Where have all the readers gone?
An excerpt from Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: “Please send us books.” But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?
I do my best. They are polite.
I’m sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Avoid Western Digital hard drives
From BBC NEWS
One of the world’s largest hard disk manufacturers has blocked its customers from sharing online their media files that are stored on networked drives.
Western Digital says the decision to block sharing of music and audio files is an anti-piracy effort.
The ban operates regardless of whether the files are copy-protected, or a user’s own home-produced content.
Well, that’s one purchasing decision made easier.
Coates on Carr
Tom Coates is annoyed with Nick Carr. Here’s his summing up:
I think the thing that annoys me most about your piece here is that it’s the same rhetoric that you always take – that there’s something inherently suspicious about all this weird utopian rhetoric of these mad futurist, self-important technologists – that somehow none of it really applies to the rest of the world, because those people are so detached from reality, and that finally they’re all missing what’s really important.
All of which would be rather more convincing if you weren’t recapitulating what we’ve been saying for the last three years.
While I’m sure it helps promote you in the eyes of people with power and money to be suspicious and critical of new technology and set yourself up to be an impartial arbiter of what’s happening, free of hype and applying real-world values (or however it is you sell this warmed over stuff), I’d argue that you’re ultimately doing yourself a disservice. You just look ill-informed!
Ouch! That’s a bit harsh: Nick Carr is a bit of a contrarian, but sometimes he’s very perceptive (e.g. about the sharecropping metaphor as a way of thinking about MySpace and some user-generated content). But Tom Coates is right about the chunk of the intellectual spectrum to which Carr has staked a claim. The title of his first book — Does IT Matter? — says it all. He’s positioned himself as the ‘grown-up’ commentator.
Sensecam
SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images.
At first sight this product of research at Microsoft’s Cambridge Lab seems banal. But it seems to have a really intriguing application. As Tech Review reports:
When Mrs. B was admitted to the hospital in March 2002, her doctors diagnosed limbic encephalitis, a brain infection that left her autobiographical memory in tatters. As a result, she can only recall around 2 percent of events that happened the previous week, and she often forgets who people are. But a simple device called SenseCam, a small digital camera developed by Microsoft Research, in Cambridge, U.K., dramatically improved her memory: she could recall 80 percent of events six weeks after they happened, according to the results of a recent study.
“Not only does SenseCam allow people to recall memories while they are looking at the images, which in itself is wonderful, but after an initial period of consolidation, it appears to lead to long-term retention of memories over many months, without the need to view the images repeatedly,” says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist who works as a consultant to Microsoft.
The device is worn around the neck and automatically takes a wide-angle, low-resolution photograph every 30 seconds. It contains an accelerometer to stabilize the image and reduce blurriness, and it can be configured to take pictures in response to changes in movement, temperature, or lighting. “Because it has a wide-angle lens, you don’t have to point it at anything–it just happens to capture pretty much everything that the wearer can see,” says Steve Hodges, the manager of the Sensor and Devices Group at Microsoft Research, U.K.
The camera stores VGA-quality images as compressed .jpg files. It can fit 30,000 images onto a 1GB flash card. And run them as crude movies which are obviously good enough to jog the memory.
Interesting illustration of the utility of photography.
What every geek’s Xmas tree needs
From Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland…
Download our exclusive 3¼” by 4½” laptop computer glass ornament to your tree for high-tech festive fun! Artfully crafted from glass, shimmering glitter accents add an irresistible appeal that will never be outdated. Comes ready to hang with a silver cord.
I expect it runs Windows XP.
Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.
Twilight zone
Quentin has some lovely photographs of King’s Parade at dusk yesterday. For example, this:
The $64 billion question
This morning’s Observer column…
So the 64-billion-dollar question is: how did it happen? The obvious hypothesis – that the senior executives of all the record companies were idiots – has always seemed implausible to me. Or it did until I read the recent interview in Wired magazine with Doug Morris, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group. Morris’s ascent to the top of Universal in the 1990s coincided with the rise of CDs – the biggest boom the music business has ever known. The colossal profits blinded Morris & Co to the threat/potential of the net.
Pressed by the interviewer, Morris went into rant mode, insisting that there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. ‘There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,’ he said. ‘That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?’
‘Default to public’, and its implications
Interesting Guardian column by Jeff Jarvis.
According to the marketing firm Alloy, 96% of teens and tweens use social networks; they are now universal. And I think this means that they will maintain friendships longer in life. Which, in turn, could lead to richer friendships. No longer can you escape relationships when you move on; you will be tied to your past – and to the consequences of your actions. I hope this could make us better friends.
But because you can’t escape your past, this also means that you could do one stupid thing in life, forever memorialised in Google, and you are embarrassed in perpetuity.
The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, jokes that we all should be able to change our names and start fresh at age 21. But I think we’ll be protected by mutually assured humiliation: we will all have our moments of youthful indiscretion and so we will have to forgive others’ if we want them to ignore ours. So you inhaled – so did I, what of it? That will be the golden rule of the social internet. And I say that could make us more tolerant.
There are other benefits to living life in public and, as a result, collaboratively. When the photo site Flickr began, its co-founder Caterina Fake said it made the fateful and fortunate decision to “default to public”.
Wilful cluelessness
Wonderful Wired interview with Doug Morris, Universal’s CEO.
Morris was as myopic as anyone. Today, when he complains about how digital music created a completely new way of doing business, he actually sounds angry. “This business had been the same for 25 years,” he says. “The hardest thing was to get something that somebody wanted to buy — to make a product that anybody liked.”
And that’s what Morris, and everyone else, continued to focus on. “The record labels had an opportunity to create a digital ecosystem and infrastructure to sell music online, but they kept looking at the small picture instead of the big one,” Cohen says. “They wouldn’t let go of CDs.” It was a serious blunder, considering that MP3s clearly had the potential to break the major labels’ lock on distribution channels. Instead of figuring out a way to exploit the new medium, they alternated between ignoring it and launching lawsuits against the free file-sharing networks that cropped up to fill the void.
Morris insists there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have done differently. “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?”
Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me.” Morris’ almost willful cluelessness is telling. “He wasn’t prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted by technology,” says a longtime industry insider who has worked with Morris. “He just doesn’t have that kind of mind.”
The piece provides a fascinating insight into the mindset that has nearly destroyed the industry. Ed Felten has some acerbic comments on it.
Morris’s explanation isn’t just pathetic, it’s also wrong. The problem wasn’t that the company had no digital strategy. They had a strategy, and they had technologists on the payroll who were supposed to implement it. But their strategy was a bad one, combining impractical copy-protection schemes with locked-down subscription services that would appeal to few if any customers.
The most interesting side of the story is that Universal’s strategy is improving now — they’re selling unencumbered MP3s, for example — even though the same proud technophobe is still in charge.
Why the change?
The best explanation, I think, is a fear that Apple would use its iPod/iTunes technologies to grab control of digital music distribution. If Universal couldn’t quite understand the digital transition, it could at least recognize a threat to its distribution channel. So it responded by competing — that is, trying to give customers what they wanted.
Still, if I were a Universal shareholder I wouldn’t let Morris off the hook. What kind of manager, in an industry facing historic disruption, is uninterested in learning about the source of that disruption? A CEO can’t be an expert on everything. But can’t the guy learn just a little bit about technology?