Converging Media Conforming Lives, Or Convergence 2.0

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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.
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FOMO & IBBI

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It is getting to be "beach time" here in North Carolina.  The snowbirds have begun their southern trek.  Houseboats bloom on the Intracoastal Waterway and RVs swarm the parking lots along NC 12.  The gentle aroma of sunscreen competes with the magnolias.  For many it will be a summer at the beach very similar to those I remember from my own childhood summers, spent along the beaches of Lake Michigan.  Roasted hot dogs, gritty soda, sandy samores, sand in the pages of my book, sand in my swimsuit, well, sand everywhere.  But in at least one way a summer at the beach will be different for today's children: the buckets have changed.

I remember building sandcastles with the one bucket that came with the pail.  You pack the damp sand into the bucket, flip it upside down, give it a thump, and "voila!" there was a tower, or part of a wall, or whatever.  You took the shovel and carved it into the necessary "castle element." You drizzled turrets with a wet sand slurry.  I have since learned that such an approach is completely passé.  The contemporary beach child has a set of forms that would make Frank Lloyd Wright envious.  Turrets and towers, crenelated walls; you name it, it is there in their Super Sandcastle Set.  The new containers allow them to shape sand in ways I never imagined.

The same is obviously true of the Internet.  No, really.  Think about it, the Internet changes the shape of our communicative world. It provides new containers, new molds, for culture, society, art and politics.   My recent polemic against smartphones was not so much an attack on the "container" itself, .i.e. the smart phone.  Instead I was objecting to the notion that we are trying to stuff all the sand on the beach into that one container and when we turn it upside down we don't always get what we wanted; rather we get what the container is capable of producing.

Consider if you will FOMO.  I had no idea what FOMO meant until recently when I read an article in The NY Times that informed me that FOMO was text-speak for "Fear Of Missing Out."  And what, you might well ask, does Fear Of Missing Out mean?  It is, the article informed me, a new 21st century anxiety.  The syndrome appears to be driven by social media messages that shoulder their way onto our various screens, touting all the wonderful things currently filling the lives of our "contacts".  The author, it seems, had just settled down for a rainy night of cocooning - popcorn and Netflix movie at the ready.  But then her phone started flashing.  "Status updates" began pouring in from her friends:  "We're out here at Fancy Place!"  "Awesome Group!"  "Food is Wonderful!" "Killer Cocktails!" and, of course the unspoken message, "Anyone Who Isn't Here is a Loser!"

She was immediately besieged with FOMO.  But she fought back.  While not able to make the ultimate sacrifice and actually turn her phone off, she did turn it over so she couldn't see the messages flashing.  She seized control of her technology, tossed Orville in the microwave, and fired up Netflix.

Point is, we are sold communication technology on the presumption that it will make our lives better and, when we keep the upper hand, it often does.  The problem is that our new culture containers often drop unsuspected and distorted forms out onto the sandcastles of our lives.  The author wanted her technology to deliver Netflix and comfort, but FOMO tried to sneak in.  Some degree of FOMO is probably unavoidable as we use technology to keep us connected to life.  My iPad just beeped to warn me that I had a dentist appointment in 15 minutes.  Plenty of time to call, apologize, and reschedule. But if I want my technology to do those things for me, I have to be ready for a little FOMO and keep plenty of popcorn in the cupboard.  Or you could just text back "IBBI!"  Oh, you haven't heard of IBBI?  Not surprising - I just made it up. It stands for "Irritated By Banal Intrusions."

So when someone posts: "Changed the color of my toenail polish!" or "OMG! Little Tommy spit up on the cat!" just shoot back: IBBI!

Maybe we could make an app for that .  .  .  .
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Kick the Phone to the Curb

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I teach about communication and technology, so it makes sense that I tell my students that they will wake up everyday out of date.  It is not really a new concept – sages since the dawn of time have been telling us that “you cannot step in the same river twice,” or words to that effect.  But time was when the notion wasn’t rubbed in our face the way it is today.  So what if Og, a couple of rivers and a mountain range away, was chipping a new axe head that would let him skin mammoths faster?  Big deal. When, or if, I ran into him he could tell me about it – or maybe eventually his kids could tell mine.  Time meandered.  But yesterday I learned that the world was in a lather to learn whether or not a K-9 corp dog was on the mission to kill Bin Laden.  What breed? How big? Did he/she carry technology? Canine tech? Do you really care?  Do you really want, or need, to know?

A corollary to my admonition to my students needs to be that out-of-date doesn’t necessarily mean out-of-touch with reality.  On occasion the opposite is true, sometimes that which is newly-minted, all shiny and popular, will also lead you astray.

It has been a long time since I have ranted about cell phones, now known as smartphones - too long.  So, I am now officially going on record as advocating that for many of us the time has come to kick the “smartphone” to the curb along with the 8-track, the Walkman, and the VCR.  Are you sensing an odd turn of example here?  Those are pieces of old technology – and the smartphone is the latest and greatest right?  No, not really.  For me the smartphone is the latest victim of technological Darwinism, they have become a branch that needs some heavy pruning here in the technology rose garden.

This is, however, not a universal condemnation of those smarty-pants phones.  It is restricted to “people like me.”  You see, despite myriad marketing claims to the contrary, no one technology platform can be all things to all people.  The tool is only a good tool if it meets your needs.  Too often we get that backwards.  We think, “Everybody has one.  I should too.  And if it does things differently, well,  I’m no old dog! I can learn new tricks!”  Personally, I have no desire to roll over and play dead for the smart phone.  And if you are, in some degree, a person like me, you might want to join the revolution.

OK, what defines a person like me? Here we go:

A person like me carries reading glasses.  I have always been visually challenged, but starting back at about 50 I had to begin using reading glasses in addition to my contact lenses.  So, I now need reading glasses to read my Droid, which has a larger screen than an iPhone.  And that is just to read the name of who is calling me - big stuff, center screen.  Surf the web?  Oh, sure.   Now, I need my reading glasses and a magnifying glass.  Maybe there is one here in the glove compartment. Oops.  Wrong lane.

A person like me never learned to “keyboard” and has hands larger than your average six-year old.  You can see where I am going with this.  My Droid has a cool little keyboard hidden underneath the touch screen upon which five-year olds and hobbits – who know how to keyboard – can easily use their apps by typing tiny words upon the tiny screen.  If you don’t want to use that keyboard, you can use the on-screen touch keyboard.  OK, it is a little smaller than the other keyboard – but don’t worry, when you touch a letter, the letter you are touching pops up on the screen.  That would reveal errors that would prompt you move to another key if you could, a: read the letter on the screen and b: knew where it lived on the keyboard.

Apparently, smarty phones also don't like the fingers of people like me.  Last night my wife and I were driving home.  Issues of import were unfolding in places far away.  First, her phone rang.  She touched and dragged, touched and dragged.  The icons were unimpressed and resolute.  They remained steadfast as the phone warbled along into voicemail.  Then my phone buzzed.  I thumbed and dragged, thumbed and dragged until finally the phone relented and connected the call.  I understand I can overcome this problem by using a small sausage as a stylus, which is an awesome solution.

