Certainly, the cinematography was excellent, albeit susceptible to cynical interpretation. A few of my more intellectual friends professed to find the whole thing boring. Shifting landscapes, people walking up walls, scenes folding back upon themselves. But that was the whole point, to provide a three-dimensional reference to an abstract framework. Dreams within dreams? Dream architects? “Kicks” to jolt you out of a dream state? These were essential props, metaphorical signposts planted by the director.

That’s the key to the fractal interface. Navigation through the planes of an experience, device-dependent by circumstance, not limitation. Inception spawned dreams within dreams, narratives expanding and collapsing within other narratives, emotions threatening to shatter them, or consign them to the oblivion of confused thought. All these are metaphors for the film experience, the consumption of narrative elements writ large on a dynamic interface.

Arguably, this is one of those films that play best in the theater, or on the giant flat screen at home. Like the best of the genre - the Jurassics, the Empires, the Raiders - it’s an outsized piece of entertainment. Perhaps someone will create a mashup for mobile devices, a rotating cube of  scenes, a stack of folding images, but it won’t touch the original.

What’s brilliant about Inception, and I did use the term in a Facebook post, is that it provides hooks for the pre- and post-viewing experience. Before I saw it, I imagined it might resemble Altered States, the wonderful precursor directed by Ken Russell that will probably seem outdated if I ever see it again. While I was watching Inception, the physical and psychological action pulled me along. Yes, there was a flat spot in the action, past the halfway point, when the exposition could have been parsed a bit better. The effect was to take me out of the dream for a moment, only to become absorbed once again, perhaps at a higher level. Now that I think about it, that might have been a “kick” for the film audience.

I’ve always been easy prey for tearjerkers. Katharine Hepburn’s scene at the end of Stage Door, the Calla Lily speech? Pure water works. The end of E.T.? Of course. And many others. So I wasn’t surprised at my reaction when the two children turn around at the end of Inception. But it was a truncated moment. The release I should have felt became ambiguous when I saw the rotating token. Was it all a dream?

It’s all an obvious attempt to drive traffic, and guess what? It’s successful. For all my immersion in digital media, I’ve become so jaded that I rarely venture out of my predictable cocoon: NYTimes, MSNBC, Facebook, LinkedIn. Lately, I’ve even taken a break from Twitter, though Foursquare seems to have taken up the slack. I read Mashable, and several other digital publications, though now more through following links from my main sources. The pace and flow of Manhattan life have pared the indulgent streams of discretionary data, conflating all the digital, visual and organic signals into one mashed pulse.

So what’s the appeal of Captivate? Well, the name does have Orwellian connotations. As a once-again New Yorker, though, I can go with that. From the fractal interface point of view, it’s inevitable. If they can put displays like this over urinals in finer restaurants, as happened in my small Bay area town some years ago, then the elevator’s a no-brainer. Some passengers don’t look up because they’re texting. I can see an opt-in feature that would print part of the display on their device, a customized readout of localized data. It’s too short a ride to customize the elevator display, not too mention insecure if you want to print proprietary data (”Jones from Acme Widget waiting for you in the lobby and he’s pissed.”) But the potential is there. Captivate didn’t put the screen there for warm and fuzzies. They saw a fractal opportunity and made the most of it.

These physical patterns of pinball navigation in and out of crowds, varying velocities to accommodate tourists without a clue (even those from other big cities) or hardened locals willing to play chicken, form a proxy for the interchange of information. I’ve already talked about the fractal surfaces, found in greater abundance in this hyper-urban settings, where more information per square inch gets projected at the user-passerby than anywhere outside of one or two Asian cities. Many people travel in a cocoon of digital music, up and down stairs, in and out of subways, while absorbing the visual flow of information. For those addicted to location services like Foursquare, it’s a never-ending opportunity to update your presence in a virtual community, all the while listening to tunes, tuning out the human traffic. This is also an opportunity stream for publishers to reach those same GPS-enabled users who’ve opted into the community interface.

