The Captured Perspective

Whether we like it or not, Google has significant control over the way we live in a virtual world. Their programs have changed the way we communicate (gmail), search for information (google.com), get directions (maps.google.com), and collaborate with others (docs.google.com), among other things. Their forthcoming project Wave is Google’s new attempt to influence communication over and above g-chat and gmail, as demonstrated in the video above.

Tim O’Reilly summarizes the new program as ” re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.” I agree with O’Reilly’s assessment that Wave includes some really interesting features, many of which I am very excited about as a consumer.

In an alternative vein, Alan Jacobs raises some intriguing critiques of the philosophical approach to communication with Wave– that of a strong emphasis the benefits of developing more and more nodes of communication, coupled with greater cross-integration. He writes:

I tend to think that among email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, shared bookmarks on Delicious, shared RSS feeds on Google Reader, and [insert your favorite social technology here] we already have enough nodes. We already have enough shared information. Instead of asking how our existing information technologies can do more and more of what they already do well, why don’t we ask what they’re not doing well — or at all?

For me, the larger question is what our Internet tools simulate, and what ideal world they are striving towards. Do these tools mirror the ways we already approach communication, or do they offer radical departure from what we already know. If so, what are they departing from?

Take for example the way Wave approaches email and instant messaging, addressed at minute 10:30. Lars explains, “we transmit live almost character by character what I am typing. (In contrast, with) today’s instant messaging tools, you spend almost half of your time looking at it saying “stephanie is typing, she’s typing, she’s typing, she’s typing” before you can look at what she says.” In WAVE, he promises, this horrible (??) wait is eradicated with a product that offers pure unfiltered transmittal of communication– fingers to keys, mind to mind.

But again, what communication model do the designers of Wave attempt to simulate. Often creativity comes from importing something from a different approach, and applying it is a new way.  If that is the case, what is this model? In removing the social space of editing (you don’t see what I say until I am sure I want to say it), Wave initiatives a radical departure from the editing posture inherent in the writing of letters and email. Almost ironically, it appears to be simulating the way we stutter through face-to-face conversations, often lacking a filter. It is a move toward a communication model that suspends the pacing, dance, and editing of written communication.

I can’t help but wonder if people prefer communicating in this (unfiltered) way. Specifically, I wonder if people like their messages received without this editing space/ filter. Take for example the huge number of people that would prefer to write a paper over having to present the same content with public speaking. Or look at the way people do speak in public, and the form it takes. 90% of the best-man and maid of honor speeches I have seen involve a significant amount of reading word for word from a pre-written transcript.

This trepidation is understandable as unfiltered implies vulnerability. Take this example of an instant message sent to a friend.  In the normal g-chat model, the friend sees this.

(Peter is typing…)

Peter: I like you.

In the Google Wave model, the communication is qualitatively different when the internal dialogue becomes explicit.

Peter: I love you!! .. (edit back, remove exclamation points, retype)… I love you… (edit back, change wording)… I like you.

Oh how different the latter message is, as understood by the receiver! The observed process significantly changes the final product. While the final form of Google Wave will have ways to make this editing more private, as of now, the default seems to be the real time approach. While this might be less of a problem for people with a stronger internal filter (read here: NOT me), I have no doubt that this approach could at least subtlety  change the way all of us ‘speak’ and ‘listen’ in an Internet age.

Survival (in middle management) depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

The above quote comes from Matthew Crawford’s case for the importance of working with one’s hands, as told in this week’s NY Times Magazine. Matthew, who earned his PhD in political philosophy from University of Chicago, left academia because of a baren job market to pursue two very different types of work over the next several years: one as an executive director of a K-street think tank, and one as motorcycle mechanic at a shop on Chicago’s Goose Island.  Add those careers to his immersion in academia (doctoral education plus a Committee on Social Thought post-doc), and his work in the corporate world (writing summaries or journal articles sold to CD-ROMS of subscribing libraries), and Crawford is left with a good deal of authority on some common themes of personal development across a wide variety of work types.

The author in shop

The entire article is worth a read, but the part I found most interesting was his discussion of the moral re-education that takes place within any job. It forms the basis of his case for entrepreneurship, and the benefits of a world where you get “immediate feedback… from material objects (where) work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.” He writes:

Mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

His point about habits of the mind seems crucial. We all make decisions, but the consequences thereof often lie outside of our awareness, and deviate from our expectations. I chose to go to a PhD program to develop a specific analytical skill set. While my program has more than met this expectation, in what other ways have I been shaped?

Personally, I would say a potential negative consequence of my education is my developed tendency to be overly analytical to the point of disengagement.  While Crawford highlights the benefits of meta-cognition, there are also downsides. Take a relationship for example. Love is organic and typically fodder for the poet, but the organic can just as easily be approached analytically as a biologist.

me: I really like this person

meta-me: but what does liking entail, and are you satisfying or satisficing your decision criteria?

me: she’s beautiful, fun and engaging

meta-me: beauty is a social construct and will fade or change over time, fun is a distraction, and engagement in one thing is disengagement in something else. Are you ready for that commitment and the corresponding sacrifice of your individualism.

she: who does this guy think he is?!

It seems to me that one of the most neglected dimension for career decisions is reflection on the ethical habits of mind we cultivate in these roles; unfortunately, these cultivated dispositions most easily bleed over into other dimensions of life. For Crawford, engagement in the think-tank world left him disillusioned, with a sense that survival “demanded (he) project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning.” I wonder how that influenced other aspects of his life: relationships with family and friends, hobbies, the way he approaches parenting, etc.

This isn’t to say that certain careers are inherently bad (middle management, or think tank advisor in the case of Crawford) or good (auto-mechanic) for all people.  It is however an acknowledgement that we don’t leave careers untouched by the frameworks they implicitly endorse.  To the extent that we desire a level of control over the unintentional direction our life is taking, it is important to be aware of the indirect development woven into many of the major decisions in life (where to go to college, who to marry, where to live). In this way, the most interesting moral dramas might truly take place beneath the surface of our stories; thus, to the extent that it is possible, this might be a level worth paying attention to.

Happiness

This month’s Atlantic contains Joshua Wolf Shenk’s fascinating profile of Harvard’s “Grant Study” of human happiness. The project started in 1937 and followed the lives of 268 Harvard men in an attempt to tease out the primary factors underlying human happiness and success.  The researchers selected  these men to follow over their life based on high performers across a variety of metrics (health data, academic records, and recommendations from the Dean).  Moving between various financiers and directors over the next 72 years, the project now rests in the hands of George Vaillant, a psychologist trained at the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis and empirical behaviorism.

So, what transpired over the past 72 years? For starters, what started out as a somewhat homogeneous group of well-adjusted young men frayed into a highly divergent group: some successes and some failures by modern standards, a mix of happy and depressed, containing both the typical and atypical. As David Brooks writes in a recent column:

The life stories are more vivid than any theory one could concoct to explain them. One man seemed particularly gifted. He grew up in a large brownstone, the son of a rich doctor and an artistic mother. “Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study,” a researcher wrote while he was in college, “the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.”

By 31, he had developed hostile feelings toward his parents and the world. By his mid-30s, he had dropped off the study’s radar. Interviews with his friends after his early death revealed a life spent wandering, dating a potentially psychotic girlfriend, smoking a lot of dope and telling hilarious stories.

Another man was the jester of the group, possessing in college a “bubbling, effervescent personality.” He got married, did odd jobs, then went into public relations and had three kids.

He got divorced, married again, ran off with a mistress who then left him. He drank more and more heavily. He grew depressed but then came out of the closet and became a major figure in the gay rights movement. He continued drinking, though, convinced he was squeezing the most out of life. He died at age 64 when he fell down the stairs in his apartment building while drunk.

One important (and interesting) question is how to  best make sense of these lives and the cause of their specific trajectories. The original study intent was to produce some helpful yes/ no’s in regards to what it takes to live a happy live. Don’t smoke, indulge desires. Go to church, abandon religion. Get married, Stay single.

And while this longitudinal study has produced some interesting correlations, the more interesting piece is the variance left unexplained– how the lives emerge uniquely over time, and what this says about how thought is both shaped by and shapes lived reality.

One approach which emerges throughout the article is the potential of the narrative framework to help understand these men– the importance of seeing lives as stories with their own inertia and the power to given the mundane meaning. In psychologist Jerome Bruner’s 1990 Jerusalem-Harvard Lecture entitled “Acts of Meaning,” he suggests of this approach that:

It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology – not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. It was not a revolution against behaviorism with the aim of transforming behaviorism into a better way of pursuing psychology by adding a little mentalism to it.  (p.2)

In all these men we can see the role of meaning in shaping life interpretation and resulting behavior. For example, how do we understand the man identified by #218 whose disillusionment with his decision against pursuing medicine at a young age haunted him to his death bed. When asked about his overarching philosophy, he states: “I have an overriding sense (or philosophy) that it’s all a big nothing—or ‘chasing after wind’ as it says in Ecclesiastes & therefore, at least up to the present, nothing has caused me too much grief.” Was this his way to account for the earlier decision to pass up on medicine, and did it shape what he taught his children, or what he spent free time on as he aged? Can this stance be accounted for solely in his biology, education, or family social structure? While those surely matter, perhaps their effect is primarily in helping code that which gives him meaning– as pieces of the larger narrative structure.

Or, how do we understand #47, a man who married and divorced twice all the while deeply desiring to grow into a role as a famous writer. He eventually came out as a homosexual and emerged as a major figure in the gay rights movement.  In the study he tells Vallient, “It’s important to care and to try, even tho the effects of one’s caring and trying may be absurd, futile, or so woven into the future as to be indetectable.” How did this understanding factor into his decisions on what tasks to pursue, whether he ought to stay in his marriages, and how he approached his coming out and eventual involvement in the gay rights movement? Or what about the themes that emerge as stories even without one’s ability to clearly tell these as a narrative… the stories and assumptions that operate below one’s level of awareness.  Are these thoughts but causally meaningless ruminations as the body and mind churn away unaltered? The Grant Study, and other research that takes us outside the temporally flat world of the university laboratory setting begins to suggest otherwise.

“The language people speak influences the way they see the world”–Whorf

“Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.”–Tennessee Williams

After seeing my friend Adam’s A+ review of”The Wrestler,”  my brother John, his girlfriend  Ashley, and my roommate Chris went out and rented the movie. I am glad we did. Darren Aronofsky’s film is a poignant narrative on the potential and limitation of personal redemption.  The shooting was crisp, the characters realistic, and the story uncomfortably true.

**WARNING: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW**

The Wrestler

The award-winning Fox Searchlight film tells the story of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a once famous wrestler 20 years past his prime.  Randy spends his time in various local independent wrestling leagues, while prepping for a 20th anniversary rematch with his nemesis Ayatollah.

After one especially brutal preparation match, Randy’s heart gives out, necessitating a bypass surgery and the morbid prognosis that his heart is not capable of sustaining further beatings of ring-side leaps, performance-enhancing drugs, and prop-induced mauling. Throughout the rest of the movie, Randy struggles to come to grips with his forced career change, as he attempts to woo the heart of a local stripper Cassidy, and awkwardly push towards reconciliation  with his estranged daughter Stephanie.

There are two scenes that sum up some of the power of Randy’s story. The first is nicely summarized by Adam:

There’s an insanely brilliant scene where Aronofsky’s camera follows Rourke from an upstairs bathroom in the grocery store where he works, down the stairs, across the stockroom, through a pathetic plastic curtain, and into the deli. It’s all done to the faintly heard rumbles of a crowd cheering, apparently heard in his head.

There is truth in Aronofsky’s depiction of Randy’s experience.  Specifically, our previous experiences condition how we view the world and what pursuits we view as being of value. As an audience, we get a clear picture of the disappointment Randy must feel in his new work, as the background noise highlights the disparity between his past life and current reality. Instead of walking out to cheering fans, he is surrounded by nagging customers.

Likewise, the final scene of the film shows Randy deciding to fight in the final anniversary fight in spite of a healthy list of reasons not to: the girl he falls for finally leaves her work to show him support, his heart is still not in any condition for a fight, and he seems to be slowly emerging out of the haze to realize that this fight is only a moment of entertainment for fickle fans, and not a ticket back into the big leagues. And yet, he chooses to fight.

In these scenes, the potential and limitation of our personal redemption narratives come into focus.  Randy realizes early in the film that his life is not worth continuing in its current form, so he makes a push out of it.  He shows his love for Cassidy, and he attempts to reconcile things with Stephanie. But the shadows of his past life, and the way they encode his sense of success and failure, stay with him.  Whorf’s quote that  ”the language people speak influences the way they see the world” is true, and Randy’s inocculation into a world where meaning is found in competition, entertainment and commerce keep him from breaking free into the other world he deeply desires.  The echos of the ring sound far after the sound of the final bell. And in the end, when, in spite of himself, there are still opportunities for another route, a place beyond the Hell that is himself, to quote Tennessee Williams, Randy hops back in the ring.  He cannot break free, and his need to finish that story keeps him from entering the story of his loved ones. Randy’s story is our story, and his battle towards (and against) redemption is the one we all have to fight.