A person like me makes actual phone calls in preference to texting.  Miniaturization is, as I have noted in the preceding paragraphs, a wonderful thing.  I note with especial awe the miniaturization of the receiver and microphone in my Droid and the various smart phones of my friends.  They are crammed right in there with the keyboard and the still camera and the video camera, and all that has been sacrificed is the ability to capture or reproduce sound with any fidelity during a phone conversation.  I am somewhat puzzled since these same gadgets seem to be able to record audio suitable for YouTube and play back mp3 files through ear buds with relative fidelity.  Phone calls, however, those become exercises in conjecture.  Rarely do I have any idea of what is being said to me.  Fortunately, I have years of experience in both cocktail parties and faculty meetings which enables me to respond to most unintelligible remarks with phrases that occasionally make sense. The downside is, of course, those times when my responses have nothing to do with the other side of the conversation.  My hope is that those to whom I am speaking are also faking it. Wait, maybe if I stick my finger in my other ear .  .  . Oops.  Wrong lane.

A person like me remains uncomfortable with the idea that a cell phone should get its own seat at the table.  I realize that in the 1950s the television began to claim a place in the living room.  Now it often gets the whole room.  I suppose you could try to talk over it, but surround-sound makes that difficult.  So we shut up and let the TV do the talking.  Nowadays, people position their phones on the table so it can share in, if not dominate, the conversation.  It has somehow gained the same dispensation as a precocious child - it can interrupt whenever it wants because, well, it is just so cute.  "Seen and not heard?"  My, what a quaint concept!

A person like me resents having to pay .  .  . doesn't have pockets where the thing fits .  .  .  .  can't merge contacts on .  .  . . well, I could go on.  But I will restrain myself.

So what is the point you ask?  Should those who share my biases and complaints retreat back into the 20th century?  Hook our phones to the wall with wire?  Pass on the pleasures of the Internet?  Au contraries, mon frère!  All I am suggesting is that we considered the attractions of other tools.

I would assert that my iPad or Xoom or any other of the emerging tablet computers excel at everything my Droid can do.  My iPad does it better and faster on a bigger screen that I can read and which actually recognizes my fingers.  The color and sound is better, the battery life far superior.  And it does more - I can paint on my iPad :-)  I have stayed with the wi-fi option as opposed to paying another arm and a leg to connect to the latest G3, 4, or 5 network.  Even with that cheap option I can sit just about anywhere, in the bathtub [very carefully], in coffee shops, in McDonalds, in parks, and there is usually an wi-fi network that allows me to iPad away.  And if I actually need to talk with someone - well, now for that I need a cell phone.  But it can be pretty cheap, and really stupid.
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Secrets in the Social Network

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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.
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Life Before a Lens

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We went to a birthday party the other day.  A young friend was turning 40.  It was a lovely gathering, and one of those days for which folks move South.  The air was soft, daffodils nodded sleepily, and trees covered with white and pink blossoms perfumed the air and cascaded petals with every passing breeze. The guests were a mixed lot, generationally speaking.  We were not the only couple beyond 60, and there were a number of thirty-somethings with toddlers in tow; older children in their late teens and early 20s amused their younger siblings. I knew enough about the crowd to know that the photographs being snapped were going to end up on online. “Interesting crew,” I thought. “Young enough to Facebook, and old enough to think about it.”

I taught photography once, at a university long ago and faraway, and have always been fascinated by the effect of cameras on people; on both subject and photographer.  As a photographer, I was well acquainted with the camera as shield.  Despite being more than a little chary of heights, I could peer fearlessly into the most dizzying abyss – as long as I did it through a camera’s viewfinder.  Strange, not? More interesting though, is the effect of cameras on the people before the lens.

The one photographic affinity I can claim with the iconic Ansel Adams is that we both married women who hated to be photographed.  Far more common is the urge to be seen, and seen in a particular way.  Pointing a camera at a group of kids is a transformative act.  They pose, they smile coyly, they smirk, they fain the total disinterest of the Gap kids they see in the magazines and store windows.  In short, they present to the lens the version of themselves they wish to be made public; they perform.

My undergraduate degree is in Theater, and for the first couple of decades of my life my plan was to become God’s gift to the American stage.  God, apparently, had not been informed.  I did, however, learn a great deal about the nature of performance.  I had the good fortune, while studying at Kalamazoo College, to be directed by visiting artist Karl Malden, who had trained under Lee Strasburg at The Group Theater in New York.  Malden, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Streetcar Named Desire, taught us that performing meant, in part, filling the theater with your character’s personality.  You had to "be" the role so completely that you radiated the character’s essence with such intensity that you “spoke” to the back of the house even while silent.  It is emotionally, psychically and physically exhausting.  And if you do it long enough, it is not difficult to lose track of where the self stops and a character begins.  There are real personal risks to a life spent in performance.  Ask Charlie Sheen.

So, I found myself musing as I looked around the sunny birthday scene, how does a life change when you expect every moment to be captured, chronicled and Facebooked? What is the nature of a life lived before a lens?  What is the result of perpetual performance?  Does “who we become” change when more people know us via a “performed existence” in social media than know us as the result of a shared life in the real world?

This is when I am supposed to lay a little wisdom on you, to give you a thoughtful answer to the questions I just posed.  I would if I could.  Instead, I am afraid I can offer only guesses. My guess is that we put too much stock in photographs these days.  We spend too much time recording and distributing events.  We should be more focused on living the event than on reporting it.

Does that mean we stop taking photographs?  Call for a moratorium on home videos?  Of course not.  Whether we pay the local 15th century portrait painter, or snap a shot with our 21st century smartphone, we will always try to capture the precious moments of our lives in a way that aids memory when memory begins to fade.  And we will want to share those experiences.  But I would caution us about watering the wine.  You sip the best vintage straight.  Perhaps it is the 20th century in me, maybe faint echoes of even earlier times, but I still feel that the most precious memories, the deepest emotions, deserve the honor of, if not privacy, then at least a degree of exclusivity.

You can now “friend” the Pope.  “Yo, Pontiff! Wazzup?”  I think not.  If I have a concern for young people growing up before a lens, "performing" their self even as they construct it, it is that they will lose sight of their precious individuality as they co-mingle it with the other 500 million folks living before the lens.  Against the backdrop of a conflagration, the flickering of a single candle seems insignificant.  And yet, it is quite lovely.
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Googling Memory

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Our lives are knit up of memories and change.  We mark their course with the artifacts we create; paintings, poems, plays, or simple prose are the signposts we jab into the swirling eddies of our existence to mark the memory of a moment, to capture a perception that was, at that time, true.  A recent experience drove me to reconsider the nature of, and perhaps the validity of, memory.  I am, of course, playing word games to a certain extent.  Yet it is an important word game.  Allow me to explain. 

