I'm going to be giving another revealing errors talk this week at the cultural center Mama in Zagreb, Croatia. The talk is scheduled for 14:00 on January 10th and will be part of the weekly skill sharing meeting. It should be a lot of fun and there will be time talk to chat and grab a coffee or something afterward. Please join if you can and feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

This year, I was invited to give a keynote presentation on revealing errors at the annual O'Reilly Open Source conference. The keynotes this year were all short form -- 15 minutes -- but I tried to squeeze in what I could. Although I was "helped" in this regard by the fact that I talk too quickly in general, I think the talk hit the core themes of the project and offered a few key examples that will be familiar to RE's regular readers.

I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest "party night" of the conference!

For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video recording that O'Reilly made that I've embedded below.

A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all my freedom loving readers.

I've recently given two talks on Revealing Errors at LUG Radio Live USA and at Penguicon. I'll be giving at least two more in the near future: today (June 18, 2008 -- sorry for the late notice!) at MIT for Boston Linux Unix and at OSCON in Portland, Oregon on July 25.

There's a post on Copyrighteous (my personal blog) with more details and links from my talks page to notes and slides.

So far, they've been successful and lots of fun. I travel frequently and am interested in doing more. Contact me if you'd be interested in organizing something.

Welcome to the Revealing Errors weblog. Our goal is to reveal errors that reveal the technology around us to learn how technology affects our lives.

Introduction

In The World Is Not a Desktop, Marc Weisner, the principal scientist and manager of the computer science laboratory at Xerox PARC, stated that, “a good tool is an invisible tool.” Weisner cited eyeglasses as an ideal technology because with spectacles, he argued, “you look at the world, not the eyeglasses.” Through repetition, and by design, technologies blend into our lives. While technologies, and communications technologies in particular, have a powerful mediating impact, many of the most pervasive effects are taken for granted by most users. When technology works smoothly, its nature and effects are invisible. But technologies do not always work smoothly. A tiny fracture or a smudge on a lens renders glasses quite visible to the wearer.

The Microsoft Windows “Blue Screen of Death” on subway in Seoul.

Anyone who has seen a famous “Blue Screen of Death”—the iconic signal of a Microsoft Windows crash—on a public screen or terminal knows how errors can thrust the technical details of previously invisible systems into view. Nobody knows that their ATM runs Windows until the system crashes. Of course, the operating system chosen for a sign or bank machine has important implications for its users. Windows, or an alternative operating system, creates affordances and imposes limitations. Faced with a crashed ATM, a consumer might ask herself if, with its rampant viruses and security holes, she should really trust an ATM running Windows?

Technologies make previously impossible actions possible and many actions easier. In the process, they frame and constrain possible actions. They mediate. Communication technologies allow users to communicate in new ways but constrain communication in the process. In a very fundamental way, communication technologies define what their users can say, to whom they say it, and how they can say it—and what, to whom, and how they cannot.

Technology activists, like those at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), understand the power, importance, and limitations of technology and technological mediation. Largely constituted by technical members, both organisations, like humanist scholars studying technology, have struggled to communicate their messages to a less-technical public. Before one can argue for the importance of individual control over who owns technology, as both FSF and EFF do, an audience must first appreciate the power and effect that their technology and its designers have. To understand the power that technology has on its users, users must first see the technology in question. Most users do not.

Errors are under-appreciated and under-utilised in their ability to reveal technology around us. By painting a picture of how certain technologies facilitate certain mistakes, one can better show how technology mediates. By revealing errors, scholars and activists can reveal previously invisible technologies and their effects more generally. Errors can reveal technology—and its power and can do so in ways that users of technologies confront daily and understand intimately.

About Us

This weblog is maintained by Benjamin Mako Hill, a free/open source technology activist, developer and consultant. This project is done as part of a Fellowship at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Contributions, both in terms of suggestions or pointers to revealing errors or in the form of full articles is graciously accepted. Please email mako@atdot.cc with any such suggestions.