self-disclosure

Coming out

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology & the Humanities (aka MITH) about changing the way humanities PhDs are educated. It was titled “Stop Being Polite and Start Getting Real: Professional Education for Professional Humanists.” The really wonderful (and super-speedy) folks at MITH just posted the audio of the talk on their website; it’s about an hour long, but if you’re interested in things like how PhD programs should be built more like AK-47s, please check the link above and give it a whirl.

A lot of the talk is based on my own experience having gotten a humanities PhD and not being able to find a tenure-track job or full-time employment doing other kinds of university work, and how I eventually wound up becoming a technology journalist. So at the end of the lecture, I talk about a lot of personal stuff, including my son being diagnosed with autism, the accident where I broke my arm & leg, waiting a year to go on the job market and getting walloped by the 2008 economic meltdown — all stuff I’ve talked about here before.

One thing, though, I haven’t — the principal reason I cautioned the folks in the room who were live-tweeting the event to tweet this carefully. So I wanted to lay it on the table before some of you downloaded the podcast and were like, “what the what?”

I am a birth dad. I have an older son who was born and placed for adoption in 2003, during the spring of my first year in graduate school. He’s going to be eight years old in just a few weeks, and I love him more than anything.

We have an open adoption, which means that he knows that he’s adopted, that I’m his birth father (as it happens, his only father, because he was adopted by two women), and we see each other and exchange information and phone calls pretty regularly. We (he, me, Sylvia, Noah, his family) have a great, casual, very loving relationship. He’s just like me. I mean, just. Maybe better adjusted. And yes, he has red hair.

When I was 21, I was so terrified of both being a father and what the news of the adoption might mean that I told no one — including friends, family, and especially the people in my graduate program and at school. (This included my upstairs neighbor, which was tricky.) I’d just moved to Philadelphia. I felt completely intimidated and totally alone. 

The only thing I did well was study and write and perform in my graduate seminars. So I threw myself into them and pretended it wasn’t happening. I even walked from the hospital downtown to attended classes just a day or so after he was born. 

Over the years, as my relationship with my son has changed, grown more open and more clear that we were always going to be a significant part of each other’s lives, I opened up to more and more people — friends, family, sympathetic acquaintances and strangers. (For instance, Robin knew before today, but Matt didn’t. At least, I don’t think he did. After all, he is a reporter.)

Before I told my parents and brothers and sister, my son’s adoptive moms compared it to coming out. You’re not ashamed. You know you have to affirm who you are. That doesn’t mean you have to fork it over to people when you first meet them or hand them your business card. It’s driving you crazy when you don’t tell the people close to you. At a certain point, the most crazy-making issue is addressing why you haven’t said something before now. But ultimately, it’s because you can’t ever be certain how people will react.

For those reasons, I’ve still been reluctant to say too much, especially on the open web. There are plenty of privacy issues that go way beyond myself — I’ve really never wanted anybody in my family to be Googleable. Still, I gave a talk about it at the MLA a few years ago. If you were really determined to find out, it’s been findable. That’s a different thing, however, from stating it for everyone to see.

But since so much of my life now, so many of my friendships, happen online, and since I’m determined to not let fear or anxiety about what I do or don’t say control how I feel about the world, this seems like as good a time as any to tell a whole lot more people all at once. 

As Jeff Mangum put it in Neutral Milk Hotel’s song “Ghost,” I’m resolved to “never be afraid / to watch the morning paper blow / into a hole / where no one can escape.” Or as xkcd put it in the comic “dreams” (This is actually the very last part of my talk), Fuck. That. Shit.

It’s an experience — one that’s always ongoing — that broke my heart and changed my life, irrevocably, for the better. Orders of magnitude better. It taught me who I was and is teaching me who I am. I can’t explain it any better than that.

 

MSU Commencement Speech: May 3, 2001

In Twitter today — and I mean, like ten minutes ago — I got involved in a Twitter discussion with Matt Novak and Mat Honan about our memories of the Cold War. Matt was about six years old when it ended, Mat 17, I was 11, so we all had slightly different memories, but generally each recall the atmosphere of fear and dread we had then. 

Mat Honan pointed out that 9/11/2001 hadn’t scared him the way it had many others because he’d grown up in the shadow of nuclear war. The spectacle of the destruction of whole cities, whole nations, is of a different order of magnitude than three-four unconventional attacks on American cities. It just is. Maybe the latter is actually more frightening, because it’s more concrete, in the same way that falling out of a roller coaster scares us more than dying of heart disease. The first one, you can see.

I remembered that I’d been thinking a lot about nuclear war in 2000–2001 — mostly how the threat had been gently fading for ten years, like a fingerprint on glass — and that I’d mentioned it in my very unusual commencement speech that I gave to Michigan State’s College of Arts & Letters in May 2001. 

I’d already gotten my BA in Mathematics in the fall, and was finishing my second/dual degree in Philosophy, starting an MA program in Math that everyone knew I’d never finish. (Hey, they gave me a job teaching algebra that spring and that summer!) 

I knew I wanted to be a professor, but didn’t know in what; I wrote some awful applications to philosophy programs in Berkeley, Princeton, and Chicago explaining that I was interested in Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, formal logic, and John Locke, which I’m sure pegged me as someone who had no idea what they wanted to do and no clear research program to pursue, and that was probably right. I was still waiting for the official rejection slip from Berkeley, trying to make up my mind whether I was going to split to Chicago for their consolation-prize Masters’ Program, stay in East Lansing and teach more math, or try to find real work.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

I was obsessed with T.S. Eliot and Gauguin, respectively; I wanted to go to Boston that summer to find out more about each of them, but blew out a tire on the way and never made it. I’d already written my commencement speech though. Here it is.

(And before you ask, yes—this is total Sloan-bait for him to post HIS speech that he gave the next year to the BIG room at MSU, assuming he can find it on his hard drive.)

Read the rest of this entry »

 

Snarkmarket Dispatches From Within Wired.com

Plenty of my posts at Wired.com’s Gadget Lab are pretty different from what I used to post, or even would want to post, here at Snarkmarket. (We don’t do a whole lot of product hands-on, industry news, or microprocessor specs, for example, here at Snarkmarket.) 

Some of them, though, are totally SM-appropriate. Here’s a short list of posts that Snarkmarket readers might have missed in the past week that I think you’d love under any masthead:

Hope you enjoy! (And please, comment! We need an injection of Snarkmarket comment awesomeness at Wired badly. It’s a bad vibe over there.)

 

You’ll barely regret this

Another Storify experiment, this time about my so-far 71%-successful effort to lobby for followers on Twitter.

 

The New Dead Media Expert at Wired

In the last year, the other two Snarkmasters switched jobs, with Robin joining Twitter and Matt moving to NPR. Well, friends, scratch off number three. Starting Wednesday, I’ll be a full-time contributor for Wired.com, writing about e-readers and emerging technology and all things awesome for Gadget Lab, plus maybe occasional pieces elsewhere in the Wired.com ecosystem. That’s right — me and Jonah Lehrer are going to get this whole fourth culture thing started.

Now, you may have heard that Wired editors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff declared that “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet,” in a magazine cover story that was also featured prominently at Wired.com. Let me tell you, friends, I was delighted to hear the news. You see, writing about the web has always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Not the actual writing — just the explaining it to other people part. 

You see, I worked so hard to become an expert on dead media, like the book and the newspaper and cinema and poetry, that writing about something living, even using something living, always felt like the grave robbing the cradle. 

Now my portfolio is much tidier. Radio and TV hosts can introduce my credentials in one line: “Tim Carmody, renowned expert on dead media and its future.” It’s probably why they hired me in the first place.

[Actually, they advertised the job, I applied, they gave me a one-day tryout (One,Two,Three), and then gave me the nod at the end of the past week, while I was writing for Kottke. It’s been a heady month.] 

Anyways, I hope you’ll stop by and bring the Snarkmatrix love to the comments over there. Tell your friends. Link to what I write, all the time, even or especially when you think I’m wrong. (I’ll be able to explain why I’m not.) 