It starts – as many of my reflections do – in that space between waking and sleep. In youth, it seemed, the bridge between those two pastures was short - the stream was narrow, and on a good day one could simply spring over.  Nowadays, the journey is more studied, as our perception of the world grows likewise more studied.  The waking world seems less inclined to release us.  So we create rituals of transition.  An evening glass of wine, quiet music, a book - gentle inducements to allow the rhythm of reality to recede and make Morpheus welcome.

My own ritual combines a home-grown mode of meditation, blending traditional Reike with some type of “structured mental meandering.”  The nature of the latter shifts depending upon my mood. I have written of the lake where I often take myself.  However, recently, I have been wandering the grounds of my childhood home.

I have clear memories of only one house from those years.  I lived there from a year or two after my birth until my first marriage in 1969.  I have been revisiting the days when I was seven or maybe eight years old.  Old enough to play outside unsupervised, but young and small enough to explore the secret pathways and hollows concealed among the shrubbery.  To me it seemed a world leapt full-blown from the pages of The Jungle Book.  Evergreen branches screened me from the street beyond, and stealthy creeping allowed me access to the full sweep of the front of the house. Bird’s nests occasionally grew in the branches, and squirrels scolded my intrusion.  I have enjoyed the return.  Eventually, I mapped our yard, and pushed out into the neighborhood, poking into corners of dusty memory.  Tasha, the name of the boxer who lived two doors to the west.  A bouncy dog, probably more playful than threatening, but still uncertain in recollection.  The alley to the east - did one or two houses intervene?  Relax, see it.  Ah - a duplex! No wonder the confusion.

It was a somniferous diversion that eased me into slumber for quite awhile, a green and golden ramble through portals nigh unto dreaming itself.  And then the reverie stumbled into wide-awake-world.  "Google Earth", I thought.  If I really wanted to know which lane connected to what alley and where one backyard stopped and another began, well, there was an app for that.  And I used it. It was a strangely disorienting experience that I cannot recommend - but probably not for the reason you might suppose.  For many, wandering past your childhood home will prove disconcerting because your home may have disappeared beneath a McMansion or into a Mall.  Would that were the case.  Mine had merely shriveled, dried up like the shell of cicada, still clinging to a limb but desiccated and empty.

The neighborhood was recognizable - eerily so.  The lots that had been vacant when I was a child remain so more than 50 years later.  The alleyways dissected the blocks.  Stroking the mouse allowed an Alice-in-Wonderland recreation of my bike ride to school.  Everything was smaller, lacking in mystery, devoid of wonder.  I was, at first, deeply saddened as if something quite lovely and once loved had died in my absence.  I had not known and had neither grieved nor said good-bye.  But then I realized that this was not my neighborhood, that structure was not my home.  Oh, the latitude and longitude were, no doubt, correct.  Google gets the numbers.  What the app does not understand is the transformative power of memory.  And that was when I realized that I was not, technically, talking about a memory – I was talking about a memoir.

Memory is what one is supposed to testify to in court.  I was here or there and did this or that at this time or another.  Memory can testify to behavior, just as Google can capture digital representations of the street where once I lived.  But that was not where I traveled when I envisioned the house in which I grew up.  When I lay abed, roaming the world of my childhood, I was wandering through a memoir.  The differences are, as the world of publishing occasionally reminds us, significant.  But I am quite ambivalent regarding the notion of which representation is more “truthful.”

The author who presents a memoir as “factual” is subject to public censure as a liar and a fraud.  Perhaps so.  However, I am inclined to assert that memoirs are more “truthful” than memories, than the “facts” contained in a pristine autobiography.  Memoirs define the truths we distill from memory.  After considerable reflection, I am convinced that memoir is the idealized-self interacting with the distorted-other in a way that results in a preferred outcome which increases harmony.  Memoir equals reality reconstructed. 

I am aware of the problems with that assertion, particularly if it were to find its way into law or public policy: “So you see, your honor, while I did not, in the cold light of the facts, actually purchase the vehicle, don’t you agree I look great in it?”  That is not where I am heading. 

I am moving more in the direction of memoir reflecting that which we should have learned from remembered events had we been more thoughtful, more attentive to the surrounding harmony.  Memories and memoirs are both the product of recollection and interpretation.  Interpretation is mandatory because no input is merely recorded in our brains.  Input is always woven into the tapestry of meaningfulness that is the ongoing product of consciousness.  Perhaps a good way to think about it is that memory is the raw clay, the actual “facts” of the event.  The lessons we learn from the experience over the course of our life, the way we fit those lessons into our chord, into the harmonic life we create, that is memoir.  Memoir is memory, glazed and fired.
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Thoroughly Modern McLuhan

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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 :-) !
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Compassionate Privacy

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It would be nice if Mark Zuckerberg had actually said, "Privacy is so 20th century." But if he did, I can find no credible reference. However, the phrase does seem to capture the essence of his remarks about "changing social norms regarding privacy" that Facebook seeks to champion. There is evidence, though, that Eric Schmidt, the out-going CEO of Google, did actually say, "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about," and "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Taken as a whole, these remarks reveal an unsettling trend toward mandating excessive sharing; like making you eavesdrop on cell phone calls about medical procedures in a coffee shop. Yeech.



This move to obsessive openness isn't a generational issue. Yes, Zuckerberg is 26, but Schmidt is 55. The phenomenon seems more a kind of “BigTech”-induced simplemindedness. Both Internet "A-listers" appear to view "privacy" as an archaic abuse of privilege: someone - your parents, your boss, "the man" - is “hiding” something to advantage themselves and disadvantage you, your friends, or "the people." I do wish privacy were that simple.



Certainly, there is a whole realm of hidden information that is venal and vindictive. We have seen too many examples of the misuse of governmental, corporate and personal secrecy to blithely assume an open and truthful world. People are "disappeared," elections are engineered, banks collapse, lakes become sewers, and the Gulf of Mexico is despoiled. One would be a fool to deny that webs of secrecy enable these human failings. But those webs of secrecy have been around for centuries. Their existence does not entitle the new digital Dons to rip away the gentle curtains of privacy that shield every human life. To acknowledge deceit does not deny the need for compassionate privacy. The Internet’s ability to peer into the most cherished and sheltered spaces in someone’s life does not legitimize the practice.

Perhaps much of the confusion surrounding the debate regarding Internet privacy stems from different entities using similar words to mean different things. “Privacy” and “secrecy” have become co-mingled to the extent that they are erroneously seen as being synonymous. However, the Oxford English Dictionary defines privacy as “The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion.” While secrecy is defined as “the quality of being secret or of not revealing secrets; the action, practice, or habit of keeping things secret.”

The “open life” advocates, among whom I would place both Zuckerberg and Schmidt use “privacy” when they really mean “secrecy.” Julian Assange provides perhaps the most salient contemporary example of the difference. As the majordomo of Wikileaks, Assange is secrecy’s fiercest antagonist. He obviously believes that, in the public sphere, no secret is sacred. For Assange, when governments and businesses are concerned, awkward transparency trumps the effective “habit of keeping things secret” every time. However, when the issue is what transpired in a Swedish bedroom among adults, privacy, “the right to be free from public attention” suddenly reigns supreme in his worldview.

