Shifted Reality, Shifting Messages

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Time was when we touched life. We hunted and gathered our food, we sat together around the fire, we talked. Some say that was when we became "human", sharing stories with friends and family in the fire's glow. There were some obvious problems with life back in that particular day. Large animals were inclined to eat us, life expectancy was about a week from Thursday, and there was no Novocain and no cable. But still we had each other and the fire - BFF.

The millennia cranked around and true civilization evolved - indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and most important, TV. After all those centuries of talking to each other we finally created the big talking screen that took the heat off.  No more "chunk a log on the fire and make up a tall tale to explain winter."  You just hit the remote and let the celebrities do your talking.  Some thought TV was a window on the world, others called it a great wasteland.  Truth probably lived somewhere in between.  But whether we loved or hated the box in the corner, television changed existence for much of humanity.  Increasingly reality lived behind a screen.  The world was "out there" somewhere. We could see it, but we couldn't touch it. It talked to us, but we had no way to talk back.

Venture out of your cave today and you will see that the great mandala has spun around yet another time, and for many the media transformation is complete; life is touched though a screen - a touchscreen on a smartphone. We touch the world though our screens, we talk to them and they talk back.  If the great carnivores still roamed the plains, they would wax fat and lazy - picking us off like jellybeans as we stalk the streets mesmerized by the screens in our hands with wires running to the speakers in our ears.  Much of our life, personal and professional, has taken up residence behind the screens of those little boxes. We can debate anew whether that is a good, convenient thing, or a horrible dehumanizing thing.  Winning either side of the argument will not change the reality.  Which means the that the relevant question becomes how do we live well, live humanely and creatively within the current reality?  The screen is the new fireplace and, I would assert, like life around the fireplace in those ancient caves, the way we use this screen to shape our stories of ourselves will play a large part in defining our contemporary humanity.

Throughout history the media which contain our communication have themselves influenced the nature of our communication. The medium is the bucket we bring to the beach, the message is the sand we pack into it.  The castle that we build, the message we construct, is the joint product of sand and bucket, of our intention and the nature of the medium.  Our new bucket has certain inclinations.  The direct descendant of the telephone, the personal computer and the Internet; the smartphone favors the brief and the immediate.  That is not to say that that person at the table next to you at Starbuck's is going to stop yammering away - "And she was like, and I was like and so like I said I like Ike and she went .  .  .  .  . " People will still be enthralled by the sound of their own voice. But that blended media heritage has led to some fascinating new possibilities and inclinations.  I wanted to touch on just two.

First is the observation that the inversion of broadcasting is complete.  We often still think of a particular portion of the media as being made up of "broadcasters," a single message source that "broadcasts" a message to us through the "mass media."  That model still applies to a certain extent.  However with increasing regularity social media such as Facebook and Google+ and Twitter invert that concept.  We - as individuals - are now the active source of the message, we are the broadcasters.  We post, we tweet and the message chains out to dozens, hundreds, occasionally thousands and millions - whether we want it to or not.

Which brings us to the second and more important notion: what are we "broadcasting?"  If you have read this far, you are apparently among the digital minority.  The data indicate that those who live through the screen favor linguistic brevity.  I suppose.  But I also wonder.  You see, it is not that the people who tweet and text cannot write complex sentences and paragraphs that exceed 142 characters, it is that the software will not allow messages that exceed that limit.  It is a strange sort of editorial control: We're not all that concerned with what you say, we're just going to limit how many characters you use to say it.  

GR8 LOL!

This all leads me to wonder how the notions of selectivity, quality and complexity will play out in this new shifted reality.  Social networks, as currently configured, make communication with a select few difficult. My guess is someone will soon see this as a business opportunity.  Communication on the screen also currently privileges the short, the brief, the simple.  That does not eliminate the possibility of complex, graceful and artful constructions - but it does reduce the options. I have no doubt that someone will eventually create the app to address that gap.

TTFN :-)
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Being Evil: It's Complicated

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Harry Potter's parents were killed because their personal data, data that they thought was secure and would not be used without their consent, was compromised by Peter Pettigrew, the very person to whom they had entrusted the data. Pettigrew leaked the data to Voldemort who, having thus learned the Potters' location data, came and killed them.  It's a lot like shopping at Target.  No, no, wait. I'm serious.  A student just sent me a link to a story about a pregnant teen being "outed" to her parents by Target's "targeted" advertising.  Aside from the murders, the story contains a lot of parallels to the tragic tale of the Potters' demise.

Here's what happened.  It seems that Target does a lot of data-mining when you shop there.  According to the Forbe's article, "Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources."  Then Target mashes the data around and looks for patterns that might reveal clues to purchasing preferences and they mail the owner of the "data bucket" a personalized flyer full of coupons that will "help" them save money on those items in which Target's "bucket algorithm" asserts they are interested.  Well, some time in the not too distant past, Target's algorithm elves zipped out a flyer to someone the algorithm assured them was pregnant. 

Problem: The recipient of flyer was an unmarried high school student whose irate father showed up at the local Target store demanding to know why Target was encouraging his daughter to get pregnant.  Further problem: the algorithm was right, the daughter was not only pregnant, but due to give birth almost exactly when the Target algorithm predicted.  Dad apologized to the manager.  A creepy tale for our time, but neither as unique nor as simple as it appears at first blush.

Perhaps our naive assumption that the data we trail behind us in cyberspace will be used to our benefit can be traced to Google's famous founding motto, "Don't Be Evil."  Yet, in the last week Google has revealed that it has been messing with the code in Apple's Safari web browser to enable Google to do much the same type of data tracking globally, that Target has been doing within its organization. The revelation of "Safari-gate" has prompting calls for an FTC investigation of all things Google.  Calls which, by the way, have fallen on deaf ears at both Google and the FTC. One wonders how long such stonewalling will be successful?  Still, it has been going on for quite awhile, and by now I would guess that Google and Facebook are the two companies that know more about the lives of millions of people in the world than any other entities.  No doubt governments would love to know more, but they don't have Google's or Facebook's budgetary and technology resources. Besides, the CIA will probably soon be able to buy the app for their iPads - after giving Apple it's 30% piece of the pie.  The companies targeted by these negative headlines staunchly assert that any excessive gathering of personal data has merely been the result of unintentional missteps in their efforts to provide the services we demand of them. I wish that were a bald-faced lie.

You see, the fly in ointment for those crying to stem the current tsunami of data mining, crunching and selling is this: we freely provide most of the data being mined.  No one holds a gun to our head and demands that we use our Preferred Customer Card at the local grocery, clothing, or hardware store.  We pay for the Groupon that feeds data into that bucket.  We fail to install "Do Not Track" software. We blithely click "Like" and "+1" all over the web.  We Tweet and Retweet our little fingers off, pouring more and more data into the busy maw of the data miners.  Do we really think that all those "services" are provided to put money into our pockets?  Let me tell an old story about a free lunch .  .  .  . Those "services" generate huge profits for a kaleidoscope of companies whose entire raison d'être is to lighten our wallets; to slide cash out of our accounts and into theirs.  And that's OK.

No, really, it is OK.  That is the core of capitalism, of a marketplace economy.  It is what the nation has been about since our earliest days, and no one seems to have come up with a better system.  The more nuanced issue is fairness and intent.  My simplistic perspective is "tell me what you are asking from me, tell me what you know about me, and tell me what I am getting in return."  If that information is open and up front, and if I can easily choose "not to play," then fine.  I will not gripe. But that is not, it seems, how data mining works.  Data miners work on the assumption of "what they don't know won't hurt them."  They take our data, often in surreptitious ways,  and use it to significantly increase their profits, or they simply repackage and sell the data to others.  But, opine the data-miners, we gave it to them, the data are in their hands as a result of our own actions or inactions.  No harm, no foul.

Increasingly, I have grown less convinced of the case for "no harm."

The case of revealing the teen pregnancy is one obvious example of harm being done.  It is probably no big deal in the life of a large corporation like Target, but it is certainly a big deal in the life of that youngster and her family. The discordant dialogues within families are difficult enough without being brought to light by the blunders of a clueless crew of anonymous digital hucksters.

But I believe there is a deeper and more primary harm, and that is the re-conceptualization of the private.  Our species began in private.  Privacy was imperative or the faster, stronger creatures would kill us.  We were relatively harmless little packages of protein, if the carnivores could find us. Then, across the millennia, we evolved into clans and tribes, towns and cities, nations and empires. We put on public faces to perform the public tasks necessary to maintain the complex institutions integral to civilization.  Privacy became not so much a case of the survival of the species as it was a comfort, a soothing retreat from the rough elbows of public life.  A private place became a space apart, became something to be valued and pursued.  In America, one became fully vetted in the dream when you owned a "home of you own." Nothing was more painful in the recent recession than losing that cherished private place, your home.