And of course, I’ll still be right here, writing about culture, really old technology, and everything else. The paisley just wouldn’t be right without the blue, orange, and green.

 

Snarkmarket Stories, Vol. 1

Today on Twitter I asked if “Tim Carmody” or “Timothy Carmody” sounded better as a writing byline. I had to explain that my last name is pronounced CAR-muh-dee (a dactyl, stress just on the first syllable) rather than car-MOE-dee. There are other various mispronunciations and misspellings — many people who hear my name think it’s spelled “Carmondy” — but that’s the usual one. And this is one of the strange things about the ambient intimacy of the internet — people you interact with regularly, even intimately, don’t know the sound of your voice, how tall you are, or how to pronounce their name.

Anyways, riffing on my name brought up other stories. For instance, I’m named after my great-uncle, who (like me) was named Timothy Brendan Carmody, but unlike me, was called “Ted.” I was “Timmy” growing up, and my brothers and sister and cousins still call me Timmy. (None of the grownups do, for some reason.) Everyone in my family has an –y at the end of their name: we even call my brothers Sean and Kevin Seanny and Kevvy. My mom is Roxanne (Roxy) and my dad is Jim (as a teenager, Jimmy). I’m the third of four kids; my sister is the oldest and was the toughest kid in my neighborhood growing up. She lives in New York now and designs handbags.

Uncle Ted was my paternal grandather’s brother. The story I always heard was that my grandfather, Patrick Carmody, left the family farm to his younger brothers because he thought they were too stupid to do anything but farming, while he could learn how to do something else. He came to the US through Canada after World War II and eventually got a job as an electrician for Detroit Edison, the power company. He grew up just a mile or two away from my grandmother in County Kerry, but they met in Detroit. My grandmother worked at Henry Ford hospital as administrative staff for years; she just passed away last fall, my last living relative I knew who 1) was born in Ireland and 2) lived within Detroit’s city limits. My grandfather’s name was Patrick; my grandmother was Ellie O’Neill. 

My mom’s dad was named William Francis Xavier St Onge; his father was French Canadian, his mother Ojibwa Indian. (My cousins on my mom’s side all have dark hair and skin; it’s amazing what marrying a full-blooded Irishman washes out of your offspring’s complexion.) He grew up in Ironwood, MI, in the upper peninsula, and had a ridiculous number of brothers and sisters. He served in the Army Air Corps in India and Indochina during World War II and worked in a tool and die shop after the war. My grandmother was Phyllis Benhauer, and I think sometimes Phyllis Hitzfield (after her stepfather), before she was Phyllis St Onge. Her father Ralph Benhauer was sheriff of Dade County, Florida, but after her mom found out he was cheating on her, she packed up her two small children and moved to Indiana to take a factory job. We called my great-grandmother “Okie-dokie Grandma,” because she used all sorts of eclectic old slang. She was 5’1″ and played semi-professional basketball. 

My parents met in Detroit, naturally, in high school. They both went to single-sex Catholic schools, my dad on the west side in a mostly Catholic/Mexican neighborhood, my mom on the east side in a mostly Italian one. (As a consequence, if I grew up with any kind of ethnic cuisine apart from my grandmother’s ritual Irish gastropunishments, it was these three. Plus Greek, because everyone in Detroit eats Greek food all the time.) They married when they were nineteen — six days after my dad’s birthday, in fact, a date which is almost exactly nine months before my birthday. 

My dad just retired from working for Wayne County, first at the jail for thirty-odd years, then for the county executive (the sheriff took my dad with him when he ran for the higher office). My mom had a lot of jobs when I was growing up; tending bar, working at 7-11s and butcher shops, then for a Ford dealership for a while while I was in college. She’s a little redheaded lady; my dad has a moustache and looks (and talks) a little bit like Scruffy the Janitor from Futurama, but with glasses. 

I played football and ran track in high school and was valedictorian in 1997. I went to Michigan State University on academic scholarship, which is where I met Robin Sloan, who had the same scholarship a year later. We each co-founded hellaciously friendly rival literary magazines, where we both unapologetically published ourselves and our friends. (I even wrote some poems for Robin’s mag.) I got degrees in philosophy and mathematics, then went to the University of Chicago for a year before ending up at Penn’s PhD program in Comp Lit. 

