What is the value of words? The euro crisis, Shakespeare and the 2012 Olympics

The current euro crisis may get a lot worse after the second national Greek election on 17 June. A lot (billions of euros) depends on a little (very small percentage differences in voter responses). (I leave to one side how much damage Chancellor Merkel might cause with a very few wrong words.) What, runs the discussion, is the least worst way to manage the drastic over-valuation of Greek assets: bail Greece out again or force them to leave the Euro? What is definitely not up for disagreement is that the value of Greek assets is not what people liked to think it was. Not to mention the Spanish and Italian – and the English? …

But this blog is about communication, not economics. If I may take the financial metaphor very seriously, though, do words have value? Does every language have a Central Bank of Meaning and Expressiveness? How might communication show up on an imaginary balance sheet? I don’t just mean in dollars or pounds, though writers and publishing companies try, very literally, to turn words into money.

5/10. This is a bit fussy and insight-free. It is also one of those few books known by the names of the authors, so at least it makes their names clear.

How might we increase the value of words? And what makes them depreciate? In a previous post about the power of words I quoted from Strunk and White (The Elements of Style, 4th edn, New York: Longman, 2000, p. 76): ‘Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.’ This kind of abundant good sense in a highly apposite money metaphor is a valuable asset that has earned their book multimillion sales. Moreover, they write in a fine and enduring tradition of American ethical pragmatism that wants to make the best out of what there is, not what might be; the writing transforms the words/world ‘out there’ into things-for-us; this is true not just for language but also for the design of buildings, furniture, cars and computers. Apple is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company because at core it has a simple message: ‘Here are some things we’ve worked hard on and we care about. We really think they are good. Trust us.’ Yes, we all know they make mistakes but mostly they deliver on promises handsomely. I wonder if we in the UK have lost track of this kind of business decency.

As an example of how not to build long-term value I have already had a recent go at Alan Sugar, the UK’s parody of Steve Jobs, currently parodying himself in the BBC TV show The Apprentice. What is shocking is how the energy and enthusiasm of young people who want to do well in business is turned into an embarrassing dog-eat-dog anti-ethical freak show where long-term product development, loyalty and reputation count for nothing. They praise their own modest skills to the sky while shamelessly stabbing each other in the front. Meanwhile they learn how to grovel to power: ‘Good afternoon, Lord Sugar’, ‘Yes, Lord Sugar’, ‘No, Lord Sugar’. This programme, like another embarrassingly sycophantic BBC offering, Dragons’ Den, dresses itself up as a true reflection of UK commercial culture. These programmes are dramatic and enjoyable as entertainment, but please God no one takes them seriously as guides to doing business. British entrepreneurial spirit is supposed to have regenerated during the Thatcher era, but I suggest that, at least in the symbolic realm, the Iron Lady’s very own patent for whipping air (it’s a lot cheaper than cream) into ice cream is a poor precedent for sustainable business success. I don’t know whether Thatcher’s aerated ice cream is doing better business worldwide than the premium and super-premium ice creams made by US companies such as Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs, but it’s clear which products we associate with long-term added value. In the world of media, brands building quality and excellence for Britain include the BBC (not always!), Penguin Books, J. K. Rowling, Ridley Scott and Danny Boyle. Short-termism and a disregard for quality – whether in ice cream, car manufacture, computers, publishing or writing – cheapens the reputation of Brand UK.

And language can also have air whipped into it. The legal profession is famous for using obscure language, but I also remember reading in Barbara Strang, A History of English (London: Methuen, 1970), that fifteenth-century lawyers perpetuated longer alternative spelling forms (honoure rather than honour or even honor) because they were paid per page. In general, though – and I hope to discuss this in more detail another time – meaning is most devalued by deception (deliberate or otherwise), false or empty feeling and the failure to consider readers and listeners respectfully.

Through the other end of the positive–negative telescope, I just been to see The Globe Theatre’s excellent touring production of Henry V. Shakespeare is English’s super-super-premium brand, playing to packed houses, adding massive value to the English language and enhancing the international perception of the UK. One man’s work has enabled us to think thoughts and simply be in ways that might not otherwise have been possible. For this very reason, and because we need to communicate the notion of the best in British culture, Shakespeare is making a guest appearance at the London Olympics – see below …

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Meanwhile, in this summer of sport here is an example of good communication, one of my favourite sporting quotes ever. It comes from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, just after the UK sprint cyclist Chris Hoy won his third gold medal. The commentator was more breathless than the competitor as he rushed up to him and blurted out:

A lot of people are talking about Chris Hoy. What does Chris Hoy say about Chris Hoy?

To which Hoy coolly replied, live on radio:

The day Chris Hoy starts talking about Chris Hoy in the third person is the day Chris Hoy disappears up his own arse.

(Commentator speechless. End of interview.) I apologize for repeating the swear word, but this is a man who is alert, decisive and incisive in his sentences as well as on the track. The truth and unrepressed energy communicates exactly who he is. So too does the deliberate and schooled blandness of footballers, but they communicate they have been trained to prefer bureaucracy to admitting their fear of making mistakes. Is it possible in the coming European championships that England’s football team will again look like frightened rabbits for this very reason?

Chris Hoy, ahead of Matt Crampton (Pruszkov, Poland, 2010). Here he is, doing what he does best – he’s a cyclist, not a diplomat. Image from Bryn Lennon/Getty Images Europe

Back to Shakespeare and the Olympics:

The London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony will be called ‘The Isles of Wonder’. Danny Boyle, the artistic director for the spectacular opening ceremony, said that the theme came from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and that the show would celebrate the whole of the UK. Boyle is the Oscar-winning movie director of Slumdog Millionaire.
Boyle also added ‘our Isles of Wonder salutes and celebrates the exuberant creativity of the British genius in an Opening Ceremony we hope will be as unpredictable and inventive as the British people.’ He also revealed there would be a sequence dedicated to the achievements of NHS and it would be performed by the nurses and other member staffs.

