It's not just about Candy Bars!

At the beginning of this week, there was are really interesting report and discussion on confused of calcutta over the role that Facebook played in Cadbury deciding to reintroduce the Wispa candy bar, which it had withdrawn from production four years ago. The report originally appeared in the International Herald Tribune; and JP Rangaswami's blog post includes a link to this story. True to form, my own position in the ensuing discussion was to dampen the enthusiasm to a point where we could sort out signal from noise with cooler heads. However, another contributor named Nic pointed to a similar story that was emerging over operations at HSBC. His link pointed to a Guardian article about a policy that HSBC had introduced to provide interest-free overdrafts to university graduates to cover them over the period between graduation and starting the first job. It turned out that HSBC had decided to restore charging interest, and the university graduates responded with a massive protest through Facebook.

Today BBC News Education reporter Sean Coughlan has released a story that HSBC has reversed their decision:

HSBC is to abandon plans to scrap interest-free overdrafts for students leaving university this summer.

Thousands of students on Facebook had threatened to boycott the bank. The National Union of Students said this made all the difference to the protest.

The HSBC bank said it was not too big to listen to its customers.

Once again the pursuit of separating signal from noise is not an easy one, since Coughlan does not provide any data more precise than that "Thousands of students" phrase. Nevertheless, if one bothers to read the story in its entirety, one discovers that there is no mention of Facebook in any statement issues by HSBC. Rather, the only acknowledgement of the "Facebook effect" came from within the National Union of Students:

NUS vice president Wes Streeting said: "There can be no doubt that using Facebook made the world of difference to our campaign.

"By setting up a group on a site that is incredibly popular with students, it enabled us to contact our members during the summer vacation far more easily than would otherwise have been possible.

"It also meant that we could involve our former members - the graduates who were going to be most affected by this policy."

There are definitely data points in this text, but they should not be confused with Streeting's interpretation of them. Further investigation will be necessary to determine how much of a role Facebook actually played and what the nature of that role was. Nevertheless, this may be an excellent opportunity for social science to move from its usual theoretical perch into a more experimental discipline!

The Chutzpah of the "Gentleman's C"

Chutzpah on schedule: that's a little bit more like business as usual! As we should all know by now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), true to its middle name, has pointed the Fickle Finger of Fate at the Bush administration (and we all know about it because a draft of their report was leaked to the Washington Post yesterday afternoon). The report, whose final draft will be delivered to Congress on Tuesday, assesses our progress in Iraq on the basis of eighteen target goals; and the bottom line of the leak is that only three of those target goals have been met.

This is where the chutzpah enters the picture, on the basis of a report filed on the BBC NEWS site early this morning. In the tradition of a mediocre Yale student whose primary academic activities consisted in bargaining his grade up to the level of a "gentleman's C," the White House is contesting the GAO findings. The reason I invoke the "gentleman's C" metaphor, however, is that, according to the White House version, eight of the target goals have been met. Those of us who still have some math skills left to our names will quickly note that this is still less than half of the target set, which usually falls short of the criteria for even a "gentleman's" C; but the mere fact that the Bush administration has been reduced to this kind of petty bargaining over such a serious matter is the hallmark of true chutzpah.

Since this is a "group award," there is also the question of who would be the best recipient on the part of the administration. While there are many who would like to see our President amass an entire shelf of these awards, I think the recipient should go to the man most responsible for putting a public face on all this petty bargaining (whose credentials include not just a previous award but an award for his extraordinary skill in meta-chutzpah), Tony Snow. Here is how the BBC reported the latest Snow job:

White House spokesman Tony Snow also said the GAO's conclusions were unrealistic.

He said the GAO set the bar for success too high and did not assess whether progress had been made towards the benchmarks.

"The real question that people have is, 'What's going on in Iraq?' Are we making progress? Militarily, is the surge having an impact? The answer is 'Yes'," he said.

This is the magical-realism world of Gabriel García Márquez where those who play the game are not obliged to agree on the rules. As just about anyone outside the Bush administration (and that includes our country's electorate) knows, the real question is not whether the surge is having an impact but what that impact is. This is not a yes-or-no question. Indeed, the complexity is such that is not even a scale-of-one-to-ten question. The only satisfactory answer will be one of goal-by-goal accountability of what has actually been done without any quibbling over whether those achievements reduce to "met," "partially met," or "not met." I would hope that anyone who takes the time to read the final draft of the GAO report will be able to answer the making-progress question far better than Snow has done so simplistically.

Interviewing the Victims

My wife did not want to see the HBO Documentary White Light/Black Rain; so I have to confess that I did not get around to seeing the copy on my DVR hard drive until today. Watching it was not a pleasant experience; but it was such a well-made film that the unpleasantness of it all was at least tolerably bearable. Indeed, there was a strong positive feeling to be derived from the ways in which the survivors were able to finally talk about their experiences in ways they either could not or would not do over the past sixty years. Also, the balancing interviews with the Americans involved with the bombing missions over both Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to the value of the Japanese interviews without overdoing any sense of regret or contrition.

Most disconcerting, however, was the opening footage of interviews with today's "youth culture" in Japan. This simply documented, without any effort to pass judgment, how oblivious today's young are to what happened over sixty years ago; and one of the interviewed survivors was even blunt enough to state (without any particular emotional coloring) that the memory of what happened in August of 1945 will probably die with the last survivor. For me this confirmed my post on Hiroshima Day, where I talked about our proclivity for "cultural blindness." As one of the Americans observed, those who talk about using nuclear weapons today have absolutely no idea what they are talking about (not that ignorance has ever impeded any culture from making decisions with catastrophic consequences).

Finally, I was impressed by the clarity of language engaged by both the Japanese and Americans interviewed for this film, because it contrasted so radically with the way I hear and read language used today, whether through the media or in the workplace. Hegel spoke of the "end of history" as the culmination of progress to an ideal state from which further progress is impossible. For me the "end of history" will be a time when we either will not or (worse yet) can not talk about the past in clear and straightforward language. I fear we are close to that "end" than most would like us to believe; and, worse yet, I fear that those who care are a pretty sparse minority.

Knowledge of the Social World Considered Dangerous

I received an interesting comment from America Jones about my most recent reflections on the social world; and, given the level of substance in the comment, I decided that it would be better to address his points in a new post, rather than a "comment on the comment."

The first point is basically a be-careful-what-you-wish-for argument: If enterprise software eventually does get around to addressing the dynamics of the social world, it is just as likely to be used for ill as for good. Jones supports this position with a link to the recent Wired article on the current state of the art of FBI surveillance:

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.

This article also includes a link to a post by John Borland to the Wired Threat Level blog; and I was pleased to see that the comments to this post included a reminder of Thomas Hobbes "panopticon" concept.

I think America Jones has a point. It is hard enough to monitor a panopticon-like view of an overwhelming volume of data for a state that deserves more focused attention. Monitoring all those data for "process features" is problematic unto an extreme. Think of what an air traffic controller has to do and then bump it up by three or four (at least) orders of magnitude. If a theory of the social world were to lead to a technology that made that volume of data more manageable, then that technology would probably germinate a seed that would ultimately grow up into Big Brother. So, if we really do want to expand our knowledge of the social world, we shall have to be even more careful about were our investigations lead than were those researchers who contributed to the Manhattan Project!

America Jones also expresses concern that an increased understanding of the social world may raise "the potential of making an economic commodity out of knowledge." This is a problem that has concerned me since the earliest days of the knowledge management fad, and I sometime wonder if it was not just as well that the fad brought about more confusion than enlightenment over the nature of knowledge and its role in the workplace. Unfortunately, America Jones also falls victim to that classic confusion that results from philosophy students misreading Plato's "Theaetetus:" the assumption that knowledge is "justified true belief," even though Plato has Socrates tear this definition to shreds. Nevertheless, his point that "knowledge about knowledge" may be as dangerous as better analytic tools for "process features" is well taken; and I would apply the same cautionary remark to those who wish to seriously investigate it!

Avoiding Controversy

Having credited Agence France-Presse for its coverage of that 147-page report on the Virginia Tech massacre, it seems fair to note that I had to go to SPIEGEL ONLINE to learn about a rather interesting approach to composing a portrait of President George W. Bush. The composition is by Jonathan Yeo, a British artist who apparently went through several cycles of receiving a commission to paint a portrait of Bush, only to have that commission rescinded. Here is how the Spiegel report describes the consequences of this situation:

In the end, though, the artist decided to go ahead with his artistic portrayal of the 43rd president, even if he wasn't getting paid for it -- and created a portrait of Bush using a collage of pornographic images.

For those who must know, the article includes an image, both reduced and enlarged; and, yes, I did examine the enlarged version! I was reminded of the story of the proper British matron who complemented Doctor Samuel Johnson on how well he had avoided including any offensive words in his dictionary. Johnson's reply is now classic: "We're you looking for them, madam?" My own opinion is that one would not take the trouble to find what Spiegel called "offensive elements" in its caption without knowing the artist's source material; and, even then, it is quickly apparent that Yeo's use of his materials is far from blatant.

Needless to say, this latest exercise in artistic expression has succeeded in provoking:

The tribute has not gone over well with Bush's supporters. A spokesman for Republicans Abroad International described the portrait as a "cheap stunt" in an interview with the British tabloid The Sun. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Republican Party in Bush's home state of Texas didn't find much humor in the portrait either. "This picture is very distasteful," he told the paper, adding angrily, "Why would anyone want to make a picture of our president from pornographic material?"

The Spiegel article actually provides Yeo's answer to that question; however, since I suspect that many readers will have answers of their own, I shall let them dwell on them before consulting the Spiegel hyperlink!

The Scapegoating of Virginia Tech

I find it ironic (but not surprising) that Agence France-Presse has provided one of the better reports on the findings of the 147-page report on the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16 (beginning with the fact that they are the only source I have encountered that gave the page count). This report was prepared by an eight-member panel appointed by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, and it seems to do a good job of affirming my own reflection on April 19 about our "inbred cultural need to affix blame." Indeed, the lead paragraphs of the AFP story give the impression that affixing blame was the primary agenda item for the panel:

Virginia Tech was too slow to inform staff and students about a shooting incident in April that rapidly spiraled into the bloodiest campus massacre in US history, an investigation concluded Wednesday.

The probe by the US state of Virginia said lives might have been saved if not for crucial errors by university police and officials following the early morning shooting of two students on April 16 by mentally disturbed gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

Personally, I see this as yet another example of how we can set priorities that blind us to the realities of the social world. One has to wonder how much effort this panel put into understanding the realities of day-to-day life and work on the Virginia Tech campus from the point of view of students, administrators, the university police, and all other support staff. Indeed, one can wonder further whether any member of the panel could recall those realities from that chapter of personal life history that covered college days (or whether, for too many of the panel members, those realities were only perceived from within the walls of a fraternity or sorority house). There is also, of course, the nagging question of whether or not, in an age of academic budgets cut to the bone, Virginia Tech had the resources to deal with the pathologies of campus life, small or large.

Needless to say, that "inbred cultural need" explains why the report turned out as it did. If the Governor could not find a scapegoat for the blame, then he would be the most likely target. The only way he could cover his rear was to direct the fire elsewhere, and Virginia Tech was the easiest option. However, the trouble with assigning an "institutional scapegoat" is that it punts on the most important part of any post-crisis analysis: identifying action items as a precaution against future crises. The AFP report has little to say about this side of the story. What it does say is not encouraging:

The panel did not recommend any officials be dismissed as a result of the probe and stated that issues such as the right to bear arms and gun control were beyond its scope.

I read this as a "license to ignore action items," which makes me wonder just why the Governor needed those 147 pages in the first place.

A Few Thoughts about the Social World

Now that the discussions on confused of calcutta are beginning to recognize the social world, this seems like a good time to sort out a couple of key observations.

First of all, I think that the best way to understand the nature of the social world is in terms of motivated interpersonal actions. In the Kantian spirit of breaking a topic down into its components, that means we need a theory of action (a major topic in social theory), a theory of motives (which has occupied literary theory as much as social theory), and a theory of interpersonal dynamics (which I happen to think is still beyond our grasp because most of our abstractions involve statics rather than dynamics). In other words we have a long way to go before we understand the social world well enough to take a theoretical approach to managing the impact of new technologies on it!

Furthermore, in my own efforts to develop a better understanding of interpersonal dynamics, I have been revisiting the concept of "legitimate peripheral participation," which constitutes the subtitle of the book Situated Learning by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. However, while Lave and Wenger try to argue the distinction between legitimate peripheral participation and apprenticeship, I am becoming more and more convinced that the former is just “newspeak” (thank you, George Orwell) for the latter. The world that now revolves around enterprise software is also a world of educational institutions that have devalued the practice of apprenticeship as some antiquarian artifact from the days of craft workers. I find it sad that, in order to convey its relevance to “knowledge work” (whatever that may mean), we have to dress this practice up in new terminology!

Packaging Pathology as Entertainment

Almost exactly a month ago I posed the rhetorical question, "Can anyone do anything about the pathology of today's workplace?" Well, assuming that the latest post on Caroline McCarthy's "The Social" blog has not been taken in by the latest Internet hoax, it would appear that Redline Films has posed a non-rhetorical answer, which is to milk the situation for as much entertainment value as it will yield. Here is most of her post:

If you thought Kid Nation was pushing the envelope, wait till you hear about this one. Production company Redline Films has just announced that you can now audition for its latest creative masterpiece, Office Fight. It's exactly what you think it is: it'll take co-workers who don't like each other and make them go face-to-face in a boxing ring.

Do you find this as supremely awesome as I do? Of course! To make it even awesomer, getting involved with Office Fight is easy and you can totally be part of it too! Just e-mail Redline, tell them who you want to pummel and why ("Jason smells like rotten cheese," or "Sean totally meant to let his pet python loose in my cube," or the serious stuff, like "Andrew cheated me out of a promotion and then ran off with my wife"), and if you have a valid claim, you're in like Flint.

The production company will then come to your office to shoot some spicy B-roll of how much you and what's-his-name hate each other, and then they'll train you for two weeks. Then you fight. If there's enough space in your office, they'll set it up right there, but otherwise, they'll hold the event in a local gym. The judges, fittingly, will be your other co-workers, and you'll have to wager bets in which the currency is pure unadulterated shame. ("If you lose, you have to wear a chicken suit to the office for the next week.")

Redline seems to have discovered that you do not have to invest in slaves to take a mass-entertainment approach to gladiator combat (or perhaps they have discovered that they can capitalize on the already existing enslavement, or serfdom if you are a Hayek reader, of today's office workers)!

Synchronic and Diachronic Listening

Apparently JP Rangaswami is not the only writer who likes to assume the rhetorical stance of being confused. Anthony Tommasini has chosen to play the same rhetorical card in his New York Times story about The Sibelius Edition, a plan by Bis to release a 70-CD collection of the complete works of Jean Sibelius. Here is his reaction to the project:

Sibelius lovers, myself included, may find this project too much of a good thing. Nevertheless the fashion for completeness has been gaining hold on the classical recording industry.

It used to be enough to own, say, a complete Wagner “Ring” cycle, or Murray Perahia’s splendid recordings of the complete Mozart piano concertos. In the last 10 years we have had complete editions of the recordings of Maria Callas, of Artur Rubinstein and more. In recent years Brilliant Classics has released bargain-priced boxed sets of what is asserted to be the complete works of Bach (155 CDs) and Mozart (170 CDs), performed by some esteemed artists and many barely known.

The archival value of these projects is real. But especially with regard to Sibelius, who is the intended buyer? In a way, all of his pieces sound like rough-hewn works in progress. His musical language was essentially late Romantic in character, unaffected by the atonal upheavals of Schoenberg & Company. Yet the utterly unconventional way Sibelius fashioned his dark and brooding pieces makes his music sound radical on its own terms. Wayward harmonies, abrupt mood shifts, discontinuities and ruminative episodes are allowed to do what they will. The music is almost beyond historical place, like the late Beethoven string quartets.

That said, Sibelius’s best works, while elusive and confounding, convey emotional, dramatic, even psychic integrity. I’m not sure his reputation will be enhanced by having all of his sketchy experiments and early efforts (like the preliminary version of “Finlandia”) made available.

This all leads to a punch line in which Tommasini confesses to being "confused" over why this project was undertaken. So, as I have tried to do so many times in my reactions to JP's articles, I would like to try to resolve the confusion.

With all due respect to Tommasini's capitalist stance, I would like to begin with the suggestion that, rather than asking about the "intended buyer," we ask who is the intended listener. I take this position to honor that remark by Stravinsky that I recently cited, which addresses the question of what it means to be a "good listener." As we unpack Stravinsky's argument, it does not take much to recognize that that path to being a good listener is one that leads through (duh!) doing a lot of listening. Thus, the more we have at our disposal for listening, the better our chances at becoming good listeners (bearing in mind, as I observed about reading, that this result is far from guaranteed).

Now there are a variety of ways we can go down this path; and, while I have long been skeptical of their work, I would like to invoke a framework that I learned from Leonard Meyer and his student, Eugene Narmour. This framework is basic on the distinction between the synchronic and diachronic approaches one may take in examining a piece of music. (The distinction also applies to literature and has long been a subject of great controversy.) The operative definition of "synchronic" in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (fifth edition) is as follows:

Concerned with or pertaining to the state of a language, culture, etc., at one particular time, past or present, without regard to historical development.

Where music theory is concerned, this means that one addresses a composition without regard to the historical context of other compositions. One may even reduce the scale to examining a single movement of a symphony in isolation from the other movements. The diachronic approach thus entails taking such a context into account.

Now I personally believe that a good listener is a diachronic listener; and I further believe that, on the basis of the text I cited, Stravinsky thought the same. On the other hand I have to appreciate that Tommasini is primarily a newspaper critic; and, whatever attention he may pay to the recording business, his highest priority involves writing accounts of "live" performances. Having written such criticism in the past, I also subscribe to the principle that a good critic is a good journalist, providing the reader with well-written description and saving judgmental opinion for whatever column space (however anachronistic that concept may have become) may remain once the description has been completed. I thus honor Tommasini's need to take a synchronic stance and might only quibble with him on the question of scale, given my own interest in seeking out a unifying theme for an entire evening's program.

