2 posts tagged “teh intarwebz”

First and foremost:  TO THE PEOPLE OF BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA (except electric firefly):  YOU ARE IRREDEEMABLE ASSHOLES.  Also, do you really think the Marine Corps is going to be intimidated by a mass public breastfeeding?  THIS IS WHY PEOPLE MOCK LIBERAL ELITES, YOU IDIOTS.  YOU COMPLETE, UNMITIGATED IDIOTS.  Semper Fi, Rob Riggle!

Second, and making reference to the very same episode of The Daily Show:  My husband (ex-military, sort of--I don't feel entirely sure the Jieitai [Japan Self-Defense Force] constitutes military, but they pretend they do) and I were watching Jon Stewart interview that dude, Lt. Gen. Whatever, and we couldn't help but notice that these two men are from entirely different planets.  They were both apparently speaking English, American vernacular, yet they were not having the same conversation at all.  It was awesome.

Next:  WTFF?  Yeah!  Fabulous!  Teenagers have no fucking idea about anything at all in history, but they are so great at using Facebook!  They are choosing (that word is used many times, because the fact that something is chosen is enough to give it validity and force, at least in the world this lady inhabits) to spend hours and hours not doing homework or bothering about who this Hitler dude is but reading and writing about themselves and reading and writing in order to socialize!  So, see?  Teenagers can read and write!  They can completely comprehend LOLcats and txt msgs that involve complex code-substitutions of numbers for syllables (like Prince didn't totally already do that shit back in the 80s), so they're totally smart.  So just get off their backs, old people!  You crazy old people who want, like, coherent thoughts and maybe writing about something other than myself.  You suck with your whole "knowing about history" deal.  Because it's not the same as what teenagers used to do, just writing in a diary or something, because this is totally, like, online, and teenagers today spend upwards of 2 hours a day doing this newfangled diary-writing, whereas you oldsters had to do, like, chores or some shit and learn about boring stuff like wars.  Yes, I see this logic so clearly.  Srsly, this is one of the lamest fucking articles I've encountered in a while.  FEH.

And finally, my old friend Linda Hirshman has an article in Slate again.  Ah, how nice, how refreshing.  She uses the example of Silda Spitzer to make the case that women should keep their paying jobs instead of staying home with kids (for those of you who don't know, Hirshman hates women who stay home with their kids).  First off, hasn't poor Silda been used enough?  Fucking leave her alone.  I don't know why she stood on those podiums (podia?) with her slimy husband, but that isn't my business.  But for fuck's sake, Linda--the woman has enough to deal with without being made an "example" of by some vicious little "feminist." 

Second, OK, go read the piece.  Her case for not quitting your day job consists primarily of:  1.  You just never know when your husband is going to get caught paying $4300 for a night with a ho and your whole world is going to come crashing down on you!  2.  When that world comes crashing down, your social standing is likely to come down a notch.  I mean, you know, you're probably still going to be quite well off--especially after the alimony!--but you will now be only the divorcee Spitzer instead of the governor's wife.  OMG!  Like, OMG!  How humiliating, this precipitous decline in standing among the elite philanthropist types.  It's almost as unbearable as finding out your husband goes to hookers. 

Nevermind that Hirshman's "opt-out revolution" doesn't really exist (does a revolution really exist if it only marginally exists among the richest classes and not at all among the rest of us?  I hardly think so), she again bases her entire argument for keeping your day job on wealth, power, and social status.  The problem with doing this is the same problem Kant identified with moral judgments and arguments of this type.  To someone who cares little about validation from outside, whether that validation is derived from money or a certain social position, the argument becomes meaningless.  Most of us like to make money and no one likes to be really impoverished, sure, but not all of us derive our ethical compass and sense of self-worth from whatever pays the most, Linda.  Nah, Linda, if you want to be convincing, you need to convince me why I should give a fuck about the old man's game of corporate rat-racing and expensive toy accumulation and the jibber-jabbering of the caviar-eaters.  So far all I've heard is because that's what will make other people, especially those old white men we all love to hate, think I'm worthwhile.  But the secret here is, Linda:  I already know I'm worthwhile.  I have no need of their validation. 

This began life as a comment on mcco12's post about ebooks and books, though I tried to edit it to make it more freestanding.  But you might want to read his post first--it's a good post, anyway.

I had an argument a few years ago with a musician named Danny Barnes about putting more music online.  He made the point that putting it online takes it to a wider, less elite audience by making it more affordable, and I'm not sure that it has.  It can, if you have a computer and a reliable connection and the necessary memory and so on, of course (and especially if you pirate it, but I doubt that's what he had in mind!).  But we tend to forget here, on Vox because we're all online, that there are people who can't afford an iPod, can't afford a computer, can't afford an Internet connection.  I only have a computer and a DSL connection because I use them for work; otherwise, I probably couldn't afford them.  I bought a computer in college with student loans, loans I still haven't paid off, and I used it long enough that it was no longer compatible with anything and then kept using it because I couldn't afford a new one; I certainly couldn't have downloaded music on it with its 10 MB hard drive (yeah, I think it was bigger than 10 MB but not very big.  Floppies, man, it was all on floppies). 

