Brian Frank » culture

Favourite Essays and Articles of 2011

Brian — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:44:40 +0000

I have trouble keeping up with all links to great long-form journalism and essays that stream past every day, but here are my favourites (out of the ones I managed to catch and read and either remember or save (thank you Longreads & Instapaper)).

In not much of an order:

How the Internet gets inside us, Adam Gopnik

I love Adam Gopnik’s writing more than I like his underlying analysis. I had the same feeling about his recent piece on fantasy literature. He gives a rich impression of substance — and I mean, there is real substance, intelligently pulling together a lot of material — but it’s too soft and somewhat shallow to support a durable understanding of the subject. Which is fine. This was a joy to read and good to muse on:

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?, Paul Ford

Paul Ford was new to me this year. He’s been around the internet for a while — he links! — and knows how to use a word or two (also read his personal, quite personal essay, The Age of Mechanical Reproduction). So Ford managed to convey a lot more nuance and detail on this topic than, for example, Gopnik (see above). He’s funny, insightful and grounded:

Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.

Hollywood: A Love Story, Clive James

Clive James on David Thomson, “the film critic’s critic.” You have to be a movie buff to love it, but there’s also lots here about criticism and writing. Self-recommending:

Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start. Writing at his best, Thomson is well qualified. You have to know about more than just the movies to see the “nobility” in Denzel Washington’s best acting; to isolate Al Pacino’s characteristic of “outrageous inner size,” you have to be up to speed with short-legged Napoleonic warlords since Alexander the Great; evoking Warren Beatty’s “puzzled look” is a nice way of describing catatonia, but it proves that the critic’s eye for aesthetic value can penetrate a surface; and it takes a knowledge of the American class structure to make the correct observation about Katharine Hepburn that she “loved movies while disapproving of them.” Thomson just loves them, but he knows there is a world elsewhere.

The suburb that changed the world, Jaron Lanier

This one from Jaron Lanier surprised me. When he’s writing about the culture around technology like this it’s usually more polemical, but this is just a really enjoyable mix of personal reminiscence with objective history and just the right amount of moral questioning. It also anticipated some of the history-telling after Steve Jobs’s retirement and passing:

The overlap between the late stages of hippie bohemia and the early incarnations of Silicon Valley was often endearing. There was a sense of justice in the way that males who had been at the bottom of the social ladder in high school were on track to run the world. Greasy cottages with futons on the floor, with dustings of pot and cookie crumbles rubbed into cheap oriental rugs, a carnage of forgotten dirty clothes in the corner, empty refrigerators and tangles of thick grey cables leading to the huge computer monitors and the hot metal cabinets where the silicon chips crunched. Asymmetrical, patchy beards, shirts part tucked, prescriptions for glasses powerful enough to find life on a distant planet. This was the new model of hippie nerd, supplanting the ascetic fellow with the pocket protector.

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?, Steve Silberman

When Isaacson’s biography came out, I was impressed by how useful its omissions were. It became a central point of reference for everyone to contribute their own stories from unique perspectives. This one by Steve Silberman would be a good read about Buddhism even if you weren’t interested in Steve Jobs, or if you’re just interested in Jobs and Apple, it offers a new angle on those well-known success stories, all nicely woven together:

The physical environments Jobs practiced in at Tassajara and other Zen centers offered breathtaking juxtapositions of highly cultivated traditional craftsmanship and wild, rugged California landscapes. I doubt that the Japanese joinery (no nails!) that held up the walls of the zendo was lost on the aspiring design geek, or that he was unmoved by the vibrant, airy layout of Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, punctuated by an enormous, twisting redwood burl (rescued from a beach in Marin) that had been sculpted to sprout tables and chairs. Zen Center’s aesthetic was a harmonious fusion of East and West — as Apple’s would be.

A Rough Guide to Disney World, John Jeremiah Sullivan

I’d never heard of Sullivan till this year but he made a big impression. His new book (which is getting great reviews) will be one of the first I pick up in the new year. I also liked his DFW review and his story about his house being a set for One Tree Hill, but this Disney story was the one I enjoyed the most in 2011:

Lil’ Dog and the ladies were sailing by up above on the Dumbo ride, in three successive elephants. Mimi had a tentatively happy face. It said, “I’m ready to think of this as fun, as long as it doesn’t go any faster or higher.” Trevor and I leaned on the railing like bettors at a track, smiling and waving every time they went past, as if we were dolls with arms hooked to wires. Trevor had his phone out, with the Internet dialed up to “the guide.” He consulted it when they were on the dark side of their orbit. Checking it against a map of the park, we determined that one of the spots mentioned wasn’t too far away, a little-used maintenance pathway with trees alongside it and some Dumpsters. Given a properly positioned lookout, you could have a puff in relative calm. We slipped away.

The King of Human Error, Michael Lewis

Another self-recommending one. Lewis profiles one of the most influential psychologists of the last half-century, the guy who partly inspired Moneyball (the best book I read in 2011, finally) and wrote one of the big books of the year, Thinking, Fast and Slow:

When I first met Kahneman he was making himself more miserable about his unfinished book than any writer I’d ever seen. It turned out merely to be a warm-up for the misery to come, the beginning of an extraordinary act of literary masochism. In effect, the psychologist kept trying to trick himself into doing things he didn’t want to do and failing to fall for the ruse. “I had this idea at first that I could do it easily,” he said. “I thought, you know, that I could talk it” to a ghostwriter, but then he seized on another approach: a series of lectures, delivered to Princeton undergraduates who knew nothing about the subject, that he could transcribe and publish more or less as spoken. “I paid someone to transcribe them,” he says. “But when I read them I could see that they were very bad.” Next, he set out to write the book by himself, as he suspected he should have done all along. He quit and re-started so many times he lost count, and each time he quit he seemed able to convince himself that he should never have taken on the project in the first place. Last October he quit for what he swore was the last time. One morning I went up the hill to have coffee with him and found that he was no longer writing his book. “This time I’m really finished with it,” he said.

Yep, writing is hard.

So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar…

Brian — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 07:41:16 +0000

So I saw this SEO copywriter joke a bunch of times yesterday. I love it:

“So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor”

(If you don’t know what SEO copywriting is, it means writing with specific keywords in certain orders to help sites rank higher in search engines like Google. Hence writing “bar, grill, pub,” etc. to get into more searches. I’m tempted to demonstrate it here but I don’t know what I’d want to optimize for — other than the joke, the funny joke about the SEO copywriter on Twitter.)

It was weird, because usually we don’t keep seeing the same joke. It kept being attributed to different people in retweets. It wasn’t like @alqaeda’s classic, ”not falling for that one,” and other big hits that keep referring back to the same source.

So I poked around and the earliest “SEO copywriter walks into a bar” I found was by @lahaff, who tweeted it last Thursday. That’s as far back as Twitter’s search would go. He has 47 followers and his tweet has been retweeted and mentioned a grand total of 8 times — only once with the new style:

But then on Friday it was tweeted by @mickjkpg (who cut off “four loko” and the period from the end, making room for a couple of hashtags. Note that was still a few days ago. I never saw it until today, when it blew up.

It’s funny that subsequent users — e.g. @cun and @LAWeekly – copied exactly what @mickjkpg tweeted: same list, same order, in quotation marks, and with no period at the end. It’s clearly cut-and-pasted — so it’s not like any old “walks into a bar” joke you might hear in a bar and and forget where you heard it. The fact that anyone can do a quick search and see it all over Twitter didn’t stop people from effectively taking credit:

Well who’s going to complain… Because it’s been around a lot longer than last week. Someone put it on Reddit back on December 4, adding,

This was stolen from a friend’s Twitter and he might have stolen it from someone else, but I still wanted to post it.

(At least he tried. Speaking of which, thanks @JayFredin for looking that up.)

So who knows? Maybe it is one of those old standard jokes — just one limited to a small, specialized community until now.

Funny how long things can stay unknown until they hit the right nodes and suddenly go fully-blown.

See Who’s Using the Internet to Make Life Less Meaningful

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:59:26 +0000

I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link.

The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing collection of crafted pieces by good writers who don’t get it.

I used to agree with Lanier, for one, but here’s what happened: I stayed open, I was still curious, I kept looking for bright spots, I kept trying things, I adopted the best and rejected the worst, I found ways to make it work for me, I kept learning from mistakes; I cultivated a productive, rewarding and meaningful way of working and living with the internet.

Like everyone else who actually understands it.

What works will be different for everyone. Facebook works for some but not others. Twitter works for some but not others (or not even most). Even within Twitter there are as many different ways to use it as there are users. The people who know the most about the hazards and challenges are the people using this stuff and learning from mistakes.

I went along with the skepticism for a long time and I appreciate ongoing criticism, but these people (Gladwell too) who are standing around outside, watching us instead of jumping in and learning how to swim, fretting, “OH NO, we all might drown!” keep looking more and more ridiculous.

Smith tried Facebook and didn’t like it, so she quit after two months. Well same here. It wasn’t right for me at the time but I’ve changed, Facebook has changed, the world has changed, I went back and approached it differently. It’s working ok for me now.

Don’t just give up if you swallow a big gulp of water the first time you jump in. You can either keep trying or leave it alone. But if you walk away you can’t come back with a diatribe that basically argues what we already know: it isn’t perfect…

These sentences from Smith’s NYBooks piece finally put these fears into perspective for me:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

I think I see where the problem is now.

Have you ever met anyone who has been reduced to data? Do you know anyone who’s had their desires, their fears and messy feelings get swallowed up by Facebook? No. What happens is, when some aspects of our lives become data, we expand — we use that as part of a platform or framework to create new opportunities and objects for new kinds of fears and desires.

In other words, humans will always find new ways to be human.

We’re not just resilient, we’re ingeniously assertive. Our species has been surviving for ages: crawling through deserts, trudging through swamps, climbing over mountains, hacking through jungles, sailing across oceans, careening down rapids, launching into space, clawing in the dirt, driving as deep as we can into any visible challenge, making our mark on the world however we can, fabricating tools with whatever we can find, etc.

