reviews career Archives - Inside the Ordinary

You’ve Doubled Down on Extinction: Standout Blacklist Script by Dave Thomas

1 December 2015 By darkviolin

Photo: Blacklist Crispin Chandler - via the Blacklist Wiki

Sir Crispin Chandler (Harry Yulin) in The Blacklist via Blacklist Wiki and NBC

Sometimes great writing lurks in otherwise ordinary landscapes. That was the case for the following speech by Raymond Reddington (James Spader) in a November 2015 episode of The Blacklist. Spader, whose character Alan Shore enjoyed regular excellent declamation opportunities in Boston Legal and The Practice somewhat less often gets the chance to do the same in The Blacklist. In this episode, his antagonist was a cryogenic evildoer Sir Crispin Campbell ( played characteristically well by veteran Harris Yulin).

Perhaps you’re familiar with the old saw ‘You can’t beat the house.’ No matter how many poor souls you turn into popsicles, the fix is in. The world in which you awaken will be one incapable of sustaining human life, and why? Because at the critical tipping point, one tragically quixotic megalomaniac cannibalized humanity of the very minds that might have been its salvation. You see, if you were a betting man you would understand that now trumps later every time. The future is a sucker’s bet, a maybe, a contingency, a what-if; the only thing that is real is the present. And you’ve plundered it, robbed it of the very geniuses that might have averted the dystopia you so fear. . . Congratulations, you’ve doubled down on extinction.

Death … Mish mosh. It’s just a process, right?

Writing kudos to Dave Thomas @TheDaveThomas, in this work reminiscent of Paddy Chayefsky. Any regrets? Sure. That Campbell had not been given a better chance to respond, resulting in a delightful bit of repartee, albeit with the same predictable action-script outcome.

Digitally Induced Affective Disorder and Possible Antidotes

30 November 2015 By knowlengr

Our attachment to digital forms of communication, especially smart phones, may be responsible for the emergence of symptoms that are strikingly similar to other affective disorders.

To call it a Digitally Induced Affective Disorder (DIAD) is exaggeration, but not a casual one, certainly not enough to keep this title from the top of a nonfiction must-read book list for 2015. True, it’s not a parallel directly drawn by Sherry Turkle in Reclaiming Conversation (Penguin, 2015), a book that the Harvard Bookstore chose to feature in its “holiday hundred” — one of eight in the science and technology category.

But take a closer look at the symptoms she associates with the decline of nuanced conversation. The clinical similarities between DIAD and other affective disorders become striking.

Ms. Turkle’s central observations about DIAD should be alarming, and not only to practitioners in the humanities.

A few of those observations:

It’s “more than a flight from conversation. This is a flight from the responsibilities of mentorship.”
Employers are struggling to maintain employee attention in meetings and conferences.
Conversations are increasingly fragmented. The mere presence of a phone on the table changes what people talk about.
There is “a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past ten years. . . a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications.”
“When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. . . We ask simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. And we become accustomed to a life of constant interruption.”
The primacy of image sharing in social networks is weakening conversation: “When things get complicated, it’s easier to send a picture than to struggle with a hard idea.” (Recall Susan Sontag’s 1973 warning about photography.)
Digital devices interfere with the maturation of the inner world of a person. What some young people “count as solitude involves being online.”

The Failed Promise of Pro-Conversation Technology

Turkle’s book is part interview anecdote, part academic citation — but mainly first person essay. (A flaw perhaps, but in the Malcolm Gladwell tradition of such flaws). Some of those interviewed insist that technology serves them well, despite the DIAD overtones.

Consider these quotes and paraphrases from some of those interviewed:

Wandering the web ‘is like thinking aloud.'”

“My iPhone world is my Zen. You flip between your music, your news, your entertainment, your people. You control it. You own it. That’s my zone.”

“Twitter is my memoir; Facebook is my way of keeping a diary.”

