TinkerX

Curiouser and curiouser.

One of the best rants in movie history is, I believe, the one that Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon) lets rip on a recruiter from the NSA. Partly I love it because it’s delivered in the wonderful South Boston (Southie) accent that so many of my friends’ parents and older brothers had from the old neighborhood. Partly it’s because it’s a wicked rant:

Why shouldn’t I work for the N.S.A.? That’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot. Say I’m working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself, ’cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin’, “Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area,” ’cause they don’t give a shit. It won’t be their kid over there, gettin’ shot. Just like it wasn’t them when their number got called, ’cause they were pullin’ a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some kid from Southie takin’ shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, ’cause he’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they’re takin’ their sweet time bringin’ the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin’ play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain’t too long ’til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s got to walk to the fuckin’ job interviews, which sucks ’cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin’ him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starvin’, ’cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they’re servin’ is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I’m holdin’ out for somethin’ better. I figure fuck it, while I’m at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.

It’s a beautiful rant, and delivered, apparently, in one breath.

I’ve written before on my thoughts about hunting vs. gathering mentalities. Here’s the quick version, in bullet point format because you just had to wade through a huge chunk of text and bullets will liven things up:

• The two main types of early human productivity focused on hunting and gathering. We’re anthropologically bent towards them.
• Hunting requires more “fluid” skills, gathering more “directed” skills. Neither is better or worse, per se, they are just different.
• The development of agriculture took gathering to a new level. Farming is, essentially, controlled gathering. You gather the crops and animals you want into your space, and then work on them there. It is, to my thinking, meta-gathering.
• The industrial revolution did to other jobs what farming did for food. It took jobs (blacksmith, for example) that required many different skills and broke them apart… “farmed” them out to many specific workers, shops and industries. You no longer had one guy making nails, hoes, rakes, plows, etc. You had one guy who made the one part that went into the one slot on the one product.
• The computer is a general tool; it allows one person to, once again, do many things.
• The Internet is a “hunt based” tool. It relies more on one’s ability to search, connect, add, comment, develop, etc. than it does on one particular skill. Ask yourself this: what would it mean to say, “He’s an expert at the Internet.” It’s a ridiculous phrase.
• Web skills and the ability to integrate them with other computer-based tools are turning us from gatherers (do the one thing, in the one place, over and over) into hunters (be flexible and fluid, concentrate on goals rather than steps, etc.)

There’s a PhD thesis in there somewhere, I’m sure. Just not for me to write.

All of this apropos a Seth Godin piece on change, by way of Stephen’s Lighthouse. Seth’s main point can be summed up by this quote:

Oh, there’s one other thing: As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change. In fact, competence is the enemy of change! Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat.

I would agree… except for one caveat. I believe that competent gathering is the enemy of change, whereas competent hunting is always ready for change and, in fact, lusts for it.

Set is right that “competent components” are reluctant to change. Why? If someone eliminates the square hole, and your job is to put the square peg in that sucka… game over. On the other hand, if your role involves leveraging skills that are more fluid — find, connect, describe, convince, improve, direct — you love change. Why? Because change is what you are trying to accomplish in a hunt. You seek to change the status quo (being hungry, let’s say), not through a well developed system of activities that anyone can accomplish. You seek change through the skills and abilities of you and your hunting party. You don’t know what you’ll find when you go out… but you know you want to kill and eat it.

Again… I’m not knocking gathering/gardening/farming/factory skills. They are hugely efficient for feeding millions of people, manufacturing huge tons of similar items, etc.

I’m just saying that hunting is coming back. And Mr. Will Hunting is right… we don’t want to be cogs in a giant, frightening machine that takes our individual work and accumulates it into something beyond our ken. We want to know, do, feel, connect, befriend, share, create, evaluate and reject. Why?

Hunting is simply more fun.

According to a new Nielsen poll (as found on cnet), Americans now send more text messages than make phone calls. And 13-17 year olds send 1,742 text messages a month. Assuming an eight-hour sleep cycle, that means they’re sending a text message about every 17 minutes of their waking days.

And, of course, someone has to read all those messages. I assume it’s mostly other teens. Which means that for every message sent, one is read. Which then means that they are either sending or reading a message about every 9 minutes.

Passing messages back-and-forth more than 6 times an hour. Even if the reply is just, “LOL,” that’s a lot of readin’ and writin’.

“Connect” is a big word. At my place of work, it ends up in our tagline:

OCLC. The world’s libraries. Connected.

From last Sunday around 4pm until Thursday around 3pm, we were disconnected by hurricane Ike. According to the weather folk, Ike pushed a really large, fast-moving warm air front up from the south. Said front met a cold air mass coming down from Canada (probably due to the good exchange rate, ha ha), and when they met… woosh. We had 75 mile an hour winds throughout much of Central Ohio, knocking out power for something like 1.4 million people in the state.

We were very lucky. We had some limbs down in the back yard, a bunch of twiggy, leafy crap in the front. We lost a fridge and a stand-alone freezer worth of food (which was covered by our homeowner’s insurance — something for y’all to remember), and had some very minor damage to our vinyl siding. No big whoop. And while having no power (or Web or phone or TV) for four days was a pain, it was also kinda fun, as it meant checkers by candlelight, more reading (I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s new “Anathem” on my phone),  and early bedtimes. Again… I’m extremely thankful that all we lost was some electrons and frozen shrimp.

So… we were somewhat dis-connected. Or were we? I still had my cell phone, as did my wife. I had Internet access at work and on my phone. I did have to go to some lengths to retrieve some files off my desktop PC at home (thanks for the battery back-up, Chris!), but that was about the only real, “Crap! I can’t do what I want without these connections!” that really needed to be “dealt with.” The rest was just, well… suck it up and wait.

I might have felt differently if the weather hadn’t been so pleasant, too. Nice, cool nights. Tack another 12 degrees onto the thermometer and Andy would have been a whiny camper.

So to celebrate our return to the connected world, I finally signed up for Twitter.  I have not yet really grokked Twitter. But, as a good corporate marketing wonk, I subscribed to an RSS feed of tweets that refer to my company, OCLC. And that has been very… interesting. Nothing hugely surprising in any given message (or as a whole), but the feeling it has given me is much the same as when I overhear a snippet of conversation in the lobby or at a restaurant. It’s a kind of… slightly guilty pleasure. Of course, all these people choose to twitter about whatever it is… but they don’t know, specifically, that I’m “overhearing” them.

Basically, it just seems kinda fun. Another level of Internetual awareness.

So… the Twitter widget is in my sidebar over there, and you’re invited to follow along, if you like. For the time being, my vow is that all my tweets will be in haiku.

Why? Well, why the heck not.

I don’t often blog about politics here. For two reasons:

1. I don’t know much about politics.
2. I’m more interested in other things most days.

The first reason doesn’t stop me on every other subject, and doesn’t stop everyone else on politics. I have opinions and preferences, sure. I even have beliefs and have done some campaign work in the past for candidates I wanted to support. But I’m not a political junkie, I don’t follow much of the point-by-point analysis of what’s going on in Washington, and (most years) I’m not sure I could name both my Senators.

