Archive for June, 2005
Transitioning to TypePad
Posted by: | CommentsIn the next few hours, I will be taking down the www.cultureby.com website.
This is because Indiana University Press will be publishing in hard cover, and then soft, the several books I had lodged there for downloading.
The blog itself moves to TypePad.
There are a couple of things that fall between the stools, neither books nor blog, and I want to reproduce one of them here, not least because it is the reason I am doing the WGBH show tomorrow.
Here’s then is a little essay about the contemporary relevance of Samuel Pepys, the man Leora Kornfeld calls the Blogfather.
The Pepys Now project:
how to write a blog they’ll read in 100 years
Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) kept a diary for ten years, 1660-1669 (http://www.pepys.info/index.html ). He helps us understand the great fire of London, some of the plague years, the aftermath of the English civil war, and the English navy.
Equally important, he helps us see what life was like. We hear him kicking himself for “carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o’clock it is one hundred times.” A man fretting.
For recording the great and little events of the day, Pepys has been given immortality. We read him still.
There is no shortage of diarists these days, not with billions of blogs on line. But will bloggers find immortality? No. This is not just because there are so many of us. The trouble is we assume the things readers will want to know in 100 years.
There are, for instance, countless blog entries from people experiencing the flu. But what history will care about are all the details that struck us as too obvious or banal to mention.
What the “flu” was like, what we took as “medicine.” The "pharmacy" we got the medicine in. The conversation we had with that man in the lab coat. The advice we got from friends. What we wore while recuperating. What we watched on TV. What was illuminated by that faint light in the “refrigerator.” The idea, for instance, of “comfort food.” (What was it? What comfort did it give?) What we talked about on the “phone.” What “emails” we wrote. What happened to personhood? What was it like to be us, as we lost momentum, as our affairs went into suspension, as our life began slowing to come undone. Where did the mind turn in this rare inactive moment. What fretting did we do?
In 100 years, the flu will be an exotic experience. (We read Pepys for his accounts of the plague; we know longer know what this was like.) Historians will hold conferences on the experience of sickness and curing. And they will consult our blogs mostly with unhappiness.
A conference paper in the year 2103:
We have 3.74 million references to “flu” in the blogs of the early 21 st century. We have the medical accounts of what it was and what curing was. But we do not know what it was like as an experience.
These bloggers were talking to one another. They were not talking to us.
But I am happy to report that I have discovered one web log that offers a meticulous record, one might even say Pepysian account, of one flu in one life.
Using the weblog entries of one Sarah Zupko , I intend to show how the “flu” worked as a social, cultural, emotional, physiological and medical event in the life.
With this as my platform, I will seek, then, to illuminate key aspects of everyday life. Sarah Zupko ’s account of the flu she suffered in the 14 th week of their year 2003, in conjunction with other records we have at our disposal, help us to see how the “self” was constructed, maintained and, in a word, lived.
In an odd way, we owe this now vanished virus a debt of thanks. Under its duress, Zupko was moved, meticulously and with rare sensitivity, to reveal not just what it was to be “sick” but what it was like to be a creature of this historical and cultural moment.
Blogs for their time
There are two strategies here.
The first is simply to document everything we can and let history do the sorting. In the case of “blanket documentation,” we don’t need to choose because we seek to capture everything.
1. The blanket documentation: a week’s regime
(do this once a year)
Monday:
Recording place:
Photo documentation:
Home, work, neighborhood, local store(s), other places we go,
Do 5 level of documentation from broad to the individual object
(e.g., our neighbourhood, house/apt., rooms, objects, contents)
Tuesday:
Recording time:
Prose documentation
Structure of the last week
Things that were scheduled
Things that were spontaneous
Who, what, where, when, and why of each event
Wednesday:
Recording things:
(Clothing, furniture, art, fridge magnets & other possessions)
Photo documentation
Prose documentation
Link the two, prop a photograph of your favorite sweater in front of the computer and describe where it comes from, where you found it, things that happened as you wore it, what it means to you know, how it interacts with other articles of clothing, the last time you wore it and anything else it brings to mind
Thursday:
Recording media:
Music, movies, television, websites
The regulars
The occasionals
The discoveries
Prose documentation of and for each.
Friday:
Recording people:
Diary entries:
Video documentation
Do interviews with everyone who will put up with one. Set up your video camera (if you have one) and leave it standing in the living room (if you have one). When someone comes over, sit them down and ask them these questions… and anything else that occurs to you, and capture anything else that occurs to them.
