SilverJacket

Unimpressed with unfriending

I realized recently while writing about blogging protocol that spell-checkers do not recognize the word unpublish. Odd, I thought at first; it's an essential part of my vocabulary. Then: Of course it's not in dictionaries! Before the Internet, unpublishing an piece of writing made about as much sense as undropping an apple. Sure, you could cease publication (Stop the presses!), but once a book or newspaper is out there, it's out there. 

I learned today that the New Oxford American Dictionary named unfriend its 2009 Word of the Year. Unpublish would have served as a less gimmicky option (although maybe gimmickry is part of the criteria for selection.) Unfriend in common parlance is restricted to social networking sites. Further, as a general concept, it's not novel. Friends have become enemies for millennia.

Unpublish, on the other hand, signifies one of the largest revolutions in communication since one could publish in the first place. And it's not restricted to getting back at a Facebook acquaintance who uninvited you to her killer birthday party.

Unfortunately, Web publishing may go the way of one of the words Oxford considered and rejected: paywall. Now there's a surefire way to unfriend your readership.

A fascinating, and queasy, new competition.

To be a journalist is to occupy one of the worst stations in life one can imagine. Picture it: Tied to a computer, sometimes on the road, occasionally forced to talk to strangers, always starting from square one on a new topic after each deadline. And you are maddeningly, incessantly indentured to the hard truth of reality, or the hard reality of truth, or some combination thereof, with the nitpicky public waiting to jump on you for any creative deviation from "fact." What a life! It's enough to drive anyone to drink, or let their hair go, or at least compete with coworkers to slip inane specimens of verbiage into front page stories. Well, we know which route(s) Malcolm Gladwell has (claimed to have) taken.

In case you missed it, read Jack Shafer's rundown on Slate. Gladwell told a tale, broadcast on NPR, about challenging a colleague at the Washington Post back in the day to rack up instances of the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" in their articles. Then they moved on to round 2 with "perverse and often baffling." It's a fun story, but Shafer did some legwork and called bullshit on most of it. Anyway, there was a flurry of attention in the blogosphere that seems to have abated.

But wait! A new contender has entered the ring! Who else but Clive Thompson? First, let me quote from a February 11 story in the Canadian paper The National Post: "Malcolm and Clive? Both went to the University of Toronto around the same time. Both are whip-smart and terrifically ambitious. [True.] ... The only difference? Clive never made it to pop culture level, and as one tittle-tattle who knows this world well tells me, 'Clive has always been a little envious of Malcolm.' [Unverified, and to be fair, Gladwell instills both envy and schadenfreude in writers from this country too.]"

So what does Dark Horse Thompson do in his latest Wired magazine column? He creates a mashup that's one part "perverse and often baffling" and one part "raises new and troubling questions." The result: "These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question." You can look it up, right on page 60.

Malcolm, are you listening? That's Thompson: 1, Gladwell: 0.
Hop to it.

Indistinguishable from Magic

Magical thinking--typically considered an archaic mode of cognition that populates the world with animistic forces, hidden dimensions, and evocative incantations--may actually serve us well in the future as we navigate an existence increasingly mediated by digital information.

Read the full post at Brainstorm.

But there are several cases where we've already jumped the gun in attributing powers to our tech toys.

Read about this, too, at Brainstorm.

Point Blank

Few things annoy me more than when a writer dramatically builds up to a revelation or punchline that turns out to be already obvious. Here's an example from the Times this week:

In the drawing, a nude man and woman stand on either side of a wall. Each wears a plastic breathing mask that covers the nose and mouth; the masks are connected to air hoses that pass through the wall. The hoses attach to pouches at each other’s underarms and crotches. [OMG they're huffing each other's stank!]

It is a device that allows people — and there is no polite way to put this — [Whoa, what's he about to reveal that's even cruder than the fact that they're remotely huffing each other's stank?!] to sniff each other. Remotely.

The Copycat Unconscious

Considering how lazy many e-daters are, and how clever many other e-daters are, it should come as no surprise that plagiarism runs rampant in the online dating world. On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported on copycat personal profiles, mentioning that in one survey 9% of respondents admitted to lifting material from someone else, and that lines from some sources appear on dozens of people's profile pages. In some cases people cop to lack of imagination, but I suspect in others people subconsciously appropriate the sentiments behind the words so as to justify their claims of authorship.

Read the full post at Brainstorm.

Best Email Ever

From: "Steve" <redacted@glis.net>
To: <matt@silverjacket.com>
Subject: Is it a secret code?
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 20:00:34 -0400

If it is, I guess  I'm fucked.

I really shouldn't care why you can't seem to spell "skills" correctly - but it seems such a singular error. You don't misspell "nut-crunching" (although one might argue that a deliberate error, such as "nut-krunching" might convey the agony [the "aggh-oh-neeee"?] more effectively; James Rand had a grandfather who though that "crinkled" should be spelled "krinkled") and you don't even misspell "dies". "Skills" is the only word you misspell - and you do it absolutely consistently.

So what in Hell is the reason?

Or must I read all preceding installments of the blog? If so, go ahead, look strange.

Once upon a time, I was gratuitously different. Then I grew up.

Eric C. Sanders
tired old fart - who finds the Empathy Theory of Yawn Contagion very persuasive.

using the boss's e-mail address

When I read the above email last night I assumed it was spam--you know that crazy surreal spam spewed onto the nets only to confuse filters--until I got about halfway through, and realized he was referring to something I posted on my blog 15 months ago. (The post described how mirror neurons might engender our "theory of mind skillz" and "empathy skillz" (but less so in people with autism, who must settle for "mad card counting skillz," if they're lucky.)) So I replied:

Hi Steve,

Please pass the following on to Mr. Sanders. Much obliged.

