Carbonated Communication

.
I often stumble upon ideas for these posts while crashing back and forth between waking and sleep; dreams, events and memories bumping into one another - struggling to find a cogent narrative. In this morning's episode I found myself at a large, professional, academic meeting; a venue I no longer frequent. But there I was, expected to present my paper to a large, obviously enraptured, audience - good evidence that this was, in fact, a dream. But my laptop had been stolen and I had no hard copy of my paper, only the conference program with its title: Carbonated Communication. I ransacked the room until the program chair, who was a dead ringer for an old professional antagonist, announced to the suddenly present TV reporters, that "Dr. Schrag's paper has been withdrawn!"

Going back to sleep was not an option. So I got up, made coffee, and sat down in the morning room to pick the dream apart.

The title of the paper, Carbonated Communication, gave me my first clue. A few days ago we had been watching The Iron Chef, and the secret ingredient had been "Halloween Candy." Yeah, I know.  For the first time I can recall, I felt no envy for the judges. But both chefs used something called "carbonated candy." This is apparently a new incarnation of Pop Rocks from back in the 1970s, only now they "effervesce on the tongue." The old fear that if you ate them while drinking a carbonated drink your stomach would explode, seems to have dissipated. They are now sparkles that disappear into nothing leaving only a hint of flavor behind. OK, got that.

So, maybe the second piece was also a foodie thing. Yesterday, I was listening to The State of Things program on WUNC radio, over in Chapel Hill. The host, Frank Stasio, was talking with cookbook author Michael Ruhlman and food writer Kelly Alexander. One interesting idea they explored was the notion of a "lost generation" of cooks.  Apparently, in the 50s and 60s a generation "forgot" how to cook. The culprit, they opined, was that the cool new suburban appliances did it for us. Frozen dinners and packaged meals, TV trays and microwaves. We didn't cook so much as we opened, thawed, nuked, served and tossed everything that was left over into the trash compactor. The lessons once handed down from generation to generation faded. The old way became passé. So now, the authors asserted, cookbooks have to teach the basics, we must learn anew the "complexities" of boiling eggs, roasting a chicken, baking biscuits and making gravy - oops, preparing a sauce.

Alright, now what I think might have been the third part: Last night I invited a recent graduate back to campus to speak to my graduate seminar, "The Place of Text in the Digital Age." She was going to talk about a variety of digital tools the students might find helpful in constructing their final projects. The guest had created a "digital media resources-resource" as part of a directed study with me a couple of years ago, and I knew she had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things digital. She arrived even more amped than usual, which is hard to imagine. Seems that she had just gotten a job offer to work on an "AR Project" [Augmented Reality - think, your smart phone overlays Yelp restaurant data on top of the street you are viewing through the phone's camera. A website that lets you put the dress they are selling on a picture of you, so you can see how you look in it. The "heads-up" view pilots get of the instrument panel. That sort of thing.] with a very hip, very high end Design firm in NYC. She was as close to giddy as a very hip, very high end, digital design person can allow themselves to be. She talked with incredible knowledge about beta versions of digital message construction and distribution applications of which I had only the vaguest knowledge. The ideas popped and sparkled. And maybe that is what my lost paper, Carbonated Communication, was going to talk about:

I worry that in our current fascination with the pop and the sparkle of digital in-your-face, on-the-screen communication, we are forgetting how to communicate ideas and feelings thoughtfully, with depth. I am concerned that Twitter is our microwave, that Facebook is the trash compactor. We slip things with amazing speed across the glittering surface of the Internet - microblogs, the image of the instant, the tune passing through our earbuds right now! They effervesce, sparkle and disappear, leaving only a hint of flavor behind.  I am afraid that a decade or two down the road someone will have to "discover" the elegance of prose, the power of poetry, the awesome complexity of the analog novel. I am afraid we will have to reinvent all those wonderful wheels because we will have become lost in the snap, crackle and pop of carbonated communication.
.

To Hashtag or #To Hashtag

. 

I just read an article about the extent to which the “hashtag”, the symbol formerly known as the “number sign” or the “pound key” - “#”, has made it's way out of Twitter into the language at large.  The rather long NY Times article asserts that the symbol has come to indicate a sort of ironic separation from the content following the #.  I admit to not completely understanding - as I don't tweet.  But apparently a # inserted before the content seems to have much the same linguistic function as "not" inserted behind the content.  So, "#I completely agree" and "I completely agree . . . Not!" would be roughly equivalent statements.

