The Road is the most majestic verbal portrayal of ashen barrenness I’ve ever read. The beauty of devastation, of stripping everything away, of forests after fires, life after collapse. I have tried before to make sense of the western enchantment with decay, destruction, and death. Perhaps it has to do with the persistent lure of the apocalypse or our recognition of the ultimate futility in measuring our lives by the materials that surround us.

Despite McCarthy’s transcendent style of writing, The Road still fits firmly within the genre of apocalyptic fiction. We are not told what causes the apocalypse, but a bright pink flash lights up the sky and several years later only a few survivors remain. Father and son – bound by the love of each other – take to the road in search of food, supplies, community, life. What they find are the sick, the enslaved, the roaming bands of bloodthirsty, barbarous gangs. Just like all other apocalyptic works, The Road relies on the assumption that a scarcity of material goods creates a scarcity of empathy.

He could see the tracks of the truck through the wet ash, faint and washed out, but there. He thought that he could smell them. The boy was pulling at his coat. Papa, he said.
What?
I’m afraid for that little boy
I know. But he’ll be all right.
We should go get him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. We could take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat.
We can’t.
And I’d give that little boy half of my food.
Stop it. We can’t.
He was crying again. What about the little boy? he sobbed. What about the little boy?

I hear two common explanations for moral behavior. The first strikes me as more secular: that we treat others well with the hope that they will do the same in the future; moral investment as a type of social insurance. This reasoning is used as an explanation for why small town folk are friendlier, and why cities wear a constant frown. The second worldview sees moral behavior as a result of human nature – something we are born with – and this is often tied to religion; the idea that a greater power has endowed humans with a unique, innate sense of ethical justice.

It is clear that Cormac McCarthy subscribes to the latter worldview. The boy is one of the youngest survivors on earth. (He was born just months after the apocalyptic flash.) Yet he is also the emblem of compassion. In a world of death, destruction and distrust, the boy shows constant concern and compassion for every creature they come across. At times the religious symbolism is over the top. There is constant reference to the boy “carrying the fire” (”a binding, metaphysical and ubiquitous power” is how Wikipedia describes The Force), and he is repeatedly described as a prophet and god. For me, all of the biblical allusions took away from the stripped down elegance of the prose.

What is this mysterious “fire” that the boy is carrying? Perhaps it is moral truth, or justice, or even the holy spirit. Or maybe it is simply the will to live. And maybe the will to live depends on believing that there is something – some decency, some inherent value other than selfishness – worth saving.

Like a delicious dessert eaten too quickly, it is difficult to slow down while reading The Road and savor the way it is written. But despite its beauty, I still question its assumption: that the world at large would go to hell without material abundance and that there exist special Jesus-like individuals who live on a higher moral plane than the rest of us. Frans de Waal has shown that there is nothing uniquely modern, or even human, about empathy. Perhaps what I perceive as an expansion of moral rights is actually just better communication of a very basic idea: that we are happier in complementary cooperation than in antagonistic conflict.

Update – Extremely related: New Normal?

What disappointed me most about the meeting of funders, however, was the almost obsessive focus on metrics and the complete lack of attention on projects or people. I was frequently under the impression that many of the funders are not even aware of the work their grantees are doing. It was just all about finding the right measurements to justify their work. This leads me to three recommended relevant links. I’d write more about each, but I need to hop on a 12-hour train journey.

GDP and Well-Being

The first is a podcast from American RadioWorks which talks about the myth of GDP as the all-encompassing metric of national well-being. It starts with Joseph Stiglitz’s skepticism about GDP and then gets even more interesting.

Is Bhutan on to something with Gross National Happiness?

Also related to GDP and well being is this podcast from the HowStuffWorks podcast. Everyone refers to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness census, but mostly with grinning condescension. In this podcast they actually dig into the details of it. Highly recommended.