Having discussed this distinction, I would now argue that a collection like The Sibelius Edition best serves the needs of the diachronic listener. Indeed, my most recent listening experience with Sibelius was a decidedly diachronic one. It took place this past April, when Osmo Vänskä (who happens to be one of the conductors involved in the Sibelius Edition project) conducted the San Francisco Symphony in that composer's first symphony. Like most listeners I am far more familiar with Sibelius' second symphony than I am with his first; but it took Vänskä's performance to reveal the extent to which many of the "seeds" of that second symphony are being "planted" in the first. Whether or not one might hear, in a chronological approach to the full corpus of Sibelius' compositions, the sort of "diary in music" that I have claimed to find in Mahler's work may not have been resolved by the music theorists; but it is a hypothesis that can only be resolved through diachronic listening. Furthermore, Bis and Vänskä already committed themselves to a diachronic examination of Sibelius when they released a CD of his violin concerto that coupled the 1905 version with the first recording of the original version of 1903/04. This makes for listening as fascinating as the three takes of "Tea for Two" that were made available on The Complete Bud Powell on Verve.

All this is my way of saying that I am far less "confused" about the BIS Sibelius project than Tommasini claims to be. (Of course, by way of disclaimer, I should remind readers that I already invested in the BIS collection of the complete piano music of Edvard Grieg and have never regretted that purchase!) It is not just a question of "archival value." It is a matter of having more resources through which I can learn to be a good listener and making those resources available to as many would-be good listeners as the market will allow!

It's the Poverty, Stupid!

The good news about the Associated Press report of the study by the Trust for America's Health, which ranks Mississippi as "the fattest in the nation," is that it goes beyond (in its own words) "making Mississippi the butt of late-night talk show jokes" by recognizing that this is not so much a story about obesity, or even the impact of obesity on public health, as it is about poverty. Here are the key paragraphs from the report:

Poverty and obesity often go hand in hand, doctors say, because poor families stretch their budgets by buying cheaper, processed foods that have higher fat content and lower nutritional value.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a self-described "recovering foodaholic" who lost 110 pounds several years ago explained during a Southern Governors' Association meeting in Biloxi last weekend that there are historical reasons poor people often fry their foods: It's an inexpensive way to increase the calories and feed a family.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the nation, and the Delta is the poorest region of Mississippi.

That Delta region, of course, shared with New Orleans the dubious honor of being one of Katrina's prime targets. Thus, all the that cautionary prose by Walter Mosley that I cited yesterday applies as much to the Delta (if not the rest of Mississippi) as it does to New Orleans. Couple these observations with President Bush's announcement last month that he would veto legislation to renew a program that provides health coverage to poor children, and we see that the Delta is as much a "front line" in the war against the poor as is that fortress of unbridled capitalism, the new floor of Saks devoted entirely to designer shoes. When the neglect of the impoverished by public health policy is at stake, it is hard to ignore what I have previously called "the reduce-the-surplus-population philosophy of Ebenezer Scrooge." Scrooge, of course, ultimately changed his ways, but only through the narrative machinations of his creator, Charles Dickens. The fate of the population of Mississippi rests in the hands of agents acting of their own free will, rather than the decisions of some skilled author; and, if there really is a war against the poor, then someone should be asking those agents which side they are taking in current and future battles.

The Inexorable Rhetoric of Literature

The mainstream media are already in the process of "celebrating" the second anniversary of the Katrina disaster. As early as last night ABC News had already relocated their anchor to New Orleans. Those scare quotes are, of course, an indicator of irony; and the irony, in turn, is a reminder of an arrogance of an industry the cares only about selling soap, regardless of whether the news is good or bad.

As I write this, I am listening to Igor Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex oratorio, whose libretto is basically Sophocles as interpreted by Jean Cocteau. That interpretation begins with an Oedipus full of his own arrogance for having saved Thebes from the Sphinx now having to contend with the outbreak of a plague. When the Delphic oracle declares that the plague is a punishment for the murder of its previous king, Laius, Oedipus' arrogance leads him to demand that he learn the truth behind his murder, whatever the consequences may be. The ultimate consequence, of course, is that he pays for his arrogance.

Reading Walter Mosley's essay for The Nation about Katrina I could not help but be reminded of the arrogance of Oedipus. It is the same arrogance that transmogrified a culture from waging war against poverty to waging war against the poor. It is the arrogance of what Lewis Lapham has come to call the "American Ruling Class" that constitutes the focal point of Mosley's well-wrought prose:

Not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age.

The disaster named after the hurricane is not confined to the areas affected. Every emergency room, empty bank account and outsourced life's work could be named. We live in a country rife with ignored and condemned poverty. The rich, high on their great corporate steeds, ride over us believing that they are out of the reach of global warming and its symptoms, of terrorism and dwindling natural resources. When government officials tell them to evacuate, they drive their cars, board their corporate jets or simply climb to higher ground with ease. At this very moment they are looking down on Baghdad and New Orleans, Pakistan and Sudan, you and me. The feeling of invulnerability that these people have is unfounded, but nonetheless it makes them reckless. They take chances and cut corners believing that everything will come out all right. Their delusions of grandeur and ultimate power put us in ever more dire straits.

However, Mosley does not stop with criticizing that Ruling Class. Rather, he then extends the argument to recognize how all American citizens have had their values warped by the Ruling Class, particularly through the influence of the media controlled by that Class:

If we call ourselves Americans (and mean it), then we are all victims of Katrina. If we breathe the air or eat fresh fruit, if we call on our cellphones, drink water from a plastic bottle or just nibble on a chocolate bar, then we are Katrina; we are the rising waters around the ankles of this world.

When the day comes to mark off the two-year point since the deluge descended on the Gulf of Mexico, we should take care not to make too much noise. We shouldn't march in that shadow of time or even protest. Rather, we should sit alone in a room with our imaginations open to feel what they experienced on that day: the waters rising, rising and us climbing stairs and ladders, chairs and fire escapes; sitting on rooftops while bodies float by; calling out to passing boats and helicopters that go by in mute witness; being pressed to the roof by the rising tide and being engulfed shouting, shouting out for the ones we love underwater, unheard; the darkness swirling around us as we die with no one coming to save us, or themselves.

This, in turn, brings Mosley to the climax of his conclusion:

Two years have passed and we are still exporting democracy while we continue living under the semibenevolent oligarchy of international corporations and their candidates. This two-year point measures how far we have sunk under the weight of the rich and their political flunkies--while so many of us still celebrate them as if they were pop stars. We experience the silence of drowning men and women. We call out and are not heard. We believe in systems and people who have no faith in us. We perpetuate the rising temperatures and waters and hatred and feelings of hopelessness. New Orleans's defeat is also our defeat. Its closed schools are a metaphor for our minds and our futures. We see the storm's passage but we don't see it coming. But it is coming. And there are no leaders, no corporations, no benevolent billionaires who are going to save our grandmothers and our babies. We must unite outside of the systems that lie like fast food heaped on golden platters at our feet. We must organize at the ground level, where the water has already begun to rise.

Thus, by invoking the rhetoric of literature, Mosley has seen through to the painful premise that the havoc of Katrina also serves as a metaphor for the havoc that Ruling Class arrogance has brought and will continue to bring. Furthermore, the environmental implications of that arrogance have escalated the consequences from the Gulf of Mexico to the entire planet (as any number of this summer's news reports have confirmed). Mosley believes we must unite to confront this arrogance. Cocteau, however, understood that such arrogance can only be brought down by "an inconvenient truth;" but, as the Gore lecture/documentary has demonstrated, that truth will not set us free but will bring us down along with the arrogant. This is what I shall be thinking when I sit alone in that room, imagining how others felt when the levees broke and the water kept rising.

Facebook in the Funny Papers

I am happy to report that my ongoing argument with JP Rangaswami over Facebook has been distilled into the mini-narrative of a Sunday comic strip. The strip is Elderberries, a delightful account by Phil Frank and Corey Pandolph of life in the Elderpark supervised-living retirement community (or, as the artists put it, "a great place to park your elder"). This strip is provided to the Web by GoComics and is currently on the Elderberries home page. As of tomorrow, it should be on the page for the date August 26, 2007. I got a good laugh out of how Frank and Pandolph managed to capture both JP and myself, and I hope that JP can share the humor!

Citizen Journalism: The Latest Dispatch from the Front

The logo for News Groper says, "News Analysis by Newsmakers;" but, as Caroline McCarthy pointed out on the latest post on The Social, her CNET News.com blog, "the title of every News Groper page contains the terms 'Fake parody blogs, Political humor, Celebrity Satire, Funny Commentary.'" However, as McCarthy pointed out, this did not prevent MSNBC reporter Alex Johnson from taking one of the items, a satirical fabrication of Al Sharpton commenting on the Michael Vick dog fighting case, for the real thing. The timing could not be better, since Scott Gant was on Book TV last night talking about his book, We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age. What I had not realized was that Gant is a lawyer with no direct experience in journalism. This may be one reason why, in the course of the hour he spent talking about his book, the word "editor" was never used. It strikes me that the really bad news about this item is that MSNBC seems to be embracing the "citizen journalism" standard of editing (which is to say none at all). At the very least, it would not surprise me if more editing goes into turning out good parodies over at News Groper than goes into preparing material for broadcast or "Web release" over at MSNBC.

Interaction Rituals: An Introduction

Yesterday I found myself taking umbrage over Amy Jo Kim, primarily on the basis of her decision to title a book Community Building On The Web. I decided it was time to take on all of those rabid technology evangelists, whose only rhetorical technique seemed to involve using words so casually as to evade even an intuitive grasp of what they mean (let alone anything objective enough to support necessary and sufficient conditions). The word that set me off, of course, was “community;” and, after a bit of research, I discovered that most of my heroes in the scholarly literature (both present and past) do a pretty good job of steering clear of it. The Shorter OED definition, “A body of individuals,” is too general to provide a benchmark for whether or not “community building” (or, for that matter, another favorite bête noir of mine, "online community") is a viable concept in either theory or practice. However, if we turn to the first man to write a substantive treatise about community, Ferdinand Tönnies (certainly the most venerable of the sources cited in the Wikipedia entry for “community,” even if I do not think the author of that entry read him very well), we find that he invokes the term to signify that “body of individuals” structured along organic lines, as distinguished from a “society,” which Tönnies sees as an “imaginary and mechanical structure.”

In the twentieth century one of the social theorists who best appreciated the need for organic, rather than mechanical, thinking in dealing with the social world was Erving Goffman; and on this blog I seem to invoked Goffman twice in dealing with issues of enterprise software, primarily for his insights into the nature of conversation as a social practice. More importantly, however, Goffman recognized that there was a lot more to interpersonal engagements than conversation; so he introduced a piece of terminology to accommodate this broader category. That terminology is the phrase, "interaction ritual" (IR). Unfortunately, the only appearance of that terminology in the Wikipedia entry for Goffman is for the title of his book, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior; and, as the reader can see, the hyperlink on this title points to a placeholder. So I have decided to use this post to provide some introductory remarks about this concept in the hope of blowing away all that blue smoke that the technology evangelists keep puffing. However, by way of a disclaimer, my effort to discuss this concept will not draw upon Goffman's book but on some excellent summary material prepared by Randall Collins in his book, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change.

Here is how Collins introduces the concept:

"Interaction ritual" is Goffman’s term, by which he calls attention to the fact that the formal religious rituals which Durkheim analyzed are the same type of event which happens ubiquitously in everyday life. Religious rituals are archetypes of interactions which bind members into a moral community, and which create symbols that act as lenses through which members view their world, and as codes by which they communicate.

Put another way, ritual provides the basic framework within which we derive understanding from our communicative actions. Notice, also, how Collins deals with the terminology of "community." He does not talk about a community being built; rather, by drawing upon religion as an analogy, he talks about a "binding" of members, without going into detail over either the nature of the bonds or how they are formed, because these are secondary concerns. Collins then develops this analogy as follows:

Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level. Intellectual sacred objects can be created and sustained only if there are ceremonial gatherings to worship them. This is what lectures, conferences, discussions, and debates do: they gather the intellectual community, focus members’ attention on a common object uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions around those objects.

It is at this point that we must begin to assess Goffman's theories (and Collins' interpretations) in light of how technology has shifted our context. When Goffman was studying "face-to-face behavior," the idea of a "virtual world" had not even entered the realm of science fiction. Thus, we now need to reexamine Goffman's observations and conclusions it terms of whether or not they can take place in software-mediated encounters as they do in those face-to-face situations. If nothing else, the gamer world has sensitized us to the proposition that "sacred objects" can reside in virtual worlds; and, regardless of whether or not they have succeeded, we have to examine the extent to which Second Life has tried to implement what Collins calls "intellectual sacred objects."

The next stage in Collins' exposition is to recognize that an interaction ritual rarely exists in isolation but, rather, is "chained" to a context of related rituals; and it is that context that embodies the nature of the concept of "community:"

An intellectual IR is generally a situational embodiment of the texts which are the long-term life of the discipline. Lectures and texts are chained together: this is what makes the distinctiveness of the intellectual community, what sets it off from any other kind of social activity.

The last stage of Collins' exposition that I would like to examine concerns how these "interaction ritual chains" are constituted, because this returns us to the question of the nature of those social bonds and how they are formed. There are three elements that constitute such bonds:

1. Cultural capital
2. Emotional energy
3. Stratified network structures

Here is what Collins says about cultural capital:

Each person acquires a personal repertoire of symbols loaded with membership significance. Depending on the degree of cosmopolitanism and social density of the group situations to which they have been exposed, they will have a symbolic repertoire of varying degrees of abstraction and reification, of different generalized and particularized contents. This constitutes their cultural capital (CC).

Here is his synopsis of emotional energy:

And they will have, at any point in time, a level of emotional energy (EE), by which I mean the kind of strength that comes from participating successfully in an interaction ritual. It is a continuum, ranging from a high end of confidence, enthusiasm, good self-feelings; through a middle range of lesser emotional intensity; on down to a low end of depression, lack of initiative, and negative self-feelings. Emotional energy is long-term, to be distinguished from the transient, dramatically disruptive outbursts (fear, joy, anger, etc.) which are more conventionally what we mean by "emotions."

Finally, the networks that derive from the formation of these social bonds are stratified, which simply means that not all members of the network are "created equal." Different individuals exhibit different levels of activity (intellectual, emotional, and/or cultural) in interactive behavior; and, more often than not, the strata reflect, rather than define, the activity that takes place. I recently discussed the role of Usenet and what may have been the earliest demonstration of a "community of communities" in a virtual world; but it is probably more accurate to say that Usenet demonstrated that the virtual world could sustain a stratified network structure just as readily as the physical world could. Furthermore, anyone who gave a serious number of cycles to participating in one or more Usenet groups knows that the activities in those groups were rich (sometimes too rich?!?) in both cultural capital and emotional energy.

So can we conclude anything by virtue of a "cleaner" sense of all that terminology that the evangelists tried to drag through the mud? Actually, I think those evangelists can derive some benefit from this exercise. We not only have a more robust foundation for the concept of "community;" but also we have discovered that this concept can accommodate social bonds in the virtual world as readily those of the physical world. On the other hand our understanding of the nature of those bonds probably supports the dismissal of the concept of "community building" as (to invoke language I appropriated in an earlier post) techno-centric tosh. Finally, I hope I have now affirmed my previously-stated assertion that the social theory literature can be just as exciting (if not more so) than any of those books put out by the technology evangelists!

Ironic Piety

It turns out that the reason the announcement for the "Bon Voyage" concert by the San Francisco Symphony last night did not include information about the soloist is that the soprano who will be singing the final scene from Richard Strauss' Salome in Europe was not performing with them last night. As I shall elaborate, this did not in any way diminish the quality of the evening here. The program was still the same one I had previously cited, and there is a lot to say about it.

My choice of title is intended to reflect a question that often arises when I face a program like this one: How seriously should I be taking the whole affair? There was a lot of overt spectacle in the program, but much of that spectacle had an ironic edge to it. I would like to explore that edge in terms of the two symphonies on the program and then extend the exploration to the rest of the program.

It is hard to imagine two symphonists less alike than Charles Ives and Dmitri Shostakovich. As I have previously argued, if we want to find a kindred spirit for Ives, we would do better to look backwards to Brahms than forwards to twentieth-century Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, at least on the surface, both symphonies on the program (Ives' third and Shostakovich's fifth) may be viewed through the lens of a pious acknowledgement of authority. In Ives' case the authority is sacred in the form of the nineteenth century religious camp meetings. For Shostakovich, whose symphony was labeled by an "ideologically correct" (but anonymous) reviewer as "a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism," the authority was secular. Nevertheless, it is not that all far-fetched to group together God and Stalin, at least in terms of stories about how they respectively exercised their authority, in which case it is also not far-fetched to ask whether composers as creative as Ives and Shostakovich where actually submitting to authority or invoking irony in ways that would elude the perceptions of more superficial listeners.

I can only speculate about how serious Ives was about his religion; but this was a man who could treat the burial of the family dog ("Slow March: Inscribed to the Children's Faithful Friend") with all the solemnity associated with a proper Christian burial, complete with an unadorned citation of the "Dead March" from Handel's Saul. My guess is that Ives had a child's perception of religion, always capable of seeing through the overly serious and just as always on the lookout for opportunities for fun. We thus have one of the richest collections of Sunday School hymns as can be found in any of Ives' works, all of which are deconstructed and patched together in oddly appealing configurations. When a tune emerges long enough to be recognized, the emergence is blatant, as with the trombone booming out with the longest stretch of "Fountain Filled with Blood" we ever get to hear.

Does all this amount to that "ironic edge;" or is it just exuberant celebration? For me the answer resides in the final movement, where the most central hymn is concealed to an extent where it can barely be recognized. What is the tune that is so scrupulously concealed? The text is "Just As I Am, Without One Plea." Is Ives asking us to accept him, as the composer of this statement, "just as he is" while, at the same time, concealing just who he is? I have no idea; but, sitting there listen to Michael Tilson Thomas bring out all the intricacies of this complex score in ways that a recording can never capture, I found myself thinking for the first time about all those subtexts that could be lurking behind all that was familiar in Ives' scores.

It is this idea of the need for a subtext that connects Shostakovich to Ives. After all, Shostakovich got himself on Stalin's bad side with Lady Macbeth of the Mtzensk District. Whatever Ives may have believed about the wrath of God, Shostakovich had plenty of "hard evidence" that the wrath of Stalin could be far worse. At least on the surface, his situation was far more desperate than that of any Christian penitent; and his fifth symphony may be seen as a desperate plea for Stalin's mercy and forgiveness. If the propagandistic press can be taken as the yardstick of success, then this symphony did the trick for poor Shostakovich; but was it really a "reply to just criticism?" Now that we are at a safe distance in time, it is hard to imagine that Stalin was ever capable of "just criticism" of music; and Shostakovich must have known this. However, he also knew that he could never let on that he knew it; and I doubt if we shall ever be able to tease out of the historical record what Shostakovich really thought. His very soul was too fried by the prospect of terrible persecution to ever make a directly honest statement.

So can we "listen for subtexts" in this symphony? My personal feeling is that this is the only way we can approach it. So much of it is rendered in such broad brush strokes and in such bite-sized gestures that we have to believe that this was a meal cooked strictly for Stalin's satisfied consumption. This is not to say that the craft is missing, but it is still a craft of manipulation. Thus, the middle section of the first movement comes off more as an effort to "pep things up" (because the serious side has gone on long enough) than the sort of turn-on-a-dime mood swing that comes from suddenly wondering if there is a knife at your back. Then the final movement bursts forth in a sustained acceleration that is less growing celebration and more running faster and faster without being sure who or what is pursuing you. The conclusion is, of course, as celebratory as Stalin could have wanted it to be; but we can still hear the celebration with an awareness of the assassins who have been assigned seats in the stadium. So it is that I feel Shostakovich could not have seen this work through to its conclusion without being sustained by the efforts of scrupulously concealing an ironic subtext.

Between these two "pillars of irony," the program offered the final scene from Salome sung by soprano Lise Lindstrom. At the very least this is a case where the libretto has to be read at more than a surface level. Oscar Wilde wrote it in French (at least some sign of concealment), leaving the translation into English to Lord Alfred Douglas. My own feeling is that Wilde had set himself the ideological task of demonstrating that the proper aesthetic veneer could make even the most offensive pornography palatable. Given what literature has produced since his time, the text now seems far tamer; but we can still appreciate how far over the top Wilde wanted to take it. This brings us to Strauss. Wilde could derive wit from the practices of excess, particularly his own; but you have to wonder whether or not Strauss realized that wit was at the heart of it all. This is a case where the music is very much a surface reading of the text, but what a reading it is! So much is piled on to the few paragraphs of this scene that coordinating all of the instrumental voices against the soprano's delivery is as daunting a task as juggling all the hymn fragments in Ives (and, in this particular case, the orchestra resources for Strauss are so much larger). Meanwhile, Lindstrom opted for a minimum amount of dramatization, mostly around presenting Salome as totally unhinged with the consequences of getting her way with Jochanaan. The only weakness came at the end when, on the stage, Salome is killed by the soldiers. Lindstrom just stood erect with outstretched arms, looking a bit like Joan of Arc at the stake (whoops! that's Honegger!).

This brings me back to the very beginning of the concert, John Adams' "Short Ride on a Fast Machine." Like many, I came to know this work through the San Francisco Symphony recording, where it was released as one of Two Fanfares for Orchestra. Even this is a case in which subtext may have come into play. After all, between Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and Leo Arnaud's "Olympic Theme," our sense of fanfare has been enculturated almost to the point of triviality. Therefore, there has to be some irony in the fact that this fanfare (for the 1986 Great Woods Festival) was conceived from a sense of raw self-indulgence, best captured in Adams' own words: "You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn't?" Nevertheless, as audience we have the luxury of seeing the fun in both the up-side and the down-side of such an experience; and, since Thomas conducted the work at its premiere, this was very much a horse's-mouth performance (for which the horse got to take a bow, too)! Not all irony has to cut to the bone.

As I mentioned previously, this was basically the program that the Symphony will be performing at the BBC Proms concert on September 1. This is a rather peculiar social setting, particularly if one chooses to "promenade" on the floor; and I have to wonder if such "promenading" is good for the kind of reflection that irony usually provokes. So the experience in London is likely to be quite different from the more formal setting of Davies Symphony Hall, although I have to wonder if the person in the balcony who seems to have been "moved by the Spirit" to give off a joyous hoot before the final notes of the Ives symphony had even sounded might have been preparing for a Proms experience!

Confused about Communities

The latest "Facebook foray" over at confused of calcutta shifts the front of the battle over to "community building." The first shot in this case is an unabashed advertisement for an out-of-print book (reinforced with endorsements from Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and Jon Katz):

It’s rare for me to buy more than three copies of a book, and Amy Jo Kim’s seminal Community Building On The Web is one such book. It’s so good that, over the last seven years or so, I have repeatedly bought it and given it away. Which was fine when the book was actually in print, but started getting a tad expensive when I had to go into the secondary market for it.

While the book continues to be “out of print” in a traditional sense, I’m glad to see that Peachpit now make a PDF download available, albeit at a price.

This then provides the opportunity to put out more Facebook flags:

What does all this have to do with Facebook? Well, I wanted to get you hooked into the way I was thinking when I first came across Facebook. I didn’t think of it as a “social networking” site. I saw it as an online community, one that had been built by people who understood the precepts and guidelines of people like Amy Jo Kim.

The scope of those precepts can best be grasped through the table of contents of the Kim book:

• Introduction: Calling All Community Builders
• Purpose: The Heart of Your Community
• Places: Bringing People Together
• Profiles: Getting to Know Your Members
• Roles: From Newcomer to Oldtimer
• Leadership: The Buck Stops Here
• Etiquette: Rules to Live By
• Events: Meetings, Performances and Competitions
• Rituals: Handshakes, Holidays and Rites of Passage
• Subgroups: Committees, Clubs and Clans

This then provides the grounds for the "big gun" thesis statement:

Facebook is not a “social networking” site. It is a community of communities. Now this is potentially of immense value in an enterprise, if we use it sensibly.

Fortunately, Balaji Sowmyanarayanan was there with a comment to put things into a most useful perspective:

All of this is true with Usenet too.
But FB is sugar coated blackhole trap.

This transported me back to the realm of cautionary remarks (particularly Marx') about those who ignore history. Usenet has much to teach us about the “community of communities” phenomenon; and, as old-fashioned as I am, I felt that, at least in its earlier days, the content was richer for being limited to text. However, I think there are more lessons to be learned than Balaji chose to invoke in his comment.

Most important is that Usenet was not about community building. It was about creating forums for discussion of topics of shared interest. This is neither a necessary nor a sufficient attribute of a community. Communities certainly emerged within many of the discussion groups, and that emergence could lead to the formation of new discussion groups. However, the very concept of community building seems to be invoked the most by those who have never seriously studied the social theory of communities and, as a result, quickly cotton on to all the surface features (as in the topics of the chapters of Kim's book) while in blissful ignorance of the “deep structure.” (I took my flame-thrower down this road back in the days of the communities-of-practice fad.)

So Usenet was primarily about enabling conversations (one of those "four pillars" of enterprise software that I recently tried to unpack); but it was also about providing the option to moderate those conversations (which is why I continue to argue for the need for quality editing). A Usenet moderator was, first and foremost, a filter. However, other forms of moderation surfaced, with responsibilities often shared by members of the group. An important one was keeping the discussion “on topic.” Another, which I would often do voluntarily, was to “review the bidding:” When a discussion got hot and heavy, going down many different paths at once, it was useful to synopsize the key points and contributors and identify the outstanding issues and questions that still needed to be resolved.

Finally, while Usenet preceded the Internet with its use of gateway management technology, its population was extremely limited compared to today’s Internet demographics. The opening of the Internet killed many (most?) of the discussion groups, for the simple reason that people flooded in for no other reason than to babble. Content quickly sank to the lowest common denominator (if not lower); and many of the original participants who had engaged Usenet as a resource began to see it as a waste of time.

Marx’ remark about repeating history, as many know, was that what is tragedy the first time comes around as farce the second time. The deterioration of the quality of discussion on Usenet may have been the first great tragedy of the Internet. Perhaps what Balaji called a “sugar coated blackhole trap” is just the farce of the second appearance.

Meanwhile, I hope that those who are seriously interested in community-like behavior in either the virtual or the physical world will spend less time with books by technology evangelists and more time with the more serious (but just as exciting) social theory literature!

In Praise of JOHN's Gospel

Bill Carter has a piece in today's New York Times about the "stumbling" of HBO:

Has HBO, the pay-television channel stocked with so many outstanding shows that it declared itself in a category all its own — as in “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” — finally tumbled from its pedestal of prestige?

While the channel rejects that notion as both inaccurate and unfair, some of its long-suffering competitors are only too eager to advance that message. As evidence they point to the final exit from center stage of HBO’s greatest performer, “The Sopranos,” and the subsequent quick demise of the show that inherited its spot on the schedule, the quirky surfer tale “John From Cincinnati.”

Lest readers think that my review of Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare's As You Like It was intended as another nail in Carter's coffin, I feel a need to say a few words in praise of John From Cincinnati.

First of all, I do not follow the media "buzz" when it comes to choosing my own entertainment. My wife and I watch what we want to watch; and, when it involves a series, we have periodic "sanity checks" over whether we really want to continue. Thus, I had no idea how John was playing to audiences in general. However, I was certainly not surprised that it "didn't resonate," in the words of Michael Lombardo, the president of the HBO Programming Group. I suppose I was also not surprised that, at least according to Lombardo, the series received "poor critical response." The truth is that it was not particularly easy to write a newspaper column on what that series was about or to classify it according to some familiar ontology of genres. Since I am currently immersing myself in the life and work of Lennie Tristano, I know that defying genre categories can be the kiss of death among both critics and the audiences who read them. So I feel some need to set down a few words about why I was as passionately supportive of this series as I was passionately antipathetic towards Branagh's latest attack on Shakespeare.

Most importantly, this series was, by no means, a "quirky surfer tale," although I am sure that Carter was far from the only one who described it that way. In Kenneth Burke's terminology surf culture, particularly that part of the culture centered in Imperial Beach (a key choice because of its proximity to the Mexican border), certainly establishes the scene but is relatively secondary with respect to the acts that constitute the narrative. This was best appreciated by a San Francisco Chronicle critic's reference to magical realism, which, in many ways, is a license to stretch logic to the breaking point, if not beyond; and one way of viewing magical realism is as a literary perspective on theology, the primary scene where it is acceptable to logic to be trumped (in the case of theology, by acts of faith and their consequences). From this point of view, just as Seymour Chatman had analyzed Mon Oncle d'Amerique as argumentation cast in the framework of narrative, John From Cincinnati is, at its core, a theological exposition rendered through narrative, instead of the more systematic structures of paragraphs that state and support a thesis. Furthermore, it is a theology of self-reflection. If prayer is the ultimate reflective act through which we try to confront who we are and what role we play in the complexity of the cosmos, then just about every character in this series engages in such acts; and, whether or not there were any thoughts of continuing the series (which seem to have been dispatched by now), all of those characters come to a closure that gave the final episode a satisfying sense of conclusion, however many petty questions of logic were still littering the narrative landscape.

Yes, I can understand why an exercise like this would not have a strong following. On the other hand I finally got around to watching Absolute Wilson yesterday, and I never expected that Robert Wilson would have a strong following. Indeed, Wilson's greatest supporters and enthusiasts remain outside the United States; so it would not surprise me if John From Cincinnati garners similar support in both Europe and Asia. My first exposure to Wilson was when I saw King of Spain over 35 years ago, and I had absolutely no idea what to make of it. John From Cincinnati left me just as stunned; but this time around I had more interpretive skills in my knapsack and enough eagerness to engage them that I could make something out of it all!

The Wisdom of Dwight David Eisenhower

Presumably, the budgetary neglect of both health coverage for poor children and education benefits for veterans of Iraq can be attributed to the mismanagement of funding in Iraq itself, which seems more concerned with maintaining the support of war profiteers than seeing to the need of the troops. In this context it is good to see John Nichols, in his blog for The Nation, reminding us of what former President Eisenhower had to say in 1953, when one of his highest priorities was getting our troops out of the quagmire on the Korean peninsula:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [...] This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Eisenhower was far from the "great communicator" that Ronald Reagan was; but it is valuable to recall that his texts often embodied far more substantive content!

Branagh Versus Shakespeare

Yes, there are some good things about Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare's As You Like It, which had its first airing on HBO last night. Kevin Kline made the melancholy Jacques a far more interesting character than the usual stereotypes of him. His only down side was having to deliver the "seven ages of man" monologue as if it were a set piece that had little business being in the play (the splices on either side of the speech were practically, if not actually, audible); but, even so, he gave it an admirable delivery. He was also wonderful in playing off Alfred Molina's Touchstone; and Molina was not afraid to go over the top, particularly in his scenes with Janet McTeer's Audrey. Finally, lest I forget, Audrey's goat was definitely up there in the same class with Kline and Molina.

All the rest was a colossal mess, best called "ill seen and ill said," would that not involve ripping off Samuel Beckett. This was not strictly a matter of trying to set the play in late nineteenth-century Japan (after the country had been "opened"). After all, Kurosawa was as good at setting Shakespeare in Japan as he was at setting a John Ford Western in Japan; but, when it comes to making a film, Branagh is no Kurosawa. Yes, there are a few pratfalls that are good for a laugh, until you realize that Branagh just throws one in when he cannot figure out what else to do. Then, of course, there is the final song-and-dance after all the simultaneous marriages, running wild through the forest and sounding for all the world like the chorus behind Andy Williams singing, "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." As a teenage girl said in a one-act play I once saw, "It's to barf!"

Facebook in the Enterprise: The Reality Factor

This morning Tim Ferguson filed a story on CNET News.com that nicely complemented my recent post about the impact of Facebook on worker productivity. Ferguson's story is about a poll recently conducted by the security company Sophos, which he nicely summarizes in his "secondary" headline:

Half of businesses are restricting employees' access to social-networking site Facebook, due to concerns about productivity and security.

The productivity factor basically aligned with the results I had previously reported, so much of my interest was in the security side of the coin. Here are the results that caught (seized?) my attention:

The issue of security was also raised by the Sophos research. In a separate poll by the company, 66 percent of workers said they are concerned about colleagues sharing information on Facebook.

Details such as employment history and mobile phone numbers have been found on the site and could be used for identity theft or to launch corporate phishing attacks, security experts warn.

Sophos research found that 41 percent of Facebook users are willing to divulge personal information to complete strangers.

Sophos last week released the results of a Facebook ID probe indicating that a relatively large percentage of people were willing to divulge e-mail addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and other data to a stranger--a fake character created by Sophos, in this case--who requested "friend" status of 200 randomly selected Facebook members.

"Everyone's just sort of letting it all hang out online without thinking who might be watching," [Graham] Cluley [a Sophos "senior technology consultant"] said.

So, if JP Rangaswami really does believe in that "wisdom of crowds," then is there not some element of "wisdom" in those 66 percent of the participants in the Sophos survey; and, if so, what does that wisdom entail?

My guess is that this is not a story about the triumph of an "economics of abundance" over an "economics of scarcity," as JP has recently tried to argue. (Indeed, I find the very concept of an economics of abundance to be as suspect as any other utopian ideal; but that is another story better told by H. G. Wells or Isaiah Berlin!) Rather this story involves an issue raised in a comment by Peter Smith, which is the proper role of freedom in enterprise work. Smith sees enterprise management through the lens of the conflict between freedom and controls; but I wonder if this might be a case where we should be thinking in terms of a dialectical synthesis, rather than an opposition. Just as Justice Holmes recognized that freedom of speech is not the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded building, enterprise managers need to find the right mix of freedom and controls that can derive benefit for social networking sites while remaining cognizant of their risks and liabilities. This is clearly no easy matter; but, in a world of complexities and consequences, why should we kid ourselves into believing that major management decisions should be easy?

Alliance Chutzpah

Once again I am faced with the question of whether or not it is too early in the week to announce the Chutzpah of the Week award. However, this one has the merit of a historical context, since it is a follow-up to an award given to Taro Aso last March, when he was Foreign Minister of Japan. The basis for the award was but one of a chain of absurdities that culminated in an election in Japan that resulted in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe losing control of the upper house of his country's parliament. Nevertheless, Abe has remained as Prime Minister; and the capacity of his judgments and policies seem to have followed in his wake. This week's award is based on a Reuters report of his current visit to India filed by George Nishiyama and Surojit Gupta:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on Wednesday for a "broader Asia" partnership of democracies that would include India, the United States and Australia, but omit the region's superpower, China.

It is hard to view any proposal for a "broader Asia" that ignores China as anything but an arrogant absurdity. Certainly, one can hold up the standard of democracy as that reason for excluding China; but what is really at stake is a power play to counter the growth and domination of the Chinese economy. The absurdity of the vision stems from the fact that countries such as the United States, Australia, and India are as interested in cultivating China as both as customer and a partner as they are in facing the challenge of China as a competitor. To reduce such economic complexity to a competitive threat (which is likely fueled by a long-standing Japanese cultural tradition) is to trivialize it to a level that will likely do more harm than good, which may well be the best criterion for chutzpah this week!

A New Insight into Memory

I spent many years banging my head against the problem of organizational memory and why so many purported technology "solutions," particularly those that emerged during the heady days of the knowledge management craze, did so little to contribute to how large organizations could benefit collectively from the wealth of experiences derived from their work practices. Many of my thoughts were ultimately compiled into a massive Word document that currently sits on my desk as I try to figure out what to do with it (and one of the few things I did with my Yahoo! GeoCities site was to create a page with the abstract for this document and a link to its current version). I have even tried to get my mind around the latest results in biological models of memory, although readers of this blog have probably discovered by now that my understanding of memory is as much informed by Proust as by biology.

My biological interests were recently revived when the Reuters BlogBurst service brought my attention to a recent post on the Anxiety Insights blog. The post concerned an explanation for why emotionally charged events are not easily forgotten in terms of the chemical behavior of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. It basically reports on a paper that has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:

Tully K, Li Y, Tsvetkov E, Bolshakov VY. Norepinephrine enables the induction of associative long-term potentiation at thalamo-amygdala synapses PNAS 2007 Aug 20; doi:10.1073/pnas.0704621104 [Abstract]

The text of the paper, as quoted in the blog post, translates this rather unwieldy title into a more straightforward summary:

We previously demonstrated that the learning of fear is associated with increased synaptic transmission between neurons in the amygdala and brain regions, which provide information about sound to the amygdala. We found that norepinephrine facilitates this increased transmission.

The research leading to this conclusion was conducted in the interest of finding treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); and the paper concludes with the hope that, now that this particular chemical process has been identified, it can be treated through "certain manipulations of the adrenaline system." This could, of course, be a good-news/bad-news result that recalls a famous letter by Rainer Maria Rilke on why he decided to withdraw from psychotherapy:

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

On the other hand only the patient who has to deal with those "devils" of PSTD has the right to decide whether they should be expunged at the risk of losing the angels as well.

From my point of view, the interesting theoretical question now is whether similar chemical links exist for the more positive emotional associations, such as those unlocked by Proust's tasting that madeleine dipped in tea. There is also the way in which Proust's memories then all spilled out in narrative form, thus invoking my previously cited quotation "that what does not get structured narratively suffers loss in memory." The biological models for these mechanisms are still hidden from us, but it is still encouraging to read that research is continuing to expose that which had been previously concealed.

A Useful Way for the Virtual World to Inform the Physical World

Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor for Reuters, has an interesting report on how online gaming may be benefiting the real world of epidemiological research. The story is based on the outbreak of an epidemic in a virtual world:

The outbreak was an accidental consequence of a software challenge added to the "World of Warcraft" game in 2005, [Nina] Fefferman and [Eric] Lofgren report in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The virulent, contagious disease was introduced by maker Blizzard Entertainment Inc. of Irvine, California, as an extra challenge to high-level players. But, just as a real virus might spread, it was accidentally carried out of its virtual containment area.

"Soon, the disease had spread to the densely populated capital cities of the fantasy world, causing high rates of mortality and, much more importantly, the social chaos that comes from a large-scale outbreak of deadly disease," Fefferman and Lofgren wrote.

"When this accidental outbreak happened, players embraced it. Some thought it was really cool," Fefferman said.

The makers did not. They reset the computer game to eliminate the disease, wiping out any data that may have been collected.

However, while this was the end of the story in the gaming world, it was just the beginning for Fefferman and Lofgren:

Fefferman, a medical epidemiologist, immediately recognized human behaviors she had not ever factored in when creating computer models of disease outbreaks. For instance, what she calls the "stupid factor".

"Someone thinks, 'I'll just get close and get a quick look and it won't affect me,'" she said.

"Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. There have been a lot of studies that looked at compliance with public health measures. But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone -- will they stay?" Fefferman added.

"No one have ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave."

She will now incorporate such behavior into her scenarios, and Fefferman is working with Blizzard to model disease outbreaks in other popular games.

"With very large numbers of players (currently 6.5 million for World of Warcraft), these games provide a population where controlled outbreak simulations may be done seamlessly within the player experience," she wrote.

There is, of course, the question of whether or not gamer behavior should be taken as a reflection of how they would react to a real-world crisis; but, regardless of how they would act in the real world, it may still be an indicator of how they would think. What may be most important is that these first results have been published in a journal with internationally-recognized authority. As such, it may be one of the first instances of published results in "hard medical science" being based on an analysis of social behavior in a virtual world (recognizing that Fox cites a similar article by Ran Balicer in Epidemiology); and Fefferman and Lofgren deserve recognition for that achievement.

Seeking a Social World Solution with Objective World Thinking

Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent for Reuters, has submitted a report on a climate change conference that convened about 750 miles from the North Pole. Here is his lead:

Climate change is the biggest security challenge since the Cold War but people have not woken up to the risks nor to easy solutions such as saving energy at home, experts said on Tuesday.

"We're not yet collectively grasping the scale of what we need to do," British climate change ambassador John Ashton told a seminar of 40 scientists and officials from 13 nations in Ny Alesund, Norway, about 1,200 km (750 miles) from the North Pole.

He said global warming should be recast as a security issue, such as war or terrorism, to help mobilize support for tougher global action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

"The Cold War was the last big problem the world faced on so many fronts -- economic, political, industrial," he said.

This may be a sign that even the scientific community is recognizing that all the powers of the objective world may lack the necessary utility when the problem actually resides in the social world. This was particularly evident in another observation from Doyle's report:

Researchers noted that people often act without weighing up long-term consequences -- many smoke cigarettes or eat too much without rationally reviewing risks of lung cancer or obesity.

Nevertheless, at least in Doyle's account, there seemed to be a general reluctance to accept the idea that there are "laws" about the nature of the social world, which, even if not as hard-and-fast as the laws of physics, need to be recognized when trying to solve problems. In the past I have tried to compile a list of such laws. Two of those laws summarize my reaction to this seminar:

1. Comfort is the enemy of will.
2. People who are comfortable do not want change, since that may lead to discomfort.

Both of these laws imply that we are unlikely to see action until the discomfort becomes prevalent enough to impact the behavior of those who currently lack the will to address the problem. There are, of course, those who would prefer to take refuge in "faith-based truths" or, worse yet, the precepts of what I have called "secular Messianism;" and many of those folks may even be strong enough to weather many winters of discontent. My hope, however, is that their influence over those who make and implement policy, which has been so strong during the current Presidential administration, will begin to ebb as the general level of discomfort increases. With any luck this will happen before we end up like the smoker who only recognizes that he has a problem after he has to rely on an oxygen tank.

Who Pays?: An Incomplete Story

Yesterday's Associated Press report, released under the headline, "Medicare won't pay for hospital mistakes," on Yahoo! News, raises more questions than it answers. From a chronological point of view, the beginning of the story was postponed until the end of the report:

Last year, Mark McClellan, then director of the Medicare and Medicare programs, said the government could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year if the Medicare program stopped paying for medical errors such as operations on the wrong body part or mismatched blood transfusions.

About the only thing wrong with this proposition is that no one had thought of it (or had the intestinal fortitude to implement it) sooner. After all, negligence in matters of fiscal accountability is probably one of the major reasons why health care is in the mess it is now in. The result is a new rule that identifies several hospital procedures that will no longer be eligible for Medicare payments:

The rule identifies eight conditions — including three serious types of preventable incidents sometimes called "never events" — that Medicare no longer will pay for.

Those conditions are: objects left in a patient during surgery; blood incompatibility; air embolism; falls; mediastinitis, which is an infection after heart surgery; urinary tract infections from using catheters; pressure ulcers, or bed sores; and vascular infections from using catheters.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it also would work to add three more conditions to the list next year.

Reading these paragraphs reminded me of Bob Newhart's old routine about those vending machines that sold flight insurance policies in most airports. The punch line was, "Buy the damned thing, if it make's you feel better; but, for God's sake, don't read the policy!" There is nothing like being told what might happen to you when your in a plane, and the same seems to be true of going to the hospital.

Nevertheless, this is still an incomplete story, since every hospital procedure has to be accounted for by the billing system. The rule recognizes this fact but not in a particularly comforting way:

Hospitals in the future will be expected to pick up the cost of additional treatment required by a preventable condition acquired in the hospital.

"The hospital cannot bill the beneficiary for any charges associated with the hospital-acquired complication," the final rules say.

This much is clear: Medicare won't pay; and "the rule" states that the patient cannot be billed. So what happens? Are those entries in the billing system logged as bad debts for tax purposes? Is the hospital truly bound by that rule, or will it find loopholes through which the patient can be billed? Or will the hospital just raise all of its rates to absorb these new expenses, meaning that, in the grand scheme of things, both Medicare and the patients will continue to pay for those errors?

From an objective point of view, we are probably talking about something that can be covered by malpractice insurance; but, as far as I have been able to determine from the news, this is just another ingredient in that whole stew that is the current health care mess. It is as if everyone recognizes how bad the system has become, yet no one has the will to clean up the mess. This is very much a time to reflect on the connotation of that phrase that Vonnegut made so famous, "So it goes."

The Wisdom of Lennie Tristano

Back in 1945, when Lennie Tristano was just beginning to acquire a reputation as an extraordinary jazz pianist and before his reputation as one of the best jazz teachers had been established, he published an article in Jazz Quarterly entitled, "What's Wrong with Chicago Jazz," which established that his way with words was almost as good as his way with notes. The content of this article has now been resurrected in Eunmi Shim's new book, Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music. His thesis is that what was wrong with Chicago Jazz was its commercial nature, particularly as fostered by greedy bookers and café owners. He did not say much about the recording industry because he tried as hard as possible to ignore it, knowing full well that recorded jazz could never do justice to a "live" performance. The basic thrust of his argument was that commercial interests were only concerned with delivering "product" (overlooking the historical fact that Mozart, too, had to worry about "product") in mass quantities, meaning that most of the "product" that was actually delivered was hack work. Tristano's reasoning, however, appealed to me for his examination of consequences. It was not enough to complain about drowning in mediocre jazz; it was necessary to establish why all of that mediocrity was a bad thing.

This is where I really caught on to his writing. His argument was that jazz performers were responsible for "the process of educating the public to good jazz." In other words, as far as Tristano was concerned, performing jazz was as much a public trust as was publishing a newspaper (which was regarded as axiomatic in 1945, sigh). He then offered a secondary argument that mediocrity is demoralizing. A performer stuck in a mediocre group will usually react by letting his own technique go to pot, knowing that doing any better will not serve any advantage. Thus, mediocrity begets inferiority, ultimately descending to the sort of junk that everyone recognizes as a waste of time.

I suppose what stimulated me the most about this line of reasoning is that it is not just about jazz (although I feel things are much worse in today's jazz scene, where it is hard to find anyone performing today whose chops measure up to the quality jazz one could hear in 1945). Today Tristano's argument can be applied to just about any performing art and just about any medium. At the end of Amadeus Peter Shaffer had Salieri "bless" the audience in his new capacity as "patron saint of mediocrity." Did Shaffer anticipate the extent to which that "blessing" would take? Perhaps it is because we are as consumed by mediocrity as those jazz performers whose technique can only get worse that we have finally come to a point where our very capacity for communication in any form is at death's door.

λόγος in the Enterprise

The more I read what JP Rangaswami has to say about Facebook and the enterprise, the more skeptical I get. Admittedly, today's skepticism was primed by a Reuters Life! story from Canberra, which was the first time I read of an attempt to put a cost figure of Facebook usage:

Internet security company SurfControl looked at the phenomenon, and found Australian workers who keep a close watch on their Facebook profile page were costing their employers up to A$5 billion ($4 billion) a year.

The article then elaborated the details of how SurfControl came up with this rather striking figure. In all fairness, however, I am not sure that the approach that SurfControl was taking to the measurement of worker productivity was any better than those invoked by JP, which I have previously critiqued; but it was still nice to see that someone is trying to assess the impact of Facebook in terms of a dollar figure, even if the dollar was an Australian one!

In his post today, JP invokes the wisdom of Max DePree, author of Leadership is an Art and Leadership Jazz. This is what JP learned about leadership from DePree:

• The first job of a leader is to articulate strategy and vision.
• The second and last is to say thank you.
• In between, a leader should be a servant and a debtor to the led.

This led to an extended riff on the use of Facebook to "capture the real-life interactions of a person in an organisation," which drifted pretty far from the points DePree had tried to make. Indeed, it all seemed to come down to using software as a facilitating and managing tool for handling masses of lists about the members of the enterprise, rather than having anything to do with engagements with and among those members.

I thus took great delight in a follow-up comment submitted by Stephen Lewis, which tried to get the discussion back on the topic of articulation in the context of such processes of engagement. This comment tapped into one of the more profound truths about the nature of knowledge, not just in the workplace but in everyday life. I tried to illustrate this truth in the following diagram, which I originally reproduced from one of my PowerPoint files for a post on my old Yahoo! 360° blog entries:
My work on that diagram grew out of Nonaka’s misconceived “definition” of “knowldge” as “justified true belief,” which he attributed to Plato's "Theaetetus." Reading this dialogue for myself, I discovered that Plato had Socrates dismiss this definition as entirely bogus, along with three other attempted definitions. However, while one gets to the end of Plato’s text without a definition of knowledge, one has learned that the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to at least three other equally fundamental concepts: memory, being, and description (which may be a poor translation of the Greek λόγος). I see that final concept of λόγος as the more general capacity that lies behind what Lewis wrote about articulation, and I further see it as another one of those skills that has fallen by the wayside in our current approaches to education.

Of course, in the context of my campaign for "equal time" for verbs, as well as nouns, I was particularly impressed with Lewis' process-based approach to such articulation. Given the pre-Socratic insight into all the flux in the world, the act of describing is more important than any resulting description, which, while more concrete is also more temporary. I have tried many times to raise this distinction on JP's own "turf;" and he has even taken some noble stabs at grasping the point I have tried to make. Unfortunately, as far as Facebook and the enterprise is concerned, he still does not seem to get it. Enterprise work is not about making a whole slew of structures (lists) about people more manageable; it is about making the processes of engagement more effective. If technology can facilitate those processes, so much the better; but the success of the enterprise will still come down to the day-to-day practices of all those who work there. I see Lewis' approach to articulation as a healthy contribution to those practices.

Patriotic Reflection

This being Sunday, I feel a need to sermonize. The text for my sermon comes from the "Book of Bierce," otherwise known as The Devil's Dictionary:

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

My need to sermonize, in turn, was triggered by JP Rangaswami's sentimental paean to the Indian national anthem and the dignity with which it was invoked in a recent propagandistic video on the theme of "respect your national anthem." It did not take long for my proclivities for text analysis to surface and start teasing out just how manipulative these few minutes of video were. So I'm afraid my reaction to JP's enthusiasm was a fond memory of one of the etchings in Goya's Caprichos on the theme that he who wishes to get hoodwinked surely will get hoodwinked.

Fortunately, however, madame l. submitted a comment that has saved me the effort of spelling out the details of my analysis. The heart of the comment was a video that vividly illustrated the techniques of manipulation, using an Intel commercial as a case study. (I believe Gertrude Stein once said that the only way to review a work of art was with another work of art. To the extent that mind control is an art form, the second video is a perfect review of the first.)

I have to insert as an aside here that I was most interested in the musical analysis of the four-note Intel motif. The video discusses the implication of how that motif had previously surfaced in Handel's Messiah ("Rejoice, greatly") and "La Marseillaise." The only thing missing was the role those four notes play in launching the storm in Peter Grimes!

Out of the ashes of this ritual sacrifice of the concept of national-anthem-as-jingoistic-propaganda emerged a comment from Mario Ruiz that absolutely amazed me. He observed that the Spanish national anthem has no text! Now, from a strictly semantic point of view, all three of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definitions of “anthem” denote a text set to music. This reinforces the American frame of reference, where “The Star-Spangled Banner” is associated exclusively with Francis Scott Key, the composer of the text. My guess is that it would be very easy to go to a sporting event in the United States at which no one knew that the music for the anthem came from the “Anacreontick Song,” composed by John Stafford Smith, which was used to open every meeting of a British drinking club (plus ça change)!

Technicalities aside, the real "lesson" of this sermon is that Spain is on to something good. Creating a situation conducive to silent meditation as far superior to conditioning a crowd to spit out words without any reflection. Key’s first stanza is only mildly jingoistic. However, as one reads further into the text, it gets downright offensive:

Then conquer we must
For our cause it is just
And this be our motto,
"In God is our trust!"

I find in very hard to find any of JP's "dignity" in that language! It is closer to the concept of "honor" that Touchstone mocks in As You Like It!

The Front Line of the War Against the Poor on the Eighth Floor of Saks

The plans have been in the news for some time; but, as Reuters reported early this morning, yesterday marked the opening of an entire floor of the Saks Fifth Avenue building in Manhattan offering nothing other than designer shoes. Reduced to numbers that is 10,000 square feet for 100,000 pairs of shoes, "along with an express elevator, a VIP shopping room, expert shoe repair and two cafes." Furthermore, the United States Postal Service has accommodated the "marketing ploy" of allocating the ZIP code 10022-SHOE exclusively to this floor of the building. One has to wonder if Candace Bushnell could have conceived of such an extreme in even her most exorbitant fictions of self-indulgence. This, of course, brings us to the question of price and the inevitable joke that "if you have to ask, to don't wanna know." According to the Reuters report, "prices range from $210 for a pair of Stuart Weitzman shoes up to several thousand dollars for Chanel boots." Now you know.

Here we are, then, on the front line of that war against the poor, which, as I have previously hypothesized, is the real "story behind the story" of the war in Iraq. Figuratively speaking, the eighth floor of Saks sits atop one of the modal points of that bimodal distribution of wealth; and that modal point is so lofty that, from there, one can barely (if at all) see the other modal point. Gone are the Frank-Capra-like images of the poor staring longingly at display windows of Saks and Tiffany's on the ground floor. The real action now takes place in a space concealed from the very awareness of the poor. It is almost enough to make me seriously consider reassigning this week's chutzpah award, were not the motives behind the Crandall Canyon mine not just egregious but fatally so.

Nevertheless, we should still remember where that bimodal distribution of wealth may ultimately lead, which is a bimodal class structure of rulers and slaves. We are all familiar with the news reports of the working conditions behind the production of "designer" athletic shoes; but we have seen little attention paid to the production side of what is being sold up there on the eighth floor of Saks. Whether it is Chanel or Stuart Weitzman, it is hard to believe that cheap labor is not behind the product, where "cheap" implies production in a country that condones starvation wages or less. Once upon a time we told stories of such workers uniting to take control of their own destiny. Unfortunately, those stories are now history; and it would appear that those who have learned the most from the history are in the ruling class, meaning that they are well-equipped to prevent such a history repeating itself.

Obsolescence

I was rather interested in Lou Paglia's latest correlate post on the obsolescence of terminology. The specific term that triggered his thoughts was the concept of the "column inch," invoked by the Vice President of corporate products at Dow Jones. This led Lou "to question as to whether 'column inch' has now become a quaint term such as 'horsepower.'" This, in turn, let me to speculate over the fact that "horsepower" actually became and remains a standard of measurement, while, in the absence of a standard column width in the newspaper business, the column inch will never be so fixed. Furthermore, as we do more and more of our news reading on a Web browser, the very concept of a column seems headed for obsolescence.

These thoughts were still with me when I resumed reading It's All in the Music, Doris Monteux' memoir of the life and work of her husband, the conductor Pierre Monteux. This was written when Monteux was in his eighties and most of the book involves her documenting conversations that had in which he reflected on his past. The whole thing is structured as a series of letters with no named recipient, meaning that they could also be "Dear Diary" entries. This gives the whole text a very personal style in which both husband and wife have distinct "voices." At first I was not sure what to make of this kind of writing, but it has grown on me as I have progressed through the book to the point where I now enjoy it.

The issue of obsolescence arose while I was reading an account of a meeting in London in September of 1963 between Monteux and Pablo Casals, both of whom were octogenarians. Here is the paragraph that jumped out at me:

After a while, I heard Casals say with vehemence that the modern composer's music could not last, as it is soulless and lacking in melody! (Indeed, Maestro [how Doris refers to Pierre] has a magnificent letter from him written from Puerto Rico to this effect.) Monteux remarked that the modern is a product of the age in which he exists, that is, a scientific and mechanical century. Since scientific and mechanical production becomes obsolete soon after its introduction, it is his opinion that much modern music conceived and composed by today's composer will no doubt have the same destiny.

This has led me to return to the question of the extent to which our "age of technology" must, of necessity, also be an "age of obsolescence." My very first blog post addressed the question of whether or not our technocentrism was bringing about an neglect of the quality on permanence in our educational curricula; and I tried to introduce the concept of "half-life" applied to much of the highly specialized content driving such curricula. My argument then was that such permanence could be found in the values behind the curriculum of a liberal education, and I still hold to that position. The question remains, though, as to whether this is just a matter of neglecting liberal education in the interest of specializing in the "scientific and mechanical."

