Remediation, ad nauseam: if you mess with Alice, you mess with me

I did not look at the date this article was written until I finished; it was painfully obvious that the article was written about fifteen years ago.  This first becomes apparent when the authors babble on excitedly about virtual reality helmets – remember those?  The authors begin the essay talking about how technology adapts to immediacy by breaking down the natural world into a mathematical interface, applying principles of both mathematics and linear perspective in making computer graphics appear as realistic as possible.  I was picturing the “Star Trek” holodeck, the square room broken down into smaller squares.  However, the aspect of this essay that dates it the most is its focus on visuals and graphics when talking about how new technologies will integrate themselves into our everyday lives.  The authors wax philosophical about making computer graphics imitate real life, from the literal (those virtual reality helmets) to the allegorical (they talk about how the Windows interface mirrors a “window” into a world of information).  However, what has happened in the years since this article was written, is in fact the reverse: computers no longer try to imitate the real world.  Your computer isn’t going to try and imitate the way our brain works; rather, new technologies, especially social media, have caused our brains to imitate the way technology works.

I must admit that I only got about two thirds of the way through the article before I became frustrated and just started skimming.  All the parallels being drawn between art of centuries past and the fabulous new virtual technologies were, to me, just obsolete.  Plus, the authors’ understanding of art, and the philosophies behind certain art movements, was woefully incomplete.  The camera obscura allowed art to become more realistic in a photographic sense; however, the powerful representational characteristics of pre-Renaissance art was completely hypermediatic, which many Modernist artists, including Picasso and Rothko, addressed (and mirrored) in some of their most famous works.  Representational works were used in a religious sense, to encourage contemplation, just as abstract modernist works use the physical medium as metaphor – to misquote McLuhan as badly as the authors have, the medium has been the message for a long, long time.

I think I completely understood what I read of the article, except for one part: where they said that the “traditional musical qualities” of Alice Cooper were “never very complicated”.  Not only are they not art students, they’re not musicians, either.  The Alice Cooper band made some really orchestrally complicated progressive rock masterpieces – they started off as proteges of Frank Zappa, one of the greatest post-modern Western composers.  But that’s another rant, best saved for another blog.

Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson Debate the Cost of Free

In his article “Priced to Sell”, Malcolm Gladwell tells us that free stuff comes at a price.  Content on the internet costs very little to produce, and is therefore offered to us for free; Gladwell points out that the production cost is in fact far from negligible when one considers the sheer volume of content being consumed without charge.  Although it seems as though the world is hurtling toward an age where all information is exchanged free of cost, Gladwell labels those who support this transition “technological utopians” who “assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors.”  In other words, Gladwell is stating that we can’t wipe away the fact that everything has a price, whether that price be our time, attention, or money.

Chris Anderson, editor for “Wired” magazine, tells a different tale.  In his article “Free! Why $0 is the Future of Business”, Anderson points out that people have always offered things for free.  Giving stuff away, says Anderson, isn’t a new thing; it’s been good business practice to give something away in order to lure a consumer in to view other products, or to buy something along with the free item.  Free stuff has always been a part of our lives; it’s only become newsworthy now that information is the item being given away.  The “technological utopia” rhetorized by Gladwell is not, in Anderson’s opinion, a new or unrealistic idea; it’s become so ingrained in our cultural consciousness that we have come to expect it, and this will only increase with the progression of the information age.

The real concern here is not the “free”; it’s the cost.  What is giving away information going to cost us?  We’ve heard all this before from the harbingers of doom who proselytize in hopes of turning us away from the big bad Internet: Journalists will lose their jobs to amateurs; musicians won’t be able to sell their music; consumers will be drawn to information sources skewed towards companies funding these sources, in order to obtain that information free, even if a more objective or accurate source was available for a low cost.  The thing is, the argument may be repetitive, but it’s worth rehashing until we figure it out.  Figuring out the solution to what should and shouldn’t be free will probably take many years, and much experimentation, with lots of commentary from folks like Gladwell and Anderson in the meantime.

Disneyland is too far; let’s enjoy it here!

