Filed under: NYTimes, literature, media, oulipo, technology | Tags: NYTimes, slate, technology, twitter
Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It’s not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.
via The reluctant Twitterer’s dilemma. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine
This may be true, but this is no reason to swear off Twitter. Yes, I am blogging about Twitter, I understand the absurdity of it. But might it be valuable to introduce a new form of communication that has no direct antecedent? Doesn’t this just mean that it has untapped potential for a differentiation in our manner of communication? I’m not sold that twitter is completely useless, though I am sold on the idea that it is completely distracting. Thoreau made an interesting point on the telegraph:
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
On another point: there was a very interesting NYTimes article back in September that spoke to what sociologists call “ambient awareness,” which is, say, the awareness we gain of a person’s moods, health, etc, by sitting in the same room and consciously or unconsciously picking up on small, mostly non-verbal cues. Maybe your friend’s eyes are a bit red, or they are slower in responding than usual, seem sluggish, maybe there is just something about them that just seems different. The article compares the inundation of data we receive from social media to this sort of awareness. Granted, many people seem to view Twitter or Facebook as a contest in which you are required to make as many friends as possible, and this seems ridiculous to me, but as a tool to keep up with people you are sincerely interested in, it simply has no parallel or better in the past.
The communication media of the past had a more direct purpose of conveying an important piece of information: letters were written and rewritten so as to guarantee the truth and nuance of the prose, telegrams were studies in the economy of language, even an email is more important-information oriented than Twitter. Twitter is undirected communication, it is neither completely for someone else nor entirely for yourself. It allows for the harmless presentation of absolutely mundane details without the risk of wasting someone’s time who would rather be doing something else: “I ate a sandwich.” “My throat hurts.” “Celtics down already!” etc. The details are mundane, but may have the effect that a tv often does for people living alone: there are voices in the room. You gain an ambient awareness of those you follow. You can read a book, work on your thesis, etc, but there are voices in the room with you. Things my friends would find too mundane to tell me in an email are exactly the sort of thing they would mention on Twitter or if we were in person, just sitting down for a meal, or maybe watching tv together.
Furthermore, some people are truly masters of the short form: Felix Fenéon for instance wrote little more than tiny little stories based on the news of the day–which, incidentally, someone is posting on Twitter. Marshall Mcluhan also has a ghost-twitterer, and the form would make sense for any writer with a gift for terse, densely packed statements. As an illustration, here are some examples from NYRB’s collection of Feneon’s stories titled Novels in Three Lines:
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like you.”
The Oulipo did wonders with constraint. Michael Agger in Slate brings up the possibility of Twittering as a new sort of Zen Koan. Or what of Twitter as the possibility for a haiku?
- old pond . . .
- a frog leaps in
- water’s sound
Which is all to say that the “lowered” level of discourse isn’t as bad as some would make it out to be. Sure, people will not always put in the thought to make a Twitter post as pithy as Oscar Wilde would (nor can we be sure Oscar Wilde wouldn’t be a boring person to follow on twitter), but the form is not to blame. It allows for both profundity and banality, both of which are valuable in equal measure. As for the banality of it: living in Scotland, I can keep up with my friends in the US, and they can keep up with me. I am privy to the small details of the lives of people I love, whether they happen to be witty (as they sometimes are) or just mundane (as most of our daily details are). Is that really so terrible?
And, in honor of my father who would always remind me when I was complaining that there was nothing good on tv that “It has an off button,” I will remind you that if you don’t like it, no one is making you use it.
Filed under: biology, human, technology | Tags: dawkins, mcluhan, slate, technology
Slate Magazine has done what maybe some of us wished we could have done – tracked down some real information about that “25 Random Things About Me” meme. It makes for an interesting study in the nature of internet memes, since this one is slightly more trackable than most by nature of the way that the Facebook notes. What interests me the most is the framework used to examine this meme: biology. Important side note from the article: the term “meme” was evidently coined by the world’s favorite petulant child, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who is infinitely more tolerable when he is focusing on evolutionary biology than throwing a hissy fit about religion.