In the interest of full disclosure I must admit to a personal history of symbolic manipulation.  It was probably sometime after 5th and 6th grade spent in Vienna, Austria, when I first encountered exotic symbol systems, but before college, when the odds of being outed as a poser would have been far greater. I used to take notes in class in fluid nonsense symbols.  I would cover pages with intricate symbols - sometimes starting from the left, sometimes from the right.  It was great fun.  I would even cross out and make corrections.  I think, perhaps, it was somehow tied up with masking ignorance as secret knowledge.  And that, it seems, is a characteristic shared with the #.  The symbol, the article implies, carries the flavor of shared, but assertive, indecision.  A declaration of "I may not know what I'm talking about - but here is what I think anyhow!" It is a phase we all go through, and perhaps there is something hopeful in a generation with the courage to symbolically acknowledge, no matter how obliquely, their indecision or uncertainty.

Still, it worries me that there seems to be an increasingly positive connotation attached to imprecise expression.  As I grow older, and more aware of how little of existence I understand, I try to express those few insights as clearly as possible.  But perhaps there is an inverse linguistic relationship at play; as maturity seeks clarity, youth masks uncertainty with oblique prose.

A couple of examples, from opposite ends of the "complexity continuum."  I mentioned several posts ago that I recently re-read The Great Gatsby.  Although he had already written two previous novels, Fitzgerald was just turning 30 when he wrote Gatsby, and, had he not died so young, we would consider Gatsby one of his "early works."  The point is that the prose is lovely, but the novel winds down to a whimpering "nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms" concept.  Youthful uncertainty wrapped in beautiful, complex, oblique prose.

Texting holds down the other end of the spectrum, well, more Twitter than texting. There are increasingly sophisticated speech-to-text software programs out there that by-pass tiny little keyboards to allow for less painful forays into texting. Some of them even get around the 160-character limits of SMS.  Still, Twitter, increasingly the short-message platform of preference, for the nonce restricts messages to 140 characters.  A restriction that, regular readers of my posts realize, might cause me to fling myself in front of a bus.

Still, younger writers seem to love it - because, I would argue, the enforced brevity lends itself to a sort of protective ambiguity. Doesn't demand it, mind you, but inclines one in that direction.  Take for example, from another iconic platform of the young, Facebook, the relationship-status descriptor "It's complicated."  What a superb example of terse ambiguity.  It says nothing specific, but implies a world of possibilities.  But a word of caution; the lack of precision does not always spin out in the protective way the author might intend. Two succinct phrases, one verifiable, the other probably mythic, serve as excellent examples of terse ambiguity gone awry:  "I am not a crook!" and "Let them eat cake!"  Neither leader spoke the phrase in an attempt to end a career.  However, the intent of the speaker notwithstanding, the audiences apparently heard, "#I am not a crook!" and "#Let them eat cake!"

Did I do that right? #It will break my heart if I can't figure out how to use the #.
.

Converging Media Conforming Lives, Or Convergence 2.0

.
In the beginning there was the stream.  Ones and zeros ionizing the atmosphere, streaking through silicone, rushing through wire; then held in abeyance in multiple forms of memory until once again they were converted to their previous incarnation as text or image or sound.  Convergence 1.0 marked the reductionist movement that reduced all human expression to that never-ending flood of 1s and 0s.

Convergence 1.0 also led, albeit briefly, to a period of diversification and specialization.  The challenge was to create environments to massage the digital streams of ones and zeros in the service of old media, better music, photography, writing, painting, math and science; more efficient gathering and manipulation of data of all types. We popped open the CPUs and stuck in sound-boards and graphics cards.  But inevitably those divergent streams found a common canyon - the Internet.  It was a Renaissance re-conceived.

The polymaths of the first Renaissance, the Michelangelos and da Vincis, had to put down the paintbrush to pick up the chisel, lay aside the lute to gather parchment and caliper.  They had to, literally, shift gears and spaces to cast their inspirations in different media.  In the converged digital Renaissance the screen became a single workbench for "everymedium," the keyboard and the mouse, "everypalette."  Multimedia became the lingua franca of the new age.  The mantra was not "word or image or sound" it was "this and that and the other."