Yet now various hip "cyberati" inform us that "privacy is so 20th century." In the 21st we share it all, posts and reposts on your timeline from womb to tomb. Every private thought and action is made public, often at the very instant of its occurrence. Yet, if that were really the undisputed state of the current culture, why would the various intrusions into our data stream cause such indignation? Perhaps it is because we are upset by the realization that in a purely public world we lose the unique opportunity to construct truth from our private existence, because that existence is no longer private.  Our insight into our personal past now flickers on Ancestry.com, open to anyone with the price of admission. Our personal present scrolls by on a variety of social media. The comfort of conversation is peppered with quick consults of the electronic oracle to ascertain any questions or assertions of fact, history or locale. The distinction between public and private has blurred beyond definitional agreement.  We seem to recognize those spheres only by the most egregious trespasses: "Not only do I not need to know that, I am offended by having been made aware of it," and, "How dare you seek to intrude upon that part of my life?"

Our inability to consistently or accurately discern the various shades of gray between those blacks and whites, between obvious good and unfettered evil, may well arise from the fact that good and evil often seem to wear the same masks and live in the same digital spaces, and those spaces are increasingly public spaces.  Our lives, taken as a whole, have become more public than private.  Which leads to this question: Is there an evolutionary advantage to lives lived primarily in public? If I am being asked to jettison the comforting quiet of the private in favor of the roar of lives lived in full public view, what do I gain?  As an individual? As a species?  To date the dominant response seems to be "better shopping." That is not yet enough for me. I'm still willing to settle for humble wine before a fire that is neither HD nor crackling in surround sound, but is quietly comfortable in a private, friendly circle built for two.
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Internet Art: The Eye of the Beholder

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It is bad form to pose a question that is almost as long as the job candidate's presentation, so for once I followed my self-imposed mandate: shut-up and listen.  The presentation on Internet Art had been very interesting - thought-provoking even, as evidenced by the fact that more words than doodles adorned the open page of my trusty notebook.  Problem was that few if any of the notations were of the "ascertain the suitability of the candidate," variety.  They were all more skewed to the "nature of art in the world and the place of the Internet in that dialogue" end of the spectrum.  My colleagues would not be pleased were I to trot them out at the end of a meeting that had already passed “quittin’ time.”   I had already tossed out one brief question, which was swiftly ignored in favor of more formal communication scholarship methodological, theoretical and bibliographic issues.  I started a new doodle.

And here's what I was thinking as I doodled:

You talked about an Internet art show where one of the formal curatorial criteria was to have no criteria, in that no submissions would be rejected.  Takes me back to days when my daughters swam for the Faculty Club in the Triangle Swim Association. Everybody swam, everybody got a ribbon.  No swimmer's efforts would be rejected.  As a parent I understood that the dominant orthodoxy of the time was "everybody wins."  I could appreciate that, but it muddied the previous clarity of a more hierarchical, though admittedly less friendly, system of the blue ribbon is first, the red is second and the white is third.  If you didn't get one, well, swim faster next time.  Tough swimming love, but at least clear.  “Ribbons for all!” was more confusing. I remember that when my older daughter was swimming in the "six-and-under" group, she decided it was really important to get a ribbon of every color.  She had every color but the cool black one with the gold letters. How do you tell a five-year old, "Well, honey, to get that ribbon you have to be last.  So go out there and do your worst!"

An art show in which there are no rejections injects similar confusion into the scenario.  I can sympathize with the idea of breaking the bounds of the old "beaux arts salon" mentality in order free up space for new methods of expression.  But that same lack of criteria almost demands abuse. I mean, if you publicly declare that anything will be accepted, you are just asking folks to see if you really mean anything.  You are begging people to foreground the "con" in contemporary art. “Let see if they’ll accept this!” And we have all been to brick and mortar shows where yes, they did.  Still, one thing about the Internet is that there are no walls on the gallery; that space is in many ways quite unlimited, so perhaps it is fine to give everyone a ribbon - as long as one is willing to accept the fact that the ribbon has no meaning.

There are probably as many different definitions of art as there are artists and art critics.  The Internet seems to be most amenable to what I have thought of as "therapeutic art."  Therapeutic art is art done primarily for the benefit of the artist.  Therapeutic art is to the artist what the gym is to most people.  Most folks go to the gym and work out because it makes them feel good - either physically when the endorphins kick in, or the more emotional and intellectual pleasure of knowing you are doing something "healthy."  Most folks are not professional athletes who go to the gym to condition themselves to better perform the physical demands of their job, they go to the gym to feel good.  The same is true of therapeutic art - it is a balm, it calms us amid life's ragged race.

The Internet art discussed in the presentation - often incredibly complex, intense effort and energy by thousands of people resulting in "products" that were often the fleeting or ephemeral manifestation of "process" - seems to have a strong therapeutic component.  The repetitive attention to detail resulting in complex patterns seen in this type of Internet art is more akin to quilting than say, painting or sculpting. Those art forms are often defined by a jerky process, start and flow, stop and stare, trial and error enacted in the isolation of a studio.  The analogy of Internet art to quilting fits even more snugly if we consider a quilting bee, when a group of artists in direct communication with one another work to create a communal work.

I tend to see quilting bee, therapeutic, art as different from what I think of as transcendent and/or definitional art.  Transcendent definitional art has more to do with the definition of the discrete self that transcends the characteristics of the group. In this type of work the artist seeks an expression of an evolving or established singular self.  The value in the creation of this type of art lies in the simultaneous expression of, and the physical crystallization of, the self in the artifact.  That assertion obviously runs counter to the notion in general semantics that the word is not the thing.  To a certain degree I am asserting that the creation is the creator, or at least has a holographic relationship to its creator in that he or she can be re-visualized through the artifact.  I went to see the recent excellent exhibit of Rembrandt's works at NCMA, here in Raleigh.  Since his death in October of 1669, Rembrandt has been his paintings.  In the absence of the artist, the artifact becomes the primary manifestation of the self.  And, of course, therein lies a threat, a danger in the fragility of the artifact.  To the extent that the creation can be physically destroyed, so a portion of the expressed self is placed at risk.

Internet art, or at least art contained by the Internet, can be both advantaged and disadvantaged by its electronic home.

In therapeutic art the Internet offers the advantage of a seemingly infinite "quilting table."  Millions of people can pull up a chair, stick in a needle and add their swatch to the pattern. However, there are risks attached to mistaking this therapeutic art for transcendent or definitional art.  One can certainly find balm in the affirming shared activity of thousands - but these actions can also bury the uniqueness of the self in the complexity of massively networked activities.  In its darker moments, networked art can feel more like the group-mind throbbing of a beehive, rather than the cozy comfort of a quilting bee. 

Obviously, the throbbing of the hive also engenders the communal power that is often germane to political art. And hence the Internet proves fertile ground for activists who wish to create group artifacts that espouse particular political perspectives.  But, in the interest of full disclosure, I need to admit that the one idea that alienates me from many of the current dominant trends in thinking about the relationship between the Internet and art is that I think the phrase “political art” is an oxymoron.  Naturally one can discern political themes in artifacts, but when one starts a work with the objective of asserting a particular political perspective then one is doing public relations, or marketing, or good old fashioned “politikin’” You can produce great music, powerful images, and memorable moments doing politics, but since the message is predetermined by policy, I have trouble seeing it as art, which remember, I define as an exercise is self-exploration and definition.

For that kind of transcendent definitional art, the Internet can offer safe harbor for the artifact.  A lot of sticky issues lie behind that simple sentence.  They all stem from my "anti-semantic" assertion that the artifact is the artist.  The question is this: To what extent is a facsimile of the artifact really the artifact? Much of my own art is, at least in part, digital.  Drawings and/or photographs are scanned into Photoshop, are digitally manipulated in that environment, and then printed out - sometimes repeatedly - on different media.  I would assert that subsequent iterations of those files could produce an artifact that would be identical, and hence the same thing as, any other output of the file. One could make commercial differentiations based on signature, chronological order, etc., but in terms of the artifact being the artist, the Internet could offer an artifact better "security through ‘replicability’" than any museum vault.

For artifacts created non-digitally the case initially seems less clear. Still, when we consider sculpture, music, paintings, etc., we enter an arena where, if we cannot already create functionally identical replicas, we will soon have that capability. Differentiating between different castings from the same mold was an arcane debate in the 1900s.  It will become functionally meaningless as our ability to do 3D rendering from either digitally created files or digital files created from scans of three-dimensional objects comes of age.  I recently read of a woman whose entire lower jaw had been rendered in 3D with a computer “printing” technique called “laser melting where layers of a metallic powder are built up and fused together with a laser.”  When the jaw was implanted, the patient could talk, chew and breathe with an ease long absent from her life.  Thus could Michelangelo's David be converted to a series of 1s and 0s or perhaps qubits that will allow for the creation of perfect replicas of any size, texture and color, including ones exactly matching the “original.” Seems to blur that entire notion of “the original,” not?

