Sam Han | Eportfolio

Great visualization.

Scientists and academics who study how we interact with technology say people often try to import those behaviors into their lives, as anyone who has ever wished they could lower the volume on a loud conversation or Google their brain for an answer knows well. But they say touching screens has seeped into people’s day-to-day existence more quickly and completely than other technological behaviors because it is so natural, intimate and intuitive.

And so device makers in a post-iPhone world are focused on fingertips, with touch at the core of the newest wave of computer design, known as natural user interface. Unlike past interfaces centered on the keyboard and mouse, natural user interface uses ingrained human movements that do not have to be learned.

“It’s part of the general trajectory we’re on in the computing industry — this whole notion of making computers more open to natural human gestures and intentions,” said Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research.

The latest is a new line of Sony e-readers that the company will introduce Wednesday. For the first time, all have touch screens; Sony decided on the technology after watching person after person in focus groups automatically swipe the screen of its older, nontouch e-readers.

Research in Motion now makes touch-screen BlackBerrys, Amazon.com is expected to make a Kindle with a nonglare touch screen, and Garmin has introduced touch-screen GPS devices for biking, hiking and driving. New Canon and Panasonic digital cameras have touch screens and Diebold, which makes A.T.M.’s, says that more than half the machines that banks order today have touch screens.

Brides-to-be can scroll through bridesmaid dresses on a Hewlett-Packard touch-screen computer at Priscilla of Boston bridal boutiques, and a liquor store in Houston uses the H.P. screen as a virtual bartender, giving customers instructions for mixing drinks. The screens also show up on exercise machines, in hospitals, at airport check-in terminals and on Virgin America airplanes.

“Everyone who touches or takes a reader in their hand, they touch the screen,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. “It’s what we do.”

Some people even try to use touch screens when their devices have none.

“I had to use my sister’s BlackBerry to make a call, and I just kept swiping and touching,” said Susannah Wijsen, 40, who works in advertising in San Francisco and had grown used to tapping out phone numbers on her iPhone screen. “It didn’t even occur to me to use the keyboard.”

Though scientists have been working on natural user interface, Apple made touching, swiping and flicking at screens mainstream, said Harsha Prahlad, a research engineer who works with robots and sensors at SRI International, the research institute. “All of the technologies existed, but by bringing it together in a seamless fashion, the iPhone had a lot to do with it,” he said.

Virginia Campbell, 99, learned to type on a typewriter and had never used an A.T.M. or other touch screen. But when her children gave her an iPad two days after it came out, she found touching the screen to be instinctual.

“It was no problem,” said Ms. Campbell, who lives in Lake Oswego, Ore., and uses her iPad daily to write limericks and reread classic novels. “It was a light tap and I have had no trouble at all.”

Shumin Zhai, a research scientist who studies human-computer interaction at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., noticed the phenomenon among participants in a study he performed.

“People inevitably point at the screen, thinking something would happen — it’s such a natural behavior,” he said. “My own 2-year-old daughter amazingly could use the iPad and somehow it was intuitive.”

For readers used to turning paper pages, e-books invite touch perhaps more than anything else. Many a Kindle screen has been sullied by errant fingers before their frustrated owners realized that readers turn the pages of an e-book using buttons on the side of the device.

Amazon bought a touch-screen start-up, Touchco, but the current touch-screen technology added too much glare, Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said in an interview when Amazon introduced the newest Kindle. “It has to be done in a different way,” he said. “It can’t be a me-too touch screen.”

Two of Sony’s previous readers, the Touch and Daily Editions, had touch screens, but they produced a glare and required a hard, forceful touch. In the new versions, Sony removed the top layer of glass from the screen to reduce the glare and effort.

Sony’s new e-readers, ranging from $179 to $299, are not the cheapest out there, but Mr. Haber said people were willing to pay for the features they wanted and touch was at the top of the list. He noted that when Sony’s last line of e-readers was introduced, many people paid $100 more for the touch-screen version.

The next generation of screens might not even need a touch. Instead, they will understand the gestures of people standing in front of them and pick up on eye movement and speech.

“The future’s going to be in fusing together several different natural human behaviors — how people point, gesture and coordinate with each other,” Mr. Horvitz of Microsoft said. “Touch is a beautiful tip of the iceberg for talking about where things are really headed.”