It was not long before commonality of modality fostered common intention.  What, after all, does one do with a platform capable of producing all the creatures of this strange new world - while still, of course, making a profit?  And one must remember that the Internet is an American creation, and America is as much a creature of the marketplace as it is a product of the Constitution.  In America one is free to pursue whatever Quixotic quest may call to you.  Those that endure tend to pay the bills.  In this regard, the Internet is as American as Apple pie.

It is undeniable that the Internet provides safe haven, information and solace for individuals previously “alone” in the world.  My just-completed serendipitous Google search for one-handed violin players did not come up empty.  And many tout the ability of the “long-tail of the Internet” to gather thousands of isolates together in the joyous warmth, or sometimes, sadly, the vicious darkness, of a previously unimagined community.  But on the Internet real profit, real power, is measured in hundreds of millions of users and billions of clicks.

What I call Convergence 2.0 is based on an increasingly obvious dominant Internet business model.  Not long ago it was common to refer to “walled gardens” on the Internet.  These were online spaces created by content providers with an eye toward keeping us within their environment.  We were to be well cared for.  Shopping, entertainment, stock reports, sports, communication, community, even government would be within easy reach here in our gated-community; as would be the advertisements from the companies affiliated with this particular garden. But as history has proved again and again, it is a short step from walled-garden to ghetto.  One wonders, even in the most gilded of cages, what is going on outside? And it has been that curiosity that has led to the destruction of the walled-garden model. It has been replaced by what is now variously known as Web 2.0, or even more vaguely, social media.  We might beneficially think of it as “The Internet Tour Bus.”

Consider the challenge that confronts today’s major Internet entities: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Yahoo, et. al.  In order to attract the hundreds of millions of users necessary to gain traction in the Internet marketplace, you cannot create an entity that attracts exclusive audience demographics.  Rather you must devise a business model that allows you to provide everything that a global audience indicates that it values and desires. You need to provide a Tour Bus from which your users can vicariously participate in the world around them, but from which they do not stray – allowing you to direct their attention to the ubiquitous, revenue creating, ads posted inside the bus, where the eyes of weary riders rest between stops. Hence, it becomes a business necessity to discover, encourage and market those “tours,” or apps, defined by characteristics that appeal to everyone. "Lovely revolution.  Good job.  Now please step back on the bus.  What can we get you for lunch?"

Two paths diverge from such a model. The first path is the more hopeful, although I fear will be less dominant.  That path actually increases our appreciation for the complexity of the world:  I may just be a kid from Smalltown, Anywhere, but the Tour Bus can take me to The Getty, in Los Angeles, USA, or The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I may be housebound in Poughkeepsie, but the Tour Bus allows me to make friends with folks around the world. I may be steeped in one cultural, political perspective, but the Tour Bus allows me to visit, understand and perhaps even appreciate others.

The second seems more common, more likely, and is directly driven by increasing convergence.  Call it Internet Nation.  I steal the idea directly from ESPN’s Sports Nation, although the notion is mirrored across a range of media from serious news sources such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to the delightfully silly and irreverent cotton candy of The Fashion Police with Joan Rivers.  The idea is that the tour guide poses a question to the passengers on the bus. They vote and truth is revealed.  67% believe Bin Laden is dead.  Fine.  Next question, please.  Which is better, Coffee or Tea?  How many hurricanes will come ashore this year?  Is there life after death?  Do fish have souls?  Post the numbers that generate “truthiness” and move on.

As an educator, Internet Nation is a terrifying concept for me; truth defined by a vote of the likely uninformed.  Just because 110 million people believe that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, do we overlook the fact that most historians assert that it wasn’t actually signed until August 2nd of that year?  Yet, truth by acclamation seems an increasingly popular phenomenon.  The phenomenon would also signal the end of meaningful diversity and minority reports, for as Sports Nation clearly demonstrates, no one really remembers who lost.

