The human race on a key ring

The MIT device reminds me of the character in Children of Men who is deeply absorbed in whatever futuristic device he is manipulating while completely oblivious to the people and conversation around him. I sometimes worry we will become a nation of people who are always focused on some other place or conversation without giving our attention to the here and now.

Great column, Mr. Ebert. As I grow older (I'm about to turn 24) the importance of being able to relate to another person and understand them (particularly as a filmmaker) only becomes more important.

A friend tried to "follow" me on Twitter the other day, and I was confused because I forgot I even had a twitter account. I set one up a year ago that I never used, and I was kind of disturbed that my friend of years found me on the internet and now wants to see updates on my life through messages I type on the internet. I just can't understand it. Updating a twitter account with status reports about my day seems self-absorbed and exhausting. Actually relating to my friend informs me and challenges me.

Of course, my friend has a problem relating to others and is a clinical narcissist, but I digress. Excellent column. You're giving yourself to people in a very sincere way that only someone who perceives clearly their own personality and its features to be able to communicate it to others. Thank you.

I recently saw a video where Francis Ford Coppola discussed film preservation, and he said something to the effect that technology can do wonderful things (including preserving film). However, I believe we are already becoming slaves to technology and we are serving it instead of the other way around.

A correction: Sir Arthur's friend was named Bill Temple. They were roommates for many years even after Bill got married (and apparently, Temple's wife had to play the role of Felix to two Oscars). Four-Sided Triangle was into a movie in 1952, and it was directed by Terence Fisher, much more famous for his later Hammer horror films.

The evolution of human communication is one of my main interests. many linguists and cognitive scientists believe that linguistic and symbolic communication did indeed evolve as means of communicating complex mental representations, but it is widely debated as to whether or not one preceded the other or if they evolved in tandem. One of the most interesting scenarios I came across-and which has much evidence in its favor-is that we evolved the capacity for sign language first, which later led to our ability for spoken language and complex verbal communication.

Ebert: I'll correct that. I think Sir Arthur misrememebered it.

Love your web site.

I'm currently working on my masters thesis in English, and my interest lies in exactly what you are addressing here; however, I'm focusing on the post-process theory of ecocomposition, or writing taking place in the digital world, and how these new digital "places" can impact writing instruction.

I was wondering how this forum has changed the way you write. Does interacting with an audience directly, through messages and adaptations to your original essay, change the ways you view writing? Is there such thing as a "final" product anymore? You also include audio and video posts in your blogs - how do they affect your message?

I'm also interested in how our thoughts are molded by they ways in which we can express them. Do people who text and twitter lose the ability to express themselves in longer, more complex formats, or do they gain better abilities to distill their thoughts into concise snippets where word choice is of utmost importance? Do these formats transform us, or do we transform them?

Ebert: Because much of my one-on-one communication is by written notes, I save time by making them as brief as possible. Then when I write reviews or blog entries, I let fly.

Here's a blog I wrote about that:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/10/i_think_im_musing_my_mind.html

Much of this depends upon the mind and the brain being separate, which I am still not convinced of (granted, I also simply may not understand it).

The idea of cloning, and then mind-copy-transference would also seem to be problematic -- or at least not solve the selfish problem of death -- in that the original you would still die, and the clone of you, complete with your thoughts, would carry on. Good for the clone, not so good for you.

This reminds me of a theory I heard once or twice about how the transporter system works in the "Star Trek" mythology. Apparently, when you de-materialize on one of the transporter, your body (all of it, of course, down to the cell), is broken down. It is then briefly copied, stored, and then used to re-materialize you at the other end. So, basically, you've been killed, and a copy of you created to carry on as normal (and the copy *would* think it was normal. It would think it was you). But then this would mean that you would actually die every time you get transported, so a version of you *is* ending.

Interesting.

May I be the first to say "AGGGHH"!

A frightening thought to say the least.
I see why you are often regarded as one of the best critics of science fiction, and still find yourself among its fans, Mr. Ebert.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who's felt that this is one step too far. I take a different tack, though, I feel like putting these minuscule thoughts out for friends and hangers on to read is dividing one's life up into too many discreet packages for sending away.

I do text people, but I tend to do it either to contact my significant other, ask about a price for something I have an eye on to see if it's worth buying, or say hello to someone I haven't said hello to in a while. I don't understand the habitual texting of moments. I tend to write things down in a journal when I've had some time to filter out the mundane.

I'm curious from an anthropological perspective about what people are thinking about at any given moment, but tweets feel so vacant to me that I just hope someone else bothers to assemble all of these tweets into some useful information on our beliefs and habits. I'm worried, though, that I'll be disappointed by any such outcome.

As far as the community sites in general, I don't want anyone from my past to hop up and say hello to me. I'd prefer to filter my input in some way or another to prevent overload, and bad memories. I use pseudonyms (and for the heck of it I'll use one now), and I try to use different ones for different sites.

There is something transhumanist about the idea that we are sort of disassociated with ourselves, in some sort of halfway point between physical and mental (not the pituitary, unless you're into Descartes), but I feel less alone in a silent bus than I do in a bus where everyone has earbuds squished into their ear canals and are texting others, effectively eliminating two of the major senses. What few chances you have to meet someone and talk with them, even if it's just a stranger and about the weather, seem less and less likely.

I think some of my most valuable experiences have been things that are OUTSIDE of my usual well-worn trails. I am just a human being, fallible, and not omniscient. I find value in the random encounter, the accident, that jolts me out of my complacency and belief that I know what's best for me. If I took upon these extra accoutrements I think I'd be much more likely to miss out on something that might help me examine my life from a new perspective.

I love the sort of questions you have about human copies. I've thought about these things and have a few science fictiony ideas, but don't want to spill them just yet :) If you want to know about them or talk about this further, Roger, email me-- but anyway, despite the horror of one's own soul in a sense becoming ubiquitous, I can't help but love the idea of my mind continuing to live and grow.

I just hope I'd be doing more than twittering "yep, I still exist."

Ebert: "Transhumanist." I like that word. Or maybe subtranshumanist. I think it's happening, but I don't think it's progress. I love to sit down quietly and read.

i hear you loud and clear.
how does the Century of the Selfish Mind fit in with the Age of Credulity?
is there any hope for the movies? for people to really care about other people, other characters, other places? to watch their stories, their lives, their situations? to empathize? or are we all too worried about how it'll make us look, CARING about something too much? like a movie? or ANYTHING?

I'm 16, i try to show kids my age my favorite movies. i think they should care, should be moved, should be angry, should be SOMETHING when watching the struggles and triumphs and failures of Guido Anselmi and Elisia Huberman and Fanny and Alexander and Antoine Doinel and Barry Egan and Ed Tom Bell and Raimunda and all the others. but they just text... they say they "don't get it" and want to go check their facebooks.

is there anything i can do?

Ebert: Not much you can do to change people by persuasion. Set an example? And make a few new friends? (Not by finding them on facebook.)

Your idea of the clone farm is one I've thought a lot about myself. When I had my kidney transplant in my teens, I often wondered if a similar process could happen with a brain. If somehow my body died out, I could get a second chance in a brand new one to get the life I felt I deserved. Your memory chip example seems like it has a real possibly of actually happening. Yet, I realized that if something like this was possible, it would present absolutely no comfort to me.

Funnily enough, the situation reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Sixth Day. If you remember, every time one of the bad guys died, a clone would be brought back with all of the person's memories right up till the moment they died. It was essentially, the exact same person in every way. At the same time though, it isn't. Though there are two Arnold s running around, one Arnold isn't living through the other or vice versa, they are living separately.

As much as we would integrate ourselves into machines, we are still heavily based in our own living, physical matter. Even if the clone is the same, it is still separate. It doesn't have my actual brain matter. When my brain dies, I am dead.

As with all things, it comes down to a person's definition. What does one consider an identity, or immortality. If its just living on through genes, then nature as already supplied us with a far better, simpler, and more pleasurable way of doing that. If it's just through memories, then downloading them into a computer maybe comforting to those people. It wouldn't be for me.

Ebert: I would just as soon die than live on in a chip. Think about that. What if you were conscious in there? Edgar Allen Poe's "The Premature Burial" is child's play.

I really enjoyed this essay. So eloquent it is in expressing just how these new advances affect our society, culture, and individuality.

I was thinking about A.C. Clarke just today, the story he tells in Colours of Infinity about Faraday presenting electricity to the king who asks what good it is. "Someday you will tax it!"

He also made up a story about a bunch of monks who believed God wants us to name him by all his names, so they made a computer to do it. At the end of the story the computer finishes, and all the stars begin going out.

But I hear by the year 2010 there will be 8 billion humans. Wasn't it 6 billion just a few years ago? Seems Dawkins is still correct about those genes.

That customized speech synthesizer sounds great. Hopefully soon medicine will inject a few stem cells into you and you will regrow your own whatever is needed!

Twitter, like every other medium, has become a ground for advertising. Is there anything that is impossible to advertise on?

Ebert: In a word, no. Have you ever visited a nation without highway billboards? There is a world back there.

I look forward to the voice synthesizer based on your own voice. You were born in Urbana, and have enthusiastically embraced Chicago as your home, for your entire adult life. I know you love England (and so do I), but, to hear you speak with a British accent, is just *wrong*.

Ours is a history in the process of acceleration.

On the subject of Clarke and HAL, I'd recently rediscovered some of Stanley Kubrick's quotations regarding 2001 and his view of spirituality and alien intelligence.

"When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans."

i have a friend in west palm beach who also has cerebral palsy. he is the CFO of his fathers company; he does all his business by email; none of his employees know he's disabled

we've been friends for 4 years. we've had countless deep conversations. i could ride the 80 miles to see him in person but..............

he wouldn't be able to understand my voice and vice versa. maybe we'd stare at each other;

so... for us Cyberspace is our place to be..us

Ebert: I read you.

I understand how you feel, Roger. I find that the more technology has advanced the more it seems to increase the feeling of a virtual segregation. Instead of interacting with the world at large, we now have selective filters that allow us to only interact with like minded individuals or to just shield us from the world altogether. The machine created by MIT, could turn that into a haunting reality, essentially eliminating interactions with people who are not "like us". However, the ipod started this trend of people shutting out the outside world deemed not worthy to interact with. Although it is important to find like minded people, it is also important to interact with people with different opinions to provide a broader worldview. The trend now is "If you can't change the people around you, then change the people around you". At 24, I am already seeing my generation choosing not to interact with their immediate surroundings and create their own perceptions of reality. The doors of perception are closing fast.
Jay Patel
Orlando, FL

Ebert: Thoreau said, "Read not the Times, read the Eternities." They don't even read the Times.

"During President Obama's recent address to a joint session of Congress, a good many members of his audience could be observed twittering. This is as childish as throwing paper airplanes in class."

Would you find it childish if some Congress members had been taking notes while Obama was speaking? I see twittering as nothing different than taking notes (and making them available to your friends/audience as soon as you take them).

Just food for thought.

Ebert: Would a professor view it that way during one of his lectures?

I just got on Facebook, or at least I've just begun using it. I've decided that I don't like it. I'd only opened an account to find an old friend of mine, and then a few months ago someone "friended" me and then his friends friended me and so on.

At first I liked it, but then I realized that I was only using it to fabricate an alternative personality for myself for people that I never see. I went to a Baptist church school, and most of my "friends" are former classmates. Most of them still hold the same beliefs while I've become a left-wing evolutionist Catholic. So, when I created my profile I did it with those life changes in mind; you know, just so they would know I was different from them.

Within a week an old teacher was wondering where God was in my life. I de-friended her rather than beginning an argument.

I think the point of my post here is that I'm not really the type of person that goes around flaunting my political or religious opinions; and who cares if I ran 8 miles this morning or that I'm depressed that I'm having so many dental problems? It's too much information; it's too intrusive; and yet I'm the one causing it all to happen. I'm like my own paparazzi. Yet those I see everyday, the friends I know well enough to know when they've gotten a bad haircut without having to read it on their "Wall," could care less when or if I'm listening to the new U2 record. In fact, they might get a little peeved if I called just to tell them that.

This century needs an enema.

Ebert: Maybe Twitter is the enema?

You know, I just don't know how people have the time to Facebook. I have my cellphone list and Instant Messaging list. Everyone I want to keep track of is there.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned (or anti-social?), but when I tried a Friendster for the first time, I found it nice finding out where my old buddies where. But then you discover, you've moved on and so have they. Does keeping track of them help you incorporate them into your current life? Not for me.

Ebert: There's a reason they're your old buddies. I'm in frequent contact with only a few college chums--Bill Nack, for example. Heard from Dave Harvey today about the death of Archie Green. His sponsorhip of the U of I Campus Folksong Siceiy changed my life in many ways. (Major obit in the NYTimes.)

I am not at home right now. I am at an indeterminate place in my mind, talking with you. Perhaps you will respond.

Hello, world!

Ebert: (((((Hellooo))))

Yes, I'm here, sir. :) And the closest thing to a gesture-based system I've built was an apparatus that a friend put in the front window of his store. He wanted people walking past the window to be able to activate a computerized display behind the window, but knew that actual buttons left outside would be vandalized in seconds.

No big deal. Taped off a "panel" area on the glass, aimed a camera at it, wrote a simple piece of software that looked for changes in the shapes of those cutouts, which registered different inputs for the computer.

But here's the thing with these gesture-based input systems: they'll never work until society demands them. Think of how improbable Twitter is. And yet it's the single most powerful new communicative engine created in the past five years.

Why? Because there was a Twitter-shaped hole in our world that we never even noticed until Twitter settled into it with the satisfying SNK of a jigsaw puzzle piece snapping into position.

As yet, people don't want these big gesture systems. The iPhone is the only successful touch and gesture-based computer and OS ever released. Even _that_ one struggles. A great many consumers simply will not accept a virtual keyboard. Lack of a clicky thumbboard is a dealbreaker.

It's 1999. Laptops have puny, 800x600 pixel screens. They have a third of the storage capacity of a desktop, and probably about half the processing power. Sit back in your Aeron chair (it's 1999; you bought it for $180 at the asset auction of the latest dotcom bust) and picture the specs of the hottest newfangled category of notebooks in 2009.

Huge display?
Unlimited storage?
Unimaginable new input scheme, maybe incorporating a writable surface or a projectable interface?
At the very least you can't even imagine what sort of an operating system it'll run.

Ready for the answer?

Cool: I happen to be using a fine example of the hottest category of notebook computers.

Its display is 600 pixels high. It has a whopping 8 gigabytes of internal storage; later this week I'll replace the internal drive and wonder what the hell I'm going to do with a whole 64 gigabytes on my hands.

The input device appears to be a keyboard, with a two-button trackpad underneath.

But you did guess correctly on the fantastic, unimaginable OS. This Dell Mini 9 shipped with Windows XP, which wouldn't be released until way until 2001. It is indeed unimaginable, in the sense that I still can't believe that Microsoft is still shipping something this old.

What I'm using is a netbook. Essentially it's a 2002 notebook made more compact and sold as cheap as is humanly possible.

It's the hottest thing going...because it's exactly what people want in 2009. They don't care about power. They care about convenience, and the ubiquity of wireless broadband means that a computer can get away with having very little by way of power. Well whaddya know: when people see the $1300 super Core 2 Duo mastermedia notebooks and see a $350 Mini or a $400 HP1000 or an MSI Wind or an ASUS or the product of any other company eager to get their hands in the till...well, Joe the Consumer pays with a $1000 bill and gets plenty of change back.

I'm bringing this up because it ties into Twitter and super-advanced gee-wiz technology demos that come out of TED and the Media Lab et al. Good marketing means _nothing_ in the world of tech. The popularity of Twitter (if sustained over several years) means that it's filling an important need. The fact that dinky little netbooks are both saving and killing the notebook industry (depending on whether or not your company has a good one in the product line) says the same thing.

Gestures in the air? Cool demo. Now show that video to some random user and try to get $250 out of them.

Final note: I did fib a little about this Dell Mini 9 netbook. It did indeed ship with Windows XP. But I've since hacked it to run the latest version of the Mac OS. I have needs of my own, you know.

Ebert: Hmmm. You know, Andy, re-selling a cheap Dell Mini 9 with the Mac OS loaded sounds like the sort of thing a VC might find fascinating. Surely Apple would have no objection?

Your message leave me a little discontented. I was looking forward to you at the Conference on World Affairs, chatting up strangers at parties by projecting your talking points on their chests.

Groucho: "And that reminds me... you've got some fascinating talking points of your own."

I like Nicholas Carr's take on Twitter (channeling Jean Baudrillard):

"Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them."

He quotes a passage from Baudrillard which is also worth passing along:

"...freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event."

http://tinyurl.com/cluxqt

This article has put me in touch with my Inner Luddite. (Yes, I appreciate the irony of writing that sentence on a blog.) In my most pessimistic moods, I suspect that the fundamental project of technology is to impoverish the human brain by externalizing its functions. And that's not just my opinion. Socrates agrees with me. One of his arguments against writing in the Phaedrus is that the technology of writing will impoverish the memories of people who no longer must memorize a text since they can simply read it. (Of course, one of the great ironies in the history of philosophy is that we only know Socrates said this because Plato wrote it down.) Closer to our own time, consider the diminution of human knowledge and ability caused by the introduction of recorded music. Before Thomas Edison, anyone who wanted to listen to music in his home had to be able to play it (or to afford to pay musicians to play it for him). The invention of the phonograph put an end to this, turning a world of music 'producers' into nations of music consumers. It was no longer necessary to know how to read music or play an instrument; you just had to know how to carefully lower a needle onto a spinning disk. And now, with the compact disk and the Ipod, even that minimal amount of mechanical skill is obsolete. We can now be almost perfectly passive consumers of musical product.

And turning us into a world of passive consumers is, finally, what technology is all about. Technological devices are, after all, corporate products, and I don't think anyone really needed the current economic crisis to remind them that corporations are incredibly and exclusively profit-focused. (Or maybe we did need it. I sometimes wonder how many Americans have ever had the Newtonian revelation that the real point of television isn't the programs but the commercials. It's a medium used to manufacture desire for products that people, for the most part, don't really need.) Maybe the ideal corporate citizen is a consumer incapable of critical thought because he has externalized all the various functions of his brain into a host of electronic gadgets.

People are right to point to the positive side of technology and say how it has improved virtually every aspect of our lives (absolutely true), improved the quality of life of disabled people (true again), increased our knowledge of our world and universe (ditto). All of this is true, but what does it matter if at the end of the day, technology has turned us into a bunch of Wizard of Oz scarecrows singing "If I Only Had A Brain"?

We need to step back, put our lives on pause, and think carefully about what these neat electronic toys are really doing to us.

Ebert: The first time I visited Ireland, I frequented a pub a block from the home of my friends, where neighbors gathered in the Lounge Bar. There was a piano and an accordion, people took turns singing, a man named Rory kept time by tapping pennies on the back of a plate. There was nothing unique about this pub. In the new Ireland, there's more often karoke or a disk jockey or the telly. Well, karoke is best.

As a child of the 40's I've been anticipating the preservation of human memories after death via high tech ever since viewing the old B&W scifi thrillers "Donovan's Brain" and "Tobor." For young readers, these movies were the antecedents of "Robocop," with just as tragic results.

Since even neurons eventually die (often before the rest of the soma, as in Alzheimer's disease), only complete transference of all memory traces to some sort of non-cellular inorganic substrate, such as a computer memory core, will ensure truly long-term survival of the mind. Or will it? Even neuroscientists who study brain function admit that understanding the mechanism by which the brain works will not explain why it works, that is to say, why we have subjective consciousness and are not simple mindless zombies or automatons. They call that the "hard question."