“With my friends, it’s either no conversation or conversation about what’s going on, on your phone.” But it’s not talking on the phone — not live conversation. That is “the absolute worst. . . You have to be listening and responding in real time.”

“Seven minutes is the amount of time you have to wait to see if something interesting is going to happen in a conversation.”

“Turning to ‘people on the phone’ is like turning to another friend present in the room.”

It’s increasingly clear that these perceptions cannot be traced to an unfamiliarity with how their devices work, or the data they provide. A survey of adherents to the Quantified Self movement turns up many who have excelled at data collection, but struggled at building narrative, conversation (“analytics,” in the broadest sense, though Turkle likely eschew that term). Turkle quotes Intel psychologist Margaret E. Morris working at Intel: “Feedback devices are most powerful as a starting point, not an ending point. . . To the extent that these technologies have an impact, it is because they spark conversations along the way.”

The “spark” is pretty low voltage, not enough to recharge an iPhone when changing planes in an airport.

These snippets and other more concrete evidence in Reclaiming Conversation argue strongly that collaboration tools — email, chat, text, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp, GoToMeeting, Sharepoint, Yammer — are immature. Worse, they are failing to advance beyond what was possible before these technologies overtook organizational mindshare.

Related Research. Not More Apps

Turkle insists that the problems she identifies are not to be solved by more apps. In the narrow sense- she may be correct, but the not-apps directive is swimming upstream. Just as drones are the hoped-for solution for generations wanting to avoid ground combat operations, and diet pills preferred over less indulgent dieting, a technical “fix” will continue to have broad appeal. She writes that her “argument is not anti-technology. It’s pro-conversation.” But that proposition begs many questions. Some of those questions she addresses in the book, but hers are not technical recipes.

Performance on SAT verbal/critical reading and writing scores has declined somewhat since that sub-test was launched in 2006, but the declines are not precipitous, and the correlation between these results and the decline of conversation skills is unclear. That said, there probably is one, and one that the SAT test developers ought to consider.

Alongside Turkle’s citations from psychoanalysis and social psychology, more scholarship is needed from narratology, storytelling, discourse, memory, learning, rhetoric, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, educational psychology — and, while Ms. Turkle might object — even research into the posthuman. Likely the needs are cross-disciplinary – to bring what has been studied elsewhere into the conveniences and capabilities of digital devices.

On the software engineering side, there’s much work to be done to improve collaboration software, and to improve how managers integrate digital communications into management practices. Turkle mentions AI, reflecting her immersion with “engineer mentality” at MIT, but in fact even simplistic AI is rarely employed in most software systems built today. What she calls our “technological affordances” are often constructed with little thought for any of the disciplines contributing to what might be termed the human factors of digital discourse.

Deeper still, while it is “DARPA-hard,” technologists must confront how people and machines must both be transformed to serve the health of both. Software must address the teaching in works like Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow and numerous other mostly academic undertakings. There’s plenty that’s relevant there: ontology, document analysis for search, discourse memory — even the technology underlying computer games.

Not that the technology horizon is all that rosy. Just look at how little Outlook and Gmail have changed over their lifetime. Or how lamely digital documents like PowerPoint decks are integrated into GoToMeeting.

Losing Sight of Conversation’s High-water Marks

Comparisons with more intractable affective disorders are, one hopes, weak. Considering the steeper challenges faced by caretakers for other disorders, the goal of reclaiming conversation seems eminently achievable. But going so far as calling Reclaiming Conversation a “sophisticated self-help book” (Jonathan Franzen in the NYT) may not be warranted. The prescriptions here are low-dose and lightly researched. Franzen calls the tyranny of devices “capitalism in hyperdrive, injecting its logic of consumption and promotion, of monetization and efficiency, into every waking minute.”

