Imagining the past-Paris Review Interview with William Gibson (Sum. 2011)

In keeping with the "disruptive technologies" theme, I came across a William Gibson interview from Summer 2011 via the Paris Review. While I've not read any of Gibson's fiction, though it's on the ever-growing book list, I have read some of his non-fiction esp. the op-eds that show up periodically in the NYT. What's particularly excellent about this interview is Gibson's wide-ranging discussion of his writing habits, a short history of sf writing and the interconnection of his thinking about the future/tech, etc.
There are particularly quotable bits from this interview that are definitely worth sharing. (Any emphasis added is mine.)

"It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone....
It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted."


"The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and u­sing it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do.We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination."

"I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing t­echnoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while."

"In the postwar era, aside from anxiety over nuclear war, we assumed that we were steering technology. Today, we’re more likely to feel that technology is driving us, driving change, and that it’s out of control. Technology was previously seen as linear and progressive—evolutionary in that way our culture has always preferred to misunderstand Darwin."

In the first quote, the idea of "trying to imagine the past that went away" is applicable on several levels to better understanding technological determinism and the view of upgrading as positive/moving forward. The future seems better because anything can be read into the future as a possibility; this is a practice we as humans regularly engage in. The upcoming elections are an excellent example of individuals attempting to claim the future by suggesting the most vote-able versions of it. To imagine the past in a "pure"fashion is to attempt to re-view the emergence of "disruptive technologies". Because, to a large extent, disruptive technologies are what make the past, the past. That is one way to read history is to mark points of change based on the disruptive technology, that more often than not, is accused or credited with "moving technology forward". To the point of the quote, it may not be possible to remember the past because the present technology drives the past out of our collective memory making it impossible to think  past, if you will, what is presently at hand as the present technology requires an investment of time to master.

When Giants Fail-Christensen and "disruptive technologies"

"The question [Clayton] Christensen began with, twenty years ago, was: Why was success so difficult to sustain? How was it that big, rich companies, admired and emulated by everyone, could one year be at the peak of their power and, just a few years later, be struggling in the middle of the pack or just plain gone? The first industry that Christensen studied was disk drives. He saw that the companies that made fourteen-inch drives for mainframe computers had been driven out of business by companies that made eight-inch drives for mini computers, and then the companies that made the eight-inch drives were driven out of business by companies that made 5.25-inch drives for PCs. What was puzzling about this was that the eight-inch drives weren’t as good as the fourteen-inch drives and the 5.25-inch drives were inferior to the eight-inch drives. In industry after industry, Christensen discovered, the new technologies that had brought the big, established companies to their knees weren’t better or more advanced—they were actually worse. The new products were low-end, dumb, shoddy, and in almost every way inferior. But the new products were usually cheaper and easier to use, and so people or companies who were not rich or sophisticated enough for the old ones started buying the new ones, and there were so many more of the regular people than there were of the rich, sophisticated people that the companies making the new products prospered. Christensen called these low-end products “disruptive technologies,” because, rather than sustaining technological progress toward better performance, they disrupted it. After studying a few exceptions to the pattern of disruption, Christensen concluded that the only way a big company could avoid being disrupted was to set up a small spinoff company that would function as a start-up, make the new low-end product, and be independent enough to ignore what counted as sensible for the mother ship."
The New Yorker Vol 88 No 13 ~When Giants Fail
This article is behind their paywall but if you can get your hands on this article, I would highly recommend it. The idea of disruptive technology applies to a lot of areas, not the least online education or libraries. Christensen's identification of the way smaller/different companies poach the bottom of the market while the big companies ignore the bottom (the steel story-see also Kodak) is the same issue higher education has with online learning. If some colleges are not going to do online education other entities, not necessarily colleges will. Frankly, if higher ed is going to make it online education needs to be treated not as an off-shoot or version of physical education but as a completely different idea. What would happen if a college jettisoned the online program into its department so that it had the freedom to experiment and try different approaches to develop its own "disruptive technology"?