Access Beyond Developmentalism: Technology and the Intellectual Life of the Poor

Lastly: Lawrence Liang’s criticism of the framing of ICT for Development at the Harvard Forum. I disagree with some of what Liang says (and plan on commenting on the post soon), but I still think it’s a very worthwhile critique to read.

Off to the train station.

The farther one goes the less one knows.

Lao-Tzu, 550 BC

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

St. Augustine, c. 390

Travel teaches toleration.

Benjamin Disraeli, 1832

In the Middle Ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

Robert Runcie, 1988

In The Songlines Bruce Chatwin does his best to make the argument that man’s most natural state is in motion. He reaches back into our nomadic past and points to offhand observations – such as the fact that crying babies tend to fall asleep calmly when they are walked around a room – as evidence that deep down inside every man and woman is a desire to set forth. To explore into the unknown. To keep on truckin’. Why else are stories like Thelma & Louise, On the Road, and the long shelves of travel literature and tourism brochures so universally compelling if not for the fact that they speak to an inner and ubiquitous desire to break through the stagnation of contemporary comforts?

Indeed, Runcie has a point in describing our modern infatuation with travel as religious. Often, friends and even strangers ask to see my passport, and as they turn its crowded swath of pages their fingers linger on its stamp-stained backgrounds of pithy patriotism as if it were some sort of relic of antiquity. “Wow,” they say, their eyes rising slowly, “I can’t imagine what it must be like to visit so many places. You must have seen everything already.”

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that such admiration inspires feelings of validation; an outsider’s legitimization of a life spent on the road. But I would also be lying if I didn’t admit that such instant acclaim also inspires feelings of fakery. For it is as easy to continue traveling, propelled merely by inertia, as it is to remain on a couch stuck under the debilitating weight of a television remote control.

Live in this belief: I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country. If you saw this fact clearly, you would not be surprised at getting no benefit from the fresh scenes to which you roam each time through weariness of the old scenes. For the first would have pleased you in each case had you believed it wholly yours. As it is, however, you are not journeying; you are drifting and being driven, only exchanging one place for another, although that which you seek – to live well – is found everywhere.

Seneca, Epistulae Morales

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live.

Anatole Broyard, 1989

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

John Ruskin, 1856

One of the last comments I received from Joel before he passed away was the following:

Travel is an addiction. And you, my friend, are a junkie. Not the functioning Of-course-I-can-quit-any-time addict. Nope, my man, you’re the hollow-cheeked lotus-eating kind. The far gone. The unredeemable.

I recognize the signs very well. Because I, too, was a user. So I know those highs: the enervating unfamiliar city, the excitement of the unintelligible, and the artificial promise of another self. And like all highs, they are temporary. So that’s why you start looking for them again.

It is so heartbreaking to read this comment now because Joel – who, like me, also spent the third decade of his life ever on the road – was able to break from the persistent temptation of novelty and personal re-invention to dedicate himself as a husband and father to his beautiful wife and daughter. And yet, on a rare trip during this new era of domesticity, Joel died in a freak accident at Hong Kong International airport, a place I’ve spent far too many hours over the past ten years.

Joel’s point – and the point of so many authors anthologized in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is that there is nothing noble in travel for travel’s sake.

Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so.

Lord Chesterfield, 1747

Veronica and I were walking down Kreschatik, Kiev’s main thoroughfare where she has lived almost her entire life. By this time I had already been in Ukraine’s capital for over a week and had walked up and down Kreschatik dozens of times, but here was Veronica pointing out all sorts of architectural, commercial, and urban planning details that I had failed to observe. I suppose that, tired and cold, I was mostly walking while staring at my shoes. What is important is not place, but perspective. You can travel to the ends of the earth (a certain breed of tourists pay more and more money to travel to corners more and more remote) and still walk around staring at your shoes, or you can walk through your own neighborhood and see it as you’ve never seen it before. The beauty of travel – as in painting, writing, and photography – is its tendency to awaken a keener sense of observation. But continuous travel without rest and recovery can also dull the senses.

