I've always been a writer. When I was much younger, before my family could afford a computer, I would use a typewriter to create fan fiction. During my final years of grade school, I was on the school paper's staff serving as a movie and game critic. In undergrad, I took an Intro To Writing Fiction class as a pass/fail instead of getting a traditional grade. The reasoning was that in theory I could focus on my other, "more important" classes without worrying too much about writing. In practice, I liked the class so much that I ended up spending most of my semester thinking and working on it. I've often said that in another life, I would have been a writer.
I'm always thinking how to phrase things more clearly or trying to figure out why an author elected to use a particular word choice over other possibilities. Structure is important: how well does the beginning, middle, and end hang together? With these tendencies, it was with great interest that I read this article on ZDNet. The premise is that as we live in an increasingly fast paced world where the tweet or short status update rules and younger people use these tools as a primary form of communication, then we should adjust our writing styles into bite-sized chunks. And to prove the point, the post is written entirely in 140-character or less chunks.
It was an interesting experiment by the ZDNet author, but the writing is very stilted. The comments do rightfully point out that shorter is better in certain environments, such as readouts to management. Short and concise allows something to be more easily digested by extremely busy people. This is a weakness in my own writing: often too many flourishes and small passing phrases (fun fact: I use parenthetical comments...a lot).
But I come from a background of writing narratives or trying to persuade people of something. In both cases, adding or subtracting words is a critical part of keeping the audience engaged. So naturally, after reading this, I wanted to post here and illustrate the value of things like pacing and the rhythm of a piece of writing. It turns out... that I kind of already did. (Talk about tl;dr: I now have two very similar posts. On a side note, less than 10 posts into this new blog, and I'm already in reruns.)
A bigger point is that I don't think we should enable a culture where the ability to focus is the exception rather than the rule. Malcolm Gladwell made famous the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at something. How can we possibly reach that level if we're constantly switching tasks? As I write this, I've got the TV on and my iOS devices within arm's reach, pausing once in a while to watch political commentary, play a game or check Facebook. I'm also a 10+ year guitar player who's barely moved past the absolute beginner stage, in large part because I can't sit still long enough to sustain a solid practice session. This compulsion to take mini-breaks every few minutes from whatever I'm doing is one of my biggest limitations in realizing my potential. Shortening writing styles until only the main ideas remain is just another way of reinforcing that hurry up and move on to the next thing mentality.
I also fear that we're heading down a path where nuances that add depth and expressiveness are lost. Prose and argumentative writing is not poetry, but vivid language is part of the toolkit that helps convey the author's intent. Someone can write "The city had a single building taller than 50 meters." Someone else can write "The building stretched high into the sky, casting a shadow over everything else in the area." With the style advocated by ZDNet, everything would read like the first example. Which one is better at creating a world?
I'm not advocating that we turn the English language into a static construct. Language does evolve and change over time. High schoolers learn the works of Shakespeare through annotated editions that explain the slang and idioms of his day. I regularly twist and combine words into new variations. But simplifying our writing can lead to a slippery slope. We may end up with a variant on George Orwell's Newspeak - where we lose ideas because the words that express them are extinct. Freedom of expression is a powerful thing and we should hang on to everything to keep that alive.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
The Entitled Millennial?
Labeling personalities is a curious thing. The Western zodiac says that all people born in the same approximate 30-day window has the same general personality. The Chinese zodiac extends the concept into an yearly interval for personality types. In both cases, millions of people form a homogeneous group based on when they were born, completely ignoring the environment they were brought up in and other factors that may shape a person.
(For the record, I'm a former Taurus/current Aries and Dog in the respective systems. The personality change from Taurus to Aries was painful. I woke up one day a lot less loyal and stubborn, which was replaced with a hyper-competitiveness and tendency to tell it like it is. Kidding aside, and despite my skepticism, I have to admit that all three personality archetypes can be combined to describe me in broad strokes pretty well.)
If the nurture part of nature-vs-nurture is ignored in these systems, then what am I to make of labeling generations? We may want to believe that the terms Baby Boomers and Generation X have more authority because this is the purview of sociologists and not palm readers. But the scope is so much grander. The labels imply there is a tendency for people born - not in the same month or year but the same quarter-century (roughly) - to have the same general traits.
The danger of applying labels in this way popped into my mind when I recently went to a workshop on generational differences in the workplace, focusing on Millennials (defined in the workshop as being born in 1980 - 2010). This was of particular interest to me, being a Millennial (albeit born toward the beginning of the timeframe) that works almost exclusively with people older than me. What struck me is some of the traits used to describe Millennials:
(For the record, I'm a former Taurus/current Aries and Dog in the respective systems. The personality change from Taurus to Aries was painful. I woke up one day a lot less loyal and stubborn, which was replaced with a hyper-competitiveness and tendency to tell it like it is. Kidding aside, and despite my skepticism, I have to admit that all three personality archetypes can be combined to describe me in broad strokes pretty well.)
