one for on the road

Yglesias:

I’m not sure a drunken commute is really the ideal we need to be aspiring toward.

I don’t know about that. It may be more dangerous to outlaw alcohol on transit than to allow it.

economics of journamalism, 2

By the time Bartley Hubbard found a place with Mr. Witherby on the Events, he had already learned something of the relationship between business and the press. Arriving in Boston newly married and unemployed, Bartley put his experience as a small town newspaper editor to work and began to write free-lance, developing a relationship with a number of papers, among them the Chronicle-Abstract. His first article was an account of life in a New England logging camp; his second – at his wife Marcia’s suggestion – a look at the world of Boston boarding-houses:

He had the true newspaper instinct, and went to work with a motive that was as different as possible from the literary motive. He wrote for the effect which he was to make, and not from any artistic pleasure in the treatment. He did not attempt to give it form,–to imagine a young couple like himself and Marcia coming down from the country to place themselves in the city; he made no effort to throw about it the poetry of their ignorance and their poverty, or the pathetic humor of their dismay at the disproportion of the prices to their means. He set about getting all the facts he could, and he priced a great many lodgings in different parts of the city; then he went to a number of real-estate agents, and, giving himself out as a reporter of the Chronicle-Abstract, he interviewed them as to house-rents, past and present. Upon these bottom facts, as he called them, he based a “spicy sketch, which had also largely the character of an exposé. There is nothing the public enjoys so much as an exposé: it seems to be made in the reader’s own interest; it somehow constitutes him a party to the attack upon the abuse, and its effectiveness redounds to the credit of all the newspaper’s subscribers. After a week’s stay in Boston, Bartley was able to assume the feelings of a native who sees his city falling into decay through the rapacity of its landladies. In the heading of ten or fifteen lines which he gave his sketch, the greater number were devoted to this feature of it; though the space actually allotted to it in the text was comparatively small. He called his report “Boston’s Boarding-Houses,” and he spent a paragraph upon the relation of boarding-houses to civilization, before detailing his own experience and observation. This part had many of those strokes of crude picturesqueness and humor which he knew how to give, and was really entertaining; but it was when he came to contrast the rates of house-rent and the cost of provisions with the landladies’

“PERPENDICULAR PRICES,”

that Bartley showed all the virtue of a born reporter. The sentences were vivid and telling; the ensemble was very alarming, and the conclusion was inevitable, that, unless this abuse could somehow be reached, we should lose a large and valuable portion of our population,–especially those young married people of small means with whom the city’s future prosperity so largely rested, and who must drift away to find homes in rival communities if the present exorbitant demands were maintained.

The success of this piece earned Bartley even more work and

As the spring advanced, Bartley conceived the plan of a local study, something in the manner of the boarding-house article, but on a much vaster scale: he proposed to Ricker [editor of the Chronicle-Abstract] a timely series on the easily accessible hot-weather resorts, to be called “Boston’s Breathing-Places,” and to relate mainly to the seaside hotels and their surroundings. His idea was encouraged, and he took Marcia with him on most of his expeditions for its realization. These were largely made before the regular season had well begun; but the boats were already running, and the hotels were open, and they were treated with the hospitality which a knowledge of Bartley’s mission must invoke. As he said, it was a matter of business, give and take on both sides, and the landlords took more than they gave in any such trade.

Mr. Ricker thought Bartley could make more money as a free-lance than as a regular reporter, but both Bartley and Marcia – who still harbored hopes that her husband would leave journalism for the law – preferred to have a more secure and steady source of income. Bartley had tried to sell his logging-camp sketch to Mr. Witherby before turning to the Chronicle-Abstract, but Witherby rejected it; they had never worked together. But now Witherby needed someone to run his paper, and though neither man was fond of the other, they had come to an understanding. Mr. Witherby just had one more request, which Bartley’s free-lance experience had rendered him more than capable of fulfilling:

“Oh, by the way,” said Witherby, “there is one little piece of outside work which I should like you to finish up for us; and we’ll agree upon something extra for it, if you wish. I mean our Solid Men series. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed the series in the Events?”

