Don’t Send

The latest commentary in the ongoing new media-old media debate is a book titled The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman. Since John Freeman (former National Book Critics Circle president and current Granta editor) also happens to be my older brother, this post will be more or less a puff piece. I posted back in February about a dream I had of my brother starring as a guest on the Today Show being interviewed by Meredith Vieira. This is more or less the second installment to that post.

A portion of Freeman’s book was published in The Wall Street Journal on August, 22nd, and it was called a ‘manifesto.’ Gosh, you would think my brother was the second incarnation of the unabomber or something! Actually, Freeman is quick to point out that he is not a Ludite, but rather a privacy and efficiency advocate. According to Freeman, email is culpable for our shorter attention spans because it interrupts our train of thought every 5 seconds. We are dependent on it the same way we are dependent on the sound bite and textspeak. Email, like all other rapid-fire and truncated forms of communication, gives rise to the Instant Replay and back-to-back commercials. It is part of the chatterbox of sounds and images vying for our senses, and it is both a contributing factor and a symptom of our cubicle existences. It is the zenith of technological progress in the realm of instant communication that cannot be surpassed, and this fact alone makes it worth examining. My brother examines these things in a sort of post-postmodern way (at least that is what I gleaned from the WSJ manifesto). In many ways The Tyranny of E-mail seems to be a segue to the next book John Freeman plans to write, a book about suburbia. Mmmmm, I can’t wait for that one.

But in the meantime, here is some of what we can expect from The Tryanny of E-mail:

“A large part of electronic commu­nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interac­tion, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of bal­ancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.

It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors. In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.

If we spend our eve­ning online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the peo­ple we could turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the com­plicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea.”

Wow, cool stuff! Keep in mind that I don’t speak for my brother, nor do I entirely care very much about his moral point of view concerning email - I am more interested in the implications of said moral point of view. I myself happen to enjoy the streamlined efficiency of email and its various applications, and I employ it as frequently (albeit as carefully) as possible. But I admit that I am more easily entertained than my brother is. I like things that are new and shiny, I eat at chain restaurants often because I crave predictability and familiarity. I am part of the Dan Brown herd, the  blind following the blind. I do not necessarily think this is a bad thing, I am merely a product of my era much like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were products of their eras. But I also think right now is the best time in human history to be alive, and email is no doubt one of the countless reasons for this.

My brother, however, is a private person. I stopped sending him emails a few years ago after most of them went unanswered. He has little patience for communicating casually in this medium when a phone call might suffice. This is unfortunate because now he is a very hard person to reach. But this goes back to the point Freeman is trying to make in The Tyranny of E-mail about how we don’t need to be available to everyone 24-7 just because the technology exists to make us available all the time. In the “old days” of the 1980’s, doctors, statesmen and hommicide detectives were probably the only ones who might expect to get a page or a phone call in the middle of the night. But having an email account with your workplace might result in employees working long after the work day has ended, which induces faster burnout rates. All of this and more is covered in the book.

My brother mentions words like “speed” and “burnout” in his manifesto in a negative way, and this made me think of something. If some people’s brains are capable of working at extremely high rates of speed, is the technology of email necessarily a bad thing for them to incorporate into their lives? I thought of this because John Freeman is a man who never sleeps, and he doesn’t read books so much as he scans them. He is capable of juggling many tasks at once, like being the unpaid president of the NBCC while also making a living in Manhattan as one of the nation’s most prominent book critics. Freeman is capable of doing and performing so much with only one brain that it begs the question: why does he think we all need to slow down?

I do happen to know that John sometimes spent 2 hours per day answering emails during his tenure as the NBCC president. When I would visit him in New York, he spent the wee morning hours wading through a backlog of emails from all types of people ranging from work associates to fans. Obviously, with this kind of responsibility resting on your shoulders, it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I watched tv or tried to sleep, I was reminded of my brother’s burden by the constant pattering coming from his keyboard. Often I would hear a tap interrupted by a pause, then another tap and a pause. This sound would repeat itself for several minutes as if played in a loop, signaling the authoritative action of an unnecessary or superfluous email message being deleted. The keyboard pattering, by comparison, sounded more optimistic, as if it was a relief for my brother to finally answer a legitimate email after reading nine wasteful ones.