If the nurture part of nature-vs-nurture is ignored in these systems, then what am I to make of labeling generations? We may want to believe that the terms Baby Boomers and Generation X have more authority because this is the purview of sociologists and not palm readers. But the scope is so much grander. The labels imply there is a tendency for people born - not in the same month or year but the same quarter-century (roughly) - to have the same general traits.
The danger of applying labels in this way popped into my mind when I recently went to a workshop on generational differences in the workplace, focusing on Millennials (defined in the workshop as being born in 1980 - 2010). This was of particular interest to me, being a Millennial (albeit born toward the beginning of the timeframe) that works almost exclusively with people older than me. What struck me is some of the traits used to describe Millennials:
- sheltered - parents of Millennials often accompany their children on job interviews or argue grades with professors.
- pressured - Millennials are raised to always be achieving something: get into the right preschool and do well so they can go to the right grammar school and do well, and on and on.
- structured - as kids, Millennials are often shipped from one activity to another often in the same day (e.g. school to soccer practice to piano lessons)
There is a common factor in the traits I listed above: they are all enabled by middle class, white-collar, suburban life. And with that statement, I run the danger of being overly general myself, but allow me to explain. Structuring children's schedules with music and sports involves time and money commitments that aren't always possible with parents punching the clock. In many areas, the quality of education is not generally a choice in a child's early schooling, unless the parents have means to reside in a good school district or are willing to pay for private school.
Generalizing attributes of the well-off to an entire generation may be justified by the workshop's assertion that Millennials are part of the richest generation that the world has ever seen. The workshop essentially implied that the Millennials consist of rich kids, whose parents organize their lives and do much of the legwork for them. It's no wonder that the workshop also stated that Millennials are perceived as having feelings of entitlement.
But let's not forget that income disparity between the highest and lowest earners has been growing for the entire time Millennials were being born. The United States is also becoming more racially diverse, and minorities traditionally have less income. At the same time, college enrollment is at an all-time high, meaning it's likely that many Millennials are the first in their families to go beyond high school. These statistics point a very different picture: many Millennials are overcoming disadvantages to increase their and their children's standard of living.
Do the Millennials who were able to break free of their given situation feel a sense of entitlement? I don't think so. If anything, it always feels like a continuous uphill battle. When you're the first, there is little frame of reference to look to: no one to guide the way and make sense of experiences. Also, when someone goes from a blue-collar background to a white-collar lifestyle, the perception is lots of schooling followed by a cushy desk job and that somehow this work isn't as real as a factory job. But it is possible to take the blue-collar work ethic (nose to the grindstone; do whatever it takes to get the job done) and apply it to white-collar work.
Millennials represent some of the most diverse walks of life that the United States has seen: some are privileged; others are severely disadvantaged; the rest are somewhere in between; some work extremely hard to move up in life; others expect things handed to them. We should expect to see a wide ranging set of personalities, making it extremely difficult to generalize all of these people into a few common traits. Yet, that's exactly what was done. We might as well start publishing horoscopes based on generations.
Generalizing attributes of the well-off to an entire generation may be justified by the workshop's assertion that Millennials are part of the richest generation that the world has ever seen. The workshop essentially implied that the Millennials consist of rich kids, whose parents organize their lives and do much of the legwork for them. It's no wonder that the workshop also stated that Millennials are perceived as having feelings of entitlement.
But let's not forget that income disparity between the highest and lowest earners has been growing for the entire time Millennials were being born. The United States is also becoming more racially diverse, and minorities traditionally have less income. At the same time, college enrollment is at an all-time high, meaning it's likely that many Millennials are the first in their families to go beyond high school. These statistics point a very different picture: many Millennials are overcoming disadvantages to increase their and their children's standard of living.
Do the Millennials who were able to break free of their given situation feel a sense of entitlement? I don't think so. If anything, it always feels like a continuous uphill battle. When you're the first, there is little frame of reference to look to: no one to guide the way and make sense of experiences. Also, when someone goes from a blue-collar background to a white-collar lifestyle, the perception is lots of schooling followed by a cushy desk job and that somehow this work isn't as real as a factory job. But it is possible to take the blue-collar work ethic (nose to the grindstone; do whatever it takes to get the job done) and apply it to white-collar work.