Saturday:
Review, reflect, spot holes, capture the things we’ve missed
Sunday:
Review, voice over commentary on each of your bodies of evidence. There are two imperatives here:1) capturing the assumptions that did not get onto film and that do not normally get into blogs; 2) showing the interrelationships of all the pieces we have know documents. What are the wholes that organized the parts? What was the lived experience of this world
There will be moments when you’ll think to yourself, “Oh, what’s the point, this is so obvious.” But think about what you would give to have account like this from your life, say, 20 years ago. If would be a dear possession. Think about what you would give to have this account of your father’s life when he was the age you are now. Think about what you give for an account of your great, great grandfather’s life. By this time, you have materials that historians would be pestering you to have a look at.
The “as if from a glass bottom boat” documentation
This is the second strategy. This is the documentation of a single thing, person, place, object, event. It could, for instance, be the flu. Now the trick is to tear ourselves away from the familiarity that, blessedly, makes so much of our experience intelligible and manageable. Only thus can we deliver what historians want (and what we will be pleased to have in 20 years).
There are a couple of aids here. One is surprise. Surprise occurs when assumptions are violated and it represents an opportunity to capture what these assumptions are. I was standing in Grand Central Station last week and a man passed me wearing a burgundy red fedora. It was too stylish to be a prank, too odd to be a simple act of style. It forced me to think about hats and to see the conventions that govern them.
Another is humor. This too depends on violated assumptions. Victorian jokes now strike us as not very funny. And this is because we no longer share the cultural assumptions they assumed and on which they operated. Take a moment of humor and supply the archeology on which they rested.
A third is what the Russians called deformalization. The banal example here is repeating a word over and over until it becomes strange to the ear. (Try saying, “saying” thirty times and see if it continues to deliver meaning as it once did.). The trick here seems to be just concentrating on something for long enough that its “taken-for-grantedness” begins to fall away. Think long enough about a kitchen and this begins to happen with surprising ease. (CxC assumes no responsibility for the dislocation that will follow.)
A fourth might be called the Goffman effect. Erving Goffman sought out the company of people who had forgotten or misremembered the rules of everyday life. They stood too close to him.(Ah, so there is a rule that says we must remain 12 to 16 inches from a conversational partner.) They gave too little eye contact or too much. (Ah, so there’s a rule…) They shouted or whispered. And so on. The trick here is to treat social error as an indicator of social convention.
(A fifth is the alienating effects of drugs and alcohol, but CxC is forbidden from recommending this path to illumination.)
What we really need here are pen pals in mainland China , correspondents who read our accounts and say, “sorry, I still don’t see how this person, place, event, or thing made sense to you.”
Storage
Once you have performed your Pepys scrutiny, burn it on a CD or DVD and send one copy to the youngest responsible member of your family, with careful instructions that they are to do the same in 20 years. Send the other to the Smithsonian. CxC will attempt to encourage them to take receipt of it and put it in an archive somewhere. Congratulations, you are now immortal.
the Pepys project II
Posted by: | Comments
Tomorrow, I take part in a WGBH-Open Source show called “Attention Historians of the Future.” My “Pepys Project” argued that blogs will someday be used to reconstruct our life and times.
Jason Scott, the internet archivist, is all over this. He is capturing podcasts by the many thousands. Open Source producer, Robin Amer, asked me to have a look at a few of these. How, she wanted to know, might future historians use them.
First things first. Future historians will know and revere the name Jason Scott. They will build little shrines to him. They will name their children after him. Unlike the rest of us, Jason gets to be immortal.
Mark Johnson
1) Mark Johnson gives an autobiographical glimpse of his participation in the world of gaming that takes us from his childhood to the present day. Some of things that will jump out in 100 years.
1.1. what life was like before the internet. Most everything Mark knew about gaming came, in the early days, from other, very local, gamers. This vision of networks before the internet will be one of the most exotic things about us and one of the toughest things for future historians to imagine and reconstruct. Mark can help.
1.2 historians will pounce on Mark’s use of the term “geek.” In 100 years, they are going to be extremely keen to see how this term emerged, changed in meaning and valence, and how it helped form the self concept and community of some of the people who helped create the internet. Mark uses the term with pride and apology.
1.3 the challenge of this documentary work is for the “assume nothing” rule. This means listening to what one says and supplying an explanation for taken-for-granted terms. The further historians are from our time, the more extensive and intensive “archeology” they will need. Mark has a splendid style. It is crisp, clear, almost completely without ego, rich in detail, and architecturally well designed. He excavates well.