My reasons for finding the latter path the more likely of the two are twofold:  First, and most important, it is the more profitable option.  Appealing to a common denominator draws a larger crowd, and the larger the crowd the higher the advertising revenue.  For that reason alone the Internet business community will favor the continued convergence model, Convergence 2.0.  The second reason derives from the first.  As the Internet business community pours more resources into the convergence model, that version of the Internet becomes more efficient and user-friendly.  Why seek to create an Internet-based environment that reflects your particular perspective of the world when you can simply fold your group into the larger GoogleFacebookiLifeLinkedIn TwitterMacWindows world?  To do otherwise requires effort and reflective thought, focus and attention.  And, alas, those qualities and abilities, current research indicates, are precisely the ones being eroded on the single workbench of the Internet-based re-conceived Renaissance.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, is only one of a spate of recent publications that assert that we lost intellectual, as well as physical, muscle when we no longer had to pick up the chisel to free the sculpture from the stone.  Seemingly, the kinetic act of slapping paint on canvas, of hoisting the book down from the stacks, of hauling the Sunday Times up the stairs, sharpens our critical skills, and deepens our appreciation of appreciation itself.  The Internet is point and click, cut and paste, thumbs up, thumbs down.  Quick, slick and often silly.   But, is the “evil Internet” really sucking our brains out through our eyes and fingertips?  I sincerely doubt it.  It is after all, just electricity in a box – no matter how sweet or sleek the box.  The task that confronts us, therefore, is not to break the boxes.  It is, rather, to reinvigorate the mind.  The mass Internet beguiles us with the banal.  It masks the silly as profound.  We must, as we always have, reclaim the medium, resisting the call of the effortless Internet, where appearance masquerades as substance.

I remember well when the Macintosh first brought multiple fonts to word processing.  Students felt compelled to use them all in the course of a three-page paper – and in the process covered those three pages with glitzy graphics, but fewer words and fewer thoughts.  We seem to have weathered that storm.  Today’s most articulate and arcane challenges to technology’s slippery slope leap initially from keyboard to screen. Use the beast to confront the beast. To mash the Bard, the fault, dear reader, lies not in the Internet but in ourselves.  Certainly much of what is slapped on our screens via the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters of the world will fade into deserved obscurity.  But others will find a place in the canon of human intellect.   Convergence 2.0 simply provides the enticing communication environment that inclines us to the trivial.  It in no way mandates that we follow that inclination.  We choose the trivial .  .  .  .  or not.
.

Secrets in the Social Network

.
Facebook and other social networks combine with micro-blogging sites like Twitter to create an online environment designed to encourage the immediate sharing of our lives.  The interface inclines one to post the momentary reality, to share the “wisdom of the herd.”  Such an environment carries certain cultural assumptions.  One of these, articulated at various times by such luminaries as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt, is that privacy is, at best, moribund.  In the brave new digital world it is more acceptable to shatter secrecy, to discourage contemplative privacy - at least online if not in life, assuming for the moment a life beyond online.

I am bothered by that perspective.  It is often the unsophisticated or the intolerant who believe “there should be no secrets.”  The unsophisticated equate privacy with secrecy, and keeping secrets with lying.  It is a youthful error, and never a surprising one.  The assumption implies another naive notion; that one should answer inappropriate questions.  The idea of either discretion or silence vanishes.  After all, if discrete silence came again into vogue we would be forced to live without either Facebook or reality TV; Twitter would perish utterly.

Such a guileless view of the world is what provides the humor in the current Gieco commericial in which a rotunde Mary Lincoln inquires of the President if her dress makes her "backside look big." Honest Abe is unable to maintain a discrete silence, and Mary flounces off with feelings hurt, leaving the President, we assume, to a night on The First Couch. A lose/lose situation that is somehow valued because it was "honest", because the President refused to keep his perception "secret."

Intolerance is almost easier to understand.  The intolerant eschew secrets because if thoughts or actions are kept secret, then those holier-than-we are denied the pleasure of pointing out the errors of our ways and punishing us for them.  The “necessity” of their own secrets is often wrapped in a “special relationship” with a “higher power.” It is a convenient duality: My secrets are good, yours are bad.

Much of our ambivalence regarding secrets springs from the fact that there are secrets, and then, there are secrets. Some secrets are encased in bubblewrap and velvet.  They rest enshrined in memory, devotion and belief.  They are secret, not because they are wrong or evil, but rather because they are too precious to bear the crass scrutiny of the masses - they are moonflowers that bloom only when sheltered from the harsh light of the sun.

