Culture

Online Life Is Real Life, Aleph-Nought in a Series

drorzel — Sun, 25 Sep 2016 05:45:37 +0000

Online Life Is Real Life, Aleph-Nought in a Series

Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me-- in a friendly way-- about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) "When are you guys going to have another baby?" she would ask, and I always said "We're thinking about it."

About a week passed between the last time we had that exchange and the day I came in and taped ultrasound photos of the prenatal Little Dude to my door. "You sonofabitch!," she said (again, in a friendly way), "You were expecting this whole time!" "Yeah," I said, "but we weren't telling anyone until now."

I thought of this while I was reading John Scalzi's epic post about self-presentation, prompted by someone who complained that he behaved differently in person than that person had expected from Scalzi's online persona. (Personally, having met John in person several times, I don't see it, but whatever...) Scalzi rightly notes that there's nothing at all wrong with this, and that much of the difference is (probably) just basic courtesy and politeness.

This is not remotely a new argument, as you probably got from my snarky post title-- it's come around before, and will come around again. I side with Scalzi in thinking that there's nothing wrong with presenting yourself in a slightly different way online than off. I'd go maybe a little further than that, though, and note that presenting yourself in different ways to different people is something we do all the time, even in strictly offline interactions.

This made me think about the incident with our former admin, which is a bit of an extreme example, but illustrates the point. At home, Kate and I had obviously known about the proto-Pip for a couple of months, and were making all sorts of plans and so on. But while I cheerfully talked at some length about SteelyKid, I dodged any questions about future kids, because Kate and I had agreed that we weren't making it public, yet. I think our parents knew (but I don't recall the exact timing), but it wasn't something going out on the blog or even to people I spent a lot of time talking to at work.

And basically anyone who ins't a phenomenal boor modifies their self-presentation in this sort of way. If you have a job and family, there are things you just aren't allowed to share with people outside those contexts, and that modifies your interaction with different groups. I talk about campus life in a different way when I'm with a bunch of students than when I'm with fellow faculty, for example. Milder versions that don't involve trade secrets also happen all the time: when we're with friends who share a particular interest, we play up that interest, and play down other things-- I talk a lot about sports at the gym with the regular pick-up basketball crowd, but sports aren't as big a topic around the physics department. Even when we don't have the Internet as an intermediary, we're slightly different things to different groups of people, because that's one of the things that lets human society function.

This is something we do so smoothly that we're often not really aware of it, which is why so many people think it's an online-only phenomenon. But if you think about it a little, it's probably not hard to come up with offline examples of people who behave very differently in different contexts. Even people who insist that they present themselves the same way in all possible situations almost certainly change the way they talk and what they talk about when they go from home, to work, to whatever they do for fun. It's just how we work, and sticking a computer in the middle doesn't fundamentally change that.

You might argue that, by removing some of the non-verbal cues and ingrained rules about in-person interactions, the Internet enables a bigger disconnect between on- and off-line personae than are possible in a strictly offline context. I'm not entirely sure I buy that, though, because I've seen some pretty extreme divergences in offline-only interactions. (And, of course, there's the "He was such a quiet guy..." trope about serial killers and the like.) What's different about the Internet is the possibility of exposing these different personae to the whole world, rather than a small group of close acquaintances who might happen to run into a person in two different subgroups.

But that's another topic. The main point at the moment is that I agree with Scalzi: there's nothing inappropriate about self-presenting in a different way in person than online. Mostly because that sort of shifting is a phenomenon that pre-dates the Internet by a good many years.

drorzel Sun, 09/25/2016 - 01:45

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I agree we are in some ways quite diferent people with different groups of friends, colleagues, family, to the extent that it can be disconcerting when people who know those different sides of us meet. People wo do not realise this are just not very self-aware.

i was talking to my wife about this other day. just because i'm nice to you online doesn't mean i think you are awesome and want to act like we're friends and you know what's going on in my life. this seems pretty obvious to a blogger, but most people aren't bloggers.

This is not really a substantial comment, but I think I'm going to have to nitpick the title and point out that &aleph;_0 is a cardinal rather than an ordinal. (Yes, you can abuse it to mean ω, but...)

Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension

drorzel — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 11:04:12 +0000

Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.

Tourists taking photos of each other in the Forum.

I thought of this (and went to the trouble of cropping down one of those shots for the image above) because The Conversation ran a more-erudite-than-average "kids these days" piece with the dramatic headline "What’s lost when we photograph life instead of experiencing it?" While this drops a few references to modern neuroscience to claim that constant distraction is reshaping our brains for the worse, the central complaint is a fuzzier one: that the sort of self-presentation involved in taking and sharing photos at famous sites is Bad.

In pursuit of digital affirmation, even ordinary experiences become fodder for photographs.

Instead of staying present – being (and really observing) where we are – our impulse is to capitalize on all lived experiences as an opportunity to represent and express ourselves visually. Part of what’s troubling about this kind of tenacious documentation is the thin line between representation or expression and – as with the “Snap Pack” – the marketing or commodification of everyday life.

Personal photo collections, publicized through applications like Instagram and Facebook, risk primarily becoming a tool for self-promotion. The ability to constantly measure public feedback for each posted photograph enables, and may encourage, users to tweak visual representations of their own lives in an effort to simply maximize a positive response.

Now, obviously, as somebody who took 1600 photos on a one-week trip to Rome, and posted a whole bunch of them on the Internet, I'm obviously going to bristle at this a bit. I don't have a very concrete idea of what "staying present – being (and really observing) where we are" is supposed to mean, but it's not at all clear to me that my photographic activity is impairing that. On the contrary, I would be somewhat inclined to argue that taking all those pictures enhances the experience, at least for me (the effect might be less positive for Kate, having to wait while I futz around with photography...). Finding the right angle, lighting, and framing to get an image that captures a particular moment-- or even just lends itself to a flippant photo caption-- requires a level of closer observation than I might otherwise give some of these sites.

And, yes, when I select a subset of those photos to present on the Internet, that's an act of carefully curated self-presentation, both through the images I choose and the words I use to describe them. I picked the photos in Monday's blog post and the jokes in that album of art pictures as a way of putting forward a certain image of myself to the Internet-- what I find aesthetically interesting, what I like in art and history, what I find funny. Which is hopefully appealing to a particular subset of people who will read and link and leave appreciative comments, and generally think well of me.

I absolutely agree that self-presentation is a big piece of what's going on, here, but I would also argue that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything particularly new about it-- the genre of self-presentation through carefully curated travel narrative goes back well before the invention of cameras, let alone smart phones. The idea of going to famous places and presenting a particular image of yourself by exhaustively documenting your reaction to them was already firmly established 150 years ago when Mark Twain got a really good book out of spoofing it.

You could argue, of course, that The Innocents Abroad is also a carefully curated work of self-presentation on Twain's part, and I'll happily agree with that. For that matter, writing a blog post about how selfie-snapping tourists are Doing It Wrong is also engaging in the same sort of activity.

A better counter might be to note that my blogging-and-photo-captioning is not remotely in Twain's league (another point I won't contest at all), and I think this hits closer to the heart of the matter. That is, I think the core complaint of the "photo-sharing is Bad" crowd is not so much about the fact that people are engaged in self-presentation through image curation-- that's an activity we're all engaged in, all the time. I think the fundamental complaint driving these thinkpieces is that it's being done by the wrong people.

That is, when somebody with intellectual heft does it-- a Mark Twain, or a Robert Hughes, or even a Ph.D. candidate at a major university-- silently contemplates a cultural object without electronic aids, and shares it later in a more traditional channel, then it's important and worthwhile. A random tourist snapping selfies, though, is crass and shallow and insufficiently engaged with Experiencing the Moment. The problem with cameraphone technology and photo-sharing apps isn't that they created self-promoting self-presentation-- ostentatious intellectuals have been carefully curating their images by publicly sharing their cultural experiences for centuries. The problem with technology is that it's democratized that process, making it trivially easy for any yob with an iPhone to seek affirmation from their friends by presenting themselves as the sort of person who visits Important Cultural Sites.

I'm obviously choosing to frame this in the most unflattering way possible-- that curation activity again-- but these kinds of pieces push a lot of my buttons. To start with, there's the Luddite element of pretending that online life is less "real" than unplugged activities, which always gets my back up. More than that, though, at their heart, these essays seem to me to flow from a deep vein of elitism that runs through not just academia but the segment of modern society that self-presents as intellectual-- people who read and re-share the nebulous collection of smart-people magazines and websites that run pieces decrying the pernicious effect of Internet technologies on modern life.

Now, I'm not denying at all that the people who rail against selfie-snapping find some ineffable benefit in slow and silent contemplation, that would be lost to electronic intermediaries. I can't quite fathom what that is, but I take them at their word on that, and believe that it's true to the sort of people they choose to be.

What I object to is the presumption that this ineffable benefit is something universal, and those who aren't seeking it out are Doing something Wrong. Because this is ultimately a question of personal aesthetics, and those are highly variable. If some other subset of the population finds that their experience of culture is enhanced by taking selfies and sharing them with friends via social media, well, that's just fine, because they're not the same kind of people. It's just as viable and valid a set of personal preferences, and so long as it doesn't intrude on the ability of others to enjoy the same culture in their own way (I've had a few close calls with selfie sticks wielded by inattentive tourists), it's every bit as deserving of respect.

The critical stance of the standard cell-phones-ruin-everything essay, though, is based on the idea that people who use their phones to do the same thing that travelogue writers have been doing for centuries are Wrong because they're not approaching and experiencing culture in the same manner as an ostentatious intellectual. It's an attempt to elevate the aesthetic preferences of academics to a human universal, and denigrate the preferences of wide ranges of other people as lesser. It's an attitude toward the public at large that I find condescending, bordering on contemptuous, and its prevalence in academia is a constant low-level irritant.

(I should note that this, too, is not especially new. Twain's book devotes no small amount of space to lampooning and lamenting the crass and shallow among his fellow travelers. I'm inclined to think it's gotten a bit worse of late, thanks to a variety of network effects that are well discussed elsewhere, but I could easily be wrong about that.)

