Spare Words Here

Okay, enough goofing around. Seriously.

My follow Friday list is here.

I’m really pleased to announce that, on April 4, 2009, I’ll be speaking at Web Design Day, a one-day, low-cost conference for web professionals in Western Pennsylvania. The lineup of speakers is impressive, and the event is sold out. (Wow!)

All my spare time has recently been devoted to preparing for my presentation, currently titled “Information Architecture as Storytelling.” It’s an ambitious topic to cover meaningfully inside of an hour, and my perfectionist streak is a mile wide. If you’ve already registered and are planning to attend, I look forward to meeting you there.

And now I hate to cut this short, but there’s much work to be done.

It’s fitting that, on Darwin’s birthday, an Idiocracy-level tweet about the intersection of American corporate hegemony and corresponding American obesity would be mindlessly retweeted like this. Because really, who are we to know better? But even weirder is what happened when I posted this screenshot to twitpic as storage. Despite me not having announced it, the image appears to have been discovered (via the twitpic public timeline) and further retweeted:

unstresst: From my conglomerat You: texburgher: http://twitpic.com/1i6ah (via TwitPic public timeline) http://twitpic.com/1i6ah

Whatever a conglomerat is, @unstresst seems to have cornered the market on it. And my silly screenshot of an afternoon’s silly retweeting extravaganza seems to have become part of the conglomerat.

Is the conglomerat large? Is the conglomerat everywhere? Is it nowhere? THESE are the questions for us to be asking on Darwin’s birthday. THIS is the mystery of evolution.

I’ve had a tumblr account for a couple of years now, but with all this blog proliferation haven’t really figured out what to do with it. Finally, after years of not caring and not thinking about it, the answer has come to me: I’ll use my tumblr to post ephemeral little things like what I used to use loremipsum.wordpress.com for! Revelation!

And enjoy.

Having been tagged today by one of my favorite Twitterers, Michele Catalno (@abigvictory), I’m sitting down to face the challenge of coming up with 7 things to write that 1) you wouldn’t already know by following me on Twitter, and 2) you might be interested in, and 3) the disclosure of which would not likely prevent me from winning that senate seat I’m bidding on. So, without any planning, further consideration, or editing – and in no particular order – here are seven things about me.

1. I’m ambidextrous, but exhibit left-handed preference when writing, drawing, or operating a bull whip. I switch hands unconsciously when painting, cutting, hammering, eating, cooking, or making obscene gestures. I hold my mouse with my right hand, but only so I can write simultaneously with my left hand.

2. I’m a Rat & a Gemini, which supposedly means I’m clever and loquacious and might have just stolen your wallet while we were chatting. Better check.

3. One of my favorite thought games is to consider what historical figure I would kill if I had a gun, a single bullet, and a time machine. Because I believe so many of humanity’s atrocities would have been perpetrated one way or another, I’ve never tended towards answers like Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot. Remove those types from the running, and the question gets pretty challenging. Past answers have included Picasso and Rembrandt. And John Lennon too. But you can’t prove a thing.

4. I am a fine artist turned UX geek. I work as an information architect in a city full of HCI geeks minted yearly by CMU. My first love, though, will always be painting, and I have a studio 10 feet from my bedroom door. But between my career and parenting, I don’t get in there very often anymore. Since my marathon divorce has finally concluded, I’m looking to having some extra cycles to put back into my painting.

5. This may still be news, even if you’ve been following me – I’m finally divorced. YAY! One more time. YAY!

6. I am a dog lover. One of the saddest things I ever had to do was put my two dogs up for adoption when I became a single dad. I’d had them for 10 years, and I cried like a baby for days after letting them go. They found great homes, thanks to Animal Friends here in Pittsburgh, but I’ve missed them terribly ever since having to say goodbye.

7. When I was younger, I went to a wacky school, the only Cistercian school in the country. Think 17th century european education by monks in robes from the abbey over the hill. Think 4 years of Latin, rulers meting out punishment for even the slightest infraction, gray pants and white shirts. And I’m thankful I went there. Had I not, how would I have escaped the subsequent 4 years of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with any remaining functional brain cells?

And now, I’ve got to tag 7 people. This is hard. I follow a lot of people, and I’d like to tag almost all of them. Alright, that sounded wrong…

@kariedwards
@seanhussey
@trevlix
@phyllisstein
@mayjah
@lidmo
@ttesco

If you haven’t heard it by now, you’ve been living in an enviable hole in the ground. And by “it,” of course, I mean Beyoncé’s newish tour de pathos, Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).

