Category: Essays

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Evergreen Halloween: Ten Years of Donnie Darko

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko. In the time since its inauspicious, post-9/11 release, it has become my favorite movie ever. At the height of my obsession with it, I attended a midnight screening of the director’s cut at The Egyptian Theatre in Seattle. During the trivia contest that preceded the movie, I was asked to sit out due to my answering all of the questions. The movie struck something in me, and I am certainly not alone. As Kelly himself put it, “I think you are challenged by things that are slightly beyond your grasp” (p. xiv). So, this is not another “twenty-five things you didn’t know” or “fifty reasons why it’s the best” (the internet loves this movie), but there are some things about it that I think make it so engaging, endearing, and enduring.

Donnie Darko is set in a Virginia high school 1988. I was in high school during the time, so that connects the film to my life in several ways: The soundtrack, the angst, and the nerdy struggle are all very familiar to me. One of my friends once derided Donnie, saying he was, “so emo he can travel through time,” and I can see how Donnie’s whiney approach to therapy could wear on one, but it’s a minor flaw in a major piece of myth-making.

Like its lauded indie debut cousin Reservoir Dogs, Donnie Darko starts with a conversation scene set over a meal, a scene in which we meet most of the main characters of the film. It’s an elegant and efficient way to establish not only the characters but also their social dynamic. In Reservoir Dogs, the scene revolves around Mr. Blue’s Madonna monologue (which one assumes at this point was written by Roger Avery and not by Quinten Tarantino, who delivers it in the movie), Joe’s address book, and Mr. Pink’s refusal to tip. In Donnie Darko, it revolves around his sister Elizabeth’s (played by his sister Maggie Gyllenhaal) politics, Donnie’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) apparent refusal to take his meds, and their use of foul language at the dinner table. In each, the trio of topics reveals just enough about the characters’ attitudes and how they play together.

Aside from Donnie and Elizabeth (played by the the real-life siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal), the Darko family consists of father Eddie (the inimitable Holmes Osborne), mother Rose (the fabulous Mary McDonnell), and kid sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase, the only original Darko defector to the abortive sequel S. Darko). Other stellar performances are turned in by Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone), Kitty “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion” Farmer (Beth Grant), Jim Cunnigham (Patrick Swayze, R.I.P.), Ronald Fisher (Stuart Stone), Professor Monnitoff (Noah Wyle), Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore), Ricky Danforth (Seth Rogan, in his big-screen debut), Seth Devlin (Alex Greenwald), and, of course, Frank (James Duvall).

Though he’s never formally acknowledged it, Kelly’s Frank the Rabbit character can be interpreted as a play on the pookah legend, which Robert Anton Wilson (1991) explained as follows:

The pookah takes many forms, but is most famous when he appears as a giant, six-foot white rabbit — which is the form most Americans know from the play and film, Harvey. Whatever form the pookah takes, he retains the special ability of his species, which is like that of Thoth in Egyptian legend, Coyote in Native American myth, or Hanuman the Divine Monkey in Hindu lore — he can move us from one universe, or Belief System, into another, and he likes to play games with our ideas about “reality” (p. 29).

Frank is from the future and he mentors Donnie through the film with cryptic guidance and disjointed advice. Like the overall feeling of the film, Frank’s ambiguity keeps Donnie and us wondering exactly what’s in store.

The iconography of Donnie Darko starts with Frank. He is as distinctive a symbol for a movie as there has ever been. The setting and surroundings of Halloween, as well as the late-night bike-ride nod to E.T., are also endemic to this movie. For example, take the music video for “What’s a Girl to Do?” by Bat for Lashes [runtime: 2:59]. Nothing here directly refers to the movie, but the cumulative homage is obvious.

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The references to other movies in Donnie Darko are as subtle as the soundtrack is. Like Tarantino, Kelly uses music to add another element to the film. It’s a different approach to soundtracking than many movies use. For instance, I always wonder what the music in True Romance would’ve entailed had Tarantino ended up directing it as well (Tony Scott did a fine job, but the music is, well, lacking). The music in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction adds so much to the overall feel of the films. Kelly pulled off the same added element with Donnie Darko‘s soundtrack, saying, “there were opportunities in this story to put a musical code on the character’s experience within this era. Picking those songs was, on our part, not to do with making it campy and mocking of the 1980s… We wanted the music to be sincere” (p. xxvii). To wit, the feeling and lyrics of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon,” INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart,” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” as well as Michael Andrews’ cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” all play with the complex themes of the story.

Somehow in the midst of the musings of a confused, possibly schizophrenic teenage boy, Kelly puts no less than the future of humanity at stake. Drawing from Graham Greene’s “The Destructors,” Richard Adams’ Watership Down (the inspiration for Frank, according to Kelly), and The Last Temptation of Christ (what is Donnie Darko if not a teen angst-ridden, sci-fi version of the Christ narrative?), he carries us to the absolute brink on All Hallow’s Eve. The meaning of all of this is never fully explained, but whatever it means remains important to us. It’s not enough to just like the characters and to wonder. We have to care. As Stephen Jay Gould explained:

But we also need the possibility of cataclysm, so that, when situations seem hopeless, and beyond the power of any natural force to amend, we may still anticipate salvation from a messiah, a conquering hero, a deus ex machina, or some other agent with power to fracture the unsupportable and institute the unobtainable (p. 58).

The official story consists of a rogue alternate universe that must be resolved through a comic-book logic involving Manipulated Living, Manipulated Dead, The Living Receiver (all explained in Roberta Sparrow’s The Philosophy of Time Travel), and others, but one of the enduring features of Donnie Darko is that even given an “official story,” one can draw many meanings. This is essential to its proven shelf-life.

My favorite scene in the movie is a short snatch of conversation between Donnie’s teachers Professor Monnitoff (Noah Wyle) and Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore). He’s grading papers and she’s eating lunch, presumably in the teacher’s lounge at Middlesex High School. Monnitoff mentions Donnie, chuckling incredulously, and she laughs, agreeing. The scene is so brief as to be missable, but it indicates that they’re in on something, that they know the answer. As Christopher Nolan said of Inception, there is an answer. That the answer doesn’t impede further speculation or meaning-mining is one of the things that makes Donnie Darko so tenacious. As Jake Gyllenhaal says, “What does it mean to you?” (p. viii)

If you haven’t seen the film (and of course I think you should), here’s the trailer [runtime: 2:23]:

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References:

Gould, Stephen Jay (1999). Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. New York: Crown.

Kelly, Richard. (2003). The Donnie Darko Book. London: faber and faber.

Wilson, Robert Anton. (1991). Cosmic Trigger, Volume II: Down to Earth. Las Vegas, NV: New Falcon.

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Touching Screens: Digital Natives and Their Digits

Since I attempted to brand and explicate the Advent Horizon idea, the following clip has been circulating online. “The new generation is growing up with more digital than print media,” deigns The Huffington Post. “They play with their parents’ smartphones, tablets, laptops. We guess It’s only natural that they examine items that don’t respond to touch — and then move on to the things that do.” Danny Hillis once said that technology is the name we give to things that don’t work yet. I think this baby would disagree with that statement wholesale [runtime: 1:26]:

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Though I find the sentiment that Steve Jobs “coded a part of her OS” a bit much, this clip reminds me of a story  by Jaron Lanier from the January, 1998 issue of Wired about children being smarter and expecting more from technology. Lanier wrote, “My favorite anecdote concerns a three-year-old girl who complained that the TV was broken because all she could do was change channels.” Clay Shirky tells a similar story in Cognitive Surplus (Penguin, 2010). His version involves a four-year-old girl digging in the cables behind a TV, “looking for the mouse.”

Without mutual engagement and accountability across generations, new identities can be both erratically inventive and historically ineffective. — Etienne Wenger

These are all early examples of a new Advent Horizon being crossed. The touchscreen, the latest ubiquitous haptic device, is here to stay. To those who are growing up with it, everything else seems “broken” — much like a TV “that only changes channels” to a native computer user. We become what we behold.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?
— Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

The screen is already the most seductive of technologies. Think about how much time you spend staring at one screen or another. Iain Chambers (1994) writes, “In the uncanny property of the computer to present a ‘world picture’ we confront the boundary set by the screen, the tinted glass that lies between the apparently concrete world and the simulated one of ethereal lights” (p. 64). We want to get in there so bad. Think of the persistent dream of entering the screen and the machine: Neuromancer, TRON, Snow Crash, Lawnmower Man, Videodrome, and even Inception, among many, many others. It has a mythology all its own.

To its end, we’ve gone from wearing the goggles and gloves of most virtual reality systems to using our bodies as input devices via the sensors of Wii and Kinect, bringing the machine into the room. Where our machines’ portability used to be determined by the size of the technology available, the size of our devices are now dictated by the size of our appendages. We can make cellphones and laptops smaller, but then we wouldn’t be able to hold them or press their buttons individually, a limitation that the touchscreen is admittedly working around gracefully. Still, we have to design at human scale. These are the thresholds of our being with our technology.

The Machine is not the environment for the person; the person is the environment for the machine. – Aviv Bergman

The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of people we want. – Robert Sommer

We have to think carefully and cumulatively about what we design. Technology curates culture. Technology is a part of our nature. How will we control it? The same way we do our lawns or our weight: Sometimes we will; sometimes we won’t, but we have to remember that we’re not designing machines. We’re designing ourselves.

References:

Chambers. I. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. New York: Routledge.

Christopher, R. (2007). Brenda Laurel: Utopain Entrepreneur. In R. Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. New York: Harcourt.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin.

Sommer, R. (2007). Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Bristol, England, UK: Bosko Books.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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And I say peace to Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011).

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Not Great Men: The Human Microphone Effect

The passing of Steve Jobs has sent millions of people into reflection and reverie, and begs questions of the possibilities of repeating his vision and success. “Will there ever be another Steve Jobs?” asks one publication. While another contrarily claims that he “was not god,” still others iconize him, call him a tech-messiah, and lament his passing with something just short of worship. As agnostic as I’ve been computer-wise, I’ve always been a fan of the man, but does the death of Steve Jobs mark the end of a human era, the end of the singular genius, the lone visionary, the thought leader? In some ways, I am compelled to answer affirmatively, but to give Jobs all the credit is to do him and others like him a disservice. As Bonnie Stewart put it, “I fully agree that Steve Jobs left us a legacy. But it is not to be him.” We are the reason he was the last of his kind.

The connectivity of the web has all but killed the archetype of the singular visionary leader. Online, we connect to share with each other, not to listen to a single voice. It’s not necessarily the death of the grand narrative and the birth of postmodernism, it’s more the onset of postMODEMism. Ever since we started modulating and demodulating our ideas, information, and identities, our heroes have been in harm’s way. The web is more about processes and projects than products. The web is inherently a collaborative space. Authorship does not equal ownership. We’re in this together.

In spite of recent reports, the creative class is very real, and, as Scott Smith pointed out, is the larger part of the masses currently occupying Wall Street. The creative class is still here, but like the creative genius, no one owes us a living. We have to make our own way, and we will.

