Symbolic sight
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
Newcomers, like newborns, have symbolic sight. They see faces first, and features later.
Will a technology become revolutionary?
From "The Challenges Facing Nanotechnology", on Ockham’s Razor:
Let us now examine nanotechnology, and assess the hurdles it must overcome before it becomes a society-transforming revolution. In our view there are four major issues:
Feasibility: can we do what we claim we can do, or is it as fantastic as the Nanobot?
Secondly, economic value: does it change the economy in any way? Does it open new sources of wealth?
Third, safety: is it safe, or does it create new dangers we don’t yet know how to handle?
And finally, necessity: do we really need to do it? And have we a choice about it?
These are the major questions all new sciences should face, and nanotechnology is no different.
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The Little Rascals and copyright absurdity
From Lawrence Lessig’s blog:
Here’s a reductio ad absurdum of folding in the face of copyright overclaiming: “While interviewing students for a documentary about inner-city schools, a filmmaker accidentally captures a television playing in the background, in which you can just make out three seconds of an episode of ‘The Little Rascals.’ He can’t include the interview in his film unless he gets permission from the copyright holder to use the three seconds of TV footage. After dozens of phone calls to The Hal Roach Studios, he is passed along to a company lawyer who tells him that he can include the fleeting glimpse of Alfalfa in his nonprofit film, but only if he’s willing to pay $25,000. He can’t, and so he cuts the entire scene.” Jeffrey Rosen, “Mouse Trap: Disney’s Copyright Conquest,” New Republic, Oct. 28, 2002, p. 12
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Movie studios and their genres
From Neither the Power Nor the Glory: Why Hollywood leaves originality to the indies, on Slate:
Back in the old days of the studio system, the brand of a Hollywood studio meant something to the moviegoing public. Each studio, with its roster of stars under contract, came to be identified with a particular genre of movies: MGM (musicals and romantic comedies); Paramount (historical epics); Warner Bros. (gangster stories); 20th Century Fox (social dramas); Universal (horror movies); Disney (cartoons).
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French policians and French writers
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
[Tocqueville] decided to devote himself to politics in France, and, like all French literary men, made a mess of it. (French writers are emporers of conceits; French politicians must be umpires of the conceited.)
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The French character
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
At a deeper level, too, [Tocqueville’s] turn of mind was French: witty but humorless, indifferent to empirical details, constantly searching for the lucid abstraction, what he called the "general idea."
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Relativism in political institutions
From "The Habit of Democracy" by Adam Gopnik in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, a review of two books about Alexis de Tocqueville:
"There is nothing absolute in the theoretical value of political institutions," Tocqueville wrote. "Their efficiency depends almost always on the original circumstances and the social conditions of the people to whom they are applied."
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Lowbow vs. highbrow
From "Culture Club" by Louis Menand in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker:
Things take their identities from what they are not … The concept of a highbrow culture, the culture of great books and the like, depends on the concept of a lowbrow, or popular, culture, whose characteristics highbrow culture defines iself against. Of course, there have always been good books, and bad books, serious music and easy listening, coterie art and poster art. Making these distinctions is easy if you just put everything on a continuum, and rank things from worst to best. The mid-century notion of highbrow culture required something different – it required a rupture between the high and the low, an absolute difference, not a relative one. …
[Dwight] Macdonald’s contribution to the criticism of popular culture was [that] he supplied a third category – middlebrow culture, or what he called Midcult. Midcult was kitsch for educated people. Rockwell Kent, Walter Lippmann, Ingrid Bergman, Archibald MacLeish, and Dorothy L. Sayers were among the practitioners of Midcult …
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Amongst family and friends
From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
His creation achieved its brilliant apotheosis a few years ago, when he reconceived Brian Grazer as a form of performance art. He started putting photographs of himself, grinning like a pixie, in dime-store frames and taking them to parties. Unobserved, he would leave his little photo among the grandly framed portraits of the host’s family and famous friends, for the host to discover, to his startled amusement, usually several weeks later.
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Unsure of himself
From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
Ron Howard: But you love really sophisticated movies.
Grazer: Like what? I guess I do. I do? Which ones were you thinking of?
The mercurial man
From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
[Edgar J. Scherick, the TV producer, hired Grazer when he was young, & had this to say about him:] "One day, he told me he was dissatisfied. We talked for half an hour and I gave him a raise. The next day, he quit. Why? You tell me."
Painter of kitsch … and security
From "Art for Everybody" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the immensely popular, incredibly kitschy painter Thomas Kinkaid:
… ten million people own some product featuring his name, and most editions are signed with ink containing DNA from his hair or blood, to prevent fakes.
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Closed vs. open source
From "Editing audio in Linux":
On proprietary platforms, eventually you’ll run into "you can’t do that." On open platforms, you’ll run into "you have to learn more to do that."
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You always remember your first time
I remember the first day I ever got on the Internet. I was an English teacher working at a camp for gifted high school students, and a technologist was there talking about this thing called “the Internet” and how it was going to change everything. It sounded fascinating, so when I returned home a few weeks later, I scrimped together some money and purchased 2 more megs of RAM for my Mac LC, bringing the total up to a whopping 4 MB, and a screamin’ fast 14.4 modem. Then I got online using a dialup account I purchased, and stayed on for 12 hours straight. That technologist was right, and it was blindingly obvious to me that day: the Internet was going to change everything.
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Clay Shirky’s Thinking About Networks syllabus
From Clay Shirky’s “Thinking About Networks” syllabus:
Communications networks are invisible in the traditional sense; their inner workings are hidden inside devices, behind walls and underground, or pass silently through the air. We will examine a variety of electronic networks — telegraph, telephones, internet — and design philosophies — client-server, lattice, peer-to-peer — and explore the ways different networks alter the experiences that are and are not possible within them.