True, the idea of "Hey! Run me off another David!" makes me a little queasy.  And I can envision an entertainment conglomerate buying up the rights to the David and selling "personalized copies" with "a true-to-life rendering of your very own face."  Yeech.  I am still a tad too attached to the idea of "the hand of the master."  If the artifact is the artist, then - ethically and artistically - the replicated artifact must remain true to that which the artist created. When we step off that path we run the risk of bumping into the Stepford Wives. But in the final analysis, the artifact is a stimulus that triggers the firing of neurons in the mind of the individual experiencing that stimulus.  To the extent that the replication duplicates that pattern of stimuli, then I think we can assume that the recreated artifact recreates the artist.

No, no.  You do not want to go there. You do not want to start down the "Well, if what we are really looking for is ‘neurons firing a specific pattern’ why don't we just .  .  ." road.  Why?  Because identical stimuli fire neurons resulting in radically different “patterns of perception” in different people.  You look at someone on the street and wonder, "Who let them walk out of the house like that?"  They glanced in the mirror and thought, "Lookiiing gooood!" Same stimulus, worlds of difference in "the eye of the beholder."

I strongly believe that we need to somehow interact with an actual artifact, that we cannot try to make a leap to some kind of direct neural stimulation.  For me the art that strikes the deepest chord is art that, through the creation and sharing of an artifact, creates a relationship between the artist and another individual, often an unknown individual.  When I was a younger man, with dreams of life on the stage still large before my eyes, it seemed important that the artifacts in which I played a part should be seen by many.  Similarly, ensemble work seemed the most fulfilling - the troupe performing for the many. Not so much anymore.  These days "from my head and heart to yours," seems more fitting.  The feeling of, if not the reality of, an interpersonal, dyadic relationship is increasingly important to me - in my teaching, in my life, in my art. So I am interested in media containers, be they physical or digital, that are amenable to those kinds of expressions.

The Internet, as a container, is not designed specifically for art. As a matter of fact the Internet is perhaps the most flexible, least content-specific container yet devised.  If it has a "content preference" it is only the one that we bring to it. Currently people who self-identify as artists seem fascinated by the nooks and crannies of the Internet container that are new to us: the ability to display an artifact to, and receive feedback from, large numbers of individuals.  We are also intrigued with the ability to involve large numbers of individuals in an Internet process that "feels" expressive, the ephemeral nature of the "artifact" notwithstanding. Those are certainly legitimate expressive uses of the container.  But, they are not the ones that attract me. 

Art situated in electronic social networks - either unique networks created for an expression or commercial entities like Facebook employed for an expressive project – are, for me, too reminiscent of middle school cafeterias.  They are spaces that, under the guise of sociability and inclusion, are actually more prone to the public competition and posturing for which at least the largest social network was originally intended.  No doubt interesting work will grow in those spaces. However, another positive aspect of this flexible container that we currently call the Internet, is that we are free to walk away from the areas in it that have no appeal.  So, I choose to stroll away from the cafeteria that boldly hangs out the sign: "Home of Internet Art" and seek greener pastures elsewhere.

And it just so happened that this morning I chanced upon a space in the container that I found far more appealing: vipartfair.com.  It appears to be the Internet equivalent of a huge art fair in a major city: lots of artists displaying their artifacts in virtual booths.  Nobody implying I need to "like" them.  Just the "stuff,” and I browse at my leisure.  The interface is rich, but needs some getting used to.  Still, it seems quite well done - "grown-up," if that makes sense.  Nobody is rushing around, hollering and posturing. Nothing "pops up" or "rolls over." Despite a wildly eclectic collection of artists, the “fair” has that "touch of calm and insight" that I associate with transcendent definitional art.  No doubt others would find it tiresome.  There are obviously some “Con”temporary works mixed in with the interesting pieces, but all in all, an intriguing show.  However I note, with some dismay, that the exhibit "closes" tomorrow.  I suppose that artists in the new container will often mold the container to retain not only the form, but also the assumptions of older containers.  I might like it. I'm not sure.  It seems that "closing" the fair on a specific day reduces the "cheapening effect" that accompanies the convenience of 24/7 accessibility to everything.  Besides, when I signed up to enter the fair the curators assured me that I would receive notice of, and access to, future fairs.  So I assume more of the art I like awaits me.

So here we are, back in the eye of the beholder, in the Internet of the user, in the art of the moment.  There was a time when I would have felt the need to close with "the proper perspective."  There may be one.  Still, when I think about the myriad ways in which art and the Internet may intersect, it strikes me as foolhardy to assert that I know what that "proper perspective" is.  You want truth, certainty?  Not here.  Maybe in that cafeteria back down the hall a bit.  .  .  .
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Magnifying Minutiae

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With an impending IPO we are once again knee-deep in all things Facebook.  Part of that frenzy is an interesting article in PC World about how to block Facebook's new Timeline feature. That feature, on the off chance you have managed to avoid hearing about it, is an unfolding womb-to-tomb dossier that records in excruciating detail and precise chronological order every post, picture, like, dislike, poke, twiddle and bleep that you have ever entered on Facebook.  The article's author, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, was apparently concerned about the ease with which others could jump back years, into the midst of her posts as a less circumspect youngster.  The steps necessary to bar that door are absolutely byzantine.

For me it was a "be careful what you ask for" moment.  You see, almost exactly 7 years ago I wrote an article in Flow asking for such a device.  I was asking for a digital "trunk in the attic." Let me quote myself:

The gradual, expressive, maturing of the digital environment makes me hopeful that an old communicative fantasy of mine may be edging toward reality. I have always been delighted by the creativity of others. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to be in the presence of another’s insight or expression and find myself reduced to a state of delighted confusion: How did they do that? And, how did they even think of that? The desire for real answers to those questions often drives me to Google to find an author’s or artist’s or musician’s or scientist’s email address and ask them. You would be amazed at how often they respond. The problem, of course, is that on occasion they have been so rude as to die before answering my questions – sometimes decades ago. 

The frustration of their ultimate inaccessibility always reignites my desire for a “virtual biography.” I want to know what Einstein ate, what the streets he walked along looked like. I want to share the music to which Georgia O’Keeffe listened; I want to hear the sounds of London that Shakespeare heard. I want to be able to participate in some way in the experiential reality that must have shaped the creative flame within those souls. And I want to feel the firelight and hear the wind that whipped around the farmhouse winter nights in South Dakota when my father was a boy. I want to see the pages of the books that entranced my mother as a young girl in rural Pennsylvania. I want interactive, real time biographies that move beyond words on a page or flickering images sprung from the imagining of filmmakers and TV producers.
 
Such living histories would be incredibly difficult and expensive to create. To reassemble the past from fragments of mostly discarded data, to attempt to reconstruct from them a facsimile of the creative, reflective, experiential reality of one long dead is a daunting, if not impossible, task. However, assembling such works to chronicle lives in the present, using digital technology, has become surprisingly feasible.
 
Think about it. All you really need is a “capture device” – something that can record the visual, auditory and textual experiences of a life, a “structuring device” – something that allows one to edit, order and organize those collected experiences, a “storage device” – someplace to store both the collected data and the constructed representations, and a “publishing-distribution device” – something that allows for the sharing of the constructed representations with others.

In short, all you needed was Facebook.  Of course, at the time Facebook was barely a year old and was primarily a tool that let socially challenged Ivy League college students hook up.  So I look at Timeline with a kind of horrified fascination: "No! No! That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all!" What I envisioned for the "Digital Trunk in the Attic," or my later, more intricate, notion of a "Legacy Library" was employing the power of digital technology to capture the insights of those among us who have enriched the human condition with beauty and wisdom.  Funny cats, dancing hamsters, or dancing drunks - these were not the artifacts I had in mind.

As the Republican primary unfolds around us with all its hedge-funded hoopla, I cannot help but recall the 1988 Vice-Presidential debates when Lloyd Benson chided Dan Quayle, "You, Senator, are no Jack Kennedy."  So I say to Facebook's Timeline: "I proposed the Legacy Library.  The Legacy Library was a friend of mine. You, sirrah, are no Legacy Library, you are no digital trunk in the attic!"

Whew.  Now I feel better.
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The Sands of Time

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Last week's very public, very digital confrontation over SOPA and PIPA may well have marked the moment when the "digitally dependent" drew a line in the sand and declared "here you may tread, but no further." And America's politicians, ever the facile navigators, hoisted their sails to run swiftly before the prevailing winds of public opinion. In this instance I approve of their self-serving agility.  The bills address issues of import, but both were penned by the lobbyists of the same dog in the fight - big content. Rupert Murdock's craggy visage became, no doubt to the horror of Hollywood's sleek elite, the poster child for "fighting Internet piracy."  The plucky hobbits arrayed against this Sauron of the cinema were the youthful scions of the united wiki-worlds, the google-eyed champions of the keyboard-tapping children of a brave new world.

