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Unplugged - ElectroliciousOne night a week for a year, I am going to completely unplug from anything with a screen. This means no computer, no cell phone, no movies. I plan to focus instead on the other things I like doing like writing letters, crafting, organizing, dancing, going for walks, cooking and making tea, writing in my paper journal. I might also try picking up some new things to like such as watercolors, mail art, dance classes, attending lit readings, etc. I’m going to work on my next book, brainstorming by hand. (BY HAND, PEOPLE!) Regardless, one night a week I’m going to unplug. Want to follow along with my progress? Read the Unplugged blog. Because of course I can’t unplug without blogging about it! (Irony, is that you?)
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I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. - New York Times"Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief….
I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop."
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.
I study people, technology, and the worlds they make
Month: November 2008 (page 1 of 7)
A few weeks ago a friend of mine announced that she was taking a break from Web 2.0.* She was going to prune her Twitter feeds, reduce her time on Facebook, and cut back on her time on IM. She needed to pay more attention to her real life, and to real relationships. Recollecting friends from high school and college was interesting for a while (Web 2.0 is a time machine for my generation, after all), but a large volume of acquaintances can't provide the same satisfaction and support as a handful of friends you can see- or who can take the kids out to the park for an hour. Getting Tweets on her cell phone was also a poor combination of intrusiveness and minutiae. And there was laundry to be done.
As one of the digital lemmings who pushed her over the edge, the episode got me thinking. Why do I Tweet? After thinking about it for a while, I've come the conclusion that while it's certainly popular with lots of my friends, I have a couple serious questions about Twitter, as a writer and a reader.
First, I have to admit that my regular life isn't interesting enough to justify throwing out real-time updates about it. Nobody needs to know that I've just convinced the kids to make their own breakfasts, or have come back from lunch at Zao Noodles, or am trying to decide where to go on this weekend's hike. The exception is when I'm on the road or doing something else unusual: at those times, my life- or my world- might get interesting enough document in detail.
There's also the problem that I'm not sure what I get out of my own tweets. One of the signal features of Web 2.0, I think, is that it's not just broadcasting: it's self-documentation. Some of my friends use Twitter to jot down little notes about what they're reading. But for me, the absence of tags in Twitter makes it hard for me to find things I've looked at long enough to know I should look for them again later, or to keep track of citations; del.icio.us is still the better tool for that. (I suppose you could replicate a little of that functionality with #tags, but that's a workaround, and there's no auto-complete….) And I'm not sure I've gone back and looked at my own Twitter stream, ever. My regular blog is valuable because it's a way to keep track of my own life; this one has been invaluable for recording and trying out ideas for my book; my kids' blog has been a place where I could store huge amounts of detail about my kids' childhoods- those pictures of them doing cute but ordinary things, or saying wonderful things, or just growing up. Tossing out tweets feels like shooting sparks from a wheel: the sparks may be entertaining, but it's the object you're shaping with the wheel that's really valuable.
Finally, as a reader, I find that seeing the raw feed of even a few people's lives can quickly become overwhelming. In the last 24 hours, a relatively quiet time after Thanksgiving, I got 34 tweets; during a busy time- when people are traveling or at SXSW- I can get several times that, easily. There's an argument to be made, as Clive Thompson has done, that the minutiae of tweets resolve into ambient awareness… but as it's currently designed, the system still puts big demands on readers, who have to constantly read their friends' Twitter streams, develop a sense of the rhythm of their posting, and build up a model of their real-world state from their online behavior. In a world in which the challenge is not to broadcast a lot of information, but to generate a lot of meaning, the stream-of-existence quality of tweeting makes it easy to mistake detail for intimacy, quantity of tweets for quality of expression or depth of understanding. As a preview of the world of ubiquitous computing and ambient awareness, Twitter is an interesting experiment (an experiment that's being conducted my hundreds of thousands of people on themselves and their friends.)
This is actually not a bad lesson for designers. Creating ambient devices isn't about pushing information; presence isn't just about connection. Connecting people virtually is as much about quality and meaning in the digital world as it is in the real world.
