The Price for this is Right:It's Free

If you’ve never heard of Jaron Lanier, I would highly recommend a contemplative read.  He has some very interesting takes on the internet generally and social sites in particular.  We are all users of the internet generally and it should be as clear as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie peering at you in all their glossiness from a supermarket checkout line, we are all users of social sites particularly.

As it stands right now, anyone who is the least bit creative in the 21st century is standing on a knife edge, a sharp and decisive conundrum: How to make money?  I will not bombard with trite clichés like, ‘money makes the world go round,’ but let’s face a reality, it does in fact at least keep societies gears turning.  This, for me, is a bit of an irony.  For many years now I eschewed the very idea of material gain as so much wasted fuel and a real drain on integrity.  I say this especially as an artist.  But for the love of Vishnu, I wonder is it possible to make a little bit of the green stuff?  My worry now, however, much like Lanier’s, is how do we expect anyone to even eke out a living in this our gadget filled, electronic age?  As another writer has said, “the internet is both midwife and executioner.”  It has sprung a plethora of a well-spring of creativity but everyone expects to bathe for free.   The internet can give new birth to a creative idea but will die upon its arrival as a ‘product.’   I am just as guilty of this.  

Indulge me in a short story.

The other day I found that a favourite writer of mine had decided to sell an e-book.  He dealt with the inevitable minor controversy that it was not an e-book at all but in fact just an essay.  The price should have been an indication.  This 9,000 word small body of work cost a mere $1.99 on Amazon.  I like him, I like his ideas, and I liked the price, so I bought it (I also downloaded the necessary Kindle for PC’s.   For free, I hope!).  I figured at that price it was essentially the same as a potentially bad cup of coffee so I justified it rather handily.  I downloaded this writer’s essay and read it in a sitting.  It was interesting and thought-provoking.  Some of it I whole heartedly agreed with and much of it I did not.  The problem was that as I found myself wrestling with those ideas I disagreed with in my head, I found that much like an uninvited party guest, the thought that maybe I wasted my money kept popping in like a messy drunk.  But, why did I think this way?  

When I delved deeper I realized I was becoming accustomed to getting things for free.  I was ashamed.  I realized I could have waited until it made the rounds certainly as time wore down and his sales for it waned.  Yet I remembered I had skillfully talked myself into it by the paltry price of the download.  Is it wrong for this writer, a great thinker actually, to give himself away for nothing?  He does this already with a blog.  He has a right to make money, I believe.  If anything, I do hope this illustrates how at least publishing is shifting beneath our feet.  The man (me) who used to decry the need to make money is now fretting over how some businesses like publishers might make a profit!  Such is the strange dichotomies of the internet.

The other frightening thing is how it promotes mediocrity.  Much like an ‘American Idol’ kind of hyper-democracy pushing the banal, the internet can do the same in more convoluted ways.  I have seen great writers (and I mean very talented people) write for a magazine and placed on these very prominent magazines websites only to be buried within everything else in that magazine.  These writers can be hard to find.  But the minute a less than talented writer’s work finds its way as a link on a prominent blog, he makes it around the world as quick as sound travels.  This, as someone put it, may have a lot to do with “the ratio of signals to noise.”  It does, however, make me feel better as when I place a poem or some such piece of work on here.   

If someone simultaneously claims in a ‘comment’ they saw Britney Spears pumping gas, they get a thousand ‘likes’.  If it is a thousand, it is exactly one thousand more than I receive. Imagine if either of these had to be a money maker.  I would be broke.  A celebrity "sighter" would not.  Am I bitter?  No.  Am I lying?  Yes.

It just now seems that America has become a weird place. With an unemployment rate of over 9%, its inhabitants appear to be content to place things—sometimes someone else’s stuff—on social network sites in hopes of getting a “thumbs up.”  We want to have sensitive egos stroked over creating a society where everyone can share in a marketable way that (hopefully) everyone can flourish.  

Whether we like it or not, we still need cash to buy things.  You know this already.  I mean in the sense that Adam Smith explained it as a market that was circular.   I guess I have to do my part by not expecting everyone within the frame of this little unblinking window that now peers in front of me is for free.   Yet somehow, and for some clear reason I still fail to bring into view, I continue to place things on Facebook for free in a quixotic attempt at a little love.  Sad.

The Blurring of Technology as Appendage and Tool

Karl Marx once stated that the worry for the workers of the world was that they may alienate themselves from what they create.  The machines they used were in danger of becoming  "appengages" to the human being.  With an extensive use of the machines, the worker and his work stood on the precipice of losing any "individual character."  Is there any technology in this our modern age that we might come close to considering nearly literally being an "appendage" than a cellphone, or ipod, or whatever mode of adjunct to the body part may be your choice? Unlike, say, a loom, these things are always "on" us.   However, the very organ I might say these things are standing in for is arguably the very nerve center (literally and figuratively) so important to organic life and acquirement of knowledge: the human brain.