On automatic sinks and towel dispensors

The shift to motion sensor- based sinks and paper-towel roll dispensers makes me nervous. On the one hand I recognize the usefulness of the paper towel machine controlling how much paper towel you get at once to help keep the wet-handed individual from ripping off half the roll to dry off his barely moistened fingertips.On the same hand I recognize the sanitary implications. Of the list of all the places to have extra handles, public restrooms aren't anywhere on it.  On the other hand, the nervous one, the motion-sensor based interaction puts the user at the mercy, as it were, of the motion sensor screen, or the towel-dispensor's batteries. Once those batteries die, you're not getting any more paper. If the motion-sensor screen goes, no more water. Also, the lack of a hot/cold handle means that the sensor is choosing your water temperature for you and if you don't like it, you can lump it. Or not wash your hands. Or just carry around hand sanitizer. The marketplace corollary is the self-check out stations in supermarkets and other stores. Though I usually use a card, instead of cash, the times that I do actually use cash, there are specific requirements for those bills in order to be acceptable by the "bill acceptor" as the disembodied voice calls it. The bills need to be crisp, pointed the right way and inserted at the proper time. I've had several instances where trying to feed a particularly aged and crumpled dollar bill into the aforementioned acceptor has failed even though if the dollar bill was handed to a cashier, it would be treated as acceptable currency.
Its is the homogenization or strict guidelines that these type of encounters require that makes me nervous. It's sort of the logical conclusion of the Industrial Revolution. Starting with Henry Ford and the assembly line and moving to Taylor and the Gilbraiths with motion study (the best way to do work) whose work paved the way for robots who can do the same exact repetitive task for hours without tiring or making a mistake. We are moving from having our work performed by robots/automated processes to being expected to make certain of our actions robotic in order to interact with everyday systems. Driving is different because while you can drive like a fool, following the laws of the road make sure you, and other around you, don't die. The automated systems we interact with are programmed to  expect an exact, precise input (crisp dollar bills) which is an additional expectation to just having cash. Now there is a requirement for a particular type of cash (crisp, precise and not run through a cycle of laundry). The cash feeder has no compassion, or use, for the crumpled up, taped dollar bill.While the towel dispenser and faucet are more forgiving, the attitude of expectation is what makes me nervous. I'm used to sticking my hands underneath the interface and getting output.What happens when that input (sticking my hands out) fails? Either a specialist fixes the screen or you get a new faucet, chucking the old one (which is a whole other level of obsolescence-planned or otherwise).
What I'm nervous about is the casual acceptance of interfaces to help us accomplish our work without thinking about the consequences of using/incorporating those interfaces into daily life. I've got nothing against self-check out stations. But the fact that the machine treats different types of currency differently than a person does/would, matters and should not be ignored.

Reading Suggestion

Via the Emerging Scholar Twitter feed there is a link to a free excerpt  from a book called Liberal Arts for the Christian Life edited by Jeff Davis and Philip Ryken.* The excerpt is by Alan Jacobs entitled How to Read a Book. (http://static.crossway.org/excerpt/liberal-arts-for-the-christian-life/liberal-arts-christian-life-download.pdf) Jacobs recently came out w/ a book called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age ofDistraction which I would highly recommend. This excerpt is in a very similar vein.

"Attentiveness is an ethical as well as an intellectual matter; it’s about treating our neighbors as they deserve as much as it’s about getting facts into our heads...Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian polymath who was perhaps the greatest literary theorist of the twentieth century, once commented that in any given conversation the real initiator is the person who listens, not the one who speaks who would ever speak unless he or she believed that someone would be listening? It is the listener who elicits the speech, brings it forth. The speaker counts on a responsive listener. In the same way, a writer counts on a responsive reader...This is what writers want also: for you to “enrich their words” with your own responses....this too is a sign of respect: when I register and explain my disagreement in a book, I demonstrate that I am paying attention and that I care about what the author is saying..."






*I'm not a huge Crossway Press fan. The last two books that I read from this press were pretty lame. This book seems a bit more substantial, esp. considering the editors and even the inclusion of Jacobs in the contents.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

In the wake of Maurice Sendak's recent demise there's been a slew of articles on Sendak and his work, as expected. There's a quick run down below of several good interviews and obits.
I grew up with Sendak's art in the Little Bear stories which are pretty storeis in the texts but the illustrations give them an almost Gothic/Victorian air. This fits with some of things Sendak says about writing kids books in the articles below. The Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia has, or at least had, a bunch of large format illustrations from Where the Wild Things Are which are worth stopping by and seeing. I've started to keep an eye out for Sendak's name in the illustration credits because he pops up a lot. While WTWTA put Sendak on the cultural map, the sheer reach and quality of his work is definitively worthy of admiration. 