I now live on the 19th floor of a modern apartment building. While I am away, the concierge desk emails me all sorts of information: my dry cleaning is ready, they’ve performed a minor repair, they’ve admitted deliverymen. When I return after work, a display at the front desk shows the appropriate icon on an interface that seems to have become standard in a certain class of Manhattan residence, colorful icons that show the status of these social transactions, much like the control panels at bars that permit wait-persons to order drinks as if they were at McDonald’s, pressing graphic objects.

The message here is really a wrapper for other messages. We are in the GeoSpatial Grid, a Matrix-like skein of nodes - some containing data, some containing services. The ability to connect these nodes into flash networks, deployments of entitled information flowing between evolving endpoints, is what will separate the successful publishers of the future from those that never got it. It’s not about the platform, and it’s not about the content. It’s about the use case, the particular instance of communication across the GeoSpatial Grid. How we define that grid is up to us, and it’s already happening.

I recently wrote about the collapsibility of interface. Fractal planes and surfaces have supported the democratization of communication. Driven largely by the iPhone, messaging and data access have devolved from desktop to palm. (Poor Palm - a fractal brand if there ever was one, collapsing into itself.) The concatenation of iPod to iPhone to iPad shows that the digital media vectors I’ve mentioned will continue to run through related families of devices and networks. But what about the macro lifestyle? How does that differ from one geographical region to another?

My workday used to start with a quick check of my email and online news sources, a few minutes of stretching, a bike ride or short run through some fairly pristine scenery, and then a short drive to my local Caltrain station. The train ride would take half an hour to forty minutes, depending on whether it was an express or local, and I would work on my novel in the morning, and read in the evening. I could see open vistas sliding by, and work in my own little space with room to set out my things.

Now, I still check my email before I leave the apartment, but the quick hike to the subway is hardly leisurely. I fight my way down into the station, and then onto a packed subway car where I’m lucky if I can reach my iPhone to change tunes, much less read a book. Most days, I hurry through the streets to the Columbia club for a compressed workout. I run through Central Park on the weekend, but the club seems the way to go during the week, particularly because it’s several blocks from my office. If I don’t remember to download the New York Times sections of interest to my iPhone, I’m without that flow of information. AT&T customers don’t enjoy connectivity on the subway. At my office building, the elevator shows the news on a small panel. For now, this surface has taken the place of television. We haven’t sold our house yet, so there’s no TV in the apartment. The Elgato USB device I used with my MacBook Pro to grab my basic cable signal in San Carlos doesn’t appear to handle the HD signal in my apartment.

Different lifestyles breed different use patterns. The fractal behavior of information is obvious in a dense urban setting, where the leisurely consumption of media is replaced by a constantly changing interface. This flow of geophysical elements is crucial not only to the theory of information in general, but to journalism in particular. Readers in different regions will consume the news differently. What works for the West Coast will not work the same in New York. The notion of one size fits all, or one content strategy fits all regions, is outdated, but what does this imply?

The International Geophysical Year began in mid-1957. I remember the televised spots of Eisenhower gravely intoning the importance of science. The Soviets beat us into space with Sputnik, but we positioned it as the beginning of a golden age. Whatever. We are at an equally important inflection point: the Geophysical Interface, writ large by Steve Jobs, but not his exclusive property. The use case has changed. It’s no longer a question of which device, but which lifestyle. Publishers have recognized the importance of delivering on different platforms, but that’s not enough. Delivery to different communities requires a heterogeneous strategy. It’s an amalgam of brand, community, and flexibility. Only the adroit will survive.

Last week, Apple sold more than 300,000 iPads. In one day.

We’ve already written about vectors, and how Steve Jobs uses that metaphor in a commercial context. And we all recognize his mastery of form factor, his unique talent for visualizing yet another combination of compelling design and common denominator functionality. But how does he do it? What framework supports such a rich stream of ideas?

The iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad offer solutions to a basic problem: how to access information. Whether that information is data (streams and files of audio) or knowledge (text and images aggregated into e-books), each product offers an interface to stored or distributed resources. The interface is the difference, not the underlying bits and bytes.