After all that and more for thousands of years, do you think Facebook is really so dangerous?

If love and friendship are so delicate that Facebook can undermine them and consequently tear apart the fabric of humanity, would they be worth saving? Or is this just about particular kinds of love and friendship that happen to be near and dear to some people at one particular place and time?

Whatever makes us special is too deeply engrained in our nature to clearly distinguish and articulate. Facebook and Twitter aren’t going to take it away from us — nor, conversely, is it so adjustable that Zadie Smith or Malcolm Gladwell or any philosopher can swoop in and save it.

They’re not against technology being used to objectify and reduce human behaviour; they’re merely against any new kinds of reductivism emerging to surpass their own favourite brand of it.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of people who’ve become “gadgets” — reduced and enslaved by two-hour movies and two-hundred-page books.

Elsewhere people have feared that photography and the written word would steal souls. But instead of reducing the breadth and depth of human experience, technologies keep creating opportunities for expansion and enrichment. I don’t see any reason to assume this time will be any different.

Here’s our choice: moan about the inevitable and miss our chance to grow, or look for the bright spots and make the most of our opportunities. Pretty easy, I think.

Part of me wants to be diplomatic, but another part is getting tired of so many fussy, timid, whiny, precious complaints coming from otherwise intelligent and talented people.

Pushing forward into the unknown, using the internet won’t reduce the meaning in life; it’s in many ways the most meaningful thing we can do.

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

Brian — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:07:10 +0000

I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:

I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.

I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort of a wannabe screenwriter myself — just enough to have wrestled a lot with attempts to balance accuracy and meaning. I look at this as just being the Internet’s turn to be misrepresented by Hollywood. I mean, does Hollywood even get itself right?

Sadly, truth isn’t as important as we like to believe. If truth was important, Hollywood wouldn’t exist. What matters most in the long run is a compelling story.

Apply a kind of Darwinian principle to it: there’s no iron law dictating that the stories that survive have to be true; they just have to be coherent, attractive, adaptable, resilient, and reproductive (of course truth helps most of those, but it isn’t necessary and is sometimes counterproductive when based on complex facts that the audience isn’t familiar with).

“Fidelity to storytelling” essentially means giving the audience something they can take home with them and use in their own social interactions. That’s what makes stories and movies successful: people can “remix” them into their own personal, social stories and conversations (think of how much meaning can be communicated with a single quote from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare).

Here’s the irony: this is pretty close to the principle on which the social web works. It’s the insight that Zuckerberg understood early on: content is merely a means for people to connect; create a platform where people can exchange social objects and “likes” and the network generates its own value.

If The Social Network was absolutely true to reality, far fewer people would see it and even fewer would have much to say about it. It would lose its social function. It would only serve a small elite that simply wants to preserve their authority and control, afraid that the ignorant masses might make things impure and imperfect…

Sound familiar?

There’s a bit of “what goes around comes around” here. Some of the most outspoken proponents of blogs, wikis, and creative commons — e.g. Jeff Jarvis and Lawrence Lessig — are also the most outspoken critics of The Social Network’s creative liberties.

As far as I’m concerned, creative liberty is creative liberty.

Either we let ignorant, bitter trolls comment on news articles and write Hollywood pictures or we don’t. Either someone has to be an expert to participate or they don’t.

We could say, “fine, they have a right — but then we have a right to challenge them with criticism,” which I 100% approve of.

But there’s another irony here. Read this post by John Hagel — with lots of interesting points and a conclusion with which I sentimentally agree — and see if you pick up the dissonance:

… the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity. It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

But the new media’s caricatures of the filmmaker’s motives seem every bit as distorted as the caricatures described in the film’s reviews, and both sides are advocating on behalf of a revolution or regime. It isn’t one constructed old media narrative vs. the righteous Internet; it’s two narratives clashing with each other — both resorting to simplistic cause-effect explanations and two dimensional characterizations.

Jeff Jarvis accounted for the filmmakers’ motives with statements like ”old media resists change” and “these guys want to deny the internet credit for it.” Scott Rosenberg quotes Mark Harris’s description of the movie as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” and added he thought “it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail.”

I think those are fairly valid, but far from the whole picture. I can’t imagine Sorkin single-mindedly rubbing his hands together in anticipation of sticking it to the Internet any more than I can imagine Zuckerberg creating Facebook simply out of spite.

They’re handy caricatures for telling more compelling stories. We couldn’t do much without them.

Of course a Hollywood movie isn’t the most generative platform — but then again, neither is Facebook.

If we keep working at it, eventually we’ll stumble on the right story.

Culture, Anarchy and the Conceptual Value of Links

Brian — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:34:24 +0000

Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration…

This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of posts, “In Defense of Links.” There was a lot of discussion after Carr proposed that we should stop inserting links within the text; he suggested we could save them all till the end instead — like footnotes, or a list of suggestions for further reading — because they add to our “cognitive load” by making us decide whether to click or not.

I can’t really complain that someone wants to experiment a little with conventions — after all, the Web is a work in progress — as long as the aim is to improve communication and collaboration, i.e. as long as it promotes learning and development across a wider community, rather than reinforcing outmoded practices and mindsets.

There are a few places I sometimes feel links would be unnecessary and unwelcome distractions: long pieces of “lean back” reading that run up to several thousand words which I can read purely for pleasure. I enjoy the long form experience; I practice and promote extended periods of deep, immersive, focused thinking. I’m not sure links would add any value to James Wood or Michael Lewis, and I’m perfectly happy reading an NYBooks review with all of the links at the top.

But those already conform to Carr’s proposal. He was referring to things like this, complaining that every link requires us to make a decision, which becomes distracting.

But it’s good to have strategically placed interruptions (see Jonah Lehrer‘s point: ”focused attention is not always ideal”). We should be making decisions as we go along: when we hesitate to consider whether or not to click, we’re thinking critically, judging for quality and relevance, and using it as an opportunity to reassess the rest of what we already know — i.e. whether we need to learn more or ‘re-place’ some basic assumptions.

Look at science: look at how Darwin “discovered” his theory of evolution. He couldn’t just focus on a single object, he had to arrange a lot of evidence in relation to other evidence — species in relation to other species, fossils in relation to other fossils, offspring in relation to parents and those in relation to their parents and so on — until a story, a synthesis, and a conclusion emerged. Of course a lot of tasks in the scientific process require acute focus, but it’s the opponents of science who stress the importance of comprehending a single text as a self-enclosed source of value, while the way science is communicated is among the most distraction-packed, extraneously referent styles around.

Similarly this style of writing for the Web is as much about organizing links from the ongoing, surrounding discussion as it is about the ideas or opinions expressed in the piece itself (if any, yet). I start with some sources and things I want to share with people and then I try to tie them together into a bit of a story, and then hopefully I can add some kind of conclusion.

This notion of “placing” links in relation to each other is something I’ve adopted from Richard Rorty, the late philosopher-turned-literary critic. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he suggested that critics don’t evaluate things for merit,

rather, they spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies. In the course of doing so, we revise our opinions of both the old and the new.

To demonstrate I’ve picked James Wood’s review of some recent books relating to Alexis de Tocqueville:

Seen in this stained-glass light, “Democracy in America” is obviously a nineteenth-century book about the fragility of faith, written on the threshold of the age of Darwin and Flaubert and Ernest Renan, a book as much about moral authority as about freedom, and about how to retain the former in an age of the latter—when, as he writes, “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished,” and “the lights of faith are obscured.” The prestige of royal power has vanished, Tocqueville says, “without being replaced by the majesty of the laws.” Matthew Arnold could not have put it better.

Those names aren’t just being dropped to show off the author’s erudition. “Darwin,” “Flaubert,” “Renan,” and “Arnold” represent specific ideas, and the reader needs to make those associations (i.e. links) to appreciate the meaning of Wood’s review. Comprehension isn’t merely about keeping track of those references, but rather pausing to reflect on, inquire into, and posit the meanings behind them. Matthew Arnold points to Culture and Anarchy and “sweetness and light” meaning beauty and truth — “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” in a process of constant cultural diffusion.

Linking is a way to make those associations more vivid and rich. It makes me more careful as a thinker and writer to consider what people might find by clicking through. Of course I should always think about specific references — even in mediums that don’t afford actual links — but in this medium it’s essential: it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses that the affordance to link nudges me to keep my expressions concrete and relevant.

It’s often all that we can do. Information can change so fast and the truth can be so fleeting that our careful judgements and explanations can quickly become worse than no judgements or explanations at all. Better to identify key points of reference — like constellations — we can use to orient ourselves and communicate with our collaborators as we go along, constantly checking our bearings and staying alert for new factors instead of staring down at a book that was written at another time and place.

Skeptics dwell on one or two premises — “in this medium… it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses” — and urge against innovation instead of recognizing that their anxieties are virtually identical to those of so many past generations. As Lionel Trilling wrote:

[Democracy in America] made John Stuart Mill modify is faith in democracy, and Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Scherer, and Arnold himself, foresaw for Europe a wave of Americanism–by which they meant vulgarity, loss of distinction, and above all, that eccentricity of thought which arises when each man, no matter what his training or gifts, may feel that the democratic doctrine of equality allows him to consider his ideas of equal worth with those of his neighbor.

As in Tocqueville’s time, we’re trying to retain a semblance of authority in an age of expanded freedom. And we’re coping not just with Cheeto-eating bloggers but a priesthood of scholars who appeal to their authority to hide (even from themselves) the fact that they’re often wrong, and professional marketers and scam artists (not necessarily in the same category; not necessarily different either) who are adept at influencing people in potentially harmful ways.

Complain if you want but the fact still remains that we’re caught up in that and eventually need to do something about it, beyond fretting and complaining.

