A Fellow Blogger Told Me...

...to write about what I feel like writing about.

So what I feel like writing about - is a certain overlap I've sensed between the writings of V.S. Naipaul and Joseph Conrad.

And apparently I'm not the first to have noticed. (As a quick word search of this site, a collection of mostly academic publications will reveal.)

I'm reading Conrad for the first time, if you can believe it; well after having read Naipaul some number of years ago (A Bend in the River). So I don't really see this as a study in how Conrad may influenced Naipaul, but more how my having first read Naipaul influences my reading of Conrad.

Also interesting is the need academics seem to feel to group topics in threes: Conrad, Greene, Naipaul. Conrad, Lowry, Naipaul. It seems to be an implicit requirement that, if you drew a correlation between two writers, you damn well better go out and find a third one to add to the mix.

So yes, this really is the sort of stuff I prefer to write about and think about.

Happy Memorial Day...

...and a special Happy Quit Facebook Day to those who pulled the plug.

I did, and if I have had any regrets, Kevin Rose's defense of Mark Zuckerberg helped ease my mind. These Web 2.0 types really know how to alienate people when they are trying to make converts.

Rose talks a mile a minute and covers a lot of topics. And I could rip into him for playing to the whole a-certain-demographic-just-doesn't-get-the-internet jibe, but he doesn't dwell there, so I'll let it pass.

Where he does get more substantive in his defense is when he starts with the disclaimer that he doesn't really know what Zuckerberg is doing, but then launches into a lengthy monologue (mostly) about how Facebook is trying to dethrone Google as the preeminent search engine of the web.

Facebook launched these "like" buttons... You linked something because you liked it... these are humans, that are liking certain individual pages in real time... That's like real time data fed directly back into Facebook... They can take that content, they can crawl it, they can classify it, they can build out a real-time search engine a lot better and quicker than Google can.

That's sounds fine, but the trick is getting users on board. With his interlocutor car-loving Alex Alberg (Sp? Not sure who he is...) playing the skeptic, Rose starts pumping the Kool Aid.

Let's say you like an ad, say you're watching a bad ass youtube add of the M3... you like it. And then get this; all of your followers... as they are browsing on the web, one of them happened to be a BMW fan as well, all of sudden they see an ad for the M3... and Alex Alberg likes this underneath it, oh shit, Alex liked it? I'll check that ad out. All of a sudden, a higher click through rate. See what I'm saying?

Yes, I see what you are saying in your 17 minute infomercial, Kev. And here's a .1 second response: No.

Okay, I'll elaborate, and I'll take a risk that I'm dipping a toe into the advertising grid, and what I intend to communicate, and how it is used, can diverge. I'm a foodie. I like Trader Joe's, I like shopping for herbs and spices at The Spice House in Chicago, I like shopping for obscure-ish Indian food items at Patel's on Devon Avenue. I love talking to people about these things with certain people, in the right setting.

I do not - DO NOT - intend to advertise these things, or make the content of my thought on these matters more public with some token little "likes" that an audience - whether I have some modicum of control on who that audience is, doesn't matter. The discussion I might have wanted to initiate with my chosen group of friends on Facebook when I posted my favorite Gazpacho enhancements is a different animal from Kevin's and Mark's profit-driven rush to supplant King Google, and I'll unplug and stay unplug before I play along.

Too Many Humanities PhDs

Back in April, Peter Conn, a professor of English at University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education stating that Humanities graduate programs were churning out more PhD grads than the market could bear - a situation I feel has marked my career path, despite my not completing my PhD, and having done all kinds of non-academic work since. It's an interesting article, and one I hope the universities take to heart.

While the whole article is bearish on the place for people with impressive degrees in future markets, it concludes with a nice defense of the humanities having some essential purpose in the world.

Collectively, those of us who profess the humanities must make a sustained effort to explain to our various constituencies... that these disciplines, and the traditions they represent, are not merely ornamental and dispensable. They lie near the heart of mankind's restless efforts to make sense of the world. Debates over war and peace, justice and equity: From the uses of scientific knowledge to the formulation of social policy, the humanities provide a necessary dimension of insight and meaning.

Now if "providing necessary dimension of insight and meaning" would just show up in more job descriptions...

European Identity and Anthropology

From Kolakowski, a social science that is born from uncertainty of self in the face of cultural plurality and existential threat:

This capacity to doubt herself, to abandon--albeit in the face of strong resistance--her self-assurance and self-satisfaction, lies at the heart of Europe's development as a spiritual force. She made the effort to break out of the closed confines of ethnocentricity, and her ability to do so gave definition to the unique value of her culture. Ultimately we may say that Europe's cultural identity is reinforced by her refusal to accept any kind of closed, finite definition, and thus she can only affirm her identity in uncertainty and anxiety. Ant although it is true that all sciences, social and natural, either were born or reached their maturity (maturity in a relative sense, of course, from the perspective of what they are today) within European culture, there s one among them which, because of its very content, is the European science par excellence: anthropology.

The anthropologist... must suspend his own norms, his judgments, his mental, moral, and aesthetic habits in order to penetrate as far as possible into the viewpoint of another and assimilate his way of perceiving the world. And even though no one, perhaps, would claim to have achieved total success in that effort, even though total success would presuppose an epistemological impossibility--to enter entirely into the mind of the object of inquiry while maintaining the distance and objectivity of a scientist--the effort is not in vain. We cannot completely achieve the position of an observer seeing himself from the outside, but we may do so partially. It seems obvious to us that an anthropologist cannot understand a savage completely unless he himself becomes a savage and thus ceases to be an anthropologist. He may suspend judgment, but the very act of suspending judgment is culturally rooted: it is an act of renunciation, possible only from within a culture which, through learning to question itself, has shown itself capable of the effort of understanding another.

From "Looking for the Barbarians" in Modernity on Endless Trial.