stuff 'n other stuff

As part of the ‘not just travel writers’ strand I was reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s history of typewriters over the weekend and he makes the point that in Dracula – written in 1897 – the protagonists make extensive use of typewriters and kodak cameras to document matters – and hence demonstrate the modernity of their approach by using technology …

The birth of the modern is of course marked by the long wars, where not only where there new ways of killing, but new ways of reporting the killing. Again the portable typewriter, the small format camera, allowed a change in the nature of journalism, especially when coupled with reasonably efficient communications.

The tipping point for this was perhaps the Spanish civil war where there was something resembling modern reporting with community of serious journalists such as Orwell whose despatches commanded attention as did many of the photographers of the time …

On the back of the social media withdrawal and SOPA memes have you ever searched for ‘typewriter’ on ebay?

I just did, and there’s scads of them at fairly substantial prices, meaning people must buy them, but who?

I can sort of just about see that if you had a writing hut out in the bush with no power you might keep one just in case, but a solar panel, a couple of old car batteries, an inverter and a laptop seems like a whole lot better, especially given the advantages of wordprocessing software …

Over on my other blog I detailed my admittedly sketchy go publishing a book with Amazon Kindle publishing. At the end of the post I also included a link to an article from the Australian on the near death experience currently being undergone by scholarly monographs in Australia. (A subscription may be required to read the article in question)

Today brings a similar article in the THES:

Times Higher Education – Farewell, obscure objects of desire.

in which it’s argued that the costs of production will kill off the scholarly monograph. I don’t actually buy this scenario, principally because of the changes in technology.

The monograph is fundamentally a product of nineteenth century scholarship. Just as scholarly journals produced by learned societies were. Gentlemen were scholars and gentlemen could afford the publications and journals.

Life is of course a little different now. Gentlemen may still be scholars and scholars may still be gentlemen and gentlewomen, but the costs of subscriptions are no longer affordable for both individuals and institutions.

In the case of monographs the costs of production play a role. To print, store, and warehouse a book that will sell 300 copies costs almost as much as one that will sell 30,000 copies . Moving to e-publication – as ANU’s e-press has done – allows the electronic copies to be downloadable (either for a modest fee to defray infrastructure costs and setup costs or for no cost) or printed on demand saving the costs of storage and warehousing.

Academic publication is an excellent testbed for the changes in publication wrought by technology. The publications have in the main authors happy to slave for hours to format text and proof read for no reward than the glory of seeing their name in print, and no expensive advertising budget is required – most of the people likely to be interested in the topic either all know each other or know someone who knows the author – I’m reminded of Irving Finkel’s remark that all the Assyriologists competent in cuneiform could probably squeeze into a phone box.

So I don’ t see the scholarly monograph going away any time soon – I see it living on in electronic form, peer reviewed and suitably endorsed. It’s university libraries and presses that need to change to reflect the changes in technology

It’s not really funny to mock other people’s mistakes, but this one is kind of irresistable:

Japanese Department Store May Want to Look Up the Word ‘Fucking’.

I love travelling by train – I havn’t travelled on an overnight sleeper train in the UK since the mid-eighties, but they’re still running …

The overnight train to London isn’t perfect but it’s still magical | Herald Scotland.

Following on from my previous post on withdrawing from social media, this popped up about twenty minutes later

Email after hours? It’s overtime by law for some.

And for those of us without fixed hours what it means is that i’s ok to be offline, so yes, go for that walk in the park …

Recently there’s been a trickle of articles about people who don’t engage with social media – about not using facebook, about the need disconnect from the twitterverse, and how smartphone use stimulates obsessive compulsive behaviour.

The subtext is of course ‘this stuff rules our lives, how do we deal with it’ and of course because it’s new people ascribe it more importance. For example, we recently had some rather breathless coverage because a security guard at a detention centre for illegal immigrants posted some racist comments on his Facebook page. In fact the behaviour is no reprehensible that if he said it in the bar, or took to wearing offensive t-shirts out of hours. It’s the message, not the medium.