Millennials represent some of the most diverse walks of life that the United States has seen: some are privileged; others are severely disadvantaged; the rest are somewhere in between; some work extremely hard to move up in life; others expect things handed to them. We should expect to see a wide ranging set of personalities, making it extremely difficult to generalize all of these people into a few common traits. Yet, that's exactly what was done. We might as well start publishing horoscopes based on generations.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Belated Movie Review: Unstoppable
Release Date: November 12, 2010
Not all movies have to be thought provoking, revolutionize a new technique, or give us new twists on character archetypes. Sometimes we've seen it all before and in cases like this, it's the execution that matters, which brings us to Unstoppable.
The film is about a train that is...well, unstoppable. A train becomes out of control after a series of human errors and ends up on a collision course with school kids, other trains, and populated areas while carrying a toxic material. It's up to Detective Alonzo Harris and Captain Kirk to save the day. I was vaguely reminded of another movie about a form of mass transportation run amok. I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down, but I could be wrong.
Besides the concept, the film is filled with familiar tropes: greedy corporations that won't do the responsible thing, tension between generations as long time employees are threatened by a new kid on the block, estranged families whose relationships are restored in times in crisis, and the old standby of grave danger just as one character is about to retire. Heck, even the two lead actors revisit previous roles: Denzel Washington's character finds himself overseeing a coworker's first day on the job while Chris Pine's is unexpectedly thrust into a role bigger than anticipated.
Despite this, the film is tightly constructed and has high production values. It wastes no time in setting up the plot. From there, it's all action sequences, with exposition smack in the middle of them. Some dialog scenes felt like this:
"Tell me about your family."
"Hang on, let me do this thing that may kill us both."
* Executes highly dangerous maneuver *
"I haven't seen my family in a month, due to regrettable actions I did."
* Move on to next set piece *
The editing can be frenetic: shots rarely last longer than a handful of seconds and flip constantly between trains, a sort of mission control of the train company, and the train company's HQ. While in most films, this can get annoying, Unstoppable makes it work. The jumping back and forth ratchets up the tension, which is the film's strongest asset.
Unstoppable takes what is essentially a two-hour chase scene and keeps it from becoming monotonous. The effects are impressive, and it's intense ride from start to finish. The acting does enough to support the story without getting in the way of things. The film doesn't add anything new to action movies, but it doesn't pretend to be do so either. It hits all of its elements so well, it serves as a prime example of paint-by-numbers done right. Highly recommended.
Not all movies have to be thought provoking, revolutionize a new technique, or give us new twists on character archetypes. Sometimes we've seen it all before and in cases like this, it's the execution that matters, which brings us to Unstoppable.
The film is about a train that is...well, unstoppable. A train becomes out of control after a series of human errors and ends up on a collision course with school kids, other trains, and populated areas while carrying a toxic material. It's up to Detective Alonzo Harris and Captain Kirk to save the day. I was vaguely reminded of another movie about a form of mass transportation run amok. I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down, but I could be wrong.
Besides the concept, the film is filled with familiar tropes: greedy corporations that won't do the responsible thing, tension between generations as long time employees are threatened by a new kid on the block, estranged families whose relationships are restored in times in crisis, and the old standby of grave danger just as one character is about to retire. Heck, even the two lead actors revisit previous roles: Denzel Washington's character finds himself overseeing a coworker's first day on the job while Chris Pine's is unexpectedly thrust into a role bigger than anticipated.
Despite this, the film is tightly constructed and has high production values. It wastes no time in setting up the plot. From there, it's all action sequences, with exposition smack in the middle of them. Some dialog scenes felt like this:
"Tell me about your family."
"Hang on, let me do this thing that may kill us both."
* Executes highly dangerous maneuver *
"I haven't seen my family in a month, due to regrettable actions I did."
* Move on to next set piece *
The editing can be frenetic: shots rarely last longer than a handful of seconds and flip constantly between trains, a sort of mission control of the train company, and the train company's HQ. While in most films, this can get annoying, Unstoppable makes it work. The jumping back and forth ratchets up the tension, which is the film's strongest asset.
Unstoppable takes what is essentially a two-hour chase scene and keeps it from becoming monotonous. The effects are impressive, and it's intense ride from start to finish. The acting does enough to support the story without getting in the way of things. The film doesn't add anything new to action movies, but it doesn't pretend to be do so either. It hits all of its elements so well, it serves as a prime example of paint-by-numbers done right. Highly recommended.
Why should I upgrade my car's CSS?