Now, am I going to make a big pitch for the underappreciated aesthetics of a well-chosen Instagram selfie? No, not really. It's not my thing-- of the 1600-odd photos of Rome on my camera and smartphone, the number with me in them probably doesn't crack double digits, and several of those are group photos with my friends from college who I only see once or twice a year.

At the same time, though, if that's what floats your boat, go nuts. I mean, I'd prefer it if people could keep their selfie sticks the hell out of my photo frames, and well clear of my head, but the quality of an aesthetic experience is ultimately a very subjective thing, and if having a duckface selfie in front of the Arch of Septimus Severus enhances your experience of the Forum, more power to you. Be who you are, where you are, share it with your friends, and don't waste time worrying about people who self-present as grumpy academics.

drorzel Wed, 06/29/2016 - 07:04

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Back in the days when cameras used photographic film, a professional photographer providing content for a magazine article (e.g., National Geographic) would typically take hundreds of photos, knowing that only ten or (if they were lucky) twenty of them would actually appear in the article. Amateur photographers like you or me could not afford the expense and weight of carrying all those film canisters around, so we'd be lucky to get a few dozen pictures over the course of a week's vacation. Most people tried to make every shot count.

Digital photography changed all that. Now, anyone who is so inclined can take hundreds of photographs, as you did in Rome, if they are so inclined. You can always delete your mistakes, at a total cost of only a few seconds of your time.

Of course this has its downsides, among them the phenomenon of selfies. But in the film days tourists would often try to get members of their party in some of the shots, and some cameras had timers that would effectively let the photographer be in the photo, so the selfie phenomenon isn't new, just more prevalent.

Balanced against that, artistic photography is a much more accessible hobby than it was 20 years ago. I have a nice photo from 2006 of the sun setting into the Pacific Ocean off Sonoma County, which photo I used as my desktop background for a few years. I took between 10 and 15 photos to get that shot. You probably take several photos of things you want to photograph as well. Of course you're only showing the best results--that's normal for artists.

Is there a reason you choose stills to video? (Other than being what you have.)

I'm generally not a big fan of video-- too much of a time and attention commitment. My first choice of medium is always prose, with still images to supplement as needed. I can read and look at pictures a lot faster than most videos I've seen can do a coherent story. And cutting together a coherent video from a bunch of clips at a bunch of different locations is vastly more difficult than collecting together still images from those same places.

There are some things for which video is the best choice, but it's a little out of my comfort zone.

Why take a photo of The Forum? Aren't there plenty of photos of it already? There's nothing unique or special about such a photo. I once had a brief dispute with someone on the internet (casting a broad net there, I know) on photo copyright, because we had each taken a photo of a particular feature of Uluru, and our photos looked the same. What are the odds? Well, actually they are pretty good.

A photo of a thing with yourself or a friend in it, however, is a rather different beast. That *is* a unique, special thing, an image that could only have been captured at one particular place and time, in one particular set of circumstances. Details like the clothing the person is wearing matter and make the photo a distinct thing.

And that's what the 'selfie of a famous landmark' is about. It's the selfie that makes the difference between your photo and anyone else's.

"On the contrary, I would be somewhat inclined to argue that taking all those pictures enhances the experience,"

I would say it depends. If whoever is taking the shots simply snaps and moves on to another, without thought of what they are including or how it looks, I can't see much enhancement - and when, or if, shots taken that way are reviewed, the chance of much of an associated memory (context) probably won't be there. It doesn't sound like that was your approach.

"Amateur photographers like you or me could not afford the expense and weight of carrying all those film canisters around, so we’d be lucky to get a few dozen pictures over the course of a week’s vacation"
I did carry tons of film with me, much to the annoyance of my wife, but I was also able to sell a few shots to help offset the annoyance (though I was, and still am, far from a professional). The larger benefit of digital (aside from having to carry film) is the instant feedback - the ability to check composition and exposure - at the time of the camera click.

Why take photos of things that have already been heavily photographed? Lots of reasons. For one, as you mention indirectly, it provides me with a source of photos to which I hold the copyright, so if I decide to go and write a blog post for Forbes about the physics underlying Roman engineering, I don't have to waste a whole bunch of time finding a public domain photo I can use.

More than that, though, there are plenty of unique images and moments that don't involve photographing myself. As I said in the previous post, I try to take pictures of odd stuff that's amusing to me, that other photographers probably wouldn't bother with. The seagull on a headless statue in that post is a transient moment that defines a particular instant as clearly as a picture of me in a sweaty Mythbusters T-shirt would.

I have read several articles similar to the one you cite and I am always struck by the logical fallacy that is common to all I have seen. That fallacy is assuming OR to the exclusion of AND. My psychology colleagues cite some studies that indicate that when we take photographs of something we rob ourselves of the memory. As one who started as a film photographer and benefitted from the tutelage of more experienced (and gifted!) seniors, I was repeatedly lectured that to take great photos one must first get that image into memory and then onto film. This is a discipline, hard learned, that seems largely dissipated.

Might as well ask why look at the stars through a telescope: just go on the web and look at the HST pics.

The difference is that it's your view.

Same with photos.

@1: My very first roll of film included a selfie shot with an autotimer, so no, nothing new there. Then consider how many painters have done the same thing over the centuries!

My own view is that making photos will focus my mind on the present, even if it is just to decide if the place or the moment should be captured at all. But they also serve as a visual trigger for my visual memory. Old photos put me back in a place and a time with great effect.

Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay

drorzel — Sun, 22 May 2016 07:28:04 +0000

Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay

I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for... months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.

But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type, and hopefully end up where I need to be, whether or not anyone else pays any attention.

So. The general thrust of both Borchelt and Jarreau's pieces is pretty similar: a lot of work in "science communication" seems to be misdirected or ineffective. The audience for science blogs and web sites and the rest is drawn from the same limited pool of people who actively seek that stuff out. Most of the rest of the public isn't looking for information about science, and thus, they're not getting it. Which is generally a cue for much hand-wringing among the science-communication crowd over how we're failing, and need to Do Better.

But over the last few years, I've started to wonder whether that's really as big a problem as all the deeply concerned blog posts I've read seem to think. And the reason for that is Beyoncé.

It's not anything that Beyoncé herself did, just the fact that I'm aware of her. I don't own any of her music, and I'm not sure I've ever listened to a complete song of hers, as occasional snippets have been enough to confirm that it's really not my thing. Nevertheless, I know of her, and have a generally positive impression, because news about her manages to impinge on my awareness in a variety of indirect ways-- performing at the Super Bowl, bits of gossip on the pop-music station I listen to when SteelyKid's in the car (they don't regularly play her stuff, but they talk about her a bunch), or various science-y people on Twitter gushing about her dropping a new album, etc.

Beyoncé is just the most positive example of a general category of people I don't have any particular reason to care about who I am nonetheless vaguely informed about. I think of this general phenomenon as "stochastic awareness of pop culture." I don't have any systematic knowledge of Beyoncé or the various Kardashians, but I know who they are and a bit about them because that information randomly shows up in front of me. Which is more or less inevitable, because there are a lot of people out there who care very deeply about the activities of these individuals, and pump an enormous amount of effort into generating stories about them. And the end result is that even though her music is not my thing, I have a hazy sense of her place in the pop-culture firmament, and a generally positive impression.

And hand-wringing blog posts aside, I think science communication could do a lot worse than operating on this same basic model. That is, we generate a lot of content about science that is primarily consumed by people who already care about the subject, in the same way that legions of reporters generate endless stories and thinkpieces about Beyoncé and other celebrities. And some fraction of that content will, from time to time, randomly end up impinging on the awareness of people who aren't actively seeking information about science, leaving them with the same kind of stochastic awareness of science news that I have about celebrity culture.

Most of the time, this involves big, splashy stories-- LIGO detecting gravitational waves, or the Pluto fly-by, and that kind of thing. In the pop-culture analogy, these are basically like Beyoncé performing at the Super Bowl. But there's also a lot of connections that are essentially random. My favorite personal example of this is when my Forbes blog post about friction, inspired by a silly episode where I didn't lose my phone off the roof of my car, wound up as a story in the Daily Mail. On a typical day, I'm pretty sure the overlap between my blog readership and the readership of the Daily Mail is negligible, but for essentially random reasons, this story ended up being put in front of a lot of people who wouldn't actively seek it out.

From a communications and policy perspective, the hope is that when these stories land in front of people, they spark a "Hey, that's cool..." sort of reaction. Ideally, this might prompt people to learn a bit more about the specific random topic, by reading other articles, or striking up conversations at work, etc. I can't say how effective this is for random phone-on-the-car stories, but it works for big news events-- whenever NASA holds a press conference, I can expect a few questions about it at Starbucks the next day, from the regulars who know I'm a scientist. And hopefully those leave a generally positive impression about science as something that's pretty cool and thus worth a bit of money.

I would argue that the implication of the Borchelt and Jarreau posts I linked at the start of this post is that this is essentially what we're already doing. That is, the work people who write about science (or make videos, etc.) are doing mostly ends up in front of an audience who already care about that subject. In the same way that most of what celebrity-culture reporters write about Beyoncé ends up in front of people who already care deeply about pop music. But I think those posts, and a lot of other writing about this, sort of underplay the effect of the occasions when, for random reasons, science news ends up in front of pop-music fans.

This isn't an argument against doing science communication, though I'm sure it will be taken that way by some. It's not even an argument against trying to find better and more effective ways to communicate science. On the contrary, I think both of those things are essential-- the more science content we put out there, the better the chance that something breaks through, and if we can figure out and put into practice techniques for making stories land more effectively, we can hopefully boost the impact of those stories that do break out. I think we've seen some real progress on the latter, actually-- NASA comes in for some ribbing about the number of press conferences they hold, but their PR people are genuinely good at crafting their messages, and the LHC has done a brilliant job of getting public attention for really abstract stuff.

