This Is Probably An Interesting Blog (But In The Offhand Chance That It's Not…)

Yorkshire, England, 1965.

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The ever-brilliant George Packer does some necessary unpacking of our new media revolution:

Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution.

I feel I use Twitter pretty regularly — or at least more regular than most — and in my own experience, I find myself aligning more with David Carr’s conclusions in his NYT essay, Why Twitter Will Endure, than Packer’s critical approach. For myself, I’m discovering the most enjoyable function of the service is my window into the lives and thoughts of scientists, policy experts and humanities professors; and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that its been part of my comprehensive education. I’ve learned much through my exposure to Twitter and experts on the internet, and I’m consuming it willfully, which is more than I can say for much of my college education.

At the same time though, I can understand Packer’s point; that the continual evolution (or devolution) of technological discourse will only see messaging become simpler, not more complex. We’re trapped in a bell curve and after the plateau of the print age, we’re sharply dropping in our ability to effectively communicate complex thoughts and subjects. I resonate with the way Packer phrases it:

There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world.

This is the line I walk; a tight-rope rising high between RSS readers and paperback novels. It’s a scary thought, but one that keeps my nose in books.

We need a commander-in-chief not a professor of law.

– Former Governor Sarah Palin, speaking to a convention of simple like-minded people.

This is why I will never respect this woman. It’s so much deeper than ideology and has nothing to do with where she grew up; it’s her fundamental distaste and exclusion of anything requiring more than a populist whim. By all means, mock the constitutional law professor whose job description is “to preserve, defend and uphold the Constitution.”

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I’m trying to avoid the habit of reposting clips from controversial talking heads, but I just found this whole exchange between Glenn Beck and Simpson’s-voice-actor Harry Shearer fascinating.

Juxtaposing this interview with Beck’s current Fox News persona seems to explain a bit about his current behavior. In this clip from Beck’s show when he was still on CNN, the interview completely revolves around comedy. Beck gushes over Shearer, which, considering both of these individuals are outspoken ideological opposites, seems difficult to imagine happening today (Shearer has a regular column on progressive politics at The Huffington Post and his radio program, Le Show, has run upwards of 25 years).

It’s hard not to feel like Beck’s behavior and subsequent reinvention isn’t rooted in low self-esteem. Here you are presented with the picture of pre-Fox News, pre-Barack Obama Glenn Beck — wacky music in the background, making strained and painful attempts at comedy (what’s with the air quotes when he say’s “Harry Shearer?”) — and you understand why it didn’t catch on (it’s like watching Jim Kramer without all the substance). And so we witness the struggling comedian juxtaposed with the successful, witty auteur, exposing Beck as the shamelessly devoted comedy fan he is (not a bad thing) while shedding some light on his clear longing for success. Shearer then, is just symbolic of the position Beck wishes to occupy. Keeping this in mind, watching Glenn Beck today and pondering his cultural or political significance doesn’t carry nearly as much weight as I used to think. He’s the Kenny Bania of political commentary — a wannabe funny-man, dejected by his idols, who finally found the perfect audience for his Ovaltine jokes.

Gordon Gee, President of Ohio State University, is proposing a fundamental restructuring of tenure that would redirect emphasis from publishing and earning grants towards rewarding good teaching:

Gee says the traditional formula that rewards publishing in scholarly journals over excellence in teaching and other contributions is outdated and too often favors the quantity of a professor’s output over quality.

“Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer,” he told The Associated Press. “In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything.”

[...]

“The universities of the 21st century are going to be the smokestacks of the century,” Gee said, referring to the heavy industry that once dominated the American economy. “The notion of the large, massive public university that can exist in isolated splendor is dead.”

I’m on the fence about tenure. The idea of extending the practice as a cove for airing controversial ideas with protection against reprisals makes sense. But in my limited experience, I’ve never seen tenure used in this manner. The assumption is, I think, that after publishing their volumes of literary criticism or ethnographic studies, tenured professors will still have enough energy and passion for their work that they would take advantage of the protections of tenure to explore newer, progressive ideas, but in my experience I’ve mostly witnessed tired professors retreat into their offices and spend less time on campus. Granted, this may have been symptomatic of my choice of schools.

Has anyone discussed limited tenure, perhaps in a form similar to extended fellowships?

Amazing concept, but I would feel blasphemous playing anything younger than the 19th Century.

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Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

– George Packer, Stop The World

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The Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal building in downtown Portland, OR. The design implements vertical fins covered in vegitation that are expected to “grow to roughly 200 feet and allow the building to use up to 60 percent less energy, saving an estimated $280,000 [in] annual energy costs.”

(GOOD)