Social networks are invisible in a different way; because we are immersed in myriad social networks — friends, family, work school — and because humans are so natively good at understanding and working in such networks, we don’t see them. We will examine some of the structural elements of social networks, such as strong and weak ties, clustering, and small worlds networks, to understand some of the ways that the shape of social networks affects us.
… Technological choices embodied in electronic networks profoundly affect their social dimensions: Why can we CC people on email but not on phone calls? How does the one-way network of television differ from the two-way network of the internet? What effect does bittorrent’s architectural decentralization have on its users? Social choices also affect the design of technology; resistance to spamming or attempts to hide from the RIAA have led to several deep technological changes in the design of weblogs and file-sharing networks respectively, changes that alter the social relations among the users. …
… what is special about a network, as different from a mere collection of nodes? …
Humans both shape and are shaped by networks. We live in them every day, and they become so completely woven into the fabric of our lives that the technology becomes invisible, and our primary experience of them becomes social. “Who said what to whom when” is more important than whether the messages traveled by email or carrier pigeon.
Yet the structure of networks does affect the culture that uses them. The kinds of conversations people have via snail mail differ significantly from the conversations they have in email; talking on the phone is very different than “talking” via IM; group conversations that take place in communities like Metafilter are very different from those that take place on irc and different again from mailing lists, in large part because the technology shapes the culture.
To a first approximation, networks can be defined by describing 3 aspects: nodes, connections, and contents. The Web and email, for example, use the same nodes (users computers), but have very different ways of connecting (real time versus delayed delivery) and very different sorts of contents (request and reply — “pull” — for a specific URL versus sending for later delivery — “push” — of text messages), which make using the Web so different from using email. …
PAPER #1 ASSIGNED: “Two Networks” Students pick two networks (Telephone vs telegraph, FedEx vs Bike messenger, etc) and contrast their structure and use. …
What is “information space”? How can you visualize an N-dimensional network in 2D space? 3D space? What visual tools and techniques are there for representing networks? How does the material used to represent a network affect the representation? When representing something as abstract as a network, what information about a network is it vital to represent? What information is it vital to ignore? …
… the 20th century was characterized by broadcast media of an unprecedented scale, but most of the new networking tools invented in the last 30 years have not adhered to the broadcast model. …
What is a social network? What social networks do you live in? How do social networks use technological networks? How do social networks affect technological network design? What are the social effects of privacy, secrecy, anonymity, security, reputation in a mediated setting?
Some takeaway thoughts & questions I have for my students in my Social Software class:
How are networks structured?
What are the named AND unnamed structures (assumed? cultural? instinctual?) you see in various networks?
How does software further those structures? Expose them? Subvert them?
Given the structure of software/system/service X, what social experiences are possible? What are unintended, but possible? What are desired, but impossible?
Look at Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous definition of “network”: “Any thing reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”
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I did not tow your car
From Scott Rosenberg’s "Web 2.0 jottings":
AOL’s Jonathan Miller … told them about having his car towed in Manhattan, and visiting the godforsaken place you go to get your car, and waiting in line forever, and getting angrier and angrier, and finally getting to the front of the line and seeing a sign that read: "The person here did not tow your car. They are here to help you get your car back. If you cooperate, you will get your car back faster."
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Willie Nelson in New York
From Adam Gopnik’s "The In-Law", a profile of Willie Nelson in The New Yorker (7 October 2002):
"I love Michael J. Fox," one says. "I was upset when he left the show because of that sad illness of his." (Willie’s family really talks that way: Willie, on being asked about Kris Kristofferson’s remark that he is the greatest songwriter since Stephen Foster, says to a radio interviewer, "I think Kris was offering something a shade too strong with that proposition you quoted.") …
[Two of Willie’s roadies, talking:] "Well, they say he’s got perfect pitch." "Yeah, well, you know what they say about perfect pitch. It’s when you throw a banjo into a trash can and hit an accordion." …
"I don’t get drunk as much anymore because I don’t have as much to get drunk about," [Willie] admits. …
[Willie Nelson] is no longer the outlaw of American music. He is its in-law, peering jovially over everyone’s shoulder at the wedding and saying, "Welcome. I can sing you, too." Nonetheless, he preserves his place as a radical, and outsider Like all great intuitive American performers (Ronald Reagan and Bruce Springsteen, for instance), he gestures toward the edge while occupying the center, thereby’ pleasing the fringe and reassuring the middle. (Less shrewd performers, like Bill Clinton and Garth Brooks, gesture toward the middle and then occupy it, earning the numbed assent of the center and the rage of the edges.) Willie’s voice pulls the edge and the center taut.
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Gershwin the prodigy
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Jazzbo", about George Gershwin, in The New Yorker (10 January 2005):
[Gershwin] had been saved by the piano. On a fateful day in 1910, a secondhand upright was hoisted through the family’s Second Avenue window and, to general shock, scapegrace street fighting George, age twelve, sat down and tore through a popular tune like a vaudeville virtuoso. He had never studied a note. Many years later, Gershwin recalled the musical epiphanies of his early childhood: sitting transfixed outside a penny arcade as an automatic piano emitted noises that turned out to be Robinstein’s "Melody in F"; feeling a "flashing revelation of beauty" when the strains of Dvorak’s "Humoresque" reached him from the school auditorium while he was, in fact, outside playing hooky.
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Getting over it
From Malcolm Gladwell’s "Getting Over It", in The New Yorker (8 November 2004):
We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that out psychological immune system will kick in and rake away the sting of adversity.