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While Carr’s book, as I outlined in my previous post seems to follow a neutral, logical character, the book is also intensely personal. Carr himself starts the narrative not as a dispassionate researcher asking whether the neuro-anatomical structures of the brain are changing due to prolonged Net exposure. Carr begins, in Chapter 1, with a gut-feeling: “Why can’t I pay attention like I used to?”

For me this was very telling because I’ve been afraid to admit to myself that my mind has been changing over these last few years and that I’m not entirely sure it has been for the better. Prior to college my mind, it seems to me, was more or less in the same state. It grew more mature, to be sure, as a function of time, but the process by which I thought seemed of a consistent form. Even my first two years in the work force didn’t seem to change my mind’s machinery much, but in the 2004-2007 range some changes took root. My mind started conforming to the mens nova. Not only did I obtain it, but I excelled at having it.

Two specific problems with this mind emerged that I see now. When I was living in SF, single, I realize I must have engaged many of my dates with this mind. When a lady might have been speaking to me, I could see where the thought was going and, I suspect, I betrayed that I knew the direction the discussion was going and tuned out until the end of the statement.

You see, I had taken to being content-oriented versus communications-oriented. Think about it, isn’t this the mode of your mind after a day at a business or role dominated by the mens nova?

To her great credit, my lovely girlfriend Lauren, has spent many, many hours trying to help me de-pattern this mind viz. interpersonal communication. Even as she worked to de-program these patterns I became and attained several times in 06-07 a modality of this mens nova called Twitch Mode that I wrote about in this very blog years ago.

Around the time I reached my peak efficacy at being a Twitchy machine, I started implementing changes in my work behavior. I was lucky I was able to do this. I started shutting down IM, I started queueing mail. However, even as I did that new mens nova- friendly sites entered my life: Facebook and Twitter gave swift informational reward for repeated visits. I got an iPhone, a beautiful device to make sure that your favorite distractor sites are never further than a swipe away.

Like most modern people I am more twitchy than I ought be, but I am less twitchy than your average 14 year-old. How I hope to retain a reserve of peace will be a topic for a future post.

However, I knew, and Lauren insisted that there was a calmer, more human, more intimate place whither to return. What if you never knew a world where the mens nova was, nova? This is precisely the situation of the youth of today. What some of us knew from the experience of “getting lost in a book,” or that the swamis knew as “relaxed contemplation,” or that yoga teachers know when executing uttitha trikonasana perfectly they will have never experienced and will not know to miss it!

For me, a day where I left in Twitch Mode with my heart pounding could be mollified with alcohol, a long weekend, or a trip kayaking. Like a weekend pill popper or a college freshman at the end of a bender I could sleep it off and get back to normal. Yet for for many of us it is getting harder and harder to get back to normal; for some of us normal has been razed and its fields salted by the armies of the new mind.

To be continued…

Introduction

I recently read The Shallows and found it greatly enlightening. I plan on doing a series of posts on the topic of this book. My first post will be a basic synopsis.

Synopsis

Nicholas Carr’s argument in “The Shallows” is beautiful in its simplicity.

1. The human brain exhibits a property called neuroplasticity that endures through all stages of life. Therefore the mind’s physical structures are always mutable
2. What we do, which tools we use to express thought, and how we think fosters or inhibits focus in our minds and alters the quality of the thoughts themselves.¹ This is not merely a style of thinking change, but an actual change in the neural structures, per 1.
3. This patterning occurs, largely, without our knowing it.² While “distracted” the re-wiring occurs. Chief distractors are:
   1. content
      1. “Content is King” ethos seen in design community at large
      2. Content is chiefly lurid, gossipy, or pornographic.
      3. Repeated draws to primally-stimulating content distracts from the new patterning occurring
   2. social reënforcement:
      
