Matins

¶ At the Monday Note, Frédéric Filloux unpacks a recent study of “Digital Natives,” 18-24 year-old French people. No surprises, but some very interesting nuances — especially concerning the concentric groups to which Digital Natives belong.

The Group they trust. The Digital Native does not rely on a single group but on several, each with a different degree of trust. The three concentric circles are : close friends and family as the core, a group of 20 to 30 pals whom they trust, and the “Facebook friends” of 200 or so, which acts as an echo chamber. Beyond these groups, behaviors such as elusiveness, temptation to trick and circumvent the social system will prevail.

How do they get the news? No wonder why the group is crucial to the Digital Native getting his information. First of all, the fastest is the best. Forget about long form journalism. Quick TV newscasts, free commuter newspapers, bursts of news bulletins on the radio are more than enough. The group will do the rest: it will organize the importance, the hierarchy of news elements, it will set the news cycle’s pace.

More chilling: the group’s belief in its power to decide what’s credible and what’s not. Truth – at least perceived truth – seems to emerge from an implicit group vote, in total disregard for actual facts. If the group believes it, chances are it is “true”. When something flares up, if it turns out to be a groundless rumor, it’s fine since it won’t last (which is little consolation for the victim of a baseless rumor); and the news cycle waves are so compressed that old-fashioned notions such as reliability or trustfulness become secondary. Anyway, because they are systematically manipulated, the Digital Natives don’t trust the media (when they themselves are not the manipulators).

Lauds

¶ The Kids Are All Right is going Brokeback — maybe. (Speakeasy)

The independently produced dramatic comedy, about a lesbian couple and their two offspring, is quickly becoming the indie hit of the summer. When the film opened three weeks ago on seven screens, per-theater ticket sales averaged $72,127, the highest for any movie this year. This weekend, after growing from 35 to 201 venues, “The Kids” continued its winning streak, generating more than $2.6 million (with another robust per-theater average of $13,173, the best of any film in release), bringing its cumulative box-office to just under $5 million.

Acquired at the Sundance Film Festival for a reported $4.8 million by Universal subsidiary Focus Features, the film has benefited from excellent reviews (”universal acclaim,” according to Metacritic.com; 96% on Rottentomatoes.com) and early award-season chatter, pegged to stars Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Ruffalo as well as director/co-screenwriter Lisa Cholodenko.

Like past summer sleepers “(500) Days of Summer” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” the film is rolling out gradually, building on word of mouth and hoping to play in theaters for months. In another sign of its forward momentum, sales over the weekend increased significantly from Friday to Saturday by a sizeable 57%. (As comparison, the new Angelina Jolie action vehicle “Salt” increased just 6%.)

When we saw the movie a second time over the weekend, our normally sleepy nabe was packed.

Prime

¶ At The Awl, a pseudonymous corporate bond analyst writes about fictive nature of “restructuring charges” — and what they suggest about the (ill) health of the economy.

Just as an aside here, there’s a reason for them breaking it out like that as a separate line-item in their expenses: that way, they can present it as a “one-time charge”. Analysts like me are supposed to discount it in looking at their “real” underlying cash flow and in forecasting their financial futures. It’s a one-time charge. Trouble is, it almost never is a one-time charge. That line, Restructuring Charges, appears, for most of my companies, every single quarter. Sometimes you begin to wonder what’s left to restructure.

Most CEOs and CFOs on earnings calls are not taking the big-picture view. They’re focused on the details of their own particular business. Still, I often ask myself if they see the connection that’s staring you right in the face: when is “the consumer” going to start spending again? Well, maybe when you stop firing him.

This really seems to be the root of the problem here in the US, and these earnings calls are like a microcosm of the whole US economy. You’ve probably read a hundred times that consumers are responsible for about two-thirds of GDP. (In the last four quarters up to 3/31/2010 it was close to 71%). So if they don’t have any spendable money because they’ve been fired (or are afraid they’re going to be fired), demand will be weak.

In other words: If I  fire everybody, then who is going to buy the stuff I make? You can see how this turns into a vicious circle.

Our idea: the deliberate “inefficiency” of more, smaller employers. As we see it, the only impact of “economies of scale” in the information age is inordinate executive compensation.

Tierce

¶ For Jonah Lehrer, the “mystery” of Inception is no mystery at all: the movie is a dream that evokes the dream-like mentality with which we watch movies.

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation. (This is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in a wide range of “limbic” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. This is why even the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens makes no sense.

I’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don’t Cobb’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we “know” it’s just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes coupled with the over-excitement of the visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don’t question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an idea. But this Dom Cobb – we’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn’t need a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a big screen.

¶ Steve Almond’s new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, got a dismissive review in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Steve’s not happy about it, and, like us, he wishes that the editors at the  Book Review took their jobs (instead of themselves) more seriously. But his ultimate response is acceptance.

Books – especially literary books – should be filled with smart, provocative ideas that deserve a response. They are intended to initiate a conversation about what it means to be human. A good review enlarges that conversation.

But it’s a loser move – an imitative fallacy, actually – to dismiss a bad review. As unpleasant as it’s been to read the assessments of my work in the NYTBR, both of the reviews in question had something to teach me – about dumb decisions I made at the keyboard, about the limited appeal of my sensibility, about certain habits of excess borne of my own doubt.

So, yeah, it’s okay to get pissed, maybe even inevitable. But we must not stop learning as writers. Even our least sympathetic reader has something to offer.