Which is not to say that Twitter is hopeless. Twitter is strongest as a platform for conversation and reportage. It's easy to share a rapid fire of short notes at conferences, for example, and the final result- assuming people are listening and paying attention- can be useful. (I wonder if there are examples of Twitter being used by students in lecture classes?) A couple of the people I follow use it as much for pinging friends as for talking about what they're doing: for them, Twitter is a cross between the Facebook wall and a chat room. And I find Twitter useful for getting reactions to news events: I stopped watching the presidential debates this fall, for examples, after I realized that most of my friends were tweeting their reactions to them.
So what do I do with my Twitter stream? I'm not going to shut it down, because there are times when I'll want to provide moment-by-moment updates about what I'm doing ("Just cleared customs in Kai Tak! Where's the cab line?" "Have now been in Victoria Stations on four continents…."). But for me, when I do use it, the challenge will be to figure out how to write the Web 2.0 equivalent of Zen koans: to fit meaning into 140 characters, rather than to fight the limitations of the medium by posting a lot.
*After I started working on this piece, I got interested in what other people had written upon getting fed up with some service, technology, or channel. Turns out that the "declaration of zeroing" is almost a literary genre. I first became aware of it through David Levy (whose book I reviewed in the L.A. Times, and who gave a brilliant talk about this stuff a couple years ago), and his ideas of a digital sabbath and information environmentalism. A couple samples:
Edward Vielmetti on Twitter:
The basic idea is that in systems where there is an infinite capacity for the world to send messages to get your attention, the only reasonable queue that you can leave between visits to the system is zero, because if you get behind you will never, ever, ever catch up gradually. Never. No matter how much time you put into it, there will always be more to do, and you will lose sleep over it.
Carmen Joy King, after quitting Facebook:
The amount of time I spent on Facebook had pushed me into an existential crisis. It wasn’t the time-wasting, per se, that bothered me. It was the nature of the obsession – namely self-obsession. Enough was enough. I left Facebook.
Donald Knuth on email:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode — like, one day every three months.
Mark Bittman on his "secular Sabbath:"
I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
And of course there's at least one blog about turning off all electronics one night a week. "Because of course," Ariel Stallings writes, "I can’t unplug without blogging about it! (Irony, is that you?)"
This a review I wrote of David Levy's Scrolling Forward, which originally appeared in the L. A. Times about ten years ago. Not that long. It just feels like it.
David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade, 2002).
When I got the chance to review Scrolling Forward, I went to Kepler's, my local bookstore, to pick up a copy. I had seen a stack there a few days earlier, but by the time I arrived it had moved, and I had forgotten the title. I asked at the information desk about a book that had been on the "New Science and Technology" table that past weekend, had orange and blue on the cover, and was about documents. They couldn't remember the title either, but they remembered the book, and knew the most likely place their stock of half a dozen copies had been moved. So, despite not knowing the author or title, we found it in a matter of seconds.
Drawing on knowledge of its recent location, jacket design, general subject, and the way books circulate between display tables and shelves to find a particular volume may seem disorganized and baroque. It is, but it's how most of us work. Our complicated relationship with documents- everything from Post-Its to encyclopedias- is the subject of David Levy's Scrolling Forward: Thinking About Documents in the Digital Age. Levy, a computer science Ph.D. and calligraphy, is well-placed to compare the old and new. His books is organized around broad subjects- reading, writing, and the like- but each chapter is a meditation, written more on the this- reminds-me-of-that principle, rather than something more formal. Such an approach can occasionally get out of control, but at its best the book's style effectively juxtaposes printed and electronic documents, and calculates the gains and losses of moving information from one medium to the other.
The very fact that Levy is interested in this question indicates a growing maturity in our attitudes towards digital materials. A decade ago, the first important works on hypertext and multimedia- George Landow's Hypertext and Jay David Bolter's The Writing Space— declared that thanks to the computer, the author was dead, the reader reigned supreme, the book was doomed, and linear thinking was passe. They were widely praised within academic circles, and provoked defenders like Sven Birketts to assert the eternal value of the book. The debate that has followed has largely been beside the point, because it misses several things that Levy wisely considers in depth.