In defense of my brother’s email tormentors, however, and as further evidence of Freeman’s bionic abilities, one could never anticipate what time-zone he was in at any given moment. Hence sending him an email at 3 am California time didn’t seem like such a sin if you might think he is currently in Germany on a cross-cultural tour to promote literature. What an even bigger surprise it must have been for the senders when they got an almost instantaneous reply too! But I couldn’t help thinking as my brother recounted his email nightmare to his family and talked of the book he planned to write about it, that he was somehow encouraging the inundation of virtual mail that consumed so much of his life by replying to just-received messages at 3 in the morning. Obviously this would tell the sender that he was in fact available 24-7, whereas waiting until the next day to read and respond to a new message might be the more wise thing to do if one doesn’t want to be hounded by email. My brother’s workaholic tendencies made him incapable of turning off, and he essentially became a human octopus. I can only wonder what went through his mind as he answered all those emails, what thoughts his brain formulated. He obviously must have discovered the limits and futility of virtual mail, mapping its paramenters as he sat there glued to his chair while his life whizzed by. He probably became adept at pointing out which emails could have easily been spared with a phone call, which ones were too long, too personal, too short.

The result of all this is The Tyranny of E-mail which not only analyzes the whole email phenomenon and tracks the history of written correspondence, but also seeks to edify email users about responsible use of the technology. It should be a good read with far-reaching implications. My last post was about how we need to put limits on what we say and I think it’s a coincidence that my brother has a forthcoming book about imposing limits on our virtual communication habits as well. This definitely is a time for 30-somethings to think more carefully about what they blurt out either in public or online. After all, we are now adults, and becoming an adult requires a lot of slowing down. Maturity means thinking before you say or do something, and the same rules apply to the virtual world. Fast thinking does not have a premium over slower, careful thinking; and in fact, the opposite may be true.

paradigm shift

Does God punish us?

Because we are moral creatures, we punish ourselves. I also believe the world can beat us down at times, but not because a higher power wills it to. The world can work against us for a variety of reasons, and how we deal with life’s unlevel playing fields results in making us either stronger or weaker individuals.

A religious person might see these grueling uphill challenges as God’s way of punishing us, but a rational person will view these things as a combination of different forces working together, some of which we have control over, and others which are beyond our control.

Why Dan Brown is important

People need to incorporate Christianity into a modern context so that it still has relevance in our daily lives today; otherwise the Bible is just a collection of ancient stories that have no present day applications. People think we don’t need God anymore because we live in a complex world with TVs, computers and medicine. But we’re still going to die, and this is where all the big questions come from: Why do I exist? Why am I here? What do I hope to achieve in life? What comes after? This is why we still have religion, and why we may always have religion. This dilemma (if you can call it that) is what inspires people like Dan Brown to write books like “Angels & Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code.” These intellectual adventures serve as a collective exploration and redefinition of faith for a generation standing at the threshold of something new and uncharted.

On seeing and believing

I believe that current events happen, but I don’t always believe in how they are interpreted and told to us by the so-called “pundits” in the media. For instance, in the 2008 vice presidential debates, I thought Sarah Palin bombed. And yet probably because of some network mandate, all the talking heads were saying that she aced the event and blew Joe Biden out of the water. By watching the debate with my own eyes, however, and seeing how she reeled and stuttered her way through the questions without saying anything concrete that came from her own head, I believe that she flopped. But news is very political, and nothing is ever reported without a spin, hence we get ridiculous assessments like this.

For this reason I carefully filter out everything that comes from the major news networks, and only accept the little trickle of facts that make it through. I have learned by now that most of the opinionated blowhards on channels like CNN and MSNBC are vacuous bags of fat that are pumped full of empty words and slogans by the candidates with the most soft money.

Three cheers for Bubba!!!

FINALLY!

I know this also could not have happend without B-Money’s indefatigable ‘Lil Kim smear campaign on facebook!

Economic Uncertainty Spawns Creative Fecundity

[via Intent.com (where inspiration flourishes)]

NEVER A WORSE BETTER TIME THAN NOW

By: Tim Freeman

If the Recession Blues are getting you down – or if you’re just dreading the countdown to 2012 when the ancient Mayan calendar predicts the world will end – have no fear. Even though you may not have a job, or you have a job but no money, you can take solace in the fact that things aren’t as bad as they appear on the surface.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21^st Century and realize what an anticlimactic disappointment it all was, we can take comfort in knowing that the world isn’t going to implode anytime soon (sorry Mayans). There is a vast future waiting to be conquered, and history is already unfolding before our eyes. Many of us might not see it, but all it takes is some sifting through the murky haze of blah-ness to uncover the possibilities.