Click here to watch “Single Ladies” in “high quality” on Youtube

It’s hard – genuinely hard – to know where to begin with a song like this. First of all, to quote Bill Hicks, “I’m a reader.” And though I’ll admit to anyone who’ll listen that I’m no Proust, I have a deep respect for the constructs for thought and expression language provides. Beyoncé and her fans, on the other hand, do not. Add to that a ferocious sense of indignant sexist entitlement to the right status, and you’ve got the catalytic vat of diseased psychology inside of which a ditty like “Single Ladies” can come into existence.

Much has been written about the ridiculousness of Beyoncé’s assertion that the ex-boyfriend screwed up by failing to request her hand in marriage. While the naivete implied regarding her understanding of marriage is indeed profound, it is also but one symptom among millions of a systemic illness from which our entire American culture suffers. The focus of most criticism of “Single Ladies” along these lines has centered on the audacity of the if/then proposition in its chorus:

“If you like it then you should have put a ring on it.”

Anyone who’s been exposed to even toddler-level logic would be right to ask, “Why?” as in fact my own 5-year-old did. You might think that explaining pathologically faulty logic to a kindergartner would be quite a challenge, but here there was no need. He had innately grasped the absurdity of the lyric’s proposition. Oh (oh oh, oh oh oh) to have the innocence of a child again! Twice as arresting to me, however, as the chorus’ assertion, is the proclamation of entitlement buried in a bridge otherwise so littered with pop culture nonsense that it almost escapes notice, let alone sympathy or alarm. Almost.

Your love is what I prefer – what I deserve
Here’s a man that makes me then takes me
and delivers me to a destiny, to infinity and beyond.
Pull me into your arms, say I’m the one you own.
If you don’t, you’ll be alone,
and like a ghost, I’ll be gone.

Holy Macy’s, Batman! Did she just threaten her man that unless he declared himself her owner (and her his sole human & female possession), she would make him lonely? Mary Wollstonecraft just rolled in her grave, albeit for the billionth time. More frightening still, though, is the declaration that (his) love is what she not only prefers, but (and therefore) deserves. Maybe in Beyoncé’s world, it’s the good fortune of all classy ladies not just to receive what they desire, but to be granted wish fulfillment by virtue of an entitlement that is causally linked to that desire itself. The sadness is the alienating imperative of a belief so isolating by virtue of its infantile narcissism. No significant relationship with such a narcissist is possible anyways, so loneliness within the relationship is guaranteed. Hogwash with her threats to the contrary.

But the pièce de résistance is a gem of grammatical ambiguity embedded in the repetitious chorus, pertaining to the antecedent of two instances of the word, “it,” in the compound sentence, “If you like it then you should have put a ring on it.” The unavoidable question – TWICE – is, “what is ‘it?’”

The second “it” seems clearer than the first, implying that (he) should have put a ring on her finger. After all, we’re talking about a demand for marital fidelity. But the first “it” becomes immediately problematic.

Special thanks to Katharine Kuhl (@katkuhl on Twitter) for her sentence diagraming prowess.

To try to untangle this mess, I turned to my twitter friends. Katharine Kuhl (@katkuhl on Twitter) came through quickly and accurately, throwing light onto the heart of my biggest point of contention with “Single Ladies.” For you see, beneath the social sickness (and all the symptoms thereof) represented in this song, there is an underlying carelessness with language – and therefore thought – which permeates not just this song but increasingly the culture which consumes it.

I’ll simply say that I believe the songwriter means for both instances of “it” to be shorthand for “me,” but you can see the depth, hilarity, and ultimate tragedy of the ambiguity when you consider alternate interpretations. If we can’t articulate what we mean, how do we know what we mean? It’s a fundamental cognitive and cultural dilemma, and it extends beyond da club, deep into our homes, educational systems, and our relationships.

“Single Ladies” is certainly alarming enough as a harbinger of the death of feminism, or a template of sickened thinking about relationships. How much more so as a measure of our basic literacy and cultural evolution?

After a nice few days off the grid over the Thanksgiving holiday, I glimpsed Twitter through new eyes today.  The experience was not unlike how I recall having felt at my first exposure to New York’s sleepless intensity: I was struck, in each case, by a shamelessly poor signal-to-noise ratio.  In the case of Twitter, the realization was nothing new, but my few days away amplified the sense of wonder when I returned.

I’ve felt challenged by this phenomenon, for the last few months, to be more concise, articulate, and poignant if possible when I tweet.  I think today I’ve resolved to up the ante in that pursuit once again.  I’m not a fantastic writer, but I love language.  In the year and a half that I’ve been using Twitter, I’ve been aghast at times as I noticed my grasp on more substantive writing weaken.  More recently, I’ve noticed a clear, negative impact on my cognitive attention span, as I try to squeeze more umph into each tweet.  This is tremendously disconcerting.  I’ve come to see Twitter as a formal challenge I enjoy.  Yet, too much focus on marshaling too many thoughts into 140 character snippets is training me to think in sound bytes, as it were – a practice I’ve previously despised and derided as eroding one’s very ability to think.