Eric,

Thanks for reading my weblog. Nope, no secret code. Just a bit of bloggy irreverence. Skillz is a common rapper and hacker spelling of skills. (See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=skillz.) As it's often applied to rhyming and fragging (performing well at the rap game or the video games), I found it mildly amusing to apply it to theory of mind and empathy, capacities not advanced through practice, nor thought to enhance street cred(ibility.) In fact, quite the opposite, as wasting fools with style often requires a certain blithe bravado. Well, maybe a rep(utation) for strong theory of mind skillz can garner props (proper respect), as it's pretty cool to say you're all up in your opponent's head, psyching him out, but the use of cog sci terminology still renders the linguistic juxtaposition subtly farcical. And as for autistics with "mad [=significant] card counting skillz," some autistics--the idiot savants-- might have stupendous skills, but, god bless em, they'll never have skillz.

I admit, adding quirk to one's prose can make one look strange, but that's how I roll.

Take care,
Matt

P.S. Are you from Roseville, MI?

No reply today but I'll keep you posted.

Money Talks

The word "said" is the gold standard when attributing quotes in straight-laced journalism, preferred over "exclaimed" or "stammered" or any other alternative; the reporter remains objective and lets the words speak for themselves. But sometimes "said" just doesn't cut it. Below are two paragraphs that caught my eye in yesterday's Times story about parents receiving a letter from a preschool warning that their practice of sending their kids to school in chauffeured SUVs that double and triple park endangers their progeny. I've highlighted two instances of "said" and suggested appropriate alternatives.

A public-relations executive, Dan Klores, who owns one of the S.U.V.’s, said he was unaware of Ms. Schulman’s letter. “I don’t have much to do with the place,” he said. “My wife takes my kid by stroller.”

Replacement: "admitted, before blatantly lying."
Reporter: "Hi, I'm a Times reporter. I just saw your child get out of your SUV in front of school." Mr. Klores: "Whatever, you must be on drugs. Plus, I don't give a shit about my kid's education."

A parent whom other parents identified as a chauffeur-using mother, Alison Schneider, whose husband, Jack Schneider, is a hedge fund manager, said, "I got the letter, but I don’t really have any feelings about it one way or the other. It’s kind of boring. It’s about cars and parking."

Replacement: "bobbled." Extra points: "bobbled, gum-snappily."
I'm less offended by the moral obliviousness than by the transgression in logic. Anything car related = dull. "Oh, it describes how people might be RUN OVER by cars? Um, BO-RING." Read it again, ma'am. This time, focus. "Wait, my defenseless three-year-old might be run over? Plus, the blood would be on my hands? My god, that's--ZZZZZZZZZZ....." And scene.

Gift of Gab

While reading about Willams syndrome, I found this:

One thing [Salk Institute neurolinguist Ursula] Bellugi has documented is the peculiar richness of the Williams child's vocabulary. For example, when she asked a child with Down syndrome to name all the animals he could think of, the reply was "Dogs, cats, fish, bird, fish." A Williams child of the same age and IQ answered, "Brontosaurus, tyranadon, brontasaurus rex, dinosaurs, elephant, dog, cat, lion, baby hippopotamus, ibex, whale, bull, yak, zebra, puppy, kitten, tiger, koala, dragon."

If I ever build a zoo I will hire a zoo director with Williams syndrome.

Furries are made, not born.

I'm tempted to let that just sit there, without comment.

But all you furries out there might waste countless hours searching the nets for the missing frames that would show this "gorping" action more explicitly.

Cool your jets (and put your dry cleaner on hold.) It's merely a depiction of a video shown to a set of two-year-old test subjects: Fig. 1 from a paper titled "Learning Words and Rules: Abstract Knowledge of Word Order in Early Sentence Comprehension" in the August issue of Psychological Science. Who knew grammar could be so kinky?

But seriously, if you want to find gorping, just ask Moby.

Update: My dear advice-giving friend Liz has now opined on the origin of the furry friend trend. More generally, she advocates:

I Would Vote for a president who runs on anti-meme. How does it work? It works on the same principle as a hybrid -- it stores up potential energy. Every time you stop yourself from creating a delightful and idiotic social trend, the energy gets stored in a battery. That battery is around eight pounds, and the presidential hopeful runs around with it, hitting people.

No, You Choose.

What's that noise? A siren? Do y'all hear the Language Police about to bring the beatdown?

Okay, so, what's the deal with giving two titles to things and placing "or" in between them? Example: A photo labeled "Second attempt to clone mental disorder or How one philosophizes with a hammer." Now, I did write a whole post about how great that photo caption is, but it's great because what comes before "or" and what comes after work together. I have to translate "or" into "and" or a simple colon; otherwise, the synergy dissipates.

Read "or" literally and it's like, well what's the fucking title of your piece? Is it A or B? Let's look at the inverse scenario. You wouldn't pick a single title and then put two separate paintings on the wall and say "Um, 'Dancing Daisies' is this one or that one." You wouldn't publish two novels in the same volume with a big page that says "or" in between and a single title slapped on the cover.

So take a look at this article headline: "The End of Originality Or, why Michael Bay's The Island failed at the box office." Oh, I get to pick what the article is titled? Wheee!

It's like these titles are fucking choose your own adventures. So, yeah, screw the simple "or"; here are selected excerpts from the title of my next abstract expressionist painting: "...Skip To Title 34 For A More Wry Interpretation Of This Piece...If You Are Currently Feeling Incensed By Life's Great Injustices You Might Like Something In a...Otherwise jump to...Not Feeling Any of These Yet? Try... Oh Screw It, Buy the Fucking Thing and Name It What the Hell You Want."

God, why do creative types have to ruin everything?