This blog post by Mary Scriver is an editorial with a lot of judging going on. I want to know why I have to limit my so-called real friends to relationships defined by the past. I do not want my grandmother's friends. I want my friends and who is qualified to tell me that my Internet friends are of less value and that they are plastic like legos. Is this to piss me off? I wish Tim will tell me but he will not. "Tell your story your way," is what he always says. "Mary did. Now, it is your turn." I have found many friends who are good friends and supportive human beings and I have found them through social networks. They are not legos. I resent being called one. I am their friend and I am not a plastic person or a cheap toy and I am not a Rolodex. No one uses a Rolodex no more.
There are other implications like the one where it is judging to say that my social network friends are like fundraising. Just because someone has found Cinematheque through a social network does that mean that their financial support is not supportive? it is safer to be on the Internet than it is to be where people can really hurt you if they have a mind to if they see you as being vulnerable. I am vulnerable. Multiple sclerosis is a disability. It gets worse and worse. Am I supposed to stay in my bedroom a shut in and cut off from the entire world because my Internet friends are not really friends and they are really legos? If the purpose was to piss me off it worked. Am I supposed to say that I am not worthy of having friends in the flesh because I can't always attend social events?
When you started reading this did you say to yourself that this writer is disabled? No because you did not know. I am treated with great equality by my social network friends and the disability only comes up every now and then. They see me as a person first and if they know about the MS it is not like the big deal it is when they know me sitting in a wheelchair. They do not feel sorry for me and I do not need or want their pity. I type with a pencil in my mouth. Does that make me into a thing that can only connect to other things? Why are we things and only people who know other people and are friends with them the old way when there were no computers can be friends and we are not really friends? Because people might not disclose on the social network? People do not always disclose face to face. Mary's aversion seems to me to be coming from a couple of places. One of them is generational where the word friend is supposed to mean sight-to-sight, flesh-to-flesh. In person. That is only one way of communicating. Am I not supposed to use the touch talker on my computer because it is not really talking and it is only a machine? I will not do it. I will use my touch talk machines TextSpeak and I will be heard by anyone I want to talk with. There are many ways to know people. I feel like Mary is putting one of the ways I find friends down and sort of making fun of it with disdain by putting me in the same category as a list. Am I an impersonal person who functions like a snap-together life?
One of my social network friends works for an airline and he has made it possible for me to travel to foreign countries. He has changed my life. He has removed barriers. Am I supposed to say that our relationship has no worth because it started on Facebook? The old way is always the better way. It is not better for me. I love computers. I have friends because of computers. Not many people know this but my friend at the airline has MS, too. We connected through a group. His MS is not as bad as mine and he can work. Are we not supposed to connect because we are just names on a list. Mary doesn't know what she is talking about. It is a complaint. If someone does not want to be on a social network who is holding a gun to their head to do it? But to put down a way many people use to make contact with other people is I think kind of mean.
Mattathias Athanasiou
(Matthathias is a member of Cinematheque in Paris. I have not edited whatsoever.)
Showing posts with label cyberculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberculture. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
A FRIEND IS NOT A LEGO
A friend is not a lego. Acquiring a friend is not like popping a peg into a hole. However, building a list of clients, customers, is very much like that. Computer geeks working for cyber-businesses assume that all lists are like that.
When our grandson was six years old, he spent the summer with us. When he settled down for the evening he would count his riches: “Today I made ten new friends, counting dogs.”
When I was trying to build a Unitarian Universalist community in Montana, I slowly accumulated a huge collection of 3 X 5 cards of people who had visited the services or who used to be members or who seemed like possible prospects. Also, I had parallel collections of sympathetic ministers of other denominations, informed reporters, printers who could do newsletters cheaply, and the like. What I was doing was “aggregating” and “curating.” That is, I was creating a mailing list and a contact list. The addresses all out of date now. Many of the people have died, but I haven’t thrown the cards out because I like to be reminded of the people.
In one of my recent BBC mysteries, the plot hinged on an old lady killed because she had memorized a list of “benefactors” who turned out to be drug dealers. Discovering this was a function of “curating.”
Business people have always guarded their Rolodexes. They are wise. In our sculpture days, we protected our secret sources, like who made P-300, the latex formula we used for antlers which made the little tourist deer and elk relatively unbreakable. Or where we bought the controlled carcinogenic substance that kept black tuffy mold material from distorting.
When a person is seriously fund-raising, as First Unitarian Church of Portland did in the days when they took money seriously, the committee sat down with the pledge cards (another version of the Rolodex cards except that they had the pledge records on them) and sorted them several different ways. First you skimmed off the high pledges and looked around at the committee to see who could most tactfully and successfully ask those people to renew or raise their pledges. Then you divvied up the cards so each person took a set of cards, representing contacts for them to make. The really hard core money raisers did a good deal of discrete investigation. A banker was an important member of the committee.
But the BEST churches had a second committee who took the same cards and re-sorted them according to their needs and styles. What could be done for this group with the resources they seem to have? Surveys were necessary, but since they never really tell you a lot more than the assumptions of the survey-maker, human interaction was crucial. Strangely, people who would visit to find out these things were harder to find than those raising money.
So now we come to the “friends” lists on Internet platforms, which amount to this kind of Rolodex building and targeting, right? But there is more involved than just raising money. In today’s political climate, Big Brother wants to know where you are, what you’re doing, who’s there with you, and why your hands aren’t up on top of the table where we can see them when the surveillance satellite flies over. And these lists are suddenly not voluntary. Even unlisted phone numbers are there, your house number even if you’re a famous movie star, the names and ages of your children, and -- if you’re willing to put out a bit of money -- more than even small town neighbors or your banker probably know about you, as indiscreet politicians are discovering when someone gets hold of a madam's Rolodex.
What we were doing when we worked on the fund-raising committee for the church is called “curating,” which is the evaluation of each entry on the list. But a computer is not a good curator. An algorithim is nothing less than a machine-made stereotype. When it sorts me one way (small town older woman), I’m sent apron patterns and pie recipes. When it sorts me another way (former minister, book buyer), I become the target for Christian publishing. (I’m not Christian. Machines don’t GET that.) When they realize that I have no money, I fall off their lists. (Whew!)
Not that human individuals don’t do the same thing, assuming all sorts of movie-inspired possibilities, maybe based on a photo from thirty years ago. And we know entirely too much about people who are using categories not to get money but to get or sell sex, especially indirectly like clothing and makeup.
So now we’re all urged to create our “platform,” which is little more than a can label for list makers and shelf stackers. Lists of literary agents show which categories of writing they will handle. There is no category for “good writing.” Rather it is YA, horror, romance, history, etc. and only “literary fiction” is supposed to signal “fine writing.” Everything is based on past products: one must not leave one’s platform.
The assumption of Facebook and Google Buzz is that you’re building a Rolodex list of interchangeable parts, like legos. A snap-together life where one doesn’t step out of one’s sociological demographic or one’s hierarchical level. I’ve spent my life fighting these assumptions, trying to break and escape templates. Even the counter-culture degenerated so that even it demanded conformity: certain way of dressing, certain hairdo, certain music.
Maybe having so many immigrants in the country contributes to this idea that there is a certain “way” to be American or even to be religious. The first generation is just trying to cope, but the second generation learns in junior high never to be too different. In my high school years (53-57) we were constantly urged to be “creative.” But one had to wear a certain kind of blouse with a circle pin on the correct side. When I was inspired by photos of English public school students to wear my father’s tartan tie instead of a circle pin, friendly people asked me whether I were being hazed by some club I wanted to join.
There’s a far less benign side to having one’s name and address suddenly put on a list developed by a stereotype. Ask the people whose criminal background is now published, like the sex offenders who get burned out by NIMBY arsonists. Ask the people who get stalked. Even I had hoped to escape some of the people in my past and I’ve had a relatively benign past. For marketing purposes it’s probably useless because there’s no platform.
So do NOT friend me, unless you really ARE my friend, my human, real, pulsing thinking friend. In that case, you’re on a very short list that I can easily remember, even including dogs.
When our grandson was six years old, he spent the summer with us. When he settled down for the evening he would count his riches: “Today I made ten new friends, counting dogs.”
When I was trying to build a Unitarian Universalist community in Montana, I slowly accumulated a huge collection of 3 X 5 cards of people who had visited the services or who used to be members or who seemed like possible prospects. Also, I had parallel collections of sympathetic ministers of other denominations, informed reporters, printers who could do newsletters cheaply, and the like. What I was doing was “aggregating” and “curating.” That is, I was creating a mailing list and a contact list. The addresses all out of date now. Many of the people have died, but I haven’t thrown the cards out because I like to be reminded of the people.
In one of my recent BBC mysteries, the plot hinged on an old lady killed because she had memorized a list of “benefactors” who turned out to be drug dealers. Discovering this was a function of “curating.”
Business people have always guarded their Rolodexes. They are wise. In our sculpture days, we protected our secret sources, like who made P-300, the latex formula we used for antlers which made the little tourist deer and elk relatively unbreakable. Or where we bought the controlled carcinogenic substance that kept black tuffy mold material from distorting.
When a person is seriously fund-raising, as First Unitarian Church of Portland did in the days when they took money seriously, the committee sat down with the pledge cards (another version of the Rolodex cards except that they had the pledge records on them) and sorted them several different ways. First you skimmed off the high pledges and looked around at the committee to see who could most tactfully and successfully ask those people to renew or raise their pledges. Then you divvied up the cards so each person took a set of cards, representing contacts for them to make. The really hard core money raisers did a good deal of discrete investigation. A banker was an important member of the committee.
But the BEST churches had a second committee who took the same cards and re-sorted them according to their needs and styles. What could be done for this group with the resources they seem to have? Surveys were necessary, but since they never really tell you a lot more than the assumptions of the survey-maker, human interaction was crucial. Strangely, people who would visit to find out these things were harder to find than those raising money.
So now we come to the “friends” lists on Internet platforms, which amount to this kind of Rolodex building and targeting, right? But there is more involved than just raising money. In today’s political climate, Big Brother wants to know where you are, what you’re doing, who’s there with you, and why your hands aren’t up on top of the table where we can see them when the surveillance satellite flies over. And these lists are suddenly not voluntary. Even unlisted phone numbers are there, your house number even if you’re a famous movie star, the names and ages of your children, and -- if you’re willing to put out a bit of money -- more than even small town neighbors or your banker probably know about you, as indiscreet politicians are discovering when someone gets hold of a madam's Rolodex.
What we were doing when we worked on the fund-raising committee for the church is called “curating,” which is the evaluation of each entry on the list. But a computer is not a good curator. An algorithim is nothing less than a machine-made stereotype. When it sorts me one way (small town older woman), I’m sent apron patterns and pie recipes. When it sorts me another way (former minister, book buyer), I become the target for Christian publishing. (I’m not Christian. Machines don’t GET that.) When they realize that I have no money, I fall off their lists. (Whew!)
Not that human individuals don’t do the same thing, assuming all sorts of movie-inspired possibilities, maybe based on a photo from thirty years ago. And we know entirely too much about people who are using categories not to get money but to get or sell sex, especially indirectly like clothing and makeup.
So now we’re all urged to create our “platform,” which is little more than a can label for list makers and shelf stackers. Lists of literary agents show which categories of writing they will handle. There is no category for “good writing.” Rather it is YA, horror, romance, history, etc. and only “literary fiction” is supposed to signal “fine writing.” Everything is based on past products: one must not leave one’s platform.
