With literary deconstructive criticism, you can take the manual for installing brake levers on your bike and turn it into a life lesson on gaining control. Or how you've just enslaved yourself, gone soft, stepped away from the edge, hidden behind the curtain of 'safety' which really offers no security at all but rather a false hope; a window into your past surrounded by the fuzzy curtains.

Yes. A book seems authoritative even if it completely packed with coherent though meaningless rubbish. A blog carries with it no more legitimacy then the drunk spouting off at the end of the bar because he loves the sound of his own voice. If your mind is primed to expect some deep truth about human culture it is easy to read that into the big words and fancy theories. If that somehow endows a deep meaning to your leisure activities all the more so. If it isn't then anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see through it.


The vast majority of post modern cultural studies are a farce of scholasticism. Theories are created and supported with the type of loose factual claims used by intelligent drunks in some meaningless argument. These are never scrutinized because the establishment that should do so has become more enamored with wordplay and exciting deconstructions then they have with relevance to reality. Such ideas are then accepted generally because they carry with them the weight of the phds that are entertained by them.

This particular online community often demonstrates its inability to accept anything that they determine was not born of themselves, take no offense. Many of the posts aimed at you were for the benefit of a few of this forums regular denizens. Their usual method are those catcalls etc that you saw, while some you probably noticed were critical but not needlessly insulting. Same as it ever was. It'd please the people I hang out with to be distinguished as separate from this group, some messenger may not like your writing style and generally they aren't shy about what they don't like, but only a rookie would have a "we" in their criticisms, nothing wrong with someone trying to lay some understanding down on anyones thousand yard stare, whether they're in that life or not.

Haha, that was spoken from a pretty postmodern perspective.

I enjoyed the article, as it defined what is easily experienced but is difficult to describe, like the taste of a ripe strawberry. 165 did have a point (verbose), but if that is your style, go for it.
The masses usually don't go for higher level thinking, as exemplified by Bill O' Reiley or the box office disappointment of "Idiocracy".

"Ow, my Balls"

haha yes, you're right. i'm glad i was able to fake my way through a lit BA and two masters, all with honors, while being functionally illiterate.

Any number of intervening factors could be involved, and while I haven't read the book in question, I would not ignore the possibility that it was good and your piece wasn't.

i don't think anyone here was "pissed off" by your article. i certainly wasn't. i just think it took something quite visceral and formalized it which generally takes what is interesting about something and what people are passionate about and strips it away. writing like this generally is far more interesting to outsiders who want to understand someone else's experience than it is to those who have experienced that which is being written about. when reading a discussion of their own experiences, those involved generally find that the written experience pales in comparison to the lived experience and thus doesn't hold much interest for them. the more academic the writing, generally, the more true this is. this isn't to say that your article is poorly written for the audience it was intended, but it being on the internet means that, inevitably, a larger audience will read.

"ambient informatics"?

Good attempt, and good quality for a blog, but if I saw this in print on a piece of paper I'd demand that the author be a little more to the point and do a little less theory-flexing. Real gangsta-ass bloggers don't flex words, 'cause real gangsta-ass bloggers know they got 'em.

And this is not to be a jerk, just some constructive criticism. I understand and like what you're going for.

I enjoy pissing contests like this one soooo much more than pissing contests about track drops and deep v's. An old roomate once told me that one of the reasons he liked skateboarding was because of the way it allows the skater to establish a different relationship with architectural elements in the environment. He was also working on his MA in art history so was also speaking from a more academic position than most skate boarders I guess. Since that conversation I have come to see riding a bicycle in a city (or any environment I suppose), as having a similar effect.
I lived in Chicago for 2 1/2 years before I started to commute by bicycle. Riding changed my perspective on different neighbohrhoods and spaces in the city. One misses a lot when taking public transit. I now look at the road differently. Before it was a forbidden zone, only for cars. Now I feel way more comfortable not only riding but walking in it as well. I have had several discussions with friends who ride bikes about how we have no problem walking down the middle of the street or sitting on curbs just hanging out. We attributed this tendency to biking often which allowed us to see the street as "inhabitable".
Maybe having these thoughts and discussions makes me a navel gazer and out of touch with reality but I think a lot of people take pleasure in parts of life for lots of little reasons. They may not be able to put them into words or even want to but I enjoy talking about them and appreciate that others do as well.