The title of this post comes from a line in the excellent “Rip: A Remix Manifesto”, a movie about copyright laws stifling creativity and freedom of expression.  The line in question is delivered by a man in China who is visiting a ripoff of Disneyland; the characters look the same (although park administrators swear their Mickey is really  a cat with huge ears), and the rides are the same, with slightly altered names (Splashing Mountain!)  When the guy talks about Disneyland being too far away, he’s speaking for all of us who enjoy things that are ripped off: mashup music, pirated video, illegally downloaded songs.  According to the “Rip” folks, it’d cost millions for a mashup artist to gain the rights to all the songs, if the record companies would agree to loan them the rights.  So people rip stuff off illegally, because we want to have access to cool things, but we don’t have millions of dollars and teams of lawyers and tons of time to go to court about it all.  By illegally copying stuff, we are bringing Disneyland to us.

I really do believe that copyright is evil.  However, I know people who don’t think the way I do, and as much as I try to listen to their POV, I don’t think they have a valid argument.  My friend Mark is a musician who’s released a few albums.  His songs get played on the radio sometimes; each time one of his songs gets played, he gets a bit of money.  Every few months, the company contracted to handle these dealings, called ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), bundles together all the bits of money from each radio airplay, and sends Mark a check.  Mark likes getting these checks; without them, he’d be unable to survive on the very modest income from his job as a bookstore clerk.  Mark fiercely believes that copyright laws need to be in place, and if you ask him, he will say that downloading stuff off the internet for free is wrong.  He knows my position on the issue, so he brags to me whenever he buys a CD, claiming that he’s contributing to the arts (don’t tell him CDs are obsolete; Mark’s in his mid-fifties and doesn’t have a cell phone or the internet. I tried explaining mp3s to him once and he just got really confused and changed the subject).  However, even Mark copies music illegally.  He’s burned CDs for me; when I tell him this is illegal copying, he says that if he likes the burned copy, he’ll go out and buy the album (this is far from the truth, fyi).  However, Mark’s situation is a perfect example of why copyright laws can be good.  Should he not be able to make a few hundred dollars a month off his albums?  It helps him survive.  If no one made any money off of music, how would artists make a living?  I don’t want to work at (insert name of corporate coffee megachain here) for the rest of my life to support my art.  How do we solve this?

It being that my politics make Michael Moore look like Glenn Beck, my solution would be a happy socialist utopia where no one is allowed to make superhuge amounts of money; there’s no reason why people need mansions and BMWs while people are starving, and we should take money from rich people and give it to artists (like me!) so they can have food and shelter while devoting their time and energy to their craft.  Some might say that this is a different debate entirely, but is it?  If everything is free, and everything can be ripped off and remixed in the name of art, how will the artists, including the mashup artists, make a living?  Playing live shows means you have to have some way to support yourself while you’re making your name at playing live.  The copyright argument really does get to the heart of capitalist criticism and politics.

I want to hear comments from people reading this.  What do you think the solution is?  Can you come up with something simpler (and more feasible) than my one-track commie mind can fathom?  I want to hear it.  Comments please…

Quitting Facebook Cold Turkey

“That sounds like a shitty assignment,” a friend told me over dinner the other day.  ”Your teacher’s making you stay off Facebook for a week and write about it?  What are you going to do, write about how you just went on Twitter instead?”

A few years ago, I noticed the trickle of people turning away from their Myspaces and going to Facebook had turned into a steady stream.  ”Myspace is for bored teenagers,” my brother told me when I asked why he didn’t have his own page.  A lot of people thought the same way; Facebook was seen as a more grown-up alternative to the cesspool of porn bots and teen scandals that Myspace had turned into.

Thus, the swarm of locusts moved on to the next fertile field: Facebook, which, in addition to attracting Myspace defectors, also appealed to a whole new demographic: people who were on no other social networking sites.  I got on Facebook about a year ago at the urging of my parents (yep, my mom was my first Facebook friend); I figured that if they liked it, I should give it a shot.  At the time, I assumed it was just like Myspace, but with these “wall update” things which sounded exactly like Twitter.  Being already on both Myspace and Twitter, Facebook sounded slightly redundant, but I gave it a go.

