Marcus' World

TV is the New Cinema

For three years I haven't owned a television.  Helen and I had one. When I moved out in March 2009 she asked me if I wanted it; I said no, and she eventually sold the huge box we'd bought in 2002 before flat screens were cool.

Until July 2010 I was both TV-less and car-less, probably placing me somewhere among no more than 5% of Americans (although my status is not nearly as unique in the SF Bay Area.)  In July 2010 I bought the Prius, a lovely car that I strive to operate as little as possible.  For me a great week is when the car sits parked outside for several days, as I enjoy the amazing luxury of walking to work.  Driving is drudgery, although I do find myself at more far-flung parts of the Bay than I would without the car.

Post-car the TV drought continued.  Pi Wen also did not own a TV, so after we moved in together in August 2010 no television was available.  I didn't much miss it, as my main interest is current affairs and there are countless ways to stay informed without watching the tube.  As soon as I downloaded the Politico app to my iPhone my nerd quotient rose in tandem with my knowledge of the minutiae of Washington politicking.

Pi Wen and I went to Malaysia in November 2010, got married in March 2011, and moved into a bigger place in May.  Still no TV, but I knew all about Donald Trump's ludicrous claims that President Obama is not an American citizen.

Meanwhile my Facebook page hummed with news of what my friends were watching. "Breaking Bad" claimed the stage for a while, before that "Friday Night Lights," right now "Downton Abbey" is sucking up all the oxygen.  What are these shows? Are they worth watching?  The New Yorker seems to think so, as evidenced by the "Is Television the New Cinema?" panel David Remnick hosted last month.

That panel reminded me that many people claim we're in the golden age of television.  Well-written, complex stories that plumb the depths of the human experience.  It's not just American Idol and Jersey Shore, thank goodness.

Meanwhile Pi Wen was noting how she missed the morning news, how it used to be her background noise as she got ready for the day.

And so we found ourselves at Best Buy this President's Day, buying a fancy flat screen.  Cable arrives next week.  We still plan to walk after dinner, not plop right down on the couch. That's what the DVR is for, so when we can watch the shows when we want to. And maybe I can finally get myself to stretch if I have something else to do at the same time, like watching "Downton Abbey."

The Lifespan of a Fact

Several years ago I took a class in travel writing.  We read classic pieces by Patrick Leigh Fermor and VS Naipaul.  We also constructed our own narratives, ideally after absorbing the lessons in craft contained in the readings.  Our instructor was Ben Downing, an expert in the life of Leigh Fermor. 

As I wrote up my own travels I wanted to get every last detail correct.  If I'd had a cappucino in Buenos Aires, I couldn't very well tell the reader it had been a latte.  If it took three buses to get from point A to point B in Recife, Brazil, it was a violation to only report two.  This was lying. And liars are bad.

The trouble was that, in the pursuit of pristine accuracy, I was losing sight of the larger truth of these trips and what they had meant in my life.  The forest for the trees.  I recall Ben's sage advice not to obsess about the facts that were mere data points more than the lynchpins of the story.  He was not claiming that we should lie with abandon, but making the more subtle point that there are facts and then there is truth.

Fast forward to the recent publication of the book The Lifespan of a Fact.  There's a great excerpt in the current Harper's, and last night a Facebook friend pointed me to an interview about the book that ran this weekend on To the Best of Our Knowledge. 

Nutshell version:  For **seven years**, author John D'Agata and fact checker Jim Fingal corresponded about the numerous specific factual claims in an article D'Agata had written about the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas.  Fingal sought support for claims about the number of strip clubs in town, or where people hailed from.  D'Agata groused back that taking some liberties in the pursuit of the larger story was fully justified.  Back and forth they went, round and round again.  After lo those seven years, D'Agata's article finally appeared in The Believer.

Although he can be pompous in defense of his artistic choices, I am with D'Agata.  If forced to choose between literal and metaphorical truth, I'll take the latter. 

Not that D'Agata always takes the high road.  He says there are 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas, but Fingal can only verify 31.  When pressed, D'Agata admits he claimed 34 because it works better in the "rhythm" of the sentence.  Lame?  Yes.  But if the larger point is that Vegas is a temple of the flesh, it works with either number.  Although D'Agata should have kept his rhythms in check, this is a disinction without a difference.

