De planes! Welcome to Fantasy Airport.

I’m in a rebellious mood today – I have a bunch of work and don’t want to do it. So I’m putting up flotsam and jetsam:

This artists’ collective have taken over a proto-ghost town in Nevada and created a semi-functional airport. They took over an abandoned air strip and built up an entire terminal complete with gift shop, chapel, and food court. It’s an extremely detailed art installation that sees no air traffic whatsoever. Sometimes the workers go on “strike.”

I really like this idea; it’s like a concept-art version of working at Disneyland. Or a traveler’s Burning Man. It’s not like they are just doing the obligatory art piece on Privacy and Security in a Post-9/11 World, give us your damn shoes, blah blah blah. I love it so much I’m willing to forgive their dreadful typos. Here’s my favorite quote from their website:

The whole airport may be regarded as a transit lounge, as a waiting-room between two places. The airport itself is not considered a place. All of us have witnessed discussions about whether one has actually visited a city or country when one has only seen the airport, and in the majority of cases, people agree that one has not. Upon entering the airport, one enters a cultural void - a third, global culture.”
from: In limbo: Notes on the culture of airports, by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Runar

I had always thought that we could never understand what our “global culture” was until we encountered extraterrestrial life—like we’d need that juxtaposition to figure out what is unique to humanity versus, you know, what everyone and their three-headed blob sister from Zarcana 7 are doing. But I think I just changed my mind.

Write About Everything. Do Nothing.

What does it mean when your mouse goes haywire? Something -- I think it's my mouse but I'm not sure -- has been acting really screwey for the past few days. I'll be typing merrily along, then suddenly, out of the blue, my screen starts scrolling rapidly up and down, up and down, spasming like a Tourette's sufferer on a pogo stick. Something bad is happening here -- if I were a reasonable person with sense, I would do whatever it is that you do to resolve your wonky hardware issues. Since I'm not a reasonable person with sense, I'm just going to blog about it until whatever's wrong makes my computer explode. I fully plan to just bitch, bitch, bitch until boom: Armageddon. If you never hear from me again, it will be because something went kablooey in my computer. It will have knocked me across the room and I'll be helplessly trapped under a bookcase. Maybe I can get some reading done.

So I have been undergoing this curious transformation over the past few months. I think I am becoming a blogger, but maybe not in a good way. I mean, I am writing this thing and actually enjoying it, but it's starting to become a Rationalization. Before, I could quietly procrastinate on issue or problem, glumly copying it from one post-it to-do list to another as the days went by. Now - I swear to God - I actually stop to evaluate whether this could be interesting material for a post. "Hmmmm, is it a trenchant observation on the travails of modern life? Or I am just really fucking lazy? Better procrastinate a few more days while I decide.” It’s becoming an enabler for my worst flaws. And I can tell it’s an enabler and not some intellectual growth spurt because I don’t really post so often. I think if I discovered some life-changing passion for writing, I’d be all over this shit every day, so I’m not buying my own line here. I mean I like it (and I didn’t used to like writing, so this fascinates me), but it’s not like I don’t do the dishes because I’m writing. I just don’t do the dishes period, and then idly think about writing about that.

And this doesn’t only affect my staunchly Puritan work ethic, it’s also changing my consciousness in some odd way. For instance: last night I went out with L and her posse; we had a great time at the movies and then started drinking sangria. Now, I’m usually a happy drunk – give me a few pints and I’m very much a ‘yourethebessssssht’ kind of gal. Occasionally I can do the sad drunk thing and very rarely the mean drunk thing, but usually I’m the happy one. But lately? I’ve become the bloggy drunk. Two glasses of sangria and I’m deep in conversation with L about this book she’s reading. It says something about the importance of cultures having high ideals, so that no one individual can live up to them, but that doesn’t matter. It’s just about the culture – the people as a collective – living up to these ideals, for that will advance civilization as a whole. (L, did I get that right?) And then there was something else about how people try to improve their workspace, but it’s just too much effort in too narrow of a area, and how politicians used to do many other things besides politics (writing, philosophy, farming, etc.), but are now too focused and are lousy people as a result. So I start raving like a lunatic about how I need to write a blog about this – saying what? I have no idea. I can’t remember; it’s all lost time now. But at the time I was yapping about something, and Ready to Spout Wisdom. Yar, I’m a jackass. So L, thanks for being kind.

I think I was agreeing with this author’s premise. Because people are probably more morally sophisticated than they were in the past. The world is slowly moving towards greater equality across race, gender, religion, etc., we have more freedom than ever to pursue whatever ambition captures our fancy. But we also don’t have many heroes. If you believe that morals are absolute, and things like slavery are Bad-with-a-Capital-B, then how can it be that we are better off as a group but more lacking individually? Where are the modern Lincolns and Jeffersons? Where are the leaders who publicly strive to be good people, who publicly fail and admit it and learn and genuinely seek to embody high values? Frankly, the only – the ONLY – person I can think of like that who is in the public eye is Oprah. You know she is a great person, and you know she also is constantly working on herself and trying to be better. Everyone else must be my kind of blogger: they talk about values and ideals but don’t show that they are actively striving to improve themselves (I mean, outside of rhetoric. Don’t get me started on Bush.). Write about everything. Do Nothing.

Am I just romanticizing the past? Or is there something odd here?

And can someone with more sense than I please tell me wtf is going on with my mouse?

Is Glare Still Alive?

My gal J is feeling a little down on her blog -- but I like her blog, I think it's great! So I thought I'd take the opportunity to share one of my favorite emails from her. This was a while ago; I had been slammed at work and then there was my impending breakup with Mr. Glare and yadayadayada. I wasn't really returning any calls or emails from friends, and then I got this:

To: Glare; D; Mr. Glare
Subject: IS GLARE STILL ALIVE?

This is the question on everybody's lips. Does she no longer love us? Is she trying to think of a way to gracefully extricate herself from a friendship of over 20 years? Has she fallen down? Is she trapped under something heavy? Has she been abducted by aliens? Fallen into a coma? Joined a cult? Left the country to climb the fabled Macchu Picchu? Working in an underground lab to create the next hot party drug? Has she been mauled to death slowly by Milla? Is she currently bound to a chair being interrogated by anti-American forces? Indulging in the world's longest bikini wax (don't forget the pleating)? Is she afflicted with some obscure neuromuscular disease that prevents her from using her fingers for email or telephone usage? Is she trapped on a bus that can't go less than 50 miles per hour or it will explode? Has her give-a-sh!t factor dropped to an all-time low, and she cannot be prevailed upon to get out of bed? Inquiring minds want to know...J.

Come Out! We Have You Partially Surrounded!

Hang on! This is a long two-parter.

There’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now, and that something is continuous partial attention. CPA hit the headlines earlier this Spring at the Emerging Technology Conference, when Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, presented her work on it. CPA is state of processing that most of us achieve while trying to multitask across digital and physical activities, so that you are simultaneously thinking about and managing multiple activities in both spaces.

(For example, in the time it’s taken me to find my article about Linda Stone’s presentation and write these two paragraphs, I’ve also uploaded some photos, checked gmail, had a moment of angst that I should have already gone to bed, found a new site with random interesting news and trivia, and gone to the bathroom YET AGAIN to locate and destroy the boulder-sized mascara schmutz that has invaded my eye… )

Anyways. Everyone at the conference was freaking out, man! Because this woman was talking about something that the attendees were in tune with, and as a consequence they actually stopped the IMing and Blackberrying and text messaging and emailing and surfing and blogging that they also had been doing as they listened, and instead just listened to her speak. And her message was that although it’s perfectly understandable and sometimes even necessary to maintain dual digital and physical presences, it also comes at a great cost. Multitasking is the enemy of concentration and makes it hard to achieve flow. It limits the focus and the introspection that can generate important realizations. (About mascara.)

But I have a different perspective on it, having drunk the Kool-aid at my former company. There, one of the senior researchers studied “cybernomads” (basically hyperconnected individuals, mostly workers or gamers). One of their traits is “persistent social connectivity,” referring to the tendency to maintain ongoing conversations with their social contacts through open digital channels.

Cybernomads supplement open physical presence with open Web or blog
access, e-mail, voice over IP, or instant message channels. Such simultaneous
channel use, often called multi-tasking, can be complementary and enhance a
single experience. Or it can be more fragmentary and support a practice of
multi-contexting. Cybernomads use multi-contexting to manage multiple,
simultaneous experiences, each of which is embedded in distinct social
relationships, roles, and identities. As cybernomads switch from context to
context (say from blog reading to an IM conversation to listening to a meeting),
they adopt a distinct identity for each that is likely responsible for a
distinct role within a distinct social network. Cybernomads don’t just do lots
of things at one time; they act out many personas at one time.

At first, I thought of this as the ordinary multi-tasking that most of us do. (Like my example above, which kind of occurred sequentially, so it’s not really using CPA. However, I also drive while putting on makeup. So there.) But then I saw Cory Doctorow speak at a company event, and realized that this is a whole other ballgame. The man was on a panel, speaking about whatever it was, and was simultaneously IMing someone. Seriously, at the same time! While 100+ people were looking at him! And he kept doing it, even when other people on the panel were talking! At first I was stunned at the evident brassiness of his nads, and then I thought it was just tacky and rude, and then I realized he was the epitome of a cybernomad. He wasn’t trying to be rude, he just wasn’t interacting in that moment in the same way that the rest of us were. But I do remember being impressed that he had some smart comments to add to the discussion—it wasn’t like he couldn’t keep up or add value. Afterwards he sat with us and listened to the subsequent speakers while simultaneously showing us his new toy. (It was one of those Danger Sidekick-type things, this was several years ago).