I’ve found that, like my parents, lots of my friends who are otherwise absent from all social networking sites have Facebook accounts.  Most of my friends are older than me; many over-40 types I’ve spoken to are scared off by the fact that Myspace got co-opted by the teenage set early on, and the one word they use in regards to Twitter is “why?”.  Most people I know use social networking for the “social” part; the “networking” bit matters little to them.  None of us have iPhones, and many of us have jobs where you can’t check the internet every five seconds, thus rendering much of Twitter moot (you must admit, it’s easier to glean useful info from Twitter if you have the ability to check it more than once a day).

I wasn’t able to post an update warning my followers of my Facebook hiatus; said hiatus began on a night when I went to school, then went to work, then my band had a show, so I was too busy to get on the internet.  The latter activity is one of the main reasons why I am itching to get back on Facebook; I get emails whenever anyone posts stuff on my Facebook, and I have had to watch silently as my bass player posts photos from the show on my wall.  I told my mom about my assignment; trying to be helpful, she got onto Facebook and began reading people’s congratulatory wall posts about my show before I could stop her (“Mom, that’s cheating!”).

A couple days into the assignment, I decided to log onto Myspace, having failed to read the fine print on the class website which said that logging onto Myspace wasn’t allowed.  What I found on Myspace, which I hadn’t been on in months, was the charred elephant-graveyard-style wreckage of a formerly buoyant social community.  Many of my friends hadn’t checked their pages in months, either.  I found very little of interest, and have been on Twitter for the past week, desperately trying to get my fix.

It was with a heavy heart that I sat down to dinner with my friend, who had been sending me taunting Tweets (“this Facebook thing is SO FUN!!!”) mocking me in my misery.  Yes, I affirmed to him, I was going on Twitter instead of Facebook, but it was proving inadequate.  Most of my Tweeple are folks from school or people in my field of study, and I’ve found over the course of this experiment that I use Facebook for the same reasons my not-so-net-savvy friends use it: Facebook is the “social” part of social networking for me, and Twitter is the “networking” part.

Censorship Within the Wiki-Nation

“Wikipedia is like a cult”, a friend told me the other day over coffee.  ”In order for your edits to stay up, you have to be a member of their elite.”  I’d just explained to my friend the now-infamous story of how my Emac 2321 class got the entire UTD campus banned from making Wikipedia edits.  Our professor had given the class an assignment: edit Wikipedia.  Any edits were okay, he didn’t care if we vandalized the site, we just had to edit it and write about our experience in our blogs.  A few students posted deliberately incorrect information to see how long it would take to get their edits taken down.  Not only did Wikipedia editors take their information down, they traced the edits to students’ blogs, and from there were led to our class wiki.  On this wiki was a list of student blogs, email addresses, and such.  Pretty soon, all Wikipedia entries by students, including the ones that contained viable information, were taken down, and several students reported receiving nasty, hateful emails from strangers who didn’t like our class project.  Although our professor emailed Wikipedia administrators and argued with them on our behalf, as far as I know, one still cannot edit Wikipedia from a UTD campus computer.

We’d been learning in class about how the internet has been breaking down geographic barriers by creating large communities of people with common interests; the size of some of these communities, such as Facebook, is larger than the population of some small countries.  And, although the internet appears to be anarchic in nature, some of the larger online communities have developed a bureaucracy of sorts that run things, minding the herds and, in some instances, censor what is being said.

On Wikipedia, the editorial elite is becoming more and more defined.  According to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, most of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a group of about 1000 people.   “A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence,” Wales told the New York Times. “But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community.”  Researcher Ed Chi of the Palo Alto Research Center tells NewScientist that there is “growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content”.  Chi and his colleagues found that editors who make a single edit a month have their content erased 25 percent of the time, compared to 10 percent in 2003.  Revert rates for editors who make more frequent edits is much lower, starting at 5 percent in 2003 and currently hovering at 15 percent.

