Why don't you write?

I always think of our modern times as being characterized, in part, by an excess of communication. Phone, email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and blogs flood our days with the details of our friend's lives and yet, I still miss my long distance friends. I always think people a century ago must have had to wait weeks before getting important news about their loved ones. Then I read in National Geographic that a century ago, in large cities like New York, the mail was delivered up to seven times per day and that people used postcards to invite each other for dinner, inquire about their health or love life, or just say hello.

In that context, it would seem that we have always had the desire to communicate to each other on a frequent basis. I'll venture a guess, however, it was only the elite and the wealthy that had the opportunity to sit at home all day sending missives back and forth. The working class would have been slaving away 12-14 hours a day in a factory or someone else's home, and would have to wait to find out if something wonderful or dreadful had happened to a loved one. In that regard, we've made great progress. As annoying as it may be that we so addicted to communication, sometimes to the point that we use it to ignore or avoid actual in person communication, there is something lovely about the fact that should a person be accepted to a school, have a baby or come down with an illness, they can tell their loved ones right away regardless of their economic station.

The zero inbox

I got an email from a reader last week and I, naturally, Google'd her to see who she was and what she had online. She actually has a page with links to her entire online life and blogs on it, not really all that difficult to find but one of her posts changed my life. I now feel much less old in that "I can't even keep up with my email" kind of way. This is it: freedom from organization.

It's a very simple guide to manage your Gmail and keep it at ZERO new messages. For someone who has become used to over 80 new messages and keeps subscribing and then unsubscribing to alerts and newsletters and then completely misses messages from friends, I was overjoyed. It took me all of a half hour to make the changes she suggests and I'm a changed woman! I wondered, of course, if ten years ago I would have been the one figuring this out and telling other people. I seem to have thrown my hands up over technology lately and just let it overtake me but Martina reminds us that technology is here to SERVE not to RULE.

Fun sucking, time wasting, age discriminating technology

I am seriously about to shoot my computer. Is it just me or is anyone else having trouble with Gmail? I swear I have to quit it constantly, try it in another browser, it just doesn’t load or when I click an email it “refreshes” but nothing happens. My browser gives up. I force quit. After I while I get a message that the program has stopped responding, do I want to force quit? YES! Damn it, I just told it to do that. Grrr. I restart. I try it again, after five minutes of trying, I am finally able to login again. There are seven new emails since I last had access an hour ago.

I’ve been at the computer for three hours already. First I discovered that my move of my iTunes music from my computer to an external hard drive didn’t quite work. It was loading an old library. I replace it with the new library. Now the old songs aren't in it. I recopy the songs, now I have 4,000 duplicates. OMG. It can’t find the original songs now, just the new ones. WTF? I have to delete the duplicates but oops, my favorites are not marked on the new imports. I have to manually mark them first.

I get that done but now I have to rebuild my set lists. That was relatively painless and I finally update the iPod for my impending trip to the UK. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to recharge the thing after my 11 hour flight…can I plug it into someone else computer and charge? After that, I upload the photos from yesterday’s brunch. I tweak color. I export. I upload to Flickr. I rename, I tag, and I organize. This is about the time my browsers want to poop out. I have about 12 tabs open of links I want to include in blog posts. I copy the links into a Word document. Oh lord, I think Word is about to give up too. I’m just going to restart.

It’s a good thing I’m unemployed. Otherwise, how would I possibly have time for all this technology? Then it occurs to me that half of my workday must have been spent wrangling with technology. Skpying with friends and coworkers, usually about nothing, reading and responding to emails, setting up my Pandora stations, and trouble shooting performance problems. But I was getting paid!

Since Saturday, I’ve written three blog posts in my notebook but they haven’t shown up on my blog yet because of the pain of sitting down and wrangling with technology to get them done. I can’t think with all this wrestling going on. Last week I spent several joyous hours shuffling video files and music from various hard drives to make room for a new video project. Technology has the maddening dual effect of making things much more accessible while also sucking the fun out of them: for me, filmmaking, writing and marketing.

There’s nary a profession these days that isn’t affected by the technology fun sucking phenomenon. My dad became an engineer because he wanted to build things but found himself instead, 20 years later, a programmer who hadn’t built anything. That’s when he quit and starting building houses. He draws the designs on the computer but it’s still a world barely touched by technology. Hairdressers are one of the rare few professions that haven’t changed. People will always have hair and it will always need cut. It’s pretty basic.

But even worse than fun sucking is the experience invalidation. A woman told me in an interview that she’d rather hire a person with two years experience with widgets than a person with ten years marketing experience (me). Seriously? I think it’s probably always been like this but I’ve always been on the receiving end of that short sighted discrimination; the belief that young people are naturally more able to understand what’s going on in the world. I can’t think of anything more preposterous. I suppose the same people who ten years ago thought the person with the most experience was the most knowledgeable are the same ones that think a 24-year old with two years experience is the most hip.

Here's the truth, there are people who are naturally curious, clever and are always changing. It doesn’t matter how old they are or how much experience they have, they are the ones who will do the job well.