And then, some secrets are cancers.  These secret thoughts, ideas and behaviors eat away at people’s lives.  They are born most often from hate and ignorance, of others or of ourselves. Such secrets rob our lives of sunshine, casting all into the shadow they inhabit.  The challenge, of course, is telling which is which.

Most often we learn the difference over time.  You see, most of our secrets look the same when they are babies. It is only as they mature and begin to influence our lives that we learn their true character, discovering which should be cherished and which must be excised.  So, confusion is a common bloom in our youthful secret gardens.  At first blush, love and obsession look much the same.  Bravery and bravado are often mistaken for one another.  Acquiescence may be taken for agreement.  Hopefully, as we grow older, we prune our cancerous secrets. We leave them behind, molted with the rejected alternative selves of our intolerant youth.  Equally desirous is a growing ability to shield the softer secrets of our better selves, allowing us to aid without fanfare, to succor without glory.

Given what I feel is the complexity of the issue, I am uneasy regarding the animosity with which the architects of social media appear to view privacy, with their tendency to conflate privacy with secrecy. How does one repair the damage done when those same architects, by implementing what seems like a “cool feature,” reveal private relationships in public spaces?  Wikileaks seems content to serve as judge and jury regarding the secrets they expose.  I wonder if Julian Assange's certainty is warranted?  How does one apologize, how does one "make it right" if the "cancerous secret" you have just exposed to the world is, on closer inspection, a secret more worthy of the protection of bubblewrap and velvet?

As with many of the life’s ambiguities, the notion of “keeping a secret” most likely has no inherent morality.  Secrets are now, and have always been, employed for both good and ill.  Still, I would prefer that I, and not my software, make that decision.
 .

Thoroughly Modern McLuhan

.
Some iconic media moments seem permanently lodged in my mind, and each defines a transient truth.  The TV show I Remember Mama debuted on July 1, 1949 some 4-and-a-half months before my first birthday, and remained on the air almost until I was almost 8.  I do not know exactly when during that time span the phrase from the prologue: “But most of all when I look back to those days so long ago, most of all I remember Mama”, stuck in my brain – but it did, as surely as the fuzzy black and white image of a can of Maxwell House Coffee, the program’s sponsor.  The “truth” of that moment has less to do with the actual images on the screen, still available over on YouTube, than it does with the emotional memory of watching that family, while sprawled around the TV with my family.  I am still uncertain as to how much of those idealized memories of my own family experience were real, and how much seeped out of the screen from the Hansen’s little house in San Francisco.

Many years later, as a young graduate student, I remember watching a very different onscreen domestic dynamic in All in The Family, while struggling with the seemingly intentionally oblique prose of Marshall McLuhan.  What did he mean, “the medium is the message?”  Obvious not that content was irrelevant. The television “on” was radically different than the television “off.”  I could "stifle" Archie with the flip of a switch - even if I actually had to walk over to the set to do it.  Eventually, I came to understand that McLuhan was exploring the idea that the medium in which a message is contained, through which it is depicted, has such a significant impact upon the effect of the message as to almost “co-create” that message.    The medium as co-author if you will.

I remember hiking in the Sandia Mountains years ago when I taught out at the University of New Mexico.  While resting on a bench by the side of the trail I noticed initials carved on the bench, carved inside a heart: “JP + someone.”  I couldn’t read the “someone”, because JP, or someone, had scratched the other initials out.  What an intriguing little romance: Who was JP?  Who was someone? What had happened?  A tiny mystery carved here on a bench by a lonely path through a forest; visible to few, noticed by fewer still.  Now imagine JP or “someone” changing their status on Facebook, announcing to hundreds of “friends” and “friends of friends” that they are no longer “in a relationship.”  Those interpersonal ripples far exceed a little carving on a bench at pathside. The “medium is the message” not because it supersedes the content of the message, but rather because it transforms the communicative potential and impact of that message.

Fast-forward to the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East.  I apologize for the whiplash, but there is a connection.  Social discontent has been present in that region for centuries.  Wherever power is maintained by power, discontent lives among the powerless.  And for those same centuries that discontent has been articulated.  Murmurs of dissent in the quiet of a desert night, perhaps scratched upon the walls in ghettos, refugee camps and interment centers both ancient and modern.  And there the message lay, like a heart carved upon a simple bench - until a little bird alights.  She cocks her head, spies the message and sounds a single Tweet, and then another and another and another until in their hundreds of thousands, the tweets unite into a roar that sweeps power from power and finds the powerless blinking in the unaccustomed glare of freedom. The “medium is the message” because it transforms the communicative potential and impact of the message.

