Alan Jacobs

Writers and editors, as Harper’s Magazine’s Thomas Frank points out, are being driven into penury by Internet wages — in most cases, no wages. But, as Lawrence Summers once said to me about Mexicans, Americans are free to ‘choos'” to work in 'content mills,’ the editorial equivalent of Mexican maquilladoras, where they can earn $15 for writing 300 words. The result of this 'free choice’ is what Leon Wieseltier calls the 'proletarianization of the writer,’ although what he describes as their 'i'ndecent poverty’ has yet to turn them radical.

I have been radicalized, both as a publisher and a writer, and have instituted a 'protectionist’ policy in regard to the Internet and its free-content salesmen. In the long run, I think I’ll be vindicated, since clearly the advertising 'model’ has failed and readers are going to have to pay (in opposition to Google’s bias against paid sites) if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.

Starting early in the 20th century, tens of thousands of scripts were produced by different mediums in several countries over a period of more than 30 years. Known as the ‘cross-correspondences’ because they seemed to be linked together, the scripts contained texts claiming to be messages from deceased psychical researchers, including Sidgwick and Myers, which together demonstrated the reality of life after death. As the flow of scripts continued an even larger claim emerged: the dead had taken on the task of saving the world of the living by means of a post-mortem experiment in eugenics. Scientists who had passed to “the other side” were fashioning an exceptional human being, a posthumously designed messiah-child who would deliver humankind from chaos and bring peace to the world.

Here’s the problem though, today’s English graduate student digital natives are not. Not digitally native, I mean. In part, I am highly skeptical of Prensky’s categories. Clearly there is more to digital literacy than the year of one’s birth. Still, English phd students tend to come from fairly affluent families (especially on a global scale). They are obviously well-educated. In other words, they have had access. English, however, probably self-selects for an aversion to technology. That is, overall, English grad students are less technologically literate than their contemporaries. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that, on a national scale, an English education fails to educate students to support a digital literacy. Just look at the curriculum and try to figure out where such an education might be taking place: in dark corners only.

So English, and maybe other humanities, is attractive to those who cannot figure out the digital world or who find some principled reason to reject it (which is fine in my view, just as it is fine that the Amish reject many technologies). However, while it is fine for an individual or even a community to reject technologies, it probably doesn’t bode well for an academic discipline.

Headphones work best for people who need or want to hear one sound story and no other; who don’t want to have to choose which sounds to listen to and which to ignore; and who don’t want their sounds overheard. Under these circumstances, headphones are extremely useful — and necessary for sound professionals, like intelligence and radio workers — but it’s a strange fact of our times that this rarefied experience of sound has become so common and widespread. In the name of living a sensory life, it’s worth letting sounds exist in their audio habitat more often, even if that means contending with interruptions and background sound.

Make it a New Year’s resolution, then, to use headphones less. Allow kids and spouses periodically to play music, audiobooks, videos, movie, television and radio audibly. Listen to what they’re listening to, and make them listen to your stuff. Escapism is great, and submission and denial, too, have their places. But sound thrives amid other sounds. And protecting our kids’ hearing is not just as important as protecting their brains; it is protecting their brains.

1. A goatskin notebook for writing down dreams
2. Mont Blanc fountain pen (extra credit if it belonged to Mme Blavatsky)

3. A Chinese coin or a stone in your pocket for rubbing

4. Frequenting places where you can overhear things

5. Tiny recorders, spyglasses, microscopic listening devices

6. A little man at the back of your head

7. The Ghost-Companion

8. Susceptibility to hypnosis

9. Large sheets of homemade paper, a stack a foot thick

10. A subscription to cable TV

(PDF)

landscapelifescape:

Vermont, Smugglers Notch State Park (by Kevin McNeal)

I’m especially looking forward to Windoro, the robot that cleans both sides of your windows at once; Kitara, the guitar with no strings but rather a video screen that can display strings or any number of other wild music-control interfaces; Sony’s new camcorder with built-in projector; Motorola’s Atrix 4G, an app phone that snaps into a docking station and becomes a computer; Iomega’s tiny iPhone charging dock that also backs up the phone to a memory card; and InteraXon’s prototype thought-control headset for iPad games.

Quotations from politicians have been getting shorter for more than a century. According to a new article in the academic journal Journalism Studies by David M. Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier, both professors at the University of Nevada, newspaper quotations evolved in much the same way as TV sound bites. By 1916, they found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892.

One way to interpret this, of course, is that we’ve been getting dumber since 1892 instead of since 1968. But Ryfe and Kemmelmeier also suggest that the truth is more complicated. The sound bite, they argue, stems less from a collapse in standards or seriousness than from the rise of a more sophisticated and independent style of journalism — which means the sound bite might not be such a bad thing. Letting politicians ramble doesn’t necessarily produce a better or more informative political discourse. Daniel Hallin, the professor behind the original study on TV sound bites, actually made the same point back in 1992, but Dukakis and his fellow critics passed right by it in their excitement over those ugly statistics. And that’s one of the ironies here: The best research on sound bites was itself turned into a sound bite.

plans

If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind. As Georgetown University professor John Haught wrote in his diagnosis of the New Atheists, ‘To know with such certitude that religion is evil, one must first have already surrendered one’s heart and mind to what is unconditionally good.’ The New Atheists may wrap themselves in torn one-liners and haggard scientism, but beneath their cynical swaddle there lies a charming Perfectionism. Charming insofar as it is usually in the body of admittedly sinning and struggling men—if you want to be a New Atheist, you’re going to be a man—so the Perfectionist tendencies will be transporting you from a particularly devilish here to a right-minded necessary there. 'Religion must die,’ Maher argues, 'for mankind to live.’ Their descriptions of religion may be flat-footed, but it’s all for an endgame that surpasses their previous personal struggles. They are not converting you to their model lives (every New Atheist will happily tell you of wayward days with hookers or Hezekiah), nor to their model educations (every New Atheist parlays a populist revolution). Rather, they are converting you—as swiftly as possible, as dramatically as possible—to their ontology of the now. Apocalypse is coming, and although the New Atheists name the source and form of this apocalypse differently, if you want to be a New Atheist, you had better pull on your Oneida pants and start shoveling in an Adventist diet, because these are some millennial folk. 'The irony of religion,’ Maher remarks at the end of Religulous, 'is because of its power to divert man to destructive forces the world actually could come to an end.’