Say everything

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
This article by Emily Nussbaum in the online archive of New York 
magazine touches upon some insights about left organizing.  See:

http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/

I'll quote from the article and make some points.

“When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly 
surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way 
into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of 
The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our 
worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.”

Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive 
Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, 
has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to 
indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. 
What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It 
sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” People are 
always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, 
not chronology, Shirky argues. “You didn’t behave like that because 
nobody gave you the option.”

None of this is to suggest that older people aren’t online, of course; 
they are, in huge numbers. It’s just that it doesn’t come naturally to 
them. “It is a constant surprise to those of us over a certain age, 
let’s say 30, that large parts of our life can end up online,” says 
Shirky. “But that’s not a behavior anyone under 30 has had to unlearn.” 
Despite his expertise, Shirky himself can feel the gulf growing between 
himself and his students, even in the past five years. “It used to be 
that we were all in this together. But now my job is not to demystify, 
but to get the students to see that it’s strange or unusual at all. 
Because they’re soaking in it.”

Doyle,
This article summarizes what I think is a cultural shift the left can 
better understand.  In essence young people, but really all of us are 
in a transition toward always using a device to communicate with.  The 
device allows our links in society to expand beyond geographical 
limits, who can know me in detail (as opposed to walking by a stranger 
in the street, or big city anonymity), and what I use to communicate 
(pictures, video, audio).  In other words the sheer person to person 
volume of communications is increasing vastly compared to face to face 
speech acts.  While Nussbaum frames this as a generation gap, it really 
is about the subordination of individualism to vastly increased machine 
automation of language like communications.

To quote;
And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger 
people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to 
have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an 
illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time 
you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that 
transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns 
your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose 
to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who 
behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not 
the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with 
a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current 
circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest 
might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, 
like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least 
that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out 
there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks 
worth it.

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus 
Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when 
people patch things together from different languages, so it serves 
well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the 
children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which 
makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par 
with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of 
media.”

Doyle;
The metaphor is actually more than a comparison to Creole and Pidgin 
speech acts would suggest.  Multi Core chips can allow a person in real 
time to separate out motion from stillness in the visual landscape 
which is the fundamental grammar like use of pictures as a language 
like medium.  So in effect, this allows us to envision re-use of what 
we know in vastly more detailed repositories of 'knowledge', but 
anybody anywhere can know that as if they were in conversational 
connection with everyone.  In most cases this simply brings up what one 
is doing that involves others in ones activities (the set theory of 
family influences like Wittgenstein wrote about), but the sheer wealth 
of possibilities opening up to create a global society is what I am 
trying to portray.
thanks,
Doyle