      1. “What you’re not on BookFace?”
      2. “Can you sign on to IM so I can ‘ping’ you the servername?”
   3. other cues that satisfy reptilian brain pleasure / warning centers (legacy routines designed for predator evasion)
      1. “ding” sound
      2. flashing lights
4. With the mind having been changed, this mens nova, it now “esteems” content that works well with the newly formatted apparatus and has a harder time working with content that doesn’t. A quine-like statement emerges: The distracted mind favors that which works well within the framework of a distracted mind. Optimization for distraction occurs at the expense of focus and concentration
5. The mens nova is ill-optimized for depth, consideration, argumentation of length or scientific research, per previous point. This is precisely the mind to which the Internet distractors and design optimize as ideal
6. Popular culture maintains a Whig history style praise of this new mind. It avers myths that current research calls to question:
   1. “The mens nova is optimized for multi-tasking.” When we multi-task we are lying to ourselves. We are drowning and not admitting it to ourselves. We are reading 19-26 words and believing we have read an entire article
   2. “The mens nova will find richness in content that will give students more depth / (Postmodern tenet) will allow students to see around the Anglo-Western-male hegemony:” The purported benefits of the “multi-tasked mind” or the “media-enhanced schoolroom” have not surfaced
7. Market forces encourage the continued production of distracted mind applications and mind-distracting endeavors.
   
   1. Making interfaces that don’t pander to the mens nova will be deemed “un-intuitive” or “poorly designed”
   2. Other media are suborning themselves into the Net format:
      1. books via Google Book
      2. FoxNews and the “crawl bar”
   3. All facts are coming to be taken as atoms, not as components of opera.
8. We must choose to be aware of these changes and not pretend that homo cassium³ is inherently superior to homo sapiens
9. In a world of homo cassium what will his weaknesses be? Has the dazzling light of “progress” actually been a regress?

My next post will be a reaction to the book and a response to the distilled argument presented here.

Footnotes

1. I love this notion of our tools being part of what forms how we see and that our tools cannot be other than the way such that they are usable to us. I think there’s an interesting symmetry between the anthropic principle and neuroplasticity
2. Re-patterning is not bad per se. While a young we were seduced by “story time” and “book reports” into patterning our brain to be book-friendly, or not
3. Man of the nets. There’s a fun ambiguity implying that he might be trapped by said nets not just be of the Nets.

Over at The Signal Watch, Ryan takes a few moments to talk about the latest cash grab from Darren Star enterprises: “Sex in the City 2.”

I think SATC2 suffers from a bout of ill-timing and age. Accordingly, these make it seem tone-deaf to the mood of the country. It’s not the case that this latest offering was exceptionally bad, it’s just that the scales have fallen from our eyes and the inherent ridiculousness shines through.

A certain someone I know told me that she loves “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” I understand why, Isla Fisher is cute and funny (Exhibit A: Wedding Crashers). The movie failed and failed hard. If there was any message the world didn’t want to hear as the mortgage bubble was bursting, retirements were being be-Madoffed, and venerable banking institutions were requiring infusions of tax dollars, it was “sometimes I buy too much pretty stuff!” So perhaps that movie got an unfair shake owing to the vicissitudes of the release cycle.

Yet “Shopaholic’s” message has always been the message of SATC. In 1998 as we danced at the peak of the tech-bubble, that a newspaper columnist’s primary concerns would be a good lay, a good stiff drink, and fancy shoes on her inexplicably inexhaustible bank account (I can imagine Carrie Bradshaw bankrupt and back in Mom’s basement after her 19 credit lines forced her to file for bankruptcy looking at heaps of shoes going: “What the hell was I thinking?”) seemed to be an avatar of the zeitgeist. And contrary to expectation, as real-world NYC went to hell in a handbasket, her lifestyle aligned with the post-9/11 advice of the buffoon, George W. Bush who encouraged America to, in a time of crisis, “go shopping.” Because the terrorists hate our freedom to buy lo-rise pants and belly tops, slap them on nubile jailbait, apparently.

Roger Ebert hit the nail on the head with:

Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies.

In a time when America is generally tightening its belt, to keep promulgating this message takes their lives and actions from “wouldn’t it be great if…” fantasy to “get a grip you bobblyhead” reality. Most of the criticism I’ve read is from those wondering just how entitled Charlotte is to feel that she barely makes it with hired help or what sort of an ungrateful woman doesn’t like that her husband, reformed skirt-chaser wants to spend time with her in their opulent (of course) home — oh right, Carrie.

