Text Patterns

defacements

2010-02-09T09:12:00.000-06:00

Toby Lichtig confesses — no, boasts:

I am, of course, talking about defacing books – a much maligned practice of which I am a passionate disciple. My flirtation with textual mutilation started off at school with primly creased corners and pencilled underlinings, but I soon progressed to cocksure highlighting and full-blown ink-on-paper action – the effluence of engagement, the living, livid trace of dialogue. If, as the poststructuralists have suggested, the act of reading is an act of violence, then scrawling across the page in cheap biro must be its logical corollary.

I'm not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of "marginalia" (a term coined in 1832 by that keenest of annotators, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains. Personalising my books is an intrinsic part of the interaction (which is why I tend to be neurotic about holding on to what I've read). Perhaps it's the fault of my somewhat sluggish memory: the marks and scrawls help me to recall the text – and, crucially, the person I was when reading it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with. The smears on my copy of The Scarlet and the Black (coffee certainly; jam I think) take me back to the cafe in Rovereto in northern Italy, where I read it over the course of a week in 2002. When I look at my edition of Dracula, with half of its cover torn away, I'm reminded of that night at university when we ran out of Rizla packets and were too lazy to look for more orthodox material.

I annotate books all the time — often heavily — but let's do it with respect, okay?

a case of increasing relevance

2010-02-08T09:04:00.003-06:00

Jonathan Zittrain wrote these words in his book The Future of the Internet:

In the arc from the Apple II to the iPhone, we learn something important about where the Internet has been, and something more important about where it is going. The PC revolution was launched with PCs that invited innovation by others. So too with the Internet. Both were generative: they were designed to accept any contribution that followed a basic set of rules (either coded for a particular operating system, or respecting the protocols of the Internet). Both overwhelmed their respective proprietary, non-generative competitors, such as the makers of stand-alone word processors and proprietary online services like CompuServe and AOL. But the future unfolding right now is very different from this past. The future is not one of generative PCs attached to a generative network. It is instead one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.
These appliances take the innovations already created by Internet users and package them neatly and compellingly, which is good — but only if the Internet and PC can remain sufficiently central in the digital ecosystem to compete with locked-down appliances and facilitate the next round of innovations. The balance between the two spheres is precarious, and it is slipping toward the safer appliance.

Zittrain’s book was published in 2008, so these words may well have been written in 2007. They’re looking more and more prescient.

anatomy of a life

2010-02-08T06:30:00.003-06:00

I thought I could post a copy of this chart by Ward Shelley, but it didn't work out so well, so I'm just going to link to it. I put this up three days ago and scheduled it to post this morning, and oddly enough, I got an email last night asking me if I had seen Ward Shelley's stuff. Synchronicity! — so thanks, Ben, even though I was there a couple of days ahead of you.

to dream the impossible dream

2010-02-03T14:29:00.003-06:00

Jaron Lanier’s recent book You Are Not a Gadget has gotten a good deal of play, because it’s being read as the lament of a guy who was once in the digerati vanguard now standing athwart history shouting “Stop!” Which is probably not quite right, but it makes a good story. Lanier is not skeptical about technology or even about the Internet but rather about vast promises being made by proponents of the Web 2.0 world. And he does sound quite a bit like the people I quoted the other day who see the iPad as marking the decline, or even the end, of a relatively long history of DIY computing.

Another increasingly widespread belief Lanier doubts is this: that artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals can make money even if their works are pirated and copied — even if they give everything away for free — if they are willing to go on the road to perform, or develop similar entrepreneurial strategies. (See Jonathan Coulton and Cory Doctorow.) He was recently interviewed by the librarian Jessamyn West and had this to say on that subject:

If you want to know how many people are making a living by giving away things on the internet then making it up in lectures, there's an easy way to gauge this, because the people who hire lecturers are lecture agencies: I've never met anyone who earned a substantial living from lecturing who didn't have a lecture agent. So all you have to do is go to the major lecture agency within town and look up the number of clients who are doing this. I've done this casually, and I think the answer is under 100, probably under 50. Maybe between 50 and 100. So there are people who are doing it, and of those, I'd have to say the vast majority have day jobs. So, Chris Anderson has done pretty well on the lecture circuit but he also has other gigs with Conde Nast and Wired, so he doesn't have to rely on it, which is a huge thing. Being able to make money is one thing. Being able to make reliable money is how you can have children. They're totally, totally different things. So, I don't think he would quit his Wired job.

Good point — alas. It’s hard even for me, a person who loves teaching, not to fantasize about being able to make a living writing for the Web and only for the Web: Have Laptop, Will Earn a Living. But it ain’t going to happen — not for me, and not for many people.

West’s whole interview with Lanier is worth reading.

(The rest of this week will be crazy, so I’ll see y'all next week. Ciao!)

my new companion

2010-02-03T08:33:00.002-06:00

My dear friend John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture — which you should be subscribing to, by the way — called yesterday evening and asked if he could drop off something at my house. It turned out to be a copy of the brand new Oxford Companion to the Book, which I will be reviewing for B&C. Oh my goodness. I have so much else to do, but . . . this is really, really beautiful.

Anna and Levin

2010-02-02T08:04:00.001-06:00

Stephen Emms thinks Tolstoy blew the ending of Anna Karenina. If you haven't read the book, you might want to stop reading here.

People sometimes say the same about the last narrative section of War and Peace: “Gee, that’s anticlimactic. Who wants to see Natasha having to change babies’ diapers and live a life of boring domesticity?” Or, as Emms says here about the end of Anna, “It's like ending a stupendous five-course meal with a bowl of thin soup.”

There are two possibilities here. The first, the one that Emms endorses, is that Tolstoy is a novelist of stupendous power and nearly godlike brilliance who, unaccountably, has no idea how to end a book. The other possibility is that Tolstoy does not simply lose his gifts when he gets near the end of a book, but rather has very good reasons for giving us endings that we certainly don't expect and probably don't want. Emms appears not to consider the second option.

Emms notes that while Anna falls into despair and ends her life, the book’s other protagonist, Levin, somehow survives — despite suffering his own profound depression and coming very close indeed to suicide. Here too Emms can think of only one possible explanation: “On the basis of this novel, it could be argued that Tolstoy rejects female experience as domestic, limited, even lacking in spiritual insight, because the one woman who attempts to transgress these boundaries ends up committing suicide. Superiority of male vision and male mastery of narrative is evident.” Emms asks, “How can [Tolstoy] allow the last word on Anna to tumble from the pinched mouth of Vronsky's mother” — that is, the bigoted, selfish mother of Anna’s vain and thoughtless lover — “who says witheringly: ‘Her death was the death of a bad woman, a woman without religion’?”

Emms does not come out and say that he thinks that Tolstoy shares the judgment of Vronsky’s mother — surely he knows better. But I take it that he wants Tolstoy to somehow refute that judgment. But that’s not necessary: it is self-refuting. And Emms would better understand what Tolstoy is up to here if he had noticed the book’s epigraph: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” That is, “vengeance is mine — it is not yours.” Vronsky’s mother has raised her son to be utterly self-regarding, and cares nothing for the life — Anna’s life — that her son’s self-regard has destroyed. (Vronsky himself is actually not nearly as bad as his mother: he genuinely loves Anna, insofar as it is possible for someone like him to love.) The foulness of her easy contempt is palpably evident — for those with eyes to see.

By telling the story in this way Tolstoy is refusing to direct his readers: he lets us form our own judgments and in that way reveal our own characters. He knows that many of us will claim the right and privilege of judging Anna, of proclaiming vengeance on her — just as Job’s “friends” do in that most mysterious of the Bible’s books. He knows that many will say, again along the lines of those who surround Job, that Levin survives because he is good and Anna dies because she is bad.

But the careful reader of the book will see it very differently. What Levin has that Anna does not have is, depending on whether you are or are not religious, either luck or grace — but in either case it’s not merit. Tolstoy makes it very clear that, in his society, a man who chooses to pursue a married woman in the way that Vronsky pursues Anna will pay something of a social price, but a small one. Vronsky continues to be received in polite society. But Anna risks everything for this affair: she loses her husband, her son, her place in society. She becomes an outcast, so when her relationship with Vronsky dies, she has literally nothing left to sustain her. And this is why she takes her life.

Levin has it better. His sins, which are many, do not separate him from society or from his family. Tellingly, he does not meet Anna until late in the book, when sheer circumstances make it impossible for him to fall in love with her or for her to seduce or respond to him. But had the circumstances been different . . . ? Above all, Tolstoy makes clear, when Levin is in his darkest days he has work to do: just the mechanical routine of life keeps him alive until he has his spiritual awakening. Anna, again, had nothing of the kind. Anna had nothing at all.

These things happen, Tolstoy tells us. One life is torn apart, another is renewed and enriched, and we cannot — if we are wise, we dare not — judge that anyone gets what he or she deserves. Likewise, at the end of War and Peace, he forces us to see that those periods of our lives which are charged with drama, fevered by event, must be succeeded by much longer periods of ordinary everyday experience, and that the brilliant young girl will, necessarily, some day become the middle-aged matron.