Imagine spending thousands of dollars on an item that will immediately start losing value the moment you start using it. Or has already lost a substantial portion of its value when you obtain it. You can increase its value by investing additional thousands of dollars into updating it, but this too continuously loses value. And there's a bit of one-upmanship going on: can you put together your declining thousands of dollars better than another person's declining thousands of dollars, while cordially comparing notes?
This is what I see in the world of car modifications. It was reinforced last week when I attended a car meet, where people display their cars and all of the modifications. I didn't go looking to confirm my biases. I went to hang out with my best friend, who I rarely see enough of, and I was genuinely interested to see if I could make sense of why people do it. But it seemed all I heard was: "I'm going to quad-charge my NFTSs and add FPSs so I can run at 7400. Pretty sweet deal at $3K, per fender."
Granted: some of the modified cars do look nice. And I'm not opposed to some embellishments of cars to accent its stock appearance.
But I'm a big believer that things should work right out of the box and need little to no dressing up. I could spend time and effort to root an Android phone to remove carrier installed applications and improve its general performance, or I could...you know. If I'm going to spend $X total on a car, I'd rather not spend a fraction of it at first, get a limited feature set, and then keep spending up to $X to get it the way I want.
The counterargument to that is the cost is spread over time instead of committing to $X right away. True, but that only brings me to my next point: What kinds of jobs do car enthusiasts have? How can they afford this hobby? I'd like to know because I may be in the wrong line of work. It seems like the total amount spent on someone's Civic approaches the price of entry-level luxury cars. And there are people heavily modifying luxury cars.
My biggest issue is not necessarily the money itself, but how little return there is on it. Modifying cars isn't sports where the competition results in health benefits. There's no immersion in some other world and sparking imagination like reading or playing video games. Learning how to play an instrument can have downstream benefits like songwriting. I'm not saying that everything needs to have some underlying deeper purpose. There is room for escapism. But I don't see any of those things here. I see hyper-competitiveness and money spent with little payoff for something that seems ultimately superficial. It's truly something I don't understand. At all. I wish someone would enlighten me and explain the appeal.
This is what I see in the world of car modifications. It was reinforced last week when I attended a car meet, where people display their cars and all of the modifications. I didn't go looking to confirm my biases. I went to hang out with my best friend, who I rarely see enough of, and I was genuinely interested to see if I could make sense of why people do it. But it seemed all I heard was: "I'm going to quad-charge my NFTSs and add FPSs so I can run at 7400. Pretty sweet deal at $3K, per fender."
Granted: some of the modified cars do look nice. And I'm not opposed to some embellishments of cars to accent its stock appearance.
But I'm a big believer that things should work right out of the box and need little to no dressing up. I could spend time and effort to root an Android phone to remove carrier installed applications and improve its general performance, or I could...you know. If I'm going to spend $X total on a car, I'd rather not spend a fraction of it at first, get a limited feature set, and then keep spending up to $X to get it the way I want.
The counterargument to that is the cost is spread over time instead of committing to $X right away. True, but that only brings me to my next point: What kinds of jobs do car enthusiasts have? How can they afford this hobby? I'd like to know because I may be in the wrong line of work. It seems like the total amount spent on someone's Civic approaches the price of entry-level luxury cars. And there are people heavily modifying luxury cars.
My biggest issue is not necessarily the money itself, but how little return there is on it. Modifying cars isn't sports where the competition results in health benefits. There's no immersion in some other world and sparking imagination like reading or playing video games. Learning how to play an instrument can have downstream benefits like songwriting. I'm not saying that everything needs to have some underlying deeper purpose. There is room for escapism. But I don't see any of those things here. I see hyper-competitiveness and money spent with little payoff for something that seems ultimately superficial. It's truly something I don't understand. At all. I wish someone would enlighten me and explain the appeal.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
This Year's Best Music Collaboration (That Will Never See The Light Of Day)
The latest issue (as of when I started writing this post) of Rolling Stone names what to look forward in music this year. Under Best Collaboration, they named U2's "upcoming" album being produced by Danger Mouse (quotations mine - for reasons that will be seen).
Anyone who knows me knows that U2 is my all-time favorite band. And recently, I've become enamored with Danger Mouse: the first Gnarls Barkley album is great; he produced The Black Keys best known song and his influence is heard elsewhere on that album; and I can't seem to get Broken Bells songs out of my head despite listening to their debut album several times a week. So when news broke in October that the world's biggest rock band was working with one of music's most well regarded producers, I was ecstatic.
The thing is: we will never hear it as part of U2's main discography. We'll be lucky if we hear some portions of it in some sort of unreleased material compilation.