I have just completed a forty-two-day voyage around my room. The fascinating observations I made and the endless pleasures I experienced along the way made me wish to share my travels with the public, and the certainty of having something useful to offer convinced me to do so.

One of the most interesting stories was Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre who wrote it while under house arrest for 42 days for dueling. Upon release he didn’t consider publishing the story until his older brother printed it without his permission. Susan Sontag called it “One of the most original and mettlesome autobiographical narratives ever written.”

This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is probably my favorite to date. It took me three weeks to get through, but that is mostly because I read a majority of the texts twice or three times. I couldn’t agree more with Aldous Huxley who wrote in 1925:

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

I said much the same a few months ago in an interview with Lesley Yarbrough of Brightkite. Thinking back on unpleasant memories of an alleyway scuffle in Caracas, I grinned at Juvenal’s quote from 125: “The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.” Trading Pigeon English pleasantries with my fellow train passengers as we set out across eastern and southern Ukraine, I re-read Gertrude Stein’s celebration of social European train travel compared to the individualistic American ‘automobiling’.

It was also pure pleasure to re-read, perhaps for the dozenth time, Henry David Thoreau’s Walking, and his praise of unhurried sauntering. “The Poor in the Bus Depot” by the Brazilian poet Ledo Ivo will now always come to my mind whenever I am in a train or bus station, surrounded by the fragrant poverty of the poor returning with their burlap-wrapped bags to the slow life of the countryside. (Ivo has published 25 collections of poetry, only one of which has been translated into English.) A letter from Charles Darwin senior to his son trying to convince him to not travel aboard the HMS Beagle because it was a “wild scheme” that would be “disreputable to his character” gave me a good laugh.

Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. My own journey started long before I left and was over before I returned.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1962

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his home country.

T.W. Higginson 1879

When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.

Francis Bacon, 1625

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

G.K. Chesterton, 1909

Because my own journeys so rarely have what could be considered a beginning or an end, they rarely feel like journeys at all. Not orbits, but rather floating in space.

But now a clear end to this journey has come into view. Or at least a significant pause. In mid-December I will board a flight to LAX, back to the California winter sun, her quiet beaches, the constant crashing of the Pacific Ocean into bleached sand. Empty life guard towers, sea gulls scoping for morning crumbs. Los Angeles will become home for a couple – or even a few – months. I imagine my first week to be pure recovery. To try and come up with some sort of personal narrative for all that has happened over the past year so that I can pack it away into the trickery of memory. So that I can handpick anecdotes which are meant to give some semblance of answer to inevitable and impossible questions: “So, how was it? What was your favorite place? Did anything surprise you?”

I will probably sink into a temporary depression upon my return; I almost always do, and never know why. But already I am looking forward to set foot in Los Angeles as though it were a foreign land. There is so much that I don’t know about the city because I have more or less taken it for granted as my own. Cyrus has already given me dozens of taco trucks to hunt out. Good Magazine constantly features lesser known corners of the City of Angels that I would have never thought existed. I will seek them out with a new eye in a familiar geography.

Back in 1996 Mike McIntyre did the same on a coast-to-coast hitchhiking trip from west to east coast in the United States (from what I remember, not a bad read). Come to think of it, the traveling freeloader is probably an archetype that has existed since before man was man. But it’s become easier than ever thanks to the internet. There are dozens and dozens or articles out there about how to travel for free using CouchSurfing. Others have found alternative paths of ingenuity.