Unlike others, I don’t think the Big Idea is dead either. I think our collaborative, networked thinking makes it more difficult to see the collaborative origins of the singular innovation. If ideas are networks, then big ideas are big networks. Even Jobs brought to market what were previously existing, networked ideas: “He saw what technologies were on the verge of being possible — and what technologies consumers were ready to accept,” Josh Bernoff wrote when Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO in August. “There could have been no iPhone without the habits created by iPods and Blackberry, no Mac without Apple and IBM PCs embraced by those who came before… Apple doesn’t make flash memory, microprocessors, touchscreens, or, for the most part, websites. It just puts them all together.” Toward the end of this 1996 interview with Steve Jobs on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser [runtime: 4:32], Jobs talks about the sheer openness of the internet and how no one single company can ever contain it [the internet bit starts around 3:15]. “We’re going to see innovation contain it,” he says.

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No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home

It’s not made by great men

The past lives on in your front room
The poor still weak the rich still rule
History lives in the books at home
The books at home

It’s not made by great men
— Gang of Four, “Not Great Men”

It’s downright eerie watching these ideas collide in realtime on the choppy live-feed of Slavoj Žižek addressing the protestors of Occupy Wall Street today, as they respond in unison: “You don’t need a genius to be your leader.” This call-and-response is called “The Human Microphone” and is used due to restrictions on amplified sound in the public space of New York City. In an ironic mix of collaborative leadership, collective allegiance, communication technology, and lacks thereof, The Human Microphone is the perfect metaphor for the death of the hero. There is no “one for all” anymore. History’s not made by great men. As Bonnie Stewart concludes, “So maybe in this new world order, we should stop touting those who are ‘crazy enough to be geniuses’, — which is a romantic notion, even if it is sometimes true, like with Jobs — and reward those who are best able to share and innovate in teams.”

The good news for all is that collaboration makes each of us bigger. Find the folks that empower you to do more, to be more, and avoid the ones who don’t. As the Hopi once put it, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

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Here’s a clip of an odd yet amazing cover of Gang of Four’s “Not Great Men” by an appropriately all-female Japanese percussion group [runtime: 4:09]:

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Many thanks to my friend Dave Allen for sharing links and the Japanese Gang of Four cover clip, to Mike Schandorf for sharing the Žižek live-feed, and to my friend and collaborating champion Heather Gold for sharing the Steve Jobs clip. Onward together.

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Drawing Lines in Time: The Advent Horizon

Significant advances in technology are disruptive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. They are the initial conditions from which our media is born. As Jean Cocteau once put it, “The public does not like dangerous profundities; it prefers surfaces” (1972, p. 316). Feared and disparaged at first, technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in and change our world. They literally change our minds. They change our relationship with our world and with each other. Not unlike learning new words, every new advance is a new addition to our media lexicon. Our media vocabulary includes those technologies with which we feel facile or familiar. Cocteau continues, “As a matter of fact, the public likes to ‘recognize’ the familiar. It hates to be disturbed. It is shocked by surprises” (p. 315), and no one states the matter more clearly than Barry Brummett:

Every new technology is feared, is compared unfavorably to the one before, and is misunderstood, especially in the early years of its inception. We simply have fewer anxieties about computers, for instance, now than we did during their introduction into the global market and culture (p. 172).

One of the ideas in my talk “Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive,” as well as in my book-in-progress The Medium Picture is the line we draw at the edge of our comfort zone with new technologies. It’s a line we draw as individuals as well as a society at large. I call it the Advent Horizon. I was pushed to explain it further by David Burn:

@davidburn Two key phrases from #Geekend presentations this week: Advent Horizon and Interchange Zero c/o @RoyChristopher and @sethpriebatsch#brainy

We feel a sense of loss when we cross one of these lines. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing (see Wolf, 2007), to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable — differently on an individual and collective level — in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. Any attempt to return to a so-called “Natural State” is a futile attempt to get back across the line we’ve drawn for ourselves.

Evidence that we’ve crossed one of these lines isn’t difficult to find. Think about the resurgence of vinyl record sales, or the way we teach computer animation. The former is an analog totem from a previous era, the latter is analog scaffolding for the digital world (what Bob Greenberg calls “analog drudgery“). Fans of vinyl records are either clinging to their youth or celebrating the only true music format that ever mattered. A vinyl record is a true document of a slice of time.

I visited Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida last summer. In their animation and game design programs, students take illustration (with pencils and paper), flipbook-style animation (with paper and lightboxes), and 3D modeling (real-world 3D, sculpture with clay and other materials) before they ever sit down at a computer. Clinging to a previous era and having to back up to learn something new: These are evidence that an Advent Horizon has been crossed.

Each generation is born during a certain technological era, between these lines we draw. We are imprinted by the media technology with which we grow up. For instance, there has always been a television in my world. When I was born, it was there. In contrast, my parents remember when the first TV arrived in their house. William Gibson tells the story.

The only memory I have of a world prior to media is of standing in a peanut field on a farm in Tennessee, looking down the hill at a black, 1950s, sort of, late ’40s panel truck, driving along the road.

One of the next earliest memories is of my father bringing home this wooden, box-like thing, with a cloth grille on the front, and a little round, circular television screen, which, I believe, we had for some time prior to there actually being any broadcast to receive.

And then there was a test pattern. I think the test pattern preceded any actual broadcast for several weeks, and the test pattern itself was only available briefly, at scheduled times. And people… neighbors, would come, and they would look at this static, non-moving pattern on the screen that… promised something.

And then television came.

As Alan Kay once said, “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born” (quoted in Kelly, 2010, p. 235). I have never known a world without television, and my students have never known — or don’t remember — a world without computers, the web, or cellular phones. Perhaps they will cross a line of comfort when implants become the norm for their children, but the world before wireless connectivity means nothing to them.

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Here’s the relevant clip from my talk in Boston, thanks to David Burn [runtime: 1:37]:

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By the way, the “L” and “B” story at the beginning of this clip was a secret message to my girlfriend, who became my fiancé on this trip to Boston. Here’s to connecting our dots, Lily Brewer.

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Many thanks to Sloane Kelley, Jake and Miriam Hodesh, and the rest of my Geekend family, as well as David Burn for the push on this idea.