U2 is, to put it mildly, self-conscious. At the end of the 80s they went away to dream it all up again (their words), after a bad critical reaction to their last album of the decade. They spent the 90s pushing the boundaries of their music, reinventing and poking fun at themselves and rock cliches. This was the band at their creative peak. At the end of the 90s, again facing criticism, they returned to a more traditional sound and went back to a save the world incarnation.
In 2003, U2 spent a year recording with producer Chris Thomas, only to scrap it and work with someone they have previous extensive experience with. <sarcasm> The resulting album certainly doesn't have any songs that try to recall some of their classics. </sarcasm> Sessions with Rick Rubin in 2006 were similarly tossed, again to work with their go-to people. The album that was released in early 2009, "No Line on the Horizon" was to be more experimental, almost another reinvention. But they pulled back on those ambitions, and delayed the album because they hit a "rich songwriting vein". Many fans read the quote as "We're working on more radio friendly songs."
No Line was to be followed quickly by a companion album filled with more atmospheric and ambient songs left over from the No Line sessions. Two plus years later, with No Line not performing well, it seems unlikely we'll hear its sister. There's word of 3 other projects: the Spider-Man musical soundtrack, an album with songs tailor made for a club, and the Danger Mouse album. All of which sound like they're almost done - and are up in the air, because the band has paralysis by analysis and can't decide what to do.
This is the band that heavily influenced my belief that rock music is more about the journey and not necessarily the destination. It's about pushing yourself into uncharted waters, while retaining some semblance of accessibility. But now, it's about trying to be the biggest band in the world and not ruining their legacy - a legacy that was partly defined by reinvention. They weren't so afraid before, releasing companion albums and non-mainstream music, albeit under a different name.
I have to admit that for me, other bands have eclipsed U2 in terms of excitement during the lead-up to new music being released, namely Arcade Fire, Broken Bells, and Coldplay. This shows what playing it safe has done - the most hardcore fans can't muster the same energy for U2 as they once did. We've seen this all before: the big "This is our best work EVAR!" statements from the band followed by delays and favoring of sounds geared towards more casual fans. Time to regain some courage.
Anyone who knows me knows that U2 is my all-time favorite band. And recently, I've become enamored with Danger Mouse: the first Gnarls Barkley album is great; he produced The Black Keys best known song and his influence is heard elsewhere on that album; and I can't seem to get Broken Bells songs out of my head despite listening to their debut album several times a week. So when news broke in October that the world's biggest rock band was working with one of music's most well regarded producers, I was ecstatic.
The thing is: we will never hear it as part of U2's main discography. We'll be lucky if we hear some portions of it in some sort of unreleased material compilation.
U2 is, to put it mildly, self-conscious. At the end of the 80s they went away to dream it all up again (their words), after a bad critical reaction to their last album of the decade. They spent the 90s pushing the boundaries of their music, reinventing and poking fun at themselves and rock cliches. This was the band at their creative peak. At the end of the 90s, again facing criticism, they returned to a more traditional sound and went back to a save the world incarnation.
In 2003, U2 spent a year recording with producer Chris Thomas, only to scrap it and work with someone they have previous extensive experience with. <sarcasm> The resulting album certainly doesn't have any songs that try to recall some of their classics. </sarcasm> Sessions with Rick Rubin in 2006 were similarly tossed, again to work with their go-to people. The album that was released in early 2009, "No Line on the Horizon" was to be more experimental, almost another reinvention. But they pulled back on those ambitions, and delayed the album because they hit a "rich songwriting vein". Many fans read the quote as "We're working on more radio friendly songs."
No Line was to be followed quickly by a companion album filled with more atmospheric and ambient songs left over from the No Line sessions. Two plus years later, with No Line not performing well, it seems unlikely we'll hear its sister. There's word of 3 other projects: the Spider-Man musical soundtrack, an album with songs tailor made for a club, and the Danger Mouse album. All of which sound like they're almost done - and are up in the air, because the band has paralysis by analysis and can't decide what to do.
This is the band that heavily influenced my belief that rock music is more about the journey and not necessarily the destination. It's about pushing yourself into uncharted waters, while retaining some semblance of accessibility. But now, it's about trying to be the biggest band in the world and not ruining their legacy - a legacy that was partly defined by reinvention. They weren't so afraid before, releasing companion albums and non-mainstream music, albeit under a different name.
I have to admit that for me, other bands have eclipsed U2 in terms of excitement during the lead-up to new music being released, namely Arcade Fire, Broken Bells, and Coldplay. This shows what playing it safe has done - the most hardcore fans can't muster the same energy for U2 as they once did. We've seen this all before: the big "This is our best work EVAR!" statements from the band followed by delays and favoring of sounds geared towards more casual fans. Time to regain some courage.
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