Like any product launch, the stakes for Britain’s international reputation are high. For those of you who found someone sawing their own hand off (Boyle’s 127 hours) difficult to watch, here is something excruciating in a different kind of way: Britain’s official Olympic handover at the end of Beijing 2008. Britain’s gold medal in (toe-)curling starts at about 6 minutes 45 seconds in; it goes downhill all the way from there. Let’s hope the spirit of Shakespeare and ‘the exuberant creativity of the British genius’ in 2012 doesn’t mean recycling a tune from 1969 and David Beckham – mirabile dictu! – kicking a football off a bus.

I’m proud we in the UK have built some decent buildings in good time, and that the design agency SomeOne has done a fine job – with the unpromising Wolff Olins logo as template – on the signage/pictograms. The massive scale of poverty, ugliness and dereliction in the east of London has for a long time been a national disgrace, so siting the Olympics there is a really admirable and brave attempt to kickstart some regeneration. And London as a whole is looking very handsome: an impressive amount of forward planning is coming to fruition at the right time. I just hope, when the eyes of the world are upon us, that the messages of Britishness we give out particularly to ourselves will be full of true feeling, meaning and value.

The pleasure of fine typography

I came across this today: an exhibition piece showing off the calligraphic qualities of Robert Slimbach’s OpenType Brioso. Rhythm, order and freedom; sense, too, because the layout adds to the meaning of the words.

Stanley Morison (1889–67) was a type designer and historian of type best known these days for his design of a familiar (understatement) typeface for The Times.

This lovely thing comes from a beautiful 46-page booklet that is an unusual example of excellent corporate sponsorship, by Adobe Systems, of skilled craftsmanship. Monotype precedents from the 1930s still resonate after 80 years. How to add value to your brand.

This is a very good instance of something being an example of itself. It seems full to me – I can’t describe what this means. I was wondering if there is a special and happy category of things that knowingly do what they are. It is not just a matter of the skill that went into making them. A beautifully designed and handcrafted table is not an example of itself. It is meaningless to say that it knowingly is a table – it is a table. What about art objects? They are knowing, but do they do anything? Might we say their purpose – if they have a purpose at all – is to be themselves? Can only commercial media – media with a purpose – knowingly do and be in the way this typography does and is? Can anybody think of examples outside print/typography? I have brain ache. This sounds like a good point to stop …

Many thanks to Gerald Fleuss for the recommendation.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich Kittler (book review)

Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011)

Friedrich Kittler’s spiky and complex masterpiece of multimodal media archaeology (published by Stanford University Press in 1986) was our first book for the Cambridge books-about-books group. Not an obvious choice: it’s not about books, but there again, books aren’t necessarily codexes any more. Something about media transmigration might free up our thinking.

By reputation it was going to be risky and fierce. Agreeing with the author is one of the great pleasures of reading – egocentrists very much enjoy the author agreeing with them – but this book was never likely to offer either kind of satisfaction. And why should it? Intellectual and social freedoms have to come from something more than people agreeing with each other – even in the enjoyable company of the book group members.

For this the book is excellent. A decision to read is an agreement to comply with predefined roles in a relationship of non-symmetrical power: we decide to give our time and pay our money/attention to the author. The author (the publisher makes this possible) agrees to provide the reader, admittedly often from high to low, some kind of expert knowledge or life-quickening experience. This might also include Dada- and punk-style confrontation; in a world of sycophancy it might mean telling the truth; easy solutions might need difficulty or fragmentation. Traditionally (but not always) this is bad box office; artists, writers and musicians – and of course commercial companies – have usually tried to veil their most authentic responses from those they most need to please. Comedians have always made a edgy living on the borderline of truth and placebo.

Although cultural reception of his work might suggest some parallels, Kittler’s provocative intellectual bravura is not, at face value, of the punk or Dada variety. His command of themes as diverse as the poetry of Goethe and the varieties of typewriter used by Nietzsche is scholarly by the most traditional criteria. His depth of reading and fastidious selection of of unusual but highly relevant texts is a feature of the development of his argument. Underneath, though, there is perhaps a subversive play on conventional author–reader power relations. Kittler may be knowingly toying – with concealed fierce political scruple too? – with the author’s power of authority. Schizoidal jokiness/seriousness and affective subversion are understandable reactions in a country shocked by its own recent history; a ‘difficult’ complexity of response is the kind of behaviour we might expect from those, perhaps like Kittler, seeking truth, authenticity and at least a glimpse of freedom.

Anselm Kiefer, Zweistromland ['Land of Two Rivers']/The High Priestess (1986–89), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Each of the lead ‘books’ weighs a third of a ton but can be removed and ‘read’. Image from anselmkieferoldandnew.blogspot.com

The premise of Kittler’s writing thus strongly reminds me of his artist compatriots Anselm Kiefer (1945– ) and Joseph Beuys (1921–86). One of Kiefer’s first works was a collection of photos of him in landscape settings across Germany, making Nazi salutes; Kittler’s enthusiastic youthful followers were apparently given to calling themselves Kittlerjugend (Kittler Youth). In some of Kiefer’s later work massive leaden books are a (jokey?) visual exploration of the kind of weight of determinism we seem to find in Kittler’s expositions of media history. Beuys’s absurdist and primitivist refusals to comply with expectations of his work that bury it alive recall Kittler’s mercurial transitions from pure lit-crit of Sturm und Drang poetry to his later anti-humanistic espousal of Shannon information theory and the teaching of computer studies. If you were born in 1943 and your middle name was Adolf you too might enjoy your humour very dark, or try to subvert relations of power and the crushingly determining weight of German history. For holidays Kittler’s parents used to take him to the seaside resort of Peenemünde – which also happened to be the site of the development of the technologically revolutionary ballistic V2 missile. It seems oddly contrary to Kittler’s complex and postmodern exploration of media, narrative and literary effects that these naively neat journalistic anecdotes might explain his conviction that the primum mobiles of media technologies are the means of destruction (weapons) rather than production – but this really seems to be the case.

