Thoughts and essays from the guy who coined the word "blog."
Two and a half years ago, I announced the birth of our baby boy, Jules Joseph Merholz. Today, I belatedly announce the birth of our daughter, Dorothy Pearl Merholz.
Dorothy was born March 14, 2011, at 1:46pm. A shade under 7 pounds. Nearly a week later, and she’s happy, healthy, eating like a horse (far beyond her birth weight, even after the initial postpartum weight loss), and taking in the world around her. Her big brother is super proud, and her mom and I could use some more sleep.
Perhaps all my blog posts will be spurred by listening to podcasts. The most recent B.S. Report features screenwriter William Goldman. In their wide-ranging discussion, Goldman points out that, for this first time in film history, there’s only one certifiable, bankable movie star left, one actor who can open a picture — Will Smith. This point was a coincidence for me, as just yesterday, I was looking at the box office take of film actors. If you sort it by average box office gross per film, the top three are Daniel Radcliffe, Robert Pattinson, and Orlando Bloom. It illuminates what has happened with Hollywood — it’s all about the bankable franchise (in this case, Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Lord of the Rings – Pirates of the Carribbean combo). Hollywood doesn’t need stars (and probably doesn’t want them). Vetted properties are what now sells tickets. What has changed? Why don’t actors and actresses have the pull they once had?
Last week, NPR’s Science Friday host Ira Flatow spoke with social scientist Sherry Turkle, occasioned by the release of her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.
Part of their conversation addressed parents’ inability to control themselves around technology, and children feeling like their competing with iPhones and laptops for the parents’ attention. As a father who plays Words With Friends at the playground, and who jokes that if my son wants me to pay attention, he needs to be more interesting than my iPhone, I became a bit uncomfortable listening to this conversation.
But then I wondered, “Haven’t children always competed for their parents’ attention?” The conversation suggested that before smartphones, we had a magical time where parents wholly devoted their attention to their children. If I didn’t have a smartphone, I’d be bringing books to the playground. Thinking back to my childhood, there was always multitasking — conversations with others, cooking, watching television, etc. In families with lots of children, there’s competition between them. Or children having to compete with their parents’ work and chore schedules. I realized children have always fought for their parents’ attention, and it’s unreasonable for people to feel that if you’re not 100% committed to your child all the time, you’re somehow being less of a parent.
Now, I think there are some very real problems with technology and child-rearing (we’ve had to closely monitor Jules’ iPad use because he started to throw fits when we limited his access to it). But we need to start from a baseline of reasonable expectations for parents’ engagement.
One of the unsung advancements of the Internet age is that distribution models no longer dominate the structure of how we disseminate our ideas. In the pre-Internet era, the forms of media strongly dictated the nature of the content on it. You couldn’t simply publish a 1,000 word essay — it needed to be bundled with a bunch of other content, either in a magazine, or a book. Music was limited to 45 minutes (on a 33 RPM album), 75 minutes on a CD, 5 minutes or so to a side on a single. If you wanted to publish a book, you had to come up with at least 150 pages worth of material, even if your idea really didn’t sustain much past, say, 25 pages. This is one of the reasons why most business books suck so bad — there’s one decent idea, and then 90% of filler to make it seem worth putting on a shelf and charging $20 for it.
The internet has made infinitely variable the size of a piece of media. While some think this means everything is getting smaller, and leading to short-attention spans, that’s not really what’s happening. What’s happening is that things are getting right-sized — the shape of the media is appropriate to the content within. We don’t need bloated business books. Or record albums with 2 good songs and 12 unnecessary tracks.
I think this is why I think Kindle Singles is so brilliant. Admittedly, we’ve already seen this model in some e-publishing, but Amazon, with it’s unparalleled retail presence, has the opportunity to make this stick. It’s an inevitable progression of what’s happening in publishing. I do suspect it will take people a while to be comfortable paying $1.99 for a “single”, even though they’ll gladly pay $20 for a book, just because the novelty will give people pause. But once there are a few Singles that prove the model (and get people excited about the opportunity), I think this could be a huge opportunity for authors.
We’ll see.
I watch TV when I exercise. Typically I watch one hour television programs (which actually run about 40 minutes). However, television programmers seem to be losing the ability of showing compelling fare. So, care of Netflix’ “Watch Instantly” service, I’ve been discovering media that has passed me by. My most recent Netflix selection was Hoop Dreams (Netflix, IMDB), a documentary film about two high school freshmen from Chicago’s inner city who are angling to make it in the NBA. As a fan of both basketball and doc films, it’s pathetic that I has not seen this sooner — I think the 171 minute (!) running time scared me away, as it seemed like such a commitment.
It turns out you can break that up into about 4 exercise-length viewings, and that ended up working out quite well. There’s a naturally episodic quality to the film, as it follow Arthur and William year by year. The story the filmmakers uncovered is remarkable, with twists and turns, ups and downs, highs and lows, and very real drama. Hoop Dreams is about so many things — family, race issues, class issues, basketball, motherhood, fatherhood, coming of age — but really what it’s about is America, thick and thin, better and worse. You have to give huge kudos to the filmmakers who stuck with this for four-plus years (and doubtless had so many hours of tape shot that figuring out how to pull together a story must have been beyond daunting), but you also have to show respect for the the film’s two subjects, who make *something* of themselves against extraordinary countervailing pressures.
