Tuesday 30 October 2012

Pre-TV humanity

William Gibson's novel Neuromancer has stirred some of my first-year level university students to protest that they just don't know how to deal with something like this. I think they refer to the genre issues--science fiction and cyberpunk. Not to the real book, printed page medium, but as I get older, that too becomes a possibility. Today in a senior course, I watched a student read his class presentation from the screen of his iPhone.

Gibson and I are both early baby-boomers. He is all of four months and a day my senior, which means we do have a few formative experiences in common.  In an article called "Rocket Radio,' first published in Rolling Stone in June 1989, but recently republished in Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson writes of one of those experiences:

 "I belong to a generation of Americans who dimly recall the world prior to television.Many of us, I suspect, feel vaguely ashamed about this, as though the world before television was not quite, well, the world. The world before television equates with the world before the Net--the mass culture and the mechanisms of Information. And we are of the Net; to recall another mode of being is to admit to having once been something other than human."

I hate to disagree with my elders--I was taught to respect them, mainly by my elders. But I don't feel that way at all. Either of those ways: ashamed, or once having been other than human.

Oh, I have a smartphone, complete with a data package, so I carry my e-mail, Google maps, and the Internet with me everywhere I go these days. I don't use Twitter yet--but I suspect it's coming. Who wouldn't?

Some of my colleagues at work, apparently.

Last week I was at a meeting of just before middle-aged to middle to somewhere past middle-aged academics (I saw a motto tile once that said that the most difficult decision a person makes is when middle age ends and old age begins. I admit to late middle-aged. I'm not on Old Age pension yet--but the government recently sent me the application forms, completely unasked for. I haven't yet filled them in.). One was telling us how he uses various forms of newer technology to help him handle his large-enrollment classes. He lets the shy ones Twitter him their questions, rather than force them to raise their hands and speak in front of a large audience. But others, while not exactly admitting to electro-Ludditism, declared their ignorance of and disaffection towards such things as Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other options. Some don't even like using the classroom computer equipment, in case it reduces eye contact with their students. I asked how much eye contact I have when I have my back to the class filling the board with notes, compared to looking over the top of the monitor?

One didn't even carry a cell phone yet, let alone a smartphone. Maybe that's why he finds the technology so easy to dismiss. Even if he had one, just a straight cell phone is just not that useful or intriguing, anyway. I didn't begin to get value for my monthly bill until I got a smartphone.

All I know is that I would have been so fascinated by the equipment when I was a kid, and why if then, would I  not be so fascinated with it now? Found it useful then, why not now?

I'm not too old to be able to learn or use or appreciate this stuff. It's the kind of thing I would have nagged my parents mercilessly for when I was a kid. Like I sort of did for them to get a television, even if I could always go to my friend Elliott's to watch Walt Disney on Wednesday evening, right after supper. (You might recall Elliott from "Dressing for Church," some postings above. Or below.)

Always with my younger brother Bob in tow (though Elliott wasn't even his friend except on Wednesday evenings), I'd show up at 6:29, knock on the door and ask if Elliott wanted to come out to play. Elliott was always just getting ready to watch Walt Disney. Did we want to come in to watch with him? We always agreed: "Okay." We kept right on agreeing until some time about 1956 or so, when a huge, ungainly tv antenna sprouted on our roof, to join the aluminum forest above the family quarters at the RCAF base in Claresholm. Bigger antenna above, to pick up Calgary: smaller antenna below, to pick up Lethbridge. Until a Chinook wind took the top part off one night, and we became Lethbridge (CJLH) viewers only. But that was enough. We were not dependent on Elliott anymore. We had our fake fumed oak cabinet, GE 21-inch, black-and-white window on . . . something.

In one respect, though, variety, radio was and stayed better, at least until cable and satellite. We could pull in stations from all over North America on a good night in winter. Two respects: our radio had a record player built in. 


But I'm never going to experience, or admit to, any feelings that the me who listened to Saturday and Sunday morning story hours on the radio, who played kids' 78 rpm records to scratchy ruin, was any less human than I would claim to be or feel now.  That's got to be Gibson over-reaching for rhetorical effect. Or I hope it is.