Joseph Beuys, Homogeneous Infiltration (1966). I am trying to find some kind of visual parallel to Kittler’s combination of lightness and heavy seriousness. Image from Wkikpedia

For so it is that the first page of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter starts with a discussion of optical fibre networks: ‘People will be hooked to an information channel that can be used for any medium—for the first time in history, or for its end.’ Note this is deliberately left hanging, a hook of his own to hold our attention, while he writes about the effect of electromagnetic pulse from nuclear explosion on communications, and speculates about the intentions of the Pentagon. Then he gets to the punchline: ‘In the meantime, pleasure is produced as a by-product: people are free to channel-surf among entertainment media. After all, fiber optics transmit all messages imaginable save for the one that counts—the bomb.’

Throughout I enjoyed his fond imitations of pithy McLuhanesque turns of phrase – in this case I was thinking of ‘Is not the essence of education civil defence against media fallout?’ (Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, 1962, p. 246). But instead of McLuhan’s empathic embrace of metaphor and his zest for commercial culture and advertising, Kittler here is grimly literal and censorious. He casts only the Pentagon as ‘far-sighted’; we readers are by implication dupes hooked to experiencing media pleasure as by-products of the military-industrial complex. I felt alienated from him straight away. Quite frankly it seems paranoid to think the Pentagon would or could somehow direct money for optical fibre networks into our front rooms simply for the purposes of communications after nuclear war. If the truth really is that much of a conspiracy, what Pentagonal purpose would be served by all us untermensch hanging around anyway?

The history of the internet as a many-to-many decentralized communication system after nuclear Armageddon is fascinating and highly relevant to his argument, but Kittler’s preference for rhetorical effects over measured and judicious attention to intermediate detail does not encourage a sense of trust. Note too the non-empathic position: ‘people’ are they rather than we; is he not a person too?

For all Kittler’s admiration and rhetorical emulation of McLuhan, the analysis throughout GFT is grittily scientistic and non-humanist. As his online biography says,

Friedrich Kittler sees an autonomy in technology and therefore disagrees with Marshall McLuhan’s reading of the media as ‘extensions of man’: Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it.

For Kittler believes that the machines parted company with human-centred instrumentalities some time ago:

Digital signal processing (DSP) … set in [after the Second World War]. Its promotional euphemism, post-history, only barely conceals that war is the beginning and end of artificial intelligence.
In order to supersede world history (made from classified intelligence reports and literary processing protocols), the media sytem proceeded in three phases. Phase 1, beginning with the American Civil War, developed storage technologies for acoustics, optics, and script: film, gramophone, and the man-machine system, typewriter. Phase 2, beginning with the First World War, developed for each storage content appropriate electric transmission technologies: radio, television, and their more secret counterparts. Phase 3, since the Second World War, has transferred the schematic of a typewriter to a technology of predictability per se …

While this is a fascinating hypothesis that generates hundreds of dazzling connections throughout the book, on occasions (such as here) it seems both wild and oddly disengaged. If you portray the mass of humanity as not even looking at the machines as they rush us down the road of world history to oblivion, to what end would one want to write about it, to communicate and persuade others? Marx said the task of philosophy is to change the world, but for Kittler the end of history has arrived. There is no call to action. What is to be done? Nothing. We can read his book, of course, but why? And what, to use terminology I suspect he would not have approved of, does he feel about this? Not much – at least on the surface. How can anybody base their guide to living their life on any of this? I don’t know.

The major theoretical premise underlying the elegant structure of his argument and the book is the mapping of Gramophone Film Typewriter onto Jacques Lacan’s taxonomy of the relations of psyche and world, Real Symbolic Imaginary. At first sight this seems like a brilliant move, but the homomorphism is surely no more than a spectacularly audacious formalism – I can’t see why the very specific historical development of media technology from c. 1870 to 1920 should correspond to Lacan’s highly philosophical and non-historical schema except by coincidence or by force. What shared principles drive differentiation in each case? Kittler does not attempt a cybernetics of history, which would have been fun. Perhaps, as Lacanians might say, it is present by its absence. Kittler tells us that Lacan refused to discuss psychoanalysis with anyone who had not studied cybernetics; in Écrits (tr. Alan Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977, p. 329) Lacan indeed says that ‘Human language constitutes a communication in which the emitter receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form’. But as for Kittler, if he claims human consciousness is now just a sideshow I can’t imagine a rationale by which he might want to borrow the language of psychoanalysis, or for that matter write, or read, or live …

Of course Kittler may perhaps have been disingenuous. Writing a book like this must have been a labour of love, the fruit of years of study and thought, with little prospect of personal reward. For all the complexities of postmodernism and irony, though, there must be a foundation, which surely has to be based on who we are, as people who think and feel. Regardless of whether the machines are now dominant or not, do we have any choice? Parallel to Baudelaire’s hypocrite lecteur, perhaps Kittler had something in common with the text from John 8:32 in the lobby of the CIA HQ in Langley, VA: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ Perhaps provocation and irony are half-truths, paradoxically given so magnanimously that the re-centred recipient may then have the gift of feeling complete.

Coda

I am making no judgements here, I am simply offering similar but divergent texts for your interest.