Still, Zuckerberg and Schmidt did get a couple of things right. First, it is “complicated.” As personal information becomes increasingly valuable in the core human arenas of conflict and commerce, the ceaseless dance of Spy versus Spy drives the development of Internet-based applications that allow the gracious sphere of privacy to be punctured as never before. Second, those routine perforations of the very fabric of our lives have rightfully relegated many naïve assumptions regarding privacy to the previous century. What I believe Zuckerberg and Schmidt have gotten wrong are the implications of these realities for public policy.

The “open lifers” seem to reason that since privacy currently lies in tatters, we should simply affirm that state as acceptable: what is, is right. I have trouble with that notion. I believe we are capable of a more nuanced approach to life in the digital age, that we can devise processes that deliver the advantages of the Internet without turning our private lives into peep shows.

Let me close with a story from my life. When I was in college, shortly after the surrender at Yorktown, we were required to live in the dorm. There were 10 young men on my hall, in their teens, away from adult supervision for the first time. “This,” I thought, “is what they mean by ‘chaos theory.’” There was no privacy, ever. Oh, certainly, you could retreat to your room where only your roommate, and whomever he brought to visit, punctured your solitude. But that was as tranquil as it got. Graduation changed my life in many ways. In retrospect, one of the most profound shifts was the ability to live in a house where I could walk in and close the door. And behind that door I found “the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention.” I found privacy.

I do not believe that, as a culture, we are intellectually or technically unable to craft hardware, software, and policy that allows us to occasionally turn off the lights of the Internet and just "shut the door."
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New Media, Old Problems

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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.
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Marco! Polo!

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I have recently been rereading The Complete Sherlock Holmes.  It is a wonderful submersion in the life and language of a past century.  It is amazing how many witnesses in Holmes’ cases were unable to testify because of a sudden onset of “brain fever.”  And yes, the game seems always afoot.

I am currently in the midst of one of the lesser-known short stories, The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, written in 1921.  As with all artistic creations, the meaning of the piece is a co-creation of author and reader.  The author wrote wrapped in the meaning of his mind and time; I unfold the story within the context of mine.  Different fogs inform us. Doyle creates in the mists of London between the wars.  This time, I read the story through the Kindle application on my Droid phone.  A delicious dialectic, not?

With similar irony, an old friend and I were recently emailing each other bemoaning our students’ seeming addiction to social media.  I mused that my intuitive sense of the issue was that students begin to feel a significant amount of angst when they are separated from their social media - despite the fact that the messages exchanged within the environment are trivial. An apt analogy emerged.  You know the game Marco Polo that kids play in a swimming pool? They close their eyes and the kid who is "it" hollers "Marco!" and the other kids holler "Polo!"  The kid who is “it” then tries to catch the others in a boisterous human imitation of the echo-location skills of bats, whales, porpoises, et. al. 

There is an early episode of the television show Bones [Season 1. #22: The Woman in Limbo] that puts an insightful twist on the game. Temperance is trying to reconnect with her older brother – there is a long backstory to the episode that is unimportant to the current observation.  The relevant idea is that after their parents disappeared, her brother became her protector. She would be sitting in class at school, or out on the playground and she would hear him call "Marco!" When she could she would respond "Polo!"  But even when she couldn't echo “Polo!” - she felt connected to him, she felt "taken care of."  I think that feeling of “being connected” blends into the same emotional space as “being taken care of”, of being “OK,” and lends significant import to social media's seemingly shallow interactions. I post "Marco" and the "friends" respond "Polo."  I believe it is that security, that feeling of "belonging" in a fractured world, to which my students, and many others, are addicted.

And, what, you may rightly ask, does that have to do with The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone? Elementary.  In the opening scene of the story Watson is upset to see Holmes looking even more gaunt and emaciated than was his custom.  When Watson asks why he does not eat when deep in a case, Holmes replies that digestion takes blood away from the brain, the blood necessary for his unparalleled feats of intellectual sleuthing.  He concludes: “I am a brain Watson.  The rest of me is a mere appendix.”  But he then goes on to express real pleasure at seeing Watson, the only friend Holmes ever acknowledges.  He entreats the good doctor, “Let me see you once more in the customary armchair.”

As the pages scroll past on my Droid, I am again struck by the fact that the Internet with its myriad social networks, through which we are wont to holler “Marco” to scattered “avataristic” friends in digital space, is in many ways “mere appendix.”  We hear the electronically multiplied “Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo Polo” of Facebook.  We may even find comfort in that cacophony. But I am increasingly inclined to believe that the tide will turn again - and sooner than we might expect – to the notion that a true friend is the one we see “once more in the customary armchair” sharing real warmth from a real fireplace, taking real shared comfort in a real room.
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Varying Degrees of Intrusion

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It is, no doubt, another innovation designed to deliver us from our more slothful evil twins.  And, come Monday, thousands of folks will roll out of bed, unaware that their clock radios had automatically “Fallen Back” in the tiny hours of Sunday morning.  They will head off to work right on time, with clock radio, computer and cell phone throbbing along in silent syncopation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory. Personally, I found it just a bit creepy.

I have come to accept that my cell phone will keep track of the vagaries of time zones as I wander around the country or the world.  That falls within its job description, that’s why no one wears a watch anymore, except for bling appeal.  A cell phone is supposed to “reach out and touch someone” as Ma Bell was wont to say, back in the less politically correct 1980s.  But my clock radio?  How did it know that it was supposed to “fall back” at 2:00 a.m. on this particular Sunday morning?  My wristwatch in the drawer didn’t know it was supposed to “fall back.” The microwave didn’t know it was supposed to “fall back.” The oven clock didn’t know it was supposed to “fall back.”  How did the clock radio know it was supposed to “fall back”?  To whom, or to what, is my clock radio talking in the middle of the night?

I realize that it is probably no great feat of programming to tell a machine when “Spring Forward,” 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March; and “Fall Back,” 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday in November, will occur for the next gazillion years and put it on a chip the size of a gnat’s eyelash.  But how does the radio know what “today” is?  I didn’t “set up” the date when I pulled it out of the box.  I just plugged it in and toggled up the correct time.  So how did it know where it was, in its infinite calendar, the moment I plugged it in?  How did the radio know if it was June, July or January?  You see, it had to know that if it was going to "Fall Back" at just the right instant.  If the answer is “the chip just knows,” we are neither comforted nor amused.  What else does the chip know?

We hear a lot about privacy in digital spaces these days.  It usually centers around the improper use of information that we, at some point via some device, intentionally tossed out into “Cyber Cloud Cuckooland.”  This sentient radio is, to my somewhat paranoid mind, a bird of a different feather.  The radio – without my instructions or permission, mind you – appears to be in communication with some entity that feeds information into this appliance in my home.  “Well, duh.  What does a radio do, dude? It brings stuff into your home – like music and words.”  True, but we did not request this channel. We were not informed of this channel.  "Back channels" are supposed to be the stuff of spy novels.