Life pre-television and pre-Net was every bit as human as life with it.

In 1926, Tesla predicted: "When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance."


True enough. But being able to communicate across larger distances more quickly does not make us more human. Wanting to communicate across a larger representative portion of the human race, to tell our stories to a bigger audience and to hear the stories from a larger community--that is definitively  human in the first place, and has nothing to do with the technology we have--more to do with the reasons we develop new technologies, new means. Greater flexibility of means is not the same as changing ends, of redefined traits. The technology just makes it possible to achieve our eternal human ends on a larger scale.
Some of a more nostalgic outlook might even  insist that life pre-TV and pre-Net was more human, but that is a whole other argument. Better? Worse? Or just different? I'm with the last option, except on evenings now when there just is nothing worth watching (that's definitely disappointing), and I don't feel like getting behind this keyboard and reaching out (that's making some space and time just to be me in isolation. Or its laziness). At those times, I sometimes read a book. Like Distrust That Particular Flavor. 










Wednesday 24 October 2012

(In)Security

I think what I am thinking about this morning is maybe heresy in many circles. Be warned.

It's a bit of reverse social engineering, speculating about "security" and "surveillance" before the internet, before Twitter and the whole complex of social media, before video cameras on every street corner, before electronic eavesdropping, before parabolic microphones, before anything even remotely electric let alone electronic. What were the mechanisms that allowed the state or enabled the state to keep its ears to the ground, to help them know what was going on in the bedrooms of the city, state, nation?

Spies, sure. Insiders among the household staff who were paid informants or hapless gossips, sure. I understand that even today, the Duchess of Cambridge is still finding reason to wonder about the motives and loyalties of some of her household staff, these days, and with graphic reason.

In fact, Hunter S. Thompson once held forth on this issue, Rolling Stone 21 July, 1983:

            That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable problem the rich have never solved--how to live in peace with the servants. Sooner or later, the maid has to come into the bedroom, and if you're only paying her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from talking.
           The servant problem is the Achilles heel of the rich. The only solution is robots, but we are still a generation or so away from that, and in the meantime, it is just about impossible to hire a maid who is smart enough to make the bed but too dumb to wonder why it is full of naked people every morning.

 Of course, by the time we have them, the robots might be full of undetected sensors, too, given the direction things are going.

But on a large scale, in pre-electronic times, where was  the dirty linen on display regularly. Where did gossip and even self-revelation centre. Where was it encouraged, even made a necessity?

Obvious answer: not the torture chamber--which is notoriously unreliable because people will agree to nearly anything and make up the most convincing stories under enough painful encouragement. No, what comes to mind is more subtle: the confessional.

Confession is supposedly good for the soul. PostSecret and its ilk profit from that truism. They make an entertainment out of it, as well as an outlet, a safety valve for releasing secrets that become public without attachment to an individual. But in the earlier times, when the church and the state were joined at the cradle, when rulers of the realm and of the church were brothers, sisters, cousins, etc.? What a temptation to place injudicious priests in key places, or even priests whose first loyalty was to the human institution of the church, rather than the spiritual calling. Or who could not tell the difference.

Think of it: a household servant comes to confession and admits to peeping on her mistress's indiscretions. And to gossiping about them to others. Both are "sins," but the penance might be made to depend on the nature of the act gossiped about. To get at the kind of gossip than can raise or lower an aristocratic house, confessing really useful gossip might get a surprisingly light penance, to make further such confessions more forthcoming.

The confessional might well be a mechanism to encourage the human need to unburden in private. It would take only a very small body of false confessors, serving different ideologies and different masters than God above, to corrupt that handy mechanism into a conduit for dynastic ambitions and power manipulation. And it could all be done in the name of "security"--of the soul, and of the state.

So I guess the more secretive form of the "general confession" as I learned it in Protestant services--as we confess our manifold sins and wickedness to Almighty God, meekly (or to judge from the groans and cracking of joints, weakly) kneeling, is maybe a reaction against such corruption (real or potential). But there was still a need for the information. That must have been a problem. For a long time in such states.

