...and Absurdistan

Keeping with the fiction trend, I've moved SE and a little more ridiculous and been reading Shteyngart's latest, Absurdistan.

Lots of fun, very entertaining, he's got a really good sense of the absurdity of modern life in the Soviet Union, life post 9/11, war in the age of terrorism and media, and the new reality of outsourced conflicts (Halliburton et al).

It was lighter than the last two and it took me a while to get into it. But Shteyngart's not aiming as high as Chabon or Lethem and once I accepted the book for what it is, it was pretty good.

Next up, back to work-related non-fiction. I've got a growing reading list about Agile Software Development Methodologies and hope to add some inches on that topic.

Off in Sitka

Haven't submitted in a while because I've been reading fiction. I'm finding that I only have room in my day to day for either imputs or outputs - if I'm filling my head, there's no time for letting stuff out.

So I've been spending my time in Boerum Hill (Fortress of Solitude - Lethem) and Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Chabon). Very different worlds, both very entertaining.

Lethem loves Brooklyn and here he's written a remarkably evocative book of Brooklyn in the 70's and 80's. It's not a nice book - drugs and crime and graffiti and all sorts of nasty things happening - but he really knows how to paint a picture. It almost reminded me of the Corrections in that you feel like you know his main character by the end. This is a real person living in a real place and you're right there with him. So much so that the fantastical elements of the story don't even linger in the cumulative feel of the book when you're done. It's such a realistic portrait that the supernatural piece just sits within it without altering the overall feel. Kind of like a gritty magical realism.

Then you switch to Chabon and boom! No realism here. A yiddish speaking nation living in Alaska?! A down on his luck cop walking the mean streets of Verbover island with his sholem (idiomatically, "peacemaker") in his holster?! Craziness! But fun.

Chabon clearly loves genres and alternate histories of niche communities. Parts of this reminded me of Kavalier and Clay and how he tried to weave in realistic elements to that book (footnotes, references to New Yorker articles about his protagonists). Here, the whole world has changed: 2 million dead in the Holocaust, israel loses the battle for independence, the US bombs Berlin with the atomic bomb... And he does a good job putting all that in that background so that he can focus on this crazy little pocket of alaskan jews and what would have happened if the vibrant, contentious, yiddish-speaking, european world had not been extinguished through genocide and assimilation, but rather had been preserved like a frozen gefilte fish in this bubble of sitka. Yiddish cops and chasidic gangsters, dead heroin addicts, chess players and a potential messiah. Like I said, lots of fun. Makes me nostalgic for a yiddish that I never learned.

Community, part 2

I think there are two problems with choosing to affiliate yourself with like-minded people who do not necessarily share geography with you.
1) They're like-minded people
2) They don't share your geography

1) When the only people you interact with are ones that agree with you, you will never have a reason to moderate your opinions. I think this is most obvious in the case of politics and has been widely-discussed. The echo chamber effect of listening to cable channels and pundits who agree with your world view and then establishing online relationships with people who think the way you do only serves to prevent people from acknowledging the possibility that others can think differently. It's like we can now all live in a small village of close-minded people who think that everyone outside the village is wrong and evil. Somehow, I don't think that's what "global village" is supposed to mean.

2) No matter how much time you spend in virtual space, most people are going to eventually leave their rooms and interact with others in "meatspace". If we are moving towards a future where you will not necessarily have anything in common with the people that you meet each day and may even have disdain for them since they are not part of your selected micro-community, then what kind of civic discourse can you have with them? Where is the chance encounter? the random stranger on the bus, the quirky cabdriver?

It's almost like the difference between searching on Amazon and browsing in a used book store. Amazon is all about searching with laser-focus for something you want and suggesting things that are like it. Browsing in the Strand is all about your eye catching a random spine on a topic you weren't even thinking about and that you know nothing about. Are we losing the randomness that leads to eclecticism and acceptance of difference?

The Long Tail and community

Trying out this blogging by blackberry thing.

The reason why this is such a big deal to me is that what's been keeping me from blogging more frequently is time and routine.

Just so happens that I have time on my highly routinized commute home every day. I expect far more output going forward (unfortunately, that doesn't guarantee greater profundity).

So one of the points of The Long Tail is that the blockbuster is busted. No longer will we have the one TV show that everyone in the country is watching at the same time. His point is bolstered by some numbers from Nielsen. For example, the number one show in 2006 would not have made the top 10 in the 70's. And that's despite the increased number of televisions, greater population, etc... There are just many more options and the pie is split into far more slices.

So my question is: what does this do to our sense of community? Used to be one could go to work and bond at the proverbial water cooler over Archie Bunker or M*A*S*H. Now, we're all segmented and you watched american idol, but I watched korean soap operas or downloaded a video or watched youtube instead.

Does this trend, only accentuated by the rise (once again) of personal entertainment devices separate us into balkanized city-states of personal interest?

Anderson's answer is that it just redraws the community lines. Instead of connecting to that yahoo next to me on the subway who also watched the big game last night, I'll reach out to the (international) online community of passionate high school curling fans who can share my anguish over the big loss.

And that connection, possibly, will be more important. Because I am choosing it. Fighting arbitrary distinctions of geography, I have sought out and found my cohorts, however few and far flung they may be.

All well and good. But there is the niggling little human need for contact - actual physical, eye-to-eye contact. Can we really replace that with blogs and forums?

More on this later

1st entry

At a loss for how to begin, I will start, artlessly, with what's going on.

I'm reading The Long Tail, a book I've looking forward to reading for a while. It's in the vein of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point et al. One of these books (often started as New Yorker articles) that take one clever idea and spin it out into book length. Don't get me wrong - I'm enjoying it. Much as I enjoyed the other ones I mentioned. I just don't feel like it's world-changing.

So this one (if you haven't heard about it), describes the "new" economy which allows for the sale of many more items to much smaller numbers of people than the "old" blockbuster economy of a few giant hits ever allowed.

For example, a record store can only stock so many CDs so they stock the 10% most popular ones. iTunes can "stock" everything at 0 cost so they can offer you 90% of the music out there. Then, a funny thing happens. People actually buy almost everything that they put up. There is at least one person out there interested in the least popular song ever recorded. That's the big idea. You can make as much (or more) money selling millions of songs to one or two people each as you can selling one or two songs to millions of people each.

As long as you can keep your costs down. That's where the internet comes in. So you sell bits, not atoms (free) and you distribute over the internet, not by truck (nearly free) and you can make money even if you only sell one or two copies a year. Pretty cool.

And the lesson applies to everything. Music, books, information...

It's really the fault of the book that I'm typing this now. He talks a lot about the power of blogs and the recommendation revolution where people need advice and filters to sort through all the crap at the long end of the tail. It's all well and good to have all the information in the world at your fingertips, but how are you going to find anything useful?

That's not to say that I intend to actually write anything useful...but we'll see.