Mihai is a Romanian blogger who wanted to ride his motorcycle from Bucharest to Mongolia and back, but didn’t have the money to finance the trip. So his brother Ion came up with the idea of “selling kilometers”, and Mihai decided to sell 500 kilometers of storytelling for 50 euros. Forty three people signed on “instantly” and Mihai had 2,150 euros in his pocket. Throughout his trip he stopped by cybercafes every 500 kilometers and penned public letters to each of his 43 supporters. “Dear Gili,” begins his first post just 500 kilometers from his hometown as he rode toward Ukraine. His latest post available in English is addressed to “Dear Mircea.” From what I understand, Mihai has just returned to Romania, and so his adventure – or at least this adventure – has ended. One dedicated fan here at the forum says that he was hooked and checked Mihai’s blog everyday for updates. I can see why. What a beautiful idea and beautiful story.

Not quite as creative, but just as successful has been Paul Smith who in March of this year adopted the moniker “Twitchhiker” and set out to not only travel for free, but to raise money for charity in the process. His blog shows how quickly and how much the long tradition of travel literature is changing in our contemporary times of instant, networked, and atomized content.

I was impressed while reading Lapham’s Quarterly issue on travel by just how much the motivations and criticisms of travel have remained the same over the past 2,500 years. But I wonder if any of those travel writers throughout the millennia and across civilizations had ever imagined a day where Ramon, Mihai, and Paul would join their rank.

Before movable type, Europeans depended on priests to know what was inside of a book. Now they simply open its cover. That is a revolutionary difference. But what is important to remember is that not everyone benefited from the printing press. Scribes all across Europe protested. There aren’t good records of their protests, but I can just imagine their reasoning: that people would be overwhelmed by too much information; that they would become isolated reading at home rather than coming to church; that mediocrity would prevail if publishing was put into the hands of ordinary people. Basically, all of the same criticisms we hear of the Internet today. In the end, the scribes lost and the printing press won. With the benefit of historical perspective, we view the result as inevitable. And we are seeing the same dynamic play out today with traditional journalism and the participatory internet.

…

As you can see, it is becoming more and more difficult to find funding to support both media organizations and journalistic coverage. Then again, it might prove to be even more difficult to find anyone to pay attention to what you publish. It seems that the scarcity of attention is even more severe than the scarcity of funding.

My next post will focus specifically on that scarcity of attention. Other good intentions include: a recap of what I saw at Media Camp Kyiv, a response to Evgeny’s “Engaged society vs Twittering socity“, a video interview with Parvana Persiani about the arrest of Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli, a comparison of e-government strategies of Macedonia and Estonia, a followup post on digital craftsmanship, and a rant about social expertise versus anti-social expertise.

Then, finally, a long series on government transparency projects outside of the West.

Good intentions. And time for gin and tonics.

I wasn’t able to make it. I feel like a let down a friend.

But we did manage to make this video. Maybe it helps explain why Pavel had such an impact on me:

Many thanks to Maryna for her translation and for all her hard work to bring Pavel’s story to the rest of the world. Though I wasn’t able to visit the site where Pavel receives substitution therapy, I was able to read about it thanks to Maryna’s latest post on Rising Voices:

10 AM. There is a short line next to entrance of the pharmacology clinic called “Sociotherapy”. I see a poster on the wall in Ukrainian: “Not all people are alcoholics or drug addicts, but all alcoholics and drug addicts are people”. This is “the site” – a place where patients of substitution therapy receive pills of Methadone and Buprenorphine.

There are no very young people in line. Most of them are in their 30’s, but there are a few of 40’s and older. Each person has a story. There is a person with crutch, a mother holding a small child …

I am entering the site together with Pavel Kutsev. He is a journalist. He is 48 and he is an opiate addict. He and his wife Yanina, the editor-in chief for a newsletter for drug addicts “Motylek” has been in the program for a year and a half.

The whole post is well worth the five minutes it takes to read.

There is a famous saying in the news industry – back when it was still an industry – which said that “today’s news is what happened yesterday to the editor’s best friends.” I suppose that now that saying must be updated. Today’s news is what is happening right now to our own friends.