To be fair, I read it through and it's pretty good. I was just having a bit of fun.

I'm just allergic to academic analysis in the soft sciences; most get lost in the flowery rhetoric dutret refers to, and the type of person that enjoys that stuff most is often the worst at doing the activity being written about. They tend to confuse their linguistic constructs with actual knowledge.

What happens when networked sensors, screens and other information-processing devices are embedded in architectural and public space. I think it changes just about everything - privacy, politics, the experience of place...everything.

I wrote a book about it (some commentary here) and am teaching a class on a closely-related subject.

"They tend to confuse their linguistic constructs with actual knowledge."

bingo! not saying that that is the case here, but in general i find this to be true. "***********y language" is something that has always been a pet peeve of mine. sure, write for an academic audience, but elevate the writing with intelligent ideas, not 10 cent language. flowery language is typically used to hide conceptual inadequacies or compensate for the author's insecurities. i don't think that's the case with adam's article though. my issue with the article isn't the language, it's just the limitations inherent in analyzing a lived experience. same reason i hate most books that look at the punk/hardcore scene.

also, after reading about Everyware a bit, i really want to check it out.

This gets to the core of why writing and ideas like this make me want to draw the shades and spend the rest of the week reading old books. Now is not special. If you think now is special, you are wrong. If you don't believe me, go to a book store that stocks a lot of remainders and look at all the books from 2, 3, or 5 years ago that argued that now was special then. There are more where they came from down at the library, though most have been languishing unread since about two years after their publication date. If you still don't believe me, go read every decent political speech ever written and think about how most of them are based on the subtext that now is special.

http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/...CLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

You can draw a lot of ears your way by talking about how special now is; Thomas Friedman, for one, has made a substantial career and a pretty penny out of it, and politicians wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't work. But that doesn't change the fundamental vapidity of the claim.

I once read an essay titled "the big bomb and the little pill." It was hilariously illustrative of your point.

Landgolier, I would suggest you, y'know, actually read the book (or any of the excerpts from it available hither and yon on the Web, or even any of the interviews with me) before comparing it to dot.com hype or Friedmanian ya-ya.

I'm perfectly willing to take a hit aimed at the tone or substance of something I've actually written, but you're way off in left field if you think Everyware is a piece of techno-utopian drivel.

There are important consequences to the fact that we now have methods to generate an enormous volume of data about each individual's public behavior, without that individual even necessarily becoming aware that such data has been collected, and storing it indefinitely in a global, distributed container. That's what the book is about, not any misguided cheerleading for the notion that we live in unique times.

Case in point, to take something relevant to being a messenger: don't you think it changes something serious in the power dynamic between a messenger and the company they work for when a dispatcher can pinpoint precisely where the messenger is at all times, via some combination of GPS and cell-tower or network access point triangulation? What does that make of the messenger's ability to tweak one of the last degrees of freedom remaining to them?

What a pretenious BS statement. "Functionally illiterate"? Writing is a form of communication whose purpose is to convey ideas. Therefore a "good writer" in my opinion, is one who can effectively and concisely convey that message. I'm not knocking this guy's blog. I found the thesis interesting and the writing sytle entertaining. It's just that I spent 3 years reading grad student papers written in that style, which more often than not, I found it o be a poor substitute for the writer's inability to effectively communicate an idea. Many students would write in this overly verbose style because they labored under the false impression that passive sentence structures, frequent use of nomilizations, unecessary modifiers, and overuse of a thesaurus made them "sound smart."