I can, however, afford a dollar or less for a used book or 5 bucks or less for used CDs.  The equipment necessary to use those are cheap and basic (light, in the case of books; a cheapie CD player for the CDs).  If I spend a dollar on a book, it can just sit there peacefully until I'm ready to read it, requiring no further input from me--no upgrading, no extra memory, no check of its battery--and it will keep sitting there as long as I keep it for re-reading for the same dollar.  Not to mention that downloading books is probably going to require a credit card, and I fucking hate credit cards.  I hate the whole culture around credit cards.  Yes, I have one and I am forced to bow the great credit god in the sky to maintain my Blockbuster queue and a few other things, but we're cash people.  We want to use credit as little as possible, and, of course, there are many people for whom using credit cards is either impossible or just undesirable.

Now, I'm not opposed to ebooks--not at all.  I just doubt.  I'm a doubter.  I'm a doubting Thomas.  I doubt they will be less elitist in the end than books are now because they introduce another device that must be bought, maintained, upgraded, etc.  I doubt that most of the unpublished authors will be worth bothering about, particularly because blogs already provide a similar outlet, and I'm underwhelmed by the quality of most blogs.  I doubt that ebooks will ever be as enjoyable to me as book-books.

You're undoubtedly right about the value of portability and searchability.  It also *may* help some authors publish their work, and I think that's worth exploring, even if I'm not interested in their work (with music, I think this has been a pretty mixed bag).  But I can't see that a preference for real books is akin to being against the printing press.  I'm not against bringing the masses more information.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I just do not see that this is going to make books more affordable or accessible in the foreseeable future to people who can't currently access books.  Technology does tend to get cheaper over time, of course, so maybe someday. 

Also, the argument that third space makes in the comments about photos (which I agree with), I would make about books, too.  They do take on meaning and intimacy as physical objects.  They *can* be mere carriers of information, but they don't have to be.  When you're doing research and need the searchability functions, ebooks are perfect, but for some of us, they're just never going to be adequate to replace that intimacy with the book as its own signifier.  For people who don't care about that, fine, use ebooks.  I'll go buy up your used books when you get rid of them.

Gah, I'm sounding like Albert Borgmann.  The object can be just a device for carrying information, and electronic devices do that just as well as paper ones and maybe better.  But there's a loss there, too, of our relationship with the object, the human feeling of paper, the smells of books, the flipping of the pages (that does not give you trigger finger), the appearance of handwritten notes in the margins, the inscriptions from the person who gave it to you or who gave it to whomever sold it to the used bookstore, etc.  Maybe those things aren't important to you or to anyone else but me, I don't know.  But to me, books can tell a lot more stories from their histories than just the information the author consciously put there.  A notebook can, too, in the right context.  I love looking at my old notebooks from college with my sarcastic little notes about classmates and so forth.  The information--the lecture notes--is kind of boring now.  But there's just so much more in there. 

And, yeah, children's books...no, that's just not the same.  Yes, my son rips up his books sometimes and gets sticky syrup on them and so forth.  But I love watching him interact with them, and he loves it too.  The pictures!  The touch-and-feel books!  I don't see how an ebook would serve these purposes at all.

Also, while everything in contemporary society is supposedly towards more convenience, more accessibility, and more choice, life appears to be becoming more stressful, less convenient, more hectic, etc.  Why would the addition of one more "convenient" device be different? 

There is also the concern, that I see now someone else has brought up in comments, about our relationship to texts.  I used to work on texts that had been transcribed from a nonliterate culture for my grad school work, and it was interesting how writing things down made the texts different.  It made people quibble about little details that formerly could change from speaker to speaker, so that each storyteller could make his/her own mark on the text.  It made people quibble about accuracy and lose sight of the larger narrative thread.  I see this happen online already.  People read an article and pick up one tiny fact that is inaccurate and thus dismiss the writer and the article, losing sight of the larger picture of the article as a whole.  It's brought us greater attention to detail and less ability, as far as I can tell, to focus on the argument or history as a whole.  It is possible that the physical properties of the book and the human scale of it draw us into them and give them a human face, which is harder to summarily dismiss than the relatively inhuman presence of type on a screen.  I am not arguing against literacy and for a return to oral storytelling, mind.  I'm just wary of these changes to our interactions with the text and, via the text, with the author.  I similarly have concerns about the value of online, unedited texts.  Srsly, dood, have you seen the grammar and spelling, not to mention the narcissism and lack of logical coherence on a lot of blogs?  srsly.  Yes, yes, I do fear that ebooks are going to sound like the LOLcats.

Hmmm, I think my last paragraph there lacks clarity.  I'll work on it.  But, I'm supposed to be working, like, at a job.