What Stephen Emms fails to see is that Tolstoy, who mastered the conventions of realistic fiction more fully than anyone ever has, also understood the false consolations that we so often want from fiction — and refused to give them to us. This is a mark not of incompetence or narrowness or provincial bigotry or sexism, but of the highest possible artistic genius.

tinkerer's sunset

2010-02-01T06:05:00.001-06:00

I think it’s really important to meditate on what Alex Payne says here:

The iPhone can, to some extent, be forgiven its closed nature. The mobile industry has not historically been comfortable with openness, and Apple didn’t rock that boat when it released the iPhone. The iPhone was no more or less open than devices that preceded it, devices like those from Danger that required jumping similar bureaucratic hurdles to develop for.
That the iPad is a closed system is harder to forgive. One of the foremost complaints about the iPhone has been Apple’s iron fist when it comes to applications and the development direction of the platform. The iPad demonstrates that if Apple is listening to these complaints, they simply don’t care. This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free. . . .
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Wonderful as Apple’s recent products are, I am actively trying to figure out how to distance myself from a company I’ve been committed to for a quarter of a century. Whether I’ll discover something that doesn't involve simply leaping into the arms of Google remains to be seen.

definitive iPad thoughts

2010-01-30T09:15:00.001-06:00

John Gruber is one of my favorite tech commentators, but he’s not doing so well with the iPad. He has divided the world into those who “get it” (i.e., adore the iPad) and those who “don’t get it.” This is an old Andrew Sullivan move, and one of the more annoying ones. Saying “you just don't get it” is not an argument; in fact, it’s a straightforward refusal to discuss an issue rationally.

Gruber and others — Stephen Fry, for instance — have said that it’s impossible to understand just how fabulous the iPad is until you hold it in your hands. In one sense I’m sure that’s true, but let’s remember that holding a device in your hands for twenty minutes (which is how long Gruber got) is not the same as using it day in and day out. Let’s think about this one task at a time:

Typing. How much typing are you going to want to do on the iPad? Even in Apple’s promotional video the guy looks awkward, pecking with three or four fingers with the device propped on his lap. You’re only going to be able to do short emails, texts, tweets — anything more and you’ll need to use the (optional) keyboard and dock. But to do that you’ll have to sit at a desk: it won't balance on your lap the way a laptop does. And then how much typing will you want to do on a screen that’s about the size of the original Macintosh’s?

Moreover, much of my writing is done while switching back and forth between my browser — where I read things that make me think, copy and paste quotations, and post links — and my text editor. Writing this post on an iPad would be a major pain in the neck, and this is just a blog post, not a novel.

I think even the biggest iPad fans are likely to concede this point — they will presumably retort that the iPad is basically a media consumption device. But have they thought about how much time we spend on our computers typing?

Okay, then, on to the media.

Music. First of all, you’ll need to make sure that you get an iPad with enough memory to hold a good bit of your music collection, at least until Apple moves to cloud-based music storage (which is bound to happen). But even if you do, you’re probably only going to be able to listen to the music while sitting down, likely with the iPad in your lap, or right next to you. In other words, this won't be significantly different from listening on your laptop, and therefore won't be nearly as convenient as listening on an iPod.

Photos. Photos will definitely be fun to look at on the iPad. How much time do you spend doing that?

Movies. This would seem to be a strength of the iPad, except that its 4.3 format significantly reduces the available size for widescreen films. Good, but not great. Movies are going to look a lot better on your laptop.

Web browsing. I hate Flash with a passion, but it is all over the internet, and that’s going to lead to a lot of frustration. It’s not just a matter of the games you can't play — Apple likes that, because it encourages you to buy games from their App Store — but think of all the retailers whose sites are Flash-based. (Come to think of it, maybe Apple likes that too: if you can't shop at J. Crew, that leaves you with more money to spend at the iTunes Store.)

Calendar. Apple seems to be making a big deal out of the iPad’s calendar, which is pretty sad. No doubt it looks really cool, but won't it almost always be a great deal more convenient to look at the calendar on your smartphone?

Getting work done. The one thing that I saw in the videos that I really like is the iPad version of Keynote. It would be great fun to create a Keynote presentation on the iPad — maybe when you’re traveling and didn't even know that you were going to need one — plug it into a projector, and wow people. But a great many of my Keynote presentations are made by copying and pasting text and images from my browser and from other applications on my computer. How easy is that going to be on a computer that can't have multiple applications open? And how much of the information (especially text-based information) that you need will even be on the iPad? It’s probably back home on your iMac or MacBook, which at some point in your travels you’ll probably be wishing you had with you.