The assumption of Facebook and Google Buzz is that you’re building a Rolodex list of interchangeable parts, like legos. A snap-together life where one doesn’t step out of one’s sociological demographic or one’s hierarchical level. I’ve spent my life fighting these assumptions, trying to break and escape templates. Even the counter-culture degenerated so that even it demanded conformity: certain way of dressing, certain hairdo, certain music.
Maybe having so many immigrants in the country contributes to this idea that there is a certain “way” to be American or even to be religious. The first generation is just trying to cope, but the second generation learns in junior high never to be too different. In my high school years (53-57) we were constantly urged to be “creative.” But one had to wear a certain kind of blouse with a circle pin on the correct side. When I was inspired by photos of English public school students to wear my father’s tartan tie instead of a circle pin, friendly people asked me whether I were being hazed by some club I wanted to join.
There’s a far less benign side to having one’s name and address suddenly put on a list developed by a stereotype. Ask the people whose criminal background is now published, like the sex offenders who get burned out by NIMBY arsonists. Ask the people who get stalked. Even I had hoped to escape some of the people in my past and I’ve had a relatively benign past. For marketing purposes it’s probably useless because there’s no platform.
So do NOT friend me, unless you really ARE my friend, my human, real, pulsing thinking friend. In that case, you’re on a very short list that I can easily remember, even including dogs.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
LEAPING INTO THE FUTURE
Technically, the first computers I knew anything about were punch cards that the principal in the 1960’s used to sort the kids into classes. The edges of the cards had holes or notches, corresponding to today’s X and O, and one stuck an awl through so that only the holes were lifted out.
At seminary (1980) when I was a typist for the U of Chicago Law School, we were on computer “stations” with the hard drive in some mysterious place far away -- like the basement. The directions were complex and touchy, but it was where I learned keyboarding as opposed to typing. I did both and my appreciation of keyboarding (which was only available for senior professor manuscripts) was the insistence of the junior faculty on error-free letters. I am not an error-free typist.
Then a centralized computer system, linked to banks of stations, was made available to students. One unfortunate typed in his thesis, only to have some line length command go wrong: every line was one letter shorter than the one before until it dwindled down to one letter and then zero letters. Talk about your long tail.
When I was teaching at Heart Butte (1989), I fell upon the little Macintoshes with glee. But the administration only recognized IBM as “real” computers and refused to support the lovable little boxes. Nothing daunted, I spent my own money and so did the kids, who learned operation far more quickly than they learned grammar and gave the computer a virus within two weeks.
When I was fired (1991), I invested some of my last money in a LISA, which I operated next to my mother’s washing machine in her basement in Portland, because that was the only three-prong plug in the house. It was that machine I was using when I first went online, making contact with a network of some kind in Dillon which caused me to burst into tears. Then I found the Native American bulletin boards and became Prairie Mary.
After getting a database entry job working for the City of Portland (1992), I could afford another Mac and it’s been slowly newer Macs ever since. I even went to PMUG meetings (Portland Macintosh User Group) and got a discount on discs which were quickly piling up. I was using the hard 3.5 discs at home and we used the bigger “floppies” at work. Then the City went to a centralized Oracle set-up and all was chaos for months. By this time I was working as cashier for the Bureau of Buildings and aware that if the public knew how muddled everything was, there would be lawsuits. When we had earlier developed an algorithm for finding deadbeat landlords and acted on it, we did get sued.
So here I sit (since 1999), retired, at last free to think with a computer that will let me do it publicly, part of a planetary network of affinity groups and linked to a co-writer I’ve never met (Tim Barrus) because he mostly lives in Paris when he’s not traveling. I’ve quit traveling. After ten years of traveling to preach, blogging means the same amount of writing and, blessedly, no driving.
This trip through the past is nothing compared to the shifting world of literature but fewer people realize the changes. This story happens on several levels, like three-dimensional chess, which interact with each other to constantly create new things. The levels I am aware of so far are: content, technical, marketing. There will be more.
In the past "literary" books have been controlled by publishers or sometimes universities. Publishers staked out a territory and provided capital to “feed” books into that venue. The most respected was, of course, in England. Next after that, esp. when the WWII intelligentsia of Europe had fled to New York City, it was Manhattan. Manhattan and the area within commuting distance, like Connecticut or Long Island, became the Wall Street of books. High school teachers who read magazines like Time or Harper’s revered the writers based in this culture and taught us to aspire to it. That ideal was dispersed by two forces: corporation ownership of publishers and Internet impact on sales, which made access to used books practical, undermining traditional bookstores. The diminishment of newspapers with review sections also hurt.
But what has really challenged publishing is Print on Demand, books that are entirely electronic and read on computers, and self-publishing. Also, the shift from physical books stored in warehouses and taxed as property to books as “potential” databases has muddled business models.
Now we are in a position to entirely bypass publishers and are dumped into chaos again. The model is music, which has become the compelling base of younger culture, displacing television. When music went from 78 to 33 1/2 to 8-track to cassette to MP3 and then to viral transmission through the Internet, it showed the way. They’ve taken the ride from radio to television to cable to satellite. At the same time the music went from one genre to another, reaching out to world music sources. We aren’t even close to a “pause” in development yet. Innovations tumble out all the time.
It has escaped some that content of literature has shifted. What was largely a print industry has gone to image: movies, television, computer screen, and now small handheld media like iPhone, iPod, and other permutations reminiscent of Dick Tracy’s wrist-radio. I worry that all these tech innovations will belong to the young only and then only to the affluent young. But street urchins “magically” acquire the devices and figure it out toot sweet. And grandmas want email from descendants.
This has impact. A story this morning says that the simplest solution to the cryptic and problematic nature of police communication -- to say nothing of the public nature of radio -- is simple: cell phones. Which means that plain English works, which means that there is now again a market for someone who can teach it.
That won’t include me. I’m not quite techie enough to make videos, but I finally signed up for DSL so I could watch them. I do BLOGS, which in my case means 1,000 word essays daily. Barrus and Cinematheque do VLOGS, which are blogs with videos embedded in them. When I get enough pretty good blogs, I compile them into BLOOKS, available through www.lulu.com/prairiemary. Now Tim and guys are creating VOOKS which are online books with embedded video. I’m contributing to them in a literary genre called “metafiction” in which part of the writing comments on other parts of the writing.
They write transgressive stuff, wild romance and forbidden adventure -- which is what they know. I drag in high-falutin’ theories and moral issues. Barrus is the interface. Surprisingly, the boys welcome this. They worry about the nature of God, the meaning of existence, how to achieve true intimacy, and where this universe is heading. Don’t we all? We must learn from each other.
At seminary (1980) when I was a typist for the U of Chicago Law School, we were on computer “stations” with the hard drive in some mysterious place far away -- like the basement. The directions were complex and touchy, but it was where I learned keyboarding as opposed to typing. I did both and my appreciation of keyboarding (which was only available for senior professor manuscripts) was the insistence of the junior faculty on error-free letters. I am not an error-free typist.
Then a centralized computer system, linked to banks of stations, was made available to students. One unfortunate typed in his thesis, only to have some line length command go wrong: every line was one letter shorter than the one before until it dwindled down to one letter and then zero letters. Talk about your long tail.
When I was teaching at Heart Butte (1989), I fell upon the little Macintoshes with glee. But the administration only recognized IBM as “real” computers and refused to support the lovable little boxes. Nothing daunted, I spent my own money and so did the kids, who learned operation far more quickly than they learned grammar and gave the computer a virus within two weeks.
When I was fired (1991), I invested some of my last money in a LISA, which I operated next to my mother’s washing machine in her basement in Portland, because that was the only three-prong plug in the house. It was that machine I was using when I first went online, making contact with a network of some kind in Dillon which caused me to burst into tears. Then I found the Native American bulletin boards and became Prairie Mary.