Maybe that's why so many internet and other kinds of electronic mediators and mechanisms for self-revelation and self-disclosure exist now in our more secular western world. The divinely ordained mechanisms do not have the same draw they once had, but the need to unburden is still there. The electronic means for unburdening are, as McLuhan and others have argued, really just extensions of the human mind and senses into a different, more extensive, mediation.

And we still have no idea over who or what is listening in or reading over our shoulders. Or what their reasons.

Sunday 14 October 2012

Responsibility

Reading accounts of his sentencing hearing is an exercise in listening to the convoluted and self-serving logic of Jerry Sandusky and his wife (who claims these things could not have happened because she never saw them happening, asking others to ignore the fact that many of the incidents happened in the men's locker room and showers at Penn State--a place she herself would of necessity have spent very little time in). It is an exercise in listening to them blame the boys who accused him of abuse, blame them for wrecking Jerry's life, for "misunderstanding," in effect all the things he was in his own mind doing to help them, to make men out of them, to help them grow up.

He wasn't helping them grow up, he was stopping them from being children. It's a different thing.

But his spin allows him to remain the victimized hero in his own narcissistic frame of mind--if that isn't giving narcissism a bad name. The kids from broken homes or deprived circumstances were supposed to be grateful and quiet. They're the problem--they didn't play by Jerry's rules. They are responsible for the mess.

Then we get the other side, grown men shooting three girls on the way home from school in order to stop them from spreading "western" ideas about things like allowing girls to go to school. Then standing up and taking credit, claiming "responsibility" for the act, as if this were in some way some sort of achievement for grown men.

In what distorted view of the world and of human worth is an attack by armed gunmen on an unguarded child in the company of other children an act worth taking credit for?  What is it about a worldview that allows for or even claims to require such an act for its continued existence? What values, whose "worth," does it promote? What fear drives such despicable and cowardly acts in the name of responsibility?

This is immaturity of the coarsest kind--the kind that again robs children of the opportunity to be children in order to make physical grown-ups feel that they are also "responsible" adults. It is the childish behaviour of playground bullies, bigger kids, or kids with more social clout, roaming in packs, claiming and protecting their overdetermined, self-appointed right to decide who gets to play on what equipment, under what rules.

The only mature and responsible mind in the crowd belongs to the girl who was their primary target-- Malala Yousufzai--who at 14 has for years shown nothing but true courage in the face of "adult" malice and stupidity. And some of that maturity and a huge measure of courage attaches to her friends and classmates who rode with her on that bus, having to know being anywhere near her put them in danger, too, given the months of threats against her and her family.

Of course, the "unguarded" aspect brings up some issues. The threats against the life of a child who has refused to be intimidated, even though she has openly expressed her fear of those she opposes, have been coming for months, yet her father refused the offer of armed escorts for her to and from school. It was unacceptable in his worldview and the culture of his region for a young girl like this to be and to be seen publicly in too close proximity to adult men. (Unfortunately, the gunMAN or MEN did not feel it inappropriate for them to be seen in such close proximity to a young girl, in public, to force their lethal intentions on her in the name of acceptable public order. )

In a way, for all the pride he has expressed in her campaign for the right of girls to pursue an education, her father is just a lesser version of the men who shot her--someone valuing a cultural practice ahead of the life of a member of that culture. His loyalties have to have been sorely tested in this period--and found strangely, even disastrously, lacking on that one point. He stands up for education for girls--even runs a school for girls--but also serves a tribal culture that in the end puts the girls in harm's way for a bigger principle.

There is a curious inversion of Sandusky-think here. Malala's father seems less bothered by what she is heard saying (or even by the fact that she speaks out at all); in fact, he supports her message. But he is tragically concerned with how and where she she is seen.

P.S.: Girls in that part of the world, or in any part of the world, will be safer only when the boys are properly educated to acknowledge that the girls are human beings, too, and worthy of being accepted as such, and taken seriously and treated with respect. Boys who are taught that girls need be both unseen and unheard get a disastrously distorted view of what constitutes male courage and male hegemony. Girls, they are taught, need to be kept in their inferior place, through force and fear.

