Habitual usefulness and ambient suffering

I've noticed I've been using a couple of phrases in increasing doses: "habitual usefulness" and "ambient suffering". Coining terms and coming up with new ways to describe old things is natural for me, but throughout the ages, some things stick more than others. Too early to tell if I'll still be using these down the line, and I'm certainly not the first person to use them — but like puppies left in a basket on my doorstep, I've already grown to love them.

"Habitual usefulness" specifically refers to tools that aren't just useful per se; they're a daily (or almost-daily) part of your life. Sometimes by necessity (e.g., if you have a high-tech job, you'll need a computer), sometimes more out of a fervent desire to be productive and save time. Regardless, these habitually useful tools are an ongoing and regular presence in your life, so much that to suddenly have them disappear would be severely disruptive to your accustomed flow of going about things.

When I say "tool", I mean it in a broader sense. A habitually useful object doesn't have to be for work purposes — it can provide hours of entertainment at a time, like an iPod. iPods are a remarkable example because at one time, they were the suspicious "new kid on the block" of a burgeoning MP3 market. Now, with over 100 million units sold, there's nothing unusual or particularly esoteric about them. They are very common, and synonymous with how we listen to music today. And certainly, during many people's daily routines, such as jogging 'round a park or going to school, they find a place being habitually usefulness. The music selection may change, but the iPod is the reliable wrapper which delivers the tunes.

Ideally (and this may be too pragmatic), habitually useful tools (objects, whatever) must have already surpassed being oohed and aahed about in a technological freakshow way. They're not novelties anymore. Their innovation must be acclimated to, and while they may be considered cool in the public eye, they've been around the block a few times and haven't disappeared in a humiliating puff reminiscent of dot com bombs. In other words, there's a certain level of maturity involved, and stability. After all, it's not a habit, nor is it useful, if unpredictable change often interferes. This doesn't mean that habitually useful tools aren't prone to error — they, like all other human-created objects, are certainly entitled to failures. But by far and large, and to recapitulate, they're recognized as paragons of being valuable enough to be a part of your daily life.

Now, let's expand on ambient suffering: what is that? One of my fave analogies is to point out the famous and various Enterprise starships from Star Trek. They may look, but certainly don't feel like the Enterprise if you halted the familiar hum of their engines and bleeps coming from the assortment of computer panels. Similarly, what is a powerful motorcycle without the purr it makes upon ignition? And from the Music for Airports liner notes, Brian Eno stated:

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

I turn towards Second Life and gesture towards the bugs we have which aren't critical scaling or stability blockers, and may be considered mere "annoyances" by some, and unencountered by others. Yet others still will come across these bugs, and not understand if they're intentional (part of the design), or if they do dislike them, not have the capability to explain them in a bug report due to lack of knowhow. This is commonly a case with new Residents trying to describe problems — it's akin to using available language to explain a miracle, or even a UFO sighting. You do the best you can, but not being better prepared, you're at a loss.

Ambient suffering is the level of noise — like a hum or hiss — that's present in Second Life, not a "I HATE THIS BUG!" outcry but more of the same sort of nuisance that comes with insects going up your nostrils. But like how repellant can be applied to combat those bugs, these bugs often have workarounds. They're nevertheless pain points, especially if during the daily course of living your Second Life, you come across one over and over while performing repetitive actions — building bugs that unexpectedly round your values and make your prims rotate when you didn't want them to! are easy candidates, as are elements that could use minor useability tweaks for smoothing out… lumps.

Having charted through numerous communication channels at Linden Lab, I've witnessed and participated in just about every sort of complaint you could see about problems. Amidst the understood but unhelpful "FIX THE DAMN GAME!" ones which rank high on Captain Obvious' scale, there are many granular, scattered pebbles of ambient suffering which are easy to ignore by themselves, but combined, add up to a weight equivalent to one of the "big boulder" issues — like being unable to login, teleport, or rez objects — which are far more glaring.

My work is largely spent watching and commenting on these scattered pebbles in series of micro-tasks, including in the Public Issue Tracker, and sifting through the pebbles to find gems. They can take many forms, such as a new Open Source contributor taking the initiative in creating a patch for a bug, or a solid repro which helps us nail one of these often longtime and under-the-radar issues. The good news is much ambient suffering is easy to fix, colorfully known as "low-hanging fruit". The bad news is, due to their ambient nature, these bugs don't get observed and commented on enough, so they tend to get lost or forgotten. Residents can contribute so much, and while it's our responsibility to develop and test Second Life, in a world based on user-created content, it makes sense that if you have the knowledge, share it and benefit the community. As I believe: knowledge not shared is useless.

Ambient suffering is also an appropriate term because when things have been broken for so long, it's hard to remember when things might've been any different. I don't let sharp edges become dull. I was with Karen Linden today going through gestures, and she reminded me that the Gestures list lets you create and edit gestures, but… you can't delete 'em! (For that, you have to dig back into your inventory. Clunkee.) Furthermore, it's not clearly stated in the interface that for animations and sounds to be included in a gesture, they must be fully-permissive. This and more frustrated and ended motivating me enough to create a "How to use gestures" video tutorial, and keeps it fresh in my mind — sharp corners cut! — about the problems with the gesture system. It's curious on a number of levels, because gestures are often used in a fun or silly way, not at all a bread-and-water element of Second Life, but they add so much… zest! And obstacles to using gestures, since we're such an avatar-centric world, impede our self-expression and communication. It can be further argued that since Second Life is such a social place, things which halt communication stop people from getting together, disabling one of the key fundamentals which SL has made conducive. Borked gestures ain't considered as serious as the chat bar not working, or to use an actual example, the current bug with group notices failing, but nevertheless — it's all connected. And since there's a clump of gesture bugs, they form a cloud unto their own.

Clouds, mist, fog can be frightening because they obscure what's beyond. They can confuse, and hide deadly hazards you're liable to fall into if you're not careful. They're also ambiguous and hard to contain, lending more weight to why I've termed it "ambient suffering". But just like our planet won't be without clouds as long as it thrives, ambient suffering is very much a continuing murk well-worth diving into. The issues and people affected by them change over time, but there'll always be something new to identify, call out from when clearing the vapors, and communicating the knowledge so your fellow Residents know what to expect.

As Second Life itself becomes more habitually useful, and a regular part of more people's everyday existence — I know how proud we are of how many hours some Resis spend inworld, and eyeballs continue to be locked on retention — being keenly aware and observant of what's happening around you, including ambient suffering, is crucial to understanding, and helping us to better your experiences.

Tagged as: General, Ideas, Work