July 30, 2005 at 6:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized
It’s worth the effort to spend some time browsing the gallery at Square America.
For example, this ill-considered comparison:
and this image of portent and apocalyptic anticipation:
both found in the semi-permanent collection [used with permission].
Adding to my own sense of coincidence, I was waiting for a carryout pizza to be done three days back and walked into the antique shop next door. Along with old books, I always have to stick my nose into the basket or box of old photographs. There were some amazing ones.
But then, our own basement has many items still needing to be catalogued…
(Via 無の研究.)
July 27, 2005 at 8:57 am · Filed under Uncategorized
So my wife is browsing the referral reports for her blog, and asks this typically salient question:
If I’m reading an RSS feed of somebody else’s blog, and they have a link in their RSS to my blog, and I click that link… who’s IP address gets written to the logfiles as the referrer?
Technically this is a question about RSS standards and practices, I suppose, as well as Apache’s logging. But in practice it’s about the observed length of chains of surfing behavior.
Advice (or experimental results) would be welcomed.
July 25, 2005 at 9:45 am · Filed under Uncategorized
…and remapping the social graph.
I think this tendency to have more diffuse identities or to be at the center (egoistically speaking) or a larger set of independent social networks has much in common with the move from agrarian villages and the modern metropolis. Someone raised in a rural area is likely to go to school with, date, and work with the same social group for much of their life. In the city, you may be a very different person in the office than you are in your neighborhood or in the clubs. The complexity of the physical space of the city allows for barriers between various performances of identity and interactions among reference groups.
and later
This idea of a village within the metropolis isn’t new to blogging: it is sometimes termed a tribe (bund). I think blogging allows for not a “global village” in the McCluhanian sense, but for the emergence of more central identities and social networks that more frequently overlap. Since private, corporate, and public life are increasingly interpenetrated anyway, doesn’t it make sense to look for models and technologies that allow us to work and play better in such an environment?
I’ve long thought that we choose the stereotypes by which we define our own lives from the same menu used by others. So, we are reminded to ask: Are we newfangled people subdividing our lives into more smaller pieces, each aimed at different audience into which we want to blend? If we’re blessed with finite resources, what does further subdivision do to the quality, the depth, and the value of each of our roles?
While it is some folks’ intuition that life today is shallower, that has always been a prevalent intuition ["kids these days..."]. If there really are deep qualitative differences between now and back then, well… all bets are off and history is of little use in knowing what’s coming. But if nothing deep has changed, we should really be asking: Where is the evidence of the many overlapping lives lived by our forebears?
July 24, 2005 at 9:20 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m not going to beat around the bush: I will be selling books here, in addition to riffing and infrequently providing “useful” stuff.
This hurts. We love books, we keep books, we accumulate books. We do not sell books.
Well, now we do. Necessity is the mother &c. We have too many. No, really too many. I’ll make clear in a little while exactly what “too many” means, when I go over to our 20-by-10 rented storage unit and take a few pictures. Those, though, are mainly the 40+ boxes of books a close friend of ours consigned to us for resale on eBay, just before she died. And the important books of historical interest and importance we have accumulated, that are there because when we sell our house it needs to be tidier.
Plus, Shalizi left 33 boxes full of his books here.
But we have other stuff as well: too much, far too much, some things never seen again since purchase, or read and treasured and no longer useful. And a midlife crisis or two.
So room must be made. We’ve been making do with eBay, but eBay is best for collectible, rare, and antiquarian works. Amazon Marketplace seems to be the place for modern stuff, like science and textbooks and art instruction and stuff. We have lots of those, too.