Aaaaand… that more or less gets us to where we are. Demographically, anyways.

PS: I totally think this should be a mini-series. For instance, did you know Robin was born in Illinois, or that Matt’s family comes from Guyana? What other stories are they keeping to themselves?

 

Building communities: Introducing Bookfuturism.com

In the fall of 2006, I was in a bad rut. An experiment in home ownership had gone disastrously awry and my dissertation advisor had split Penn for Princeton. I spent most of my time watching Star Wars and playing Sudoku, trying to ignore the horrible stomach pains I had, which took months of tests and medicines to finally diagnose. I was cut off from everyone, adrift in my goals, and in danger of lapsing into what could have been serious depression.

One of the things that pulled me out of that funk was a local web site called Young Philly Politics. The site had been a group blog of some friends, just out of college, most of them, who had been involved in the Howard Dean campaign in 2004 and an effort to upend the local DA in a primary challenge. Before the mayoral primary, they relaunched the site to allow anyone to create a profile and start posting to the blog. Many of the posters were this core group of young progressives, some were hacks and astroturf plants working for the various campaigns, many were cranks — and still others were like me, people who were highly interested in the outcome of the primary but who hadn’t had much direct experience in Philadelphia electoral politics. 

Before long, state reps and city councilmen, most of the political reporters for local papers and radio, and even some of the mayoral candidates were posting and commenting on the site. We all had candidates we liked (and some we didn’t) and issues we pushed — even within a community as seemingly heterogeneous as progressive bloggers, we had huge areas of disagreement, and the debate got fierce. Sometimes you would find allies, whether over issues or over a general approach, a way of writing about the world. That winter and spring, my best friends in the world were people I had never met. 

And — it didn’t matter who you were or what your credentials were. If you wrote a thoughtful, well-argued post, it got on the front page, which meant that everyone saw it. That was the motivation to say more, to do better. I was briefly famous among politicians and journalists because I wrote some really good posts about local tax issues, and one about nativist attitudes in Philadelphia politics. I didn’t work for a campaign, or a newspaper. I just wrote my ass off. Where else is that even possible?

This, to me, is the beauty of writing for blogs, and for Twitter. With time, hard work, and a few pieces of great writing, it doesn’t matter who you work for, what you do, or where you went to school. You can rub elbows with famous writers, talk shop with people who work for your favorite magazines, and wind up getting written up in the newspaper. It’s not a meritocracy. But it offers great meritocratic possibilities. And maybe even more importantly, it offers a promise of community.

For the past few months, I’ve written here extensively on the past, present, and future of reading. By plugging away at it, I feel like I’ve learned a tremendous amount about it, through the act of writing itself. I’ve also met many brilliant and like-minded people who are trying to sort this out. I’ve tried to articulate both what’s wrong with how we usually talk about reading technologies (whether past or present), and stake out the basic principles of some alternatives. At every step, I’ve benefited from critical and complementary comments and cross-posts; in some cases, I feel like I’ve helped to spark discussions and ideas in others.

Today, I launched a project that I hope will take this further. It’s called Bookfuturism.com.

The basic premise of Bookfuturism.com is that it’s like The Daily Kos, TPM Café, or yes, Young Philly Politics for book and media nerds. Anyone can create an account and begin creating content, whether blog posts, book pages, links to important stories, or commentary on another user’s entries. It has no institutional or corporate sponsorship or structure. All it has are a bunch of men and women who care passionately about reading and writing and want to understand its future, so they can be a part of it.

It’s a commons, which means it’s a place to share news and ideas and to collaborate on projects. There’s already one project underway — a collection of essays on the future of reading edited by Clusterflock’s Andrew Simone — that’s being developed in partnership with the site. Some of the contributors — I’m one of them — are going to write our entries in public and incorporate feedback from the community before we ship it off to be printed, as a real, live physical book. (Bookfuturists love paper and print. As Robin Sloan has said, books are great techné.) And we have other collaborations already in the works, from meetups to conferences to reading groups. If you’re interested in reading and technology, this will be the place to be.

