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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

In the mid-1990s our friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.

It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often do only use about ten percent of its capacity at any given time. Another way to look at it is as a giant sieve. When we’re awake and alert, our brains are filtering out a vast majority of the stimuli around us. Don’t check my math, but think of it as only ten percent of the world getting in. Contrast that idea to idea that when we’re asleep and dreaming, the filters are only partially on or completely off. This makes using less of your brain — or stimulating less of it — not only an advantage, but a necessity to your sanity.

As amazing as the human brain is, it still has plenty of limitations. Some of its limitations are what have created the aforementioned glut. We externalize our knowledge and the processing thereof to free up our internal bandwidth. Hieroglyphs, language, books, keyboards, archives, databases, cassette tapes, websites, and iPods are all products of our mental offloading. We’ve emptied our heads so much that now it’s difficult to find a signal among the noise. The digital shift from bits to atoms only exacerbates the issue, problematizing the filtering process in altogether new ways.

For instance, with the impending demise of the printed page the debate regarding digital books is in full swing, following closely after that of the compact disc. Though the nature of reading the printed word and listening to music lend themselves to digitization in very different ways, there is a major overlooked similarity in the transition: The organizing principles of both are being irrevocably reconfigured.

What is a book but an organizing principle? What is an organizing principle but a filtering device? The book works for printed language just as the album does for recorded music: it filters and organizes it in a meaningful way for mental consumption. As David Weinberger pointed out, analog media like books and albums filter first, whereas digital media like websites and MP3s filter last. That is, by the time you read a book it’s been through a thorough rigorous organizing, writing, editing, proofreading, and design process. When you run a search on Google or Wikipedia, what you end up reading is filtered and organized on the fly as you request it (Wikipedia actually has an ongoing organizing process, and Facebook and Twitter are filtering digital information in still new and different ways).

None of this filtering and reorganizing means that the book as we know it is going to go away anytime soon. What all of this means is that some things that were never meant to be books will now have a place to be themselves. Let’s face it, just as some records only have one good song, some books would be better off as blogs.

Time is the one truly finite resource. If we are to optimize it, we need better filters and better organizing principles. Instead of slogging through a whole book on a topic that would’ve just as well made a decent magazine piece, we’ll read it as it develops on the author’s blog. When we want to get lost in some convoluted alternate reality, we can still read a thousand-page Thomas Pynchon novel on good ol’ paper (his newest came out yesterday and is roughly half that long).

These changes change the way we think. They literally change our minds. With more and more choices for our filtering pleasure, I believe it’s mostly for the better.

Image via http://www.masternewmedia.org

Tammy Erikson, the award winning author, will have her latest book released in December. It is titled ‘What’s Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead, and Getting the Career You Want‘ and is the result of her studies and interviews with people born roughly during the years between the 1960’s and the 70’s.

She has an article on the Harvard Business Publishing web site where she gives a top level view of her work in this arena. She makes a compelling case for how the next generation of business leaders will be unlike any who have gone before. As she points out in the article – “Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points of view. There will be no dominant voice.” I sense that her book will be a fascinating read. Below are some of the important elements that she says will have shaped the Gen Xers as future business leaders:

“In this context, I’m convinced that Gen X’ers will be the leaders we need. The experiences that shaped those of you who were teens in the late ’70s and ’80s, as I’ve outlined in past posts, translate into valuable contemporary traits and perspectives.

• Your accelerated contact with the real world, for many through a “latch-key” childhood, has made you resourceful and hardworking. You meet your commitments and take employability seriously.

• Your pragmatism has given you practical and value-oriented sensibilities that, I believe, will help you serve as effective stewards of both today’s organizations and tomorrow’s world.

The most difficult elements of your past may well be those that provide you with the strongest capabilities for today.”

In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine’s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer;s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

Amazon’s Kindle 2 has more of an Apple iPod feel to it. Found on MobileRead.com

Click image to play ‘Because of’

I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.

In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s – “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.

The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter – women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.

“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”

The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”

The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.

In a mashup culture all manner of digital and graphic goodies get mashed. Mashup artists run along a tightrope that is pinned at one end by copyright law and the other by fair use doctrines. There is no safety net not even under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA]. If a copyright holder feels her work has been infringed then out go the takedown letters followed by legal action if the perp doesn’t roll over and submit. See the news about Muxtape being taken down by the RIAA.

Given the RIAA’s jackboot tactics it is heartening to hear that Jim Davis the creator of the popular comic strip Garfield did not automatically send out cease and desist letters to Dan Walsh who created a knock off of the strip called Garfield Minus Garfield. As Walsh has posted in his site’s header “Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.”

So what did Jim Davis of Garfield fame do? Not only did he embrace the spirit of Garfield Minus Garfield but he reached out to Dan Walsh and together they have signed a book deal.

Epic. RIAA, record labels and artists please wise up. [Thanks to Otis for the heads up.]

Related Post: Mashups, Girl Talk and Me