First, arguments over "the future of the book" focus on books, particularly high literature. But we live in a world saturated with texts: we might not read Dante every today, but we'll read street signs, scan newspapers, select from restaurant menus, answer e-mail, ignore ads, type URLs. To drive the point home, Scrolling Forward begins not with a discussion of encyclopedias or the Bible, but a… deli receipt. Even something so utterly inconsequential turns out draw upon thousands of years of history and complex social institutions, not to mention a host of technologies. "Over the centuries a complex network of institutions and practices has grown up to create and maintain meaningful and reliable paper documents," (162) Levy argues. This is as true of receipts as it is of Rilke: "To be a receipt is to be connected to cash registers, sellers, buyers, products, expense reports, the IRS, and so on." (29) It takes a village to make a document.
Levy's receipt was a hybrid, a printed record generated by an electronic system; therein lies a second big point. It turns out that documents have sloshed between electronic and printed form for decades. Checks and airline tickets were computer-printed from the 1950s. Mainframe computer publishing systems were developed in the 1960s and 1970s for newspapers and other high-volume publishers. (It is instructive that the early adopters weren't book publishers, but companies that had high-volume, varied, or rapidly- changing material. The Encyclopedia Britannica's publishing system was adapted from one developed for the Jehovah's Witnesses, who published countless pamphlets in dozens of languages.) In the 1980s, word processors allowed writers to create digital texts. In the 1990s, web browsers gave readers direct access digital works. This last, and most-publicized step, was a culmination, not a revolution. Seen in this light, the whole "print versus digital" debate seems irrelelvant.
The fact that the debate over "the future of the book" took off in the last decade suggests that what's at stake isn't just materials, but practices and cultural institutions. We pick up cues about the utility and reputability of printed sources from the publisher, the feel of the paper, even from a document's location in a library or bookstore; such cues have yet to be reproduced consistently online, and the social networks that add value to printed works weren't threatened by the computerization of typesetting and printing. Documents, Levy argues, aren't just information; they're also material things and cultural artifacts. Even digital documents aren't "just" immaterial bits. As Levy notes, "the ones and zeros of our digital representations… are embedded in a material substrate no less than are calligraphic letterforms on a piece of vellum." (156)
This is not to say that an electronic document can't have all the qualities of a printed one. It IS to say that those qualities can't be programmed as features in the next upgrade: they have to be created in the social world, and in the world of human practices and attitudes. Levy's concern is that we recognize that books and journals are much more than containers from which content can now be "liberated." They have influenced- often to the good- the way we read, organize our thoughts, and create order in our intellectual worlds.
Ikea’s finest!
At a post-hike party this afternoon, I was talking to a friend about the Sydney Opera House, which I visited during a layover in Sydney in early 2007. Even now, visiting the Opera House seems like one of the high points of my life.
via flickr
Now, I read in the Guardian that Jorn Utzon, the Opera House’s architect, has died.
For some reason, this detail in the Telegraph about Utzon’s creative process stands out for me:
Utzon rarely used a sketchbook, but would draw on anything that was available. He drew the initial plan for an art museum at Silkeborg, in Denmark, with poured salt on a restaurant table in Sydney, which he then photographed with a borrowed camera. Based on Buddhist caves he had visited near the Gobi Desert, the museum was never built.
Another friend recalled Utzon using a charred stick on a pavement to sketch the cross-section of a cave-room he had seen in China, which was to form the basis for his design for a new house; sadly the sketch was washed away by a thunderstorm that same night.
It also reports this anecdote:
He also told the audience [in London in 1978] of a letter he had received from a woman who was put off the idea of throwing herself into Sydney Harbour by the sight of the opera house, deciding that if Utzon could go through the agony of getting it built without wanting to kill himself, then she too could cope with life.
Thomas Keneally had a great piece on the Opera House last year. It waxed rhapsodic about the design, the amazing location, and the structure’s long and complicated history, and is well worth reading. The conclusion:
But it is as a focus for citizens and visitors, as well as the home of art practitioners, that the Opera House works. It is the great communal house of Sydney. In this way, it is more than a mere monument. Inside and out, it is Sydney’s agora. The excessive and often excluding awe induced by many European opera houses is missing in it. Children run on its concrete skirts under a blue sky (well, often it is blue), and do not need to be hushed. A building children can feel ownership of is more than a mere opera house.
