Maria Bustillos | The Verge

Curses! The birth of the bleep and modern American censorship

2013-08-27T10:30:36-04:00

bleep assets

The Enlightenment sages who wrote the First Amendment into the US Constitution in 1791 created the most secure legal foundation for a real democracy in history thus far. By refusing to grant government the power to shut anyone up, no matter how obnoxious, the authors of the Bill of Rights ensured that even if the worst, most corrupt idiots managed to grab power they wouldn’t be able to silence their political enemies (in stark contrast to “the divine right” of kings, who dealt with the opposition by throwing it into a dungeon.) It’s just 45 words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

What the First Amendment really grants is the power of society to maintain its own standards over those of government. Over centuries, sometimes despite the most furious opposition, individuals have increased their participation and added the force of their lives, their words, and their ideas to the culture. And so the principle of free speech is growing, slowly and unsteadily, into the truth of its logic: each person, each member of the press, each citizen can believe, think, and speak independently and without fear of oppression. The same is true of Amendments Two through Ten: the Bill of Rights is a political structure built to safeguard a democratic state, but its implications in the personal lives of that state’s citizens are immediate and profound.

Because of the ironclad protection of the First Amendment, it has proved very difficult for government to control what we can read, listen to or see. A few curbs have been put up, though, notably by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulations of which largely determine what kind of material is bleeped out of radio and television broadcasts.

There’s a temptation to believe that even so mild a form of censorship as broadcast bleeping is a curtailment of that freedom, but the truth is more complicated. Bleeping can also be understood as a vivid illustration of the First Amendment in action.

The bleep of censorship invariably draws attention to the material it was intended to conceal; circles it, if you like, by loudly omitting it. Bleeping also serves as proof that there is a watcher: someone looking out for us in advance. In the bleep lies the evidence that you are being “protected” — but by whom? Why? And from what?

A politician in your living room

In A Tower in Babel, media historian Erik Barnouw describes the invention of bleeping at the dawn of the radio age. Or proto-bleeping, I should say, since the earliest system didn’t produce a censorship sound, but rather provided the engineer with a switch to a nearby phonograph that could be flipped to play music in case any troublesome content should appear over the live microphone.

This innovation seems to have been prompted by the 1921 appearance on Newark’s WJZ of one Olga Petrova (born Muriel Harding in 1884), a famous vaudeville actress and singer known (and feared) for her strong views. Petrova was “a fanatic on birth control and always making speeches about it,” according to Barnouw. She was friends with Margaret Sanger, who founded the American Birth Control League, the organization that would later become Planned Parenthood.

One night in 1921, Petrova, then engaged at a Newark theater, went to the local radio station WJZ to perform. The Great War had just ended, during the course of which the government had forbidden the use of private radio equipment. After the armistice the Navy tried to retain monopoly control of radio, but Congress put a stop to their power grab. Wartime restrictions were lifted, but the pioneers of broadcasting such as those at WJZ were mindful of potential government interference, and Petrova had a reputation as a firebrand. She disarmed her hosts by announcing that she would be performing her own versions of Mother Goose rhymes, and then proceeded to read the following:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children because she didn’t know what to do.

The 1873 Comstock laws, which banned the distribution of “obscene” materials, including information about contraception, were still in force; Petrova had, arguably, kind of broken the law.

The means for censoring broadcast content came years before the emergence of the first national broadcast network

“The staff was terrified,” Barnouw relates. “They were certain there would be trouble from Washington. Westinghouse [then owner of WJZ] executives were already nervous about possibilities of this sort, and had wondered what to do if a ‘red’ got on the air. An emergency switch was provided for the engineer in the shack.” Thus, he could switch to that “phonograph beside him — on his own judgment or on a signal from the studio.”

Thus it was that the means for censoring broadcast content came years before the emergence of the first national broadcast network, NBC, in 1926, and the Federal Radio Commission in 1927. By then, the technique was well established. Petrova recounts an episode that took place in 1924: she’d been reading a scene from her play, Hurricane, on radio station WOR when the red on-air light suddenly went out. Afterward, she learned she’d been cut off; the engineer told her that “radio audiences were very mixed … it wouldn’t do to offend any of their listeners.”

“One would suppose that radio audiences must be completely paralyzed,” Petrova observed dryly, “and therefore unable to turn off the switches of their own sets the instant their ears were shocked … by what they heard.”

The tug-of-war in the courts, in Congress and in the media over restrictions on free speech in broadcasting has altered very little since then. Justice William Brennan was still making Petrova’s argument in his dissent in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), the Supreme Court case involving George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” routine: “Whatever the minimal discomfort suffered by a listener who inadvertently tunes into a program he finds offensive during the brief interval before he can simply extend his arm and switch stations or flick the ‘off’ button, it is surely worth the candle to preserve the broadcaster’s right to send, and the right of those interested to receive, a message entitled to full First Amendment protection.”

Decades later, Stephen King repeated the sentiment in a 2002 interview: “If [Howard Stern] is saying stuff that you don’t like, if it offends you, you got a hand, you reach out, take hold of the knob, turn it off. He’s gone, goodbye … You don’t need a politician in your living room to say you’ve got to put a Band-Aid over that guy’s mouth.”

What the bleep?

Society is often compared to a single organism, “the body politic” or “the hive.” The increasing interconnectedness of people, of groups and nations, makes this analogy seem truer and more obvious all the time.

If the hive has a mind, it has also an id: the primitive, unconscious, instinctive part of our collective nature. It is also as uncontrollable and strange as the id of an individual person, that dark wild substrate of the psyche Freud called “a cauldron full of seething excitations … filled with energy reaching it from the instincts.”

“I could kill you” is the standard illustration of the id in a single mind: the fleeting, instinctive impulse that the superego effortlessly represses. The collective id is limitlessly more complicated; it contains all our boundless shades of darkness and all our craziest, most selfish impulses. It is the total of all we are ashamed or alarmed or unhappy to feel, and everything we would prefer to keep behind the curtain. The collective id is what is bleeped or censored out of our media, which is really just another way of saying our shared consciousness.

Society’s relationship with the dark side of its own nature is complex and contentious; it’s a struggle that is always clearly visible in our comedy. Stand-up comedy in particular is intimately concerned with “crossing the line” in order to confront us with the truth about ourselves. Lenny Bruce might be the best practitioner of this kind of stand-up; he was like a firehose for the collective id, like the role played today by Kanye West, Lewis Black, or Lady Gaga. Bruce’s personal life was very troubled, but it was also his consummate skill in shocking the establishment that led him to be repeatedly harassed, arrested, and jailed.

By the way, are there any niggers here tonight?

[in a whisper] “What did he say” “Are there any niggers here tonight?” “Jesus Christ, is that cruel. Does he have to get that low for laughs?…”

Are there any niggers here tonight? I know that one nigger who works here, I see him back there. Oh, there’s two niggers, customers, and ah, aha! Between those two niggers sits a kike — man, thank God for the kike!… The point? That the word’s suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.

Dig. If President Kennedy got on television and said, “Tonight I’d like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,” and he yelled “nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger” at every nigger he saw, “boogey boogey boogey boogey boogey, nigger nigger nigger…” ‘till nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, till nigger lost its meaning — you’d never make any four-year-old nigger cry because somebody called him a nigger in school.