So I don't mean this as a "Science Communication: You're Doing It Wrong" article. Instead, it's an "Everybody take a deep breath and try to calm down" article. Yes, we're mostly talking to ourselves, but "mostly" isn't "only," and I'm not so sure that stochastic public awareness of science is a major crisis that we need to wring our hands over endlessly.

------

(The obvious counterargument to my position takes the form "Yes, but science news is Important, while celebrity gossip is just trash." Which is true to a point, but this is yet another area where science is not in any way unique. Pretty much any field of study that has even a slight connection to public policy has the same issues of stochastic public awareness of their subject, which is more Important than whatever Beyoncé is up to these days. And it's been that way for decades (at minimum; Borchelt offers some documentation in the case of science) without the world coming to an end. So, you know, maybe it's not that big a problem.

(I also find that I'm becoming less comfortable with declarations that this issue or that is What Really Matters, because there's a kind of fundamental elitism to the whole business that rubs me the wrong way. At the end of the day, what matters to the general public is what they say matters to them, and if that doesn't align with the elite consensus, it's on us to convince them otherwise. This is maybe a sign that I've been in academia too long, and the secondhand smoke of "postmodernism" is rotting my brain, but whatever...)

drorzel Sun, 05/22/2016 - 03:28

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I totally agree with you on this. You have no idea what will or will not connect with someone or some group.

Just this morning I was going through The Observer comments on their GMO editorial. Someone I don't know, and never met--has put a video of me from a local Boston Skeptics event as evidence for the issue they are addressing.

Who knew a small local thing would have that kind of reach?

I'm very tired of the "ur doin' it rong" criticisms from the scicomm pros and chatterati. They seem to want to have a top-down proper strategy thing that dismisses, or would prevent, a lot of this kind of stochastic stuff.

Just to say I read you here, but I'm not sure that I've ever commented. I just don't often have anything to add, but a my best friend said to me many years ago 'I'll tell you if I disagree so if I'm not saying anything it's because I agree with you'. Do you get hit rates for this page?

Completely offtopic, but apparently J.D. Jackson, of EM Textbook fame, died a few days ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/4kjd4j/john_david_jackson_has…

There doesn't seem to be a single obituary anywhere, nor likely to be one at this rate. By the power vested in me by the internet, I hearby nominate you, Blogo-supersphere-star Physics blogger guy, on account of the fact that you wrote probably the most circumspect appraisals of Classical Electrodynamics I have ever read, in a blog post a few (quite a few?) years back, and on account as you have a Forbes account to post something quasi "official", and on account of the fact that you're one of the few people both qualified to write about this and still likely to do a pretty decent job.

I don't know if jokes about grad students wanting to bury the body under a moonlit crossroads are appropriate right now, but I kind of just made one. Not sure if you should, but you'll be writing for a lot of current and former said students in any case. Good luck!

"All is like an ocean..."

I agree in a sense, but Beyoncé, like most public figures stands to benefit from greater awareness of her and engagement in conversation about her regardless of the content. Beyoncé could quite easily claim her figure was the result of eating only apples and it would cause a huge surge in interest and discussion without any evidence for or against her claims. Celebrity culture is a religion of sorts and science can't be science if it becomes oversimplified. The media already simplify to the point of absurdity so that the end message is delivered only as 'food X' causes/cures cancer, without any further discussion. Beyoncé only benefits from the world discussing what diet or exercise influenced the shape of her rear, while science looks like the killjoy for telling the public that it must engage in rational thought before accepting something as true. Unfortunately, far too many people never want to think and gain all of their information passively as you have gained your knowledge of Beyoncé. If your immediate reaction to apples=Beyoncé isn't the desire to either dismiss it as gossip or try to find evidence to support it before throwing out all of your food and replacing it with apples, then science will never interest you.

Good post and makes me a little less worried. I guess science writers should try to have physics play the Superbowl half-time show.
I might quibble a bit about "what matters to the general public is what they say matters to them". That might be what they care about, but I'd argue that (e.g.) climate change matters to people whose homes are going to be flooded out in the next decade, whether they say climate change matters to them or not.

You Don't Have to Like New Music

drorzel — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 08:37:58 +0000

You Don't Have to Like New Music

The tagline up at the top of this blog promises "Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture," but unless you count my own photos as pop art, I've been falling down on the last of those. This is largely because, despite being on sabbatical, I've been so busy running after the kids that I don't have much time for pop culture. And also because this is kind of a frustrating pop-culture moment, with a number of media currently dominated by works that just aren't my thing.

That's a critical bit of context for my reaction to a recent Salon interview with music critic Jim Fusilli, which sports the headline "Stop buying old Bob Dylan albums: “Every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians”." That pull quote in a little more context:

It’s easier to sell them another Beatles box set or a new Dylan bootleg. The industry seems to market old music to old people, so to speak.

Right. In other words, the industry keeps people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago. You go down a dead end with some people, who say to you, Where’s the new Bob Dylan? Where’s the new Beatles? Well, there is no new Bob Dylan. There is no new Beatles. There is no new Thelonious Monk. There’s no new Duke Ellington. These people and their achievements are beyond the reach of anyone, so maybe it is interesting to empty the vaults and study how they got to be who they are. But for most artists, they had something to say in their own times, and that’s really where it belongs. My feeling is that every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians. They’re thwarting the growth of rock and pop. I understand the grown-ups’ instinct to do that, because it’s easier. It’s a comfortable place. You will be welcome there. But it doesn’t enrich life very much to just keep doing the same old things.

And, you know, there's a lot going on there, essentially all of which makes me want to sigh heavily. I don't disagree with the core point, but it's phrased in a way that makes me want to go right over to Amazon and buy a bunch of old box sets in retaliation.

For one thing, there's something a little ahistorical about the whole "taking money away from new musicians" thing, as if those new artists somehow have a right to have their albums bought. I don't think the Beatles and Bob Dylan, when they were new artists, were all that concerned that my grandparents weren't buying and appreciating their records-- on the contrary, a lot of those folks took for granted that they were revolutionizing culture, and old people weren't supposed to get it.

And I'm not sure why that should be any different today. The interview includes the obligatory name-check of Kendrick Lamar, and I kind of doubt he's losing much sleep over not selling records to the sort of people who buy Bob Dylan reissues instead. In fact, I'm moderately certain he's actively trying to alienate those folks. They're not his audience, and that's just fine. Really, that's probably how it ought to be.

There's also the lazy leftist trope of Big Bad Corporations, the notion that the reason people are buying re-issues of old stuff is all a matter of record companies "keep[ing] people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago." I find the habit of ascribing magical brainwashing powers to corporate marketing departments incredibly tiresome.

But the thing that bugs me the most is the condescending subtext of the whole thing, which is highlighted in that last sentence. This whole genre of writing is founded on the belief that pop-culture taste is a reflection of character, and that people who don't share your tastes and interests are, if not Bad People, at least less-good in some manner. They're lazy, brainwashed, just doing what's "easier." So you get the showy disappointment of "it doesn’t enrich life very much to just keep doing the same old things."

And, you know, fuck right off with that, okay? Yeah, fine, the only music I've acquired since the start of the calendar year is a bootleg of Bruce Springsteen playing a 40-year-old album straight through in concert, which probably isn't doing all that much to enrich my life. But you know what is enriching my life? My kids. I'm not spending money buying albums from new artists because I'm running SteelyKid around to a whole bunch of different activities-- taekwondo, Odyssey of the Mind, trips to visit friends-- and helping her and The Pip build forts and play games.

In the same way that I'm not buying much new music, I'm also not doing a whole lot to enrich my culinary life-- I'm eating at Panera and Applebee's with depressing regularity. But as much as I sometimes grumble about those-- and as nice as it was to get a break from them this past weekend when the kids were away-- I'm happy to do it, because going to those restaurants makes my kids happy. And while they're thoroughly exhausting, I'll take hanging around with my cute and happy kids over dining alone at exotic restaurants.

And the thing is, I'm smack in the demographic that's probably supposed to nod along in agreement with this whole piece. While I mostly listen to music in old modes, I generally try to check out new bands in those. For example, here's one of my favorite songs from 2015:

And now that SteelyKid is developing strong opinions about pop music, I find myself listening to a bunch of Top 40 stuff when I'm in the car with her, and have found plenty of stuff to like even in the relatively disposable pop genre that I used to disparage. I'm more familiar with the work of Taylor Swift than I ever would've expected five years ago, and honestly? It's pretty good.

But while I'm mostly in the "right" group of people, who prefer older modes but are happy to find stuff to appreciate in new artists, there's an air of condescension to the whole business that really rubs me the wrong way. To be fair, a lot of that is just Salon's house style, but more and more I find the whole business of finding significance in people's pop culture tastes incredibly wearying.

Kate's absolutely nuts about Hamilton, as are a ton of other people in my social circles, and I've tried several times to listen to it. I have yet to make it through a full track. Does this mean I'm a bad liberal, or objectively pro-Aaron-Burr? Maybe (I did write a paper about Burr for a school project back in the 80's...). Mostly, though, it just means I'm pretty ambivalent about hip-hop and actively dislike musicals. So, you know, combining those things into a hip-hop musical just isn't likely to work for me. And that's fine, in the same way that Kate's failure to fully appreciate the genius of Craig Finn's various projects is just a reflection of her personal tastes, and not a commentary on her as a person.

(She's actually been subjected to way more Craig Finn/ Hold Steady/ Lifter Puller than I have Hamilton, because I play music more or less constantly at home and in the car, and she doesn't. She's way too good to me.)

On a fundamental level, pop culture, like any other form of art, is a diversion, not an obligation. You don't have to like any particular piece of it, if it doesn't happen to speak to you. Discovering a new favorite band can be a life-enriching experience, but so can lots of other things. And if somebody prefers to give a greater weight to other experiences, and just listen to comfortable old music, well, everyone has the right to set their own personal priorities, and they don't need to be made to feel guilty or inadequate for not sharing yours.

drorzel Thu, 02/25/2016 - 03:37

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Yeah, Bob Dylan hasn't put out a new album since way back in the dark ages of 2015.