Still, there are moments when even the present day ethnographer wants to shout out, “For God sake’s Mark, give us more.” This happened especially when Mark talks about the advent of role playing games. We guess that this changed gaming extraordinarily. But Mark does not illuminate here.
2) Ron Brugler puts his sermons on line. These are interesting for a couple of reasons:
2.1 Ron is just about the most patronizing speaker you have ever heard. That people were prepared to put up with this when it was virtually banished from all other forms of discourse will interest. Was this the voice of sincerity? Did patronizing speech say that this was a man who “felt your pain?” What was going on here?
2.2 Ron appears to be engaged in a “how slow can I go” bicycle race, telling stories that just take forever. (Really, it’s like using a 56k modem again.) This is the exception that helps prove a rule: we are a culture that prizes pace. Why this sermon (and the church of Swedenborgian) is allowed to break the pace rule will be a nice little puzzle for future historians. (The answer may be simple. It may not.)
3) Free traffic tips from Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Our culture is extraordinary because many of us have seen the “man behind the curtain.” We have glimpsed the grammars of filmmaking, television, music making, etc. Almost all of us are hip to the codes of production.
But there will be places and people that do not evidence this cultural competence, and parsing who understood what and why, will be one of the ways historians will preoccupy themselves. Enter Traffictip.com. Whoa, baby. Here’s a woman who has a charmingly imperfect understanding of what makes this sort of thing hum…or not. (Again, why Tinu is indifferent to, or exempt from, prevailing rules might be illuminating or it might be banal.)
4. Radman talking about Ascii art and early computer music (chip tunes)
This is where Jason’s work really shines. The cultural production being talked about here is way, way off the mainstream and this is just the kind of thing vulnerable to the forces of neglect and entropy. This is the sort of thing that must be preserved. And there are some interesting moments that illuminate the state of our aesthetic categories as when Radman talks about a chip tune version of oye com ova as being really funny and really good (or words to that effect). I am pretty sure this is a aesthetic judgment (and its mixing of admiration and contempt) that did not exist even 20 years ago. Discovering it will be a future historian’s notion of a compelling thesis opportunity.
References
More from Jason Scott here
More from Mark Johnson here
More on the WGBH show here
Last note:
Please forgive if there is a little choppiness in the next couple of days. I am moving from Movable Type to TypePad (Thanks to Dave Ely.)
Trend watching, the VC way
Posted by: | Comments
Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures. (Gary Rivlin. NYT)
Venture capitalists are good at many things, but, generally speaking, reading trends in consumer taste and preference is not one of them.
Sometimes they acknowledge this, as they did after the dot.com run up.
“Almost universally, venture firms said, ‘You know, we’re not comfortable working with consumer stuff, we’re really technology- and engineering-based firms, we made a mistake going into these businesses and we promise never to do it again,’” (Tod Francis, Shasta Ventures.)
Then they forget. According to the NYTs story, David Sze of Greylock Ventures gets several calls a month from VCs who want to invent with him.
“They’ll say, ‘I’m a consumer guy, let’s invest together,’” Mr. Sze said. “But when I read their background, it turns out they’re telecomm guys. [ ] I think it’s great that the Internet consumer space is heating up again. But consumer is also quickly becoming a space where lots of venture capitalists are diving in without a clue.”
Now I am not going to do the usual arts & letters, social sciences, culture studies, & qualitative thing, and mock the VCs for their presumptions.
In point of fact, those who claim special training and sophistication in this area dont have much to brag about. We dont use numbers, so we have no sense of scale or interval. We black box much of our analysis so that the visitor must take our conclusions or leave them. We are much too cool to define our terms or to ask the terms be defined. There is a species of “identity scholarship here that says you cant ever admit to not having heard of a trend, a singer, a director. We are shameless about inventing proprietary language when perfectly good, and more distributed, terms exist. In sum, we are running mom and pop shops in a world that has higher standards and more powerful operations.
Too bad. The VC analytic traditions, the power and acuity of their thinking would make a contribution to the common goal: to track and anticipate a culture that now moves faster than the analysts who wish to understand it.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. Brands behaving badly: the naming and claiming game. This blog here
Rivlin, Gary. 2005. Venture Capital Rediscovers the Consumer Internet. New York Times. June 10, 2005.
Blog list changes:
I have added Denis Dutton to the bloglist. Dutton endeared himself to just about everyone a couple of years ago by hosting the “bad writing contest which helped to publize (and one hopes, to shame) the rhetorical abuses being committed in the name of post modernism.