NPR Fresh Air interview from several months ago

Stephen Colbert interviews Maurice Sendak (January 25, 20120)

NY Times Obit

Interview/Retrospective of  Sendak at 80

Guardian Interview with Maurice Sendak

Guardian Obit

Review: The Holy Trinity of American Sports by C. Forney

      I dig books on language and explorations of how language influences our thinking in daily life. So when in the course of my daily toil I came across The Holy Trinity of American Sports: Civil Religion in Football, Baseball and Basketball by Craig A. Forney I was intrigued. When the first sentence read at random was "Extraordinary gifts of marriage call for gift of a stone in the shape of a baseball park" I was hooked. Unfortunately that hooked feeling didn't last long.
  Forney takes three institution of sport in America, football, basketball and baseball and examine the linguistic and societal connection to civil religion. He has some really good observations, especially along the lines of metaphor in sport and the language of civil religion. Forney notes references to LeBron James as "the One"..."apparently the savior of play on the hardwood." (p. 2) Also dimensions of religion such as ritual, sacred stories, doctrine, ethics (daily practice), social interactions and dimensions of experience. (p. 4-5) Each one of these dimensions, he rightly points out, has direct parallel and/or links to the world of any one of "Big Three". Forney does a good job pointing out each one of the sports' reliance or dependence on the spoken word. (p. 36-37) He recognizes the role that language and identification plays in each one of these sports, both for the players and the fans.
There are, however, several rather significant shortcomings to this book . The least subjective shortcoming is that the book reads like a poorly edited grouping of redundant conference papers. There are several sentences missing key words throughout the book. While the repetition of ideas is necessary to making or driving a point home, the repeated ideas in this book become tedious as they are often repeated verbatim in various sections throughout the book.
The most objectionable part of this book come when Forney begins to develop that these three sports represent. For ease of example, and brevity, I've chosen baseball. For example "Baseball illustrates the American mythology of unlimited freedom to come." (p. 71) "Baseball expresses the American expectation of immanent truth to come, ideal time of finding abundant understanding from within the commonplace." (p. 110) Finally, "Baseball expresses the American aspiration for a future of manifold benefit from divine forces." (p. 118) I would have less issue with these assertions if there were adequate support via observation or research. There is no research, as second/supporting opinion, and the observed support is less than convincing. For example, Forney makes mention of pitching "...seemingly aided by some invisible force." (p. 118) Also, "outfielders sprint and leap in full extension to rob the opportunity of an apparent base hit, enacting an almost miraculous turn of fate." (p. 119) The book has a large number of these types of statements, extending to basketball and football as well. I'm not sure if it's my failure to look at baseball more holistically or at a deeper level but in my watching and talking about baseball there was never/has not been a sense that anything outside of the the players was motivating their actions.
This type of analysis bothers me on three levels. One, it reads like the Freudian or literary pscyhoanalysis that literary criticism took which makes sweeping assumptions about the author based upon very loose readings of the text with very little to support these assertions other than authorial conjecture. These sentences quoted above, and others reflect this type of extremely loose reading of the text/sport.
Secondly, this analysis fails to take into account that sometime the game is just a game. Players do seemingly amazing things because it is their job which is to stop the ball or hit the home run enough times to win the game. This book fails to engage with the many millions of dollars that are paid to players in an effort to entice them to more championships and better results. 
Third, even thought it is possible to observe or read a particular set of ideas from a unique event, or in this case sport(s), does that mean it is a correct reading? I'm not convinced that Forney is able to fully engage his reading of sport with convincing arguments based upon his own observation. There is less argument for his view point and more of a categorical statement of act. To give the kind of credence to baseball, in the examples above, also fails to taken into example the rulebook which governs what type of play is deemed admissible or incorrect. I also question if these aspects of baseball are observable at this point, does this mean that this what the founders of the game had in mind?
     Forney makes excellent points in comparison of civil religion, language and sport at the beginning of this book. There are many cross-overs between how many fans approach sports and the manner in which civil religion is discussed.
The end result is that this book has a good premise but finishes rather poorly. Forney fails, in my opinion, to consistently demonstrate how sports draws upon the language and practice of civil religion. What could have been a good idea is lost to abstract assertions that lack the foundation of solid argument or research to convince the reader of their efficacy.