“Yes,” said Bartley, “I have.”

“Well, then, you know what they are. They consist of interviews–guarded and inoffensive as respects the sanctity-of private life–with our leading manufacturers and merchant princes at their places of business and their residences, and include a description of these, and some account of the lives of the different subjects.”

“Yes, I have seen them,” said Bartley. “I’ve noticed the general plan.”

“You know that Mr. Clayton has been doing them. He madethem a popular feature. The parties themselves were very much pleased with them.”

“Oh, people are always tickled to be interviewed,” said Bartley. “I know they put on airs about it, and go round complaining to each other about the violation of confidence, and so on; but they all like it. You know I reported that Indigent Surf-Bathing entertainment in June for the Chronicle-Abstract. I knew the lady who got it up, and I interviewed her after the entertainment.”

“Miss Kingsbury?”

“Yes.” Witherby made an inarticulate murmur of respect for Bartley in his throat, and involuntarily changed toward him, but not so subtly that Bartley’s finer instinct did not take note of the change. “She was a fresh subject, and she told me everything. Of course I printed it all. She was awfully shocked,–or pretended to be,–and wrote me a very O-dear-how-could-you note about it. But I went round to the office the next day, and I found that nearly every lady mentioned in the interview had ordered half a dozen copies of that issue sent to her seaside address, and the office had been full of Beacon Street swells all the morning buying Chronicle-Abstracts,–‘the one with the report of the Concert in it.'” These low views of high society, coupled with an apparent familiarity with it, modified Witherby more and more. He began to see that he had got a prize. “The way to do with such fellows as your Solid Men,” continued Bartley, “is to submit a proof to ’em. They never know exactly what to do about it, and so you print the interview with their approval, and make ’em particeps criminis. I’ll finish up the series for you, and I won’t make any very heavy extra charge.”

“I should wish to pay you whatever the work was worth,” said Witherby, not to be outdone in nobleness.

“All right; we sha’n’t quarrel about that, at any rate.”

the economics of journamalism, 1

The future of journalism has attracted a lot of attention lately, what with all the pressure the online media have been putting on traditional print and broadcast organizations. But some kinds of pressure haven been around a lot longer. From William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882):

[Bartley = Bartley Hubbard, a reporter who once had aspirations to becoming a lawyer; at the time of this conversation he has been working free-lance in Boston, but hoping to find a permanent position]

Witherby = Mr. Witherby, owner of The Boston Events, an evening newspaper]

“But of course my idea in starting the Events was to make money.”

“Of course.”

“I hold that the first duty of a public journal is to make money for the owner; all the rest follows naturally.”

“You’re quite right, Mr. Witherby,” said Bartley. “Unless it makes money, there can be no enterprise about it, no independence,–nothing. That was the way I did with my little paper down in Maine. The first thing–I told the committee when I took hold of the paper–is to keep it from losing money; the next is to make money with it. First peaceable, then pure: that’s what I told them.”

“Precisely so!” Witherby was now so much at his ease with Bartley that he left off tormenting the things on his desk, and used his hands in gesticulating. “Look at the churches themselves! No church can do any good till it’s on a paying basis. As long as a church is in debt, it can’t secure the best talent for the pulpit or the choir, and the members go about feeling discouraged and out of heart. It’s just so with a newspaper. I say that a paper does no good till it pays; it has no influence, its motives are always suspected, and you’ve got to make it pay by hook or by crook, before you can hope to–to–forward any good cause by it. That’s what I say. Of course,” he added, in a large, smooth way, “I’m not going to contend that a newspaper should be run solely in the interest of the counting-room. Not at all! But I do contend that, when the counting-room protests against a certain course the editorial room is taking, it ought to be respectfully listened to. There are always two sides to every question. Suppose all the newspapers pitch in–as they sometimes do–and denounce a certain public enterprise: a projected scheme of railroad legislation, or a peculiar system of banking, or a co-operative mining interest, and the counting-room sends up word that the company advertises heavily with us; shall we go and join indiscriminately in that hue and cry, or shall we give our friends the benefit of the doubt?”