Tactility…haptic…corporal…

It seems we have reached the degree zero of Labour politics in Britain. Few on the Left lament the passing of 13 years of New Labour, in part because it was associated with an illiberal style of hectoring micro-management that repelled people of all parties. Labour needs a complete reassessment of its values and purpose. But it is just this, as Neal Lawson pointed out, that is difficult for those closely associated with the old regime. Labour politics in Britain is at a crossroads.

One starting-point for analysis is to ask what explains New Labour’s illiberalism. At least three immediate reasons can be found.

First was the unholy alliance between media and government business managers, which reduced debate on policy detours (Iraq) into managing media reaction to the leader’s gut instincts, and more generally corroded the process of policy deliberation. Government foreshortened into corporate-style monitoring of media-friendly targets requires an illiberal means of implementation.

Second was the lack of any internal democratic or ideological resources for interrupting this corrosion of the policy process, due to the long-term weakening of the Labour party infrastructure, its accelerated detachment from the trade unions, and Blair’s own lack of ideological reference-points. While the first reason is a problem for any contemporary government, as Thomas Meyer argued ahead of New Labour’s demise, [1] the second factor was New Labour’s own sad trajectory.

The third reason for New Labour’s illiberalism was the distinctive nature of its attachment to the neoliberal market principles that in so many areas became its dominant paradigm. New Labour was a case of conflicted neoliberalism, unable to appeal to supporters’ automatic loyalty to market rhetoric and so relying on the artificial imperatives of management culture to impose its will. The result, as I discuss in a recent book, was to expose neoliberal social democracy as an oxymoron.[2]

Labour must, as Anthony Barnett insists, rethink New Labour’s illiberalism. Let’s not follow Coalitionistas in forgetting that New Labour built on the illiberal state infrastructure that John Major forged when he pushed the early 1990s investment explosion in CCTV surveillance and created the ‘world’s first’ national DNA database for criminals in 1995.[3] But the values of liberalism will not now be enough to reorient Labour: it was not hostility to liberalism that drove New Labour to its illiberal dead-end, but rather a deeper ideological vacuum distinctive to its tortured brand of neoliberalism. The only way forward is to identify the positive values for which Labour might plausibly stand as a political party. Until just recently the contest for Labour leadership has failed to do this.

From one direction, the contest seems to be about whether a metropolitan elite will continue to dominate Labour politics (Andy Burnham). But a metropolitan elite has dominated British politics for a very long time and, if this has got worse, the reasons are not ‘metropolitanism’ but the collapse of the Labour party as an organization with meaningful local participation, the neglected relations between Labour and a national trade union movement, and the leadership’s turn towards London, and specifically City-based, business interests for ‘natural’ support. Burnham points to a real problem, – a problem implicated in the causes of the 2008 financial crisis – but its roots lie in Labour’s shift in what it stood for as a party.

From another direction, the contest has become focussed on whether the new leader gives priority to recovering heartlands working-class support (Ed Milliband) or the authority to speak for the centre-ground of British politics (David Milliband). Since both strategies are clearly necessary, in varying mixes and at different stages, for an electable Labour party, this fraternal dispute seems at most a scholastic wrangle.

The real silence in the election campaign has been ignored: the lack of discussion about the values for which Labour should stand, and the lack of any acknowledgement that for more than a decade in government Labour increasingly distanced itself from values that could resonate with the interests of working people, rather than those of capital. Rumours of Tony Blair’s private investment bank for the super-rich are a baroque ornament on a decade-long edifice of pro-wealth rhetoric, of which John Hutton – already advising the coalition – was a leading spokesperson. So Ed Milliband is right to point to the Labour party’s dangerous divorce from its former working class supporters, but has fallen short so far of identifying the deeper value deficit within New Labour’s project of government. The problem is not whether the new Labour leader has the right election tactics, but whether s/he will lead a party that has a political purpose any more.

