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Judith A. Symonds, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
jsymonds@aut.ac.nz
Symonds, J. A. (2007, Dec), Book Review: "Shaping Things". Bulletin
of Applied Computing and Information Technology Vol. 5, Issue
2. ISSN 1176-4120. Retrieved
from
Sterling, B. (2006). Shaping Things. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press (145 pages).
At 145 pages long, Bruce Sterling’s book ‘Shaping Things’ is
refreshingly easily digestible.
The obligatory Google search tells me that Bruce Sterling is a
CyberPunk writer. Sterling
doesn’t refer to himself as a CyberPunk but more of a science fiction
writer. However ‘Shaping Things’
doesn’t read like a science fiction novel either.
It is more like a fascinating meta-analysis of modern
technosocial discovery in which Sterling analyses where WE (society)
have come from in order to understand more about where WE are going.
He makes meaning jump out at the reader throughout the book, with
underlining, <-arrows->, graphics and CAPITALISATION.
His book is non-fiction work, but he also manages to break many
of the rules. For example he
gets away with presenting mysterious figures and diagrams that perhaps
he thinks will reach the reader through appearing on the page, as he
makes no attempt to refer to them or to explain why they are there.
My Google search of Sterling also pulled up several social Internet
experiments where many individuals contribute to larger historical
collections of work. This
suggests to me that he is not entirely a capitalist, though like the
majority of us, has to accept some capitalism ideology in order to
function.
My interest in this book is from the perspective of my current
research into the application of RFID technology in everyday
environments and my belief that one day end-users might be able to make
use of so called ‘ambient’ information.
The main underlying message of ‘Shaping Thinks’ is that our
current world is not sustainable.
Sterling illustrates this in ways that are not widely thought
about thus avoiding the current hype regarding climate change and carbon
footprints. In fact, I think
that Sterling accepts that climate change and carbon footprints are
facts of life. The best way
to describe this without spoiling Sterling’s little gems for you
(because you are simply going to have to read this book) is to talk
about our home fish aquarium.
We have some very brightly coloured tropical fish in our aquarium
and as I have a young family, we have our fair share of pre-schooler
aged visitors to our house.
Pre-schoolers have a fascination with how things work and high among
their list of fascinations are bodily waste functions.
Pre-schoolers who stare in wonder at our aquarium invariably ask
about whether the fish wee in the water and what happens to it.
Our tropical fish aquarium is an obviously closed system bound by
glass, everyone can see that.
However, our world is also a closed system where wee is the least
of our worries as WE produce all sorts of toxic rubbish in the process
of producing end products.
Sterling devotes around a chapter of ‘Shaping Things’ to RFID.
He doesn’t go in for acronyms, so he talks about RFID in
non-technical terms as ‘arphids’.
This is handy because arphid is a label that has yet to be
categorised by readers, so that Sterling gets away with talking about
the technology without being constricted by what is already known.
Sterling is also refreshing honest about technology.
“Passive RFID technology barely works” he says.
This I know to be true.
In our RFID lab, lots of conditions have to be in our favour for
the technology to work and it is still very unreliable.
My students have already latched on to the notion (and I used to
subscribe to this also, so maybe I am guilty of teaching it to them)
that RFID might someday be placed where a barcode used to be so that a
supermarket shopper could wheel a trolley through a gate rather than
being delayed at the checkout.
Maybe RFID will someday be where a barcode used to be, but not in
the way WE might first think.
Throughout ‘Shaping Things’ Sterling escapes physical bounds and
manages to explore how we might design our world once our current world
becomes unsustainable.
Sterling suggests that the way to escape all our toxic rubbish is to
bring to the attention of the end-user the history of things.
In Sterling’s example of a wine bottle, the current label
provides product description, information designed to build consumer
desire and a product identification number (barcode).
However, by integrating an arphid into the wine bottle (I nearly
said attaching, but this is not about slapping a device onto a thing),
the object can know all the information about how and where it was
produced that can be ‘googled’ at will by the end-user.
There are lots of other little gems in Sterling’s ‘Shaping Things’
that will have you chuckling out loud and nodding.
I’ll leave these for you to discover.
It is new, thought provoking and refreshing and it is well worth
it.
Further reading: Beer D.
(2007) “Thoughtful Territories:
Imagining the Thinking Power of Things and Spaces”. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 11(2).
Copyright © 2007 Judith Symonds
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