(2) Thu Sep 22
The world according to Clive Thompson
BEFORE CLASS:
1. Watch
Watch at least five of the Sunday Story #1 videos on Vimeo and share feedback.
Vimeo login: bhsecbooks@gmail.com Password: cutandpaste Once you have logged in, click on: My Videos.
2. Write
Post a comment (directly on Vimeo), sharing feedback for at least two of the videos, considering any of the following:
- What surprised you? Why?
- What reminded you and/or made you reflect on your own experience?
- After watching several videos, what connections and/or hypothesis can you share?
3. Read
Clive Thompson writes about digital technologies and their social and cultural impact. Below are several essays that that Clive published in WIRED, a monthly magazine that reports on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy and politics. Clive is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds For The Better (2014). Clive visited BHSEC Queens as a guest author in Spring 2013.
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
WIRED (2009)
As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write — and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom — life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos — assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling seriousacademic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis — from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs — has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.
We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
Clive Thompson on Capturing Aha Moments
WIRED (2011)
DAVE DEBRONKART WAS sick of losing his best ideas. He spends a lot of time talking — on the phone, at conferences, in meetings. He often hits on a great idea while deep in conversation but is too busy talking to write it down, and — poof! — it vanishes. So this spring, deBronkart, an advocate for participatory medicine, began an experiment to capture those stray thoughts. If he’s on the phone and the ideas are crackling, he slaps on a headset plugged into his laptop and boots up his Dragon speech recognition software. It transcribes — with surprising accuracy — everything he says, producing a permanent record that’s easy to review and search afterward.
“These micromoments of, oh, I just got an idea — but it’s gone, like a champagne bubble! Now we’ll be able to capture all those,” he says.
For years, dictation programs were regarded as a curiosity — kludgy, error-prone tools for people who couldn’t type or who had wrist-strain injuries. That’s all changed. The software has become shockingly good and is now available for phones. (There’s a free iPhone version of Dragon, and Android has built-in voice recognition.) The upshot is that talking is poised to become a major way we produce written words, and the shift will produce weird new forms of composition and thinking.
As deBronkart discovered, voice recognition revolutionizes how we capture ideas. We might talk at 200 words a minute, but we can jot notes at only 25 or 30 words a minute (and many people type at that pace, too). Plus, creativity scientists have long known that our best aha moments often occur when we’re out for a stroll or grocery shopping. The old-school hack was to call your voicemail and frantically recite the idea; the new one is to dictate it to your phone. (I’m at work on a book right now, and I’ve generated easily 5,000 words of on-the-fly notes this way.)
Imagine how interesting things will get as dictation tech becomes better, cheaper, and more omnipresent. Your computer or phone could save a rolling text buffer of every conversation and even your idle chatter, so when you realize days later that you need to recover an important thought, it’s there, as a searchable text document.
The sheer fluidity of talking has other benefits, too. Five years ago, while working on his PhD thesis, writer and critic Tim Carmody sometimes found himself staring at an empty page, not knowing where to begin. He had no problem talking to friends about his ideas, so Carmody booted up Dragon, talked aloud for hours, and got past the block. Writing theorists know that students struggle with “prewriting”: They have trouble uncovering what it is they know. Dictation might uncork a gusher of prewriting and increase the torrent of public writing and thinking on the Internet.
Granted, if you believe the web is already overfreighted with babble, this prospect will fill you with dread. I’m less worried, though there are subtler dangers. Voice dictation isn’t good (in my experience) for formal writing. I doubt dictation will stamp out typing and the pen, but if it becomes much more common, it could shift the tone of how we talk to ourselves and each other.
Maybe we can learn from our forebears. Back before typewriters were ubiquitous, dictation was common. Henry James dictated his novels to secretaries, and the 16th-century author Michel de Montaigne is believed to have done the same for his superbly nuanced Essays. It didn’t seem to hurt him. “The things I say,” Montaigne dictated, “are better than those I write.”
Clive Thompson on How YouTube Changes the Way We Think
WIRED (2008)
Click here to watch responses to “One World” on Vialogues. Share a one-sentence critical response.
Two years ago, a YouTube member named MadV — who silently performs magic tricks while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask — put up a short, cryptic video. He held his hand up to the camera, showing what he’d written on his palm: “One World.” Then he urged viewers to respond.
The video was just 41 seconds long, but it caught people’s imagination. Within a few days, hundreds of YouTube users had posted videos — shot on webcams, usually in their bedrooms — displaying their own scrawled messages: “Don’t quit!” “Tread gently.” “Think.” “Carpe diem.” “Open your eyes.” And my favorite, “They could be gone tomorrow!”
Soon, MadV had inspired 2,000 replies, making it the most-responded-to video in YouTube’s history. MadV stitched them all together into a long, voiceless montage, and it’s quite powerful. All these people from across the globe convey something incredibly evocative while remaining completely mute.