All of this to say that it scares the crap out of me that Sarah Palin, in her interview with Charlie Gibson, didn’t know what the “Bush Doctrine” is… AND I DO.

I’m a marketing manager living in Columbus, Ohio. I teach history of advertising one night a week. I play video games and read lots of fiction as well as non-fiction books and watch cartoons with my kid. I am, as far as I can tell, a fairly “ordinary” dude.  I have to look up the capitol of Afghanistan. I don’t know what the currency unit for South Africa is.  I can’t ever remember if Waterloo was before or after the War of 1812. I do OK on Jeopardy stuff, but not great.

If Palin hadn’t known the difference between a “virtual world” and an “MMO,” I wouldn’t care. If she got “Star Wars” mixed up with “Star Trek,” I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t even really care if she stumbled on a question about net neutrality or digital copyright law, even though I think those are important issues. I don’t expect every political candidate to know as much about certain things as I do. That wouldn’t be fair, and I’m a fair (as well as ordinary) guy.

Is it unfair, however, to expect a vice presidential candidate to know about one of the most controversial and influential policies enacted by her own party’s leader, the current president?

I actually yelled at my radio this morning when they played the excerpt from the interview. I’m so not that guy… especially about politics. But when I heard her response to Charlie’s question…

Gibson: “Do you agree with the ‘Bush Doctrine.’”
Palin: “In what respect, Charlie?”
Gibson: “What do you interpret it to be?”
Palin: “His world view?”

… I realized… she doesn’t know. She just doesn’t know what it is.

Cue Andy yelling at the radio.

Look back at my blog entries. There’s more stuff here about my dog than about politics. So if *I* know more about this issue than Palin…

I am afraid. Very afraid. More than I was yesterday.

By way of Terra Nova, I found the Development Informatics (DI) working paper, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games.” Quick definition for y’all non-grognards: gold farming is the selling of virtual/game world goods and services for real money. The easiest example is that I play a game, and with my character, earn a whole bunch of in-game “gold,” and then sell it to your character for real money. Other types of gold farming include leveling (improving another person’s character for a fee) or actual in-game item sales (selling a very rare or powerful in-game object for real world money).

My first “holy crap” exposure to gold farming was in the excellent January, 2003 Wired story, “The Unreal Estate Boom.” In it, Julian Dibbel quoted a study that estimated the size of Everquest’s GNP (the biggest game at that time) at around $135 million which, per persona, made it the 79th richest nation on earth. Dibbel estimated that the “value” of all virtual stuff in all worlds in 2003 was around $300 million. Now… that’s the total calculation of what *everything* inside these spaces would have been worth if it could have been sold for real dough; the study compared what the going rate for in-game gold was, and multiplied that by the total gold value of all items and character accounts.

So… check out the list of countries by GDP from Wikipedia. You’ll find quite a number of small countries whose GDP is lower than $500 million. That means that people all over the world have now attributed the worth — in actual, real dollars — of a year’s worth of virtual/gaming stuff as more valuable than everything Granada produces in one year.

I’m sure someone smarter (and with more time) could figure out what the “unrealized” GDP of these virtual spaces is; meaning, what all the virtual stuff would now be worth if it could be sold. If (and I’m totally making this up) that $500 million, for example, purchased 500 billion pieces of “gold” (a 1,000-to-1 ratio), and there were actually 50 trillion pieces of game gold being used… that would be a 100-to-1 real-to-virtual ratio, giving us a worldwide, virtual GNP of $50 billion. Which is more like the size of Croatia.

[Edit, 08/04/08. I just realized that the above bogus approximation is probably too complicated even for being so crappy. It might be easier to ask ourselves, “What percentage of virtual goods are realized in actual world money.” I still don’t know, but a 100-to-1 ratio doesn’t seem too absurd; that is, for every one piece of gold purchased from a farmer, 100 are generated “naturally” and not sold/bought.]

As I said… that calculation is pretty bogus. But when you figure that a fairly small percent of all the virtual stuff that’s generated ends up being gold farmed… a 100-to-1 relationship doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.

$50 billion worth of magic swords, character attributes and elvish gold. You may want to have your kid start playing *more* games.

I was on vacation last week. The beach in SC. Lovely, thank you, but very windy the last couple days. Good for surfers, bad for families with kids.

I try to read one non-fiction book while on vacation (along with several pieces of brain candy). This year, it was “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I don’t always agree with Clay, but even when I think he’s wrong, he’s wrong with intelligence and style.

In the case of this book, he ain’t wrong. It’s his best work yet, I think, and a must read for anybody who’s serious about thinking seriously about the ways in which the Internet (and associated technologies) are intersecting with society. I may do a longer review post at some point, but for the time being, just go read it. Lots of good, telling examples. Lots of well thought out questions, without necessarily giving any answers. Which is a good thing. Asking the questions well is important. Pretending you know the answers is less so.

Clay talks a bit about the “publish then edit” mode that the Internet enables. In traditional media, you “edit then publish.” That is, producers and directors and publishers sift through (edit) a mountain of content, and then present what they think is best. On the Web, everybody publishes everything, and then we, the public, use a number of functions — links from friends, search engines, blog posts, etc. — to edit down the already published stuff.

In another part of the book, Clay talks about how folks all over the world are using this functionality to impact political situations. He gives examples of how smart mobs, email campaigns and even Twitter are used to turn the usual “Big Brother” thing on its ear. This started me thinking… Publish, edit, politics, government. Role reversals.

And then I started reading William Gibson’s new novel, “Spook Country”. Not done with it yet, but 1/3 of the way in… it’s great. There’s a scene where one character is talking to another who may be doing some sneaky “anti-terrorist” stuff. He says (I’m approximating, as the book’s downstairs and I don’t feel like getting it), “A nation is defined by its laws more than it’s circumstances at any particular time. A person whose morals change with circumstance is not moral. And a nation whose laws change based on circumstance is not true to those ideals that brought it into being.”

Bong. Gong goes off in my head.

Are laws, when taken as content, the result of publishing or editing? I would argue that laws themselves are a kind of editing; they keep us from doing certain things; they proscribe. Is the tendency of the current administration to do whatever the frick it wants, and then justify it later, a kind of “publish then edit” rather than the other way around? We’re supposed to come up with laws based on (among other documents), the Constitution, which (as my Republican friends point out all the time) does more to limit the power of government than describe it.

OK. If government is meant to be limited (edited), and laws are meant to be editorial tools… then doing things first, then coming up with wild-ass justifications for them, is a case of going “public then edit.” Action as public publishing of events; editing as the spin, rewrites, cover ups, justification, etc. after the fact.

I’m still not sure if this makes any sense. But all these thoughts are tangled up in my head in this way, and sometimes they need to live somewhere where I can come back and look at them later.

Publish then edit gives power to the creative masses. Editing, not publishing, is the proper function of government and laws.

Are the current hijinx in the White House a kind of reaction to the new balance of power imposed, to some degree, by the Web and the Flat World? Are politicians “doing more things” outside the lines of editorial (read: Constitutional) correctness because the Great Unwashed now has access to so much more creative power.

I have no idea. But it’s ringing in my head.

I saw Disney/Pixtar’s “WALL-E” yesterday with my son. Fun movie, excellent animation, some good laughs. A bit heavy-handed on the overarching messages about society side… but that’s Disney for ya. B+

Based on the film, I was going to write a quick post about how, apparently, in the film, singularity is achieved through waste management. Go read the Wikipedia article on “technological singularity” so I don’t have to do a crappy job summarizing here. [pause] Thanks.

Machine intelligence is a wonderful topic for when you’re hanging out waiting for a movie to start, or sitting around drinking wine coolers on the deck on a nice, early summer evening. It’s fun to discuss the differences between creativity, computation, cognition, recognition, etc. and go on about how men and machines may differ — both now and in the future — in terms of thinking-type activities.

My point, from watching WALL-E, was going to be that we equate (especially as children) emotional goals very specifically with self-awareness. You can have an animal (or a plant, a teapot, a statue, a car, etc.) in a movie be, essentially, a prop, and have no “feelings.” Or they may be rudimentary feelings that reflect back from the main characters. But for a creature to be “alive,” it needs to do thinky things that have more to do with its own well-being (usually emotional) than with sheer computing power. Thus, though WALL-E may be able to do many computational things, what makes him “thinking,” what has pushed him beyond the singularity, is his ability to formulate his own goals.

Interestingly, the “bad guy” in the movie [very minor spoiler] seems alive, too… but has received his goals as part of a program; ie, they are not his own goals, per se, but are direct instructions from a human.

That was about it for my original post idea… the thought that we base our idea (at least in a shallow, entertaining sense) on what is “real person thinking” on the ability not to solve problems, but to come up with them. To decide, “This situation isn’t ideal for me… I can envision another possibility.” Person-hood based not on survival (which requires all kinds of problem solving, and which animals do all the time), but on idealism.

That was the extent of it. But then I read a new post at Kevin Kelly’s The Technium about “The Google way of science.” The basic idea being that a new kind of cognition (or at least, though-work) is being done through super-fast evaluations of super-huge data sets. The example I like is the one about how Google provides on-the-fly Web site translation. They don’t have an translation algorithm, they just compare enormous sets of currently translated documents.

This is, as Kelly and other point out, a fantastic way to solve problems. You don’t worry about a model, you don’t worry about a theory or an equation. You just put trillions of cycles of computing power to work examining billions of data points, and then you figure out where new data points would line up.

Fascinating, important stuff, yes. But Kelly goes on to suggest that this kind of computation disproves Searle’s riddle of the Chinese room,  whereas I think it actualy *proves* Searle’s point in that thought experiment. If I had access to all the (let’s say) Chinese-to-English-and-back documents that Google does, I, too, could translate between the languages without understanding both. Maybe even neither. If you’ve ever tried Google’s spot-translation facilities and seen what it does to metaphor, you know that quite a bit of understanding is lost (ahem) in translation.

Kelly goes on to quote George Dyson in a response he (Dyson) made to an article Chris Andersen wrote in Wired on this subject:

For a long time we were stuck on the idea that the brain somehow contained a “model” of reality, and that AI would be achieved by constructing similar “models.” What’s a model? There are 2 requirements: 1) Something that works, and 2) Something we understand. Our large, distributed, petabyte-scale creations, whether GenBank or Google, are starting to grasp reality in ways that work just fine but that we don’t necessarily understand. Just as we will eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we will discover that true AI came into existence without ever needing a coherent model or a theory of intelligence. Reality does the job just fine.

By any reasonable definition, the “Overmind” (or Kevin’s OneComputer, or whatever) is beginning to think, though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend. What Chris Anderson is hinting at is that Science (and some very successful business) will increasingly be done by people who are not only reading nature directly, but are figuring out ways to read the Overmind.

Now… I love science fiction. But I really don’t buy that dipping into enormous pools of data to look for correlations counts as any kind of “thinking” that we would recognize as being of an order even close to that of animals, to say nothing of the cute (yet not cuddly) WALL-E. Dyson himself says, “… though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend.” Well… why call it “thinking” if it’s something completely different than what we call “thinking,” and on a totally different scale… Mama always said, “Life is like a box of semantics.” If I can call what the weather does “thinking” because it moves enormous numbers of things around and exacts changes and is involved in activities based on ultra-complex rules, then OK. What Google etc. does could be called “thinking,” too. If we open it up that far, though, we’ve lost the original intention of what we mean when we use the term to apply to us man-apes.

When you challenge a child who has done something stupid or dangerous and ask, “What were you thinking?” you’re not looking for an answer in terms of their problem solving abilities. If the boy-child has emptied 25 cans of shaving cream into the kiddie pool and is making “summer-time snow angels,” you may love the creative spirit, hate the waste of money (and how he smells afterward), but your chat with him afterward will be about making choices, not about air pressure and aroma. You want to know what led him to the choice to do the unwise thing, so that you can teach him not to lead himself there. You want to help him create better problems for himself, not, in many cases, solve them.

I can’t tell time anywhere near as accurately as a watch. But that doesn’t mean that a watch is thinking. Or, if want to say it is, it is only ever thinking about what time it is.

* * * * *

PS: Irony of the week. The last line of dialogue in WALL-E was clipped slightly at my showing by the “pop” you get during a slightly crappy jump from one reel to another. A movie created using advanced, computerized digital effects about an advanced, computerized digital creature… partly f’d up by an analog zit. I was amused.

Todays journey of metaphoric bliss: Alzheimer, buses, jewelry, YouTube.

Patients with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive troubles who wander out of their nursing homes are a danger to themselves, of course. And with short-term memory issues, folks can go as little as a block away and then forget how to get back or why they’re out. To help with this, some German nursing homes have put “phantom” bus stops outside their facilities. Patients remember the distinctive look of the bus stops and associate it with “going home.” So they stop, rest, and the workers from the home come and get them (link).

Paco Underhill did absolutely groundbreaking work in the science of retail shopping behaviors. The New York Times called him, “the anthropologist of the dressing room.” He wrote “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,” (Google, WorldCat) and has consulted all over the place. In a 1996 NewYorker article (by Malcom Gladwell, no less), titled “The Science of Shopping,” the concept of the “butt brush” theory is discussed. Full article here.

The quote that I’m most interested in today, though, is, “…the likelihood of a woman being converted from a shopper to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being brushed on her behind while she’s examining merchandise.” Which is the explanation for giant, wide aisles around the jewelry, perfume and watch displays in stores like Lord and Taylor, Macy’s, etc. When pondering a pretty purchase, we get into a kind of dreamy, fugue state. Being bumped on the behind takes us out of that state and puts us back into the reality of, “Holy crap… that watch costs as much as three car payments.”

[Note: I share this story with all my marketing and advertising students, male and female. It’s a good trick, and not just for guys with wives and girlfriends. Men go into this same state, I believe, when shopping for power tools, HDTVs, boats, video games, etc. My non-scientific assumption, though, is that men are more likely to break out of Shopper’s Fugue if you bump them in the testicles.]

What’s the connection to degenerative brain disorders and shopping for jewelry? Well… let’s move on to YouTube.

