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Newsprint is dying.

We’ve got language on the brain lately here at Snarkmarket, so Ron Silliman’s link to a talk abstract by linguist Bob Port at Berkeley caught my eye.

Most of it’s written in linguistese, but the main idea is that when we’re talking, we’re not manipulating a storehouse of meaningful sounds that we’re carrying around in our heads, but kicking around each other’s speech in a way that approximates but can’t be reduced to these fixed categories. But we think that that’s what we’re doing, because when we learn how to read (matching symbols to sounds), that is kind of what we’re doing, even if it isn’t when we speak.

Here’s the kicker. To explain/summarize this idea, Port writes: All alphabets are a recent technology for low-bitrate representation of language.

Let me explain why I like this.

Language is one of our oldest technologies, and probably the most important. It’s inevitable that we use other technologies to try to understand how it works. One of our other really old, really important technologies is writing, which is, in its own way, an heroic and powerful attempt to understand and functionalize how language works.

But writing is too powerful; not only does it change the way that the whole field of language works, it “restructures thought,” as Father Ong would say, not least by making the whole field of language look a little more like writing.

Alphabetic writing alone isn’t the only communication technology that affects how we see language; clay tablets, books and scrolls, dictionaries, the telegraph, file cabinets, and computer programming all give us different metaphors for thinking about how signs and communication work. But we’ve got a richer set of storage and communication technologies than ever before, which means we have a broader set of metaphors. We’ve got more metaphorical memory and processing power, kids!

Which means that we don’t have to think of an alphabet as a permanent stone etching, an engraving on the heart, of what a linguistic sound looks like. We can think about it as a low-res copy, a functional representation, that flows in and out of our memory, gets remixed and mashedup and commented on and tagged by friends — an evolving document.

I think it’s a mistake to spend too much time dwelling on whether our current technology just introduces new distortions, because it inevitably does. It’s just that asking language (which is what we’re talking about) to give you something else is to ask language (even written language) to do something it does not really do. And that itself is three-quarters of the insight.

The other day, a group of my friends, including two other PhDs, discussed the high rate of depression among graduate students. “It’s the stress,” one said; “the money!” laughed another. But I made a case that it was actually the isolation, the loneliness, that had the biggest effect. After all, you take a group of young adults who are perversely wired for the continual approval that good students get from being in the classroom with each other, and then lock them away for a year or two to write a dissertation with only intermittent contact from an advisor. That’s a recipe for disaster.

So I read Atul Gawande’s account of the human brain’s response to solitary confinement with an odd shock of recognition:

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the ‘soul-destroying loneliness,’ as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact…

[After years of solitary, Hezbollah hostage Terry Anderson] was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

But here’s the weird part — all of this isolation actually serves to select for a particular personality type. This is especially perverse when solitary confinement is used in prisons — prisoners who realign their social expectations for solitary confinement effectively become asocial at best, antisocial generally, and deeply psychotic at worst.

Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.

As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

I think we just figured out why so many professors are so deeply, deeply weird.

Idris Elba, best known for playing Stringer Bell in seasons 1-3 of The Wire, is now playing Charles Minor, Michael’s new boss on The Office. (Which, when you think of it, if David Simon had ever gotten around to telling the story of put-upon postmillennial office workers in America, is essentially the same story.)

Part of Stringer’s conceit on The Wire is that he wants to turn drug dealing into a modern business. He wants even his front businesses to run well. But it’s still dissonant, to say the least, to watch this Baltimore man-god walk among the paper salesmen in Scranton. Rex and the commenters at Fimoculous cracked me up.

Rex: Yeah, that totally threw me too: Stringer Bell on The Office last night…

kittyholmes: I guess he’s finally using all those business classes.

jed: Well, he did run the copy shop.

Rex: HAHAHAHAH!

True.

Read more…

Nancy Franklin on the not-so-secret geography of NBC’s Kings:

Watching the show, you feel a tension as you try to decide whether it’s holding a mirror up to the present or whether it’s making an argument about where the world may soon be headed. We have already noticed, in the aerial establishing shots of Shiloh, that “Kings” is filmed in Manhattan, and that the city isn’t just a film location. It’s never stated, but it’s clear that Shiloh was New York City, before it was destroyed to the point where even its name disappeared. There are inconsistencies that give you pause: the Time Warner Center is still standing — in fact, it’s the home of the King’s court — but the Empire State Building, I noticed with an actual start, is gone, as is the Chrysler Building. A tall building that resembles the planned Freedom Tower is (thanks to special effects) in midtown. The exterior of the palace is a well-known apartment building, the Apthorp, on the Upper West Side, a block from Zabar’s and H & H Bagels. (We don’t see those emporiums in the show, but I’m going to assume that they still exist in the world of “Kings”; otherwise, let me tell you, there is real cause for despair in the realm.)

I like the show, but it might be a bad sign for its longevity that even I, who made a point of watching and actually liked the pilot episode, missed the broadcast of episode two last night (and rewatched Lost online with my wife instead). Oops.

It’s weird to talk about “the best show on TV” now that The Sopranos and The Wire are off the air, and the end of Battlestar Galactica brings that particular third-way contrarian option to a close.