So here’s my question: What exactly is this? What do you call MadV’s project? It isn’t quite a documentary; it isn’t exactly a conversation or a commentary, either. It’s some curious mongrel form. And it would have been inconceivable before the Internet and cheap webcams — prohibitively expensive and difficult to pull off.
This is what’s so fascinating about online video culture. DIY tools for shooting, editing, and broadcasting video aren’t just changing who uses the medium. They’re changing how we use it. We’re developing a new language of video — forms that let us say different things and maybe even think in different ways.
Here’s another example: a new trend on Flickr called the long portrait. These are short videos in which the subjects simply stare into the camera. The first time you see one, it’s unsettlingly intense. The subject’s gaze — staring at you — totally discombobulates the normal voyeuristic payload of a photo. It’s also a lovely comment on the hyperkinetic style of today’s world: Slow down and look at something, will you!
What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there’s photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art.
In a sense, you could argue that even after 100 years of moving pictures, we still don’t know what video is for. The sheer cost of creating it meant we used it for a stiflingly narrow set of purposes: news, documentaries, instructional presentations.
Now the lid is blowing off. The Internet has shown us that video is also good for mass-distributed conversation — as with Talmudic response chains on YouTube or Vimeo, or even the super-short Twitter-like blurts of video on Seesmic. I know people who use Skype for virtual closeness, leaving a video channel to their spouses open all day long while they work. They’re not even looking at the feed or talking; it’s like emotional wallpaper. Who would have thought of doing that with a $10,000 videoconferencing rig?
Marshall McLuhan pointed out that whenever we get our hands on a new medium we tend to use it like older ones. Early TV broadcasts consisted of guys sitting around reading radio scripts because nobody had realized yet that TV could tell stories differently. It’s the same with much of today’s webcam video; most people still try to emulate TV and film. Only weirdos like MadV are really exploring its potential.
A bigger leap will occur when we get better tools for archiving and searching video. Then we’ll start using it the way we use paper or word processing: to take notes or mull over a problem, like Tom Cruise flipping through scenes at the beginning of Minority Report. We think of video as a way to communicate with others — but it’s becoming a way to communicate with ourselves.
Clive Thompson on the Establishing Rules in the Videocam Age
WIRED (2011)
WHEN MANS ADLER founded Bambuser — a Sweden-based service that lets people broadcast live video from their cell phones to the Internet — his idea was simply to help users share their lives with friends in real time. Early this year, however, Adler saw an explosion of use from a political powder keg: Egypt.
During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.
“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”
The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”
Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera — and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.
“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.
Granted, omnipresent recording is a double-edged sword. When activists posted videos of the protests in despotic Middle Eastern states, government agents eagerly downloaded the amateur footage and used it to identify and target dissidents.
But sousveillance will not go away. If anything, it’ll become woven ever more tightly into everyday life, with new tools arriving that let citizens document incidents in surprising new ways. Media critic Dan Gillmor envisions software that stitches together phonecam footage from several people to re-create an event in full 3-D detail. Meanwhile, Witness — a nonprofit that supports the use of video for defending human rights — is working on software that blocks out faces so dissidents can shoot scenes without endangering those in the viewfinder.
And bearing witness will get easier. Right now, sousveillance requires an act of will; you have to pull out your phone when you see something fishy. But always-on videocams are spreading. Many new cars, for example, have cameras for backing up, and forward-looking ones are gaining popularity. And wearable video devices like the Looxcie are already hitting the market: Pop one over your ear like a Bluetooth headset and it’ll capture a rolling five-hour buffer of everything you see and do, publishable to Facebook with a single click.
I recently wore a Looxcie to see what it’s like to be an instrument of sousveillance. I felt weirdly powerful, knowing nothing could escape my glance — and, like Mann, I alarmed every guard I saw. But my wife got so freaked out (“Wait, is that thing on?”) that I had to turn it off after a few hours. We can record everything; now we need a social code around doing so. Even Little Brother has to watch what he watches.
As citizens turn their videocams on the authorities, we need some new rules of engagement.
Games Without Frontiers: Poetic ‘Passage’ Provokes Heavy Thoughts on Life, Death
Clive Thompson, WIRED (2008)
Click here to watch a demonstration of Passage on Vialogues. Share a one-sentence critical response.
Are games art?
If you’re like me, you are sick to death of this argument. It has raged for years, and recently reached a crescendo when Roger Ebert wrote a column sniffing that games will always be “inherently inferior to film and literature.” That’s because games allow the player to control some of the outcome — and art, for Ebert, is all about surrendering to the control of the artist.