I am tempted to leave the story here, to revel in the “good news.”  But the negotiation between the medium and the message, between culture and technology is unending, and already the wheel has turned.  During the uprising in Egypt, the press reported, often almost tangentially, “Internet and cell phone service to the country has been interrupted.”  Yesterday, the New York Times finally published an article titled “Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off Switch’ for Internet” that discusses the various aspects of the Internet that make it far more susceptible to control and manipulation than is commonly believed.

A wide-ranging round of discussions continues regarding the nature and the power of this new medium that now contains so many of the messages of our lives.  The Obama administration calls for open and transparent access to the Internet, yet seeks to discover private Twitter account information in connection with the Wikileaks diplomatic cable investigation.  China, known to closely monitor the Internet activities of its citizens, is widely rumored to have a national “kill switch” for the Internet. But is that a feasible option for a country whose rise to economic power is closely intertwined with Internet-enabled commerce? Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor is advocating an inexpensive “plug in server” he calls the Freedom Box, that would make political dissidents “invisible” to the authoritarian governments who seek to oppress them.  Yet, if it works, could not the same technology be used by child pornographers, spammers and terrorists to become “invisible” to those in government whom we charge to protect us from these harmful messages?

So, I am still inclined to agree with McLuhan, at least as I choose to read him.  The medium co-creates the impact of the message by merging content with the unique technical and social capabilities of the container: the medium is the message.  The devil, it seems, remains firmly entrenched in the details. Bad guys infest the Internet like roaches discover the cleanest closets.  But without the Internet, you couldn’t read this – and nobody wants that :-) !
 .

New Media, Old Problems

.
It is, increasingly, a familiar story – young, political idealists sound a call to action via Facebook and Twitter.  Thousands sweep into the street demanding that established, authoritarian regimes cease their nefarious ways and return power to the people.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  In the summer of 2009 we waited with baited breath to see Mir-Hossein Mousavi swept to power in Iran on the wings of a Green Revolution powered by Twitter.  It didn’t happen.  Then a couple of weeks ago in Tunisia it did, sending President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family packing.  Today, in Egypt, it is anyone’s guess.  Mubarak lies low, and the army disappears while cellphones, Facebook and Twitter take a back seat to bricks and clubs, blood, bodybags and bandages.

As technologies go Facebook and Twitter are relative babies. Were they children, neither would be old enough for middle school.  However, they are huge babies.  Were Facebook a country, at 500 million users, it would be the third largest in the world, trailing only China and India in population.  It makes a strange sort of sense then, that revolutions fostered by these new media often founder on adolescent arrogance and childish assumptions.

Egypt provides a painful example.  Fed by Tunisia’s success, the opponents of Mubarak’s long and often churlish regime assumed that they, too, could Tweet thousands into the streets and break the tyrant’s grip on power.  And, like many adolescents, they were right – almost.  Mubarak, as the opposition planned, ceded power, but only in that he declared he would not seek re-election.  “WTF?”  And now he has, at least for the moment, faded into the mist – neither present, nor gone.  Similarly, the official trappings of power have withdrawn from Tahrir Square, apparently replaced by the “non-governmental” thugs who have often been the unofficial enforcers of unpopular policy during the Mubarak years.  The protestors had childishly assumed that the old regime would be swept away by a flood of digital demands and the sun would rise on a new Egypt – fresh and full of promise.  Instead the sun set on bloodshed and the morning is very much in doubt.

The opposition’s vision may yet materialize.  But I am quite confident that it will not be done in 142-character Tweets, or with Facebook status updates. New media, we are learning, are powerful tools for claiming the moment, for mobilizing the mob, for occasionally winning the election.  But they have yet to prove themselves in the more pedantic arenas of governing, democracy, and compromise.  In the adult world the devil is in the details.  And those details, it seems, are still hammered out the old-fashioned way: face-to-face, word-by-word, and person-to-person.
.