Those who view Wikipedia, on the other hand, number in the millions.  What is viewed by these millions is determined by a small number of people.  However, there are no checks and balances, no system of fair governance set up, just a few simple rules about how you should tell the truth in your edits and be respectful.  When students are receiving hate emails over Wikipedia vandalism, it is clear that the power held by the wiki-elite is being abused.  But where is the outrage akin to that which emerges in geographic nations where censorship is committed by the ruling elite?  The answer tells us something about the strength of those geographic boundaries in contrast to those of online communities.

According to the Palo Alto study, Wikipedia’s growth peaked in 2006, and has been declining steadily since.  Have we written everything there is to write about things?  Possibly – it isn’t likely that people will find out new information about stuff in the past, like Elvis or the ’62 World Series, that hasn’t already been written about.  The chapter is closed.  Because of this, the vibrant community of contributors will slowly dwindle.

In this respect, Wikipedia isn’t really like a nation at all.  In countries like China and Iran, citizens are slowly beginning to break through intellectual barriers established by their governments, one blog at a time; in a geographic community, citizens can’t just abandon their location and create another space to inhabit once the first has become oppressive.  The Internet is a fantastic tool, but it’s just that: a tool, not a place.  Users are much more fickle when it comes to their online communities; although they may be fervently attached initially, it’s so easy to leave that community that, once leaders mess things up, that community is done for.

Tragic Kingdom: the tragedy of the commons as applied to breakfast cereal

The “tragedy of the commons” is a term used to describe a phenomenon of human behavior that is easiest to describe using metaphor.  The phrase’s inventor, Garritt Hardin, realized this when writing his 1968 essay on the topic; the metaphor he uses, that of grazing cattle, is still one of the best.  Picture a grassy plot that is a free, common area available as grazing land to several farmers who own cows, with the understanding that they could graze their cows in a collective herd.  The plot can only support a certain number of sheep before overgrazing causes the grass to cease growing.  One of the farmers decides to add an additional cow to his herd, thinking that the negative consequences caused by overgrazing are absorbed by the entire collective; however, the positive outcome, that of profit from selling an additional cow, belongs to that farmer alone.  The other farmers see this; thinking that it’s only fair that they also make an additional profit, they begin adding cows as well, and overgrazing quickly causes the plot of grass to wither and die.

When I was a little kid, my parents made sure my two brothers and I ate very healthy food.  The junk food that we saw lining the grocery aisles in enticingly colorful packages was, for the most part, forbidden.  However, every so often, they’d allow us to eat something sugary.  The Holy Grail of junk food at my house was Trix cereal; the cartoon rabbit and sugar-coated pastel bits of cereal seemed magical in their elusiveness.  About once a year, our parents would buy one box (ONE BOX) of Trix, and tell us that once it was gone, it was gone; they would suggest that we eat it slowly so as to savor it and make the box last for some time.  Readers can probably see where this is going.  My brothers and I would turn into hyenas tearing at a zebra carcass once the box was placed in front of us.  We’d sit down at the table, no matter what time of day it was (the concept of breakfast food doesn’t apply to the Almighty Trix), and begin stuffing ourselves with the sugar cereal, eating as quickly as possible, til the box was gone (this usually took about ten to fifteen minutes).  The logic behind this was, if one of us decided to wait and eat the cereal at a later time, the box could be commandeered by the sibling(s) who sat down and ate it immediately, therefore leaving none for the other(s).  If we all sat down and ate immediately, the sibling who ate more slowly, or ate less, or stopped when they were full, would get less cereal than the others.  This idea was unacceptable, so we’d sit in silence, stuffing our mouths and barely chewing, not even savoring the flavor of the glorious, unattainable Trix, for fear that the other siblings would get more, which Just. Wasn’t. Fair.

So we see, when it comes to the tragedy of the commons, once one person starts to exploit it, it’s all over.  Pretty soon the cereal’s gone and nobody really got to enjoy it anyways.  I can’t propose a surefire solution to the tragedy of the commons, but I can say that had my parents divided up the cereal (we would’ve demanded that they weigh each portion to make sure it was equal) and put our portions into plastic baggies, we probably would’ve taken longer to savor it (provided that we could keep it somewhere that the other siblings couldn’t find and steal from).  Does this mean that we as humans need government around to divide up and monitor our cereal/social services/natural resources/public property to make sure no one person gobbles it all up and ruins it for the rest of us?  In my opinion, yes.  And with that statement, we begin veering off into politics, which is another blog post entirely (for the record, my political beliefs make Michael Moore look like Glenn Beck, so if the Politics Post does happen, read at your own risk).

