I wrote to my 12-year-old granddaughter the other day to ask her what a ‘goo-goo cluster’ might be. Somebody on a radio program referred to it and it sounded like some kind of Southern food in the program's context. So I asked her because she lives in southern Missouri, which is more southern than northern, I suspect, and because her father comes from North Carolina and is a genuine southerner by upbringing. I figured, one way or the other, she ought to know about ‘goo-goo clusters.’
She wrote me back promptly, saying, ‘haven’t a clue, but Wikipedia says,” and she went on to describe some candy item with marshmallows, peanuts, and chocolate, invented in Tennessee, and advertised as ‘a meal in a bar.’ I’m not familiar with that meal, but maybe in the south they have an extra one that’s just candy. If so, good for them.
The thing is, I didn’t even think to google the ‘goo-goo clusters,’ although you’d think the name alone might have suggested it. But everything is apparently there--even dumb candies--and with a history.
Today, a guy called Ed (on what we now refer to as our land line) and was leaving a message with a phone number that started with 714. ‘Isn’t that Orange County?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he replied, but now everything’s on the Internet.’ His company as well as goo-goo clusters.
Not to mention commerce. Today I also picked up a package from the post office which contained 400 grams of gorgeous mohair yarn. I bought it on E-Bay and it came to me via Turkey. I paid a total of $8.00 for the yarn and $9.00 for the postage, and the interlude between purchase and delivery into my hands was under a week. At a yarn store, that amount of mohair would have cost me something like $45-$60, but of course I wouldn’t have had to wait even a week. For that kind of discount, I can wait. But still, life on the internet. Simple commerce has changed so radically and so quickly that it’s just impossible to imagine what happens next.
I had to travel to Bellingham to see the eye doctor yesterday. In the future, I’m hoping to just see him on the internet.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Cousin Caterpillar
Another Internet treasure hunt and a real treasure at the end. This morning, Ed was looking at one of those photo collections that somebody is always sending to somebody via the email and I looked up at the screen just as a funny picture of a dog and a hedgehog slid into place. Looking at the hedgehog (and thinking of hedgehog/groundhog/badger day having just passed), I remembered the wonderful, bouncy, funny song of the Incredible String Band, a U.K. band of the 60’s, and called ‘The Hedgehog Song.’ I once had a much-played LP of the album that included that song, but it went away 20+ years ago when I let go of all my vinyls and 33’s and LP’s and committed to CD’s. Lots of albums got replaced, but The Incredible String Band didn’t because, at least at the time, it wasn’t there in that format so that I could replace it.
Ed doesn’t remember the song; I try to sing it, but I can barely croak anymore, let alone get out a complex tune like that one (whose refrain begins ‘Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song she sung’). On a flyer, I Googled ‘The Hedgehog Song’, and up came a YouTube with a static visual and the original album cut. What a treat! And there’s more like this if you can just remember song titles or lyrics. (How can we have lost sight of the ‘Minotaur Song’ over the past eight years???? Or ‘First Girl I Loved? ) I also found “My Cousin Caterpillar’ (also by The String Band), which begins with the immortal line (given the title), ‘My cousin has great changes coming one day…’ And ends, ‘Come on, Do Your Thing!’ That may perfectly capture how we felt in the 60’s, those of us who were doing a lot of feeling in the 60’s, anyway.
Inspiration for our times, maybe. We are certainly hoping for great changes and we could surely use them. It’s just not clear that we any longer have ‘a thing’ to do. But at least the String Band is on YouTube; there’s a comfort. Here and here. Just poke around and you’ll find the other titles too there on ‘related video’s’ at the YouTube site.
Ed doesn’t remember the song; I try to sing it, but I can barely croak anymore, let alone get out a complex tune like that one (whose refrain begins ‘Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song she sung’). On a flyer, I Googled ‘The Hedgehog Song’, and up came a YouTube with a static visual and the original album cut. What a treat! And there’s more like this if you can just remember song titles or lyrics. (How can we have lost sight of the ‘Minotaur Song’ over the past eight years???? Or ‘First Girl I Loved? ) I also found “My Cousin Caterpillar’ (also by The String Band), which begins with the immortal line (given the title), ‘My cousin has great changes coming one day…’ And ends, ‘Come on, Do Your Thing!’ That may perfectly capture how we felt in the 60’s, those of us who were doing a lot of feeling in the 60’s, anyway.
