Having just two weeks ago posted a link to what I think is a reasonably intelligent take on the importance of serendipitous discoveries in old and new media, Damon Darlin’s not-quite-an-essay in the NYT is by comparison offensively stupid.
Let’s just juxtapose these two excerpts:
All this gabbin’ ’bout Shakespeare makes me wonder – what are the sacred, that is, foundational, texts for us? (Feel free to variously define “us.”)
I mean Shakespeare’s plays are one; I think the Bible is or ought to be another; The Simpsons, seasons 2-8; the original Star Wars trilogy; Sophocles; The Great Gatsby; Goodfellas…
I’m half kidding, one quarter reaching, and one quarter deadly serious; what cultural references are now, for you, and in your interactions with others, just assumed, like the way Moby Dick assumes King Lear, Paradise Lost, and the King James Bible?
John McWhorter’s exhortation to perform Shakespeare in modern-language adaptations caught my eye a while back. His case is that Shakespeare’s language is more-or-less unrecognizable to us; we misunderstand most of what we pick up; and (I think this is probably uncontroversial) full-length 100% faithful readings of the longest versions of the texts are chorish.
Original Shakespeare should occupy the place original Chaucer does today: engaged by scholars and hard-core aficionados. However, to require intensive and largely unfeasible decoding in full three-hour live performances is to condemn us to ignorance of something that makes life worth living. As Liddell put it, for a people to genuinely possess, rather than merely genuflect, to a literature, its words “must convey expression not to one man only, but to thousands.”
Maybe I’m an outlier, but I think I’m so conditioned by my professional position and highly personal Shakespeare fetish that it’s almost unimaginable to me to go to a Shakespeare play and try to comprehend the action and language as if I’m hearing it for the first time. Do people actually do this? Should they?
When I see Shakespeare, it’s more like going to a Bloomsday reading. I’m quite consciously seeing an adaptation/interpretation of texts that I have read and (usually) know quite well. My attitude is generally, “let’s see how they do this.” Again, maybe I’m in the minority on this. But I’m also probably squarely in the middle of the target audience for live Shakespeare.
I actually DON’T think that there’s much of a market for middle-of-the-road contemporary-language Shakespeare. When people want the Bard, they want the real stuff, and feel cheated if they think they’re getting anything less. Even if they don’t understand the language. ESPECIALLY when they don’t understand it.
But I think you could generate more interest from everyone if you avoided intelligibility for intelligibility’s sake and offered a more stylized take on Shakespeare’s language. McWhorter’s counterexample to Shakespeare is August Wilson, and Wilson’s language is NOT plain-language. It’s often not even contemporary. If you wanted an August Wilson take on Shakespeare, you’d really be looking for something completely different.
My own preference for clever updates of Shakespeare – again, I’m a history freak – would be for lots and lots of adaptations that don’t just port his text into the present, but into lots of different periods, including mishmashes of multiple times and places. (This is actually what Shakespeare does.) Do Julius Caesar during the American Civil War; give us a Prohibition-era Twelfth Night (I actually saw an adaptation like this in London). Put Shakespeare in masks, just any mask but our own.
Matthew Battles takes on academics and corporate types horning in on social media. This paragraph reminded me a bit of the sensibility underpinning New Liberal Arts:
In a thriving networked culture, it should be possible not merely to complement but to replace institutions and corporations with commons-native constellations of intelligence. The mainstream media quakes before the ever-multiplying range of news-gathering alternatives. In the intellectual world, the Infinite Summer
I had a stray thought the other day, related to Chris Anderson’s observation that what’s really radical about the idea of “free” isn’t its economic reality but economic psychology. Free things freak us out; either we think they’re worthless or scammy or we love them so much that sometimes they actually make us economically stupid. (I once stood in line for an hour for a free burrito when I was paying a babysitter $10/hour at the same time. Say what you will about whatever I was “buying” with my money, I wasn’t maximizing my utility.)
Anyways, here’s the idea:
If what matters about “free” is the psychology, then the solution is to make paying something feel like paying nothing.
