Over at the Atlantic, James Somers reports on software called Etherpad that adds a temporal dimension to writing, tracking every keystroke and allowing users to "play back" the entire writing process. As Somers points out, that functionality--despite the fact that the Etherpad software is more or less defunct--holds a lot of promise for academia, both as a way to track writers' revisions over time and as a way to make sure that students are doing their own work.
I'm sort of partial to the idea that the reason we have rough drafts is so that no one has to see them, not so that everyone will have access to them forever--so I also have my doubts about this catching on among literary types. But it would definitely be useful for academic integrity, for tutoring, and--if actual literary writers used it--as a tool for understanding the cognitive process of writing at a level of granularity that prior technologies never allowed us to. After all, with pen and ink, typewriters, and computer files, we could only see drafts that the writers officially considered finished drafts, not the writing as it was constructed at a word-by-word level.
I, for one, was shocked to see the sketchy, outlinish way that Somers himself writes, which he shares here via the open-source descendant of the original product. I don't write my posts that way--they just come out in the first draft the way that they come out, and then I cut/paste/delete as necessary--but that is, actually, how I write research papers, which makes me wonder if we approach writing differently based on how we generically categorize it: "professional/research" vs. "casual/interpersonal".
Anyway, check it out.
Writing As a Spectator Sport
Facebook, Death, and Literature
Facebook is killing our souls. Or so culture pundits are claiming, as usual. Zadie Smith's review essay in the most recent NYRB trots out all the usual fears, as she reviews The Social Network and You Are Not a Gadget, the new book by Jaron Lanier, who has been discussed in these pages before.
Smith's take on The Social Network is interesting--it's when she wades into cultural critique of the impact of Facebook (buttressed of course by Lanier) that she goes astray. Smith's fears for the coming generation are somewhat incoherent--she worries, on the one hand, that Generation Facebook is more wonderfully gooey and rich than any of our measly technology allows us to show:
[T]he more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.Sweet of her, I guess. But on the other hand, she fears that she already sees how boring our technology is making us, as she compares her old (Harvard) students with her comparatively less interesting new (NYU) crop, and concludes that "it's absolutely clear to me that the students I teach now are not like the student I once was or even the students I taught seven short years ago at Harvard"--because the new students have a "denuded selfhood" unrecognizable to her. (Sucks to be her student and to read this article, don't you think? But I digress.)
What are we losing with Facebook? Principally, depth. The most compelling part of Lanier's argument (as Smith summarizes it) is that technological systems are essentially kinds of representation, and that they can only represent or encode a very small bit of what it means to be human. As Smith rightly points out, literature does this, too, but--and here's the key "difference"--it does it less. What's really on the table here is not a difference of kind, but a difference of degree, and Smith is smart enough to know this, but still unconnected enough (only connect, Zadie!) to want it to be a more dramatic and devastating difference than it is.
At a crucial turning point in the essay, Smith broaches that most literary of topics: death. Death (as we all know from the profound novels we try to imitate) is something that broods over us, coming home to roost in sudden epiphanies like Gabriel Conroy's at the end of "The Dead". Smith models this approach to death nicely as she walks casually to a movie theater to see The Social Network. "Soon I will be forty," she realizes, "then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan." Then she brings home the fundamental question: "Can you have that feeling, on Facebook?"
That's a rhetorical question, of course, and the obvious/ominous answer is "OMG no u tots cant!!!" Having primed us for this answer, Smith looks at how death does manifest itself on Facebook, glancing over the wall of a dead girl and puzzling over the strange new sort of people who choose to leave messages there: "Do they genuinely believe, because the girl's wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive?" Does Smith ask the same question when she sees flowers on tombstones, or when she hears speakers, at a funeral, addressing the dead? I'm going to guess no, but because these equivalent activities take place within social rituals Smith is used to, she doesn't feel the need to tear her hear or beat her breast over them.
The irony is that a substantial portion of Smith's fame comes from a very public conversation she herself has had with the dead. I'd like to ask her how she feels about E. M. Forster. Does she think he's dead, completely? Or, when she engages in a literary conversation with him, does she genuinely believe, because his novels continue to exist and be read, that he is still, in some sense, alive? And if so, is that a bad thing? And if we can't all become famous novelists, is it so wrong that some little bit of us should remain, as a memorial and a site of remembrance, in the space of representation? Or does everyone have to make a masterpiece to be worth that?
A radically different approach to death on Facebook appeared only a short while ago in the Atlantic, and it shows how, in a strange way, the voyeurism of Facebook allows people to feel close to each other in a fashion that would have otherwise been impossible--an example of the manner in which Facebook can actually humanize, rather than dehumanize, relationships that otherwise never would have existed at all. These are the sorts of things that paranoid pundits can't see, because they simply don't want to. People don't live in Facebook, so the lack of certain possibilities in Facebook does not mean the end of those possibilities. People may not have dizzying death epiphanies while logged onto Facebook. But people can't have sex on Facebook, either, and yet Smith doesn't seem to be concerned that we'll stop breeding.
While Facebook certainly conditions how we think of ourselves, its modes of conditioning thought aren't new; they're borrowed from older technological forms (the facebook, the visiting card, the trading card) that haven't destroyed society yet. If there are some people who are shaping themselves around Facebook personae and thereby "becoming" two-dimensional, so be it. There were people who shaped themselves around two-dimensional literary personae before Facebook; there have always been two-dimensional people who have tried to make themselves more interesting by shaping their personalities and social roles in relation to current forms of media.