So, in short: I have major doubts about the utility, for most users, of the iPad. There isn't a single thing it does that isn't done better by other products in the Apple lineup.

And one more comment: everyone who is sold on this device is trying to refute the critics — people like me who “just don't get it” — by quoting all the people who dismissed the iPhone. But let’s remember two things: first, some of us who are skeptical about the iPad were really enthusiastic about the iPhone, right from its first appearance; and second, I don't notice anyone quoting the people who predicted that the Apple TV would be a failure, or that the MacBook Air would be a fringe product. Not all of Apple’s products have done what the iPhone has done.

So for what it’s worth, my prediction: over the long haul, the iPad will be a minor success, but not a game-changer. It will be a heck of a lot more popular than the Apple TV, but nothing like the iPhone. And many of the people who buy them will within three months be setting them aside to gather dust, because they’ll discover that they’re happier with their smaller but utterly portable iPhones. I have a feeling that this time next year there will be a great many iPads available on eBay.

Carta Geografica Completa di tutti i Regni del Mondo

2010-01-30T07:42:00.003-06:00

One of Matteo Ricci's maps. Amazing things may be seen at the Library of Congress. Thanks to Ryan H. for the tip.

the non-digital classroom

2010-01-29T09:05:00.001-06:00

Mark Bauerlein is making a prediction:

As more kids grow up writing in snatches and conforming to the conventional patter, problems will become impossible to overlook. Colleges will put more first-year students into remedial courses, and businesses will hire more writing coaches for their own employees. The trend is well under way, and educators will increasingly see the nondigital space as a way of countering it. For a small but critical part of the day, they will hand students a pencil, paper, dictionary, and thesaurus, and slow them down. Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths, and say, “I can do better than that.”
The nondigital space will appear, then, not as an antitechnology reaction but as a nontechnology complement. Before the digital age, pen and paper were normal tools of writing, and students had no alternative to them. The personal computer and Web 2.0 have displaced these tools, creating a new technology and a whole new set of writing habits. This endows pen and paper with a new identity, a critical, even adversarial one. In the nondigital space, students learn to resist the pressures of conformity and custom, to think and write against the fast and faster modes of the Web. Disconnectivity, then, serves a crucial educational purpose, forcing students to recognize the technology everywhere around them and to see it from a critical distance.

I hope he’s right, because this is already what I try to do in my classes. Though (as you can see) I blog, I tweet, I tumbl 4 ya, I set up blogs for some of my classes, I receive and respond to student writing electronically, and I even use Wikipedia, during class I focus almolst all of my attention on the reading and annotation of paper codices. Because I think those are technologies worth knowing — not the only technologies worth knowing, but important ones, ones with which all college students need considerable facility.

But will educators come to recognize, as Bauerlein predicts they will, the value of these tools and the power they yield of achieving a “critical distance” on other, more recent, technologies? I would like to agree, but I doubt it. Educators by and large equate “technology” with “very recent electronic technology,” and passionately believe that all problems have technological solutions. I can't imagine many of them doing what they would call “turning back the clock.”

But I devoutly hope I’m wrong. The people best equipped for navigating our world are those who have knowledge of multiple technologies, and multiple kinds of technologies. The Luddite and the techno-celebrant alike are crippled by the narrowness of their technological equipment.

a quick iPad roundup

2010-01-28T07:20:00.001-06:00

Gruber has the need for speed:

Lastly, there’s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be ‘fast’. . . . It is fast, fast, fast. The hardware really does feel like a big iPhone — and a big original iPhone at that, with the aluminum back. (I have never liked the plastic 3G/S iPhones as much as the original in terms of how it feels in my hand.) I expected the screen size to be the biggest differentiating factor in how the iPad feels compared to an iPhone, but I think the speed difference is just as big a factor. Web pages render so fast it was hard to believe. After using the iPhone so much for two and a half years, I’ve become accustomed to web pages rendering (relative to the Mac) slowly. On the iPad, they seem to render nearly instantly. (802.11n Wi-Fi helps too.)
The Maps app is crazy fast. Apps launch fast. Scrolling is fast. The Photos app is fast. . . .
But: everyone I spoke to in the press room was raving first and foremost about the speed. None of us could shut up about it. It feels impossibly fast. (And our next thought: What happens if Apple has figured out a way to make a CPU like A4 that fits in an iPhone? If they pull that off for this year’s new iPhone, look out.)

