stevenberlinjohnson.com

Meet The New Blog

Today marks the most significant change in this little blog since I first set up shop here a little over three years ago. Some of the changes are cosmetic or technological: I've switched over to Typepad (fingers crossed that their recent troubles are behind them), cleaned up the design a little, polished the biographical material, and so on. I'm still tinkering, but this is the basic look. As you can see I continued the tradition of having a beach picture on the front door, for some totally arbitrary reason. But at least in this one I'm looking at the camera.

More important changes are on their way, though. As many long-time visitors know, my posting rate has been slowly, but reliably, declining since I started this thing, with occasional bursts of energy usually following the release of a new book. (What can I say? I can't help reviewing the reviewers.) That decline is a normal fact of life for those of us who don't blog for a living, but I think it has been accentuated by my primary posting genre: the mini-essay, somewhere between 200-600 words, with some kind of coherent argument, not always fully-baked, of course, but usually in the oven.

Don't get me wrong -- I love that genre, and I plan to continue to post in that mode at the (erratic) rate that I have up to now. It fills an essential hole in my writing and thinking life: a way to tinker with emerging ideas in public, try things on for size. But it takes time, and emotional investment, not to mention a reliable supply of interesting ideas. So I'm going to try to add another category of posting, inspired largely by Kottke's links with one-sentence commentary and by the new Flock browser's quote-and-post tool. (More about Flock in the coming weeks.)

The idea is to create more of a bridge between the way I use the blog and the way I use Devonthink, the research tool I wrote about in a Times Book Review piece earlier this year. So there should be more brief, untitled quotes -- from web pages and from books I'm reading -- with a line or two of context from me. I'm hoping that will make for a mutually beneficial situation: I'll be better about grabbing and commenting on snippets for my own private research library, and you'll find something interesting in watching me curate that library in public. We'll see how it works. But for now, thanks for the last three years, and let me know what you think about the new direction...

P.S. I know all the old links to individual articles -- at least via Google -- are now broken, and I'm working on a fix. Any tips about automatically redirecting from Movable Type URLs to Typepad URLs would be greatly appreciated.

The scientists also cited research suggesting young dolphins deliberately make their games as hard as possible, possibly to enhance the learning experience. The captive dolphins “produced 317 distinct forms of play behavior during thefive years that they were observed,” they wrote. One calf became adept at “blowing bubbles while swimming upside-down near the bottom of the pool and then chasing and biting each bubble before it reached the surface,” the researchers continued. “She then began to release bubbles while swimming closer and closer to the surface, eventually being so close that she could not catch a single bubble.”

I love this story for obvious reasons. It's a great endorsement of the idea that play may be crucial to advanced forms of learning, not just among the primates. But I suppose there's also the crankier interpretation: that any sufficiently intelligent species will inevitably use that intelligence to waste their time in increasingly baroque ways.

Dolphin games: no mere child’s play?

"We have for years allowed ourselves to be held hostage to one metric only," says Jay R. Smith, chairman of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and president of Cox Newspapers Inc. "Newspapers have for the last couple of years been finding whole new pockets of audiences for which they get no credit."

I've often wondered why there seemed to be such a consensus that the newspaper business was in a state of chronic decline, when their total audience is clearly growing thanks to the Web. I probably read articles from a dozen different newspapers each day -- via links from the blogosphere -- while ten years ago, I read only one. Given that the online ad model is finally starting to pay dividends, I don't see the cause for all the doomsaying...

Dispelling the Myth of Readership Decline

The Battle Of The Books

I can't say enough good things about the "Battle Of The Books" public debate last night at the NYPL. (For background, see here.) It was substantive, focused, occasionally hilarious, and always deeply interesting. As I suggested here a few weeks ago, I'm not a supporter of the Author's Guild action against Google, despite being a member of the Guild myself. But last night muddied the waters for me, in the best of ways. Two quick observations:

1. Google has amassed a serious image problem -- at least among the Manhattan intelligentsia -- in a shockingly short amount of time. There were some real boos at a few choice moments last night, and a few audience questions that were positively white-hot with rage at Google. The hotter they were, the more confused they seemed to be about what Google was actually doing. But still. There was a subculture of animosity in the room that was stronger than anything Microsoft would conjure up today. That's something Google needs to take very seriously. "Don't be evil" in a way is the easy part. The trickier one is: "Don't be dismissive when people end up thinking you're evil anyway."