Perhaps my paranoia stems from my deep understanding that communication is transactional.  If a device can store or receive “Spring Forward” or “Fall Back” data without my instruction, it is technological child’s play to give it transmission capacity as well.  Want to walk a little way down that path with me?  Consider Microsoft’s new gaming rave, the Kinect.  It sounds awesome.  Three cameras peer into your home and allow you to interact with games as if you were actually up there on the screen.  No wires, no remote, you move, it sees you and reacts.  Now consider that last sentence all by itself: No wires, no remote, you move, it sees you and reacts.  You perceive, perhaps, the reason a shiver just ran down my spine.

When someone seems to look the latest multi-gigabyte gizmo gift horse in the mouth, it is easy to cry “Luddite!” and trot out the myriad wonders that technology has given us.  I do not deny them.  I have no desire to live in some seemingly bucolic past where we spent most of our lives finding or raising food, where, in lieu of vaccines, children died of the measles, and, think about it – there was no Novocain! But, I must repeat a favorite mantra: the role of technology in society is a continual negotiation, we ask and the engineers respond.  The first part of the equation must dominate.  We must be thoughtful when we make demands, and bestow limitless trust upon, the technologists who create our toys.  Our most powerful tools can also be our most dangerous weapons.  Human intent defines the difference.

Garth Brooks wrote, “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” There is an oblique B-side to that hit: “Be careful what you ask for, you may get it.”
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Can it Scratch Glass?, or Of Scarcity and Value

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Major cultural transformations occur when events create imbalances in traditional social relationships.  Those imbalances eventually find new equilibrium, but the interim can be unsettling.  This early evolution of the Internet in American culture is one such event.  The Internet’s complex interweaving with all aspects of our lives nudges any number of traditional relationships towards reconsideration.  Among those is the dynamic that has long existed between scarcity and value.

On its surface that relationship is a straightforward one – the scarcer a resource, the greater its value.  Of course, scratching that surface reveals the details in which the devil revels.  The first obvious proviso is that the resource possesses intrinsic characteristics that make it desirable – we can eat it, or clothe ourselves with it, communicate with it, it is beautiful, or powerful, or makes us so.  Those intrinsic characteristics, in combination with its scarcity, make the resource valuable.

Complicating the equation further is the notion that all scarcity is not the same.  There are at least three important variants.  The default definition is natural scarcity – characteristics, elements and resources that simply do not occur that often.  About 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch, that is a naturally occurring scarcity, and one whose value increases if that one person also happens to be musically gifted, hence piling scarcity upon scarcity.  Second, there is manufactured scarcity.  Nobel Prize winners are of this type of scarce resource.  Only 543 have been awarded to date out of a world population of about 6.8 billion souls.  Talk about scarce!  However, the value of a Nobel Prize winner is an iffy calculation.  They are of significant value to research institutions and universities who point to “their” Nobel Prize winners as evidence of organizational excellence.  But to the average person on the street these incredibly scarce individuals have no greater inherent value than the next passer-by.  

The final type of scarcity is manipulated scarcity.  Manipulated scarcity occurs when an already scarce resource is artificially manipulated to increase its scarcity and hence its value. Diamonds are often accused of possessing this manipulated scarcity.  Data are sketchy in this area, as a matter-of-fact, I occasionally wonder if the purported information about the number of diamonds in the world is itself being manipulated to establish a "diamond mythology" that adds to the value of the gems.  The "mythology" narrative is based in the accepted natural scarcity of diamonds.  You don’t plough them up in the back garden when putting in tomatoes.  However, delicious rumors circulate that DeBeers has a stash of diamonds secreted away that exceeds the number of diamonds currently in circulation.  One also hears tales of discoveries of massive new diamond finds in this or that remote locale.  The icing on the cake is, of course, blood diamonds – a political manipulation of scarcity.  If the world market “de-legitimizes” diamonds from certain sources, scarcity, and value, of "legitimate" diamonds spiral.

The scarcity/value dynamic currently being disrupted by the Internet that raises my concern is the one that plays out among the variables of information, knowledge and wisdom. I have talked about this phenomenon before, but let me refresh it for you

Information:  This is the “Dragnet” part of the dynamic: “All we want are the facts, ma'am.” Information equals facts, the data as we are best able to discern it.  The boiling point of water at sea level.  The number of traffic tickets written in San Francisco in February, 2009.  Data, facts, information.

Knowledge: Knowledge grows from an inspection and ordering of the information.  It is the recognition of patterns in the information that allow us to make assertions regarding the relationship between behavior and outcomes; “if/then statements.”  If 10,000 traffic tickets are written in February in San Francisco, and if the average fine is $20.00 and if the average rate of payment is 68% within 30 days, then one might assume that approximately $13,600.00 in revenue will be available from those tickets by the end of March.  

Wisdom:  Put most simply, wisdom is the ability to discern from among all the potential “if/then statements” those that should be affirmed and pursued to result in the greatest good.  The end of wisdom is thoughtful, compassionate belief and felicitous policy.   The absence of both in most human endeavors is, at least, indirect evidence of the paucity of wisdom currently in play in our world.  Agreement regarding the nature of wisdom will always be slippery, but I am concerned that the Internet increases wisdom’s scarcity by flooding the world with component parts – information and knowledge – of questionable validity.  Let me explain.

Prior to the Internet there were cultural hedges to the dissemination of raw information.  Census data, the data from the Hubble telescope, satellite images from all over the world – none of this raw information was available to distract the private citizen.  Those data streams were gathered and analyzed by individuals and organizations with recognized expertise in the interpretation of that data.  The next step in the process – turning information into knowledge – also rested primarily in the hands of specialists who vetted the “if/then statements” that form the core of all professional literature.  The concerned private citizen then could, ideally, peruse the various conclusions of the experts and make a rational decision regarding which version of knowledge struck closest to truth and could, in rare instances, follow that truth to wisdom.

Now let us return to diamonds for a moment.  How do we know that a diamond is a diamond? Cubic zirconia and other faux diamonds are getting very good, and manufactured diamonds are reaching gem quality.  The informed consumer can make good calls based on brilliance, clarity, color, etc.  But if one is buying or insuring a diamond, your great aunt Lady Rutherford’s opinion isn’t quite enough.  You want a gemologist to break out the scientific instruments to peer into the depths of the stone, to note any flaws, to certify quality, color, and perhaps place of origin.  For a thing to have value you must, at the very beginning of the process, know that the thing is the thing it claims to be.

Back to the Internet.  Peter Steiner drew an iconic cartoon published in The New Yorker on July 5, 1993, that showed a dog seated before a computer, turning to a dog on the floor.  The dog at the computer says, “On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog.”  As recent news stories about Facebook and RapLeaf make clear, that assumption is now bogus.  The contemporary Internet now knows not only if you are a dog, it knows your breed and the most intimate details of your pedigree.  Reality has inverted.  The problem now is that it is difficult for us, the users of the Internet, to know if the page on our screen was composed by a purebred canine or a mutt. Is it a diamond, cubic zirconia or cut glass?