Interviewed by Lauren Cassani Davis in the Atlantic, cites work by Tristan Harris at Google and Gilles Philips at Constant Contact. As for the latter instance: true, Philips seems to be applying well-understood concepts from Human Computer Interaction (vigilance load, cues), but these basic concepts have been in play since the late sixties. Yet most software interfaces are still cloned, copied or drawn from pizza-fed armchair developers — not from a code of principles such as those you might expect in architecture or civil engineering. Change from that sector is likely to be slow in comparison the speed of movements like DevOps, Big Data and machine learning.

Father and child with phone: photo by Ambernectar 13 Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/ambernectar/

Parents feel they must equip their children with digital devices but some are increasingly aware of the risks.

On balance, Turkle is optimistic, though the book has many dark passages (such as characterizing Snapchat’s message destruction as the disappearance of self). She has prescriptions for those, as she wittily titled one chapter, “Left to Their Own Devices.”

But the central problems remain deep-rooted, intertwined with widely accepted notions of progress and happiness. If standards for quality discourse continue their steady decline, not only will we cease to ask another what we have lost; we will no longer recognize what it is we hope to reclaim.

Image credit: Ambernectar 13 | Flickr

Postscript The Kindle version is recommended. The Reclaiming Conversation endnotes are often valuable, and some of the references will need investigating for serious readers. I’ve created 479 Kindle notes in my copy of this book.

discourse-analysis-beyond-the-speech-event

extending-experiences-structure-anlaysis-design-of-computer-game

analyzing-narrative-discourse-sociolinguistic-perspectives

toward-a-cognitive-theory-of-narrative-acts

narratology-in-the-age-of-crossdisciplinary-narrative-research

storytelling-and-the-sciences-of-the-mind-9780262019187_0

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interpreting-motion-grounded-representation-for-spatial-language

advances-in-automatic-text-summarization

Small Pond, Big World of Letters and Letterwriting

7 May 2011 By darkviolin

Book Cover: Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

What There is to Say We Have Said (Ed. by Suzanne Marrs)

When was the last time you spent an entire day writing a letter? Suzanne Marrs has edited a collection of letters by two writers for whom this must have been a regular occurrence.

In an unrelated essay on photography, A.O. Scott wrote that “. . .while the literary canon has made room for a handful of diaries, letters and newspaper articles, these exceptions tend to reinforce the exclusion of vernacular forms from the pantheon of art (NYT Magazine 6 May 2011). A collection of letters between Eudora Welty and William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. (with an occasional letter from Maxwell’s artist wife, Emily Gilman Noyes) has been curated by Suzanne Marrs. While the collection on the whole belongs firmly in the aforementioned vernacular, to fellow swimmers in that drought-stricken pond known as the literary world, the collection offers a unique dialog between two able practitioners. Editor Marrs reprises James Watson’s belief that such letters fit in the space between art and life, and this collection reaffirms that conclusion.

What is most remarkable about the dialog is not extraordinary prose, though there is some of that, and not the events in their separate lives, which spanned two long-lived and productive careers. Rather it’s the civility, the steadfast tone of mutual encouragement and affection. When William signs off with “Devotedly” (26 December 1960), it strikes the reader as precise and faithful to the nature of the correspondence read up to that point in the collection.

As a 2011 release, the book will work better as an eBook than the advance proof print received for review. The reason for this is the extensive research done by Marrs. For each chapter of the collection, there are 75 to 120 endnotes. Today’s hypertext-savvy reader is accustomed to hovering over footnotes, rather than bookmarking the relevant page of endnotes and flipping back and forth. The endnotes provided can be ordinary, but sometimes they provide essential context for literary projects, characters or contemporaneous history. Consider endnote 43 in Chapter 6:

Eudora and her brother Edward drew dialogue balloons above photographs on magazine pages and folded the pages so that the photographs could not be seen. Then they exchanged pages, wrote remarks in the balloons, and shared the results” (p. 467).

On other occasions, the endnotes recall the writers’ public appearances, such as:

Eudora first met newsman Jim Lehrer in 1984, and he quickly introduced her to his colleagues Robert MacNeil and Roger Mudd. Late in 1989, as a reporter for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, Mudd interviewed Eudora about the photographs she had taken during the Great Depression. An extensive collection of these images, titled Photographs, had just been published” (p. 476).