I suspect that the argument would be that even buying new records from Dylan is doing a disservice to new music. There's a rant later in the interview about how awful it is that a lot of Baby Boomers went out and bought Don Henley's latest record.

There’s a rant later in the interview about how awful it is that a lot of Baby Boomers went out and bought Don Henley’s latest record.

Mr. Fusilli ought to know better. When you are a professional recording artist, your job is to record music that people want to buy. That's just as true for Don Henley as it is for Taylor Swift, and the fact that people are buying their records (not necessarily the same people) is evidence that both of them are good at their jobs. Fusilli is entitled to his opinion that we should be supporting Swift rather than Henley, but others are equally free to do the reverse, or support both, or support neither.

I don't have the excuse of kids around the house, but popular music and I went our separate ways in 1993 because none of the trends that were ascendant at the time (hip-hop, country, and grunge) were directions I wanted to go, musically speaking. I have bought the occasional new album since then, and I recognize the talent of some of the more recent musicians I have heard, but I feel under no obligation to buy music I don't like.

I suppose he thinks musicians should all have a five year career and immediately die when they turn 27?

I'm slowly getting into current pop music after an adolescence steeped in rock and metal, but even so about half of the albums I buy are new material from my old favourites.

It's a juvenile attitude as far as I am concerned. In my teens yes 'tribes' were defined partly by the music they liked and if you liked one type of music you weren't supposed to like any other. Going to university and meeting people I liked with different music tastes meant I really listened to music I would have affected to despise previously, often finding I liked that music. I don't discover as much music now as I did then, but that is partly a function of not going to live gigs much and not meetig new people who introduce me to their music the way I did back then.

But thanks for the Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats - S.O.B. tip Chad, I like that ...

I've only heard segments of Hamilton, and it sounds like Opera to me. If I had the libretto for Hamilton and listened to it in pieces, I would probably get it and then I know (from what I can pick up already) that I would like it a lot, but that particular urban accent at high speed is too much at a first sitting. Sort of like the last movement of Beethoven's 9th when you don't speak or hear German. Once I knew the words and what they meant, it was awesome. Ditto for Shakespeare.

I totally love Uptown Funk, and that S.O.B. was great!

Sort of like the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th when you don’t speak or hear German. Once I knew the words and what they meant, it was awesome.

Lyrics can add a dimension to how you enjoy a piece of music, but it's not necessary to understand the lyrics. The Ode to Joy is one example of this (keep in mind that the lyrics aren't Beethoven's; he set a poem by Schiller to music). My limited knowledge of Russian does not prevent me from liking some Russian folk music. Or, to consider an extreme example, a native English speaker would have to be willfully ignorant of Springsteen's lyrics to consider "Born in the USA" a patriotic song (it's about an unemployed Vietnam war vet, and Springsteen enunciates more clearly than many popular singers).

I liked Happy until, on Ragbrai a few years ago, 80% of the cyclists seemed to be blaring it out of a cheap bluetooth speaker on their bike. Hearing it all day, every day, for a week, wore it out.

The argument by Jim Fusilli seems to be the old "you kids and your new music now-a-days" turned around to be "you old folks and your old music now-a-days" - and it makes as much sense.

Eric @7:

True enough (since I liked the Ode immediately and didn't sort the words out until quite a few years later when I was reading Clockwork Orange in high school), and I also know plenty of pop songs where the words are often mostly in someone's imagination. "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen comes immediately to mind.

But the words add an essential dimension that would make the difference between not enjoying "Hamilton" and enjoying it immensely. To my ear, much of hip hop is pretty much the same as the vocal gymnastics of an opera singer, mostly sound and fury, unless I know the words.

Twitter Is a Cocktail Party That I'm Not Invited To

drorzel — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 09:06:43 +0000

Twitter Is a Cocktail Party That I'm Not Invited To

As I go through my daily routine, I find myself sort of out of phase with a lot of the Internet. My peak online hours are from about six to ten in the morning, Eastern US time. That's when I get up, have breakfast, and then go to Starbucks to write for a few hours.

This means that most of the other people awake and active on my social media feeds are in Europe or Australia. And my standard writing time ends right around the time things start to heat up in the US. I do continue to have access to the Internet through the afternoon, of course, but unless I have a deadline coming up, I'm often doing stuff that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer (and if I do have a deadline coming up, I shut down social media to concentrate on work). And evenings are terrible-- I spend a lot of weeknights running SteelyKid to various activities, and even when I'm not doing that, our dinner and bedtime routines don't leave me much space to participate. By nine or ten pm, I'm completely wiped out.

As a result, I find Twitter a deeply frustrating medium. Twitter is mostly about conversation, but its deliberately ephemeral nature means that you can really only converse effectively with other people who are online and active at the same time you are. And the peak activity times for Twitter conversations are at times when I'm not regularly available because of the way my work and family schedules are arranged. In those peak hours, I'm only checking in intermittently-- a few times an hour, usually-- and as a result, I miss tons of stuff.

I started thinking about this the other day, when there was a big kerfuffle over Twitter's plan to introduce an "algorithmic" timeline that would depart from the current strictly-chronological display to highlight some posts from the past. This predictably led to wailing and gnashing of teeth among Twitter power users (and it's since been walked back a little), who declared that it would be the end of Twitter as we know it. Personally, though, I think it might be a good thing, which led to this lengthy tweetstorm, which you'll notice was posted at 8am on a Saturday, because that's when I have time to be on Twitter...

The standard line is that any deviation from strictly chronological Twitter will hopelessly break things in one of a variety of ways, but this is largely predicated on the assumption that the algorithm will be the stupidest and most obnoxious thing you could dream up. But, really, it's not that hard to do a better job than most of the people outraged about the idea seem to think.

Take, for example, Facebook. Facebook famously switched to an algorithmic timeline a while back, and most of the anti-algorithm arguments feature dark mutterings about how this will make Twitter just like Facebook. To an intermittent social-media user like me, though, Facebook is in many ways better than Twitter. I have slightly more Facebook friends than people I follow on Twitter (about 750 vs just under 600), but Facebook does a better job of highlighting stuff I want to see. I regularly find tweets from Rhett Allain because he has his feed mirrored to Facebook, and the Facebook algorithm knows I like his stuff and makes sure I see it. On Twitter, in the middle of the day, his tweets get lost in a vast flood of stuff that I don't get to check very often. At the same time, if I'm actively on Facebook for a relatively long time, the feed I see is pretty much chronological.

The other insinuation is that under an algorithmic scheme only stuff from famous tweeters will get shown, or paid ads. But again, I'm not convinced, because Twitter already has an algorithmic feature, the "While You Were Away" box that pops up when you go several hours without checking in. That was roundly condemned when it was introduced for basically the same reasons, but again, I find that it does a good job of highlighting stuff I wouldn't see otherwise. And it's not just getting me massively-retweeted stuff from clickbait outlets. One of the people who pops up most frequently in my "While You Were Away" tab is a guy with under 400 followers, because I like a good deal of his stuff, and the algorithm knows that. I find that feature one of the most useful things Twitter has done recently, and would be happy to have it show up more regularly. And given that they do that well, I'm not especially worried about what would happen with a wider use of algorithms.

Of course, the fundamental issue isn't anything about practical implementation, but rather that the current power users like Twitter as it is, because it works well for them. Which, you know, good for them, but it should be noted that this is fundamentally pretty exclusionary. That is, the way Twitter is set up right now works really well for a particular set of people, who have the sort of jobs and family arrangements such that they're online and actively engaged at the same time as their friends. It's big among journalists, for example, because their whole business is about being connected, and science Twitter is dominated by folks in fields whose research mostly has them sitting in front of a computer already. If you're not lucky enough to be in that particular demographic stratum, though, the current experience of Twitter is much less attractive.

I've heard Twitter described as a virtual cocktail party before, and it's a decent metaphor-- lots of people hanging around, engaged in conversation and witty banter. I would note, though, that the usual analogy doesn't go far enough. For an intermittent user like myself, Twitter is like a really cool cocktail party that I'm not invited to. It's a bit like the party is spilling out of bar into the lobby of my hotel-- I catch snatches of cool conversations as I make my way to the elevator, but I miss most of it because I have other stuff to do. Every now and then, I get a chance to hang out in the bar for a bit, and that's great, but mostly I'm getting second-hand reports and that's just not the same.

And it should be noted that I am, in fact, relatively fortunate as such things go. I do have a few hours in the morning where I'm able to participate, and I sometimes get the chance to do more. In the cocktail party metaphor, I'm at least staying in the same hotel with most of the partygoers. The folks in other hotels don't get even that much, which is why so many people continue to not see the point of Twitter.

The kinds of changes Twitter is talking about making could, if implemented well, make the medium more accessible for those who are currently shut out. It won't completely open things up-- it's always going to be a conversational medium, and conversation will always require time for engagement-- but good algorithms could make it easier for people who aren't already part of the conversation to see why those who are find it useful and enjoyable.

Of course, as it is, there's very much a "cool kids" dynamic to Twitter, and a lot of the reaction is best understood in that light. The experience of Twitter that the current power users enjoy is a relatively exclusive one, and Twitter is choosing to pursue broadening access to the service over enhancing the experience of those who already use it heavily. Nothing I've heard described is going to shut out anybody who's already in, though-- at most, they're going to be inconvenienced to a small fraction of the degree that non-power-users are already inconvenienced.

Most of the Bad Things people trot out as results of algorithmic timelines are things that I already put up with as an intermittent Twitter user. Bits of conversation will appear out of context? If you only check in a few times an hour, you already get that (and because otherwise very smart people can't figure out how to properly thread conversations, there's often no good way to reconstruct what's going on, but that's another rant). You might miss things posted by your friends? That happens now, given the huge flood of stuff that comes in at peak hours-- as mentioned above, I have to rely on Facebook's algorithms to rescue a lot of stuff that gets lost in the noise on Twitter. Your stuff might just vanish without the right people seeing it? That already happens to those of us who are out-of-phase with peak Twitter activity.