Steve Jobs died on 5 October 2011. This is from the very end (pp. 570–1) of Isaacson’s biography:

One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden and reflected on death … “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”
He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.”
Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”

Friedrich Kittler died on 18 October 2011. Gill Partington’s excellent obituary of him in Radical Philosophy 172 (March/April 2012) takes its title and closing sentence from Kittler’s final words:

Someone for whom the human and the technological were inextricably linked, Kittler was kept alive in the end by life-support machines until his final command: ‘Alle Apparate ausschalten.’ Switch off all apparatuses.

A shout out for The Scream

‘Why is The Scream so iconic?’ a BBC webpage asks about what, as of Tuesday 2 May, is the world’s most expensive picture. It continues: ‘Professor Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of the History of Art at Oxford University … said it is the “sheer power of the image … the communicative power which manages to transmit … that elemental power” that makes it so iconic … Professor Kemp said a large number of iconic images are about faces and “decoding the expression”.’

Eh? I don’t think I have distorted the article and I am certainly not criticizing Professor Kemp, but how does this explain the picture’s power?

Here’s the previous owner, Petter Olsen: ‘I hope the publicity given by this sale will increase public interest in Munch’s work and awareness of the important message I feel it conveys. The Scream, for me, shows the horrifying moment when man realises his impact on nature and the irreversible changes he has initiated.’

Perhaps he was responding to Munch’s fascinating account on the frame: ‘I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.’

Yes, this is vivid, but when Olsen talks about man’s ‘impact on nature’ he is still not explaining the power of the image, how we feel when we look at it. I feel disturbed and scared, how about you?

So now, to use a phrase from the magic industry, the reveal: this picture shocks because it is silent. The title, the gesture, the violently tilted plane of the path, the loudness of the colour clashes – all are cues we ought to hear something. And our human empathy wants to go into the picture but we are grotesquely trapped outside. For comparison, the Oscar-winning silent movie The Artist has a disturbing scene of the lead figure’s nervous breakdown that smashes the very genre: a feather hits the ground with a startling loud crash. More wittily, the brilliant crux of the story – a clash of literary, auditory and visual modalities, with the added tension of whether the ending is comic or tragic – is the stillness and silence of a single word on the intertitle: ‘Bang!’. In Munch’s picture, frighteningly, the noise is trapped inside, and we are on the outside, trying to hear …

The power, I think, is that the silence amplifies the sound of our imaginings about the picture until the nothing becomes deafening.

If $119.9 million was a noise, it would be loud, but it is still only an echo of the truth of what one man imagined – and, crucially, we complete his imaginings – about what it can be like to be human in the world.

On being a bit deaf

If you are not deaf, you might know someone who is. The admirable Gallaudet Research Institute gives some statistics: ‘if everyone who has any kind of “trouble” with their hearing is included then anywhere from 37 to 140 out of every 1,000 people … have some kind of hearing loss, with a large share being at least 65 years old.’ Any writing and speaking hopes that readers and listeners are both generous and curious about people who are similar but different. The hope, similarity and difference are key to communication, which starts from the optimistic expression of our human need for others. There is no such thing as a private language, whether written or spoken. Yes, writing isn’t always read, and speaking isn’t necessarily heard properly, but pessimists don’t see the point of trying.

Are you receiving me? Over …

What is it like to be a bit deaf? Firstly, it is normal – for me. We all take our sensory perception – good or bad – for granted. Compared with a dog, even the most sharp-eared of us have hearing loss. Compared with the 80-mile stare of a vulture, the best of us are partially sighted. (OK, human beings are not like animals, not least because of our extraordinary capacity for imaginative identification. You are perhaps doing it right now: what is it like to hear through someone else’s ears?) And mystics through the ages have tried to point out that sense data is not the same as what we have come to think of, purely out of habit, as reality. In The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006, pp. 405–6) Richard Dawkins goes for a strikingly odd metaphor that defines the limits of human perception as what we can see through the opening of a burqa. Science, he says, opens up the window so wide ‘the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely, exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom.’ In Cambridge we have the excellent and PR-savvy ‘edutainers’ the Naked Scientists, but they wisely conduct their exciting and explosive experiments wearing fully protective if admittedly non-Islamic clothing.

In my sound-muffled world I often notice other people can hear what I cannot: conversations in noisy places, quiet actors in plays, questions in meetings, a television turned down, an alarm clock, a door bell, children’s voices in school assemblies … So I tend to think about hearing when I guess most people do not. I try to sit near the stage, or when I teach I am mobile and go round the room to where people ask questions. I make sure I stand or sit to face someone who is talking to me – cues from the shape of their mouth help me a little to hear what they are saying – the sound becomes partly visible, even though only between 30 and 40 per cent of sounds are visually distinguishable. According to Wikipedia, ‘“where there’s life, there’s hope” looks identical to “where’s the lavender soap?”.’

But deafness is not, so to speak, black and white. Some people are ‘profoundly’ deaf, the same way some people are completely blind. Others, like me, are less affected, in ways I hope are extensible to a broader understanding of media and communication in general.

Sometimes I try to guess what percentage of a conversation I have heard, but the meaning of a sentence isn’t based on percentages. For example, if I hear someone saying to me ‘The —— sat on the mat’, I’ve only missed 16.66 per cent of their words. With what I imagine is a good chance of being right I supply cat. But our speech-acts are so compulsively and wonderfully creative that dog or even banana may well be the real answer. I try to respond intelligently, but if I then talk about cats my conversational partner will consider my understanding nearer zero per cent than 83.33.

The banana sat on the (mouse) mat.

