"A phone interaction requires participants to be 'on the same time,' which entails negotiations over entrance into and exit from the conversation. Consider all the time we spend first on, 'Is this a bad time to call? Can you talk?' And then later on, 'O.K., gotta go, talk to you soon, see you later, good talking to you … '... [If you tweet about your children, they] can’t control whether you laugh at it, or what tone you use when you do.... But we live in a world that is starting to allow us to satisfy [the desire for human connection] without feeling the common-sense moral strictures that have traditionally governed human relationships. We can engage without obligation, without boredom and, most importantly, without subjecting our attention to the command of another.... The immense appeal of this free-form socializing lies in the way it makes one a master of one’s own time — but it cannot happen without a place. All that data has to sit somewhere so that people can freely access it whenever they wish.... When we alienate our identities as text data, and put that data 'out there' to be read by anyone who wanders by, we are putting ourselves into the interpretive hands of those who have no bonds or obligations or agreements with us.... People we cannot trust. The Great Control Swap buys us control over the logistics of our interactions at the cost of interpretive control over the content of those interactions. Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data."
From "The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids/When I’ve told you what my son said, it’s not 'his data' anymore" by Agnes Callard (NYT). Callard is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.
As is even more clear if you read the entire column, Callard mixes 2 topics:
1. Creating permanent text that is stored beyond your control where it can be used by others for their purposes. There's the businesslike monetization done by whatever social media platform you use. And there is the infinite human potential to use whatever has been written down for whatever new purposes arise at any point in the future. There's too much evidence in written form, lying there, discoverable, to be used against you, out of context, by anybody, any time for the rest of you life.
2. The escape from the time constraints involved in conversations — whether in person or by telephone. There is freedom in not having to get and stay in the same time frame with another person, but you miss the ongoing feedback about how the other person is responding, and there's more distance, room for interpretation, and exposure to people whose emotions and intentions are far beyond your knowledge and control.
This essay would work better if the subject of websites monetizing data were left out. The topic of control in personal relationships is enough and even too much. The headline writer teased us with an even smaller topic, mothers writing about their children and appropriating their lives for their transitory narcissistic pleasure. We do (ironically) hear some details about her sons, but Callard is writing about human relationships more generally, and she doesn't have the space to really get into that topic.
Callard doesn't go back into the history of adopting the telephone and whatever havoc that caused. Before that, people spoke in person or wrote letters. What about "The Great Control Swap" that happened when we all got telephones? Fewer letters and less knowledge about what people who were speaking to you were actually doing and feeling and where they were and who they were with.
I'm not buying "Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data." Yes, there's data in the sense of our manufacturing a product that some business can sell, but the words still have wings in the sense that they are read by real human beings who understand and interpret and do things of their own with those words. Are the words more dangerous to the person who creates them because they are written down? If they're dangerous, it's not because they've "fallen to the ground" but because they are still in action and the writer has lost control. But the words you speak also escape your control, and because there is no text record, you're at the mercy of the the person who heard or misheard and remembered or misremembers and repeats or misrepeats whatever you said.
याची सदस्यत्व घ्या:
टिप्पणी पोस्ट करा (Atom)
५१ टिप्पण्या:
I didn't want to mess up the post by adding this, but I'll add it here: Trump and the phone call transcript. What if we didn't have that text but were at the mercy of hearsay witnesses?
When past writers and thinkers imagined the future they always saw video oscreens and automated homes and ease of communication and other functions so many of which have today but few anticipated all that data being owned by someone else and potentially used against you.
One of Derrida's first things was that speech is a subgenre of writing. Both assume the absence of the speaker.
Any defense of speech will be written.
https://professorfangirl.tumblr.com/post/55099677451/slashing-philosophy-with-jacques-derrida-one-day
Pic showing Socrates writing and Plato speaking.
Derrida, The Post Card, resulted from it. I've thought the book was a good introduction to Derrida for women. (Spurs, for men. Skip the preface by somebody else.)
Welcome to e-mail. Apart from pontificating about social mores, it’s been this way for several decades. Indeed, one can go further back with all the other methods of asynchronous communication.
But we live in a world that is starting to allow us to satisfy [the desire for human connection] without feeling the common-sense moral strictures that have traditionally governed human relationships. We can engage without obligation, without boredom and, most importantly, without subjecting our attention to the command of another....
I would argue that human connection and satisfaction of the desire therefor, can’t happen without our subjecting ourselves to obligation and tea focus on another, at their and not always our whim.
A relationship that happens totally on your terms and timing will never produce the deep connection that over time becomes so satisfying.