So here’s where it gets interesting. Steve Jobs has constructed a fractal interface.

Strictly defined, a fractal may be reduced or magnified to a form similar in shape and structure. Sound familiar? The iPhone as mini-computer? The iPad as maxi-iPhone? By replicating a desktop metaphor that wasn’t even his to start with, and embedding it in a series of addictive use cases disguised as consumer electronic products, Jobs has created the real-world version of Toy Story, the addictive film he produced in partnership with Disney. But just as the preceding link to that film produces a slow-loading Web page with embedded video preview, the i-Products coming out of Cupertino aren’t perfect. They don’t have to be.

Yesterday, I went to the Apple store at the Stanford Shopping Center. Not to buy an iPad, but to get a new headset for my iPhone (turns out I didn’t need it because my old one was fine, I just had to clean the gunk out of my phone’s headset jack, but I won’t begrudge Jobs a few more bucks..:) Now this particular location used to be a boutique of some kind, so space is at a premium. It’s a long, narrow room, always crowded, salespeople mingling with the customers, like a cocktail party. The island in the center that used to display computers is now covered with iPads. I walked past people of all ages, holding and playing with these devices - holding them at different angles, tilting them, stroking them, the adults quizzical, the kids overjoyed.

That’s when it struck me. Jobs’ fractal interface continues to telescope, to expand and contract on itself, presenting different surfaces, a multi-faceted polyhedron capable of infinite mutation. And this is not a static interface, but a dynamic one, driven by connectivity and network artifacts. The shape of future i-Products (and there will be more) will accommodate more data distribution and seamless navigation of syntactic networks. Taxonomies will migrate downward, into the hardware.

People are beginning to whisper that Apple is nullifying the browser (link originally posted elsewhere by Michael Zimbalist). Call it what you will, what’s really happening is the evolution of the fractal interface.

That’s not to say the iPad is a Mickey Mouse contraption. No matter what you hear out of the Googleplex. Far from it. The iPad is a perfect representation of digital media’s geometry, the interplay between data and the physical interface of different devices or control surfaces. Some people call this form factor; others, interface; still others, user experience. Which makes me laugh, because it’s mostly psychology, another proof of the Pavlovian reflex, another trick of the light.

Glancing off the iPad’s sparkling new touchscreen are the hopes and dreams of publishers, more than one newspaper among them, who see the flow of dollars and cents (well, OK, cents) from the owner/readers as a panacea. But aren’t these the same people who bought iPods and iPhones? More than one pundit has called the iPad nothing more than an over-sized combination of its two predecessors. That’s not true, and even if it were, that’s not a bad track record to follow.

What’s at work here is another fundamental law: The velocity of information, like water through a pipe, is governed by several phenomena. Width of the pipe, yes; reach of the network, check. But the endpoint, the handle/faucet/spigot, holds the value. The set-top box boys knew this for years, but they’re such propeller-heads it took Cisco to scare them off-center. Control surfaces, the angle (vector?) at which you hold the remote, all this is fundamental. Enter Tivo, that ever-changing experiment in user experience. Nice idea, all that interconnectivity, a growing number of options that lead me to wonder if I really want TV on my iPhone. I already have Kindle for iPhone, which I’ve used on Caltrain, my last hideout from any other kind of screen. It’s an angular thing, for sure, because those real Kindles look clunky to me, I’m sorry.

Like the iPhone, the iPad will push the polyhedron potential of what is still essentially a two-dimensional interface. Its apps will be more clever, take advantage of the larger tract of screen real estate, and because of the content,  which we feverishly await, probably suggest more Avatar-like experiences. All this will drive demand further, and the flat-looking Android had better keep up. It’s the geometry of media at work, the angle and circumference of knowledge, as embedded in device.

Our grandchildren will laugh at all this.