Think about it! When the idea of free really works, it makes us forget that it ever even cost anything at all. Reading web pages is free – once you count the money you pay for internet access. Between my phone and my house, I pay more for internet access per month than I do books – and I read a lot. Add on to that all of the ways my free behavior is paid for with information from or attention paid by me, and a ruthless calculus would determine that the internet is expensive as hell.
Almost all free things are cross-subsidized in some ways. But if the cross-subsidy is obvious – “Free phone with a two-year plan worth at least…” – then free fails. If your website suddenly has a glaring and obnoxious banner ad, then it doesn’t matter if it is as free today as it was yesterday. It doesn’t feel free anymore.
On the other hand, you can actually make getting something you’ve paid for feel like something free. Casinos are terrific at this. Everything’s free, and you still spend money everywhere. Sometimes, governments are good at this too – although they sometimes create benefits that are so invisible that we don’t even think about them at all, except when they fail. (Free can’t work too well! Or people will still feel cheated!)
A classic example might be buying something – let’s say, groceries – with a credit card. I used to pay for all of my groceries with cash or check, so I always had to be aware of exactly how much I was spending and whether I either physically had enough money on me or at least had enough in the account (and enough to still pay rent, etc.). Then I got a credit card that gave me rewards at gas stations and grocery stores – the money is like invisible bullets. I don’t worry about each individual trip, I just pay the lot at the end of the month. This ramped up until I looked at a breakdown of my finances, and realized I was paying twice as much for food each month as I was a few years before. It felt more like free.
Digital media is catching on. I hardly ever used to buy anything in iTunes, because it was a total hassle. The terms of service had always changed, I had to log-in, add something to my cart, and then check-out. It was worse than going to a record-store! And a lot worse than Amazon, where I had one-click, free shipping… Anyways, I recently disabled all of the nag screens, and suddenly, I’m buying stuff on iTunes left and right. People talk about this with their Kindles, too – the fact that you can browse for, buy, and begin reading books so smoothly reduces the friction of every purchase, so you read one after another. It all goes through Amazon and you get billed at the end of the month. You know you bought something… but you kind of didn’t. To quote Flanders, “it feels like you’re wearing nothing at all.”
Software sort of works like this too. It’s easy to buy applications for the iPhone or iPod touch, because you do it all right through Apple – it syncs to your iPod and you’re ready to go. It’s much harder, psychologically, to go to a developer’s website, fill out all of your information, decide whether or not to use PayPal or your credit card, download the application, open it up, enter your serial (which went to your old email address), register the software again, etc… At every moment, it screams, “you’re paying something! You’re paying something! Are you sure there isn’t free software that could do the same thing?”
The real trouble, however, is advertising. If you have an ad-supported application or website, it’s going to feel the most free and probably be the most popular if the ads are so discreet as to be practically invisible – you don’t even realize that someone paid for you to see what you’re seeing. But advertising HAS to be attention-grabbing if it’s going to work.
Newspapers actually came up with a genius solution to this problem years ago – the classified ad. It’s an advertisement that feels like a service. In most cases, when you were reading classifieds, you actually PAID to see them (although each ad – for the reader – was free). Now, of course, classifieds are (almost) actually free (to place and read). But you still see things like job advertisements, etc., which play out to readers more like services than ads. And because they feel like services, they feel like free.
So here’s the (provisional) lesson. There is no such thing as a free lunch. But some lunches feel freer than others.
That’s right. There’s a new redhead for everyone in the office to swoon over.
Mad Men Yourself, via Kottke.
There’s a great scene in Star Trek IV – yes, the one where the crew travels back in time to save whales – where Scotty, the engineer, tries to control a Macintosh by talking to it. When McCoy hands him the mouse, he speaks into it, in a sweetly coaxing voice: “Hello, computer!” When he’s told to use the keyboard (“How quaint!”), he irritably cracks his knuckles — and hunts-and-pecks at Warp 1 to pull up the specs for “transparent aluminum.”
As recently as 2000, it seemed inevitable that any minute now, we were going to be able to turn in our quaint keyboards and start controlling computers with our voice. Our computers were going to become just like our telephones, or even better, like our secretaries. But while voice and speech recognition and commands have gotten a lot better, generally the trend has been in the other direction – instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones.
