kip/bot/blog

Really great article in The Atlantic about the internet’s possible impact on our cognitive structures/patterns/modes. The title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, sounds like the usual whingeing about the internet — how it hurts our spelling, makes us less polite, decreases our capacity for independent thought, makes us less inclinced to memorize epic poetry, etc. But this article is smarter and more relevant on several fronts.

The thread of the article is that the author has noticed that while he has become quite adept at scanning a staggering amount of information and number of articles on the web, he has become less and less able to finish books or even articles. Friends of his have noticed that as well.

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article, and many of the people cited in it, speak in clear tones of worry that we are losing something, but it avoids being a tedious baby-boomer lament. Instead, it has a nice survey of how we have always lamented new technologies (Socrates worries that texts will undermine memory and deep learning in The Phaedras, Nietszche’s typewriter causes speculation about what his real voice is, people worry that the printing press will make knowledge too cheap).

It goes deeper, though, into how we have always thought about our consciousness and how our consciousness may be shaped, by our technologies. We used to think of our brains as clocks, then machines, now computers . . .

There is a woe to us argument:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

This puts me in conflict. My tech side, which abhors tech laments rolls my eyes, but my conspiratorial said “uh-oh.” Then there is a genuinely sad part:

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

This upset in ways that upset me: I am no longer even a trailing member of the digital vanguard.  (And the fact that I found the article through a sample of the magazine on the Kindle — the device that was going to get me reading again — is not a comfort.)

Kindle is fast becoming a bigger conversational go-to for me than wikipedia on the iPhone.  Last night, while hanging with my friends (and cultural guides) Tom and Donna, I shared my story about being a real “trouper” versus “trooper”.  This brought up other phrases, like “the proof of the pudding” (or the proof is in the pudding), which Nownow sorted out thus:

The entire phrase is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” meaning that the true value or quality of a thing can only be judged when it is put to use. (”Proof” in this context means “the act of testing,” rather than our more common “conclusive evidence” sense.) “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” dates back to around 1600, and is more often heard in the United Kingdom than the U.S., probably because puddings of various kinds occupy a more prominent place on the dinner table there.

“The proof is in the pudding,” a fairly common mutation of the proverb, does make a certain amount of sense, i.e., that the final product, not the recipe, is what counts. But personally, I can’t shake the feeling that “the proof is in the pudding” would make an excellent last line for a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Source:
http://www.word-detective.com/081100.html#proofpudding

They also provided confirmation for my personal pet peeve about the misuse of “begging the question”:

In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (also called petitio principii) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning. The first known definition in the West is by the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 B.C., in his book Prior Analytics.

In contemporary usage, “begging the question” often refers to an argument where the premises are as questionable as the conclusion.

In popular usage, “begging the question” is often used to mean that a statement invites another obvious question. This usage is disparaged.
* Suppose Paul is not lying when he speaks.
* Paul is speaking.
* Therefore, Paul is telling the truth.

I love these guys.
Toby, at Pondering Points, seems to get quite agitated by misused phrases as well.  Perhaps Nownow would help . . .

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel . . . pause for a minute to celebrate that fact (which I didn’t know until this morning) . . . pause for another moment to celebrate the fact that it is not historical fiction (as opposed to his last three) . . . too many ellipses …

Eos books, the imprint for the next Neal Stephenson novel, had a nifty blog entry today announcing that Stephenson would be doing an interview soon and that readers could submit questions in the comments section. Stephenson has done a lot of interesting publishing things. When he released Cryptonomicon, a novel in which the importance of cryptography and secrecy to WWII and business today was prominent, he offered readers a code to crack. For the release of Quicksilver, the first volume of his Baroque Cycle he started a wiki in which readers could document the characters, events, ideas, and books covered in what turned out be a massive historical cycle. The release of In the Beginning was the Command Line, a book about software design and the predominance of the GUI in it, as a free downloadable was one of the early instances of ‘free’ in publishing. He semi-famously told the NYT that he wrote Snow Crash because programming it as a multi-media thing turned out to be too hard. He also used to provide soundtracks to the writing of the novels as part of his acknowledgements.

So this is another of those interesting things that Stephenson is doing to publishing. The questions and comments are awesome:

Stephenson has a fervent following, which cares deeply about his work and the subject matter driving his work, so it’s not entirely safe to say that every author can or should do this. But there are two points worth noting. First, Stephenson writes dense fiction that entertains but which also goes somewhere. He can write hilarious, memorable scenes, but they almost always occur in a setting that has depths the novel doesn’t have time to explore. Even his pen-name-written Interface, one of his more straightforward narratives, gets into how the brain works, how much we can manipulate people’s tastes, and, oddly enough, turned me onto a now decade old love of Mahler (along with Kundera . . . I read Immortality a month before Interface. Second, he is all about the “More…” dynamic of the internet era. Knowing that there is a feedback loop where his intellectual passions feed his fiction which fuel his and his readers’ passions, he participates readily and effectively in creating and pointing to content that deepens the reading and appreciation of his work.