One more example, less cut-and-dried.  D'Agata claimed that one of his sources was from Mississippi, but Fingal figured out she had lived in Vegas for many years.  So doesn't that make Vegas her home?  Depends on how you look at it.  When people ask me where my home is, sometimes I say California (where I live) and sometimes Ohio (where I grew up).  There aren't always shared facts that we can all agree on.  

Here is that sentence as it ran in The Believer, which happens to be the first sentence: "One summer, when sixteen-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the observation deck of the 1,149-foot-high tower of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas, the local city council was considering a bill that would temporarily ban lap dancing in the city’s strip clubs, archaeologists unearthed shards of the world’s oldest bottle of Tabasco brand sauce from beneath a parking lot, and a woman from Mississippi beat a chicken named Ginger in a thirty-five-minute-long game of tic-tac-toe." 

Looks like D'Agata won this scuffle, since the Mississippi roots are intact.  Had Fingal prevailed we would probably read "a woman....beat a chicken named Ginger..."   In either case, we have a vivid scene set. And if this woman somehow became a person from Arkansas not much would be lost even though it isn't true.

But if Levi Pressley had jumped from the Bellagio and not the Stratosphere, we'd have a big problem on our hands.  There are facts and there are FACTS.  But our language has no way to make this distinction, so any deviation from the literal truth is suspect. 

Maybe the solution, as the Facebook discussion indicated last night, is to post a clear disclaimer when authors are taking liberties.  Readers who are troubled can look elsewhere, those who are not can read on.

Leon Wieseltier on Browsing vs. Search

A recent New Republic includes an especially trenchant essay by Leon Wieseltier, "Going to Melody" (link to an excerpt, full text for subscribers.) He packs a lot into this meditation on the end of his beloved record store, Melody Records. 

Melody outlasted the rise of Internet shopping, due to its very knowledgable staff and convenient neighborhood location.  But Melody fell before Amazon's recently introduced Price Check app, in which smart phone users enter a shop, scan a bar code for an item, and then send the bar code info to Amazon and get a cheaper price.  Commentators have justly pilloried this graceless gesture, as it relies on the disadvantages brick-and-mortar stores already have against Amazon--the need to pay rent and keep the lights on--to further weaken the stores.  But as for all graceless things, like porn and Jersey Shore, there's a big market.  And so Amazon Price Check ended the wonderful community asset that was Melody Records.

One reason Melody was so good, according to Wieseltier, is that it gave its customers the opportunity to browse the stacks.  Here is Leon, in words that should make librarians across the land shout for joy: "It is a matter of some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education...It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges."

This is all true.  It is why classification systems that organize books on shelves are a wonderful thing.  It is why serendipitous research happens.  It is why, as an undergraduate student, I went to the library for one book and left with six others that I did not know existed.

And, despite all these glories, there is absolutely no doubt that browsing as mode of information acquisition is out of style.  Search has its limits, as Wieseltier notes.  But search has won the battle all the same. 

The question for academic librarians is, what do we do?  Strategies to lure people back to the stacks, so they are on turf we understand, will fail. The better course is to build algorithms into search engines that encourage serendipity.  Bring browsing into the workflow people actually use, rather than pining for the good old days.  This would be an intersection of librarian organizational strength and computing science prowess, but in this blurry age the boundaries between fields are collapsing anyway. Now is the time to invent our future.

Philosophical Underpinnings for Open Education

Inspired by David Brooks's call for people to identify philosophical traditions that can underpin new ideas, I wonder what tradition best supports education conducted in the open.  The problem is that our conceptions and processes for how to teach are firmly pre-Web; the lecture, transmission of knowledge from expert to novice; the course pack.  Most learning management systems like Blackboard rely on these outmoded ideas.

But what's to replace them?  How do we move toward a fully Web-immersed educational experience in which the teachers learn from the students and the students learn from each other?  This is what we do not know, and so we slowly lurch along. Generations hence people will be amazed that we mostly used the Web as a more convenient delivery vehicle for traditional types of content.  We didn't think big, and they will notice.

The problem may be, as Brooks argues, that there are no abstract principles guiding our quest toward a new way of learning.  So as a first marker I throw in communitariasm as the philosophy underlying our emerging practice.  I might change my mind many times until settling on a particular stance, but that is part of the process.