It’s nearing a critical point.  I’ve seen it coming for awhile now, the need to shrink my Twitter brain and make more, read more, write more of significance in its demands and results.

I sense a New Years resolution coming on.  And at the very least, I ought to be able to summarize that resolution in a tweet, once I finally winnow it down to 140 characters or less.

Something puzzled me when I received the following “invitation.”  I’m just curious – what’s the point behind a message like this one?  Anyone?

Hey @hotdogsladies, what’s that you’re gloating about? What with your big words, your sexy Raymond Carver jokes, and those torrents of resulting stars, you must think you’re pretty funny.  With your whole “I can -own- favrd whenever I damn well want to” attitude and billions millions hundreds of thousands nearly 30 thousand followers, I bet you spend at least 24 hours a day intoxicated by the power of your comedic reach.

Yeah, well, not so fast.

Consider your 30,000 followers compared to my 600. That gives you a 50X advantage on favrd right out of the gate, making favrd a more effective measure of how many followers you have than of how funny your tweets are.  But mann, we already know how many followers you have, and we’re not impressed.*  If we wanted to be impressed, we could visit your Twitter page and oooh and ahhh over how many followers it claims you have.  30k.  Great, that’s about the size of Amherst, MA., which I hasten to add is a snobby town nobody ever heard of before now.  Well, maybe it’s where you should go live.  But before you do, consider this: Favrd would be a more interesting and accurate measure of funniness of a tweet if it scored by dividing a tweet’s number of stars by the number of people following its author.  That would provide a sort of funniness index which virtually all of us** would find more interesting.***

Here’s how it would change the results of a recent couple of tweets:

Yours (from today’s front page):

90% of all self-help is Buddhism with comfortable chairs and a service mark.

hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann) from SF

6 hours, 37 minutes agoView original

34

Mine (oh, you’ll find it on, say, page 4):

Stuffed cabbage is miraculous in that it can produce warm winds that can simultaneously heat a house, kill the mice, & send the guests home.

texburgher (Geoff Barnes) from Pittsburgh

20 hours, 31 minutes agoView original

13

On the surface, you look pretty funny.  But let’s apply my formula and see how things shake out.  I think we’re in for a real treat.  Well, at least I am.

Yours (not even on the leaderboard, now that it’s scored fairly):

90% of all self-help is Buddhism with comfortable chairs and a service mark.

hotdogsladies (Merlin Mann) from SF

6 hours, 37 minutes agoView original

34/30,000 = .001134

Mine (#1, page 1, all-time best, compared to yours):

Stuffed cabbage is miraculous in that it can produce warm winds that can simultaneously heat a house, kill the mice, & send the guests home.

texburgher (Geoff Barnes) from Pittsburgh

20 hours, 31 minutes agoView original

13/600 = .02167

Do you see that difference!?  When we adjust the scores to remove the unfair advantage conferred to you by how many more followers clearly follow you than follow me, your tweet gets .00134, compared to my crushing .02167.  As it turns out, my tweet is 16.17X MORE FUNNY THAN YOURS.  And that’s a scientific FACT.

So think about that.  Let it sink in.  Because you’re going to have to step it up and be a lot funnier if you want to continue to compete.****

Oh hi.  Maybe you’re here because you’re thinking of following me on Twitter.  Before you do, please take just a moment to consider the following:

1. I use Twitter kind of a lot. If you’re only following a few users, this may be a little overwhelming.
2. I don’t auto-follow my followers, and I don’t follow everyone who follows me.  When I realize someone’s following me, I pay attention to that person’s tweets for a week or so.  Sometimes I follow them, sometimes I don’t.  It’s nothing personal if I don’t.  I just follow a lot of people, and it’s hard for me to keep up.  You can always get in touch with me by emailing me or @messaging me
3. This is the biggest one:  If you follow me, you’re following a whole person.  Not the public face of an organization, not a brand ambassador, not a carefully crafted persona.  Just a person.  I curse occasionally.  I’m tasteless every now and then.  But I try to speak to everyone consistently, and with as much respect and eloquence as I can muster.  If my tweeting starts to bother you, don’t hesitate to unfollow me.

So that’s it.  Those are my warnings, caveats, and disclaimers.  If you’ve read this without flinching, go click that Follow button.  See you in Twitter-land.

http://www.twitter.com/texburgher