References:

Brummett, Barry. (2008). A Rhetoric of Style. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press.

Cocteau, Jean. (1972). Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau. Margaret Crosland (Ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Kelly, Kevin. (2010). What Technology Wants. New York: Penguin.

Neale, Mark. (director). William Gibson: No Maps for These Territories [Motion picture]. London: Docurama.

Wolf, Maryanne. (2007). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper.

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The Sibling Point: Unrelated Familial Success

Having grown up with a kid sister, I have often been fascinated with our similarities and differences. There are myriad examples of both, but our ways in the world and the way we see them are very different. When siblings emerge from the same nature and nurture to much different ends, the multifinality of their paths begs investigation. When they go on to excel in completely different fields, questions abound. The Baldwins, Cusacks, Gyllenhaals, and Arquettes are interesting, but less so.

Richard Patrick was the guitarist in Trent Reznor’s first incarnation of Nine Inch Nails. After differences of one stripe or another, he went on to form the band Filter, who had a handful of mid-1990s hits themselves. His brother Robert Patrick was the T-1000 in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day and ten years later, he went on to replace David Duchovny on The X-Files. These two were brothers whose successes in very different fields were not dependent upon one another.

Here are a few more examples:

  • During the mid-1990s female singer-songwriter boom, Poe had a hit with “Angry Johnny.” Her follow-up five years later, Haunted (2000), was a soundtrack of sorts to her brother Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves, which pushed the limits of the modern novel and changed the way books were not only written but read and thought about as well.

Frances Bay as Mrs. Tremond

  • Frances Bay plays the creepy grandmother, Mrs. Tremond, in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series (1990) and prequel movie, Fire Walk with Me (1992). She’s also had minor but memorable roles on Seinfeld, and in such movies as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Happy Gilmore. Her younger brother was sociologist Erving Goffman, author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), In 2007, he was the sixth most-cited scholar in the social sciences.
  • Henry James wrote acclaimed novels, including The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Turn of the Screw (1890), which challenged the conventions of literature up to that point. His brother, William James, co-founded both the field of psychology and the American pragmatism philosophical movement.
  • Ari Emanuel is a Hollywood talent agent who has inspired on-screen parodies by Jeremy Piven (Ari Gold on Entourage) and Bob Odenkirk (Stevie Grant on The Larry Sander’s Show). His brother, Rahm Emanuel, is the fifty-fifth mayor of Chicago.
  • Brad Carvey is an engineer responsible for the Video Toaster, as well as the inspiration for his brother, Dana Carvey’s character Garth Algar from the Wayne’s World movie (1992) and Saturday Night Live skits of the same name.

While there are many factors that could contribute to these dual, unrelated successes, I wonder if there are one or two initial conditions that contributed to the achievements of these siblings. I’ve only done Wikipedia-level research here, but it’d be fun to investigate further. There’s at least a Malcolm Gladwell-style book here. I think it would be fun and interesting to write — and to read. Call it The Sibling Point.

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Special thanks to Cecy Correa for additional input on this idea.

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Of Bicycles and Bipeds: Farming Flying Forms

A wing is a bridge. Flight is a ride on that bridge from take-off to landing. Dinosaurs became bipedal, balancing their large bodies on two legs via counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same biological process—or set of processes between biology and environment—morphed wings, and thereby, flight. Using this transition as a metaphor is an trip we might do well to take.

Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight… Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings…
— Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 24-25.

The approach I want to take here is what Kingslover and Koehl (1994) call “bounded ignorance.” That is, I’m going to outline a possible homology between the evolution of flight in animals and in human technologies, one that “seems consistent with available evidence” (p. 426). One could say this is how McLuhan theorized changes in the media. Kingslover and Koehl were looking at flight in insects, which does our tack no good. Insects added extra limbs/wings as needed. Drones, swarms, crowds, organizations — these are insect analogs (cf. Parikka, 2010; Shaviro, 1996). We’re interested in a transition from quadraped to biped to winged flight (cf. Paul, 2002; Chiappe, 2007). That is, we’re interested in an appropriation of existing limbs, not an adding on of new ones.

Explaining the transition in dinosaurs, Shipman (1998), writes, “First, activities of the forelimbs and tail became separated from those of the hindlimb, pelvis and torso” (p. 89). This freed up the forelimbs for other purposes, while the hindlimbs grew accustomed to holding their own. She continues, “Thus, logic, anatomy, and paleontology all support the same deduced sequence of evolutionary changes: bipedalism first; wings second; tail third” (p. 89). Not all wings were created equal. Not all wings were made for flying. Some enable related abilities such as walking on water (see Schaller, 1985). Some are made for thermoregulation (see Chiappe, 2007; as they are in butterflies in addition to flight; see Halpern, 2001). Nonetheless, the dual transition to walking on two legs and flapping wings is mirrored by the dual transition of balance on two wheels and wings, both of which usually and ultimately lead to flying.

Karl Popper (1968) called our creation of tools and externalization of knowledge “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). It’s a structural coupling—in Maturana and Varela’s terminology (1987; Maturana & Poerkson, 2004)—between us and our environment. Technology is a part of our nature. Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli. We farm adaptive forms.

Didn’t your first unassisted ride on a bike feel like flying? Riding that two-wheeled bridge of balance is like taking off on wings of your own. In more sober tones, McLuhan (1964) aligned the two activities as well, writing,

It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early planes seemed in some ways like bicycles (p. 182).

So, it stands to reason that one kind of balance begot another. Just as the bipedal dinosaur became the flying dinosaur and the bird, our own bicycles became the airplane and the jet. Admittedly, I’ve been trying to get poetic and playing language games (e.g., forms, firms, farms, etc.), but how many of our design processes legitimately come from organic means?

Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight…

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A new paper by Andy Ruina, Jim Papadopoulos, and their colleagues attempts to get at what’s behind bike stability [runtime: 3:25; with thanks to Jessy Elfy for the tip].

References:

Chiappe, L. M. (2007). Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Halpern, S. (2001). Four Wings and a Prayer. New York: Vintage.

Kingslover, J. & Koehl, M. (1994). Selective factors in the evolution of insect wings. Annual Review of Entomology, 39, 425-451.

Maturana, H. R. & Poerkson, B. (2004). From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition. Heidelberg, Germany: Carl-Auer Verlag.

Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Paul, G. S. (2002). Dinosaurs of the Air. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Priakka, J. (2010). Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. Cambridge, MA: University of Minnesota Press.

Popper, K. (1968). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schaller, D. (1985). Wing Evolution. In M. K. Hecht, J. H. Ostrom, G. Viohl, & P. Wellnhofer (Eds.), The Beginnings of Birds. Eichstätt: Brönner & Daentler.

Shaviro, S. (1996). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. New York: Serpent’s Tail.

Shipman, P. (1998). Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Alternate Titles:

Of Wheels and Wings: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Flying Things

Of Feet and Feathers: Taking Leave of Terrestrial Tethers

Of Birds and Bikes: How Sprockets Became Rockets

Of Pedals and Pterodactyls: The Evolution of Flight

From Flapping to Flight: Winged and Wheeled Escape Velocity

From Perches to Pedals: Gliding and Flying from Birds to Humans

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[Drawing by Roy Christopher, August 6, 2007]

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Guy Debord: When Poetry Ruled the Streets

Writer, filmmaker, instigator, and revolutionary, Guy Debord is probably best known for his involvement with the Situationist International (McKenzie Wark calls him their “secretary”) and their concepts of the dérive and détournement, the former of which is one of the core ideas of psychogeography, and the latter of which went on to define the culture jamming movement. Their slogans were the words on the walls during the May 1968 uprisings in France. They published the proto-Adbusters of the time, and their spirit hangs heavy over the work of Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Joey Skaggs, The Yes Men, Kembrew McLeod, and other postmodern-day culture jammers and media hackers alike. Greil Marcus (1989) puts them in the lineage of resistance movements: Dada, Surrealism, Situationists, punk rock. Wherever we attribute his influence, Debord lived and loved in line with the thoughts he wrote.

Guy Debord on the set of 'Critique of Separation', 1960

Debord’s best known and best selling book is The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books, 1994; originally published in 1967), and the “spectacle” concept it defined have remained a mainstay of media criticism ever since. Debord biographer Anselm Jappe (1999) wrote, “The spectacle does not reflect society overall; it organizes images in the interest of one portion of society only, and this cannot fail to affect the real social activity of those who merely contemplate these images” (p. 7). Debord (1994) himself wrote, “All that was once lived has become mere representation” (p. 12). Does that sound familiar? It should. He continues, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (p. 12). Defined as such, the spectacle sounds a bit like fellow French thinker Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, does it not? Debord clarifies, writing that the spectacle has two foundational attributes: “incessant technological renewal” and the “integration of State and economy” (1998, p. 11-12). Nonetheless, Debord’s work has yet to receive the widespread reverence it deserves.

One might be surprised that I implicitly seem to compare myself, here and there, on a point of detail, with some great mind of the past or simply with personalities who have been noted historically. One would be wrong. I do not claim to resemble any other person, and I believe that the present era is hardly comparable to the past. But many figures from the past, in all their extreme diversity, are still quite commonly known. They represent, in brief, a readily accessible index of human behaviour or propensities. Those who do not know who they were can easily find out; and the ability to make oneself understood is always a virtue in a writer.
— Guy Debord, Panegyric 1, p. 8.

One recent attempt to remedy Debord’s unsung unrest comes in the form of Vincent Kaufman’s biography Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (The University of Minnesota Press, 2006; now available in paperback). Kaufmann assumes the role of “unqualified reader,” as he claims no previous fascination or familiarity with Debord. This perspective gives him and his book a unique approach among books about the Situationists. Lacking an “ideological axe to grind” Kaufman sees as imperative to understanding Debord and his life of rebellion, fortunes, misfortunes, adventures, exploration, drifting. “Perhaps it is only by boat that we can really lose ourselves,” he writes, recalling Slavoj Zizek’s metaphor for postmodern rootlessness, and Debord’s persistent pursuit of authentic experience. Of the numerous biographies of Debord and books about Situationists, Kaufman’s is among the best, most thorough, and makes a great introduction to his work and their world.

“I wrote less than those who write,” Debord once said, “but I drank more than hose who drink.” The title of his sixth and final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), is a palindrome that he roughly translated to “we turn in the night and are consumed by fire.” If any one phrase could sum up the way the man felt about our media-mad, modern world, that one would do.

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When Poetry Ruled the Streets: This clip from Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) features Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt as two of the gang of four, and Hymie Samuelson as Guy Debord. [Quicktime clip. Click the image to play; runtime: 2:30]:

Click to play video

References:

Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Debord, G. (1998). Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. New York: Verso.

Debord. G. (2004). Panegyric 1 & 2. New York: Verso.

Debord, G. (2009). Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957 – August 1960). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Jappe, A. (1999). Guy Debord. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kaufmann, V. (2006). Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Linklater, R. (Writer/Director). (2001). Waking Life [Motion picture]. United States: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Marcus, G. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wark, M. (2008). 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. New York: FORuM/Princeton Architectural Press.

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Apologies to Andrew Feenberg and James Freedman for stealing the title of their book for this post. Here is a mini-documentary of Feenberg’s time in Paris in the late 1960s and his archive of posters therefrom. [runtime: 8:36]

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Generation BMX: New ESPN Piece

I finally have a new piece up on the ESPN BMX site. This one is about the generational differences between first and second generations of riders. Heraclitus once wrote that generations turn over every thirty years. Well, it’s about that time.
You’re right, Roy, you’re hopeless. Hopelessly obsessed with a time in your sport that died a long time ago… — McGoo
Roy Christopher executes a Backwards Elbow Glide at a Jacksonville NBL contest circa 1990. (photo by Peter Cowley)
Here’s an excerpt:
The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was in the ’80s. Given the proliferation of technology into every aspect of our lives, that’s not much of an insight, but hear me out. In addition to the lack of dope video games, the riders of thirty years ago were also missing out on the parks. There were like three ride-able skateparks in the whole country. Now there are at least that many in every city of any size whatsoever. Where the past was spent riding curb cuts, banks, walls, streets, and backyard ramps, today the terrain consists of those as well as many human-made options. It makes for different riding, different tricks, and different values.
The full piece is up today. As always, thanks to Brian Tunney for the opportunity and for coordinating these things.

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The Greatest Actor of All Time: Nicolas Cage

Few actors have had careers anywhere near as diverse and dynamic as Nicolas Cage. A member of the Royal Coppola Family, Cage has been in everything from goofy teen comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to mind-blowing, block-busting adventures like National Treasure (2004). His acting agility is abetted by his willingness and ability to take on challenging roles that other thespians of his caliber wouldn’t think of accepting — and pulling them off without dumbing them down. As Roger Ebert once put it,

There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He’s daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air. No one else can project inner trembling so effectively…. He always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience. He is committed to the character with every atom and plays him as if he were him.

The filmic examples are seemingly endless, so instead of surveying his career in its entirety, I will concentrate on three representative films: Raising Arizona (1987), Matchstick Men (2003), and the indisputable greatest movie of all time, Con Air (1997).

Francis McDormand once said that one can’t make any money working on a Cohen Brothers film. While I’m sure that’s changed since (this statement was made pre-Fargo), I think most would agree that for an actor, working with Ethan and Joel Cohen is an honor, a privilege, and an opportunity to establish oneself artistically. No one has done this more fervently in one film than Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona. With his career stretched out before him like a sleepy kitten, Cage took on the lead role in a film that would define one of the many facets of his style as an actor. H. I. McDunnough is a good-for-nothing, two-bit thief who falls in love with a police officer hell-bent on raising a family. After an intermittent courtship involving H. I.’s lengthening rap sheet, the ultimately infertile couple marry and attempt to have children. Seeing a news story about a couple who has more offspring than they can handle, they decide to steel one. Hi-jinks ensue, and the doomed H.I. is caught between his old ways as a thief and his new life as a family man, with the two inextricably intertwined like so many lovers’ legs.

In the similarly quirky Wild at Heart (the plot of which I always confuse with True Romance, perhaps because of their similarly Westbound plots and blonde love interests), Cage would almost reprise this role. He was to all but abandon this kind of character later in his career, save maybe Adaptation (2002) and, our last stop, Matchstick Men (2003).

What did he abandon the weirdness for? Action, of course, and Cage’s crowning achievement, Con Air (1997) is jam-packed with it. This Jerry Bruckheimer vehicle crashes and burns in the best possible way: right into Las Vegas! Where else are you going to see oddball jokesters like Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, and John Leguizamo teamed-up with powerhouse hunks like John Travolta, Vin Diesel, and Ving Rhames, alongside A-list actors like John Cusak,  John Malkovich, Matt Damon, Willem Dafoe, and Nicolas Cage in the same movie? Bob Stephenson is even in here! What happened to the casting director on this star-studded screen scorcher? Fired for awesomeness? How about the screenwriter or the director?

The Ridley Scott-directed Matchstick Men (2003) tells the story of an obsessive-compulsive con man getting conned out of everything. Sam Rockwell plays the partner-cum-con (Frank Mercer) who uses a young girl, Angela (played by Alison Lohman), posing as Roy Waller’s (Cage) estranged daughter. Matchstick Men (and Adaptation, pictured below, by proxy) is less important for Cage’s role per se than it is for his role at the time it happened: dead in the middle of a string of Cage-fronted action movies. In the midst of constant reminders of his action-hero status, Matchstick Men recalled a younger, weirder Nicolas Cage, and reminded everyone of his immense on-screen strengths.

So, in brief, Nicolas Cage is the greatest actor to ever entertain a darkened theater. I dare you to come up with a stronger, more genuine, more diverse body of work.

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“…I was just admirin’ your cage.” Here’s the trailer for The Greatest Movie of All Time, Con Air (1997) [runtime: 2:23]:

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Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive — My Talk from SXSW Interactive

I’ve been thinking about all of the ways we change our world with our technology for years now, but more so lately as my book-in-progress, The Medium Picture, comes into better focus. This talk itself is brand new and not quite complete. Regardless, I decided to take my own advice and get it out there. I did this one for the first time at SXSW Interactive 2011. Judging by the post-talk discussion, these ideas are generative if not fully formed. In what follows, I expand my speaking notes, including bits from my thinking aloud in old posts from this site, references, my slides, and a video clip. Also, the audio from the talk is available on the SXSW site.

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Technology is not taking over our world. It already did. Take a look in any coffeeshop, and you’ll see humans strapped to machines, ignoring one another. Take a look at any street in the city, and you’ll see humans strapped into machines, ignoring one another. Your cognitive surplus is sitting in traffic. We shape our technology and it shapes us. Marshall McLuhan said that, but his thoughts have become such a staple of our vocabulary that no one even cites him anymore. Chances are, your feet are literally shoe-shaped. Some of us have bodies that are car-shaped. Our technology frees us from so much physical labor, but we to exercise. We drive our cars to the gym to run on treadmills. The very existence of gyms points to a disconnection between our physical bodies and our work.

When I first started thinking about this disconnection, I was on my way to class and then the climbing gym. I realized that I had the option of taking the elevator to class on the seventh floor and then going to the gym to climb afterward. It struck me as odd that the two actions were completely disconnected. Getting to a higher floor in one building and the act of climbing up the wall in another were totally disassociated, even though they were essentially the same act.

We love our technology. Walk into an older building, built before elevators were standard, and you’ll see grand staircases filling its atrium. In newer buildings, one can scarcely find the stairs. They’re tucked away out of site, while the shiny elevator doors are on display. We showcase our latest mechanical marvels.

Also when I started thinking about these disconnections, I went looking for an example of connection. I found a map showing a direct link from the brain to the act of riding a bicycle — something our bodies never forget how to do. In addition during this, I started riding a fixed-gear bicycle. That is, a bicycle that has a direct connection between the front and rear gears and the rear wheel (the pedals and the rear wheel are thereby working in concert at all times, so that the bicycle doesn’t coast). Given the extra work and hazards associated with such a vehicle, people often ask me why? What’s the appeal? Well, one of the reasons that fixed-gears are so seductive is the direct connection one has to the distance traveled and the control of the motion. No matter the terrain or conditions, your body is always at work negotiating the ride. You and your brain are directly connected to your environment. Once you start coasting, the disjunct begins.

If you want to investigate this simple disconnection a bit further, think about your activities from the point of view of your pets. Think about what you’re doing from the point of view of your dog (your cat won’t care what you’re doing). If your dog is confused by your sitting and staring at a screen or a paper for too long, you are disconnected.

A beginning is a split, a disjunct, a bifurcation. At the beginning of every story, there is a phase during which one feels a bit disoriented: the first pages of a novel, the first scenes of a movie or play, the first notes of a song, the first song of a record, the part of the performance where the audience members are still finding their seats. You don’t know where we’re going from here.

The introduction of every new technology gives us the same feeling. Significant advances in technology are disjunctive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. Feared and disparaged at first, technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in and change our world. They literally change our minds. They change our relationship with our worlds and with each other.

If you came here looking for the contemptus mundi, it-s-all-going-to-hell point of view, you’re in the wrong place. Technology is a part of our nature. The singularity already happened. It was called “agriculture.”

These concerns are not new. People have been worrying about technology taking over our lives for as long as we’ve been externalizing our knowledge and tempering our world with tools. This is a painting by Harry Grant Dart from a 1911 issue of Life Magazine — one hundred years ago. It depicts an extreme example. A man is shown seated in the middle of a room where speakers, tubes, ducts, projectors, and printouts provide his every need – comfort, nutrition, information, entertainment. He needn’t ever leave his chair.

More recently (same slide), artist Jeff Nicholson depicted the main character in his 1994 comic Through the Habitrails enduring technology-enabled, all-at-once weekends. His work week leaves him so drained of enjoyment and so far from his interests that he seeks to fill the gap as quickly as possible. “My stimuli is taken directly to my nerve endings and orifices,” he wrote, “and I take it in and in and in with clenched teeth and a fibrillating heartbeat.” Attempting to reconnect the disconnected parts of his life, Nicholson’s nameless protagonist relies solely on technology.

Context: This is where we’re going from here:

  • Disconnection
  • Threshold
  • Bridge

This is the process of technological mediation, a process that happens in three stages: disconnection, threshold, and bridge. First, there is a break, a split, a disconnection. As with a new invention or application, a new path is formed deviating from the old. This break leaves a threshold to be traversed, a chasm between what was and what is. Crossing the threshold requires a bridge, a new metaphor. When one first hears a novel metaphor, there is a new way of seeing something, a break from the old (disconnection). The existence of this new knowledge leaves an obvious gap between it and the old way (threshold). Before long, the metaphor becomes the only way we think about the idea (bridge).

Technology is quickly antiquated, so this process happens very quickly. Think about when you see picture or movies that have cathode ray tube monitors or televisions in them. They look old! But it’s only been in the past few years that we’ve switched to flatscreens. Just saying the word “MySpace” gets a chuckle. Again, it’s only been a few years since it was not only relevant, but part of the zeitgeist.

We’re no good at predicting these things either. Sure, we can tell that cell phones are going to get smaller and become ubiquitous, but in other ways, we’re clueless. I watch Blade Runner (1982) on a regular basis, and for all of its prescience, it completely misses a couple of key things. In one scene Deckard is reading a newspaper (not a fancy, animated Minority Report newspaper either), and in another he uses a payphone. In the movie’s defense, it was a video payphone, but I seriously doubt that either of these technologies will be extant in Los Angeles in 2019.

Here’s how silly our predictions look. This is Steve Newman’s “Telepaper” story as broadcast on KRON in San Francisco in 1981 [runtime: 2:17]:

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Disconnection: We employ and implement technology to mediate the spaces between…

  • Ourselves and each other — The most obvious and least interesting of these disconnections.
  • Ourselves and our work  — Steven Johnson pointed out in Interface Culture (Harper San Francisco, 1997) that the Graphical User Interface makes us feel closer to our work on our machines, but that it’s actually a layer of abstraction between us and the work that’s going on inside the computer. It is a metaphor that we often acknowledge we are using.
  • Ourselves and our world — Clothes, cars, roads, buildings, cities, etc. As Max Frisch once put it, “Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”
  • Ourselves and our selves — Our minds are colonized by our technologies. Our minds are literally different when a new technology exists. New knowledge and new stuff physically and chemically changes the make up of what’s in your head. Howard Bloom uses the example of bags used to carry things. In his “Jack the Pelican presents” lecture from 2003, he explains it by saying that our brains are different when different inventions exist. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations exist in our world (the material to the spiritual). Before bags were invented, one could only carry what would fit in one’s hands. After bags, well, it depends on the bag and one’s fortitude for carrying.

All of our technologies have both the potential to augment human abilities and to obstruct them. For example, think about talking on the telephone. On one end of the spectrum, the telephone allows us to communicate with each other over vast distances, rendering our physical location almost irrelevant (augmentation). On the other end, the voice-only nature of the telephone strips our communication of facial expressions, gestures, and other nonverbal cues (obstruction). One can play this game with every machine and device we’ve conceived and implemented.

Every new technology frees us from something while binding us to itself.

We’ve used metaphors to conceptualize and understand phenomena since early Greek philosophy. Thinking theorists over the years have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer. The latter of which has been the most useful and generative, and its use is so common that we rarely give it a second thought. If the explanatory power of the metaphor in use is successful, the metaphor becomes obsolete. If a metaphor obsolesces into general usage, it is forgotten as a metaphor. These splits, these breaks, these thresholds, between disorientation and orientation and between acknowledging a metaphor and just using it — the beginning, the space between the two, and how we handle the transition — are where the process of technological mediation happens. Something is lost every time we cross over that space.

Donald Norman calls the threshold between our goals as users of technology and the interfaces of the physical systems we use — the mappings between the two — “distance.” The “gulf of evaluation” is what we have to figure across the gap, and the “gulf of execution” is what the machine does. I use his as an example of the threshold in all of these situations.

Threshold: In The Young & The Digital (Beacon, 2009), Craig Watkins points out an overlooked irony in our switch from television screens to computer screens: We gather together around the former to watch passively, while we individually engage with the latter to actively connect with each other.

And we want to get in there so bad... Think of Tron and Lawnmower Man: We’ve gone from wearing goggles and gloves in order to enter the machine (e.g., most typical virtual reality systems), to using our bodies as input devices (e.g., Wii,Kinect, etc.), bringing the machine into the room.

The size of our devices are now decided by the size of our appendages. We can make cellphones and laptops smaller, but then we wouldn’t be able to hold them. We have to design at human scale.

Advent Horizon: I call the line we draw at the edge of our level of comfort with technology our “Advent Horizon.” We feel a sense of loss when we cross it. From the Socratic shift from speaking to writing, to the transition from writing to typing, we’re comfortable — differently on an individual and collective level — in one of these phases. As we adopt and assimilate new devices, our horizon of comfort drifts further out while our media vocabulary increases. Any attempt to return to a so-called “Natural State” is a futile attempt to get back across the line we’ve drawn for ourselves.

Evidence that we’ve crossed one of these lines isn’t difficult to find. Think about the resurgence of vinyl record sales, or the way we teach computer animation. The former is an analog totem from a previous era, the latter is analog scaffolding for the digital world. Fans of vinyl records are either clinging to their youth or celebrating the only true music format that ever mattered. A vinyl record is a true document of a slice of time. I visited Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida last summer. In their animation and game design programs, students take illustration, flipbook-style animation, and 3-D modeling — real-world 3-D, like sculpture — before they ever sit down at a computer. Clinging to a previous era and having to back up to learn something new: These are evidence that an Advent Horizon has been crossed.

Bridge: Touchscreens are making strides to reconcile these limits, but the QWERTY keyboard is still our most ubiquitous bridge into the machineworld. Writing is a bridge. It is an interioralizing technology that externalizes knowledge and memory. No matter which story you believe about its origins, the QWERTY keyboard has changed our behavior.

The shift from writing to typing is also worth mentioning. The two acts — much like browsing for an item in a physical store versus searching for the same item in a database online — are related in only the most tenuous way. Typing an “L” and a “B” versus hand-writing an “L” and a “B” are just not related.

Technology curates culture. Aspects of our lives only matter because a certain number of us have decided that they do. Often called social construction and often harshly critiqued as uselessly postmodern, the concept is testable. Go to your local coffee shop or restaurant and try to walk behind the counter. You will be swiftly ushered back to the other side of the counter if not out of the establishment. Whether or not there is an actual physical barrier in place, there is an accepted area for the employees and one for the patrons – that’s social construction. As a society or culture we tend to agree on a great many of these constructions. We decide what matters.

Technology makes decisions for us. Often there isn’t a choice as to what is easier, more convenient, or more fun, much less what is more acceptable. Often the technology in place makes only one path available.

The tyranny of adoption. Many times we find that those around us have moved across an Advent Horizon en masse, leaving us behind, or forcing us to cross our line. The opposite is also true. If you’re the only one who adopts a technology, it’s useless until your friends start using it. MySpace works as an example here as well: It’s still viable if all of your friends are using it.

Last year here at SXSW, a friend of mine was exchanging contact information with this woman he’d met here. They both had iPhones, so he wanted to use an app called “Bump,” where you just bump two iPhones together and the contact information transfers from one to the other. Well, the lady he was trying to, er, “bump” didn’t have the app, so they had to enter their information in manually. That’s the tyranny of adoption.

“The Machine is not the environment for the person; the person is the environment for the machine.” — Aviv Bergman

“The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of people we want.” — Robert Sommer

We have to think cumulatively about what we design. Technology curates culture. Technology is a part of our nature. How will we control it? The same way we do our lawns or our weight: Sometimes we will; sometimes we won’t, but we have to remember that we’re not designing machines. We’re designing ourselves.

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So, there you have it. Again, the audio is here, and references are below. Please feel free to offer feedback in the comments below, or tweet about it using the #divisivedevices hashtag. Thanks to those who braved the time change and came to see it live, and as always, thank you all for your time and attention.

References:

Christopher, R. (2007). Brenda Laurel: Utopain Entrepreneur. In R. Christopher (Ed.), Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Seattle, WA: Well-Red Bear.

Johnson, S. (1997). Interface Culture. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

McLuhan,M. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Norman, D. (1986). User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction. New York: CRC Press.

Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin.

Sommer, R. (2007). Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Bristol, England, UK: Bosko Books.

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young & The Digital. New York: Beacon.