Anecdote: Success

Bono once said that if you were successful enough in the music business, you eventually become a parody of that (young, hard charging, awesome, gritty, great band) you once were. Ironically, he said this at the opening of Zoo TV.

Or, as Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle said:

A little background for our younger readers: U2 is a band that was cool throughout the mid-1980s, then it briefly sucked, then it became cool again, then it sucked for a much longer time — and then it got sort of cool for a third time but the band members sold their musical souls in the process. This video was taken right at the beginning of their first period of sucking.

I think this has a lot to bear on the SATC universe. SATC clever:

Miranda Hobbes: The only two choices for women; witch and sexy kitten.
Carrie Bradshaw: Oh you just said a mouthful there sister.

not the dubbing of a certain vigorous male “Lawrence of my Labia. (SATC overwrought)”

Question: Why does Kim Cattrall deliver all her lines like Snagglepuss?

Really. Check it out.

Lauren and I, when encountering a situation which is SATC-like, and which calls for a ham-handed double entendre (see above) often deliver it with a:

<span style=”voice:snagglepuss; referenceto:SamathaJones”> Mmmmm, Carrie, you could say that it wasn’t a ham-burger, but a man-burger.</span>

Anecdote: The Gay Vote

I think I knew there was a sea-change afoot on Friday. I went to get a slice of pizza at Marcello’s at Castro and Market and as I walked past the beautiful Castro movie house I overheard three men walking ahead of me one of whom said:

“…God he was like a horse, speaking of horses, we’re all skipping “Sex and the City 2”, right?”

Anyone from anywhere in the world will find driving in San Francisco for any distance greater than 4 miles a bit daunting.

We have many, many one-way streets, streets to be shared with streetcars, iPhone senses-numbed hipsters wandering across intersections, drunken street-people, horizon-obliterating hills, a non-gridded layout, and few free parking spaces.

Therefore, when a tourist, or any other sane person, goes down a street and sees a herd of lanyard-wearing tourists crossing a square you mean to traverse that seems to have suddenly changed bearing from southwest to dead south with double-parked cabs on the right lane and the left lane is marked exclusively for highway access s/he might let off the gas or tap the brake and …

HONK!

I’ve decided the ability to negate all the legitimate reasons for hesitation and punch through with no doubt at 10 miles over the speed limit is the shibboleth of San Francisco drivers. Just as saying “Man-Chack-Uh” in Austin, or pronouncing “Houston” in NYC like the city in Texas earns you derision and sneers, deciding not to bore across a crosswalk at 50 MPH with pedestrians in view up a blind hill crest marks you as “no from ‘round here.”

Regrettably there’s no retro-honk. You know, when someone honks at you for stopping for a wheelchair-using citizen. You’d love to say “Listen, Jackass, I’m in the moral right.” But that’s just not how it works.

It’s not actually like they were trying to tell you to do the wrong thing, they were just trying hard to aurally re-assert “hey, I’m local, g-money.”

My local newspaper had this article as the front page story:

“Obama speech causes nationwide stir”

Apparently, parents are contemplating keeping kids at home so that they will not be exposed to the president’s address.

What?

It’s not like Mr. Obama is saying “You should tell your parents to support the inclusion of the public option.” He’s going to talk to the boys and girls of this, the nation in which he functions as the chief executive officer, and tell them that education is important and that being part of the 30% of the high school population that doesn’t make it to graduation is a less-than-stellar idea.

What’s to complain about?

Obama is not Stalin (talk to me after you compare Obama’s pogram efficacy to Old Joe’s). Obama is not Hitler (talk to me after you compare their internment camp policies). He’s the president who won his position by a democratic process. Even if you don’t like what he says, even if you cringe at every word (as I did under the malapropism mudslides that came with the infrequent public addresses of GW Bush), to say that you’re going to prevent exposure to the ideas by plugging your years or keeping your kids home in protest is the height of willful ignorance.

For the record, other luminary organizations that engaged in this behavior were: Catholic Church on “does Jupiter have moons (15th-17th century),” recording industry (circa 2000), “should the testimony of this girl be used to hang women as witches? (late 17th c., Salem, MA). See how well those worked out?

