Chapter 53 10.4 Planning a Community

In the United States, every auto parts store has a long list of product catalogs on the counter.The catalogs would be the width of a dump truck if lined up.The spine is down, and the pages are rolled out with the edges out.Even if you look from the other side of the counter, you can easily tell from the tens of thousands of pages which are the dozen or so pages most used by technicians-those pages have a lot of black spots left by greasy fingers. mimeograph.Those frayed markers became a tool for mechanics to find things—every stubborn stain locked a chapter they needed to consult more often.The same scuffed logo can be seen on cheap paperbacks.Put the book on the bedside table, and the junction of the spine will open slightly where you last read it.You can follow up on your story the next night with this naturally occurring bookmark.Wear preservation is useful information.There are two forks in the yellow woods, the one with more tread will give you the information.

Worn marks are emerging.They are the product of a multitude of individual activities.Like most emergent phenomena, wear and tear has a tendency to reinforce itself.A gully in nature tends to breed more gullies.Also, like most emergent attributes, wear can convey information.In real life, "wear is a tattoo that's inscribed directly on the object, and where it shows up, it shows that there's a noteworthy difference," says Will Sheer.He is a research fellow at the Bell Communications Research Institute. What Hill wanted to do was graft the environmental awareness conveyed by physical wear and tear into the machine ecology of the office.For example, Hill believes that records of user interactions with electronic documents can greatly enrich the information in electronic documents. "When using a spreadsheet to adjust the budget, the number of revisions for each grid can be mapped to a grayscale interval, thereby visually showing which grids have the most or least number of changes." Points out where there may be confusion, controversy, or error.Another example is that in businesses that use productivity tools, people are able to track which parts of documents are changed the most as they are kicked around from department to department.Programmers call this kind of hotspots that change back and forth as "churns".They found that among the millions of lines of code written by a group of people, it was very useful to be able to find the area where the "toss" hides.Software and equipment makers will gladly pay for comprehensive information about their products -- which parts are used more and which parts are used less.This kind of detailed feedback helps them improve their products.

Where Hill works, all the files that flow through his lab hold records of other people or machines interacting with them.When you select a document to read, a narrow bar appears on the monitor with little scales showing the cumulative time others have spent on each section.You can see at a glance where other readers hang on: a crucial passage perhaps, perhaps an eye-catching but somewhat ambiguous one.The usage rate of the public can also be displayed by gradually increasing the font size.It's a bit like the "striking quotes" in enlarged font in magazines, but these highlighted "commonly used" passages emerge from uncontrolled collective appreciation.

Wear and tear can be seen as a metaphor for community.A single scuff mark is useless.But pooled and shared with others, its existence has value.The wider their distribution, the higher their value.Humans crave privacy, but the truth is, our sociality trumps our independence.If machines understand each other as we do (even about intimate things), then the machine ecology is unconquerable.