Imagine you walk into a handball court, filled knee-deep with stones that appear to be diamonds.  As a matter of fact there are several hundred perfect diamonds scattered throughout the glittering hoard.  If you can find them, you can keep them.  What do you do?  And, no, the back wall is Plexiglas, all the gems can scratch it.  This is what currently confounds our use of the Internet – there is a surfeit of information, an excess of asserted knowledge, and no reliable path to wisdom.  The cubic zirconia is pretty and may well get us the best route to tonight’s concert venue.  The online reviews, however, reviews are cut glass tossed into the court – some by the bands publicity staff masquerading as discerning fans, others, perhaps vitriol lobbed in by competitors or former lovers.  Not much chance of consistently informed opinion, less still of encountering wisdom .  .  . the odds of grabbing a diamond are one in hundreds of thousands. 

Still, the diamonds are there – that is what drives me crazy.  Out there, in a medium designed for distraction, amidst the masses of trivial, self-serving, ignorant, foolish, bogus, and malicious pretenders, are diamonds of exquisite perfection.  Finding them, however, does not lie within the purview of search algorithms or crowd sourcing, both of which are driven by well-intentioned but fatally flawed bias.  So how do we find them? How do we mine for diamonds instead of data?  I do not know.  But there is something sparkly over there .  .  .  . maybe if I rub it against the other pretty pebbles .  .  .  .

The problem with this "aimlessness" is that we tend not to tolerate it for long. We are inclined to a desire for certainty.  Hence, in lieu of a reliable path through information to knowledge and on to wisdom - we grab the bauble that catches our eye, that seems to fit best with our other gems, regardless of source or pedigree.  We stuff it in our pocket and walk out of the handball court:

"Wisdom be damned, don't I look good with this stuff?"

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On Life and Dreaming

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Hopefully, committing this to words will stop it from swirling around my mind.  It all began sometime yesterday.  I was reading an article about chimpanzees in the latest Smithsonian.  The TV was playing in the background, and a cell phone ad squeezed in around my concentration.  The tag ran something like this  “ .  .  . texting, the Internet, and video.  All without lifting your face from your phone!”  I wish I could be more exact – but I can’t find the ad online.

Equally frustrating was my subsequent inability to nail down a bit of dialogue about the nature life and dreams that had been flitting through the cobwebs of my brain since hearing the phone ad.  I thought the source must have been film or video since I seem to “hear” the words. Lord of the Rings? Watership Down?  Hamlet?  I didn’t know.  Then it came to me this afternoon, nothing that lofty, Heaven Can Wait, 1978, with Warren Beatty.  When Beatty’s character finds himself in heaven after a car wreck, he asserts it has to be a dream; the supervising angel says:

“Now, Joe, you know this is not a dream, you know this is real.  There is a certain quality to dreaming and a certain quality to life.  This is life.”

The issue, of course, is the interplay between those two perspectives.  There is a certain quality to life that separates it from dreaming.  That is what makes a dream that approaches the borderline so powerful.  In its aftermath, you lie there, staring at the space around you, letting reality reaffirm its dominance.  You take comfort from the feel of cloth upon your skin, the breeze upon your face; welcoming even the poke of a bedspring or an unreachable itch – you find comfort in the insistence of the landscape.  You sense that “quality of life that separates it from dreaming.”

The inverse can be equally powerful.  A dream in which you are free from pain, again in the presence of one once loved and now departed, when you are whole and lithe and laughing can give way to a far more desolate life.  But, however distressing, again there is that affirmation of difference, of qualities that separate life from dreaming.

How do we know the difference?  It seems true that we do, but how did we come to understand, identify, perceive those defining, differentiating qualities of life versus dream?

I am caught by the notion that we learn the qualities of life by living in the landscape.  We learn “real life” through the physicality of touching, smelling, tasting, by seeing and by hearing.  Goosebumps on our arms, tears on our cheeks.  Pleasure and pain, experience and learning are writ upon our bodies.

I find it intriguing and somehow disturbing that life lived with “our face to our phone” engages only two elements – sight and hearing.  I am concerned that with so much of our lives being delivered to us by screens and speakers that we may begin to perceive with less clarity those qualities that separate life from dreaming.  Very Matrix.

I realize that there is a kernel of positive potential in this fuzzier, two-dimensional, landscape.  For those in pain, disabled and despairing, there may well be therapeutic aspects to an immersive dreamlike alternative.  But those are not, for the most part, the folks living life with their faces to their phones.  I am concerned that the kids “t’wixt twelve and twenty” are losing time in the landscape and touching only a truncated version of life.  And I wonder if one casualty of such a youth will be the clear, intuitive understanding of the qualities that separate life from dreaming.
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DrS Gets a Smartphone: Droid Week Two

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As you can tell by the lapse in postings, Janus and I have settled into an uneasy truce.  Since I don't make all that many phone calls, my slowly evolving understanding of the interface isn't all that much of a hurdle.  Still, Janus occasionally asserts himself and places calls at random.  If you have received one, I apologize.  Similarly, an apparent "send" default has resulted in a few blank emails.  Again, I apologize.

I am finding it useful when I get caught in long lines at the store.  I have loaded the Kindle app and so always have a book with me to read - that's a good thing. Also on the upside, my frustration with the dominant text and function entry systems that Janus seems to share with a variety of touchscreen devices has led to a software concept that I will explore with some entrepreneurial friends.  Which leads to the 21st century daydream of being wealthy enough to turn your back on digital demands.  Think about it: "Jeeves, take an email," or "Jeeves, bring me the New York Times crossword on the terrace with pencils, and freshen my orange juice," or "No, I really don't care what searches are trending up on Google."

On the confusion side - where are you supposed to put the thing?  I suspect that Janus makes his surreptitious calls when I put him in my shirt pocket.  Putting it in a pants pocket creates bumps and bruises on your thigh.  If you don't carry a purse or backpack you are reduced to carrying it in your hand, which, of course, inclines you to use it, to put it on the table, to make it your new BFF.  I suppose one can get a belt clip - but that makes me feel vaguely like a meter reader with no particular meter to read .  .  .  .
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DrS Gets a Smartphone: Droid Day Three

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Janus Strikes Back

I can just hear Janus now, "Call me an obscure god, mortal?  Think you can keep me in my place?  We'll see about that!"

Alright, so I shouldn't have said that.  Day three and Janus took off the gloves.  Remember when I said the Google email accounts downloaded rather effortlessly?  Perhaps I misspoke.  There was a seemingly small problem. The gmail email addresses and my old phone contacts came down in two separate batches so that when I clicked on "contacts" I got both lists combined, with one card for an email address and another for phone numbers.  But when I clicked on "Favorites" I got everyone for whom I had a phone number.  All I wanted to do was blend both lists and remove most folks from the "Favorites" list - since you can't speed dial, the favorites list is your phone call shortcut.  The understanding of the problem is not terribly important - the lesson lies in the route to the solution.