“Give them the benefit of the doubt,” answered Bartley. “That’s what I say.”

“And so would any other practical man!” said Witherby. “And that’s just where Mr. Clayton and I differed. Well, I needn’t allude to him any more,” he added leniently. “What I wish to say is this, Mr. Hubbard. I am overworked, and I feel the need of some sort of relief. I know that I have started the Events in the right line at last,–the only line in which it can be made a great, useful, and respectable journal, efficient in every good cause,–and what I want now is some sort of assistant in the management who shall be in full sympathy with my own ideas. I don’t want a mere slave,–a tool; but I do want an independent, right-minded man, who shall be with me for the success of the paper the whole time and every time, and shall not be continually setting up his will against mine on all sorts of doctrinaire points. That was the trouble with Mr. Clayton. I have nothing against Mr. Clayton personally; he is an excellent young man in very many respects; but he was all wrong about journalism, all wrong, Mr. Hubbard. I talked with him a great deal, and tried to make him see where his interest lay. He had been on the paper as a reporter from the start, and I wished very much to promote him to this position; which he could have made the best position in the country. The Events is an evening paper; there is no night-work; and the whole thing is already thoroughly systematized. Mr. Clayton had plenty of talent, and all he had to do was to step in under my direction and put his hand on the helm. But, no! I should have been glad to keep him in a subordinate capacity; but I had to let him go. He said that he would not report the conflagration of a peanut-stand for a paper conducted on the principles I had developed to him. Now, that is no way to talk. It’s absurd.”

“Perfectly.” Bartley laughed his rich, caressing laugh, in which there was the insinuation of all worldly-wise contempt for Clayton and all worldly-wise sympathy with Witherby. It made Witherby feel good,–better perhaps than he had felt at any time since his talk with Clayton.

“Well, now, what do you say, Mr. Hubbard? Can’t we make some arrangement with you?” he asked, with a burst of frankness.

“I guess you can,” said Bartley.

transfers

I’ve been meaning to start writing about transportation stuff ever since this post, but other things have gotten in the way. Here are some links I’ve collected in the last month:

Over at The Bellows, Ryan Avent asks his commenters, and they answer:

Why isn’t transit a bigger part of the national discussion on energy/climate change/congestion/etc.?

Later, his commenters ask him:

What are the obstacles to high speed rail in this country?

To his answer of “primarily…demand and money” I would also add state and local politics. Some routes might seem obvious when you think of them in terms of endpoints, but the ground-level details are a lot more complicated. I didn’t follow it that closely, but I remember there being a heated debate over the Bay Area end of the San Francisco to Los Angeles route: should it start in SF or Oakland? what pass should it use to enter the Central Valley? and so on. Even now when the line seems to have been settled in San Francisco’s favor, there’s a conflict with the Union Pacific company over use of right-of-ways. (If you’re interested in the California project, check out the California High Speed Rail Blog, which has much more detailed coverage of this.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that high-speed rail necessarily bypasses a lot more towns than regular rail – too many stops and it’s just a rail line with a high top speed. There’s only so much time you can save over regular rail on a Washington, DC to New York route if you also stop in Baltimore and Philadelphia and other places, but it’s hard to see those cities agreeing to be skipped over (and it’s not clear that they should). And indeed, as Avent and some of his commenters point out in the linked threads, in a number of places around the country it makes more sense to upgrade existing service rather than to build “true” high speed rail.

As a sidenote, apparently some of the high speed routes in Germany have been criticized for having so many stops that the average speeds aren’t really that great. By contrast, the couple of times I took the TGV south from Paris, the first stop didn’t come for about 3 hours – longer than the entire Acela trip between New York and DC. My anecdata is a few years old, though, so I don’t know what the European systems are like now. Aside from being better than ours.

