i've recently started a new project in Canada's national capitol, Ottawa.  i've had a long fascination with Ottawa because it is the home of some of Canada's most historic and important institutions - Parliament, the Supreme Court and the National Gallery of Canada to name just a few.  i used to watch the House of Commons Question Period on public television and felt that i could directly observe (if not quite participate in) the process of democracy shaping my world.

these days i have quite a different feeling than i did twenty-some years ago.  each week that i've been here, i would walk down Wellington Street past Parliament and the Supreme Court and the National Archives and wonder how the world got this way. debates about constitutional reform seem like a thing of history.  discussions about human rights and legal ethics are things that we engage in regarding other countries, but there appears to be so little attention paid to these matters here (at least in the popular press).  maybe all of the really hard questions have been dealt with and we Canadians are just doing our best to keep our heads above water while the globe's economic and political structures pitch and sway with dervish-like abandon. 

i really don't mean for this to seem disdainful or contemptuous.  Canadians are fiercely proud of their incomparable good fortune - we have an abundance of everything that is scarce in the rest of the world combined with a degree of safety and security that is virtually unprecedented in the history of the world.  i know that i am fiercely proud of this state of affairs - even as i worry that we are not as contemplative or vigilant a nation as i feel that we used to be.  

however, my ruminations do make me feel that it is important to speak up against something like SOPA.  SOPA has the power to destabilize the very internet - the thing that pays my salary and gives me freedom to access information in a way that i can directly control.  the internet has broken my dependence on mass media for ideas and information, and has empowered me to draw my own conclusions on what the world is and where it is heading by allowing me to find a contemplative and vigilant community that cares about issues of concern, rather than the biased concerns of populist media conglomerates susceptible to corporate interests.  while SOPA is not directly about quashing the democratic voice of the people of the world, it has the power to censure and constrain it, and that is why i think that it is harmful.  the thin edge of the wedge.  the edge of the slippery slope.   

there are altogether too many fronts on which our modern society is on the brink.  therefore, i feel that it is not too much trouble for me to participate in what might be the largest online protest in the history of online to voice my concern.  i hope that during this week, you will think about this issue and do what you can to express your concern in what way you can as well.

thanks for your attention.  

- g

in preparations for (yet another) cross-country move, i was at my parents' house rearranging some stuff i had there for storage. most of the stuff was college textbooks and other heavy items that i didn't want to move before. the problem with books is that they are so heavy, and unless you are constantly rereading them, you can exert an awful lot of effort and cost trucking them back and forth with you everywhere you go. even moving within the same city, a single box of books can easily weigh 40kg and piss you off by the tenth or twentieth box. that is why i came up with the moving rule of buying digital versions of whatever book i needed from hereonin.

but then i found my box of records from my childhood in the garage. the albums and singles had been lingering in the garage for well over a decade, continuously visited by rain and snow and thaw and cold and mold and mice. i brought the box to my apartment and surveyed the damage. the cardboard of most of the covers had become warped and soiled for the most part, but the vinyl seems to be fine. looking over the curious and antiquated media brought back all kinds of memories and recollections from my past for which i was frankly unprepared.

i have 46.2 days worth of continuous music in my iTunes library. 13,441 items which would fit on approximately 1,344 albums. but the emotional impact of leafing through that collection, compared to the 40 - 50 albums in my crusty cardboard box, was a fraction of that amount. even with coverflow. so i wonder what young people who grew up with purely digital media will have to look forward to 20 - 30 years from now. will they scroll through a window of files in a directory and think, "wow, i remember when i listened to these downloads over and over on my iPod nano" and smile inside?

to me, the issue is not one of audio quality or convenience or availability, but of quality of experience. there is something inherently ritualistic about pulling out a great big 12" square record album, looking at the big high-definition printed cover art/photography, reading the cleverly designed liner notes, placing the disc on the turntable and setting the needle to the record that is lost in the replacement task of double-clicking a file or a song title in a playlist.

or how about movies? i used to go to the cinema all the time, as recently as a few years ago. now, i can almost barely be bothered to go and see the climax of the Harry Potter series on the big screen. again, the ritual of taking the bus to the theatre, buying a ticket, getting a bag of popcorn, and struggling to find the best available seat, has been replaced by shlumping onto the couch and renting "Hanna" online from iTunes on demand. I can stop the film, go to the bathroom, write and email, make dinner, go to work, and come back to the film, totally breaking its demand for the suspension of disbelief. how can that possibly do justice to the artist's vision?

the same goes for books. i used to revere books and care about them dearly, personalizing them ever so carefully with annotations and dogears only where absolutely necessary or critical - because books, unlike eBooks, have no "undo" feature, and a page once folded, can never be made smooth again. so how is it that i've come full circle and sold and abandoned so many cherished books in favour of their back-lit imposters?

i even have digital versions of my entire "Sandman" comic book collection, now sitting in the dank crawlspace between my parents' main floor and basement. i only read "Wired" magazine on my iPad, although i used to buy every issue from the very first issue that was ever printed religiously. i haven't had a newspaper subscription since the internet began.

i've come to enjoy the consumption of every type of medium digitally - i depend on it with my lifestyle and workload. but now that i have given myself completely to the digital age, i have to look back and wonder just what the heck i've been reading/listening to/watching/loving in that entire time. it's a completely unfathomable mystery to me now, because all i can see is a stack of perpetually inadequate storage devices on my desk that hold the three terabytes of data that represents my life for the past 15 years.

i need a better way to appreciate and reminisce about the things i've experienced than what the current digital experience allows me. maybe Facebook timeline will help with that - LOL!

- g

ps.  i fear that this post indicates the completion of my transformation into an emo-hipster.  sigh.

today at Facebook's F8 developers conference, Mark Zuckerberg made one of the smartest plays with Facebook since adding the Like button to everything on the web - he announced Timeline. Timeline allows Facebook users to view their Facebook contributions from the beginning of their accounts, and earlier, on a clever and attractive timeline - like a patchwork autobiography. Timeline isn't an amazingly novel idea (i mean, even i had the idea a year ago) but it is one that i truly believe can add at least another 2 - 5 years to social networking's reign as a supreme technology and i will explain why.

this summer saw reports of declines in use in social networking sites with the term "Facebook fatigue" being coined and endorsed by CNN. this is pretty understandable. apart from sharing photos of pets and newborns, and less noble pursuits like stalking and snooping on friends or friends-of-friends, the novelty of Facebook as a social sharing medium has grown a little thin. we can only poke a friend so many times before it gets old. Facebook's most valuable commercial enterprise apart from ads is online gaming, which again while entertaining, offers no substantive value to the end user. the only other real value Facebook has is allowing friends to share content that they've liked on other sites with other friends, but there are so many vehicles to achieve the same thing, Facebook hardly has much of an edge on that (apart from its ever-increasing user base). so how can Facebook be made relevant and valuable to users after they graduate high school/depart university, etc.?

Facebook has discovered that the information that we Facebook users have been loading it full of over the past years has personal, historical value to its users. i stopped keeping a diary when i turned 15, and now that i am… older than 15, i am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the things that i've been doing and have done. So when i get the opportunity to look back at the past 3-4 years that i've spent injecting Facebook with status updates, wall photos, relationship updates, random profanity, and other sundry posts and messages, i find that i've got for myself a pretty sweet little autobiography that i can use with to-the-second certainty to identify exactly what i was doing/thinking/eating/drinking/liking at that point when i was updating Facebook. it's as if all of those fleeting and extemporaneous thoughts that I had in-the-moment to be released and forgotten ever after, were gathered up and marvelled at as a mosaic-tiled narrative.

"ok - so what?" you are probably thinking to yourself. who cares that my Facebook content is now ordered chronologically? well, for me anyway, and apparently the geers at Facebook agree, it makes Facebook a valuable tool to ME as opposed to my network and i can now choose to contribute to it because i want to extend the narrative that i have been creating for the past four years and improve its quality and fidelity, especially now that the tool is much better designed to do it. i am no longer motivated to update my status because i want my community to be aware of what i am doing - i am motivated to update my status because i want FUTURE ME, of my future wife, or future children or whoever to be aware of what i WAS DOING at this point in history.

and Facebook went one very clever step farther. with its Open Graph API, launch partners are able to add their apps to the timeline from day one, so that your Spotify data can feed a part of the history, or what you were watching on Netflix. Zuckerberg demonstrated integration with Nike Plus, which i have also been using forever - and having that data integrated makes Timeline even more authoritative. the potential is really vast.

obviously, there are significant challenges to be faced by Facebook Timeline. people are already concerned with how much control they have over their private information and the permissions they can give to others to view their content. Timeline seems to be a way of getting users to pour even MORE personal information than they would normally place on Facebook - even going so far as to prompt users to add photos, videos, and notes about their own birth, or other significant life events. i'm not sure how much even i like that idea, and i love the idea of Timeline tremendously.

privacy and security concerns notwithstanding, evolving social networking and sharing into a personal micro-history generator is simply brilliant. so many of the young generation's best moments have already been captured online in social sites so when they turn on Timeline, their autobiographies will be so much more robust than my generation's, and so much more meaningful. i have a hard time believing that any of us will be able to see the reflection of our personal histories presented in a slick new interface and quickly turn away from it… at least not without thinking twice.