Certainly all this social stuff is ideal for giving the idea of useful activity and engagement, just as in the old days exhaustively reading usenet news postings and listserv digests was classed as ‘work’.

There’s certainly a component in surfing RSS feeds and twitter to keep up with what’s going on that’s definitely work related but there’s no need to be obsessive about it. Once, perhaps twice a day is enough. Life doesn’t run at warp speed

Now, maybe I’m odd. I’m more than happy when the phone doesn’t ring. I don’t use facebook – yes, I have an account ,but that’s not the same as using it. Yes I use email, but I don’t deal with work email at weekends, and yes I use twitter to track what’s going on, just as I use RSS feeds.

The only problem I have is that, living in Australia, we’re 10h ahead of Europe and 19h ahead of California, which means that there’s sometimes stuff to catch up on on a Saturday, but in practice most of it can be ignored. If it’s important, you can guarantee that at least one person will ask you ‘did you see X?’ on Monday and send you a link. Same way, as if you’re back from vacation you can safely just skim the subject lines and mark 95% of the content of your mailbox as read without looking at it. If they need you to do something you’ll find out soon enough

If it wasn’t for the Calfornia problem I’d invariably make my weekends social media free. It could of course be argued that I am an antisocial introvert that would be happy living in a cave in the bush, and to an extent that’s true. While I enjoy talking and working with people I’ve never been a highly social person.

And this perhaps has given me a sense of reality about this. For example, salespeople and account managers are not your friends, but you build a working relationship with them during any procurement and contract management exercise, purely because a bit of chat makes life more pleasant, but at the end of the day it’s just business. Same with Facebook ‘friends’, or work colleagues or whatever. You are pleasant with them because you share some goals or interests.

Now of course you may genuinely be friends with some people in these categories, but they’re definitely in the minority.

Twitter, RSS, even email is different. Basically you actively select sources of information that may be valuable (or interesting).  There are people who might be funny and engaging in real life but whose twitter postings are the equivalent of “I’m on the train” and truly uninteresting to 99.9999% of humanity. They’re broadcast mechanisms. If you want to tell someone you’re on the train use a point to point service (text message, IM, email).

In no way however am I saying ‘a pox on your social media’. Over the years I’ve found Skype, email, and microsoft messenger invaluable for maintaining relationships when you are away from home, in just the same way that in the pre electronic communication days a postcard or two, or a letter was invaluable.

And in fact, being part of a family spread about several continents they make it better because it’s more immediate.

However, social media is a tool. Only a tool. It can be used for good or bad, it can enhance your life or you can let it rule your life, but whatever it is it’s not a substitute for real life.

And you can prove it for yourself next Sunday. Sleep late. Read the papers or a book, go to a cafe and meet up with some real people, go to a gallery or walk in the park. Do some stuff. ride your bike or whatever.  Sure, if you want to make a cake and don’t have a recipe, google for it, but otherwise, no phones, no email, no twitter, no facebook.

And on Monday ask yourself ‘did I have a good time, and did I miss anything really really building burning down important?’

Elsewhere I’ve written that the US is a meat eater’s paradise – this article in the NYT kind of confirms it …

A Vegetarian’s Struggle for Sustenance in the Midwest – NYTimes.com.

Broccoli anyone ?

Over the past twelve or so months my obsessions have changed, it used to be classical and early modern history as can be seen in the Sighelm obsession, but more recently I’ve returned to an earlier interest, that of the Russian Revolution, and also to events in Manchuria – as evidenced by my recent blog posts, in part because of a renewed interest in my family’s history and connections with what used to be known as the far east, and in part because, having learned Russian many years ago I still retain a fascination, similar to a nostalgic affection for one’s first girlfriend, for the drama of the end of the tsars and birth of the Soviet regime.

So recently I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Russia, the Allied Intervention, Manchuria, and the foreign concessions in China. And buried in among this is another topic – the birth of the modern world.

If, for example, one looks at life at that start of the nineteenth century as represented by the books of Jane Austen, it is quite different from life today, circumscribed, cut off, and incredibly fixated on marriage and status.

