"The death of the Desktop"

by Michael V. Copeland

December 3, 2007

This blog entry raises a very important question that speaks to the heart of cloud computing. The paradigm in which we operate today feels as if most people have their digital identity primarily contained in a handful of websites. For people between the ages of 15-25, it is hard to argue that Facebook does not have some sort of a monopoly on the market for social content. For email, Gmail would like to make the same claim, but Hotmail and Yahoo Mail continue to serve as widely used and recognized platforms for web based email. Flickr (owned by Yahoo) is very popular for photographs, but many young people would probably say that they use Facebook for maintain their digital photography album's on the web.

This article sheds light on a new firm that is banking on the future of computer users shifting over to the cloud. The company is an online storage firm called BOX.NET, from Palo Alto, CA, and is two years old. Their main concept is a program they have created, OpenBox, which has an open platform. The idea is that the user can store all kinds of digital content online that can be accessed by other web-based applications, rather than having to upload content from your pc each time you want to add something to a particular web-based application.

This service hinges upon a critical assumption: that the web-based applications (ie. Facebook) that its clients (ie. the person who stores data on box.net) intent to feed with content from its website will actually adopt its open platform to allow for the users to access the box.net content. Considering this scenario raises an interesting question: Will the future of cloud computing become another platform for a struggle between internet companies to try to force its users to choose between one and other, rather than allowing the user to easily share and exchange content between web-based applications

I think this is article #7

Found from "information seeking" or "searching" and "behavior" or "attitude" and "Students" or "undergraduates" in ERIK/CSA (no specific fields selected)

Developer's Guide

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This chapter gives a history of the term 'meme' as it was coined by Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter's later book on the topic.  The next part of the chapter talks about viral memes, which the author considers to be any meme designed to propogate itself. These memes "invoke an emotion and insist on being spread", such as chain emails.  Those appealing to topics that provoke reaction, such as pity, fear, or sex, are considered to be the best examples of this.  As for schemes, the author defines them as a set of related memes shared among different people. Schemes spread in a way similar to memes, but also through membership.  In other words, if certain members of a scheme are considered to be good authorities or role models, other people, regardless of whether they accept the memes on their own, will become a part of the scheme.

The headings in this chapter look good, although the information (especially the example under viral memes) seems somehow off. As a brief history of the term 'meme' and an exploration of the schemes, this chapter is thought-provoking, but I'm hesitant to necessarily take the ideas he proposes as fact.

This article discusses how memes catch on (or don't) and their impact on culture. The first approach is looking at history as either a narrative or a science. The narrative must be plausible, but not predictable, to be interesting. So too is culture. The things that catch on don't follow a formula per se, but in retrospect they aren't completely out of the blue. The second approach is a comparison with evolution. In this view, it is the glitches that move things forward, not just the formula. The good will continue, the bad will be cast off. However, the line between good and bad is blurry at best, and the very nature of parasitic things like memes is to trick the hosts. The article gives the example of a person with a sweet tooth. If the candy tastes good enough to make the person forget about its negative impacts, it will persist, furthering both the good and the bad qualities of candy. Memes are selected unconsciously and consciously. Even in the case of meme-engineering, in which someone tries to create an idea that will catch on by mimicking what is popular, nothing can be predicted for certain. It doesn't necessarily matter how good an idea is (although it helps), but rather the unpredictable pull of many natural and cultural forces that decides the fate of a meme. Cultural evolution is thus not a direction, but a trend, and not necessarily a very definite trend.

The article touches on a lot of different possibilities, but its tone makes it easy enough to read and digest. The nature of taking the side of unpredictability is that no firm conclusions will be drawn, but the article still discusses numerous possibilities. The question Dennett repeats is "cui bono?" or "who benefits?" He doesn't give an answer, or perhaps the answer is that even if one could measure the benefits, they wouldn't necessarily inform anything beyond that.

This article analyzes how the internet works in terms of memetics. In this way of viewing things, each user and website is a different agent or node in the network: not aware of the underlying structure of the network, but instead only concerned with its immediate links within that network.  Marshall takes a bottom-up approach and applies memetics to each level.  At the operational level, the internet is a series of linked memes through which information and messages are routed through agents that have a specific purpose but do not know the intentions of the central controller.  At the service level, agent are interfaces designed to achieve certain goals through interacting with other agents.  In the example Marshall gives, a search engine for online stores has a goal of interfacing with other agents (the online stores) and processing the information.  At the user level, the internet memeplex is able to transmit information quickly and ignore real-world boundaries. Thus users are able to indicate what information they want to receive, and then get it through the network. Marshall concludes that the memetic support system embedded in the internet make it more efficient and allows each additional layer to perform more useful and complex operations efficiently.

Although the aim of this paper is sound, the connection between each level is not discussed in any amount of detail. The clearest points are the discussion on virtual communities and general overview of how the internet can operate as a series of memeplexes.