Slate funneled the data gathered through a system meant to model infectious diseases, attempting to discover the “patient zero” of this “epidemic.” They treat the “25 random things” phenomenon as both an organism and as a virus.
This is not new, exactly. Memes have been described as “viral” for about as long as I can remember memes. The important issue at play here is the meme as an evolving organism, not the meme as a thing that spreads. Now, we begin to discuss the robustness of the meme, the ways in which a meme mutates in order to fall on the happy side of the long odds of their survival. This discussion of Facebook memes is an examination of a techno-biological microsystem.
Which reminds me of another thing (I won’t call it a “meme”) you begin to see a lot: articles about technology and biology. This is actually why I started to study new media: the discussion of technology and biology (or, to put it simplistically, nature) seems to suffuse a great number of publications. We see this evidenced in articles about designer drugs, designer babies, biopolitics, bioethics, social networking, etc. We’ve been on this track for a while, since we really started to consider media post-printing-press. After all, McCluhan famously titled a book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, and cybernetics, quantum physics, and poststructuralism have all but fully broken down the barrier between who we are and what we create by implicating the observer in every system.
Technology, you could say, has always been in the process of getting out of hand.
It each day seems less and less like something we have created and more like just another part of an open, dynamic system (call that system “nature” if you’d like). We attempt to leverage the system, but then our lever also needs to mutate and evolve to survive the long odds of retaining its usefulness as such a lever. It seems that what we create to help us get away from nature starts to show emergent properties, to get away from us, to show organic, emergent, dynamic, unpredictable behaviors. It simply refuses to stay put, and so we finally, belatedly, learn that our lever, technology, isn’t quite a lever separating man from his world but really just another part of that world we pretended to separate ourselves from.
Technology, assumed once to be the absolute opposite of nature and the apotheosis of “culture,” is really just a part of nature again, though admittedly an interesting and multifaceted one. It is tempting, but it would possibly be a mistake to say that technology is becoming a new nature as it becomes more and more ubiquitous and our ability to manufacture becomes more and more complicated, that being surrounded and “infiltrated” by technology will usher in a new state of nature. Technology always was nature, just as everything is. It’s not going to change, really, but it just might become more and more obvious to us.
I recognize that I have not posted in this blog for quite some time. I understand that there is likely not even anyone left to read the blog, but I have decided to take up writing the blog again for reasons related to why I stopped writing in the first place.
Now, in the beginning stages of new media graduate study at the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Modern Thought research center, I decided that I wanted a place in which I could practice some sort of disciplinary action on my own writing. This blog will be a venue in which I will sometimes write merely for the sake of writing. It will also be, hopefully, not only a dynamic record of my research and a sounding board for (sometimes) personal, unacademic writing, but also a forum in which to allow some of my friends to comment on and criticize my research and conclusions. This is to say, I have decided that I will subject myself, insofar as it is within my power (and insofar as anyone cares), to intellectual transparency.
In doing this, I am also attempting to define an internet presence for myself. To do this, I will use my blog and possibly a couple of other technology-related projects to subject myself to certain kinds of transparency, perhaps more and more as I become more comfortable with the idea. I believe that the storage capacity of both the free space allotted to us on the internet and the very inexpensive space allotted to us in terms of personal storage should be leveraged for archival purposes. With the proliferation of archival space, though, we begin to problematize the private/public, the value of the remembered/forgotten, and the even the overlap of each individual’s private information/data, like some sort of a venn diagram. Though this is a weak first step in that direction, I hope it can be a useful one that becomes part of a larger project.
That being said, I also want to write about music, sometimes politics, and sometimes sports. This blog will be personal as well as academic. It may not rise to the grand occasion that I have set for it, but it will still act as both an attempt and a record of my attempt to work out some of the issues within the technological discourse that trouble me. I hope it will serve as the nerve center of my own experimentation with technology and the personal archive.