It is probably not that simple. Despite the narrative clarity offered by depicting this conflict as being one of young versus old, that is an analogy which in itself affirms a misconception I feel driven to dispel: The sands in which this line has been drawn are not the sands of time; this battle is not, despite appearances, at its core generational.  It is about the nature of the media, and the conflict is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

"The media" themselves have always been rather mundane containers: a flat space on the cave wall, a plane of rough paper, canvas or wood, grooves on a spinning disk, and now pixels on a glowing screen, vibrations in the air.  The tools of communication have always been inert products, clever constructions of capable machinists and engineers.  They are animated only by the magic of human communicative intent.  When they come to contain and distribute the product of human minds and imaginations, then they acquire value because then they enable art and artifice, power and profit.

Mature media are those containers that have come to dominate the manifestation, distribution and marketing of those contents, contents that enable the acquisition power and profit through the distribution of information, influence and entertainment; their contents define the broad sweep of the culture in which they exist. Cave paintings, symbols on stone and mud, papyrus, paper, illuminated images dancing on silver screens, electrical bursts fleeing along copper strands, cathode ray tubes, all these containers - and the companies that controlled them - have had their days of dominance. None passed the torch willingly.  In every era the guilds, unions, and corporations whose power and profits depended on the dominance of a particular container sought - usually by seeking the succor of the current crop of rulers - protection from emerging forms of containers.  Old media companies always oppose new media companies unless they can co-opt them and maintain their hard won place in the world of power and profit. The current hue and cry over SOPA and PIPA is the latest iteration of the grinding of gears and the gnashing of teeth that have forever accompanied the inevitable turning of the wheels of change.

What concerns me in the current discussion of the nature and mandate of the media, of the nuances of our immediate transition into "digitally contained culture," is the increasing presence of a new "elephant in the room."  We have a grand tradition in American cultural discourse of choosing to - if I might invent a word - "obliqueocize" important but uncomfortable issues.  Race, gender and sexual preference or identity have all been genteelly ignored while people at the "adult table" blithely made paternalistic policy for "the kids in the next room."  I would like to draw our attention to another group of "OAs" -  "obliqueocized Americans" - folks over 55.  That is 25% of the population, with a disproportionate amount of leisure time and expendable income.  I suppose there are certain businesses and industries that can ignore that demographic group - we don't buy a lot of hip-hop music or toy helicopters that we control with our cellphones.  We shouldn't buy spandex.  But the seeming marginalization of those over 55 by the new media moguls is a significant strategic faux pas.  Finding references to seniors in tech-based advertising, websites or other dominant forms of digital content is a lot like trying to find people of color or women outside a kitchen in 1960s TV – “Oh, look there’s one! Aren’t they cute?”  Now, as then, a huge resource, and a huge market are being overlooked.

The FacewikiTweet+ demonstration of online political moxie demonstrated by the technorati blunting, at least for the moment, SOPA and PIPA should not persuade those actively shaping the digital environment that they have got it right.  Actually, they aren't even asking the right questions.  You don't know the world better by simply knowing it faster, by just keeping the systems open and speedy. That notion is so 27 seconds ago.  There is a difference between successful media and mature media – and you can have one without the other.  Successful media generate revenue, sometimes massive amounts of it as reflected in the economic muscle of Google and Facebook. Sometimes the money is accumulated by profiting unethically or illegally from the work of others like the folks at Megaupload or Pirate Bay demonstrate, and the legitimate commercialized web, with its high profile start-ups and publicized IPOs, certainly gives more than passing kudos to acquisitiveness.  But despite the cool T-shirts, the person who dies with the most toys doesn't really win, they just die like everyone else, only a little more foolishly.  Bling doesn't do much for a casket, and often trivializes the significance of its contents.

The point is this, mature media are those that enable, distribute and archive the wisdom of the culture in which they exist.  Despite their current fixation with the quick and the glib, there is certainly nothing to prevent today's new media from maturing.  Examples may already exist, they just haven't been in existence long enough to demonstrate that they will have lasting cultural legitimacy.  It is inevitable that today's new media will become tomorrow's old media.  But the mantle of tomorrow's mature media is not inevitable, just as wisdom itself is not mandated by age. Both require effort and study.  Without effort and study we simply grow old.  My hope is that new media will seek new ways to address and benefit from more mature audiences – our cultural reservoirs of wisdom and literacy - and that those mature audiences will find creative ways to return the favor by taking a more active and attentive role in the development of the next iteration of mature media.
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To Add or Not To Add? To Accommodate or Enable? That is the Question.

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It is without doubt my least favorite time in the semester. It has become particularly distressing in the last four or five years when I interact with most of my students “at a distance,” either in large lecture halls or over the Internet. Long gone is the university I signed up for almost 40 years ago, the one with small classes, and long, leisurely, writing assignments. The new U creates new tensions, tensions that may arise in no small part from the “at a distance” communication model that is the norm on the Internet.

Here’s my problem: You see, students still, technically, have five days to add a course despite the fact that classes started two weeks ago. I wonder what committee established that little bit of institutional insanity? I mean, I always tell my students that one of the worst things they can ever say to their professor is “Hi. I wasn’t here on Monday. Did I miss anything?” Yet, that is the message in an email that reads something like this:

“Hello Professor. I was told I needed your permission to add this class. I need it to graduate. Please put me in. My student number is #########.” Thanks! See ya soon!”

Translation: “Hi. I wasn’t here on Monday. Did I miss anything?”

“Monday? Oh, no. We played a little Farmville. Checked Facebook. And I brought 14 pizzas. You’re cool.”

Did I miss anything?! Did you check your brains at the door? Of course you missed something!

A college class – even an online class - is not like a bowl of M&Ms that sits there for the semester so you can just waltz in and scoop up a handful anytime you want. Bowl empty? Class over. Bye! No, it doesn’t work that way.

From my point of view, a good college course should be designed like a high-end dinner party. It begins with some finger food and a light beverage until everyone has arrived. Then you move to the dining room when the serious eating begins. You start with the Amuse Bouche, or second appetizer, to get the brain working. Next the salad. Then you cleanse the palate – a little sorbet is good. Now the entrée and sides. And finally, dessert. The host/professor should match the wines with each course of the meal, and keep the conversation rolling. It's about lectures, papers, quizzes, assignments, final projects, an exam. Ta da! Dinners over!  I am the chef and the student’s host. It is my job to provide the student with valuable, thoughtful content, well-considered and well-prepared.

The student/guest should make sure to be on time, not to spill on themselves, watch the host to know which utensil to use, pay attention, and be respectful. It is the student’s job to listen, think, absorb, question, respond – and appreciate.

The mature, focused student does not walk in, or email in, to class two weeks late toting an “apology six-pack” and ask “Did I miss anything?” It is just rude. Your host may, as etiquette demands, smile, but the truth is they are angry.

But that type of rude behavior is precisely the kind of behavior that this two-week long "add window" encourages. I think I know where it is coming from. Our cousins over in the small liberal arts college community have become enamored with the idea that students should be able to “shop the curriculum,” try a few courses at the beginning of the semester before settling in to the ones they really like - or will be an easy A. And I suppose that’s fine if you are teaching 13 to 25 students who are paying 40 grand a semester for the privilege of shopping the curriculum. That can probably be explained as “fiscally necessary accommodation.”

In my world it is simply “enabling.” The “late-adders” AKA "LAs", waltz in blithely, hand you their “apology six-pack” explanation – or not – and ask “Did I miss anything? Where do I sit?” They are often quite winsome; it is a necessary survival skill for an LA. And their late arrival is always “someone else’s fault.” Their schedule “got cancelled”, their “advisor” forgot to put them in the course, “they” lost my records. The “I” word is rarely attached to any culpable behavior. And the LAs expect to be accommodated as, I suspect, they are at home and were in high school. The LAs expect that all the other students, the ones who came to dinner on time, will get put on hold for awhile while everyone scurries around to make sure that the LAs are comfortable.

I know, I know, I should just chill. The LAs are a handful among hundreds. Yet, soooooo irritating, because experience has taught me that I will hear from them again at the end of the semester when their computer will have crashed, or their roommate will have run off with their girl/boyfriend, or their puppy will be sick and can they please have an extension on their paper? And that is yet another reason why, in these last few days of potential “guess who’s coming to dinner” abuse, I turn surly, I stop enabling:

The Would Be LA: “I want to add your class. Did I miss anything?”
Surly Me: “Yes, too much to make up.”
The Would Be LA: “I don’t understand. Where do I sit?”
Surly Me: “Anywhere you like, as long as it is not in my class.”
The Would Be LA: “But I need three hours to graduate.”
Surly Me: “Have a good day.”