You probably already recognize some of the trends brewing these days without even being aware of it. If not, let me call your attention to some of them:

Jon Itkin

Not since Bruce Springsteen has an artist tapped the American working class backbone with so much originality and intellectual honesty as this 24 year old virtuoso from Oregon. Itkin’s website describes his music as, “A little country, a little rock n’ roll,” but this man’s sound truly defies genre labeling. In “Like a Bruise” off of 2005’s Oregon, Jon laments, “Working ‘till [he’s] sixty then dying of a heart attack.” Not the most uplifting lyrics, but this coffee drinking hick has a way of turning pain into something beautiful. “Bismarck,” from 2007’s Big Gold Guitar in the Sky, is a more upbeat ditty which rants about fathers who are “land-locked sailors” and running away with “a beautiful woman.” Probably the most promising thing about Jon Itkin’s music besides his prematurely-aged wisdom and talent, however, is that it attempts to redefine a certain way of life within a 21^st Century context. Itkin proves that cowboys can still be cool and have relevance for all time, if they only adjust their sensibilities every once in a while.

Blog Your Way to a Job

Believe it or not, ennui is marketable. Chances are you and everybody you know (and their dog) has a blog. But did you know that your blogging might pave the way to a career? Yes, what you had for breakfast and your insights about last night’s episode of Big Love can actually land you a job. Emily Gould, former Gawker editor turned blogger, is a perfect example of someone who utilized this bedroom launch pad to make a career for herself in the limelight. Considered a leading authority on the whole blogging phenomenon, Emily is currently authoring a book based on her 2008 NY Times Magazine article about her personal obsession with blogging and being what she calls an “over-sharer.”  The blogging maven has even been a guest on Larry King Live and FOX’s Redeye.

Carmichael native and Del Campo alumnus Brenna Hamilton, a self-described “freelance writer and former advertising wondergirl” began studying mass communications after her advertising job was downsized. “There is a huge rift in the mass media between traditional forms of broadcast, cable, radio, magazines, newsprint, books and sound recordings (music) versus the 21^st Century digital Internet and mobile/cell revolution,” she says. “What we are experiencing is the end of the line for the traditional media as they struggle to adapt or die in the new age of all things Internet/digital.”

As old school media struggles to keep pace with newer technologies, conditions are ripe for bloggers to move in and fill the gap. What does this mean for us lay people? Let’s say, for instance, you have season tickets to the King’s games. Perhaps you could provide firsthand reporting of all the Arco action on your blog titled Cow Bells.  Sports Illustrated would no doubt be jealous, and who knows – they may even try to recruit you. With so much foreseeable potential in the future of blogging, you need to start asking yourself before you sit down at the computer: Who is going to be reading this and how will it impact me later on down the road?

The New York Invasion

Another foreign music invasion wouldn’t be something to feel optimistic about if it were anything as dismal as the last invasion which brought us such depressing acts as Coldplay, The Vines and the new politically-charged U2. No, the latest invasion of musical genius is actually being generated from within our own borders in a little place called New York City. These new bands share more in common with their older British siblings, bands like Radiohead and Blur who illuminated the alternative rock scene during the middle and late nineties. Acts like the Brooklyn-based MGMT, The Kills and Georgia born Cat Power are spearheading an American musical Renaissance. Add to this domestic juggernaut the Canadian rockers Arcade Fire and a Danish duo called the Raveonettes, and it seems as if the world is musically on the verge of something very powerful and transcendent. If you are someone who thought there was no future to music after Radiohead, think again.

***

On the surface, blogging and a musical Renaissance may seem like meager sea changes in these gloomy times. But we should all take solace in the fact that the economic pall cast by the failures of the shadow banking system could not and cannot kill or dampen human expression and creativity. We will always have these great freedoms and commodities to enjoy, trade and sell.

And when times are toughest, sometimes this wellspring of freedom is all we have.

Slow Dancing with Laura Ling

By: Tim F. Freeman

AS I WRITE THIS, it has been 8 WEEKS since journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee became pawns in a game of political muscle flexing between Kim Jong-il’s North Korea and America and its allies. The grueling saga for the two women began when they were picked up on March 17 by North Korean soldiers in a porous border area near the Tumen River in China. The reporters, who work for Al Gore’s San Francisco-based Current TV, were doing a story about North Korean refugees being abducted by human traffickers. In the winter, the frozen Tumen River is a popular crossing point where people fleeing North Korea’s dire poverty escape over the border into China.