All of these negative features are annoyances that people who aren't on the inside already have to put up with. And given sensibly designed algorithms-- which my experience with Facebook and "While You Were Away" suggests are entirely possible-- these can be minimized. Done right, they have the potential to make Twitter more attractive and enjoyable for a lot of people who don't currently get anything out of it.

drorzel Tue, 02/09/2016 - 04:06

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I'm not sure about those 'sensibly designed algorithms' - what I see on Facebook is usually nothing like what my friends have posted. Infrequent posters are submerged in the stream and I haven't found a way to surface them yet.

The solution appears to me quite simple - add a tab for the algorithmic view, and allow both views. However that will interfere with the monetization of our eyeballs, so will never happen in Facebook at least.

"A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision"
is as much a fantasy now as when Steely Dan first sang it..

I don't understand twitter. It's like people seem to be constantly yelling random things at me, and if they yell two-three times in a row I put them on mute, and that's that. I find the 140 character limit makes conversations impossible. It's good for sharing links, for everything else I use facebook or my blog or G+ if it must be (not paying much attention to this).

Having said that though, statistically the vast majority of my followers both on twitter and on my blog are based in the US and in Canada, so I too miss the peak period because it's in the middle of the night for me. I'm also the kind of person who leaves parties early, so I suppose it fits well enough ;) Honestly, I think you spend too much time thinking about what you might be missing on twitter :p

The difference between Facebook and Twitter seems to be that Facebook wants me to follow all sorts of random people I've never heard of but cannot imagine why I might want to follow while Twitter wants me to follow all sorts of people I have vaguely heard of but cannot imagine why I might want to follow. Every day the two services send me long lists of names that I sometimes scan and sometimes ignore.

Now and then a friend emails me a note telling me to check out something on Facebook or Twitter, so I do. Maybe I'm old fashioned. I still have friends who mail me VHS tapes of television shows I should watch.

On Sports Injury Rates, or Today in Why I'm Glad I'm Not a Social Scientist

drorzel — Sun, 13 Dec 2015 08:49:30 +0000

On Sports Injury Rates, or Today in Why I'm Glad I'm Not a Social Scientist

The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days-- the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports in One Chart. You can go over there to look at their specific chart, which is drawn from a medical study of cheerleading; I don't find the general ordering of things all that surprising.

There was, however, one aspect of this that I found sort of surprising, namely the difference between rates for girls' and boys' versions of the same sports. The chart Vox shows has girls' soccer as the second-most dangerous high school sport in America, but boys' soccer is all the way down in ninth place. And this pattern is consistent. So I copied their data and used it to make a bar graph of my own to highlight that:

Injury rates for boys and girls in equivalent high school sports.

The bars here are comparing injury rates for sports that are equivalent, or at least analogous-- I tacked softball and baseball on at the end as approximately the same game, though each is played only by a single sex. The only sport for which the injury rate is higher for boys is lacrosse, and my extremely limited understanding is that the rules are rather different between the two, with much less contact allowed in the girls' game.

Excluding lacrosse, softball, and baseball, the average ratio of girls' injury rate to boys' injury rate is 1.4+/-0.1. So female high-school athletes playing a given game are roughly 40% more likely to suffer an injury ("defined as anything that required the attention of a physician or athletic trainer, or kept the athlete off the field for at least one day" from Vox) than their male classmates playing the exact same game.

It's a striking correlation, but what's the causation? Well, this is the "I'm glad I'm not a social scientist" part, because as with any system involving more than about two atoms, it's a hopeless muddle. Are girls more fragile than boys? More likely to report injury or less likely to try to play through pain? More likely to have their injuries treated as serious enough to count toward this statistic by coaches, athletic trainers, and sports-injury researchers? Probably all of those, to some degree.

I considered trying to bend this into a "Football Physics" post over at Forbes. But while it would be nearly as good clickbait there as at Vox, I would feel some obligation to try and draw a sensible conclusion or connect this to some sort of policy recommendation. And, you know, I'm on vacation in Florida (though currently taking a vacation from vacation-with-kids to do a bit of Internet writing).

So instead I'll throw the graph up here, say "Huh. That's odd," and return to thinking about the simple interactions of small numbers of frictionless spheres.

drorzel Sun, 12/13/2015 - 03:49

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Huh. I LOVE systems with lots of variables, because they make life interesting.

Differences in reporting rates sounds like a very plausible explanation. There may also be biological reasons. Trouble is, this data provides exactly zero evidence to figure it out. You need to dig into the actual records. What kinds of injuries? How bad?

If you find that most of the difference is due to a higher rate of minor injuries in girls, while serious or non-ignorable injuries occur at similar rates, then it's probably a reporting issue. If you see specific injuries that appear more commonly in girls, it may be biological.

Here's another theory for you. May be total nonsense, but I'm putting it out there. Some kids like to play hard, push the limits, get a little violent, etc. The boys who like that gravitate to football, but the girls don't have that outlet, so they're pushing the limits in sports that draw less aggressive boys.

You should have included cheerleading. Although VOX didn't provide the breakdown, the abstract of the linked article did: 1.33 boys and 0.69 girls. (Read your cited artcle, but NOT while on vacation!) That is a huge difference on your chart, making boys cheerleading more dangerous than baseball.

Because I accept most of your reasons for the reported differences, that must mean that boys cheerleading is really really dangerous. But that isn't surprising, because it is essentially gymnastics and many schools abandoned gymnastics for insurance reasons.

I remember reading once that girls were more susceptible to ACL tears. This risk can be partially mitigated by strengthening the appropriate muscles. I suspect a mixture of culture and genes, might be responsible here. Also learning how to fall (and how not to fall). I fear that is rarely taught because of liability concerns.

I can imagine CCs statistics which show mens cheerleading as being especially risky. Here there is substantial difference in the physical roles, with the boys frequently lifting/supporting the girls.

I wonder if the cheerleading issue isn't that they're counting all-girl cheerleading squads that are really just leading cheers and not doing anything all that dramatic, and thus incur little risk. The squads that include boys are more likely to be the ones doing big showy competitions in addition to cheering at games for other teams, which involves more high tosses and tall pyramids and so on, and those lead to more injuries.

This is probably answered in the article that I haven't read. But, again: vacation.

One metric on the Lacrosse issue is that boys wear full helmets and girls just have eyeguards. This link suggests that body checking is not allowed in Womens Lacrosse http://www.lacrosse.com/womens-lacrosse/
It also turns out that in womens lacrosse stick checks are allowed away from the head only.
So the boy's game is significantly more physical players wear both helmets and shoulder pads.

The explanation I got from our gymnastic teacher for cheerleading injuries was that many squads have coaches who are not trained as coaches. Many are just former cheerleaders, if that much, and therefore are not aware of dangers inherent in certain moves, etc. I wonder if that is true of other girl's sports, especially in schools where money is tight.

What about field hockey? In my mind that always had the reputation as the sport that drew the girls who most liked to play hard.

As Omega says in #3, ACL tears among young soccer players are very common, especially among females. Also I've heard that the bone structure softens enough for females around 10-16, that a sudden stress may tear away the part of the bone where the ligaments attach, so while strengthening muscles is ay good idea, it should not be taken to extremes.

A Constructive Response to Professorial Anxiety

drorzel — Sun, 07 Jun 2015 14:24:02 +0000

A Constructive Response to Professorial Anxiety

Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it's not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn't have anything all that concrete to say beyond "Huh. That's interesting." So it languished in one of the many, many open tabs cluttering up Chrome, too interesting to just close but not anything I could see a clear angle to comment on. And eventually it was sort of forgotten until I set about paring down open tabs before an out-of-town trip.

I have a slightly different slant on it, though, after the past week's blow-up on academic social media over a pair of articles on Vox. The first was an anonymous professor complaining that he fears students and the second a response saying that the real problem is the deprofessionalization of the professoriate and the rise of contingent faculty making everything more stressful. These generated a great deal of heat, and not all that much light.

One of the more disappointing aspects of the whole thing is the insistence on both sides that this is an all-or-nothing question when, in fact, it's perfectly possible for there to be truth in both of those articles. That is, changes in the relationship between faculty and the institutions that employ them have unquestionably increased the strain on contingent faculty (whether adjuncts, visitors, or those lucky enough to be on the tenure track) in ways that carry over into what they teach. That doesn't mean, though, that the current political moment can't also have changed the classroom atmosphere for those faculty in ways that are not particularly helpful. It's true that contingent faculty will always find something to freak out about (God knows, I was a giant ball of stress before I got tenure, and that was before the job market really cratered), but that doesn't mean that their freaking out can't involve some genuinely problematic elements.

In that context, the Jezebel "Ancient Rape Joke" piece stands out as something that we could use more of. That is, it explicitly acknowledges that increased sensitivity to issues around sexual assault have genuinely made it harder to teach certain types of material that appears in works that cannot easily be cast out of the syllabus. And it goes on to talk about some constructive approaches to handling that material in a way that's sensitive to legitimate concerns (that have recently taken on much greater weight), but respects the importance of the original sources.

So, you know, more like that, please.

drorzel Sun, 06/07/2015 - 10:24

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Should I Wash My Dishes Before Putting Them In The Dishwasher?

gregladen — Wed, 13 May 2015 06:34:28 +0000

Should I Wash My Dishes Before Putting Them In The Dishwasher?

As an anthropologist, I find the interface between technology and the larger culture in which it is embedded fascinating. You all know the old story of the family cook who habitually cuts the ends off the roast before slipping it in the oven. One day her child, hoping some day to be the family cook, asks why this is done. It turns out that nobody can remember, and the matter is dropped. But the question comes up again, at a later family dinner, this one attended by great grandma, who was the family cook a generation ago, and of course, she knows the answer.

"Back in the day," she says, "It was the depression. We weren't able to just go to the store and buy whatever we wanted, like people these days."

