Matthew Parris vs. Clay Shirky

A great piece in Saturday's Times from Matthew Parris on the speed and ease of communication - and its possible impact on liberty.

Discussing the publication of the list of BNP members - and what bloggers have done with it:

What has changed is not the principle of what may be done, but the effortlessness and speed with which it may be done.

He argues, seemingly perversely, that the sheer effort of digging up information in the pre-internet era gave it a sort of viability - and that our personal privacy was protected by precisely this amount of effort.

Now, in the information free-for-all we live in today, the construction and maintenance of a "good reputation" is much trickier, he says. I certainly know of more than one person at my university who trawled Facebook for debauched and shameful photos - all of which went in a special folder he assumed to be of tremendous value for journalists of the future.

It all goes to support something that Clay Shirky has been saying for the last five years or so: that the ease of group-formation (and other Web 2.0 community-building tools) may be remarkable - and a potential reason for optimism - but that no moral values should be ascribed to it. The web merely facilitates previous patterns of behaviour - or even encourages "worse" patterns (as the trends in cyber-bullying, blog-defamation etc. show). He uses ANNA (pro-anorexia) forums to make his point in an interview:

I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

dysTalk - up and running

dysTalk went live on September 2nd, 2008. If anyone has any feedback, we're all ears...

Re-living Memories

Below provides some interesting empirical evidence for the elegant words of Ed Cooke, whose talk on using one's memory for great feats can be seen here.


For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving
By BENEDICT CAREY
Excerpts from The New York Times September 4, 2008

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, …

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. …

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).


Read the rest of the article here.

A parisian station in London

I went to St. John's Wood for the first time in ages today, and was taken aback by how magnificent it is:

Very evocative passage in Justin Cartwright's The Promise of Happiness. Amidst the tired soul-searching on what defines Englishness, this'll do for me:

For Frances the church has very little to do with God; it's more a shrine to Englishness: flowers, history, familiar - if meaningless - hymns, your own kneeler and a sort of bracing draughtiness, long out of favour.

Girls and Intellectuals

Geoff Dyer:

I spent my twenties labouring - more accurately, idling - under the misconception that women liked intellectuals. In Africa I am confronted by an elemental truth: they prefer rangers and pilots...

Web 2.0 Countries?

I presume this observation is old-hat now, but I found the selection of countries that Feed Informer put as the 'likely guesses' on their registration form (before listing the rest alphabetically) pretty interesting. I wonder if it was compiled from data?


United States
United Kingdom
Australia
Canada
Spain
China
Sweden
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Russia


Where's India? - I thought,

x


Technorati Tags: Feed Informer, Web 2.0 Countries, India, Connectivity

Diary vs Blog

Knowing that I was going to an experiment with a blog, I brought a few of my old diaries out with me to The Hamptons. They're a rag-bag and misleading look at my life - spiking each year in the summer (when I've tended to travel) as well as the obligatory January 1st - 3rd resolution season - but I was worried that my love affair with the blog might spell the end for those wistful diary-keeping days. Ah, me...

Not so, I've realised.

My diary was a two-headed beast, and the two sat awkwardly beside on another. On one neck was my deep introspection. (An example at random from my Peruvian journal: "I miss laughing with her, and watching her laugh with other people.") Whilst on the other was my monkish transcribing of extracts: from the books I had with me, from newspapers, or from the great ideas in my head that seemed to warrant a wider audience.

Now I can divide the two.

The fluff can stay behind closed covers, biding its time mischievously until the biographers arrive, whilst the larger musings can fight it out in the blogarena.

One caveat to this. Like the best non-fiction writers, the best bloggers seem to be alive to the sweet taste of allusion. A lot of columnists tell us just enough about their lives to hook us; again, Geoff Dyer is the master:

Desperately lonely in Peru, I came across this in a Geoff Dyer article on - was it statues?:

I see your face everywhere, wandering through it like rain and the drifting steam of streets. I wake at four in the morning and think of you doing ordinary things: hunting for your glasses that you can never find, taking the tube to work, buying wine at the supermarket.