After being taken into custody, the journalists were detained and interrogated in a guest house on the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea’s Potemkin village capital. The latest from the state run news agency out of this city is that preparations are under way to try the women for illegal border crossing, suspected “hostile actions” and espionage. If found guilty, each could face a maximum prison sentence of more than 20 years under the dictatorship’s strict penal code.

America has no official diplomatic ties with North Korea, but negations are under way to free the two detainees. So far, in an effort not to compromise the case, American officials are being very tight lipped about any efforts underway to secure a release for the reporters.

***

THIS HARDLY SEEMS surprising in today’s world—two journalists are detained by a rogue nation, threats are made and people become anxious. If I didn’t personally know Euna Lee or Laura Ling, this story might not even gain my attention let alone spark a gut reaction. But North Korea’s territorial and suspicious handling of these two young ladies does in fact make me tense. I really do know Laura; or, at least, I knew her.

Laura and I grew up just blocks from each other in the same suburb of northern California and we attended the same junior high and high schools. Despite this proximity, however, it is fair to say that we only tangentially knew each other. If my social life were rendered as a drawing of concentric circles, Laura would have been orbiting somewhere in one of the outermost rings. Even though she lived right across the street from the swim and tennis club where I spent the majority of my summer days and evenings, we led separate lives and only saw each other briefly in passing.

The only salient memory I have of Laura that stands out above all of our mundane fleeting encounters involves a slow dance we shared at a junior high dance.

The venue for these dances was our school’s multipurpose room, a long building with a barrel-vaulted corrugated roof that looked like a hanger for small airplanes. On dance nights this building, which also served as a cafeteria and gymnasium, was bedecked with balloons, disco lights and an array of jagged haircuts and flowing mullets. Hundreds of kids donning the latest Miami Vice fashions would throng the dance floor choking the air with Brut, Aquanet and the occasional embarrassing whiff of body odor.

Looking back, the spectacle of all of us trying so hard in the dim and diffuse light probably looked more comical than surreal, but everything seemed to be riding on these dance nights in a way that – in retrospect – seemed so out of proportion with today’s ephemeral pubescent social crazes. If the phantasmagorias of kids’ trends these days seem recycled and throw-away, that is because they are. Kids (and their parents’) are smarter and evolved enough to know now that puberty is hardly a more serious and permanent phase of life than childhood is. For us coming of age in the late 80’s and early 90’s, however, the different phases we went through as we were blossoming were a real part of an ongoing process of self-discovery.

Some of us had it, some of us didn’t.

But no matter how well any of us could break to MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” slow dancing was still foreign terrain for most 7^th graders and a lot of 8^th graders. Only the really cool people could heat up the dance floor during a slow song as well as they could during a faster song. The rest of us who were brave enough to partner up with somebody when the DJ slowed things down would just demurely rotate in step like nursery school kids practicing the fundamentals of dance.

There wasn’t really any formula for selecting a slow dance partner, except that kids usually picked someone whose looks and popularity approximately matched their own. This is how I came to ask Laura if she would like to dance during the cross-fade between the B-52’s “Love Shack” and Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go.”

Lucky for me Laura accepted, and lucky for us nobody teased our awkward synergy. Dancers would usually clasp hands and place the other free hand either on their partner’s shoulder or hip. Like mannequins on a wobbly turntable Laura and I slowly revolved this way, avoiding eye contact and trying not to make any intimate gestures as Houston pondered whether or not broken hearts could find their way home.

Since Laura was a year ahead of me in school, she was slightly taller than I was. I had to look up slightly into her oval face. She was rangy and graceful, her black hair cascading down her back like an oil slick. Unlike the other girls flaunting high bangs, shoulder pads and tight miniskirts, Laura’s dress was not Kabuki elaborate but elegantly sheer and simple.

I couldn’t read her thoughts, but Laura’s hand felt delicate and clammy in my own. I don’t know if this was from shyness or from the heat generating in the room from all the bodies, but it matched my own inner nervousness during all of these slow dances. Junior high is an awkward time, and nowhere is this awkwardness more manifested than in the ritual of the school slow dance.

Safe to say we made it through Whitney Houston’s ballad about estranged than reunited lovers, both of us probably stronger for having taken another important leap on the road to maturity.

