The Way We Live Now Archives
July 19, 2010
Posted at 3:53 PM in The Way We Live Now
There's a stack of publishers' catalogs on my desk at work nearly a foot high. There are 5, 645 messages in my mail inbox. My family's digital photo archives contain about 13,000 pictures--and my kids are only in elementary school. You don't want to know how many scraps of paper I have on my desk at home, waiting for me to sort through and file or (more likely) recycle them. I have far more ideas for stories, fiction and non, than I've made time for yet. The list goes on.
Welcome to my personal version of hyperabundance. It's been a personal preoccupation lately but also a professional one, as the term has been turning up a lot lately in conversations I have and conferences I go to. Hyperabundance was front and center at the Association of American University Presses conference I covered in June in Salt Lake City, where Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communication for the National Academies Press, led a brainstorming session on hyperabundance and publishing. Scholarly publishers, who specialize in material that has a small target audience to begin with, feel especially vulnerable to hyperabundance these days. If the world is drowning in too much information, your monograph stands even less chance of finding an audience and a market.
I thought about hyperabundance as I was reviewing Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and William Powers's Hamlet's BlackBerry for the Washington Post. (Read the review here.) Both books confront the digital overload a lot of us deal with every time we switch on our computers or power up our iPhones. There's too much information and chatter out there, the argument goes, and we spend too much time getting distracted by it, which means we're not spending enough time concentrating on the skills and activities that really matter: deep reading, sustained focus, creative thinking. Partly as a result of Carr's book, there has been a hyperabundance of commentary about what the internet is doing to our brains.
If you read my Post review, you'll see that I have some serious reservations about Carr's argument, how he makes it, and just how much of the world it really applies to. I also think it's an important conversation to have, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time navigating digital seas of information.
Here's a proposal. I am not going to recommend that you unplug or de-digitize your life. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the intellectual and digital clutter, the hyperabundance of commentary about hyperabundance, try thinking of the problem in terms of scarcity, the antimatter to hyperabundance's matter. Don't list, as I tend to do, all the things you have too much of (tasks, email, ideas, obligations, articles and stories and blog posts to write and to read). What do you wish you had more of? Is it time, the most precious of mortal commodities? Patience? Readers? Money? Satisfying reads? Books with your name on them? If you have time, let me know what's underwhelming you--what you don't have enough of. But I'll understand if you decide to go read a book instead, even if it's The Shallows.
Now, if I can just get to Inbox 0.
January 7, 2010
Posted at 9:36 AM in The Way We Live Now
Happy New Year, everyone. Like a lot of people I know, I was not sorry to see the back of 2009, a year in which some very unpleasant things--personal, financial, global--occurred. There were good moments, too, which I try to remember to be grateful for--catastrophes narrowly avoided, for instance, and some fiction published.
Even though a new year is supposed to be a clean slate, a fresh start, there's always some lingering business from the old year to wrap up. I finished the year, as I have for the last 5 years, at the Modern Language Association's annual conference. The 2007 conference nearly broke my spirit. The 2008 confab, held in San Francisco, was better, even if I did blow out my knee climbing up Nob Hill in the wrong pair of shoes.
And the 2009 gathering, held in Philadelphia? The humanities job market gets gloomier all the time, but the meeting was a good one. Happy, even, in its hyper-theorized way. The official theme this year was translation, but the digital humanities made a robust showing. The unlikely star of the conference was a visiting assistant professor who couldn't afford to attend in person but whose paper on contingent-faculty hell, read in absentia, rocked the academic Twittersphere and provoked a lively conversation that's still going on, mostly on blogs now, a week after the conference ended. And Twitter itself, and the way it and other social media added layers of conviviality and interaction to the proceedings, added another story line to the narrative arc of the conference.
All in all, a good MLA, maybe even a very good one, and one that marked a turning point in scholarly communication, at least from where I stand. There won't be an MLA meeting in 2010, because the conference is moving to January. Thank god. Something to look forward to next year.
Meanwhile, enjoy 2010, everybody. I hope it treats you and yours well.
March 2, 2009
Posted at 8:39 AM in The Way We Live Now
At the 2009 WebWise Conference on Museums and Libraries in the Digital Age, held here in D.C. last week, I collected a new term: switch-tasking. Definition? Instead of doing a number of things all at once--multitasking--you rotate among tasks. I haven't figured out yet whether the difference is more semantic than substantive, but it's worth thinking about.
The conference itself was fascinating, as much for the anthropology of it as for the substance. Here's part of the report I posted to the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog:
If you’re used to the decorum of a big academic conference—the Modern Language Association’s annual confab, for instance—the atmostphere at the WebWise Conference ... comes as a bit of a shock. No more furtive tapping away at your laptop in the dark corners of meeting rooms. Laptops are not only tolerated at WebWise, they’re practically mandatory.
At this year’s WebWise conference, held here Feb. 26-27, the organizers—the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Wolfsonian museum at Florida International University—arranged for a designated conference wifi connection. They also set up a backchannel Twitter-style feed (via a service called Today’s Meet) where attendees kept up a lively running dialogue in short-message form during the presentations. Many were tweeting at the same time, tagging their posts to create a running Twitter stream of commentary and i-reports. (Twitter also turns out to be a handy way to solicit local restaurant recommendations.)
