In today’s Business Section, I came across one of those pieces that makes the Times look more like a publicity machine than a newspaper. The publicity is rarely focused on a single company’s new product — that would be transparent. Instead, it calls attention to new developments in a field. But there is a hopeful, prospective quality to these “developments” — which is to say that they haven’t actually developed yet.

“New Habits Transform Software,” by Quentin Hardy, prints the following statement, by Bret Taylor, “one of the best-regarded young software designers in Silicon Valley.”

“The way people use things is fundamentally changing,” said Bret Taylor, chief executive of Quip, a start-up offering document-writing software that focuses more on mobile than desktop work.

You can tell that the air is thin by the fact that this claim, both grandiose and obvious, has a paragraph to itself. The point of the story is that it is going to be easier to write documents collaboratively and on the fly, via mobile devices. I’m afraid that I don’t find any “transformation” in this news. What I was looking for, when I swallowed the bait in the title, was news about improved automation. For example: What I want is an app that will allow me to right-click on a photograph, make a selection between the two image sizes that I use at my sites, and — done. Something that would save me the trouble of “saving as” — assigning a new name to a copy of the original image. The app would know how to name it, because I follow a protocol about names that it could easily learn. A second right-click would ask me whether I wanted to PhotoShop the image. Eventually, it would insert the uploaded image’s file name into the draft of the pertinent Daily Blague entry. This wonderful app would cross many software borders to execute its commands, but in doing so it would finally realize the promise of desktop computing: true automation. Anything that I’m doing by rote, day after day, ought to be done by a machine.

I’m not expecting anyone to design this app. But surely someone could create an app for designing such apps.

***

So, no automation. I continued reading about making word-processing easier on small devices. Also, this:

“Writing and editing has always been somewhat collaborative, but things are moving much faster now,” said Mathias Crawford, a researcher in human-computer interactions at Stanford University. “We are moving from persuasion based on rhetoric to persuasion based on tables and videos inserted into narrative text.”

Well, that sounds pretty rhetorical to me. The shift to “tables and videos” is simply a move to another kind of rhetoric. A lesser kind, I believe.

It has been a bitter year in several ways — more bittersweet than bitter, perhaps; I’m not rending garments here — and one of the persistent sharp notes has been a reflective comprehension of what it means to be neither collaborative nor mobile. I don’t work with other people, and my favorite mode of communication, aside from the essay, is the exchange of letters. I do not consider such correspondence “collaborative.” Although correspondence can have some of the effects (on a third-party reader) of a collaborative effort, as two writers work to refine the expression of ideas in an exchange of comments, it completely lacks a key element of collaboration, cooperation. I am not an intellectually cooperative person. What I do well I do best by myself.

And I am not a mobile person, which is perhaps why I’ve never been able to find a use for Twitter. Six or seven years ago, when using a computer on the go, wherever one happened to be in the world, was just beginning to be imaginable, I was as eager as anybody to do it. But my age got in the way. Just as mobile devices came on line and became more reliable, I found myself at home most of the time. When I did go out, I went out to see or to do something, not to write about it. The things that I went out to see or to do did not entail news flashes that I might forget, and on those rare occasions when something startling crossed my attention, I wrote it down in a small notebook (and usually forgot about it). Conversely, when I did set to writing, I more often than not wanted to consult my library. I am very much in the position of Michel de Montaigne, who worked in his tower room. Montaigne was a man of affairs, and very mobile in his day job. But he wrote in retirement. I believe that everyone does. Reading and writing are different activities only to the extent that they are not bridged by thinking, and thinking, for most human beings, requires freedom from disturbance.

I don’t see anything on the technological horizon that is going to alter that.

As for “tables and videos,” I don’t know whether to laugh (at the blithe naiveté of the statement, as though there were anything new about the use of media in business presentations) or to cry (at the difficulty of putting media to use in ways that are intellectually clear to the uninitiated). Reading about Condorcet recently, I stumbled on what I take to be a truth that can be stated simply: the sole object of political activity is to shape laws and conventions that conform to a social consensus about everyday commerce. I am not convinced that “commerce” is the best term for this statement, but it was the most immediately handy. I mean it to cover the full range of human transactions, including of course the purchase and sales of goods but also comprising the many illiquid agreements of everyday life, such as our mutual engagement not to drive through red lights. (And certain human transactions, regarded as private, are not to be subjected to political attention. They are to be covered by exclusion.) But, to restate the truth: Politics is the business of making our laws agree ever more fully with our expectations about daily life.

A simple statement, but the complexity of realizing it is discouraging. It’s not that we need to think of a new system for making politics do what it ought to do. The system that we have will work well enough, if enough people agree to put it to that use. No, the complexity lies in closing the gap between the profusion of abstruse conditional statements that fill our lawbooks, on the one hand, and the comprehension of normally intelligent citizens, on the other. Few of our laws are written with everybody in mind. That’s what has to change, and changing it poses extraordinary challenges to the ability to express ourselves clearly. To state the challenge baldly: the economic underpinnings of our laws on taxation and incorporation must be plainly understandable to citizens without higher education. Otherwise, what we have is government by the elite, for the elite. (And I hasten to note that I belong to the elite!)

Visuals might be very helpful here, but learning how to create them won’t be taught visually. I remember something that the late media critic Neil Postman said about the act of thinking: it makes for dull television. Uncertainty is fatal to visual expression. In order to instruct, a video must be sure of itself, and to make a video that is both sure of itself and honest requires a great deal of thinking on the part of its makers. This is what ars est celare artem means: (according to the Random House) “true art conceals the means by which it is achieved.”

And there is no getting round the need to make clear thinking easier for more people. The plethora of less-than-honest visuals out there makes the problem twice as difficult.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 1st, 2013 at 11:53 am.