every typed letter, every choosen word feeds back to the system to update the next possible words. In this way the machine adapts to the user and becames more and more autonomous.
Human communication becomes mediated, automated and predictable.
Redundancy and Claude Shannon
By assigning biological processes to computer machines, Norbert Wiener suggested to calculate interim results twice or even more often "for the sake of redundancy" (Gleick, The Information, ch. 4) to prevent errors.
„Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room. “
Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, worked up a theory which exposes the informative content (= entropy, Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948) in messages. Shannon worked at a telephone company and was concerned "with questions of efficiency in sending messages down communication channels such as telephone lines" (Pickering, Cybernetic Brain, p. 148). Therefor he worked on making information and redundancy in messages measurable (Gleick, The Information, ch. 1).
Also Norbert Wiener talks about the importance of redundancy: „ In any case the computers, being human, made errors, so the same work was often farmed out twice for the sake of redundancy.“
Norbert wiener
boston arm
hearing glove / seeing glove
Keywords:
hot cold
participation
redundancy
1500 words
read: Cybernetic Brain
1) Explain my work
2) compare it make bridges to
McLuhan > Media circulates and changes the society
Wiener > Feedback Loops, systems adapt and learn (iPhone dictionary)
Shannon > Redundancy / Messages
Bibliography
Agapakis, I Heard You Like Feedback Loops, 15.12.2011. Christina Agapakis: Blog. Available from: <http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/oscillator/i-heard-you-like-feedback-loops/>. [23 February 2007].
Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Technology Press; New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948.