I danced with a lot of girls at all of the junior high dances I attended, and I only retroactively remembered my dance with Laura once her sister Lisa became a household name after landing a guest host role on ABC’s The View in 1999. I felt so privileged to be connected to fame (even in such a tiny way) that the memory began to grow and take shape during the years that followed Lisa’s break into stardom. It blossomed from a vague recollection into a colorful and visceral highlight of my early adolescence. It’s amazing how many details are never fully deleted from our memories, but rather compressed into smaller files in case we ever need them for future reference.

***

HAVING NEVER TRULY KNOWN LAURA, I hardly imagine she enjoys being a bargaining chip in all this frustrating vestigial Cold War nonsense. I can’t fathom that she likes going round and round, her face appearing below every headline next to Euna Lee’s, looking a little bit professionally disheveled in that I didn’t-have-time-to-do-my-hair-globe-trotting sort of way.

It seems too easy how Kim Jong-il mockingly flourishes Laura’s face like a tattoo on his bicep, or how the news of her plight invokes an anger and urgency in the stomachs of so many Americans. That this girl from my hometown – this cute girl who I once rocked back and forth with at a junior high dance – can spark an international controversy is at the same time both strange and amazing. In my mind the Laura I danced with more than half a life ago and the Laura who now sits so precariously between two nuclear-backed ideologies can’t possibly be the same person.

Lisa Ling informs her facebook friends that she suffers sleepless nights worrying about her baby sister. Doug Ling, Laura’s father, told KCRA news in Sacramento that he is worried about his daughter but not enough to lose any sleep over it. Laura has previously reported on drug wars in Mexico and native tribes in Brazil for Current TV, so this isn’t the first time her family has had to worry for her. Doug is more or less used to the emotional rollercoaster by now.

A lot has obviously happened in the nearly two decades since the night Laura and I shared a slow dance. But the Laura who I see and read about today is rooted in the memory of the girl I remember from all those years ago who grew up in the suburbs of northern California.

I think back to our slow dance and I can picture the way Laura looked that evening—ornately tall and slender but still girlishly cute. Yet I can’t reconcile this vision of Laura with the image of the Laura who is currently being detained, somewhere, within the secretive confines of North Korea’s borders. I wonder if she is shackled, if they keep her in a cell or if perhaps she is being treated to the same grand tour of Pyongyang and the countryside which all skeptics are treated to. I worry about her meals, her hygiene and her contact with the outside world.

But most of all, I worry about the prospect of Laura Ling serving a lengthy prison sentence in one of North Korea’s notorious reeducation camps.

When I consider the possibility of this dreaded nightmare becoming a reality, my reverie of our slow dance breaks apart and comes crashing down into a million tiny pieces. The memory of touching Laura’s delicately moist hand that night at the dance turns into a prophecy of her calloused hands sweating in the grips of a sledge hammer. I see her slowly raise her arm above her head to bring the hammer up and over then down upon the rocks. The rocks smash and shards fly out in all directions. The echo of the smash reverberates off the walls of a quarry filled with other hapless enemies of the North Korean state. There is no escape from this non-place, no past and no future here either. The only thing that exists is the echoing and the dirt and the endless grey of rocks. Welcome to North Korean reeducation.

The air is silent except for the ceaseless echo of chipping, hammering and breaking of rocks. The echoes become Laura’s new memories. She keeps time with them, counts the days by them. She culls the memory of a face from her past, a rock shatters, the face vanishes.

The years drag on this way. There are no phone calls or letters from friends, no slumber parties and no early morning jogs along the beach. There are no late night parties, no music, swimming pools, children, dogs or ice cream for dessert. Nothing. And there certainly isn’t any dancing here either, slow or otherwise.

Onward & upward with the news

Is the NY Times losing readership? Somebody asked me this recently and I didn’t have an answer. I just offered my best educated guess and tried to sound like a vast receptacle of general knowledge.

I said something about how print media is having a hard time competing with the Internet, 24-hour soundbite news and iPhones, Blackberries, the Great Recession, blah-blah-blah.

But this futuristic-looking newsrack for the Times caught my eye the other day.

A television monitor on top cyles through the top headlines from each section of the paper.

Utilizing cool pictures and graphics, these headlines are bound to catch readers’ attention better than the stacked newspapers will. Notice also how the current temperature is displayed in the bottom right corner.

A light inside the newsrack illuminates the stack of papers.

With this sophisticated new technology The New York Times is whittling its niche in the 21st Century as a leading authoritative chronicler and arbiter of news, arts and culture.

Good luck Old Grey Lady!