    And speaking of Europe, Paul Krugman points out that Europe moves proportionally less freight by rail than the United States does. I have anecdata for this too: I was surprised at how few freights I saw as a passenger in Europe a few years ago as compared to what it’s like to ride Amtrak. The only place I remember with a significant freight presence was the northern end of the line between Stockholm and Kiruna, Norway, where trains carry ore from a Swedish mine to the coast. The combination of gorgeous scenery (fjords and mountains) and natural resource extraction industry (mining, the freights, and the transshipment facility in Kiruna) made the area feel almost (American) western to me.

    Leaving rail aside for the moment, Matthew Yglesias considers Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and worries: “What I primarily fear about BRT is that we’ll get into a “defining BRT down” scenario since it lacks a very clear definition.” In Berkeley, some BRT opponents appear to be trying to do just that.

    Finally, in the early 1980s John Stilgoe wrote a book, Metropolitan Corridor, examining the geographical changes the adoption and expansion of the railroad brought about in the United States. I remember reading a review – I haven’t read the book, but I looked up the reviews when I was in grad school for research-related reasons – which, though generally positive, criticized the book for being perhaps too nostalgic towards the railroads, given their postwar decline. That was then; Stilgoe has now written a new book on railroads, and from the looks of it, there’s no need for nostalgia.

    history: older than it looks

    If you’re reading this blog, you probably have already seen Rick Perlstein’s posts on Box 722. If you haven’t, they’re fascinating and you should go read them. I was struck by this statement in the second post:

    One thing to observe: over and over again, the Chicago Southwest Siders protesting open housing repeat a variant of the resident on 71st Street who averred that Congress “cannot legislate morals or love.” The reason this is fascinating was that this was one of Barry Goldwater’s constant refrains on the campaign trail in 1964 for why he didn’t vote for the civil rghts act. Like most everywhere else, not many people on the Southwest Side of Chicago voted for Barry Goldwater. But clearly they heard what they had to say, and took it to heart, and repeated it verbatim two years later. It’s a fascinating lesson in the mysterious ways political messages take hold.

    But while the letter-writers might have been influenced by Goldwater, the message itself has a longer history. My guess is that the general claim that it’s not possible to legislate morality could be traced to some dead political theorist; in the context of segregation it shows up in the majority opinion in Plessy vs. Ferguson:

    The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and a voluntary consent of individuals…. Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.

    [Quoted in Charles Payne, “”The Whole United States Is Southern!”: Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race”, which is worth reading, here.]

    clean finance

    I’ve never followed New York politics, so when the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke, I didn’t know much about Spitzer’s earlier career. I was in New York at the time and I followed the coverage fairly closely for about a month – just until a little after it stopped being a major story. Today I was catching up on some old New Yorker reading and I came across this, which I didn’t see mentioned in any of the post-scandal stories I read:

    Perhaps the most significant support came from his family. The 1994 campaign had been funded in large part by a $4.3-million bank loan that Spitzer took out, using as collateral some apartments that he owned; he told the press that he was servicing the loan with his own income. In 1998, a few days before Election Day, in a nasty race with the incumbent, Dennis Vacco, he admitted that he had been paying off the bank with a loan his father had given him on generous terms. In effect, he’d received a $4.3-million campaign donation from his father, which is well in excess of family donation limits, and lied about it. (The Board of Elections declined to investigate.) Michael Goodwin, a columnist at the News, asked Spitzer why he’d lied, and Spitzer told him, according to Goodwin, “I had to”—a phrase that Spitzer’s detractors have lorded over him ever since, as a kind of shorthand for a streak of dishonesty and hypocrisy. (Spitzer says that he doesn’t remember any such conversation.) Nonetheless, after a hotly contested recount, Spitzer won.