Now that the traditional means of establishing authority and trust are increasingly obscure and misleading, the practice of linking (both actually and metaphorically) is the most effective way to earn it. Links in a text aren’t just about connectivity but credibility and readability as well, as Jason Fry argued [update: forgot to mention Scott Berkun's point, essential to the argument for embedding links: "In a glance I can see the link density of a page – too much and I might pass, but none at all, and I might wonder if the writer has thought much about the topic, since they didn’t bother to show they’d found a reference to support or counter their own claims"]. Rosenberg didn’t explicitly go as far as I do but I’ll certainly echo what he wrote in the third part of his series:

The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

So it’s about quality and discipline as much as it’s about quantity, equality and freedom of expression. Above all it’s about getting past the myth of perfection: we learn to assume that value is in the process of questions, corrections, and connections. Ironically, concentrating on the wrong books for too long is ultimately the worst distraction of all. In most cases, we’d be better off if we skimmed.

Even if Carr’s worst fears are realized and the Web destroys people’s capacity to concentrate, I’ll happily say fairwell to extended one-way lectures and screeds foisted on submissive publics (heaven forbid we have to pause to make decisions in the course of learning). I’ll happily welcome conventions that compel readers to take responsibility for finding and filtering the best knowledge, forming their own interpretations, and weaving those ideas into our cultural fabric for others to criticize, correct, or corroborate. (Steven Pinker and Steven Johnson made arguments that complement this.)

It isn’t techno-utopianism. It isn’t quite a compromise either. It’s more like a “third way” forward. And it’s the same old notion that Matthew Arnold advocated in Culture and Anarchy in the 1860s: preserve the best of the Church and the aristocracy but let the static aspects fall away; allow the best democratic values to flourish but exercise discipline against democracy’s excesses:

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality… who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and the learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time…

So but what exactly is “the best knowledge and thought” of our time? Maybe we spend so much time arguing about what the Internet “is doing to us” that we neglect to actually use it (or quietly decline to use it) to generate knowledge and thoughts worth sharing. So let’s get on with it…

The general conclusion of my book (and several years of soul- and truth-seeking) was provided for me by Charles S. Peirce:

… it may truly be said that there is but one thing needful for learning the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true… No matter how erroneous your ideas of the method may be at first, you will be forced at length to correct them so long as your activity is moved by that sincere desire.

If we really care about making our knowledge the best it possibly can be, we’re not going to let links or anything else distract us as long as we have a choice. My choice is to have choices, and to see how much information we can synthesize. It isn’t easy, but with practice a lot of people might be surprised.

Our Sense of Awe in Perspective

Brian — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:59:02 +0000

Lately I’ve been missing the old sense of wonder and enthusiasm I once had for the future. It seems to be a natural development in the life cycle: it was easier to get excited “when I didn’t know any better,” or hadn’t “seen it all before.”

I’ve been able to get some leverage on that since reading an essay called “Awe and the Machine,” by Christine Rosen. She wrote that “we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called ‘machine-made helplessness.’” Her point of historical perspective is the experience related to us by Henry Adams upon seeing a dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition:

… to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,—scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power,—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

By comparison, Rosen points out that “our machines are often portable and are such a central part of our everyday lives that we barely notice their presence.”

It’s a very convenient comparison in support of the essay’s sentiment.

The paragraph I excerpted above, from The Education of Henry Adams, is one of the key passages of one of the greatest non-fiction books of the 20th century, written by an intellectually ambitious historian who went out of his way to experience such moments as part of his personal quest to understand the general “motion” of history. It was written as a sequel to another book, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, about ”thirteenth-century unity” represented by cathedrals and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. That’s when culture seemed to have been unified to the same degree it had since become fragmented and pluralized. As he explained in chapter 29,

From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: “The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity.” With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better.

In other words, it doesn’t represent a normal person’s experience. People certainly marveled at machines, but few people were as transfixed as Adams. To compare Adams’s once-in-a-lifetime experience with how we feel (or don’t feel) walking walking around every day with iPods in our pockets is a bit of a stretch…

It’s important to take in a bigger picture, rather than thinking in terms of individual iPods and Kindles. The device itself can’t be separated from the larger system that distributes sound and images to it — not to mention the multitude of other services available. And consider e-books that allow us to read half of a book on one device, and when we open it up on another device it knows which page we’re on. It’s the aggregate effect that’s most impressive.

It isn’t so different from the sense of awe we experience when walking into a cathedral: what matters most is the imperceptible way that so many different elements work together: the mosaics, the sculptural relief, the structural geometry, the ornamented pillars and arches, the light coming in through the stained glass… A network of digital devices (not to mention content and users) generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than Adams’s dynamo a century ago, just as a cathedral generates a richer yet no less profound sense of awe than the Great Pyramids. Instead of standing outside, marveling at the direct and instantaneous experience, we have to enter into it, actively, inter-temporally, repeatedly adjusting our focus between particular components and the emergent sense of the whole.

And there’s no reason to assume we won’t see something invented this decade that’s more appropriately analogous to the dynamo. I’m roughly half the age Henry Adams was in 1900. I’ve spent years trying to understand technology — something I wouldn’t do if I wasn’t awed by it in some way. By comparison, there’s little indication that Adams had much interest in machines at all. Politics, history, and art induced most of his fascination. He was apparently more interested in geology.

A useful point of reference is Adams’s statement that in 1900 he was “almost exactly the same age” as the locomotive steam engine. He was 62 (actually younger than the locomotive). So let’s say the Internet is to us what the locomotive was to Adams. There are a few dates we could give for the Internet’s birth, but let’s be generous and say it’s 1969, when the first connection was made between two nodes on ARPANET. That puts it at 41. That means we have almost two more decades to find something that produces a sense of awe analogous to what Adams felt beside the dynamo.

(Noting that awe may or may not be diminishing, but patience certainly is.)

It might have happened to you already: e.g. while playing a massive multiplayer game with countless strangers, following “the raw feed of history” as breaking news about a big events arrives instantaneously from different directions, waking up to find your blog post or video suddenly discovered and shared by thousands of people, seeing a Wikipedia article updated within seconds of news confirming someone’s death, noticing someone you know “liked” an article you were reading (and thinking it was sheer coincidence — before you realized “the Internet knows” you know each other), etc…

None of those experiences alone is likely to generate the profoundest sense of awe, but by meditating on all of them and seeking, like Henry Adams, to understand the “forces” moving around them, eventually (if you’re lucky) we might have a profound experience on seeing something that symbolically brings it all together.

But Rosen nevertheless raises an important thought, with is very much worth addressing: something has changed about our attitude towards technology. What is it? Will it be good or bad? Does it indicate we’re stuck on a giant hedonic treadmill, looking for more, more, more, more, and more information every minute? (Numb to the power of our machines while hyper-sensitively tuned to the most mundane experiences — to use a cliché, “OMFG the best cat picture evarrrrr!!!!!!!”)

Are we in the throes of an accelerating addiction? (As Paul Graham recently asked.)

Or have we outgrown technological naivety that led people in past generations to marvel at machines and associate them with utopian possibilities? (As Virginia Postrel recently argued in a piece about Americans’ declining interest in expositions like the one Adams visited in 1900.)

By reading and thinking about history, I’ve been able to find some answers (or a sense of confidence that will suffice). Coincidentally, among my biggest influence I’d include The Education of Henry Adams, as well as much of the work of Jacques Barzun, who Rosen quoted about “machine-made helplessness.”

Barzun is critical of technology and progress — but he’s critical of everything, very nuanced, wary of utopian fallacies (e.g. lamentations about the loss of simpler, better times), and just as critical of other critics and most of what came before our time. While he expressed concern about the social effects of machine, he expressed optimism as well — or what he called “spirited pessimism”: an appreciation that “experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth.” That is, after all, the spirit that led Henry Adams to lurk around the dynamos — not just in awe of the machines themselves but of what they represented. My assumption is that it’s the same spirit that will ultimately make the most of what we have now, and create the next great, awe-inspiring objects.

Barzun expressed that hope himself at the very end of From Dawn to Decadence, his massive study of Western cultural life from 1500 to 2000. His treatment of decadence doesn’t dwell on decline; he also emphasizes rebirth, or literally “renaissance” — not unlike the rebirth and reformation that happened five centuries ago — enabled by centuries of accumulated knowledge and artifacts, sparked by new technology (then it was the printing press) and kindled by , sparked frustration and boredom, until finally a few members of some generation decide enough is enough and start rediscovering their past “and [using] it to create a new present.”

That’s where I see us right now.

It isn’t simply that enthusiasts like me “don’t want to admit” that our machines “ensure that we directly experience less,” as Rosen claims. Whether or not it’s true, it’s a trade-off we’re willing to accept and in order to explore our unique, unprecedented advantages. And to many of us, too many awe-inspiring spectacles and direct experiences had already lost their allure — being too generic, contrived, impersonal, over-intoxicating, non-generative, and unsustainable — and we consciously turned to digital technology as an opportunity to develop positive alternatives.

Awe is something we naturally get over with experience. Having written this I’ve been reinvigorated not by generating naive enthusiasm but by coming to terms — realizing that it’s those of us who grow bored with our own time and place who create the most awe-inspiring inventions… to say nothing of the most enduring histories.

Thanks also to Arts & Letter Daily for linking to Rosen’s piece, and Alexis Madrigal for Postrel’s piece (at the promising-looking Big Questions Online).

My New Favourite Phrase

Brian — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:52:00 +0000

I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!”

But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become famous?”

I soon realized that famous quotes are famous thanks to the person or the work they came from, not simply on their own merits. There’s no committee accepting proposals for “ideas for a good quote.” So I let go of the dream — though I wasn’t the least bit discouraged. Learning the truth and moving on was more gratifying than clutching a few random, pseudo-profound utterances.

My entire life’s narrative is pretty much like that: a few spontaneous thoughts will build me up with high hopes, then after recognizing how absolutely delusional those ideas are, I’ll work them out into a more realistic platform for further growth. All of the divergent, harebrained ideas become material to analyze and practice being critical on, and once all that’s straightened out there are suddenly new opportunities for open-ended experiments, and the cycle keeps going around and around.