After getting a database entry job working for the City of Portland (1992), I could afford another Mac and it’s been slowly newer Macs ever since. I even went to PMUG meetings (Portland Macintosh User Group) and got a discount on discs which were quickly piling up. I was using the hard 3.5 discs at home and we used the bigger “floppies” at work. Then the City went to a centralized Oracle set-up and all was chaos for months. By this time I was working as cashier for the Bureau of Buildings and aware that if the public knew how muddled everything was, there would be lawsuits. When we had earlier developed an algorithm for finding deadbeat landlords and acted on it, we did get sued.
So here I sit (since 1999), retired, at last free to think with a computer that will let me do it publicly, part of a planetary network of affinity groups and linked to a co-writer I’ve never met (Tim Barrus) because he mostly lives in Paris when he’s not traveling. I’ve quit traveling. After ten years of traveling to preach, blogging means the same amount of writing and, blessedly, no driving.
This trip through the past is nothing compared to the shifting world of literature but fewer people realize the changes. This story happens on several levels, like three-dimensional chess, which interact with each other to constantly create new things. The levels I am aware of so far are: content, technical, marketing. There will be more.
In the past "literary" books have been controlled by publishers or sometimes universities. Publishers staked out a territory and provided capital to “feed” books into that venue. The most respected was, of course, in England. Next after that, esp. when the WWII intelligentsia of Europe had fled to New York City, it was Manhattan. Manhattan and the area within commuting distance, like Connecticut or Long Island, became the Wall Street of books. High school teachers who read magazines like Time or Harper’s revered the writers based in this culture and taught us to aspire to it. That ideal was dispersed by two forces: corporation ownership of publishers and Internet impact on sales, which made access to used books practical, undermining traditional bookstores. The diminishment of newspapers with review sections also hurt.
But what has really challenged publishing is Print on Demand, books that are entirely electronic and read on computers, and self-publishing. Also, the shift from physical books stored in warehouses and taxed as property to books as “potential” databases has muddled business models.
Now we are in a position to entirely bypass publishers and are dumped into chaos again. The model is music, which has become the compelling base of younger culture, displacing television. When music went from 78 to 33 1/2 to 8-track to cassette to MP3 and then to viral transmission through the Internet, it showed the way. They’ve taken the ride from radio to television to cable to satellite. At the same time the music went from one genre to another, reaching out to world music sources. We aren’t even close to a “pause” in development yet. Innovations tumble out all the time.
It has escaped some that content of literature has shifted. What was largely a print industry has gone to image: movies, television, computer screen, and now small handheld media like iPhone, iPod, and other permutations reminiscent of Dick Tracy’s wrist-radio. I worry that all these tech innovations will belong to the young only and then only to the affluent young. But street urchins “magically” acquire the devices and figure it out toot sweet. And grandmas want email from descendants.
This has impact. A story this morning says that the simplest solution to the cryptic and problematic nature of police communication -- to say nothing of the public nature of radio -- is simple: cell phones. Which means that plain English works, which means that there is now again a market for someone who can teach it.
That won’t include me. I’m not quite techie enough to make videos, but I finally signed up for DSL so I could watch them. I do BLOGS, which in my case means 1,000 word essays daily. Barrus and Cinematheque do VLOGS, which are blogs with videos embedded in them. When I get enough pretty good blogs, I compile them into BLOOKS, available through www.lulu.com/prairiemary. Now Tim and guys are creating VOOKS which are online books with embedded video. I’m contributing to them in a literary genre called “metafiction” in which part of the writing comments on other parts of the writing.
They write transgressive stuff, wild romance and forbidden adventure -- which is what they know. I drag in high-falutin’ theories and moral issues. Barrus is the interface. Surprisingly, the boys welcome this. They worry about the nature of God, the meaning of existence, how to achieve true intimacy, and where this universe is heading. Don’t we all? We must learn from each other.
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