Second, as writers (of whatever sort) we should discuss books as seriously as we want ours to be discussed. I truly believe this. And not just in print, but in our daily lives, in how we talk about books with friends and colleagues, on our blogs, or even within some aggrieved comment thread. To degrade another writer without a respectful consideration of his or her intent and labor is to degrade our own vocation.

It would be wonderful if the NYTBR had a bunch of editors who held themselves to this standard. But that’s not really their job – as much as they might think it is. Their job is to drum up interest in a cultural artifact (the book) that keeps sliding further out onto the margins of our frenzied visual culture.

Nones

¶ We’re always delighted when Strange Maps turns up something piquant for this hour, even if it does involve Switzerland. Who knew that there are no fewer than three movements to expand the Alpine federation? But of course there would be three, just as there are three languages.

Although it doesn’t take in all the areas covered by the first and second proposal, the third plan is the most ambitious one. Launched in June of 2010 by the right-wing populist Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), it would expand Switzerland into all its neighbours–except tiny Liechtenstein, which would be enclaved inside a truly Greater Switzerland. “We’re always discussing Switzerland joining the EU, never the other way around,” said SVP-president Toni Brunner, approving of to the proposal by one of his party-members. SVP-parliamentarian Dominique Baettig said he would neighbouring regions that “suffered under their national and the European political classes” to join the Swiss “democracy with a human face.” Ideally, he would like to see Switzerland snatch the Land Vorarlberg from Austria; the province Aosta, Varese, Como and Bolzano (‘Bosen’ in German) from Italy; the départments Jura, Ain, Savoie and Haute-Savoie and the région of Alsace (‘Elsass’ in German) from France. The single biggest chunk would be the German Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, bringing in almost 11 million new Swiss citizens. If all went according to the Mr Baettig’s plan, the new, Greater Switzerland would count around 25 million inhabitants and would be a mid-sized European power to be reckoned with… at least by the Libyans.

The crack about Libya refers to the beginning of the entry, which discusses Muammar Gadaffi’s “crackpot” desire to liquidate the Confoederatio Helvetica.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Darryl Campbell presents George Orwell as a pamphleteer — Orwell thought of himself as such — whose references to the essentially ephemeral controversies that inspired his work fade and (much like some hyperlinks) break. This makes it possible for people to make whatever use they want to of his work, and now Tea Partiers decry anything vaguely socialist as Orwellian — notwithstanding Orwell’s strong socialist sympathies.

Never mind that, for most of his life, Orwell advocated nothing short of a socialist revolution in England! As far as these people were concerned, Orwell’s works amount to nothing more than an anti-government, anti-change screed.

Overuse on the one hand, distortion on the other: what perversely fitting tributes to a writer who underscored the dangers of reductionism, revisionism, and willful ignorance. Clearly, George Orwell is a victim of his own success, and in a peculiar way – there are no public fights over the legacy of Hemingway or Joyce or even over other midcentury political writers like Hannah Arendt that rival the ones for Orwell’s posthumous stamp of approval.

So Orwell was right to consider himself more pamphleteer than novelist. Many critics have dismissed this as a kind of false modesty, but in this case, Orwell was not merely managing expectations. Pamphlets are designed to make a specific point to a specific audience, and then to be thrown away because they can no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended. Orwell’s works are ephemeral too, in the sense that they cannot really be understood without some semblance of historical and intellectual context. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of reading, and a lot of extracurricular effort to do so, however. Obviously, many readers simply find it easier to shout down any opposite political position with Orwell’s own words – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others – than to really understand what these words, in context, were supposed to represent….

Until Orwell’s readers bother to do so – which, as a rule, they don’t – then we can look forward to another sixty years of use and abuse.

Compline

¶ At a local library’s used-book sale, Michael Blim picks up Robert Sherwood’s Hopkins and Roosevelt, a book as old as we are. (We haven’t read it, alas.) The shift in political vision twixt then and now is depresing. (3 Quarks Daily)

Sherwood cites a passage from a remarkable speech Roosevelt as Governor of New York gave to an extraordinary session of the state legislature on August 21, 1931. I quote it at length because of its germinal significance for the political beliefs of Roosevelt the man, before he became Roosevelt the president:

“What is the State? It is the duly constituted representative of an organized society of human beings, created by them for their mutual protection and well-being. ‘The State’ and ‘The government’ is but the machinery through which such mutual aid and protection are achieved. The cave man fought for existence unaided or even opposed by his fellow man, but today the humblest citizen of our State stands protected by all the power and strength of his Government. … The duty of the State toward the citizens is the duty of the servant to his master. … One of these duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstance as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others. … To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty.” (Sherwood, 1948, 31)

Roosevelt’s beliefs seem almost embarrassingly simple. The state serves the greater social purpose of protecting and supporting all of its citizens, but most especially those in need. Full stop.

For reasons that continue to be perplexing and profoundly enraging, neither the Administration nor the Democratic Party in Congress seems capable of upholding this one basic proposition under which they were rewarded with power in the first place. 

Have a Look

¶ Superlative Mad Men recapping at Tony & Lorenzo. (via MetaFilter) Ben Zimmer on Mad Men-ese. (NYT)

¶ The pancake-flipping robot (on the off-chance that you haven’t seen it already; the iPad wouldn’t let us watch it, and we kept forgetting to check it out at the computer.) PS: we wish we were as coordinated as the robot. (at kottke.org)

¶ “Just How Bad Is the Summer Air Quality in Your City?” (The Infrastructurist)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 10:30 am.