Month: October 2014

Jacob Silverman mulls over whether coding counts as art:

Coding, some of its practitioners claim, is an art form. This argument often hinges on the notion, promulgated by prominent industry figures like the venture capitalist Paul Graham, that coders are “makers.” They produce remarkable things — essays crafted out of the programming languages C# or Javascript that, like a literary essay, depend on elegance, precision, and a knowledge of form. Their creations sometimes affect humanity on a massive scale. According to this calculus, the operating system designed by Steve Wozniak for the Apple II might be as important as Macbeth.

For the novelist Vikram Chandra, who spent years working as a computer programmer and consultant, this comparison holds some appeal. But, as he argues in Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, his first nonfiction book, it’s a rather facile argument, one that incorporates some unacknowledged biases, including the American tech industry’s particular blend of nerdy arrogance and latent machismo.

Yes, Chandra acknowledges, “coders – like poets – manipulate linguistic structures and tropes,” he says, and coders also “search for expressivity and clarity.”

But the virtues of what might be called “beautiful code” are different than those of beautiful art. “Beautiful code,” he writes, quoting Yukihirio “Maz” Matsumodo (the creator of the Ruby programming language), “is really meant to help the programmer be happy and productive.” It serves a purpose. Art, by its very nature, serves no purpose. Code is practical and logical. Art is about affect, associations, and emotional responses — part of what Chandra calls dhvani. The term, developed by Anandavardhana, a ninth-century Indian literary theorist, derives from a word meaning “to reverberate.” Dhvani is resonance or “that which is not spoken,” as Chandra says. Code is explicit. Art can be irrational and leave some of the most important things unsaid.

(Image by Kim Dong-Kyu after Caspar David Friedrich)

In a take-down of Matt Richtel’s new book, A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention, Philip N. Cohen maintains that Richtel needs to chill out about a so-called “texting-while-driving epidemic.” He collected the “data on mobile phone subscriptions by state, to compare with state traffic fatality rates, only to find this: nothing,” as seen in the above chart:

What does predict deaths? Driving. This isn’t a joke. Sometimes the obvious answer is obvious because it’s the answer…. I also put both of these variables in a regression, along with age and sex composition of the states, and the percentage of employed people who drive to work. Only the miles and drive-to-work rates were correlated with vehicle deaths. Mobile phone subscriptions had no effect at all. … [T]exting while driving is dangerous and getting more common as driving is getting safer, but driving still kills thousands of Americans every year, making it the umbrella social problem under which texting may be one contributing factor.

Doug Hartmann nods along, adding that Cohen’s analysis “reminds me of a thought experiment Joseph Gusfield posed in his brilliant, if under-appreciated 1981 book on drinking driving and the culture of public problems”:

Gusfield asks his readers to imagine that some all-powerful god has come to America and offers to give us a new technology that will make our lives immeasurably better by allowing us to go wherever we want, whenever we want, faster than we have ever gone before. The only catch? The god demands that we as a society sacrifice 5000 of our citizens every year for the privilege of this great technological innovation. Do we take that bargain? Would you? With our reliance on the automobile, Gusfield says, we already have. In rejecting the conventional wisdom and moralistic outrage about texting and bringing new data to bear on the dangers of just being in traffic on the roads, I think Cohen is just trying to force us to grapple with this consequences of this collective decision more honestly and directly.

Read the Dish thread on driving with cell phones here.

James Poniewozik has mixed feelings about nostalgia over the Internet:

News outlets have always loved the convenience of anniversaries, of course; we’re in the middle of experiencing the 50th birthday of everything that happened in the ’60s. But lately we’ve been buried in “Wanna Feel Old?” listicles and “___ Turns 20″ features. (Some of them, I fully admit, written by me.) A lot of this material is aimed at millennials (see the outpouring of love for cultural landmark Saved By the Bell), but I wouldn’t want to overstate this as a generational phenomenon. My own people, Gen Xers, grew up on Happy Days and gave the world the Schoolhouse Rock Live! musical. Premature nostalgia may just be our general way of dealing with our society’s extended nether-zone between childhood and independent adulthood.

Whatever the explanation, though, online sharing and social media have positively weaponized nostalgia.

Others are nostalgic for life offline:

In an era where people flock to Facebook to find friends or communicate solely via text, a growing niche of entrepreneurs is building businesses that help people meet the old-fashioned way: in person.

As digital connections have blossomed, so too has a sense of loneliness among some users. Patrick Janelle, a founder of Spring St., is one of them. He said he started the society, in part, because his digital life, which includes an Instagram account with about 276,000 followers, lacked the human contact he craved.

Guests now depend on him, not a computer algorithm, to do the social sorting for them, betting his parties will create an atmosphere that fosters meaningful relationships. “I want to be remembered for bringing these people together,” said Mr. Janelle, of the get-togethers he plans with his Spring St. partner, Amy Virginia Buchanan. He added: “It resonates right now because there is a mystery and surprise, and you are discovering new things.”

Cody C. Delistraty, meanwhile, insists on the authenticity of online relationships:

The question, then, is whether these relationships in the virtual world are still the same as relationships pursued in the real world or is there a fundamental difference, as Baudrillard would have claimed? Can we still call love “love” if it’s passing through a screen?

For the past decade, Paul J. Zak, a professor of neuro-economics at the Claremont Graduate University who sometimes goes by “Dr. Love,” has been conducting studies on how relationships maintained over social media differ from relationships in real life. What he has found is that there’s hardly any difference at all.

“It’s as if the brain doesn’t really differentiate between you posting on social media and you being there in person,” he told me. “We’re such hyper-social creatures that we have a large release of dopamine when we’re with other people. But we can also get that release through Twitter or any social media, really.”