2. I offered this up as an open question to Lessig, and he didn't seem to buy it, but I came away from the session with one new variable suddenly floating around my head. The fair use doctrine ultimately has to have a stable definition of what it means to "use" a piece of copywritten material for it to be at all useful as a legal category. And so it occurred to me that part of the problem here is that "use" changes dramatically when you move from "read" to "search." When you're reading something, access to the entire work is a defining part of the experience. So if you eliminate 95% of the work, it seems logical to file that as a critical subtraction under fair use. If you only quote three paragraphs in your literary analysis, that's cool. There are still 2,000 paragraphs of the original work sitting out the shelf waiting to be read. Effectively going unused.

But what do you "use" when you search? Google wants you to think that what you use is the result of the query. So if they send you back a few sentence fragments and a link encouraging you to buy the whole thing, then they've more than done their part, fair-use wise. They've only "used" a small portion of the book, and they've tried to make a sale. But the use-value of books when you're searching is different from the use-value when you're reading. If you were only searching snippets, the search would be, literally, useless. The value comes from knowing that your software representative is, on some basic level, reading the entire work and coming up with matches based on that comprehensive survey. Imagine doing a search and having Google report back "No matches, based on looking at 2% of the available documents." That would be supremely unhelpful, precisely because the use of search depends on the full range of the database being queried, and not just the sliver of positive matches culled from that database.

Google agrees that it would be a flagrant abuse of copyright if they scanned every page of Freakonomics and then served up the whole book to anyone willing to suffer through GoogleAds while reading it. And that's because the whole work is at stake. But if the value of searching comes from querying the whole work, not reading it, aren't we really talking about something different?

I'm sure Battelle has long ago wrestled with this somewhere, but it seemed like news to me.

Literary Darwinism

There's an interesting article on literary Darwinism in this Sunday's Times Magazine. I'm sure those of you who know my general fascination with evolutionary psychology and consilience would assume that I'm a literary Darwinist as well, but the truth is I have some doubts about the project, which I've been following on and off for the past few years. I wrote a little about this in the introduction to Mind Wide Open, but my general concern is that, almost by definition, the Darwinian insights that literary critics can use are the least interesting thing about evolutionary thinking. Because ev psych is concerned with human universals, most of the behavior it describes is the stuff of cliché: women are attracted to high-status men, people tend to value the lives of their near-relatives over the lives of strangers, and so on. What's fascinating in ev psych is not usually the behavior it documents, but rather the way it explains the evolutionary roots of that behavior. (I know many of you out there think those explanations are merely just-so stories, but whether you buy them or not, they're the intellectually meaty part of the model.) And it seems to me that literature doesn't really bring anything new to that part of the story. It's true that you can find plenty of examples of status-seeking and kin preference and incest taboo in the canon, but you can also find plenty of examples of characters dutifully obeying the laws of gravity as well -- and that's not going to tell you anything interesting about physics, right?

The Literary Darwinists that I've read tend to talk about the way great works of literature shine light on the human universals described by the ev pysch canon. But I think the more interesting application would be to shine the light in the other direction: if we know something about human universals from the sciences, then we can use that knowledge to gain a better appreciation of the achievements of culture. We can point to the historical places, or the elements of our own society, where we've ventured the furthest from our biological inclinations. And what better place to look for those wanderings than in the canon of world literature?

That said, this review by the excellent Denis Dutton makes me wonder if there's more to it than I've perceived so far.

Air Purifiers For Data Smog

My latest Discover column takes a look at a question a lot of us are grappling with -- how do deal with information overload -- and speculates a little on whether, in effect, we can use software interfaces to solve a problem that software interfaces created in the first place:

People already prioritize by thresholds of concentration. That's why you may say to an assistant: “Please, don't bother me with calls –– unless it's my spouse.” Computers should be better at this kind of filtering, but they're not programmed to anticipate how your attention shifts from one minute to the next. Your e-mail client doesn't know that you're trying to focus on another, more pressing problem. But it would be easy enough to create protocols that define different modes of concentration. Many laptops have location settings that allow you to switch from office mode to home mode and thus change a whole host of settings. Why not offer a comparable option for defining different mental states?

In “focus” mode, a computer could automatically switch to a full-screen view of the current document and notify all other applications that you're to be bothered only in an emergency. You could define the criteria for breaking the cone of silence by creating a list of important people authorized to interrupt. Or your computer could compile the list in the background, by watching how quickly and reliably you respond to different people over time. That vice president from accounting always gets a rapid response, so the software automatically puts him on the white list. But all those unanswered e-mails from your mother-in-law? She doesn't make the cut when you're focused.

This sort of idea is clearly in the ether right now. The always fascinating Clive Thompson had a long piece a couple of weeks ago in the Times Magazine that tackled comparable issues, and Merlin Mann from the most excellent 43Folders site apparently proposed something quite similar to what I was imagining in the column a while back.