Douglas Galbi, over at the ever-intelligent and interesting “purple motes” blog, has an excellent recent post titled, “Stories largely missing in online video.” His conclusion, after going over some good stats, is that online video is not successful in telling stories. While I agree with him that the “short form” video — with YouTube as its major example — isn’t doing much storytelling, I’m going to point out some details that, I think, are important with regards to online viewing habits.

First, Doug is 100% right that the majority of YouTube videos are short, and a large percentage are repurposed  music videos that, in the past, would have run on MTV or VH1 or a similar network. A research study I was involved with at my day job provided much the same insight (”The YouTube Phenomenon,” page 2-16 of “Our Social Spaces,” from “Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.”) Our survey indicated that 49% of the top 100 YouTube videos were music videos. Also, 63% of the top 100 videos were “professional,” in nature. This segment of the material is clearly not “user created content,” but maybe best described as “user uploaded.”

Doug also points out that online video viewing time only amounts to 3% of traditional TV viewing time. When considering this, lets remember that TV is, and has been for 50 years, the dominant communication medium in our country. It’s only over the past few years that even a decent minority of the U.S. population (23.3% as of December 2007, according to the OECD) has access to broadband Internet service, which is pretty much a requirement for watching online video.

My two points, and they relate back to comfort — which relates to bus stops and butt touching –  are simply as follows.

First, we currently regard TV as, largely, a “comfort medium.” We sit down to watch, don’t interact much, and enjoy it largely as entertainment. There are good stories on TV, yes. Because stories are a big part of how we like to be entertained, especially in “comfort” mode. I would remind my several readers, however, that lots and lots of TV is also “short form” entertainment, lacking in real storytelling elements. We have talk shows, sports, game shows, reality TV, news, weather and informational shows that don’t have traditional narrative. And many of these have parallel elements in Web video. I just watched, for example, Clinton’s “campaign suspension” speech on the NYT site. It was very, very nice to have the transcript and a TOC right next to the video. I think that as more online video becomes nested within other activities, it will gain more usage. I also think that as broadband becomes more the norm, non-narrative video will seem much more natural online, both in aggregate and compared to TV viewing.

As to when we’ll get more narrative, storytelling content on the Web… well, it’s starting. Hulu provides free (ad supported) access to narrative TV and movies. I missed an episode of Battlestar Gallactica a few weeks ago and watched the hour-long show on the SciFi channel’s site to make up for my DVR behaving badly. I now have a desk chair in my home office for working on the computer… and a comfy chair nearby for relaxing and watching DVDs and long Web-videos. But, even when I choose to watch long-form video on my computer, there are issues. My spam-blocker, anti-virus software pops up in front of the movie screen and tells me it’s finished updating and update. Super. My IM pings, unless I’ve remembered to turn it off. My screen saver kicks in sometimes. Geez. I’m trying to watch TV on my computer and it keeps behaving like a computer.

The boundaries are melting. Slowly, yes. I agree with Doug that, at the moment, there’s not a lot of storytelling going on specifically within online video. I do think, though, that it’s beginning. And, also, that many online “stories” have video as one element, with other media embedding video as part of the story.

We like our comfort zones, and TV is a *HUGE* comfort zone for Americans. We head to the bus stop of our La-Z-Boy lounger because it means, “Here there be relaxation.” Major changes in how we watch long-form video will take time, and will require computers to become something other than “working machines,” and to stop touching us on our collective butts when we’re trying to enjoy a story.

[Note note: the draft of this post was written months ago. I’m not sick anymore, thanks for asking.]

Note: I am sick as heck. Bad cold. This is Day 4 of what, at work, is being called affectionately, “The Pox.” I read an interesting post on Lifehacker about “Presenteeism,” the opposite of absenteeism. The idea that going to work, regardless of consequences, is necessary. We’re all the stars in our own life drama. So the idea that I’d put my own work requirements above the health and welfare of my coworkers isn’t completely unreasonable; especially when we take into account the fact that we don’t know what facts to take into account in terms of where/how we get sick. All this being apropos of nothing, except that I did stay home from work Thursday and worked from home on Friday, and now consider those acts to be somewhat selfless and communal. Whereas before, I would have considered myself lazy and weak. New wine, old skins. Yea.

Meanwhile… having been sick, I’ve been waking up early and watching The Daily Show on the DVR. One of the episodes from last week featured an interview with Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” I did not read the book, and don’t plan on it. This is a review of a couple things Lee said on the the show.

First, he made the claim that relationships mediated by electronics — the Web, that is — aren’t really as real as those in real life and (?) those conducted over the phone. Hmmm… Odd that he wouldn’t consider the phone part of the machine of the electronic mob. When it debuted, critics believed that the phone would end civilized discourse, as it allowed for communication without physical presence and, therefore, without possible physical repercussions. That is true (I suppose), as you can call somebody a dillweed on the phone and not worry about him/her cracking you on the mellon.

Lee went on to say that because of the lack of real presence on the other end of the digital line, we tend to imbue “the other” with our own characteristics, thus making the relationship both shallow and somewhat fictional. That’s not a bad point. It is easier, certainly, to create a web (ha ha) of assumption when there is more left to the imagination. He then started talking about bad behavior on blogs and bulletin boards, what with the ranting and raving and flaming and invective and… and… and…

And he lost me. Even as an interesting antagonist to my own view… he lost me. Because you can’t have it both ways, Lee. If the machine is bad because it is a concave lens that diminishes our perception of “other,” that’s one thing; if it is a convex lens that exaggerates the bad behavior of others… hold on. Can it be both?

Well, here’s the thing: it can, if you’re being a dillweed.

I tend to expect the best of people, regardless of circumstance. I assume that they, like me, want to get along, be friendly, be smart, do the right thing, etc. That holds true online as well as in RL. I’ve had very cool, long, intelligent disagreements with people in both places. Where it stops (again, regardless of media), is when someone clearly just wants to rant on their own, and has no interest in discourse; no interest in the voice of “the other.”

Does that happen on the Web more than in RL? Perhaps. Comments on blogs are often not set up as discussion points, but more as stand-alone statements. And it is certainly possible to read a such a comment as if it were aimed right at you, thus making it seem like a churlish response, rather than a simple statement.

And so we’re back to the Web, as Lee said, distorting relationships because of our tendency to put ourselves in the center of the whole thing. We either assume closeness that isn’t there (because we want to see it), or assume animosity that isn’t there (because we read everything as personal).

At least we do when we’re being dillweeds. I’ve done it, for sure. A disagreeable statement that, in RL, might have been mitigated with a shrug and eyebrow-raise, comes across as totally hot-headed and unreasonable. And I’ve flamed back, too. But… but but but (this is the big but, and I like big buts, and I can not lie)… because of this tendency, signs and appeals to reason come across even more strongly, too. I’ve made some very good friends over the Web — some of whom I’ve never met in person. And in almost every case, it is because their online voice is one that I want to hear more of.

Which is the same as in RL. We seek out those people whose presence is pleasant. And that’s the case online, too.

Yes, there are more cranky, shallow statements on the Web. But there are also more chances for rare and beautiful flowers to spring up, in stark contrast with the dillweeds.