Here I would argue that the problem goes deeper to the more foundational level of the production economy that is now so dependent on "scientific and mechanical" expertise. There is a dangerous narrowness to the view that life is all about what one produces and the corollary that the value of one's life is determined by the value of one's products. Alma Mahler, in her memoirs of her life with Gustav Mahler, attacked Richard Strauss for evaluating the merits of his own compositions in terms of the royalty checks he received. However, there is also the joke about George Gershwin seeking out Ravel (Stravinsky in some versions of the story) in Paris in order to study composition with him. Ravel asked Gershwin how much money he had earned in the last year and then announced that he wanted to be Gershwin's student! These anecdotes precede the rise of audio recording as an industry that just keeps growing in unexpected ways and directions, and both the composition and performance of music become more and more productized. Similar arguments can be developed about the "progress" of written texts during the twentieth century. In other words the very contents of the liberal education have, themselves, become productized, leaving us in an unfortunate position of viewing them only through the lenses of productization. Thus, it is not concepts like the column inch that have become "quaint" but the very idea of concepts that endure over centuries, rather than from quarterly report to quarterly report. Permanence has now gone the way of the column inch!

Deadly Chutzpah

Unless I am mistaken, it was back in the Nineties that the government of Indonesia decided that, because they had so little land and because pretty much all of that land was being put to use, they would construct a nuclear power station in the crater of a dormant (not extinct) volcano. At the time this seemed like the ultimate what-were-they-thinking act of stupidity; and just about every industrialized nation responded with its characteristic nationalist stamp of derision. However, as we get more and more background on the Crandall Canyon mine catastrophe, we have to ask just who came up with the bright idea of drilling a deep mine into a seismically active formation in the first place. The only really substantive difference is that the mine puts fewer lives at risk than a nuclear reactor would, but both acts of thoughtlessness are in the same league. This has not received a lot of coverage; but, now that there has been a second cave-in at Crandall Canyon, Associated Press writer Paul Foy has had the good sense to acquire some seismological background.

It turns out that there is a technical term for what caused these cave-ins. It is called a "mountain bump." Foy describes it as the phenomenon "in which shifting ground forces chunks of rock from the walls." Since that rock bears much of the structural weight of the mine passages, dislodging any of it jeopardizes the structural integrity of the entire passage. None of this is beyond the scope of Geology 101, nor is the fact that the mountain formations in Utah are still "young" enough to be seismically active (not unlike the fault lines through California). So trying to dig a network of mine tunnels into such a formation is essentially an act of chutzpah against nature (defying the earth to hold still or else, so to speak); and sending miners into that network compounds the chutzpah by setting the authority of the mine owner above those forces of nature.

So, following the usual path of analysis, what are the consequences to date of these acts of chutzpah? As of August 6 six men were trapped more than three miles into the network, and rescue workers still have not located them. Then, last night at 6:39 PM local time, a second "mountain bump" induced a second cave-in, which killed three of the rescue workers and injured at least six others. Sometimes the substance of the Chutzpah of the Week award turns out to be little more than a loud public raspberry, but this week's award should be presented as a Badge of Shame to the owner of the Crandall Canyon mine.

The Path to the Lowest Common Denominator

My ears picked up when I heard the radio news story about the CIA editing entries in Wikipedia for purposes that had more to do with propaganda than information; so I was glad to see that Jonathan Fildes, science and technology reporter for BBC News, had prepared a story that gave a more comprehensive account of just who is now playing this game. However, while this turns into a plague-on-all-your-houses account, one has to wonder just what that CIA agent was thinking while assuming the role of editor:

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

This was enough to prompt Wikipedia to issue a warning about vandalizing behavior (along with a polite request to cease and desist) but, apparently, not enough for Wikipedia to undo the vandalism.

Lest with think that only the right-wing is capable of such outrageous behavior, Fildes points out that Rush Limbaugh is faring no better than Ahmadinejad:

The [monitoring] site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded."

The IP address is registered in the name of the Democratic National Headquarters.

Furthermore, this is a game that is being played beyond the borders of the United States:

The site also indicates that Vatican computers were used to remove content from a page about the leader of the Irish republican party Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams.

The edit removed links to newspaper stories written in 2006 that alleged that Mr Adams' fingerprints and handprints were found on a car used during a double murder in 1971.

The section, titled "Fresh murder question raised" is no longer part of the main online encyclopaedia entries.

The final example Fildes cites involves Diebold editing out links to stories about the alleged role of their digital voting machines in the rigging of the 2000 election.

I take this all as evidence that the wisdom-of-crowds Wikipedia philosophy is only viable if one can assume the good will of all the participants. All it takes is one or two incidents that involve deliberately introducing "noise" to the content to turn the very editing process into a mud-slinging contest. In other words the information content of Wikipedia entries will rapidly descend to the information level of most political advertising (or just about any other form of advertising, for that matter). Like it or not, the authority of a cool-headed, informed, and skeptical editor really does add value when the publication of information is at stake!

An Introspective Pianist

Given the almost encyclopedic breadth of Norman Krieger's appearances as both piano soloist and with major orchestras, I feel slightly embarrassed not to have heard of him, let alone heard any of these previous appearances. However, after the great disappointment the treatment of the art of transcription at last week's "Musical Lunch Break," Krieger's bread-and-butter program was greatly appreciated. His approach to all the works, by Beethoven, Brahms, and Chopin, was highly introspective but executed in such a way that the introspection made perfect sense as a feasible stance for the composer to have taken.

Consider the Beethoven sonata, Opus 31, Number 2, that Krieger played. This has been supplied the popular name "The Tempest," based on the often repeated anecdote that, when asked about the meaning of this composition, Beethoven told his inquisitor, "Read Shakespeare's 'Tempest.'" In all fairness it should be observed that while this anecdote can be found in program and liner notes, it is absent from Thayer's biography of Beethoven, which many still take as an authority on such matters. Krieger introduced the work as being like an angel with a devil on either side, referring to the setting of the middle adagio movement in the context of the two more intense outer movements. If Beethoven, himself, was familiar with Shakespeare's play, then that middle movement could well be an invocation of Miranda, while the frenetic alternations between largo and allegro in the first movement give at least some impression of Prospero conjuring up the storm that opens the play. Assigning the final allegretto to Ariel may be a bit of a stretch. However, the movement is a perpetuum mobile; and the harsh rhetoric of the bass line can be associated with his bondage to Prospero without too much difficulty. None of this is particularly consistent with Krieger's impression of the work, but both interpretations treat each movement as a character sketch. This is where the introspection surfaces in Krieger's performance, because he was able to supplement the clarity of his technique with equally clear (and distinct) senses of personality in the three movements. Whether or not those senses of personality could be traced back to Shakespeare is less important than the fact that he thought them through well enough to realize them in performance.

The three Brahms works on the program divided between the beginning (Opus 10, Number 4, published in 1856) and end (Opus 116, Numbers 1 and 2, published in 1982) of his life. In his verbal introduction to these works, Krieger paid particular attention to the Opus 116, Number 2, which he felt was Brahms' deepest expression of loneliness. (Personally, I always found the final movement of the clarinet quintet to be Brahms at his saddest; but Krieger certainly made his case with this intermezzo.) Thus, once again the emphasis was on personality; but this time it involved the diachronic transition from the struggles of youth to a despairing old age. Again, Krieger's introspective stance served both end of this time-line equally well.

The program concluded with Chopin's Opus 23 G minor ballade. This is such a warhorse that any pianist needs to program it with a better reason than because-I-can-play-it. Chronologically, Chopin stands between Beethoven and Brahms; but his logic, grammar, and rhetoric differentiate him from both of them. Thus, what we really have is a set of snapshots across the progression of the nineteenth century but with Chopin out of his proper order. On the other hand honoring the chronology would have ended the program in that dark shadow of the Brahms intermezzo, so Krieger opted to end the program with more positive energy. This also gave him the opportunity to present Chopin in terms of a different approach to introspection, dealing particularly with a duration more sustained than either the short Brahms pieces or the individual movement of the Beethoven sonata. This is a work in which introspection can be sustained by a general sense of architecture. Krieger understood this and demonstrated it effectively in his performance.

Taken as a whole, this recital should be considered in the context of those comments by Stravinsky that I recently cited on the topic of being a good listener. Krieger's performance demonstrated his appreciation of what Stravinsky meant by being a good listener. He could then use his performance of the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Chopin to give us at least some taste of just what it meant to be a good listener to those compositions.

The War Against the Poor

While it seems as if most of the liberal press has now become obsessed with reading the tea leaves of Karl Rove's resignation, Truthdig has run a report by Bill Boyarsky that sheds light on an issue whose important may be gauged by the extent to which it has been ignored by both mainstream media and most of the Presidential candidates who get any coverage, good or bad. The title of the report is "War in Iraq, Poverty in America." The basic thesis is as follows:

One of the most important, now forgotten, aspects of the tragic year of 1968 was the way Sen. [Robert F.] Kennedy and Dr. [Martin Luther] King saw the relationship between the Vietnam War and poverty at home. If the war continued, poverty would too.

However, while Boyarsky devotes the rest of his column to making the case for the existence of this causal link, he says little about why or how it came to be so. I would like to try to pick up that ball and run with it.

In the spirit of trying to tease out "the story behind the story," I would like to argue that the story behind Boyarsky's report is one of the shift that has taken place, over the last forty years, from the War on Poverty under the Great Society to a war against the poor as one of the long poles in the neoconservative tent. For at least half of that forty-year period, the distribution of wealth has become bimodal (affectionately known as the "dumbbell curve"), with the separation between the modal points growing ever larger. It is as if, under a zero-sum-game mentality, the rich, not satisfied with taking all of the marbles away from the middle class, now want to clean up on the few marbles left to the poor. In this light our whole Middle East policy is just an excuse to reallocate funds for the poor that both addressed immediate needs (such as health care) and supported opportunities to get out of poverty (such as education). These marbles eventually find their way into the piles of those who see war as a source of wealth and see a causa belli as relevant only in terms of its anticipated "return on investment." This is the country of Lewis Lapham's "American Ruling Class." Furthermore, while the robber barons of a hundred years ago eventually started relinquishing their marbles to philanthropy, there is little sign of such a mood swing among today's marble-holders.

So why is this "ruling class" so obsessed with holding all the marbles? It is just a matter of greed. I would argue that, beyond greed lies the real truth in Lapham's selection of sobriquet. It is all a matter of ruling for no other reason than that such absolute rule is possible. It is the ultimate objectification of the subject, which is to say, the reduction of anyone not in that ruling class to slavery (or, if you prefer Hayek's terminology, serfdom). Furthermore, by virtue of globalization, this new division into only two classes will not be a national phenomenon, but an international one that will probably reduce the threat of Communism as an "international brotherhood" to its last shards of insignificance.

Storytelling for Working, Learning, and Innovation

Having once again summoned the article by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that appeared in 1991 in Organization Science entitled, "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice" to beat someone over the head (this time JP Rangaswami in his effort to promote Facebook as a vehicle for knowledge management), I figured it was time for me to review for myself what I thought were some of the gems from this paper that keep it alive for me over fifteen years after it was published. Beyond the "big picture" in which the authors develop "a unified view of working, learning, and innovation," which I have already cited, the argument to which I continue to return is the case they make for the role of storytelling in this unified view. That case draws heavily on Julian Orr's anthropological study of Xerox repair technicians, with particular attention to their practice of sharing "war stories" at the end of a hard day's work. What emerges is an analysis of how the very telling of these stories is as important as the stories themselves in the ways in which those technicians behave as knowing subjects. Here is a passage from the Brown-Duguid paper that bears much of the argumentative weight for making this case:

Story telling allows them [the repair technicians] to keep track of the sequences of behavior and of their theories, and thereby to work towards a coherent account of the current state of the machine. The reps try to impose coherence on an apparently random sequence of events in order that they can decide what to do next. Unlike the documentation, which tells reps what to do but not why, the reps’ stories help them develop causal accounts of machines, which are essential when documentation breaks down. (As we have suggested, documentation, like machines, will always break down, however well it is designed.) What the reps do in their story telling is develop a causal map out of their experience to replace the impoverished directive route that they have been furnished by the corporation. In the absence of such support, the reps Orr studied cater to their own needs as well as they can. Their narratives yield a story of the machine fundamentally different from the prescriptive account provided by the documentation, a story that is built in response to the particulars of breakdown.

It is arguments like these that remind me why I get so upset when I ponder evidence of our growing inability to tell stories. On the one hand this make be taken as a sign of our work culture undermining our more general social culture; but, at least to those of us who buy into the Brown-Duguid argument, that inability is also undermining our work culture. What will we be left of our lives when the social contexts of both work and leisure have been so undermined? Perhaps yesterday's comparison that put us below the level of the great apes is not as hyperbolic as I originally intended it to be!

The Death of Communication?

A recent post to the CNET News.com News Blog by Candace Lombardi provides new grist for Norman Mailer's mill on mind rot:

Internet users are spending more time looking at content and less time communicating with others, according to an index of Nielsen/Net Rating statistics released by the Online Publishers Association(OPA).

In 2003, Internet users spent about 46 percent of their time communicating and 34 percent reading online content. Those habits seemed to have reversed in the last four years. From January-May 2007 about 47 percent of users' time was spent looking at content and 33 percent spent on communicating.

The change in media habits can be attributed to changes in technology over the last four years, according to OPA.

"The increased popularity of video is leading to more time being spent with online content," according to the OPA reports. Time spent communicating could also be less because more people are using instant messaging (IM), which is quicker than sending e-mail.

Search time also rose. In 2003 people spent 3 percent of their time searching and for the 2007 period measured they spent about 5 percent.

At the very least this provides a supplement to Mailer's observations about television, but it takes those observations beyond the pathology of the interrupted narrative. It also takes the observations I made yesterday beyond the failure to tell stories to a more general inability to say anything about anything. It also relates to a rant that I just posted on confused of calcutta involved with a failure to understand the role of recorded music in the social world.

The foundation for my rant was a remark I read by Igor Stravinsky quoted in David Schneider's book, The San Francisco Symphony: Music, Maestros, and Musicians:

To be a good listener, you must acquire a musical culture, as in literature. You must be familiar with the history and development of music. To receive music, you have to open the ears and wait, not for Godot, but for the music, and to feel that it is something you need. Others let the ears be present and they don’t make an effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

I used this as a point of departure to compare good listeners with good readers:

Just as the printing press provided an opportunity for more people to learn how to read, recorded music has provided an opportunity for more people to learn how to listen; but neither offers any guarantee that those people actually will learn.

The Internet has provided a new link in the chain. In one fell swoop it has integrated opportunities to learn how to read, how to listen, and how to view cinematic narrative; and I read Lombardi's post as a sad comment on how little those opportunities have been seized. What we learn is ultimately manifested through how we act; and, if we no longer have the will or the ability to communicate through electronic mail, then we should take this as a sign that, for all those opportunities, leaning is not taking place. There is only the hollow shell of sitting in front of the screen constantly trying to soak up more; but, if that "more" has no impact beyond more soaking, then we are no better than zombies. Furthermore, the "IM factor" does not really counter this effect. Instant messaging is far to impoverished to cover the scope of speech acts that constitutes the foundation of communication. It is little more than an exchange of gestures in the immediate present; so, if we are not zombies, then we have still regressed to the level of interaction of the great apes!

Further Reflections on Mailer's Diagnosis of Mind Rot

Michael Tolkin is a writer with a gift for making us very uneasy; and he does not have to resort to the special effects of exorcisms, frantic chase scenes, stalkers, or shoot-outs to elicit a sense of dread. His is a study of the depravity of a human nature that has lost its ability to cope with the ordinary of reality, and we get uneasy through the recognition that our own coping skills are no better and it is only by a fluke of circumstance that we have escaped the horrors of his characters. This is most evident in his screenplay for Changing Lanes, but I first became aware of his perspective while I was in Singapore and saw Robert Altman's adaptation of his novel The Player. The sequel to this novel, The Return of the Player, has now been published; and the Telegraph used the occasion to send Stuart Husband to interview Tolkin.

I read what is basically a transcript of Tolkin's comments this morning. I normally shy away from such "background pieces;" but I was drawn to this one in the wake to those comments I had recently heard from Günter Grass and particularly Norman Mailer on Book TV. Tolkin invoked Mailer in talking about his own preference for novels over screenplays:

If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose between novels and movies, I would choose novels. It's a sentimental choice, because I think the novel is now regarded as an esoteric delivery system at best.

Here's how far it's degraded: in 1969, when we sent a man to the moon, Life magazine hired Norman Mailer to write about it, because they deemed that only a novelist could have the imagination to handle the subject's immensity.

The idea that the novelist has that kind of exemplary moral authority has been irretrievably lost. How many people in the States read first novels? Ten thousand, max. And the last one for most was probably The Corrections.

We don't need Norman Mailer to articulate the myth of Paris Hilton to us when we can watch her in the buff round-the-clock on YouTube. Though I'm sure he would like to.

There are two facets to this argument. One, which I have previously explored, has to do with the deterioration of our capacity for telling stories; and the other has to do with the deterioration of the stories themselves. I would like to explore both of these aspects a bit further.

The question of whether or not we have lost our capacity for telling stories, as my previous remarks emphasized, goes back at least as far as Walter Benjamin; but I doubt if even Benjamin, from his 1936 vantage point, could have anticipated today's cultural context, although it is definitely worth considering the YouTube phenomenon in light of what Benjamin wrote about "mechanical reproduction" that same year. In my earlier comments I suggested that "the Internet is gradually changing us from storytellers to story readers;" but Tolkin seems to suggest that we can not even be credited with a capacity for reading. The world of The Player is a world in which we are all story consumers; and, as is the case with so many other aspects of our consumerism, the product is fed to us, thus reducing us from motivated acting subjects to passive objects subject to the analysis of marketing strategists. With the loss of the capacity for reading comes the loss of the capacity for reflection, which, in turn, brings us back to that problem of mind rot against which Mailer railed in his appearance at the New York Public Library. If this sounds bleak, then Tolkin's assessment of the impact of consumerism is even bleaker:

This is definitely the worst generation of American parents, ever, in terms of those who send their kids to private schools. It's horrendous.

The Boomers raised a generation of drug addicts and compulsive shoppers; their offspring's urge to have children is conflated with their own narcissism. They use their children like pawns to reflect their own status and free-floating dread.

The effect on the children of this parental neurosis is having serious psychosocial knock-on effects. As I say in the book, most of these children are absolutely awful and they graduate from high school with all the strength of a potato chip: fried and fragile.