My Small World (that’s full of dudes in bands)

Duncan Watts is too self-deprecating.  In his book “Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age”, he talks about how, as a graduate student at Cornell, he struggled through his math courses, learning little and faking his way through grad school.  Somehow, this process gained him a Ph.D in theoretical mathematics.  Self-deprecation gets on my nerves when it’s coming from really, really smart people.

However, perhaps Watts is simply being consistent when telling us that he is an ordinary dude with an extraordinary education.  The topic he tackles in “Six Degrees”, i.e. the theories behind networks and how we’re all connected, is a simple problem with a simple solution that is reached through frighteningly complex processes.  Watts tells us, in words we can understand, the basic idea (building a mathematical formula that would predict how networks of people form and grow), then presents us with a bunch of scary charts that show how the phenomenon of everyone being connected to everyone else can be mathematically predicted, then tells us fun stories about Kevin Bacon (you’re familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, right?).  Watts’ writing is like his subject: multilayered.

As I read Watts’ words, I connected some of his complicated theories to examples in my ordinary life.  It seems like all my friends are musicians.  Now, being in a band is much like being in a romantic relationship: band members have the same petty arguments, lasting attachments, feelings of connection and betrayal.  It’s like being married, only to five people at once.  This is why most people I know have been in many bands – staying in the same band with the same people for years and years, a la U2, isn’t easy.  Some are in several bands at once; others hop from band to band.  I’m currently in a band with a bunch of guys who have been in Every Band Ever, and whenever I bring up the name of a local (or national) musician, they’ll tell me a story about how they were in a band with so-and-so who was in a band with them.  I was talking about the late Carter Albrecht to our drummer, Chuck; turns out Chuck was in a band with Carter at some point (I can’t remember the name of the band).  I thought about whether a game of Six Degrees of Chuck Spurlock would be possible, and I realized that I can probably connect Chuck to every local Dallas musician, ever.   “Social networks consist of many small overlapping groups that are densely internally connected,” says Duncan Watts, “and that overlap by virtue of individuals having multiple affiliations.”  This certainly applies to musicians: “small overlapping groups” describes bands perfectly.  My band overlaps almost completely with early ’80s punk outfit the Howling Dervishes; Chuck, Tom the guitarist, and Bass Chuck the bassist (yeah, there are two Chucks) are all former Dervishes.  I like to brag to people that I’m just a couple degrees away from Sid Vicious, as Tom’s other project, the Swingin’ Cornflake Killers, is fronted by Tex Edwards, the singer for the Nervebreakers, who opened for the Sex Pistols once in the ’70s.  This is a stretch, as nobody I know actually played in any bands with Sid, but I’m gonna continue bragging about it anyways.

All in all, my musician friends occupy a small world that doesn’t extend far outside of Dallas; it’s more similar to the Watts/Asimov “Caves of Steel” than to a larger network phenomenon like Twitter.  A few local folks (e.g. Edie Brickell, Reverend Horton Heat, Dave Abbruzzeze from Pearl Jam) have gone national, which puts us Dallas folk within a few degrees of some very famous people.  However, I’m pretty content with being part of a small cavelike collective – as long as I can retain bragging rights for my dubious Sid Vicious connection.  I guess I’m Duncan Watts in reverse – I talk a big game but I haven’t done much.  Perhaps my small-world connections will help me go far in the future.

Are Bloggers Bringing The Blogosphere Down?

I see what Andrew Keen is saying.  The first chapter to his much-ballyhooed book “The Cult of the Amateur” is all about how the internet, with its fast-paced flow of user-generated information, fosters a culture in which the voices of a thousand amateur bloggers drown out experts who might be better qualified to write on the topic at hand.  Keen is concerned that “nurturing talent requires work, capital, expertise, investment”, and he believes that today’s bloggers don’t have the tools necessary to deliver content that can enrich our lives as well as experts.