February 12, 2009
Posted at 3:01 PM in The Way We Live Now
Dear Facebook:
I am not my music, even though I sometimes wish I were. I do not want to share 25 random facts about myself with even one other person, much less 139 of them. I do not want you to help me create my Witness Protection Program name. I do not want to know which English word I am. Don't get me started about the whole Superpoke business.
Can't I just use you? Keep your memes to yourself and we can make this thing work.
Your friend,
JHoward
September 19, 2008
Posted at 11:22 AM in The Way We Live Now
It not just Emoticon Day, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day. Please don't.
Posted at 10:36 AM in The Way We Live Now
Sept. 19, 1982: The electronic smiley face makes its debut. Interpersonal communication will never be the same again.
September 18, 2008
Posted at 10:39 AM in The Way We Live Now
The Espresso Book Machine, coming soon to a library near you? In 5-7 minutes, the Espresso will deliver a printed-and-bound copy of any book you like (as long as it's out of copyright and available in digital form through a collection the machine can access).
The Espresso's manufacturer, On Demand Books*, has big dreams for it, imagining a global network of machines in libraries and bookstores. "What Gutenberg’s press did for Europe in the 15th century, digitization and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow."
Okay then! Still, a cool idea. More love for the Espresso here and here.
*On Demand Books was co-founded by Jason Epstein, formerly editorial director of Random House, and a founder of the New York Review of Books. (I worked for his ex-wife, Barbara Epstein, at the NYRB long ago, but that's a story for another time.) The On Demand site links to a letter he wrote to the WSJ in May. In it, he predicts a print-rich POD future in which "a multilingual, deep backlist will reside on Web sites of related interest, as well as with aggregators--and be transmitted on demand as swiftly as email..."
September 11, 2008
Posted at 9:24 AM in The Way We Live Now
Yup, if Salman Rushdie, editor of this year's Best American Short Stories, is to be believed:
Q.What do the themes in this year's best stories show about American culture today?
A. There's clearly an interest in domestic subjects, religious subjects, and, most mysteriously, in the game of golf. But there were enough wilder, more imaginative fictions to satisfy my taste for that kind of thing.
Yeah, we're all about the golf, we are. Just ask anybody.
Then again, ask a dumb question....
Hey, has anybody mentioned that Rushdie didn't make the shortlist for the Booker this year?
August 27, 2008
Posted at 2:39 PM in The Way We Live Now
I don't know about you, but I have been underwhelmed by Twitter as a vehicle for political coverage. Just because everybody's doing it doesn't mean it's a good idea. Does "twittering" sound like serious reportage to you?
Twittered literature, however--now there's an idea with legs. Call it twitlit. Maud Newton notes that, so far, we have twittered versions of Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost, and William Blake. Others?
August 21, 2008
Posted at 2:32 PM in The Way We Live Now
That's conventional as in conventions, "stultifying media spectacles where no one expects anything to happen." So says Chris Lehmann in a Q&A posted today by Harper's. Chris is a senior editor at CQ, the nonfiction editor of Booforum, and a very sharp guy. (He's also a good friend of mine from my Book World days, but I would flag this even if I didn't know him.)
From "Six Questions for Chris Lehmann on 'Moronic' Campaign Coverage and the 'Press Bubble' ":
6. But don't these narratives sometime become self-fulfilling prophecies?
Yes, and the distressing proof text of that argument is the 2000 election. It's not a stretch to say that the media largely defeated Al Gore. They burrowed in with these idiotic memes about him being uncomfortable in his own skin and about his claiming to have invented the Internet and Naomi Wolf advising him on how to be a he-man. Most of it wasn't even true, but that didn't matter because the press is so invested in its own narrative that it all becomes self-fulfilling; these things are repeated like mantras. In the same way, it never seems to matter that John McCain is the wealthier candidate and represents economic interests that are in many ways aristocratic; it's always Barack Obama who is the "elitist."
(Via Romanesko.)
August 11, 2008
Posted at 9:20 PM in The Way We Live Now
From the cover of the September issue of Lucky: "Milla Jovovich gets sexier and sexier."
Hey, it's a living.
August 1, 2008
Posted at 7:34 AM in The Way We Live Now
We're headed to Blueberries for Sal country--Maine, somewhere around here--for an actual vacation, so posting will be intermittent or possibly even nonexistent until Aug. 13, when we're back in swampy, mosquito-filled D.C. See you then!
Though the bear in Blueberries for Sal was imagined, the rest of the story was completely real. McCloskey has pictured his own daughter in Sal, and his late wife, Peggy, is the mother in the story. The kitchen illustrated in the endpapers is their own, although the fascinating old stove is like the one that was in Peggy McCloskey's mother's home in Hancock, Maine.
May 1, 2008
Posted at 3:06 PM in The Way We Live Now
Yesterday was International Anti-Noise Day. If only I'd known. Greg McNamee has a quiet meditation on our noisy lives over at Britannica Blog. Read it in a quiet place, if you can find one.