Nevertheless, even in the context of consumerism, there remains the issue of the degradation of the "product," which is the second aspect of my argument. Tolkin approaches this from the problem of the decline of box-office revenues in the movie business, the extent to which, even with the most calculated marketing strategies, the "product" no longer sells as well as it one did. However, rather than viewing this as a problem with marketing, Tolkin prefers to address the defects of the product itself. People do not put out at the box office because they no longer have an appetite for the stories they are being fed:

This is largely because the classic journey-of-the-hero structure, from Mr Smith Goes to Washington, in 1939, to Star Wars, is over.

You still get it in such movies as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and there's a sardonic echo of it in Will Ferrell comedies such as Talladega Nights.

But as a grown-up national myth, it's finished. It died with the Abu Ghraib pictures and it won't come back. The last great American movie was probably Apocalypse Now.

We're still living in the world of moral abeyance it described.

I'm working on the script for Nine - a musical version of Fellini's 8½ - and I went back to La Dolce Vita, as part of the research, and realised that it was prophetic.

At the end of that movie, the novelist becomes a publicist and everyone is happy to live in a world of decadence, self-promotion and despairing intellectuals, who write themselves out of relevance.

I see this as another aspect of that loss of the capacity for reflection. No matter how many "faces" the hero had, we could always reflect on his journey. This has been known since Homer; and it was still there in George Lucas (even if he needed Joseph Campbell as a consultant). Abu Ghraib could have provoked reflection; but, since such reflection would have undermined the prevailing power structure, mainstream media summoned all their strategies to undermine the Abu Ghraib pictures instead, drowning them in the flood of the preferred "manufactured reality" of American Idol and more news time for Paris Hilton than for the grunts dying in Iraq. Reality has subverted myth, not by opening our eyes to the insights of Enlightenment but by sewing them shut to those lessons that only fiction can teach us.

For all that, Tolkin still wrote his sequel novel; and it appears that his gift for making us uneasy is as potent as ever. The only problem is that not much of a reading public remains, not for this kind of book, at any rate. Robert Altman may still have the stamina to direct a film as good as The Player was; but we have to wonder if, in the context I have just outlined, that stamina will also be up to pushing such a project through "the system." Tolkin summarized his own position with a clever expression of optimism:

Despite it all, I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy. Or make that glass-quarter-full.

Being less of an optimist, I have to wonder if there is even that much in the glass!

Don't Forget the Baseball, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet!

Informality may be George W. Bush's strong (only?) suit; so we can appreciate why he has prepared "traditional American picnic fare" (as White House spokeswoman Dana Perino put it) for today's visit to his father's place in Kennebunkport by Nicolas Sarkozy. Still, we have to wonder whether Sarkozy may have had his heart set of traditions more consistent with Maine than with Texas. After all, ignoring lobster in Maine is a bit like ignoring crawdads along the Gulf Coast; so why is our President going so "generic" with hot dogs and hamburgers (and will be handling the barbecue duty himself)? The latest word from the BBC is that Cecilia Sarkozy will not be accompanying her husband. The official reason is that the children are not feeling well. If that is true, I hope that this was not due to lobster; but I also have to wonder if, given that the Sarkozy family has experience in traveling around the United States, maman may have decided to take "preemptive precautions" against those hot dogs and hamburgers, having eaten far too many of them while "on the road!"

Imagination and Mind Rot

There was a lot to be learned from watching Günter Grass being interviewed by Andrew O'Hagan at the New York Public Library on Book TV. Most interesting was getting beyond what Grass had to say about Germany to his thoughts on how the United States in currently perceived in Europe. I had not anticipated what he said, but I could understand it. His observation was that, during the period of recovery from the Second World War, Europe looked to the United States for inspiration, whether it involved the lofty ambitions of space travel or the imaginative use of media. In that context Grass asserted that Europe no longer finds the United States inspiring, and one has to look no further than the current operation of our government to understand his position. Will Bill Clinton be remembered as the last President who inspired American's to turn out on Election Day? If so, then the days we face are likely to be dark ones.

Grass shared this event with Norman Mailer, who also made a striking comment. He made the claim that television damages the mind because it interrupts narrative. Mailer is certainly not alone in recognizing the role that narratives play in how we make sense of the world in which we are embedded, but he is the first one I have encountered to recognize that interrupting the act of storytelling is inherently pathological. The consequence is that we have lost our capacity to both enjoy and be informed by uninterrupted narrative. Mailer views this as a form of mind rot, and I think I agree with him!

Chutzpah toward Veterans

Once again I face the question of whether it is too early in the week to commit to the Chutzpah of the Week award. However, on the basis of a report filed on the ABC News Blotter site by Alexandra Bahou and Anna Schecter Report, I would say that we have a very strong candidate in Keith Wilson. For those unfamiliar with the name, this is the guy who oversees the education benefits program at the Veterans Administration; and it would appear that he cares about as much for the education of veterans returning from Iraq has his "ultimate boss" (otherwise known as The President of the United States of America) cares about health coverage for poor children. Since the latter earned George W. Bush his second chutzpah award, it seems fitting that Wilson now receive one. Here is the basic story as reported by Bahou and Schecter:

Senate Democrats, led by Virginia's Jim Webb, want the government to pay every penny of veterans' educational costs, from tuition at a public university to books, housing and a monthly stipend.

Such a benefit was a major feature of the historic 1944 G.I. Bill, which put more than eight million U.S. soldiers through college and is now credited by historians as fueling the expansion of America's middle class in the post-war era.

But in recent years the benefit has dwindled; under the current law, passed in 1985, veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can expect Uncle Sam to cover only 75 percent of their tuition costs. That's not enough, say Democrats and veterans' advocates.

More than 450,000 used the benefit last year, at a cost to taxpayers of $2 billion, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which administers the program. The Democratic proposal would cost an additional $5.4 billion a year, the VA estimates -- and that's too much, it says.

Wilson, in turn, responded with the usual jargon of the mindless bureaucrat:

Keith Wilson, the VA official who oversees the education benefits program, told senators last Friday the proposal would make "administration of this program cumbersome," and its costs would "tax existing VA resources."

If we unpack these reasons, then we should, by all rights, ask whether or not the administration of the education benefits program is any more "cumbersome" then the current administration of our troops in Iraq and whether or not the budget for returning veterans should be consistent with the budget for members of the armed forces on active duty. Unfortunately, since we know a thing or two about that latter budget, particularly with how well armed and protected those armed forces actually are, the second half of the "unpacking" may tell us more about why things are just as much of a mess for the veterans. Nevertheless, this is such a blatant case of adding insult to injury (without even using those words metaphorically) that it deserves the Chutzpah of the Week award, even if the week has not yet finished!

The World Wide Web and the Real Wide World

Those who continue to believe that the Internet has more to offer the public than pornography will probably be interested in a story that K. C. Jones filed yesterday for InformationWeek about the online metrics firm Hitwise:

Hitwise announced Tuesday that it has created a new tool for measuring the most popular political search terms and the most searched, visited and sought candidates online. Unlike most figures from Hitwise, this data sampling is open to the public.

"As the Internet continues to evolve as a major communications channel for candidates and a platform for the public to research issues, we are delighted to share insights on how American Internet users react to political campaigns and policies online as the election unfolds," Tessa Court, chief marketing officer of Hitwise, said in a prepared statement.

The data will be updated every Tuesday and available through RSS feeds. It covers the top candidates' Web sites, as well as breakdowns according to party affiliation. It also shows which candidate search terms are most popular and which political Web sites draw the most visitors. Based on the results, Hitwise said it will name "Fast Moving National Political Web sites" and the "Candidate of the Month."

In other words, having already imposed major changes on the normative practices of journalism, the Internet is now moving in on the turf of political polling and its legacy of discipline developed by George Gallup and those of his ilk. Here is the first round of Hitwise results:

As Hitwise announced the new features, [Ron] Paul a Republican Congressman from Texas, held the lead for the largest market share of visits to Republican Web sites. Paul's site, Ronpaul2008.com accounted for 44.16% of the market share for Republican visits during the week that ended August 4.

Mitt Romney's site, www.mitromney.com, ranks second among Republicans, but well behind, with 16.13% of the market share for Republican Web site visits during that week, according to Hitwise. Rudy Giuliani ranked third, holding 11.78% percent of the market share among Republicans for Joinrudy2008.com.

Barack Obama (Barackobama.com) held a lead over Hillary Clinton (Hillaryclinton.com) among Democrats, with 40.64% of the market share among Democrats, compared to Clinton's 24.20%.

John Edwards held third place among Democrats with his site, www.johnedwards.com, accounting for 18.36% of the market share of visits among Democratic candidates.

Film maker Michael Moore ranked top among political search terms, followed by Daily Kos.

The data is based on Hitwise' examination of Internet use and search behavior of more than 10 million users and 1 million Web sites that fit within more than 160 industry categories.

Back when I was in high school, I had an opportunity to see George Gallup interviewed. Back in those days, humility was often taken as a positive sign of professionalism; and, if he had not begun his work with a spirit of humility, he had no trouble talking about how he learned it when the best polling techniques of the time totally bungled the forecasting of the 1948 Presidential Election. As I recall, the lesson Gallup learned from this experience was that there was still a lot to be learned about selecting the right sample as a basis for representative results.

Both Hitwise and its subscribers should bear this in mind in light of the fact that the results of last spring's National Technology Scan are unlikely to have changed very much. Let me reproduce the "punch line" from my post about this survey:

A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a survey released on Friday.

The issue is not one of how many data points Hitwise can summon up with the click of a mouse but of whether or not they are reporting on that great bugaboo of polling, a representative sample.

Now, in all fairness, I should cleave to my own Wittgensteinian principle that the value of information is only revealed in how it is used. If nothing else, Hitwise has identified a gap between the amount of attention Ron Paul is receiving from the mainstream media and the amount of attention he is receiving from Web surfers. This should constitute grounds for someone in the mainstream media poking around to see if there is really a story here or if it is either a statistical fluke or the result of a few hackers gaming the system (both alternatives being entirely feasible). Personally, I am very skeptical of the proposition that vox populi speaks through the Internet (at least about anything other that the latest site for hot pornography); but I am equally skeptical of the judgments currently imposed by mainstream media over what constitutes news. To invoke a phrase I previously used in a post about technology fads, I think we are dealing with another clash of over-inflated midgets. Unfortunately, in this case both midgets are more interested in selling soap (in one sense or another) than in promoting political discourse, meaning that, one again, our electoral process will get stuck with the short end of the stick.

What Really Matters on the Internet

I take a certain amount of delight when even the most polished of Internet evangelists can be brought down by the dead moose on the table that is pornography. Whether it involves what middle-aged men are really up to in Second Life or what the biggest Google search requests really are, even the more learned efforts to study the impact of the Internet on society turn depressingly myopic when questions about pornography arise. On the other hand everyone seems interested in litigation, so there is nothing like a good lawsuit to remind us that the moose is still on the table. This was made apparent by a brief report by Jeremy Kirk, of the IDG News Service, which just appeared on the InfoWorld Web site, short enough to be reproduced in its entirety:

A publisher of nude model photography is suing Microsoft for putting links and images of the company's content in search results taken from other Web sites that are illegally reproducing the material.

The company, Perfect 10, previously filed similar suits seeking injunctions against Google and Amazon.com over alleged copyright infringement.

The latest suit alleges that Microsoft's MSN image search feature creates unauthorized thumbnails of content owned by Perfect 10 and includes links to see a full-size versions of the images for free. The suit also says that Microsoft's MSN search engine makes passwords available to the company's perfect10.com Web site.

Microsoft also takes advertising money from Web sites that have stolen Perfect 10 images, and provides links to Web sites that offer passwords for Perfect 10's services, according to the lawsuit. The companies could not be immediately reached for comment.

Personally, I wish Perfect 10 all the best in their effort to find just the right stone to bring down Goliath. There seems to be an unwritten "law of Internet culture" to the effect that "if you can link to it, you can use it," which is sort of the latter-day version of the rule of thumb that you can make a photocopy of anything that fits on the glass of your copy machine. The older problem resolved itself more through standards of normative behavior than through court battles over property rights. This new case, on the other hand, may involve challenging what has become a normative practice; so its consequences are likely to be very interesting. I suspect the resolution may come down to recognizing the difference between the Internet serving us the way public libraries have traditionally served us and the Internet enabling us to create personal libraries through a path that ignores any compensation to the "authors" (in the most general sense of the term) of the material in those libraries. Mark Stefik tried to address this matter in "Letting Loose the Light," one of the pioneering essays on digital rights management; but his thoughts were overshadowed by the more technical content of that essay concerned with how property rights could be represented in a form suitable for digital processing. Perfect 10 may be providing the opportunity to shift this issue from an academic exercise to a question of normative practices in the real world of electronic commerce.

"The Art of the Transcription"

Last week I described the program for Sandro Russo's piano recital as organized around the theme of the art of embellishment. I argued that, taken on those terms, the recital was most impressive, the only weak point being the performance of a Haydn sonata which made heavier cognitive demands on puzzling out just what was being embellished and how. This week, for her "Musical Lunch Break" recital, Tien Hsieh chose a far more challenging theme and, unfortunately, was less successful in meeting the challenge. That theme is the title of this post. I use quotation marks because it happened to be the title of a recital that Earl Wild gave in Carnegie Hall in the fall of 1981, which was subsequently released as a recording. (As a footnote, that recital happened to be my first date with the woman who would later be my life; so I have very fond memories of it!) Wild was most judicious in his choice of title, because his performances made it clear that there was an art to both composing and performing transcriptions that was qualitatively different from the performance of works composed for solo piano. The problem is one of juggling multiple levels of interpretation of the "text." The "original text" is the work being transcribed; but the "text" of the transcription is a reflection of both that work and the impressions of the work by the composer of the transcription. The performer then has to establish his own impressions of how both the "original text" and the transcription can be presented to the audience. Needless to say, this requires as thorough an understanding of the original as of the transcription; and Ms. Hsieh was, for the most part, not particularly convincing in regard to either level of understanding.

This was most apparent in her performance of Liszt's transcription of Beethoven's only song cycle, An die Ferne Geliebte. Beethoven was rarely at the top of his game when writing for voice, but I happen to have a soft spot for this work, probably because in his play, Beethoven's Tenth, Peter Ustinov conjured up a scene in which Beethoven, having come back to life in the twentieth century and had his hearing restored (don't ask), coaches a soprano in singing the first song in the cycle. This scene was convincing enough to change the way I listened to Beethoven (whether or not its message was musicologically sound); and that is more than I can say about just about any of the scenes from Amadeus! Having said all that, I should also point out that Liszt was not at the top of his game for this particular transcription, either, particularly when it is compared against his transcriptions of Schubert Lieder that have been performed so well by pianists like Wild and Jorge Bolet. Still, Hsieh's performance left me wondering if she had ever tried to accompany a vocalist's performance of this cycle, since it invoked no understanding at all of what Beethoven had been doing, even to the point of ignoring where the commas were in the text. (That text is included in the Peters edition of this transcription.)

Things were somewhat better in Hsieh's performance of Liszt's transcription of Bach's G minor organ fantasy and fugue (BWV 542); but Liszt brought better understanding to this transcription, probably because of his own experience with playing the organ. There are a lot of "grand sounds" in both parts of this work. Liszt was clearly interested in capturing that grandeur, and Hsieh was not shy about accommodating his demands. At the same time she brought a delicacy to the exposition of the fugue subjects that treated all four voices (the fourth is a "late arrival") with the individual attention they deserved. Of the two Bach transcriptions she performed, this one was truer to its "original text," which had a lot to do with why listening to it was so satisfying.

The other was Rachmaninoff's transcription of three movements from the E major partita for solo violin (BWV 1006), in which there is a heavy element of Rachmaninoff trying to upstage Bach (fortunately without the blatant vulgarity that Lukas Foss invoked in the "Phorion" movement of his "Baroque Variations"). Nevertheless, I seem to recall that the recording that Rachmaninoff made of these transcriptions had the decency to recognize that the "Gavotte" and "Gigue" movements were dance pieces that benefited from a relatively steady tempo. Notwithstanding a Romantic "tradition" of pulling tempi like pieces of taffy, Hsieh's performances were far from danceable. The "Prelude," however, was suitably dazzling in the best Rachmaninoff tradition.

The only other transcription of a Prokofiev treatment of a Buxtehude organ prelude and fugue with which I was totally unfamiliar. As a matter of fact, until this concert I had been unaware that Prokofiev had attempted this "art of the transcription" (at least not for any music other than his own). This left me at a disadvantage with regard to both the "original text" and the transcription, and I fear that the performance did little for me. On the other hand what was I to expect? Was this meant to invoke the kind of interest that had motivated Bach to make a pilgrimage to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude at the top of his game? Also, if my recording of the complete organ works of Buxtehude includes this in the "Epiphany" section, does that mean it has a liturgical connotation? No such sense was evident in Hsieh's performance.

After all the transcriptions, Hsieh concluded with the first of Liszt's "Mephisto" waltzes. Once again, there was nothing particularly danceable in this performance; but this time it was Liszt at work (being "diabolic"). Unfortunately, the performance was more rambling than diabolic, doing little to invoke the elements of tension and suspense that give this piece all of its impact. The notes were all there, but Mephisto was absent.

Unpacking Rangaswami's "Four Pillars" of Enterprise Software

Regular readers know that I spend a lot of time wrestling with the posts on JP Rangaswami's confused of calcutta blog, usually trying to clear up what I feel are serious misconceptions about the nature of work and the role of technology in the workplace. Much of what JP writes is oriented around his assertion of "Four Pillars" of enterprise software: Publishing, Search, Fulfillment, and Conversation. While I would not dispute that these are important activities in the operation of any enterprise, I am not sure I would pose them as the "pillars" of that operation, particularly when the priorities of that enterprise necessitate living in the social world of the service provider, rather than in the objective world of the manufacturing and delivery of products. Thus, I was glad to see that JP finally decided to develop a case for his Four Pillars around the more fundamental question of the nature of work in the service sector, probably in response to a recent discussion over the extent to which the use of social software could be construed as "wasting time." Here is the latest development of his argument:

Well, in most service industries, people appear to “work” by doing four things:

They look proactively for information. They search for things.

They receive information because they said they were interested in receiving that information. They subscribe to things.

They talk to each other using various forms of communication: letter, e-mail, audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter, whatever. They are even known occasionally to talk to each other face to face without use of technology.

And they transact business as a result. Within the enterprise. In the extended enterprise and partners and supply chain. With customers.