That, I think, is the truth that a believer in the profundity of every human soul has a hard time accepting. It's harder to see that humanity is full of flat characters when you live in a highly literate culture, because people who borrow their quirks from Joyce and Freud appear more profound and interesting than those who borrow them from Facebook. So in a way, this breezy technology is a boon--it lets us see more of the shallowness of people than before, a vision that's only frightening if you were living in denial of it.
Literary sages are always good at denouncing the new, because it's so obviously different from what they're used to. Ruskin railed against railways in his lectures of the 1860s; by the time Forster was writing Howards End in the early 20th century, it was the railways that seemed to demonstrate a true, old, and stable connection with the land, while motorcars were fast, unpredictable, and destructive. And so Smith steps into the role of sage here, denouncing the technology she isn't yet totally familiar with and peppering it with the paranoid fears of commerce in which sages have always, somewhat paradoxically, traded. But while sages are great at finding flaws, they're incredibly bad at predicting the upside of change. The Atlantic article is one small example of that upside (although it maintains the fashionable skepticism that has to be fit into Facebook stories to make them sell); other upsides will reveal themselves over time. After all, writing itself was once a dramatic technological change, one that meant the end of oral memory--and yet somehow, we seem to have survived, even though our civilization doesn't look like an ancient bard might have predicted. Do any of us regret that?
Cyborg Anniversary
September marked the 50th birthday of the term "cyborg." Who knew? I certainly didn't, until I saw this post at the Atlantic.
More interesting than that story, though, is the larger project of which it's a part:
It is what it sounds like. The thinkers who spent September writing in honor of cyborgs range from the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal to Ryan North, founder of Dinosaur Comics. It should provide food for thought for quite a while, and from all ideological camps: a quick skim shows opinions ranging from "eek-stop-the-machines" to "we-are-all-cyborgs-now." Happy reading.
P.S.--In addition to being the title of this post, "Cyborg Anniversary" would be a good name for a band.
Easy Rider, Not-So-Easy Politics
"Idea of the Day" over at the NYT is drawing attention to the debate around the politics of Easy Rider, as briefly summarized in an obit of Dennis Hopper written by the libertarian magazine Reason.
Like most debates about the "political message" of any cultural object, this one intrigues at first, but quickly becomes boring. The main reason is that any cultural artifact that really succeeds among sophisticated critics over the long-term tends to be rich, complex, and unpredictable: almost by definition, it does not have a single message, political or otherwise...its message changes with its contexts.
A ludicrous metaphor should help explain how silly this form of interpretation is. Trying to determine whether a work of art generally supports left-wing or right-wing causes is like trying to determine whether a kitten generally faces East or West. First, you're using a simplistic measure ("left or right? East or West?") in a reality that has a lot of other possible orientations. Then, you're applying that bad framework to a highly unstable object that, in its ideal state, will change directions frequently, or challenge the notion of directionality in the first place.
The only interesting thing about these kinds of readings is watching how the interpreter turns somersaults to try to claim that his inadequate tools fit the complexity of real life, or real art--and there can, occasionally, be a kind of artistry even in those gymnastics. But for the most part (especially on the internet), the exercise of showing how a work is "progressive," "conservative," or "apparently-conservative/progressive-but-secretly-progressive/conservative" can only go so many ways, and those ways are all well-traveled. It's time to prioritize new, more interesting approaches.
Bing Has Great Ads, the iPhone...And Nifty Rictus
Bing, Microsoft's johnny-come-lately of search engines, just earned major points in my book. Their ads are catchy--and omnipresent--but I never understood how they could possibly compete in a market dominated, even saturated, by Google and Yahoo!.
Until tonight, that is. It was recently announced that the new iPhone will carry Bing, in addition to Google, as a search option. I guess that's good news for them, but what really caught my attention was not what's carrying Bing, but what Bing is carrying. That's right: Bing is now indexing Nifty Rictus.
For those even less knowledgeable about these things than I am, that means that a search for "nifty rictus" on Bing turns up this blog, while a search on Google or Yahoo! turns up "0 results" or results limited to pages (like my web site, or my old blog) that link to this one. One of the fastest ways to appear in the search results on a search engine, of course, is to submit your site for indexing. Given my skepticism about Bing, I submitted "http://niftyrictus.blogspot.com" to Google a few weeks ago, then to Yahoo! about a week ago, and finally to Bing a day or two after that. Not only was submitting to Bing far easier than submitting to, say, Yahoo! (which forces you to open an account with them to submit a site), but its turnaround was the fastest--which surprised me, since this blog is hosted by a Google subsidiary.
So thanks, Bing...and I apologize about my lack of faith in you. I was already using your ads as reference points to help explain why certain people are bad conversationalists and bad classroom participants. (I swear I had a class with a version of the search overload guy in it--see below.) Now I see that your strength isn't just advertising. I think you've made the right decision, boosting my little blog when all the big search engines just smirked. I'll try not to let you down.
How to Kill Your Own Blog
If my old blog taught me anything, it was that the quickest route to blog suicide is lengthy, essayistic posts. I didn’t like the way writing works on the Internet—I still don’t—and I wanted so badly to write micro-essays on a blog.
The thing is, no one has the time or will to read that kind of thing. There were always a few exceptions…but overall, I think it was a failed experiment. The blogs I most admired had long posts like the kind I wrote—and I discovered that I “admired” them, but I never had time to read them. I was always “saving them for later.” I then started “saving for later” my own posts, which always required more and more time, because I was oh-so-afraid of putting things out there that weren’t top notch. That is how a blog dies.
Here’s to quick cultural reflections, and quick personal reactions. Welcome to Nifty Rictus.