One thing Keen misses out on is how the sheer pace of the information flow can affect content.  In his article titled “The Business Of Blogging is Ruining The Medium”, tech blogger Dan Rayburn explains that bloggers who “write for headlines”, i.e. try to post about the latest-breaking news before anyone else, get more hits and more attention than bloggers who take more time to research their posts; however, bloggers who write for headlines often skimp on the quality of their content.  According to Rayburn, too many bloggers are using the same quotes and images as everyone else in their rush to get the story out as fast as possible.  “Most of them don’t take the time to do anything but report on the news, but provide no real analysis,” he explains.  Blogging is supposed to be an outlet for people to provide their own perspective on the world.  So what happens when amateur bloggers, untrained in the art of analyzing information and drawing their own nuanced conclusions, are pressured to get out more stories, faster than everyone else?

Andrew Keen realized that the content side of journalistic writing would change drastically with blogs; however, he never really thought of this twist.  Is this fast-paced endless repetition simply, as Rayburn suggests, “the nature of this booming business”?  Can blogs sustain themselves under the kind of pressure that is being mounted on them from new angles?  Only time will tell.  Knowing how fast the digital world moves, it won’t be long before we’ll have a clearer picture.

Andrew Keen 2.0

Our assignment for this week’s class was to read “The Great Seduction”, a chapter from “The Cult of the Amateur” by Andrew Keen, without interruption: no music, no cell phones, no checking the computer, just 40 minutes of uninterrupted reading.  We did this experiment last semester, in the EMAC 2321 class, so I figured I was old hat at this.  So I waited til after my noisy pet parrot went to bed, then set about reading.

The walls in my apartment are paper-thin, and my wacky downstairs neighbor, Cesar, often blasts either Tejano or elevator-style instrumental music so loud the floor shakes; I waited til 1 AM, hoping against hope that he’d turn it down, with no luck.  I got into bed and pulled the blankets up over my ears in an attempt to drown out the din.  This sort of worked – the music was a small distraction, made worse by the fact that, shortly before I began, my neighbor switched from Tejano to some of the worst elevator music he’s played in a while.  This sounds better in theory; elevator music can be soothing, I suppose, but not when it’s so loud that my windows rattle.

After about fifteen minutes, I heard a knock on my door.  No one knocks on my door at 1:30 AM except for Cesar the wacky neighbor; he gets very drunk, knocks on my door at all hours of the night, and attempts to give me random things that he finds in his apartment (the last time he did this, I got a children’s watercolor-painting instruction book and a plastic seat that hooks over the bathtub so old people can sit down and avoid falling in the shower.  If I try and politely refuse his kind but puzzling presents, he insists that I take them, often shoving the gifts through my door, so I usually just take them, stuff them in my closet, thank him for his kindness, and be done with it).  I ignored the knocking and tried to keep reading, but it was distracting; I worry about Cesar, as I think he may be dealing drugs.  Luckily, he only knocked a couple times before giving up, so I was able to continue reading.

As I read, I thought about how things were different from the time I first did this experiment.  A few months ago, I began text-messaging, and I learned how to Tweet on my phone, all part of a conscious effort to become better connected to the network of flowing information that is the new media universe.  As a result, I think I’m more easily distracted.  I found my mind wandering more often than it did when I first read the article last semester, although the fact that this was my second time reading this may have had something to do with it.  I found my mind wandering to my recent Twitter conversations, the work I still had to do on other homework projects…my poor brain was all over the place compared to the focus that I usually display when reading.

This experiment, as a whole, didn’t really differ from my normal reading habits.  When I read the newspaper, I read all of it but the sports, business, and classifieds, in one sitting, without any distractions.  I regularly spend stretches of three to five hours reading books, uninterrupted, with my blankets over my ears to drown out the Cesar-sponsored soundtrack.  This assignment wasn’t challenging in the least, but it was interesting to see how my mind wandered much more often than it did when I first did the assignment.  And you know what the kicker is?  This fact made me really, really happy.  I felt like I’d accomplished something in training my brain to become easily distractable, adapting to the ADD new-media thought pattern.  Now if I could just figure out Tweet Deck, I’ll be set.

