I’ll collect three observations. The first is from Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine:

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

The second from grumblebee’s Ask MetaFilter comment:

One can get by in our culture without problem-solving, so why bother with it? By get by, I mean that one can make a good living, have a big house, kids, etc. without having to solve intellectual problems.

And — most important — one can be a “smart person” (as our culture defines it) without solving problems. Most people want to be smart. They want to be seen as smart by others. Our culture sends a really strong message to them, which is “memorize a lot of facts and you’ll be smart.” My guess is most people think they ARE doing rigorous problem solving when they see something that needs to be done and have to search through their mental database to find the right fact or the right formula. I guess this IS a kind of problem solving, but it’s the easiest kind. It’s similar to solving a problem by searching on google until you find the answer.

Those two are percolating in my mind alongside this, from Tim just now:

It turns out that social networks are actually terrible places to try to send a message en masse. At some point, they stopped being a high-function version of your email address book, and became a kind of low-power broadcast antenna. It might be a great station, but it’s static-y, there’s too much filler, and it’s all too easy to drive out of range.

The proliferation of small facts can short-circuit a more profound understanding. (Of course this is the pattern I’d find here, right?) But what do we do with this, exactly? Especially in domains like social networking. How do we build systems that enable higher-order intelligence to thrive?

(See also “The intelligence pyramid.”)

For some reason, I’ve been unsubscribed from Howard Weaver’s Twitter feed, which means I missed a bunch of great links. (I figured it out when he linked to my post on publishing from the other day, and my vanity alerts went off.)

Anyways, I thought this was a clever link: Dave Pell’s Top 25 Reasons We’re Fucked, which enumerates some of the most glaring asterisks to the claim “online social networks are terrific!”

Two in particular struck me as being both 1) true experiences and 2) symptomatic of a major (maybe THE major) problem of social networks: the illusion of control over the dissemination of what you write.

3. No Party Favors: You’re having a great time at the party? Well I didn’t get invited to the goddamn party and now I know about it and I know you’re having fun.
Solution: Shut the fuck up.

20. Diss-intermediate: Instead of being direct, you vent your loosely veiled personal (and even professional) attacks on the web. Here’s the bad news. The person on the receiving end of the attack also has a computer. And guess which one of you looks like a pussy?

(Note: For #20, I would substitute “asshole” for “pussy.”)

Both of these experiences suggest that when social networking fails, it’s due in no small part to either the excessive transitivity or the excessive symmetry of information. You write something intended for person or group A, but it winds up being broadcast to person or group B — either because someone in A relayed what you said to B, or because A and B are all part of the same undifferentiated audience.

NB: So far, this is just a different version of the old saw, “everything you write on the internet can be seen by everyone and stays there forever and will someday be used against you” — used to frighten teenagers and employees and grad students since the internet began.

What I’ve discovered, though, that social networks often experience the opposite problem. Here’s the scenario. You write something with the intent that EVERYONE — all of your Twitter followers, or Facebook friends, or blog subscribers — will read it. Inevitably, however, it winds up missing some of them. I might even add, it winds up missing MOST of them.

This is because for most people, messages on social networks aren’t actually messages, discrete items with a sender and recipient, but a broadcast. Facebook is like a television that’s always turned on. Sometimes you watch it intently, absorbed in what you see; sometimes you’re staring at it, bored, waiting for something good to come on; sometimes, it’s just background noise; and sometimes, you leave it on while you go on vacation so that people think someone is home. If you’re trying to reach the reader/viewer of a social network as broadcast, your status update or blog post or heartfelt plea for help is just as likely to reach a blank couch as it is a living, breathing person at the other end.

For example; I haven’t blogged about this here, but:

About a month ago, I was in a very serious accident. I broke my leg, broke my arm very badly (requiring multiple surgeries to repair), broke several ribs, took a gash to my forehead, etc… I’m actually quite lucky to be alive. However, the prognosis is good, and with hard work in rehab (and TLC for the parts still healing), I’m expected to make a full recovery.

I was in a hospital for a few weeks, during which you saw reduced Tim-activity on the Snarkmarket. I re-learned how to type left-handed (thanks to Robin for correcting typos), and I’m now in an inpatient intensive rehab facility, working on getting all of my functions back. I can walk using a walker (although I have to use a special platform to put weight on my elbow rather than my wrist), and I’m a whiz in a wheelchair. Now, I can even type right-handed again. I’m still in a fair amount of pain, and I’ve got swelling around a bruise on my back that won’t quite go away — but I’m in good spirits and actually doing quite well.

(Now, that is on the internet forever; readable by everyone. Please don’t use it against me.)

A week or so ago, I posted a statement very similar to the one above, and sent it to all of my Facebook friends. Many people responded instantly with surprise, well-wishes or concern. Most said nothing.

Then, a week or so later, when I started posting status updates again, including some which made reference to hospitals and injuries, I got a flurry of messages. “What happened?” “Are you okay?” And again and again: “Did I miss something? What’s going on?”

In some cases, people were away, or at least away from Facebook — and my message had dropped beyond the circumference of attention. In most cases, my quite-startling, very serious message had simply been filtered out — lost in a sea of viral videos, reunion invitations, and petty complaints. I might as well have written: “I had a great run today!” — just omitting the key coordinating clause, “until I got hit by that car.”

It turns out that social networks are actually terrible places to try to send a message en masse. At some point in their development, they stopped being a high-function version of your email address book, and became a kind of low-power broadcast antenna. It might be a great station, but it’s static-y, there’s too much filler, and it’s all too easy to drive out of range.

When I first saw the NYT headline, “For Some Parents, Shouting Is the New Spanking,” I thought, oh, great. I prepared myself for an argument that parents were too sensitive about shouting (just as they are too sensitive about spanking), and that they should just lighten up, go old-school, and slap and yell at their kids.

But nope; it’s not a lagging indicator but a leading one. I can guarantee that parents at the farmers’ market, this article in hand, will turn their laser vision on any parent who slightly raises their voice at a child, even from across the park.

Okay, enough with the straw men on either side.* Just to be clear, I think regular yelling at kids is a really bad idea. Here’s what the article says:

Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. “This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”

I also like this principle, from the University of New Hampshire’s Murray Straus:

If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.

*Let me just say that dealing with parenting advice is absolutely exhausting. Whether it’s a young mom toting the latest research on vaccination and language delays featured in Fretful Mother magazine, a well-meaning grandma offering ludicrous folk remedies and endless, endless stories, a hipster dad justifying why he lets his kids free-range their BMs in the backyard, or a frazzled mom angrily defending slapping her kids on the subway, the message is always: “You’re doing it wrong.”

I always say that one of the best how-to movies about fatherhood is Finding Nemo, which presents three models of fatherhood: the initially neurotic, PTSD, over-anxious Marlin (who wants to protect Nemo from everything); the initially selfish Gill (who’s willing to subject Nemo to real danger so he can escape the dentist’s office himself); and the turtle Crush, who has achieved a kind of laid-back affirmative Zen. Over the course of the movie, Marlin needs to relax and trust in his son, Gill needs to learn to care about somebody else, and Crush — well, Crush is a turtle. He doesn’t have to do much of anything.

I’m also liking (with some reservations) the justly famous dad whose wisdom fills Twitter’s shitmydadsays:

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”

I wish I’d read that six months ago — soooo much grief could have been averted.

I saw a link to a Publishers Weekly story saying that Cory Doctorow was kicking off “a unique publishing experiment.” And I thought, cool! Doctorow’s stories aren’t exactly my thing, but I like innovations in publishing, and always wish to know more about them!

But then when I read the article, I was kinda let down. Basically, he’s releasing a free e-book (which he’s done for a while now), an on-demand paperback, and a de luxe hardcover edition. And one dude gave him 10K as a commission on a story.

Well, let me be fair. There are two things that I think are interesting and kind of new about what Doctorow’s doing:

• Doctorow has some nifty-sounding software, contributed by a fan, Vaskin Kissoyan: “a beta of a package called ‘Ange’ that he’s written to single-source my master text files into HTML, PDF and EPub, so that all I need to do is make an edit in the text file and run the script, and it converts the updated file to all the other formats and uploads them for me. There’s a reason this collection is called With a Little Help!” That’s pretty cool.
• Doctorow is going to disclose all of his earnings, from every stream, in a blog for PW, to show that giving away e-books can pay off. I think that’s kind of nice, and might even be useful.

I think what bothers me is that Doctorow’s “packages” aren’t really packages. Each book is a separate product at different, individuated price points, without any overlap. And you get to pick one. Compare that to what this whippersnapper is offering:

• Pledge $3 or more

  DIGITAL PACK. Get a PDF copy of the book and follow along with behind-the-scenes updates.

• Pledge $11 or more

  PHYSICAL PACK. All of the above, plus get a physical copy of the book. (The more people who choose this level or higher, the better the book is for everybody!)

• Pledge $19 or more

  SINCERITY PACK. All of the above, plus your book is signed, and it comes with a little surprise.

• Pledge $29 or more

  PATRON PACK. All of the above, plus your name (or secret code-name) is listed in the acknowledgments.

• Pledge $39 or more

  SUPER OCCULT VALUE PACK. All of the above, plus get three more copies of the book (for a total of four), so you can give one to a friend, donate one to the library, leave one in a coffee shop with a line of hexadecimal code scribbled across the title page…

Note the refrain: “all of the above.” When you spring for a package, you actually get more than one thing. You don’t choose between a digital book and a paperback — you get both.

This is pro forma true in CD’s model, too, b/c he’s giving away the e-book for free — but what if the e-book, for hard copy purchasers, came without advertising? Might not the collectors’ edition hardcover buyers also want a paperback as a reading copy? How can an upmarket purchase actually give a reader some leverage on a downmarket one – or vice versa?

I’m going to put a marker down on this. In this transitional period, the most valuable and successful experiments will come from people who find new ways to give readers BOTH digital and print books – who in fact create incentives to encourage BOTH kinds of reading – and that in turn value their readers as members of an interlocking community, not (just) isolated buyers at different price points. And that means aligning readers’ interests and offering them MORE than they might think they’d want.

I think Phil Gyford’s observation here is really important:

It wasn’t long ago that buying a purely digital piece of music — downloading a file rather than paying for a piece of holdable plastic — seemed terribly modern. But already I feel like an old fool when I visit Amazon or 7Digital to pay for an MP3. These days, a several-megabyte file on my computer is starting to feel as much of a burden, as much of a physical thing to cart around for the rest of my life, as a CD or a cassette or a record.

I can imagine the Renaissance analogue: “An octavo book printed on paper is starting to feel as much of a burden, as much of a physical thing that I need to store and display and move from home to home, as a manuscript folio book on parchment.”

Via things.

Most of my favorite quotes in Derrida’s Paper Machine come from the first full chapter, “The Book To Come.” (The title is also the title of a book by Maurice Blanchot, and a chapter in that book, which is largely about the poet Stéphane Mallarmé.) Samples:

A question trembling all over, not only with that which disturbs the historical sense of what we still call a book, but also with what the expression to come might imply—namely more than one thing, at least three things:

1. That the book as such has—or doesn’t have—a future, now that electronic and virtual incorporation, the screen and the keyboard, online transmission, and numerical composition seem to be dislodging or supplementing the codex (that gathering of a pile of pages bound together, the current form of what we generally call a book such that it can be opened, put on a table, or held in the hands). The codex had itself supplanted the volume, the volumen, the scroll. It had supplanted it without making it disappear, I should stress. For what we are dealing with is 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 a new economy—which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserves.

2. That if it has a future, the book to come will no longer be what it was.

3. That we are awaiting or hoping for an other book, a book to come that will transfigure or even rescue the book from the shipwreck that is happening at present.

This – especially the first part – is one of my favorite moves, that of the LONG historical perspective, coupled with that critical sensibility, borrowed from Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics, that multiple terms coexist but change and shift in their relative values and significance as they jostle against one another. Linguistic change is never a straight substitution, but a high-friction accomodation to the new. In fact, so is most cultural change — the distinction isn’t between live and dead, or even (entirely) high and low, but between forms that are residual, dominant, or emerging.

But this position, which could just make for a tidy deflation — we’ve seen all of this before — is joined to an acknowledgement that what we are experiencing is a shipwreck. It’s just not (or at least not only) the shipwreck we think it is:

Now what is happening today, what looks like being the very form of the book’s to-come, still as the book, is on the one hand, beyond the closure of the book, the disruption, the dislocation, the disjunction, the dissemination with no possible gathering, the irreversible dispersion of this total codex (not its disappearance but its marginalization or secondarization, in ways we will have to come back to); but simultaneously, on the other hand, a constant reinvestment in the book project, in the book of the world or the world book, in the absolute book (this is why I also described the end of the book as interminable or endless), the new space of writing and reading in electronic writing, traveling at top speed from one spot on the globe to another, and linking together, beyond frontiers and copyrights, not only citizens of the world on the universal network of a potential universitas, but also any reader as a writer, potential or virtual or whatever. That revives a desire, the same desire. It re-creates the temptation that is figured by the World Wide Web as the ubiquitous Book finally reconstituted, the book of God, the great book of Nature, or the World Book finally achieved in its onto-theological dream, even though what it does is to repeat the end of
that book as to-come.