So, for example, a big news event for all of us in this room is the jail sentence of Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizada because we now consider ourselves friends of Parvana Persiani. However, we aren’t talking about – indeed, we don’t even know about – the other 185 cases of threatened or arrested bloggers being tracked at threatened.globalvoicesonline.org. We don’t know about them because they are not part of our networks.

Personally, I don’t think that either the old or new model is an ideal way to learn about the world around us. In the first model our impression of the world is formed by just a few powerful gatekeepers. In the second model we each belong to separate echo chambers that are usually built on top of class, popularity, and interest.

Still, there are occasional stories that become so big that almost everyone is aware of them. Usually they have to do with celebrities and reality TV shows. But last week it was something else. On Thursday at 1:30 in the afternoon in Fort Hood, Texas an American-born Army psychologist of Palestinian descent opened fire on the largest US military base in the world. He killed 13 people and wounded 30 others. He was then shot once, hospitalized, and taken to an undisclosed location here he is now recovering. However this is not what the media reported on Thursday. Their main source of information at the time was a soldier from Michigan who was posting updates to her Twitter account. She reported that the shooter was killed and that there was at least one other shooter. Both of those observations turned out to be wrong.

Here is a classic example of poor ethics in the media field. They had spread misinformation in the unnecessary rush to break a story without taking the time to check the facts.

Morbid Curiosity

This may come as a surprise, but I really don’t care about such classic examples of poor media ethics. So, for a few hours the world of news junkies thought that the Fort Hood shooter was dead and then it turned out that he was still alive. What is the big deal? I don’t care about such mistakes because they almost always fix themselves. As Clay Shirky summed up in a nice soundbite, “fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way way up.” In fact, the discussion about the discussion of the Fort Hood shooting has almost eclipsed news of the shooting itself. We also saw this during the Iranian election protests. The discussion about the use of technology in the protests became a larger news item than the protests themselves, or indeed, the complex history that led to the protests.

When we speak about ethics and responsibility in the media industry we almost always obsess over the ethics of publishing, but I am much more interested in the ethics of listening. Who and what do we pay attention to and why?

Almost everyone in the world knows about the Fort Hood shootings, but how many people here know about the Akihabara massacre that took place in Japan in 2008? In that case a 25-year-old went on a rampage and drove a rented truck through a crowd in a popular Tokyo shopping district. 15 minutes later dozens of Japanese were lying in the streets bloodied and dying. Meanwhile, crowds gathered, pulled out their cell phones, pressed record. Two observers began streaming live video from their cell phones on Ustream.tv. Within half an hour over 2,000 viewers were watching the streaming video. What did this instant, at-the-scene coverage generate? Outrage. From Chris Salzberg:

So when stories of people crowding like paparazzi around bleeding victims made their way from the streets of Akihabara to people around the country, many were shocked. The weekly papers were quick to react, running articles lambasting the indecency of the Akihabara mobs. The weekly Shukan Shincho featured the story of a university student whose two friends had been killed in the rampage, surrounded by onlookers snapping photos of their suffering. In his Mixi diary, the student railed at the picture takers for ignoring his pleas to stop. “Why did they do it?” he wrote. “It was so horrible, I couldn’t stop crying.” But the mobs persisted, clamoring for the best shot, dodging warnings by police to snap pictures and share them with friends.

Almost all of the after-the-fact-checking which followed the Akahbara massacre mentioned the “morbid sense of curiosity.” Why were so many people interested in watching and documenting others die?

In the United States a teacher taught his young students how to become journalists. But rather than giving them real video cameras, he had them make fake cameras made out of paper. And for the rest of the week they pretended that they were reporters. By the end of the week two of the students got in a fight. All of the other students made a circle around them and were pointing their fake, paper video cameras at the fight. No one helped break it up.

It seems that when we have a choice between getting involved to do what is right and documenting what is wrong, that we choose the latter. After all, that has been the standard and accepted behavior of journalists since the beginning of journalism. They were the privileged invisible observers documenting the world for the rest of us. And now we are all journalists, observing, documenting, and not getting involved.

If I were to start strangling Adina here, what would your first reaction be as a blogger? Would you come to defend her or reach for your camera?

Tracking our Media Diet

I work for an organization called Global Voices which was founded by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman. Ethan got his start as an internet researcher when he developed a project called Global Attention Profiles. This project used a few scripts to guesstimate how much attention mainstream media outlets like the New York Times are paying to different countries around the world. So, for example, how often did the Washington Post mention Romania over the past month compared to France?

It was an interesting project at the time, but it is less interesting now. We no longer get our news from just the New York Times or the Washington Post. Now we mostly get our news from our friends via Twitter and Facebook. So rather than monitoring the attention of mainstream media, we need to monitor our own attention patterns.

I use two tools to do this. The first is called RescueTime. It is a free program that monitors how much time you spend on each program on your computer and on every website that you visit. The purpose is to help boost your productivity, but I use it to monitor my media diet. At the end of each week I look at what websites I spent the most time on. Another tool I use is Google Reader. They have a very handy “Trends” section which shows you how much attention you give to each of your RSS feeds. It is so depressing when I look at these statistics. They show me that I spend way too much time looking at software that I will never use and cameras I will never buy. But by looking at the statistics I become more aware of my media diet and slowly I change my behavior so that I pay more attention to the topics that I want to learn more about.

The Economy of Self Interest

I agree with Ritchie Pettauer that self-interest is what governs what we choose to publish. Everything that we publish is meant to make us look better. I am interested in the economy of self-interest. Often self-interest is mutually beneficial. President Basescu came here to speak to us because it makes him look good and makes the Romanian mainstream media look bad. Then we all tweeted that we were in a room with the president of Romania because that makes us look good.

But, from what I understand, President Basescu is actually a pretty unpopular guy here in Romania. And so I was amazed that none of the Romanian bloggers here took the opportunity to challenge what he said. My assumption is that doing so would damage our reputation. We would not be invited to next year’s World Blogging Forum.

We cover an event when it benefits us, when it adds to our own social capital. Loic Lemeur posts a twitter link to the president of Romania because it adds to his profile, makes him look like an important enough blogger that he spends his time hanging out with the world’s most important leaders. (And, apparently he is.)

My observation is that as more of us become absorbed in publishing content we become less talented at listening and paying attention to others. Here today we are not communicating with one another, we are talking past each other. We are more interested in what each one of us is saying – and how others react to what we say – than in what others are saying. We are increasingly forgetting how to listen.

Perhaps this is just the natural evolution of humanity, or maybe we were never interested in listening to others in the first place, but we did so out of social politeness. Maybe listening was always a façade. But, in my opinion, strong morals come from empathy, and empathy comes from listening and understanding the perspectives of others. So it might not be in our own self-interest, but it is in our collective interest to become better listeners and to care about others outside of our own circles of friends.

Here’s my latest Global Voices celebrity profile – this time Elena Ignatova who covers Macedonia on Global Voices, is in charge of Global Voices in Macedonian, and works for the Metamorphosis Foundation, which seeks to seeks to enhance the use of information in Macedonian government and society. Among the posts we mention in the interview are: Macedonia: Use Facebook If You Want to Flirt With Politicians, The Balkans: “Whose Is This Song?”, and Macedonia: Student Protest Ends in Violence.

I’m about to get three hours of sleep and then start a ridiculously long journey to Sao Paulo for Cultura Digital where I’m looking forward to seeing Jose, Ronaldo, Diego, and others. Video profiles of Filip and Diego are forthcoming.

I could really use some help though. I have posted this video of Elena to dotSUB where I always like to add a transcription (so that the Lingua teams can translate it into other languages). But I won’t have time to start this transcription for a few more days at least. So if any kind soul is willing to help me out, all you have to do is register for an account and then start transcribing. Thanks!