An eBook also permits search. As the arc of these two lives becomes clearer in succeeding chapters, a desire to revisit mentions of certain events, places, opinions and literary works arises. Old school thumbing through previous chapters is quaint but inefficient and error prone.

Devotees of the cult of the New Yorker magazine where Maxwell worked as an editor will find much to their liking, as literary figures major and minor make their way across its stage and the magazine’s host city. As a result, the letters occasion appearances by John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Rachel Carson, William Matthews, Katherine Ann Porter, Howard Moss, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Connor, John Cheever — well, only John Leonard would list them all in a book review. The particulars surrounding the editorial process and the publishing world of that era (Maxwell: “I didn’t like the jacket copy that Knopf sent and so rewrote it”) will also be of interest to cultists.

The letters are instructive for what they do not mention, or at least mention little. Their careers coincided with the space program, the personal computer, the Hollywood blacklist and race riots. Here and there are snippets of those events (Welty wrote “Where is the Voice Coming From” after the Medgar Evers assassination), but the sense of small pond-ness is everpresent. For this they can be forgiven, though less so Marrs’ effusive characterization of their intellect.

The book contains a few black and white photos (though none from Welty’s NYC photographic exhibition), but otherwise it lacks the compelling imagery that marked some of these letters. The letters were sometimes written on illustrated notecards, with performance notes, funeral programs and clippings included, and featured the requisite strikeouts and editorial commentary. A glimpse of some of those artifacts would have livened up the book’s inexorably linear course. (Perhaps there were issues in gaining permission.)

In a way, the collection can be seen as unintentionally didactic for today’s reading and writing habits. As editor Marrs wrote,

. . . the lack of self-absorption, the embracing of experience in all its complexity, the capacity for love, the generosity of spirit, and the ability to face loss and death — these constitute the invisible signature of Welty and Maxwell, signatures that are as powerfully present in their letters as in their fiction (p. 14).

Theirs reflected the sort of disciplined friendship that may be put at risk by the mashed-up, cut-and-pasted interactions the Twitterverse fosters. A wistful, reflective quality in many of the letters that goes beyond literary observations like Maxwell’s “It is raining cats and dogs. How I admire the person who said that for the first time,” and Welty’s “Nothing looks more disheveled than a thoroughly rained-on redbird.” It is a quality goes beyond their small town roots and sturdy sense of themselves. They spent those days and nights writing letters for the friendship, and to keep alive articulate, specific urgings the letters both sent and received sustained. As Welty wrote in a Vietnam War era letter dated 12 June 1967:

Please forgive me backsliding into not writing.

The book is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN-10: 0547376499.

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The Unceasing Wail (And Barb Would Like Her CD Back)

29 August 2009 By darkviolin

In the echo chamber of pain and tears Robin Romm @RobinRomm inhabits in The Mercy Papers (Scribner, 2009), there are other characters: father Richard, boyfriend Don and a mother, Jackie, “who was the first to notice when the crocuses bloomed each spring,” even after she had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. And other characters, too. But Ms. Romm’s shrieks are so piercing, so monstrously realistic that nearly all other voices are drowned out in this narrative.

This is as it should be.

Readers should be prepared for plainly difficult passages such as:

On very bad days, Mom will look up at me, fear and pain staining the brown in her eyes, and she will say, ” I want to go home.”

“You are home, Mom,” I say, holding her hand, which is hard as plastic from edema.

“I know, ” she says, her face pleading, “but I want to go home.” My dad says I’m attaching meaning to this when it’s nonsense.

At other times, The Mercy Papers’ rant achieves more. This is where Romm is at her best, craft giving lift to the despair where nothing else could. That lift — one is reluctant to use a more demonstrative expression — is very much in need.