"What does technology want?"

Another one of my favorite Pop!Tech lectures asks the question, “What does technology want?” Kevin Kelly doesn’t give technology a sentient voice, but he examines the behavior of what man creates and makes some startling conclusions. Technology “doesn’t want to be prohibited,” it wants to “increase its efficiency,” it wants to “replicate easily and without restraint,” it wants “to become more complex,” “wants diversity,” and “alters it’s environment to suit itself.” But, he says, it’s not that technology wants to take over the planet, we can live with technology in cities and still have nature coming up to the border of that city. He ends the lecture with a summation that technologies are like children, there are no inherently bad technologies, just bad applications. And it’s our responsibility as the creators of technology to discover the best application for it.

Then I read an article in Wired about the Internet in China and there’s a great illustration where a river is rushing towards The Great Wall and then right over it. I remember someone wrote me an email about China, asking my opinion about censorship and I said that I thought restricted information was better than no information. It seems to me that having the Internet available, filtered through the Chinese government, is better than no Internet at all. (You'll notice that there are no red dots in the giant land mass of China on my ClustrMap.) But this lecture beautifully illustrates how the Internet, as technology, has an agenda of its own and enables people, as this article says, to subvert the sensors and get access to restricted information. Technology wants to be replicated and doesn’t want to be prohibited.

I love this idea of technology, not as something with consciousness but as an organism with it’s own method of evolution and survival. We might give birth to it but it doesn’t mean we know why or how it exists.

The wonderful world of Wired

Do you ever get the feeling that despite ALL the time you already spend on the web that there's a million, even a gazillion, totally cool things happening that you aren't experiencing? I have come to realize that I'm a creature in conflict. I dream of living a simple life and resist technology in so many small ways (like insisting that I don't need the Internet on my phone when I find myself MANY times a day wishing that I did), and at the same time curse that I'm missing all this cool stuff on the Internet.

I spent the day browsing eBay, bidding on items and putting on up for sale, and was led into a rabbit-holes looking for veg shoes which led me to etsy. I ended up creating an account to buy some super cute t-shirts and then subsequently found another site where a woman makes clothes from old clothes, which are so interesting but most is sold out. My coworker wanted music and I started a radio station with CocoRosie on Pandora, which I visited once a year ago but didn't come back for some reason, and have since been listening to the COOLEST f'ing music that I've never heard of!

I've also been online researching video sites and found that Wired partnered with PBS to create a science show. Wired magazine has been some of the best reading since Chris Anderson took over as editor-in-chief and now this is just so fantastic. You can watch videos and see demonstrations of the weird and wild stuff Wired reports on. Science hasn't been this cool since the turn of (last) century. And they were smart enough to cast a cute host...hey, I know this guy! Our short films played at a screening together in Hollywood. Ah, Hollywood, I miss ye.

I miss my India

I've been thinking a lot about India lately. Staying with my friend in San Mateo, I have eaten at an Indian restaurant here no fewer than five times in a week. It is possibly the best Indian food I've ever had and only a few blocks away. My friend and her daughter, new to it, refer to my favorite dish Saag Paneer as "the goosh." They can't get enough of it. Strangely, the first time I ate Indian food was in San Francisco, in college, visiting a friend in the city. The restaurant offered a tour of their kitchen and the Tandoori oven and I, of course, took them up on it. And strangely, while I've overplayed my music during the 40-minute commute, the only songs I don't tire of are those from the Bend it Like Beckham soundtrack.

This December will be the ten-year anniversary of my two-month trip to India. I was recently looking up a town that I visited and discovered that all the names of the towns and cities have been changed since I was there. They were starting it when I was there - Bombay was already Mumbai and Madras was already Chennai - but all the names of the little towns (I visited over twenty) have been changed. When I returned to the U.S. I remember someone asking me if I would go back. I think my answer then was that there were so many other places I wanted to go, I couldn't see myself going back to a place I'd already been. But despite the wear and tear on my body from eating the food, the minute the plane left the ground, tears streamed down my cheeks and I cried "I miss my India!"

Ten years later, I still don't miss an opportunity to talk about my travels and many memories are as fresh as the day they happened. There's something about the country, the culture, the people, that get in you. I left India but it never left me and when I read or hear things about it, it's like hearing about a place I used to live or a person I used to love. There has been a lot about India in the news lately. There was a slew of polls in Time magazine and one said that people in India were two-three times more optimistic about their future than Americans. The commentary was that people are happier in a society that's in the process of improving than in one where things are already good. The author surmised that it was a feeling if things are good, they can only get worse.

But progress always has its price and a while back I saw an article about the giant boulders in India - across the Deccan plateau - that are being blown up with dynamite to make way for new construction. Yes, they're that big. One of my favorite places there was a town called Hampi (it's not on the map anymore, they changed the name!), just a little ways from Bangalore - then called the Silicon Valley of India. I can't help but wonder now if there are more Indians in the tech industry in the U.S. than in India. I read that the software industry is so booming in India that engineers from the U.S. can go home to India and take their jobs with them. But I digress, the article was about a society formed to "save the boulders!" of Hyderabad. It even describes one guy who built his house around a boulder, something that should have a been the subject of a Dr. Suess story. I don't usually post professionally published photos but this was just too beautiful and I don't have any of my India photos scanned (they were taken pre-digital!)


