Carbonated Communication

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 Schrag's paper has been withdrawn!"

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

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

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

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

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

It's N-uanced

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections of an Armchair Luddite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working Without a Net

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello," growls a Slavic male.  "My name is Peggy."
.

Opting for Art - Second Draft

.
I cannot shake an image of the Artful Dodger trying to coax Eeyore through MOMA's revolving doors:

"Oh, Dodger, I don't want to go - nobody wants to look at old me.  I'm just here today and gone tomorrow .  .  .  . and this clown suit.

"Don't be silly Big-E!  They are going to love you here - they positively dwell on the gloomy.  They're thinking of renaming the place "O, Me, O, Ma."

The tableau springs to mind whenever I stumble across a particularly flagrant example of an artist inflating the CON in contemporary art. I wrote before [http://mayispeakfrankly.blogspot.com/2009/06/about-con-temporary-art.html] about wandered into an exhibit called Emerging Talents: New Italian Artists in Florence a couple of years ago to find a half-full bottle of bitten finger-nails defined thus:

Simone lalongo's work consists of a small pillbox.  The seemingly naive simplicity of the work is given the lie by its content: the artist's fingernails, the product of his anxiety and neuroses.

Well, move over Simone you ain't heard nothing yet!  I learned this from a recent edition of Wired: [http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/08/horse-blood-art/]

It seems that The Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for hybrid art was recently awarded to Laval-Jeantet for the provocatively titled May the Horse Live in Me, in which she effected what she calls a "hybrid man/animal existence" by injecting herself with horse blood.

One motivation behind the project was to find out how the animal immunoglobulins would affect her mind and body.  A motivation I would question as it presumes the presence of a mind.  Nonetheless, after showering much of Eastern Europe in bureaucratic paperwork – the “artists” were given permission to perform the piece at a gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In post-performance interviews Laval-Jeantet reports that she is now oversensitive to stimuli, and can't tolerate as much alcohol as previously.  Poor baby.

I find it hard to empathize with her malaise.  Remember she did shoot up with horse blood, for crying out loud.  The child needs therapy.

And that, perhaps, is what is so discouraging.  So many young artists take up the mantle of nihilism, claiming Equus asinus Eeyore as their patron Saint.  One cannot blame them too much.   It is de rigueur for my generation to assert that it is the role of the artist to reveal aspects of the human experience that others ignore.  But I'm not quite sure when that path got turned so firmly to the dark side.  Maybe we are attempting to atone for Timothy Leary and all those years of vaguely remembered, sensuous, gaudy, hedonism. But do we really want to encourage our creative kids to do horse blood?  I'm thinking it may be time to move beyond Op-Art and Pop-Art and take a stand for Opt-Art: art rooted in optimism, in happiness.

After all, who are the adults here?  Perhaps it does require a certain fullness of years to realize the precious depth of joy.
.

Hurricane Morning

I have the golf course pretty much to myself this morning.  My erstwhile companions, perhaps still shaken by Tuesday's earthquake, have been, I presume, somewhat deterred by the hurricane. 

I see one high flung-hawk being buffeted about by the gusts aloft.  The herons seem content to hug the edges of the ponds, aerodynamically perfect bodies facing into the wind atop absurdly fragile legs.  Across a couple of deserted fairways I see the lone white heron launch himself toward the next water hazard - it is how I imagine a dragon would fly - all awkward wings and churning energy.  In the ponds themselves all is quiet, save the geometry of raindrops, erased by wind driven wavelets aping their monster kin crashing ashore several hours to the east.  The muskrats, frogs and turtles seem snug below decks, sipping toddies, no doubt.

We sit at the very western edge of the storm, having again "dodged the bullet."  Still, the local TV stations have sent the young and foolish of their clan to the coast to cling to lamp posts, brace themselves against the lashing wind and horizontal rain to declare the patently obvious: "As you can see, Jane, it's really bad out here!"

I hope that folks to the northeast of us will be spared the disruption and devastation we experienced when Hurricane Fran motored right up the beltline here in Raleigh some 15 years ago, trashing the city and leaving us without power for more than a week. Today's far more gentle rumblings do remind me of the respect one must give these storms.  They strike me as a kind of meteorological giantism, a throwback to the age of dinosaurs, they stomp up the coastline leveling our petty constructions with an unintended flip of the tail. 

Still, the wind seems to be rising, and the intermittent rain grows more constant.  I see a respectable branch freshly down across the path ahead.  So I take the shorter fork toward home, not so much fearful of my life, but painfully aware of the embarrassment my wife would suffer from the headlines: Lunatic Killed While Out Walking During Hurricane.
.

iThink, therefore, i.

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

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

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

But i might be wrong, mightn't i?
.