Do people who feel they have to answer a text immediately look like they are in control of their time?
“My life is an open... text.”
It’s not like the left is deferring to the transcript now. With out it we’d still have the crappy hearsay, the lefties trying to pull off the coup and the partisan divide right where it is now...
Would you be more willing to accept hearsay in the absence of the transcript?
"But the words you speak also escape your control, and because there is no text record, you're at the mercy of the the person who heard or misheard and remembered or misremembers and repeats or misrepeats whatever you said."
Been that way since at least Henry II.
This is a very insightful analysis.But having a transcript transforms human rituals into an influence that lasts a hundred generations.That's big fucking deal.
So the pen is mightier than speech. And some people write better than others. And then there are the re-writers and translators. Five hundred years ago William Tyndale gave God an English voice , one heavily influenced by Welsh speakers.
The teens today are comfortable with complicated Texting. It is a big reason they say "OK Boomer" when we want to impose the old rules of conversation.
Yes, she really should have left out the data monetization. It's all data. Derrida was directionally correct. As far as the monetization is concerned, or the NSA, as long as it's not on Huawei 5G, it's all just data.
I do think it's incredibly rude to just call people nowadays. Such an intrusion. I always text first to ask if it's a good time. I make allowances for boomers who grew up in a telephone world, though.
i read history books (mostly about the civil war), and MOST of the sources for history books are letters.
back in the day, when a person would write a letter; they'd (often!) keep a copy of that letter for themselves. So people wouldn't just save received letters, they save SENT letters (just like your email app does).
And they wouldn't keep them for 2 years; they'd keep them FOREVER. Then, their Chilren would keep them, and then their grandchildren would.
Telephone's the weird one
If we didn't have a written record of things: stories, biographies, historical missives, letters, fiction and non fiction novels, science tomes.....we would gradually lose all connection and knowledge of the past.
Previous civilizations are unknown to us because we can't read their "writings" or they never did write.
Mythology and stories, based on real events, that are passed down from generation to generation are fractured and distorted by the passage of time. Oral history is easily distorted.
We can make fun of texting and the mundane content of most of the text messages....but....some of the most illuminating writings we have from ancient Rome are the graffiti on the walls or customer complaints about the quality of the olive oil in ancient Sumeria on clay tablets. Interesting, funny, and important things that tell us about their societies.
The problem with texting is that it is too ephemeral and will disappear with no trace because the platform...electronic....is also ephemeral.
whitney said...
but few anticipated all that data being owned by someone else and potentially used against you
George Orwell DID! in 1984, he EXPLICITLY states that THE PURPOSE of the telescreen, is to record YOU, for THEM
DBQ points out, that.... Oral history is easily distorted.
listen Lakota people talking about Their oral history of a battle
read the army's report of same
Complete mismatch
the hilarious thing is: Modern society is teaching kids that the sioux oral history
MUST BE THE RIGHT VERSION
I'm not saying that there aren't lies in military reports, just that there are WAY less in them
i read history books (mostly about the civil war), and MOST of the sources for history books are letters.
That's why history is going away. TV and movies are deliberately destroying history, especially anything political. The movies "Truth" and "The Post" are examples.
My kids never answer the telephone and I'm not sure they read email. It's all text even though they are in their 40s and 50s.
Gilbar said: i read history books (mostly about the civil war), and MOST of the sources for history books are letters.
Then you would love these books that I inherited from my aunt. War of the Rebellion. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
I have 5 volumes from Series 1. Only 5 of 53 volumes!!!. Mostly covering the Carolinas , but also one containing communications in the West during the beginnings of the Civil war that covers California and also deals with the actions of the Army versus the California Indians and the actions with the rebels from Texas who decided to leave California en masse to go support the South and join their families in the war.
Very interesting, illuminating and actually a bit funny in the historical nuggets that we don't normally get to hear about. Certainly not "light" reading in any sense because each volume is 4 to 5 inches thick and could be used as a lethal weapon to "brain" someone.
My favorite part is where one of the Union officers is writing to complain to a higher up about the actions of his 'unruly' troops in the area where they were occupying in the Carolinas area. He was trying to keep the peace and bring the civilians into cooperating with his troops. The troops from Boston and New York were (paraphrasing) a bunch of drunken, asshole, criminal, insubordinate, louts who were intent on creating mayhem, raping and pillaging. I get the sense that he really hated his troops. :-)
History is interesting. Learn it or repeat it!