(Which is arguably the hidden message of Scotty and the Mac – even somebody with the most powerful voice-controlled computer in the galaxy can touch-type like a champ. He probably only talks to the computer so his hands are free to text his friends while he’s engineering! “brb – needed on away team” — “anyone know how to recrystallize dilithium” — That’s why he’s so inventive! He’s crowdsourcing!)
The return to speech, in all of its immediacy, after centuries of the technological dominance of writing, seemed inevitable. The phonograph, film, radio, and television all seemed to point towards a future dominated by communications technology where writing and reading played an increasingly diminished role. I think the most important development, though, was probably the telephone. Ordinary speech, conversation, in real-time, where space itself appeared to vanish. It created a paradigm not just for media theorists and imaginative futurists but for ordinary people to imagine tomorrow.
This was Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” – a media and politics where the limitations of speech across place and time were virtually eliminated. Walter Ong called it “secondary orality” – we were seeing a return to a culture dominated by oral communication that wasn’t QUITE like the primary orality of nonliterate cultures – it was mediated by writing, by print, and by the technologies and media of the new orality themselves.
Towards the end of his life, in the mid-1990s, Ong gave an interview where he tried to explain how he thought his theory of secondary orality was being misapplied to electronic communications:
“When I first used the term ‘secondary orality,’ I was thinking of the kind of orality you get on radio and television, where oral performance produces effects somewhat like those of ‘primary orality,’ the orality using the unprocessed human voice, particularly in addressing groups, but where the creation of orality is of a new sort. Orality here is produced by technology. Radio and television are ‘secondary’ in the sense that they are technologically powered, demanding the use of writing and other technologies in designing and manufacturing the machines which reproduce voice. They are thus unlike primary orality, which uses no tools or technology at all. Radio and television provide technologized orality. This is what I originally referred to by the term ‘secondary orality.’
I have also heard the term ‘secondary orality’ lately applied by some to other sorts of electronic verbalization which are really not oral at all—to the Internet and similar computerized creations for text. There is a reason for this usage of the term. In nontechnologized oral interchange, as we have noted earlier, there is no perceptible interval between the utterance of the speaker and the hearer’s reception of what is uttered. Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle [page break] such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ We are not considering here the production of sounded words on the computer, which of course are even more readily assimilated to ‘secondary orality’” (80-81).
This is where most of the futurists got it wrong – the impact of radio, television, and the telephone weren’t going to be solely or even primarily on more and more speech, but, for technical or cultural or who-knows-exactly-what reasons, on writing! We didn’t give up writing – we put it in our pockets, took it outside, blended it with sound, pictures, and video, and sent it over radio waves so we could “talk” to our friends in real-time. And we used those same radio waves to download books and newspapers and everything else to our screens so we would have something to talk about.
This is the thing about literacy today, that needs above all not to be misunderstood. Both the people who say that reading/writing have declined and that reading/writing are stronger than ever are right, and wrong. It’s not a return to the word, unchanged. It’s a literacy transformed by the existence of the electronic media that it initially has nothing in common with. It’s also transformed by all the textual forms – mail, the newspaper, the book, the bulletin board, etc. It’s not purely one thing or another.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Jacques Derrida quotes, from his essay “The Book to Come”:
What we are dealing with are never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with the new economy — which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserves.
I doubt that “secondary literacy” will catch on, because it sounds like something that middle school English teachers do. But that’s too bad – because it’s actually a pretty good term to describe the world we live in.
Mark Sample spots a review of a David Foster Wallace collection authored by a Don Delillo character. McSweeney’s? Nope. It was published in the book review section of the academic journal Modernism/Modernity.
Update: M/M editor Lawrence Rainey and former managing editor Nicole Devarenne ‘fess up [kinda] in an open letter to Mark.
One of my favorite “pop music meets pop culture” writers is Tom Ewing, who writes the “Poptimist” column for Pitchfork. Ewing’s posts have a way of generally filtering into the cultural conversation without him necessarily getting a lot of direct credit – for example, he beat Paul Constant to the punch back in May by writing an essay on Twitter in 140-character paragraphs.