A few years ago I even stumbled on a quote to describe this whole process, from Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana:

The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.

It probably isn’t something that works for everyone, but it became my motto for a few very pivotal years, marking the moment I stopped inquiring about things separately — finding my bearings, basically — and started reading more systematically, towards long-term goals.

Now I’m due for another change.

The phase of self-disciplined reading and rumination has run its course. Now that the objectives of that phase have been met there’s nothing to provide structure for ongoing discipline, and I seem to be casting around somewhat arbitrarily, trying to find possible uses for my ideas.

The process has become divergent again. I’ve got all of these ideas, but my ability to communicate them persuasively isn’t up to the task. All of my practice and thinking about writing has been focused on precision and clarity — though since I’ve been blogging I’ve worked hard at being more relevant and meaningful as well (losing a bit of precision by doing so) and I’ve always followed and absorbed the main conversations around business and marketing, but since I got deeper into philosophy I lost the habit of thinking with persuasion or “stickiness” foremost in mind. I want to get that back.

For the sake of being consistent with the big strategic shifts I’ve made in the past, this calls for a new motto to mark another turn towards discipline.

But here’s the thing: if I’m supposed to be learning to think about writing more persuasively — i.e. constantly trying to develop better turns-of-phrase to capture and express ideas — then I probably shouldn’t settle on a single quote. Instead, I should aim to improve on today’s motto with a better one tomorrow, and so on…

So my new favourite phrase hasn’t been written yet. Instead of something already written, it’ll always be something I’m working on.*

* See “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”**

** See “fake it until you make it.”

What I’m Reading

Brian — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:02:47 +0000

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration.
A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which are cut-and-pasted and paraphrased from others (in most cases the reader has to flip to the end-notes to learn who).
My must-read list has grown by at least a dozen books after this…

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail

I picked this up from the library a couple of days ago while wandering aimlessly through the stacks, kind of frustrated that I’m having trouble being interested in anything. I gravitated to the shelf of “big history” something I’ve wanted to read for a few years and finally got nudged towards after watching the doc based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel last week (excellent, btw).
It combines history, anthropology, neuroscience (and other disciplines) into a very fascinating account of how we cope with “deep time” — i.e. all those hundreds of thousands (or millions, or billions, depending on where you decide to start your story) of years of so-called “pre-history.” The notion of a Deluge was a way to deal with all of that uncertainty: people didn’t have to explain much of what came before (other than the cause of the Deluge itself) because it wouldn’t have effected anything that happened since. More recently, historians talked about the Dark Ages as a point at which history was apparently reset. I’ve noticed the First World War can be presented with Deluge-like qualities in some accounts of 20th century history.
No doubt the time we’re living in right now will have the same sort of effect on future people’s historical consciousness…

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

I skimmed this at the book store enough to know I’ll have to sit down and actually read it. It isn’t merely a rant or an expanded version of his famous Atlantic essay. The takeaway from most of the reviews I’ve read is that Carr makes a fairly good case, but he leaves some very big questions open: “So what?” and “What should we do about it?”
Ultimately I think when we try to answer questions like those, we’ll end up discarding much of Carr’s argument as essentially moot. At the very least it’s supposed to be well written and apparently a pleasure to read, and I’m grateful we have at least one source of lucid and somewhat sensible dissent…

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Not out in Canada until next week, so I can’t say much about it.
Shirky’s concept of “cognitive surplus” (which he presented at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo) was a great boost to my general point in Truth, Will & Relevance. I get a sense that my thinking is very close to Shirky’s — albeit lacking his brilliance in formulating simple phrases to convey complex, moving ideas.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

The promotional push behind this book focused on their “obesity is contagious” idea.
The single-word title led me to expect Connected to be a the kind of non-fiction book that only needs to be 25 pages long but stretches out with + 175 pages of anecdotes and repetition, but there’s a lot of sociological substance in it — more like Bowling Alone than Blink.

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida

Skimming the book and reading the reviews suggests it brings together much of what Florida was blogging around the worst of the economic crisis in 2008 (much of which I re-blogged here).
I’m honestly having trouble motivating myself to read something I assume I’m already in full agreement with — though I certainly recommend it to anyone else…

Notes on Satire

Brian — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:42:17 +0000

I worry I enjoy ambiguity, irony, “meta” and satire a little too much.

I’m worried my last post about copyright laws might seem too resentful (it is somewhat resentful — regretfully) because I genuinely sympathize with all sides.

In the case of copyright, I appreciate the economic [and social!] stability it enables, and I want to explore ways to sustain that in the most generative way possible.

I usually resort to satire when I want to take a side in a debate but I also want to recognize the contradictions and negative aspects of what I support (as well as the other side’s positive points). To really commit to something requires a kind of blindness: a willingness to lie to oneself, or circumscribe and settle on an arbitrarily small selection of imperfect knowledge.

We pick a side and then we find the facts and arguments to support it, unconsciously overlooking contrary evidence and considerations. Then we argue. Nuance gets trampled and kicked aside. We get pissed-off and energized by the confrontation, and the confrontation itself generates a sense of justification for our original ideas, and we come back harder.

A Huntsville area man was on the CBC news last week saying he was going to join the protest against the G8 summit because he didn’t want protests in his quiet community. Activists are seeing security efforts as verification of their cause — or rather, the barriers become a focal point that galvanizes a broad variety of grievances.

Then security folks point at that sentiment and say, “See, this is why we need all of these barriers.”

I have to laugh…

Some of us see these ironies and nuances and have trouble picking a side. It makes us awful leaders — and even worse followers. So we criticize and try to triangulate positions towards some kind of resolution (or dissolution) of the conflict.

But sometimes I find myself already within the conflict — as is the case with debates about the Web (see my first attempt at satire) — and I feel obligated to defend or promote my own interests. I have a hard time doing it with blinders on. The urge to articulate the nuances is still too strong.

It isn’t necessarily due to a higher degree of integrity; I think I just enjoy identifying and describing situations that are paradoxical or otherwise absurd.

And then again, maybe that sense of enjoyment points towards a deeper love of truth.

Satire Humour helps sweep away stock ideas. Occasionally events happen that either, in their purity, can’t be rationalized — like a guy getting hit in the balls – or create tensions that compel us to reconceive our stocks of ideas.

Sometimes the process hurts. The instinct to laugh and satirize ideas is like an intellectual anesthetic: it helps us work through these painful episodes, rather than letting wounds fester until they’re inoperable.

Besides, ultimately our victories afford us the freedom to share laughs. Let’s make time to pause and laugh along the way.

In Praise of Copyright

Brian — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:42:46 +0000

Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.”

The dispute comes down to different perceptions of “rights.” One side claims primacy of the right to share and participate in the creative process, rather than consume info and entertainment via the terms carefully chosen for them by the wisdom of corporate and governmental bureaucracies; the other side claims primacy of the right to own and control bits and pieces of information and experience. One side is composed of (or at least ideologically infected by) parasites maximizing their own ends thanks to the creativity and information provided by others; on the other side are people who are primarily motivated by creative, intellectual, and social development.

What the impatient hackers and remixers don’t appreciate is that not everybody can be as creative as they want to be: some people just want a 9-to-5 job, some people just want to be rich, some people just want the sense of status and control conferred by a job title. Organizations have evolved as comfortable nests for many of these people to sit on their eggs. A lot of these organizations are in industries affected by copyright — think of record labels, TV networks, publishers and newspapers — and they absolutely depend on all of the barriers and constraints provided by copyright law for their survival.

Of course it’s somewhat ironic that copyright laws originally protected writers and composers from exploitation by printers and distributors; now it’s the means of distribution that are being protected. Anyhow…

You only need to walk into your local cineplex, or turn on the radio or watch network television for an evening to recognize how much cultural value is being produced by large organizations and protected by rules and regulations. And look at the artists themselves: it’s hard to even argue about the system’s fairness when Ben Stiller and whatshisname from Harry Potter can each make over $40 million in one year.

These are the sorts of realities that copyright rules are meant to preserve. Especially in Canada. Our creative economy has become a safe and comfortable place for a lot of executives, administrators, lawyers, IT and HR staffers, various people who like clip-boards, PowerPoint, and a sense of orderliness, occupying offices owned by deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates that are apparently more innovative and aggressive than Canadian companies. It wouldn’t be very nice if that system changed and all of those people had to give up careers they so dearly and passionately love.

Now that writers, musicians, film-makers (and people inventing whole new categories by mashing-up different mediums) can easily produce and distribute their work independently — now that organizational structures are becoming increasingly outdated and redundant — if we want to conserve the non-creativity of our creative economy it’s imperative that the Canadian government empower organizations with the ability to maintain the artificial barriers and conditions of scarcity on which their existence depends.

/satire

Convergence of Social and Indie Media

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:23:43 +0000

If you’re in London Ontario this Saturday afternoon come to the Central Library for the Indie Media Fair. I’ll be doing a workshop at 3 pm on the convergence of social and independent media.

I didn’t come up with the theme but it certainly resonates with me. I went to the fair last year and was sort of surprised by how analog-centric it was. Open House Arts Collective and From My Bottom Step were the only exceptions I know of remember [correction needed?].

It led me to write a rant about how we ought to be using the web to document the city’s culture and ultimately recognize the best of it:

There’s a false assumption that blogs [and any use of social media more generally] are these fleeting, in-the-moment things. That’s certainly how they are made, but in the process they also leave behind concise threads of enduring information…

Social media bridges between us better than anything else (hence calling it “media” — what mediates our experiences). It’s no replacement for meeting face-to-face, but before even getting to that there’s no better way to identify shared interests with people we may have assumed were completely different. It happens to me every week. It’s amazing to learn how much we have in common with so many different people.

Thomas Cermak at LondonFuse is one example of someone I stumbled upon through the web — and he’s the one who approached me about participating on Saturday. We’re of the same mind when it comes to the need to bring a broader mix of people together.