Pepys project
I will be doing a segment of the Open Source show on the WGBH show Open Source on how the internet can help us accomplish a more thorough documentation of the contemporary world. I have an interest on this topic as you will see on this blog one level up. More details on the WGBH show here
Last matters
Over the weekend, with the help of David Ely, I will be moving from Movable Type to TypePad. I am hoping this will be a seamless transition. Please forgive, if it is not. Thanks to Tom Guarriello for the suggestion.
China : India :: Wal-Marts : Target
Posted by: | Comments
Yesterday, Thomas Friedman compared India and China.
If India and China were both highways, the Chinese highway would be a six-lane, perfectly paved road, but with a huge speed bump off in the distance labeled "Political reform: how in the world do we get from Communism to a more open society?" [...] India, by contrast, is like a highway full of potholes, with no sidewalks and half the streetlamps broken. But off in the distance, the road seems to smooth out, and if it does, this country will be a dynamo.
There is a better way to make the comparison:
China is to India as Wal-Mart is to Target
I apologize to 2.4 billion people so characterized and to TBSA readers for this violent insult to their intelligence. But as long as the NYT is trading in dubious metaphor, surely bloggers have license equally rash and quite as ludicrous.
Here’s what I mean by the analogy. In the international economy, China is a commodity player. India’s promise lies in its control of cultural particulars. And by this I mean, India understands and participates in the culture of the First World West in ways China does not.
As long as the world wants its merchants to "pile em high and sell em cheap," China will flourish as Wal-Mart does. But as Virginia Postrel’s vision of the marketplace comes to pass, and all consumer goods begin to add value and win share by embracing design intelligence, India will flourish as Target has.
India has a large intellectual and creative class. Many of these people are worldly in ways the chattering classes of the West are not. More than that, India is its own intellectual challenge, a culture that knows a thing or two about diversity and discontinuity. Moreover, India has been drawing on the intellectual and educational resources of the West for several hundred years. (What’s theirs is theirs, what’s ours is theirs.)
There are lots of smaller questions: 1) Has India borrowed from the English that disdain for the marketplace that keeps some smart people out of the game? 2) Clearly, India has its own traditions of world refusal. Are these active? 3) Do the educational institutions of India encourage creativity and in what domains do they encourage it? I have a feeling that there is a bias for hard science over interpretive approaches every bit as ferocious as the Western one once was. Indias "cultural creatives," to use Richard Florida’s term, are being shaped by many factors.
Mao’s cultural revolution was vastly destructive of intellectual talent, ideas, and worldliness. Clearly, these stocks of knowledge and personnel are coming back. (Sometimes, literally in the person of fully Westernized members of the "overseas" community.) And some part of the contest between China and India will turn on whether the former can recover cultural sophistication faster than the latter can create the infrastructure that Friedman finds so lacking.
Caveat lector
I am not a student of India or China. I have been to China five times over the last 15 years, traveling widely, doing commercial research and detailed interviews in home, talking to people of modest means, and generally speaking, not much education. I have been to India twice over the last 8 years, to Mumbai and New Delhi only. Again, I was doing commercial research and interviewing people of modest means and limited education. While I know lots of South Asians who are intellectuals and cultural creatives, all of them have been resident in Canada or the US for many years. In sum, the argument above is pretty much pure surmise.
References
Friedman, Thomas L. 2005. Bangalore: Hot and Hotter. New York Times. June 8, 2005.
Florida, Richard. 2002. The rise of the creative class. Washington Monthly. May.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html
Postrel, Virginia. 2003. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins.
Howlers at the New York Times
Posted by: | Comments
The Times did a fine job again today demonstrating its irrelevance in the coverage of social and cultural matters.
Fred Conrad covered the Ladies of the Red Hat Society, with photographs and voice on tape, in the production of a little document that should deeply embarrass his venerable institution. It is, among other things, journalism that contradicts the facts of the matter.
Heres what Fred “discovered about the Society. “Its a huge organization of women over the age of 50. Its dedicated to one thing: to having fun.
Actually, the Society takes its name from a poem by Jenny Joseph called Warning. The first two lines of this poem read:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.
The poem is a refusal of the dismissive notions that compete to define women of age. Happily, all this escapes poor Fred who covers his eyes and just takes a stab at it. “Girls just want to have fun, Gene? I dont have anything against journalism that moves away from who-what-when-where-why reporting. But this is embarrassing.
References
Conrad, Fred. 2005. The Ladies of the Red Hat Society. The New York Times. June 8, 2005. on line