Gilbar, I initially wrote that comment saying none and then remembered Orwell and changed it to a few. Once I remembered Orwell it made me realize I probably didn't know others who thought the same hence the few instead of one. Orwell really did have a vision. The weird thing is that in The Road to Wigan Pier he wrote about the seeing no hope for future employment for the British underclass unless there's something like a war to infuse work into the economy and was pretty clear that was 100% out of the question. He wrote that in 1937. So apparently he's not all seeing. Or perhaps it's easier to see the distant future than the near future?
Strikes me that tweeting has devolved communication down to the "See Spot run" level. (Even I thought OK Boomer as I wrote that.)
Is sending out pics of one's meal a way of increasing connectivity?
Callard doesn't go back into the history of adopting the telephone and whatever havoc that caused. Before that, people spoke in person or wrote letters. What about "The Great Control Swap" that happened when we all got telephones?
I read a memoir by a doctor who was practicing when the telephone became common. ("Diary of a Medical Nobody") He commented on the change in medicine. Before the telephone, someone had to make the effort to come to the doctor's house to get them out of bed or away from their dinner to attend to an illness, so they were more likely to only request after hours help for serious illnesses. After the telephone, it was so easy to call that they called about everything, even unimportant things. He described one of his partners yanking the phone out of the wall and hurling it across the room one night after a lot of stupid phone calls.
"But the words you speak also escape your control, and because there is no text record, you're at the mercy of the the person who heard or misheard and remembered or misremembers and repeats or misrepeats whatever you said."
Or misrepresented.
I guess (actually I know) that I am old fashioned. I do use email often for quick messages, business purposes and to have a record of what I have said. I don't text anyone, but if someone does text me...I might...might....text them back. Maybe.
When I want to communicate with a friend or family member...I want to hear their voice. The nuances of the conversation, emotions, humor, laughing, tiredness, fear, anger, whatever cannot be communicated in a text as it can by the voice. We recognize this lack of the underlying subtleties of electronic communication and have invented Emoticons. (>.<)
Different tools for different purposes. I prefer the human connection but also realize that the timing may not be right for a call and that electronic can be more efficient.
He described one of his partners yanking the phone out of the wall and hurling it across the room one night after a lot of stupid phone calls.
I've been tempted. The ones I enjoyed the most were from addicts trying to get me to call in a prescription for drugs.
DBQ, I found a copy of "The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion" in the USC medical library when I was writing my medical history. I went to the head librarian and told her that there were only 6 copies of this 6 volume history in existence and maybe it should be in the reserved section and not on the public shelves. I wound up scanning a lot of the illustrations for my lectures on the medical history of the American Civil War, which I gave to the Royal Army Medical Corps, hence the title.
Some of the illustrations are in these slides, which I put on my blog.
Like I keep saying until I'm blue in the face. This is early days of social media. Nobody is really seeing the forest for the trees at this point of course except me hahaha
@ Michael K
Very interesting and horrific at the same time. The suffering of the troops, both sides, was terrible...yet they persisted.
Hope they did save the rare books.
I hope my online comments don’t harm the Binks family.
Howard said...
Like I keep saying until I'm blue in the face. This is early days of social media
Howard? You're way smarter, and way more informed than me
Could you tell me how long "early days" last?
Could you tell me When the first Smart Phone was introduced?
Could you tell me When Facebook was introduced?
Finally, could you tell me, since you're Way Smarter and Way More informed than me, how 15 years are still: the early days?
Quit with the humble brag intro, gilbar. It's unbecoming. Taking the Long view, I'd say that it takes a generation to evolve through social change.
Whitney said...
Or perhaps it's easier to see the distant future than the near future?
When i first read 1984 (sophomore english class: 1978),
i thought How Ludicrous it was, for the Telescreens to be recording everyone.
There was NO WAY ON EARTH that i, in 1978, could imagine a world were telescreens would record Everyone' words. It Still seems unlikely: Right Alexa?
ps. I'm not sure if that was distant future or near future
It's not a question whether words used in texting have wings but whether those wings allow those words to fly very well. Compare a random collection of letters written to friends during the Civil War (or World War II) with a random collection of text messages to friends.
DBQ said...
Then you would love these books that I inherited from my aunt. War of the Rebellion. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
it's funny that you mentioned that! I found it online, but haven't been able to start it yet (i'm simultaneously reeading two books on shiloh, one from 1921 and another from 2015);
53 volumes!!! IS rather intimidating : )
Dr K said...
TV and movies are deliberately destroying history, especially anything political.
