Rogue Dictionary

today's xkcd is mindblowingly great

the anti-literary internet

David Foster Wallace committed suicide about a week ago. This is sad, if not entirely unprecedented. He was a towering talent, and, in memoriam, lots of his writings have begun springing up online. They're worth digging up—the man could dance with the English language.

One article in particular got me thinking: Federer as Religious Experience, published August 20, 2006 in the New York times. Obviously it's full of great, Wallacian sentences like these:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

And these:

He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

And even (my favorite) these:

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Sitting in my chair, reading these words on my computer screen, I realized that I was enjoying a fundamentally different experience from all the other reading I've done in this position.

Think about it this way. The internet is still a fundamentally text-based medium. I worked it out once, and I consume between fifty and a hundred pages of printed text per day off the internet every day, factoring in news, blogs, RSS feeds, and everything else. And that's exactly what it is: consumption. The words come in, the ideas come out, and I move on. Almost none of it really sticks.

But reading this article, written by a real honest-to-God gifted-to-the-sky writer, I realized that I've been doing the equivalent of consuming a thousand calories per day of Powerbars. Sure, it'll keep you alive, and even give you most of the energy/information/whatever that you need, but it's a fundamentally joyless experience. It's more about the end product, what you learned, what you can do with it, rather than the reading itself.

The internet makes it very easy to passively acquire information, to let it pass through us like so much water. And it is crucial to note that this is fine. Water is necessary for life, and, let's be honest, it would be exhausting to wade through an article like this one every time we wanted to find out what's going on in the world. But the English language is capable of so much more than this. In the hands of a master like Wallace, it can be made to turn backflips. The water can become a tidal wave and sweep us off to some wild and new island full of wonders we could never imagine on our own. It can requires our whole brain to parse it, grab us by the eyes and show us something new. And I'm concerned that, in the word-flood of the modern internet, the occurrence of such works is becoming rarer and rarer. After all, it's much easier to bang out a blog post (irony duly noted) or, heaven forfend, a Twitter than it is to put the blood and effort into really writing something.

So I find myself reconsidering all of those daily RSS feeds and newsposts and things. If I trim some of those out, I'll have more time to read things like this. And while I may know less, in some quantitative sense, I'll have acquired something less tangible, but ultimately more real (at least in terms of sticking in my memory).

And I am left wondering: These days, has our increased ability to know somehow come at the cost of our ability to be?

the connected law student

A week into classes now, shaping up to be an interesting semester. Federal Courts, Telecommunications, Criminal Appellate Clinic, and an Independent Study. Yay 3L, I guess. But it was a comment on day one of Fed Courts that prompted this entry: the professor, based upon the quality of final exams, is convinced that using laptop computers in class short-circuits critical thinking and analysis. Her evidence? That as students use laptops to take transcriptive notes, the insightfulness and flexibility of their thinking on exams declines.

It's funny, the more things my computer can do, the more minimalist I've become. I've got this blog, but I post to it FAR less than I Twitter. I have e-mail, but I use IM/GTalk more often. I have a whole stack of fancy word-processing and writing applications, but I do most of my writing in plaintext (exception: class notes).

I stopped using Linux not long after I graduated from college—my priorities had changed, and spending an evening trying to get my sound to work after a kernel update didn't seem like quite as much fun. I don't write my own shell scripts anymore.

Maybe it's part of growing up. Maybe it's part of the technology maturing, where the differences become more of quantity and less of quality. Maybe I've just become a more perfect consumer, shifting from computer-as-object to computer-as-verb. I do lots of things with it, but at this point I kind of want it to be as transparent as possible.

Who knows. All that said, I still vastly prefer Macs to PC's, and I still get some joy out of using this wonderbox to elegantly solve a problem. For example, video skype still kind of feels like magic. But computers AS computers just don't interest me so much anymore.

being a meat puppet

Yes, I'll be there at 8 A.M. to pick up a phone before work. It's a strange feeling, knowing that I am being thoroughly manipulated by Apple's marketing strategy and willfully (gleefully) going along with it. Oh well.

Nice work, Apple. You have succeeded in overriding my free will. Maybe I'll take a camera to my local Apple store so I can at least justify it to myself as a kind of street-level sociology experiment. Yeah. There we go. Self respect restored.

On the bright side, I finally get to escape from by-god Sprint. And it is a well-documented fact that my current phone is not only in its death throes, but actively and spitefully scheming against me. How dare I have the audacity to make a 20-minute phone call and expect more than three hours of standby time? How dare I jostle the phone in my pocket and expect it to remain powered on? How dare I cup it between my cheek and shoulder and expect it to maintain a connection to the network?

