Dept. of Minor Observations
A repository of bulletins, field reports, working papers, and notices concerning small thoughts, odd details, internet archaeology, abandoned drafts, and gentle critiques of modern digital culture. Items are classified, stamped, and filed accordingly.
Working notes on ambient notifications
Consider: the notification that arrives to tell you nothing has changed. The bank app that notifies you that your statement is ready. The service that notifies you that it has sent you an email. The email that notifies you that a notification awaits.
We have built information environments in which systems endlessly inform each other of their informing, recursively, without approaching anything that could reasonably be called information.
The Department speculates whether this constitutes a new category of communication. It is not signal, it is not noise, but sits so clearly somewhere in between that we still lack a word for. Signo? Nonal? Suggestions are welcome. This paper is under reconsideration pending receipt of a better word.
Notice on the Retirement of Blinking Text
The Department formally acknowledges the passing of the <blink> tag, deprecated by the major browsers in 2013 and removed entirely in Firefox 23.0.
The blink tag was widely condemned as an accessibility hazard, a visual irritant and a crime against aesthetics. These criticisms were entirely founded and correct. We do not mourn the blink tag.
The Department notes, however, that it was the only HTML element that communicated urgency without any form of irony. Everything that has replaced it communicates urgency with considerably more subtlety and considerably more effectiveness. Whether this is an improvement is a question the Department has left open.
Filed. No revisitation planned.
On cables that are still in the drawer
Every household in the developed world contains at least one drawer
with cables in it. As least some of these cables connect to nothing currently owned. Their
original devices are gone — upgraded, broken, donated or just lost
— but the cables remain, because throwing away a cable feels premature and wasteful.
The cable might be needed. The device it connected to might miraculously return, or
a new device might require exactly this cable or someone might ask to borrow
it. The cable is kept against a future that never arrives.
The Department notes that this is not irrational. It is, in fact, a
reasonable response to a world in which standards change faster than our own
habits. The drawer is an act of faith. Keep it. The Department respects it.
On menus that are now QR codes in restaurants
The laminated menu was a permanent object. It accumulated stains and
small tears and the occasional sticker with a handwritten amendment in biro on top. It could be
read without power. It could be handed to a child. It could be studied
at length without performing the act of studying it.
The QR menu loads, or does not load, depending on the strength of signal, battery life and functioning websites. It
refreshes. It requires both hands. It cannot be propped against the
condiments while one eats.
The Department does not oppose progress in restaurant technology. The
Department is noting that the laminated menu solved several problems
that are now, once again, not solved.
Towards a phenomenology of the unread badge
The notification badge, a red circle containing a number, presents
a count of items awaiting attention. For most applications, this number
bears no relationship to the actual capacity or intention of the person seeing the notification.
Observed: a badge reading 2,847 on an email application. You have
not read these emails. You will not read these emails. The number
is not seen as 2,847 discrete tasks or communications but as a single ambient
condition, like the expected high in today's weather report.
The badge was designed to prompt action. It has, through accumulation,
become background scenery. The Department suspects this was not the intended
outcome and may prepare a fuller account of what it means to design
for attention in a world that has apparently run out of it.
Notice on the redundancy of "ATM Machine"
The phrase "ATM machine" contains the word "machine" twice, as ATM
stands for Automated Teller Machine. Similarly: "PIN number,"
"ISBN number," "LCD display," "GPS system," and "HIV virus" all
contain their final word twice, already embedded in their acronym.
These represent RAS syndromes — Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndromes.
A category that is suitable named with the
redundancy that it describes.
The Department has no recommendation. Language accommodates its own
contradictions with remarkable patience, and the Department has learned
to extend the same courtesy. Filed with no further comment.
Field notes on hold music
Hold music serves a precise psychological function. It confirms that
the line is still connected. A silent hold would be dangerously indistinguishable from a
disconnected call. The music is not entertainment; it is the only evidence of an ongoing connection.
What is of interest to the Department is the choice of music. Organisations
that would spend multiple pounds and many months deliberating over a logo will select their hold music from a convenient list, delegating the decision to whoever
created and manages the telephone system. The result is often vague jazz with no particular provenance, or a classical piece that is inoffensiveness rather than
being of any quality.
Calculating the total time spent on hold, this music is, for the majority, the most time they will ever spend in direct sensory contact with the organisation. The Department
considers that this worth noting.
On the digital thing that has replaced the other digital thing
A partial record, kept for institutional memory..
The blog gave way to the platform. The platform gave way to the feed.
The forum gave way to the thread. The thread gave way to the reply.
The website gave way to the profile. The email newsletter returned,
having briefly given way to the notification, which gave way to the
alert, which everyone turned off.
The Department is not offering any argument about quality or progress.
This is a list. Lists of this kind will be useful in approximately
fifteen years, when someone will describe a current format as entirely
new and the list will be available for consultation. And then a reconsideration of their observation.
Working notes on the word, "Content"
"Content" is what writing became when it needed to be produced at
scale. It is also what painting became, and photography, and video,
and music, and conversation, when each of these was required to fill
a feed that urgently needed filling.
The word is accurate. Content is what remains when you remove the
question of what something is more specifically. It is the relic of a poem, a memoir, an
argument or a joke and retains only the fact of its existence as a form of
material to be distributed and consumed.
The Department does not see this is a complaint. A container that
holds everything then holds everything without differentiation - or interest.
This paper remains under
reconsideration pending a clearer sense of what was lost when we
stopped asking what was really in the container - and what was meant by it.
On the persistence of the fax number
A significant number of institutional, medical, and legal forms still
contain a field for a fax number. The fax machine has not been common
in domestic use for over two decades. Many, if not most, offices no longer own one.
Yet the field remains. In some places, a fax number is even legally required
for certain submissions. In others, the form was designed when fax
numbers were common and has not been updated because the form still works,
in the sense that all the other fields still apply.
The Department observes how long administrative forms can outlast the
technologies they were designed to accommodate with a high degree of regularity.
The field persists as a kind of fossil — evidence of an earlier
environment, preserved in the sediment of a PDF that no one has
opened to edit since 2009.