This is where I understand the idea for a workshop on “the convergence of social and independent media” came from. Just as I was surprised by how analog the Indie Media Fair was last year, the indie media milieu seems to be equally unsure of what to make of the Geek Dinner crowd. It seems odd to have this split — after all, both groups tend to be both social and independent.

I’m looking forward to the discussion. I’m not quite as preachy as I was when I ranted about it last year. I’m hoping to kickstart an actual dialog — and hopefully cultivate a little more convergence. It isn’t a big city; there are a lot of fascinating opportunities to complement each other’s efforts…

Are there any related ideas or issues you’d like us to address there?

The other scheduled workshops are:

• 1 pm » Kane X. Faucher — “scholartist” — how academic and artistic work can be made to contaminate and resonate to produce new media forms.

• 2 pm » Iconoclast on “intellectual self-defense”: combating propaganda in our society.

Tables to showcase your creative, independent work are only $5. Contact indie.media@lpl.london.on.ca or 519-661-5100 Ext. 4986.

Generativity & Prosperity

Brian — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:37:52 +0000

Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic.

There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America:

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

The recession is technically over but we know the situation is more complicated than that. There are no economic models for seeing where we’re going. These are unprecedented times; our thinking will have to be unprecedented too.

Regardless of what you expect from the future, the best way to deal with uncertainty is to make things with ”an independent ability to create, generate or produce content without any input from the originators of the system.” That’s what generativity means.

Technology provides the clearest examples of how generativity works (think of how the internet developed through many contributions that combined in unexpected ways). The concept is often associated with Jonathan Zittrain. Lately there’s been a lot to write and speak out about, with controversies about net neutrality, and open standards, closed vs open platforms, etc.

Look at the iPhone. Much of its success is due to the additional value offered by third party apps. No company alone — not even Apple — would have the imagination or expertise to produce more than a fraction of these.

But Apple’s approach isn’t completely generative. While not completely sterile either, it’s still what Zittrain calls a “tethered appliance.” Dave Winer has been on a role about this dilemma. I think his post on whether we should trust the iPad captures it pretty well. On one hand the iPad is an interesting (and downright seductive) platform to develop for. There’s going to be some awesome stuff that we’re not even able to conceive yet. But on the other hand, Apple controls the platform (and it’s also not tinker-friendly), which puts constraints on how generative it can become.

Putting artificial constraints on generativity can stifle growth (imagine Twitter without third party applications, e.g. TweetDeck, or user-generated syntax, e.g. @replies and #hasthtags), and it can also introduce the risk of wiping out an entire creative system all at once. As Winer pointed out:

The problem is this — if Facebook goes away — and it could, so does everything everyone created with it.

The same might be said about Twitter, but in their case many of the third party applications are already working with similar services, and the service can easily be replicated elsewhere.

As for users, if you’ve merely been collecting subscriber counts, then you run the risk of instantly losing years of work; Twitter might suddenly cease to exist or kick you off by changing its terms of use. But if you’ve been developing genuine relationships with real people, based on the exchange of real value, then you’ll have generated connections beyond Twitter and you’ll have the means to recovering the community you helped build. In that case, change won’t be such a problem, and may even present some great new opportunities.

Note that genuine and generative (as well as genius) come from the same root: “beget.”

Relationships, complex competencies (developed through experience and understanding, not merely simple techniques and repetition) and communities of practice are generative things we can invest in that don’t just retain value in an uncertain future, but tend to create it.

Think about losing your job. What do you have left? It’s best to invest in generative possessions — relationships, reputation, mastery — things that go beyond the bounds of any particular office or shop. These are the things we need to focus our time and energy in. Human civilization has always thrived through generative processes (and keeps failing whenever things became too sterile and closed).

Technology might provide the clearest examples of generativity, but the truest examples are family and community.

Predating the concept of The Generative Internet is the term’s use in the context of social and psychological development. Psychologists Erik Erickson and Dan McAdams are associated with it. David Brooks invoked it a couple of weeks ago in a column about the need for older generations to help the younger ones — not just for the sake of young people, but for the good of society and their own personal well-being:

One of the keys to healthy aging is what George Vaillant of Harvard calls “generativity” — providing for future generations. Seniors who perform service for the young have more positive lives and better marriages than those who don’t. As Vaillant writes in his book “Aging Well,” “Biology flows downhill.” We are naturally inclined to serve those who come after and thrive when performing that role.

Working with the next generation isn’t about giving them (us) absolute freedom, nor is it about controlling or trying to have them do everything as you did before. It’s about providing the framework, then stepping back to see what independent creators will make of it… then stepping in with an updated framework, then stepping back, and so on.

We’re different people in a different world, addressing different challenges, creating new opportunities. You can set certain conditions for growth, but ultimately the best outcomes are generated when those conditions are deliberately open enough for people to play, learn new tricks, make new models, and discover new forms of interaction and value.

No specific solutions are guaranteed to get us through whatever’s brewing for the next few years… whether the next few years turn out better or worse than people expect, we know at the very least a lot will be unprecedented.

The very least we can do to prepare for an uncertain future is give ourselves the freedom and discipline to build — something original — on what came before.

My forthcoming book will elaborate, with a lot more background on this. Make sure you subscribe by RSS or by email or follow me on Twitter to stay in-the-know (hint: it’s in the design stage now).

Learning as a Craft

Brian — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:00:54 +0000

Read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — one of my favourite thinkers. This book gets right to the heart of things. From the publisher’s description:

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The same day I finished it I participated in a panel on do-it-yourself approaches to education conducted by a group in the online journalism class at UWO (the edupunk episode will be part of a series that launched last week at Rabble.ca and The Tyee).

On the way there I started feeling a connection between the book and the discussion to come.

Education is itself a craft — over and above (or underlying) everything else.

Learning is something a lot of us have an “impulse to do well for its own sake.” Some of us have the same impulse for teaching too.

Yet institutionalized education is premised on the idea that students don’t or won’t learn unless they’re lured and prodded through a network of corrals. It messes with our natural motivations», and actually gets in the way» of learning.

That premise is self-perpetuating. If you teach people in a way that assumes they don’t want to learn, then they’ll learn to not want to learn, they’ll learn to wait to be prodded and pulled…

During the discussion Jim Groom brought up The Wire — an amazing show that depicts cops (among its many characters) trying to fight crime for the sake of fighting crime, but find themselves up against institutional dysfunction (and individual corruption) at every turn.

“Real police” like Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon damaged their careers by investigating crimes too well, rather than letting criminals slip through for the sake of artificially inflating the department’s statistics.

Likewise, in learning, by discovering or creating something new you create more work for everyone else. Institutional “zombies” (to use David Hall’s word) tend to mobilize against initiatives; they’re there to meet whatever institutional metrics have been imposed for the sake of a paycheck.

There’s a scene in season 4 of The Wire in which one of the characters has been paid to round up truant students and take them back to class. He thinks he’s doing it for the sake of the kids’ education until someone explains they only need those students for a couple of days to get funding; after that the school lets them go back to work on the street corners.

Every kind of organization has problems like this. New people come along and say “we can do better” and people start moaning. It isn’t just more work people are afraid of, people are also afraid of failing and looking stupid.

Institutional rules and guidelines serve to deflect criticism — promoting the wrong kind of responsibility»:

People working for failed companies might say “I was just doing my job” (i.e. “carrying out my responsibilities”), but that doesn’t excuse them from Responsibility. Likewise, “I was just following orders” doesn’t necessarily excuse soldiers from Responsibility for inhumane acts.

It’s time to relearn the best kind of responsibility — responsibility for rules and conventions, not merely responsibility to them (i.e. a willingness to stand up to them and change them).

It’s time to relearn the love of learning» for its own sake — the same kind of love we had as kids when we learned to walk and talk and make things.

Nobody had to force you to learn that stuff. It’s no mystery; the motivation for it is no mystery, just humanity. The real mystery is why we turned things around and got so good at squelching it.

Thinking in the 21st Century: Progress Report

Brian — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:31:13 +0000

The premise of this series is to work out a new way of looking at our changing world»

Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have not caught up to the technologies and practices of our age.

We live in a world that consists of distributed, decentralized, and constantly-changing networks of real-time connections, but we still think in terms of simple one- and two-dimensional polarities, velocities, pressures, and collisions.

It’s like we’re trying to draw three-dimensions without knowing anything about linear perspective. It would be easy if someone could just show us the tricks — but nobody has quite figured those out yet.

Overcoming the old habits, learning new ones, is an incremental process. Think of it as replacing planks on a platform one-by-one rather than tearing the whole thing down. We still need something to base our thinking on, it’s impossible to simply clear everything away at once. Or you can think of this as either bootstrapping or disentanglement: we need to get the new ideas through the old; ratcheting ourselves up gradually, using the old habits as leverage for learning new ones.

Specifically, digital media needs to serve as a metaphor for appreciating the new ideas about human nature; at the same time, the updated understanding of human nature is required to fully appreciate a socially dynamic world connected by digital media… back-and-forth until both aspects become intuitive.

The series itself was inspired by a more recent post about social media and the creative/intellectual cycle»

Everyone has a slightly different interpretation, with a slightly different vocabulary (that is constantly evolving). Batches of books keep coming out that say essentially the same things in different ways, suited to slightly different needs (which is natural). There’s a lot of corroboration and consistency but it’s mostly tacit and subjective, difficult to get an objective grasp on.

So when we find ourselves in disagreement — like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble recently have (see here and here) — we have to be nice to each other, agree to disagree, and wait for new features to come along and reframe the disagreement or make it irrelevant. We lack the basis for objectively placing each other’s interpretations in relation to each other.

Most disagreements don’t even matter very much because people inhabit different spaces within the domain. That helps everyone get along, but a lack of friction also indicates a lack of scientific traction. There’s no rigorous, canonical framework for figuring out who’s right and decisively eliminating the bad ideas (other than watching them try and fail).