Ta da, dinner's over.
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The Pathos of the Gator

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It was, at first glance, a classic “jock-mobile.” A large black SUV, tall enough that the license plate was at eye-level as I pulled up behind in my little Yaris. From that vantage point I couldn’t help noticing the various “shout-outs” to the reptilian team from points South. Above the standard “Yukon” logo was an equally-sized ornate “Gators” written in chrome script. Level with my hood was the towing hitch, capped by a grinning Florida ‘gator.  The license plate frame surrounding the prestige plate declared “Florida Gators – National Champions.” The date was conveniently omitted, allowing the claim to ripple out across the decades.

“Jock-mobile,” right? Well, that aspect certainly can’t be over-looked. But as my Grandfather used to say, “Alles ist nicht so einfach,” – “It is not that simple,” or as Facebook would assert – “It’s complicated.” I told you it was a prestige plate. Six letters, no symbols, one word: PATHOS.

Whoa, there Nelly Bell!

I’m having trouble reconciling what seem to be the discordant worldviews etched across the back of this vehicle. Obviously sports, and certainly fandom, is all about emotion – but it is most often guy-type, fist- and chest-bumping passion – “I AM A WARRIOR!” Prevents any misinterpretation of all the butt slapping that goes on in pro sports. But “pathos?” Come on now, I mean it is Greek and it doesn’t stand for a fraternity. You encounter it in courses in literature, art and cultural criticism – not PE for crying out loud. The seeming contradiction in the juxtaposition of these various sets of symbols was, well, mysterious. And I love that.

You see, most days it feels like much of the mystery is draining out of human interaction. In just the last week Facebook has announced the release of “Actions”, which along with “Timeline”, “Ticker” and other various Apps, allows you to “instantly and seamlessly share” what you are doing, listening to, thinking about, eating, etc., etc. with all your “friends.” Google countered the next morning with Search Your World – which sends Google’s search spiders scurrying out through all your Google+ contacts, and includes their posts, reposts, pictures and whatever in the results of your normal Google searches. Just what I need to know, what do my second cousin’s school age children in Montana think about the candidates competing in the Presidential primary in South Carolina?

Let me share with you ancient hieroglyphic inscription by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993.

"On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog" Quaint isn’t it?   The notion that on the Internet nobody knew who you really were. It is now ancient, the idea that the Internet was this huge Carnival, a Masked Ball where mystery and intrigue were only a mouse click away. "Who was that?" "What did they mean?"

Now, almost two decades later, I know the "mysterious stranger" just had the egg and cheese biscuit at the McDonald’s on Western Boulevard, while listening to Colin Cowherd on ESPN radio. Also they are looking for a parking place in the parking structure off Dan Allen Drive while tracking the campus bus that they hope to catch out to Centennial campus because parking out there is just terreeeeb! And maybe they have a little cold coming on because on their pillow this morning . . . .

Do we really want to know? Is there any way we could possibly care?   Zuckerberg may believe that privacy is so 20th century, but this old guy clings to the notion that a life without secrets, without mystery, without romance, is not worth living.

No, I don’t really need to understand "the pathos of the gator" to take comfort in the knowledge that something that mysterious is gliding through some swamp, somewhere.
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Happy New Year! - More or Less

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I'm not really playing the Grinch here, but conversations about New Years usually deal with "more or less."  We want to weigh less, we want to earn more.  We want to spend more quality time with those we love, we want to be less driven by the demands of work. We wish Congress would do more, and spend less time explaining why it is always the other guy's fault that nothing gets done - stuff like that.  So I thought it would be fun to take this first essay of 2012 to look back at 2011 to see  - from a digital technology perspective - when "more" was a good thing, and when, instead, "more" was really less.


When more really is more: The Lytro Camera

The Lytro camera [http://www.lytro.com/] claims my top spot by virtue of the fact that it is "more" in a sense far beyond "more of the same."  Lytro is more in the sense that it increases the total of what we had before - it is "more" in that we never had this before.

Never had what before?  Excellent question.  Everyone who has ever taken a picture, from the gods of Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White to the worst Facebook projectile photo poster, has had the experience of wanting a "do over."  "If I could only go back and focus more on their faces!" "I wish I could see both the foreground flower and the background mountain better."  But the shutter had snapped and marched on and no amount of fretting could undo the compositional decision made at that moment - until now.

Lytro is a light field camera for the masses, and you can Google "light field camera" if you want to read the long explanation.  In a nutshell, it means that a light field camera like Lytro gathers all the light waves bouncing off the scene in front of the camera's lens and stores them as a data set that can be manipulated after you trip the shutter.  Focus points, depth of field, light dark, framing - you can mess with everything.  Just thinking about the creative possibilities that arise when you add Lytro to our already existing bag of Photoshop goodies is enough to make a photo geek - dare I say it? Swoon?

One can preorder the Lytro for $499.00 for a 16 MG version, $399.00 for 8MG, so it still isn't an impulse buy item, but compared with the far more expensive, far less portable previous generations of light field cameras, that is an exceptional price for some really sweet technology.

And the downside is?  Well, just as a word processor can turn you into a sloppy writer, I can see the Lytro making one a sloppier photographer.  Back in a previous life when I taught photography, I would ramble on at length over the arcane aspects of f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field and the aesthetics of composition.  Now, I must admit to more than one instance when I came across some natural or urban vista and realized that there was a good photograph "in there somewhere."  However, rather than seek it out, compose and shoot the desired image, I would simply loosen the frame and shoot the wider image, capturing mega-megapixels, and trusting Photoshop to allow me to do the compositional work necessary to find the good photograph in post-production.  Sloppy, sloppy! A "where's Waldo" approach to photography.  The Lytro gathers far more information in each exposure than the most muscular digital cameras - and thereby possibly increases our inclination to "shoot now, compose later."  That, I must admit, concerns me.


When more is less: Social Networks

Facebook is the worst, simply because it is the biggest and can bring us even more of the "more that is less."  I could wax tiresomely on and on about my concerns regarding the trivializing of social ties that spin out from the "culture by the herd" churned by social networks, but I will limit myself to just a couple motes of "more is less."

The first I dubbed "Marley's Digital Chains," in a previous essay [http://awholenewbucket.blogspot.com/2011/08/marleys-digital-chains.html].  The core of the problem is this: when you "friend" or "connect" or "co-join" or whatever with someone via a social network, you also invite his or her other friends/contacts/accomplices onto your screen as well.  The result, without hiring a professional programmer to prevent it, is that entering the realm of "your" social network, is akin to walking into what you thought was going to be your class reunion or your family Thanksgiving dinner only to discover that most of the people there are utter strangers - strangers seeking to engage you in embarrassingly personal conversations regarding individuals you neither know nor about whom you care.  Yeech.

The other problem stemming from social networks and the general increasing transparency of the Internet is a loss of intentional private communication, whether with another individual or a group of close friends.  Google+ seemed to be addressing this issue with its notion of circles, but it was in the context of what I thought was a close and closed Google+ circle, that the notion of Marley's Chains first became apparent. One invited circle member signed in, and trailing behind him was a digital chain ponderous beyond all imagining. Friends and friends of friends clung to his coattails, and posts upon re-posts from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizons.  Another time, I posted an anonymous comment on the website of a TV show, only to have it show up - with full attribution - during one of my infrequent visits to my Facebook page.  I have no idea how it got there.  It was more than slightly creepy.  I worry that perhaps privacy really is a fading relic of the previous century.

And the upside is?  The rebirth of snail mail?  Of personal correspondence?  I have a friend who still mails cards of his own photographs with brief, but tangible, messages of commemoration or remembrance.  The experience is unusual enough as to be slightly disorienting.  But the notes affirm that if I REALLY want to send a private message to just one person perhaps I need to take up a writing implement of some form or another, mark meaningful symbols upon a page, download postage from the USPS website [Heheheheh] and mail the letter.  Does that guarantee privacy?  Of course not - but it greatly reduces the number of possible peekers.


When I'm not really sure whether more is more or less: Free books in the Kindle store. 

Hello, my name is Robert and I am a mysteryoholic.  I read them the way I used to smoke cigarettes - back before cigarettes were a health hazard and cost less than a steak dinner or a small car.  You weren't really aware that you were smoking, but then at the end of the day there was this empty pack in your shirt pocket.  Huh? Weird, wonder who smoked all my cigarettes.  Now it's "Damn, finished another mystery.  When did I start that one, and where is the next one coming from?"

