Media and Sanity (Formerly "Mental Hygiene")

Whatever device or gadget or medium in which you read this post shapes your apprehension and understanding of it, according to McLuhan. Please tell me more about McLuhan, if you have the time.

A number of you have asked for some more takes on our digitized media landscape (actually, the number is zero...is zero even a number?), given my inveterate bookishness, so I'll download the following into the blogosphere and see if anyone salutes, comments, clicks, vomits.

Irony
The OG does not have a Twitter account, has not tweeted a damned thing, as of the date above. The OG has read practical reasons for doing so, but is not sure the practicalities outweigh the investment of time (<----O! that omnipresent "time is money" metaphor again!). The OG was on Facebook for one day, then closed his account. He has no Droid or iPad. Not even an iPod, which may be illegal - not owning one - but I'll have to look that up later. He's not on Google +. He hasn't made any videos to be seen on You Tube or Vimeo or some of those other ones. He is not Linked In, so presumably not many are Stumbling Upon him.

OG likes that you like it and use it and enjoy it, or that, or some of it. He's wired differently. A friend who is the opposite: he's sending Drop Box music to a friend while he's carrying on a conversation about web browsers and Tweeting what someone just said that was funny; his Droid is a permanent attachment to his nervous system and may as well be a prosthetic. When it's possible to get some nano-implant in the brain that accesses the Net only by thinking and speaking out loud to the Cloud, he will be the first in line.

Meanwhile, I sit with my books. I take long walks in the forest, alone. I meditate. I love the MacBook I write this on, so I'm not completely neo-Luddite, nor do I think - and this is my main point - that "my way" is right, and everyone else is crazy. Only most of you are crazy. You know who you are. Or maybe not... Besides books, I love the medium of actually being in the space of another human, and conversing freely. It's analog, but cut me some slack, okay?

Hands at Ten and Two?
I don't know if they still say this, but when I first got my driver's license, the Authorities tried to inculcate the dogma that keeping your hands at the ten o'clock and two o'clock positions on the steering wheel was a big part of safety. That was before Internet and cell phones, but the whole Department of Motor Vehicles system seems antiquated and pretentious and reactionary, so there's probably some 16 year old being told this by a driving examiner as I type this. Anyway, use your turn signal, be aware of the vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, drones, and other moving and not-so moving vehicles and signs around you. Is it necessary to emphasize you ought not be TEXTING while driving? (The quick dopamine or serotonin or oxytocin buzz from making yet another connection with another Being seems a legacy from the Paleozoic, so I consider it an almost intractable problem.)

Farhad Manjoo tries to solve the texting while driving issue HERE; the rise of Siri and the current melange of laws state-by-state in Unistat shows the lawmakers are pretty clueless, although I do like Maine's ban on "distracted driving."

(Wait a minute, hold on: only 70% of "connected consumers" said they'd prefer speech commands over touchscreens while driving? WTF?)

Other states' current laws just seem arbitrary and narrow, and probably unenforceable, for the most part. Voice-texting seems to make a basic break with the old touchscreen texting and reading. (I have sent a touchscreen text maybe five times in my life and do not have a disembodied friend named Siri, and don't tell me you're surprised to hear this.) While it seems difficult to tell how much injury, death and general mayhem has been added by distracted, cell-phone using, texting, even newspaper-reading drivers, and some say it's difficult after an accident to tell if a driver was distracted unless they say they were, or there was a witness, I know I feel distracted even when I'm talking to a friend in the passenger seat, or trying to change the CD (I still listen to CDs in the car!), so I perhaps am not entitled to an opinion.

Some studies I've seen have shown that texting while driving is as dangerous as driving while over the legal alcohol limit. Other studies I've seen (ask me for citations if you really care) show that driving while sleep-deprived is as dangerous as drunk driving.

Let's not even think about texting while drunk, in heavy traffic, on two hour's sleep, but I'm sure it's done.

The comedian Marc Maron nails it for me. He tells about the time he was minding his own business, driving down the road, texting, when he had to slam on the brakes because someone suddenly appeared in the road in front of him, and it angered him they were there. He realized that texting while driving was worse than drunk driving because, as he says, "When you're drunk driving, at least SOMEONE is driving the car." Maron goes on to cover an angle I hadn't thought of before: dying in a car crash because you were texting, and that portion of the text is still there for the emergency crew, cops, medical personnel, etc, to see. Maron "guarantees" what's on your device will be absurd. "Soy milk is so fu..." So fu what? "What a lameass LO..." Laugh out loud at WHAT? And then the worst: did you hear how Dave died? He was texting while driving and his last words were, "That bitch can suc..." (Polite mourners will all agree he was trying to say, emphatically, that his ex-wife can succeed in anything she tries to do!) Ask yourself, driving-texters, do you want your last words to be something like that? (Catch Maron's full act with This Has To Be Funny - the bit about his visit to the Creationist Museum alone is worth the price - and his podcasts are pretty cool, too.)

