…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?

At green gab­bro it is opined:

I don’t want to see any of these crap aquar­ium exhibits about how sharks are nice and you can pet them. Sharks are sup­posed to be killing machines! If a shark isn’t fight­ing a bear, or at least think­ing about fight­ing a bear, or maybe fight­ing a pirate or a zom­bie croc­o­dile or a por­cu­pine, what good is the shark? Answer: no good!

and, else­where:

I don’t give a shit about future–me. I mean, I do, but all things in mod­er­a­tion, y’know? I don’t want to be in the habit of plac­ing every expe­ri­ence in some grand life plan, jot­ting every good idea down for future con­sid­er­a­tion, or oth­er­wise con­stantly expand­ing my focus beyond the present moment. So phooey on you, life hack­ers! Nethack is more fun than life­hacks anyway.

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.

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.

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?