Obviously then, when I mosey on over to the Kindle store and search the top hundred free offerings, I am immediately drawn to the mysteries and thrillers.  Actually, I don't even have to do that anymore.  Given the transparency of the Internet, my Amazon history, and the increasing sophistication of "personalized search,"  Amazon now emails me the top free and 99 cent mysteries each week in a personal email.

I download a few.  I start them all.  Some die, along with the vic, in the first few pages.  Some last only a couple of chapters, and a surprising number I read completely.  But remember, I do have an addiction in this area. The issue you see, is that we are fast moving into an era when a self-published book, the product of what we used to call a vanity press, is - in a digital format - indistinguishable from a publication by an established publishing house.  That is until you begin to read it.  The self-published book often makes it into the hands of a reader without benefit of a second opinion, let alone an editor.

The results are as varied as stars in the sky.  A few are delightful, even shimmering.  More, like dark matter, are best appreciated unseen.  I don't know where this glut of electronic novels will lead.  I think we are going to have to wait out 2012 and the evolution of e-readers and the digital publishing industry before hanging the "more is more" or "more is less" label on these Saturday Night Special Digital Mysteries.  Maybe the good ones will find their way to established houses or digital cooperatives and return a living to their authors.  The bad will, no doubt, remain with us due to imperturbable self-confidence of their creators.  But with any luck at all, the ugly will end up swimming with the fishes in that dirty, dark river, Denial.

So then, forward into the New Year with eyes wide open - more or less.
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Carbonated Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I read in the New York Times today that a U.S. Intelligence entity called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa, wants to launch a satellite that will automatically suck-up "big data," from various digital streams; things like "Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries" in order to, well, essentially predict the future.  From this avalanche of data they will, I suppose, get a heads-up on impending wars, revolutions, traffic jams in LA, and the Super Bowl winner.

Now I am always delighted to add a new follower to my blog, even if it is only an automated satellite. But that seems about the only positive piece to this puzzle.  The rest has a really creepy feel to it.  The article does begin with a nod to the "Psychohistory" of Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels.  Psychohistory was the fictional social science that was supposed to be able to predict human behavior to the "99-umtyith" decimal point, a level of confidence that was apparently "good enough for government work" when it came to running the galaxy.  But this Iarpa project is unfolding in what we are swiftly coming to understand as "real life."

Supposedly this super-data-sucker-satellite would allow Iarpa to compute and massage the global data stream in a way that "would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types of widespread contagion."  I wonder if it has a built-in mirror in case it needs to catch a reflection of itself as an indication of "widespread contagion."  Still, I suppose there is some value to having a well-nigh perfect example of hubris floating around up there for all of us to see, but did the folks over at Iarpa also read Asimov? Did they not finish the book?

What happens is that all the efforts at predicting the future and dominating the galaxy get knocked into a cocked hat by the arrival of "The Mule."  The mule is not a raging Democrat hell-bent on whupping up on the Republicans whom he feels are protecting the super-rich of the galaxy.  He is rather a mutant, and, as such, behaves at odds with the predictions of "psychohistory."  Well, duh.  Has it ever been any other way?  Is history not the recording of the exceptional, the unexpected?  Were it not for the exceptional efforts and the unpredictable behavior of "aberrant" individuals, huge swathes of history would read "nothing much happened today."

What rankles me about Iarpa's creep-in-the-clouds project is that it presumes our predictability. That strikes me as either naive or childish - in much the same way that Facebook's "It's Complicated" status indicator is naive.  To assume it is ever anything but complicated asserts a level of predicability that is alien to human nature.  Human nature is, I contend, the least predictable and most nuanced variable floating around the galaxy.  Just about everything else seems to at least approximate the laws of physics.  We, on the other hand, are nuanced - we often act in ways that the data would indicate are contrary to our apparent best interests.  Peasants march off to war to defend the royalty who keep them in servitude, working class people vote to protect the rights of the wealthy who repress them, those born into great wealth lead movements to overthrow their own heritage.  As the bard put it, "O, brave new world, that has such creatures in it."

Here's the thing, we are each of us an N of one, the only subject in that ongoing experiment that is our life.  As individuals we are utterly unique.  You can gather all the data you want, you can run regression equations until a week from doomsday, and it will all fall apart when confronted by the behavior of that subtle, nuanced, extraordinary thing called a single human being.
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Reflections of an Armchair Luddite

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First we must remember that the Luddites were not opposed to technology that made people’s lives better; they were opposed to the implementation of technology that bruised the lives of human beings. The conflict that lent their name to history occurred in the early 1800s, when they demonstrated a disturbing tendency to burn down the factories housing the mechanized looms that, they asserted, were stealing their jobs and hence degrading the quality of human life.

And now Apple has introduced the iPhone 4S. The S stands, I assume, for Siri – the artificial intelligence-like “assistant” that allows you to talk to your phone, a function not to be confused with using your phone to actually talk to other human beings. In the cool video on Apple’s home page, [http://www.apple.com/iphone/] Siri does the communicating to distant others:

Jogging Guy speaks: “Siri, read me my messages.”
Siri replys: “Great news, we got the go ahead on the project. Can you meet at 10?”
Jogging Guy: “You bet! See you there.”
Siri: Sent.
Jogging Guy: “Siri, text my wife. Tell her I’m going to be thirty minutes late.
Siri: I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

All right, I made that last part up. Unlike Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Siri seems quite compliant. But you can probably see where I am going with this. Actually, I’m headed in two directions. First is that potentially “Hal-ish” path that asks that we at least reflect on the notion of technological dependency. Consider the fact that we no longer know anyone’s phone number. To call them we just hit speed dial, or touch their picture on the screen, or select their name from a list. We forget that the “code” that Skynet recognizes is a string of numbers. That is, we forget it until we let our cell phone battery run down and we are forced to use another phone, one without our “contacts." We stare at the strange grid of numbers and wonder which ones to push.  And then, of course, there is GPS.   I drove around Chicago last week as if I had lived there for years; a task I could not repeat sans GPS for all the money in the world. Recalculating, recalculating.

I believe those technologies to be helpful. They free up grey matter for more complex tasks; for those issues at the top of the “thought pyramid,” if you will. If I don’t have to worry about the base of the pyramid – phone numbers, addresses, my library card number etc., I can devote my attention to upper level issues; my lecture for this afternoon, an idea for a painting, or wondering about the nature of dark energy. I like that. What does concern me is the extent to which Siri, and his/her even more powerful kin over on the Android platform, are creeping up the pyramid, sucking up more and more “helpful tasks.” Apple’s video goes on to demonstrate:

“Will I need an umbrella?”
“No.”
“What the weather like in San Francisco?”
“Should be nice, highs in the mid-sixties.”
“How many ounces in a cup?”
“Let me think, 8 ounces.”
“Set my timer for 30 minutes.”
“Thirty minutes and counting.”

I worry about what happens if Siri’s battery runs down after we have given it responsibility for much of the seemingly trivial portions of the thought pyramid:

“Siri, where do I keep my shoes?”
Silence.
“Siri, how do I turn on the cable system?”
Silence.
“Siri, what is my credit card number?”
Silence.
“Siri, what was the make of my first car?”
Silence.
“Siri, where is the hospital?”
Silence.

I worry that “If we don’t use it, we will lose it.” And we are talking about our minds. Lurking in the back of my non-Siri mind is what Eric Schmidt of Google once said: "More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

“Siri, I’m bored – what do I want to do?”
“I’m sorry, Dave, I don’t know.”

My second concern is less dark, but more likely. The Apple videos show Jogging Man wearing ear buds and the other Siri users chatting away with Siri in the privacy of their own homes. Somehow I don’t see it working out that way.   Jogging Man will join the growing legions of Bluetooth users who spew their self-important conversations, Tourette-like, into the air; toxic vapors vented into the sphere of public silence. And can you imagine sitting in your favorite coffee shop surrounded by hordes of “Siri speakers”? Will the phones get confused if they “overhear” other “masters” talking to their “Siris”? Will people have to name their Siris to avoid confusion? Can you imagine how that will work in our celebrity-obsessed world?

“Leonardo, turn on the microwave.”
“Beyonce, put more starch in my shirts.”
“Mr. President, text my mother, tell her I’ll be late for dinner.”

Don’t get me wrong – I like my technology for the most part. Much of my life would be far more difficult – at times impossible - without it. But I would remind us that technology has a way of drifting into spaces either unintended, or at least unheralded, by its creators. I remember, in much the same hazy way I remember watching The Mickey Mouse Club, a time when parents assumed that if their children were using the computer they were doing their homework, because it was, after all, just a computer.
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Working Without a Net

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It is, I suppose, the nature of things. The more you stretch something, the thinner and more fragile it becomes. Over the last week or two I have noticed my technology stretching and cracking around me.  Right now the cracks are minor irritations.  I can cover the flaws, work around the errors - but I wonder when they - like the car windshield in the TV commercial - will shatter before my eyes?  It is akin to being nibbled to death by ducks:

First, our tech support people failed to burn a DVD for my class because "the machine was down"  Nibble.