Now, before I get flamed, I am not knocking the article. There is a time and place for that type of writing, which, when done properly, can be very poetic and can be appreciated in its own right, apart from the message it is trying to convey. I think that article was one of those instances.

I do however, take issue with the sentiment that people who do not appreciate that writing style are "functionally illiterate." Has the thought ever crossed your mind that in most instances, people are reading for content, and do not want to slog through a 5 page essay whose ideas could be effectively communicated in one?

I just cannot abide by pretentious statements like the one quoted above. If everything you write sounds like Hawthorne or a sociological discertation, chances are that you do not effectively communicate.

What's a nomilization?

I wasn't talking about your book, which I would happily read if I had all the time in the world. However, I don't, so it's going to have to go to the bottom of the pile marked "stuff which may or may not be good, and which deals with subjects not directly related to my fields of interest." There's plenty of other pop market STS stuff and other foucauldian detritus in that pile, and I should get around to finishing it off about 18 months from never. I was commenting specifically on your statement that I quoted. However, to start with your book's title, how can you talk about the dawning of an age and not be talking about the uniqueness of the present?

I did buzz though the Wired thing, though as soon as they started in about wearable computing being at all a significant phenomenon I started laughing so hard coffee shot out of my nose. That was probably a good cue to stop drinking coffee for a minute, though, because I probably would have blown it through my sinus cavity into my brain when I got to the part about the latest way to do cute but useless things with cell phones in Ginza.

Look, I think panopticism is a mildly interesting subject, but I stopped getting fired up about it when a company I worked for was involved in a consumer data buy from one of the big firms that collects all this scary 1984ish information about everything everyone does ever. We got our hands on the best data out there, and it was about 50% hot garbage. I know you used to work for a spyware company, so you're probably as aware as I am that the signal to noise ratio for this stuff is incredibly low.

Dutret, do you remember anything else about that essay? Sounds like Joe Masco

A nominalization is when you turn a verb or adjective into a noun, usually as a direct object. This generally necessitates that you use some form of the verb "to be," which creates a passive sentence structure where an inanimate object, concept or thing is the subject of the sentence and is simply "being" rather than doing something. Here are some examples.

There was considerable erosion of the land from the floods.
vs
The floods considerably eroded the land.

The instability of the motor housing did not preclude the completion
of the field trials.
vs
Even though the motor housing was unstable, the research staff
completed the field trials.

Our discussion concerned a tax cut.
vs
We discussed a tax cut.

Their cessation of hostilities was because of their personnel losses.
vs
They ceased hostilities because they lost personnel.

Nominalization: turning a verb or an adjective into a noun

discover -> discovery careless -> carelessness
move -> movement difficult -> difficulty
react -> reaction different -> difference
fail -> failure applicable -> applicability
refuse -> refusal intense -> intensity



There are only a few instances where it is really necessary to use a nominalization. Nine times out of ten, an author can reform the sentence so it has actors/actions rather than "things" in a state of "being"

[vs--Nine times out of ten a sentence can be reformed by an author into one involving actions]




----My mother was an english teacher, and i was schooled by penguins with rulers that made me diagram sentences-----




[edit]. There are some times when you intentionally want to use a nominalization, such as to distract attention from an actor.

The victim was brutally slain
vs
The defendant killed the victim


Nominalization are often incorrectly used by the media coupled with personifications... e.g.

Another cylist killed by carelessness of SUV
vs
A man who carelessly drove his SUV struck and killed the cyclist


Here is a rough paraphrasing of a paper i remember grading:

The complexity of the issue of foreign policy is obfuscated due to misconceived notions of politicians regarding the appropriateness of being consistent.

Not really it was some zeitgeisty overly academic cultural criticism from the 60's(obviously) about how the human condition had been fundamentally changed by the advent of nuclear weapons and birth control. All sorts of stuff about how peoples now lived with the constant awareness that they could **** whenever they wanted and it all could end at any minute. Society specifically the dynamics of interpersonal interactions would never be the same. I think it was in some journal and I think I found it while researching for a scathing critique on the pervasive acceptance of freudian dogma in the humanities. Not something I really care about beyond bull****ting on while drunk, bored at work, or formerly an easy A.

skanking biker, thanks.