    From earlier in the article, which came out in the December 10, 2007 issue, when it looked like he’d have a full term in office:

    Spitzer’s agenda, broadly and loftily speaking, is to make the workings of Albany more transparent: to disentangle the corrosive influence of the special interests and to combat, if not eliminate, the nest-feathering that flourishes in the dark. Campaign-finance reform is an essential part of this.

    That said, had he been successful in this reform it probably would have been a good thing, whatever the details of his own past campaigns.

    what you pay for

    It looks like not a single person other than me has read this blog in the past couple of days, so I don’t think anyone has noticed I changed themes. But I have. It should be more readable: the normal text size is bigger and I like the way this theme handles blockquotes. The free wordpress.com restricts choices more than I’d like – it would be nice if the archive and category pages showed full posts – but I’m not ready to get into the CSS or to set up my own domain.

    One thing I don’t like is the way the privacy settings affect the category links included in each post. If you set your blog to be public for normal readers, but blocked from search engines and other listings, the category links go to categories within your own blog. If you set your blog to be public, and included in search engines and other listings, then the category links take you off of your blog and into a listing of posts on wordpress.com blogs that use that same category name. This makes site navigation needlessly inconvenient, especially on blogs that don’t include a category list in the sidebar. (Example: go here and click on the categories.)

    I’d prefer to have my blog set up so that if someone likes a post and wants to see what else I’ve written in that category, they need only click on the category link in the post, but I also want the blog visible to search engines. That doesn’t appear possible to do. Of course none of this matters very much because zero people read this blog.

    Published
    Categorized as meta

    My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.

    [Note: This post originally appeared on my old blog on June 15, 2008 and I am posting it here under that date. I didn’t want to carry over that whole blog, but I did want to keep this post with me. For the record, today is actually July 24, 2012.]

    ————

    I read this

    Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

    and thought that I’ve been having the same experience for a few years now, except that when I lose a thread while reading a book or article online and look for something else, that something else is more text in another tab or window. Then I remembered that I’ve always had to put energy into concentrating on what I’m reading, even if I find it interesting. The only exceptions are things I find engrossing – even if I don’t find them interesting. What makes something engross me? I don’t exactly know. I’d say “good writing” but that’s hardly a satisfying explanation.

    I read this

    Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

    and thought that the seeming thinness of research aimed mainly at gathering “telltale fact”s or “pithy quote”s resides more in its goals than in its methods.

    I read this

    I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

    and the sentiments felt familiar. I may have always had to work to keep focused on long writing, but I used to finish books at a much higher rate. Outside of required readings, I used to start multiple books at once until I found one that held my interest until I finished it, at which point I re-started the process. Now it seems like I’m always beginning books.

    I read this

    “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

    and thought, who can read War and Peace in any sort of “normal” way at all? I read it in bunches over a period of about a month, quickly at first when I was into it, more slowly when I began to get frustrated with the plot about halfway through, lethargically as I approached the end, determinedly as I read the final few hundred pages in one sitting, knowing that if I put it down I was in danger of never picking it up again. I reflected that reading fiction has always been a different experience with me than reading non-fiction. I can’t skim fiction. I might read blog posts quickly, but I don’t skim them unless I’m deciding whether or not to then read them.

    I read this

    As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

    and wondered if there was also evidence that they never went back and actually read those articles. I wondered if the authors considered that people may be exhibiting “a form of skimming activity” because they were skimming to see which of their search results were useful, if any. Or because they were curious about something they found but weren’t looking for. I wondered if browsing nearby books in the stacks is “a form of skimming activity.” I wondered if this says something about how people search as well as about how people read.

    I read this

    “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

    and tried to remember where I saw Wolf’s work discussed recently. I resisted searching for it right then and there. [I later looked and found it: Caleb Crain’s essay “Twilight of the Books” on the future of reading.]

    I read this

    Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

    and thought, that may be true, but doesn’t that mean we have the flexibility to re-wire if we change our behavior? So to the extent that there’s a change taking place, it might not be a permanent one.

    I read this

    Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

    and thought of Francis Parkman, who needed a special tool to help him hand-write along straight lines as his vision worsened.

    I read this

    In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

    and thought that maybe if I finish reading Mumford’s two best known Cities books, I might read some of his other work. I remembered that I decided not to get a used copy of Technics and Civilization recently because I wasn’t sure how it stood in relation to his other work – and, more importantly, because it was kind of heavy and I didn’t want to carry it when I moved.

    I read this

    When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.

    and was reminded of Marx writing that the bourgeoisie creates the world in its own image.

    I read the rest of that paragraph

    It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

    and thought: you can change a lot of those settings, you know.

    I read this

    The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

    and wondered if the author thought these were all bad developments. More ads and shorter articles certainly don’t seem like a positive step, but abstracts and snippets, done well, could be quite helpful. Assuming abstracts aren’t all that people ever read.

    I read this

    Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

    Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

    The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

    and had a few questions:

    1. What happened to labor? Is Google’s workforce organized along Taylorized lines? Reports suggest that the answer is “no,” at least for some subset of employees.
    2. How can the claim that the internet is encouraging Taylor-like efficiency be reconciled with an article premised on distraction and lack of concentration? It sounds like it is the search engine itself that’s being Taylorized.

    I read this

    “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

    and thought it sounded like marketing.

    I read this

    The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

    and thought it was a good point. I wondered if it would have been better to build the article around this observation rather than around reading. Page layouts, column widths, displaying articles on one or on multiple pages, print versions, linking within the same site or set of sites – all of these things affect the way we read and are affected by the way we read (since site designers have to try to grab and hold our attention). The internet is not just some undifferentiated entity known as “the internet”; search engines don’t just pull up “the best” or “the most efficient” results at the top. There is a sense in which technology “uses” us, sure, but that shouldn’t obscure the ways technology mediates the way people interact with or act upon each other. That’s one of the reasons we use the word “media” right? (Or is that a false etymology?)

    I read this

    In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

    and thought that what Plato and the article both leave out is the unreliability of memory and the ability to check it against a documentary record (which itself isn’t always reliable).

    I read this

    The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.

    and thought of Ann Blair’s article about Early Modern information overload, which you can find summarized here [dead link removed] and here [dead link removed] (the latter link points to an ungated version on this page).

    I read this

    The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

    and was reminded, despite my skepticism about much of the article, how much I too value sustained reading. But having read some books online in the past two years, I don’t know that it has to be print-based.

    I finished reading the article. I tracked down some links and planned to post on it in a day or two. I read some other things online. I turned off the computer and began reading this book, which I’ve been meaning to read since I mentioned it months ago. It could be years before I finish it.

    [The original post can still be viewed here.]

    My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.

    I read this

    Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

    and thought that I’ve been having the same experience for a few years now, except that when I lose a thread while reading a book or article online and look for something else, that something else is more text in another tab or window. Then I remembered that I’ve always had to put energy into concentrating on what I’m reading, even if I find it interesting. The only exceptions are things I find engrossing – even if I don’t find them interesting. What makes something engross me? I don’t exactly know. I’d say “good writing” but that’s hardly a satisfying explanation.

    I read this

    Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.

    and thought that the seeming thinness of research aimed mainly at gathering “telltale fact”s or “pithy quote”s resides more in its goals than in its methods.

    I read this

    I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

    and the sentiments felt familiar. I may have always had to work to keep focused on long writing, but I used to finish books at a much higher rate. Outside of required readings, I used to start multiple books at once until I found one that held my interest until I finished it, at which point I re-started the process. Now it seems like I’m always beginning books.