People do all this now. But we do not have the tools to do the job well. Search is not free-form and wild-cardable and probabilistic; most of our search is very forms-driven and deterministic. Publishing or syndication is done using reams of paper producing reams of reports that no one reads. Mainly because it is done in elephant-sized chunks rather than bite-sized chunks. We need to be able to subscribe to changes in data elements rather than whole humongous lumps of data. Conversation is constrained by the difference in the technologies used. And fulfilment is often held up because we have weaknesses in the static data we use, things are not always up to date. Wrong names, misspellings, wrong addresses, wrong or missing authorisation information, poor delivery or fulfilment instructions.

That’s what Four Pillars is about. Syndication. Search. Conversation. Fulfilment.

This is all very neat, if a bit heavy on the techno-centric tosh (one of JP's favorite nouns, although I would probably go with "claptrap"); but, to try to push the metaphor in a meaningful direction, does it have the "strength of support" one expects from pillars?

Having invested a lot of my own cycles in the nature of service work and the supporting roles that technology may play there, I want to challenge the initial premise of this passage and then see where the challenge leads. In the spirit of my blog title, I should also point out that much of my challenge is based on material I have already "rehearsed" in a seminar talk I delivered at the University of California at Santa Cruz last March. That talk gave me an opportunity to present my skepticism of the recent academic "rush" to offer curricula in "service(s) science," which I had been "rehearsing" in my blog writing for some time.

The basis for my challenge is to identify the nature of service work before trying to enumerate what service providers actually do. Invoking the language of Jürgen Habermas, I wish to characterize service as a two-phase "action situation:"

1. The customer has a motivated action that needs to be performed.
2. The service provider performs that action on the customer’s behalf.

Thus, if we want to understand the nature of service work, we must first understand the nature of those motivated actions that a service provider may perform. I propose that we do this by invoking a variation on a quad chart based on the “Four Paradigms of Information Systems Development” paper that Hirschheim and Klein published in the Communications of the ACM back in the dark ages of October of 1989 (inspired by a book from the even darker ages of 1979 by Burrell and Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis):

The point behind this quad chart is that its structure tells us something about the nature of the engagement that must take place between the service provider and the customer if the service provider is to effectively perform the customer's motivated action(s). It is only in terms of the nature of that engagement that we can assess what the four elements of JP's list actually support:

1. I have already addressed the matter of search in terms of the "discontents" of the "Google paradigm;" but I think the point here is that a service provider can only be proactive about search if the search has some kind of goal. If we are taking a task-based approach to the customer's needs, then engagement with the customer is likely to lead to, at the very least, one or more hypotheses about such a goal. However, if those needs are worker-based, the emphasis is probably going to be on motives, rather than actions; and it becomes much more difficult to address those motives in terms of goals. In other words search is not much a "pillar" for half of the quad chart!
2. On the other hand the engagement will certainly always be informed by the "knowledge" that the service provider brings to the customer. However, that knowledge is less a matter of what information the provider receives and more a matter of the provider's interpretative skills in the face of information that "flows in," whether by virtue of subscription or happenstance. Without those skills it matters little what is actually "flowing" to the provider, even if it is "focused by need" or packed in "bite-sized chunks." In other words all that really matters is that the provider needs to be a first-rate reader, regardless of any benefits from publishing/syndication; and, in the spirit of Paul Ricœur, that reading skill must be applied to actions as well as texts.
3. Equipped with those interpretative skills, the provider is then in a position to organize the engagement around conversation; but it is a conversation grounded more in social processes than in the specifics of content or the media through which the content is delivered. I have already argued that JP's assumptions about conversation are impoverished in the context of this social dimension. Therefore, I shall not belabor the point further but once again acknowledge Erving Goffman as the inspiration behind my own point of view.
4. This brings us to the final point, which is the danger of viewing the engagement as nothing more than a business transaction. This is also a point I have already discussed; but, in this case, I would like to explore an additional perspective. Consider health care as a paradigm for a service offering; and consider the hypothesis that the "industrialization" of health care that we now face in the United States arises from a failure to understand the breadth of motivated actions around relations between physicians and their patients. JP's list may suffice well enough if all we are trying to address is the diagnosis of a patient's malady (goal satisfaction); but, if our ideal vision of health care is one in which the literal sense of "health maintenance" (rather than the one corrupted by the institutions that currently invoke that phrase) is one of an ongoing engagement (achieving mutual understanding and/or changing work/life practices) that takes place "in sickness and in health" (to shamelessly borrow a familiar phrase). This latter reading is not grounded in transactions and would be undermined if it were grounded in transactions.

That is probably enough for now. (Besides, I need a break for today's lunch-time recital!) My point is that the pillar metaphor can only be invoked through the connotation of support. From that point of view, JP's pillars do not support very much. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a role for the support of service through technology. I also believe that we need to do a lot more research in both the social and technical dimensions of service engagements before claiming that we understand that role and how it can be "played."

National Idiosyncrasy in the Age of Globalization

Had Tolstoy been given to generalization, he might have asserted that every unhappy government is unhappy in its own way. However, having considered the proposition, he might then have taken a deep breath and realized that, while it was not particularly difficult to write about a happy family, finding a happy government to serve as the subject for a novel was a lot more difficult. On the other hand both the Levin family at the end of Anna Karenina and the Bezuhov family at the end of War and Peace are a bit far-fetched in their happiness; and neither novel would have amounted to much had it not devoted most of its attention to the instances of unhappiness.

If we invoke harmony as a metaphor for happiness, then, when we consider governments, we should view unhappiness in the light of social discord, either within the borders of the state or in relations with other states. In the period between the first inauguration of George W. Bush and 9/11/2001, such discord was in abundance on both fronts. Indeed, the very election of Bush was born of a discord that divided the nation when the votes were cast and spilled over into the process by which the results of the election were decided. Such divisiveness was not new to our history; but it was disconcerting to many of us that, for all of the unpleasant experiences it had invoked in the past, it was still with us.

More problematic, however, was the external discord that became so central to the neoconservative policy of the new Bush administration. At a time when social unrest was breaking out at every meeting of the World Bank and similar institutions, the administration chose to thumb its nose at two of the nobler efforts to invoke global thinking in the interest of the greater good. One was the rejection of the Kyoto Agreement on climate control; and the other was the refusal to accept the conventions of the newly-formed International Criminal Court. From the vantage point of those of us within the borders of the United States, it seemed as if, long before the divisiveness brought on by the ways we ultimately responded to 9/11, our country had set itself in opposition to the rest of the world. The "New World Order" was one of a single superpower with the authority to dictate which rules it would deign to honor and to reject the others out of hand without any need for discussion or debate.

Nevertheless, the United States is hardly the only government that has pushed back against global agreements and conventions that had been proposed in a sincere (if overly utopian) effort to make the entire world at better (or at least safer) place. Today we learned from a Reuters report filed from Kuala Lumpur by Jalil Hamid that Malaysia never ratified the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. As a result, Malaysia views all refugees as illegal immigrants. Hamid's story summarized the penalties for illegal immigration as follows:

Illegal immigrants face a mandatory jail sentence of up to five years and up to six strokes of the cane. Males above 50 and women are exempted from caning.

The reason this is newsworthy is because the refugees currently in question are from Myanmar (Burma); and many of them are Muslim:

Of the total ["an estimated 46,000 refugees" currently in Malaysia], about 12,700 are members of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority, another 12,000 are members of other Myanmar minority ethnic groups.

The Rohingyas came in the 1990s from Myanmar, but the government there disputes their origin and refuses to let them return.

Hamid's report asserts that "dozens" of these refugees have already been caned and that 300 Rohingyas arrested over the weekend are likely to receive the same sentence.

The sentencing for illegal immigration was originally designed to discourage foreign workers from entering the country illegally (which should sound familiar to anyone who has been following our own recent debating and wall-building); but, as is often the case, it was written to cover the broadest number of cases. However, if Malaysia, as a country, has decided not to acknowledge a global convention on the status of refugees, the rest of the world can do little more than think long and hard about applying statecraft (probably along the lines recommended by Dennis Ross) to convince that government to adopt a more humane policy. This is probably the way many nations in the world now view the United States in regard to its own defiance of similar efforts at global agreements.

Mutual Illusion Reinforcement

Since Al Jazeera English did not simply pull an account of the meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and American President George W. Bush from a wire service feed, we should consider whether or not their version is more perceptive than others we are likely to read. The report certainly has a point of view. Unfortunately, that point of view seems to regard the visit as a case of Mutual Illusion Reinforcement. Just to be clear, this is my own phrase, deliberately chosen because its acronym (MIR) happens to be the Russian word for peace. This is one of those situations where irony rules, since the Soviet Union never found any peace in Afghanistan; and now the United States seems to be reliving the narrative of their experience with only minor changes in the cast of characters.

To see the irony we need to look no further than the script read by the characters. Here is the Al Jazeera account of Karzai:

Karzai arrived at Camp David for talks with George Bush on Monday, amid concern over worsening violence in Afghanistan and 21 South Korean hostages.

In a news conference with Bush, Karzai said: "They [the Taliban] are not posing any threat to the government of Afghanistan ... the institutions of Afghanistan or to the buildup of institutions of Afghanistan."

He acknowledged the group were a threat but said it was "a force that is frustrated".

Here is the Bush side of the story:

Bush called the Taliban "cold blooded killers" who "have no regard for human life" and put a positive spin on Afghanistan's progress since the 2001 invasion.

"There is still work to be done, don't get me wrong," he said. "But progress is being made, Mr President, and we're proud of you."

One has to wonder whether or not Karzai could recognize the "Vietnam-speak" in Bush's text; but, since we are talking about mutual reinforcement of illusions, my guess is that he missed the historical reference (as, probably, did Bush).

Still, we have to wonder about that acronym. Is there ever a peace that is not an instance of Mutual Illusion Reinforcement? Isn't peace a matter of knowing that your expectations of the other side may never be satisfied but that it is still in your best interests to assume that they will be; and, if each side can cultivate that attitude in the other, we have one of those rare cases of a virtuous circle! This is not necessarily statecraft "by the book" (not, in any event, the book that Dennis Ross wrote); but, if it works, should we bother to question it? From our point of view, one answer would be that it depends on just what our best interests are. If those interests are concerned with the stability of a democratic state, where the effectiveness of our armed forces and possibly also our drug agents depends on that stability, then, to invoke one of Bush's classic turns of phrase, we may have fooled ourselves many more times than twice. On the other hand many of Karzai's critics have suggested that the only interests served by his government have been the profit motives of corrupt agents, leading us to wonder if any of those agents have ties back to the White House!

Hiroshima Day

I am not quite sure how to react to the fact that the only news report I have seen this morning about the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was a Reuters story filed by Toru Hanai from Hiroshima. In fairness, however, I should report that HBO has chosen this evening for the first broadcast of the documentary it produced, White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, based on interviews with survivors of the attack. This is yet another example of HBO venturing into territory that most of us would prefer to ignore, possibly out of what I have previously tried to analyze as "cultural blindness." In this case, however, the blindness involves a failure to grasp the consequences of the use of atomic and nuclear weapons. Back in the fifties, when these weapons were still being tested above ground, one of the wiser generals in the Pentagon proposed that, once a year, every member of Congress be invited to such a test to get a gut-level understanding of what was at stake when they were debating military policy. Today policy is being made by those who were not yet born on August 6, 1945, living in a culture that no longer feels this date has a position in its own cultural memory. Japan, understandably, takes this memory more seriously. (Even Kurosawa incorporated it in one of his last films.) Like it or not, we may have to rely on Japan to act as our conscience when future questions about the use of such weapons arise.

Is there Strength in Union?

AP Business Writer Ashley M. Heher just filed a story from Chicago based on a panel discussion at this week's YearlyKos Convention. The title of the panel was "A Union for Bloggers: It's Time to Organize." Since most of the attendees at this convention were left-wing political bloggers, the AP coverage took some effort to give voice to other points of view, reinforcing the general opinion that the blogosphere, as a whole, embraces anarchy and wants to keep things that way, thus reminding me of my favorite button from the Summer of Love days, which had only the two words "Anarchists Unite!" Heher also used the lead to the story to try to identify why unionization was up for discussion in the first place:

In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.

These motives are worth examining, and I would like to take them in reverse order.

• Professional standards. This seems to presume that blogging is a profession, an assertion I read as a call for professional identity, a topic I addressed back in May. In that post I invoked a lecture by Jacques Derrida, who engaged is skills in text analysis to demonstrate how sloppy we are in invoking the noun "profession;" and I take this motive to be just another instance of such sloppy thinking. I suspect that what the YearlyKos bloggers were actually concerned with was a need for legitimation, perhaps best understood in terms of a deliberate lampoon: "I know I'm not as dumb as Bill O'Reilly, so why can't I be taken as seriously as he is?" This is a deliberate exaggeration, but it still exposes an underlying attitude that is fundamentally fatuous. Yes, legitimation can be achieved through union; but, since union has, in the past, legitimized not only dock workers but also the Nazi Party, we have to fall back on the cliché that "there is legitimation and there is legitimation." Just as the death threats against blogger Kathy Sierra engendered a lot of sloppy language about governance (from a lot of bloggers whose understanding of the concept was, as Andrew Keen would put it, "amateur"), we are now facing sloppy language about professionalism that cannot even grasp the subtle reasons why the underling noun is inappropriate.
• Collective bargaining. Here again we have sloppy language revealing sloppy thinking, since, in the general context of the blogosphere, it is unclear who is bargaining with whom over what! I know that several of the Democratic candidates who faced the YearlyKos audience promised that, if elected, there would be an official White House blogger; but this is just following a path that the corporate world has already begun to explore. This is neither more nor less than experimenting with a new strategy for public relations, which is in direct opposition to the view of the blogger as a "citizen journalist," which is probably the sort of identity label favored by most YearlyKos attendees. Ostensibly, however, the power of the citizen journalist lies in not being beholden to any employer who might have to juggle the priorities of the needs of customers, workers, and shareholders. Accepting that power, however, entails opting out of a scene in which bargaining over any form of compensation (salary, benefits, etc.) can take place. Being a citizen journalist with the power of collective bargaining brings to mind the old James Thurber quip about the young woman who wanted to be a femme fatale without getting mixed up with men!
• Health insurance. I wanted to save this one for last because it is the one that hits closest to my own home. While I do my own blogging from what can be fairly described as a "position of comfortable retirement," I also live under the shadow of what a catastrophic health emergency could do to the resources I have that support such comfort. This is one reason why I follow the news about the health care mess so closely and why my own votes in the coming primary and general elections will be driven heavily by whether or not I think a candidate can do something about that mess. One would think that the YearlyKos bloggers would share my concern and exert the weight of their words towards achieving a fair and equitable universal health care system that cares more about patients and their doctors than about shareholders in the "health care industry" (a phrase this captures just how corrupt things have begun). Instead, they seem to have chosen the I'm-alright-Jack strategy of solving their own health care problems through unionization, thus ignoring the extent of those problems for the rest of the American population! This, then, takes us back to that identity label that they have embraced. As Russell Baker recently observed in The New York Review, the idea of a newspaper being a "public trust" has been annihilated by holding companies that care only about their shareholders. On the surface one might think that "citizen journalism" would be well-positions to assume this responsibility of "public trust;" but this certainly would not be the case if the citizen journalists but their own needs above those of the public for an issue as critical as health care.

The point of this rather cynical analysis is that the discussion about unionization that Heher reported is actually the tip of an iceberg. The real lesson from the YearlyKos panel is a lesson about power: Attending the YearlyKos convention invoked a sense of empowerment among the attendees, which is only good to the extent that they can remain aware of the tendency of power to corrupt, not only among the people they blog about but among themselves as well. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a painful question about a blogger's financial resources in the face of a health care crisis to reveal that blogging can be just as hypocritical as some of the more "professional" opportunities for writing, such as public relations!

Covering Your Rear (against coffee burns)

The San Francisco Chronicle was very late this morning, probably because there was a last-minute scramble to make sure that Barry Bonds was above the fold on the front page (accompanied, no doubt, by a major overhaul of the Sports section). At least now I know why there was an eruption of automobile horns outside my window at around 9:15 PM (when I was trying to listen to C. P. E. Bach). The result was that I found myself reading Matt Smith's latest column for SF Weekly about what happened when a Starbucks' barista spilled a fresh (and hot) cup of coffee on his father. This appears to be a relatively straightforward account of what happened next:

Instead of running to get some ice, the barista grabbed a questionnaire.

"I don't remember all the questions, because I was thinking, 'What am I going to do with this burn?'" Dad recalls. "There was a man in the shop who was a male nurse. He came from where he was sitting and said, 'I've been watching this, and I'm a nurse, and I must say to you, you must not fill out this form. You must take yourself to the bathroom and make sure you get some water on your foot.'"

The nervous employee persisted. "He said, 'I'm almost done.' I said I had to go to the bathroom and cool my foot," Dad recalled.

The resulting burn was so bad that Dad had to go to the emergency room, get the welts on his foot treated, and take pain medication so strong he wasn't supposed to drive for three weeks. His hospital visit and medicine cost around $500.

The rest of the column is concerned with Starbucks' "official" reaction to this incident. The reader can obviously expect some bias here if "standard operating procedure" involved asking the customer a list of questions (presumably in anticipation of subsequent litigation), rather than giving the customer enough personal attention to assess the extent of the accident (which is the priority of a trained nurse). Nevertheless, Smith took the trouble the recognize the context of the situation:

But for all the good feelings associated with coffee and caffeine, the fact is that, when served at piping-hot temperatures, it can and routinely does cause severe injuries. This consumer safety issue has been pushed from the public's mind over the years in part by a popular coffee-based PR legend stemming from a 1992 case involving McDonald's. The legend says Americans don't take responsibility for their actions and corporations are victims of a justice system that is out of control.

Even without reference to his father's case, it was good for Smith to remind us of that fifteen-year-old McDonald's story, since it was one of the more overt nails in the coffin for the burial of the precept that "the customer is always right." Indeed, when a businesses operation procedures basically treat the customer as an object (as I have previously argued), then the question of whether or not the customer is right is no longer an issue, since objects cannot distinguish right from wrong. However, the remainder of Smith's column indicates that the Starbucks case is more than another instance of objectification of the subject:

I asked Starbucks spokeswoman Tara Darrow if the company instructs employees to help people who are burned at their stores. In other words, should people feel safe patronizing Starbucks?

"Do we have a policy in place for responding? Yes, we do. We have a policy in place. I can't really give you details," Darrow said.

She said that scalding incidents do happen at Starbucks stores, but that it's a secret how often.

Can't you explain how you care for people who are scalded in your stores? I asked.

"No, because, first of all, we don't give specifics on the program," she said.