Books are a privileged object, even in the digital world, but I also want to try to include reading of all kinds. Journalism is likewise an important example, as are blogs and web sites. But so are text messages, street signs, video games, comic books, technical manuals, restaurant menus, and medical forms. In our hyperliterate culture, reading is everywhere — and everywhere it’s in flux.

I also want Bookfuturism.com to be a kind of social network for Bookfuturists like me. There are clear markets for writing by technological triumphalists (I call these guys and girls technofuturists) and doomsayers (when it comes to reading, this group can be called bookservatives). It’s easy to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to new technology; it’s a lot harder to try to engage with its strengths and weaknesses, to think of ways it could work better, to situate it in history, to study its effect on a culture. 

Bookfuturists, though, being equally people of the screen and the page, who know that both screens and pages are as varied and self-differentiated as the act of reading itself, are well situated to offer those readings. However, our status as members of two worlds makes it hard for us. We’re the humanists who can’t put down our iPhones, the tech geeks who read Proust. We don’t fit in at the faculty club or at a technology trade show. We have a hard time explaining to our friends and families why we collect card catalogs and buy two copies of used books — one to read, another to feed to the two-sided scanner. We’re the nerds among nerds.

This is also why I wanted to start this site. Because — and this might sound hokey, but I mean every word of it — there’s no reason why any of us should ever feel alone.

I hope you’ll come by, create an account, and start writing. If you have a blog of your own already, feel free to cross-post or link to your site. (Some of you might be clever enough to automate this.) If you don’t, but have something to say about all this, this is a great time to start one. 

You can also post links to stories, blog posts, product reviews, and new books that you think this community shouldn’t miss. (One of the great things about Young Philly Politics was that during the run-up to the primary, it was hands down the best news site in town — period.) This should be the place you go for news on reading technology. At least, I’m going to do my best to make it so.

It’s an exciting time for reading now, because everything is in flux. Soon, you might be able to read magazines on a Hulu-like site on your gorgeous Apple tablet. Giants of publishing will continue to fall. Others will vie to replace them. Amazon and Barnes & Noble will sort out the pricing and compensation market for e-books, and publishers will figure out when to release them. Book piracy might go mainstream.

And yes, human nature itself might change.

It’s all happening now. I’m just glad we get to see it.

 

All the while, it was growing

WARNING: MEDICAL

On Nov 13th, Jason Kottke asked

Why doesn’t anyone talk about bacterial marketing? Or hookworm infestational media?

I wrote

@jkottke viruses make a better metaphor; they need a host’s cellular architecture to replicate their own DNA. Also AIDS put viruses on map.

Just a couple of days later, I became very, very sick.

It turned out I had an infected abscess, around a hematoma in my lower back. I’d been trying since October — and if you remember, I was seeing a lot of doctors in October — to get a physician to take this swelling seriously, to say something other than “Wow, would you look at that?” or “Let’s just wait a few weeks to see if it goes down on its own.” Now it had almost killed me. It’s like my accident had finally found a way to get at my insides.

On Thursday, I was admitted to the hospital (again), to get the infection cleared up. This ultimately required not just dose after dose of antibiotics, but also surgery. Actually, two surgeries so far, and a third tomorrow. It’s not closed yet, for I’ve got a little vacuum pump sucking my incision dry. But no more little hunchback. And no more fevers or explosive bouts of illness. And a good chance I’ll be discharged in time for Thanksgiving.

I’ve had it with hospitals. After this year, I hope I don’t see the inside of one for another ten. I think I’m due a break.

Anyways, I wanted to explain my long Snark-absence. This is my first night with the computer, which also feels pretty good.

Because something has been growing inside me besides just bacteria. (Eww. Where’s this going?) 

AN IDEA. I have an idea!

It comes from Joanne McNeil’s name for her Twitter list of wordly nerds who like to think about books and new media: “bookfuturism.”

More to the point — bookfuturists.