- g

on my first full day back, i went back to the neighbourhood where i lived between the ages of 10-18, capilano, to see how things had changed while i was gone. it was pretty dismaying. the mall where I used to go for our weekly shopping was virtually abandoned with only a handful of tenants and dozens of empty, locked shops. there were two liquor stores, a Wal-mart and a Winners. the old municipal library where i would go on weekends to read Superman and Charlie Brown anthologies was gone. also gone were the independent butchers and art shops that i remember visiting in my youth.

i went to a KFC to have a snack before heading back to the apartment, and i overheard the familiar sounds of Edmonton-conversations... fringey counter-culture punks repeating stories of being wrongfully assaulted by the cops and waiting for their out-of-court settlement paydays. what was new were the stories of roving gangs of Somalis and other groups who had all come here during the boom, and with the boom at low ebb, they've turned to rather disorganized crime. everyone had stories of their iPods stolen, being mugged for their wallets, jacking somebody's iPhone... curious that low-life's don't seem to feel inclined to tell stories of BlackBerry-related crimes.

what was most strange to me was how familiar all of this really was. i've had these people as friends at various points in my life... why wouldn't i? this was(is) what people in Edmonton were(are) like. here, no one cares or discriminates if you have an accent or not, if your educated or not, wealthy or poor, clean or dirty, sober or stoned, well-spoken or gutter-talking. and that's when it hit me. i had felt so sorry for myself to have to be surrounded by such wretched small-life people, but it dawned on me that i was the one who had become small. i had become small-minded about people and toronto helped me with that.

part of my problem is that i didn't realize how insulated i had become in my little toronto bubble, probably because i had done such a great job of surrounding myself with my very favourite things. i had always been harshly critical of select people in toronto for being closed-minded and judgmental (well, where hedonism wasn't involved), so it has been hard for me to face just how much of that had rubbed off onto me. here i am, strolling around a city where, in spite of growing up here, i am basically a stranger, but full of prejudice and disdain for people i've never even seen before. why? because edmontonians don't all wear fashion labels or stay in perfect physical condition, or use reusable shopping bags, or have not quit smoking yet. because they aren't torontonian? i'm not torontonian!!!

this has been a hard transition... much much harder that i had anticipated. it's also hard to see the value of something that you are doing where the immediate costs are so high, the rate of change is so high, and the benefit is something so intangible like future moments with your family. i've spent hours crying, laughing out loud, gritting my teeth, shouting at the road, panicking over my decision, and i am sure that a more mature and settled person would just go with the fact that they had moved and live with it. but i, being the emotional nuclear reaction that i am, am having a hard time just going with it. i'll figure it out. i usually do. but it will take time.

i'll post some stories about the drive across the country as soon as i can. it was an amazing trip.

- g

there is a strange tension in america today.  on the one hand, america is on a winning streak, as evidenced by record-breaking apple share prices and the fascination that we north americans feel watching a superstar like charlie sheen let it all hang out the way he has.  he is living the american dream - banging seven gram rocks and porn stars and generally carrying on the way that we imagine that we all might if all moral and ethical constraints were removed. similarly, buying into the apple lifestyle has made me incredibly oblivious to technology innovation in general because i know - not believe, but know - that whatever modern lifestyle challenge i might have (be it consuming mass media or social networks, watching tv or movies, listening to music or podcasts, or even going for a 10k run), apple has already figured it out and there will be a product announcement in the next few weeks that will have me salivating over the next device they release that will solve that challenge.

but on the other hand, i've been rereading plato's republic, in which the challenge goes out to socrates - why should we be righteous when there seems to be so much reward in being unjust?  charlie sheen seems to epitomize the counter-argument to living a righteous life with his flagrant sinning and carrying on, and his stock has never been higher.  buying the latest apple gadget promises to solve all of the most altruistic of my needs - facetimeing my baby's first steps or video-chatting with a loved one wirelessly from across the globe.  why should i care if a city of chinese workers slaves over this production line with tragic suicide rates and concurrently threatens to absorb through this toil all of the globe's monetary wealth?  it's just a product that i can get at the cool apple store. right?  so why live a righteous life when all the consumeristic messages tell me otherwise?

the countervailing argument comes from a documentary that i watched the other evening called "waiting for 'superman'" that deals with the challenges in the american education system where tenured teachers are not held accountable for their performance and children are pushed through a broken education system thinking that they are all charlie sheens and lindsay lohans and generally are owed a rock-star existence that they have not earned.  the vast majority of young americans are unprepared for the reality of an adult life in a global economy where basic skills like math and language and imagination are pre-requisites, but they feel, more than any other nation on the planet, that that is their birthright.  

we all live on borrowed time.  we all live in some kind of society and owe an obligation to its success and health.  a society of charlie sheens and lindsay lohans will last for approximately 48 hours and then collapse into a black hole of irrelevance.  that's because that kind of selfishness is meaningless to everyone except the main participant.  we like charlie because his dad was awesome, and for about 30 seconds, we might like to have his life.  but in the end, his sybaritic life is vacant and lacking value and his actions embarrass a real human's sense of self and dignity.

wow - that was an incredibly preachy post.  i'm pretty sure that the next one that will deal with my feelings about the unbelievable tragedies that are slamming the country of japan will be less difficult (i.e. more fun) to read.

- g