This routine is 50 years old, but it still is very moving, still has the power to create discomfort, even anxiety. It’s hard to say how much grief Lenny Bruce would have been given for writing and performing it today — one imagines he would have faced a lot of criticism from both extremes of the political spectrum — but it would be possible to watch on cable now, and on the internet, at least for the moment. Still, this performance couldn’t appear on ordinary television, at least not without so many bleeps as to render it entirely incomprehensible.

Luckier performers have made a success out of flouting conventional morality. In a notorious appearance on Late Night with David Letterman 1994, Madonna (whom Letterman introduced by dryly observing that she had “slept with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry”) smoked a cigar and said “fuck” 13 times. Letterman faux-innocently asked, “You realize this is being broadcast, don’t you?”

You might say that our relations with the cultural id provide a simple, accurate litmus test for what, in the end, separates the liberal from the conservative in matters of social policy, and determines his real attitude toward speech rights. Social liberals are in a state of détente, or perhaps even on speaking terms, with the beast within, while social conservatives still seek to shame, repress, and somehow eradicate it.

That’s part of the reason why bleeping itself is inherently so funny. The bleep is the shock of a hidden truth revealed: an explicit illustration of the superego’s casual strangling of an unwanted, unworthy impulse; the knowledge that this struggle is always going on beneath the relatively untroubled surface of daily life. First it was unconscious, and now it’s not.

My name is… comedic meta-bleep

Shortly after it became a familiar convention, the bleep became the subject of comedy in its own right. This kind of humor has a long pedigree. There’s “Elderly Man River,” a lovely bit from Stan Freberg’s 1957 radio show in which a persnickety censor, Mr. Tweedly of the Citizens Radio Committee, noisily and self-righteously bowdlerized a performance of the song “Old Man River.”

The writers of Arrested Development are masters of this comic technique, repeatedly pushing the envelope. They snuck the word “fucking” past prime time television censors by putting half the word at the beginning of the show, and half at the end.

It’s in the nature of certain artists to bend societal restraints to their own ends

But it was with the aid of censor bleeping that Arrested Development reached the summit of its satiric genius. The show’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz, told Neda Ulaby of NPR, “We realized, you know, it’s more fun to not know exactly what it is that we’re saying … It becomes kind of a puzzle for people. And I think it’s about, you know, letting your imagination do the work.”

It’s in the nature of certain artists to bend societal restraints to their own ends. In 1999’s “My Name Is” Eminem needlessly substituted the phrase “Hi kids, do you like Primus” for the original, “Hi kids, do you like violence” in the “clean” radio-friendly version of the song. This produced a new, veiled joke. Primus, who composed and performed the South Park theme song, is well-known for a certain penchant for all things frowned on by the FCC. If Eminem wasn’t to be permitted to tease the youngs for their attraction to violence, then he would surreptitiously tease them for liking “Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.”

A more recondite instance of the comedic meta-bleep came in the inaugural episode of that deceptively moronic Comedy Central sitcom, Workaholics. It’s a layered, nuanced comment on the different kinds of mediation and restraints between performer and audience: technical, editorial, societal, legal. In one scene, our slacker heroes discuss the dubbed profanities in a cable broadcast of Die Hard.

Adam: Yo, Kyle, what’s up?

Kyle: It’s almost the ending, bro. It’s Die Hard.

Adam: Did they just say, “clucking”?

Blake: Yeah it must be on cable, so they switch the swear words out?

Adam: Oh Carl Winslow, I’d forgot about him!

Karl: Ssshhhh!

Anders: Did you know Reginald VelJohnson wasn’t actually originally cast—

Karl: Shut the cluck up.

[Anders snatches Kyle’s snacks away, Kyle says “fuck” — and it is bleeped out.]

The fantastic confusion produced by South Park’s depictions of Mohammed resulted in the collision of the meta-bleep with the real thing in “Episode 201.” In this episode, the people of South Park have to trade Mohammed to Tom Cruise and his gang of angry celebrities in exchange for their dropping a class action suit, but nobody has reckoned with the Ginger Separatist Movement, and it just gets crazier from there.

There could be no doubting the real danger in making critical portraits of Islam after Dutch director Theo Van Gogh was gunned down by a radical Islamist in Amsterdam in 2004 for having made a documentary film censuring the treatment of Islamic women. So, shortly after the airing of South Park ”Episode 200,” when a group called Revolution Muslim threatened violence against the show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, in a blog post claiming that the two would “probably end up like Theo Van Gogh” for their comic portrayal of Mohammed, Comedy Central wasn’t prepared to take any chances. The studio added its own real censor bleeps to the comic ones written in by Parker, and additionally bleeped out three long speeches in their entirety. To this day the uncensored version of “Episode 201” is not available to stream or buy.

Censorship, in practice

The Supreme Court has revisited FCC restrictions governing radio and broadcast television a number of times (federal laws don’t govern cable television, which is regulated locally). The federal laws guide “Obscenity, Indecency, and Profanity” (the FCC provides a handy fact sheet outlining the differences).

In order to be considered obscenity, the material in question must pass a three-pronged test: first, it has to “appeal to the prurient interest,” or be be liable to turn the average person on sexually; secondly, it must describe sexual conduct “in a patently offensive way;” and finally, “the material taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” The last is how both Ulysses and Lolita slide out of being considered “obscene.”

“So, fuck ’em. I still have a job, and they don’t.”

Indecency, as defined by the FCC, is a much broader category, and can be anything that offensively describes “sexual or excretory organs or activities.” So, pooping, farting, mentioning of the peen. And profanity is just “offensive language,” expletives and the like.

But because the community’s word is the real law, the FCC can’t decide on its own what is offensive and what isn’t; not because they are sensible or thoughtful or even have half a brain, but because freedom of speech is the law. Hence the FCC must rely on actual complaints received from members of the public in order to take action or levy fines against anybody. Otherwise they would likely be sued, and they would lose. Though cable networks aren’t directly affected by FCC indecency regulations, they still must answer to audiences and advertisers. This is how the First Amendment is supposed to work: strategies for arriving at a consensus must be developed by the community itself. Hence the modern censors of the cable era: the Standards & Practices departments at each cable network. These departments comb through every second of material broadcast, and try to make sure that the work is suitable for their wide audiences. This work requires a lot of sensitivity: it’s a balance, and is about making material available to interested audiences, as well as forbidding that which is likely to offend. (Robert Pondillo’s 2010 book, America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrich, documents early network censorship).

When Cher received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Billboard Music Awards in 2002, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler introduced her, shouting gleefully, “She’s got 19 patents on her ass!” And when she took the stage, she said:

I’ve worked really hard, I’ve had great people to work with… and… oh, you know what? I’ve also had critics for the last 40 years saying I was on my way out every year, alright? So, fuck ‘em. I still have a job, and they don’t.

This moment, among other similar ones, was described in the Supreme Court filings in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc. (2012). They weren’t worried about Steven Tyler’s “assless pants” comment, only about the single word, “fuck,” that Cher had nonchalantly dropped.

In the years of Bush II, Congress and the FCC broadly expanded their indecency policies, eventually deciding that networks could be fined up to $325,000 for “fleeting” indecencies such as the inadvertent flash of a boob, or a casual expletive like Cher’s. But the court held that the FCC couldn’t reasonably fine broadcasters for “fleeting expletives” and “momentary nudity” after the fact, because their regulations were “unconstitutionally vague,” so that broadcasters could not be sure of exactly what to avoid in advance. The judges stopped short of saying that the FCC’s indecency regulations violate the First Amendment: they just said, y’all need to figure this out.

If the Supreme Court ever decides that the FCC has no right to enforce indecency regulations, there will never be another bleep.

It’s quite possible that the day will arrive, if the outcome of Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988) is any indication. Here, the Supreme Court considered the matter of a satirical ad in Hustler, claiming that Moral Majority leader Reverend Jerry Falwell had lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse while the two of them were “drunk off our God-fearing asses on Campari.” Hustler’s publisher, Larry Flynt, spoke about the case in an interview with Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center.

Paulson: Falwell sued you, and at the lower court, he actually won in a very strange way. Not for libel, because no one could believe that there was any truth to it, but because you were, in effect, mean to him; intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Flynt: They wanted me to pay Reverend Falwell $200,000 because I hurt his feelings. My attorney says “Pay it,” because he was suing me for $50 million. He said it will cost you $2 million to take it to the Supreme Court. I said, “Well, that’s where we’re going,” and we lost in the Fourth Circuit. It wasn’t looking very good then, and no one thought that the Supreme Court would ever grant cert, and they did. And their decision was unanimous. I remember Justice Rehnquist’s words even so clearly today. He said, “Simply because the government finds speech offensive does not give them the right to repress it… And I don’t think it was the Supreme Court siding with me over Reverend Falwell. I think that they were looking at the practical implications of the decision if they would have ruled the other way.”

ADVENTURE TIME AT SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON

Maria Bustillos: The FCC indecency regulations, as I understand them, are to do with sexual activity and excretory functions: bodily functions, basically. How much do you have to think about these regulations as you go about your work?

Adam Muto (Supervising Producer, Adventure Time): A lot of it’s done internally, actually. We have our own S&P [Standards & Practices] department [at Cartoon Network]. So it never has come to the FCC ruling against us. The tone of the material is really dark, but that’s not the hard stuff to get through. The hard stuff to get through is the more obvious, like, scatological targets.

Kent Osborne (Head of Story, Adventure Time): The poop is always internal.

[eyebrows raised around the table]

MB: Well, hmm, eventually, though—

KO: It becomes external.

MB: These regulations are very much about what children should or should not be exposed to; to protect their innocence, you might say. Your stuff is pitched at children: what do you think about exposing them to nihilism, the end of the world, the apocalyptic themes you guys go in for? It’s serious business.

AM: Yeah it’s serious, but I don’t think it’s beyond the pale, or that it’s something that they’re not seeing anywhere else. Childhood’s sort of… I mean, I was a really depressed kid, at times. Wouldn’t you want to see that reflected in what you’re watching?

Dead air

The Petrovas of today, should they come on the radio and make reckless remarks, might be dealt with by means of an Eventide BD960 Broadcast Obscenity Delay, also known as the “dump button.” The dump button delay system is different from bleeping in that the edit is concealed completely from the audience. Before the invention of the dump button, this kind of hidden cutting was often done with tape delays. As sound engineering consultant Gary McAuliffe explained at Part15, a low-power radio broadcasting forum:

Take two identical recorders, place side by side 10’ apart (assuming 15 ips tape speed.) Record on one machine, but run the tape to the take up reel on the second deck, which plays the tape. This gives you about 7 seconds to catch the S word. We used to do this all the time on any call in show back in the ’70s. You need closely matched machines, otherwise, you wind up with either tape on the floor or broken tape… Back then the FCC was really strict, so we took no chances……

The dump button provides a relatively insidious, more censorship-like form of editing, because its alteration of the original broadcast has been actively concealed. If we are to have disagreements about what constitutes acceptable media for a civilized general audience — and we should — they should be aired in every possible way. Through a very loud bleep, for example. And through litigation, and yes, complaints to the FCC. Through arguments at dinner tables and letters to the editor. A bleep is honest, immediate, noisy. It’s the cultural superego in motion, calling attention to a difference of opinion regarding the offensiveness of the bleeped material. Here is this questionable thing; think about it for yourself, investigate if you like. In this way, the bleep is a literal demonstration of First Amendment principles: the 1KHz-sound of a community actively engaged in the process of establishing standards, and struggling to understand itself.

Online classes can be enlightening, edifying, and engaging — but they’re not college

2013-05-28T12:45:06-04:00

mooc illustrations

The future of higher education online is, at present, clear as mud. Do Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — college-level classes offered online through a number of corporate providers — offer students better tools for study, increased opportunities at lower cost? Can they provide access to higher education to those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it? Or do these canned classes portend the selling out of American education to Silicon Valley profiteers?

I took the best MOOC I could find over the last several weeks in order to try to answer these questions, as well as the one perhaps too seldom asked: Are even the best of these classes any good, or not? Are the best ones now, or could they one day be, as rewarding, informative and useful as a real class?

Could the best online courses one day be as rewarding, informative and useful as a real class?

University professors founded or helped to found all the companies that provide online platforms for serving MOOCs, the largest of which (Coursera, Udacity and edX) all have affiliations of one kind or another with Stanford. San Jose State University made headlines earlier this year by offering course credit for certain online classes hosted and administered by Udacity. California has consequently emerged as the front line in the MOOC wars, and the debate here seems likely to be repeated across the country. Here, academics defending traditional classroom-based college education are finding themselves pitted against cost-cutting administrators and government representatives (and even against their fellow academics, since many MOOCs consist of lectures and exercises developed and recorded by sometimes quite eminent professors from all over.)

California’s educational system, once the pride of the state, has experienced drastic cuts over the last 30 years, and has deteriorated accordingly. A little research indicates that the alleged “need” for cuts to educational funding is more a matter of changing priorities than the result of fixed imperatives. The watchdog group California Common Sense pointed out last year that “after adjusting for inflation, higher education in 2011 received 13 percent less state funding than it did in 1980. Corrections, on the other hand, expanded its share of the state’s general fund by 436 percent.”

In this atmosphere, San Jose State’s move to grant credit for MOOCs has exacerbated fears that administrators will soon consider online classes an adequate substitute for the real thing. The pushback began in earnest as a direct result of this move.

Earlier this month, “An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel From the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University” was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Sandel is a professor at Harvard University; SJSU’s faculty had been asked to use Sandel’s MOOC course, “Justice,” in their own classes. The letter details the reasons for their refusal, and it’s a scorcher.

The philosophers began by explaining exactly how and why using Sandel’s canned course would shortchange San Jose State’s students:

In addition to providing students with an opportunity to engage with active scholars, expertise in the physical classroom, sensitivity to its diversity, and familiarity with one’s own students are simply not available in a one-size-fits-all blended course produced by an outside vendor.

Then they go on to address an entirely different concern:

The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel.

And another:

We fear that two classes of universities will be created: one, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch … videotaped lectures and interact … with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant.

There’s a real appetite for online learning

Professor Sandel’s feet having thus been placed to the fire, he responded with unequivocal (if terse and rather lofty) support for his colleagues: “I strongly believe that online courses are no substitute for the personal engagement of teachers with students, especially in the humanities … The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions.”

But if academics are responding with hostility to the idea of being replaced by glorified YouTube videos, it’s also obvious that there’s a real appetite for online learning, and that it is colossal. MOOC enrollments routinely number in the tens of thousands. Clearly, it would be a great thing for those with a desire to continue learning, but who don’t have access to traditional college classes, to be provided expert guidance to facilitate their studies.

It would be wrong, then, to dismiss these efforts without an exact understanding of what their proponents are really trying to achieve.

“The Ancient Greeks” is a free, seven-week course offered through MOOC provider Coursera. I started my own undergraduate career more or less convinced that I would one day become a classicist (didn’t happen!), and was familiar with much of the assigned reading.

The class was being taught by a professor at Wesleyan. So first, I contacted Wesleyan to get an idea of the school’s exact arrangements with Coursera. Lauren Rubenstein of Wesleyan’s Department of Media Relations provided answers via email.

Maria Bustillos: What I’m most interested in is the nature of Wesleyan’s partnership with Coursera from a financial perspective. Specifically, are professors of Wesleyan’s Coursera offerings compensated by Coursera separately? Is Coursera compensating Wesleyan, and if so, how?

Lauren Rubenstein: Coursera does not compensate Wesleyan faculty for offering a Coursera course. There is a revenue share agreement between Coursera and Wesleyan that delineates what percent of revenue beyond Coursera’s costs would go to Coursera and what percent would go to Wesleyan if there comes a point when there is revenue beyond costs … Wesleyan currently pays faculty members a small stipend for developing a Coursera course. If a particular course earned significant profits, a revenue sharing agreement exists to split proceeds between Wesleyan and the faculty member teaching the course.

I did not ask how the Coursera expenses would be calculated; I’m from LA, where Hollywood has given the “net deal” rather a bad name.

“The Ancient Greeks” is taught by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, and he is basically the flower of the American university system. His own training is utterly traditional, and top-notch: Michigan, Princeton, Wesleyan, Princeton. He comes from a distinguished Hungarian emigré family. Furthermore, as many a glowing recommendation (complete with chili pepper) on RateMyProfessor.com will attest, listening to the voice of Andrew Szegedy-Maszak is exactly like soaking in a huge stone bath scented with rose petals while being fed grapes and gently serenaded by a distant lute.

There are no papers, no grades, no final

So is “The Ancient Greeks” a serviceable introduction to the history and literature of ancient Greece? And how! It’s fantastic: serious, fun, beautifully presented and engaging as anything. What it is not is a class. There are no papers, no grades, no final; just seven short quizzes, one administered at the end of each week. It is quite possible to skip the readings entirely, to just watch the lectures and get a perfect score on the week’s quiz. Discussions in the Coursera fora provided for the class are quite like those in an ordinary literature listserv: The noise-to-signal ratio is sky-high. In short, what comes from the instructor is highly valuable, sublime even: What is expected of the student is next to nothing.

“Professor Andy,” as he signs himself in class correspondence, has an uncanny gift for communicating complex ideas with lucidity, humor, and elegance. Each week there are several video lectures, each about 20 minutes long, on a topic relating to the readings assigned for that week: long excerpts from Homer, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sophocles, Euripides, and many others; the most concentrated time is spent on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Though Plato is not discussed in very great detail, the course ends with a fine, touching lecture on the career, trial, and death of Socrates.

I especially loved the way this great teacher interrupts the brisk pace of the survey to focus more closely on details like the beguiling and terrible character of Alcibiades, or the reaction to the Peace of Nicias (between Athens and Sparta, in 421 BCE):

We are told that on hearing of this peace the Athenians reacted with joy; they sang a chorus from an old play, a tragedy by Aeschylus which includes the lines, “Down with my shield! Let it be covered with cobwebs!”

If only. Not so fast… the peace is fragile. Open hostilities are suspended for a bit. But one of the things Thucydides doesn’t talk about is what we might call the opposition movement at home. To get some sense of that we have to turn to a very different kind of source, and that is comedy. And that’s what we will do in our next lecture.

This leads to a reading of The Acharnians, and Aristophanes’ conception of “everyman”: “It’s an example of how an ordinary person gets caught up in these massive events, and does what he can to survive. You don’t want to look at it too closely, because then you move from laughing to tears, or outrage. That’s how comedy works.”

My feeling about the course is twofold: First, the quality of the lectures is far in advance of all but the very best documentary television (such as Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New). Add to this the value of the reading list and bibliographic information given in the lectures, and you have a whole new form, and a quite exciting and pleasurable one: a template for study that is intellectually rich and stimulating, first-rate, providing up-to-date scholarship for those with the time and inclination to work carefully through the reading list.

It’s not even remotely like a real class

Secondly, though, as I said earlier: It’s not even remotely like a real class. In no way did the rudimentary quizzes and forum discussions substitute for having to write papers, participate in class discussions or sections, swap information and notes with fellow students, talk with profs and / or TAs — all of the things that amount to supplying concrete proof, to teachers and to yourself, that you’ve learned something specific from your studies. Furthermore, humanities classes wherein we’re made to write essays have the more advanced goal (again, for those who can and wish to flex a bit more muscle) of getting students to generate their own new ideas from what they’ve learned — say by relating the lessons of history or literature to other books or ideas or periods of history, or to their own lives, societies, or circumstances.

These features are crucial not only to develop and mark out individual progress, but in a broader sense, to lay the foundations for future scholarship for our whole culture. It’s relatively easy to learn about complicated subjects, online or off, if you already have the discipline and research skills to follow through, abilities that educated adults already possess. The trouble is that these skills are just what undergraduates go to school to acquire. Only those who’ve been through the traditional kind of college education have the ghost of a chance of becoming the next Andrew Szegedy-Maszak.

All this is to say nothing of the fact that a newly-hatched adult, someone in his late teens and early twenties, is soaking in an enormous amount of information from each new adult he meets. Much of what college teaches us, if we are patient and paying attention, is how to behave as autonomous citizens and individuals in the adult world. There are so many subtle signposts, little skills, jokes, shades of meaning that most younger people won’t grasp for a long time. Help in acquiring all these subtle skills is far, far more important in the case of a young person whose parents and family don’t already belong to the educated class.

We go round and round about what all that means but let us be clear, for the purposes of this discussion: It means, primarily, a way of speaking, of making oneself understood, and of listening, of conducting conversation in a rational, patient, and respectful way. If you don’t need that modeled for you because you got it at home then sure, with a lot of initiative and imagination and discipline, you’ll be able to learn quite a lot on the computer. But if you never had it modeled at home, going to school and being exposed to articulate, patient, sensitive teachers will show you how professional grown-up life is done, so that you won’t be weirded out when you have to apply for jobs or meet people who can help you, lead you to work, mentor you, help you shape your own future.

I spoke with Andy directly in order to learn exactly how a brilliant lecturer and MOOC participant feels about the future of online learning. I first asked him how he felt about the possibility of undergraduate degrees being awarded, eventually, online, given the current limitations of MOOCs.

Andy Szegedy-Maszak: I remain pretty skeptical about getting a full degree online. The main difference between MOOCs and residential learning isn’t even the writing, but more the interaction and the exchange between the faculty member and the students.

Now, Coursera’s platform makes it fairly easy for the instructor to check in on the fora and add a post or a comment. But that’s very different, as you know, from being in group of people where you are interacting and engaging and encouraging them to link up with one another and to link up their insights. But who knows? I mean, maybe down the line, as technologies evolve we will be able to get to that.

Maria Bustillos: I enjoyed your lectures so much and thought they would be just the greatest launch pad, if you wanted to learn about Greek literature and history as a hobby. But I did not feel that anything was demanded of me as a student. For instance, it’s not at all necessary for me to do the reading: I could just watch your lecture, do the quiz, and get a perfect score, more or less.

AS: Well that was the idea. Again, that is something very different from the way I could do it with an in-person course, where I would spend a lot more time actually talking about the reading. I have described this — and this may come back to haunt me — but I’ve described this course as kind of a highlights reel, you know like on a sports show?

MB: You’re so expert, though, and you’re able to transmit that… It’s more like a book, I kind of thought, where everything that’s coming at me is so first-rate, made with such care, but basically it is a one-way street; something to take in.

AS: I’m supposed to teach the Greek history survey at Wesleyan this coming fall, and I think that what I will do is to incorporate the course lectures as part of the assignment, use them as a sort of introduction, and then I’ll have more class time to engage the students in discussion of some of the interpretive problems, and issues of the sources, that otherwise I would have to skim by. Here, the class is 80 minutes twice a week; we were very strongly advised to keep the Coursera lectures between 12-20 minutes. This isn’t adhered to by all the Coursera folks by any means, but I really felt that I had to distill the main points of the Wesleyan lectures, and in some ways intellectually that was the most interesting challenge.

MB: Right now this is an experiment, a pilot. What is Wesleyan’s goal for this thing, given that it’s not for credit? Your institution has got their star dudes spending a lot of time developing these courses.

AS: Well, we are going to continue. This is a very big topic around here. Five courses have been offered, including one by our president, Michael Roth, who is doing this course on “The Modern and the Postmodern,” which has also gotten a very positive response. There was a course in economics, another in psych statistics, another in film, and this summer my friend and colleague, Scott Plaus, who is also a social psychologist, is doing a social psych course — the course launches sometimes in June or July — and the enrollment is already bumping up just under 100,000.

And then we are going to have, I think, three or four new courses from colleagues next year. So we’re moving forward at a steady pace.

As to the question, what is Wesleyan getting out of this? There are a number of answers; for one thing, it was a real boost, an honor, to be the first liberal arts college to be asked to join this consortium of what were otherwise Research 1 universities. That Wesleyan was recognized, along with Stanford, Princeton, Michigan, and Columbia was great. It was also a way of making Wesleyan known to people elsewhere in the world who might have heard of Harvard or Princeton or Yale, but wouldn’t have heard of a small liberal arts college in Connecticut.

So to be in at the beginning of what may well be a revolutionary change in higher education? It was great to be asked. Those of us who have done these courses can now give our successors a sort of clearer idea of how much time and institutional support it’s going to take.

MB: It was obviously a massive amount of work to put this together. How long did it take?

AS: Oh, hundreds of hours.

MB: I bet. Did you have a lot of help?

AS: Yes, some valuable help from undergraduates.

MB: In California we have a lot of wariness, because of the business of San Jose State offering actual credits through Udacity. Can you comment on that?

AS: I honestly don’t know. I’m not dodging… well, I am dodging, but it’s out of genuine uncertainty. That is to say, I worry about cash-strapped public universities, and now I’m not talking about the flagship ones, like Berkeley or UCLA, but the Cal State system: Are they going to start using MOOCs instead of hiring flesh-and-blood faculty to be in a real classroom with flesh-and-blood students? That I would find deeply regrettable.

I think of these courses as a kind of enhancement; a way of enriching the educational experience.

MB: How is this educational revolution going to take place, exactly? If the class is not asking anything of me yet, as a learner — how you get from Point A to Point B is completely opaque to me.

AS: One of the revolutionary aspects is just making this material accessible to a genuinely worldwide audience. You know, that’s huge. It’s no longer just for the folks who can get to one of the universities here or abroad; folks who bring just an interest in a topic and a passion for it can now get at least some sense of how it’s being approached within the academy. This is starting to sound like a thumping cliché, but I would hope that people would just keep maybe thinking about this, reading more, taking another course… That’s one of the revolutionary potentials of this medium, is that anyone with an internet connection and a basic command of English can have access to this kind of material.

MB: If you’re a grown-up and you don’t need to learn how to do research, understand something of logic and have basic rhetorical skill, you can study and learn by yourself. But those aren’t skills that kids have. The main thing that undergraduate profs are giving college students, as Aaron Bady once said, is that they are modeling a kind of intellectual engagement, and the space in which to practice it. I don’t think this is something you can get any other way.

AS: It’s different from the full-scale engagement that one can, to use your absolutely correct term, model for the students in a classroom.

I do this stuff because even after all these years I find it fascinating, and I love the way interpretations change.

The needs of real students, and teachers, must come first

If we are to figure out how best to use technology for the improvement of education for everyone, and to protect our existing system of education from the depredations of rent-seeking entrepreneurs, a nuanced approach could be adopted whereby we can appreciate and build on the efforts of professors like Andy Szegedy-Maszak, while refusing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. (In case anybody cares, I would love to take, and would gladly pay for, a 10-week class from him on the role of the Golden Mean in Greek math, philosophy, history and literature.)

But the needs of real students, and teachers, must come first in assessing the next steps for higher education online. And it seems clear that the best teachers out there also espouse this moderate, balanced, inclusive view. When I asked Andy for a comment about the SJSU Philosophy Department’s letter to Michael Sandel, he responded: “I read the letter, and I have to say that the authors make several good points. I’m pretty sure the current obsession with MOOCs will subside, and, I hope, administrators will then realize that such offerings can enhance but cannot substitute for in-person instruction.”

The difficulty of maintaining such a balance in the face of twisted rhetoric and warped priorities, calls for efficiency and cost-cutting and “disruption,” calls to mind a comment from one of Andy’s lectures on Thucydides and his views on political corruption:

Thucydides goes on to say that ‘words had to change their accustomed meanings.’ A reasonable caution? — that was cowardice. A brash willingness to do anything for your side? — well, that was courage … When words change their meaning and only action is possible, human nature being what it is, that action is going to be self-seeking and violent. In these circumstances the ones who suffer most are the ones who try to be moderate, in the middle, because they are subject to attack from both sides.

Illustrations by Steve Kim

Everyone shoots first: reality in the age of Instagram

2012-09-18T11:37:03-04:00

photo death lead

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
— Bertrand Russell

There are over five and a half billion cell phones in the world, nearly all equipped with cameras: an orgy of recording of life as it passes. Our age has seen an explosion of this peculiarly human activity — recording activity — on a scale scarcely comprehensible even by those who’ve lived through it. What changes has this revolution wrought, not only in how we see the world, but how we live in it?

Not so many years ago, taking a photograph was a painstaking business; film was expensive, and there were no do-overs. The ordinary person might take a few rolls, say 96 or 144 or 288 exposures over the course of a holiday, composing each one with the greatest patience and care; they were very easy to spoil, since the camera could be opened again only when the film had absolutely for sure been rewound all the way. Then each roll was lovingly stored in its own little canister, away from extremes of temperature, and once home, they were dropped off at a processor, or sent by snail mail in special mailers; many anxious days would pass before the results came back, the occasion of hard-won rage or bliss scarcely imaginable today.

Nowadays one takes hundreds of images in an afternoon without a moment’s thought. The suspense over whether or not a photograph “came out” lasts for seconds, not weeks, and if it didn’t come out we can often try again, five times, a dozen times.

No other earthly creature tries to keep something of its own vanishing moments — that we know of, I mean. Who knows what Unamuno’s crab might not get up to, in his spare time. That is one great difference that separates us from other animals. Later developments indicate another, newer and more complex difference: we are increasingly conscious of the nature and purposes as well as the ultimate futility of the attempt.

I talked these things over with Ted Soqui, a Los Angeles photographer, and Julie Dermansky, a multimedia artist and reporter based in New Orleans.

MB: We’re recording what is happening almost in real time. What’s that doing to us, to the audience, to you, to your market?

TS: The audience almost requires it… for a more sophisticated audience, you can put together a story over six months, but in a Newsweek or Time, it almost has to be shot as it’s happening.

JD: It’s old news two days later.

TS: You couldn’t sell it two days later. Yeah, it’s almost in real time… I think there’s a serotonin squirt the brain gets from the immediacy. This is everywhere. During Occupy L.A., on the last day that the police were brought in. I was photographing the captain that was in charge of the operations. And he’s working his BlackBerry, and he sent the word in via BlackBerry.

JD: I got some photos over their shoulders of them texting stuff. Have you ever seen as many cameras, that the cops have now? Really really good cameras. Hardcore. They film everything.

Recordings are proliferating in part because the cost of special equipment and the time and expertise required to make films, books, images, songs, have all shrunk by an astonishing amount in just the last two decades. That means, among other things, that culture is no longer made for us by others. Increasingly, ordinary individuals are able to roll their own, each of us creating a world that is increasingly the fruit of our own experiences: our own videos, books, blogs, and images made from the materials of our own lives. Increasingly, we own our own worlds.

Increasingly, the truth is what we’re investigating and provisionally agreeing on together

Because the flood of images, of artifacts and imaginings surrounding us need no longer have originated outside oneself, the power of many former cultural authorities has weakened. Television news is less important when we can learn faster about breaking news on Twitter; national glossy magazines are competing for our attention with potently attractive writing and art on blogs with a staff of one. Which seems like not necessarily such a big deal, but this alteration has affected not only the manner in which information is recorded and consumed; it is beginning to alter the nature of truth itself. Truth used to consist in what we were told by authorities; increasingly, the truth is what we’re investigating and provisionally agreeing on together.

For me, the first striking intimations of this shift came in 2006, when California congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian posted photos of a trip he’d made to Baghdad, claiming that they showed that “Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But each day, the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it — in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.” There was just one problem: the photos Kaloogian had posted were not of Iraq, but of Istanbul. It took a matter of days for the readers of Daily Kos to pinpoint the true location where the photos were shot, once the original rat had been smelled.

In former times, there was infinitely less ammunition available against such attempts to spin some story for the benefit of some politician, company or cause. The Kaloogian story demonstrated that the truth could be determined entirely outside the purview of professional media interests. The web had grown large enough that individuals could band together to verify facts faster and better than traditional media could. Not always, not exclusively — the hive mind will maybe always be impossible to control or focus reliably — but sometimes. This was a mind-blowing realization. The next day, the New York Times caught up with the Kaloogian story.

In a recent Brooklyn Rail interview, the painter Gary Stephan approached the political role and significance of art from a postmodernist perspective. “[A] foundation of the Modernist argument is the idea that the text is open and that the readings of it are co-constructed by the object and the viewer,” he said. “But what’s worth remembering is how new that construction is because it’s replacing, at least in France, David and Ingres, who made paintings that are completely authoritative, that were supposed to have one reading and only one reading […] painting had been an instrument of state authority and was designed to tell the viewer that the state was in charge, you’re in good hands, everything’s okay. With Cézanne, you get something that comes along and says, no, it’s all up for grabs […] The bourgeoisie are coming into the world, they’re disrupting the dualism of the ruling class and the peasantry and everything is suspect, the roles, the positions in society, the very objects, including the painted objects, are all being reevaluated.”

It seems we are undergoing a new period of reevaluation something like the Modernist one, but instead of “disrupting the dualism of the ruling class and the peasantry” it’s proposing disintermediation on a vast scale.

If one creates one’s own surroundings, one creates one’s own reality, yes, but far more importantly, the reality you make yourself is a challenge, conscious or not, to any authoritative version of events. Without really realizing it we’ve gone a step beyond Cezanne’s proposition (or Roland Barthes’) that reality is a matter of co-creation. Which do you trust more: a Twitter photograph sent in by a witness to a rally, disaster or crime scene, or the “official” photograph published by newspapers the next day? And what does that say about culture as “an instrument of state authority”?

In a recent BuzzFeed piece, John Herrman posted a series of screengrabs of images on Instagram taken by witnesses to dramatic events, together with the comments on those images from major news outlets offering publication (though not, it would appear, money) to these avocational photographers who happened to be in the right place at the right time. In one way this seems to suggest that “professional” photographers are no longer needed as much; in another way, the growing sophistication and interest in making our own recordings and images of events might mean that these skills, being better understood, will eventually be all the more highly valued. Already it seems better, truer, to think of fine photographers like Soqui and Dermansky as gifted fellow-seekers, leaders, teachers, than it does to think of them as having a job apart from our own.

That immediacy and connection goes both ways, too: it’s very stimulating for an artist to communicate with fellow artists at a higher level of understanding, more interesting to engage with the world more fully.

The reality you make yourself is a challenge, conscious or not, to any authoritative version of events

MB: As we become more capable of recording an event at the moment it’s happening, are we judging less, and seeing more? Maybe we’re not interposing our ideas of how things should be, as much, between ourselves and the reality.

JD: I gotta stop you there. Here’s the thing: a lot of people are. However, an artist, or photojournalist, has a visual language, so they can take what you’re doing with your cellphone to a different level, because they’re not just filming it because it’s there […]

As an artist, just… imagine being in your painting studio, and you have to get it all from inside yourself; I can understand how people get burned out. But as a photographer you can just go somewhere you’re interested in, and it’s right frickin’ in front of you.

A growing number of artists, including Errol Morris and Banksy, are providing a mirror for these changes as they occur. Morris’s whole shtick is the open interrogation of “respectable,” “standard,” or “authoritative” readings of images, accounts and recordings of all kinds. These artists are lifting the many shells under which we might expect to find the “truth,” and it’s still a little shocking to find that there is rarely anything to be found under any of them. There is a strong possibility, they suggest, that you have to put the pea under there yourself.

MB: What are you thinking, then, when you’re photographing?

TS: I’m thinking what does the camera see, and what do I want it to see, and how do I get it to see what I think I want to see?

MB: What do you want it to see?

TS: Well… sometimes you want to see beautiful things, or you want to see like, that dead dolphin… so many things. But you have to know what the camera does, what it can do. You’re thinking about that.

Sometimes I would like to meet that girl over there, or I want to take a bad picture of that politician, because I know he’s going to ruin America, or that policeman is like, the worst guy I’ve ever seen, I want to take a photo that makes him look like that. What’s hittin’ you at the time. But it’s like, what f-stop do I have to use to make that guy look like a real jerk.

JD: You don’t censor what’s in front of you; a photographer can’t really censor what they’re seeing. You can control the depth of field and the speed you’re shooting at, but you can’t control what’s outside you…

There was this fish kill I shot, my friend and I had gone looking for it, the sun was going down. So we turn down this thing and the smell… you couldn’t believe. But he said I was squealing, like he’d never seen someone so happy. I was having these moments, with the light… it was insane, it all different species of fish, and the water looked like oil, everything was clogged, and you’re just like lost, inside this thing.

The phrase “observer effect” has a number of different connotations: in physics it refers to effects caused by the observation on the phenomenon being observed, say by instruments used in measuring; in IT, you might invoke the same phrase to describe how internal logging will cause a program to slow. Our obsession with recording has, I think, such an effect, and it’s increasing all the time. We are altered first by the act of watching, as in a fine description I once read of a Rembrandt self-portrait: all absorbed in the greed of seeing. And now we begin to be altered again and again, recursively, observing ourselves as we observe. Seeing one another as fellow-observers, fellow makers of records; they are observing themselves observing; observing us observing.

Human self-awareness is multiplying itself onto an altogether new plane.

Our experience of the world becomes more and more like looking in an ever-more-complex series of mirrors and seeing an infinity of our own reflections, a multiplicitous, accelerating version of the phenomenon called mise en abyme, the object depicted within itself.

Illustration by Steve Kim

Not fade away: on living, dying, and the digital afterlife

2012-07-11T14:38:05-04:00

digital_death_lead

In the world of social media, it can feel bizarre that potent evidence of grieving from one friend is followed so quickly by pictures of oven-fresh cookies from another.

– Paul Ford, Facebook and the Epiphanator

My father died almost twenty years ago, after an illness spanning decades. My parents had enjoyed a very affectionate, happy marriage; prepared though we had been for long years before the end came, my mom was utterly shocked and devastated when he died. A protracted gloom overwhelmed her naturally sunny demeanor. But one day, maybe a year or so after my father’s death, I had a phone call from her, and she was laughing. Laughing quite hard, really.

You might say that human beings are analog creatures with certain digital tendencies

“What is it?” I said, laughing too, just contagiously.

“Oh — oh, your father was called to jury duty, and I sent the form back saying ‘deceased’…”

“Yeah?”

“And they wrote him back.”

“What?!”

“It says, ‘Your excuse has been accepted.'”

The machinery of human affairs churns blindly on and on, no matter what, in a manner absurd enough to send even deeply grieving people into gales of uproarious laughter (years later, the phrase, “your excuse,” etc., still has the power to reduce both my mom and me to helpless guffaws.) The system, the bureaucracy, the forms to fill out. The alarm clock rings, appointments to keep. The crazy futility of it all is a little bit sad, too, the way perhaps all truly hilarious things have to be.

That Kafkaesque sensation of tragicomic futility has now acquired a new and larger dimension of weirdness, because the seeming permanence of the Internet is so crisply, coldly digital, and therefore so entirely at odds with the messiness of real life. You might say that human beings are analog creatures with certain digital tendencies, and that the digital and analog parts of our nature are inevitably at war with one another.

Jeff Goldblum, Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise, and Tom Hanks all fell off the same hoax cliff in New Zealand

It’s long been evident that death is liable to create all sorts of snafus online. It can be difficult to prove or even to determine on the Internet whether or not someone has really died. In the case of celebrities, TMZ and the like will be leapfrogging over one another on Twitter to be the first to announce a death; reports may turn out to be true, false and then true again. There’s a continual stream of hoax reports of celebrity deaths online: Jeff Goldblum, Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise, and Tom Hanks all fell off the same hoax cliff in New Zealand, or celebrities can hoax-die of being stabbed in a bar brawl, as Daniel Radcliffe did.

Even for those who are not hounded by the media there is still plenty of opportunity for confusion. For instance, I have a Google Alert on my own name, so that I can keep track of any blog posts or reviews of my stuff that I might want to see; one morning last year I had an email from Google containing my own obituary, or rather, what turned out to be the obituary of another Maria (G.) Bustillos. Not that I was confused about whether or not I am alive! (Though after having seen The Sixth Sense or what have you, who can be entirely sure?)

Strategies for verification of an actual death online vary a great deal, creating more and more potential for chaos. Money can be trapped in the deceased’s Paypal accounts, horrified friends and relations meet with Facebook recommendations to “friend” the dead (“People You May Know”) and so on.

In 2004, Yahoo refused to provide the father of a Marine killed in Fallujah access to his son’s email. It was quite sobering for me to read about this; nobody knows my passwords for Paypal, Gmail, my cell phone account — probably a dozen or more accounts that would need closing if I were to be done in by the zombies tomorrow. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to include a page with all those passwords and whatnot with your will, when you’re making one. Of course, then you won’t even die, and you will go and change all your accounts instead, rendering all these preparations useless!! It’s such a mess.

Efforts are underway to identify the issues surrounding death online in order to make better policy. Thanatosensitivity is a term formally coined by researchers at the University of Toronto, in a paper presented at the 2009 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. It means, “a humanistically-grounded approach to human-computer interaction (HCI) research and design that recognizes and engages with the conceptual and practical issues surrounding death in the creation of interactive systems.” Sounds simultaneously dry and far-out, but authors Massimi and Charise have some solid ideas:

One compelling example […] is the recent suggestion by American and British ambulatory care units to program into one’s mobile phone a contact named “ICE” (“in case of emergency”) so that rescuers can easily identify and call an emergency contact when the phone’s owner is possibly dying. The need for this type of preparation crystallizes how difficult it has become to unravel the data stored in highly personalized devices.

Broad implementation of standards like these will certainly be miles ahead of the private efforts I’ve seen, such as the “electronic safe deposit boxes” on offer at assetlock.net (formerly the unfortunately-named and no-confidence-inspiring “youdeparted.com”), where you can store sensitive information to be released to designated parties in the event of your demise. Top-tier access costs $79.95 per year (or $239.95 for a “Lifetime Membership” [?!]) for “unlimited entries and up to 5GB storage.” Or you could invest in a piece of paper and print out a list for your executors! Just sayin’.

Meatspace, as it is sometimes called — the analog, temporary, fleshly arena of the world — is inextricably linked with, or more like suffused with, the passage of time. We’re accustomed to think of “real life” as taking place there, though for many of us, the online world and the real one have begun increasingly to blur into one another. For those who have been known to fall asleep holding a smartphone, really, which world is the “real” one?

Meatspace equals entropy. Impermanence. The fading of anger or passion is analogous to the fading of a photograph, the yellowing of old newspaper, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies. Through time we mend, heal, alter our convictions, learn; what burned cools, and what froze melts; both grief and delight are fated to end, sometimes abruptly, yes, but more often gradually, even imperceptibly. Entropy is our enemy, but also our friend; it defines that part of us that is changing, coming into bloom and then, because we are mortal, fading.

The contrast between the magical perfection of recordings of the past, and that past’s ultimate irretrievability, is in itself nothing very new. It’s something like seeing Greta Garbo or James Stewart in old films, so vividly real, their particularities so peculiarly manifest; they breathe, talk, move, their gleaming eyes and moist lips parting to speak or laugh in an inimitably beautiful way. To rage, marvel or sigh. Though their clothes and manners might strike us as strangely old-fashioned, they might still be standing right beside us. But it’s a trick, and we know it; we know that in reality the remains of James Stewart (Wee Kirk o’ the Heather churchyard, Forest Lawn) and Greta Garbo (Skogskyrkogården, in southern Stockholm) are just that: dust, still, quiet, moldering for many years in the cold ground, and yet, something of them yet lives.

What are we to make of this image that can never answer back?

When someone dies nowadays, we are liable to return to find that person’s digital self — his blog, say, or his Flickr, tumblr or Facebook‐entirely unchanged. An online persona will date, but agelessly, without wrinkling or acquiring dust, and unless someone removes each separate element there it will stay, to remind us of that person’s favorite song, of all his minutest concerns, exactly as if he’d typed them in yesterday. Facebook doesn’t fade. It just stays cyanotically fresh and crisp forever.

The digital world’s false perfection corresponds in some way to preferring a world containing certainties, where we can absolutely know answers that have been scientifically, empirically sought and found. In the practical conduct of human affairs, though, there is a stubborn tendency for complexities to arise, causing the idea of an on/off switch or a black/white answer to be at best of no use and at worst, a real impediment to progress (cf. Congress, U.S.) As Voltaire says: le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, (“the best is the enemy of the good”), by this indicating that the futile search for a black/white solution will inevitably blind us to the serviceability of the grey one. Is the desire for a chimerical “truth” ultimately the fatal flaw of the “scientific” lens through which we have tried to make sense of the world for the last few centuries?

In stark contrast, the philosophically-inclined are today quite possibly farther from Manichean certainty than human beings have ever been before. What the empiricists began, Wittgenstein and his successors completed: our understanding of reality has itself become provisional, mutable, and analog. Meanwhile, the digital world has blossomed into a global machine, reaching into nearly every corner of our lives, all-knowing, absolute and all-encompassing in a very different way. Zero and one. On and off. Black and white.

My stepson had a high school friend named Evan who committed suicide in 2007 in a very carefully orchestrated and elaborate fashion. I met Evan a few times when he was a teenager; He was a sweet kid, a little manic, a vivid, funny presence.

Evan was barely grown, just twenty-five, when he killed himself with nitrous oxide. He set up his blog to continue to send messages at odd intervals for a time after his death. And he made a seventeen-second YouTube suicide note that I was surprised to find still online. (I advise caution in visiting these links, because they are really sad.)

The aftermath of Evan’s death was my first experience of the practice of online memorials, something that has become almost familiar on Facebook now. Friends came to his blog to share remembrances of Evan, and there are hundreds of comments there and on his YouTube goodbye video, as well, some angry, some sad, some wistful. What all these comments share is a certain bewilderment. What are we to make of this image that can never answer back?

The art director, lecturer and author Angela Riechers wrote a striking paper presented at the CHI conference in 2008, Eternal Recall: Memorial Photos in the Digital Environment. Reichers draws a straight line between the elaborate memorial photos of stillborn Victorian infants and the online memorials dedicated to stillborn babies today. It’s illustrated with some disturbing photographs but its argument clarified something about the subject of death online for me. Western culture generally hides from death and grieving, but eventually, it catches up with most all of us. Then there is a reckoning, a jarring confrontation apart from the ordinary texture of life.

I can’t help but think we are better off taking our chances on the future’s mystery than we would be to trap ourselves in amber

There is an Uncanny Valley aspect to these messages from beyond the grave, just as there is in a particularly lifelike, formal Victorian funeral portrait. They are lifelike, they may look or even sound and move just like a living person, but they are not life, and the almost-lifeness of them is entirely unsettling. Some may find comfort in holding onto these images and last ideas of those who have left us, but for me, they cause more confusion than clarity, and more pain than pleasure, for the very reason that they are so all-but-real.

Our digital part, the part that can consider changeless things, formulae and eidoi, can be almost satisfied by the digital ghosts that persist online. These representations won’t — can’t — completely satisfy our flesh-and-blood longings. But there’s another and far stronger reason why the digital can never be enough.

We’re represented by some combination of digital and analog, both the blown flower and the glowing screen. Is death a fading away, or a flick of the switch? It’s both. The digital part of ourselves, committed to a tumblr or to a decades-old blog preserved on the Wayback Machine can never change; it can never fade, erode, or die, but just as it can never decay, it can never evolve or improve, either.

That’s what’s so scary about the Singularity movement; Ray Kurzweil and his adherents are betting that a single life on earth, enhanced by machines, a single consciousness stretching out into eternity, is a desirable end. This strikes me as a very narrow view of what the universe might be all about.

I can’t help but think we are better off taking our chances on the future’s mystery than we would be to trap ourselves in amber. Maybe the real Frankenstein danger, more fearful than death itself, is an unquestioning reliance on the stasis of the immutable, digital world.

Someone has to keep paying to register domain names; someone has to pay for server space, keep up with alterations demanded by ISPs and software providers

In closing, let’s consider the tangential kind of decay experienced by online artifacts, like websites, at their interface with the physical world. Someone has to keep paying to register domain names; someone has to pay for server space, keep up with alterations demanded by ISPs and software providers. That’s part of the reason it was so surprising to me to find Evan’s blog still online.

I didn’t know him at all well, but it saddens me a lot that such a seemingly lively, intelligent boy should have succumbed to his demons the way he did. The things that remain of Evan online are ghostly, and fiercely real, too; they are objects that evoke the sense of seriocomic futility, and pity and a terrible sadness. Also, a sense of mystery and wonder, that he should seem so near.

This mysterious part recalls the talismanic lines of Nabokov’s titular poem from the novel Pale Fire referring to the possibility of a supernatural order, beyond what we are permitted to see, but just hinted at in the weird synchronicities of our world. In the story, the poet John Shade has tried in vain to make sense of a vision he had during a near-death experience, and is taunted by a misprint in the text he’d been convinced was solid proof of an afterlife (“mountain” for “fountain”):

I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

I’m tempted to see Nabokov’s message coded at the bottom left of Evan’s blog, where the “Recent Comments” should appear. But instead, we now see this:

Illustrations by Steve Kim.