I spent time in Hyderabad and I don't remember the giant boulders there, but I do remember them in Hampi. Out in the middle of a huge plain, along a river, hundreds of giant boulders are stacked and sitting in piles, miles away from the nearest mountains. The first question you ask is where did they come from? The second is why are they here? When you focus your eyes you notice the buildings that have been carved out of stone by a civilization thousands of years ago and realize that the "buildings" are the size of a thimble compared to an orange. The boulders are way bigger than they look initially.

Protest is now part of the familiar modern tale of development vs. nature, but nature is starting to be more valuable I think. I also heard on NPR that Indians are protesting the arrival of WalMart that is threatening to replace the "mom and pop shop" with jobs, robbing Indians of their independence and freedom sell what they want, and only benefitting a few. We're starting to realize, as the article says, that once certain things are destroyed, they can't be brought back. Which is why, ten years later, I find myself thinking about India and wanting to go back to that which someday will be no longer.

Good news for the lazy, inattentive and paranoid

Volvo, a car known for it's safety features, is running a commercial advertising some of their newest additions. The first scenario shows a guy changing lanes. He looks in his mirrors and doesn't see anything so he gets over but OH CRAP there's a motorcycle there. The car automatically corrects itself, putting the guy back in the lane he was leaving and the unharmed motorcyclists continue on their merry way. The driver of the car is completely unfazed by his car driving for him and his near collision that sure would have been fatal to the cyclists. Hmmm, I wonder why he didn't just turn his head to check his blind spot...too much work I guess.

In scenario two, a business woman (to show she isn't stupid, I presume) stops paying attention momentarily to pick up a folder that's slipped off the pile in her passenger seat. But OH CRAP a car is stopped in front of her and in front of that, a group of tiny schoolchildren parade across the street. Luckily, the Volvo bloops and blinks its warning system to tell her to stop. (They're working on a system that will automatically brake, in case the driver doesn't brake hard enough or soon enough.)

Why do we bother driving cars at all? Obviously it's much too challenging a task for our feeble species. Aren't they working on replacing cars with the public pod? You leave your house and you walk to the pod station. You get in a pod, swipe your card, enter our destination and the pod sets out to get you there. You don't have to do anything else. There are some obvious problems like...what if you have groceries? Will they fit in the pod? How will you get them to your house? What if someone spills ice cream on the pod seat? Will there be some kind of automated cleaning system? Damn, I really like this pod idea.

The last scenario in the commercial shows a woman crossing a dark parking lot at night. As she walks towards her car, she checks her key fob and notices that OH CRAP a heartbeat is registered. Someone has broken into her car and is waiting inside to commit atrocities to her person. She turns around and hurries back the other way.

Now this is really a limited feature. I mean, what about that old routine with the guy hiding UNDER the car...does it pick up that heartbeat? Or what if someone has attached a tracking device to my car? I need to know that before I drive to the secret location of the Batcave. OR will it detect whether explosives have been wired to the ignition? Hmmm? When the car starts taking pictures of the people who slam into it in a parking lot when I'm not there, I'll start thinking about it.

Immediately following Volvo's commercial, Nissan followed up with push-button ignition. It really is such a pain to put a key in the ignition. You need the key in the car you just don't need it in the ignition, just push a button to start. See, what happens when you get to your destination and you don't know where your keys are? Did you put them in your pocket? Purse? Or did they fall on the floor? Again, until the car is starting with voice recognition commands like the Batmobile, I just don't see the point.

I think all this technology is just prepping us for the future of machines. Relaaaaaaax, don't worrrrrry, the machiiiiiiines have got it allllllll under controlllllll. Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Amazing Planet Earth

Every month, I hit the gym with my new Wired magazine and read it cover to cover. Even things I don't think I'll find interesting, I become engrossed in. Last month, they featured an article about new camera techniques, made possible by HD video, that allowed photographers to capture footage of animals in nature better than ever before. The techniques were used for a miniseries running now on the Discovery Channel called "Planet Earth."

If you haven't seen it, it is breathtakingly gorgeous, awe-inspiring, and simply amazing. I think it's so fantastic that we have used our awesome technology to record the wondrous beauty and fascinating complexity of our planet. Quite simply, this footage is like nothing you've never seen before.

I was giggling hysterically at the sped up footage of hundreds of gelada baboons in the Ethiopian Highlands all following the same daily agenda. My jaw hit the ground at the extremely slowed down footage of a great white shark LEAPING out of the ocean while swallowing a whole seal in a split second. And I was wowed by the aerial view of a MILLION caribou, the largest traveling pack of animals on the planet, streaming across the tundra, pursued by wolves.

It's available for pre-order at Amazon and I've already secured my copy. You can see some of the fantastic-ness in the meantime on their official site.