First of all, let me explain the use of the word “perils” in the post title. It’s an arcane word, and clearly out of conventional usage. We’ll most often see it in modern language used in an slightly ironic way, often with alliteration: “The perils of puppies,” “Perambulator Perils,” etc.

I use it here very specifically, rather than its near synonym, “danger.” Why? Because “The danger of self-knowledge,” implies future harm. If something is dangerous; you can avoid it or not. “Peril” is more about the activity itself, already undertaken.

And self-knowledge is like that. You can go into almost any situation and come back with self-knowledge. But by then, it’s too damned late. You can’t say, for example, “There’s a danger of increased self=knowledge at this year’s Thanksgiving dinner with my wife’s family… I’ll stay away.” You go, no thought of peril, and you learn that your tolerance for various kinds of bad behavior has lessened since you all got together 10 years ago. You come away with new self knowledge. [Note: this is an erroneous, facile example — I get along just swimmingly with my wife’s family. Not that they read this blog, but if they do, they’ll recognize the fiction; we never have Thanksgiving with them. So, ha.]

You just can’t tell when a trip will turn into an adventure in discernment.

But sometimes you should.

About 12 years ago, my then-boss had our whole team take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It was so we could learn about ourselves and each other and work together better. Those of you who have read my stuff before know that I have a low tolerance for corporate hoo-hah. Being told, “You’re going to learn about yourself,” makes me feel like a small child being led by the hand. I already understand myself very well, thank you. And if you don’t think so, then clearly *you* don’t know me very well.

So… The MBTI. I’m an ENTP, if you care. Which, in general, made sense to me at the time. Read the linked description, if you know me, and (I think) it’s not too far off.

But… when you take the test, you get a score from”0″ (meaning dead center between two of the paired functions) to “100″ (meaning extremely one way). I was very near zero for the first three classifications. Which, when it came to splitting the difference between Sensing v. iNtuition and Thinking v. Feeling, I was fine. I like balance on those things, and would have been surprised to find a test that scored me much higher in either of those pairs.

But an “Extrovert” score of only 4? That’s mad! I’m the f’in life of the party! I love public speaking and teaching. I have no fear of strangers and of approaching people I don’t know for help, advice, directions, bottled water, sunscreen, etc. I like working on a team. All kinds of extroverty stuff. What’s with the “4?” That’s nearly balanced!

Well, come to find out, I’m a closet introvert. What the trainer we had (she was quite good) explained, is that for the MBTI, the categories are less about activity than attitude. From the Wikipedia definition:

People with a preference for Extraversion draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline. Conversely, those whose preference is Introversion become less energized as they act: they prefer to reflect, then act, then reflect again. People with Introversion preferences need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy. The Introvert’s flow is directed inward toward concepts and ideas and the Extravert’s is directed outward towards people and objects.

Gulp. New self-knowledge came flowing in as the trainer explained this. I am introverted, in that sense, at many times. I like to reflect before acting. Sometimes several times. Sometimes to the point where it seems like procrastination, even to me. And that one line — need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy. Yikes! Totally me, totally on the spot.

So. Hmmm…. Yes. I went in skeptical, and came out having learned something about myself that has, ever since, been helpful to some degree, yet painful, too. Because self-knowledge doesn’t necessarily imply actively working on anything based on that knowledge. Now, when I get funky and low after having spent too much time in “extrovert mode,” I understand that it’s my introverted need to reflect and recharge. I know, now, that I’m not an extrovert with periods of waning energy; I’m an introvert with occasional bursts of energy.

The point of all this being that I just took another one of these kinds of assessments at work. And I went in with a bit of the same attitude: “Yeah, it might be fun and/or interesting. Yeah, I’m sure it’ll tell me some stuff I already know. But it’ll be no big deal.”

Indiana Jones would’ve known: there’s always snakes in that cave.

I’m still processing what I learned. It took a couple of years after the MBTI for me to get comfy with the results. We’ll see about this latest batch of understanding and maybe, later, I’ll share the results.

But maybe I won’t. As they say about ENTPs, “…less interested in generating and following through with detailed plans than in generating ideas and possibilities.”

At work, I get to do some research about the information industry and related technology because, well, libraries are deeply involved in the mediasphere. So that’s cool. And last week I was reading up on teens (god, I hate the terms “tweens” and “screenagers”) and tech. And there’s a neat, very recent report from Pew on teens and writing, and another, older study from Fox about “Never Ending Friending” and a NYT article that asks, “Can Cellphones End Global Poverty,” another good report from Pew on the demographics of mobile data use, and on and on. Stuff about social networking, teens, mobile phones, games and media literacy. So that’s all in my head.

Then, this morning, I read Clay Shirky’s blog post, “Gin, Television and Social Surplus.” It’s good. Go read it and come back.

Clay is talking about what we do, as a society, to deal with radical shifts in culture. He gives the example of people going on a generation-long gin bender when the industrial age brought millions of people into cities. In order to deal, they got plastered.

Years ago, I read a similar theory about the pyramids. You had this ancient, Egyptian agrarian population that, like most of such, spent almost all their collective time farming and starving. Then some clever dudes figure out some basic math, engineering and astronomy, and put the knowledge to use to create an irrigation system that is N% more productive and reliable than the old methods. Whatever that “N” is, it provided a bunch of time that nobody new what to do with. So they built the pyramids. Partly as a program of public works… but mostly because they had a bunch of people with time on their hands and no idea how to spend it. They already knew how to build stuff… so why not build really big stuff!
Clay makes the point that TV has been sucking up brjillions of hours of our free time, and that we now have more choices about what to do with that time, many of which are creative, and that people like being creative, and so they are choosing things that are at least interactive as opposed to truly passive. Best quote of the post, imo:

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

That’s just so true it makes my teeth hurt [note, I actually enjoy both of the above, but the comparison is valid as hell].

OK. So we’ve got new media literacy. We’ve got participatory media and massive social applications. We’ve got mobile phones that are increasingly used as tools for digital participation, and are less expensive (than desktop PC’s with Web access) and thus more readily available to folks in lower economic strata, and that includes kids. That’s all in my head. Don’t worry… it’s a really big head.

Some people have said that participatory media is a move back to a time when people made their own fun and entertainment. Up until the printing press, if you wanted a story, you pretty much had to *hear* a story. News and history were participatory media. Until radio, there were no mass, single-source, culture-wide stations. Then TV came along. And we had tens of millions of people watching “Leave it to Beaver” and “Dallas” and and and and. I grew up in the middle of that. I joke that I had three parents: Mommy, Daddy and Teevy.

It was, and is, a cross between beauty and horror. I love, for example, that there are now hundreds of channels of TV. We watch all kinds of history, science, engineering, etc. programs with my 8-year-old son (Hooray for Myth Busters!). But he also watches Sponge Bob and  Avatar and other stuff (so do I, btw). Big budget media can produce some neat stuff.

Soon he’ll start typing in earnest. And then, I assume, will enter the mediasphere as a participant; commenter, responder, linker, writer, poster, photographer, videographer, blogger, cartoonist, podcaster, IMer… something. Many things. Some interesting, some meaningful, some trivial. Just like life.

And that, I think, is the major difference between the old, top-down media (TV being god there) and what we’re getting into now — it’s more like life.