Ewing’s newest column smartly juxtaposes the decline of the relevance of the Top 40 (particularly in the UK) with a certain strand of newspaper pessimism. I particularly like his definition of pop music as “a fragmented cross-section of popular culture squeezed into a tiny space, and the act of squeezing– when things were working– filled that space with energy and fizz.”
Well worth reading the whole thing – here’s a relevant sample:
Far more people worry about the decline of newspapers than the decline of the British pop charts, but their plight is comparable. Both packaged worlds of content into small things and let the different elements fight for attention. Both also enjoyed audiences who had to consume a whole to get at the parts they liked. Okay, a newspaper reader could skip over the sections they didn’t care about more easily than a radio listener could, but still a good headline might turn that half-second flicker of disinterest into attention. And in that half-second chance lived serendipity and argument.
For serendipity to happen you have to be able to give people what they don’t want– or don’t think they want– as well as what they do.
Maybe that’s a utopian conception of the newspaper as well as the Top 40 — but it seems like all we do is trade in utopian conceptions. Let’s kick this one around for a while.
This is the last day that Hilzoy will be blogging at Obsidian Wings and Washington Monthly. I don’t think everyone yet realizes what we as her readers are losing. As I wrote to Matt after we heard the news, “she wasn’t the most famous political blogger; she was just the best.”
A philosopher by training, she was compelled to blog in 2002 by what she saw as the craziness of the country then – not just the bad policies of the government, but brutal invective against anyone who doubted or wanted to debate them. Now, it’s calmer. As she wrote in her farewell post:
There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more. Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it’s time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.
One of the things that’s sad for me, though, is that while Hilzoy was particularly fierce, patient, and logical in her approach to Big Issues In Politics, she was also attentive to things that typically draw much less attention. For example, her post on the unseriousness of Sarah Palin’s resignation pivots from smart but general things (government is serious business, a lame-duck governor can actually usually do more to affect policy than one who needs to secure re-election) to a very specific policy issue, with data to back it up:
As of 2007 (the most recent data I could find), Alaska was the fourth worst of 45 states reporting when it came to keeping kids from being abused in their foster homes — the homes they’re given to keep them safe from abuse and neglect. Alaska’s child protective services were the fifth worst in the nation at keeping kids from undergoing repeat abuse, the third worst in response time, and the sixth worst in terms of the time from an initial report of child abuse to receipt of services…
Foster care is one of those issues that liberals and conservatives ought to agree on. Kids are not responsible for being abused or neglected. They can’t just take care of themselves. And someone like Sarah Palin, who is forever talking about fighting for our children, might be expected to work at this. If she was looking for a way to spend her time other than taking junkets at taxpayer expense, it might have occurred to her to fix Alaska’s foster care system so that it really took care of Alaska’s kids.
If I had to put a label on Hilzoy’s best virtue as a blogger, it was this insistence on moral seriousness. Some of this was rooted in a basic respect for due diligence in policy decisions – see her blistering comments on the origins of the enhanced interrogation program. After all, she was a professional philosopher, who took reasoning and evidence seriously. One of my favorite posts of hers in this vein was her takedown of EO Wilson’s Atlantic Monthly article on biology and morality. She just knew her stuff cold.
But I think it was also rooted in her deep empathy for people who were abused, powerless, without recourse technical arguments as a means to solve their problems. She was also unafraid to interject her own experiences into the discussion. See her rebuttal to David Brooks’s complaint when a politician had grabbed his leg, which Brooks read as a signal that the code of dignity governing interactions had slipped away.
News flash: This has been happening to people forever, at least if you count women as people. Back when George Washington was writing out his “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation”, which Brooks cites as an example of the Dignity Code, Thomas Jefferson was hitting on Sally Hemings. A professor whose class I was enrolled in once grabbed my breasts at a party. Every woman I know has stories like this. Maybe being groped in a public setting is a novel experience for straight guys; not being a straight guy, I wouldn’t know. But if it is, that isn’t because no one ever groped anyone in a public setting before.
What can I say: nobody knows if hilzoy’s retirement will be like Jay-Z’s. I doubt it will be like Brett Favre’s, because she’s too deliberate to mess around with a decision like this. I do hope that we’ll be seeing her writing on politics and morality in some popular forum – because she is the real thing. And we need that.