AKMA makes an important point for those of us who share a Text Patterns frame of mind:

And the super-good news, if Apple doesn’t ruin everything (and I don’t trust them not to), is that the iBook app rests on the open EPUB book format. I repeat my assertion/plea that this is the moment for some university press to lay claim to a huge untapped market share.

And for Nick Carr, the iPad (I infer this, anyway) is another step in decline of writing. Carr thinks that reading is in decent shape, and will probably continue to be, but the reign of “texting” means that “Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.”

I'm all ears

2010-01-27T15:56:00.002-06:00

If I ever write Text Patterns: the Book, this will absolutely be the cover image. (Here, via Culture Making.)

copyright and making sense

2010-01-27T08:35:00.005-06:00

We interrupt this hiatus to comment that Larry Lessig's essay in The New Republic on copyright and the Google Book Settlement is by far the best thing I've read on the settlement and the many associated issues. Sample:

My wife had just given birth to our third child. On the morning of the child’s third day, doctors were worried about jaundice. By the evening, the child had fallen into a state of severe lethargy. We called the doctor. He wanted a report in two hours. If she did not improve, he wanted her taken to the emergency room. By midnight she had not improved, and so I bundled her into the car seat and raced to nearby Children’s Hospital.

As I sat waiting for the doctor, I began reading an article I had found through Google about jaundice and its dangers. Fortunately, the piece was published by the American Family Physician, which makes its articles available freely on the Internet. And so with an increasing feeling of panic, I read about the condition--hyperbilirubinemia--that the doctor feared our child had developed.

I reached a critical part of the article. It referred to a table. I turned the page to see the table. The table was missing. In its place was a notice: “The rightsholder did not grant rights to reproduce this item in electronic media.” No one had licensed the table for free distribution. Distribution was thus blocked. “Have your lawyer call my lawyer,” the article seemingly urged. “We’ll work something out.”

I sat in that waiting room chair staring in disbelief. It was a relief of sorts, to fear for the future of our culture rather than the future of my daughter. But I was astonished. I could not believe that we were this far down the path to insanity already. And that experience spurs me to ask some urgent questions. (The kid is fine, by the way.) Before we continue any further down this culturally asphyxiating road, can we think about it a little more? Before we release a gaggle of lawyers to police every quotation appearing in any book, can we stop for a moment to consider whether this way of organizing access to culture makes sense? Does this complexity get us something we would not get under the older system? Does this innovation in obsessive control produce any new understanding? Is it really progress?

The whole thing is a must-read.

report

2010-01-26T22:58:00.003-06:00

Back from my travels — where I was treated wonderfully hospitably by the good folks at Baylor — but under the weather. I'll get back on the horse ASAP, but I don't know when P will be.

Amazon's bad move

2010-01-23T08:38:00.003-06:00

Amazon's decision to open the Kindle platform for app development is not smart. It seems obvious that Amazon is anticipating the arrival of the Great Apple Tablet and is trying to forestall its dominance by turning the Kindle into a multiple-use device. In other words, Amazon is granting Steve Jobs's argument that "general-purpose devices will win the day because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device" and trying, belatedly, to turn the Kindle into a kind of tablet.

This will never work. The Kindle, with its black-on-gray screen and slow processor, is engineered to be "dedicated device" — dedicated to reading — and simply doesn't have the hardware to be anything else. (As anyone knows who has tried to use the Kindle's primitive browser.) And it's the fact that the Kindle just does this one thing that attracts me, and many other people, to it. I like not being able to to anything but read on it. I don't want other features competing for my attention. And the more assiduously the Kindle tries to bolt on extraneous and (necessarily) poorly-implemented features, the more obvious will be its inferiority to Apple's tablet.

Kit Eaton has argued that 2010 will be the year of the e-reader, but the only year of the e-reader, because e-readers will necessarily be supplanted by the Apple tablet and other general-purpose devices. This may be true in the sense that over time general-purpose devices will outsell e-readers, but e-readers can still be successful products that make a lot of money for their manufacturers — if those manufacturers don't try to ape the tablets, but instead focus on creating the best possible environment for reading.

new world, potentially brave

2010-01-22T08:23:00.002-06:00

I’ve written elsewhere, once or twice, about the experience of homeschooling my son Wesley. We’re still at it, and now, in the humanities portion of his curriculum, studying Dirty London — sanitation and social class in the Victorian era. He finished reading Dickens’s Bleak House last week, and today will be wrapping up Steven Johnson’s terrific account of the conquering of cholera in London, The Ghost Map.