Grandma always managed to work in a mention of how poor they were back in the depression. But this time it was relevant. "We had only one roasting pan," she continued. "It was only 14 inches long and the roast was always a few inches longer. So I'd cut the ends off."

And of course, ever since then, subsequent generations had learned to cut off the ends of the roast because that is how grandma did it, and there must have been some reason, though nobody knew what it was. And now, the roast, be-ended, sits small in the large stainless steel double handed Williams Sonoma roasting pan.

I think that is how some people load their dishwashers. Back in the day, dishwashers weren't very good at washing dishes. They were really status symbols that did little more than rinse off the dishes that you'd already scraped and run under the faucet. You put dishes in the dishwasher that already looked pretty clean. The role of the dishwasher was to remove the few remaining cooties (or dog saliva for some households) and, if you kept up the supply of anti-spotting juice, to make sure that the glassware was shiny-clean.

Dishwashers have changed. A reasonably good dishwasher, not even the most expensive or fancy, does a much better job at washing dishes. Even cheap ones, probably. The difference in price between dishwashers is mostly a matter of bells and whistles and whether or not it has a stainless steel front, that sort of thing. Inside, the engineering of how to spray water on dishes from various angles for a very long period of time has been worked out. These days, you only need to remove the large parts, the parts that remain because people these days, unlike back in the depression when there was not enough food, have forgotten that they should finish the food on their plate. Even the chicken bones. Back in the depression, people ate the chicken bones.

When you wash dishes in the sink, you use water and energy. The energy is to heat the water, but also, the water itself requires energy to process and pump. When you wash dishes in the dishwasher, you use energy. Again, heating and getting water are factors, but also, the dishwasher has a pump and may have a water heating element, and of course, a drying element. More on the drying element later.

If you did a complete hand washing job on your dishes, then ran your dishes on a full cycle in the dishwasher, you would be using way more energy and water than required to actually get the dishes clean. But if you only hand wash the dishes a little -- scrape the plates than run them under the water -- maybe you are using less energy and water. But the fact remains, if you just scraped the dishes minimally and the put them in the dishwasher straight away, with absolutely no rinsing, you will use a minimal amount of energy.

Some people claim that they do hand washing so efficiently that they are using less energy than a dishwasher would ever use. Such folk eschew the dishwashing machine entirely. However, dishwasher experts claim that this is only rarely the case. The dishwasher uses a small percentage of the water and energy you use in hand washing.

Chis Mooney has written up the current research on dishwashing efficiency. His Washington Post article cites research from the EPA, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. The bottom line: Don't pre-rinse the dishes. Just put the damn dishes in the dishwasher. Oh, and you think your hand washing is efficient, do consider the possibility that you don't really know that. You just think that because you want to. It is almost certainly the case that you can't really prove that and it is likely (but not impossible) that it simply isn't true. From Moony's Washington Post article:

... dishwashers just keep needing less and less water (and energy) because of improving appliance standards, even as they get better and better at using it.

“While it may be possible to use less water/energy by washing dishes by hand, it is extremely unlikely,” Jonah Schein, technical coordinator for homes and buildings in the EPA’s WaterSense program, said...

“In order to wash the same amount of dishes that can fit in a single load of a full size dishwasher and use less water, you would need to be able to wash eight full place settings and still limit the total amount of time that the faucet was running to less than two minutes,” he said.

“...modern dishwashers can outperform all but the most frugal hand washers,” adds the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

This applies to modern Energy-Star rated dishwashers. Which, if your dishwasher is reasonably new, is probably your dishwasher. And by new, we mean up to several years old because this has been true for a long time. Moony's story has further details on exactly what makes dishwashers more efficient.

So, this is like cutting the ends off the roast. In the old days, you needed to wash your dishes before you washed your dishes. Now, you can just wash your dishes. But do you? Or are you still cutting the ends off the roast?

(It is unfortunate for the dogs that they lose in both cases.)

Moony also talks about the drying element in dishwashers, and I have a word or two to say about that as well.

Consider the term "dishwasher safe." In my household, everything is "dishwasher safe." This is because I put everything in the dishwasher. If something is not dishwasher safe, it gets weeded out. Most things that are not dishwasher safe are subject to heat damage when the drying element comes on. I installed our present dishwasher about five years ago. The heating element has yet to come on. Well, it did by accident once and boy, did that smell bad. (If you don't use the heating element, it tends to accumulate a layer of stuff that smells bad once you do turn it on). This is not to say that the only unsafe thing in a dishwasher, if you are a plate or a bowl or something, is the heating element. The water in a dishwasher is hot, and the chemicals are caustic. We have a number of coffee mugs that no longer say what they formerly said because the cheap printing process used to make them did not stand up to the slings and arrows of outrageous technology. Those coffee mugs that change on the outside when you put hot coffee in them? That works because of a layer of cheap plastic on the outside of the cup. My Doctor Who mug (where the Tardis disappears and reappears) lasted one day. I still have it but it is a simple black mug with no evidence that the Doctor ever existed. And, when I pop in "clean recyclables" like a peanut butter jar made of plastic, that stuff comes out distorted and half melted, but not really melted and it isn't a problem; It was on the way to the recycling bin anyway.

If you never turn on your heating element you will use a lot less electricity and many non-dishwasher safe items survive the dishwasher. I'm not making any promises, I'm just telling you what I do. Don't worry, the dishes get dry. Modern dishwashers run some air through after the washing is finished on a full cycle, and if you open the door, physics, in the form of evaporation, will work very well.

This, of course, is a metaphor for many other things. Consider the culture of your use of technology. Do you let your car warm up for a long time on a cold winter morning? To you leave it running when not actually driving because you heard it takes more energy to start it than to run it for a while? Do you leave florescent lights on in the office all day even when the rooms are empty because you heard that was more efficient? As usual, you are probably doing it all wrong. Not your fault, it is just how our brains, and our cultures, work. But you can change and help make a difference.

gregladen Wed, 05/13/2015 - 02:34

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energy

Green Energy

Culture

Dishwasher Efficiency

Technology

I just Googled "dish washer." They appear to be popular, since there seems to be billions and billions of different ones available for sale, though I don't recall ever seeing one. Where I was born and raised (near Black Mesa, Arizona) there was (and is) little water, and there was (and mostly is) no electricity, but even down the mesas where the "rich Navajoes" lived no one had machines that washed dishes. The whole idea of using a machine to wash dishes just freaks me out.

My grandparents, and my parents, and my siblings used a wet cloth to wipe dishes, and the cloth was rinsed in a bucket of water. Water came from a government-drilled well, pumped by a AEROSTAR wind turbine, where dozens of households would go with containers to get water. If the wind didn't blow for a few days, no one had water.

I can imagine standing around the well, waiting to fill my two-gallon jugs, and asking people how well their dish washing machines wash their dishes. "Does the heating element dry them fast enough?" Heee!

When I was about 9 years old the government came in with a generator and an electric pump to replace the wind-powered pump. This meant that when there was no fuel for the generator, we didn't get water. It also meant that everyone had to avoid standing on the concrete casement when holding down the power switch, otherwise we would get a terrible shock. Complaints flooded into the chapter house, and those complaints were sent to the BIA, and the BIA sent the complaints to Richard Nixon, who at that time had his own problems, and there it sat.

Then one day a Hopi came along looking for water, and since no one cared if a Hopi got electrocuted, no one bothered to tell him about the faulty wiring. After he stopped jerking and shaking from the shock, he went away and later that night "someone" ripped out the wiring, hauled up and destroyed the pump, and vandalized the generator. All of us non-Hopis thought "why didn't we think of that?"

A few weeks later we got our wind-powered system back.

The moral of the homily is, if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

Regarding regulations for washing machines, I found a hilarious web site that says, in part:

As of May 2013, dishwasher manufacturers are not going to be allowed to make or sell a machine that works.

It is from a "free market" fundamentalism web site:

http://lfb.org/regulators-destroying-your-home-appliances/

I tend to rinse the dishes, especially if the dishwasher won't be full by the end of day. Otherwise it starts to smell, and the food sticks to the plates.
Your results may vary.

I hand wash because the number of dishes in a 2 person house is very small and not worth the effort and I don't even use a sink of water.
Also there is no such thing as drying in a dish washer. The dishes are always wet no matter when they are taken out.
I dry my dishes with a small economy fan just moving the air over them, when I do use the dishwasher (large gatherings) I also dry by opening the dishwasher and using the small fan....it works way better and uses little electricity.
When using the dishwasher I never pre-wash (the idea defeats the entire purpose of the dishwasher) and have never had a problem with dishes not coming clean.

I'm sure it would be difficult to beat a modern dishwasher when full, yet how many people turn the dishwasher on when only partly full? As L.Long pointed out, with only one or two people in a household, it may be more efficient to hand-wash. Leaving in dirty (and increasing smelly, over time) dishes until a full load is reached doesn't sound appealing. I sure wouldn't want to be the one to have to load in the last of them after a day or two of marinating.

There are only two people in my household, and we don't go through a lot of dishes anyway. I can often wash the dishes on a single cycle of my pressure tank, and it doesn't take the well pump very long to re-pressurize. I always air dry on a rack. I'd really need to see some more numbers to be convinced I should buy a dishwasher (which would require energy to manufacture) to save energy in the long run.

We don't have room in our kitchen for a dishwasher. We had a portable for awhile but it took up too much room. As L. Long says the amount of dirty dishes two people create in a day is minimal. I just give them a quick rinse, wipe them clean with a soapy washcloth (water not running), then a quick rinse and into the drying rack it goes

We can accept the claim about hand "wash[ing] the same amount of dishes that can fit in a single load of a full-size dishwasher"...

But it should be obvious that if one has a single place setting to wash, the dishwasher will be more wasteful (as it is programmed to wash what it expects to be a full-size load, using that amount of water & power).

The important question is: What's the break-even point where it's better to hand-wash than to use the machine?