I don’t know what misplaced sense of loyalty would encourage parents to “sick-out” their kid to avoid a “study hard, this country needs you” speech. Mr. Obama is trying to say “education is important as are the skills in critical thinking it engenders.” Putting a kid on sick-out says exactly the opposite to the child. When I was a child, the president (and his wife) frequently advised us to “Just Say No,” in an era where international competition is stronger, we’re up to our eyeballs in Chinese debt, and can only seem to grow our economy by inventing crazy debt instruments, having a president say “Just Say Yes to Basic Education” is needed and ought be heard.

Curiosity is a funny thing, and sometimes breaking the taboo verbally, by merely suggesting it, leaves us all astounded, uncomfortable, and immobilized for a short amount of time. In that daze, nothing changes, but the opportunists and innovators find ways to profit by the new zeitgeist. At just about the time the public thinks that the verbally-broken taboo has gone away, the work of these opportunists and innovators surfaces and gives us a tangible artifact that the way we knew, whose existence had effectively been banished by the mere thought of the world with this change, will not be coming back.

Doubtless someone said this when the MP3 compression produced a small music file: “Hey, we could move songs over the internet in an acceptable time length over consumer-grade broadboand” I don’t doubt that those who were paying attention to this algorithm then faltered: “You mean, we could write software to move music about for free?” And then, a breath later: “we could destroy (or save the recording industry as we know it.”

Other examples are innovation, radio, television, the destruction of the newspaper, etc.

With these models in mind, it’s with some trepidation that I consider the case of [WARNING: GRUESOME FOOTAGE] Neda, the brave Iranian woman who, during a protest, appears to have been killed…on film. The legend of the snuff film is nothing new, but there’s something about the immediacy and the ubiquity of a this woman’s cruel fate that scares and awes me.

Here we are in the breathless moment I mentioned above: “Are we going to live in a world where we, and thanks to the Internet I do me all of us, see death – live?” Will this serve as that first drop of blood to our inner Audrey IIs that teaches spectator bloodlust to our culture as once belonged to the Romans and Aztecs of yore?

Don’t feed the plant

How would our world change. Perhaps with such spectator-grade gore there would be learning experiences from showing the charred bodies of those killed in combat. We would understand the horror of battle more clearly. And perhaps, too, seeing the bodies of the fallen we would better understand the incredible practice made pro patriam.

But the world we live in is not one of gravitas, a BBC world. We live in a world of fluffier stuff, and I can see a world, the ravenous chasm of which we now stand before, in which spectator bloodlust becomes blood entertainment.

If you have the stomach for the clip, you can feel it there, that adrenal cortex response as the danger grows great to the woman. As she crumples. Your animal circuits rage to run, or to fight but your cerebrum calms you down and understands it’s “just footage.” Nevertheless, the jolt was there, was real, and was vaguely stimulating in your life of Jon and Kate, of Paris Hilton, of church and taxes. It was a pituitary hypodermic straight to your “stay alive” center. Suddenly that pagan eros shoots up, the world is brighter, you feel sexier, and all those secondary adrenal responses fire reminding you to live and spread gametes.

And just like the porn genie that the internet let loose, I wonder what happens when they (probably some of those self-same entrepreneurs as they already have a taste for “extreme” entertainment) start collating blood-footage and giving it away in 30-second teaser doses for $30/month fees. Will they turn to a generation raised on mixed martial arts, war, and social dissociation to provide the willing fodder for the burgeoning market?

Mortituri nos delectabunt

If you think blood spectatorship, ask yourself is it so terribly far from martial implosion spectatorship?

Dear Huffington Post,

I love you. I worked on Arianna’s gubernatorial campaign where she autographed one of her books for me. As the big-names of journalism and television news are becoming ever more farcical, you properly captured the zeitgeist of the Obaman age.

But I implore your copywriter to stop using the term “slam” as a verb. You use it for everything. To wit:

Note that this was today’s front page.

I was going to do a short video clip where I would need the visage of Ruby creator, and general nice-guy Yukihiro Matsumoto.

By Dave Thomas

So, I go to The Google and type in “matsumoto” singly because I’m lazy.

The top image results are of Matsumoto Rangiku LINK NOT ENTIRELY WORKPLACE FRIENDLY

In the words of Stephán Urkel: “Matsumoto, Bazooms!”

Gosh.

I really think Barack, excuse me, The President is really the coolest world leader.

Previously, my list was:

1. King of Thailand
2. Carla Bruni
3. Angela Merkel of Germany, for freaking out so stylishly when she got the Bush back-rub treatment

Now it is

1. Barack Hussein Obama, POTUS
2. King of all Cosmos
3. Carla Bruni
4. King of Thailand

It was a hard choice…

versus

In all seriousness, I recall my mom once saying that in her childhood, the Kennedy era, they thought that the government were “cool” guys. I remember her saying this to me and thinking, this is somewhere in the Bush I era, “you’ve got to be joking.” Something died between Vietnam, Watergate, and has, I believe, for my generation, been dead until the election of Obama. Not ever having seen it before, we didn’t know to miss it. Having seen it again, I don’t think that I could well settle for less again.

When I was in high school I was quite captivated by Ayn Rand and the philosophies she espoused in The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and The Romantic Manifesto. Miss Rand died in 1982 and I was therefore unable to appreciate her voice and presentation style. I recall my grandmother once told me that she remembered seeing Rand often on television and I was a bit jealous. In those medieval times, the 1980’s, we couldn’t just go and summon video forth on a whim. As such, for me, Miss Rand image et voix, was her books.

Youtube changes this. I watched the following interview of Miss Rand by Phil Donohue in 1979 shortly after the death of her husband, Frank O’Connor.

To be honest, I was absolutely stunned by these 8 minutes. I was surprised not because of the content presented, I’m well familiar with it. Rather I was bowled over by the exceedingly high quality of interview facilitated by Donohue. It felt completely foreign. Her philosophy, Objectivism, is explored by in a Socratic discourse by Donohue and its more contentious points are drawn out and put to the test of several what-if scenarios.

What was particularly notable to me was the quality of questions that Donohue asked, it was clear he was familiar with the work in a substantial way. He was not basing his questions on hearsay of some snippet that had come from some other show or some talking point. It also appears to have been understood, in general, that Rand was a “public intellectual”, someone with something to say and someone to whom people could respond with questions and requests for further clarification. I do recall Donohue on during the daytime in the early 1980’s and didn’t understand why he was regarded as a “big deal.” I get it now.

I look at my own times and see the great paucity of such figures, intellectual and interlocutor alike. Today we are awash in self-righteous intellectual gasconade by the likes of infotaining fauxlebrities ( and neologistic bloggers, ahem ) in awe of their own cult of personality. Those that would call their opponents pinheads and tell them to “shut up” continue to help race the quality of the public debate to its nadir are to be found on every channel, yet those that actually engage in a substantive exchange are few.

Can one imagine Oprah talking to an atheist, Russian, emigrée about Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction, and welfare-state economics? I have a hard time belieiving such, having seen her promulgate the content of “The Secret” and “The Celestine Prophecy.”

To be sure, in the clip Rand certainly shows some of the truculence that marks the loudest of those who ringmaster cargo-cult hours on the “news” channels: in one of the sections she harangues an audience member in a way that felt entirely familiar to those who have seen Bill O’Reilly do his “poor me, it’s a conspiracy” bit when interviewed by another as to how he handles certain interviewees who have caught him with his intellectual pants down.

That there has been a consistent downward slide was confirmed by another interview of Rand, this time performed by a Bryl-cream and bravado Mike Wallace.

Reading up about this show, thanks to The University of Texas’ wonderful HRC, I see that it ran in 1957 and interviewed Dali, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Lili St. Cyr (va-voom!). If I turn on my TV right now, at 10 o’clock, I believe I should find nothing as captivating as any of these episodes. Another 30 minutes of “Ow, my balls ” has little allure for me.

In Holland the evening programming on Nederland 1 was also news-based, direct information targeted at an informed population. In such a tiny country the news that was made that day could be discussed, substantively, with the makers of that news that night in The Hague. Can you imagine evening programming on the IQ level of Charlie Rose; better, a panel of Charlie Roses?

I encourage you to watch these clips and see a time when we had a better calibre of news show, and a better calibre of interview.