If my brain tries to supply missing words this can be disconcerting for me and the person I am talking to (if I let them know what I am thinking) because I am in fact free-associating or projecting only what it is I think they have said. This is a kind of surrealist computer program that converts speech into Monty Python sketches. For example my piano teacher rang me recently to tell me that after more torrential rain she was going to be late for my lesson because ‘the slugs had blocked the path’. After a request to repeat what she said I could hear no difference. I privately wondered if she was hyper-anxious about slimy creatures, or if the conditions had made the slugs much bigger than usual – I was imagining slugs so big they were impossible to get round. When I asked her casually about it later, she told me the river had risen right over the footpath, so it had been blocked by floods.

My theory is that men find puns funnier than women because men’s language cognition tends to be more goal-directed, less emotionally convergent, so the pun hijacks the meaning (the goal) to a new absurd and remote place. Some men enjoy the affective disconnect of puns and absurdity generally because they are a holiday from empathy. Maybe it helps (?) that men’s hearing tends to be less responsive to the higher frequency ranges of the voices of women and children. But a joke should be like sex, something for two people both to enjoy – and the distortion of what somebody says usually only makes one person laugh. Even though human communication is often based on repetition/mirroring or regular blips of reassurance (someone listening on the phone: ‘No … yes … I see … mm …’), I don’t like to repeat back to people what I heard because if I get it wrong – my reason for checking – they might think I am taking the mickey.

Another strategy is changing the subject – a new and tangential topic avoids understanding too closely. I also tend to talk too much so I don’t have to listen. And I talk loudly too, trying to add energy to those I would like to speak louder. I confess my fallback position is a ‘Mm’ and a nod, perhaps a wry smile that could mean either ‘I am happy for you’ or ‘I am sad for you’. None of these are good, but I promise you people let me know fairly swiftly the limits to the number of times I can say ‘Pardon?’.

The iMac-styled hearing aids sat on the mouse mat.

My hearing aids are ugly and useful if disappointingly non-cyborgian. Perhaps in the future they will indeed give me bionic powers. The styling is c. 1998 iMac – entertainingly parodic translucent plastic. They are digitally programmed to boost, differently for each ear, deficit frequencies. For me these are above 3000 Hz; fricatives s, f, v, z, h, ʒ and θ are in this range, so sausage and forest (for example) might sound similar – some people speak more clearly than others. They aren’t as good as ears at filtering signal from noise: when I go to see a play, someone turning the pages of a theatre programme three rows back will sound loud. There are different settings: the default is equalized to compensate for noisy backgrounds; there is a directional setting that doesn’t make much difference; there is a listening-to-music program that is useful at classical concerts. The T setting takes an audio feed direct from a mic – it doesn’t amplify ambient sound. I can sometimes even pick up – when no one else can – the person with the mic whispering or muttering. My experience is that many of these T loop systems don’t work, so my thanks to all those places that check their installations from time to time.

Owing to the wonders of the UK National Health Service, my hearing aids and batteries are free. ‘Going private’, though, for a rather less visible ‘in-ear’ pair will cost upward of £2500. I wonder what the manufacturing cost is – I have seen estimates of $100. I am astonished that an iPod with substantially more features will be on sale for 10 or more times less. I can only assume the hearing assistance industry thinks that compensating for human anxiety and sense of loss is an opportunity to make large profits. I can see that a personal and professional service, particularly outside an intimidating hospital setting, is reassuring and helpful, but I feel sorry for those who have (rather than choose) to pay this amount. As the enormous cohort of mobile phone users gradually shifts into the ‘seniors’ demographic we may perhaps find major digital products manufacturers will make hearing-assistive devices for them, and prices will fall. There are plenty of technical opportunities for convergence with smartphones; even now, in a not particularly technologically advanced market, if I spend £140 on a bluetooth device I can play music from my phone or receive calls direct into my hearing aids. But the sound system on many newish cars can connect, cable-free and with minimal set-up, with smartphones. Perhaps the numbers of bluetooth-aware deaf people and the comparatively slow turnover of devices doesn’t justify the design costs – but then high prices and minimal upgrades of technical features are bound to slow down the rate of device replacement.

‘The painter Valerio Adami reminisces about Jacques Derrida … “He loved Ribera’s painting of a blind man touching a Greek sculpture, and the idea that one can attain a different kind of knowledge by closing one’s eyes.”‘ Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), Allegory of Touch (1613). Quote from http://films.louvre.fr/en/the-films/discovery/perspectives-on-art/jacques-derrida-memoirs-of-the-blind.html, image from http://www.mfah.org/

Hearing loss is – as we might expect – invisible. Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, however, is an account, based on many works in the Louvre, of sighted artists’ images of blindness. But how can we convey the sound of deafness? The ecstatic and angular final works of Beethoven (such as the late string quartets, the Diabelli Variations and Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111) are astonishing achievements in abstraction and testaments to the visuality of musical composition, but how would a hearing composer denote a deaf world? Perhaps they can’t and don’t need to, for if the human sensorium is a gestalt, and a change in one part of it changes the whole, we might expect that when one door of perception closes another opens: blind poets and musicians from Homer to Stevie Wonder have been celebrated and admired. Perhaps their courage and intensity of truth-saying is something we – sighted or not, deaf or not – might learn from as we all try to make the best of our limitations and losses.

Those, at least, are some of my meditations to myself about hearing. The last sounds, below – and sights – go to Beethoven. Thank you for listening.

An insight (I am not being metaphorical) into the sounds of deafness – well, Beethoven’s: the final page of the manuscript of the Diabelli Variations. Its purchase by the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn 18 months ago has made it available to the public for the first time. The explosive energy simply of the look of the notation is amply expressive. Image from http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/

What is the Apple success formula? Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (book review)

As Steve Jobs was dying of cancer of the pancreas in 2011, it was ironic, Isaacson notes, that all the top-notch medical specialists gathered around him should have the same fenced-off departmental or ‘silo’ pathology Jobs fought all his life:

He realized that he was facing the type of problem he never permitted at Apple. His treatment was fragmented rather than integrated. Each of his myriad maladies was being treated by different specialists—oncologists, pain specialists, nutritionists, and hematologists—but they were not being coordinated in a cohesive approach. (pp. 549–50)

I am not saying an integrated or holistic approach to their patient’s health would have kept him alive. Indeed, Jobs’s New Age ideas on eating and health (what Andy Grove of Intel called ‘trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots’ – p. 454) may have killed him; he refused surgery in October 2003, when even a leading alternative health practitioner advised him in favour of it. (I am not criticizing or diminishing Jobs; I sympathize with his fears.)

