Stairs vs. elevator

NPR has the story (and that gorgeous, scene-stealing photo, displayed above). Here's a taste:

Over the years rabbis have approved various methods of automation, such as lights that run on timers, as permissible on the Sabbath.

But now some prominent rabbis have declared that Shabbat elevators must not be used. The rabbis say Shabbat elevators are a "severely prohibited" desecration of the Sabbath. Thus, the eternal debate about what an observant Jew may and may not do on the Sabbath has taken another turn.

Baker vs. Kindle

Novelist (and novel addict) Nicholson Baker took a good, hard look at Amazon's e-reader last week in The New Yorker, and ended up recommending... the iPod Touch or iPhone. Ouch.

Wanted: Facebook addicts

Stories like this always make me think of a classic, and prescient, Far Side panel:

“But can you tweet a minyan? I don’t think so.”

The New York Times examines the intersection between social networking and religion. (Is the article just an excuse to use that headline?)

More thoughts on "We Live In Public"

In the "About" section of her film's Web site, director Ondi Timoner makes the following observation:

[T]he virtual world is subsuming the physical world and determining how we spend our time and form and maintain our relationships more and more...

When I was in high school, I "met" someone via AOL chat. Her name was Sasha Pasulka, though at the time I knew her only as "patpv," her AOL handle. She was a few years younger than me -- I was 16 or 17 -- but she knew a lot more about certain things than I did (dating, for example). We also talked a lot about Tori Amos, the mutual interest that had brought us together in the first place. (She'd searched all AOL profiles for "Tori Amos," picked me pretty much at random, and started an instant-message conversation.) We often e-mailed each other, trying to decode Tori lyrics or just discussing details of our lives. I eventually contributed poetry to her literary blog, The Sweetest Cherry, and we stayed close -- as close as online pen pals can be -- until I graduated from high school. I rediscovered her via Friendster (I think) around 2004, and we e-mailed back and forth a few times before drifting apart again. Finally, last year, I found out through MySpace that she'd moved to Seattle, and I convinced her to meet me for brunch.

Originally, when we were IM and e-mail friends, Sasha didn't want to talk on the phone, but eventually she sent me a picture of herself with her prom date, so I knew what she looked like. (This was before Facebook and Flickr -- i.e., before displaying personal photos online was a ubiquitous practice.) When we met for brunch, I found her as smart and funny as I'd imagined she'd be, but I wasn't sure we'd end up being fast friends in the non-virtual world. She'd moved recently from L.A. and was just getting used to the Northwest's slower-paced, less glamorous lifestyle; I lived at the Kibbutz and had about five different outfits total. Still, Sasha came to both of my birthday parties -- the small karaoke night and the huge house party -- and proved herself to be a hell of a lot of fun, and very down to earth. I've also become a fan of Sasha's blogs (The Evil Beet, Zelda Lily, and Sasha is a Monster) and feel lucky to have witnessed the birth of her blogging career, which has become more successful than even she imagined it would.

I recount this story because I always thought of my relationship with Sasha, long before we met in person, as a "real" friendship. I really cared about her, was interested in her life, and enjoyed her company, even if it was virtual, and even if I'd never heard the sound of her voice. Sasha and I managed to break through the coldness of the technology and really connect. What I didn't write about yesterday while considering We Live In Public is that while Timoner seems concerned about the societal effects of the Internet and our culture of personal overexposure, Josh Harris isn't quite so down on the whole situation. He certainly learned a painful lesson from living in public with his girlfriend, but both in the film and during the Q&A he seemed to view our collective decision to live in public -- via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and many other platforms -- as more of an inevitability than a tragedy.

After all, technology is destiny. One of the things I like about Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is that he rejects the common assumption that a given technology is neutral, that it's what we do with it that matters. Mander sees TV as something that was bound to have particular effects on society, and I think the Internet is similar. It's interactive, it allows for almost infinite exhibitionism, it's (mostly) free, and the laws governing its content are very few. The "Wild West" atmosphere that characterized the dot-com boom has changed form but remains intact. No other medium could contain "Two Girls, One Cup" and a video depicting U.S. soldiers in Iraq throwing a puppy off a cliff. There's no Interpol keeping "inappropriate" things from leading endless lives online, and nothing prevents any private citizen from becoming tremendously, intractably public. An article a while back called "Prisoners of YouTube" described the lives of people who found themselves immortalized on the video site. In most cases, they were embarrassed; some of them, like the "Numa Numa" guy, tried to capitalize on their unexpected online fame.

I've come a long way since my first experience with Web-based friendship. I have a blog, I check Facebook each day like a good little addict, I update my Twitter status, and I've posted video of myself, my friends, and my mother's dogs on YouTube. In Timoner's movie, when Harris steps away from the Web, he does it big time, first buying an apple farm and later moving to a small town in Africa. I think there's a lesson in that: The man who loves technology also needs, on occasion, to leave it far behind.

Several months ago, I gave up Facebook for a week as part of an exercise my Buddhist meditation group was doing. I missed it, but it was also kind of nice; interestingly, I felt the need to post a message before going on my hiatus so that my many Facebook friends wouldn't feel neglected if they tried to contact me and didn't hear back. These days, I hungrily check my profile for messages, notifications, event invitations, and -- best of all -- friend invitations. That hunger, that urgency, is part of what Harris and Timoner know all about: our desire to measure our popularity, and maybe even our worth, using online metrics like page hits or unique users.

Facebook has so cleverly incorporated features of other applications -- Flickr, Twitter, e-mail, Evite, and on and on -- that it does seem at times that my life itself is on Facebook, as much as it's anywhere. In Buddhist terms, it's a convincing projection of a false self, the ego made manifest in a medium that plays tricks on the mind. We Live In Public made me self-conscious about using Facebook and Twitter, not because I'm sharing too much of myself on the Web but simply because I'm living online too much. I'm glad to have a blog, a place where I can write informally on a regular basis, but it might be good to take stock, one of these weeks, of how much time I'm spending at the computer each day. It's all about balance, and I'd rather find a way to make my days healthier than have a total meltdown and find myself harvesting apples and riding around on a tractor. Though, actually, the second part doesn't sound too bad.

On visual media

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV. In fact, one of the only fights I remember my parents having was about whether or not to reduce my television time. (There was also the occasional discussion of how much I played video games.) I was so enamored of TV that I created illustrated stories based on the Lassie series and taped myself reading them so that people could read along with the recording. (I had a number of books that worked that way; that is, they came with tapes you could listen to as you followed along in the text.) I also imagined myself as the hero of not one but two television programs. The first, called N.E.S. (my initials, and also those of the Nintendo Entertainment System, by sheer coincidence), was an action show modeled after The A-Team. Neal, on the other hand, was a drama in the My So-Called Life vein, even though I wasn't yet a teenager when I cooked it up in my media-addled little brain.

I mention all of this because a girlfriend once told me I wanted life to be like a movie -- swelling music, perfect edits, happy ending -- and life just isn't that way. She was frustrated, and I got defensive, and that was that. In the years since then, I've realized she's right, to an extent. All the romantic comedies I've watched -- and there have been many -- probably have reinforced my desire for, and belief in, True Love in true Hollywood style. (That's why I'm excited about the upcoming flurry of romcoms that seek to reboot the genre, inasmuch as they try to make a more realistic, less "happily ever after" presentation of romance palatable to audiences. Good luck, plucky, offbeat little movies!) Anyway, even now, I find myself feeling cooler when a song I love comes on the radio while I'm driving, but specifically cooler in the way movies are cooler than life -- the right song in the right moment makes that moment feel a bit more scripted than most, a bit more audience-friendly, as it were. Except of course that there is no audience.

When I read Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, it was a revelation, because it presented not a shrill battle cry against TV (like the "Kill Your Television" bumper sticker) but a calm yet passionate thesis: technology takes us further from nature, and TV is perhaps the most insidious case of this phenomenon. I still remember the part of the book where Mander reminds us that cars distort our idea of distance, whereas walking gives us an authentic sense of what a mile actually means. (Or five, or ten.) This could be why people who walk to work feel a greater unity of experience, and why runners are not just healthier physically by also psychologically. Getting into a weird little room on wheels and zooming around at dozens of miles per hour seems perfectly normal to most of us, but Mander seeks to make it strange by pointing out how different it is from the transportation that characterized most of human history. I try to be choosy about the movies and TV shows I watch, not because I think visual media are evil (I find bumper-sticker logic unimpressive) but because there's so much I want to do more of -- exercise, creative writing, managing my finances, working towards grad school -- that I want to make sure my time in front of a screen is well spent.

As I begin to pick out SIFF films, and as I get more and more DVDs from the library, I think about the time in high school when I was on an Objectivist kick (The Fountainhead hit me like a ton of bricks) and decided to eschew TV and movies for a while. I remember sitting in the study, working on a paper for school, and hearing the sound of the television in the living room, where my parents were watching some prime-time drama. I crept out, opened the hall door a crack, and peeked through, watching a little of what they were seeing. It was hard, in short, to resist the temptation, but I tried to stay strong. When I think about Mander's book, I'm grateful to him for reminding me to examine my default settings, because they may or may not be what's best for me.

My default in the past was to absorb a lot of television and film without worrying much about it. Now I realize that my long-postponed goal of making creative writing a regular part of my day-to-day life means pushing myself to produce narrative instead of just absorbing it. I want to both enjoy and study stories, written and filmed, but I think it's important for my self-esteem and long-term sanity to make sure I'm being an active creator as well as a (more) passive absorber. In the end, that's what Mander is trying to say: watching Into the Wild and going on a hike are radically different experiences, and if you're going to do the former, you might consider giving the latter a try, too.

iPhone apps are not parenting manuals

Some app designers really don't like kids.

Best "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" clip ever

Ignore the asinine visual element and focus on the pure genius of the audio:



My sister played this for me while I was visiting her in L.A.

I text, therefore I am... a danger to society

Today's P-I story certainly hits close to home:

Two other pedestrians, Sarah Polachek, 21, and Emily Crawford, 22, both said their friends walked into poles and swerved their cars while texting, but wouldn't admit to having any accidents themselves. In fact, both condemned continuous texters.

"They think they can sense everything around them while texting, but they're oblivious," Crawford said. "For them, texting takes priority over safety."

Polachek took her disapproval a step further.

"I think texting is impersonal and stupid," she said. "It gets on my nerves."

In other news, the latest McCain attack ad is awful.