I embedded one of these videos and linked to the other in my Gadget Lab article on the near-future of wristwatches, but I thought it’d be worth juxtaposing ’em here too.
Two quick notes: in case it’s not obvious, “Anémic” is “Cinéma” backwards. And as you can see, Duchamp was never one to limit himself to just vertical OR horizontal reading. (Watch the whole thing.)
In the long list of books I’ll never write, there’s one that’s about a theory of risk. The theory is that there’s a threshold of risk aversion beyond which our attempts to extinguish risk actually exacerbate it. It would be filled with the case studies you might expect – things like the overuse of antibiotics and how a financial insurance product short-circuited the economy. But the opening anecdote would be about roads. And I’d basically copy and paste it from from this December ’04 Wired story:
Riding in [avant-garde traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s] green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. [Monderman’s baby. – M] It’s the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior – traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings – and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn’t contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it’s unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous – and that’s the point.
Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. “I love it!” Monderman says at last. “Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”
I wrote the text for “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” but TheAtlantic.com’s science and technology editor/good friend of the Snark Alexis Madrigal edited it and added all the hyperlinks and images. The images are really wonderful, so I thought I would add some short annotations/captions/homework assignments for each one here.
Here is a link to Tim’s terrific new post over at The Atlantic, provided for your convenience. Like I said on Twitter:
@tcarmody I love that your magisterial media history post totally has a Demand Media headline. Nicely done.
I love the fact that Gutenberg’s press represents just one of ten revolutions here, and I love Tim’s characterization of it:
2. Outside of scholarly circles, the top candidate is usually the better-known Print Revolution, usually associated with Johannes Gutenberg, who helped introduce movable type to Europe. Now, as Andrew Pettegree’s new history The Book in the Renaissance shows, the early years of print were much messier than advertised: no one knew quite what to do with this technology, especially how to make money off of it.
“No one knew quite what to do with this technology.” I can’t tell you much I love that—how heartening I find it. It means we probably haven’t even figured out what the web is really good for yet.
But yo, Tim, I’ve got beef: where’s the paperback revolution in your list?
Why didn’t US dollar coins take off, or even take hold, in 1999-2000? Stan Collender, who led the award-winning marketing effort for the popular golden Sacagawea coins, breaks it down:
The reason had nothing to do with consumers refusing to use it: Instead, businesses refused to order the coins and so didn’t have any to give to consumers.
Their reasoning made a great deal of sense. Most large retailers pay to get bills and coins delivered to them by armored vehicle and, because they weigh more, coins are more expensive to deliver than bills. The average retailer didn’t want to spend anything additional for coins when there was a perfect substitute product — dollar bills — that it could get at a lower cost. That meant that, unless they received a Golden Dollar as payment from a customer, retailers had none to use as change. Like almost any other new product, consumers quickly tired of asking for the coins when the answer almost always was no…
There were other reasons. The most prominent was that the manufacturer of the paper for the dollar bills who wanted to keep selling it to the federal government, waged an aggressive anti-dollar coin campaign and trashed the effort every way imaginable. For example, the Mint had to cancel a promotional effort in Boston because the paper manufacturer, which was located in Massachusetts, protested to its senators and the senators demanded that the Mint cancel the effort.
I think everybody who’s breathed the air around economics gets the thesis that money is an economic product subject to supply and demand like any other. But to actually see it broken down as analysis of discrete things — a fiat currency backed by the full faith and credit of the US gov’t but whose weight and materials and cost and durability and shape all turn out to be crucial to its success or failure — man, it’s another thing altogether.
Via @dancohen.
What do you think of when you think of Germany and the German people? Let me guess:
That’s about what I thought. Well, let me tell you: from about the 1770s through the 1920s, the German-speaking world was fucking awesome. Not that you necessarily always wanted to be there, especially when Napoleon came through. But they had Kant, Mozart, and Goethe AT THE SAME TIME. That’s like John Locke, Shakespeare, and The Beatles all just hanging out around England, kicking it.
And it wasn’t like it was just a handful of philosophers, composers, poets, and scientists. It was one after another. And an industrial boom. And the formation of a new empire, when everyone else was beginning to walk back the whole empire thing. The Germans were pumping out babies like it was their job, but unlike the Brits, they had nowhere to go. So they came to America. (More Americans can claim German descent than any other ethnicity.)
Prussia beat France in a war in the 1870s when France was at the top of the world. And didn’t just beat them — they stomped on them. France was so shook up, it had to have another revolution about it. This was like England beating the Spanish Armada.
The industrial revolution? Yeah, the Brits did some nice things with textiles, and the Americans had a lot of bodies to throw at it (plenty of them German), but the rest of it? German.
The twentieth century was Germany’s to lose. And sweet Jesus, did they lose it.
But the Germans didn’t. Not all of them. Because all of that knowledge spread throughout the world. There’s a great line in The Right Stuff, where one of the Americans claims that the Soviets can’t be ahead of them in the space race: “Our Germans are better than their Germans.” World War II just never stopped for them — the so-called Allies kept fighting each other on their turf, using their brains to do the work.