Seriously, good riddance. Now all I need is a clever, thematically appropriate (that is to say, mythological) name for my new toy. Currently debating between Aegis (since my laptop is named Athena—goddess of technology and heroic endeavor) and Mjolnir (because Thor is freaking awesome, and I am apparently a Viking Jew).

hierarchies of communication

A few brief thoughts on hierarchies of communication. At this point, the ways in which you can get in touch with a person are so varied that it seems best to tailor the mode of contact to the relative importance contained message. I think it looks something like this (in descending order, from most intrusive to least):

• hunt me down in meatspace (something vitally important has happened, and I need to be told right now)
• phone call (we need to have a full conversation about something)
• instant message (somewhere between conversation tool and answering machine)
• e-mail (get back to me when you can; no real rush—see note below)
• text message (you should know this thing; no response necessary)

Sound about right? Maybe this betrays some of my own prejudices; not sure. At the very least, it illustrates why I fail to understand text messaging as an interactive method of communication. Its bandwidth is simply too narrow for anything more than low-priority note-leaving.

And keep in mind, these can be used together. E-mail as a system has extraordinary bandwidth, capable of translating everything from sentences to multi-megabyte file attachments. When used in conjunction with a higher-priority form of communication (wait for this attached document), it can be levered up the scale.

Man. What a snooty and overly-academic parsing of a simple topic. Something more lighthearted next time, I think.

identity, the internet, and metadata

One of the Big Ideas running around the Creative Commons Tech Summit last week was this theory of licenses as metadata. This isn't a conceptual leap so much as a technological one: in a sense, lots of attached rights can be conceived as metadata. Property rights that travel with the land, individual rights that attach in a given country, and, yes, copyrights attached to a work. But this isn't a reductio argument--it just goes to show the depth of the word. If, as the physicists say, all is information, then anything descriptive, in a sense, metadata.

So why licenses as metadata in the classical sense (that is, data about data)? Because we're talking about things that are easily expressed as data that can be manipulated to an almost infinite degree. Take digital music. It's just bits that encode for a song, along with some metadata that describes the song. All the CC folks want is to make sure that the two pieces, the data and the metadata, travel together. So I think the math equation looks something like this: the importance of metadata varies proportionally with the ease of transmission of the data. Compared to e-mailing a song to a friend, transferring a piece of land is incredibly difficult. This is why we have contracts, and property rights, but we don't really worry too much about the one getting severed from the other. With online file sharing, and with the ease with which we bend bits to our will, the integrity of metadata, and its persistence, becomes all the more important.

But you know what else is easily transmittable? The internet representation of ourselves. Any modern digital native understands that we exist on several planes simultaneously—meatspace and cyberspace, to use previously coined terms. In the meatspace, our identity is inextricably bound up with our physical self. But in cyberspace, we range far and wide, tied to no particular time or place, identified only by our transactions and interactions. And in that latter regime, all we are is the data we're shuffling around, and the metadata associated with it is no more and no less ourselves.

Which takes me back to the Dick Hardt video at the end of this post. How do you know who you are on the internet? How do you ensure the integrity of that metadata? It's a difficult problem, but it's also an important one.

one of the coolest things i have ever seen

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Click here for a larger version. For more information, check out WhereTheHellIsMatt.com. Be sure to read the About Matt story. The internet is an awesome and powerful thing. And the world is a beautiful place.

thoughts on the lessig method

"you would think that in a room full of people who worship lessig *someone* would know that slides with more than five words on them are almost always a mistake"

The above quotation appeared in the IRC backchannel (#cc on Freenode) during the Creative Commons Technology Summit, an event I was fortunate enough to attend. It was full of brilliant people talking about amazing things, with one glaring problem: far too many of the presenters used the venerable (and horrible) technique of using slides as a background for endless bullet points, which they then proceeded to read through. For highly technical fare, this seems reasonable--the more complex the information, the more structure you need to get it across. But even the less technical talks employed this form of presentation, and so we finally circle back to the above quotation.

Larry Lessig is known for employing a highly dynamic, fast-moving presentation style, where each slide is little more than a short phrase or picture that supplements his talk, rather than outlining it. It brings the focus back to the words he says, rather than whatever he's showing on the screen (which, taken alone, would probably come across as nearly meaningless). It's entertaining, engaging, and it keeps the audience present. This is what I mean when I refer to the Lessig Method (for more detail, click here).

For my part, I was left wondering--is there a maximal amount of information that the Lessig method can convey? Tech talks are, in many ways, the trivial case--you can't get code snippets or graphs or mathematical equations across in five words or fewer. But past that, it seems like there is a vast gulf of people who have fallen prey to siren song of PowerPoint bullets because it's EASIER than scripting and choreographing an entire audiovisual performance (which, make no mistake, is what talks given according to the Lessig Method are).

Then again, I've never given a talk like this (yet). For all I know, the amount of work required to put together a successful presentation in this style vastly outweighs the benefits derived, especially for informal endeavors.

But we'll see. I've got Keynote, I've got P22 Typewriter (one of Lessig's signature fonts). I'm going to try this at next month's New Media lunch. We'll see how it goes.

Oh, and for a visual example of the Lessig Method, watch Dick Hardt's presentation at OSCON 2005.

For a more professional take on the evils of Powerpoint, read this article from Wired.