No problem, I can use the ancient VCR in the classroom, except, no, I can't because "Gosh. Never saw that before. The console software that controls the projector couldn't 'see' the VCR. Sorry." Nibble.

And then the online students couldn't see the video because the library "had a server meltdown." Nibble.

And my wife's iPad "doesn't work anywhere in Europe" so I only get emails when the hotels have computers in the lobby for the guests.  Nibble, nibble, nibble.

What concerns me is that subtly, without my really noticing it, the tools that had always been digital "enhancements" in my classroom and my life have become the primary platforms upon which I depend.  And with our increasing expectations and digital "solutions," the simple tools which technology used to enhance have faded into the mist with the dinosaurs and the giant sloth. You cannot draw on the board if there are no markers, and if there is no whiteboard, they frown upon your drawing on the screen that has replaced it. When your systems crash, there is no back-up, and a hundred kids are staring at you.

I wonder, as they gaze at me, if we have found too much comfort in the size of the digital world.  I could pull out my phone and instantly tell hundreds of people of my misery.  If I allowed my students to do same, we could report our plight to thousands.  Perhaps there would be some comfort in a public rant. It does seem quite the thing for celebrities, sports figures and politicians these days.  But, practically speaking, no one can provide me remedy before our class time slips away, leaving my students to mutter, "How lame was that?"

I wonder how many of us are out here working without a net?  We see the TV ads where the sleeping guy is roused by a phone call from his colleagues announcing "We're at the gate. Where are you? Do you have the presentation?!"  And before the end of the 15-second spot, our protagonist rolls out of bed, downloads the presentation to his mobile device, slips into business clothes, and is out the door - road warrior of the new millennium!  I wonder if that has ever happened in "the real world"?

But wait! There is a phone on the desk here in the classroom.  Furthermore, if I am teaching between 9 and 5 - it will connect me immediately to the "Help Desk."  It is five 'til three! I call. They are concerned. They are chagrined. They can do nothing. And that, of course, is the problem.  We are connected - digitally speaking - but they are functionally impotent here in the world beyond the TV commercial.

I hang up and push more "touch sensitive" screen buttons on the classroom control console.  Nothing happens.  I call the Help Desk again.

"Hello," growls a Slavic male.  "My name is Peggy."
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Marley's Digital Chains

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The first time I read Dickens' A Christmas Carol, it wasn't so much Marley's ghost that bothered me, it was the chains.  OK, the rag that tied his mouth shut was pretty creepy too, but mostly I had a problem with the chains.  I was too young to realize that it was an existential thing - that I was undone by the notion that, no matter how sorry he was, those "chains of sin" would follow him forever.  As Marley said:

"I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

No matter his current regrets, he was going to haul those chains around with him throughout eternity.  It just didn't seem fair.

The same, it occurs to me, is true about the strands of text, image and experience we "make link by link of our own free will" out on the Internet.  No doubt, all those links seemed good decisions when forged, when we hit post, link, send or tag.  Each link was a momentary insight, a fleeting truth. But they grow heavier by the year, and we cannot shed them, no matter how sorry we now may be.

Actually, we cannot shed them even when we are not sorry, we cannot shed them when they are simply outgrown and inconvenient - like Uggs in a ballroom.  I came to that realization when I began my experiment with Google+.  I quite liked the idea of an upside-down version of Facebook, where the small group took precedent over the revealing hoard.  So I created a "circle" that contained only the graduate students who served as graders for my large undergraduate courses.  I flung open the door in anticipation of a cozy chat with a group of young scholars who shared my interest in online education.

In walked a member of the team, a bright and delightful young man, who was also a Google+ power user.  Trailing behind him was a chain ponderous beyond all imagining.  Posts and responses from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizons.

"Please leave those in the hall," said I.

"I cannot," said he, quoting poor Marley, "They are my business."

Well, I let him in anyhow.  But I wasn't wild about the idea.

Surely there is some simple way to strike off Marley's Chains when we enter the theoretically more cordial environment of Google+?  The idea was, I thought, to advantage the small, the private, the constrained. Yet still we hit "share" and forge anew these schizophrenic chains, condemned to drag their babbling voices behind us into any "Circle" to which we are invited.  What's more, they do not fit into the room, you cannot bar the door.  The chains stretch out, posting and re-posting time out of mind.

"This is just between us, " you say.

"Right," says Marley. "Strictly 'entre nous'"

"Got it," say his chains.  "Under the hat"

"Mum's the word!"

"Shhhh," "Keep it down!"  "Cool it!"  and so on around the world.  

Rude at best, creepy at worst. 

And Marley's Chains stretch far back beyond today's sexy new "social media." Old email, papers written and published online back when you were far more certain and foolish than you are today, programs from conferences you wish you hadn't attended.  All our digital faux pas clanking along behind us. It is not so much my own chains that trouble me, though a quick Google search reveals them significant in their own right.  Still, I have labored on Marley's Digital Chains for a mere mite of my life.  I was already 45 years old when the digital forge leapt to fire. Hence, many a callow and foolish link lay forgotten amidst the dust of analog attics.  Letters, notes, diaries, poems and photographs were abandoned - with only occasional regrets - to be swirled away by the insistent winds of time.

Time was when time was forgotten.  But that was the world before bits and bytes.  I read, with the same blend of fascination and horror we bring to train wrecks and natural disasters, of parents setting up Facebook accounts for their children in utero.  An ultrasound image anchors the profile of the unborn.  I swear, I wake up sweating.  But Marley chuckles, smashing away at the forge: "They're gonna love this at preschool."  These are the chains that worry me.

I have nothing against memory, though, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I prefer her more forgiving twin, memoir.  But the Internet's blind fidelity to "that which was entered" crafts for us all trailing tails of Marley's Chains.  Yes, some are chains of our own making, but others are struck by those beyond our ken, the creation of an unknown "friend" of a "friend", yet still permanent.

In closing let us turn again to Dickens:

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change."

Perhaps we should consider departing from some of the courses down which we follow our Internet guides.  Perhaps every thought should not be given voice, perhaps some images should be restrained, perhaps some video should remain private, some music "thumbed" neither up nor down.  Perhaps, since we cannot break them at our leisure, some chains should be left un-forged.
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iThink, therefore, i.

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I consider it irrefutable evidence of the universe's sense of humor that such an uppercase individual will forever be associated with the lowercase i.  I empathize with what must surely be his family's joy, as he steps out of the limelight to rest a bit before the hearth.  And I hope that he has years of inspiration yet to share from his new perch as Chairman of the Board.

Still, Jobs has to feel a bit like Tom Sawyer today, hearing all these almost eulogies while still firmly abroad in the world of the living, hiding in the gallery.  And he certainly has the ego to enjoy them.  Who wouldn't?

If I were to get a few words at the funeral, before Steve revealed himself to the startled congregation, I would dwell on the significance of the lowercase i.  Jobs has, no doubt, long realized that when you decide on a product all by your lonesome, and when don't "test market" it to catch the mood of the herd, when you insist on doing it your way, and when you are right as often as he is, well folks are going to get a bit testy.  Nothing irritates us like someone else's success.  I choose to believe that this is where the whole lowercase i concept came from - in Jobs's inherent feel for marketing. IBM, the first company to play Goliath to Jobs's David, pointed the I to the company - "I B the Man."  So with the iMac, the ancestral i, Jobs pointed the i to the user: "i'm just here for you."  And somehow i became us.

But i might be wrong, mightn't i?
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Respect in Disrepair

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Respect seems a crippled concept in contemporary culture, becoming, in some ways its own antonym.  The Godfather provides at least a cinematic history of this inversion.  "I am sorry. What happened to your father was business. I have much respect for your father."   But that respect will not prevent me from sending him to sleep with the fishes.  Or we can move from gangster to gangsta by spinning the dial to any of the festering "reality" programs and hear something like, "Diss me again and I'll kick your 'bleep!"  Spin again and we find C-SPAN with our "leaders" engaged in partisan bickering that makes it clear that they would not recognize respect if it jumped up and bit them in their "bleep."

It was not always so.  My wife and I were watching The Conspirator last night, the movie about the trial of Mary Surratt, accused of participating in the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln.  The film's reviews are mixed, but even those who found it somewhat pedantic are in agreement as to its attention to historical accuracy and detail.  In the 1860's lawyers always buttoned their coats as they stood to address the court. Even when that particular court had forfeited its claim on respect, you showed respect for the notion of the law by buttoning your coat in the presence of the court.  To do less reflected poorly upon you.  Etiquette, manners, were and are the external manifestations of respect.

