Alan Jacobs

I have tried, Prezi — you can’t say I haven’t tried. But I’m done with you now.

The core idea of Prezi is a terrific one: allow people to create presentations based not on static slides but on dynamic visualizaton of ideas, and then make those presentations available online. Wonderful! Fantastic! Why didn’t anyone think of it before?

But see, it doesn’t work. There are many problems, but let’s boil them down to two.

One: So you create a Prezi that shows all these ideas in spatial relation to one another — but when you look at a whole Prezi each component is so small that you can’t see what anything is. And then when you zoom in on an individual component it’s impossible for anyone lacking an eidetic memory to remember how it’s related to all the other components. So you really end up with nothing more than slides, but slides that are supposed to be in significant spatial relation to one another, which makes you feel uneasy and inadequate when you can’t discern that relation.

Two: The way Prezi zooms around makes me seasick. Actually physically queasy.

All the recommended Prezis on the website have these problems, including the demo created by Prezi’s makers. So while I’d like to say, Prezi, that it’s not you, it’s me … I really think it’s you.

Moses, the orphaned baby elephant being raised by a human

A Google data center, courtesy of Nick Carr

Why shouldn’t newspapers around the world, or at least in the most internet-saturated parts of the world, just stop the presses — especially if they know they’ll have to do it anyway, and in the meantime the cash is draining away? What are the restraining factors? Habit and tradition? Powerful executives who have known the print world for so long that they can’t imagine life without it? The half-conscious feeling that paper and ink are real in ways that pixels and bits are not, and that if you only have pixels and bits you might as well be just a blogger, without a saleable product you can hold in your hand?

This inquiring mind really, really wants to know.

My thesis is that the academic novel stems from the rise of mass higher education in the United States. It follows the demographics; the fact that two thirds of Americans go to college provides an audience. College is no longer a cloister but as common as the shopping mall. (For good or ill, it seems England is trying to catch up to this American tendency.) Professors were rare in the U.S. in 1900 — only about 1 in 3,167 people was faculty. Medical doctors and lawyers were much more common — about 1 in 600. However, by 2000 professors came to constitute 1 of 243, so they were a familiar professional to most American people — especially to those who read literature, who in all likelihood went to college.

Also, the novels show academe not as removed but in the thick of public culture, embroiled in the culture wars and subject to the vicissitudes of adult, middle class life. The academic novel no longer depicts a pleasant enclave, but faculty are subject to pressures that any other professional experiences. In fact, one wing of the recent wave depicts those just hanging onto tenuous jobs in academe. It’s no longer close to a sinecure. In short, the academic novel portrays class in the USA, touching a chord with the reading public.

In a late essay, Arnold argued that the prayer book “has created sentiments deeper than we can see or measure. Our feeling does not connect itself with any language about righteousness and religion, but with that language.” But this does not mean that we believe the prayer book’s teachings in any traditional way: “Of course, those who can take them literally will still continue to use them. But for us also, who can no longer put the literal meaning on them which others do, and which we ourselves once did, they retain a power, and something in us vibrates to them.” Arnold thinks this appropriate, since “these old forms of expression were men’s sincere attempt to set forth with due honour what we honour also”; therefore “we can feel” the doctrines of the prayer book, “even when we no longer take them literally.”

It’s an old, and sad, story: the deep desire to hold on to whatever vaporous comforts remain in religious rites or words after belief has departed. It reminds me of a scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets …

The “free speech” aspect of this is largely nonsense. Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it’s a privately owned space on the Internet. From a legal and (United States) constitutional point of view, people who post on Reddit have no “free speech” privileges; they have what speech privileges Reddit itself chooses to provide them, and to tolerate. Reddit chooses to tolerate creepiness and general obnoxiousness for reasons of its own, in other words, and not because there’s a legal or constitutional reason for it.

Personally speaking, when everything is boiled down to the marrow, I think the reason Reddit tolerates the creepy forums has to do with money more than anything else. Reddit allows all those creepy subreddits because its business model is built on memberships and visits, and the dudes who visit these subreddits are almost certainly enthusiastic members and visitors. This is a perfectly valid reason, in the sense of “valid” meaning “allowing people to be creepy isn’t inherently illegal, and we make money because of it, so we’ll let it happen.” But while it makes sense that the folks at Reddit are either actively or passively allowing “we’re making money allowing creeps to get their creep on” to be muddled with “we’re standing up for the principles of free speech,” it doesn’t mean anyone else needs be confused by this.

dust jacket, 1937

via All About Lettering

Many critics lay the blame on the College Board itself, a huge “non-profit” organization that operates like a big business. The College Board earns over half of all its revenues from its Advanced Placement program – more than all its other revenue streams (SATs, SAT subject tests, PSATs) combined. The College Board’s profits for 2009, the most recent year for which records were available, were 8.6 percent of revenue, which would be respectable even for a for-profit corporation. “When a non-profit company is earning those profits, something is wrong,” says Americans for Educational Testing Reform. (The AETR’s “report card” on the College Board awards a grade of D and cites numerous “areas of misconduct” by the College Board.)

It’s clear the College Board has the mentality of a voracious corporation, charging $89 a shot for an exam to millions of students who have no business taking it. The college admissions process today is a total crapshoot. At least for the most competitive colleges, nobody in the applicant pool has any certainty anymore as to what will secure admission. In the face of that uncertainty, one rational form of behavior is to take the shotgun approach, blasting away at the admissions committee with every weapon in the student’s armory: multiple AP courses, ridiculous amounts of extracurricular activity, and do-gooder volunteer work rivaling Mother Teresa’s.

Lots of guidance counselors will advise families and students that a rational alternative is to opt out of that race. Concentrate on one or two things. Excel at them. I agree. But it shouldn’t be the customer’s responsibility to stop a scam. The customer buys into it because the con artist is so skillful and the world is so uncertain. The only way to stop the College Boards of the world is to expose them. Tell people to be wary.