The first level of Verizon tech support figured out how to "join" the cards for the duplicate contacts but couldn't figure out how to "de-Favorite" anyone.  So I was passed along to Verizon Tech support level 2. There I met Dr. Kevorkian.  "We can fix this," he said. "But we must erase all your settings."

"Are you sure?"

"I am sure."

"OK."

"Then we are jumping in it."

And we jumped in it, losing all my apps, settings, gmail accounts, etc.  But soon we were back to the exact same situation as before vis-a-vis the contacts.  I just had no settings, apps, etc.

"Hmmmm." said Dr. Kevorkian, "Now we are going to Motorola Tech Support."

So we did that for an hour or so until we ended up with a specialist who sounded like she was about 13.

"Hello Robert, I'm Janey!  My screen says you are trying to remove contacts from your favorites list.  Is that correct?"

"Yes, it is."

"Okey dokey Robert.  Do you have your contacts on your screen?"

"Yes, I do."

"Okey dokey Robert.  Please touch a contact and hold your finger on the screen."

"All right."

"Okey dokey Robert.  In a second a menu should pop up.  Did it?"

"Yes."

"Okey dokey Robert.  Is one of the choices 'Remove from favorites"?

"Yes, it is."

"Okey dokey Robert, can you touch that selection for me?"

"Yes."  And I did so.  The favorites star disappeared.

"Okey dokey Robert.  Did that resolve your issue?"

"Yes, it did."

"Okey dokey Robert.  Can I help you with anything else?"

"No, Janey, that was all I needed."

"Okey dokey Robert.  Please call if there is ever anything else we can help you with."

"Okey dokey, Janey.  Thank you very much.  You've been most helpful.

"Okey dokey Robert."

And we hung up.  Elapsed time to solve problem: 2 hours and 35 minutes.

I concede this round to Janus.  But remain amazed by the incredible paradox in the situation.  All of the tech support people I talked with were determined to make sure my problem was solved.  But there was an obvious disconnect between that laudable intention and their ability to access the information - the very simple information - needed to solve my problem.

The first level tech support person actually solved 80% of the problem - describing the process to merge the two cards for each contact.  However, Dr. K. at level two, decided that we had to "rip the guts out of the system" to fix whatever was wrong.  He was wrong, and I eventually realized that he was simply using the old Windows strategy.  Turn it off, reboot, start all over.  Yet, Okey Dokey Janey was able to solve the primary issue in about 45 seconds.

I was struck again by the two faces of Janus.  It is a tool that is sweet, simple and wonderfully effectively when it works.  But when it does not work, it swiftly reveals layers of complexity and confusion that belie the seamless facade of its responsive screen.  It becomes a paperweight with integrated circuitry.

Janus may be an obscure god, but he is by no means simple.
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DrS Gets a Smartphone: Droid Day Two

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Actually did very little with Janus today.  [Janus is what I am thinking of naming my Droid.  Janus is an ancient Roman god, the god of transitions, usually depicted as having two faces, one looking to the future, one looking to the past.]

Played a little bit with editing contacts - which was an interesting exercise.  I have had the same phone "contacts" for 15 or 20 years.  I was a it taken aback by how many people had faded from my life.  Caught myself saying "Wonder what ever happened to him/her?" a lot.   Even stranger were the strangers, the "Who the heck is that?" contacts.  But I did not leap to Facebook to look for them.  Janus is a two-headed god.

That was about it.  Janus is an obscure god.  I felt as though I kept him in his place today.
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DrS Gets a Smartphone: Droid Day One

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When folks have occasion to look at the art that I create using digital tools, they often ask "How long did it take you to do that?"  The answer ranges from dozens to hundreds of hours - and there was the really complicated piece, well, I don't want to go there.  The point is that when it comes to learning about a digital tool - be it software or hardware - you often have to turn off the clock. 

Want to learn Photoshop?  Fine.  Pick a project you want to accomplish and keep plugging at it until you figure out how to make the tool do that. Don't count the hours - it will just depress you.  It is, I admit, an attitude at variance with our 24/7 world that wants everything done "right now!"  Still, it is an attitude I will try to maintain for at least a while as I explore this new tool.  There are a lot of issues to keep in mind.

As I said in the last post, one major concern is that I don't become - well, a Droid, a person who is merely an extension of a piece of technology that I carry around with me.  Second, and oppositional to the point just made, I do not want my intuitive "droid-reluctance" to prevent me from adding to my communicative skill set.

So, at least initially, I will try to turn off the clock, and learn my way around this tool. . .

My first major objective is to make sure that I can do everything on the Droid that I did with my old dumbphone: make calls and do minor texting.  I discovered that my old phone was just barely new enough to import my contacts from my old phone. Did that, but remain a touch confused because - being a Google phone - it also imported all my gmail contacts.  So now I have several dozen "contacts" with two cards, one for their phone numbers and another for their email addresses.  But there is no such thing as speed dial.  Various discussion groups define "really easy" work arounds - like, "get a dialer app and make a short cut and drag the icon to the main page."  Ah, yes.  "Can you grab the pebble, grasshopper?"  Think I'll come back to that later.

Texting was one of the highlights.  It turned out to be relatively easy once I had my phone contacts.  The issue is that, even though I have tiny hands, the virtual keyboard too small for my fingers.  Fortunately, the Droid has this nifty slideout physical qwerty keyboard.  The keys are still too small, but I discovered that you can work it fairly easily with the eraser end of a pencil.  I'm looking for a neat app I read about several months ago called Swype that could make using the virtual keyboard feasible.  Again the message boards were of limited assistance:  "It's still in beta, not officially released - but if you go here, you can download an elephant.  Take the elephant, and a sewing needle with a really large eye.  Push the elephant through the eye of the needle, and there you go man! Rock and roll!"  I think I'll come back to that later too.

The keyboard does present interesting issues that I may expand on later, but briefly, the keyboard environment is not conducive to reflective composition.  It is fine for pragmatic exchanges, but I do not see pulling out my droid and beginning, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times .  .  ."

Setting up email was both incredibly simple and basically impossible.  Again, remember that the Droid runs on Android software, made by Google, designed to be an iPhone killer.  My gmail accounts all came down even with out being asked. However, my university email is an IMAP account.  There are instructions for getting an IMAP account onto your Droid.  But after several hours with Verizon tech support, university tech support, and a personal consult with my ultimate guru, we couldn't shove that elephant through the eye of the needle either.  I ended up creating a gmail account to which I forward all the mail that comes to my university account. "Hah! Come on through Dumbo!"

So that's about it for today - more time than I wanted, but remember, sometimes you have to just turn off the clock.

