Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information by Malcolm McCullough (review)

Malcolm McCullough has produced a provocative set of essays on an emerging but elusive set of phenomena in his Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Asserting that "The twenty-first-century arts are the arts of the interface," he broaches with gusto the question of exactly what and where that interface is, allowing only that "interface is no longer just about sitting at a machine" (p. xi). Thus he raises the notion that the totality of the overlapping technological interfaces that we experience today may be thought of as "ambient" within all of our daily social and material environments—and that our ability to attend to, utilize, or even resist such an all-pervasive interface may have to be re-conceptualized as well.

In exploring this idea, McCullough ranges through a wide variety of media examples and cultural settings, which allow him to introduce and mobilize a diverse catalog of previous scholarly concepts such as "intelligent environments," "embodied information," "urban informatics," and "situated technologies." His essays cycle back again and again to some common themes: the relationship between personal, mobile, wireless technologies and the collective, fixed, wired spaces that enable them; the transformation of the body, its senses, and its sense of selfthrough both inward-focused technological augmentation and outward-focused technological immersion; and the differences, if any, between a utopian condition of anytime/anywhere information access and a dystopian condition of every-time/everywhere information overload. This is neither an empirical case study, nor a systematic, comprehensive historical synthesis—it is an intellectual journey where McCullough walks a vast and sublime conceptual terrain (though it is not a hike to recommend for beginners).

This emphasis on breadth of inquiry over depth of inquiry is both the strength and the weakness of McCullough's book. It is indeed refreshing to accompany him as he juxtaposes moments and meanings from across the arts, culture, and humanities scholarship of a dozen disciplines. Information infrastructures are a "modern firmament" in the tradition of medieval cosmology; "intrinsic information" built into environments is exemplified by the transcendental impact of growth rings evident in a tree stump; and the "continuous partial attention" we provide to electronic screens of all sizes is interpreted with reference to the writings of William James. But McCullough's whirlwind tour through the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of mind, attention, and interaction rarely pauses for long enough to build up an argument for the many provocative claims and judgments that he offers along the way. Some of these seem downright nostalgic, as when he argues that "cumulative, cultivated engagement with embodied, direct stimuli provides a defense against predations of mediated novelties and interruptions" (p. 86).

Unfortunately, such sweeping statements sometimes undermine his original (and very useful) goal of problematizing the very terms he's using. What does "embodied" stimuli mean within different technological and historical settings? How do we define what is "novelty" or "interruption" in different social circumstances and from different positions of power? And how can one easily contrast "direct" stimuli with "mediated" information, when the starting point of the whole project was to try to break down a notion of what "mediation" even means?

Such concerns, however, reveal the real power of McCullough's essay: he demonstrates that our construction and interpretation of information environments are inevitably laden with norms and value judgments. In keeping with this argument, he ends his book with an epilogue declaring that "You should have the right for your environment to remain silent" (p. 286). McCullough admits in his introduction that his use of the term ambient"is a simple name for a complex set of phenomena," which he hopes "usefully conflates several noteworthy conditions found where a new attitude about attention meets a new era of information technology becoming situated in the world" (p. 17).

He ultimately asks, "do increasingly situated information technologies illuminate the world, or do they just eclipse it?" (p. 20). This has been an...