Legacy.com operates a hosted for paid obituary notices for 275 national newspapers, including the New York Times (not to mention Gadzoo, a pet finder service, perhaps suited to the sensibilities of the Company) . As fate would have it, I’ve had occasion to sponsor a legacy.com post / guest book and to visit three others since January. A casual visit to most guest books on legacy.com confirms Romm’s perception that outside the small world of those directly affected by the loss, an abundance of platitudes and poorly reasoned sentimentalities serves to create a sense of isolation. In Papers, this plays out in many scenes. One that comes to mind comes after Jackie asks the rabbi what happens in Judaism after people die and the rabbi offers up that “there is a great energy in the universe . . . and when you die you rejoin this great energy.” Little wonder the sense of estrangement deepens as this memoir continues:

We could get a cup of coffee. But who wants coffee? Who wants to see anyone in the outside world? The outside world has gotten increasingly foreign. People smile for no reason, purchase sugary snacks, worry over leaky roofs out loud to strangers. Who needs this? No one in this house wants to talk about leaky roofs. We want to sit quietly and be known. We want to be soothed by quiet warm hands. We want to be passive, have the world come to us. If we are going to use our tiny reserve of energy to strike up conversation with a stranger, well, it might as well be with God. No one else is useful. Not that God is being very useful — up there punching buttons on his death remote, smirking away.

Or, as Romm writes elsewhere, having nine years to prepare for the coming death still left her ill-prepared, and she works to convince the reader that this is as it should be.

. . . the changes won’t be hopeful — like the clarity of vision I sometimes feel when I’m in my bedroom after crying and the lines of the windows and slatted doors all look too sharp, hyper-sharp, and all people seem tragic and plain to me, easy to understand. Some of the changes will be only pain. Pain when I see babies, pain when my friends go to lunch with their mothers, pain on my birthday, on her birthday, on every birthday of every person I know. Pain and a deep, toothy hollowness inside me that will go on grinding forever.

There’s some transference/substitution wound in the author’s psyche, as there’s far too much narration about pets. Even though the comings and goings, food ingestion and waste discharging of the beasts lends a certain authenticity to the story, this may appeal to only to inveterate animal lovers. On the other hand, had Ms. Romm not been an only child, descriptions of siblings might have been no less meaningless.

When the reader arrives tearful and bloodied (and the blood will not all be your own) on page 194, Ms. Romm gifts the purchaser of this volume twelve Six Feet Under-esque blank journal pages (imagine the conversations with the publishing house over this decision).

Loss doesn’t end. It goes on and on and on, written on every day that will follow.

There you have it. Twelve blank pages for notes, after 194 pages of meticulous coaching. Preparatory notes, should it not yet be your time for such loss. Or, if your time has come, as it has for me and my mother (www.billieunderwood.com) only three months ago, then twelve blank pages just to gather up the bits of memory that loss has tried its best to obliterate. Ultimately, there is no making sense of it, but we are each judged — perhaps by someone much like Robin Romm — by the character of our wail.

When the wailing ends, probably through mere fatigue, prepare to be instantly teleported back to that other place you live, the one where Barb would like her CD back.

“You Turn”: Involuntary Career Shifts in a Downturn

20 December 2008 By knowlengr

you-turn-book-cover Because I suffered the indignities of job loss in the last downturn, I am deeply sympathetic to those who find themselves in this predicament. I found myself on the net looking for information on the plans of John McChesney and Ketzel Levine — recently of NPR — to see how they were handling what I assume to be their own grim news.

Judging by Nancy Irwin’s You Turn: Changing Direction in Mid-Life (Touch The Sun Publishing, 2008), a collection of career change narratives by 40 folks over 40, all may not be lost. Irwin collects stories ranging from a cocaine dealer turned real estate investor to timid housewife turned landscape architect. Some of the stories are inspirational, told by You Turners eager to share not only the plot twists their careers ensured, but the ideas that got them through the difficult years of transition.