The famous "Turing Test" posits that if an information processing entity, be it a human or a machine, responds in a fashion that we cannot differentiate from our own responses, we must assume that is possesses the same sort of subjective awareness that we do. We instinctively attribute that level of awareness to our fellow human beings, but should (or would) we do so for a high-functioning Artificial Intelligence (AI) device? Alan Turing said "yes" back in the 1940's, yet many an episode of Star Trek-TNG focused on whether Commander Data was a sentient being who could truly empathise with his human and "humanoid" crewmembers or whether he was just a cold calculating machine programmed to perform a clever trick. Looking, walking and quacking like a duck apparently sometimes still leaves one's duckiness open to debate.

In any case, let's say it could be proven (don't ask me how) beyond doubt that an AI entity can possess sentience indistinguishable from that of a human being, and, moreover, that your memory traces could be implanted within that entity in their entirety, thereby creating an artificial version of yourself, what Phillip K. Dick liked to call a "simulacrum." You know, like the "replicants" of "Blade Runner," only intended not to do dangerous or menial labor but to carry on in your place after your demise.

Now, if the simulacrum was created after your demise from signals detected in your dying brain, I'm sure there would be few objections, except from those of you tired of living, right? Most of us would rejoice at the prospect of a personal resurrection. The more difficult choice comes into play if your still functioning natural brain had to be destroyed during the information transference or (tougher yet) was scheduled to be shut down AFTER ascertaining that the new AI was properly up and running. Do you believe the AI would be you or merely a new sentient creation to which you've contributed your memories? If the latter, would the deal still be worthwhile to you? Does it truly represent personal survival? It does in some fashion, but within what limits, if any? Of course, the whole issue begs the question, what is individuality? And, can individuality be extrapolated or shared, or is that an oxymoron? If Arthur C. Clarke's brain could have been down-loaded into HAL 9000, I'm sure that Roger could continue having fascinating conversations with what appears to be the same mind and personality, but what would the experience be like from Arthur's vantage point? A continuation? Or just a mocking simulation after personal anihilation?

And, on the issue of cell phones, blackberries and other PDA's in the classroom, being a recently retired professor, I can tell you that students frequently use them to cheat on exams. They text Q and A amongst one another and to outside contacts during tests, which is why our university (a major SEC campus) advised the faculty to ban them during exams. Otherwise, students commonly use them to chat and play games during lectures. I guess it keeps them from falling asleep.

Ebert: The kids nowadays. I used to read during class.

Mr Ebert,

Every time I sit down to read a post of yours it's always in your voice. It's an amazing piece of technology called memory. :-)

Part of the beauty of conversation is the sound of the human voice. You can't get this with Twitter or Facebook or any other 'social' website. The majority of my friends I communicate with online I have physically conversed with. With each of their updates online I hear a faint echo of their voice.

Any technological attempt to create voice is merely a poor substitute for the real thing. I hope one day your voice returns to you. Until then I'm lucky enough to have heard you speak numerous times and can 'playback' your uniqueness anytime I want -sans technology.

Ebert: I have written so much for so long that my writing has become my voice. Students used to say I lectured in complete sentences and paragraphs. Actually, I wrote that way, and it become second nature. The writing shaped the speaking.

Your introductory paragraphs remind me of Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition by Merlin Donald. The starting point was episodic culture -- apes can communicate, but only about specific events.

The first stage humans went through was mimetic culture, when we learned to communicate through gesture and sound at a level of abstraction that apes can't. Through mime and sound you can convey a lot of knowledge -- the tall guy has deer meat, if you go over the hill, watch out for the hole next to the big rock, etc.

The second stage is mythic, when we developed language to share narratives to complex to mime. Silent films (without cuts to text) can tell a lot of great stories, but its expressiveness is limited -- you couldn't make My Dinner With Andre or even The Godfather without words. Of course, since language was an addition to mimetic and episodic thought, it didn't need to fully replace the old ways of communicating, so a lot that we communicate without language is very difficult to explain with words. Even in the talkie era, some of my favorite films -- Koyaanisqatsi, Triplets of Belville, Modern Times -- have essentially no words.

The third stage Donald describes is theoretic culture. The key cognitive development in this stage was writing, a method of storing information somewhere other than a human brain. Writing and other systems of symbols let us work with an idea a piece at a time, overriding the working memory constraints of our brains (which are in turn limited by the size of the female pelvis). With writing we can develop complex thoughts that aren't held completely in a human mind at one time such as science. We can even involve people in this cognitive process who are separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years. I've already forgotten a lot of what I read in Donald's book; fortunately, I wrote down my thoughts when they were fresh.

I think most Internet technologies are optimizations of these cognitive skills -- e-mail is essentially like postal mail, but much much faster and with access to a lot more minds than our ancestors had. But I think there's a case to be made that computing generally represents a new stage. Not only can we offload the storage in a book, now we can delegate the thinking to a machine that we've made to come up with the same answer we would if we could just think faster and without making mistakes. But just as language often has trouble handling things that gesture is perfectly good at, computer-aided cognition isn't very good at the things humans have been doing for tens of thousands of years. We're making movies with computers now too, but so far they're mostly just high-tech ways of reaching old parts of our minds. I guess Twitter is just an optimization of an ancient practice -- it cuts out the middle-man in gossip.

I wrote a review of Donald's book for a graduate course. I'll highlight one quote:

Perhaps the most radical piece of Donald's theory of mind is the role of the individual mind. He begins AMSR's 7th chapter by saying "We acquire our symbolic skills from the outside in. Therefore, we had to evolve them in the same way. Symbolic thought and language are inherently network phenomena. Thus their existence cannot be explained in a solipsistic manner. The problem calls for a paradigm shift, away from our mainstream theories of human evolution, which tend to assume that language evolved inside the brain box; that is, from the inside out." In this new paradigm, culture drives and humans respond. Symbols came first and humans learned to use them. That is, humans began using symbols and then internalized them.

I look forward to seeing you in Boulder next week. I've missed out on most of the last several CWAs and I'm eager to toss myself into my favorite venue for moving ideas from one human mind to another.

Incidentally, this comment is a great example of why I'm not on Twitter. I'm one verbose guy, and very few of my thoughts come out in 140-character wholes. I enjoy good short stories, though, so maybe I should see if anyone's utilized Twitter for fiction delivery. Editing might violate the principle of tweeting, though.

Ebert: If they came from outside individual minds, how did we know they were symbols?

I don't know if people have really become so-called "twits" or the like, but I sometimes think that people have become a little too self-involved with their own thought processes.

In a way they let their mouths do all the talking without consulting their brain first. Of course, this doesn't happen to everyone all the time. I think people will always be good deep down inside; it's just harder to look for it in some. It's easy to become cynical. In the end, we're all flawed. I don't know if people will ever become "totally connected" or whatever, but it's likely that will happen someday. In a way I hope it doesn't because that would be so very boring. As for kids of today, kids have always been distracted but deep down I still believe they are "kids" at heart. Kids just want to be adults and adults just want to be kids again. Go figure. I guess when you get really; really old you don't really give a darn. That's not something to sneer at though.

Of course, people do and should remember that all this business of internet blogs, cell phones, texts, forums and cubicles, water coolers, talking heads and self-important commentary etc. is not real life at all. Nothing can replace basic human connection and conversation.

A person is not their blog entries or their writing. That is (for the most part) created for purposes of entertainment or self-indulgence. In the end, it should not be taken too seriously. If there's anything I've learned it’s that talk is cheap. Actions speak so much louder than words. I don't believe we say those things because deep down we truly believe in them. It's just that we haven't found a better way to occupy ourselves yet. Perhaps we should all "do" more instead of talking our heads off. Wouldn't that be nice? We'd probably get a lot more done.

You got me thinking about passing down information from chimp to chimp, dolphin to dolphin, and human to human. This is my theory, but I think it's valid. Chimps don't quite have the vocal chords and brains and time to invent much aside from something small to teach another in his or her tribe. All this knowledge may die when the few who know this thing die. Or when the tribe dies. Other tribes may have never had this idea. And now it will have to be reinvented.

Dolphins have no arms nor legs. They may as well have pea brains except for one thing: We CAN talk to them and they to us. Same with chimps and I know for a fact my dog tries and succeeds in putting ideas in my head.

Humans and our types have been around hundreds of thousands of years. It's only been around 6 or 7 thousand years that we've been able to pass knowledge from one person to another, from one tribe to another. and one generation to the next one.

Why do brilliant ideas die on the vine, especially among such bright creatures as humans? Because early on, there had to be at least 2 gifted brains around. One to invent and the other to understand the invention. Until recently, this apparent existance of propinquent genius was rare. A tribe population had to be quite large for more than one gifted brain to exist in close proximity to another. In a group of 100 or so, there is a 1 in 10 chance of a genius, and a good chance of someone with an IQ of 115 or greater.
So only recently were the correct tools invented in the presence of enough bright people to make a difference. The ONE critical difference is language and it's graphical representation. Only when a tribe or group had language and it's representation could really good ideas survive the death of the inventor, or the tribe itself.

Think about it. How many of us could pass down the theory of electricity and it's usefulness if it were up to us? Very few. We all use electricity in simple to complex forms, yet very few of us really have the ability to teach someone about it, to pass it on to the unknown beings in the future. How many of us can build a television receiver? I didn't raise my hand.

The few smart ones had to work their butts off to try to teach the other tribe members in such a fashion that the original idea didn't need to be epiphanied into existance all over again. It took
hundreds and thousands of years before there were enough smart humans in one place at the correct time to keep all these brilliant ideas from being buried with their deceased owners. Before burial became the norm, the beasts and vultures ate the genius's genes - and took off after some possum gene with which to water it down.

Genes may mutate for better or worse. It's what we did with the genes we were given by accident that makes us what we are today (and that isn't much more than the brutal killers we've always been).

Damn - I hate getting cynical on the last paragraph. But thanks for getting me thinking about this again. Oh, a few weeks ago someone threw up to you the notion that you have a charmed life. Perhaps it was charmed until you got sick and had it all taken away from you, had your jaw removed and lived in a state of darkness for what appeared to be nearly 2 years. And now you're writing for us faster than David Letterman can apologize to all the people to whom he was a asshole prior to his quintuple bypass 9 years ago. It's great to have you back.

Ebert: It interests me that Letterman remembers who he wants to apologize to and why. A true asshole never looks back.

I don't think people realize just how dangerous this can actually be. I mean, do you actually want these billion dollar corporations to have all this information about you? Most people I know think "What the hell are they going to do with it? I'm not important enough for some big guys to look into my information". Oh dear.

Harry Lewis wrote Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyq-Q9HEnFg

Scary much?

I'm anti-social and proud of it!
It's my duty because society isn't worth knowing.
Beware anyone with more than a couple of friends.
Yours is the only blog i read because it was linked to your review site and you are fairly intelligent and a decent sort of fellow.
I agree with Isaacson about your synth voice, it seems the perfect choice for you would be Hal's voice, Douglas Rain's speech pattern.
Ray Kurzweil probably wrote some of the software for your synth voice machine. He is one of the few multi-lateral geniuses to have lived and believes consciousness can live forever as part of a universal mind.
He's serious, and is actively pursuing it.
If anyone can do it he can, but what if you became an omnipotent mind, immortal and reached the end of knowing? Could you kill your disembodied consciousness?
I hope Ray figures out an off switch before he makes it with the universe.

Ebert: Immortality would be a horrifying fate.

Ebert: Hmmm. You know, Andy, re-selling a cheap Dell Mini 9 with the Mac OS loaded sounds like the sort of thing a VC might find fascinating. Surely Apple would have no objection?

Funny you should bring that up. A company calling itself "Psystar" is in the middle of a massive lawsuit with Apple to establish their right to sell "hackintoshes" commercially (desktop machines built from cheap, generic components). It's a curious little operation and I wonder (I put it no more significantly than that) if the company was founded specifically to prove the legal point and open the door for larger, more seriously-funded operations.

As for individuals such as myself, well, Apple has made its annoyance known. The method I used requires that you own a legal copy of Mac OS X. All the same, Apple wishes to remind everybody that among the legalese that you agree to when you install the OS is your promise not to install this software on any non-Apple hardware.

If Hackintoshing gets out of hand, we'll surely see some mojo in a future edition that prevents the OS from running on any machine that can't properly identify itself.

re: the CoWA -- I prefer to project my anger and inadequacies upon my audience...not my user interface.

Ebert: That would change quickly enough if you were using Vista.

All this debate over the good or bad nature of Facebook (which I use) and Twitter (which I don't) seems to be a natural extension of the evolution of mass media, not the death of it. The point, I think, is that both sites can be useful, amusing, and harmless, but that many use them to virtually replace actual living. I tend to think that statements like the Carr quote are rooted in some truth, but still hyperbolic, as are many reactions to new media.

The long and the short of it is this: with every new revolution in media, we get good and bad. Facebook and Twitter are no different. Like the internet, television, and Penny Press newspapers, it will smooth out over time.

but when we do something as simple as read a book or daydream, aren't our minds in an indeterminate place, outside the physical world? to some extent, havent we always had the option to 'disengage' from reality. of course, the advent of technology and increased leisure time gives the option to take this so much further.

It's somewhat like determinism vs freewill. Trying to figure out after x years what? implicitly assumes that somewhere it is already written and we have to figure it out like a Sherlock Holmes. A believer in free will and a healthy respect for human capability would start from what should be the future, what do we want it to be and how to go about realising it. Even if the truth is half way this approach seems healthier rather than waiting for the sky to collapse like Getafix in the Asterix-Obelix series.

Ebert: How did I know you read Asterix?

My name is Spinner. Athena, the controller of the Life Experience Grid, is neglecting her job. She makes experience programs. These implement virtual reality systems. The programs are fed to anyone wearing Gridlife suits. They offer refuge from pollution or radiation during Grid-sleep curfews. The programs replace life.
~ Pete Townshend

No matter where you go, everyone is connected.
~ Serial Experiments Lain

The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: the Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.
+
Well, I think we live in overstimulated times. We crave stimulation for its own sake. We gorge ourselves on it. We always want more, whether it's tactile, emotional or sexual. And I think that's bad.
~ Videodrome

I have heard people speculate about whether Stephen Hawking could get his old voice back through similar computer technology. I would really love to know what his natural voice sounded like.

But there are shades of so many movies here. The aforementioned Videodrome and the 13-episode Serial Experiments Lain; The Matrix; Ghost in the Shell; the Neo-Human/New Evolutionary Paradigm segment of Waking Life, which ought to be an embeded video at the end of this article; and the web-based short story "I of Persistence."

In closing, I will urge you, very strongly, to watch Serial Experiments Lain. It is a singularly hypnotic experience. The artistry is fantastic. The surreal applications of McLuhan philosophy are mind-bending. The atmosphere is thick and intoxicating. This is my most fervent recommendation to you.

You're missing the point. It's not about ego or fueling the human need to be acknowledged. These technologies can be bent to those purposes, but so can just about anything. What they are is a means of filtering out the massive amount of stuff we don't want and bringing in only the people and things we like.

In some cases, like Pandora or Twitter, they allow you to expand your interests based off of user input. Pandora is an internet radio station that builds a play list of music off of artists and songs you say you like, and then finds more music similar to that. You can further tweak it by telling it whether or not you like the songs it's pulling up. Twitter is a way for people you know or respect to guide you around the web to only the stuff that is most interesting or entertaining to you. One person posts a link, and even if you aren't following them on Twitter, someone you know probably is, and they ReTweet the link. Using it to tell everyone about the corndog you ate is just abuse.

Facebook is the modern worlds way of staying connected to the friends you made in college. I don't see half the people on my Facebook friends list even once a year, but at one point I was good friends with all of them, and why should a little distance change that? I still want to see them go through life, get married, have kids and so on. Roger, you have expressed your love for the Up Series of films on more than one occasion, and how is that any different, except that you NEVER knew the people who's lives you've been following with great interest?

Our lives and resources are short. I agree that we shouldn't spend all day languishing in front of the computer, we should be out there living. That's why when I do have a spare moment, either at home or waiting in line for something, I like that I can quickly touch all my bases, see how everybody's doing, or argue with you about whether technology shapes culture or vice versa.

One final note: When you find that the support for your thesis comes largely from observing the behavior of teenagers, politicians and the Hilton sisters, it may be time to withdraw your thesis.

Ebert: It is I fear creeping into the thinking classes.

I love the semi-ambiguous moral tone of this blog. At first reflex, some of the things you contemplate seem wrong, even horrifying. Face to face contact replaced by digital communication? Group consciousnesses stored in a central computer? Transferring consciousnesses into clones?

Yet, for the most part, you do not pass too harsh a judgement on these possible futures. Most would. The human reflex is to lionize that which is current or recent history, and to demonise that which may be coming. Everyone naturally believes that his own current way of doing things is best. I like that you leave open the possibility that although the future will be a much different place when it comes to human interaction, that isn't NECESSARILY a horrible thought.

What I'm sure of is that society will probably not do something if it is horrifying to the members of that society. Change will come gradually, naturally, inevitably, and the experiencers of that change will always look on the past and the people consigned to it with something like pity. Just as today we pity the poor labourers of the industrial revolution, or serfs of the middle ages, or the slaves of any era. Ultimately I believe history has a strong record showing an overall improvement of the human condition, not only physically, but morally and ethically as well. I see no reason for that trend to reverse.

While it's interesting to theorize about the future, you should perhaps take a note from Kubrick.

In the 1960s, when Stanley Kubrick directed his 2001: A Space Odyssey, he had taken care to directly consult MIT Professor and AI expert Marvin Minsky, who assured him that, yes, by the end of the 20th century, robots like HAL would not only live among us, but they would exceed us in many capacities.

While certain aspects of AI (and I'm shoveling a lot of your thoughts on mind, body, and computer interaction into this category) have been moderately successful, it's worth knowing that AI research is a pretty dead field, especially in Britain.

Bottom line is: It's turned out a lot harder than we initially imagined. And while it's nice to think about all the amazing things the future holds, you have to be careful about extrapolating from the present.

If you're interested about this, you may want to read the article: "Did a philosopher kill WALL-E?"

On a related note, you may like the article: Everything that's wrong with Facebook. In particular,

"Suddenly, when all your friends have been reduced to teensy avatars, canned quotations, and endless ‘favourites’ lists, they don’t seem quite as special as you may have once remembered them."

Ebert: In our interview, Sir Arthur was also sure AI would arrive by 2001.

Response to Andy Ihnatko,

"Think of how improbable Twitter is. And yet it's the single most powerful new communicative engine created in the past five years.

Why? Because there was a Twitter-shaped hole in our world that we never even noticed until Twitter settled into it with the satisfying SNK of a jigsaw puzzle piece snapping into position."

"Good marketing means _nothing_ in the world of tech. The
popularity of Twitter (if sustained over several years) means that it's filling an important need."

It's the convincing of "here's something you didn't know you needed." It's what all infomercials are based on (shamwow, George Foreman Grill, super kitchen knife etc). So, I think it does tie into a tried and true marketing scheme on some level.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with technology.

As a working class artist born on the precipice of great change, it's been a constant struggle all my life to keep up with it. And not out of choice but rather necessity, for we now live the digital age - which comes at a price not readily within reach of those who work in the Arts.

When is a computer old? The minute you take it out of the store. When will you need to upgrade your software? The minute you've learned how to use it. When is fast too slow? The minute someone invents something even FASTER - and then they'll just invent something faster than that. Buy it today, toss it tomorrow and then buy it again, like a toaster you only keep for a year because there's no point getting it repaired. Planned obsolescence in electronic engineering has seen to it. So enjoy your toys while you can!