So bear with me, and let’s see if the new Amazon thing works the way we think it should:
A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Method (Philosophy) [Paperback] by Carey… • A Dead Man in Deptford by Burgess, Anthony • Active Portfolio Management: A Quantitative Approach for Producing Superior… • Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications, and Markets [Hardcover] by… • Amnesia Moon [Hardcover] by Lethem, Jonathan • An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writing [Paperback] by Hares-Stryker, Carolyn • Angel by Kilworth, Garry D. • Anna of the Five Towns (Wordsworth Collection) [Paperback] by Bennett • Another Fine Myth by Asprin, Robert; Freas, Polly; Freas, Kelly • Artists by Themselves: Artists’ Portraits from the National Academy of Design… • Beads, Buttons & Bows [Hardcover] by Moody, Jo • Bicycle Stamps: Bikes and Cycling on the World’s Postage Stamps (Bicycle Books • Bilbo’s Last Song [Hardcover] by Tolkien, J.R.R.; Baynes, Pauline • Blood: A Southern Fantasy by Moorcock, Michael • Bronze Mirror by Larsen, Jeanne • Brothel in Rosenstrasse by Moorcock, Michael • Coca-Cola Collectible Bean Bags & Plush (Collector’s Guide to Coca Cola Items… • Descent of Man. an Atlantic Monthly Press Book: Stories by Boyle, T… • Contemplating Minds: A Forum for Artificial Intelligence (Artificial…
…and lots more.
OK, so at this stage I have learned Point One — this should be automated. I’ll see what I can do.
Meanwhile, do please poke around. I’ll try to add more items here as time becomes available. And as far as I can tell, there’s no list of our items available at Amazon unless we pay them a bit of money up front.
That would be a hint.
July 24, 2005 at 11:13 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Alas for Ivan Tribble and his diverse and unexpected consequences. We will remember you fondly, when you have been outed. You have shone a light we can use to see the future.
Whoever “we” are.
I think that a mirror — like the one you’ve provided — shows us many of the things we expect to see. Since before the realization that “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” the users of the Web have built [or transformed] themselves into a skein of myths and norms. It’s an old-school flaw of mobs, whether they’re “smart mobs” or “wise crowds” or something else: they tend to conflate the daily use of a new technology with a real understanding of it. Send them on a daily commute in a car, and they will think they know their own home town; let them talk on the phone as they walk down the street, and they will imagine they’re more “connected” to their friends; give them Microsoft Word, and they will think that knowing how to underline words for emphasis and change from Times Roman and Helvetica is all they need to know to write a beautiful book; give them a spreadsheet, and they will imagine themselves programmers or accountants; give them all a camera, and they will imagine that endless scrapbook libraries filled with devil-eyed families against lightning-illumined blank walls constitute a bastion of personal history against the attacks of time; give them the glib non-explanation of “chaos” in Jurassic Park, and they will use the notion to describe their lives, their management techniques, and their feng shui styles; construct for the world a logistics system unprecedented in history, and they will use it to cover the face of the land with Barnes & Noble and Wal-marts, and plant gaudy purple petunias in their gardens and Harry Potter on their kids’ shelves.
Whenever this happens, the true owners of these skills wake one day to find themselves immersed in a sea of harsh noise and misapprehensions. That morning, a big chunk of the world which last night was filled with the thankful customers for their hard-earned skills, now “knows” how to do it for themselves. And is even willing to offer time-saving advice.
And these new pseudo-experts do it so wrong! It cuts the eye, it hurts the ear, it makes the world ugly and stupid and bad. Can they understand the beauty they lose, when they don’t walk? meet face-to-face? create careful typography? conduct a thorough analysis? consider composition and lighting? know that mathematics does not connote? Learn to appreciate the Long Tail?
No! They blithely read Dummies’ Guides, they create and form communities and devour faddish popularizations, they spout jargon (not even the real and centuries-honed jargon, but newfangled stuff that sounds so stupid, or worse: misuse the old words in new, very very wrong ways) at one another, they promote the noisiest among themselves to positions of unwarranted admiration… god, come on experts, doesn’t it make you wanna puke?
This isn’t a rhetorical straw man, by the way. I am this very expert, with this very expert’s reaction, in every single context on that list. I’m naming names: I am the expert typographer who hates to see ugly desktop-published crap, the man who wants you to write unit tests for your spreadsheets, the guy who pretentiously uses “complex systems research” instead of “complexity”, the one of the few who still buys plants the Wayside Gardens catalog instead of Home Depot.
But I’m lazy. I just gripe and bitch and moan. Kids these days. Look at all the trash. Jesus, how stupid can people get? Hell <– handbasket; got it?
Between puking and puling, some not so lazy experts — only the most altruistic — they feel for these folks, see them being taken advantage of, and want to help. “You know,” they offer, “that’s all very nice. It has some potential. But someday, when you’ve tried this ticky-tacky out and found it lacking, you’ll want to ask us about this fancy stuff we’ve broken our backs developing through the years. You’ll come back to us. Just wait and see. Meanwhile, we’ll be right here, when you need us. We’ll forgive you.”