But then, the cyberbullying that goes on in "the west" to keep peers in their places (below the level of those doing the bullying) suggests that girls need some education, too. Amanda Todd made one mistake of judgement, and was punished for it, punished for it to death. What is adolescence for, if not for making bad choices and learning from them. By that logic, I suppose cyberbullying is another bad choice, but one that allows for a dangerous level of disengagement and relative anonymity. It is the choice made by hit-and-run drivers on lonely roads late at night.


Friday 5 October 2012

Twilight and audience responses

This began life as  a response to my Popular Culture class, after a spirited reading and discussion of Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer.

First of all: The reviewers and commentators whose responses I put into a series of PPT slides exhibit different levels of skills at explaining their attraction to or disaffection for the books—and the more articulate seem to be the haters (who also seem to be older). That presents a problem—the reasons for liking the books and characters are no less serious (though they do seem rather immature and frivolous at times) to the people who write the positive responses. The two populations are working against different paradigms, different value systems. But maybe we just have to accept that people do not usually waste time and money on things that are meaningless or trivial to them--even if we don't like the meaning we assume they are getting or generating.

The "Michaelas" (a passionate defender of the books and of Meyer) out there are responding out of emotion or passion, "irrationally," maybe, but truthfully within their frame of reference and experience, to a book that represents irrational passion as an ordinary, everyday reality. One to be sought out and cherished, evidently.


Secondly: I’ve been mulling over a phrase that came up from a student: “Safe creep.”

I think that Edward as vampire is an over-determined yet typical romantic hero: a Romantic "superhero," in effect. He’s a dangerous boyfriend, albeit a dangerous boyfriend who understands quite a bit about the range of dangers he represents—to Bella, and to his family because of his relationship to Bella. As a romantic hero variety of "safe creep,"  he’s threatening, not easy to read, physical imposing, but also rational, knowledgeable, talented, and most of all a “caring animal,” or a “considerate monster,” who can be tamed by his love for the right woman.

As such a “dangerous creep,” he also provides a vicarious set of thrills to female readers, despite or maybe because of his creepiness as a mind-reading peeping Tom who sits in the corners of Bella’s bedroom, "taking care of her" by watching her sleep and listening in on her talking in her sleep. He’s creepy, but safely removed from another version of “reality.”

It’s a fairy tale: “Beauty (Bella) and the Beast (Edward),” in part. And once she becomes “Beauty,” she emerges from another fairy tale as “Bella Swan”—the beautiful swan at the end of “The Ugly Duckling.”

Women (or readers in general) who hate the books or to dislike and mock them, tend to start at Edward’s domineering, temperamental, controlling nature and Bella's lack of any standards of self-expression or self-protection from such a creep. Oddly, the ones who dislike Edward are maybe the ones most like him—restrained, disciplined, refined in taste, rational, looking for a different, more positive order of things. What brings out the irrational in Edward (and for a lot of the "haters") is Bella. It’s his emergent irrationality in dealing with her that somehow “humanizes” the vampire. Yet his rationality (typically a male-gendered trait) and self-control are also part of a different kind of fairy tale, I suppose—or a different myth cycle.

What is truly “creepy” is that he does not seem to understand or respect other people’s privacy or need for a personal space of their own. He's in constant "surveillance" mode, a perfect potential staffer for any of several state or private security firms. 

The disapprovers can reject him and his behaviours--a popular position, to judge from the PPT slides. They can resist a gendered power structure by expressing disapproval of the “patriarchal” Cullen coven and od Edward's behaviours as a "model boyfriend."

I wonder at times if a huge influence on the "popularity" of this series is that people love to hate it--it gives them scope to work out their own personal ideological boundaries, by seeing the everyday problems in extreme relief. The only danger they expose themselves to is not the "safe creep," but the angry, mocking disapproval of the other audience—the ones who love Twilight, like Michaela, who calls one such hater a bunch of insulting names: “a little nobody with no creativity,” for openers

But consider: in a book ostensibly designed to bring in or appeal to a female teen audience (and that finds another audience in the mothers of those teens), there are discernible ideas or worldviews, promoted or “advertised” in and by the entertainment in the story. This is just like a magazine, a tv series, etc. The “entertainment” or editorial part is designed to pull in and create an audience that is then sold back as a product to the advertisers. The worldviews that are the "advertisements" are evident in the discerned story shapes that support the various popular and critical stances that might not be "progressive, by some standards, but can be discernibly so by others--again, depending on the fairy tale one is within.