So basically, I’m interested in people’s strategies for managing media, and also all of the etiquette debates that flow from that. In the last 15 years, we’ve had to learn the social niceties of at least 6 different new communication media (name ‘em, fast!), each with the accompanying panicky articles and huffy generational gaps. I think there are 3 issues at the center of these sorts of plaints:

• the inevitable lag between adoption of a new tool and the standardization of etiquette for tool use,
• the widening of the gap between the haves and have-nots across a range of tools (and accompanying strain on a collective culture), and
• uncertainty about the limits of human abilities to manage information.

Does the last one sound odd to you? I think the kerfuffle about continuous partial attention is, at its heart, an expressed concern that people have an upper limit on the amount of interactions that can be simultaneously managed across multiple media. There’s too much to focus on—the fear is that people will lose focus and all of their communications become watered down. Furthermore, the pressure is on for conversationalists to be entertaining, in order to compete for limited (human) bandwidth.
In a way, this is just a new name for the same fear that we’ve had for eons. I remember hearing somewhere that people were concerned about the first automobiles. They thought they would drive so fast that humans wouldn’t be able to withstand the momentum! The real interesting story is about the incredible capacity of people to simultaneously manage more and more information. What is the upper limit? How does practice and context stretch those boundaries?

CPA, Part 2

Before his stroke, my mother’s father was regarded as multitalented—he painted, he played the fiddle, he built things in his woodshop. When we would visit my grandparents in Missouri every summer, he would let me sit next to him in his woodshop while he worked. He would make whatever he was making (I don’t remember, I was 6) while I would bang nails into scraps of wood with no skill but great enthusiasm.

He wasn’t thought of as special because he could do those things—a lot of people could paint and so on. When he was growing up in the 20s, these were comparatively widespread forms of self-expression. Somewhere in my lost Adrienne Rich book, she makes a point about America’s continued movement towards focused specialization and away from broader skills. Thus we miss out on the undemanding pleasure of being able to do several things, not professionally, but well enough for everyday life… (imagine that quote right here, dangnabbit)

So grandpa Herb wasn’t special because he had some talent in these areas. Many people did. Rather, he was unusual because he could do some of them at the same time.

After he had his stroke, my grandfolks moved out to CA so he could be cared for by the family. Sometimes my grandma would babysit me, and I’d hang out, boredly poking through their things. (Such a rude kid I was). Grandpa’s self-portrait in the living room always fascinated me. It showed a much younger man with a head full of red hair, holding a fiddle on his porch. The family legend was that he painted it from a photo with his right hand, while simultaneously working on a math problem with his right. (I think of this as the ultimate artistic version of patting your head while rubbing your stomach). I wish I had the opportunity to know that version of my grandfather when I was old enough to clearly remember him.

Today, Smart People Who Know Things are becoming concerned about our ability to manage simultaneous interactions—and yet, aren’t most of them some version of typing and/or reading a screen? It’s not even a left brain/right brain problem, and it’s certainly no picture painting/math problem solving exercise.
I’ll admit; I am not so great about multitasking in this maner. (For example, one of my most recent IM sessions really suffered from my simultaneous participation in a company teleconference. Sorry R! But my boss kept mentioning my name—typos were inevitable.) But those of us who are cybernomads, or those who are naturally gifted like my grandpa, will show us all that we are not close to touching the limits of these multiple interactions.

Cats Are The New Babies

The SBC modelling her Halloween costume (those are her devil horns):

Blah blah blah terrier, blah blah blah derriere!

For some reason Blogger wouldn't let me post this before, but today it loves me...

A couple of weeks ago we went to the movies in Dolores Park--they were showing Best In Show and everyone on the planet brought their dogs. I of course spent the entire evening in advanced Whuzh mode; cooing admiringly at every dog that came my way (which was basically all of them. A full picnic basket meant we were belles of the ball.). I snapped a few of them:

I really wanted to take this one home with me. It was the smallest and I think even smaller than Milla. She could bully it to her heart's content. Maybe matching outfits for Christmas?






This little swing coat is killing me! Seriously, I want one. It kind of matches my new Yahoo avatar outfit. There was also a great Dane in a 10-gallon hat and bandana, little canines in littler sweaters and matching hats, or medium-sized dogs having their fat days in forgiving ponchos. Basically all the dogs were dressed better than me.



After I valiantly took the hit for the team by drinking more than my share of the wine, we went to the Lex. I am proud to submit rare photographic evidence of the particular face B adopts for her Southern accent moments:



Don't know about this one. Don't remember. I blame the Jukebox.


Thanks for showing this gal a great time DD and B!

I have decided that you should buy these for me.

I hope you don't mind. I went back and forth about it for a while--it was a tough decision--but eventually decided that you should go ahead and purchase them. For me. Just because.

They are from Johanna Wright. Of course, I like the first one the best, and it is sold, but I'm sure you can fix that.





Thanks! You're a mensch.