Yet as soon as we raise that question – what is the purpose of the Labour party? – we find a ready answer: to challenge the fundamental continuation of neoliberal doctrine that the Coalition’s new policies represent

That requires recognising both differences and continuity between the Coalition’s policies and those of the preceding three decades. Continuity lies in the orientation of government to dictates of global markets, and the absence of any political strategy that would set other values against the dominance of market functioning. True, the extent of the Coalition cuts, ‘is not’, as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times noted, ‘in response to actual market pressure’, but it is undoubtedly designed to allow George Osborne ‘to hold his head up high in the select club of “tough” finance ministers’. Meanwhile some see the Coalition’s GP commissioning plans as fulfilling, not contradicting, New Labour’s vision.

Yet there are ideological differences too. First, a return by the coalition to an explicit suspicion of the state; in the long run, this may be no more matched in a decline in the state’s size than was Mrs Thatcher’s, but it clearly differs from New Labour’s reliance on the state’s authority to regulate the social. Second – more surprising, initially – the Coalition’s reaching for a social rhetoric to cloak its attempt to shrink the state. What on the face of it could be more removed from Milton Friedman’s scepticism about ‘the social’ than the ‘Big Society’?[4]

As yet there is little evidence of what ‘society’ will emerge from this, and there is good reason to be suspicious. After the conspicuous failure of market fundamentalism in the financial collapse of autumn 2008, the underlying neoliberal consensus needs new room for ideological manoeuvre. Even the old idea that a small state makes room for the private economy is discredited when, to quote Martin Wolf again, ‘the deterioration in [governments’] fiscal position is the result of the cutbacks in the private sector’s spending, not a cause of it’. So, as the authorisation for drastic cuts in government spending, we get ‘big society‘. But this apparent move to the left is only surprising if we forget the distortion to the political spectrum that Tony Blair’s brand of Labourism achieved.

Whatever rhetoric clothes the coming cuts, it will not address the democratic deficit inherent to all neoliberal politics: that major economic action gets taken, affecting jobs, livelihoods, indeed whole ways of life, without adequate political consultation, under the guise of ‘necessity’.[5] The ‘post-bureaucratic’ sham of inviting people to send in their ideas for where the cuts will fall only diverts us from recalling the fierce debates on the timing and scope of fiscal readjustment by rival ranks of economists just six months ago.

The ‘Big Society’ will not fill in for the lack of a coalition strategy to encourage investment, stimulate consumer demand, or (most important, long-term) to safeguard the employment skills of what some fear will be a generation lost to the labour market. Nor will it address the Institute of Fiscal Studies’ well-publicised concern that even in absolute, let alone relative percentage, terms the poor have lost out more than the rich from the Coalition’s first budget. No idea of ‘society’, however big, can compensate for the absence of genuine consultation about what economic and social policy Britain needs.

Large sectors of the population will soon experience at high personal cost the avoidable ‘necessity’ of accelerated and expanded cuts. A party is needed that can give voice to that experience, challenge the ends those cuts serve, and argue for practical measures, both national and local, to counter their potentially devastating impacts. That party could be Labour. But first it must reorient itself to addressing the needs of the working population, not distant investment capital.

‘Middle England’, along with most of Britain, will soon be suffering: can the Labour party find its voice in time? [6]

Notes

[1] Thomas Meyer, Media Democracy  (Polity 2003).

[2] Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage 2010), chapter 3.

[3] Duncan Campbell, ‘April start for DNA criminal database’, Guardian 17 March 1995.

[4] Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom  2^nd edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, (1982: 133-135).

[5] Colin Leys, Market-Driven Politics (Verso 2000).

[6] I discuss the need to move beyond the narrow template of neoliberal politics in Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage 2010).

I’m pretty ignorant on British politics but this seems like a pretty good, “soft” critique of New Labour. I wish someone as smart as Couldry would write something like this addressed to Democrats.

H/T Fiona Lee (@fionally)

This is great.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

More retailers like Art.com, B&H Photo, Diapers.com, eBags.com and the Discovery Channel store use these kinds of ads. Nordstrom says it is considering using them, and retargeting is becoming increasingly common with marketers in the travel, real estate and financial services industries. The ads often appear on popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Realtor.com.

In the digital advertising business, this form of highly personalized marketing is being hailed as the latest breakthrough because it tries to show consumers the right ad at the right time. “The overwhelming response has been positive,” said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com. The parent company declined to say whether it also uses the ads.

Others, though, find it disturbing. When a recent Advertising Age column noted the phenomenon, several readers chimed in to voice their displeasure.