Inspiration for our times, maybe. We are certainly hoping for great changes and we could surely use them. It’s just not clear that we any longer have ‘a thing’ to do. But at least the String Band is on YouTube; there’s a comfort. Here and here. Just poke around and you’ll find the other titles too there on ‘related video’s’ at the YouTube site.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
What Everybody Says
One of my adult kids wrote a blog about the situation in Gaza on one of the big left political blogs the other day and received a storm of responses. If it had been a real storm instead of a metaphorical one, she’d be under ten feet of water, I guess, but the Coast Guard would be on its way to rescue her. About a third of the responders were supporting what she had to say, another third opposing it, and the remaining third seemed to believe that she should never have said anything at all. I don’t know how Obama is going to produce his much-touted and fabulous coming together in the light of this kind of ‘conversation.’
In my twilight teaching days at UCLA, I was amazed by the students’ rather uniform contention that on matters that were not strictly factual (12 inches = one foot), everyone’s opinion was of equal value. It surely made teaching in the humanities and the social sciences a challenging experience, but I guess that is what we are in for in the foreseeable future. I once wrote a negative review of a book and its author was outraged that I disagreed with him. It's hard to know when you publish something whether you'd prefer to have people ignore you or disagree with you. It's unlikely they're just going to love what you say.
It’s only amplified by the new technology, of course, which fosters a kind of wildness. On the other hand, it’s that same new technology that has so many benefits for us, that keeps those of us in places like Point Roberts (oh, I know, there aren’t any places like Point Roberts) connected to ROTUS and to friends and family in ways we just couldn’t have been 20 years ago, even if you loved writing letters and wrote them all day long and had an endless supply of postage stamps. The New York Times, the other day, had an article about grandparents ‘videoconferencing’ with grandchildren. And for everything else, you have credit cards. So, on balance, I’d say, hooray for the technology and for the fact that it opens the conversation to everyone. My daughter, at comment 400, gave up trying to keep up with it. That’s another thing to remember about this brave new world: it’s well to know when to stop.
In my twilight teaching days at UCLA, I was amazed by the students’ rather uniform contention that on matters that were not strictly factual (12 inches = one foot), everyone’s opinion was of equal value. It surely made teaching in the humanities and the social sciences a challenging experience, but I guess that is what we are in for in the foreseeable future. I once wrote a negative review of a book and its author was outraged that I disagreed with him. It's hard to know when you publish something whether you'd prefer to have people ignore you or disagree with you. It's unlikely they're just going to love what you say.
It’s only amplified by the new technology, of course, which fosters a kind of wildness. On the other hand, it’s that same new technology that has so many benefits for us, that keeps those of us in places like Point Roberts (oh, I know, there aren’t any places like Point Roberts) connected to ROTUS and to friends and family in ways we just couldn’t have been 20 years ago, even if you loved writing letters and wrote them all day long and had an endless supply of postage stamps. The New York Times, the other day, had an article about grandparents ‘videoconferencing’ with grandchildren. And for everything else, you have credit cards. So, on balance, I’d say, hooray for the technology and for the fact that it opens the conversation to everyone. My daughter, at comment 400, gave up trying to keep up with it. That’s another thing to remember about this brave new world: it’s well to know when to stop.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Casting Off Chains
One of the things about living in an out of the way place like either Point Roberts or Roberts Creek is that you are oblivious of much that goes on the in world. I seldom experience traffic jams or daily newspapers or even traffic lights. I don’t know anything about the kinds of things that are advertised on billboards. Since I don’t have a TV, I largely don’t know anything about most of popular culture. The tabloids at the grocery store are filled with headlines about people I’ve almost never heard of except in those (repeated) headlines. I’ve never been clear about whether Paris Hilton actually does anything other than be Paris Hilton. I know who Regis used to be, but am not clear at all about who he is now or who is the Kathy who is so frequently attached to him. I remember Oprah largely from ‘The Color Purple,’ and although I know she has a TV show and an eponymous magazine, I have never seen the one or read the other. She changes size, I know from the tabloids. And I know she endorses and causes to be sold large numbers of books, mostly about victimized people who eventually triumph over adversity. I’ve learned, over the years, to avoid the ‘Oprah's Book Club'-labeled books. Not that I have anything against triumphing over adversity. I mean, are not many if not most of the great 19th Century novels—Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskill, even Trollope—about people triumphing over adversity? It’s more the whininess of the adversity part than the triumphing that I object to.