Travel and communication was difficult, you had to make do with what was available locally, and anything from far away, teas, silks etc were impossibly exotic. People were also limited to their social circle – it has been suggested for example that Wordsworth possibly had an incestuous relationship with his sister purely because she was the only female of the right class of his acquaintance in Grasmere. Likewise Darwin, despite being a well travelled man, married his first cousin in part due to the smallness of his social circle.

By the late nineteenth century things are quite modern – there are electric lights and trams, and not just in the cities of Europe and America, but in east Asia as well, an efficient postal service, railways and steamships ensure efficient communication and advances such as the telegraph meant that news could be sent from London to Sydney in a few hours. When Burn-Murdoch travelled to Burma, he did it by a combination of steamship, train, and riverboat.

And again this is reflected in the literature of the time – for example in Erskine Childers’ ‘Riddle of the Sands’ one of the protagonists not only orders bits of boat gear by telegraph, but executes a complicated ruse by dint of the railway timetable.

It is world that is recognisable to us. Yes, details are different, but not that different. For example in Burn-Murdoch’s day there were no airlines but his asides on the merits of travelling on various shipping lines uncannily echo our debates over the merits of Etihad versus Qantas.

Even the lack of electronic technology does not make that much of a difference. For example when, at the end of the seventies, I was a research student, you were treated as an embryonic academic by Blackwell’s bookstore.

You went in, opened an account, they discreetly checked that you were who you said you were and in a couple of days sent you a nice letter with your account number. They sent you information about books they thought you might be interested in, and when you ordered a book you simply sent them a note quoting its ISBN and your account code. The book would arrive in due course, as would your monthly bill.

In terms of business analysis no different than purchasing a book from Amazon or Abe.

Likewise journal articles, one filled in a postcard and sent it to the library, and again it appeared in a day or two if they held the journal, or if not in a couple of weeks if they had to get it from elsewhere – a situation not too different from today with electronic journal delivery.

So, the world may have been slower, but all technology has done is improve the speed of execution of business processes. Just as the advent of the typewriter freed people from the need to write legibly, and the word processor from the tedium of revision, the world of the late nineteenth/early twentieth was not that different from our own, but very different from that of the early nineteenth century.

Some years ago I blogged (the actual blog server has long since turned up its toes):

C19 changes – how modern world 1.0 came about

posted Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:07:42 -0700

1) Cheap universal postal service

coupled with literacy postal service made it easy to order and send items to remote locations including overseas.

Additional functions such as post office savings bank, postal orders and (perhaps) telgraphic transfers made it easy to send money for payments etc.

Allowed mail order catalog shopping – p commerce. Particularly important in US and Canada – Sears Roebuck etc.

2) Railways & steamships

pervasive enough in many countries (Europe, US, Australia, NZ, India etc) that they provided easy access to transport. Allowed goods to be moved from one location to another, allowed easy and quick distribution of postal material including mail order items

Allowed distribution more widely of newspapers making it economic to print in large quantities and sell cheaply, hence also making them attractive for advertisers to advertise and sell their goods

Allowed cities to grow by providing commuter services – cf Metroland and growth of certain London suburbs with expansion of Metropolitan railway line.

3) Bicycle

Provides cheap reliable individual transport, providing autonomy and allowing people to live further than immediate walking distance from work

Allows people option to go to areas of their choice and visit recreational things of their choice

In rural areas allowed people to reach railheads if they did not live in immediate vicinity. Allowed rural farmworkers (eg in NE Scotland under the fermtoun system) to visit nearest local town rather than spend six months holed up on farm

to which could be added electric light, which allowed people to extend their day, and the advances in sanitation which meant that people could live longer lives with a significantly reduced risk of disease.

However, when did modern begin? I personally tend to date it to sometime around 1880 due to the rise of the advertising poster. Enough people increasingly had disposable wealth that manufacturers had to get the message out and could not simply rely on word of mouth to spread news of their products, which previously would only have been available in the local area. By the 1880’s there were trains or ships to most places and the advent of the safety bicycle in 1885 turned cycling from something for a few rich young sportsmen to a mass means of transport that anyone could learn to use.