Bad as it was to be stalked by shoes, Ms. Matlin said that she felt even worse when she was hounded recently by ads for a dieting service she had used online. “They are still following me around, and it makes me feel fat,” she said.

With more consumers queasy about intrusions into their privacy, the technique is raising anew the threat of industry regulation. “Retargeting has helped turn on a light bulb for consumers,” said Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. “It illustrates that there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too.”

Retargeting, however, relies on a form of online tracking that has been around for years and is not particularly intrusive. Retargeting programs typically use small text files called cookies that are exchanged when a Web browser visits a site. Cookies are used by virtually all commercial Web sites for various purposes, including advertising, keeping users signed in and customizing content.

In remarketing, when a person visits an e-commerce site and looks at say, an Etienne Aigner Athena satchel on eBags.com, a cookie is placed into that person’s browser, linking it with the handbag. When that person, or someone using the same computer, visits another site, the advertising system creates an ad for that very purse.

Mr. Magness, of Zappos, said that consumers may be unnerved because they may feel that they are being tracked from site to site as they browse the Web. To reassure consumers, Zappos, which is using the ads to peddle items like shoes, handbags and women’s underwear, displays a message inside the banner ads that reads, “Why am I seeing these ads?” When users click on it, they are taken to the Web site of Criteo, the advertising technology company behind the Zappos ads, where the ads are explained.

While users are given the choice to opt out, few do once they understand how the ads are selected for them, said Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, the chief executive of Criteo.

But some advertising and media experts said that explaining the technology behind the ads might not allay the fears of many consumers who worry about being tracked or who simply fear that someone they share a computer with will see what items they have browsed.

“When you begin to give people a sense of how this is happening, they really don’t like it,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who has conducted consumer surveys about online advertising. Professor Turow, who studies digital media and recently testified at a Senate committee hearing on digital advertising, said he had a visceral negative reaction to the ads, even though he understands the technologies behind them.

“It seemed so bold,” Professor Turow said. “I was not pleased, frankly.”

While start-ups like Criteo and TellApart are among the most active remarketers, the technique has also been embraced by online advertising giants.

Google began testing this technique in 2009, calling it remarketing to connote the idea of customized messages like special offers or discounts being sent to users. In March, the company made the service available to all advertisers on its AdWords network.

For Google, remarketing is a more specific form of behavioral targeting, the practice under which a person who has visited NBA.com, for instance, may be tagged as a basketball fan and later will be shown ads for related merchandise.

Behavioral targeting has been hotly debated in Washington, and lawmakers are considering various proposals to regulate it. During the recent Senate hearing, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she found the technique troubling. “I understand that advertising supports the Internet, but I am a little spooked out,” Ms. McCaskill said of behavioral targeting. “This is creepy.”

When Advertising Age, the advertising industry publication, tackled the subject of remarketing recently, the writer Michael Learmonth described being stalked by a pair of pants he had considered buying on Zappos.

“As tracking gets more and more crass and obvious, consumers will rightfully become more concerned about it,” he wrote. “If the industry is truly worried about a federally mandated ‘do not track’ list akin to ‘do not call’ for the Internet, they’re not really showing it.”

Some advertising executives agree that highly personalized remarketing not only goes too far but also is unnecessary.

“I don’t think that exposing all this detailed information you have about the customer is necessary,” said Alan Pearlstein, chief executive of Cross Pixel Media, a digital marketing agency. Mr. Pearlstein says he supports retargeting, but with more subtle ads that, for instance, could offer consumers a discount coupon if they return to an online store. “What is the benefit of freaking customers out?”

It’s happening to me right now (as I sit at home waiting for UPS to bring me my boots).

This Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s daughter. I wonder what her childhood was like…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Susan Jacoby together, on the same page, should make you shudder. It makes me at least…

Like come on…really? When there are so many unemployed young people who are looking for a place to work on their resumes and be online while sipping some coffee, places like these want to be gourmet? Look I get it. I’m a big coffee drinker and a big fan of Stumptown’s coffee. But this makes me so much more a fan of Starbucks than Stumptown since those sucky purveyors of ubiquitous “not that bad” coffee have started to give free wi-fi everywhere. Ugh.