 I have surely mentioned more than once somewhere within a sea of blogs that I am concerned not so much with technology as a tool, but rather it's expediency as a tool.  On the face of it, this should sound like a positive.  I believe it can be one  (I chuckle at how often I hear people exclaim they cannot imagine life before cell phones but I rarely hear it lamented that they cannot imagine a time when they couldn't look up a useless information at the drop of a hat).   But I also chuckle at my local bar and a random bit of useless trivia is thrown out there as a challenge to the collective know-how.  This is usually in the form of some sports trivia of a sort.  Heads come up and away from beer rims like lions lapping up lake water only to hear or smell some tasty prey.  It’s then that cellphones collectively come out at the ready with all the aplomb of taking out a chewing gum packet and thumbs begin to genuflect wildly in contrast to faces frozen in stony stares at their little screens.  The race is on for the answer.  Is this a good thing?  Well, why not?  There should be nothing wrong for a ‘quest’ for knowledge and there should certainly be nothing that hinders the honest competition in acquiring that knowledge.  It may be all fine and well for getting lackadaisical men from pulling their heads from out of a beer mug, but is this what we want, for example, in our classrooms?  No doubt the acquirement of knowledge especially at the click of a button seems appealing but there are dangers beyond the seemingly educational allure.

The problem with this is it might foster the ‘habit’ of being able to find information without the time worn need to also distill, absorb, and remember the information.  If there’s a study that says otherwise, I don’t know of it.  However, in my own travels, I’ve found that students are infinitely cheery at answering a question right but sadly cannot expand or improve on what they’ve answered correctly.

As an example of this, imagine I'm having a discussion with a friend over some rich and tasty coffee. Somehow, and for some reason only known to him,  my friend is gripped with a desire to remember a quote by the the Rennaissance painter and sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarotti.  He says between sips: "I'm thinking of that wonderful quote by Michelangelo but I can't remember it for my life!  What was it?  I know he said it  around the time he was painting the Sistine Ceiling.  When was that?"

I'm glad to oblige.  I do this by firing up the phone, punching the mini keyboard with the words google, then I'm off on my own quest.  I get my info rather easily.  "He started it in 1508 but didnt finish for another four years," I say matter-of-factly.  This helps jog my friends memory.  He's on the trail thanks to my hint.  He says, "Yes!  Yes!  It was something to do with the nature of genius.  It was  said around that time.  This I remember!"  This is all I need, or, more to the point, all google will need.  I punch in Michelangelo, then 'quotes,' then simply the word 'genius.' After some of the least amount of research, I've found it!  "He said, 'Genius is eternal patience,'"  I might declare proudly.  My friend is content.  But what have I done?  Well, for one I have used the phone as appendage, as a stand in for my brain.  It may be argued that this is analogous, or merely a stand-in, for an anthology or thesaurus on art.  There's no doubt this analogy holds weight.  But, the expediency of the cellphone has become part of the usage of the thing.  It's become an essence.  If you own an anthology on art, it should be unlikely that you would carry it around on your person waiting for any questions to do with the Rennaissance, or the Baroque Period, or any other art movement.  You will hopefully read it and get to know it intimately so that the knowedge gained becomes just as intimate with you.

But the real problem here is that I have only become a distiller of information.  What if he then asks me my opinion on the more esoteric meaning of the chronological layout of the Sistine Ceiling?  What if he asks why he placed a Sybil here and a saint there?  What if he asks my opinion on his theory of form and function?  Is there enough room on my little screen?  Is there enough time before a second cup of coffee?  I might be embarrassed.  My only recourse to him may be a sheepish, "My little machine did all that."  Of course, this will depend on if I pretended all along I knew what I was talking about.  Admittedly, this little problem, though still associated with how I got the information, may have more to do with my attitude and my honesty about it.  But, if I did pretend I knew what I was talking about, it should then have been my responsibility to expand my knowledge beyond mere trivia.

This is why it seems more than ever, it is a teacher's duty to  demand that expansion.  Herein lies the danger of something like a Wikipedia.  When I was a student I well remember the ire of the teacher when she finally came to the conclusion that a student was merely regurgitating (without feeling or understanding, mind you!) some those 'notes' that were a mere distillation of a story to a book that was meant to be a companion to a work and not its replacement.  Might Wikipedia be the “Cliff notes” of the present?  In this case, an answer does not even have to be memorized!  One merely has to call it up on a laptop or phone and an answer is provided immediately.  The danger in English (and I might even argue math) is that the expediency is eroding the critical thought that goes with finding new information.  Ones work is done once something is cited. No need to keep it.  It was all in a moment.  What's next is next.    The other problem with such rapid information gathering is the thrill of the find seems to be lacking.  As a psychological motivation, with much digging comes more interest and hence, more passion into the quest for knowing.

I  remember well when young, and in hindsight as slightly older, the thrill of the search for knowledge. At the time, it seemed deeply frustrating but in lovely retrospect, I now see the importance of pushing myself to finding it was something so essential to the desire of attaining and finding  knowledge.  When one works for it, one holds it dearly.  As an analogy, imagine the polar bear in the zoo who is fed daily, something he never received in the wild.  Why then does he seem so depressed?  Quite simply, because, in the wide stretches of the years,  nature has placed in him the need, the very desire, to find his own food.  His very 'raison d'etre' was not eating alone.  It was finding it.  I sometimes wonder if we are putting on a brave face but we might be feeling just as dejected as the imprisoned but well-fed polar bear.

This also applies to college students who use websites as a way to facilely cut and paste information expected to pass as their own paper.  The laziness is near unforgivable but the ignorance of the severity of such a crime cannot be comprehended.

We must teach children that, despite the speed that new information can be called up, it is still just a tool for reference and the topic called up must still be thoroughly examined and, most importantly, must be compared to other information as a way of cross referencing facts and ideas for the best possible educational outcome.

Googling is fine for at the bar when you want to acquire the number of strikeouts Andy Petite has achieved on every odd number month of a lunar eclipse.  But for a student who wants to deeply understand Homer’s “The Iliad,” it should be a tool that requires further human thinking.