They say that in the medieval period the great cathedrals - Chartres, say - operated both as a place of wonders and a market not just for bishops and priests but for the entertainment, instruction and delight of ordinary folk, peasants and craftsmen. That is the role the secular cathedral of the Opera House plays in Sydney.
Today we went with some friends to Wunderlich Park (here’s a map), just outside the town of Woodside. A century ago the land was owned by James Folger, the founder of Folger’s Coffee (like Levi Strauss, Folger had come to California during the gold rush, but made his money not by extracting wealth from the mines, but by extracting wealth from the miners).
via flickr
The park was a pretty big hit with the kids. We took a roughly two-mile hike that took us through coast redwoods, eucalyptus, and oak. (I’m a complete pushover for redwoods, especially when the paths- like the one in Wunderlich- has lots of switchbacks and curves.)
via flickr
The terrain is hilly, but not outrageous, and trails are pretty well-kept and -marked.
via flickr
Of course, most of the kids enjoyed themselves mainly because they had company (if there’s one essential piece of equipment to keep kids happy on a hike, it’s not water or snacks or good shoes, but other kids). But my son, who likes to complain about hikes, even enjoyed himself. I caught up with him walking by himself on the trail- the girls had run ahead- and he seemed self-contained and perfectly content. Which is unusual for a 6 year-old.
via flickr
The Bay Area has a pretty amazing network of parks, open spaces, nature preserves, and the like- and I know very little about them. That, combined with a desire to explore the region more thoroughly and get the kids more vigorously engaged with nature, has made me start to take them hiking. Most of our experience hiking has been along the bay, and while those parks are nice, they’re pretty small, and flat.
Today we took the kids hiking at Skyline Ridge, an open space preserve. (Here ‘s my Flickr map of it.) There are two artificial lakes near the intersection of Page Mill Road and Skyline Road, and we walked both of them.
It was very foggy on the drive up, and for the first half our or so of our hike, it was pleasantly cold and white. It reminded me a bit of an old black-and-white Kurosawa film.
via flickr
We started with Horseshoe Lake.
via flickr
It’s the more interesting of the two lakes, as it has a hill overlooking it, with a pretty nice climb along the lake.
via flickr
The trail along the lake’s edge is pleasant, with several benches, a couple places where kids can go down to the water, and a bathroom nearby- all essential when your party includes a 6-year old and a 9 year-old.
via flickr
After Horseshoe Lake, we moved the car to the Russian Ridge parking lot, and walked around Alpine Lake. This is a smaller lake, and has maybe a half-mile circuit from parking lot and around the lake.
via flickr
There’s a nice grove (is that the right word?) of stones near the lake.
The kids enjoyed climbing on the rocks.
via flickr
One of the more interesting features is a grinding rock, where the Ohlone used to grind acorns into flour.
via flickr
The drive up Page Mill Road is about 8 miles of winding, twisty road. Kids who easily get car sick could have some trouble with it- both of mine reported feeling queasy.
This sculpture points to the landing strip at Palo Alto Airport. Not with complete precision, but certainly it's accurate enough so a plane could use it to wayfind to the airport. It's also an irresistable climber.
My kids and their cousin, all ready for the traditional pre-Thanksgiving walk along the bay.
Byxbee Park, in Palo Alto, is a pleasant and easy place to walk, especially with kids. Since it’s right in the baylands, most of it is quite flat, with a few gentle hills, and good views of the Bay and Moffet Field. There are also a few pieces of sculpture that are fun for kids to climb on.
This morning I was replacing a bike tire, and it unexpectedly blew up.
My ears were really buzzing for a while. I cam hear out of both, but one feels like it’s underwater, or muffled. I wonder how long before I should start to worry.
Add REST: WHY YOU GET MORE DONE WHEN YOU WORK LESS to your Goodreads shelf
My books on Goodreads
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul
reviews: 78
ratings: 316 (avg rating 3.53)
ratings: 316 (avg rating 3.53)
