Author: AKMA

Is a multi-player online snowball fight. Share and enjoy, and phear my multi-ball pelting skillz.

I admired Leah Price’s column in yesterday’s NYT Book Review; I tend to sympathize strongly with the retrospective historians’-eye view that the present generally thinks of itself as exciting and unique and unprecedented and ominous in ways that doesn’t square with careful attention to our ancestors’ experience. Price reminds hand-wringing doomsayers that “until radio and television dethroned the book, social reformers worried about too much reading, not too little.”

As Price points out, the internet has made readers of people who were significantly less likely to pick up a tome off the Nonfiction Bestsellers List. There’s a difference between reading online and reading books, but that difference can’t accurately be characterized as a decline in reading per se. If there’s a problem with what we read online, we need to address it by acknowledging first that we are online reading.

This exemplifies yet another dimension of my tedious refrain: We’re participating in (or “futilely resisting”) a cultural transition in response to digital technology. We can panic and shout, we can ignore it and hope it goes away, but the most productive course entails participating critically — so that we know what we’re pontificating about, and can make pertinent, useful suggestions about how things might be better.

Josiah’s home from college, looking well and strong and tall. He and Pippa and I spent yesterday afternoon braving the wilds of Princeton-area shopping locations, looking to fill the holes in our gift-giving inside straights. We work well together, had a good time, and covered most of what we needed to.
 
We’re expecting Nate and Laura on the day after Christmas, and Jennifer will come home who-knows-when, but this townhouse that seems quite spacious when it’s just Margaret and Pippa and me will soon be brimful of family (and eventually we’re taking the show on the road to visit Holly and my Dad and Susan in a rented van).
 
As Maxwell Smart used to say, “And loving it!”

The days are getting longer! At last!
 
Meanwhile, David’s description of the return of Open Source Radio gets it just right — “more naturally than ever, in Web-only form.” It hadn’t clicked with me before, but after Chris started his interview series as podcasts, something seemed off-kilter about his moving the show to radio.
 
There was something else I meant to link to. When I remember what, I’ll delete this paragraph.
That’s what it was! Jon Armstrong’s very clear, extensive description of what it’s like to live with a someone who has serious chronic depression. Add that to Heather’s own perspective, posted a couple of weeks ago, and you get a moving sense of what this life entails. My own experience differs from Jon’s — every depression is different, every spouse is different, every relationship is different — but these two essays convey a vivid picture of what your experience might be somewhat different from. For a variety of reasons, I’ve become a contact for people who need a crash course in depression and its ramifications; these are now highly recommended reading for that course. (I don’t require anything of anyone who’s coming to grips with this particular beast.)

I’ve been watching my CPU load closely for the past week or so, and have noticed that some mysterious process occasionally takes over my processor and claims more than half of my capacity, and won’t let go. It involves AppleScript; the process is osascript, and it doesn’t make clear what launched it or what would complete it. Emory speculates that it’s a Folder Action, though I can’t think of a likely candidate (I haven’t set up any Folder Actions of my own, so it would be either an Apple-issued script or something that an application has installed. Any nominations would be welcome; in the meantime, I just watch out for it and kill it when it starts hogging memory.

I posted the separate videos of the Desperate Measures concert about two weeks ago, and it’s interesting to see how YouTube viewers have responded to them.
 
For instance, I gave “I Can See Clearly Now” a head start by posting it above the fold on my first presentation of concert videos, and it’s stayed near the top of the “most viewed” for most of the interval since then. But recently “Save Tonight” passed it for the lead in the “most viewed Desperate Measures video” derby (interestingly, two harsh critics among the viewers have assigned it a two-star rating). After “I Can See Clearly” in second place, there’s a sharp decline in viewing; “Zombie Jamboree” has half as many viewers as its heavier-hitting neighbors. “King of Spain” and “Torn” follow closely, with high ratings as well. Only about fifty viewers have watched “Brick” and “In The End,” but they liked them a lot (five stars).
 
I don’t have a far-reaching conclusion about all this, except perhaps that Eagle Eye Cherry fans are (a) curious about cover versions and (b) not wild about a capella arrangements.

David links to the year-end summary of the favorite online videos from twelve webby marketers; I was delighted to see that he chose Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0. . . The Machine Is Us/ing Us” (and Seth Godin chose Wesch’s follow-up video).

And Doc points out that David Isenberg has wrangled another year’s-worth of F2C, his annual “Freedom to Connect” conference. It’s a pivotal meeting at a pivotal moment in the trajectory of U.S. participation in cultivating the digital dimension of our common life, and I hope some legislative types (maybe even some candidates) pay attention to what develops there.

I know I promised to post Sunday’s sermon yesterday, but I’ve lost my hand-corrected copy of the manuscript. If need be, I’ll reconstruct the changes I made — but I’d rather start from the refinements I already made.

[IF YOU CAME HERE FROM BOING BOING OR SLASHDOT, THE LINK YOU’RE FOLLOWING IS HERE.]

That rain you requested was sent to the wrong address.
 

I drove from Princeton to Cape May today, to preach at Debra’s installation as Vicar of St. Barnabas, a small church near the southern tip of the Jersey peninsula, and all along the way I saw standing water in streets and fields, streams brimming their banks, muddy rivers, flooded coastal swamps, and more coming down every mile. I wish I could redirect some of it where it’s more needed. . . .

The service, on the other hand, was wonderful — a community amply enthusiastic about their pastor, Bishop Councell demonstrative in his delight with Debra’s ministry, and generous good humor all around. I’ll post the sermon tomorrow; tonight I’m just unwinding.

From Stephen Downes, a post from Michael Umphrey that emphasizes the importance of actually improving students’ writing (at the high school level — but gosh darn golly, maybe something like that would even help college and graduate students). Some of the standout points include Stephen’s comment that “I do believe that there are good reasons for good writing, and that there are ways to become a better writer. Clarity and precision – whether in writing, art or athletics – are virtues, because they help you obtain your objectives. The principles of writing are intended, in the first instance, to foster clarity and precision,”; Michael’s observation that although “empowerment, authenticity, and voice” may identify dimensions of writing that teachers should encourage, “research (not just Googling). . . . truth, and accuracy” were pretty desirable too (I would add “even more desirable,” and I’d import Stephen’s “clarity and precision” here. Plus, “knowing the difference between an argument and an opinion).”

Michael suggests that getting students to write online, where they stand visibly responsible for what they say, would be a good step — blogging, for instance.

Michael notes that you can’t simply assume that accredited teachers make good writers (one might think this self-evident, but the ideological power of credentials obscures the obvious in this as so many other respects). Teachers need to be taught to write better, and the whole curriculum should support the value of strong, clear, focused writing — otherwise, in a culture that accords little explicit emphasis to effective expression, it will be perceived as a cranky obsession of the minority who uphold it. “Promote this school as the place where writing matters.” In theological education, one can only imagine what would happen if a particular seminary got the reputation as forming remarkably articulate, effective preachers and communicators.

It’s not that it has been tried, and found wanting. It’s that it has been found difficult, and not tried.

This Cat and Girl comic delights me in a dozen different ways. (Title allusion — I can’t make the title a link in my WordPress set-up.)