There’s little in the way of unifying structure — no definitive map, no architecture that shows exactly how everything connects.

We’re well into the digital age but still camped in tents.

That might be acceptable (and probably necessary for a time) but I don’t think it’s optimal or sustainable. It has to change eventually.

A new lightning rod

There’s a lot of electricity in the air.

It’s going to ground itself somehow — whether we wait for sparks to fly or whether we construct some kind of theory, structure, or apparatus for conducting it in the most generative (or least destructive) way.

But it isn’t just about social media or even the web. I’ve been working on the “grounding” thing since well before I began blogging. The web definitely factored into it, but as one of many other cultural aspects, e.g. as I wrote in my first post, a week after the start of 2007′s credit crisis that transpired towards 2008′s financial collapse… I expressed concern that our ideas are on the same shaky ground»

It’s the same with ideas as it is with money: it isn’t wise to go from fad to fad, investing with borrowed wealth; we need long-term vehicles for learning and understanding that retain some of their value when markets lose their footings — or rather, such long-term enterprises are the stabilizing force that markets need.

I’m referring to both ‘knowledge markets’ and financial markets: the former is a foundation for the latter…

To address arguments that thinking is a waste of time and action is universally superior to theory, I made a case for why ideas need to be managed» (while accepting it’s ok if most people don’t want to do it).

This idea of investing in and managing ideas was elaborated most fully in a post outlining a new kind of pragmatism»

Think of how much life goes by without being harnessing for educational or intellectual use. There are ways to turn anything towards more generative, sustainable, and manageable ends. All experience is in a sense learning experience, but it is predominantly undisciplined and unproductive; we tend to let most things come and go without effecting us or our ideas and habits.

Meanwhile, we allow ideas and habits become important parts of our lives without accounting for them. We learn some of our most influential habits, preferences, and beliefs by accident. Most people have no clue how these were formed, nor would they know how to evaluate or correct them. When these habits, preferences, and beliefs are challenged, people will stand up for “who they are,” they’ll go to war over “what they believe,” but they are hardly able to make any account of the sources of their identity or beliefs, nor make the even the minutest adjustments needed to turn a destructive confrontation into a generative conversation. Instead, most people are content merely to be “who they are,” and “agree to disagree” with anyone who’s different. This goes nowhere.

The ultimate good of pragmatism is not profit or truth; the ultimate good of pragmatism is social. Pragmatism is the attitude by which individuals humanize the organizations and institutions where they work, learn, and live. As these institutions become more humane, it becomes easier to be humane ourselves. As we “unstiffen our theories” we are better able to communicate and collaborate – resolving differences, overcoming challenges, and addressing new opportunities, both in our private lives and as part of larger public enterprise.

A ‘pragmatic plasticity’ is required to be both tough and soft – rigid at times and malleable at others. On one hand we need to use hard facts and rules to avoid or overcome subjective excesses. On the other hand, the desired aim of life is subjective well-being and freedom.

So I’m going to suggest a couple of terms to describe two complementary aspects of the pragmatic approach to working, learning, and living: ‘open objectivity’ and ‘tempered subjectivity.’ Tempered subjectivity is the supposed end, and open objectivity is the means to that end.

Open objectivity recognizes that we can’t accomplish anything together unless we have hard structures and facts to serve as common points of reference. When disputes arise, we need to be able to say, “Well, let’s see how X turns out, then we’ll know if either one of us is right.” But this is no way to enjoy life; merely knowing what’s right and following hard rules is not the whole point of living, so this objectivity needs to be open-ended, incomplete, liberating.

The point of working, learning, and living in those objective structures is to develop enough personal knowledge and competence so that we’re not totally bound by those structures. The aim is to learn how to make spontaneous decisions and evaluations that are just as fair and effective as those calculated by objective instruments. This is what I mean by tempered subjectivity, whereby free thinking has been (in)formed by objective structures and facts, and those structures and facts are always readily available to keep thinking from wandering back towards past mistakes.

Creative freedom is both experienced as enjoyable in itself and serves practical necessity – just like owning your own home. At its simplest, a good and happy life is about having the freedom (which, don’t forget, also means having security and stability) to enjoy spontaneous moments of beauty, discovery, laughter, and love.

At the same time, emergencies and surprises inevitably occur, whether we want them to or not, and these cannot totally be accounted for by objective means in advance. The most effective response to new realties is performed by people who have been trained to just know what to do without being paralysed by analysis.

Ultimately, a society of human minds is smarter than anything we could ever design. But our minds can’t function without conceptual facilities, and these facilities are designed. If they’re designed poorly, we think poorly; if they’re designed well, we think well.

A lot of what I’ve written since then is an attempt to refine and rephrase and illustrate those points in relevant contexts. Most prominent is my attempt to frame web as our way to understanding»

I’ve been learning a lot more from the web than merely web-stuff — and so have you, whether you know it or not.

First, our tools, activities and surroundings literally teach us how to think. We constantly absorb metaphors and images that go on to inform our intuition and reason. [...]

In the past, the most dominant metaphors in civic and commercial spheres were from machines, war, and sports. Now the metaphors are becoming more organic (e.g. concepts like “streams” and “cloud computing”). As life and work gets more networked and dynamic via the web, life and work via the web also supplies the metaphors for making sense of the new structures and systems.

Like nothing else, social media provides a working model of life’s yin and yang»

Imagine there are two essential aspects of everything (that go by many names): space and time, body and soul, object and subject, rest and motion, permanence and change, solid and fluid, stable and dynamic, being and becoming, existence and experience…

These two aspects exist for each-others’ sake. Space couldn’t happen without time, while time couldn’t be measured or observed without space. The object can’t exist without a subject experiencing it, while the subject couldn’t experience without the existence of objects, etc.

Think in the practical terms of the web: if a site isn’t used, then it dies; if an event occurs but doesn’t leave a permanent record, then it dies too. The optimal arrangement is events-generating-artifacts, artifacts-generating-events.

The importance of the subjective, moving, living aspect should be self-evident: we’ve all experienced it — especially people who’ve nurtured relationships online before meeting in person…

Conversely, we sometimes forget how important it is to make permanent stuff. It’s more of a long-term investment (or maybe just an insurance policy that could never pay off — but just might…), the benefits of which aren’t immediately evident. It’s great to just enjoy life but activities that generate artifacts and monuments tend to be the ones that spread, replicate, repeat, and survive.

If necessary, I’m not afraid to get deeply cosmological to address the life’s vital and flowing character»

To understand why we do things, we have to appreciate why things happen at all.

It’s ridiculously simple: things happen because time exists.

I’ve found this principle to be a useful heuristic for grounding uncertainty and making random occurrences continuous with the rest of experience.

If something weird happens — e.g. someone acts crazily, markets go haywire — rather than guessing wildly at causes or dismissing the event as completely unexplainable, we can start by reminding ourselves that “something had to happen” and organize our thoughts from there.

It isn’t so much an explanation as it is a way to overcome some of the old ideas and biases that prevent us from recognizing and understanding new opportunities. On the deepest level, we need to be careful we’re not resting on false assumptions of concrete objectivity»

There is no logic that compels us to explain everything logically, there is no purely objective account of why or how we can be purely objective; instead we have deep undeniable feelings that we must make ideas objectively explained.

Start with that simple fact and work backwards: instead of obeying the rules of objectivity, account for them.

Evolution is the ultimate explanation for all of our knowledge and beliefs.

It’s about what’s practical — whatever works in the long run, whatever manages to survive and succeed.

We’re the species that happened to acquire imagination and memory capable of transposing the real world into a conceptual world of symbols — abstract objects that aren’t subject to the physical laws of change and motion affecting the rest of reality.

The impulse for manipulating abstract objects and transposing them back into real-world action eventually developed into principles and laws, which in turn provided frameworks for civilizations.

Civilizations themselves are conceived as objects that come into contact with other communities — “the barbarians,” etc.

History indicates that (at least where and when the environment allowed), civilizations which accommodated the most complex systems of abstract objects tended to persevere and succeed over those that used less complex abstractions.

Occasionally there have been exceptional disruptions, but in general the civilizations which dominated have tended to have the most effective systems of ethics and discipline, the most sophisticated mastery of science and engineering, and the most powerful religious symbols.

A hypothetical pre-historic group that wasn’t comfortable with abstractions like “freedom” or “justice” (or “me” or “us” and “them” — or truth itself) may have been more empirically sound but they wouldn’t have been as effective at communicating and collaborating.

Such a group would have found it more difficult to surviving — especially if they lived in the same area as proto-humans better-developed systems for working, living, and fighting together.

But eventually our objective systems reach a point of diminishing returns.

At some point, rather than expanding, the system starts to require more and more energy to merely maintain the integrity of the structures, rules, and information they already have.

Large empires find themselves with infrastructure and other resources that need to be protected. Monuments deteriorate and need to be rebuilt. Institutions acquire their own momentum, making them difficult to steer.

Meanwhile knowledge accumulates and becomes hyper-specialized.

One teacher might have a hundred students, each working in their own narrow sub-specialty. When the teacher passes away there’s nobody left who remembers how all the paths once parted — and anyone who tries to reunify the field will have to contend with ninety-nine accusations of ignorance and meddling.

I’m afraid this is the point we’re at now: earlier generations built amazing things, but as we work with the ideas and institutions they passed onto us, nobody knows how how it all works together.

It’s time we take a close look at all of our ideas and institutions with an evolutionary appreciation.

The ideas and institutions of the past aren’t permanently true and good, they simply worked for some time. Now it’s time to reassess whether they’re still as generative and sustainable as they once were.

But we also need to be careful of new ideas and institutions.

We may recognize a problem but then become attracted to the first new abstraction that occurs to us — and sometimes we might be attracted to a new abstraction even while the old ones still work fine.

We have to assess every idea that occurs to us by reminding ourselves how powerfully attractive abstractions can be to our imaginations — especially the simplest and most obvious ones — and evaluate every idea with the question, “What are the real effects of this idea?”