I love it because the first word modifies the second as much as the other way around. A futurist (in the original sense) wants to burn down libraries. A bookfuturist wants to put video games in them. (And he wants one of those video games to be Lego Hamlet.)

A bookfuturist, in other words, isn’t someone who purely embraces the new and consigns the old to the rubbish heap. She’s always looking for things that blend her appreciation of the two. (The bookfuturist might be really into steampunk.)

The bookfuturist is deeply different from the two people he might otherwise easily be mistaken for — the technofuturist and the bookservative. Technofuturists and bookservatives HATE each other. Bookfuturists have some affection for each of them, even if they both also drive him nuts. 

What do I mean by “technofuturists” and “bookservatives”? Well, I can show you. 

Bookservatives talk like this:

Accompanying this plague [of bookstore closings] is a feel-good propaganda campaign that enjoys the collusion of the major media outlets, including such true hi-tech believers as the NY Times and NPR—print and broadcast venues that are themselves cheerily being rendered obsolete by the hi-tech rampage—and that in subtle ways positions the destruction of book culture like so: “books” in and of themselves are nothing, only another technology, like the Walkman or the laptop. What is sacred are the texts and those are being transferred to the Internet where they will attain a new kind of high-tech-assured immortality. Like dead souls leaving their earthly bodies the books are, in effect, going to a better place: the Kindle, the e-book, the web; hi-tech’s version of Paradise…

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

Further, we are told that to assign to books a particular value above and beyond their clearly inferior utility as a medium for language is to mark oneself as an irrelevant social throwback. And then, goes the narrative, think of the extraordinary sleekness, efficiency and amplitude of a Kindle, where thousands of texts lie at your fingertips. Which teen or twenty something in their right mind is going to opt for paper over electronic texts? No one of course. That’s just the way of evolution, goes the narrative. Publishers and readers, writers and agents, are well-advised to get with this truth or perish. As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven…

The advent of electronic media to first position in the modern chain of Being—a place once occupied by God—and later, after the Enlightenment, by humans—is no mere 9/11 upon our cultural assumptions. It is a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human. 

Technofuturists can get nearly as apoplectic, but they’re winning most of the fights these days, so most of them sound like this:

I am utterly perplexed by intelligent and innovative thinkers who believe a connected world is a negative one. How can we lambast new technology, transition and innovation? It’s completely beyond my comprehension.

It is not our fear of information overload that stalls our egos, it’s the fear that we might be missing something. Seeing the spread of social applications online over the past few years I can definitively point to one clear post-internet generational divide.

The new generation, born connected, does not feel the need to consume all the information available at their fingertips. They consume what they want and then affect or change it, they add to it or negate it, they share it and then swiftly move along the path. They rely on their community, their swarm, to filter and share information and in turn they do the same; it’s a communism of content. True ideology at it’s best…

Frank Schirrmacher asks the question “what is important, what is not important, what is important to know?” The answer is clear and for the first time in our existence the internet and technology will allow it: importance is individualism. What is important to me is not important to you, and vice-a-versa. And individualism is the epitome of free will. Free will is not a prediction engine, it’s not an algorithm on Google or Amazon, it’s the ability to share your thoughts and your stories with whomever wants to consume them, and in turn for you to consume theirs. What is import is our ability to discuss and present our views and listen to thoughts of others…

As someone born on the cusp of the digital transition, I can see both sides of the argument but I can definitively assure you that tomorrow is much better than yesterday. I am always on, always connected, always augmenting every single moment of my analog life and yet I am still capable of thinking or contemplating any number of existential questions. My brain works a little differently and the next generation’s brains will work a little differently still. We shouldn’t assume this is a bad thing. I for one hold a tremendous amount of excitement and optimism about how we will create and consume in the future. It’s just the natural evolution of storytelling and information.

I mean = it’s not THAT either, is it?

And yet = there are clear outlets — clear markets — for both of these sentiments and styles. They both LIKE arguing against the other. A more sophisticated point-of-view — which is also not just that of the distinterested critic, or the market watcher, or the tech insider — where is the space for that, really? Where is the community?

There are a lot of us — Joanne’s list is a decent place to start — mostly writing on blogs, on Twitter, trying to figure this out.