2/10. The original title and cover. Vulgar, cheap and disrespectful – though to be fair to the publisher it pre-dates Jobs's death. 'iSteve' is false chumminess. 'The Book of Jobs' is another meaningless joke; it also encourages us to pronounce the surname wrongly. The Jobs-enforced radical rethink (according to Isaacson's interview on CBS, accompanied by a refusal to permit publication otherwise) testifies to Jobs's power to compel the publisher to let him have it laid out by the Apple design department – and give it a new title too. And he was right – see below.

Jobs lived and died a particular kind of relation between the individual and the organization, between creativity and corporate departmentalism. It is one of the strongest stories in the book. It is fascinating to wonder whether Jobs’s career – perhaps our own too? – can be considered as repetitions, with some modifications, of one really quite simple idea or position. Whether we love or hate Jobs and his products we cannot deny he found a formula that has made Apple the world’s most valuable commercial company.

What is it? Before I attempt to answer, two points: (a) it is not a secret, and (b) if it was easy, Jobs’s competitors would have done it – but they didn’t. Let’s look at some case studies from the book in chronological order.

1. The teenage Jobs was bright, rebellious and literally odious – his affiliation to the counterculture, Dylan, bizarre diets, Indian mysticism and dope/acid came with a belief that deodorant was for straights. He was a good but not brilliant electronics engineer. He could, however, recognize genius in, and be trusted as a friend by, Steve Wozniak. ‘Woz’ was too geeky to see the potential in commercializing his inventiveness, but – as with the first Apple personal computer later – Jobs could: in 1975 he subcontracted a commission from Atari for a single-player version of Pong (with a bonus for each chip saved below 50) to Woz. Jobs then shared the basic fee but pocketed the bonus without telling him.

2. In December 1979 Xerox PARC in Palo Alto was the place of Jobs’s Damascene conversion to the graphical user interface and the mouse. Note (a) he was again making use of other people’s original work, (b) he saw a chance to design a machine around the way he thought people really do work, feel and think, and (c) Xerox deliberately placed their research group 3000 miles away from their headquarters in Rochester NY to ‘allow’ it creative freedom. This begs the question of how much Xerox really wanted to do anything with their intellectual property.

3. Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 by the powerplays of senior management finding him too obsessive and disruptive. They were intent on turning Apple into a ‘sensible’ company. Earlier Jobs had shown his leadership and an admirable instinct for grasping the key point in asking John Sculley, then President at Pepsi, ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?’ The markets, though, backed Sculley: Apple shares went up 7 per cent on the news of Jobs’s departure, even if Nolan Bushnell of Atari presciently asked Time readers: ‘Where is Apple’s inspiration going to come from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new brand of Pepsi?’ (p. 217).

4. The Pixar success story was another good Jobs pick of some very talented people who eventually found they could integrate their technology skills with an appeal – without sentiment or kitsch – to our shared humanity. Jobs invested in them when the animation was just a hobby – at the time they were trying to sell image rendering software. Note that, a bit like Xerox, the competing Disney corporate culture under CEO Michael Eisner had been so inimical to creativity (‘rapacious, soul-less’ – Roy E. Disney) that they had had no major box office successes for 10 years. 2006 saw a de facto reverse creative takeover by Pixar of Disney, with Pixar personnel now holding the key creative positions and (incidentally) Jobs becoming the single largest Disney shareholder (7 per cent of a current $37 billion valuation). The longest index subentries (under the main entry for Jobs) in Isaacson’s book are for ‘controlling personality of’ and ‘offensive behaviour of’, but with Pixar Jobs also clearly backed and continued to back, even under severe financial pressure, other people’s creative skills when conventional corporate wisdom would say bail out.

8/10. Compare this with the publisher's first attempt above and note the improvements in every way. Even though the 'iSteve' cover uses Apple's house typeface Myriad, the Helvetica here recalls the most recent devices themselves. The qualities of simplicity, whiteness and directness have almost become defining properties of Apple itself and here strongly impute Apple ownership. This is odd, because the book is fully independently written and published. The only false note is the rather weak use of 'by' in the title/author line. The Svengali-like image, compared to the type, is borderline too powerful.

5. By 2001 some people had already written music compilation software and made digital music players; the iPod was comparatively late into the market. But only Apple understood that their device needed to go beyond consumers’ fear of change by being simple, cool and elegant. This was not market-researched – Jobs didn’t believe in it. Note the real product development thinking behind what Jobs said about the iPod’s victory over Microsoft’s rival offering Zune: ‘The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out’ (p. 407). In a commercial world where pseudo-passion disguising worship of money is now the norm (as I write, the buffoon Alan Sugar – ennobled in the UK for his cheesy parody of hi-tech entrepreneurship – is on the TV), Jobs’s pride in his products exalts us by reflection as buyers. Note too that hiving off the complexity of downloading/making playlists onto the bigger screen of the computer made the Apple integration gestalt start to pay off: in a virtuous cycle Apple consumer products were driving sales of Apple computers. And by controlling the route to market and return of money (Marx’s ‘means of distribution and exchange’) shortly afterwards via iTunes, Apple were early, trusted and dominant players in e-commerce, staking out an enormously valuable piece of real e-estate. But what about the competition? Sony had everything they needed to blow Apple away: a history of excellent consumer electronics product design, including the precursive Walkman; they were also early adopters of a vertically integrated product strategy, including the large-scale acquisition of rights to music (including Jobs’s beloved Dylan) and video content. Isaacson: ‘But because each division tried to protect its own interests, the company as a whole never got its act together to produce an end-to-end service’ (p. 400).