Maybe There is a Reason We Lost Touch

.
I just learned from The Washington Post that, "Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web."  I hate that.  Oh, I understand why they are doing it.  They are doing it for the same reason any media company has ever done anything - to make money.  They are, after all, companies formed for the purpose of making money - otherwise they would be non-profits.  I do not begrudge them that - but they have spoiled us with the free e-mail service.  They made us think it was our e-mail, now they want to "Facebookize" my e-mail so they can generate more advertising revenue.

I guess I am amazed by the fact that all these e-companies assume we want to share our lives with all the people to whom we send email - and, further, that we want to make it possible for people to whom we have never sent an email to find us and "friend" us through any of several "invasion by default" portals. Those include Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yelp, Pandora, Classmates, etc., etc. - any website that makes information about us publicly available without having specifically received our permission to do so.

Here is the thing - there are reasons that we choose to affiliate with other individuals.  In our childhood our friends we most often determined by proximity that was determined by where our parents lived.  As we moved on with our lives we chose our own path, job, inclination, opportunity, lots of variables there.  But the point is that as we moved we tended to retain the contacts that were deeply important to us while others fell away from mutual neglect. Social media work from a different assumption: that we let relationships die that call out for resurrection.  I doubt it.

I blanked my Facebook profile last week.  But in the last couple of years I had received 10, maybe 15, "friend requests" from folks from my past.  My response has varied from "Oh, interesting," to "We never spoke in high school, why now?"  Most fell somewhere in between.  But the reality is that none of those contacts - even the interesting ones - have resulted in the renewal of friendships that were often tentative 30 or 40 years ago.

I realize that one's use of social media is probably generational to a certain extent.  If you have emailed or texted with your BFF all your life then sharing the details of your life electronically with a cluster of acquaintances may come more easily.  But I would assert that even the most dyed in the wool digital native would like to define those relationships by personal choice as opposed to letting your email client establish them as a "default setting."

And that, for me, is the unsettling issue.  I still believe that technology enables us, empowers us in wonderful ways.  Yet, we are subtly allowing that new power to be leached away to serve the economic goals of the Yahooians of the world. Letting Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter create our list of "Friends" is not unlike removing the front door to your home; it is no longer your prerogative to invite people, any wandering soul can just stroll in. As I said before, the friends of our childhood were determined by where our parents chose to live.  But, we're the adults now, right? We should get to choose.
.

Swoosh

.
Communication is the process by which we bring the inside out.  It is the process through which we interpret the nature of the external.  Communication is the palette with which we paint the nature of our reality.  That composition is ancient and modern and made uniquely complex by the pervasiveness of contemporary media.  That complexity was much in evidence in Tiger Woods' address this morning.

The over-riding dialectic placed the personal and the private in tension with the professional and the public.  Here is a man who can, because of his public and professional persona, walk nowhere unnoticed.  Yet, here too is a man who seems to desire a life at least as private as yours or mine.  The chasm appears impossible to span.

Adding to the complexity is the extent to which communication acts enabled the crisis.  It was the immense wealth and celebrity made possible by the media that deafened Woods to the inner voice of the better man, that convinced him that the rules that bind our lives did not constrain his behavior.  A life without boundaries seemed to propel Woods into a surreal existence in which both his blessings and his banes bloomed to absurd proportions.

The protagonists in ancient Greek drama needed only to play out their hubris before the gods.  Tiger has had the public, via the media, with which to contend.  The same media that had sung him to heights of glory, now sought to Tweet him down; to judge the man according to the god-ling they had created.

Tiger’s own behavior, personal and professional – in the clear light of hindsight – gave evidence that the public god and the private man were coming unglued.  Excess is most often the blustering trapping of raging uncertainty.  And then came the night in November when tragedy and comedy conspired to shatter the dualistic illusion – leaving both the public and the man with no clear notion of who this character, this Tiger, was.

The media abhor a vacuum, and so turned their attention elsewhere. That is until today, when the savaged Prince returned, perhaps to reclaim the tarnished throne of Denmark.  The drums rolled, the trumpets blared; and in walked a very ordinary man.  He seemed a man who had awakened from a dream – a dream both wonderful and terrible.  He seemed a man resolved to seek a path to balance, normalcy and reality.  That he is not yet there was evidenced in his futile plea for privacy, for the media to leave his family alone: if you choose to swim with sharks, they must be fed.  Still, I am encouraged by his intention to return to the Buddhist teachings of his youth.  Of all the world’s great faiths, that is the one most firmly committed to the principles of harmony and balance.  I wish him well on his journey.
.

