Hrair

I was taken aback by this article by the Washington Post. This newspaper arranged to have a very famous classical violinist (Joshua Bell), pretend to be a street performer and play the violin in downtown DC. Bell is absurdly good, and even if you aren't really the type to appreciate violin music you can respect a kid whose parents figured out he needed an instrument to play when he, at the age of four, started playing classical music on his dresser by tensioning and loosening rubber bands. The man is somewhat a legend in his field.

The question posed was by the article essentially boiled down to "would people appreciate great art even out of context?" It referenced the beliefs of Kant, who said that in order to properly appreciate art, the viewing conditions must be optimal. The article agreed with him and surmised that this art, taken out of context, was not as meaningful.

I found something else startling though: the number of persons who watched the performance who were interviewed later and did not remember that a violin player had even been in the station.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

There were a large number of other people referenced in that article who seemed to not notice that Bell existed at all, and while technologically provided ideological isolation is a topic that has been beaten to death, I think more interesting than what he was listening to is the fact that he could be listening at all. He could also have been listening to a podcast of a college course, been playing with his smartphone or talking on his cell phone and it wouldn't have mattered a lot. The point is that our connection to technology has enabled us to take in far more information than our physical environment is providing us. The other point is that our mental ability to take in data has not scaled with our capacity to access it, and so in order to pay attention to one thing we lose the chance to use that mental bandwidth elsewhere.

***

"Does anybody know where the word Hrair comes from?" My professor asked.

"Watership Down?"

The professor grinned ear to ear and bounced a little pacing the front of the classroom, "Very good, Watership down! Yes, the rabbits could only count to four, and everything after that was 'hrair.' Humans have the same problem too you know. Systems at some point just reach a complexity where no single human can keep all the information in their head. At that point you must break it down into little building blocks, check each block, check how the blocks work with each other, and hope the whole system works. Often those blocks are written by entirely different people."

It is a true principle in more than software. I feel safe in assuming all my readers use computers, but how many of you can program one? Build one? Fix your car? Build a house?

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Scott Adams in his book The Dilbert Principle humorously attributes most of the world's problems to sex and paper. The concept being that with so much sex going on every once in a while by sheer chance we get one smart person. This person has ideas, writes them down, and now complete idiots who could never have built such a thing have access to them... that our world is many times more complex than the average person's intelligence can handle.

I am not sure if we ever had the capacity to really process all the data coming at us in our world, but it seems to be harder than ever now.

So when you have a mind-bandwidth shortage, what do we keep? Increasingly it seems to be the familiar, the mindless, and the mundane. We, like all those people in the station that couldn't hear Joshua, are too locked into our own habits and internal thoughts to see the opportunities or problems around us.

I saw a little sobering scrap in this article on this note:

Viral Media Rewards Absurdity

"I can't believe Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for intentions instead of action..."

I heard the same sentiment expressed with varying levels of clarity and expletives dozens of times Friday. "What on earth has come over the commission?" "Nobel is rolling in his grave," and "They have officially made this into a sham," and "Why the hell would they do this?"

I'll tell you why. I'll prove it on one sentence.

Can you name the winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize without looking it up. No? It's Martti Ahtisaari. Here's the sad part: that name probably doesn't help you. A good percent of us could not identify this former President of Finland for love nor for money.

That's alright, lets try again. Can you name any winner of the Nobel peace prize in the past five years? When I tell you that 2007 was Al Gore and some other people for some global warming stuff, you might say "man I knew that," but the recognition on Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank (2006), International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), or Wangari Maathai (2004) is pretty low.

So what's special about this? Well, lets consider this: news is a form of media. Media is an industry. Industries seek to make profit. How does media make money? Media makes money from advertising. Advertising pays more when more people see it more. Media wants to make as much money as possible. Media wants as many people to watch it as possible. Media reports the news which people will watch.

This dynamic is as old as the news as a business is (which some people link especially strongly to the development of cable news stations). The issue is: now not everybody gets their news from the news stations. As a matter of fact the majority of the news which I receive is transmitted to me virally either by a friend in an IM or via an IRC channel.

So what gets transmitted? Mostly it's the inane and the insane, in short the absurd. You know the memes as well as I do. I see easily as many links to the likes of Chris Crocker, various forms of Bill O'Riley expressly because he is losing flipping a shit or making an ass of himself, and Reuters' Oddly Enough as I do to "actual news." Try getting the same sort of stories you get off the BBC on Digg. They are probably there, but they are also probably awash in a great deal of other stuff.

Awash isn't a bad word for this whole situation. We're awash in way more information than we can reasonably process. We rely on summaries of everything, from what our friends are up to to the disturbing little bullet points that accompany a one page news article on CNN because they believe we have lost our attention span so badly that we are unable to finish and analyse a one page news article for ourselves.

And what is coming out on top? Well, your diligent readers will probably pick, choose, and not fluctuate but items which actually go viral reward the news site with a huge traffic spike. Spikes like this are very lucrative both financially. They are also psychologically attractive for the same reasons the lottery is.

Check out what is right at the top of the webpage of CNN, which is generally regarded as a fairly reasonable news site. Will the naked burgler that CNN reports as caught change your life? How about that an "ultrarunner" says shoes are the devil? This stuff is not news, its just a light laugh that sells well.

So if somebody is determined to make the news or "have an impact," they are going to have an easier time doing it if they are doing something that will go viral: the inane or the insane, the absurd. The Nobel Peace Prize, like all Nobel Prizes was founded essentially as a form of activism by the man who invented dynamite as an attempt to recognise those who have helped improve humanity. This was to offset the destructive and warlike ramifications of his own invention. The goal is to highlight and reward those who have done something significant to better humanity.

So how can the people who award the prize make sure the prize has an impact? By making sure everybody knows about who won it. How do they do that in this modern age?

They pick somebody who is doing good, but where the statement is just absurd enough to go viral.

Now I'm not proposing that this is some giant media conspiracy. I'm arguing that this is an unconscious algorithm that evolves from the combination of the strength of viral media introduction, media companies trying to make as much money as they can, and the people who are making news attempting to be sure they have an impact. This is the age that rewards Sarah Palin's cutesy folksy gimmicks, and reactionary "opinion pieces" where people completely lose their shit on youtube.

So, in conclusion, stop linking garbage, go read some damn news, and make the world a better place. Hell, while you're at it you might even give yourself an education. :p