                                 We've come a long way, baby! The UNIVAC, 1951

Dithering over Twitter
Some of my smartest friends don't understand why I don't at least set up an account and Tweet to..."followers" (as a minor scholar of the Manson Family, the word bugs me a bit) that I've just written an article for so-and-so, or blogged on blah-blah-blah. So I admit it: I'm thinking about jumping into the twitterverse. But no plunge yet. I worry about its own imperatives, specifically how much time it'll steal from me when there are so many things I know I enjoy and find fulfilling already. I doubt yet another way to "connect" in some disembodied way with fellow humans will finally make me feel like I've arrived. And when I look at the top Twitterholics and their number of followers, I'm amazed to see that Barack Obama is #7 in the world. He's hip, he's smarter than me. Maybe there's something to this stuff?

But then I see the Barackstar is just ahead of Rihanna and Taylor Swift, but below, in descending order to Numero Uno: Britney Spears (she's still alive?), Kim Kardashian, Shakira, Katy Perry, Bieber, and Numero Uno Gaga. I'm a snob. I know it.

Twitter seems to have revolutionary applications; we've seen that with reports from the Arab Spring (not going too well in Syria, so far, and Egypt? Oy!), and Occupy stuff. And it can get your house robbed, too. If you've committed some crimes such as bank fraud and others, it can get you arrested. If you Tweet the wrong joke in the wrong place, you can find yourself arrested and banned for life from, say the airport. Twitter also adds a whole new dimension to the art of creepily stalking someone else, even if, for this writer, it was Dear Ol' Dad. On the other hand, you can continue to update your friends on the latest even after you're dead, so there's that enigmatic mindfuck of a thrill to foist on friends. You may have heard it here first! (And Blogger allows you to complete a blogpost, then set a timer for it to go live, so you cannot be 100% sure you're not reading this from a dude who's already dead! WOW! Talk about receiving messages from the Great Beyond!? <cue: theremin music>)

It seems there's an ethical quandary among tweeters about "Tweeting you own horn." How much is acceptable? In a writer's forum I read recently there seems a basic assumption that one of the primary purposes for Tweeting is to let followers know you've produced yet another masterpiece. Other early Tweet-theorists tell us we ought break our Tweet-actions into - I've seen two models, each with variations - 33/33/33 or 25/25/25/25: with the 33s, you spend a third of your tweets telling people about your work/projects/business; another third is spent on pushing your friend's work/projects, etc; and the last 33 just "shooting the breeze," apparently in attempt to bond phatically. The 25 model is the same as the 33, but with an extra category shoved in: social and political ideas, responsibilities to your fellow humans, I'm going to the Occupy/Tea Party/Meat Is Murder/Save The Plankton rally at the Union Square, who's with me? Etc.

I could relate articles I've read about why Twitter is more popular per capita with African Americans than "whites" (although the gap seems to be lessening), the use of Twitter by Somali terrorists, the implications of a bazillionaire Saudi Prince's investment in Twitter, and the project of trying to predict the future by monitoring the twitterverse, but call me a twit or a taxi, it'll have to wait.

A French Idea
The French have decided it's not fair to mention Twitter, Facebook, etc by name in their mainstream media because it seems to be free publicity for those giants, and there are always smaller companies that do social media who are trying to gain a sliver of the pie. After a few hours of thinking about it, this makes sense to me. However, when one of these megacorps have been found to be violating the law, or a prominent, independent citizen watchdog group says one of these monstrosities wants to do something that will infringe on what we so laffingly call "privacy" or something else having to do with fundamental fairness, I think you have to be able to mention them. Imagine your bubble-headed bleached-blond babbling on the 11 o'clock news that, "A very powerful search engine company announced today that it intends to corner the market on tasers, personal drones, and automatic weapons and in a separate statement says it's going to independently explore Mars for the future recreational colonization of its own CEOs and some of its most loyal employees..."

I don't know about you, but I'd want the name of that company blurted out by the mouthpiece. Oh hell, I'll probably read about it on Twitter. And who are we fooling? We all know it's Google. And the French aren't banning naming search engines, only "social networking" sites. But aren't Google's tentacles in every pie by now? Anyway...

FREE Course in How to Code!
In Douglas Rushkoff's book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For A Digital Age, he says if you know how to program, that's great, but he extends the semantics for "programming" to how you interact with your gadgets. (One of the things I like best about Rushkoff's semantics of "programs" is his extension of it to BS [belief systems], social institutions, and language itself.) The gadgets are programmed by their makers to have, seemingly, their own imperatives. You must program yourself and your interaction with your gadgets for what YOU want, not what the gadget wants you do with your time. To you philosophy geeks, we're in the realm of subjective intentionality here.

But would you like to learn how to code, the hardcore way? Two young hotshots, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, started Codeacademy, and you can learn to code throughout 2012 for free. This article covers it, and makes a point I found salient: how many people who have lost or will lose their jobs to robots have/had no clue how easily this was done. This coding dealio seems empowering, and I'm going to try to find the time to learn some of this stuff, being a blithering idiot when it comes to these modalities, right now.

So, if all goes well, I will be coding like a madman by the end of the year, just in time for the Apocalypse, when that damned Mayan calendar claims us all.

Rushkoff talking for 5 minutes about Program or Be Programmed: