The Captured Perspective

Alan Jacobs has a fascinating post on the future of memoir in a Facebook age at his blog, Text Patterns. Reflecting on his teaching of the memoirs of Augustine, Richard Rodriguez, and Marjane Satrapi’s, he writes:

All three of these authors are, in their varying ways, displaced persons — displaced from homeland, or upbringing, or culture, or language, or some combination thereof — and that displacement is one of the major prompts for memoir and other forms of self-narration. The person taken out of the environment in which he or she was formed is almost forced to reconsider the self and its components, is almost forced into redefinition. And one of the classic ways to achieve a successful redefinition is by telling one’s own story, in large part because through telling it one discovers what it is.

Alan’s explanation of the power in memoir is succinct and deeply true. It is for primarily for this reason that I keep coming back to memoir as a genre in my own free reading, attempting to find certain self-narrations that help me make sense of my own life, goals and desires. On my night stand right now is Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, a book of which I hope to write more on in a later post.

Jacobs continues on in this post to reflect on the future of memoir for people from the Facebook generation, questioning:

Does Facebook make self-narration less compelling, less necessary? In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates a false sense of seamlessness in lives that have actually undergone significant ruptures

While Jacobs’ outlines a fascinating theory here, I don’t know if I completely buy it. To help flesh out some thoughts, I went back to Orenstein’s original article in the Times. In this piece, she writes of her concern that her necies will not have the space for necessary self-development in their upcoming journeys to college; specifically, she questions whether they will be able to explore and redefine their adult identities with “450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam (their) present self?” Point taken, and it especially resonates with me given my tendency towards fulfilling the identity expectations that others have for me.

Orenstein goes onto argue that, “something is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness.” In essence, Facebook circumvents loneliness and introspection for the individual. It is here where I think Orenstein and Jacobs misdiagnoses the role of Facebook on youth psychology. Loneliness is not removed in Facebook; if anything, it is amplified. Nothing makes one feel more alone than seeing a constant stream of self-selected photos from another person’s life, the parties they attend, and the new friends they are making. Nothing makes one pain of disintegrating high school friendships more acute as being a distant (but seemingly present) observer of their transformations. Though Facebook as a communication medium provides space for connection, as a voyeuristic space, it is more likely to cultivate existential isolation.

So, if as Orenstein seems to argue, Facebook make life into a “virtual coffee shop,” it is closer to the coffee shops I experience on a day-to-day basis than any sort of social ideal. We do not walk into Starbucks and see good friends at every table. Rather, we see familiar but nameless faces, and are known only by the snapshots they have of what we do in that place. In overhearing snippets of conversations between friends we do not know, we are surrounded by people but profoundly alone. If that does not cultivate a breeding ground for self-reflection and self-narration, I do not know what will.

I want to identify three forces that I find interesting and perhaps related: 1) American society is guided by the self-regulating market and a culture of individualism; 2) We are the most Christian and religiously devout nation in the west; and 3) Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily less happy over the past 100 years despite living in one of the most opulent nations in modern history.

I recently picked up the Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell in which he writes:

I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: “Weary of earth and laden with my sin.” In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.

This is due in large part to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection. External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

This speaks strongly to both my life experience and frustration with the church, but also hints at a potentially inherent antagonism between capitalism and Christianity.

The primary religion of our culture emphasizes the depravity of the human nature. The institution that has largely guided American social transformation for the past two-hundred years, market capitalism, is centered in the primacy of self-interest. With our economics leading us to focus on ourselves, and our religion on how fallen and broken we are, is it surprising that we aren’t getting any happier?

Despite my frustrations, I am a Christian and believer in the usefulness of markets – seeking an alternative way to understand faith and society through a lens of human flourishing, not depravity and selfishness.

On Wednesday March 11 around 9:00 p.m. Derek Copp, a student at Grand Valley State University, was shot in the upper-right chest by an Ottawa County sheriff’s detective during the execution of a search warrant at his off-campus apartment. He sustained injuries to the lung and liver and was, at last update, in serious condition at Spectrum Butterworth Hospital.

Comments to the stories center on whether marijuana should be legal, how closely administrative leave resembles vacation, whether police are pigs, and how much lawless kids can get away with these days.

Somewhat surprisingly the question of whether the officer was justified in shooting this man is barely asked or addressed. This is understandable in light of the fact that police have released no information about the raid. All we know is this: Copp was unarmed and did not confront the officers.

This black hole that is the police is nothing new. Consider the modus operandi of David Simon during his time on the crime beat at the Baltimore Sun:

Everyone had very good reasons for why nearly every fact about a crime should go unreported.

In response to such flummery, I had in my wallet, next to my Baltimore Sun press pass, a business card for Chief Judge Robert F. Sweeney of the Maryland District Court, with his home phone number on the back. When confronted with a desk sergeant or police spokesman convinced that the public had no right to know who had shot whom in the 1400 block of North Bentalou Street, I would dial the judge.

And then I would stand, secretly delighted, as yet another police officer learned not only the fundamentals of Maryland’s public information law, but the fact that as custodian of public records, he needed to kick out the face sheet of any incident report and open his arrest log to immediate inspection.

Where are the facts of this case? Why has it been nearly a week and still nothing is known about what took place between the time police entered through the rear sliding door to Copp’s apartment and the time he was shipped off to the hospital?

The police, whom we pay to keep our selves, our families, and our communities safe has has shot and nearly killed a private citizen. The onus is upon the government to provide clear, incontrovertible evidence that this intrusion into private life is justified. This shooting may be well-founded, but the police cannot sit idly by while a report is filed in a month or two.

The police keeping any and all information from us is akin to an employee keeping company records from his boss. No boss would accept that from a subordinate, and we should not either. The government derives political power from the consent of the people. To keep records and details of this incident from the public is a breach of the contract by which they are allowed to govern.

In fact, I propose a mandatory helmet-mounted video recording system be worn by officers of the law during the execution of a warrant. This footage could have been on YouTube the next day. With this we (the officer’s employer) could immediately judge whether, in shooting Mr. Copp, the government acted legally. The police could set up a blog to give their interpretation of the evidence, as long as the evidence was freely available.

And why can’t we see a Google map with pushpins at every traffic stop? It could show details of why a car was stopped, demographic information on the driver, and any charges or tickets that resulted. Someday…

Why does it matter whether different cultures are protected from emerging global forces? Some would say it doesn’t, most anthropologists would argue otherwise. I guess I see both sides.

On the one hand, no humane person pines over the glory days of when we had a culture of slavery in this country. Or, for a more current example, do we really want to preserve our current American culture of excessive consumption and environmental degradation? Just because a culture exists doesn’t mean it should. Further, as Westerners, we shouldn’t deny remote cultures the vast material benefits of our system (if they desire those benefits) for the sake of being able to visit exotic peoples and discuss our neat differences.

From the anthropological perspective, it seems that all cultures ought to be equally valued by outsiders because it’s inappropriate for one group to determine the fate of another based on priorities and principles that are not shared. After all, who is to say that we got it right as Westerners?

Intuitively I believe in preserving distinct cultures because I see the beauty and concert in the thousands of unique expressions of human voice around the world. I would just like to unpack a little further what it is specifically that we ought to value about our culture and others’ to better understand how to think about things like globalization and international development both critically and constructively.

What do you think? How careful should we be about cultural imperialism when thinking about global “progress?”

Since I can remember I have readily recited Milton Friedman’s old adage that the government should ensure that people have “equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.” The logic here is that if everyone is afforded the same opportunities (e.g. education, health, etc.), then it’s simply a matter of individual will, luck, and choices whether one gets “ahead” in terms of social and economic outcomes (e.g. income level). This line of thought also embodies a general disregard among conservatives concerning the role of government in mitigating inequality of outcomes. As with most others, it’s time for me to revisit this proposition.

Rethinking this raises two basic questions: 1) Is equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes a useful distinction? and 2) Why might inequality of outcomes be a proper focus of government? In regards to the first question, I’m not convinced that equality of opportunity vs. outcomes is a practical distinction.

Theoretically I understand the logic, but we live in a world where peoples’ opportunities are directly shaped by the outcomes of their families and communities. For example, if one’s parents are too poor to live in a neighborhood with high caliber schools, then that directly impacts their opportunity to get a high quality education, thus furthering educational inequality of opportunity.

I absolutely agree that we should focus on equalizing peoples’ opportunities, not outcomes, but in order to do that we need to restructure opportunities so they are not dependent on outcomes. This is where the typical conservative line falls apart. You cannot simultaneously advocate for more equal opportunities AND smaller government.

If the funding of healthcare and education continues to be largely decentralized, as conservatives advocate, then the quality of those services will mirror the economic circumstances of communities: poor areas will have weak basic services, rich areas have robust education and health systems. If we take Friedman’s logic seriously, I think it undermines his advocacy for small government. By the way, Obama’s quote on this point was spot on: “The fundamental question of our time is not whether government is too big or two small, it will be whether it works.”

On the second question, as usual, I think Amartya Sen says it best in this tour de force of an interview:

I believe that virtually all the problems in the world come from inequality of one kind or another [...] There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. I find that very difficult for the reason that Adam Smith discussed a long time ago in The Wealth of Nations. He pointed out that the same thing that everyone likes doing, talking with others, appearing in public without shame, taking part in the life of the community, if you live in a community that’s relatively rich, you need a much bigger income to be able to do these elementary things.

If you are a villager in rural Bangladesh or Uganda, you might be able to meet with people very easily even if you’re not schooled or if you don’t have a car or if you’re not clothed in a way that’s regarded as obligatory in some cultures. But in, say, America, if you don’t have a television at home your kids might find it hard to converse with each other in school. The income that we need in order not to be poor is much higher in a richer society. So that relative poverty, which is really a matter of inequality, in terms of income can be the cause of absolute poverty, the inability to do the basic things which Adam Smith noted we all like doing.

The idea that we can be interested only in poverty but not in inequality I don’t think is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is in fact inequality because of this connection between income and capability. The same capability to take part in the life of the community requires a much bigger basket of commodities and therefore a much bigger income in a rich society. So you have to be interested in inequality. And since we live in a global village, events in different parts of the world influence each other. The Internet begins to penetrate in my country. Indians begin to find out how other people live in the rest of the world. Given these circumstances, the issues of inequality and the issue of poverty are not separable even globally.

They’re very closely linked, both in terms of the need to ask the moral question, Is it right that I should enjoy my privileges, and not feel I owe anything to others? As well as the other level, do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? Both these questions motivate us to take these issues to be central to human living. Ultimately, the old Socratic question, How should I live? has to include a very strong component of awareness and response to inequality.”

My apologies for the length of this interview segment, but Sen makes sense of why inequality matters in a way that I have never been able to articulate. In short, I still agree with Friedman’s basic proposition, but I would argue that taking it seriously undermines the libertarian solution he ends up coming to. Further, I think Sen’s argument forces us to reconsider the real difficulties surrounding inequality of outcomes, which may be good reason to believe that it is a proper thing for the government to focus on.

A Few Good Men:

“Col. Jessup: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. . . And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall; you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”

The Dark Knight:

“[After the good District Attorney Harvey Dent has been driven to madness and a killing spree, culminating with Batman finally killing Harvey to stop him…]
Gordon: The Joker won. Harvey’s prosecution, everything he fought for . . . undone. Whatever chance Gotham had of fixing itself, whatever chance you gave us of fixing our city . . . dies with Harvey’s reputation. . . . People will lose all hope.
Batman: No. They won’t. They can never know what he did.
Gordon: Five dead? Two of them cops? We can’t sweep that under—
Batman: No. But the Joker cannot win. . . . Gotham needs its true hero.
Gordon [realizing that Batman is expressing a willingness to take on the burden of Dent’s guilt]: You? You can’t—
Batman: Yes, I can. . . . You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things because I’m not a hero, like Dent. I killed those people. That’s what I can be.
Gordon: No! You can’t! You’re not!
Batman: I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.”

Some similarities between what Batman has become at the end of The Dark Knight and the way Colonel Jessup sees his role in A Few Good Men:

1. The public cannot understand the price of peaceful, free society
2. In order to be effective, the protector must be (willing to be) reviled

However in A Few Good Men Jessup in the antagonist and in The Dark Knight Batman is the protagonist and at the end of the movies Jessup is in handcuffs and Batman is streaking through Gotham on his bat-motorcycle to fight another day.

The difference seems to be the setting. Back in 1992 the most dangerous wall upon which the screenwriter could set Col. Jessup was that between the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay and Cuba. The public wanted to put aside the worries and demands of the cold war and move to a more cheerful world in which Col. Jessup could be left as a memory of times past.

In 2008 however, a dark knight like Batman is more palatable to the American movie-going public. In a time of many fears, both real and imagined (today’s threat level is elevated in general, but high for airplanes!), Americans identify with the citizens of violence-ridden Gotham in a desire for security.

This Christmas, one of the items on my Christmas List that got no love was a Netflix subscription.  I am getting sick of driving to Blockbuster and having to pay late fees (yes even with their new-ish No Late Fees policy). Netflix has a much greater selection, will let us have a movie to watch whenever we feel like it, all without due dates. Awesome. One other thing I like about Netflix is the Netflix Prize. Not that I might win it, but that they’re putting it on.

The Netflix Prize, which is written up in this New York Times Magazine article and video, is a $1 million award to any team that can improve the Netflix movie recommendation algorithm by 10%. As a user rates movies (1-5 stars) they’ve seen, Netflix hopes to recommend other movies they might like. The algorithm predicts the rating a user would assign to movie Z from their ratings to movies A, B, …, Y. When the user, in fact, sees and rates movie Z, the accuracy of the program can be evaluated.

Watching the teams and waiting for the next big move has been water cooler talk around the academic signal processing community (or at least CSIP at Georgia Tech). A check of the leaderboard shows the top teams to be around the 9% improvement mark. That last 1% is a doozie though. The KorBell/BellKor team made up of two AT&T Labs researchers has been one of the most competetive. They won the $50,000 Progress Prize for 2007 and by joining forces with BigChaos, an Austrian group, has won the 2008 Progress Prize.

Here is what they write about the competition in the ASA Statistical and Computing Graphics Newsletter after the first year:

In a less technical regard, the Netflix Prize competition demonstrates the value of making industrial-strength data sets widely available. These data and the prize have generated unprecedented interest and advancement in the field of collaborative filtering. Many of these advances have been shared, most notably in the Netflix Prize forum (http://www.netflixprize.com/community) and in a 2007 KDD workshop.

Certainly, the money spurred a lot of people to take a look at the data, but we doubt that money was the main stimulus for progress. Most participants (ourselves included) probably realize that their chance of winning the grand prize is small, precisely because there is so much interest. However, that interest provides great opportunity to build on the advances of others and to provide a rigorous test of any new methodologies. For that, we thank Netflix and all the other competitors, especially those who have been active in the forum and other outlets.

The model here is an echo of the open-source movement that gives us Mozilla Firefox and the collaborative model that made Wikipedia. Though these algorithms aren’t open-source (I can’t download their code and replicate their results), this open-access spirit on the part of Netflix is not only great advertising, it appears to be bringing out more creativity and progress than Netflix could make through internal research.

People everywhere are looking for ways to invest their time. At least some portion of the population is uneasy spending their free waking hours taking in Monday Night Football and Seinfeld reruns. They want to be a part of something and to work on something that matters.

Does this unpaid, collaborative work fill the altruistic  space in life that might have been spent sorting cans at a food bank? Does it fill the social space that might have been spent hunting with friends? Or the constructive space that might have been spent building, sanding, and staining an end table? Every contributor has his or her own motivations, but I am curious what the opportunity cost of all this work is. If it’s just lost television viewership, the world has been done a great service. But  these projects are likely completed to the neglect other valuable efforts.