This history — which the understandably overwhelming memory of the Nazis has effectively wiped out for most Americans — is the theme of Peter Watson’s new book The German Genius. He calls what happened in Germany in this period “the third Renaissance.” Here’s a glimpse:
At Göttingen and Halle in the 18th century, and at Berlin and Bonn in the 19th, Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science — at a time when Harvard and Oxford were conservative and theology-centered. University grads staffed a new bureaucracy of experts, and their work in laboratories and archives made research “a rival form of authority in the world.” The universities also enshrined a new ideal of individual cultivation (the fetishized German word is “Bildung”). Germans from Kant to Mann embraced this “secular form of Pietism,” turning inward to find truths not anchored in reason or revelation — and often, like Mann in 1915, choosing mystical wholeness over messy liberal politics.
So how did all this happen? Well…
There’s a new thesis making the rounds that has already stimulated plenty of discussion about the benefits and costs of copyright laws. It comes from the German economic historian Eckhard Höffner, his work summarized in a Der Spiegel review titled “No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion.”
Höffner contends (according to the review) that the near absence of copyright law in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany laid the groundwork for the “Gründerzeit”—the enormous wave of economic growth that Deutschland experienced in the middle and later nineteenth century.
An “incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany” by the 1830s, Höffner notes. Some 14,000 publications appeared in the region in 1836, widely distributed thanks to the presence of “plagiarizers”—competing publishing houses unafraid of infringement suits. The result was a cheap mass book market catering to a huge reading public…
And this “lively scholarly discourse” didn’t just focus on poetry and philosophy. It included endless tomes about physics, chemistry, biology, and steel production—crucial subjects a nation would need to master to launch a top flight industrial revolution.
That’s right. They BitTorrented it.
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.
Publishers trying to sell ad space inside their books is like the producers of a TV show selling the commercials that air during the show, or the director of a film picking the previews that appear before the movie starts.
I mean, maybe there are some interesting, creative things you could do with that on a case-by-case basis, that would really add something to the total experience. And product placement (in books, TV, or movies) is something else altogether, because it needs to be incorporated into the narrative flow. But there’s a reason why we have TV networks, movie studios, and theater programmers. They’re really good at these things. In fact, some of them, like Nick Jr, are really good at marketing and incorporating ads in books and DVDs, too. So are Apple and Amazon. People on the creative side aren’t. (And yes, I’m including book publishers in the “creative” camp.)
If anything, even as traditional broadcast television might be beginning a slow decline, we’re seeing the metastasis of the television network model. Netflix, particularly since Watch Instantly, is more like HBO than it’s like Blockbuster. People talk about it the same way; “ooh, did you see that they’re showing all three Die Hards on Netflix?” Someone pointed out recently that Netflix has started producing their own original content. Zach Galifinakis had a comedy special released on DVD exclusively to Netflix. You could say the same thing about Hulu, which is trying to figure out whether it should be Showtime or Fox.
Amazon and Apple are like TV networks too, and not just for video. They’re the channels you tune to to get what you want. The difference is that in the digital age, content frequently appears in more than one place. But 1) that’s usually NOT true for what Apple sells, and Amazon’s been pushing for more exclusive deals too.
Twitter, too, isn’t microblogging or an archive of content — it’s a broadcast channel that carries its own water-cooler. And in blogs, Gawker (which already actually is a media network, including Gawker TV) is redesigning itself for bigger screens. highlighting “must-see” content to catch casual drop-in readers, a synthesis of blogs, magazines, and television
So that’s the new world: no more dot-coms, no more blogs, no more revolutionary retailers.* Instead, it’s all channels. We TiVo a handful of favorites and let ourselves flick through the rest.
* Obviously, all of these things will continue to exist and thrive. It’s just these are no longer the only metaphors/terms of art we have to talk about these emerging powers.
Paul Carr at TechCrunch has the best take on the “ads in books” hysteria kicked up by the WSJ (original article conveniently paywalled) I’ve read yet. It’s even smartly titled “Eat Pay Love“:
The crux of the argument is this: books are the only word-based medium currently free of advertising (unless you count the pages full of ads for other books at the back of most mass market paperbacks). This isn’t – as you might think – because ads kill our enjoyment of literature (many magazines publish fiction surrounded by commercial messages) but rather because until now it’s been difficult to sell ad space in books. The lead times in publishing – and the shelf-life of paperbacks – are simply too long to deliver timely commercial offerings: who hasn’t experienced the amusement of picking up an old paperback and being invited to send off for the previous title in the series for just 25c?
But now, thanks to e-readers, all that is changing. With electronic books, ads can be served dynamically, just like they are online – not only does that remove the problem of out-of-date ads being stuck in old books, but it also allows messages to be tailored to the individual reader. Those reading the Twilight books at the age of 14 can be sold make-up and shoes and all of the other things teenage girls need to attract their very own Edward. Meanwhile, those still reading the books at 35 can be sold cat food. Lots and lots of cat food.
Why, that sounds fantastic! What’s the problem again?
It’s a compelling argument, but like so many compelling arguments made about the future of books, it’s also hampered by consisting almost entirely of bullshit. For one thing, publishers are really not geared up to sell ads: they’d have to recruit armies of ad sales people who would be forced to actually sit down and read the novels and historical memoirs and chick-lit-churn-outs that they’d be selling against. Not going to happen.
Now that’s very true. That scenario will not happen.
If only there were some large company with a dominant position in the e-book business that had lots of demographic data about what you read and other things that you buy online who could whip up a smart software algorithm that automatically generated product recommendations based on this information, who’d be willing, I don’t know, to electronically host and deliver these ads in the e-books on behalf of the publishers, in exchange for a fee, or better terms on each sale of a book.
Yep, if there were a company or three like that in the e-book market today, then we’d be talking about something.
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?