My brother in law, faithfully watches the History Channel; which he thinks has something to do with history. Since it' television, they "recreate" historical scenes, using actors and fabricated dialog. As bad as that is (and, it's pretty bad); my pet peeve is when they show "war footage", which is Really color movies from the 1960's that they have made black and white (with Scratches!) so that Stupid people would think it' real.
I'll be sitting there, and my BiL will be saying: isn't this footage Great?
and i'll be thinking: It's Tora Tora Tora
Dr. K?
Any opinions about why foot/toe amputations would be (nearly) twice as deadly as hand/finger?
I'm guessing more foots than hands, and less toes than fingers?
Gilbar. Thanks for the link to the War of the Rebellion sources. I have Series 1 volume L (50) Part one and am interesting in also looking through Part 2 (Pacific Coast and West operations).
It is amazing and a bit awe inspiring to hold a book created in 1897 that has correspondence from the early 1860's. People long dead and we can read their thoughts about events long ago.
I am afraid that our reliance on digital records is going to result in historical amnesia. Dangerous to not know or to erase history. We may not LIKE what happened in the past, but it DID happen and we need to be aware.
ah history channel, when it's not pushing ancient aliens, the von daniken estate must be ticked, they are pushing skydragon, and mega quake, (like roger corman for cereal) and before that, they took the priory de sion, seriously,
And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. ... Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time...
That’s McLuhan on our drift away from written/alphabetic culture to oral/visual culture. Texts and blogging may be ephemeral inasmuch as they’re stored electronically but they’re really a throwback.
Ah, for the halcyon days of the telegraph.
Any opinions about why foot/toe amputations would be (nearly) twice as deadly as hand/finger?
Maybe coincidence or more feet than hands. Lots of interesting issues from those books.
They did not know about mosquitoes and malaria but still used mosquito nets.
Lister published antisepsis in 1867, just too late but in time for the 1870 FrancoPrussian War. French results were as bad as the Civil War. Anesthesia was available for the Civil War but sometimes they ran out. One of the big drug companies got their start making ether. I think it was Eli Lilly.
Hi, Ann! Long time lurker. Thanks for the blog :)
The comments above about written history vs. oral history are interesting.
We know way more about the Mayans of the Classic Period, for example, then we do about other North American civilizations during that time because the Mayans left a written record.
Most of that written record was lost. Most codices/parchments were destroyed by the Spanish and other European colonizers, so only the stone engravings and a handful of codices and murals are left. Bishop Diego de Landa is a grotesquely fascinating character – overseeing “book burnings”, slavery, torture, etc, he is also instrumental in the ultimate decipherment of the Mayan script.
There was a point prior to decipherment where historians romanticized the Mayans as peaceful and diplomatic. Then we got to read the record. So much for that.
that's largely true, then there are the very biased works of Thucydides who was pericles partisan, who minimizes how the pelopenesse was arrived at initially, thanks to Donald kagam,,
I wish they would release Kagan's condensed history for Kindle. Only the 4 volume full history is available for legit e-reading, which is a shame, because my daughter won't read 1800 pages but would gladly read 450.
I think Gilbar has it right about early days of social media. While some things have been around a decade and a half, widespread adoption is only 5 or 10 years in. True, things move a lot faster today, but I don't think anybody 15 years into the printing press revolution had the idea of thousands of different newspaper being published worldwide every day.
In fact, we're still in a printing revolution, thanks to the internet: When I was a kid, you had the books in the library. Specialty publishing houses put out unusual volumes for hundreds of dollars a piece. Today, you can find reprints of out of copyright texts for tons of things. But more important, computer publishing coupled with internet sales allows you to find the 100 people who are interested in your book and produce copies for them for cheap. In particular, I've noticed a number of textbooks published by outlets like Lulu and CreateSpace/Amazon. In the past, professors handed out photocopies of notes to supplement the closest thing to a suitable textbook they could find, which usually went for fifty to one-hundred-fifty dollars. Today, they're prettying up their notes and you can buy the resultant book for twenty or thirty bucks.
As for the feet/hands thing, infected hands air out while infected feet fester in boots. And if you crawl through the swamp, those boots stay damp for a long time. Just my speculation.
yes, you would think they would provide a sampler, the first 400 pages or so, now the Thucydides trap seems trite, because western analogues would be the us vs the eu, not china or Russia,
I don't think he wrote this, but I think it's fair to say that if you want to threaten an incumbent power and trigger the Thucydides trap, you need a navy. With the UK exiting, that disqualifies the EU.
that was graham Allison, whose previous big cause was nuclear weapon proliferation,
टिप्पणी पोस्ट करा