Did you just say "program?" I asked.

"Our scalding incident program," Darrow said. "They have guidelines for how to respond. I'm not sharing those, because they are part of an internal practice."

Customers might like to know what's going to happen if they're hurt.

"I'm sure they would," Darrow said. "But that's internal information."

She said the company sometimes pays for customers' medical bills. But under what circumstances Starbucks decides to leave scalded customers to fend for themselves is a company secret.

Darrow said that the company keeps first-aid kits on site, and that employees are trained to use them, but that the specifics of this training are also secret.

"I can't give you the specifics of step by step what our response is. That's internal information," she said.

From this exchange Smith drew the conclusion that Starbucks "knows it burns people, and it has put a low priority on taking care of them;" but, in the context of my own previous observations, I have a slightly different reading of Darrow's text. All of that secrecy indicates that, for all the impersonality of the "scalding incident program," Starbucks does, indeed, recognize its customers as subjects; but it also views every customer as a potential adversary. I can think of at least two ways in which revealing that "internal information" could be problematic from Starbucks' point of view.

1. Any customer who would really like to be adversarial could use that information to "game the system." This is judo applied to a mega-corporation. If you want to bring your opponent down, concentrate on the weaknesses of the opposition rather than your own lack of strength. For all its enthusiastic customers, Starbucks also has a lot of enemies out there, many of whom would be creative enough to make advantageous use of such "internal information."
2. Then there are the lawyers. The McDonald's case was ultimately resolved by a secret settlement, meaning that there is no record of either the compensatory or punitive damages. Presumably, however, this amount is greater than the value of the $50 gift card that Smith's father received in the mail two weeks after he was burned. The case is thus not only what Smith calls a "PR legend" but also a potential opportunity for a new generation of creative personal liability lawyers. (Why chase an ambulance when you can find the action at your local Starbucks?) Starbucks wants to do all it can to avoid such litigation, as this could impact both its budget (for a settlement) and that "public image" from which the PR staff earns its keep.

Here in the Civic Center there are any number of places I can walk to for coffee. Ironically, the nearest Starbucks is the most distant among all those alternatives. Nevertheless, I make my coffee at home; and, since I do take responsibility for my actions (and continue to write about this as a virtue), I feel I am sparing myself the potential hassle of having to make my case to a well-financed team of corporate lawyers!

Hearing (and Writing) the Seconds

The notes that accompany the recording made by Per Dreier conducting the London Symphony Orchestra claim that "one can hear for the first time all the music which Grieg composed for Peer Gynt." As a glutton for thoroughness, I found this offer hard to resist; and recently it has come to satisfy my growing interest in listening for the sounds, rather than the notes. This is particularly important when Grieg draws upon folk elements, and for two of the folk dances Grieg dispenses with the conventional orchestra and draws upon a solo Hardanger Violin. I believe I saw my only Hardanger (or a close variation of one) when I was attending a conference (on cognitive musicology) in Jyvaskyla, a Finnish city that seems to be known for its automobile rally and university (along with a squirrel that raids a local grocery store to steal chocolate eggs at least twice a day). As seemed to be the case with a lot of "folk fiddle" music, the Hardanger sound had a lot to do with double-stop playing, possibly using an open string to create the same effect as a bagpipe drone.

This morning, as I continued to work my way through his Lyric Pieces, I discovered that Grieg was impressed enough with this effect to translate it to the piano keyboard. In the fourth "Halling" piece in the fourth set (Opus 47, 1888), there are two "open string" tones in the right hand, the D above middle C and the A above it. What is particularly interesting is that all of the double-stops in his effect involve seconds (both minor and major in the "Halling" piece, which is actually appropriated from the first of the Hardanger folk dances, which, in turn, first surfaces in the "Prelude" to the first act of Peer Gynt). Thus the sound is more about the stubbornness of the drone, rather than the use of multiple tones for harmonic effect. Nevertheless, the effect is used very sparsely in the piano version, unlike that persistent "Gibet" note in Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit (although it is used far more heavily in the second Peer Gynt folk dance). I take this as an understanding on Grieg's part of what was necessary to achieve the proper "sound effect" in the absence of the "original instrument," providing yet another example that there is more "information content" in Grieg than may be deduced from the notes printed on the page!

Learning to Listen

This afternoon I attended the second of two chamber music recitals given by young students in the Summer Music West 2007 program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. These tend to be uneven events, but there is usually a pretty close balance between disappointments and pleasant surprises. There was no information about the performers. However, it seemed as if the first half of the concert presented pre-teen students; and the second half performers were in their early teens. The sharpest differences in quality involved the string players, which should be no surprise; but it started me thinking about what separated the disappointments from the pleasant surprises and whether or not it was age related.

The greatest disappointment was a performance of the first movement of Haydn's "Lark" quartet (the second time this week that Haydn proved to be the most problematic composer on the program). Once again we were dealing with a work of deceptive simplicity in which the performers seem to have been taken in by the deception. However, even if we grant that teasing out the highly experimental nature of Haydn's music may be a bit much for pre-teens, there was also the problem that the very sound was disappointing. There was no sense that these four budding musicians were playing as a quartet. It seemed as if every individual was struggling to get the right notes played at the right time, dealing with the challenges to the fingering hand without worrying about whether the specific pitches were blending properly. The result was no blend at all, making for harsh dissonances that pretty much killed any "lark-like" atmosphere.

Compare this with an older quartet of performers who took on the first movement of the early Beethoven Opus 18, Number 4 C minor quartet. This group had an authentic ensemble sound. Yet it was also one in which each instrument was playing with the expressiveness of its own "voice," which is precisely what Beethoven's score demands of the quartet members. The result was a bit rough around the edges but just as exciting (if not more so) than many of the more "polished professional" performances I have heard of this quartet.

So is the problem one of age. Is there some Piaget-like discontinuity in "the child's conception of musical performance?" In the earlier stage one is an individual struggling with the physical challenges of delivering each note on time, barely listening to the sounds of one's own notes, let alone those of anyone else. On the other side of the discontinuity, one now has the capacity to listen to one's own sounds, those of the other performers, and, perhaps most important, the sound of the music as a whole. Is this nothing more than a case of the "wiring" of cognitive development?

I'm not yet sure. Another explanation may be that so much of music education is so focused, at least in the earliest stages, with playing everything correctly that little attention is given to listening as an equally important activity. The very idea that we need to learn how to listen suffers benign neglect, yet it is just as great a pedagogical challenge as learning to play. Back when I was in Singapore, I had a small group experimenting with using computer visualizations as a way to cultivate the skill of how to listen; but, since the project did not have a financially viable future, it was allowed to languish. (We could not even get the funds to file at least one patent on what we felt were the most important inventions from our research.) This project only scratched the surface of what it meant to learn how to listen. With today's better technology and more experience in trying to understand the nature of listening in a broader range of musical examples, it would not take much to tempt me to return to that line of research!

Bush Makes it Three!

On the grounds that foreign policy trumps the position of poet laureate, it looks as if, in the final decision for this week's Chutzpah of the Week award, President George W. Bush now sprints past Condoleeza Rice with three awards to his name. Traditionally, awards concerned with foreign policy are matters of the State Department; but in the case the award has been prompted by yesterday's executive order, reported on Al Jazeera English as follows:

The US president has signed an executive order to freeze US assets of anyone considered a threat to the Lebanese government.

George Bush's order covers those wanting to reassert Syria's control over Lebanon and anyone judged to be contributing to the breakdown of the country's rule of law.

It is in the second clause in that second sentence that the real chutzpah of Bush's action resides. Once again our administration has hurled us into a strategy of fighting extremism with extremism, this time invoking that weapon made notorious during the Nixon Administration, the "enemies list."

One also has to wonder whether or not this executive order is likely to have any impact other than giving an enormous raspberry to Theodore Roosevelt's advice to speak softly and carry a big stick. Given all the reports we can now examine concerned with the financing of terrorist acts, it is hard to imagine that the enemies in question are tying up their resources in the United States when there are so many better alternatives. Meanwhile, at least according to the Al Jazeera account, under the executive order all United States citizens are prohibited "from doing business with people officially identified as threats to Lebanon," where, of course, "officially identified" means "the ones we tell you to avoid."

This is yet another example of the folly behind the very concept of a "war on terror." Once again we must invoke Gore Vidal's proposition that the second attack on the World Trade Center, like its less successful predecessor, was neither more nor less than a criminal act. There are already plenty of laws in place that cover business activities that support criminal objectives. There is no need to supplement that legal foundation with an executive order, let alone an enemies list. The only consequence of this latest act of Presidential chutzpah is that any social capital that the United States may still have left in its resources for resolving the problems in the Middle East has now been squandered (just as so many of our other resources have been squandered).

The Value of the Poet Laureate

I know Charles Simic better from his essays that have appeared in The New York Review, but I was still pleased to read the Reuters report that he was named today as the United States' 15th poet laureate. I was less pleased to read the final paragraph of this report:

Laureates receive a $35,000 annual award with the term lasting one or two years. The Library [of Congress] said it tries to minimize specific duties so laureates can work on their own projects.

If we "do the math," this comes down to less than $3000 per month (or less than $675 per week and slightly more than $15 per hour). Granted, this is more than twice the minimum wage rate in New Hampshire, where Simic lives; but it still seems to be an awfully skimpy amount to merit that label "award!" It is good to read that the Library of Congress "tries to minimize specific duties so laureates can work on their own projects;" but I wonder to what extent this "award," combined with the current income from his poetry books, will allow Simic adequate funds for food, clothing, and the shelter of his home in Strafford, New Hampshire (from which he can work on his own projects)! Whoever fixed the amount of this award is now in the running for this week's Chutzpah of the Week award (which carries no financial stipend)!

Wasting Time

In just about every setting in which I have worked, there has been someone in the managerial hierarchy obsessing about wasting time. Thus, I suppose it was only a matter of time before the question of whether or not using social software in the workplace was a waste of time. Since JP Rangaswamy has now taken on this question over at confused of calcutta, I figured it was time for me to do the same.

My own approach, of course, is to unpack the text into its underlying connotation. “Wasting time” is basically another way of saying “not doing what you’re supposed to be doing;” and it reveals two interesting aspects of workplace pathology. One is that, particularly with all the “knowledge technology” you have at your disposal, what you are “supposed to do,” does not take a lot of time, leaving you with time on your hands until the next thing you are “supposed to do” shows up (which is why you see so many screens with solitaire on them when you wander around the cubicles). The other is that you are in a workplace where you never have a particularly clear idea what you are supposed to be doing except when you are given a very specific task. I am not raising these examples to argue that we should go back to the assembly-line regimen of Barbara Garson's "electronic sweatshop" but to demonstrate that, particularly where “knowledge work” is involved, just about any workplace you choose lacks even a vague sense of what constitutes normative behavior. Yes, there are still managers that resort to "job descriptions;" but, when it becomes obvious to everyone that there is a wide gulf between what the job description says and what the job-holder does, it is a sign that the nature of the job probably has more to do with a normative behavior than has never been examined seriously.

I have now been in two settings where senior managers were virulently opposed to allowing staff to work at home, particularly on a computer. In the first the argument was that anyone with a computer at home will just use it to play games, and in the second the argument was that anyone claiming to be working at home might actually be out shopping. Neither argument had anything to do with “getting the job done,” because there was no normative characterization of what it meant to “get the job done!”

Now, while I have never been one for playing games on my computer, there have been definitely times when I felt a need to "play around" with new software prior to trying to use it seriously. When I first encountered Excel, I thought it was a monster; and the only way I could "tame" it was through such play. The first thing serious thing I did was to work out a way to keep track of expenses I could claim for a “side job” I had editing book reviews for a professional journal. In other words it was not related to the work behind my monthly paycheck. I got good enough at this sort of thing that, in my next job, I started to submit work-related summaries of travel expenses in Excel. (As a matter of fact, I maintained my report on my laptop while I was on my trip, since that worked better that sorting out, not to mention decoding, a jumble of receipts when I got back to my desk.) Not too long after I started doing this, our Accounting Department defined a specific Excel format to be used in all future travel expense reports! In other words, by investing personal time in one job, I helped define normative behavior in the next one! Needless to say, I never felt I was “wasting time” in either setting!

The question, then, is whether or not this kind of experience with spreadsheet software provides lessons to be learned for social software. However, if we think too much about the software, then we fall into that trap against which I have already ranted, that we deny the existence of the social world by being too fixated on the objective world of that software. Before asking whether "playing around" with social software is a waste of time, we need to look at what is already happening in the flesh-and-blood social world; and ask similar questions. Are you “wasting time” when you take your client to a karaoke bar? I know what the answer is in Japan; but I know of no business (Japanese or otherwise) that has ever bothered to think explicitly about this as a question of normative practices. My point is that we cannot have discussions about uses of social software in the workplace without first establishing a foundation of the broader scope of work-based social practices; and, until businesses recognize this, no amount of reasoning, whether from a white paper written behind a desk or with a PowerPoint presentation delivered in a board room, is going to bring social software into the workplace!

An Excess of Embellishment

How does one win a piano competition? Sandro Russo, who played today's "Musical Lunch Break" concert at St. Patrick's Church in San Francisco, seems to have embraced the strategy of cultivating an ability to execute more embellishing tones per second than any other pianist. This may explain why the London press recently praised his performance of Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a theme of Corelli" for "a complete understanding of the work combined with a flawless technique," since, as was the case with that composer's third piano concerto, "understanding" is very much a matter of apprehending the many layers of embellishment that are applied to a relatively simple background structure. If this is, indeed, Russo's strategy, then it is worth asking whether or not it is possible to prepare a full recital program that is basically "all about embellishment." This was the question behind the "Lunch Break" program; and the answer to the question was almost, but not quite, definitely positive.

The program rested on a foundation of three "schools of thought" about embellishment:

1. The classical view of Haydn, in which embellishment is a necessary, but secondary, "foreground" to a more substantive "background."
2. The virtuoso view of Liszt, in which embellishment is necessary to attract and maintain audience attention, regardless of what may be in the background.
3. The impressionist view of Ravel, who experimented with reducing the "background" to such an absolute minimum that it is more implied by the foreground embellishments than explicitly stated.

From this point of view, Ravel poses the greatest intellectual challenge. With a background that is minimal or absent, the "information content" of the embellishments must be greater than it is in the Rachmaninoff example I previously discussed; and few composers rise to that challenge as effectively as Ravel did in "Une barque sur l'océan," which, interestingly enough, occupied the very middle of Russo's program. It is also interesting that Ravel composed an orchestral version of this work, as well as the solo piano version that Russo performed; and, while Ravel was as much a master of orchestral color as he was of piano technique, the challenge for the keyboard is greater, just because the palette of sound colors is more limited. Consequently, a truly understanding execution of the solo piano version, such as the one Russo provided, is ultimately the far more awesome experience.

On the other hand it would be hard to accuse Liszt's "Rhapsodie Espagnole" of challenging the intellect. Liszt wrote this in 1845 while touring Spain, and it was clearly making a play for local appeal. It is written around two Spanish themes, "La Follia" (which is the theme that Rachmaninoff mistakenly attributed to Corelli, since Corelli had previously written his own variations on it) and the "Jota Aragonesa." Both are relatively simple and are probably about as familiar to today's music lovers as they were to Liszt's audiences in Spain. That kind of familiarity invites an abundance of embellishment, since the ear can still hear the familiar background, however far in the background it may be; and Liszt was never one to stint on embellishments. Indeed, if this piece had been as long as even the shortest movement of the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto, it would have been an equally daunting endurance test; but Russo did not have to worry about budgeting his energy the way Gabriela Martinez did when she took on "Rocky 3." On the other hand I had to wonder whether the piano Russo was playing had been rattling quite as much before he played this piece as it was after he proceeded to the rest of his program.

Liszt was also represented by an arrangement of Saint-Saëns' "Danse Macabre," which was subsequently rearranged (presumably by adding further embellishments) by Vladimir Horowitz. Once again the familiarity of the background allowed excessive embellishment to be the order of the day, and that is precisely what Russo delivered. This was the final piece on the program, and it was certainly a good way to go out with a bang.

Between this and the Ravel, however, was a paraphrase on "The Flight of the Bumblebee" by György Cziffra. I had not previously encountered this composer, who lived between 1921 and 1994; but it did not take me long to figure out what was going on in this particular composition. Basically, Cziffra was doing to Rachmaninoff's arrangement of this familiar chestnut and same sort of thing that Witold Lutosławski had done to Rachmaninoff's treatment of a Paganini caprice, which was to take a far more outrageously excessive approach to embellishing the original. If this is representative of his work, then it is a pity that Cziffra never got out of Europe, since he clearly had the talent to provide soundtracks for the best of the Warner Brothers' cartoons!

I have been putting off writing about the Haydn, because this was definitely the weakest part of the program (meaning that the whole event got off to a poor start). The problem was that, for all his talent in executing all those foreground embellishments, Russo never seemed to figure out where the background was in the Hoboken XVI/46 A flat major sonata that he played. This frustrated me to the point of sending me back to my Wiener Urtext copy of the score, and I have to admit that finding that background is no easy matter. There are plenty of works by Haydn that you cannot just sit down at the piano at start playing from the score without any premeditation, and this is one of them! So, now that Russo has made his reputation with his record-breaking executions of embellishments, I hope that he can now take some time to engage some of his conservatory lessons in analysis. Haydn demands that kind of cogitation, and Russo owe it to his audiences to make more of an effort.

From Infantilism to Arrogance

Having had my rant about the infantilism of IT professionals, I discovered another perspective in Eliot Weinberger's New York Review piece on the (final?) collection of essays by Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches. Weinberger's characterization of Sontag invokes "the old joke about the Oxford don" who "knew everything, and nothing about everything else." This is a good way to describe that narrowness of the IT perspective that is so concentrated on the "everything" of the objective world that its practitioners know nothing about the "everything else" of the subjective and social worlds. The result is that the sort of arrogance that has always been associated with the most scholarly of scholars has been inherited by an entire professional class that almost takes pride in ignoring the day-to-day realities of the clients who are supposed to be beneficiaries (not unlike the arrogance of power that we tend to associate with all three branches of our Federal government). As is the case with the Oxford don, the IT professionals neither recognize nor care to recognize that "everything else" within their sphere of consciousness; and, unfortunately, the current market for (addiction to?) IT products tends to reinforce such sociopathic behavior. The consequence is that day-to-day life, itself, may begin to "phase out" its subjective and social elements, following the path of the objectification of the subject (reinforced by that new marketing strategy of subjectifying the object) to an ugly conclusion where all of us will experience that same dispassionate neglect that we have already seen meted out to the victims of Katrina.