Anyway, don’t be like me. If you have any inkling of interest in this film, but haven’t seen it yet, do not put off watching it.
Over the last few days, Stacy and I noticed that Jules had some trouble getting his words out. He’s doing some rather classic stuttering — repeating the initial sound of a word at the start of a sentence.
Being first-time parents, we had what is doubtless the universal response, “Should we be worried?” It turns out: no. Stuttering is common in toddlers, as, it seems, their brain moves faster than their vocal apparatus can support.
Child development is fascinating to observe. Such stuttering is simply the most obvious expression of how Jules’ various systems advance at differing rates. Jules is tall for his age, but his muscle coordination hasn’t caught up, leading to a lot of stumbling, tumbling, and just outright falling. (Though, given his parents’ coordination, this might be a lifelong deficit.)
Care of Netflix’s Watch Instantly service, I just finished Exit Through the Gift Shop (Netflix, IMDB),a fun, and strange, documentary on street art, psychosis, the idiocy of the art world, and Banksy. The focus of the documentary is Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles with his wife and children. He’s something of a videomaniac, continuously recording his life. Through a familial connection, he uncovers the world of street art, which then becomes his obsession, first to document, and then to produce. He crosses paths with Shepard Fairey (of OBEY/GIANT and the Obama Hope poster fame), and, most notably Banksy, perhaps the most notorious street artist in the world.
The film tells the tale of how, at Banksy’s urging, Guetta stopped filming the world of street art, and started making some of his own. Under the moniker Mr BrainWash, he briefly engages in the kind of paste-ups and stenciling the Fairey and Banksy have made famous, but then quickly decides to have his own giant warehouse show. The lark being, his warehouse show, typically the kind of thing that comes after an artist works for years, if not decades, but for him happens after just months, is an overwhelming success.
More then anything, the film is fun. Street art is a great subject, what with all the surreptitious evening shoots and people going where they shouldn’t, doing things they shouldn’t be doing. Guetta is a great subject — outrageous French accent, seemingly crazy, but also with a strange ability to get others to rally in his support and pull off this monstrous show. I actually found that part endearing, because it spoke to a kind of karma — Guetta had given much of himself, his time, and his resources to help other street artists, and they ended up supporting him, too.
A conceit of the film is that it was originally going to be a film by Guetta about street art, but then became a film by Banksy about Guetta. This is important because a one of the film’s main themes is that, well, the art world is a load of bollocks. It starts small, with video of Banksy infiltrating the Tate with his art, then the ascendant rise of street art as a subject of auctions, culminating in Mr Brainwash’s surprisingly popular show, given he had no real art bona fides.
This has lead some to think the whole point of the film is for Banksy to flash a big “up yours” to the art world.
Some have even gone so far as to say the entire Guetta/Mr Brainwash story is a hoax or prank, perpetrated by Bansky and Fairey, to prove their point. A stance I find appalling, because, really, there is no evidence whatsoever of a prank. However, there’s a sad class of smart-erati who live in fear of being duped, and in order to demonstrate their smartness, level accusations such as “prank” or “hoax” on such things. Regardless of whether there is evidence. Really, this kind of thinking is no different than conspiracy theorists, piecing together a set of insubstantial “evidence” as a demonstration of a diabolical master plan.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a fun, quirky, pointed diversion, Exit Through the Gift Shop is definitely worth a look.
The Night of the Hunter is my favorite American film, so I loved this explanation of the process behind its new Criterion box art.
My undergrad degree is in anthropology, and I’m married to a woman with a doctorate in anthropology (emphasis in historical archaeology), and so I find myself drawn to news about the field. When I heard that the American Anthropological Association revised it’s mission statement (Now: “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.”), I rejoiced because my biggest beef with the field was how cloistered and disconnected it was from common discourse. I think anthropology can be an unparalleled tool to help people understand themselves, and, given all the various global crises occurring, it strikes me that this understanding is needed now more than ever.
It turns out that many in the discipline are upset about the change, and, from what I can tell, the foofaraw is centered on the removal of the word “science” from the mission statement, and that this must mean the AAA is forsaking the scientific underpinnings of the discipline. As a relative outsider, I didn’t pick up on that at all, and I also don’t see how the new mission statement can be construed in any way as excluding science. Science is a necessary tool for understanding humankind.
Anyway, as a friendly layperson, I just wanted to encourage the anthropological community to embrace this shift, and take heart the potential positive impact it could have.
We now interrupt this irregularly-scheduled blog for this announcement.
Adaptive Path has a big push for our 2011 slate of events. Called “Register Now Save Big!” the point is to help folks use their 2010 training budgets for 2011 events. You can get 15% off the already discounted early registration prices for three events: MX: Managing Experience 2011, UX Intensive Amsterdam, and our flagship conference, UX Week 2011 (We still haven’t announced any speakers yet for UX Week, as it’s pretty far out, but if you’ve gone in prior years, you know what an amazing event it will be.)
So, when registering for the event, use the discount code RNSB for your additional 15% off!