(Yes, the pre-supposition is that, as with #3, you are not in a position to leave crusty, slimy dishes to rot in your dishwasher for several days to accumulate that full load.)

P.S. The greywater from hand-washing OUR dishes lives on to water our garden & house plants... That requires rather unusual (though not unheard of) plumbing arrangements to accomplish with a machine washer. Local laws may have a say in that, too...

Kengi, yes, the diswasher should be full! I think people usually do that.

I have a household with three people including a five year old, and occasionally one more. We have no problem filling the dishwasher. I think people worry necessarily about that dried on food. Dishwasher engineers know about that. Dried on food gets undried on during the process.

There certainly are a few items that no amount of mechanical washing will wash off, but for the most part you can leave your dishes in there for quite a while. If you don't think so, just try it and you may be surprised!

If two/three people cook their own food, prepare lunch to bring to work/school, etc. they will use a lot more dishes. If they eat out a lot (i.e. a few dinners a week, lunch at work, etc.) they may not. I work at home so there are usually lunch dishes. I cook the vast majority of our evening meals, so there's pots/pans/dishes/ etc. I can see where some will hardly ever fill a dishwasher.

A while back I lived (in a 2.5 person household) with a very small kitchen. We made room for a half size dishwasher. That worked OK. Hard to get them, but you can. We ordered it at Home Depot. It was not half the cost of a regular dishwasher, by the way!

Yeah, portables are a pain in the ass. I've had those too.

Again, on the encrusted dishes. There is no real difference between a ceramic, glass, or stainless steal surface with one day dried on food gunk and three day dried on food gunk, when it comes to what a dishwasher does.

That is a valid hypothesis...I love the story about the chicken recipe that was passed down through the generations, I refer to it when I ask someone why they do something or why they have a certain opinion and they have no reason.

Wasn't there a study recently with results to the effect that bacteria count on dishes post-dishwasher was dramatically lower if you'd pre-rinsed them?

Ketil, I'd love to see a link for that. Doubtful, but if so, don't forget that we need those bacteria for our endoflora!

#superimportantsciencequestions

Hmm, my google-fu is failing me. It came up in the (Swedish) news about a month ago, as I recall.

Ketil, perhaps it was this one:
http://www.foodprotection.org/files/food-protection-trends/May-Jun-15-s…
(Table 1, see row "utensils prepared before loading")

Greg Laden #9

I don't doubt the ability of a modern dishwasher to clean encrusted dishes. I doubt the willingness of people to deal with smelly dishwashers after a couple of days of food going bad inside of them. I suspect they would rather run the dishwasher partly empty rather than have to deal with the smell of rotting food when they open the dishwasher.

I'd be interested in seeing studies on consumer habits of dishwasher use as well as try to get a better feel for how much energy I use manually washing dishes. Not sure how to approach the latter, but I'll give it some thought. As for the former, I saw this article:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1470-6431.2009.00839.x/abs…

but it's behind a paywall...

I've been reading several studies on water/energy use and most seem to show similar results. This one is fairly typical:

http://www.finish.co.uk/media/1237336/berkholz_manual_dw_habits.pdf

It looks clear that many people washing dishes manually "over-clean" and waste a great deal of water and energy. Given that, if everyone were to get and properly use a dishwasher (no pre-washing and only washing full loads), there would be a significant energy and water savings.

Of course, most studies show that even people with dishwashers often manually clean dishes, and I still haven't seen numbers on how full they load dishwashers before washing, but given the frequency of dishwasher use, and that manual washing is used as well, I'd guess most people are running the dishwashers on partial loads.

So, it looks like the average dishwasher user as well as the average manual dishwasher are both energy and water wasters, as your original article pointed out.

Personally, I've long been concerned over energy and water usage, so I'm careful when washing dishes, and would be one of the outliers in usage anyway.

This discussion has made me think about how I could improve my efficiency even more. I use very little hot water, so most of my energy use is probably from the well pump. Rather than a dishwasher, I would probably put that money towards solar panels and batteries to remove the pump from the grid, which would make most of my washing-up energy renewable, as well as give me the advantage of having unlimited water during a power outage.

I think I'd prefer that to a smelly dishwasher...

In the version I heard, the grandmother cut the *ham* because her old *stove* was too narrow.

We have a beagle pre-wash. Everyone.should. It's so efficient that sometimes I mistakenly put dog washed dishes back in the cupboard thinking they're clean.

Call me a dreamer, but I look forward to a day when it won't matter if I squander energy in my kitchen, or my car. I'll be able to heat my home as toasty warm as I want in the winter, and keep it as frosty cool as I want in the summer.

Because all my energy use will be from carbon-free electricity, and it will be cheaper than hell compared to fossil fuels.

Would that that day comes sooner rather than later.

Some years ago I did a bunch of testing & experimentation with water & energy conservation in household laundry, refrigeration, and dishwashing, to develop my current practices.

The most-efficient practices are highly dependent on the number of people in a household and their various relevant habits.

Firstly, size the appliances to the size of the household. NOT based on "when we entertain," but based on the modal average: the normal day's usage. (This is a particular peeve of mine: much inefficiency occurs when homes and their infrastructure are sized for "entertaining large groups." Oversized living rooms, oversized kitchens, oversized TV screens, oversized appliances, etc. are the result, with enormous waste. This is like buying an SUV "for hauling the kid's baseball team around," when in fact it's used for single-person commuting most days of the year.)

The correct size of dishwasher is that for which one day's dishes etc. make up a full load. That prevents the "stinky dishwasher syndrome" and makes the task easy and routine: after dinner, run the dishwasher. (When you have 20 people over for Thanksgiving, do multiple loads that night and don't complain: the total amount of loading & unloading is the same, the only difference is the number of times you add detergent and press the Start button.)

The wastewater output of any dishwasher is through a hose that's connected to a drain pipe. That hose can easily be replaced with one that's long enough to be brought out to the front of the kitchen cabinets, where it can fill a 5-gallon or larger bucket. (NOTE: Be careful to set this up so the hose will not be expelled from the bucket under force of the water discharge: you want the water in the bucket, not all over the floor.) The water in that bucket can be used for toilet flushes or watering non-food plants (unless you know that the detergent won't have some unforeseen nasty effect on food crops in a garden).

For smaller households, arguably up to 4 people depending on cooking/eating habits, a countertop sized dishwasher is sufficient. I'm using a unit made by Danby that cost less than $300 and does an excellent job. The final rinse is a sanitize cycle that uses the heating element to get the water up to 180 degrees. After that, I leave the door ajar, and the retained heat in the dishes and cabinet is more than sufficient to get them bone dry in less than an hour.

For dishes and for laundry, the rinse cycles are the issue for water usage.

Rinse is basically active dissipation, to dilute the level of detergent that remains on/in an article, to a level that is acceptable. It usually takes two rinses to get an acceptable result, but with care you can get it down to one rinse. Most people use far too much detergent on both dishes and laundry, as evidenced by the suds in the second rinse cycle. (Try washing your clothes with no added detergent: you'll still see suds from the detergent residue that's already in the fabric from overdosing on detergent most of the time.)

Detergent manufacturers recommend higher amounts than needed, to ensure that the product does a complete job of cleaning. Yes they sell more detergent this way, but the primary motivation is to ensure that the product works completely, thereby keeping loyal customers.

You can and should experiment with reducing the dosage of detergent in laundry and dishwasher, to a level that will do the job correctly and not require multiple rinses. For dishes this will involve pausing the cycle after the wash cycle, to check that all food residue is removed, and then pausing it again after the first rinse to check for detergent residue on dishes. (However if you recycle the graywater to toilet flushes, rinses aren't a big deal as long as they don't exceed the demand for toilet flushes between loads).

Detergent dosage will also vary as a factor of the quantity of oil- or fat-based material to be removed from dishes (or clothes). This is the reason for using a manual dish brush or sponge to remove visible food particles before putting dishes in the dishwasher. The brush or sponge only needs to be damp to do its job, so there's no need to run the water in the sink for this.

For washing dishes in the sink, use any appropriate size of container to catch the used water, and then dump it into a bucket to be used for toilet flushes. As with graywater from the dishwasher or laundry, use this water as a priority so it will not have time to stagnate (or add a few drops of bleach).

OK, so now I'm off to do laundry tonight. For this purpose, the clean water input comes from a tank that was filled with the purge water from the shower (the cold water that comes through before the hot water), and the graywater output will also be used to flush the toilet.

All of this stuff is easy if one just gives it some thought and the willingness to experiment.

About showers:

Adjust the thermostat on your hot water heater to the temperature that is comfortable in the shower (trial & error: empirical method). Thus you will only need to use the hot water faucet in the shower, and you can turn it down to a bare trickle while soaping up. This is better than having to rush through a shower at full-blast, and much better than having to fiddle with both hot and cold controls to adjust temperature. For applications that require hotter water, heat what you need, e.g. in a coffee pot or tea pot, or let the clothes washer or dishwasher heat it up for the cycle.

Another peeve of mine are those obnoxious "single control" faucets in showers, that only turn on full-force and only allow adjustment of the hot/cold balance: another piece of incredible waste for no good purpose. To deal with that, get a shower nozzle with an "off" button and learn to adjust that button to the comfortable trickle while soaping up.

Lastly, with a few simple bits from the hardware store, you can build an attachment for the shower that connects via hose to a garden spray nozzle. Using that nozzle to wash yourself in the areas that the flow from the overhead nozzle can't reach effectively, is more efficient than turning up the flow to the overhead nozzle.

Really: all of this is easy if you're willing to experiment.

Remind me to give Gregg a large roll of heavy duty aluminum foil for Christmas, to transform his quality of kitchen life.