DeLillo got his start in advertising, writing terse copy for mainstream America, spinning icons out of thin air while learning his real trade - the manipulation of images, symbols, and meta-characters, people whose lives are the first derivative from our common human experience. I was thrilled to re-read his magnum opus Underworld for my MFA graduate lecture, partly because I wanted to go back over the 800+ pages of dense narrative, and partly because I felt something was waiting for me. Sure enough, when I examined his early description of the vast desert wasteland of the Southwest, whose white emptiness contrasts so acutely with the blackened Bronx tenements he covers later, the locus of his childhood trauma, I unearthed a few tours de force that could only have come from an ex-copywriter. When he talks about “lonely-chrome America,” for example, I thought of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the product of an artist who suggested one medium within another, whose paintings could have been photographs, and were in fact influenced by the genre of Hollywood stills.

DeLillo’s entire output since Underworld, four slim novels, has barely equaled the page count of that one giant work. The Body Artist, a Kabuki rendering of half a marriage, is a study in minimalism. Cosmopolis is a Leopold Bloom-like journey within a single day, through the streets of New York instead of Dublin. Dangling Man, his  much-anticipated take on 9/11, disappointed most, though I thought his characteristic understatement well-suited to the hollowness we all felt about the event.

So it’s understandable that Point Omega would generate the same criticism. DeLillo can’t write another big one. DeLillo’s characters are shallow, empty, devoid of humanity. The protagonist of this novel, a reclusive military strategist named Elster (get it?), has not gone over well with the critics, who continue to clamor for the old DeLillo. But that ’s not going to happen.

In the same way that journalism, and other legacy media, will never be the same, DeLillo’s novels will never be the same. Whether or not he does produce another 800-page work (I’d bet against it, though I’d be happy to lose), DeLillo has made the commitment to a new form. Point Omega features an art installation built around a 24-hour showing of Hitchcock’s Psycho, frame by frame. Film is important to DeLillo (e.g. - the Zapruder footage in Underworld) because it’s the new novel to many, the new archival form. His prose does not merely examine film, it becomes film, engaging in cinematic devices the way few others can.

The clamor for his return to the old form mirrors the discomfort of those mourning old-school journalism. Ignore the philistines. Bring back the brotherhood of truth. Well, it’s not going to happen, at least not quite that way. Truth, of course, is eternal. It’s just the purveyors of truth who’ll have to change their style to survive. DeLillo is special because he bridges generations and can point to the future. Critics will always have their say, but he is the ultimate critic, whose work speaks for itself. What a lofty goal for any writer.

The flow of information through digital media is like the flow of water through pipes. There are laws governing the behavior of information, and its atomic components, in the same way that there are laws governing the behavior of atoms themselves. If these laws are more subjective than their physical counterparts, that subjectivity matches the reasoning process through which information passes from others into our own consciousness. We choose the ideas we consume in much the same way as we choose the water we drink from those pipes, and just like that water, which often passes through filters to remove the impurities, our information passes through filters that remove time-space dependencies. One generation watches real-time television, fitting in other activities around a fixed broadcast schedule, while another reaches adulthood having never lacked the ability to asynchronously consume video, from VCRs, DVRs, and whatever comes next.

Which, of course, leads me to the iPad…:)

The frenzy surrounding last week’s ceremonial unveiling by Steve Jobs was a comforting affirmation to those of us in Silicon Valley that the world still watches what we do. Yes, we felt entitled to bicker among ourselves about the iPad’s pros and cons, whether the omission of a camera was more heinous than the lack of a USB port. But the overwhelming sentiment was one of relevance, the byproduct of successful innovation. Once again, Steve Jobs has created demand for something we suspected might exist, but didn’t quite imagine.

Before the announcement, I had been formulating a premise: that the velocity of innovation is another governing construct in the digital media space. The iPad did not magically appear as a full-blown apparition. It rests on the innumerable person-years of design and development that went into its predecessors, most conspicuously the Newton. What the iPad does represent, however, is the attainment of escape velocity, the kinetic state of innovation that explodes into the marketplace.