I am concerned with the current Alice in Wonderland treatment of etiquette and respect because, quite simply, learning cannot occur in an environment devoid of either.  We sit atop the food chain not because we are big or strong or fast.  Rather we are there because we can construct culture.  We can define rules for civil behavior that say "Look, I extend an open hand.  I smile.  I will not kill you and eat you.  Let us talk, let us learn one from the other."

The notion of respect, of manners, of etiquette have been a little slow out of the gate when it comes to the whole area of mobile technology.  I was glad to see Mark Zuckerberg don a suit and tie for the G8 conference last year.  The iconic hoodie-wearing CEO of Facebook Nation demonstrated respect for the forum, and in so doing affirmed that etiquette and manners have a place in digital culture.

But what is that place?  I will admit, to affirm a meme from the Chairman, it's complicated.  The ability to be in constant contact gives rise to situations that did not exist in the pre-cellphone era.  Birth, death, tragedy and joy can - of an instant - flash from around the world into the palm of our hand.  It seems foolish to ignore information of such import.  To do so would be disrespectful - and we answer, we attend.  But then, far more often, the trivial, the banal, gains the same access and is awarded the same attention.  That, too, is disrespectful.

So what are the rules?  In flux no doubt, but I would like to propose some starting points:

The person present takes precedence.  The individual with whom you are face-to-face, the person I see, takes respectful priority over the person I cannot see.  I will maintain eye-contact, I will not blatantly, nor surreptitiously, text the remote, intruding other.  To do so is simply bad manners.  If the remote message is truly of such import that it must interrupt the face-to-face then I will apologize - sincerely - and remove myself from the face-to-face environment.

The world is not your phone booth.  There was a time in the paleotelephonic age when, not only were there phone booths, but they had doors.  The doors affirmed the notion that telephone calls were private.  We tend to assume that meant that people shouldn't eavesdrop on our conversations.  In the digital age we seem to have forgotten that it also meant that we should not inflict our conversations upon our neighbors.  Remember, your freedom to broadcast your conversation extends only to the point where it intrudes upon the freedom of others not to hear your conversation.  Speak quietly.  Better yet, take it outside.

Yes, that means you.  I read a story recently about a group of passengers who broke into applause and cheers when some public transportation personnel forced a woman - who had been yammering into her cellphone for several hours - to leave the car, which was plainly labeled: "Quiet Car.  No cellphones or music players permitted."  The woman should be glad that applause and cheers were the only things broken.  There are obviously still soft spots in mobile communication etiquette, but when someone takes the trouble to create and clearly state "the rules of the game," read them, follow them.  They mean you.

I agree.  Those seem like common sense assertions, despite the extent to which they are ignored.  Yet "common sense" means commonly shared, common knowledge, commonly accepted good manners.  The way your mother raised you.  And maybe that is the problem - many of our mothers never had a cellphone.
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Photoshopping the Filter Bubble

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Eli Pariser first noticed the phenomenon that he calls the “Filter Bubble” when his conservative “friends” began to disappear from his Facebook page.  Now you might think that for Pariser, co-founder of the unabashedly liberal website MoveOn.org, this was good news.  Not so, he asserts in his book titled, not surprisingly, The Filter Bubble. Pariser is apparently a throwback to the days of the founding fathers when savvy politicians believed in keeping their friends close and their enemies closer; when you learned by studying the perspective of your adversary. So, he wanted to find out why the Tea Party had left his Facebook party.  Not their choice, Pariser came to discover – they had been filter bubbled out.

What Pariser learned in the course of researching his book was that Facebook had shown his conservative friends the door because Facebook, or rather Facebook’s filtering algorithm had decided, based on the fact that Pariser did click on his Tea Party buddies less often than his MoveOn cronies, that he really wasn’t all that interested in them.  So why clutter his page with them?  “Off with their heads!”

I advise you to read the book.  It is interesting, and more than a little chilling.  Basically, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of what is going on:  Most of THE INTERNET makes its money from advertising.  The ubiquitous little ads that pop-up on the pages you go to while online.  The hosting page – be it Google or Lands End, the Gap, Spotify, whoever – gets a bigger piece of the ad revenue if you actually click on an ad.  Hence the more the page "knows" about you the more it can push – in split seconds – ads onto the page that are tailored for your very personal profile.  Try this – do a Google search for Labrador retrievers, play around on dog pages for a while.  Now go to some other site – like Amazon or Yahoo news.  Look at the ads.  Seem a little more “doggy” than usual?  I told you it was a touch creepy.  There are very large, very wealthy companies that do nothing but gather our “click streams” and sell them to the algorithm-makers.

You can actually understand it from a business perspective.  Advertisers are simply trying to place their products in front of people whose own Internet behavior indicates that they are interested in the product.  Seems harmless until we remember the case of the vanishing conservatives.  THE INTERNET isn’t simply tracking and constructing filters based on the products we like, it is also building filters that keep out the ideas that we don’t like, while foregrounding our proclivities.  Internet algorithms try to construct, and lead us to, our vision of “a perfect world.”  You know the saying – someone asks you a question and you respond, “Well, in a perfect world .  .  .”  What we mean is in our perfect world,” the world as we would like it to be. 

In the movie Heaven Can Wait – the 1978 Warren Beatty version – the welcoming angel tells Beatty’s character that heaven is “a product of your image and that of those who share your image,” a perfect world, defined by what we, and our “friends” believe a perfect world should be.  That is a very prescient “internet-algorithm-esque” concept for a 1978 chick-flick!

There are, however, problems inherent in letting Internet algorithms define a perfect world for us, based upon their perception of our behavior.  I am reminded of the elementary schoolyard where I played as a child.  It was, by contemporary standards, a death trap.  Asphalt paving everywhere except on the fields where we played baseball and football.  Those were dirt, not grass, dirt.  The slides were really tall – you sort of had to lean back to see the top.  They were shiny steel with four-inch sides.  Sliding down on summer days was a delicate balance.  The heat seemed to increase your speed, but if you were too light to get all the way off the end, you stuck.  First degree burns on your butt.  So you leapt off to the easier embrace of the landing area, which was, remember, asphalt.  Similarly, sliding in a baseball game was a decision to which one did not come lightly.  You measured the transient heroism of victory against the possibility of major abrasions and a tetanus-shot trip to the nurse’s office.  All in all we had a good time.

My daughters grew up as playgrounds were transitioning into “a perfect world.”  Everything is now low and slow, plastic and padded.  No doubt injuries still occur, though it seems you would probably have to put some planning and effort into it.  According to the TV ads, successful injuries are dealt with by a phalanx of perfect moms welding spray-on antiseptic and instant bandages.

The point is this – sometimes the world that is constructed by others for our “own good” damages the depth of our experience and compromises the legitimacy of our conclusions.  Internet filters that show us only that which we already believe and desire, destroy the opportunity for the serendipitous discovery that comes from going somewhere we have never been before.  They deny us the opportunity to learn from those who think differently than we.  They create a perfect world in which everything seems low and slow, plastic and padded.

But wait! There is a software fix for this world in a bubble that might even increase Internet profits.  Listen up, moguls.  Photoshop has a feature that lets you select parts of an image; either parts that you click on, or parts that share a color.  Point is that it lets you select part of an image based on certain criteria.  Once you have selected those parts of the image you can go to the “Selection” menu, where among the options is: Select Inverse - which means "select all those elements that I have not chosen."

You see where I am going here?  If the algorithm can decide what it thinks I want, can’t it also decide what I don’t want?  Wouldn't it be cool if I could tell Google to “Select Inverse?”  Create a search based on the notion that what I haven’t experienced might be more intriguing than what I have already done?  Think about it as a clock face.  You are standing in the middle and facing 12 o’clock.  Noon is “a perfect world.”  Midnight is what the algorithm predicts you want it to find.  Six o’clock is “Select Inverse.”  Why can’t I ask for that “six o’clock search” instead?

And let’s not forget the numbers in between.  Photoshop also has a slider attached to many of its functions called opacity or intensity.  Essentially, it a function rheostat.   You move from, say, 100% opacity, where you cannot see through an image at all, to 0% opacity where the image disappears and only the background is visible.  Why not a “Search Slider” that lets you move the algorithm around.  Say 1:00 o’clock equals a search with your characteristics intensified 30%, 2:00 o’clock is “you” intensified 60%.  And 11:00 o’clock reflects a search with your characteristics deflected by 30%, 10:00 o’clock and “you” are deflected 60%.  Fader Bar Search. Why not?

There are obvious and intriguing existential implications in the fact that moving in both a “positive” and a “negative” direction will eventually bring us to the same 6:00 o’clock “Select Inverse” world that stands in algorithmic opposition to the perfect world that the Filter Bubble seeks to create for us.  But, in the final analysis, shouldn’t we be allowed to choose the direction and intensity of the journey?  Isn’t that really what “searching” means?
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