Notice: this was not sent from my mobile device :-)
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Fear of Phoning

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I have always had a penchant for solitude.  As a child I delighted in “not being seen.”  I loved to hide among the bushes outside the house, or up in the branches of low hanging tree, observing the ebb and flow of the neighborhood.  I had no interest in eavesdropping or stealing secrets.  There was just something soothing in the notion that nobody knew where I was, that I could observe the world at my leisure and think unhurried thoughts.  It is an inclination that has remained with me throughout my life.  Even during high school and college, when I spent much of my time as an actor, there was a special peace to be found high up in the catwalks above the stage, seeing but not seen.


I am still drawn to solitude, to times when I am either unobserved or merely unnoticed.  Neither judging nor be judged.  Just quietly “being.”  I was struck by the notion strongly, yet somewhat paradoxically, yesterday during a visit to Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.  It isn’t the Valley of the Kings, but it is probably as close as we get here in America.  The rich and powerful of this city of broad shoulders - Pullman, McCormick, Fields, et. al. - lie beneath obelisks and mausoleums beside tranquil ponds.  It is a pool of solitude in the midst of a teeming metropolis.  You do not take notice of others strolling beneath the trees and they do not acknowledge you.  The dead themselves, it seems, could wander about without attracting much attention.  It is a graceful, peaceful, pasture of the dear departed.

This new attention to solitude may well be heightened by the fact that I have been without my laptop for more than a week, and my cellphone is of the old dumb variety - I use it to talk, and it occasionally surprises me with a text message from Verizon.   Hence, the distraction technologies of today’s world have been largely muted.  The silence brews a strange blend of calm and anxiety.  The calm, of course, is born of solitude.  My childhood friend wraps sweet and soothing arms around me, lulling me to soft reflection.  The anxiety springs from our digitally enhanced sense of self-importance: surely something is going on out there in the wide, wild, wired and wireless world that needs my input, my attention, my keystrokes.

I still choose to believe that participation in the digital mediascape is option not mandate.  But more and more I doubt it.  I could not do my job in a non-digital environment.  I would not sit down and put stamps on envelopes to share these reflections with you.  On this trip, Matilda, my GPS led us through the Appalachians down roads without names that are undoubtedly used as luge tracks come winter - and deposited us at the doorstep of our B&B in excellent time.  I worked through last week’ Sunday NY Times crossword puzzle with my daughter and son-in-law, and they only had to use their iPhone Google app a couple of times.  I would not choose a pre-Internet life.  Yet, I remain concerned.

The TV claimed a spot in the living room during the 1950s.  Today it has its own room.  The smart phone also now claims part of our personal space.  I was at a gathering awhile ago, peopled mostly by adults in their 30s and 40s, with kids ranging from single digits to late teens.  I was in the midst of a conversation with my hostess when another adult stepped between us to place her cellphone directly in the hostess’s line of sight. No one missed a beat.  No one, other than I, and I only in retrospect, seemed to notice, let alone find it incredibly rude.  Walk into any coffeeshop and most restaurants - certainly at lunchtime - and you will find most patrons partnered by their phones.  They are no longer nestled in pockets.  Tiny and unobtrusive phones are no longer cool.  The new largescreen varieties are positioned on the table next to their - hmm?  Which is the master?  No doubt better restaurants will soon have “phone rests” designed to match the chef’s preferred presentation.  You don’t want some clod to knock over the spun sugar sculpture because there is no space for their touchscreen sweetheart.  If you can’t beat them, guide them.

I do not wish to become one of “those people,” and yet, ironically, I must.  One cannot teach about digital culture from afar.  So, soon, I will move to a droid, having given up waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon.  But I will seek to maintain perspective, to avoid having my phone become my new BFF.  I think I’ll be able to manage it, after all, “I’m just chipping. I can quit anytime I want.”  Who said that? Kerouac? Joplin? Jackson? I dunno .  .  .  . 
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Maybe There is a Reason We Lost Touch

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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.
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Cable Clutter

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I happened to pull open the fourth drawer last night.  It was not a pretty sight, which is why I don’t often do it.  The fourth drawer, you see, is the 21st century equivalent of that 20th century corner of the attic where you stacked all the old National Geographic magazines.  Huge dusty stacks in fading yellow; probably doing significant structural damage to the house.  I don’t know why we all saved them; I suppose one could argue that they kept a significant amount of carbon safely locked away.

The fourth drawer is where we keep all the old cables, connectors, AC adapters, chargers for long lost cell phones, and other unidentifiable electronic doodads: The obligatory detritus of the digital age.  But while staring down at all that techno-pasta it struck me that those wires carried electronic impulses only secondarily, their primary function was to transport experiences.

Hang with me for a moment on this one.  Communication as an academic discipline is the often awkward child of a mixed marriage.  Dad was this Greek guy of ancient and respected lineage, Plato, Aristotle [the philosopher, not the shipping tycoon], all those thoughtful guys in togas.  Mom – well, the lady was a bit of a flapper.  Flashy woman out of Bell labs, a lot of sparks, switches, transistors – saw the world as very binary. All about those 1s and 0s.  As a result the contemporary field can be viewed as two large tribes, one descended from the Greeks, the other descended from the Geeks.  Some kids carry genes from both tribes – sort of rhetorical geeks – we call that “cultural studies” for want of a better term. 

As I stared at the drawer I decided that the Greeks had given us a transformative model of communication in that their ruminations, despite twists and turns through form, style and intent, was in the end primarily concerned with how human communication transformed human behavior, how symbols recreated and affected the human experience.

The Geeks on the other hand, were – well – geeks.  They want to move 1s and 0s around the universe as efficiently as possible.  Make HDTV, and satellite radio. They are awestruck by the fact that Voyager spacecraft continues to beam 1s and 0s back to us despite being more than 10 billion miles out in space.

How do you know which gene pool you represent?  Consider this possibility:

You are visiting the Louvre; heading off with a few thousand of your closest friends to see the Mona Lisa because, well, it’s here you always liked the song.  Suddenly just as you enter the hallway across from the Mona Lisa, all the power goes out in the building.  Everything. [I know, it couldn’t happen – but this is a teaching story, give me a break.]  You grope your way into the room where you think the Mona Lisa should be, and encounter one of those “velvet ropes and poles” constructions that keep visitors away from the art.  As you feel your way around the rest of the room you touch another plaque on the wall.  Finally, you back into the middle of the room and find a bench.  You sit down facing, you hope, the Mona Lisa, and stare into the darkness imagining da Vinci’s masterpiece.  After a few minutes there is a whoosh and the lights come back on and you find yourself staring at a poster in five languages, describing evacuation procedures during an emergency.  Turning around you see the Mona Lisa hanging on the wall behind you.

If you find yourself thinking that, without the transformative power of light, we are powerless to discern between the symbolic power of great art and the pragmatic function of a poster, then you are a Greek.

If you look up and wonder how the lights failed and what sensing system cued them to cycle back on you are a Geek.

If you find yourself feeling a little guilty about sitting on a velvet couch looking at the Mona Lisa when millions of others cannot, and you surreptitiously shoot a little video of her to post on YouTube, then you will feel right at home in cultural studies.
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