I’ve taken to saying that my motto for the new, participatory mediasphere is “verbs over nouns.” Whenever you want to bet on a new trend or idea or technology, ask yourself… is it improving (or growing) something “noun-y” (stuff), or something “verb-y” (activities). The line that many of my (older) friends use about much of the new content on the Web (YouTube and journal-style blogs seem to be the favorite targets), is that, “It’s a bunch of crap.”

Well, yeah. But for the people who created it, it’s their own personal crap as opposed to a small piece of a giant load of crap dropped on them from 30,000 feet up that also hits a couple million other people.

It’s also useful to keep in mind that the pyramids, when looked at a certain way, are crap, too. Engineering marvels? Sure. Wonders of the world? Of course. But what have they ever done for you? Would your life be any different if the pyramids were suddenly not there? Or if they’d never been? The Colossus of  Rhodes went away in 226 BC. Do you miss it? I mean, sure… it would be cool to see. But I’ve never, once, in my life, said, “Thank God for the pyramids!” (as opposed to penicillin, steam power, the printing press, blues, chocolate, etc.)

How will we spend what Clay calls our “social surplus?” Will we make more friends in more places? Spread knowledge? Create great works?

I don’t know. I feel that it’s inherently better to do things that are creative and connected. That time spent creating even the “least of these” in terms of blogs and YouTube movies is better than time spent watching a rerun of (shudder) “Welcome Back Kotter.” But I also wonder if partly all we’re doing is creating many, smaller pyramids.

The nice thing, with the new media, is that we get to decide what’s important. It doesn’t have to be a centralized project like the pyramids or TV. And, just like with the printing press, I bet (as does Clay) that many smaller voices will add up to something more important than one, big voice.

For the record, I think Kevin Kelly is a genius and often am extremely gratified to find him exploring weird, wild areas of technology and the mind. Even when I disagree with him, it’s usually on small points or on wording.

In his latest post on The Technium, though… I just think he’s wrong and oddly so, to boot. Read the post, so I don’t have to paraphrase it too much, here. It’s short. I’ll wait…

So, where is he wrong? Well, let’s start with the idea that computer scientists are more comfortable with technological change because, “They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers.” Really? There are computers designing computers and writing code? There are robots building robots? I haven’t seen much of that.

What I’ve seen is that computer scientists use computers in their daily business, and that computers do more tasks than they used to. But not tasks that used to be done by CS folks. The scientists are doing the same tasks, just with more complex, robust and cheaper tools.

I also haven’t ever seen good art created by a computer or good poetry or fiction (or non-fiction, for that matter) written by a computer. But many artists, designers and writers absolutely embrace technology because the tools are just so flippin’ helpful. The writers I know love word processors, for example, and the spell-checking, note-taking, formatting functions now available. I don’t in any way begrudge my computer the ability to look up spelling much quicker than I did with a dictionary back in college. Yet there isn’t a computer out there that could, as of yet, write this blog post.

Same with designers. Those of you out there with a graphic arts background, especially those who have come-of-age in the last 15 years or so, will understand why “Photoshop is God” is a popular phrase. Does the computer do a better job at some mundane (and elegant) tasks associated with design? Hell, yes. Doing layout with InDesign or Quark Xpress is hundreds of times faster, easier and better than using the old paper layout methods. But a computer has yet to design a great piece of packaging or ad or children’s book illustration.

In some cases, I think this is the opposite of what Kelly is saying. As a writer (and sometimes designer), I have absolutely no fear of adopting new technology, because I think it’s impossible (or at least waaay down the road) for a computer to “do” what is at the heart of what I do: create. I’d put many musicians and film makers in this bucket, too. Again… I don’t see any films being made by computers, but the movie industry is moving the tech ahead in many cases.

And about doctors… I’m not sure what docs Kelly is working with, but most of the ones I know are huge tech nuts; they love they new toys. The digital distribution of records and labs is something they *rave* about when I talk to them. Scans of X-rays go on the hospital computer system and show up on the computer screen in the patient’s room, maybe even across town, in minutes rather than hours. MRI and CAT scan tech relies incredibly on computer power, obviously. Genetic engineering of drugs is almost impossible without computers. Maybe there are some good ol’ GPs who don’t want to computerize their bills… but I think this is a micro-example of a pain-in-the-ass system that nobody even likes the old way, so they don’t want to spend time on it.

In short… I think this is just a weird argument. When computer technology disrupts your job to the point that you are totally disintermediated –  take, for example, the guys at the print shop who used to cut film — you aren’t, I think, going to be thrilled about it… but, to be successful, you may have to get on board. But there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll go the other direction and be pissed off. On the other hand, if computers make your job easier, you’ll probably be OK with them in other instances, sure.

Oh… and I know some UNIX grey-beards who absolutely resent new computer technology. They liked being part of a small, elite band of brothers who understood computers when they were big and important and separate. Now that there’s a computer in my cell phone, and kids can mash-up aps on the Web, they feel a bit massintermediated.

Turing proposed a computer that was indistinguishable from a person in a conversation. In Kelly’s examples, he seems to be talking about our tech (computers in this case) besting us on particular tasks. Well, that’s been happening  since spear-throwers came along. John Henry died trying to beat the steam drill. I’d die trying to beat a spell checker. Just because I respect a tool’s ability to multiply my value doesn’t mean I think it’s likely to replace my value.

16 Gary Gygax Jokes we better not catch you making

1. “Quick! Someone cast Raise Dead!”
2. “Don’t worry – he’s just playtesting the Astral Plane for the next edition.”
3. “He’s gone the way of Star Frontiers.”
4. “Analysts warn of a free-fall in Mountain Dew futures.”
5. “In the next town, you meet a stranger named Barry Bygax.”
6. “Now who will lead our young people to Satan?”
7. “With his last breath, he cursed the name of Marlon Wayans.”
8. “I wonder how they’ll divide up his XP.”
9. “Pallbearers, make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll.”
10. “At least he didn’t live to see Disney’s Greyhawk On Ice.”
11. “Lorraine Williams is behind this somehow, I just know it.”
12. “The worlds of adventure gaming, fantasy fandom, and van painting will never be the same.”
13. “When I heard, I cried 2d10 tears.”
14. “Is there anything in the will about electrum?”
15. “Heart condition? Wow, I always thought it’d be owlbears that got him.”
16. “Suddenly, nobody in Heaven wants to hang out with Marilyn Monroe on Friday night.”

After more than a year, JotSpot (bought by Google that long ago) has come out from behind the gCurtain and has reemerged as Google Sites.

I blogged the Google purchase of JotSpot back in November of 2006; I called it the “2nd wiki that Google bought.” Writely (the engine for Google Docs) being the first.

So… now you can use Google to create not just pages that you can view (iGoogle), but pages that you can share with everyone. Visitors can view the pages, registered users can create/edit stuff. [I’ll have a better review of the functionality after I get a Google Site up and running]

So what? So you can now use Google to search, create docs, create Web pages, share stuff, etc. etc. Nothing new here, right? These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…

Maybe they are.