Even the idea of object bias is subject to object bias, we have to consider this as well.

By turning the idea of object bias on itself you might send yourself in seemingly endless circles.

It might seem meaningless and futile.

It isn’t futile.

It’s possible, with practice, to overcome the discomfort of uncertainty. It’s possible to cultivate the habit of doubting ideas without dismissing them altogether. The hard-earned ability to manage ideas is more valuable than any idea will ever be.

Accept it and move forward, develop techniques to take advantage of concrete objectivity without trusting it absolutely»

It’s by working with the static slices of time and learning how to interpret them that we learn to understand what’s happening.

Understanding isn’t a thing we hold, it’s an activity we learn and maintain through practice.

It’s also worth considering that putting data and intuitions together isn’t just prescriptive, it’s descriptive; i.e. we never handle facts without affecting them with emotions or intuitions. [...]

That’s the ultimate verification or falsification we should be watching for: not just how accurate the ideas themselves are themselves, but how effective we are at managing our ideas.

That idea of managing effectiveness isn’t just prescriptive, it’s based on a basic fact that personal efficacy is what actually motivates and gratifies people»

A number of theories have extended that insight. Probably the most widely known is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow (1990), which means to become fully absorbed in a challenging-yet-doable activity that requires concentration and skill but seems effortless, involves goals, and generates constant feedback and growth.

Complementing flow is the notion of intrinsic motivation, specifically self-determination theory described by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985).

As with the ideas of White and Csikszentmihalyi, the need for competence is key to self-determination theory. Deci and Ryan also emphasized the importance of personal autonomy — i.e. to recognize that outcomes result from personal decisions, not from external interference.

Deci and Ryan also include the need for relatedness, or “organismic integration” — a process of assimilating environmental elements inwards and accommodating oneself back outwards to the environment.

The reason why those ideas from psychology have not had as much influence as they deserve in business, politics, economics, etc, is that we haven’t had the metaphors and models to make them intuitive.

But we do now — thanks to the social web and its well-defined networks of relationships and ongoing interactions. A couple of years ago I proposed we should think of ourselves as motivated by a kind of will to relevance»

The problem with the simplified good-evil accounts of human nature is that they treat people as hard, static, well-defined mechanical units — wealth maximizing machines — whereas our behaviour is affected by all kinds of dynamic, ongoing, subjective processes and interactions that are difficult to define and control.

So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation fromdomination and control to connectedness and meaning. Mind you, connectedness and meaning may just happen to manifest itself as domination and control, but connectedness may also manifest itself as altruism, etc.

In my original notebook entry from March 1, 2005, I wrote that “the tendency of individuals persists to an (unknown) end of maximum social relevance — peer-level connections.”

Google’s search engine (especially PageRank) acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.

And it isn’t just the search engine itself. Witness all the effort that goes into maximizing websites’ “relevance” to increase and sustain traffic. It isn’t just search engine optimization: consider the absurd amount of friending on MySpace, whereby people accumulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of “friends”; or witness bloggers jockeying for “authority” ratings on Technorati by exchanging links and RSS feed subscriptions (which, if you read any of the countless blogs devoted to the topic of how to make your blog popular — another absurdity — too many bloggers seem to value stats far more than actual readers).

But relevance means more than just maximizing connections and links, it’s also about optimizing the appropriateness, context, integrity, vitality, richness, and reciprocity of those relations: it’s about how effective and alive our connections are. The value of the subjective relevance of “1000 True Fans” may be far greater than the value of the objective relevance of 10,000,000 “friends” in MySpace, or “authority” points on Technorati…

This is where I’m at… much more to come.

Favourite Books of 2009

Brian — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:58:35 +0000

Nonfiction:

What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis

It’s focused on media but the message is essential for anyone who’s work or life relies on the use of information. Chances are that means you….

It could be called a “new economy” book but it isn’t about the future. It’s about the economy we have now.

The people and organizations that are good at working with abundance and distributed control aren’t just winning at a new game, they’re creating value for the whole system — which eventually comes back to the creators.

And I love Jarvis’s phrase (which, ironically, Google itself doesn’t really adhere to): “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”

[Note: That link (like the one for the next book) goes to my Amazon Affiliates account. Amazon doesn't seem to have WWGD in stock. In Canada Chapters does.]

Fiction:

Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi, Geoff Dyer

Normally I don’t read fiction, so it says a lot that I even picked it up and actually finished it.

Previously I wrote that Geoff Dyer is “my anti-career hero” (in retrospect I should’ve said “uncareer,” which to “career” is what “unconverence” is to “conference”).To paraphrase Dyer’s protagonist, my admiration is both “a hundred percent sincere and a hundred percent ironic at the same time.”

The “Jeff” in the book, I imagine, is a lot like the “Geoff” who wrote it, but it isn’t just semi-autobiographical, it’s almost autobibliographical: in a way, much of the book seems like it’s about its own becoming.

With the mid-life travel-and-self-discovery elements, this book is sort of an Eat, Pray, Love for dudes who like recursion and sardonic irony (Drink, Laugh, F**k?…).

Recap:

Both Geoff and Jeff (not the one in Venice) are long-run optimists who love meta-level complexity, and whose honesty and realism look to many like sheer cynicism.

There’s a lot of absurdity in our world; if we can’t look at it and laugh and call it what it is, 2010 is going to be a very rough year.

Maybe it seemed like there was a lot of uncertainty and change in 2008 and 2009, but the the ball is just starting to roll.

I’m looking forward to learning and growing (and laughing) through the coming challenges, fully aware of how tough the process will be.

Google Wave: Obey the Speed Limit

Brian — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:58:38 +0000

Ok I just had my first hard-core experience in Wave.

Things got pretty nuts when three of us found ourselves updating at the same time. It was sort of a “breaking-in” session for all three of us and it didn’t take long to accelerate…

Turns out it is not easy to read what two people are typing at once while you’re also typing in response to what someone just typed 10 seconds ago and trying to do it as fast as you can so you can hurry up and start responding to what the other person typed 1 second ago and what they’re typing is a response to what you just typed 5 seconds ago while the other person is adding new points and you’re kind of anticipating where those are going and already responding before they finish their sentence and meanwhile someone else was watching and they’re jumping-in too because they’ve anticipated how you’re going to finish your sentence and so they’re already adding more to iiiiiiiiiiiiiittt……

When it slowed down I noticed my palms were all sweaty. Then I started to respond to someone on Twitter and heard myself thinking “oh no everyone on Twitter just saw that typo” (I’m thinking it now too). It felt like I just jumped off a trampoline (or maybe a surf board is a better analogy); I felt dizzy being on solid ground.

It’s a problem I’m not used to experiencing on the web: having too much power & speed.

Just because my new Bugatti Veyron gets to 100 in 2.5 and tops out at 407 doesn’t mean that’s how I’m going to drive to work.

But you gotta try it at least once…

[Ed. Note: Brian does not own a Bugatti. Sometimes people write things for rhetorical value. For more information on literary devices, visit your local library, join a writers' group, or just google it.]

See what it did? Wave messes with your head… I want more Wave!

Adam Bly’s Science Renaissance

Brian — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:00:41 +0000

Props to TechAlliance and BIOTECanada for booking Adam Bly to speak at the launch of National Biotechnology Week. I’m very grateful to have attended; I came away rejuvenated with energy and ideas…

Bly made the case we need to reorient “our collective ideology, our collective imagination,” towards science — towards “Big Science.” Some of his remarks were captured on Twitter by David Millar (sitting next to me):

“Science is culture… a catalyst for economic growth.”
“We need to rekindle the value that knowledge is good.”
“We need — a new scientific lens for the 21st Century.”

He admitted, given the audience, that he was “preaching to the choir.” Certainly I was one of the already-converted, having made a similar case in December:

For the past few years we’ve been passionate about gadgets and fashion: we want toys and a distinctive personal image, and consumers have paid incredible sums of money to create a robust and prolific supply system to meet those demands. Now if some of that passion could be turned to science — energy and healthcare being the most immediate and relevant fields — then more money and human resources will gravitate towards addressing the greater demand for scientific discovery and innovation.

… The principle I have in mind is that if we spent as much time wishing, thinking, and talking in public about medical research and green technology as we spend talking about jeans, cars, and iPhone apps, that scientific sentiment would seep into our cultural values and affect people’s beliefs about what jobs are cool and what kind of investments are sexy.

Seed Magazine — which Bly founded in 2001 — is proof that there’s a cultural market for science. Society has the capacity to love science, it just has to be calibrated the right way to take hold.

Because science is more than just what scientists do. It’s more than what happens in the lab — or what ends up in the library (often to be read by no more than a few dozen people). It’s an attitude, a mindset, an “approach to the world… a foundation for thinking,” as it was for one of Bly’s childhood role models.

That’s one of the things we need: more role models — or better role models — or better ways of finding and interacting with them. A couple of books mentioned today are good places to start:

From there the spokes go out… e.g. here…

Another way to recalibrate the popular mindset towards science — this was more explicitly promoted in the talk — is via data visualization, aka infographics. Check out Seed’s ScienceBlogs community; there’s been a recent series there on data visualization, and Smashing Magazine ran a recent list of useful resources for web designers.

Much more to come…

Neurodiversity and the Dumbest Generation

Brian — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:06:59 +0000

Mark Bauerlein complained at WSJ.com that “Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” It has something to do with all the time they spend, according to Nielson Mobile, sending and receiving an individual average of maybe 1,742 or 2,272 mobile text messages per month.

And what’s supposed to be bad about that? Bauerlein’s concern is that “much of our social and workplace lives run on” non-verbal communication, and if they spend all their time looking at iPhones instead of people in-the-flesh, they won’t be very good at projecting or picking up on the right cues.

Users insert smiley-faces into emails, but they don’t see each others’ actual faces. They read comments on Facebook, but they don’t “read” each others’ posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal—and expressive—behaviors.