Stay tuned, Snarkkinder. I’ve got something cooking on this. Let’s keep thinking about this together.

 

Craven solicitations and moaning

Umm.… yeah, I just wrote this.

Tuesday is my 30th birthday. I’d like to buy a Nook e-reader. I’d been setting money aside for it — okay, I’d been setting it aside for a Kindle — but I’ve recently been in a bad accident that’s forced me to take the semester off of work. So, I’ve asked family and friends if they’d be willing to pitch in to collectively buy the Nook as a birthday present. I figure if we can get 13 friends to pitch in 20 dollars each, we’re home. My buddy Kelly Bennett suggested setting up a Paypal donation button for this purpose, so that’s exactly what I did.

I don’t have a slick video pitch like Robin’s for his book, nor do I have anything to offer you — except more blog posts about reading machines. Really, since I wrote this and this, B&N should just send me an offical review copy. However, it seems to be an iron law that nobody sends you anything for free until you are at least thirty years old. So I shall call on friends instead.

NB: This is here purely for folks who wanted to find a way to participate in my birthday present, but didn’t have a better way. Most readers of this blog have never met me, nor do they have any business buying me a birthday present. But, I figure — what the heck. Anything is worth a shot. 

 

The value of older people

Phillip Greenspun argues that technology is reducing the value of older people’s wisdom.

Let’s start by considering factual knowledge. An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young person ask an elder the answer to a fact question that can be solved authoritatively in 10 seconds with a Web search?

How about skills? Want help orienting a rooftop television aerial? Changing the vacuum tubes in your TV? Dialing up AOL? Using MS-DOS? Changing the ribbon on an IBM Selectric (height of 1961 technology)? Tuning up a car that lacks electronic engine controls? Doing your taxes without considering the Alternative Minimum Tax and the tens of thousands of pages of rules that have been added since our senior citizen was starting his career? Didn’t think so.

The same technological progress that enables our society to keep an ever-larger percentage of old folks’ bodies going has simultaneously reduced the value of the minds within those bodies.

Well, fine; if you previously treated your grandparents like the contents of the vintage encyclopedias on their shelves, then you’ve got some new options. But get this: you always could have just read those encyclopedias, too.

Probably no invention diminished the knowledge-retention-value of older people so much as writing. At the same time, writing provided a way for that knowledge to survive death, to reach not only children and grandchildren but great-great-grandchildren and strangers and people in far away places. Likewise, if older folks’ wisdom can be transferred to the internet, then it will actually add value to both their wisdom and the internet. Oh, wait — it already has! 

More to the point, Greenspun’s human-hard-drive concept of valuable knowledge is pretty ossified. When I see my grandmother, I don’t ask her about the names of plants or when the best time is to plant certain flowers, even though I know that she (and not I) know this stuff cold. I don’t even (at least always) ask her to sew my split pants seat or loose jacket button, even though she’s the one in the family who’s got the sewing machine and knows how to use it.

Instead, I talk to her about the time when she picked me up from school, and took me to Taco Bell, and the hot meat melted the cheese on the tacos, something I had never seen before, and that we both marveled at. Or I ask her about the book she’s reading, what she thinks of it, her opinions about the characters and the writing. Or I ask her about things that happened before my lifetime, about the Depression, or how she felt when she and my grandfather moved into their house in Detroit — I have the picture of her, nineteen years old with the nineteen-inch waist, doing a cartwheel on the front lawn, but it’s not enough. I listen to her describe how the city was then, and sometimes wince at the sharpness she expresses in her distaste for the city now. She tells me about how difficult it is for her to read now, how she wishes she’d kept taking the shots in her eyes for her glaucoma and macular degeneration. She tells me about my grandfather, who has been gone for fifteen years, whom I knew not nearly as well.

Not all kinds of knowledge are generated at random, of equal factual value to everybody. Sometimes they’re embodied in experience, and specifically relevant only to the people who share them. As Zora Neale Hurston has Janie say in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “you’ve got to go there to know there.”

(Greenspun’s post via Lone Gunman.)

 
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