These are two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achievement. We must take seriously these two fantasies; what’s more they are what makes writing and reading happen. They remain as irreducible as the two big ideas of the book, of the book both as the unit of a material support in the world, and as the unity of a work or unit of discourse (a book in the book). But we should also perhaps wake up to the necessity that goes along with these fantasies.

Two fantasies! Both generative! Both probably unavoidable!

This is why Derrida is so good.

What can I say about Jacques Derrida’s book Paper Machine, besides “I adore this book, and wish everyone would read it”?

It’s the great French-Algerian philosopher’s most important look at the transformation of the written word through electronic and computing technologies. It’s also one of his most important looks back at his own career; he revisits and updates a thousand and one of his earlier ideas and positions from the point of view of transformations in writing technology. “It seems as if I’ve never had any other subject, but paper, paper, paper,” he half-jokes – knowing that philosophical deconstruction was/is as much a function of a technological epoch on the wane as it was a social/intellectual breakthrough.

“Paper” for Derrida isn’t just the paper of books, but also identity papers (the French term for undocumented immigrants is “sans-papiers,” i.e., without papers), newspapers, and printer paper – “Papier-Machine” means “typing paper, printer paper, machine paper,” even as it comes to mean (and I’m here I’m extrapolating) the whole structural edifice of a world built on networks made of paper. William Carlos Williams said that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”; you could also say that a poem (or a book) is a machine made of paper.

This retrospective aspect makes Paper Machine a great introduction to Derrida and his writing, even as it introduces new wrinkles. The man who famously titled a chapter in Of Grammatology “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” has to stop and rethink “what does this mean?” in a world where “the end of the book” (that is, the printed book) is a real possibility. It’s fun to watch.

Also fun, and given the positions in the book, inevitable — the book has been scanned and OCRed, and is now available at AAAARG.org, aka the best website for philosophy/theory PDFs ever. So, please — give it a whirl.

It’s been fascinating to me to watch the circulation of this clip of Louie CK on Conan O’Brien, loosely titled “Everything Is Amazing And No One Is Happy.” The appearance is about eight months old (if anyone can track down an exact date, please let me know) over a year old, but I still regularly get links, embeds, forwards of it. What’s more, each highlights a different aspect — for some people, the clip is about the importance of thankfulness; for others, it marks generational change; it’s a good riff about the magic of new tech; and for still others, it’s a great attack on spoiled jerks.

Something about this resonates with people. It hit a sweet spot, and it’s on its way to becoming a modern classic.

Kottke links to a really good article about the technology behind men’s razors. Me, I’m linking to this old article from The Onion, “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades.”

You’re taking the “safety” part of “safety razor” too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let’s hit it. Let’s roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let’s dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren’t on board, then fuck you. And if you’re on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I’m the only one who’ll take risks, I’m sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of “this is how we shave now” A…

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic’s wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the razor game for good, and that won’t happen until the day I die!

A lot of straightforward but not-always-obvious wisdom in this 37signals post, “Don’t just try to steal a share of the existing market, create a new one“:

Nintendo goes after people who aren’t using other video game systems. While Xbox 360 and Sony one-up each other trying to reach experienced, demanding gamers, Nintendo goes after newbies. The Wii’s controller makes video games so simple that a three year-old can play it. And the company is thriving because of it…

Nearly half of all undergraduate students in the US now attend community college. Why? They are more affordable, have more lenient admission standards, offer online degrees, and focus on market-driven degrees aimed at nurses, firefighters, law enforcement officers, and EMTs. All that means they are able to enroll students who otherwise might never wind up in a classroom.

You could take this lesson to politics, too – especially local politics, or anywhere you’re trying to outflank an entrenched establishment. Don’t go to the usual power brokers, making the same speech in all of the same places. Put together a coalition of people who don’t usually bump up against each other. And especially, make sure you get all of the people who haven’t been successfully targeted by a political campaign before. Don’t fight the same battles if you can redraw the map.

Come to think of it, I guess that’s how Obama did it. Smart guy.