Multitasking and the Art of Paying Attention

This week’s assignment consisted of listening to two audio clips, and reading an article.  The first audio clip was a speech by former Microsoft VP Linda Stone entitled “Attention: The New Aphrodisiac”, and the other was an NPR “Talk of the Nation” program entitled “Bad At Multitasking? Blame Your Brain.”  The article is called “Attention Literacy”, by the formidable Howard Rheingold.

Let me preface this entry by giving you some background on my experience with the kind of multitasking common in my field of Emerging Media and Communications.  I want to be a journalist when I grow up, but was advised against going into a traditional journalism program.  “Go into emerging media,” I was told.  “You wanna be a writer?  Start blogging.”  So I signed up for the EMAC degree program at UTD, and soon realized that my fellow students were a formidably tech-savvy bunch.  I say “formidably” because I’ve had a cell phone for about two years now, and I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of being connected and reachable at all times.  My classmates, however, are glued to their smart phones.  They have what appear to be superhuman multitasking abilities; they check their phones during lectures, they Tweet, they are constantly connected to a giant network of folks who are turned-on and tuned-in at all times.

Honestly, I don’t know how they do it.  Everything seems to move at phenomenal speeds for new-media folks – they even talk faster than most folks I hang out with.  My professor remarked that spending a few days without his smart phone is like losing his fifth limb.  It’s as though new media and connectivity is giving us a collective case of ADD.  Ten things at once?  I can’t handle that.

Or can I?  I began listening to Linda Stone’s lecture while I was doing the dishes.  What she said was really resonating with me – she thinks that what she calls “Continuous Partial Attention” isn’t necessarily good for us.  I smiled as I scrubbed away, hoping against hope that the pendulum swing she speaks of, in which our culture will someday veer away from the belief that those who aren’t doing ten things at once aren’t reaching their full potential, will in fact come to fruition.  Then I looked down at the soapy sink.  Was I multitasking?  Well, yes.  Could I sit down in front of the computer and just listen, without doing anything else?  I put down the dish-scrubbity thing and did so; within ten seconds, I’d become fidgety, so I got out a bowl and some soap, and began cleaning my makeup brushes while listening to the program.

This task took me into the second program, in which NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton explained that when we multitask, our brain isn’t in fact doing five things at once; rather, it’s rapidly switching attention between tasks.  Hamilton says that if one of the tasks we’re doing is menial and doesn’t require much attention, we can make our brain pay attention to the more challenging task and therefore successfully do both things at once.  Scrubbing dishes doesn’t take much attention.  I can absorb everything being said on the audio program while I’m wringing out my makeup brushes.  I cannot, however, write a blog post while listening to one of these programs; I was so excited about what Stone had to say that I tried bringing up this blog before she was done talking, and I found that if I began writing, I couldn’t pay attention to what Stone was saying.

Reading is another matter entirely.  I have to print out articles in order to read and absorb them.  When I read, I can’t be interrupted; otherwise, I’ll lose the train of thought that allows me to fully process what I’m reading.  So I went to print out the article, silently thanking the heavens that this was a written article, as the brilliant Rheingold, one of the foremost new-media scholars of our time,  has one of the most sleep-inducing speaking voices I’ve ever heard.  However, the article seemed too short to print, so I cut up an apple to snack on (I can’t eat apples whole – they must be sliced), sat down in front of the screen, and read it.

Looking down at my apple slices, I realized I was multitasking again.  I smiled with my mouth full of apple as I read about Rheingold’s experiment with videotaping his students not paying attention, then making them turn off their laptops.  Paying attention, says Rheingold, is a valuable skill that we must not lose even as our brains shift in the way we learn and communicate in the information age.  I wondered, as I ate my apples and read the article, whether I in fact have the advantage over folks who can’t go five minutes without checking their smart phones.  I can pay continuous, full attention to the task at hand.  Well, almost full attention…but hey, my dishes are done, and these apples sure are delicious.