Irwin begins the book with several brief but reasonably sensible essays. Her essays, intended to introduce the narratives that follow, are not wanting for platitudes (“We are all born with a mind, and most people don’t have a clue how it works. I’m going to give you the Manual [sic] for the Mind [sic] so you can start driving your life in the direction you choose, rather than staying on a dead-end street”). Overlook these. Go instead for the lists she offers up, such as these selections to be savored — albeit paraphrased thus:

Don’t wait until you are not scared
What is the worst possible outcome you can imagine? Could you survive . . . “
If you could be present at your own funeral, what would you want to hear the eulogizers saying about you?
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
If money were no object, what would you be doing?
Celebrate milestones along the way

The earnestness of the stories in this collection make me reluctant to criticize, especially since many You Turners found themselves, or better put, created for themselves, careers in comparatively rewarding nonprofit or charity sector work. Alas, there is much advice that is less than helpful. For example, one You Turner complained convincingly about how an abusive husband held back her career transformation. Perhaps this sidebar enhanced the vignette’s story, but it also felt off-topic. Some of the stories sermonize or rhapsodize more than they persuade. Others are self-promotional. Try to see past those to the personal triumphs.

Also, there is precious little about the practical dimensions of You Turns, to which I offer my own short list of somewhat neglected topics in You Turn:

Finances: funding new education, funding new businesses, bankruptcy, refinancing
Family finance issues
What kind of education is valuable for career change
Mentoring. It’s on Irwin’s list (“Driving Your Business on A Shoestring” # 11), but figures in only a few of the collected stories.

Irwin closes the book with more self-help lists. List quality varies. I was unimpressed by the suggestion of SCORE, whose well-intentioned organization of retired workers I have personally found to be uniformly unhelpful. Irwin also pays too little attention to social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and professional society forums and blogs.

On the other hand, Irwin goes out of her way to point out that each You Turner path is unique, or as she puts it, “Life is built on exceptions. Be an exception!” That each story is unique is proven by the collection.

If you find the diversity of stories underwhelming, go to the book’s companion web site, where Irwin invites you to submit your career change story.

Irwin’s outline for this book is quite strong, and despite regular lapses into Pollyanna-isms, many of her suggestions will have a ring of authenticity for those of us who have been through the You Turn process. In some respects, the outline is stronger than some of the narratives she has included. While her emphasis on daring is certainly part of career change, there is only indirect discussion of how one’s existing career and skills can be reapplied elsewhere in ways that may lead you back to somewhere not so far from where you started.

One’s personality unifies the careers you find yourself inhabiting, like houses you made home for a time.

There cannot be too many self-help books on this subject. You Turn is worth a closer look, even if you find only a few pages of inspiration in it. It will be inspiration delivered at a time when it’s genuinely needed.

The following comments concern aesthetics, not content.
Production and Design It’s the publisher’s doing, presumably, but I have a few nits about the design and layout of the book.

Each narrative is accompanied by a photo, perhaps provided by the storyteller. The photos vary wildly in size, quality and tastefulness. This creates a dissheveled appearance, as text sometimes flows around these photos, sometimes not. Some of the photos look as though they were taken from promotional brochures, while others appear to be casual family snapshots. Most of the photos are so poorly executed that I wished they hadn’t been provided at all. To be clear, my complaint here is about the photographers and publisher’s art direction, not the career-shifters themselves.
When I see “Dr. Nancy Irwin” splashed liberally throughout the book’s cover, spine, table of contents and chapter titles, I am reminded of the radio program “Ask Dr. Science.” Dr. Science’s introductions began “He knows more than you do,” and “He has a Master’s Degree — in Science!” This is a nontechnical self-help book. No doubt Ms. Irwin’s training in psychology has given her additional insights, but her credentials are given embarrassing prominence. This is unfortunate, as some of her best suggestions and observations are common sense and stand on their own. Obviously both a design and a content decision, I found this practice a distraction.
The lists should be offset with a different design. The CSS used in this blog creates more interesting lists than are typeset in You Turn.