In any case, all these things, I am untouched by. But what I receive in full measure are the chain letters of wonders that circulate endlessly around the internet. Virtually every day someone somewhere, someone that I actually know, sends me some series of sayings, or pictures, or videos meant to amaze or amuse or educate. The internet seems to be a hot medium, in the McLuhan sense, because I find it hard not to look, at least a little, at these wonders as they unfold via my email screen. Only yesterday, I was being counselled that all the wonders of our world were intended by God to do honor to humans: walnuts, look just like brains, and good for thinking; grape bunches, the shape of a heart, and excellent for lowering excess blood pressure; celery, like bones, and a real contributor to preventing osteoporosis;oranges prevent breast cancer; olives, you can imagine; etc.
Today, Ed got a video of a carnival ride in Texas that combines bull fighting with an Octopus ride; by the end of the video, people had been flung off the octopus and were being chased by the bulls. Yesterday, he got a b&w video of an Italian uniformed motorcycle drill team that looked like its routines had been devised by Albert Speer or whoever choreographed all those military drills in Triumph of the Will (or maybe it was in Riefenstahl’s Olympic Games film from Nazi Germany).
Ed’s chain letter gifts from others are largely action videos; mine, more like art stuff. I’ve received numerous examples of toothpick art, of street painting, of peachpit carving, of painting on feathers (feathers, I might add, that were much more beautiful before they were painted on than afterwards). There seems no end to this stuff. Today, I was visited (for the third time this year) with the fabulous series of painted cats. When I first saw these, my reaction was, ‘Amazing!’ Most of my family tends to respond with ‘How could they do that to cats?’ Perhaps this is because I take it as a given that nobody does anything to cats that cats don’t choose to have done to them, but perhaps I just don’t take cats seriously enough. In any case, sometime after the second email visitation of the fabulous painted cats, I had occasion to track down the pictures to show to a grandchild. Imagine my surprise when Google offered me, high up, a link to Snopes and the painted cats . Turns out the painted cats are a stunning example of (and might as well be a brilliant advertisement for) Photoshop: a fraud, a hoax!
I like those cats, though. Even photoshopped, it seems like a very interesting idea. When I first saw them, I couldn’t imagine how they got the cats to submit to it, but I walked right into believing that it was the real deal. Now, of course, I don’t know about any of those other things. Carved peach pits? Maybe not. Spectacular sand sculptures? Dubious. Italian drill teams, octopus rides with bullfighting thrown in? All of unknown status. If I have to check with Snopes before I look at every one of these chains, I might at last find a way to keep from looking at them. Unchained, at last!
In any case, all these things, I am untouched by. But what I receive in full measure are the chain letters of wonders that circulate endlessly around the internet. Virtually every day someone somewhere, someone that I actually know, sends me some series of sayings, or pictures, or videos meant to amaze or amuse or educate. The internet seems to be a hot medium, in the McLuhan sense, because I find it hard not to look, at least a little, at these wonders as they unfold via my email screen. Only yesterday, I was being counselled that all the wonders of our world were intended by God to do honor to humans: walnuts, look just like brains, and good for thinking; grape bunches, the shape of a heart, and excellent for lowering excess blood pressure; celery, like bones, and a real contributor to preventing osteoporosis;oranges prevent breast cancer; olives, you can imagine; etc.
Today, Ed got a video of a carnival ride in Texas that combines bull fighting with an Octopus ride; by the end of the video, people had been flung off the octopus and were being chased by the bulls. Yesterday, he got a b&w video of an Italian uniformed motorcycle drill team that looked like its routines had been devised by Albert Speer or whoever choreographed all those military drills in Triumph of the Will (or maybe it was in Riefenstahl’s Olympic Games film from Nazi Germany).
Ed’s chain letter gifts from others are largely action videos; mine, more like art stuff. I’ve received numerous examples of toothpick art, of street painting, of peachpit carving, of painting on feathers (feathers, I might add, that were much more beautiful before they were painted on than afterwards). There seems no end to this stuff. Today, I was visited (for the third time this year) with the fabulous series of painted cats. When I first saw these, my reaction was, ‘Amazing!’ Most of my family tends to respond with ‘How could they do that to cats?’ Perhaps this is because I take it as a given that nobody does anything to cats that cats don’t choose to have done to them, but perhaps I just don’t take cats seriously enough. In any case, sometime after the second email visitation of the fabulous painted cats, I had occasion to track down the pictures to show to a grandchild. Imagine my surprise when Google offered me, high up, a link to Snopes and the painted cats . Turns out the painted cats are a stunning example of (and might as well be a brilliant advertisement for) Photoshop: a fraud, a hoax!