I keep pointing people to this essay by George Dyson on Edge. In it, he says:

The books that have been written are easy. They represent the collective memory and imagination of mankind, and the technical resources now exist to deliver The Complete Works of Homo Sapiens, Unabridged. Who can argue against this? It is the realization of every librarian’s dream — unless you harbor suspicions about who is going to need librarians once the Universal Library has digested all the books… The Universal Library promises us a repository for the souls of all existing books — and the resurrection of all titles that have gone extinct. And the books that have not been written yet?

Emphasis mine.

The biggest library in the universe is the one of those works as yet to be written. Every year the Web sees the creation of more content than exists in the Library of Congress. I don’t want to discuss the relative value of those materials at this point. I’m just noticing that lots of people are adding lots of new stuff to “The Library” all the time.

And now Google has pushed out another service by which that content can be… manipulated? Captured? Serviced? Advertised? Searched? OK… whatever you want to call it. You can do it on Google.

So what? Some will ask. I can create a Web site on MySpace or WordPress or with a free, generic tool and a couple bucks on GoDaddy. It’s not that what Google is doing with Google Sites is particularly unique, it’s that it’s doing it in conjunction with everything else.

Creation, too, has a much bigger brand footprint than search, advertising, etc. When you create something, you put yourself into it. The Web becomes more “yours” when you create a Wikipedia entry or post a YouTube video. Or if you create a site with Google.

No prognostication on this post. Just observation. The world’s mightiest search/advertising engine is now even further into the business of creativity as well as findability. It’s the printing press for the Universal Future Library as well as the table of contents and advertiser.

It takes love over gold nd mind over matter
to do what you do that you must
when the things that you hold can fall and be shattered
or run through your fingers like dust.

Dire Straits, “Love Over Gold”

Kevin Kelly wrote a great post recently titled, “Better than Free.” In it, he makes the point that, “…when copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.” He asks the question, “…why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” He then goes on to list eight “generatives” (because they generate value) that are “better than free.” They are (and I’m going to shorten his description of each, and add my own little parenthetical tag that will make sense in a minute):

• Immediacy – Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset. [Get something for less of your time]
• Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot… As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. [Get something better that someone else has spent time on]
• Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. [Experts save you time]
• Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was indeed actually performed by the Dead. [Don’t waste time on fake crap]
• Accessibility – Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. [Timeliness]
• Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good… The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive. [This is a red herring as far as this discussion goes… more on that in a moment]
• Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect… The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something…. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good. [patronage is based on the emotional/brand connection between buyer and seller; another red herring on this list, I think]
• Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. [Findability = value in less time]

What I noticed about Kelly’s list when I first read it is that all but two of these “generatives” map to some kind of time value as opposed to product value. And I believe that the two “red herrings” I noted above, while indeed “better than free,” aren’t related to the digital world, which is what Kelly’s main (and excellent) point is about. I think he should lose those two from the list. Why?

“Embodiment,” is actually the idea of something having a tangible, “non-free” value, without regard to the content, per se. I can create the wonderful, creamy, cottony book experience for an absolute crap novel, and the physical value of the leather, paper, gold trim, etc. will be the same as if I print a book I love the same way. Any value I place in the book I love vs. the crap novel is the same value that differentiates a free, digital copy of the two works.

Second, “patronage” is a value that works as well (or maybe even better) in the physical world as it does in the digital. The idea that a digital copy I pay an artist for, in order to support their work, has more value to me than one I steal is, indeed, true. But you cannot separate out the value of patronage from the overall value of the work, digital or otherwise. Users will get no “patronage value” from a piece of work that they detest. And they may, in fact, have a negative patronage experience if they support an artist, and then are burned by a bad product. In short, what I think I’m trying to say is, patronage only works as a value if someone was going to value something anyways.

So… of the eight, six are, I think, pretty directly related to the value of time. I’ve been talking about this with my advertising students for a couple of years now. In order to understand the history of advertising, you have to start with a point in time when there was almost *no* advertising. And why was there no advertising? Because people made almost everything they needed, and had very access to cash. In that environment (which accounts for most of the last 10,000 years of civilized-ish human economic history), real value almost always devolves to land, in one form or another. You live on the land, get your food from it, get wood and coal and metals from it, get water there, etc. etc. You can’t have a king without a kingdom, and the “dom” is the land.

Over the last 150 years or so, though, we’ve moved away from land-as-root-value. Yes, it’s still there, of course. As the man said, real estate is a good investment because they ain’t making any more of the stuff. But more and more frequently, those things with the most value have little connection to real property.

One definition of wealth I heard years ago and really liked was, “Wealth is a measure of excess food.” Right. If you have to spend 100% of your time hunting/gathering in order to barely survive, you are as poor as you can be and not be dead. Better control/ownership of the land and its uses provides better/more food for people, allowing them to do things like invent even better farming tools/techniques, be artists, lawyers, teachers, etc. The wealthier a society is, the less time/effort per capita is spent on food, giving people more time to do other stuff that can add to the quality of life.

Did you notice how we moved into “time” as a value even in that discussion? Society (everybody doing something) needs to produce food, or we die. Less time spent on food = more time for fun, games, medicine, music, etc. As soon as somebody figured out how a horse can plow the same plot of land and get more food off’n it, the equation changed from “land is the basis of all wealth,” to “technology that improves the land use is a good thing, too.”

Back to Kevin’s list. And to a discussion on Terra Nova about whether or not the theft of virtual items counts as theft. When we pin all our ideas about possessions, wealth, etc. on “stuff” (like land), then the idea of virtual theft is absurd. Of course the owner/publisher of the game can just “undo” the theft instance and give us back our virtual thing-a-ma-bob. That’s not the point. I’m not paying the publisher (or the advertiser) in order to have access to things; I’m “spending my time.” And that’s a phrase that, now, I think is hugely significant.

We live in an age when food is almost free. Or course, this is only true in those societies engaged in the kind of digital economics that Kevin talks about. Very few areas where starvation is a real issue are in any way worried about digital piracy and the value of free copies of content. But for those of us in the “Internet World,” food is very, very cheap; about 10-15% of household income for those of us in the middle class. And since most of us don’t rely on investment income from real estate (or other tangibles), but on wages… time, in a very real sense, ends up being equal to money for us.

But… that value may not be fungible, depending on how you measure it. If you peg your time back to your salary/wage, you end up with a dollar-per-hour calculation that can easily be compared to that of everyone else. Right? Fred makes $20/hour and Grace makes $40/hour, so her time is worth twice as much as his.

Or is it? Grace’s time is worth twice as much to the economy that determines wages based on the service provided. But is it worth twice as much to society in general? Or to their families? Suppose, after work, Fred spends 20 hours a week tutoring kids who need extra help with reading. He does this for free. Grace, on the other hand, watches TV. Nothing wrong with that. But aside from their hours spent working, can we say that an hour of Grace’s time watching the Food Channel is as valuable to society as an hour of Fred’s time improving the minds of our youth?

And, regardless of the value to society, can anybody but Fred or Grace determine the value of any given activity relative to their own time spent? And another and… can anyone place a value on time spent doing things that are universally acknowledged as having personal value, such as playing with one’s kids, going to church, loving up your honey, etc.? Meaning, is one hour of Grace’s time spent with her family any more or less valuable to her than an hour of Fred’s time spent with his?