6. The idea of Apple stores appears to have first seen the light of day around the end of 1982 in a cheery memo by John Sculley: ‘Invest in in-store merchandizing that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to enrich their life!’ (p. 150, Sculley’s underlining). At the time the first store opened in Virginia in May 2001, Apple’s former chief financial officer Joseph Graziano offered Business Week readers a classic quote about the clash of creativity with mean-spirited-control-freakery-pretending-to-be-sensible: ‘Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers’ (p. 374). Yet as Jobs was to say in 2010, the Fifth Avenue New York store ‘grosses more per square foot than any store in the world’ (p. 376). In terms of the underlying Apple success formula, Gateway had previously tried selling its PCs in malls, with disastrous consequences. Apple’s desperately marginal market share at the time (under 3 per cent) seems to have driven a particularly bold hybrid strategy integrating education/outreach with retail. Hence near the entrance the shops act as a virtual playground or nursery school, and deeper inside (I am grateful to my father-in-law Clive Boyce for this suggestion) more like a church; the Genius Bar is an altar, complete with priests watching over (as Richard Brautigan didn’t quite say) – with loving grace – the machines.

Preparing for communion: the technological priesthood in the Apple Store, Cambridge UK. Note the backlit images of products are like stained glass windows. I really have no complaint about this, but Apple company policy is not to permit photography in their shops. It is perfectly reasonable that they should wish to promulgate only the images that are the most idiomatically appropriate to their medium and which reinforce Apple's severe uncluttered Zen-like visual style. 250,000 RGB pixels are not enough for the visually messy plurality of humanity, whereas when we are there in the shops our sensorium tells us they feel sterile and grey unless people are all around. The Apple press office have kindly replied and said that images are not available; to fill the gap I offer this one, but I apologize for withholding the source of this image.

 

7. The iPhone is another repetition of what is by now clearly visible as the formula: copy the idea, connect it up with something usually separate, make it really work, make it simple to understand and beautiful to use. Also:

• Have the courage to back what you think is right; have more courage to pick yourself up again after you were wrong. The contrast with the cowardice of competing corporate managers covering their backs by playing it safe – what could be more dangerous than that? – comes out in this book again and again.
• Have the intelligence and insight to understand something that is worth having the courage to defend; in Jobs’s case he had a vision of integration and symbolic expressiveness that is a good deal more than a Bauhausian design-led ‘form follows function’ mantra. Apple’s products reflect the psychic and bodily fullness of our humanity. What does this mean? Truly good things reach, with generosity and respect, our curiosity, our childlike sense of wonder and pleasure of being-in-the-world. Fear, laziness and fallibility are human responses too and deserve corporate responses that are not secretly contemptuous. We all know in a thousand ways what companies really think of us. Yes, Bill Gates made billions of dollars by making things that were intentionally no more than pragmatic, but where now is Microsoft’s sustainable business idea? It will be fascinating to see if Google have a more powerful and creatively generative commercial relation to the zeitgeist. Perhaps Jobs’s business model was the first to truly understand (and, importantly, to commodify) our world of increasingly instantaneous information integration.

People at the virtual playground end of the Apple Store, Cambridge UK. See what I mean about people as visual clutter? Please don't misunderstand, I am only talking about people *in pictures*. (My photo, taken with approval outside the shop)

On the deficit side of the ledger, the foul-mouthed Jobs was clearly no saint, and it becomes increasingly clear that the lock-in to Apple (why can’t we change the battery in our iPhone?) is also a kind of possessiveness that could push us away.

The future? The book gives us a big hint at an Apple television, which would fit the formula very well. The increasing complexity of our user experience of television (when linked to the web) – just like music downloads 10 years ago – is a classic opportunity for Apple. My VirginMedia Tivo box, for example, works well enough as a machine, but the human interface is poorly considered. An Apple TV would also connect seamlessly (two key Apple words) with iTunes online selling and distribution of video content. The iMac design is already a television by another name without a purpose-designed user interface, and the high screen resolution of the iPad 3 is a bravura display of what Apple can do.

In a tilt at some bigger windmills Jobs pitched heavy-duty changes in the US education system – based on iPads of course – to Obama. Only Jobs had enough personal kudos to take this on; new CEO Tim Cook will wisely leave this alone. As for the breakup of monocausal/departmentalized diagnoses and treatments in the health sector, we may just have to wait until the New Jerusalem.

Afterword

Two very minor gripes about an otherwise fascinating and inspiring book:

1. Isaacson talks too much about Jobs’s ‘reality distortion field’. I am pretty sure most people married for more than 10 years would say their spouse distorts reality – we all do it, and not knowing about our distortion is the distortion. The difference with Jobs is that he had the power to make people comply with his ‘vision’ (if we like it) or ‘obsessions’ (if we don’t). He would fire them if they didn’t. Not many people get a book written about them; Isaacson’s book is another distortion field that continues Jobs’s distortions of reality anyway – as does this post.

2. The index entry (p. 612) for Jonathan Ive, English-born visionary designer afforded uniquely privileged status and power by Jobs, refers to his nickname (actually ‘Jony’) as ‘Sony’. I enjoyed this well-meaning but embarrassing proofreader’s mistake very much – I’ve done a couple like this in the past. But I’ve mentioned it here just to see if the magic of social media and search really does get through to the people who have the power to change these things.

16 things about white space

1. White space is the name typesetters, typographers and type designers – artists of the black – give to a presence where we might expect an absence. We can, if we choose, see a shape where the mark has not been made. Some printmakers can be finely attuned to these ambiguities because they work in negative, i.e. in wood engraving, linocut or wood block printing their work cuts away the areas that don’t print.

2. Artists and art critics sometimes refer to it as negative space, or figure–ground reversal. Some artists help us see that we don’t usually notice we impose sense on what we see:

M. C. Escher, Day and Night (1938). Image from http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=54213&image=13362&c=ggescher

Bridget Riley, Movement in Squares (1961). Not an illusion, but perhaps a play on and reference to printing by offset lithography? Image from Wikimedia Commons

3. In written language white space is the most important, subtle and invisible kind of punctuation or punctus: a point, a division of multiplicity, a something out of everything. Just in case you are not convinced, here is the same sentence again without it: Whitespaceisthemostimportant,subtleandinvisiblekindofpunctuationorpunctus:apoint,
adivisionofmultiplicity,asomethingoutofeverything.

Claude Shannon (1916–2001)

4. The extraordinary Claude Shannon was the inventor of information theory in the 1940s. It is a highly mathematical analytical methodology that fascinatingly defines communication as negative entropy: noise is our default expectation of the universe, whereas the improbability of signal is its guarantor of meaning. Note the metaphor of ‘white’ for undifferentiated, unpitched noise, as if meaning and sense are black. The statistical analysis in his 1951 ‘article “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English” proved that treating white space as the 27th letter of the alphabet actually lowers uncertainty in written language, providing a clear quantifiable link between cultural practice and probabilistic cognition’ (Wikipedia).

5. In letterpress printing, a space was a piece of typefounder’s metal, containing lead. Leading (pronounced ledding) still survives in the digital age as the typesetting term for space in between lines of type. Some space between lines helps the eye pick out the start of the new line below. Too little looks mean, too much looks lazy or empty.

6. End-of-line space is a micropause that helps us take in the meaning. We see lines on the web that are too long and give us indigestion. Lines that are too short are not enough of a mouthful. A typical book has 10,000 lines in it, so these things make a difference.

7. Typesetters work hard to use space to make subtle and expressive connections between units of meaning. In other words, things make sense on their own, but connections between things mean something else. In very fine typography we might used a thin space each side of a colon in a ratio: 20:80 rule. There might be a hair space between pairs of quotation marks (‘“”’). There should be a non-breaking space between T., S. and Eliot because it is meaningless to split any of these characters on different lines, ditto Henry and VIII. We might put a non-breaking fixed word space between the points of an ellipsis (. . .) because the ellipsis character is too mean-looking (…) and it looks silly to see a point on one line and two on the next. We might add a zero-width discretionary space to a long URL so it does not hyphenate at the end of a line.

8. All these features are in HTML. Does anybody use them? If not, why not? Is there a generalizable point why they don’t? My points in this blog generally are not about technology itself but the human use of it. I am hoping that in the future innate human pride in our work will make these features – by repetition and the accumulation of tradition – better used.

9. White spaces in books run (in ascending order): hair, thin, word, en (‘nut’), em (‘mutton’), paragraph, chapter, part, end-of-book. An en space is the width of capital N, an em ditto M. In mediaeval texts it was more common to run one paragraph after another, separated by a pilcrow ¶. The ‘return’ (how old-fashioned a mechanical metaphor is that?) character in Word uses the pilcrow symbol but mistakenly puts it at the paragraph end: the pilcrow was originally the ¢ abbreviated from capitulum, chapter, and came at the beginning.

10. The paragraph indent space was formerly the space left for a decorative capital to be printed in a second colour. It saves a lot of space compared with typists’ ‘double paragraph returns’, which always seem to me like wedges between blocks of meaning. Most paragraphs in a story or discussion should be more closely related.

11. In a book on paper (a codex) the page space following a part (section) blank page is always a verso (left-hand page). The recto is the page considered the most emphatic, so the title page and part headings are always rectos (right-hand pages). The prelims (front matter) in a well laid-out book will balance the need to save space with the pleasures of the elegant expression, recto or verso, of the relative interest or importance of the content.

12. Traditional ‘justified’ book setting uses variable word spaces to give a straight right-hand edge to the text block. The skill is to balance the fewest number of end-of-line hyphens against the least variation in word spaces. Paragraphs that are too gappy create ugly ‘rivers’ of vertical white space which are distracting: we read them and not the words. I have already moaned in a previous post about current grisly word spacing in the Kindle, which I am nudging Amazon (via the secret pathways of social media) to fix.

13. This is the logo of a large courier/delivery company. It is doing a great job, adding value and generating good publicity. You have probably seen this hundreds of times and perhaps not noticed until now the strong white arrow between the E and the x:

If you have not seen this before, I apologize for changing the way you will see these vans in the future. The ambiguities of white space have a curiously invasive effect on our minds.

14. The Japanese word ma ‘suggests interval. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision. Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the person who experiences these elements’ (Wikipedia).

15. According to Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (c. fifth century BC), eleventh chapter,

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,
but the empty space between them
is the essence of the wheel.
Pots are formed from clay,
but the empty space between it
is the essence of the pot.
Walls with windows and doors form the house,
but the empty space within it
is the essence of the house.

16. I wonder if Rachel Whiteread’s unforgettable House was a response to the last three lines. Concrete is an unusually broad and physical interpretation of the idea of white space, but why not? Yet House now exists only in memories and media traces. This makes it much more expressive and resonant, don’t you think?

Rachel Whiteread, House (1993), Grove Road, London E3. The artist had concrete poured into a Victorian house that was being demolished. Image from http://www.image-identity.eu/artists_images_folder/england/rachel-whiteread