I read The Ghost Map last year on my Kindle, but thought I had bought a paperback copy for Wes. However, it appears that I forgot. No problem: I handed him the Kindle, re-read the book via the Kindle app on my iPhone, and then prepared a reading quiz for him that he’ll access in Google Docs. When he writes about The Ghost Map and Bleak House later, I’ll show him how to find some useful sources online, especially through Google Books, and I’ll show him how to find searchable texts of both books, for instance via Amazon’s Look Inside the Book feature. As I was writing up the quiz last night, it struck me how recently this way of doing things — teaching with these particular technologies — would have been unimaginable. And yet to both of us it all seems perfectly natural.

No big deal, I guess, and nothing original here. But sometimes the obvious suddenly strikes home, if you know what I mean.

(Off to Baylor this weekend, back on Wednesday. Light or nonexistent posting until then, but it’s possible that fascinating things will show up via the Twitter feed.)

I got Googled too

2010-01-22T05:27:00.000-06:00

Mark Zuckerberg is probably right when he says that privacy is ceasing to be a value; and then of course there's Scott McNealy's notorious — and now long-ago — comment that "You have no privacy anyway. Get over it". But I tend to think that there are degrees in these matters, and distinctions to be made. A great deal of personal information about me — i.e., about my character, personality, interests, friends, etc. — is available for anyone weird or bored enough to search online for it, but probably not as much as there would be if I used Facebook. But I'm sure I am as open to financial scrutiny, not by the average person googling but by people with access to the financial industries' many tools, as anyone else.

So there may not be as much privacy to preserve as there once was, but there's still some. And while I really don't believe that the particulars of my private life are of any interest to Google — they make money off aggregating data, not parsing it person by person — I can still get uncomfortable when I think about how much of my day-to-day life goes through Google's servers. That sometimes gets me thinking about the virtues of paper-based life organization, but more often what I consider is distributing my online information: moving my calendar from Google Calendar to my Backpack account, shifting from Google Reader to the gorgeous NewsFire or Fever, using a different search engine, and so on.

But here's the thing: Google gets more information from my Gmail account than from all those other sources — plus my search history — combined and multiplied several times over. So if I really want to distance myself from Google, I should probably ditch Gmail, right? And yet I haven't. Minor consideration: a quick check of All Mail yields 23,874 messages. What more can they learn? Major consideration: Gmail is so radically superior to any other email client that I can't bear the thought of going back to the Bad Old Days. And here's how Google and other smart companies defeat our concerns: by making products so valuable to us that we're willing to sell our privacy in order to get them.

asciimeo

2010-01-19T14:10:00.003-06:00

Speaking of text patterns, how about these beautiful videos in text? And note the related iPhone app.

(Hat tip to Matt Frost.)

reading resolutions

2010-01-19T14:00:00.000-06:00

Normally I think such resolutions are bad ideas, but these by Wayne Gooderham are sufficiently anti-resolutional that I like them:

My Reading Resolutions are important to me for the simple reason that if I'm not reading something in which my full interest is engaged, the feeling of disaffection tends to encroach upon all other areas of my life, rendering me a shadow of my former self, left to wander listlessly from room to room, sighing heavily and gazing wanly out of windows. Well, metaphorically, at least.
Of course, first and foremost, reading should be a pleasurable activity. Therefore, the whole point of my Reading Resolutions is to make me a better reader (thereby increasing my reading pleasure and the pleasure I get out of life, and so on). To this end, if it turns out I have misjudged a resolution and it is in fact having a detrimental effect on my reading life (and all that follows), I don't hesitate in breaking it. For example, one of my RRs for 2009 was to finish every book I started. This was a resolution I was forced to stick to at the time due to a project I was working on, and meant long and painful slogs through The Tin Drum, East of Eden and The Glass Bead Game (apologies in advance if these are your favourite books: they just weren't for me). Now, at the end of 2009, I'm happily breaking this resolution and reverting back to my old reading habit of giving up on books I'm not enjoying, on the grounds that life's too short to spend reading something you don't like.

information wants to be really, really expensive

2010-01-19T07:05:00.003-06:00

Nick Carr is grumpy in ways I find consistently interesting. I’m going to quote a big chunk here and commend it to your thinking apparatus:

Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today.
I'm guessing that by the time you reached the end of that sentence, you found yourself ROFLAO. I mean, WTF, this the Era of Abundance, isn't it? The Age of Free. Digital manna rains from the heavens.
Sorry, sucker. The joke's on you.
Do the math. Sit down right now, and add up what you pay every month for:
-Internet service
-Cable TV service
-Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging)
-Landline telephone service
-Satellite radio
-Netflix
-Wi-Fi hotspots
-TiVO
-Other information services
So what's the total? $100? $200? $300? $400? Gizmodo reports that monthly information subscriptions and fees can easily run to $500 or more nowadays. A lot of people today probably spend more on information than they spend on food.
The reason we fork out all that dough is (I'm going to whisper the rest of this sentence) because we place a high monetary value on the content we receive as a result of those subscriptions and fees.
Now somebody remind me how we all came to think that information wants to be free.

Of course, not all of us are on the hook for all of those, but it’s worth taking a few minutes to add up what we do pay for, and how much. Sobering.

One of Nick's commenters suggests that his point is misleading because we're not paying all that much per bit of data. That's probably true, but it may not make the point the commenter wants it to make. Consider an analogy to restaurant dining: Americans in the past twenty years have spent far, far more on eating out than any of their ancestors did, and that's a significant development even if you point out that huge portions of fat-laden food mean that they're not paying all that much per calorie. In fact, that analogy may work on more than one level: are we unhealthily addicted to information (of any kind, and regardless of quality) in the same way that we're addicted to fatty foods?

things to come

2010-01-18T08:49:00.004-06:00

Friends, I've been traveling the past few days — visiting family in Alabama, driving around in my daddy's old pickup, eating at Chick-fil-a and Jim 'n' Nick's — yeah, they've gotten kinda fancy and above their raisin', what with slick websites and Twitter feeds and all, but they still serve darn good smoked meat — and I have now returned to a big pile of work. And then at the end of the week I'll be headed to Texas for a few days to give a talk at Baylor on "The End of the Book and the Future of Reading."

Ergo, posting will be light for a while — but take heart, interesting links will continue to appear on my tumblelog, and all those posts are accessible via the Twitter feed you will see to the right of this page. And I may post a sample passage or two from the upcoming lecture.

speak, memory

2010-01-18T07:26:00.003-06:00

Evan Maloney writes thoughtfully about how inconsistent our memories of books can be. "Are our memories of books determined by how much we enjoy them? Not for me. I read Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late in the mid-90s. I thought it was fantastic, and I never thought of it again until someone mentioned it last year. Conversely, in 2002 I read John Irving's A Widow for One Year, and I thought very little of it, and yet I often remember the little I thought." This is true for me as well: I can't discover any pattern that would account for what I remember and what I forget.

Maloney concludes by saying "Nobody can fully understand or explain the relationship between reading and memory. And that's a wonderful thing, because the mystery of how we remember a book is something that leads us deep inside the magic of storytelling." Well, if you say so. For me it's more a testimony to the frustrating unreliability and irregularity of memory.

Kindles and the blind

2010-01-14T07:22:00.001-06:00

Here’s a curious story:

Three U.S. universities will stop promoting the use of Amazon.com's Kindle DX e-book reader in classrooms after complaints that the device doesn't give blind students equal access to information.
Settlements with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed College in Portland, Oregon, were announced Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice. The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind had complained that use of the Kindle devices discriminates against students with vision problems.
The complaints about the Kindle were based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability.
The three universities were among six schools participating in an Amazon.com pilot program testing the use of the Kindle DX in classrooms. On Monday, a fourth participating school, Arizona State University, also reached a settlement with the DOJ and the two organizations representing the blind.
Three other schools announced in late 2009 they will not deploy Kindle in classrooms.
The Kindle DX has the capability to convert text to synthesized speech, but the device does not include text-to-speech functionality for its menu and navigational controls, the DOJ said in a press release. Some reviewers and users of the device's text-to-speech software have also said the speech is difficult to listen to and the conversion can be inaccurate.

These points are absolutely correct, but doesn't the logic require that the universities stop using books as well? Presumably in classes that do require paper codexes, blind students do not use those editions, but rather Braille editions (or, if students just have very poor vision, large print editions). So why not follow the same policy in this case — Kindles for sighted students and Braille editions for the blind? I'm sure I'm missing something.

(Via Slashdot.)

it's a comin' and it's gonna be big

2010-01-13T06:21:00.001-06:00

Kevin Kelly seems to be confused. About the (supposedly) emerging Brave New World he calls the Technium, he says, “I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it.” But then, immediately afterwards, he says, “I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option.” Isn't that what in the pre-Technium days we used to call a contradiction?