    I read this

    “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

    and thought, who can read War and Peace in any sort of “normal” way at all? I read it in bunches over a period of about a month, quickly at first when I was into it, more slowly when I began to get frustrated with the plot about halfway through, lethargically as I approached the end, determinedly as I read the final few hundred pages in one sitting, knowing that if I put it down I was in danger of never picking it up again. I reflected that reading fiction has always been a different experience with me than reading non-fiction. I can’t skim fiction. I might read blog posts quickly, but I don’t skim them unless I’m deciding whether or not to then read them.

    I read this

    As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

    and wondered if there was also evidence that they never went back and actually read those articles. I wondered if the authors considered that people may be exhibiting “a form of skimming activity” because they were skimming to see which of their search results were useful, if any. Or because they were curious about something they found but weren’t looking for. I wondered if browsing nearby books in the stacks is “a form of skimming activity.” I wondered if this says something about how people search as well as about how people read.

    I read this

    “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

    and tried to remember where I saw Wolf’s work discussed recently. I resisted searching for it right then and there. [I later looked and found it: Caleb Crain’s essay “Twilight of the Books” on the future of reading.]

    I read this

    Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

    and thought, that may be true, but doesn’t that mean we have the flexibility to re-wire if we change our behavior? So to the extent that there’s a change taking place, it might not be a permanent one.

    I read this

    Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

    and thought of Francis Parkman, who needed a special tool to help him hand-write along straight lines as his vision worsened.

    I read this

    In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

    and thought that maybe if I finish reading Mumford’s two best known Cities books, I might read some of his other work. I remembered that I decided not to get a used copy of Technics and Civilization recently because I wasn’t sure how it stood in relation to his other work – and, more importantly, because it was kind of heavy and I didn’t want to carry it when I moved.

    I read this

    When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.

    and was reminded of Marx writing that the bourgeoisie creates the world in its own image.

    I read the rest of that paragraph

    It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

    and thought: you can change a lot of those settings, you know.

    I read this

    The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

    and wondered if the author thought these were all bad developments. More ads and shorter articles certainly don’t seem like a positive step, but abstracts and snippets, done well, could be quite helpful. Assuming abstracts aren’t all that people ever read.

    I read this

    Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

    Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

    The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

    and had a few questions:

    1. What happened to labor? Is Google’s workforce organized along Taylorized lines? Reports suggest that the answer is “no,” at least for some subset of employees.
    2. How can the claim that the internet is encouraging Taylor-like efficiency be reconciled with an article premised on distraction and lack of concentration? It sounds like it is the search engine itself that’s being Taylorized.

    I read this

    “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

    and thought it sounded like marketing.

    I read this

    The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

    and thought it was a good point. I wondered if it would have been better to build the article around this observation rather than around reading. Page layouts, column widths, displaying articles on one or on multiple pages, print versions, linking within the same site or set of sites – all of these things affect the way we read and are affected by the way we read (since site designers have to try to grab and hold our attention). The internet is not just some undifferentiated entity known as “the internet”; search engines don’t just pull up “the best” or “the most efficient” results at the top. There is a sense in which technology “uses” us, sure, but that shouldn’t obscure the ways technology mediates the way people interact with or act upon each other. That’s one of the reasons we use the word “media” right? (Or is that a false etymology?)

    I read this

    In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

    and thought that what Plato and the article both leave out is the unreliability of memory and the ability to check it against a documentary record (which itself isn’t always reliable).

    I read this

    The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds.

    and thought of Ann Blair’s article about Early Modern information overload, which you can find summarized here and here (the latter link points to an ungated version on this page).

    I read this

    The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

    and was reminded, despite my skepticism about much of the article, how much I too value sustained reading. But having read some books online in the past two years, I don’t know that it has to be print-based.

    I finished reading the article. I tracked down some links and planned to post on it in a day or two. I read some other things online. I turned off the computer and began reading this book, which I’ve been meaning to read since I mentioned it months ago. It could be years before I finish it.

    subtlety

    I don’t know the politics of Ted Turner, but I saw in the listings that this movie was playing on Turner Classic Movies last night. I’d never heard of it before. I’ve still never seen it.