I like those cats, though. Even photoshopped, it seems like a very interesting idea. When I first saw them, I couldn’t imagine how they got the cats to submit to it, but I walked right into believing that it was the real deal. Now, of course, I don’t know about any of those other things. Carved peach pits? Maybe not. Spectacular sand sculptures? Dubious. Italian drill teams, octopus rides with bullfighting thrown in? All of unknown status. If I have to check with Snopes before I look at every one of these chains, I might at last find a way to keep from looking at them. Unchained, at last!
Sunday, July 6, 2008
No Clicks Without Bricks
Today’s post is primarily from Shelly Albaum who explains what he meant when he told me that a web site would not be sufficient to create community communication because ‘no clicks without bricks.’
"The research shows that most people do not regularly visit very many websites. They have dozens or scores of bookmarks, and they could check them all regularly, and a few people do, but the vast majority have only a few well-traveled paths -- less than 10 sites visited weekly -- and people are resistant to change. For example, just knowing that a great website is out there, or a better search engine than Google is out there, has almost no impact on my actual behavior.
That's because I don't have a real problem with Google, and information overload is such a serious problem for most people that news of a new website isn't really all that welcome. Or at least it's not particularly good news.
So creating the website that has all the information about Point Roberts is critically important, and is a must-do, important step. However, 95% of your intended audience won't remember to go there, and thus they will not hear the news. RSS was supposed to solve this by pushing the information out to your customized Yahoo Portal Page or your iGoogle Page, or your iPod, or your cell phone, but that still doesn't reach most people.
In the physical world, we have many more well-worn paths and thus are way better at receiving serendipitous information from our peripheral vision. That's why the big sign at the main intersection is so helpful.
What you'd want ideally is a big comfortable public space with great seating, occasional entertainment, lots of displays and bulletin boards, great drinks, cheap food, and convenience services like photocopies, faxes, or whatever people need. This would be a meeting place that everyone would have occasion to visit daily, or at least regularly, and would encounter visual reminders of interesting things, and then they would check the website to find out more. In its most fully articulated version, this idea would actually bring blogs and web sites into the physical world with large screens and plenty of free browsing terminals.
This kind of thing would have a different personality in every town, but every town needs something like it. Almost no town has one, though, I think. The main thing is to create a common public meeting space that is analogous to and complementary of the virtual town square that is a web page."
The Point Roberts Community Center comes immediately to my mind. It isn’t what Shelly describes, but it is extraordinarily easy to imagine it being that. I can see where we are; I can see where we can end up; but I can’t at all see what are the steps in between. I suppose that’s why ‘almost no town has one.’ More to think on.
"The research shows that most people do not regularly visit very many websites. They have dozens or scores of bookmarks, and they could check them all regularly, and a few people do, but the vast majority have only a few well-traveled paths -- less than 10 sites visited weekly -- and people are resistant to change. For example, just knowing that a great website is out there, or a better search engine than Google is out there, has almost no impact on my actual behavior.
That's because I don't have a real problem with Google, and information overload is such a serious problem for most people that news of a new website isn't really all that welcome. Or at least it's not particularly good news.
So creating the website that has all the information about Point Roberts is critically important, and is a must-do, important step. However, 95% of your intended audience won't remember to go there, and thus they will not hear the news. RSS was supposed to solve this by pushing the information out to your customized Yahoo Portal Page or your iGoogle Page, or your iPod, or your cell phone, but that still doesn't reach most people.
In the physical world, we have many more well-worn paths and thus are way better at receiving serendipitous information from our peripheral vision. That's why the big sign at the main intersection is so helpful.
What you'd want ideally is a big comfortable public space with great seating, occasional entertainment, lots of displays and bulletin boards, great drinks, cheap food, and convenience services like photocopies, faxes, or whatever people need. This would be a meeting place that everyone would have occasion to visit daily, or at least regularly, and would encounter visual reminders of interesting things, and then they would check the website to find out more. In its most fully articulated version, this idea would actually bring blogs and web sites into the physical world with large screens and plenty of free browsing terminals.
This kind of thing would have a different personality in every town, but every town needs something like it. Almost no town has one, though, I think. The main thing is to create a common public meeting space that is analogous to and complementary of the virtual town square that is a web page."