I was pleased to read a piece by Steve Lohr in today’s Sunday New York Times. He describes Jobs as “a skilled listener to the technology…tracking vectors in technology over time.” This is precisely what I mean about the velocity of innovation: it occurs in time-oriented vectors, as a function of demand, perceived or real, and the economics of production.

The iPad has already generated debate about its role as possible savior of journalism. I’ll leave the panegyrics to others, and concentrate on what I think are the measurable social phenomena that will prove yet another metaphysical law.

The piece was published before I had a chance to review it, but that wasn’t the problem. I had been freewheeling with my answers to questions posed in a chatty offhand manner. What I got was a post facto lesson in old school journalism. My remarks formed the basis of a mild send-up, a report on SMDs that questioned the job’s credibility.

Now, this is not sour grapes. Though I did correct the initial misstatement that accorded me the title of SMD at Chronicle Books (I’m a senior software engineer), my beef is not with the content but the tenor of this article. You can see the finger wagging behind the authorial style that depicts newspapers “allowing news to alight on Twitter.” My observation that newspapers were replicating their columnist listings on Twitter became “..newspapers are turning their entire mastheads over to Twitter.”

Hyperbole sells as many magazines as accuracy, I suppose, though the assertion that “hiring an SMD is a marketing crap shoot” does nothing to cure antediluvian reportage. The irony lies in the brittle approach taken by the online version of a major business publication, host to numerous narratives of success and innovation. Here, the arc dips instead of rises, implicitly discrediting social media before concluding that “..it’s just a great conversation starter.” Like the demise of print, I suppose.

This is a case of narrative indifference. Like our previously defined properties of information (velocity, elasticity, etc.), the vector of credibility offers a scale of measurement: perceived accuracy, compared to other sources. Social media exposes the opposing view. Journalists may still write to an agenda, but that decision becomes much more transparent in an open framework. It will be a chapter in our book on social journalism.

The sad thing is that somewhere in the Forbes organization, there must be someone dedicated to extending the influence of social media. Perhaps that person can connect with the author of this piece, and defend the role of SMDs. Here’s the piece.

That’s the simple explanation. In a more complex reality, my personal brand became less elastic. I started this year by leaving a job where I had done technical product management, as well as Web development. By amplifying my social media presence, I projected the breadth and depth of my skill set. I was able to work on projects that required every aspect of that set, and my ideas flowed freely. My current employer first contacted me via the most popular job-related social media network. That by itself was a sign of its forward-looking culture. I became immersed in that culture, and as it so often happens in the initial cycle, everything else faded into the background. Since my last blog post, I’ve been absorbing new information, and generating new constructs, at a rapid rate.

So the elasticity of knowledge has changed. At first, I thought that would be the title of this piece. In economics, the concept of elasticity of demand refers to the decreased interest in a product as its price increases (or something like that, it’s been decades since I took macro and micro in business school). In a knowledge economy, the ability of a person, or an enterprise to absorb and process new knowledge is a function of existing payload and bandwidth. Yes, these are networking terms, and they apply equally to my premise.

By shortening the arc of my reasoning process (i.e.- concentrating on code-level architectural and design issues), I’ve been able to perform demanding tasks, but at the price of negotiating less peripheral, or ancillary knowledge. My personal brand has strengthened in the Web development space. The more I do, the more I realize that being a senior software engineer has as much to do with combat experience as it does absolute knowledge. You can be a brilliant PhD, but if you don’t know where you are in a project, or the ramifications of your theoretical decisions, you’re not as valuable as a hardened (jaded?) veteran who’s seen too many miscues.

So the elasticity of my personal brand has changed. I’m less involved in strategic digital media issues than I have been in quite awhile. Strangely enough, this has clarified my strategic vision. It’s almost as if, by concentrating on the low-level technical issues, I’ve sharpened my view of the big picture. I have shortened the horizontal and broadened the vertical, to use terms I’ll define more fully in my next piece. There’s a book here somewhere, and I’m going to write it.