But my favourite, recently discovered, is this. In his book on The Great War, GD spends a few pages discussing the letters to and from loved ones, before inserting this:

Propped against the bar of the Cafe de l'Industrie, I open an envelope with my name in your writing. The second paragraph wonders, in your latest flourish of colloquial English, how I am 'bearing up.'

Technorati Tags: Geoff Dyer, The Great War, Diary Keeping

Interactive learning: always a good thing?

This is too good, not to post in full: from David Smith.

"There are 120 contributors [to a magazine feature that asked: 'what do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?]. From these, I have selected Esther Dyson. I have her dictum, 'Always make new mistakes', as a fridge magnet and her Edge contribution is something every teacher should ponder. Here's a substantial excerpt:"

We're living longer, and thinking shorter.

[Disclaimer: Since I'm not a scientist, I'm not even going to attempt to take on something scientific. Rather, I want to talk about something that can't easily be measured, let alone proved. And second, though what I'm saying may sound gloomy, I love the times we live in. There has never been a time more interesting, more full of things to explain, interesting people to meet, worthy causes to support, challenging problems to solve.]

It's all about time. I think modern life has fundamentally and paradoxically changed our sense of time. Even as we live longer, we seem to think shorter. Is it because we cram more into each hour? Or because the next person over seems to cram more into each hour? For a variety of reasons, everything is happening much faster and more things are happening. Change is a constant.

It used to be that machines automated work, giving us more time to do other things. But now machines automate the production of attention-consuming information, which takes our time. For example, if one person sends the same e-mail message to 10 people, then 10 people have to respond.

The physical friction of everyday life—the time it took Isaac Newton to travel by coach from London to Cambridge, the dead spots of walking to work (no iPod), the darkness that kept us from reading—has disappeared, making every minute not used productively into an opportunity cost.

And finally, we can measure more, over smaller chunks of time. From airline miles to calories (and carbs and fat grams), from friends on Friendster to steps on a pedometer, from realtime stock prices to millions of burgers consumed, we count things by the minute and the second.

Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now. …

How can we reverse this? It's a social problem, but I think it may also herald a mental one—which I describe as mental diabetes. Whatever's happening to adults, most of us grew up reading books (at least occasionally) and playing with "uninteractive" toys that required us to make up our own stories, dialogue and behavior for them. Today's children are living in an information-rich, time-compressed environment that often seems to replace a child's imagination rather than stimulate it. I posit that being fed so much processed information—video, audio, images, flashing screens, talking toys, simulated action games—is akin to being fed too much processed, sugar-rich food. It may seriously mess up children's information metabolism and their ability to process information for themselves. In other words, will they be able to discern cause and effect, to put together a coherent story line, to think scientifically?

I don't know the answers, but these questions are worth thinking about, for the long term.

Technorati Tags: Esther Dyson, interactive learning

Carolyn Cassady interview

This is an interview I conducted earlier in the year with Carolyn Cassady. You can listen to it here. The fantastic illustration (left) was done by the talented Tom Kingsley.


What a curse a cult novel seems to be . By connecting so acutely with the zeitgeist, books like On The Road tend to seduce their readers with such emotion that any sense of objectivity is lost. The myths begin; the readers own the book.

Carolyn Cassady seems to have spent most of her life negotiating that difficult terrain between fiction and truth. Fictionalised as Camille in On The Road , married to its hero Neal Cassady ('Dean Moriarty' in the novel) and a lover to its author Jack Kerouac ('Sal Paradise'), Carolyn is perhaps the most qualified person to clear up what she calls 'all that misunderstanding' in a subject so relentlessly stylized and distorted. 'I am not in On The Road actually. Camille? - she just lies there and cries. And I mean black lace? I don't think so,' she laughs, taking a graceful drag of her cigarette.

As expected, she denies that there was any such thing as 'The Beat Generation'. 'As far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg.' Generations, just like Sets and Movements, seem to be antiquated notions these days: they're just too easy to unravel. She brings a much more controversial corrective to the men's behaviour - traditionally seen as proto-rebellious. 'They included me in everything. Contrary to popular belief, Jack and Neal were very respectful of women, always gentlemen, never swore...' She also recovers the mindset of the times: 'what most people don't realise is the consciousness of the thirties and forties, which was very much influenced by Victorian values. Both of them were Catholics - Jack an immigrant . They were not wild. ' On multiple occasions during the interview, Allen Ginsberg - though remembered fondly - is blamed for encouraging this reputation of recklessness and abandon: as a conduit for his own literary and commercial success.

'Jack', she mourns, 'got dragged into it...' Jack Kerouac is a great example of what misrepresentation can do to a writer. He wanted to join the canon of great American writers - Jack London, Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway-and the role he was cast in instead proved devastating, as Cassady explains. 'He was called the "King of the Beats" and the "Father of the Hippies", he told me that he was going to drink himself to death. He was so sensitive, so self-conscious, and so paranoid that he just couldn't stand the image that had been created of him. All the hippie stuff was just so alien to what his dreams had been...it destroyed him.' To what extent does an artist have control over how his work is perceived once it's in the public domain? It's a fascinating case study of an artist trying to escape his caricature. As every depth was plunged for commodity - 'his awful poems, his awful drunken doodles, his awful play' - Jack found the only means of escape in alcohol.

Neal Cassady faced much the same dilemma. According to Carolyn, he wished that people would not read On The Road as it undermined his desire for respectability. The problem for Neal - and, now, for his family - is that despite being the focal point for Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing, as Carolyn puts it, 'Jack was the recorder; Neal was the do-er'. Besides his letters, there's very little creative output: he was doomed to always being a character, in some ways to always being fictional. It's much easier to squabble over the legacy of someone's words than their character. Carolyn finds herself constantly having to rectify or absolve Neal's reputation: whether it's the 1980 film Heart Beat starring Nick Nolte as Neal or the final images of Neal, after their divorce in 1963, driving the Merry Prankster Bus - and accelerating his drug intake. He had written to Carolyn to tell her how much he disliked this image too. Even Neal's death is much disputed - as befits his status as a cult icon. The myth is that he died from exposure after deciding to walk back home along the railroad tracks in San Jose - a hopelessly romantic image. Carolyn says it was none of these: under 'cause' on the death certificate, the doctor writes only 'all systems congested.' Carolyn is a fastiduous historian, a self-confessed 'stickler for facts' - a great difficulty in light of the nebulous legacy of her husband. Not just nebulous but polyvalent: Neal might well have desired to be an upstanding citizen but his wilder urges are indisputable. Carolyn does acknowledge this: she didn't want to read On The Road because she didn't want to know what her boys got up to when they weren't with her. A website (nealcassady estate.com) has been set up by the family, 'dedicated to bringing you the real Neal' but one gets the sad sense that the Cassady family's will continue to be a lone voice in the wind. 'I realise now that it is the utter inadequacy of human contacts that makes us turn to art,' wrote William Boyd in The View from Yves Hill , 'only in fiction is everything explained.'

Technorati Tags: Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassady, On The Road, Neal Cassady, William Boyd

Interview with Sarah Hall

This is an interview I conducted earlier this year for Notes from the Underground:


In an interview after one particularly majestic display, Billie Jean King's only explanation was a shrug: 'I don't know...sometimes you just...see the ball like a football.' It's an attractive notion - professionals unaccountably hitting form on certain days - and it turns out that writers have them too. 'It is like exercise,' Sarah Hall says, 'you get that burst of adrenalin... you feel strong . The words come easily.'

It helps if you've got focus - if, in Hall's words, you're 'fired up.' In her latest work, The Carhullan Army , one gets the sense that Hall didn't have too many days staring at the ceiling or re-checking the word count: there's a real sense of purpose here. Set in a Britain crippled by environmental catastrophe, the novel follows Sister, a woman who defies the State's bleak regime by fleeing her hometown in search of an all-female commune of kindred spirits. With her fictional Britain partially underwater, Hall sees this work as a critique of 'reactive', wait-and-see politics. Worthy campaign novels are often short on panache but Hall's mindful of her priorities: as she commented on her receipt of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in November last year, 'the duty of a writer is to write a story.'

