Please Justify Your Existence, Hollywood

Why do we need cameras and producers and CGI, when one person can set a story to music and make people cry using nothing but sand?



Addendum: To preempt the inevitable comment: yes, I do recognize the irony in using a performance for a highly produced television franchise that I found on the Web's largest video repository as evidence that we don't need technology to be entertained.

World Enough and Time

My friend Albert's recent blog post about Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" has me ruminating on that poem a lot lately. Albert focuses his explication on the enigmatically beautiful phrase "vegetable love." Yet it's that poem's first line, "Had we but world enough, and time," that still gets me.

Has there ever been a more concise, universal statement of longing?

Marvell specifically addresses a longing erotic in nature, but his hypothetical construction could be a prelude to any human passion. It is why we chase youth and money, technology and entertainment, fame and status—all things that represent control over some inexorable force.

Youth stalls time's yardstick, age. Fame enables our names to live, thus cheating time's ultimate arbiter, death. Money, status, and entertainment offer us "world enough," whether that means consumption or leisure. And, of course, technology buys us the illusion of both time and world. After all, technology saves us time and allows us to be virtually in multiple places at once.

Of course, such pursuits ultimately prove fruitless. We know this objectively, yet we pursue anyway. But we can't be blamed for this drive. It's something we struggle with today. It's something Marvell recognized 400 years ago.

However, I can't help think that the world would be somehow better if we could just recognize that world enough might be the ground we can cover with our own legs. And time enough might be living each moment in a manner meaningful to us yet mindful of others. And both could be achieved in those instants when we give over some gift of ourselves, to either a lover or a stranger, in whatever capacity we have to give, with no expectation of reciprocation yet complete surprise and delight when that gift is returned.

The World Actually IS Flat

The Internet has an end point. Who knew?

TV Fills the Void

I've always wondered why the television show Friends was so popular. It had an improbable concept (young people with no visible means of support living in gorgeous New York City apartments), formulaic sitcom banter, and some consistently annoying characters and story lines. Yet people, myself included, watched it with a devoutness that would be the envy of any church. The show was, in fact, an anchor for years of Must See TV.

Could Friends' popularity be due simply to its title? Perhaps, if one stretches the argument Jonah Lehrer reports about in his latest post on The Frontal Cortex: "the benefits of watching television when lonely . . . provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people."

Media ecologists have been observing these effects of television for decades. Marshall McLuhan identified television as the most significant electric media of his day, because it enabled the viewer to transport beyond time and space and engaged multiple senses, thus stimulating our evolutionary proclivities toward a fragmented, tribal society. Neil Postman then took up the yolk, exploring the darker implications of this feature of electric media.

But even television itself is limited, primarily by schedule, distribution, and level of interactivity. We still must watch our shows either according to a network's schedule or must wait for the DVD release, and we can't enter the narrative played out before us.

Which leads me to wonder where the Internet, which breaks through those barriers by being always already available and completely interactive, will take us. Lonelygirl15 aside, how much less lonely will we be online, even if it forces our attention away from our physical environment and into our own isolated head-space focused on a device?

Sex or Conan O'Brien?

India's Health and Family Welfare Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has a solution for exploding birth rates: give poor villagers electricity so they can watch late-night TV and stop fucking.

According to Rhys Blakely of the London Times, the minister said,

Don’t think that I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious. TV will have a great impact. It’s a great medium to tackle the problem... 80 per cent of population growth can be reduced through TV.

Why stop at TVs? Give them laptops and smartphones, and they'll never even want to touch another human.

Sustainable Work, Sustainable Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about work lately, not out of dissatisfaction or a sense of crisis. Rather, I’ve been pondering a question I’ve long put off: where do I see myself in five or ten years? Having avoided this question for so long has led me down some interesting paths, but it also means that I’ve had more jobs in the last twelve years than my father had his entire life, which is not something I think is sustainable as I get older.

I’ve been approaching this question through the lens of media ecology, which I think of less as a social science and more of as a mode of thought, and I’ve shocked myself with some of the conclusions I’ve reached. I work in the Internet industry, so I’ve had a front-seat view of the changing workplace. I love my job, but the following seven dictums suggest it’s not the right path for me.

Work has its place and should be kept in its place.
Work is a part of life, not life itself. It can be meaningful and enjoyable and offer fulfillment. However, it is still only an aspect of what makes a person whole. Work should not require my attention beyond work hours, at home, on vacation, or during the weekend. Sure, there are some people who successfully and healthfully integrate their work and personal lives thoroughly. They are rare and lucky and we should admire them. But we should not emulate them. Those who do—which is the vast majority of us who put in too many hours at a job that wouldn’t be our first choice of life’s pursuit, if given the absolute freedom to choose—shouldn’t be labeled “passionate.” We should be called by our true names: “obsessive,” “scared,” or “misguided.”

Work with people who are smarter or more skilled than you.
This will challenge you hourly, ensure you learn something daily, and lead to a deeper and more sustainable fulfillment.

Work should be described accurately as “craft.”
Not all jobs are equal here. Some, perfectly good and noble pursuits, do not qualify. I would never describe even the best retail salesperson as a “craftsman.”

Work should not involve multi-tasking.
I want to focus on one task, do it the best I can, complete it, and move on to the next task (see #3: craft). The compulsory attention deficit disorder commonly enforced in most workplaces is neither healthy nor fulfilling. I find more satisfaction in rolling one ball down a straight and narrow lane to knock down ten pins than I do in keeping those same ten pins juggled in the air. This, I know, is unavoidably changing, as more people who grew up natively in a digitally mediated world enter the workplace. But there is still value in those of us who think more linearly and methodically.

Work should involve in-person interaction or complete solitude.
I understand we live in a global, digital society. I get it. But work should limit mediated communication. This means no more phones, email, IM, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, or far-flung teams. They are an excuse to schedule meetings at all hours to accommodate all parties in all parts of the world, yet avoid the tasks at hand (see #4: attention deficit disorder). If I can’t conduct work interactions face-to-face, where I can build a relationship based on handshakes and eye contact and the subtle modulations in vocal tone and facial expressions, then just leave me alone to do my work as I see fit.

Work should not move at the speed of electricity.
Again, I know the revolution has come, but for me a work environment that is “always” and “instant” is neither sustainable nor fulfilling. I prefer to prepare rather than anticipate, to act rather than react, to consider and craft rather than iterate. A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing once and well.

Work should make others’ lives better. Period.
This is a direct call-out to Web and tech companies, who are changing our language in many of the same ways George Carlin once skewered the military and government for doing. For example, please stop talking about “evangelizing” and “designing meaningful interactions” in relation to your products, when what it is you’re really trying to do is capture a large portion of the public’s attention and sell them something. The only time Internet-speak is being truly honest is when it refers to their customers as “users,” which is also the term for drug addicts.

I’m not sure what all of this means. I’m not sure if what I seek exists. I’m not sure if I’d even know it if I found it. I’d love your take on it.

Reuters Pwns the Associated Press

Want an easy and legal way to post Reuters content in its entirety on your site with 11 clicks of your mouse—and with the choice of paying for it or allowing them to post their ads to your site with their content? You got it. I'm glad someone in journalism is paying attention.