Personally, I think Ebert made some excellent points, but I’m not going to debate him blow by blow here. Instead, I’m going to try and shift the grounds of this debate by suggesting that you stop reading this column — right now! — and take five minutes to play Passage, a free, downloadable game.
Wait: Did I call Passage a game? I actually meant to say poem. Because while Passage behaves like a game, it’s psychically and aesthetically closer to a superb and tightly crafted sonnet. More than any game I’ve ever played, it illustrates how a game can be a fantastically expressive, artistic vehicle for exploring the human condition.
To prove it, let me describe what it’s like to play Passage.
When I first launched the game, I was struck by the weird size of the play screen: a thin, horizontal strip only a few inches high. The graphics are old-school, low-rez pixels of the sort you’d see in an early ’80s videogame. Your character is a little blond, blue-eyed man. You have five minutes to play.
As I started moving around, I quickly realized that while you can only see a small strip of the game world at a time, it contains a maze that stretches far off to the east and south. This makes exploration tantalizing but also frustrating, because you can’t figure out what direction to go in.
About 30 seconds into the play, I encountered a little pixelized woman, and when I touched her, a heart bloomed around us — and suddenly we moved as one. Marriage! It was charming, but I soon found that it limited my movement, because there were parts of the maze that only a single person could fit through.
Then things got weird. About three minutes into the game, I realized with a shock that my character had changed appearance. My hair had darkened, and — hey, was I getting bald? My “wife,” too, looked older, her hair whitened.
We kept on exploring eastward and southward; the lovely but impressionistically vague backgrounds changed color, shifting like Picasso-style fall leaves. But pretty soon it was obvious that my avatar was getting really, really super-old. Then abruptly, my wife died: A little tombstone blipped in her place. I walked on alone for another 30 seconds, then, just as suddenly, I died, too — another little gray tombstone.
Which is when I realized, with a stab of pain, just what Passage is:
It’s a game about life.
“That’s exactly what I was doing,” agreed Jason Rohrer, the game’s creator, when I called him up. “I wanted to create something that makes you think about how it seems to sort of slip away from you. People tell me they don’t even notice that their guy is slowly balding, because it happens so slowly. And that’s how it works in real life! You get older and older and then one day, you look in a mirror and you’re like — ‘Wow, how did this happen?’”
What makes Passage so remarkable is not merely its lovely, intentionally abstract graphics. It’s that Rohrer uses the mechanics of gameplay as metaphors. He takes the very thing that Ebert finds artistically limiting about games — the player’s agency, her ability to interactively “do” things — and uses it to explore human experience.
Consider just a few of the delicious metaphors at work here. For example, there’s the partnering. Sure, it makes it impossible to go certain places on the map — but as Rohrer slyly points out, it makes exploration more rewarding. You gain points more quickly as you walk around.
The world also changes subtly as you “age.” When you begin, the east — the “future” — is hazy, and the past is clear. When you’re near death, this reverses: The future is clear, and the past, now remote, is hazy. As you move further east and age, the obstacles become more frequent and harder to navigate.
Most evocative for me is the five-minute time limit. It means that, as with life, you can never explore the whole map at one go. You have to make choices, pick one direction and enjoy whatever it is you’re able to see. (If you want an even deeper exploration of Passage, check out Rohrer’s Creator’s Statement about the game. He’s also got a few other games to play.)
Passage is clearly a work of art. Perhaps the reason critics like Ebert can’t see the artistic possibilities of games is that they’re looking for something that feels — cognitively and aesthetically — like a movie or a book, with a strong, single narrative. But the power of Passage isn’t in its narrative. It’s in its gamelike qualities. It sets up a system, and invites you to explore it. It architects your behavior: It’s like being an actor in a partly ad-libbed play.
Compare it to poetry, for instance. Passage hit me precisely the way, say, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” stunned me when I first read it. Both pieces of art slam you with a short burst of lyric intensity, then leave you to think about it.
Sadly, as with poetry, there’s no commercial market for what Rohrer does. More than 100,000 people have played Passage, but he hasn’t made a dime off it. Seriously artistic games probably never will make any money; most “high art” never does. Artistic games won’t crack the Top 10.
But they’ll change the way you think about life.
4. Link
Instructions
DURING CLASS
1. Current events
- Discussion leader: Robert
2. Lesson work
- Assigned reading/video discussion leader: A
- Online discussion leader: B
- Links library discussion leader: C
3. Digerati: Clive Thompson
- Activity leader: D
In-class reading (click here for a copy) excerpted from: Michael Agger, Interview: Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think”, The New Yorker (2013)
4. Preview
Preview Sunday Story #2 assignment, due Sun Sep 25 (midnight)
- Digerati
Preview homework for class 3 (Tue Sep 27)
- Before class homework assignments
- Classroom leadership assignments
5. Gists and Guiding Questions
Let’s also discuss “gists” and “guiding questions”:
