It's interesting to stop and ponder (as I'm able to do in my quiet, private workspace) the possibilities opened up, and closed off, by an age in which, for many of us, both solitude and non-solitude are often just a matter of closing a door or flipping a switch.

communication, horizons of the possible, noise, solitude

Nate

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It’s vital to understand that solitude, like silence, have rarely been available to human beings. Try reading Bruce Smith’s extraordinary (though too jargony) account of The Acoustic World of Early Modern England if you’re prone to think of the pre-industrial Western world as a silent one. Especially in cities, the noise — often literally deafening, in areas where blacksmiths and other craftsmen lived — went on twenty-four hours a day; though of course things were quieter in the countryside.

But not more solitary. In country and city alike, whole families slept in single rooms, often sharing those rooms with animals. Only the enormously wealthy could spread out into multiple rooms. (It’s worth remembering that throughout human history the vast majority of couples have had to have sex in the same room, and often in the same bed, with other people.) And all of these noisy and crowded conditions that we see in our studies of the European past are, of course, present-day realities for many people today; perhaps most humans on the planet.

As Diana Webb has recently shown in her new book Privacy and Solitude: The Medieval Discovery of Personal Space — reviewed here — medieval Europeans in general simply accepted their lack of “personal space,” but others valued it and desired it sufficiently to retreat from the world, as hermits and anchorites, in order to get it. But these were necessarily special cases. Until the nineteenth century in Europe and other economically developed parts of the world, very few people have been able to find either solitude or silence.

Librarything's Unsuggester tells us, based on millions of user-datapoints, that readers of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity are very unlikely to have read Christine Feehan's vampire novels, and that readers of just about any work of contemporary literary fiction (my latest try was A.S. Byatt's Possession) have not, apparently, been plumbing the breadths of recent Christian devotional writing. (For some reason I can't get it to return any unsuggestions for Culture Making. Could it be that that book's readers really will read anything? Let's hope.)

aesthetics, books, happiness, horizons of the possible, reading, serindipity, technology and change

Nate

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On sites such as Amazon and iTunes, homophily is a selling point: it’s the basis for “collaborative filtering”, whereby you’re recommended books and music on the basis of what others who made the same purchase - people like you - also enjoyed.

The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfillment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it’s that we’re terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don’t think we’d like?

You don’t need technology to do that, but then again, technology needn’t be the enemy: Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You’re Least Likely To Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site LibraryThing.com: enter a book you’ve recently read, and it’ll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people’s bookshelves. Tell it you’re a fan of Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason, and it’ll suggest you read Confessions Of A Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.

Okay, this is pretty funny. And the book as a whole (by a former editor of Details magazine [there are a lot of former editors of Details, by the way]) looks, actually, great.

change the world, generations, pop culture

Andy

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The first question on the GXAT [Generation X Aptitude Test, better known as the G-zat] is this:

1. Do you want to change the world?

A. Yes, and I’m proud to say we did it, man. We changed the world. Just look around you!

B. Yes, absolutely, and I promise I will get back to doing that just as soon as interest rates return to where they’re supposed to be.

C. Omigod, omigod, changing the world and helping people is, like, totally important to me! I worked in a soup kitchen once and it was so sad but the poor people there had so much dignity!

D. The way you phrase that question is so . . . cheesy and absurd that I am not even sure I want to continue with this pointless exercise.

That’s the only question on the GXAT.

A fascinating example of the power of a very simple cultural artifact to move the horizons of the possible. (Though it seems clear that the debates about exactly how checklists work, and how well, will go on for quite some time.)

horizons of the possible, medicine, safety

Andy

:

Sticks and stones may break your bones — but if you need surgery, the right words used in the operating room can be more powerful than many drugs. New research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when surgical teams heeded a simple checklist — as pilots do before takeoff — patient-mortality rates were cut nearly in half and complications fell by more than a third. . . .

Whether these changes can be sustained over time is another question. Gawande and his colleagues note in the study that a phenomenon called the “Hawthorne effect” may be largely responsible for the checklist’s success. The effect was named for a series of experiments designed to determine how to increase productivity at a factory in Chicago. All of the tactics implemented by the study leaders improved worker output during the experiments — but researchers realized that the effect they were really measuring was a boost in motivation among workers who knew others were watching.

“The checklist is kind of an effort to produce a consistent Hawthorne effect,” says Gawande. “It is intended to make people aware that other people expect these things to be done.”

Sociologists are useful: they tell us whether our intuitions about cultural trends are on target or just wishful (or baleful) thinking. In this case the data surprise me: I would have thought that many more Americans move than actually do, and the long-term downward trend is striking. (Although what the heck happened in 1986?) What happens in American culture as more of us become "stayers"?

america, demographics, home, migration

Andy

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The Pew survey finds that stayers overwhelmingly say they remain because of family ties and because their hometowns are good places to raise children. Their life circumstances match those explanations. Most stayers say at least half a dozen members of their extended families live within an hour’s drive; for 40%, more than 10 relatives live nearby. A majority of stayers also cite a feeling of belonging as a major reason for staying put.

Movers are far less likely to cite those kinds of ties. Fewer than four-in-ten say a major reason they moved to their current community has to do with family or child-rearing. Most movers have five or fewer extended-family members living within an hour’s drive of them, and 26% have none. The most popular reason that movers choose a new community, selected by a 44% plurality, is job or business opportunities, according to the Pew survey. About the same share of stayers (40%) cite job or business opportunities as a major reason for staying, but far more stayers choose reasons related to family and friends.

When you want to publicize a recipe, it sure doesn't hurt to have 1,200 followers on Twitter. But the creation of this cultural good still started with the three. (I use the phrase "cultural good" loosely. Vegetarians, and even moderate carnivores like me, will want to avert their eyes from the photos of the Bacon Explosion under construction.)

3 12 120, bacon, cooking, food, social media, twitter

Andy

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Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.

The Bacon Explosion was born shortly before Christmas in Roeland Park, Kan., in Jason Day’s kitchen. He and Aaron Chronister, who anchor a barbecue team called Burnt Finger BBQ, were discussing a challenge from a bacon lover they received on their Twitter text-messaging service: What could the barbecuers do with bacon? . . .

Mr. Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion “got so much traction on the Web because it seems so over the top.” But Mr. Chronister, an Internet marketer from Kansas City, Mo., did what he could to help it along. He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking sites. “I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push it,” he said.

This would be an interesting challenge: to locate a friend in a new-to-you American city using only conversations with people you meet—neither you or anyone of your informants would be allowed to consult the usual lists, maps, phone books, etc. I wonder if it'd be possible ...

africa, gardens and cities, ghana, horizons of the possible

Nate

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When I carried out fieldwork in Ghana during the 1960s, I was amazed by how migrants found their relatives, after traveling 500 miles to an unknown city of a million people. They had no addresses or phone numbers written down. When they arrived in the central lorry park, they would look for someone wearing Northern dress and ask him where they could find people like themselves. Directed to a particular district, they would seek out a leading figure in the ethnic community. They might then be directed to someone else from their home village. By all means, within an hour or two, they would be sitting with their relative. These African migrants knew that we live in small worlds connected by fewer links than most of us imagine. They used contingent human encounters and network hubs like local big men, not street maps. Their method was news to me then, but it shouldn’t be now.

Terrific article by Farhad Manjoo, who is sneaking up on my awareness as one of the best journalists writing on technology. It's almost five years old, but still well worth reading, as is this brief update of his analysis from Slate this week. Make sure you read all the way to the end for the twist: in spite of the reality-altering powers of Photoshop, there may be a way for cameras to tell us the truth after all. It just takes more cameras.

critique, photography, photoshop, unintended consequences, visualcy

Andy

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There was a time when photographs were synonymous with truth—when you could be sure that what you saw in a picture actually occurred. In today’s Photoshop world, all that has changed. Pictures are endlessly pliable. Photographs (and even videos) are now merely as good as words—approximations of reality at best, subtle (or outright) distortions of truth at worst. Is that Jane Fonda next to John Kerry at an antiwar rally? No, it isn’t; if you thought so, you’re a fool for trusting your own eyes.

Some photographers welcome the new skepticism toward images; it’s good that people are learning not to automatically believe what they see, they say. But many fear that we’re losing an important foothold on reality. Without trustworthy photographs, how will we ever know what in our world is real?