And to some extent this is true: There are a few guidebooks to the more famous back roads and by-ways, and very expensive typesetting packages can be bought for people who want to make “professional-looking” books, and a handful of students sometimes learn enough advanced mathematics to teach them what “chaos” actually is, and consumers sometimes seek out artisans and local businesses. People, a few benighted souls, still pursue a few of the Old Lost Arts, in silence and isolation, or at most bolstered by scant distant like-minded aficionados. Because the old way, the right way, was better.
But we never come back, you know. Expertise has been irrevocably supplanted. It has been, to coin a word, tailed — dropped straight through a cultural crack caused by some disruptive cultural or technological innovation, and left blinking and calling out, there in the fat-but-dwindling part of the Long Tail.
So, you say. Tribble is [arguably] an academic, talking about getting a job in academia. How does this have anything to do with using em-dashes correctly, or not planting your flower beds wrong? That’s a bit of a reach, isn’t it?
Nope. “Craftsmanship” is just one type of social structure that can fall apart this way. All sorts of stati quo can have their legs yanked out from under them, and they all make more or less the same squawking and flapping noise when it happens.
What is the problem with writing online? It sidesteps the standards used to gauge quality of applicants. What is the problem of developing an online social network? It subverts the existing social network upon which all hiring decisions depend. Where is the risk in making flip, unconsidered pop-cultural references in your online writing? It shows you have not given due effort to joining the elite craftsmen of the academy, who in many cases signal their membership by their very detachment from the fly-by-night world of online discourse. Where is the harm in talking about your personal problems? It brings salient things to the attention of people who currently hold power over your future — which it may be illegal for them to be influenced by.
How rude is that, huh? Sheesh, people. We have a perfectly good way to do things, to schedule meetings, to create barriers to entry and credential our membership, to gauge value and productivity. And yet you insist on talking as if there’s some other thing, some “life” thing out there on the internets?
The internets. The undistinguished, generalization-prone laity. A bit of a rabble. O thou inexpert world, who think you know the first damned thing about history, or politics, or public policy, or genetics, or mathematics, or even computer programming.
Here indeed is the mirror’s message: Who you talk to and associate with, and what you say, and how you say it, is crucial to building a life in academia. Just as Tribble has said, on the face of it. Academia depends on these standards.
Academia as it exists today, that is.
You academic reading this have now been shown the basket, the little well-oiled wheels on the bottom, the precipitous slope, the darkness thereunder. And you can guess, and maybe hope, what lies down there in the flickering gloom — a lesser place maybe, but also greater, a Small World that is not small at all. Maybe the flickers are not flames, but the LEDs of routers. Or glistening coins. Or the flashes of paparazzi cameras. Or maybe just the hiss and glare of a television tuned to no channel in particular. We’ll all find out together.
Those academic folks who have not attended to this, and who refuse to do so and thus believe themselves firmly set in the friendly Old Ivy-covered Tower, are still along for the ride. Let them, for the time being, remain oblivious. It’s best for them. Someday they will write books on how to really be an expert. In whatever it is they’re doing. Meanwhile, consider carefully who you talk with online, and what you say, and how you say it. For it puts you at an advantage, now the basket is on its way. Perhaps the noisiest among you will be promoted to positions of unwarranted admiration. Perhaps some of you will take to printing new warrants of your own.
July 20, 2005 at 9:11 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Heidi Bond gets pushed a long way out along that gradient I was just talking about.
It makes me melancholy, you know. I’d best have a box of kleenices nearby, in case it overwhelms me.
No seriously, if you think about it, this abbreviated slangy crap people use online (especially ESL writers) might be taken as evidence for the fundamental difference between reading and writing — these are folks reading Rowling (and lots and lots and lots of words she wrote), but who on the face of it haven’t integrated her language very well, though they can clearly parse it. Imitation does not follow from exposure.
Either that, or you’ve gotta buy into that whole English is a Living Tongue bulldada. And you know, we need to decide. It’s gotta be one or the other….
It also makes me think about the dynamics of cultural mixing brought about by large wide-ranging shocks to the system. Now where’d that meme come from?
Subscribe to posts feed