There’s A Buzz in the Bucket

.

OK, there is now a little “buzz” icon on my gmail page – looks like a chat balloon in red, yellow, blue and green.  The page looks a bit like my Google Wave page; little thumbnail images of people I know, other little images of people I might want to know.  Both pages bear a bit of a resemblance to my Facebook page, but I don’t go there very often so I would have to check.  Same with my Linkedin page, which I visit even more infrequently, and the Ning Community I created a couple of years ago.

I guess I keep hoping that one of these cool new tools will actually increase the quality of the information being communicated.  I should know better.  Garbage in, garbage out; that little bon mot has been with us since the dawn of the computer age.  Certainly, the bucket containing the information will have its inevitable impact.  But the essential nature of the information is dependent upon the care and effort that went into its creation. Buzz will not improve the quality of the images formerly posted on Picasa or Flickr.  Placing fragmented observations on Twitter make them no more profound than when they were posted on Facebook.  The current thinking seems to be that we all wish to be heavily invested in the surface of hundreds of lives, and each company wants to deliver the environment that best facilitates such emotional dilettantism.  Less considered is the reality that if we spend our energy maintaining hundreds of tangential relationships, we must necessarily reduce the effort we expend on those true friendships that actually sustain us.

I sense, in the current introductory flurry of online and in-the-hand devices, an unusually disjointed cycle in the perennial negotiation between the communicative exigencies of a culture and the technological responses to those pressures.  Perhaps the issue is not, as it has often been, that we lack the tools to address our communicative needs.  Perhaps the current situation reflects a glut of tools to handle increasingly myopic perceptions and expressions.  I can show people around the globe pictures of my puppy a dozen different ways, but representatives from two different political parties cannot see common ground across a narrow aisle in a single room.  I can listen to my favorite pop star on four different devices secreted about my person, but theologians are deaf to any voice save their own; governments seek to constrain the flow of digital information to “protect” their people from “inappropriate” messages.

The paradox is almost amusing; the power of our communication technology seems, at the moment, to far outstrip the uses to which we put it – a wonderful paring knife for skinless grapes.
.

Honey, I Broke the Internet.

In much of the industrialized world we have come to see the Internet as a force of nature. Like sunshine and storm, it rolls uninterrupted around the globe and out to the ubiquitous flock of satellites that buzz like bees around the azure bloom of Planet Earth. The events of the last few days demonstrate that in reality the Internet, like aspects of nature, is fragile indeed. Here’s what happened:

Russia and Georgia [the nation, not the US state with the football team] have, shall we say, "issues." As the Soviet Union crumbled and previously independent nations and wannabe nations sorted out the new maps, Russia and Georgia asserted rights to the same turf. As a war it was smaller than most – but it got a lot of press here because at the time we liked Georgia and didn’t like Russia. The shooting part of the war has been over for a while but the bad blood continues to bubble up.

These days, bombs and bullets are taking a back seat to bits and blogs. Among the current players is an economics professor from Georgia who is a strident nationalistic blogger. The professor seems to have rubbed his Russian counterparts the wrong way. They responded with a “denial of service”* cyber attack on the blogger’s tools: Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal. Twitter went down for most of a day and the other two were severely compromised.

The point is this – two or three angry and immature geeks brought down large portions of the Internet in a fit of personal pique. They either did not stop to think, or did not care, that others depend upon the Internet for information, and communication, for work, for directions, for entertainment and for revenue. More frightening still is the thought that they had no idea of the potential scope of their personal feud. In any case, the big old monolithic Internet got zapped in a personal fight. A number of questions come to mind:

• How dependable is the Internet?
• To what extent do you assume your Internet connection will always be available?
• How disrupted is your life when you are separated from your technology?
• Do you most often use the Internet as “big and public space” or as “small and private space”?

*In a “denial of service” attack, the attacking computer(s) overwhelm the target computer with a flood of bogus messages that prevents the victim from making normal use of their computer. For a more complete definition see this article from US-CERT: The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team: http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST04-015.html