Do writers have a duty to address the big issues too? Hall calls it 'not so much a duty as a high note'. A victim of the Cumbrian floods in 2005, ' the implications of an altered climate became no longer merely imaginable, but visible .' It's not that she felt a duty to write about it; more that she couldn't have written about anything else. 'What's happening to the planet is desperately frightening', she says, 'but so much so that most people don't know how to process it.' The Carhullan Army forces both her and her readers to meditate on the potential consequences. Hall never pontificates; she actualizes, and this accumulation of images and interactions - societal disintegration, rationing (both of food and children), overcrowding, disease and the proximity of violence - is far more admonishing as a result.

Her prophesy is both broad-brush and local. We have the 28 Days Later passages - the deserted streets, the derelict shopping centres etc. - but the main focus is on the small-scale, the decentralised. Not 'what would happen to Britain?' but 'what would happen to your town, your village, your family?' Hall grew up on the Eastern side of the Lake District in a sheep farming community: her inclination is towards the rural and local. If she's grinding her climate change axe in her right hand, her left is busy working the axe of community breakdown and social atomisation. Her description of the self-sustaining commune of farming women might be read as a critique of the Tesco-ification of rural Britain and the devastation of its farming communities. 'It's great to have a South African grapefruit for breakfast every morning but it's just not...sensible. We're a great farming country...' she tails off poignantly. Is Carhulla's 'brave new world' (as Sister describes it) not an exercise in nostalgia? 'I'm not nostalgic, I'm just cross. When I was growing up, we had bottles of milk delivered to our door every morning, which we knew came from two farms down the road...The milk was a reasonable price and the farmers made a reasonable living. But yes, what we see in Carhulla we could have seen in Britain a hundred or even two hundred years ago.'

Nostalgic or not, Hall's familiarity with the local geography infuses the novel's language. She talks about the register of her characters. The women speak as their survivalist circumstances dictate - with parade-ground precision - but also as befits their lives as Northern female farmers. Hall grew up with these women: 'if you saw two women farmers leaning on a gate, you probably wouldn't understand what they were saying.' (I felt the you rather assertively.) Her women have a muscular, no-nonsense familiarity with agricultural technique, buttressed by a liberal sprinkle of Northern idiom ('tuss', 'corbie', 'bothie') and cursing. Hall loves to resuscitate the impact of words: 'swear words generally fail to shock...but somehow used by a woman they retain some of their original power.'

Hall used the authenticity of these characters to separate her novel from its literary predecessors. There's something so daunting about Dystopia for a writer - it seems even harder to wriggle free from cliché. So in The Carhullan Army , we do have the spectre of state control ( Nineteen Eighty-Four ), the establishment of a utopia ( Brave New World ), the rurification of cities ( The Tripods ), enforced sterilization ( Children of Men ) etc. But we also have some wonderfully original images and conceits: as Sister flees her hometown, she sees a church with no doors, and the 'grey arched hole' retreating inwards. In another, a rotting dog comes to symbolise the degradation of the world. Did she feel at all burdened by previously conceived dystopiae? 'Not really, because there's a real dialogue going on between writers of Dystopia. Brave New World is a satirical response to the progressive ideas put forward by Freud, Ford and the early behaviourists, and to the work of H.G.Wells, for instance.' Hall sees dystopian fiction as 'the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster'; what she wants to introduce into the broader conversation is a pro-active role for women. 'In any discussion of apocalypse, reproduction is obviously going to be key.' And not just reproduction: one of the The Carhullan Army's controversial decisions is to have women as 'front-line resistance and rebel-force' rather than as just the victims.

It was Hall's willingness to engage in discussion - whether climatic, societal or gender - that convinced the John Llewellyn Rhys panel to award her the £5,000 prize. Suzi Feay, chair of judges, praised Hall for " tackl[ing] the most urgent and alarming questions of today," adding that "we need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

Technorati Tags: Notes from the Underground, Sarah Hall, Dystopia

The 'slide'?

I'm coining a neologism, not being able to find the anatomical term on Google.

The slide: that region of a man's body between the bottom of his gut and the top of his pubis.

In New York (from where I write), it seems to be the gold standard in male physique, stretching itself grandly over advertising boards across Manhattan. Its loudest celebrant is Abercrombie and Fitch (see above). Theirs runs on and on - ever southward - into a fine, sultry mist. The shop itself - a dimly-lit grotto on 5th Ave with topless male assistants - dresses its mannequins accordingly: a plaster-white crescent separates the top of their shorts from the bottom of the shirts.

Is there an attraction over and above the generic ideal of the Grecian torso? In the promo surrounding The Dreamers, Bertolucci described the area (citation needed) as the localisation of male youth; the focal point of male eroticism - and maligned that his own had turned to flub.






Technorati Tags: New York, Abercrombie and Fitch

Marginalia

... one of the brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin. The margin is a place on a paper form, which is designed for writing things down that are outside, both physically and conceptually, the form that “the system” expects. The thing about the margin is that it is connected to the form in such a way that the form carries the stuff that goes beyond the form along with the form.

Austin Henderson, quoted in chapter 4 of Software Design & Usability (Klaus Kaasgaard): 'Beyond Formalisms: The Art and Science of Designing Pliant Systems'.

Link via David Smith

Literary historians get excited about the margins from writers' own book collections - and rightly so. Geoff Dyer is surely right that the most interesting critics are writers themselves:

On the other hand, it's really, really exciting reading what other writers have said about Lawrence. It seems to me as well, that is the kind of thing which would encourage people when they have left university to go on to be writers as opposed to going on to be academics.

It's part of GD's wider criticisms of academia, which reach a frothy rant in Out of Sheer Rage:

Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because academics are busy killing everything they touch.

Some of the most poignant (and famous) marginalia are Sylvia Plath's on her copy of The Great Gatsby. They range from the banal ('good') to the majestic. When Nick leaves the Buchanan house, passing Gatsby in the driveway, Plath underlined the final sentence in the chapter ("So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight watching over nothing"), and wrote in the margin:

knight waiting outside dragon goes to bed with princess

A melancholy comment.





Technorati Tags: Geoff Dyer, margins, The Great Gatsby, Sylvia Plath,

Things that make the hairs stand up...

To be updated...

After Hours


Ikea ad: Home


Technorati Tags: After Hours, Ikea, Martin Scorsese

A boon for Tory educational policy

Is this the sort of thing the Conservatives want to include in their 'Swedish-school' education plan?

Ex-comprehensive teacher praises his new independent school


Technorati Tags: David Miliband,

Smart guy

David Miliband grows and grows in my estimation. First there was the interview with the FT; now, I've just come across this speech thanks to David Smith's blog:

To quote David Smith's post in full:

In two recent speeches, UK politicians are beginning to show they understand the web. First, George Osborne. And now, David Miliband:

When we think of education, we tend to think of formal teaching in classrooms by teachers. This remains important. But the range of resources to support learning is far wider than that - from workplaces and museums to individuals with skills to contribute, and passions to share. They lie beyond the school gates and they are 24/7. And the key to genuine educational transformation is inspiring children and adults to learn more for themselves – what Yeats called ‘lighting a fire’ as opposed to ‘filling a pail’. So the challenge is to connect people with skills and time to give, from university students, part-time employees and people in retirement, to others with similar passions and interests. ‘Every citizen a teacher’ may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not impossible to imagine an educational world where a large minority of citizens play an active role, either on a voluntary or paid basis in supporting learners as personal tutors, running after-school clubs, or integrated into the curriculum and the classroom. The web can create the potential to aggregate the dispersed supply of citizen-teachers and connect them to learners with particular interests. It can also help learners filter the good from the bad through peer to peer recommendations and make sense of a world where educational resources are much more diverse.

And much more besides: 'I believe the businesses and government that succeed in the future will be those that give people greater power to shape the future of their individual lives and greater capacity to collaborate. A sense of I can and we can.'

Exciting stuff


Technorati Tags: David Miliband

The awakening of my e-consciousness

I have just come across the phenomenal blog belonging to David Smith, a teacher at St. Paul's. Found here. Just the notion of a Head of English at one school, re-launching himself as Director of ICT at another is a wicked one - especially in the English private school sector. But, more than that, he seems to have a real passion for pushing the - for want of a better word - Web 2.0 agenda into his kids' line-of-sight.

He's also ex-tutor to friend and all-round hero, Ed Cooke.


Technorati Tags: David Smith, Ed Cooke