Meanwhile, I’m just psyched that he’s doing a novel about monks. I love that s@!$.

Jon Evans’s new book Invisible Armies, has a trailer. (It’s also free for a month, and the author has travel tips and the publisher is running a GPS contest)
Better still, it has a blog-blurb-review-endorsement from Bruce Sterling that works for on an absurd number of levels.

(((That’s a pretty good book, actually. It’s kind of a tough-as-nails technothriller from a leftie Seattle 99er perspective. People who aren’t morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.)))

One of my favorite things about my Kindle (which I’m already quite over the top about) is the idle screen function. When you don’t hit a key for more than five minutes, it gives you these really nifty prints from old books, like so:

It’s like stuff out of bibliodyssey. I’m trying to figure out if Amazon loads new ones onto the unit (I really hope they do), and I will sometimes deliberately sleep the unit to see more pics.

What tickles me most about this, though, is that idling the screen is completely unnecessary. These screens don’t burn, and they don’t draw power by staying on (e-ink technologies don’t require screens to be re-drawn x times per second — once it’s rendered, nothing else happens until a button is pressed.

More pics of the idle screen on my flickr photostream.

One of the fun things to do with the Kindle is NowNow, a question answering service under the “Experimental” menu of Kindle. NowNow is based , I think, on the “mechanical turk“, a group of humans paid in a micro-fashion by Amazon to curate content and, under this program answer questions.

My first question to Nownow, sprang from a conversation with our CTO about gnostic and apocryphal scrolls (a very important part of our business of web marketing) and said that Mary Magdalene was the brother of Lazarus (the resurrectee). I didn’t know that, and while I didn’t doubt it either, I thought it was a good time to test Nownow:

Within 5 minutes, I had gotten three answers with varying shades of personal voice, exploration of nuance to the answer (”No … although it’s hotly debated”), and citations in the form of hyperlinks (you can use the Kindle’s wireless EVDO connection for web browsing).

This morning, while reading a trashy genre novel (I’ll do anything to get back in the fiction groove), the narrator described a character as “a real trouper.” Nice! Trouper! As in, the show must go on or do your part within a troupe/ensemble. I didn’t know that. I’ve usually encountered it as be a real trooper - soldier on, take your orders. Trouper felt right, but I ran it past the folks at Nownow.

My favorite answer comes from a person who I think I would like to have more chats with:

It’s definitely “trouper”, but “trooper” is taking over because so many people misuse/misunderstand the phrase. It seems likely the correct “trouper” will die off because it’s so neglected.

(In the same way “presently” is starting to mean “now” instead of “in the near future”, which is what it ACTUALLY means… just because people have been misusing it so much for so long.)

Anyway, a “trouper” means a member of a theatrical company (usually traveling, in a troupe) and has come to mean someone who keeps plugging away even when things go sour.

While both troupe and troop derive ultimately from the Latin troppus “flock”, one was adopted for military use while the other was applied to performers. However “a reliable, uncomplaining person; a staunch supporter or colleague” is, indeed, a trouper, likening someone to an actor or dancer who goes on despite hardship or impediments. It’s a compliment.

Troupe “group of performers” dates from the early 19th century in English, having come from French, and trouper “a performer belonging to a troupe” dates from the late 19th century. Trouper as in “she’s a real trouper” dates from the 20th century; it was already a cliche as evidenced by this quotation from 1959: “The phrase ‘she’s a trouper’ now has an old-fashioned and faintly derogatory air and is usually bandied about when someone continues to play with a high temperature or a shattering bereavement.”

Troop as in “a body of soldiers” is earlier, dating from at least the 16th century and deriving from Old French trope. A trooper is therefore a member of such a military group (1640), or, by extension, a certain type of law enforcement officer (especially in the U.S., where we have state troopers, who are state police. They’ve been called troopers since the early part of the 20th century). Calling someone a trooper in this way isn’t so much a compliment as a statement of fact: they’re a normal member of a group, nothing special.

This has been misused for a long time, though, and in the USA where the word “troop” is much much more common than “troupes”, it’s completely predictable that people would start using the “wrong” one. If you use the wrong one over and over again, over decades, it becomes acceptable, of course.