In order to accept Bella as a heroine of a romance, what other ideas does a reader have to “buy” into? Same for Edward as a hero? What story shapes: star-crossed lovers? (potential for tragedy)? Romance couple (grounds for miscommunication? Potential for a comic “resolution” that is typically a resolving of the miscommunication, or an overcoming of an older order of rules and customs).

 What is it that the traveling vampires at the baseball game threaten—not just Bella (whom one in his standard vampire frame of reference mistakenly identifies as a "snack") or her relationship with Edward—a lot more: the travelling vampires represent an older, more destructive idea of order; the Cullens a newer, more progressive model of vampirism, a demonstration of the ability to control appetites? restraint? The Volturi, who come up later, are a “Roman Catholic/old European” style of vampire.They represent older, more destructive, even "selfish" worldviews--though Edward seems pretty selfish in his jealous "protection" of Bella from the fumbling overtures from all the teen-aged boys in her school.

 [Here's a thought--Bella is truly 17. Edward looks 17 but is around 100 years old. There is a name for old men who pursue young women--and it isn't "hero." Well--maybe to them and their peers.]

What do the Cullens have that could make a family of vampires a model of "patriarchal" success (which is a model the feminist line of cultural criticism finds objectionable and “not progressive”?)—the ability to support each other (and Edward threatens that unity, so Bella has to be worth it)? So, to lovers of the book, part of the answer has to be their response to the question, "In what ways is she 'worth it.'”


Thursday 4 October 2012

Goodbye, Greenwoods'

When I was young and impressionable in ways different from the ways I am way older and impressionable now, young and fascinated by valiant, stalwart knights in armour and resourceful, humorous heroes in tights, "under the greenwood tree" was Robin Hood with his Merry Men, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, and all things good, holding out against the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, the stooge of the even more evil King John, and enemy of brave, good King Richard.

When I moved to Edmonton in 1986, and took my first walk along Whyte Avenue (or 82nd, as I had not yet learned not to call it) I first made my way into a Greenwoods' of a different kind, but similar quality, this lavish bookstore, crowded with customers. It was one of my first indications Edmonton was going to be an all right place to call home.

Many years, hours of browsing, and well-spent dollars later, I made what will probably prove my last trip to Greenwoods' as a customer last weekend. It was a sad excursion into a hollowing, echoing, emptying mausoleum. Greenwoods' is closing down on Saturday, Oct. 6, and as of last weekend, there were just not many books left on the shelves or customers left on the carpets.

Marty Chan, on Facebook, is trying to organize a last pilgrimage from among his Friends for Saturday, but ...

An editorial and a column in today's Edmonton Journal celebrate and eulogize the store. They also explain and maybe attempt to rationalize the economics of family businesses and of the book trade in particular that have helped bring down to this whimper of an ending this precious independent storehouse of surprises and opportunities, with its knowledgeable, literate and helpful staff who filled a "Staff Suggestions" section that could keep you satisfied month after month, and whose own brand of magic was that they could find titles for you based on the skimpiest of clues about author, title or even subject matter. Going into a warehouse of a chain bookstore to search its cold computerized database to see if I can locate a title on my own (and I would pretty much have to do it on my own) based on its e-logic is just not going to be the same--even if I do end up with the book, in the end.


 
Knowing why such places close does not make its closing any easier to accept. And the rationale does not fill me with confidence about the future of the one last notable independent bookstore in the city, Audrey's. Though I hope to be a customer there for quite a while longer.


All I see right now is that Edmonton has more than doubled its population in the years I have been here, and yet, with one closed door, it becomes a diminished place to call home.



Thanks, Greenwoods', for your own kind of magic over the years.