essaysbysean.blogspot.com
“Follow your passion,” goes the
self-help wisdom in California.
Recently I’ve been feeling
strangely blank from wondering: Do nerds, and others too, spend their hours on
the web from having “new improved” passion, with computers being “the exciting
wave of the future” or, instead, invest their hours merely in plunging down a
time sink… As the band Counting Crows would sing, “…I want to know, and all I
really know is I don’t want to know.”
“Know thyself,” goes the ancient
wisdom; “Know others,” goes the street wisdom.
Nerds, of course, the forgotten
minority, are known for “not knowing” about what “others” would think of basic
fashion and social skills. Too bad, because knowing about “others” could be a
check to see if you are missing out on fun or too unwisely following your
passion: such as programming computers all day long, even during an
all-too-brief Banff summer, down in a dingy basement. Contra-wise, (said
Tweedledum) the “others” could check to see if they are missing out on knowing enough science.
I suspect many people don’t have
any passions or hobbies, and I also think some people, even while they
have an above average I.Q., haven’t any passion for learning. I graduated
university. While only a few among the public might agree with Grandpa Rabbit,
“Reading rots the brain,” more might think, “anyone at university must be a
smart nerd.” Not so. Although undergraduates, by
definition, have an above average I.Q., in my experience few see themselves as nerds, while some
students, although smart, are downright passionless. They seem to be “going through the motions” in order to
“get a good job” while having little interest in abstract knowledge—Those folks are the
ones I confess I’m still trying to understand… And none of them ever seem to marvel at being able to look across a
crowded hall where everybody has
a university level I.Q.
I know most people, the “others,”
well: They prefer noisy discos and dancing to conversation in quiet cafes; they
prefer walking in lively malls and fashion districts to browsing in quiet
bookstores. They prefer cities with neon lights such as Vegas, Miami and Los
Angeles to modest places like Boulder or San Francisco. These regular folks are
everywhere, average and normal but… they aren’t me.
It was my favorite web essayist and
computer millionaire, Paul Graham, who pointed out that you won’t get any new
start-up software companies, no Google or Microsoft, in any of the glamour
cities because nerds don’t want to live there. Millionaires do and regular
folks do, but not nerds. Graham is a delight for his reminders that there are
other nerds just like me…
Of course I love the common man, of
course I see nothing wrong with readers of People Magazine sharing the World Wide Web with readers of The
Economist. I’m pleased that I once
commented to computer expert Scott Berkun that in the wired world we haven’t
yet come up with any “indicators,” any way to show instantly, on a home page,
who is the intended audience. In fact, I said, it was as if the virtual world
was defaulting to the dominant culture, to being for folks who watch TV and
read People. In the paper world,
of course, indicators abound: Ratio of pictures to print, density of
paragraphs, number of pages, and more. Now I understand other people enough to
know: We haven’t evolved such indicators yet—and we never will...
Nerds, being computer savvy, and
being early adopters of the World Wide Web, were quick to have some
nerd-centered web forums such as reddit and diggit. But here’s the thing: While
reading such nerd sites, if it weren’t for some of the topics, you wouldn’t
guess the users were smart: No dense paragraphs, no need for an attention span; lots of
glitz and emotion, as flashy as Vegas, without sustained thought; everything
presented in the now, devoid of historical context.
The Vegas “Wonderland” reminds me of young Alice. She would be right at home on reddit. (See Neil Postman footnote) You
may recall Alice wondered, “What’s the use of books without pictures and
conversations?” Well, Berkun once referred to a young woman, a reddit fan,
writing angrily that if you can’t make your point in x hundred words then don’t
bother. She didn’t mean get to your thesis before the bottom of the first page;
she meant say it all in double-quick time. I suspect she watches her TV screen more than she reads,
and maybe she spends more time at her monitor than at her TV. Like Alice would,
she values the web for pictures and little dialogue-sized paragraphs. Yes,
she’s a computer nerd, but no, I don’t expect her to help evolve any indicators to show weighty web sites.
For years, amidst the excitement of
spreading computers, I kept expecting computer users to pull up their socks. At
last I came to understand, during the “blogging and linking” craze,
that others would be in a hurry. Not me. Not Roger Ebert. I remember one fellow thought he would
compliment blog-essay writer Roger Ebert, a highly literate man at the Chicago
Sun-Times, by telling Ebert his writing was
the only thing he didn’t skim. I’m sure Ebert had mixed feelings over this
“compliment.”
Needless to say, there was a lot of panicky skimming during the
crazy race for “successful blog” statistics: such silly skimming I thought
would be fading away by now because blogs are fading. No such luck.
What I failed to take into account
was how my fellow Americans, the ones who “need” the Internet—even when on
vacation in Banff—also crave their couches. In this our new century, others
have noticed “the couch” might explain why there was no “citizen” oversight as people expired in Iraq and
Afghanistan, bleeding to death alone, while no one in Washington was ever
reprimanded or fired. The vast couch land of America enabled the men of
Washington to have no sense of urgency—and no common sense. (No, I won’t
footnote any history texts—I’m too disgusted) In hindsight, “Let George do it”
is a perfectly predictable response for a “civilian” with a couch.
Of course there’s nothing wrong
with couches in moderation. The same fellow who sits up and thoughtfully reads
conceptual science fiction (sf) the “playground of the mind,” might then flip on
his TV to watch sci-fi for a well-deserved chance to slouch like a potato.
Especially right after work.
For me personally, the problem is at my monitor. The problem
is when, like some sort of compulsive chain smoker, I go down the rabbit
hole following links, emerging much later with no coherent awareness of
“what just happened?” I know one thing for sure: If after spending hours
sitting at my computer I stand up feeling hollow inside—which does happen—then
I have just spent my man-hours in compulsively avoiding some specific task, or
perhaps in avoiding my life.
I recall a motorcyclist who broke
his leg leading to a stay in the hospital: He got released, went home, and
found himself still watching soap operas. After saying, “Arrhg!” the ex-patient
reached for sanity. Others make insane-to-me
choices. I know this now. I know now that many nerds, and many others in
general, “read” their computer screen while half-wishing they could just
“view” it.
Successful science fiction writer
Philip K. Dick once gloomily said, “Entropy always wins.” The solution for me is… I have a choice.
As for the choices of people
accessing the Internet, thanks to Crawford Killian, (footnote) here is what one
expert, web designer Jeffrey Zeldman, found back in the previous century:
Some are viewers, “…look for audiovisual entertainment…treat the web
like radio, TV or movies, and don’t have much use for text, except as
directions to the next surprise.”
Some are users, “…look for information they can apply… love
hit-and-run retrieval.”
Some are readers, “…actually sit and scroll through long documents…may
read for entertainment or for use, but they’re not in a hurry.”
Zeldman's findings were from at least as early as 1999.
Since then, I suspect, “readers” have become even less “not in a hurry” and
even fewer in number.
It’s queer: While the “regular
culture,” when not forgetting about nerds, sees them as different, I think
[nerds and “others”] actually have a lot in common: viewing. Perhaps the
actual forgotten minority, the group being, as Neal Stephenson put it,
“photoshopped out of the national scene” is not the nerds—perhaps, instead, it’s the readers: the minority who can
handle complex sentences and slow sustained complex thoughts. Like Stephenson, I’m
not bitter. Stephenson, being both a writer on the web for Wired
Magazine, and a successful science fiction
novelist, has a nice serene paragraph in Some Remarks (2012) subtitled Essays and Other Writings:
“Books though, and the thoughts
that go through the heads of their readers, are too long and complex to work on
the screen—be it a talk show, a PowerPoint presentation, or a web page. Bookish
people sense this. They don’t object to it. They don’t favor electronic media
anyway. So why should they make a fuss if those media Photoshop them out of the
national scene? They know how to find each other and have the long
conversations that nourish their bookish souls.” (p 270)
When I read Zeldman’s findings on
the consumers of computer networks I didn’t feel any, “Yes! I was right!”
Instead I felt blank, the same blankness I always feel when I’m integrating any
new reality that “is what it is.” … Now what? What are the implications for the intersection of citizenship and everyday life?
Many people are remarking that our
“attention span” is slipping. Very few are remarking on the more serious issue:
Our “citizenship” is slipping. It’s not an easy thing to face, I know. God
bless the passionate readers… At least, as a society, we are not mute peasants enduring a dictatorship. No. As
the reverend Martin Luther King said, we are bound up in a network of
mutuality—And we each have a choice.
Sean Crawford
Owning a TV,
Lacking a rooftop antenna,
Lacking cable and rabbit ears and
netflix,
June 2013
Banff and Calgary
Footnotes:
~The Counting Crows song, Amy Hit
the Atmosphere, (waiting for mothers to come) used for the episode Toy House of
Roswell, is from the album This
Desert Life.
~The findings of Jeffrey Zeldman
were condensed from a summary in Crawford Killian’s Writing For the Web, subtitled Writers’ Edition, Self-Counsel Press, USA
and Canada, 1999, p 26
~For precisely what I commented publicly
to Scott Berkun, and for what he had said, see my essay Fluffy Social Media archived November 2010.
~I recently proposed that blogs are
fading in popularity in Fading Blogs and Human Nature, archived February 2013
~For a short essay, quoting Roger
Ebert, on the perils of surfing, see Surfing At Work, archived January 2011.
~For a long essay with a “present
at the creation of the web” perspective see Essays and Blogs, archived in June 2010
~For a long essay answering a
commenter as to why university is not merely for a job see Citizens, Jobs
and the Liberal Arts, archived October 2011
~For an expanded look at ‘couch
versus citizenship,’ see my quotes of The Assassins’ Gate by George Packer, as part of my essay Citizenship
After 9/11 archived September 2012.
~The viewpoint of Alice as regards
TV, (not the web) as noted by Neil Postman, is in the footnote to my
essay-and-book-review of Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, archived as Literacy Builds People, July 2012
~I like Philip K. Dick, not only as
“a writer’s writer,” impossible to imitate, but as a man. According to a movie
industry trade magazine, as I dimly recall from two decades ago, (Memory or the
magazine could be off) Dick had a choice of receiving 4 million or 12 million
dollars for the movie rights to his novel “Bladerunner” called Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? To get the 12
million, he would have to agree to have his original novel suppressed and a new
one, Bladerunner, written by a
certain modest writer as a movie novelization. As it happens, Dick’s novel was
written in the context of the Vietnam conflict, when he feared we were losing
our empathy. I like Dick for taking only the 4 million.
Unfortunately he lived much of his
life in poverty, with Bladerunner being
the only movie made from his work in his lifetime. Since then there’s been both
mainstream and independent movies made from Dick’s work. Too bad his other
works have only become marketable movies since his passing, instead of during
his lifetime.
Movies, from using a search engine:
Screamers, A Scanner Darkly, The
Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report, Paycheck, Total Recall, Next, Megaville,
Radio Free Albemuth, Imposter.
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