There’s the old Yeats joke; when Swinburne died, WBY said, “Now I’m king of the cats” — and he was (probably) for the next thirty years. It’s strange now that the new king of cats might actually be on broadcast TV rather than cable — but Mad Men aside, that’s where we seem to be — and there are a LOT of genuinely ambitious network shows out there.

Rex makes the case for Dollhouse, which has indeed picked up. If you were (figuratively) buying stock in a show, it’d be a hot bet. But I’m going to stick with Lost in the drama category (no one does it like you), 30 Rock for character-based comedy (Liz Lemon is our decade’s female answer to Homer Simpson), and The Daily Show/The Colbert Report hour for sheer cultural relevance — simply put, nothing else is essential.

Sorry if those answers seem boring, but that’s just how it is sometimes.

A.O. Scott on the new Neorealism in American cinema:

WHAT KIND OF MOVIES do we need now? It

When I first heard that Sopranos creator David Chase was making an HBO miniseries about the movie business, I thought it would be a roman a clef or something entertaining but insidery like The Player or “Entourage.” But this actually sounds pretty cool:

The series, “Ribbon of Dreams,” will begin with the behind-the-scenes roles played by two fictional characters — one a cowboy with some violence in his past, the other a mechanical engineer — who work for the famous early film director D. W. Griffith. It will follow them and their professional heirs through the development of the movie business.

The project is expected to cover each period of Hollywood movies, beginning with silent westerns and comedies, through the golden era of the studio system, to the emergence of auteur film directors in the 1970s, and up to the current mix of studio blockbusters and independent films. The cast of characters will also include many of the biggest names of Hollywood’s past, including John Wayne and Bette Davis

.

I love this stuff, and I bet I will be very into this.

About three years ago, Robin noticed a strange phrase making the rounds in political talk about the costs of the Iraq war: “blood and treasure.” I’d noticed it too, and when he posted about it, I started to do some digging into its origins. I thought that it would be a nice tidy little search, make for a fun thread and discussion, and we’d figure out that it came from Washington, maybe, or Lincoln, or Clausewitz.

As it turned out, I spent the better part of a year trying to find out where “blood and treasure” came from. I exhausted databases. I learned languages. I asked everyone I knew about it. I gave lectures on it. I contemplated scrapping my planned dissertation to write about it instead, and when that seemed like a bad idea, I contemplated leaving graduate school to write a book about it instead.

“Blood and treasure” is in its own way the key to all mythologies. Tracing the phrase traces the history of human thought about violence, whether in politics, history, religion, philosophy, or literature. I wanted to share here a fraction of what I have found so far.

Read more…

Sparta had a great army, lots of places had great olive oil, and plenty of city-states had plebiscite democracy. So why was life in Athens so great?

[Josiah] Ober’s hypothesis is that Athens’s participatory institutions essentially turned the city into a knowledge-generating and knowledge-aggregating machine, and also supported the effective deployment of useful knowledge over time. Athenian institutions and culture functioned so that the right useful knowledge made it to the right people at the right time, resulting in the production of consistently better-than-average decisions. Athenian institutions and culture also functioned to provide an effective balance between innovation, on the one hand, and, on the other, learning or routinization, which brings efficiency. To overcome the problem of dispersed and latent knowledge, the Athenians used “networking and teaming.” To overcome alignment problems, they built up stores of common knowledge through extensive publicity mechanisms and an emphasis on “interpresence”–frequent and large public gatherings–and “intervisibility” in public spaces, the capacity of all members of an audience to see each other as well as the speaker; and these stores of common knowledge worked particularly well to sustain systems of reward and sanction able to motivate ordinary citizens. To minimize transaction costs in areas such as trade, they standardized rules and exchanged practices and widely disseminated knowledge about them. The Athenians invested more resources than did their competitors in ensuring that their laws did not contradict each other, and in archiving and widely publishing final versions.

One particular example that the reviewer Danielle Allen (aka The Smartest Classicist I Know) examines is a ship-building competition authorized by the citizens of Athens: not only did public competitions like these encourage innovation in building, but since they were publicly judged, they helped disseminate expert knowledge throughout the populace, as the people learned what made one ship better than another.

Allen also looks long at what lessons American democracy can learn from Athens; one big (if obvious) conclusion is that the polis is a lot more nimble than an empire or even a republic, but from the interconnected micropolitical structures of the polis, one might actually be able to sustain a the macropolitics of a democratic republic:

As Ober notes, the immediate usefulness of the Athenian model pertains not directly to nation-states that are vastly larger than the city-state of Athens, with its population of approximately 250,000, but to the wide variety of smaller scale organizations that make up the sub-units of any given nation-state. To unleash the full value of participatory democracy at the level of the nation-state, a citizenry would do best to focus on tapping participatory democracy at the local level and throughout the variety of organizational types that make up modern society. Then there would be the further question of how well each of these sub-units is connected to the rest. If participatory democratic practices on a smaller scale and in various contexts do indeed increase the knowledge resources of the citizenry of a nation-state as a whole, then the structures of representative government, too, should function better.

It’s a very Athenian conclusion, that democracy is a function of knowledge (and vice versa), but I think it’s a welcome one.