"Firstly, size the appliances to the size of the household. NOT based on “when we entertain,” but based on the modal average: the normal day’s usage. "

I would even broaden that principle. People may, for example, buy a car with a v8 engine, a hitch, a lot of power, and a high form factor (a big SUV essentially) because of that two or three times a year they have to tow a boat and the four or five times a year they have a big purchase at home depos. But if they got a small super efficient car that served their needs every other day of the year, and rented a truck (and home depot will do that for you for those trips) when needed, or hired someone to do the towing, there would be huge savings in their money and their Carbon use. I know someone who had the need to tow two boats a year, about a mile one way, twice a year, and always bought such a vehicle. When they upgraded one of the boats to be too big to tow, they started having the marina tow it for them. Adding the marina towing both boats would cost a total of about one gas fill up, once a year. Switching that vehicle for a good hybrid (for the range) would reduce annual gas consumption to about 20-25%.

I never pre-wash any of my dishes, it defeats the whole point for me! It's only worth cleaning them if they're still dirty when they actually come out really.

Thanks for this post. I was also having such a doubt :D

Actually it depends on the dishwasher model type. But anyways, It'l be good to scrape off larger food wastes. But most dishwasher manufacturers say there is no need to do a complete rinse as it's an additional wastage of water. We have bought an AEG dishwasher from 'Best Brand Appliances', Canada before 2 years. We don't rinse dishes before placing in dishwasher? :)

My name is Roby, belong to Gold Coast, Australia but right now, I am in NYC. I got your blog post from FB timeline which is shared with my friend Nat. I review this information based post and like it. I bought new dishwasher recently by using the an outstanding price comparison website …PayLessDeal,com.au they provide huge collection of latest models/brands, which made easy to choose according to your budget. I bought Fisher Paykel DishDrawer integrated Dishwasher and its working well. Before putting dishes/plates in dishwasher they should be rinse normally.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

drorzel — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 08:22:56 +0000

So You've Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson

Over the last month or so, it's been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at the phenomenon of social-media shaming, so anybody who had participated in or even watched one of these unfold had an opinion.

I've enjoyed Ronson's previous books a great deal, because he brings a real empathy to all the interviews and profiles he does. Even when he's profiling really problematic people, like some of the wack jobs he interviewed all the way back in Them, he presents them in a way that's sympathetic without excusing their flaws.

Like the previous books, this is a set of profiles of people who have been on the receiving end of public shaming, in one way or another-- Justine Sacco, whose job-destroying tweet is described in the Times excerpt; Lindsey Stone, who had a joke Facebook photo blow up; Jonah Lehrer, whose attempted apology speech was accompanied by a live Twitter feed of people ripping on him. These also include a few folks who came through remarkably unscathed-- Max Mosely, whose sex scandal fizzled, and a preacher caught in a prostitution scandal in New Hampshire, who lost his job but was surprised to find that his friends and neighbors were more sympathetic than judgemental.

The Sacco and Stone excerpts give you a pretty good idea how this goes-- Ronson's treatment of his subjects is very sympathetic, but doesn't really excuse their mistakes. He's also not especially judgmental toward those who take part in these shamings-- he's mostly interested in documenting how these things play out, and how they affect the people involved. On both sides-- he gives about as much space to Michael Moynihan, who exposed Lehrer's fake Bob Dylan quotes (and is clearly still conflicted about that), as he does to Lehrer himself. He's not exonerating or condemning, here, just telling stories.

Which is, as always, a little frustrating, in the usual manner of books that identify a problem but don't propose a solution. Ronson's charming enough as a narrator to mostly get away with that, though. And it's a genuinely difficult problem to suggest solutions for-- as I said back when the excerpts started appearing, the only real fix is for people to think more carefully about what they're doing.

And that's really impractical, because a lot of these things really have very little to do with the person being shamed. They're really about the people doing the shaming, because the act of participating in these things is a way of demonstrating membership in the tribe of Right-Thinking People (whichever of the many subgroups thereof you might be seeking to belong to). Ronson doesn't really get into the performative aspect of the whole thing, which I think is the biggest weakness of the book, because that's the thing that makes this such a tough nut to crack. This is something Freddie de Boer writes about a lot, and stuff like Ian Bogost's piece on "supertweets" is also interesting in this context. For many of the people heaping abuse on Justine Sacco or Lindsey Stone, it's not so much about the specific things Sacco or Stone did but about defining themselves in opposition to what they think Sacco and Stone represent.

(I almost think what we need is a set of Markov chain text-generating robots to establish plausible-seeming social-media profiles for a few months, then drop in something awful in one direction or another. Then everybody can heap shame on the robots, reaping the self-definition benefits thereof, and we can reboot the bots under a new name for the next go-round...)

Along with the promotion for the book, of course, it's been all but impossible to avoid responses to it, many of them critical. Having read a few of those reviews before reading the book, I mostly come away unimpressed with the criticism. A lot of the negative responses seem to me to be founded on misinterpreting stuff that Ronson says, or at least over-interpreting it to the point where Ronson seems to be saying things I doubt he'd agree with. (Not naming or linking here, because I'm not interested in picking fights.)

Anyway, I liked this a good deal; Rosnon's a charming narrator, and he provides excellent and humane illustrations of some things that have really been bugging me about the culture of social media. It doesn't really make me any less ambivalent about social media (I'm constantly about this || close to writing Twitter off completely), but it's a good read and food for thought.

As I said on Twitter, if I were going to be the subject of a magazine profile, I'd like Ronson to do it, because his genuine empathy stands in stark contrast to the withering contempt that is the dominant critical stance these days. Of course, the easiest way to end up with him writing about you (to this point, at least) is for something to be horribly wrong in your life, so I'll be happy to hold off on that honor for a while... If he announces a new project on "Reasonably Well-Adjusted Scientists and Authors," though, I'll sign on in a heartbeat.

drorzel Mon, 04/27/2015 - 04:22

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It was a great book, but I felt like it ended pretty abruptly--I had to check to make sure that my audiobook didn't suddenly crash or something. I was rather hoping for a bit more of a wrap-up.

I guess we'll really just have to see what happens with Justine Sacco and Lindsay Stone in the few months following this book.

Yeah, the ending was pretty abrupt. I had the advantage of the page counter in the ebook, though, so I knew it was coming up fast...

This interview on CBC radio with Ronson was really good. He's got a lot of interesting things to say, and is a good speaker.

It's an excellent book. I could mildly relate to it, and I gifted a copy of it to Scott Aaronson who I am sure can massively relate to it. I think Ronson does let Lehrer off the hook a bit more than what Lehrer deserved (partly because plagiarizing work from others *and* then lying about it is very different from simply tweeting a tasteless joke) but otherwise it's a must read for our times.

Actual Hugo Comments

drorzel — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 06:26:21 +0000

Actual Hugo Comments

So, as alluded to over the weekend, the Hugo nominations this year are a train wreck. The short fiction categories are absolutely dominated by works from the "slates" pushed by a particular collection of (mostly) right-wing authors and that prion disease in human disguise "Vox Day." The primary purpose of the "slates" is to poke a stick in the eye of people on the other end of the political spectrum within SF, which is why three of the five nominees in one category got to John C. Wright channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand. If you want a round-up of the entirely predictable reactions to this mess, File 770 has you covered.

I was waffling about going to Worldcon this year-- on the one hand, promoting the Schödinger Sessions, on the other hand, it's $1000 to fly to Spokane-- and this probably ensures I won't go. I will, however, be buying a supporting membership so as to be able to vote these jackasses below "No Award, because, really. On the bright side, the reading for this will be simple, as I've already read two of the three Best Novel works I might plausibly vote for, and gave up halfway through the third.

(I will at least start the other two novels, assuming they're in the voter packet, but I don't expect to get all that far... Likewise the short fiction.)

In terms of the many discussions now raging about how to fix this, I'll cast my vote with Jim Henley and his call for competing slates. The highly complicated WSFS constitution and amendment process means any rule-based fix (say, limiting the number of nominations a member can submit to less than the size of the list of finalists) will take at least a couple of years to implement, and in the meantime, the slate-pushers will have free rein.

And while I would like to sympathize with the people invoking the grand mystical tradition of everybody voting for the works that deeply moved them and everything magically working out, that's nothing but a myth. The Hugos have always been an ungainly mix of literary award and popularity contest-- the infamous second-ever Best Novel winner is proof enough of that. Every year, the final ballot includes nominations for works that get there based less on their merit as works of fiction than the personal popularity of their authors, and sometimes those works even win. (Two of the four Worldcons I've been to in person, in fact...)

If I cared less about the result, I might enjoy the irony of a bunch of mostly conservative folks making radical changes to the system, while a bunch of liberals pine for the good old days of inside networking when the right people just knew the right people to vote for, but I'd actually prefer explicit and open campaigning. (Also, this situation is too much a depressing reflection of real-world politics...) So, suck it up, and somebody put together some counter-slates opposing this nonsense.

Of course, I'm not without self-interest in this, in that I feel a little guilty about my role. I was eligible to nominate for the Hugos this year, and sent in a ballot with five Best Novel votes but the short fiction categories left blank. I don't have much time to read these days, and strongly prefer novels to short fiction, so I just don't know enough about the state of the field to make a sensible vote, and most recommendation lists were too long and diffuse to do me any good. I would happily consider voting for a slate of short works put together by sensible people, though, if it means not having three-fifths of the nominations going to a single turgid polemicist. If nothing else, cutting down the list of stuff I have to read before I fill out my nomination ballot would be a huge improvement.

(I have a sabbatical starting this fall, so I might make some effort to read more short fiction with an eye toward being able to nominate a reasonable set of stories, as one of my occasional attempts to be a better person. The novella category is probably a dead loss, though, as I'm just not going to pay hardcover prices for single novellas in small-press editions, which seems to be what all the cool kids do these days.)

So, anyway, there's my marginal-participant contribution to the whole business. For what little that may be worth.

drorzel Mon, 04/06/2015 - 02:26

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I feel your pain about Worldcon. This is my second year as a voter and the first Worldcon I'll actually attend in person. (With my dad, no less!) It's a real downer that the short list has ended up this way. Well, for what it's worth, know that you'll have at least one reader at Worldcon if you decide to go.

I strongly approve of the competing slate idea. I would definitely commit to reading a bunch of short fiction suggested by someone like Jim Henley.