The Point Roberts Community Center comes immediately to my mind. It isn’t what Shelly describes, but it is extraordinarily easy to imagine it being that. I can see where we are; I can see where we can end up; but I can’t at all see what are the steps in between. I suppose that’s why ‘almost no town has one.’ More to think on.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Institution-less in Gaza
And maybe eyeless as well. I got an email the other day from a sometime Point Roberts visitor and relative of locals who is putting up a new web site in hopes that it will help to address Point Roberts’ residents’difficulties in creating some kind of community voice both for dealing with the community and for all kinds of other purposes, as well. So, I’ve been thinking today, having witnessed some of that broken-ness yesterday at the 4th of July parade, about why Point Roberts is so fractured. Things work for awhile, and then--all too frequently--they suddenly fly apart. Maybe it's not 'too frequently' but inevitably.
There are all the obvious reasons for the fracturedness and fractiousness of the Point community: lots of full time residents who don’t actually live here full-time; more Canadians than Americans who own property, but more Americans than Canadians who can vote; the border (which could itself be reasons numbers one through ten); a substantial portion of community members who are retired and thus less concerned pragmatically about the issues that affect younger people (jobs/economy) and younger people with children (schools, recreation). When the old people want some recreation, they take a cruise.
Other reasons are possible, but I don’t have any data to confirm them. However (never to be stopped by the absence of data), I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people who came here just because it was a kind of outpost where they weren’t going to be put upon by other people and weren’t going to be badgered into being members of a community. Voting patterns here suggest a hardy band of libertarians and they are bound to come in conflict with that other resident group of former hippies who are happy to have everybody in the soup together.
There are plenty of reasons why community doesn’t really work here. But I think the biggest one may be that we are a community without community institutions. We have a community health clinic, and a community library, and a community center and a community church. None of those institutions is set up to in any way create a sense of community beyond their narrow focus. Kris and staff run a great little library; Virginia and staff run a much needed health clinic; the community center itself is just a building, really, for events that somebody else has to figure out. The church is as ecumenical as a Lutheran church can possibly be, but it has worked hard to broaden its reach without substantial success, although the new minister is working hard to bring more people into the church for non-religion-specific events. But there’s nothing else: the newspaper, once a month, just isn’t enough, or often enough, to provide that center point.
In a brief conversation with my son (a web publishing/internet maven) about the possibility of a website as a community institution, he replied cryptically to me, ‘No clicks without bricks. You need a pub.’ I’m looking forward to hearing more from him on the topic, but I have so far figured out that he’s saying a website won’t work if it doesn’t also have some kind of physical community presence. I’ve looked at a few previous local website attempts, and they certainly don’t seem to have generated that conversational focus on their web basis alone.
So, we need a pub; I don’t think he meant a bar, though, because there are plenty of those already. It hasn't helped.
There are all the obvious reasons for the fracturedness and fractiousness of the Point community: lots of full time residents who don’t actually live here full-time; more Canadians than Americans who own property, but more Americans than Canadians who can vote; the border (which could itself be reasons numbers one through ten); a substantial portion of community members who are retired and thus less concerned pragmatically about the issues that affect younger people (jobs/economy) and younger people with children (schools, recreation). When the old people want some recreation, they take a cruise.
Other reasons are possible, but I don’t have any data to confirm them. However (never to be stopped by the absence of data), I strongly suspect that there are a lot of people who came here just because it was a kind of outpost where they weren’t going to be put upon by other people and weren’t going to be badgered into being members of a community. Voting patterns here suggest a hardy band of libertarians and they are bound to come in conflict with that other resident group of former hippies who are happy to have everybody in the soup together.
There are plenty of reasons why community doesn’t really work here. But I think the biggest one may be that we are a community without community institutions. We have a community health clinic, and a community library, and a community center and a community church. None of those institutions is set up to in any way create a sense of community beyond their narrow focus. Kris and staff run a great little library; Virginia and staff run a much needed health clinic; the community center itself is just a building, really, for events that somebody else has to figure out. The church is as ecumenical as a Lutheran church can possibly be, but it has worked hard to broaden its reach without substantial success, although the new minister is working hard to bring more people into the church for non-religion-specific events. But there’s nothing else: the newspaper, once a month, just isn’t enough, or often enough, to provide that center point.
In a brief conversation with my son (a web publishing/internet maven) about the possibility of a website as a community institution, he replied cryptically to me, ‘No clicks without bricks. You need a pub.’ I’m looking forward to hearing more from him on the topic, but I have so far figured out that he’s saying a website won’t work if it doesn’t also have some kind of physical community presence. I’ve looked at a few previous local website attempts, and they certainly don’t seem to have generated that conversational focus on their web basis alone.
So, we need a pub; I don’t think he meant a bar, though, because there are plenty of those already. It hasn't helped.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)