We need a new way to think about value when much of what we are concerned with is how we spend our time, rather than how we spend our money. Kevin points out, wisely, that there are things we can do to add value to digital stuff that is easily copied. My view is that most of those “generative” qualities map to relative time-value of various activities. I value…

• Immediacy – Getting something in less time
• Personalization — Getting something someone else has spent time matching to my needs, rather than having to spend that time myself
• Interpretation — The time of experts
• Authenticity — Not wasting my time on stuff that will suck
• Accessibility – Being able to get something at any time
• Findability — Spending less time looking for something

In regards to virtual theft, then… someone who steals my virtual “stuff,” is actually robbing me of immediacy (if I can’t use it when I thought I could), authenticity (the “magic circle” of me thinking of my stuff as mine), accessibility (I can’t use it when I want), and “findability” (I may have to go back to the publisher for a new copy).

When I spend time on a digital asset, I’ve assigned value to it relative to anything else I might have done with that time. When somebody/something requires that I spend more time on something, they’ve robbed me. Thus, DRM that requires me to spend time fiddling around with various protection schemes is robbing me of my time-currency in order to help protect the digital security of some content. The fact that a song I buy on iTunes can’t be used on all my devices is a theft of immediacy, findability and accessibility.

Time is the new gold. We should work on ways of assigning and evaluating time-value that aren’t rooted in dirt, food and metals.

Need more of this.

So, when my Dad was my age (early 40’s), and I was a teenager, he’d embarrass the heck out of me by wearing a pith helmet while mowing the front lawn. Yes. A pith helmet. He had it left over from when he was in the Air Force. Not that they issued it to him. He just had it from back then.

He’d fire up our nasty, smoky old lawn mower and grudgingly hit the green. I inherited my loathing for yard work from my Dad. Not gardening; gardening is a lovely pass time. But the care, feeding, watering, cutting, raking, etc. of a patch of crappy, homogeneous weeds is truly noxious to me. If it was culturally OK to have a sand/rock garden in one’s front lawn in Ohio, I’d do it.

Out Dad goes! Wearing the pith helmet; a short-sleeved, white, button-down shirt; plaid Bermuda shorts; dark socks; and sandals. You can imagine that I was somewhat… chagrined.

Until I got to be about…well, my age now. A few years back, I took to wearing a Tilly hat (see pic) because we found one that fit my great, huge noggin’. It keeps off the rain, the snow, and the sun. It floats. It has a secret inside pocket. It has a drawstring inside that can be worn three different ways. It is an awesome hat.

And, last summer, I went out wearing that hat, and a pair of cut-off sweats, and dark socks with sandals (cause the sandals chafe, but I didn’t have [couldn’t find] any clean white socks, and I had a window-of-opportunity of 30 minutes to mow before the rain was going to hit) and began to mow.

And then realized I’d become my dad. Cursing while mowing the lawn, wearing a dumb-ass hat. And it occurred to me why men of a certain age and type — men like my dad, and now me — wear dumb-ass hats: because we like them, and don’t give a crap what other people think anymore.

God bless the moon, god bless me, and god bless my dad. Who taught me, silently (except for the cursing) to be myself.

[Note: I’m posting this in the winter because I feel like it, dammit!]

A friend of mine (Hi, Bill!) sent me a link to a story at The New Republic called, “Atheism’s Wrong Turn.” It’s a decent article, and I recommend reading the whole thing. The basic point is that the crop of current, media-ready atheists — Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens — aren’t liberal atheists who push for a system that respects beliefs, but illiberal, evangelical atheists who want to eradicate God from public discourse.

The author, Damon Linker, sees this as a problem for liberal humanists, as the tendency for deists might be to paint liberal churchgoers with some of the paint spatterings of illiberal atheists, since there is some overlap between “separation of church and state,” and “separation of church and reality.”

I agree, to an extent. I think most of my Christian friends can pretty easily separate out the religious views of angry atheists from the political views of liberal believers, such as myself. The fact that I am not a fundamentalist and Christopher Hitchens is not a fundamentalist shouldn’t really confuse any but the most cross-eyed of conservative believers.

What is more interesting to me is the phenomenal sales records of the atheist, anti-God tomes that these four have authored (see below). The percentage of people who say they do not believe in God in this country is quite small. According to a Wikipedia article that quotes the 2001 “American Religious Identification Survey,” about 15% of Americans identified themselves in 2001 as “agnostic/atheist/no religion,” s up from 8.4% in 1991.

What motivates someone to buy a book that argues, quite strongly, against a belief in God? Not against a particular religious belief, or for a type of practice… but argues that God just doesn’t exist? If you are already an atheist, it is, I would think, a waste of time. If you aren’t an atheist, as I assume many of their readers are not, why buy such a book?

I think it’s a kind of spiritual/religious porn. That’s what I think.

Not porn in the sense that it’s bad/wrong/nasty to argue against a belief in God. As a liberal Christian, I’m all for a society where your disbelief in God is as respected as my belief. So there’s nothing *wrong* with these books, per se. I’ve read some of Christopher Hitchen’s work and he’s quite brilliant at times as well as entertaining.

No… I mean that, I think, the impetus for many believers who read these books is one of religious prurience. It feels naughty to buy and read a nicely bound, well authored book that argues vehemently against the very existence of a being to whom you are bound as a servant and worshiper. It’s shocking. It’s (maybe) a little creepy. It’s exciting. And you’re pretty sure you shouldn’t be doing it. You know… porn.

I think it’s a great idea for believers — of any faith — to be familiar with these works, or at least the major arguments from them. And you should do so as if seeing a naked body in a medical film, as opposed to watching hard-core scrunt. It may be interesting and compelling in some similar ways, but it has education at its heart, rather than titillation.

If you can’t read well-reasoned arguments against your faith and come up with good rebuttals, you need to question your faith. I don’t mean “question” in the sense of “doubt,” but you need to ask questions, and get answers, to help you understand the issues at stake.

A good friend of mine and I (same guy, “Hi, again, Bill!”) once came to the conclusion, during a long religious discussion, that core religious beliefs must not require high levels of brain power or rigorous intellectual scrutiny. Why? Because then God would be prejudiced in favor of the smart. I believe one statement to come out of that discussion was, “God would not require that we reason our way into Heaven.”

Many (if not most or all) arguments for atheism boil down to a belief (yes, atheism is a belief) that (some) intellectual arguments are more valid than (supposedly) emotional arguments for faith. And while reason can certainly be applied to aspects of faith, in the end… the word “faith” itself is the qualifier. If it made complete, abject, logical sense… it would be science, wouldn’t it.

So have a go at one of the atheist manifestos, if you like. Take a peek behind the curtain at some rigorous, impassioned arguing. It may feel like porn, but it’s more like a trip to the doctor; it’s good to shine a light into some dark places in order to understand what that pain is.

Another fine post (a bit aged; my bad) from Purple Motes, this time about the decline in literary reading in the U.S. The news comes from an NEA report, "Reading at Risk."

The short version is summed up by the table below:

Literary Reading by Sex
(% reading in given year)