But then as soon as I read that I thought of Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy, in which he makes a case that new technologies and practices on the web — precisely the ones Bauerlein has criticized — are empowering autistic and neurodiverse individuals to be more social and productive.

Compare the last sentence from the Bauerlein quote with this, taken from the Wikipedia article on Asperger’s Syndrome (often described semi-incorrectly as “high-functioning” autism):

Individuals with AS experience difficulties in basic elements of social interaction, which may include a failure to develop friendships or to seek shared enjoyments or achievements with others (for example, showing others objects of interest), a lack of social or emotional reciprocity, and impaired nonverbal behaviors in areas such as eye contact, facial expression, posture, and gesture.

Cowen’s great insight (not necessarily original, e.g.) is that those characteristics are not absolute deficiencies, they are merely differences. Society just happens to have been skewed in ways that amplify the weaknesses of the autistic-style while providing few opportunities to cultivate autistic-style strengths.

That’s changing — and Bauerlein himself helps make the case.

To show how valuable non-verbal communication has been, he reached all the way back to 1959, citing anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s research on the importance of non-verbal communication for “imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments.”

But what makes “feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgements” so much more useful and important than ideas, observations, criticisms, analyses, insights, explanations, etc, which are often obscured by non-verbal communication?

Speaking for myself, I vastly prefer the latter set; I’ve spent most of my life fretting about how under-appreciated those are, relative to the former set I’m less suited to work with.

I’m pretty happy about the shift. I don’t know how anyone could be anything other than astonished by the way so many autistic-style characteristics are considered flaws: e.g. the tendency to be “too honest” or the tendency to “interpret things too literally.”

It seems ridiculous. My feeling is that if our society considers honesty and interpretive precision to be flaws, then it’s our society itself that’s in need of therapy.

And again Bauerlein seems to help make the case:

Hall explained, U.S. diplomats could enter a foreign country fully competent in the native language and yet still flounder from one miscommunication to another, having failed to decode the manners, gestures and subtle protocols that go along with words…

Should we have read that as he intended — to mean those diplomats needed to improve their non-verbal communication? Or could the problem be interpreted another way? I’m more inclined to read it as demonstrating a case for relying on less non-verbal communication in professional settings… i.e. Why isn’t the standard manner of diplomacy more straightforward, explicit, and unambiguous?

Finally, the fact that text messaging is so popular isn’t just arbitrary; it shows there are human capacities for different styles of communication that weren’t fully realized in the past.

After all, there must be some psycho-social-anthropological explanation for the rapid adoption of digital media… 2,272 text messages per month, per person, can’t all be written-off as incidences of stupidity.

One final point in passing: this being a blog post, not a book, I don’t have room to address very valid concerns about serious cases of low-functioning autism. That’s another matter — though no less of one — but one I’m much less capable of treating.

After Graduation: Create Your Own Economy

Brian — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:21:23 +0000

I was going to do this Thursday night but I got sidetracked.

Dan Brown at the The London Free Press took up my challenge (which was “both 100% ironic and 100% sincere at the same time”) to “take a few hours or a few months to figure out what really matters” and compose it into a commencement-style address.

Dan’s “speech” was about the value of a liberal arts education in today’s frantic, social media-driven world.

He didn’t oppose the two. It’s not an either/or scenario. A liberal arts eduction is a foundation or background — an appreciation of the things that don’t change — on which to build and grow.

The fact that everything is constantly changing doesn’t mean that reading Plato and Shakespeare (and stuff) for a few years is a waste of time. Counterintuitively, the fact that everything seems to change faster makes that kind of education even more valuable:

Besides, learning the new communication tools is not your real problem.

The true challenge is finding ways to use those tools.

By coincidence, I also happened to read this, from someone else, within minutes:

More and more, “production” — that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations — has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. A tweet may not look like much, but its value lies in the mental dimension. You use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other Web services to construct a complex meld of stories, images, and feelings in your mind. No single bit seems weighty on its own, but the resulting blend is rich in joy, emotion, and suspense. This is a new form of drama, and it plays out inside us — with technological assistance — rather than on a public stage.

That’s Tyler Cowen, promoting his new book in an article for Fast Company. It’s called Create Your Own Economy: The Path of Prosperity in a Disordered World. When it comes out in July readers will be treated to an

astute and thought-provoking take on how we can harness technology, embrace multitasking, and open our minds to “neurodiversity” in order to create our own happier, richer personal economies.

I’m genuinely excited to pick it up. When I first heard about this I tweeted “I live to read this book.” I wasn’t joking.

If you read everything I’ve written on this blog you’ll start to get an impression of “what it’s about.” Cowen’s book comes as close as any book is likely to get to my sweet spot (at least until I write one).

Just take a look at some of my earliest posts, which

proposed we overcome our economic woes by investing in intellect
made a case for composing better stories about ideas via technology
predicted the web would only become mature when we learn to approach it primarily as a platform for education and creation

Even as I broadened to cover more topics and events, I have almost always implicitly referred to the same core questions and ideas.

When I write about media, for example, I’m not writing as a blogger who gets off on taking potshots at the “MSM” (I think that’s the first time that acronym has appeared on this blog); my thoughts about media come directly from my thoughts about where the world is going, how economies are changing, how governance is changing, how human relationships are changing — not to mention our core values, mindsets, and worldview…

When I write about Michael Jackson, or Iran, or London Ontario, or Google Wave, I’m not “spreading myself thin,” I’m actually just repeating myself — reiterating the same ideas in different contexts.

But eventually that process of reiteration must culminate or it will start losing energy. I can either keep blogging week-in and week-out, cycling through contexts and events as if I could go on forever, or I can organize it into a coherent whole that’s capable of standing on its own, without me having to feed it every week.

As Paul Rodriguez pointed out recently, technology can make people more creative without necessarily culminating in creation (which I take to mean making something self-sufficient and generative; not just something to address wants and needs but something that makes itself wanted and needed). In fact, technology might even diminish creation.

“The resulting blend is rich in joy, emotion, and suspense,” but that can’t go on forever. We need it to coalesce from time to time into structures or we’ll lose our way.

When crises occur we look at our past creations for guidance and support.

In a very general way, this is what the investment banking industry lacked. They traded and traded but they never created anything self-sufficient — which is to say, they didn’t create anything that could hold its value without more trading.

So I don’t know about you or anyone else, but want to create creating something that holds its own value without retweeting…

Death of an Immortal

Brian — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:42:50 +0000

The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event.

Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu exceed 5%. Mashable later reported over 30% (“likely an underestimate”) at one time referred to Michael Jackson or “MJ.”

I have a hard time believing there’s anyone in the world who hasn’t already reacted to this. Even supposed ambivalence about Michael Jackson’s death is expressive. My own initial urge was to announce I didn’t care and wasn’t going to add to the din — until I realized I was adding to the din, and I must have cared somehow to say anything at all.

Then Phronk quickly and rightly argued against nonchalance – calling this a globally significant, history-changing event.

To understand the significance of the event we need to distinguish between “history” as actual events and “history” as the account, or story we compose around them… Don’t underestimate the power of the latter.

Granted, Michael Jackson’s death doesn’t change much of the structure or substance of our world. It doesn’t have any potency — the way a war does, or an election, or a scientific discovery, or economic booms and busts — like the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, which has affected the dynamic of a real, ongoing crisis with countless lives in limbo.

To that list of “potents” we can also add art, literature, and music. Music can be as potent and powerful as anything. Michael Jackson, more than anyone, proved that himself, acting as a beacon for oppressed and impoverished peoples around the globe. Even in Iran, I imagine, this is a significant event.

But as an artist, Michael Jackson washed up long ago. While many still loved the man and his music, he ceased to move the world forward.

What he did continue to do was act as the paradigm, or paragon of Pop. His example was projected onto the careers of every performer who followed (even alternative and indie performers could never escape the paradigm, to oppose something is still to be influenced by it).

He’s still at the centre of our popular culture — and our Pop Culture, Michael Jackson’s Pop Culture, is the only Pop Culture there ever was.

There was popular music and popular culture before him — there was even “pop” — but not with all of the interwoven connotations and assumptions and expectations we now have that make it a distinct and vital concept.

Think of mega-bestselling albums, choreographed music spectacles, videos, tabloid controversies, the cult of eternal youth – things Michael Jackson elevated into the mainstream but which we now take for granted – things that have even become so formulaic that we have a game show, American Idol, producing new pop stars on a four-month schedule.

It hardly impresses anyone anymore. Not the way it used to when an absurdly talented man in read leather morphed into a zombie and moonwalked onto the highest pedestal in the Pantheon of Pop.

While his passing in itself won’t make an immediate impact on music, it does provocatively symbolize an end.

We won’t see it that way — not yet anyways: not as long as there are people who, like me, have childhood memories of putting on little talent shows to the irresistible tune of Billie Jean, Beat It, or Thriller, or Bad, wearing a single white glove, abortively attempting to pull off his superhuman dance moves.

Michael Jackson — and more generally, the popular culture he represented — is ingrained in our identities.

But subsequent generations will come along that never shared the same vital symbols that have defined our time. It follows that they won’t be of the same culture, in a sense. They’ll have their own heroes and paradigms, their own concepts with different connotations, their own galvanizing events.

Compared to the political, social, and economic changes we’ve witnessed in the past year, the death of a pop star is insubstantial — but it is not meaningless, it is not insignificant.

Such an event affects us on a human, emotional level that technical, structual matters do not.

It’s also more symbolic. It doesn’t matter that the symbolism of an event is mostly made up and assigned by our imaginations after the fact. That’s precisely what makes them so important.

In a complex world that often makes little sense, rapidly unfolding towards an uncertain future, we need to imagine idealized and immortal figures. They can be our only means of orientation, navigation, and control through the dusky realm of the big picture, or simply, “What comes next?”

Like a real star, he’s something we never touch but is always there to remind us where we are and why we’re here.

Brian Frank » culture

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