Really, all Kelly means — as the whole interview shows — is that most people won’t opt out of new technological possibilities. But of course that tells us nothing about how many will, how many should, and how many will actually never have the Technium available to them because they’re too poor.

But in these matters Kelly is an evangelist — literally:

KELLY: But I don’t think the Technium is only about humans. It’s a type of learning. It’s a type of expression. It’s a type of possibility.
The Technium works as an ecology. Just as evolution has a longterm direction as we look 4 billion years into the past, so technology increases complexity and diversity, with increasing power.
LAWLER: So technology is part of evolution or God—that which drives the universe?
KELLY: Exactly. Some people call this the Great Story. Roving preacher Michael Dowd talks at churches about this alternative creation story. It is about evolution through God, that which started from nothing, grew into particles that gained mass and complexity, and then clumped into molecules and then became dust and planets and so forth. And technology is the latest variety.
LAWLER: So the Technium is one of the ways in which the universe is getting to know itself? And by increasing complexity, the universe becomes more self-aware?
KELLY: Exactly. I think of God as the intelligence of mind that is increasing the complexity of the universe.

He goes on to say, “In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence, enjoying what to many of us is the greatest conceivable ecstasy, the ecstasy of a brain, an intelligence, actually conscious of the whole, and with executive force capable of guiding it to a perfectly benevolent and harmonious end. That is what we are working to. When you are asked, ‘Where is God? Who is God?’ stand up and say, ‘I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole of society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends.’”

Oh wait — that isn’t Kevin Kelly, that's George Bernard Shaw, writing one hundred and three years ago. Kelly appears not to be aware how elderly his theology is — and how little its persuasive power is augmented by calling it the Technium instead of the Life Force.

(My title, by the way, comes from an old Roz Chast cartoon: those are the words spoken by one of the "Four Press Agents of the Apocalypse." )

Farewell, Mr. Dalton

2010-01-12T08:03:00.006-06:00

From Christopher at Survival of the Book I learned that the last B. Dalton bookstores are closing. I can't help but feel some nostalgia about this, because B. Dalton is one of the three employers I have had in my entire life. And my first employer.

B. Dalton came to Birmingham, Alabama in the summer of 1975, when I had just graduated from high school, as part of a brand-new mall called Century Plaza. (The mall itself, after many years of decline, closed last year.) I was sixteen, and this was my first job. For the first month, when we couldn't get into the still-under-construction building, we worked out of a min-warehouse, lugging books and supplies down a long alley the UPS trucks were too big to get through. Then, when the store became available, we lugged them all back down the alley and onto trucks, drove half-a-mile, and unloaded them into the store. All this in an Alabama July. I don't know whether I’ve even been so consistently hot, tired, and sore.

What I remember most about that month is the wonder of taking from their boxes book after book that I had never heard of before, reading their covers, and then setting many of them aside to purchase at my 30% employee discount. (We couldn't buy anything until we got into the store and got the registers set up, which meant that when I finally got to purchase the books, I used up most of my paycheck.) What impresses me now, as I look back, is the hopefulness that underlay the original inventory of the store. It contained a remarkably full selection of literature, philosophy, science, anthropology, psychology — you name it. Of course, many of those books didn't sell, and the home office in Minnesota knew it: B. Dalton was the first bookstore chain to computerize its inventory, and every evening when we closed we had to set the registers to send the day’s data through a modem to the General Office. So after six months the store’s inventory had altered for the worse, from my point of view, even though it certainly matched our clientele better.

(Incidentally, even before the store opened we got several calls a day from people wanting to speak to Mr. Dalton. It was remarkably hard to convince some of them that there was no no Mr. Dalton, that the store's name was a fiction. People are used to that sort of thing now — I doubt that anyone comes to Applebee's looking for Mr. Applebee — but it was a relatively unfamiliar practice at the time.)

Before the official opening date of the mall, the store was ours, and all the books therein. It was therefore something of a shock to have to open those gates one morning and let the rabble in. We felt violated, somehow — especially since we had been in the store until well after midnight the night before cleaning the parquet floors and then mopping them with linseed oil.

I was actually the person who opened the gate the first time, and as I did a woman walked in, approached me, and asked a question. Our first customer! “Do you have The Seagull, by Jonathan Livingston?”

I paused. “Um, you must mean Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”

“No,” she said, confidently. “I know what I want. I want The Seagull, by Jonathan Livingston.”

I paused again. “Well,” I said finally, “we don't have that.”

She turned on her heel and walked out. And thus began my career as a book salesman.