Landgolier, a big part of my argument in the book is that you know that data is garbage, and I know that data is garbage, but that won't stop people from trying to make (crude) inferences from that and taking action on the inferences they make.

You've got people like good ol' Ray Kurzweil out there telling people "the singularity is near," any number of organizations willing to build and sell systems based on the assumption of seamless and perfect data capture and useful machine inference, and suckers by the boatload lined up to buy them because they promise to make life "safer" and "more convenient." (Not infrequently, the suckers in question are municipalities, etc., with Homeland Security money burning the proverbial hole in their pockets.)

What's ten times as scary to me as genuine panoptical surveillance is panopticism the way we're actually going to get it, which is unusable, overpriced, taxpayer-underwritten systems that are manifestly ate up like a soup sandwich but treated as if they were infallible.

I like the English language, too. That's why I would prefer that it not be made to do such vapid tricks.

's not possible to really address functionality if there's no understanding and/or consensus as to what the function is...in this case, I'll say that the function is to be able to understand the emotional excitement of the author...so, I called your literacy dysfunctional...how was he sucking the life from his literary interpretation of his OWN experience?

as to your 'education'...if you went through all that school and continue to think that having gone through all that school makes you automatically more 'functionally literate', then I'm sorry that you spent so much time being unaware of your surroundings

That doesn't sound like "now is special" so much as "now and the foreseeable future will be much different," which isn't the same thing. I think it can be reasonably argued that society and the "dynamics of interpersonal interactions" have changed permanently because of those two developments, but that people our age aren't as acutely aware of the change because we don't remember a time when human civilization couldn't be destroyed in a matter of hours.

Admittedly this is a bit more plausible in the case of nuclear weapons, and admittedly I haven't read the piece and I have only your description of it to go by, so I could be wrong about all of that.

Incidentally, this:

...is the first time one of your posts has made me laugh, and not at you.

I've noticed the 'nominalization' is very common in two places.
1) Academic sociology papers.
2) New-age books.

No, really. The skateboarder having an experience with increasing 'wall-ness' of the wall is just like your ever expanding consciousness having an elevated 'being-ness' with 'one-ness' and 'all-ness'.

Just sayin'.

That's something different known as adjectification, a process by which nouns are turned into adjectives. It was invented by hitler as a means of impressing eighteen year old freshman girls.

They are pretty much the same. Saying that we are right now at the beginning of a new age and everything is changing is saying that now is special. Humans have been stagnant since the industrial revolution or agricultural revolution but now we are moving into a brave new pomo world of free sex or constant surveillance or everyone being an investor or... Rejoice and help craft the new age. The now is very unique under such a claims, which is precisely why they are so seductive. It's exhilarating and comforting to think that everything is changing and what we decide about these changes will affect generations to come. However the fanfare is normally for naught is replaced by some new revolution in a couple years time.

I'm not entirely sure I agree.

On the one hand, I totally endorse your skepticism about claims that a particular moment in time is somehow the one nodal point that changes everything. I think you're spot on about why that myth is so appealing to people. And I also happen to believe that in any objective consideration, a whole lot more changed technosocially between, say, 1850 and 1900 than has changed since then.

Having said that, though, historically, some moments really were pivotal, at least for some domains. 1914 and 1989 come to mind. Those genuinely were civilizational inflection points - Eric Hobsbawm calls this interval "the short twentieth century." (We're still a little close to be able to tell, but I'd argue that the era that began in 1989 came screaming to a halt in September 2001.)

There's even an argument that we find ourselves in a unique moment of human history, though that one feels a little self-congratulatory to me, and even though I don't have the math to find the hole in the argument, I tend to believe it's there.

So maybe it's one out of every hundred or even thousand times that the proclaimers of a New Epoch are right. But when they are, man would I hate to have not paid attention.