English is like that.

I hope this answer is good for you!

You can just tell this person enjoyed writing the answer, was glad for an excuse to dig into the mutual latin roots of both possibilities, and is sadly resigned to the way common usage overrides the richer, deeper original meaning.

I would, of course, be devastated to find out that this is a turing test and this was software generated:

if (question == usageOfWords) then

print “English is like that.”

endif

Techcrunch providing compelling reasons for the Kindle.  Or rather Citi investment analysts are.  They estimate that Amazon will generate between $400 million and $750 million in revenue from the Kindle by 2010, or 1% - 3% of Amazon’s total revenue.  There’s a nice side-by-side comparison that opened my eyes:

The most important, and most interesting, one is that book selection.  I was under the impression, from where I can’t remember, that both were at about 90,000.  My regular tests of Amazon and the Sony store didn’t seem to unearth any differences — attempts to find test books on either store yielded identical results.  Weird perceptual thing on my part?  Bogus data?

Most important, though, is Jennifer Aniston’s endorsement, also in Techcrunch:

People who don’t read fiction sometimes annoy me.  They can be so smug about how frivolous it is to read stories that aren’t factual.  While I can hardly argue that my genre binges are improving books, they’ll extend this argument to the good stuff even.

Most of them are fun and charming, though, and defending fiction is a source of fun with them.  So, as I started reading Germinal yesterday, I sent one such friend a tail to a note about some work-related stuff:

hope all is well.  you’ll love this:  I’m reading Germinal by Zola — 19th century fiction! You’d be amazed at the relevance my oh-so-intelligent friend.

To which, he replied:

19th century fiction? C’mon Kip…. with only time to consume just over 2000 books over an average life span you can certainly find some non-fiction to help prevent the brain rot.

That was depressing.  I’ve always been keenly aware that I will never read more than a fraction of the books I may want to.  That’s the reason I embrace the rule of “if I don’t love a book after 50 pages, I’m dumping it” (and I may just dump Germinal, which will be really weird — like turning my back on my labor past).

But only 2000 books???   That’s a bummer, especially when I think of all the books I’ve re-read four or five times or more.  Makes me wonder if I should stop with the books and just read magazines.

After lunch with a politically like-minded friend, I decided to read Germinal, one of those books I’ve felt guilty for not having read for many years now — and which he had recently read and was raving about. Check out the elegant advisory that there are spoilers below . . . as if there were any other reasons for students (or tired middle-aged readers) to read it).

David Brooks doesn’t usually inspire me, or inspire me to even read him with the chance of getting inspired, but a piece that he did yesterday, describing the modern depletion of imagination, was terrific and made me want more, but now I’m adrift and have much too much work to do to get it.

The article centered on a piece about C S Lewis:

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I’ve been trying to work through Bullfinch’s Mythology recently, in an effort at self-erudition. One of the disturbing things about reading the book is its rationale:

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which enlarges our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no that appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Without a knowledge of mythology, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

This is the constant sell of Bullfinch, that if you read the book, you can understand references in poems and decode their meaning. Not to unlock their magic, feel what it’s like for absurd but wonderful images to mean something deep and emotional, or tap into stories that tap into obscured parts of our psyche — but to understand poems and literature which are almost as removed from us as the mythic stories they reference.

On the rare occasions when I read Shakespeare, I am always struck by how alive the 16th century was with magically powered plants. References to properties of plants abound in Shakespeare, and I think how cool it would be to walk in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and to see flowers which are pretty, smell nice, and have medical/magical/(al)chemical properties. How much more alive and rich the place would be. But that’s gone to us.

So . . . When I see a passage about how night skies used to be magical and once inspired wonder, I want more. Brooks goes on to tantalize even further:

The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time. As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity.

(Tantalize comes from the story of Tantalus, who as a punishment for stealing ambrosia, was put in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree. Whenever he bent to drink the water would recede away from him, whenever he reached up for fruit, the tree branches would move just out of his grasp. I knew that without looking it up, but I also know it because I learned a bunch of Greek myths in High School so I could be clever and witty in Extemporaneous Speaking.  I’m not sure if that’s good or not.)

At the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator tells of a couple who suffers from this post-medieval condition:

A moment later, the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite

Yeah, so I want more out of this Brooks column and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t provide a link for the Ward essay, which seems selfish for one who is lamenting the closing of our imaginations, “many historians” gives me nothing, and oh, how I wish there were some implicitly titled “If you like this or care about the night skies, you should check out…”

The internet’s best contribution to this dilettante’s life is “More…” and I have none.