Personally, I don't own a cell phone or a Blackberry or a Laptop. I don't even drive; never could afford a car. I've got a computer obviously (Windows XP, though! VISTA sucks!) and enjoy a state-of-the-art fibre optic High Speed ADSL Internet connection, but aside from a digital camera and MP3 player (both Xmas presents) that's it, in so far as technology goes unless you count a DVD player? But everything else is old school, so to speak. My TV isn't plasma or LCD and I still use my old VCR.

Technology has it uses of course - Roger might one-day get his voice back via some device; but it won't make him a better writer. It won't make his wife love him anymore than she already does. Everything that really matters is felt with the heart, eh?

Newer, bigger, better - BETTER than the "real thing" is the siren call of technology; which always makes more promises than it can keep while dumbing-down those who worship at the alter of it via Facebook, MySpace and now Twitter. It's like the evolution of Nicole Kidman's character in "To Die For" - "You're not anybody in America unless you're on TV. On TV is where we learn about who we really are. Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person."

Only now TV has been replaced by a hand-held device.

I have a Facebook page but I never use it; I got bored. I'd rather just pick up my regular phone or failing that, send an e-mail. I do download a lot but that owes to finances and also limited accessibility. My interests are extremely eclectic and if I have to live in the digital age, I'll be dammed if I'm going eat a steady diet of whatever crap some corporation decides to serve me so they can make a profit by pandering to the lowest common denominator hello reality based TV.

I use technology in other words, I don't serve it. I don't care about Twitter or iPhones or 3D - screw those stupid glasses; the effects are distracting and get in the way! It's all distracting. And all the gadgets designed to simplify your life are just sucking your life right out from under you.

When I look into the future, I shudder. I see a world racing too fast towards an illusion designed to make consumers feel like they're living a better life - but as one qualified by those who make their own living doing it and wheeled in like a Trojan horse. They used say religion was the opium of the masses. Now it's the thought of being able to live at light speed. And it's the journey that counts, not how fast you reach your destination.

P.S. there's a film from Sweden out now with truly atrocious subtitles. Many are seriously displeased about it. And some kind soul has remedied that - if you know where to look and I do. :)
As I don't hate the Internet. Not when it serves me intelligently while striking a blow against the dumbing-down of Art. Technology, you see, can be a good thing.

It all comes down to how you use it. And I think a virtual dream should be treated as a vacation; not a way of life.

Roger, I'm glad you don't want to be a part of this Facebook, Myspace, Twitter thing. Celebrities on these sites tend to have tens of thousands of "Friends" and no actual conversation taking place in the message threads. Commenting on your blog now and then may not be a suitable substitute for say, attending one of your scene-by-scene movie screenings, but I like having the opportunity to have some exchanges with a favorite writer (and not his ghost writer) and other loyal readers on a level slightly deeper than throwing three word sentences back and forth.

Twitter just makes me think of that Far Side comic where the man walks down the street with a pair of earphones that allow him to hear what dogs are saying when they're barking: "Hey!" "Hey you!" "Hey!" "HEY!"

Quote:
`Would you find it childish if some Congress members had been taking notes while Obama was speaking? I see twittering as nothing different than taking notes.
Ebert: Would a professor view it that way during one of his lectures?`

Hi Roger,

I am a professor, and my students are often texting under the table. I do not find it very distracting, so no, it doesn`t bother me that much. Sleeping, showing up late and creating disruptions are the only things that raise my ire, because they disrupt my flow of thought and other students ability to concentrate. If a student doesn`t want to learn, I can`t make them. Twitter away! Maybe they are telling someone what a wonderful lecture they are listening to!

Frankly I see contributing to comments on blogs to be equivalent to twittering, but certain blogs like this one make the effort worthwhile; I often walk away enlightened, and that is not easy to come by.

In fact, I am leaving a comment today to tell you that your blog about the role of the vagus nerve and the feeling of elevation had a big impact on me, and that I am planning on writing a long story, maybe a novel, that incorporates that idea, and how leaders could manipulate that feeling for their own nefarious purposes.

A last note, I recently submitted a short story that talks about a future earth where people live under a dome in a hostile environment and entertainment is by sending thoughts to other members of the society. I couldn`t believe the similarities between my story and Clarke`s `The City and the Stars`; I had never read it!

Thanks for your blog, it is much appreciated.
Charles

So, here I am, desperately trying to think of something witty to say on Roger Ebert's blog instead of doing a dozen other things I should be doing right now. There are so many online distractions that sometimes I feel like disconnecting myself from the internet all together. But of course, I would last about a day before I called back my internet service provider like a crackhead looking for his lost pipe.

I tell myself that Facebook helps me keep in contact with friends and family, but the truth is that it's the perfect combination of narcissism and voyeurism. I think the only reason I take pictures anymore is put them on Facebook. Hey everybody look what I did this weekend!

Yet, I am proud to say that I don't own a cellphone or any other form of electronic leash. The only electronic device I ever carry in my pocket is a hand held GPS when I go hunting or fishing. But is not owning a cellphone really anything to be proud of? I'm only 33 but have I already begun to get "out of touch" with society? As Dylan said, "Don't criticize what you can't understand." Everything Clark envisioned about the future sounds to me like a living hell, but I imagine if Socrates had to be transplanted into a modern city of the present he would probably lose his mind in hours. I guess what I'm getting at is that everything you said about twittering (all of which I agree with by the way) just sounds like the same cliche lamented by every passing generation.

A conversation from yesterday...

... where a friend told me that she'd hugged her son. They hugged and then kept hugging. "I thought we were having a moment," she told me, "until I realized he was texting his friends."

Ebert: This is an emblematic story.

Sigh. Time's normally interesting Richard Corliss has now joined the ranks of the Box Office Stenographers:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1888296,00.html

Key sentence: "This column is the first of a weekly TIME.com series on box office grosses."

I realise this is totally off-topic but the declining quality of news writing in general and movie writing in particular is a recurring theme on this blog, and here's yet another depressing example. Surely the time Richard Corliss spends opining on essentially meaningless and uninteresting box office numbers that can be obtained in any number of places is time that he could be using to actually offer critical insight into films worthy of recognition. Unfortunately, he's now reduced to adding yet more hype to box office kings, most of which are populist trash designed only to be as innoffensive and mass-consumable as possible, and which hardly need any more hype. Meanwhile great pictures such as those by Ramin Bahrani continue to be unknown by the vast majority of the movie-going public.

Ebert: My guess is, that wasn't Richard's idea. Editors are bedazzled by that shit.

For a couple years now, since I deleted my MySpace profile and during the rise of Facebook, I've been wondering whether the virtual, or online, self is divisible from the "real" one. I've resisted creating a Facebook profile, and while I joined Twitter a while ago to be polite to the person who invited me I've since deleted that profile. I never used it. I never saw the value. Do people really care about what I'm doing at any given moment? Do I care whether others care? Sometimes I feel like a simple luddite, a curmudgeon (and I'm not yet 30!), especially when I learn that friends older than me are Facebook-ing away while I toil in obscurity. But I just don't feel comfortable with voluntarily offering the ephemera of my life for all to see, or learning to love Big Brother, so to speak. But I'm troubled with whether I truly "exist" without a Facebook profile, or a Twitter account, or a blog of my own. Of course, I make these points on a widely read blog, for all to see.

Maybe you're just a brain in a vat that some scientist in the "real world" is sending electronic impulses through, making you think you're experiencing life, think you're writing a blog, think that I exist as I write this comment, but really it's all just triggered nerves. Maybe I'm that scientist, sending this message just to fool with you. On second thought, if I were the scientist, I'd probably wait until April Fools Day to do that.

Roger,

Since you're obviously interested deeply in the mind/body/computer relationship, I can't recommend the book "The Mind's Eye" strongly enough. Compiled by logician/author/thinker-of-the-mind Douglas Hofstadter, it contains essays and fiction into the nature of the mind. One of the most famous essays "What is it like to be a bat?" is pretty much required reading for any aspiring philosopher of consciousness.

Ebert: How did I know you read Asterix?
Et tu, Brute?

For all that I love and rely on technology, I do sometimes regret its omnipresence. I'm proud of my general knowledge, the wide and esoteric sprawl of data I keep in my head.

But with Wikipedia just one click away, what purpose does it serve? There's nothing I know which isn't available to every netizen in greater detail and accuracy than my poor neurons could ever hope to achieve.

There's a novel by Charles Stross called Accelerando, which discusses the exponential advance of technology and its effect on human beings. Its hero is Manfred, who keeps much of his memory and existence in high-tech devices carried around with him.

In the best and most troubling section, he's mugged and his gadgets stolen. His lobotomised stumblings around Glasgow, trying to remember who he is and what he's doing there, are deeply disturbing. Is he even the same person? Is the mugger, who plugs into his memories, now partially Manfred?

At least inside our own heads it's only disease which can steal who we are.

Roger,
This is freaky... (cue "Twilight Zone" theme music). It was not more than a week or so ago when a good friend of mine was in town visiting. The conversation turned to Twitter and Facebook, of which I will have no part. Poor him, he got the full brunt of my passion against these 'meaningless' friendships and how much I disdain being 'mired in other's minutia'. His rebuttal was that its fun, harmless and he's able to connect with people from High School (class of '93). Only argument I had on those points was, why should I care what someone I haven't seen in 15 years is doing now? I always come off cold and heartless in discussions such as these.

I will admit, however that I do text friends/siblings often... mostly due to something interesting happening that doesn't really warrant a phone call. Those touch points are frequent but brief.

Cheers!
Chris Ortman

Ebert: Speaking for myself, it has been fairly easy for the last 40 years to figure out how to reach me. Those who wanted to, have. Vice versa.

What you said about DNA using human bodies as a vessel - couldn't technology be lent a similar nature?

I'm 23 years old, and I refuse to twitter because it registers to me as a contrivance. I feel the same way about the Iphone and all those stupid "apps". On the other hand, I check my stupid facebook, on average, 46,000 times a day, and am more comfortable conversing on AIM than I am on the phone.

The difference, for me, is that AIM and facebook wove themselves naturally into my sense of communication, where as the others have been advertised to me without my feeling any need for them. But others twitter, of course, and though they may in time reject further digital evolution, others after them will embrace it. Technology, then, is not commanded by human beings, but carried by them - traveling into the future almost in its own right.

If our memories, personalities, etc wind up in digital storage one day, we will not be in control of this. If mankind manages to effectively alter his state, he will do so by yielding power over that state to something else. We are not passnegers of evolution, but purvayors of it, doomed to be left behind.

Thanks for kicking off my Monday on the right foot, Rodg!

I'm reminded of that quote from Matthew McConaughay's character in the film Contact: "Is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the web; at the same time, we feel emptier, lonelier and more cut off from each other than at any time in human history."

Without question, science and technology and has improved the world in many ways, but there are problems. It's not the fault of the technology, it's how we use it that matters. (A quote I saw once: "We can use a laser to zap a cancerous cell or to direct a missile. It's up to us which one we do.") The practical application of it has been a great thing. Achievements like industrialization, sanitation, and the like has made this a much more livable world than it was in earlier days. No one doubts that aspect of it. But there is such a thing as going too far in anything, and this latest craze of Facebooks and Twitters is perhaps the natural extension of that. It's great that these tools were created for the supposed purpose of enhancing communication. Maybe it has greatly expanded communication, but maybe it hasn't enhanced it. The important thing is moderation, as in everything. There's nothing wrong with those networking sites if they're used to stay in touch with long lost acquaintances, or are another way to sent private messages and other media to friends when they are not able to be in your immediate presence. Reliance, though, is a perilous thing.

I love the Internet, and I think it's enriched my life in a good many ways - I can gather opinions and make "friends" all over the world, I can work from home, and see videos of practically whatever I want. When I was a kid in a small town, I was the only one who liked the movies I did, the music I did, the books I did. I wasn't lonely or anything, but I would have loved the Internet. I think the generation that grows up with all this stuff has a great chance to be the brightest and most understanding generation in history. If they spend so much time gabbing into a little keyboard, that seems like a small sacrifice to make.

That said, I'm not 100% sure what the *point* of Twitter is, and I can simply assume that if you have to ask that question, then it's not for you.

My only concern with the "kids these days" is in their attention span for literature. Yesterday I sat down and read the last quarter of Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" in one sitting (related story: nobody bugged me on my cell phone during this time). I was amazed by the style he used, and how each of those long, long paragraphs slowly descended into madness and despair as they progressed, even switching from third person to first person. Will there be authors like this in 40, 50 years? Will there be an audience for it? *Should* there be? I should also remember that the "OMG LOL" generation is also the "Harry Potter" generation, and their biggest cultural event was a book series, whereas my generation's biggest cultural event was "Star Wars".

As a species it seems as if we are compelled - among many other compulsions - to communicate and to control our environment. We seem to need not only to filter what we allow to affect us and how we are affected by it, but also the need to share ourselves with others. Perhaps the success of texting and sites such as Twitter indicates the need for us to displace ourselves from the daily barrage of information and events beyond our capacity to control or embrace and seek saner refuge through connecting with a reality that suits our need to be heard and be supported in that need outside of the artificial boundaries of our neighborhoods or social status or whatever other boundary there may be (including classroom or press room).

It's as if we are using technology to fight the technology that has separated us as individuals/subsumed our voices - a fair and reasonable response, don't you think? A justifiable approach to maintaining our personal equilibrium.

I have a hard time with present day reality (including texting, et al) - I want things to be different in in the world, more like they "used to be". Maybe Twitter and Facebook are the way to get back some of that.

I didn't see anyone bring this up: your link to Peter Segal's page at the very end of your post is broken. The right address is:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102250008

Some extra characters have crept in.

Ebert: That's the link I had. Mystery. Works for me. Anyway, readers, there it is if you need it. Thanks, DV.

Roger, you wrote as a response to one of the posts: "Immortality would be a horrifying fate." Discussions on these themes always remind me a Stephen King short story called "The Jaunt". I read it many years ago and it is impossible to forget. Being alone with one's thoughts has never been such a terrifying concept.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt_(short_story)

I have MySpace and FaceBook pages, and both to me are the equivalent of having another email account (fortunately I haven't gotten into Twitter yet, and am resisting with all my might). I have been reprimanded for not being "on" either enough, because apparently constantly updating one's own status with daily minutiae, and comment on someone else's, constitutes the majority of social interactions for some people.
I find it all to be boring drivel. What I do most days is pretty uninteresting: getting up, going to work, going home, eating breakfast/lunch/dinner between (hey, there's at least 6 status updates!). What other people do is even less so. The only reason I maintain the pages is because I have friends who insist I must. Alas, they have entered a state of disrepair from my neglect, as well as the relationships that I don't really have but I do through some ephemeral online interactions.
Sadly, the Internet has become more mind-numbing than television, and people have shown a strong willingness to numb said minds. I don't blame the medium; as with most things, we are prone to abuse it. I also see a willingness in people to neglect their own lives, relationships, and realities in favor of virtual ones. Why bother raise your children when you can plop them in front of the TV while you update your status on FaceBook about how fun your child is? As an introvert, I find this all a bit curious, sort of like my own lifestyle is under assault. When everyone else shuts themselves in, alone in a room with their computer, to connect online to other people doing the same, what is an introvert like me supposed to think or do?

Ebert: Get out more. It will be like one of those sf stories where the city is deserted except for two or three wandering survivors. Or at least, get a nice pot and start a tomato plant.

Another interesting development in all this is how twitterer's and facebookers create their identity through associations with their favorite bands, movies, television shows, celebrities, etc.
When human contact is removed from the physical world, this is how we find common ground and fellowship with one another: our broader cultural interests. If your favorite band is X, then you join various lists to follow their movements, read their twits, and banter with other X-loving fans. If you dislike band Y, you do not associate with people who do like band Y. Profiles on Facebook rarely contain meaningful information, instead they are filled with lists of favorite movies, etc.

Roger, I’m starting to wonder if you don’t already have my consciousness downloaded somewhere for your perusal. These blog posts are hitting increasingly close to home - it’s like you’re already in my head.

If timestamps are to be believed, on March 30, 2009 at 9:24 AM Brad Hoehne scooped me on "The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul" (just as I was reading down the list of replies on this thread and preparing to pimp the same book). Since I can’t be first, let me second his nomination. Considering the potentially dry nature of it’s subject (the nature of human consciousness) it’s a really fun read – essentially a collection of short stories and essays that run the gamut from the whimsical (Jorge Luis Borges wondering if he actually has a face) to technical examinations of AI theory. You can read more about it here...

http://www.amazon.com/Minds-I-Fantasies-Reflections-Self/dp/0553345842

... before clicking-to-own, or heading down to the trusty local library/quirky independent book shop.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the book is co-edited by none other than Daniel Dennett, (whom you’ve obviously read as he’s has received so much attention on the “Whose Dice?” and assorted Evolution threads here). He contributes a particularly memorable essay to the collection in which he tells a tale that could be right out of “Amazing Wonder Stories” – A man agrees to have his brain removed and connected to machinery that would allow him to run his body by remote control, but things go horribly wrong…

Dennett also provides some great commentary on each selection, along with Douglas Hofstader (one of my all-time faves) who is probably the ranking master world-wide when it comes to matters of what constitutes thought and whether or not it can be mechanized. If you want to read a shelf full of great books that expand on the subject of this post at length, Hofstadter’s entire bibliography would fit the bill as well as anything else I could recommend (you know me, I’m all about those summer pool-side reads). I’d start with…

Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
http://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-Pattern/dp/0465045669/ref=pd_sim_b_3

… which is a collection of Hosfstadter’s “Scientific American” columns (he was a regular feature there for several years during the 1980’s). I know it sounds heavy, (occasionally it is), but like the blog of a certain movie critic I could name, his professional interests serve as a starting point for columns that lead down a variety of fascinating side roads that (at least on the surface) seem to have very little to do with in Artificial Intelligence. He’s just as likely to write about art, music, language, or world problems, as he is technology or mathematics. He writes in a very conversational voice that’s delightfully readable even when he gets into the esoterica of highly technical fields, and since it’s a collection of columns you can easily snack on one or two, then ponder, without feeling like you have to power all the way through in one sitting.

If that whets your appetite, try “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (http://www.amazon.com/Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=pd_sim_b_2/185-0686152-5285816) and then maybe I Am a Strange Loop (http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030793/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b)

I’ve waded into various on-line interactions through the years (including, now, this one), usually for the reasons cited by Mark Stevens above – as wide as one’s circle of non-virtual friends may be, the odds are pretty long of finding more than one or two people in one’s life who want to talk seriously about movies/science/technology/philosophy (all with equal enthusiasm) on a regular basis. These associations have varied wildly in length and intensity, but this has very little to do with the technology. What draws me in is not the act or means of conversing, it’s the quality of the conversations themselves.

This blog is a great case study of new media done right: Not a lot of technological fireworks, just well-written posts followed by a lot of very informed and insightful comments from people who are interested in the subject at hand and want to share. For example I loved Phil Trinh’s post (especially the links) above - I thought of WALL-E as well, though my mind went not to the robots, but to the people, zipping around in their hover-chairs, chatting away on their screens, oblivious to the fact that the person they were talking to was right next to them as they clicked on the icon that told them blue was the new red. They were always connected, but never together.

Maybe is why some of these new formats just don’t do it for me. I succumbed to the urgings of friends and family members in “the real world” and joined Facebook a few months back. It was interesting for a few days, and several folks from various “long lost” categories in my life did locate me (which was fun) but there’s so much extraneous junk (both commercial and personal) that my heart has never been in it (so the rest of my mind and body haven’t been spending much time there either). However great it might be for keeping tabs on the gastrointestinal states of former high school classmates, it’s not a medium that lends itself well to serious discourse. There’s a great clip circulating on the internet for the last year or so that sums it up pretty well:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qkc9VfDYLc

I don’t say all this as a cabin-dwelling luddite either: I’m a professional Alpha-Geek technologist who designs, provides, and services techno-tools for large numbers of people for a living (I even enjoy my work). I’m supposedly the target audience for this sort of thing. Even so, the Twitter sort of thing completely eludes me (as does the IM/Texting sort of thing). These seem to be specially built to provide people with very little to say a medium in which they can say very little, more/less constantly. If phone calls, web pages, blogs, wikis, or e-mail didn’t already exist maybe I could understand the appeal, but we don’t live in that alternate universe. If someone invented a phone that only allowed you to send and receive 5-second recorded snippets of your voice, would anybody use it? (Especially if it cost a lot more and was a bigger hassle to use than your regular phone?).

Of course, I’m clearly prejudiced against brevity…

One great thing has come of this: If I wear my Bluetooth headset, I can talk to myself in public and nobody even looks askance.

I am tempted to glibly write "many news ways of immediately communicating things of less and less importance"...

It seems most of the Twits are happy with the substance of new invention and new ways of doing old things, rather than with substantive evolutions in the ways we think of things and each other. They/we are dazzled by the shiny wrapping paper, so dazzled that we can't tell that we got the same gift last year, and the year before, and it's never really what we wanted.

I got a gift on Saturday night. Somehow, fate or God or self-determination put me in front of Steven Spielberg at a party. I shook his hand and told him that I was a sad 9 year old when I saw E.T. in the theater (by myself), and that when the curtain fell at the end and everyone was crying, I had a kind of revelation above the tears that "someone" had done this wonderful thing to us, and that someone was him, and that I wanted to do that same thing to others someday. I told him, he seemed genuinely touched to hear it (a sentiment I'm sure he's heard a few times before)... and after about 30 seconds with him, that was it.

Now, that's a message I've waited more than a half-century to deliver, but it seemed to arrive just in time.

P.S. - Roger, I'm glad you've vowed never to Twitter. The only person I can imagine being important and interesting enough to Twitter constantly would be Jesus twittering us all the Stations of the Cross. In other words, I do not presume to know that Paris Hilton is or is not a bon vivant, but I doubt her every precious thought needs immediate broadcasting.

Ebert: Something like that means something infinitely more than, "I love all your movies."

Friend readers:

Computer World mag said you write "about the best comments you will find on the web," but in this tread, you have outdone yourselves.

I believe that comment for comment, this thread represents possibly the best after any entry so far. Of course you've written countless most excellent posts, but I'm praising the average. And I have posted every single comment received.

You people are something else.

Roger

There's a great novel by M.T. Anderson called "Feed", which expands on the idea of Twittering in the head by placing the entire internet there. It touches on a lot of themes, including corporate control of everything, genetically modified food, environmentalism, etc, but the major theme is the loss of the essential humanity of the characters. They cannot read, cannot express themselves in a meaningful way, cannot connect with each other in a meaningful way. They are parodies of people.

It scared the heck out of me when I read it (I was 15 or 16, I think), and I still can't look at my fellow youngsters and their constant, cheapened communication without thinking about that book, and feeling my stomach twist all over again.

I wonder why people who paid $7.95 to see a movie would bother to text through the whole thing. What is their thought process? Do they notice the movie at all, or is it background noise that passes through them and hits nothing? Is that how the world will be, eventually?

I'm eighteen and scared as heck.

Ebert: A movie can be a whole two hours long.

You represent hope for the future--for yours, anyway. If this economy digs in, there is going to be scant opportunity for those who prepared themselves by twittering.

I read the city and the stars a few months ago, It was a greatly enjoyable read. Clarke managed to give me the feeling that even though everything is diaspar was perfect, there was still something missing.

I wonder why we don't have more films based on clarke's novels, I've read a lot of them and I think some of them would transfer quite well onto the big screen. Especially if 2001 is anything to go by.

(and now that you've praised the preceding I'll make way for the more mundane of replies... haha just kidding, sort of)

Movies are the greatest testimony to how much we need to communicate. This art-form (though I think it can equally be termed as simple 'communication') displays the depths a single human being will go to get a single message across. Though a film can involve an absurd number of collaborators, much of the time, any good film will be the primary work of one human, the director. This is debatable as theory, but I have to say that to some extent it is very much the case... not only do movies portray our great need to communicate, but they also display one of the most commendable forms. As I said, it's a huge collaboration, not only the on-screen humans, the off-screen 'credit' humans, but even the off-screen secondary collaborators involved merely in financing, legalities, etc. What is so wonderful about such a medium of communication is that it is miraculously counter-cultural to the increasingly solitary forms of communication. If Martin Scorsese wants to tell us something, to make a movie and tell us, how many hundreds, how many THOUSANDS of people does he need to help him say it? Wow.
In my growing desire to enter the world of filmmaking, i'm mostly impressed by this reality. I've become a fairly equal mix of extroversion and introversion. Yet, I find that if I wanted to make a film, it would be overwhelming to gather a huge force around a single statement. This is why I feel David Lynch is still one of my favorite of directors (though he falls well below a handful of greats). Lynch, though a bit too extreme in his manner at times, really knows how to get people to get behind his vision even while being true to themselves. I'm digressing. My main point is, consider the great hope that films give us in transforming an insatiable need to communicate into a form that is utterly reliant upon a collective voice (now that reminds me of Altman!)

You are a wise man, Ebert, for someone who has not lived even a single lifetime.
I believe, with Gould, that a gene does not have a point of view.
Your blog, by itself, isn't a refutation of your fears, but it offers an alternative universe. Biologists, cosmologists, philosophers, and stand-up comics have talked about how what-is is made up of information. Somebody on this thread can tell us exactly how fast information and the communication of information,and the organization or dis- of information is increasing. My scientific estimate is, a freaking lot. Some of this information-sharing will be adaptive, some not. We shall not know about the ghost in the machine for some time, but even if we all eventually become the Borg, sometime, in a galaxy far, far away......
Your note about Natasha Richardson was very moving. She was Natasha, a person in the midst of life.

You're sounding like a man who remains devoted to his own distractions while casting aspersions on those of others, no? I've often wondered how any sane person could visit, say, the south of France and spend day after day in dark rooms watching one movie after another. Talk about favoring abstractions over realities. How DID you accomplish that, after all? What is the difference between that and twittering all day?

Let's face it, mind is nothing but abstractions, a process of creating symbols that stand for other things. From this we attempt to derive meaning, which becomes an addiction. But the whole (life itself) has no meaning, because there is nothing standing apart from it, no substitute for it that can say "this means" life. The point being that mind is not going anywhere, not coming to any conclusion. It is just occupying our time with distractions and pleasurable/painful forms of addiction. Does it make much sense to favor one form of addiction over another?

Ebert: Attention, everybody! Let's have a show of hands.

Those in favor of twittering for two weeks this May?

Okay, you can put your hands down. Now. Those in favor of going to the Cannes Film Festival?

The problem with cyberlife is that it occupies our hands. And we need our hands, if only to make cooperative gestures, as Mike Tomasella of the Max Planck Institute illustrated in one of a number of experiments:

A human is in a room with two barrels; under one of them is some food. A chimp enters. The human points at the barrel with the food, but the chimp doesn't understand and will choose barrels randomly. If the human reaches for the barrel as if to grab it, the chimp understands and heads for the correct barrel.

Other primates understand competitive gestures; we get those, all right, but also the cooperative ones. But if we're locked inside ourselves, clicking at keypads, heads down, commenting on blogs--hoping to write something cool enough to rate posting and (dare we hope?) a response ("competitive communication"?), I'm afraid we'll eventually lose the capacity for cooperative gestures. And while we may not need them for cyberlife--note the abundance of online snark--real life might decide non-cooperative humans just can't cut it, survival-wise.

By the way, Greg Egan has a good story, "The Extra," in which the ultra-wealthy keep congenitally brain-damaged clones on hand from whom (which?) the rich "owner" harvests organs--and whose bodies eventually will be used to house the brain of the over-indulgent tycoons. Coming soon to a society near you ...

Roger, forgive me for this if you've seen it. It's a viral internet joke that is funny and well written. You don't have to put it on the blog if you don't want, but substitute "Twitter" for "Diary" and it is appropos!

Excerpts from a Dog's Diary.....

8:00 am - Dog food! My favorite thing!
9:30 am - A car ride! My favorite thing!
9:40 am - A walk in the park! My favorite thing!
10:30 am - Got rubbed and petted! My favorite thing!
12:00 pm - Lunch! My favorite thing!
1:00 pm - Played in the yard! My favorite thing!
3:00 pm - Wagged my tail! My favorite thing!
5:00 pm - Milk Bones! My favorite thing!
7:00 pm - Got to play ball! My favorite thing!
8:00 pm - Wow! Watched TV with the people! My favorite thing!
11:00 pm - Sleeping on the bed! My favorite thing!

Excerpts from a Cat's Daily Diary...

Day 983 of my captivity...

My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects.
They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while the other inmates and I are fed
hash or some sort of dry nuggets.

Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear, I
nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength.

The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an
attempt to disgust them, I once again vomit on the carpet.

Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their
feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it
clearly demonstrates what I am capable of. However, they merely made
condescending comments about what a 'good little hunter' I am. Jerks!

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was
placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However,
I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my
confinement was due to the power of 'allergies.' I must learn what
this means and how to use it to my advantage.

Today I was almost successful in an attempt to assassinate one of my
tormentors by weaving around his feet as he was walking. I must try
this again tomorrow -- but at the top of the stairs.

I am convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches.
The dog receives special privileges. He is regularly released - and
seems to be more than willing to return. He is obviously retarded.

The bird has got to be an informant. I observe him communicating wi th
the guards regularly. I am certain that he reports my every move. My
captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell,
so he is safe. For now................

Ebert: Diary of a Twit:

Insert time code! I twitted!

Insert time code! I twitted!

Insert time code! I twit you not!

Anybody interested in starting a movement that specifically opposes junk communication? I'm sure we'd have Ned Ludd's blessing.

Kevin Kelly's website www.kk.org/thetechnium is something you might enjoy.

Jeepers, Roger, now I have to try to follow your comment with something as profound as all the ones which came before it....

What struck me most was your comment that people who Twitter and speak on cellphones are somewhere else. Twittering is not the same as taking notes, because when you take notes, you are concentrating on the content of the speech. When you Twitter it (I believe, never having done so), you are concentrating on the reaction to your notes and not the content of the lecture.

I would love to see a scientific study done on this to see if I'm correct.

But anyway, when I am deep in the midst of writing a story or essay, I am indeed somewhere else. Coming back to the "real world" afterward is like coming up from a deep sea dive. Everything seems strange and unreal in comparison to fiction.

Ebert: When creators create, they find themselves in the Zone. When I went through a period of drawings and watercolors, I literally lost track of time. I wasn't so hot as an artist, but the doing of it freed me from words.

This is a story from two years ago. I was writing a news script on my computer in a corner of the newsroom. It was the night shift in a small channel, so basically empty, just me and two of my colleagues. On my way to get a drink of water I saw both of them hunched over their computers, Orkut(A facebook substitute popular where I come from) open, mouths slightly agape, typing away little, disjointed, grammatically incorrect sentences. I asked one of them "who exactly are you talking to at 3 in the morning?" She looked at me with bleary eyes and said " Oh, were just talking to each other." Her colleague. Sitting five feet away.

So why this long and slightly boring and predictable story? Just to illustrate maybe, exactly how inane digital conversation has become? Maybe just because it was amusing and related to the topic at hand. But mostly because I had something to say, so I couldn't possibly say it say on any social networking site because it wouldn't be possible in less than three seconds or sentences, whichever comes first. Well I don't have a twitter account, the very concept of it baffles me, but the basic appeal of social networking seems to be that it requires little or no concentration. Less cerebral activity that watching pro wrestling on television, if it is possible. It's the easiest form of entertainment, other than drinking yourself into a stupor, and that is hardly possible at work or in the classroom. And then, it evolves its own badges of honour. How many "friends" do you have on facebook? How many "scraps" on Orkut? How many times do you "twit" a day? Feelings of accomplishments emerge from nothingness. Meaningless chatter takes over actual conversation. It's painless, risk-free, and requires no thought whatsoever. Thought and introspection is apparently the enemy of our age. Far too many times everyday, I am encouraged to "not think things too much". So many people are scared, scared of the path "thinking" will take them down. Scared of the people who would read or think quietly, rather than join them for conversation that can be classified as verbal twitter. I am not friendless, or anti-social. But I do sometimes enjoy doing things alone. More than once people have commented on how strange and alien it is. The need to be around people is normal, healthy. But the obsession to stay connected, even when you have nothing to say or do. Now that's scary.

I'm 23 and just barely old enough to appreciate the last vestige of humanity's freedom. I'm talking about the exponential increase in connection, from telegrams to twittering, that really accelerated with the cellphone. I don't know if it's nostalgia for a marginally freer existence, but I often wish cellphones would just go away. I feel like everyone was much more liberated before cellphone proliferation, able to really experience the world as people had for thousands of years. When you left home, you were out in the wilderness. You were out in the world, away from the watch and control of society; Now if someone wants to be able to get a hold of you, no matter where you are, they just need your Prisoner cellphone number. Before cellphones, if someone wanted to contact me but I wasn't home —too bad!— they couldn't, I was out there! If I became stranded, I had to find a payphone and hope the other people in my life weren't also out in the wilderness. Obviously, I was hardly ever anywhere that anyone would consider the wilderness, but then that's nostalgia for you. There's no arguing, however, that all this constant connection is bringing us much closer to a "1984" society of constant surveillance. When I think about stuff like "twitter" that allows people to constantly update others on whatever mundane thing their up to, and how popular its becoming, I shake my head in disgust.

Obviously cellphones are convenient, but so what? American life had gotten along just fine before. A few people climb mount Everest just to get away from the doldrums of "civilized" life, most other people would rather leave their wallets at home than their cellphones http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06075/671034-294.stm Everyone has them and the US society now runs on that premise. So, it's not feasible to simply get rid of my own cellphone, it would be like living in "The Village" only without ridiculous monsters.

For a fascinating take on the subject of cloning, I can think of none better than Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel, "Never Let Me Go." (He is author of "The Remains of the Day") It is difficult to say much about the novel without giving away crucial plot details, but the subtle way Ishiguro paints his canvas is by turns beautiful and unnerving.
Wikipedia indicates that the novel is slated for adaptation into film this year with Mark Romanek directing.
SPOILERS AT LINK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go

Ebert: I agree. And it's heartbreaking. It's a story you don't want to know anything about beforehand.

If your whole mind was uploaded to a computer, would it be immoral if somebody turned the computer off?

p.s. Sometimes when I'm on travel and dining alone I use the iPhone to read email, the news, etc.

Re: Letterman

It takes a gifted person to actually be dealt a life lesson and take in all it's value and have it change his/her life. He's not had one slip back into pettiness since the incident. I hope he becomes the grizzled old dad he already thinks he is.

Dear Roger,

I'm writing a screenplay that touches on the dwindling borders between bytes and thought. It posits a miraculous mind-reading device, and while the necessities of dramatic storytelling force me to call the usefulness and legitimacy of this device into question, I've been wrestling with how to ultimately acknowledge the fact that if it did exist, it'd probably be pretty cool. Technology is indeed, as an above poster mentioned (the lasers quote), fraught with complexities.

I've contemplated kicking the Facebook habit, though never seriously. The luxury of youthful solitude that you and many of my elders speak wistfully of did not prevent the global environmental crisis we now face, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't solve it, either. (I read sometime last week that 5,000 children worldwide die of hunger every day. I wish I had a dog to pass time with, but then, a dog would never challenge me with such a statistic.) Facebook, email and the online forums I frequent may or may not dull my imagination. But they're also constant reminders that I am one amongst many, and my resulting humility reminds me that the species must hang together - or most assuredly an unacceptable number of us will hang separately.

Dear Roger,

I am writing this just after reading your Friend Readers praise, and am both thrilled and intimidated, much as I am around technology. But nothing for it but to plow ahead. Onward!

I hate Twitter. I don't use it and don't plan to, and am sure many would come down on me for ripping on something that's not part of my everyday life, but the idea infuriates me. Who the hell is important enough that they should send me every stray, badly spelled, emoticoned thought that passes through their head? Why on earth should I care that much about someone who is demonstrating clearly that they have no regard for their own privacy, that they don't care to develop their thoughts before they announce them? Anyone who has wondered what it would be like to read minds--Twitter is what it's like. Every last particle of someone's thought process, spewed out to the pulsing, greedy, hostile world.

I no longer have a cell phone (I never used it and it was a waste of money), I refuse to go on Facebook, and I don't drive. But I don't hate technology. I adore having electricity and running water, I take the bus, eat foods from all over the world, I use the web, and have had the incredible thrill of having you actually read and occasionally answer my posts. Technology has allowed me more and deeper understanding of the world and its peoples.

But if you Twittered, that would be cheapened. You wouldn't be reading a post I put time into, just as I wouldn't be reading the posts of your journal. We would mean nothing to each other other than jabbering mouths throwing random syllables at various, anonymous ears. People go on about how the racing pace of technology brings us closer together, but what good is that if "closer" is all that is valued? Without distances, there is no perspective, no way to relate different ideas and calculate their worth. We become as smushed together as the original point before the Big Bang--no room to breathe, explore, have a reason to live. A totally informed system, with information cycling evenly and endlessly through it, is a closed one, that is eventually doomed, either to flicker out or to explode.

Ebert: Your final sentence. Yes. Information needs to engage. Information for its own sake has no meaning. You cannot have a pie fight with the idea of pies.

"You people are something else."

-Roger

Our posts reflect the respect that we've come to have for your intelligence, curiosity and honesty over the years, Roger. When your site fills my monitor, it becomes like a classroom with an ongoing open-ended seminar on some intriguing subject moderated by a wise old don. Since I am offered only pearls of wisdom by yourself and the other participants, it would be unworthy of myself to offer anything but my best effort. I'm sure most of the others here feel the same way. I hereby nominate you not only for an honorary doctorate, but an honorary professoriate in the University of Unbounded Possibilities. May the joys of discovery never end for you, Roger.

Ebert: These posts expand and improve on the entry. Writing them takes work. That there is obviously a readership here for them must be an inspiration. I can imagine an entire blog entry reading: For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Discuss.

All of the arguments leveled against facebook, twitter, and other 'social networking' services that have been raised on this blog hold real weight with me. Your observation that we are losing the a sense of the physicality we take up in space is particularly scary and seems like it would give the Dalai Lama nightmares. I do feel, though, that there are other more positive aspects that have gone unaddressed.

When people tweet about their breakfast etc. this affirms what people have said - that twitter is puerile, pointless, and a definite waste of time. However, I find that it can also be a positive tool for sharing real information. For instance, I consistently learn about new music and movies by 'following' people whose opinions I trust. For instance Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek consistently points me to articles in places that I would never come across on my own. After recently graduating from college its wonderful to have any avenue with which to receive direction on how to continue learning.

I also enjoy Christopher Walken's twitter which shows a different sort of genius. His reads like Jack Handy as if he was, well, someone doing a Christopher Walken impression ie hilariously bizarre.

As long as we keep track of who we are when we engage with new media, these services really are what you make of them - which is to say, not necessarily categorically soul crushing.

Ebert: Now Christopher Walken, I could read.

George G. wrote - "This blog is a great case study of new media done right: Not a lot of technological fireworks, just well-written posts followed by a lot of very informed and insightful comments from people who are interested in the subject at hand and want to share."

Ditto!

For me, the attraction of Roger's blog is getting to read what others have to say; as the comments are often just that, very insightful. Which in addition to being fun to read are also of personal benefit. I've said it before - you are what you eat, and that's especially true for artists because it shows up in our work.

Where do artists find their inspiration..? I've been asked that many times and I always answer the same: from everywhere. The trick so to speak, lies in knowing how to see what's staring you right in the face.

"Yeah, but how do you do THAT?" I'm then invariably asked.
"By looking beyond the surface of it."

Blank stare.

"Okay, think of it this way - ever build a website?"
"Yeah, I've got photos of my cat up on..."
"Never mind the kitties. Do you have links on your website?"
"Yes."
"Okay - for me, reality is hyper-linked. I can see the invisible code connecting stuff to other stuff on a metaphysical level and the trippiness of that equals inspiration."

Another blank stare.

"It's a gift from God, I don't know how I do it." Sigh.
"OH! That's what I thought!"

(Seriously, I have actually had that conversation; chuckle!)

And so it's nice to come in here and find others swimming in the deeper end of the pool while at the same time, dropping a line into the collected reservoir of thoughts that fill it. As you never know what you're going to catch or where it may lead you next! I caught a stone recently and it turned into a platypus and learned in the process that every thought has a frequency! And I could use that in a painting. Or maybe my experience thus far inside the blog will end up partly as a strange and surreal graphic novel about a book trying to read itself?

"The Curious Comma" - the story of a little comma who travels from the very first page of a story to the final period on the last, and in a perilous journey yet HEROIC quest to learn what all these mysterious letters mean?! And how would he even get to the next page..? Jump? Could he fall off the book?! Would the letters help or hinder his progress for having some dark ulterior motive? Oh the sheer DRAMA! :)

That's the sort of stuff I sometimes think about when I'm taking a walking base line through the blog. In a way, for me Roger's blog is often like going into an Art supply store or Home Depot. Walk down a few isles in the guise of posts and suddenly - those plumbing supplies turn into a light saber! So it works for me personally on a multitude of levels. I get to think. I get to explore. I get to learn and sometimes play.

All of which speaks to what makes the blog a worthy contribution to the Internet while serving as an avatar of its potential; ie: this is what technology "can" give birth to. Not everything has to suck or be pointless.

Birds of a feather flock together and why I often see the posts as flocks of every shape and color circling round the "bread crumbs" Roger's scattered in the Blog. If he were to drop them somewhere else, we'd just fly over there instead, no? And so it's not the medium that attracts followers but rather, how nourishing those yummy crumbs are - and for going down now more like a really fine meal - served with wine and everything!

In fact if I were to describe this particular blog Entry, I'd say it was like dinner at Le Train Blue in Paris - which is not a loud and trendy place to be "seen" while observing others. Instead the mood is elegant and tranquil and where you can find "indulgences and indiscretions" listed on the menu...

http://www.le-train-bleu.com/

I'm going to start Roger, with the Risotto carnaroli with cep mushrooms creamy sauce with crushed hazelnuts and shaving of parmesan. Hey, it's imaginary Euros - I can order whatever I want and you can too! Go on, read their menu, see if you can taste the words and if you can, isn't that an exquisite torture? :)

And with that, I shall bid you adieu with a bit of entertainment by way of satire...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

...as I head off now to make some macaroni and cheese. :)

Ebert: What I do is, I stir some frozen green peas into hot macaroni and cheese. Don't knock it till you've tried it.

For me, Twitter brings to mind the idea of vacation photography and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. When I remember to take a picture so that I can preserve the moment forever, haven’t I already changed the moment, usually for the worse?

One of my favorite feelings in life comes in the final few sleepy minutes around a dying campfire, sitting silently with close friends, knowing that soon someone will say, “Well, I’d better turn in.”

One of the finest science fiction books I have ever read is 'Altered Carbon' by Richard Morgan. His vision of the future is one in which most people have their minds stored digitally in a device in their spinal column, and those who can afford it can have their selves transfered to a new body (generally a cloned one, called a 'sleeve') when the old one wears out, and can even have their digital minds backed-up regularly in case theirs is damaged or destroyed.

The most intriguing aspect of this scenario is that it neatly solves the problem of interstellar space travel, since while physical matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light, a digital mind can be transmitted almost instantaneously (by some mechanism that I've forgotten now). So you just send out ships of frozen 'sleeves' to distant planets, have the ship automatically thaw them out when they arrive after a century or so, and upload the minds of whoever wants to colonize the place from earth. They can even come home for a visit whenever they want, or have weekend vacations on other planets. Plus the book has this whole Raymond Chandler thing going for it.

Word is that James McTeigue might be doing the movie, which would be a wonderful thing.

outside of business related reasons, women are the most voracious texters. One girl who I was interested in refused to talk on the phone unless I called her. She felt like there was less pressure to say something interesting when you have time to respond, vs. a regular conversation where you can seem dim-witted if you take too long. That, and it eliminated awkward silences.

I hated typing a button three or four times just to get one letter or type of punctuation, and I never bothered to get one of those phones with a built-in keyboard---that's just admitting defeat. My biggest with having entire conversations via text, was that I never knew if it was really her or someone messing with me and impersonating her; her family was the type that would that. I was always scared to death that she or someone else would display to the world, an embarrassing log of personal tid-bits. She once told me, in graphic terms, that she wanted to have sex with me really really bad. I'll never trully know if it was her that actually said that.

I eventually just stopped texting altogether, which forced her to start calling. After realizing that she'll never have the courage to say how much she wanted me in person, I broke it off. Soon after, I met my current fiance. She had no problem with talking on the phone when we were dating, but she'd just beg that I engage her in ENDLESS text-based chatter. To a lesser extent, she still does.

My theory is that women unconsciencely (who knows, maybe consciencly) evaluate the heart of a person, when their words are isolated from distractions such as manner of delivery, or pressure to keep a converstation lively with constant cute/witty/smart responses. Or maybe a text message from a guy is like reading a micro romance novel.

*shrug*.

Maybe humans will evolve thin, sharp points at the ends of their thumbs, where only the quickest texters will reproduce with desirable females.

There is an opportunity for social research in all of this. What's interesting to me is that facebook and twittering represent the creation of social reality, something that every person and perhaps every generation does anew. Each person, in a lifetime, creates strands and threads of thought and consciousness connected to one another. I have in my office two boxes of letters that I wrote to a former teaching mentor of mine, over a five year period in the early nineties. Yes, letters, as in postal, although we often delivered them by hand, since we worked together at the school. They were the ramblings of a young teacher, and a valued mentor--about life, disgust with administrators, idealism for teaching, students and their work, coaching, my young family-- all of it really. We would often follow up with a lunch or dinner out, where we would drink beer together and enjoy the intimacy of friendship and mentoring. The letters are growing yellow, and have been replaced by blog and occasional email correspondence. We both have moved on; he is retired. But we are still connected.

Now I see in my students the same need and yearning for social connections, and they use whatever tools they can. They are living their lives, really, in contact with one another, searching for the kind of relationships and friendships that are intimate and meaningful. Does texting and such interfere or enhance their natural desire for social connection? We create our social reality as friends, lovers, professionals, people, and project that reality into the world for others to see and respond. We do this in whatever medium we have available to us--those of us who speak and teach do it in the classroom and in academic communities. Those who cannot speak, find other ways. We connect, and thank God for that.

Working with young people has kept me grounded and connected. Yes, they have facebook and communicate at a moment's notice. But they still hold hands in the hallways, look deep into one another's eyes and fall in love. They still love to laugh and hang out, go see films, and read blogs like this. Sure, they waste time texting and playing video games. I wasted time listening to records, watching baseball and reading comic books.

Because they are social tools of the young of this generation, we should strive to be kind. There is a real human intimacy and connection behind facebook, etc, that we should admire. I do not participate either, with twitter or facebook, but that's OK. They are young and it is their world. They are also an idealistic and service oriented generation, as witnessed by growing numbers entering all sorts of service professions, as well as Teach for America, the Peace Corp, etc.

Ebert wrote: "What I do is, I stir some frozen green peas into hot macaroni and cheese. Don't knock it till you've tried it."

You cook? :)

Actually it was homemade macaroni and cheese and so it was super rich and creamy and I added broccoli too - however peas would work just as good, so thank-you for the tip!

Karen Murphy wrote - "For me, Twitter brings to mind the idea of vacation photography and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. When I remember to take a picture so that I can preserve the moment forever, haven’t I already changed the moment, usually for the worse?"

See?! Now that's what I'm talking about - I learn stuff in here! For I didn't know what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was.

So I headed over to Wiki where I learned that in quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain physical quantities, like position and momentum, cannot both have precise values at the same time. But then they started talking about how Albert Einstein believed that randomness is a reflection of our ignorance of some fundamental property of reality. While Niels Bohr believed that the probability distributions are fundamental and irreducible, and depend on which measurements we choose to perform - oh and that Einstein and Bohr debated all this stuff for years.

Which led to them talking about Einsten's box and Matrix mechanics and Schrödinger's wave and the Energy-time uncertainty principle thingy and to me clicking on a link for the for "Observer effect" - ie: in physics, the term refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. At which point, I stopped reading for realizing it was another case of Doctor Who's T.A.R.D.I.S and explaining how it works. WTF?

And so ironically, I had to toss ALL that stuff out! It just got in the way. And instead, used "fuzzy logic" to figure it out.

Karen Murphy said, "When I remember to take a picture so that I can preserve the moment forever, haven’t I already changed the moment, usually for the worse?"

Okay so what does that mean? That when she takes a vacation photo, it's because she wants to remember it. But what exactly does she want to remember? The object in the photo - or how she felt about it? How she felt about it, of course! And why would taking a photo ruin that? Insert empathy and intuition...

The last time I saw Paris, I was killing time outside my hotel before heading off to the airport; I was going to Venice next. I was in the Tuileries Gardens across the street. It was May, 8:00 am. The morning sunlight was streaming through the canopies of the trees, dappling the ground in post-impressionist puddles of light at my feet and the effect made me feel as though I were floating up into the canopy because it was just that beautiful. I remember CURSING as I'd left my camera at the hotel and there wasn't enough time to go back up and fetch it; so I never got the shot. Someone has ironically caught it though, as it looked JUST like this...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1215/560810463_0d392906ab.jpg?v=0

And you know what? My memory of the photo I "didn't" take, means more to me than I any shot I've ever captured on film. For you can't actually photograph the metaphysical value of anything felt in a transcendent moment. I was there at the right time, in the right place on the right day and what I brought to the moment completed it and made it perfect. The minute you take a photograph of that - you've recorded the passing of it. But if you don't take a photo, the moment never stops because emotionally, it never did.

And why some things are best remembered as memories. For that photo I've linked to only caught the surface. And had I taken a shot that day, that's all I've had captured too.

Note: did I get it right..? :)

Either way, at least I know Heisenberg is not a German beer, that Karen Murphy is probably taking science, and Roger likes peas with his macaroni and cheese - and that might end up in a cartoon one day; you never know where a good idea may come from, inside Roger Ebert's Blog. But at least there's always plenty to inspire one. :)

Ebert:

I eat my peas with honey
I've done it all my life
They may taste kind of funny
But it keeps 'em on the knife

The best thing I have read about all the issues being discussed here is Greg Egan's 1994 novel PERMUTATION CITY.

Here's the pitch from the back of the book:

THE GOOD NEWS is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.

THE BAD NEWS is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.

THE GOOD NEWS is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...

THE BAD NEWS is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.

I highly recommend this book. Anybody else read it?

I've often wondered how any sane person could visit, say, the south of France and spend day after day in dark rooms watching one movie after another.

What I am now going to say I say without any irony or rhetoric at all, but I honestly sometimes wonder how some people manage to maintain their sanity without watching movies regularly. How tedious and how scary, to have only reality to look at.

By the way, what is a twitter?

Ebert: If you don't know, take my advice. Be content that you don't know.

Ken Wettington: I've noticed the same thing. It's a boon for me though; for a long time I've been more comfortable writing than speaking. When it comes to conversations, I'm relatively bad at telling stories or long jokes; I mostly keep my contributions to short witty insights, and I generally just concentrate on listening carefully to other people speak, which is of course always appreciated, but not always the best way to attact the opposite sex. When texting became all the rage, as an amateur writer I found I had a huge leg up on the potential competition =p A lot of my fondest early courtship memories are exchanging intimate text messages late at night, out of necessity, as my girlfriend's dormmates were sleeping nearby.

This reminds of Birkerts' book The Gutenberg Elegies, where he talks about how this digital age is leading to the death of the traditional novel. Is this alarmist or an accurate interpretation?

Speaking of our rapidly changing communications systems, what does the future hold for this blog, and your work for the Sun-Times, now that the company is seeking bankruptcy protection? I'm sure I won't be the only one who asks about this, so please forgive me.

Ebert: The website and blog continue as before. I was asked for a statement, and replied:

"This is a sound business judgment. I've been expecting it for some time. Hopefully it will help free the paper from the crushing tax debt imposed on it by convicted thieves in the previous management. The paper has no bank debt, and I believe it has a future. Management is taking the right steps."

As I post this, I am following Mr. Rana who inquires:"What is a twitter?" Recently asked if I twitter, I responded, "Only occasionally when I use the restroom." Kinda liked that one, keeps getting me a few chuckles.

There's a lot of hostility toward Twitter out there, I see.

As with any way of communicating with the rest of the world (say, as with a blog), Twitter is as annoying or beneficial as the users' intent and personality. Are there a plethora of self-obsessed people in the world? Of course. Look at the vast range of blogs, facebook pages, and MySpace pages. This blog excluded, of course.

Clearly, these are like setting up a shop, or a home, where one can present oneself however one may like, and if someone wants to find you, visit you, or get in touch with you, that is facilitated.

Twitter is an ongoing conversation, rather than a home. And not with oneself, as is being implied by most of the reaction here. If one is a public person (writer, actor, etc.) it can be a creative outlet, a performance, and/or let you interact directly with fans and possible customers. If one has a project to promote, a quick link can make hundreds or thousands of people aware of it.

For example, musician Amanda Palmer is using it to give away free tickets to her shows, just hours, or even minutes, before going onstage. She also sometimes uses Twitter to take requests for songs as the show is going on.

One can also send links to news, photos, and anything else one might want to share with others.

Something that doesn't seem to be realized here, is that Twitter can be set to private, so that you are only sending and receiving messages from friends of your choice. You must approve someone before they are allowed to be included in your social circle. Easy as that.

When this is done, the program can help facilitate a sense of immediacy with distant friends that simulates the experience of hanging out in the physical world. By limiting the postings to 140 characters, it recreates the feel of chatting with someone at a party, or in the workplace, or while doing whatever one might do with one's friends.

And even amongst one's friends you have the capability to send more private, personal messages.

It is free, quick, easy to use, and only as annoying as the person using it. It is only as public as one's circle of friends.

@Nathan Reese

Thanks for pointing out how Twitter can have real value.

@Marie Haws
Thanks for your close reading of my post. I think you got it right. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as far as my limited, lay understanding goes, says that you can’t measure two aspects of a particle—position and momentum—at the same time. The more accurate your measurement of one is, the more inaccurate your measurement of the other will be. It’s related to the idea that the act of examining something changes the thing you’re examining.

As far as travel photography (or Twitter) goes, it’s the awareness that a moment should be recorded that pulls me out of the moment and ends it. I think that if I trained myself to remember to take pictures—or if I trained myself to tweet—I’d also be training myself to bring myself out of the experience of meaningful moments.

I don’t think that’s the only perspective. I can see the value of being more aware, of thinking, “This. Notice this. I am here. I am alive. This moment will not come again.” I don’t think the world needs to know what I’m having for breakfast, though.

P.S. I’m not taking science, but my dad is a scientist. When I was a kid, he talked to me about Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Planck. He also taught me to count on my fingers in binary, a skill for which I haven’t yet found a practical application. My five-year-old son is destined to suffer the same fate. I wonder how long it will be before he realizes that Mom’s a little weird.

It has been suggested that we recall our lives similar to the way we recall the details of a novel we once read. In other words, we are not defining ourselves based on memory but rather the essence of experiences distilled. Though memory is involved, consciousness is a living process, not a remembering details process. And much of what we call consciousness is, one might argue, to a large degree routine or habit. Consider the effort and difficulty required to change routine - respond to, or seek, a higher level of consciousness. What you are doing now - are you doing it because you recall memories that say you should be doing it? (insert twilight zone theme here)

So, downloading a brain`s contents into a chip merely occupies that chip with data. The essence of experience that we use to define ourselves I would argue cannot be captured because this essence is not developed solely within our brains. It is developed, and constantly being modified or reinforced, through ongoing experience and, to some degree, influences what we will experience, and our perception on what we experience - that is, the world around us.

So (and finally), one`s self-consciousness may (may) only be reproduced if its essence (and not trivial minutia detail) of experience is preserved along with the corresponding world that reinforces this consciousness. Otherwise, you simply have data out of context - without meaning.

The liberal notion of ontological man likes to dream that consciousness is abstract. It isnt. But these type of discussions, as interesting as they are, need to understand the context of their discussion. We are not discussing human nature as is, which is the claim of the liberal philosopher. We are discussing a philosophical and culturally unique perspective, one that tends to peel-the-onion, so-to-speak.

I think Twitter is a great equalizer. It's nice to know that everyone has nothing to say in 140 characters.

By Nathan Reese on March 30, 2009 10:34 PM

I also enjoy Christopher Walken's twitter which shows a different sort of genius. His reads like Jack Handy as if he was, well, someone doing a Christopher Walken impression ie hilariously bizarre.

Ebert: Now Christopher Walken, I could read.

Knowing you to be a reader of Salon.com, Roger, I was going to link you (and my fellow readers) to a piece Glenn Greenwald -- one of the most insightful and trenchant commentators on the absolute corruption and hypocrisy of our most-wonderfullest-bestest-ever-in-the-history-of-the-universe American system, and the vapidity of our chattering political media class, for those who've never read him -- did last Sunday which induced me to sign up with Twitter. The lure? Christopher Walken's tweets (Update 7, at bottom). Nathan's beaten me to it, though, it seems.

In principle, I don't have the desire to know every banal "thought" sent out by celebs, etc., but Walken's pretty damn funny in such a concise format.

Ebert: I understand that "cwalken" is not Christopher Walken, but only seems to be.

Ebert: If you don't know, take my advice. Be content that you don't know.

If I don't get it, sooner or later it will get me.

I am 34 years old. I grew up in Reseda (remember Boogie Nights?). I didn't own, or know anybody that owned a computer until my first day in college. My parents bought me a Compaq PC with a 486 processor for school. It took me a LONG time to figure out how to use it in all its Windows 3.1 glory. I remember struggling with the damn thing to get it to do anything the first time. The first time installing a computer program, setting it up to print, figuring out dial-up and logging into the UC Irvine mainframe to check e-mail...everything was a huge chore. But, I didn't mind at all because it was a new experience. I tinkered and played with it for a year until I broke it, then I learned how to fix it. Partly because I was afraid to tell my parents, yeah thanks for the $2000 gift, can you get me another one? Every computer after that first one, I've built myself out of parts.

I have a four year old daughter. She jumps into my computer chair and turns on the computer and the monitor. She double-clicks the broadband account manager and hits connect. Then she'll open internet explorer and surf the web, sometimes noggin.com or else she'll go to youtube and watch disney princess videos or I'll see her on some strange japanese sites with dress-up dolls. Occasionally, she will turn on the printer and print some stuff out. She know's exactly where she wants to be though. When she's done she turns off the monitor if she is only stepping away for a bit or turns off the computer if she is done for the day. As a computer tech, I've met a lot of people that didn't know the difference.

The point I want to make is that I didn't teach her anything. I NEVER sat her down and said, this is how you turn this on, this is what you press. She learned everything by some strange technological osmosis but then expanded it on her own. My daughter showed ME how to watch a youtube video in full-screen. She's four. When she's not online, she will open up the family photo album and peruse her baby videos and pictures. Then she'll draw on them. My wife has no idea how she draws on pictures.

The philosophical point I want to make is that I don't know what any of this means. I know my daughter is not unique, because my friend's kids are the same way. I think facebook and myspace are stupid. I think twitter is a waste of time. But, I imagine that my kids won't see things my way. People nowadays differentiate between someone thats a good friend and someone thats a good friend, irl. IRL is short for "in real life." To me a good friend is someone I can call up and say, "hey, let's go watch a movie." A good friend is not someone that I get a twit from: KNOWING SUX, 2 RELIGUS, PLANE CRASH WAS AWSM THO...

I think that the minutiae of my life is exactly that, minutiae. It is stuff that I wouldn't want to ever revisit in my lifetime. Ironically, the major life-changing events in my life I would not want to revisit either. So that leaves absolutely jack for me to talk about with anybody but my closest friends irl. The need for posting about your life and reading about everyone else's is tied to this sick exhibitionist/voyeuristic culture we are creating. Tabloid reporters used to be a dirty, underground profession. Now they are the norm as you have so eloquently pointed out on many occasions.

Now the tabloids have come to us. Without a middle man. I can look at what Wil Wheaton, Will Shatner, and Will Anybody are doing any given minute thx to Twitter. But, does that make me their friends? Does knowing that Snoop Doggy Dogg is getting a lot of honeys from the twizzle, enrich my life somehow? Of course, not. I mean ofcn. It's entertainment. Richard Roeper's twitter is great, some of the funniest one-liners I have ever read. And that's what everybody's twitter boils down to, entertaining one-liners.

Once you realize that Twitter, Facebook and Myspace are tabloidism you come to understand why they are so impersonal. People take the maxim of "there is no such thing as bad press" to the extreme. They will talk about every aspect of their genitalia and sexual prowess OR on the other extreme talk about minutiae like a bad Seinfeld imitation. Everybody wants to feel like a celebrity, and everybody can. We can all dish dirt on each other all day long as long as everybody participates. Which is why twitter devotees are so adamant about you joining in.

Who would've thought that one day we could all be celebrities...ok, Andy Warhol did. I just hope my daughter is more like Samuel L. Jackson IRL than Andy Dick IRL.

By Marie Haws on March 31, 2009 4:40 AM

See?! Now that's what I'm talking about - I learn stuff in here! For I didn't know what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was.

Heisenberg? Who he? Seriously, Marie, there's some more (serious) discussion of Heisenberg in Roger's "A roll of whose dice" comment thread.

We tweet on Twitter, blog on Blogger, post ourselves on YouTube, and do all three on MySpace, Friendster, Facebook.

It's as if we've given up being famous for 15 minutes in other people's minds in favor of a lifetime of fame in our own minds.

Hi Mr. Ebert, I love art in all its forms. I saw a wonderful play yesterday starring Mr. John Barrymore. It was magical what he did on that stage. Also I went to a wonderful concert. I saw Puccini conduct the orchestra at the Teatro Dal Verme last week. He was amazing. I sat up front and absorbed every note that came from the orchestra pit. Have you been to the Louvre lately? There is a rising star by the name of Claude Monet who is really shaking up the world of painting on canvas. I met him in person and you could just sense something about him that was reflected in his work.

Anyways, the reason for my letter is that I wanted to warn you of a horrid new art form that is coming. Apparently they have figured out a way of making photography come to life and have it move. Somehow they run a strip of film through a device and project the shadow on the wall, creating the illusion of a moving picture. To call this art is obviously an insult to everything that the tradition of artisic expression holds dear. They say it's superior because it can incorporate other mediums of artistic expression such as music, poetry, literature, and theater performance. Obviously no shadow on a wall can replace the actual feeling of being there to see a live performance, or to actually see a painting with all it's texture and vivid colors. I can't imagine hearing sounds from this ungodly projection machine could possibly be better than seeing Bizet or Puccini in person.

I suggest we find a way to get all citizens to resist this ungodly form of art. There's no way an intelligent person like you could ever recognize that anything like this could ever be passed off as artistic. If this underground movement ever does surface it would be the end of all human expression as we know it. The disconnect between the performer and the audience would turn us all into mindless robots (although robots have not been invented yet I loathe the day when they are.) Please pass this along to all your loyal readers and warn them of the dangers of this new technology that threaten the expression of the human condition.

Ebert: Or lacking that, limit all movies to 140 seconds, and shots of the director and his friends.

Dear Roger,
You talk about devices that use brain waves to operate prosthetic limbs and recreate speech. Last night's episode of House was about( sort-of) a patient with locked-in syndrome. They came up with a ridiculously impossible gadget that correlated the patient's brainwaves by computer in such a way as to allow him to move an on-screen arrow and thus communicate. This palpably ludicrous sci-fi idea turns out to be real, at least insofar as there's a press-release from Honda which seems to demonstrate the actual technology. I submit that all the twittering in the world will neither prevent homo sapiens sapiens from continuing to do the impossible, nor render such creation superfluous.

In another dispatch from the anti-Twitter front, as well as from the anti-cinema- is -dead front, look at the possibilities of web-based Ebert-fests, or Sundances, etc. We'll find out for sure whether film is an essential art, because the kids coming back from The Knowing will be able to call up Day of Wrath, and the couples who get home from the latest Judd Apatow can see L'Atalante. Or Zack and Miri.

The Twitter people were using Twitter before Twitter. I remember seeing their stuff all over walls in Hyde Park.

By the way, Mos Def is really good. Has he met Mr. Bahrani?

Immortality would be a horrifying fate.

Oh sure you SAY this but - ok now imagine that being immortal meant you were free from the things we do because if we fail to do them, we die - ie eating, not wandering into fires, getting enough sleep - and also, add that everyone else is immortal too (thought experiment, go with it - and don't worry about overpopulation - for the purposes of the thought experiment, people can live underwater, saving space), and no one ages physically from their prime years, but gets wiser and wiser as they go on, and, not being subject to death, can do almost anything - wouldn't that be FUN? I think it'd be fun. I think the things we think of as making life wearying and immortality a curse are all things bound up with being mortal. Would life get boring lived forever? "It gets boring now." Yes but now we have to do a lot of boring things to make sure we have enough to eat, shelter, have to deal with old age and illness, and so on. I think a truly free life would be fun, forever. Of course I agree that life as we know it ought to end in a timely fashion, as it does.

You mentioned in response to a comment, who would rather go to the Cannes film festival in May? Well, I would, but Cannes is a terribly elitist film festival that is not open to the general public. I would love to go, but apparently the festival is not concerned with showing films to the theater going public, but only to the film journalists, and studio executives. What a way to foster the love and appreciation of good film than to alienate the public.

Ebert: I said I would rather go to Cannes than twitter fir the same length of time.

Cannes is a business convention, not open to the general piublic but indeed open to critics, festival directors, cineastes, filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, etc. Every other festival is open to the public.

I'd like to chime in with Nathan Reese, and try to balance things out a little. My comments here are limited to Facebook, because I've never used Twitter, and don't feel the right to hold any opinions on it.

Facebook, like so much else in this world, is only as good as the people using it. When I consider that Chicago is the fourth place that I've called home in my lifetime, Facebook becomes more and more useful. Keeping up with friends from Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada is much easier with Facebook. In fact, it was through Facebook that I was able to regain contact with my first roommate, and good friend. He'd moved to Calgary and I couldn't track him down until I noticed that a friend of mine was friends with his wife. As convoluted as it sounds (and it is), I'm glad to have contact with him again. Facebook also helps to keep tabs on family as far flung as England. I have an easy way of keeping up with them, and sharing pictures of their new child.

Facebook can be inane. There are plenty of times when I wish my friends would use it a bit more judiciously.

But yeah, most of the time I wish we could return to a time without the internet, and only land line phones. Here I am commenting on your site - something I wouldn't have been able to do without the internet.

Thank you for your references to The City and The Stars. Growing up in the so-called "Golden Age" of science fiction (late 40's to mid 50's) I had the opportunity to read a TON of this genre, some mediocre, a lot passable and, occasionally, a work of art. CATS affected me deeply, mostly because of the Alvin's rebellious - this, after all, was the 50's and I was pubescent - nature. I think that point, in this discussion, at least, is being missed. Alvin, I'm sure, would remonstrate with his friends to get off the computerized asses and go out and DO something!

Thank you for the kind words!

Has anyone yet mentioned Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun? It echoes much of the discussion be made here. There was no writer more pro-science than Asimov (Asimov turned me to science the way Ebert's reviews turned me to film), yet in both that book and his classic short story "The Feeling of Power" he tempered that with a humanistic warning, that we not lose our innate intellectual skills to technological dependence ("The Feeling of Power" is even more chilling and prophetic in describing how people lose their ability to do even simple arithmetic due to their dependence on calculators).

But of course, E.M. Forster predicted all of this earlier, with "The Machine Stops".

Ebert: These posts expand and improve on the entry. Writing them takes work. That there is obviously a readership here for them must be an inspiration. I can imagine an entire blog entry reading: For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Discuss.

You wouldn't DARE!

Things I would rather do than Twitter:

1) go the Cannes festival
2) try this frozen green peas in macaroni and cheese recipe
3) watch any of my favorite movies again and see if my brain has caught up with them yet
4) make love to a beautiful woman
5) make love to an average-looking woman
6) make love to myself
7) stare at things that move
8) stare at things that don't move
9) close my eyes and contemplate existence
10) close my eyes and contemplate the inside of my eyelids
11) sleep, perchance to dream
12) re-invent lasagna
13) read the entire POPEYE comic strip, from back when it was called THIMBLE THEATER
14) learn to (insert unlearned physical activity here)
15) organize my loose change by quality of portraiture
16) have the insides of my pockets martinized
17) pick a direction and walk
18) pick a direction and run
19) wait until I've got something REALLY witty to say, and then post it here.

It's just so ARROGANT for anyone to think that they need a machine to broadcast their every thought as it comes to them. Who has interesting thoughts so often that we need constant updates? Woody Allen, Stephen Hawking, maybe five more people?

This is just another fad that will never leave us. That's what our culture is now: a collection of "just a fads" that have stood the test of time.

That said, if Twittering is the way the modern man gets girls, I may have to be a twit. Although being a twit to get girls has never been my style before.

Ebert: Be a twit, get a twit.

Western, modern society somehow adopted the notion that photography captured reality. It is from this beginning that realism became a property of motion pictures. A movie tends to be judged according to its ability to remain authentic, true to life. Supposedly, other societies, like the Japanese, see cinema as an extension of theatre, therefore as drama, not realism.

This is why, apparently, documentary film viewing is not so popular in Japan. Because the Japanese (rightly) view the documentary as they do cinema - as drama, theatre, compared to Western cultures that tend to believe what they see.

@ Marie Haws and Karen Murphy

Excellent points.
I even take this to a further extreme when travelling by intentionally knowing as little as possible what sights I `must` see. And yes I dont see everything. But what I do see, I experience. Anyway, I am glad you posted this, as it confirms for me my decision to forget my camera more and more.

And, this meme that educated me to where I thought I must take my camera abroad for fear of `missing` something is a cultural phenomenon. There is an educational process that teaches me that this is what travellers ought to do. Similar to the way I thought I `needed` to take my camera with me, so too do people twitter and facebook and dare I say blog (this blog is an obvious exception) away. They have been taught to, not because there is any intrinsic benefit, though the people that do these things could recite for you their generic `reasons`. `I like to keep in touch` is just as meaningless and fruitless as `I want to capture the moment` or `I dont want to miss anything`.

An excellent book is The Pentagon of Power The Myth of the Machine Vol 2 by Lewis Mumford.

Tom Schershel writes above, regarding technology, "(it) is a means of filtering out the massive amount of stuff we don't want and bringing in only the people and things we like." As if that were a good thing. With all due respect, this is a concise excuse for the "dumbing down" of the species.

He goes on to compliment Pandora, an internet radio-of-sorts program that caters to listener's specific tastes. The problem: It doesn't and it can't, unless the listener's tastes are limited to its particular formulas. Try to tell Pandora that you like the music of Prince, Joni Mitchell, The Clash and Fela, and it will eventually crash after you've repeatedly told it to never play Tori Amos again.

The technology exits to categorize the uncategorizable. It's not the human mind technology covets. (Technology already knows the human mind is, mostly, empty.) No technology wants the human soul. Technology is CGI-generated genie-of-the-lamp.

Ebert: I understand that "cwalken" is not Christopher Walken, but only seems to be.

"Twould seem you're correct; apparently after that url got so many hits, someone seems to have raised an objection, and it's been removed. Even if it wasn't him, it was still funny.

Why all the twittering, all the blogging? Who cares what I have to say? My emotional mind, that's who!

Putting Feelings Into Words Produces Therapeutic Effects In The Brain

ScienceDaily (June 22, 2007) — Why does putting our feelings into words -- talking with a therapist or friend, writing in a journal -- help us to "feel better" A new brain imaging study by UCLA psychologists reveals why verbalizing our feelings makes our sadness, anger and pain less intense.

Another study, with the same participants and three of the same members of the research team, combines modern neuroscience with ancient Buddhist teachings to provide the first neural evidence for why "mindfulness" -- the ability to live in the present moment, without distraction -- seems to produce a variety of health benefits.

If you think you'll need it...

twit·ter (twitÆÃr), v.i.
1. to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.
2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.
3. to titter; giggle.
4. to tremble with excitement or the like; be in a flutter.
–v.t.
5. to express or utter by twittering.
–n.
6. an act of twittering.
7. a twittering sound.
8. a state of tremulous excitement.
[1325–75; ME twiteren (v.); akin to G zwitschern]
—twitÆter·er, n.
—twitÆter·ing·ly, adv.
—Syn.8. flutter, tizzy, fluster.

Roger,

Wonderful entry. This morning on the local Public Radio Station, I was listening to an amazing conversation with a scientist from India who is working on a process to help children diagnosed with Autism interact with machines in order to learn socialization from a robotic source. These machines have the advantage of being designed to function as a predictable source of game playing, unlike real children and adults who are unpredictable and therefore challenge the child who is lost within himself.

The inherent danger of this play form is that the child may become too dependent upon this nonhuman source of contact. The Professor went on to say that there are experiments planned in this country to test this theoretical approach.

I hope that you will continue to explore your "voice" in its many forms. However, may I say that your voice has never been stronger or more vibrant. What a pleasure it is to read your site and have many worlds open up, many new themes to consider and lastly many rich new authors of text and screen to enjoy!

Judith

Hi Roger and all,

Fun blog, full of great ideas.

The best books I have read showing what a future with a very high technological level might be like are the series of novels by Iain M. Banks about The Culture. The Culture is also exceptional in being one of the few futures in which this type of environment is shown to be a lot of fun. I'd like to live in The Culture! I find it refreshing vision, since the future in modern science fiction novels is so often a dystopia.

I was looking at a flight of about 1000 Canada geese flying over this morning, heading north. all arrayed in their typical V pattern. A beautiful sight, that touches me every time I see it. Now, these are the descendants of dinosaurs, a group "superseded" by mammals these last few million years after an unfortunate (to them) cosmic accident. We humans, as top mammals, could easily kill all these birds in, what? Two years?
But we don't do it. In fact, hundreds, probably thousands of us are actively protecting them, and not only to keep them for hunting, not because they are useful to us, but probably because we (mostly)know that we are not the owners of the universe. Just fellow tenants.
I believe the same attitude will continue to exist in whatever electronic "life" we end up creating; either for our "souls", our kids "souls" or some future entirely digital/electronic creation. I just don't see why "digital" life shouldn't coexist peacefully with biological life, specially as I don't expect them to have many needs in common.
In the last few centuries humanity has been learning fast, acquiring vast power, and, I think, using it more and more wisely (yes, I know, I'm an unabashed optimist!). We have started to control our numbers, curtailed some overly dangerous technologies (anyone remember the nuclear airplanes imagined in the fifties?)and cleaned up some of our worst messes. If we can make it through the next century or so, we should be OK for a longgggg time.
There is absolutely no guarantee of this, however. The universe is a tough place. Meteorites fall, suns explode, entires galaxies tear themselves apart with gigantic bursts of energy that would destroy any life in their midst. We've got to make our own luck. So electronic life by all means but let's try to make it friendly electronic life. After all, we should try to include some, er, intelligent design into them, while we can.

(sorry about the intelligent design bit, couldn't help myself)

best regards

Michel Lamontagne

Immortality would be a horrifying fate.Ebert.

I don't know. Eternity of life is the more correct term-immortality as you wearily apprehend is more like extreme senility.For one we don't have choice. So one might as well learn to like it. We periodically erase out the memory so it's renewal. You retain the illusion of mortality-the fact of immortality has to be learnt, at least at the present stage of social evolution. And one will get to see the Great Movies to come. The next existence builds on the present, with creativity justice and compassion. Our travails are the pangs of our spiritual(oh! ambiguous word) evolution.

Eternity as I concieve or believe is not some kind of conjectural futurism. It influences my present life by imbuing it with far greater gravity, meaning and resilience. I am not particularly interested in knowing my lives to come any more than than I want to figure out next month or year--that would be spoilers. Rather a belief that the universe which includes everything about you and me whether self designed or by some intelligent designer is not the handiwork of a malicious Joker and is lawful not only in terms of things but people. Ofcourse you will quote the Lear ending and the tragedies of the bygone century.If I may embolden to modify the words in Hamlet, there are All things in heaven and earth and Hell, beloved Horatio.

Beautiful and wonderful are inadequate words for life, having relished both films--it's ugly and cruel too. Life is AWESOME. Eternity is AWESOME. A human being is an awesome thing. We are too. Eternity is an expression of man's essential hunger to do great good in this world.

May your blog be the best ever!

Ebert: Immortality would be a horrifying fate.

The alternative to immortality(Rip van Winkle type, as you concieve it)or eternity of life as I prefer to call it is eternal sleep,coma,death, oblivion---a kind of bucolic non existence. Eternity--or the essential nature of life----"lacking in nothing"- has room for even such extended pastoral interludes. But one would like to get up sometime--death,like sleep being "nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast" , a renewal--rather than doze all day long. The craving for mortality is life denying, escapist with a sigh and a groan and "Enough!". If life is good and meaningful eternity hath no stings.

I have firm professional roots in science--as far as I chose and still make a living out of it, as you in film. Einstein repeatedly spoke about the beauty, the essential aesthetic aspect of science. I can humbly claim to have been alive always to this aspect and to have experienced it frequently and strongly, again like your ongoing joy in cinema.

The idea of mortality is aesthetically displeasing in a scientific sense---it has of it incompleatness, absurdity and something hanging like a loose branch.

Science is a jig saw puzzle in which the pieces mesh more and more in a kind of slow motion of decades and that's the elixir of science and the ecstasy-the Eureka!- of the scientists, as I vicariosly visualise. The belief in mortality, for belief it is( as is that in eternity) does not satisfy the aesthetic criterion of life ---to love and accept the incompleteness of the jigsaw for these very qualities is more poetry than science---one more science fiction.

Etrnity is the most revolutionary idea--it upsets everything. For the better.

Ebert: Immortality would be a horrifying fate

This is not the affirmative you which has been emerging in this column---your broad brow encompasses much beyond film or like the masters of cinema itself who have kept pace with other arts to reach out and embrace the mysteries and verities of the world. Cinema surely is deservedly a great doorway in the "box" which is our home.

Ofcourse I have made much of your passing comment. But it has shades of thanatos, Weltschmerz and Traurigkeit----none of them an American word.

Non eternity, apart from the defect of being tragic rather than joyous, suffers from the infirmity from the scientific/aesthetic criterion of gross asymmetry---life is not a loose branch hanging from a shrivelled tree.

On a completely unrelated note. RIP to Maurice Jarre, which no one seems to have noticed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Jarre

I am a strong believer in human exceptionalism. Although it is not inconceivable that an AI could one day believably mimic an "implanted" consciousness, I do not see how this could ever be interpreted as an actual continuation of the original being. Just as a photograph or voice recording of a deceased person gives a reasonable approximation of how they looked and sounded, but could never convey precisely the same sensation as actually being in the same room as them, so would this digital being duplicate a reasonable approximation of their consciousness, not the consciousness itself. The original would be irrevocably lost even if the transfer is performed so successfully that the digital entity claimed to be the real thing. This copy of a person's consciousness could not grant immortality any more than a picture of them will continue their memory. The original person is still lost, much as in the above reference to teleporters in star trek.

As difficult as it would be, synthesizing a functional brain is nothing compared to the impossibility of replicating an individual's particular brain with any accuracy. While any zygote has the potential to form some brain, the probability of forming one particular brain is incredibly low. Despite the incredible variety and uniqueness observable in human genetics, it is dwarfed by the potential for differences in an individual brain. The genetic diversity is compounded by a near infinite variety of molecular interactions that occur throughout brain development, which is basically a continuous process (neural plasticity is truly awesome in case you haven't looked into it). For example, a set of twins will exhibit substantially different thoughts at any given moment in time due to the vast differences in stimuli they have received throughout their lifetime.

"Implanting" an existing brain structure by perfectly replicating it in a clone, which could theoretically result in an identical consciousness, seems completely unfeasible to to me under any circumstances of advanced technology. Only by conditioning the clone to precisely the same stimuli as the original human throughout its entire existence could such a doppelganger be created. Since two bodies can never occupy the same space at the same time, there would inevitably be some difference in their perception of the world no matter what measures were taken. From this perspective, identical consciousness could never be imposed on a clone. Since thought is a function of the interaction between vast numbers of neurons, and each person is wired in such a particular way, I don't see how any person could be anything other than completely unique.

S M Rana ,Chandigarh, India: That was a rather beautiful pair of posts about immortality and eternity. Thank you for writing that and putting it in a place where I could read it. If your scientific pursuit involves human immortality, or at least life extension, then I wish you all the best!

Ebert: He is our resident sage.

"I eat my peas with honey
I've done it all my life
They may taste kind of funny
But it keeps 'em on the knife" - Roger

"Green peas with honey,
Who ever would have thought it
So gross yet clever" - Marie's Haiku!

Karen Murphy wrote on March 31, 2009 11:36 AM: "@Marie Haws, Thanks for your close reading of my post. I think you got it right. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as far as my limited, lay understanding goes, says that you can’t measure two aspects of a particle—position and momentum—at the same time. The more accurate your measurement of one is, the more inaccurate your measurement of the other will be. It’s related to the idea that the act of examining something changes the thing you’re examining."

Um...so is that like the flux capacitor? Ie: it makes sense to the guy who came up with it. :)

Chuckle; I have to process this stuff using mental images if I hope to avoid a cerebral hemorrhage. Okay, so if you're taking a photo of a tree, because you can't take it from more than one position or aspect, you can't capture the tree in its entirety. To do that, you'd need to be able to take your shot 360 degrees in the round and from every conceivable angle. And because the sum total of the tree (all its particles) is greater than the 2-dimensional photograph you end up, that's how you change the tree you're looking at. For you're only catching a single aspect of it. Yes? Or, does it mean that experiencing the tree isn't the same thing as trying to capture the tree?

Either way, I've always understood it as "The God Perspective." Only the Universe can see/feel everything about a thing. Still, those Quicktime QTVR panoramas are kinda neat - here's the Grand Canal from a gondola in Venice...

http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen6/f7-venice-gondola.html

But even then it's not the same as being there, eh? Just ask Roger about Venice. Virtual reality can be trippy but it never captures the intangible, as that's a metaphysical thing in nature.

Scott wrote on March 31, 2009 5:24 PM - "...I even take this to a further extreme when traveling by intentionally knowing as little as possible what sights I `must` see. And yes I don't see everything. But what I do see, I experience."

Exactly. As an artist, I'm at odds with the very technology that's make it possible for me to record what I later use as reference in my work. As you have to really focus on all the technical stuff while you're doing it; shutter speed, F-stop, and it pulls you out of the moment. Whereas just wandering around and being in the moment and experiencing reality as it comes... it resonates in a way trying to capture it for posterity can never duplicate.

I do understand WHY people try though. Ironically, it's because we value that resonance so highly and it's temporal - which sucks. So we want the make the best moments in our life last as long as humanly possible. And often for feeling as thought those are the moments we're actually living "for" eh? As it sure as hell isn't all the mundane daily stuff! And to the extent some totally embrace technology, perhaps a measurement of their discontent? I mean, if you're constantly shown a world that looks and sounds better than the one you're living in, who wouldn't be tempted to reach for the happiness it purports to be? And then to prolong the satisfaction of believing you've obtained it, by taking a picture to prove you managed to experience it?

We used to go to the movies to escape our lives for 2 hrs. Now we want to step into them Ala the halodeck on Voyager. But at the end of the day, it's "not" the real thing, there's nothing really there...

http://www.startrek-voyager.info/voy_holodeck.jpg

And I think the difference is that fewer people seem to care now that it's fake. It fills an emotional void and that's enough. Twitter, Facebook - the drugs of choice now.

Ron Barth, Jr. wrote on March 31, 2009 12:33 PM - "Heisenberg? Who is he? Seriously, Marie, there's some more (serious) discussion of Heisenberg in Roger's "A roll of whose dice" comment thread."

Yeah, but imo it's ultimately in pursuit of planting a flag on top of Mt. Roger. A bunch a geeks jockeying for position as they scramble up the mountain side of his passionately held opinions, armed with a plethora of incomprehensible jargon and in the hopes of finding a fault in his reasoning so they can "best Ebert" - and all because deep down inside, most geeks just want to score anyway they can. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzxR8OH-fDQ

Michel Lamontagne wrote on March 31, 2009 7:33 PM - "I was looking at a flight of about 1000 Canada geese flying over this morning, heading north....We humans, as top mammals, could easily kill all these birds in, what? Two years? But we don't do it... probably because we (mostly) know that we are not the owners of the universe. Just fellow tenants."

The Canadian Goose is the National Bird of Canada, I think that might have something to do with it. Americans eat them, though. :)

Paul Brian McCoy wrote on March 31, 2009 11:32 AM - "Twitter...It is free, quick, easy to use, and only as annoying as the person using it."

To be fair, you make a very valid point; as have a others in here. On the face of it, technology isn't the enemy. The world has always had its share of annoying, rude of self-absorbed people, so nothing new there. I think the difference is that its become increasingly "easier" to be those things because you CAN just click, remove, delete, hang-up, redirect and avoid what you don't want to deal with it. While pandering to the "OMG LOL" generation.

And if that's just human nature in all its messiness, it's also human nature to take advantage of human nature. To encourage people to press on the gas and not the brake. Which is the siren call of technology, eh? You can have it all! You can multitask and do 10 things at once! Think of all the TIME you're going to save! But the more you buy to make your life easier, the more work you end up doing. Because it raises the expectation of "what" can be achieved in 24 hrs.

Imagine 100 years from now - are you even going to go into work? Or will Roy Batty be doing it for you? Because we as humans have reached the point where we simply can't keep up with the machine and so we invent machines to be human for us?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuBToeQeeEU&feature=related

And will they know now what we've forgotten to value? Life.

Excellent post! One of my favorites so far. I wonder sometimes if our fears (imbued by the very media we are so immersed in?) are driving us towards, causing a striving in us for, Locked In Syndrome.

As someone who has been intimately involved in online technologies for almost 30 years and chaired organizations that establish standards for these technologies, I can say with confidence that I will never Twitter, nor will I ever read a Twitter. I don't care what's going on in six words or less. I don't want my reality reduced to sound bytes, and am terribly sorry for those whose are.

Who guessed when we first strapped on a Walkman how deeply we would retreat into a contrived reality. You are not your Facebook page, sorry you are stuck with being you, no matter how deeply you try to bury your digital ostrich head.

Immorality would be a horrible fate.

I'm not sure this note belongs here, but I've read at www.dvdbeaver.com that the full 9.5 hour version of "Greed" has been found and is hoped to reach Blu-Ray in the next couple years. Supposedly it was found in the garage attic of Erich von Stroheim's niece Helga -- a situation that almost has a Mel Brooks sound to it.

I guess I can connect this to your blog by saying that I'd rather watch a ten-hour movie then spend any time on a Twitter.

Ebert: Yeah, I did a storya bout that...

By Nic Hautamaki on April 1, 2009 5:41 AM
...... If your scientific pursuit involves human immortality, or at least life extension, then I wish you all the best!

No it doesn't---I'm just an old fashioned electrical engineer plus mathematics thrown in. Eternity is , as it must be, a matter of faith and strong conviction which I was not born with and which I have developed over the years. I have zero interest in anything occult.

Thanks for the quite undeserved compliment, Roger---I am just fortunate enough to have a great mentor .
who taught me life and faith.
.

As a person who deals with technology on a daily basis, Twitter is one of those services (like Facebook) that I simply didn't feel a desire or a need to belong to. Yes, I have friends who have Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts but I have no reason to look at such things. And yet it does seem to feed some basic human need, a kind of non-stop gossip line that can be tapped into at any time.

Arthur C. Clarke was not the only one who discussed the idea of downloading the human mind into a computer for 'storage'. Tanith Lee in her novels _Don't Bite the Sun_ and _Drinking Dandelion Wine_ had humanity living in three arcologies, a period of growing up where you're able to design your own body, and during that time you're floating in the computer system until the body is ready for inhabiting. Certainly an intriguing idea but I'm not sure that the rest of humanity is ready for some of the designs that might come out.

Perhaps one day we will find ourselves sitting in a chair, staring at a blank wall as the scenes of a virtual Chicago appear in our minds. As long as our technology keeps racing ahead of our ability to handle it, the fear of being overloaded by such things will remain.

Sounds to me like you have the makings of a fine sci-fi novel there, Roger.

S M Rana, Chandagarh, India --

Nicely put. Yes, the jigsaw puzzle is incomplete. And so, let science admirably go about it's business of taking measurements and mapping relationships. And let us all gawk with wonder and awe at how each amazing discovery seems to propel those elusive edge pieces further off into the cosmic horizon, like some impossible dream that one can never wake from, or fall asleep into. And so through surrender, grace.

In truth, I don't even know what a "twitter" is. Sounds like some kind of gooey candy you buy at the concession stand.

In fact, as of last week, I'm pretty sure that was still one of the few people left on the planet who didn't own a cell phone. I resisted for years, citing that not having one was the last thing keeping me an invdividual. I finally relented because I was taking a long road trip to visit my sister, and I realized that in case my car broke down or I needed directions, I could no longer rely on payphones to work. This occurred to me on my LAST road trip, when I tried to call someone on a payphone at a gas station, found it didn't work, and was told by the clerk, "Just use your cell phone."

Personally, I'm deeply disturbed by the way that we create conveniences to make our lives easier and then adjust our lives around them so much that the conveniences become a necessity. I still keep phone numbers in my pocket planner and people look at me like I'm Amish. Evidently, you can keep them all in your cell phone now. But I will continue to use my planner, cell phone be damned. There's nothing more impersonal to me than having my life based around a microchip, and how many people have I seen who lost their cell phones and basically shut down, unable to operate because of all the essential info they kept on it? Not me, God willing.

I'm reminded of the alien narrator's rant in Herzog's "Wild Blue Yonder," when he laments that mankind's fall started when they began to farm pigs. "A dog can join you in the hunt, so that was acceptable," he says, "but to farm your prey so that you can easier catch them was the beginning of the end for mankind!" He's on to something, as only Herzog could be.

Just a suggestion- If that Audeo thing pans out, I'd talk to them about getting more than one vocal bank to work with. Granted, I'm sure you'd be pretty psyched to get your regular voice back, but I'm pretty sure with a little ingenuity (and perhaps an bribe) you could get them to throw in a button that makes you sound like Barry White. That would be *awesome*, and if you claim otherwise you're a god damn liar.

There's been a lot of good comments here that have kept me thinking (a bad habit I picked up somewhere in my youth). I find myself coming back here in a disturbingly Facebooky sort of way, just to see what else has developed since I checked in last.

I mentioned above that providing technology tools is what I do for a living. In that professional capacity I recently participated in a forum about the professional and personal impact of various telecommuting tools on how we work and how we live. That discussion ended up wandering down many of the same paths this conversation seems to be taking. Being essentially lazy, I'm going to copy/paste some of the thoughts I shared in that context into this one:

-------------------------------------------
... As a "Manager", I'd give telecommuting mixed reviews. Sure, it's great having people be able to respond to urgent needs when they're not sitting in their cubicles. Sure, I enjoy being able to meet the needs of the business while giving people the freedom and flexibility to deal with their personal lives in ways that are more convenient for them. Sure, mixing things up this way makes my job easier in a lot of ways, but I'm still not a fan of people going off-site altogether.

Why not? First off, there are a lot of useful ideas that spring from spontaneous conversations - chats that may start over lunch or with fantasy football at the water cooler or something someone heard on NPR on the drive in - but that eventually veer into inspired problem solving. Those conversations can only happen when people are in proximity to each other, interacting in non-deliberate ways. They can only happen when people get to know each other in ways that don't usually occur via e-mail (or even phone calls).

There's also a lot of informal efficiencies that go away when everything has to be packaged, sanitized, and distributed in formal ways. Time and effort gets spent tidying things up for hand-offs that would have occurred effortlessly between two people sitting next to each other. Issues that would take 30 seconds to work through on a "hey, can you look at this a sec..." basis, end up generating lengthy e-mail threads (with time gaps between each reply) before resolutions are reached. Sure we CAN probably work this way, but who wants to? What will we be missing if we try?

Most of all, I feel like that intangible organizational quality of "teamwork/esprit de corps/unity of purpose" takes a big hit when you loose the organic face-to-face relationship. Folks never fully develop that sense of responsibility and trust toward each other that get you through the tougher challenges.

As a "Consumer", like most people I have a seriously bipolar Love-Hate relationship with my telecommuting tools:

On the Love side of the equation, I've really come to enjoy (and rely on) the immediacy of knowing about issues whenever/wherever they occur, and being able to respond to the time-critical ones right away, from wherever I happen to be. The stitch in time really can save nine, and I'm all about saving stitches when I can. In addition, the sales pitch on this gadgetry is in some measure true - the flexibility these tools provide does reap real benefits in my quality of life. I am routinely able to do things I enjoy with family and friends that I previously may have missed out on because I needed to be standing in front of a particular piece of machinery at a particular time. I can spend less time in the car (or on the plane... or in the hotel...) because so much of what I used to do in person is now always at my electronic fingertips. This IS really cool, and I'm trying to maintain an appropriate sense of wonder and appreciation for it.

This can be hard to do, because, on the Hate side of the equation, the simple existence of these tools carries with it the tacit but unpleasant understanding that all time can now become work time. Just because I CAN do something from home at 11:30 PM, doesn't mean that said thing NEEDS to be done right there and then, but there's an increasingly pervasive tendency to see people as unresponsive if we have to wait on them for more than a few minutes. We KNOW they've got the Crackberry, we KNOW they've got the laptop with the cell-card in it, so we KNOW they're not taking us seriously if they wait until they're at their desk the next day before they give us the satisfaction we demand of them.

This is not only unhealthy personally, it's unhealthy organizationally. Good people (including myself) perform well largely because we have the ability to do identify the most needful things and do them in the right order. Running after the loudest or most recent shout is rarely the most efficient use of anyone's time. Expecting instant gratification from others simply because we know they have the tools to deliver it can not only harm important working relationships, but it encourages the types of bottlenecks that occur when we make unreasonable assumptions about things like the availability of critical and prerequisite work that has to come from those other parties.

In addition, the quality of our own work product inevitably suffers when we can never give it our full attention. Whether the distraction comes from continuous interruptions of our important personal lives by co-workers anxious for us to "display some urgency", or from trying to work at home amidst the diversions and distractions of family life, these tools put us in situations where it's increasingly difficult to keep our minds present on the task at hand. Not good for either enterprise from a quality control standpoint.

In short (something I'm obviously bad at being...) it's been my experience that too much blurring of the line between work life and personal life tends to diminish both. Multitasking has it's place, but equally important (I think) is the ability to "be where you are". It's hard to be your best as an employee, or a spouse, or a parent, or a friend, when you can never quite allow yourself to get dialed ALL the way in to any one of those things. We don't expect musical virtuosos to take phone calls in the middle of a concerto. We don't expect major league hitters to answer e-mails while they're in the batter's box. We know they couldn't perform at the requisite level if they tried. Why do we assume we can do any better at the things that are most critical to us, either professionally or personally?

Telecommuting tools are great tools, but no tool is great all of the time. My table saw is a great tool, but it's lousy at unclogging my toilet. I think when we use these tools wisely, they can be a great help to us both at work and at home. If we try to use them too exclusively, I think we're in for a very messy bathroom.

--------------------------------------------------------

I loved what Marie Haws had to say about how her camera got in the way of her photography. Years ago we got a camcorder, thinking that it would be great to capture some of our best times for later review. We hardly ever used it becuase we noticed right away that whenver we took it out and turned it on, whomever was holding it was immediately removed from whatever was going on. We became filmmakers instead of party goers, so we were trying to capture memories that we weren't actually having. When I see the constant stream of Twitters and Status Updates, I get that same sense very strongly.

There's an old Taoist saying that "The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao." This encapsulates a lot of what we seem to be trying to get at here - there is a life outside of our words/pictures that is always something other than the words and pictures (even when we're using the words/pictures to capture some of that life).

All that being said, one of the troubling things about this particular conversation (and related conversations I've had through the years ) is that there seems to be a tacit and popular understanding among both "artsy" and "techie" folks that the Right Brain is the Right Brain, the Left Brain is the Left Brain, and never the twain shall meet. That obtaining a workable scientific understanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will somehow preclude you from ever properly enjoying a walk on the beach with your loved one at sunset.

My experience with ACTUAL people of both scientific and aesthetic persuasions is that this is bunk. Sure, some folks live on one extreme or the other and there may be tendencies that can lead to stereotypes, but generally speaking this is a false dichotomy. Just because "Equations are just gibberish" or "Jazz is just noise" to some people doesn't mean that there isn't some great stuff going on there if we're willing to step outside the narrow confines of our tribal comfort zones.

Bach was a theoretician and mathematician of the highest geek order, and he used that understanding to create artistic masterworks that still move the guts and souls of millions, even hundreds of years after his death. Haskell Wexler doesn't just think happy thoughts, osmotically absorb the Spirtus Mundi and wait for his beautiful images to fly out his butt like magic monkeys. I'm guessing he knows his way quite expertly around some very technical hardware, and that he wields it in some very precise and deliberate (some might even say "geeky") ways. The creative impulse is served and enhanced (not impeded) by the mastery of the underlying functional details.

Likewise, most seminal scientific work (Einstein, Hawking, Darwin, you name it...) owes at least as much to imagination as it does to calculation. The ideas behind something like Relativity or Uncertainty are deeply creative ones, and it's only after the fact that the serious number-crunching goes on. Developing the Theory of Evoltuion involved a willingness to look beyond the popular conception of things, an immersion in the disorderliness of teeming life, and an ability to see the profound patterns enmeshed in what was ACTUALLY THERE. Doesn't that sound like the work of an artist?

All of the common posturing here, be it...

"Geeks lack soul and cling to mastery of esoteric technical subjects to fill thier otherwise emotionally empty lives and sublimate their frustrated sexual impulses."

or

"Artists lack brains and rail against things like technology and working for a living only because they're too scatterbrained and inept to comprehend them."

...seems to me just so much territorial pissing. Just more gang colors or rooting for the home team. The intelligensia's equivalent of "Hell yeah, Red Sox Rule!" It has very little to do with the real lives and thoughts of most actual people. In fact, my personal experience has been that the two impulses make excellent bedfellows, and many of the "Artiest" people I know are also the "Geekiest" (present company on this blog most decidedly included).

I just came upon the following link with an animated video commentary about Twitter. Seems appropriate given the nature of this blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w&feature=player_embedded

S M Rana,

As a teenager, I read Jack London`s The Star Rover and was fascinated by the story of an inmate recounting his experiences of previous lives. I was raised in the Christian tradition, which dismissed such things, so it was my first real exposure to the idea. I realize that London was calling attention to several things but the idea of reincarnation did not seem so foolish, as I had been lead to believe.

Since then I have shed any religous affiliation and have been developing the stoic stance of the Western realist - agnostic towards all concepts non-temporal. To read an expression of your passion for this belief I suppose can render one somewhat envious. I dont say this condescendingly. I imagine it must be quite empowering, as I glimpsed in the novel mentioned above. But I suspect my ordeal with indoctrinations has perhaps numbed any ability to consider the non-temporal as anything but wishful thinking. THough it is food for thought. Im glad you wrote.

Marie Haws,

I can understand why people would try to capture an hold onto an experience. But I cannot understand how the notion, after experiencing the futility involved, continues. I think it is a learned reflex, nothing more. I admit, pictures I have taken from trips etc years ago I never look at. Not even sure where they are, though this does not reflect any non-importance of those experiences. Interesting, but the common (as in non-artistic) photographs I find interesting are those taken of people and places I have never known, the older the better. I suppose because then imagination can play with the `data` that is the photo, bringing them alive, in a way I could never do, nor have the inclination, to do with my own.

My friend Pat pulled an awful April Fools Day prank on me, and you were involved. Shortly after our class let out, he turns to me, and asks, "Did you hear Roger Ebert is retiring?" I said, "No, where'd you hear that?" He responds, "Well, on the news this morning they announced that the Sun-Times was filing for bankruptcy, and because of this, they could no longer employ you." I was a lil' stunned that I hadn't heard this on your website, so I asked, "Well, what's he going to do? He still has his website--" But before I could finish, he counters, "Oh no, that's the Sun-Times's website, so that's out the window, too." For a second, just a second, a cold chill ran down my spine, and I was about to throw up my arms in disgust, I caught a gleam in his eye and his dimples accentuated as he began to smile, and I knew I had been had.

Just thought I'd share that with you. I don't know where I'd be without ya.

Ebert: Punked!

As a certified techno-geek, I feel compelled to rise and defend Twitter/Facebook, and its enthusiastic users, against the wave of snarky putdowns that have surfaced here.

I have a 65-year-old friend who is currently touring Italy. If I were to rank all the people in my life by how close they are to me, he'd be down in the vicinity of #20; maybe lower. He's a fun, smart, interesting guy, and, if circumstances had brought us together for more extended periods of time, he'd likely be a closer
friend. He's having a great time in Italy, touring little villages, walking in scenic vistas, finding sites of historical importance, and eating great food while hanging out with his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and other family members.

How do I know all this? You've already guessed. He's been posting little Facebook Profile Status lines (the equivalent of Twitter) during the quiet, dull, waiting moments that we all know occur regularly when one travels to faraway places. It's easy to do on his iPhone. He also sends pictures, posted automatically on his Facebook page, just by poking at his iPhone screen a few times. As a result, I am staying in touch with him to an extent that I would not have had time to do otherwise -- not because it wasn't worthwhile for me to follow his life, but because there just wasn't enough time to do it via more old-fashioned methods, with all the different friends that are as close or closer to me than he is.

Has my friend's Facebook activity lessened his Italy experience in any way? Not that I can tell. Do his postings facilitate or signal the end of intelligent civilization as we know it? Oh, please, don't be absurd.

Folks, twittering is a *tool*. Stupid people will use the tool stupidly and publish lots and lots of drivel. Smart people will post smart things -- just because something is short, doesn't mean it has to be banal or trivial. I try to post quirky, eccentric, interesting little things in my Facebook status: maybe a little observation about something I saw, that doesn't merit a whole essay but will give my friends a little insight into the small moments in my life, or into the way my mind works. I flex my creative muscles to think of such things. I am taking stock of my daily life, looking for and appeciating little things I can say something about. Is that so bad? Example from my friend: he wrote a few hours ago that he "thinks it is the ultimate irony that you have to pay the Catholic Church 5 Euros to see Galileo's tomb." -- a complete twitter, succinct and yet meaningful.

Roger, would I want you to stay at home and twitter, instead of going to Cannes? Of course not. Would I want you stop writing your brilliant, lenghty, thoughtful articles and blog posts, and replace them with twits? Of course not. But, if you were to choose to *add* to your longer writings (e.g. to go to Cannes and twitter from there), I'd be there in a second to see whatever you wrote. I don't expect you to do so, and that's fine too -- after all, you have the luxury of broadcasting your insights in a longer format, to a huge, smart, attentive audience, with the time and skills to craft full essays.

What if you were to find out that Werner Herzog twittered? Could you resist looking? It's not so outlandishly absurd -- he's an unpredictable guy, and has embraced corners of the world that the rest of us might have dismissed as mundane. Do you think Werner Herzog would even be capable of writing a twitter that wasn't utterly fascinating?

There was an interesting article on cnn.com about this decade being called the 'Age of Individualism.' Less people are going to church, more divorces, more people staying single, and parents choosing to be single parents. One of the cause for the housing bubble was that single people, not couples, were buying homes shooting up demand. Perhaps, Richard Dawkins is on to something. And yet, we try to connect to people more than ever before with technology.Our Individualism is veiled with techno gadgets deluding us from a collective social bonding to an isolated state. Kids invite other kids to play games at their house when not a single word is spoken to each other; consumed in trying to beat each other on the Sony Playstation for hours on end.

Is it individualism or collectivism when we created more gadgets to communicate with each other yet see less of each other because of it? Or, maybe with more techno gadgets, we can access more people which then would make us a more of collective society.

Heisenberg uncertainty, eh? Why don't the tiny electrons whizzing around the giant sluggish proton-rich nucleus eventually slow down and land on it?

There is a formula, something like

dm>h

The verbalization is, "You cannot measure the position (displacement) AND momentum beyond a certain certainty. If you want greater accuracy with one, you must give up accuracy with the other".

Suppose the electron did land on the nucleus. Its position (displacement) is now the same as the nucleus, but since an electron is much less massive, its momentum is also less.

Heisenberg says you cannot have that higher level of accuracy! Thus the electron cannot land!

Happy April Fools Day!

i dont think this is a matter of technophile vs luddite. im on facebook for one reason: scrabulous; now lexulous

i get updates from my friends when i log on-- 95% of which is crap
take this test
find the easter eggs
im doing this now

my point is there are people who are HAPPY to waste their time on garbage like this and then there are people like who post on this blog;

both use the internet. its just a matter of what they want from it

Next let's have a story about two women in love with the same boy.

Ain't nobody care what a bunch of old men think about Twitter - in spite of a couple of my Facebook friends' insistence on posting links to Roger Ebert's journal.

Yes none of you are twits. Because you are sooooo goddammmmm deeeeep all the live long day. And you're so manly, not like some shallow gossipy teenage girls OMG!

Now go tell those kids to get off your lawn, Treebeard.

Ebert: Why do you assume all twiters are women, and all the critics of twittering are men?

Thank you for this wonderful post; it touched on so many things that I have been thinking about lately.

I used to be a complete tech junkie, but now I find myself turning off my cell phone and using my computer for purely educational purposes (reading your reviews/journal, studying for a test, etc). I deactivated my Facebook for a month in order to rid myself of distractions while studying for the SAT, and found it completely liberating. I no longer felt like I had to waste my time checking the status updates of people I barely know, and gained so much free time to study as well as relax.

I completely support the development of useful technology such as the Audeo, but stuff like the Sixth Sense just creeps me out. It sort of reminds me of Cypher from The Matrix when he says, "I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."

Ebert: What you don't know can or can't hurt you. But which?

To see a good idea of where the info net is headed check out Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge. As a retired math and computer science prof he makes ordinary tech geeks seem quaint. His vision of the immediate future involves computers embedded in contact lenses and RFID nano comp's woven into everyone's clothing, all inked to a wireless info grid extending everywhere. My main problem with this (aside from everyone being tracked 24/7) is a growing body of evidence that EM fields currently considered 'safe' cause damage to living tissue as well as interfere with normal working of consciousness. Telling people that cell phones and wireless networks are bad for you is currently like saying smoking is bad for you around 1950. Wireless networks are already becoming illegal to have in schools in some parts of Europe. Dr. Nick Begich has done a lot of research on this, and points out that when there is a power outage most people naturally exhale from a release of tension in the nervous system. When everything we own and wear is wirelessly connected we are going to need an artificial backup for consciousness, our bodies will be little more than huge cancerous lumps!

My computer geek friends have often expressed a desire for brain implants as recreation - video games would certainly be a lot more immersive, and movies interactive etc. As a conspiracy buff when I point out that in all likelihood they will not be given a choice about getting a chip implanted the response I get is something like that would be a good sign that it's time to buy a rifle and head for the hills. Imagine the scenario of 1984 only the camera is a chip in your skull and even your very thoughts aren't private. Guess what - the plans for this are already in motion. Don't take my word for it.

Vinge wrote an essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences. Rudy Rucker (my favorite fiction author) writes about these scenarios in several of his novels, albeit much more humorously. I see something like this coming down the pike in say about 3 years (hint).

In my opinion the transhumanists have got it wrong. The human body is not fundamentally weak and flawed. If an external device is used for intelligence expansion the result is to make us dumber, not smarter. If you take the technology away, has the organism really evolved? Remove the gizmo and you lose the ability. Hence college math students who can't do basic times tables without a calculator. And yet all of them already possessed quantum level supercomputers - the number of possible connections in the average human brain outnumbers the sum of all the atoms in the entire physical universe by an order of magnitude! To say we as a species have only scratched the surface of our potential is a spectacular understatement. From the point of view of an average human consciousness our supercomputers are merely a vehicle for the experience of beer, sports and sex. It's a good idea we don't have the full abilities of our systems. If the philosopher JC was right and we have an inborn power to move mountains through a particular state of consciousness alone most people would start dropping them on each other.

As an example of the decline of the mind of man I would refer to the work of Maurice Cotterell in decoding hidden messages encoded in ancient legends and stone monuments of which most people are familiar with. None are harder to refute than the coffin lid of palenque. When the image of the lid is doubled and overlayed against itself there is revealed not just one but as the images are rotated several other pictograms that each tell a multilayered story of both legend and physics.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1128787908498295835

http://www.mauricecotterell.com/palanque_anim.htm

How would our primitive stone carving ancestors have accomplished something like this without the aid of transparencies or computers? Clearly they had a degree of control of their minds that is lacking in people today. It may just be possible that technology is like government - there's nothing it can do for you that you couldn't do better for yourself.

Now if you will excuse me I have to get back to Grand Theft Auto 4 on my xbox.

Ebert: Ever see that YouTube about kids popping popcorn with their cell phones?

A hoax, apparently, but...

Roger--all this talk about technology and the mind lead me to think of a very interesting book I read a while back called "The Alphabet versus the Goddess The conflict between word and image" by Leonard Shlain. He goes through history, and posits that the rise of the written word rewired our brains, affecting culture profoundly, leading to the rise of patriarchy and the decline of the feminine. Lead me to wonder whether these new technologies are also in some way changing our brain structure, and if so are the changes for better or ill (or both!).

And on the subject of memories and eternal life, I thought of the movie "After Life" by Kore-eda Hirokazu. If you could only take one memory into the afterlife, what would it be? The movie and the idea continue to haunt me. These days we are flooded with input, but this movie is about essence, distilling everything into one potent memory. I would rather have one full beautiful memory than gigbytes of tweets.

Ebert: Leonard Schlain was a regular at the Conference on World Affairs at Boulder for years. A nice man. Very smart. He's ill now, unfortunately.

"To Scott
As a teenager, I read Jack London`s The Star Rover and was fascinated by the story of an inmate recounting his experiences of previous lives."

My conviction about what happens after we die is derived from my association for a considerable span of time with the Soka philosophy and it's illustrious mentor.

Ofcourse it's not possible for anybody to recall their past lives(what purpose would it serve anyway) or peer into the future(where would be the drama and excitement if one could).Philosophy is what philosophy does. You are dead on dot that it is empowering and vitalising. That's exactly what it is, pragmatic to the core. It results in unconditional hope, greater concern for others, a sense of responsibility for issues that cocern us all like environment, peace etc. Ofcourse this is hardly even the tip of an iceberg .
May I quote:

"Our life from past to present to future is like going for a drive. From birth to death, in lifetime after lifetime, we travel upon the great earth of life. But even though birth and death are repeated by everyone, there is a great difference between struggling across a dangerous swamp in an old rattletrap and speeding along a freeway in one of the latest models. The former is the result of living your life with the idea that everything ends with death, and the latter the result of a life lived with a knowledge of the essential reality of birth and death."

SGI President Daisaku Ikeda

Ebert: What you don't know can or can't hurt you. But which?

I think what you don't know can hurt you: if you know something--no matter how horrible that something may be--you have the power to deal with it.

To Brad

I don't mean any disrespect to science.It's a grand achievement of our species, a diciplne hard as sculpture, beautiful as art (I heard pure mathematics described as opium, so all consuming can it become.)Science is a powerful weapon ethically neutral like a good knife. But it should not be confused with issues beyond it's purview. It can't tell us what is right and wrong. It can't tell us the nature of death, the most urgent and absorbing of questions----Hamlet's beautiful soliloquoy is as far as the naked intellect can penetrate. Science is a good handmaiden but a dangerous mistress.

Mr. Ebert's fascination with science is comparable to mine with film---I think we all lke to venture beyond our professional cages.

Roger,

I'm curious as to why you personally feel immortality (or, at least, a vastly pro-longed existence) is a "horrifying fate"...?

Ebert: To live forever? I don't even like to take an airplane flight without a book to read.

"To Scott
To read an expression of your passion for this belief I suppose can render one somewhat envious. I dont say this condescendingly. I imagine it must be quite empowering...."

If I say so myself, envy is fully justified....it is that big, much bigger, to tell the truth...

On the other hand, there is no cause for envy, since faith is a universal resource like oxygen and no less necessary, specially when we strike that iceberg, as we all eventually must.....I have mentioned above WHERE I draw my water......and boy! ain't it something!...so the question is of choice rather than envy....this is not the forum to go on and on....

Forgive me if I am too literal minded....and thank you for your kind comment.

Friend Readers:

Bob Bailin of Hamden, Conn.has solved the problem of the inactive YouTube clip headed "MIT's wearable $350 Sixth Sense." He writes:

He writes: "There's a subtle glitch in the HTML code that throws Microsoft's recently released Internet Explorer 8 for a loop.

"Lacking a valid "end object" command, IE8 blissfully treats the entire rest of the page as part of that object. Other browsers like Firefox, with a modicum of common sense, realize that there's nothing more than a trivial typo going on here, and assume that the object definition ends at the next paragraph of HTML code, where there's a new "onject" command to insert, and display the entire page properly, comments and all.

Somehow, with months of beta testing by tens of thousands of users, this glitch was never picked up and corrected. I've dutifully reported the bug and attributed it to your journal."

It should work now. Three cheers for Bob Bailin!

Roger. Haven't actually read your review on it, but I just watched Elegy on dvd. Wow. This is one of the more intelligent movies I have seen in a while. And, finishing the movie, and looking back at the box to see the title, I was upset (in an involved way). The title really told me something about the story that wasn't contained in the film, which I think is rare. This was an intelligent movie beyond just being filmsmart. I'm glad you gave it a positive review. I think the last time I had such an immersive experience in a film on dvd was Marie Antionette, but that was quite a bit different. I'm just gushing, and I'm glad you liked it. I know I liked it. I will read your review tomorrow because I feel too caught up right now to read it. I expect, though, that reading your review will add to the experience on way or another.

I understand why you would think immortality to be a horrible state. But if you had someone to be immortal with, I think that would be great, as long as you could get along. :)

This idea makes me think that the side story if two immortals in HANCOCK would have been a lot more fascinating to pursue, than the way it went.

Ebert: In a word, no. Have you ever visited a nation without highway billboards? There is a world back there.

I instantly flashed on Christopher Lloyd's monologue in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".

"I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, at all hours of the day and night. A place filled with automobile dealerships, tire salons, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, and billboards...wonderful billboards, as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful."

A serious note, on the last part of the post regarding clones. I had a book called something like "The Big Classic Book of Science Fiction", an anthology of stories edited by Groff Conklin, if memory serves. One of them was about a man who was insanely rich, and devoted his life to living the high life. He would eat whatever he wanted, drink, smoke, and generally live the life of the high-living playboy. At the end of two years he was obese, had heart disease, was starting lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, etc., etc. Whereupon he would go to a ranch in the mid-west, where the doctor would extract his memories and put them in a brand new clone of his body grown for the purpose. And off he'd go to do more of the same, with a cheery, "See you in two years!"

The final scene has him walking away, vaguely aware of a skinny, grizzled man tending the wheat field by hand. The grizzled man spares him a glance filled with contempt and hatred...because of course the grizzled man is one of the guy's old bodies, and because it has had its memory transferred into a clone, it has no right and is used as slave labour to maintain the ranch.

Ebert: Ouch!

Great post Roger. However, I do get the impression that this isn't new. People have probably being saying this sort of thing for hundreds of years in one form or another. It seems we, as a human race, go around in circles appauled, frightened, excited, and confused by change. That is life. I choose to embrace it. :)

on a side note- how lovely to be able to see the comments and links now! i don't know if you changed anything, Roger, but i am happy to rejoin the thread of ideas. i am running on 3 hours sleep today but the philosophical conversations on this page provide a soothing sensation all their own, even when i disagree with a point or two. it's nothing short of amazing.

Ebert: Yes, there was a bug affecting only Internet Explorer 8, and it has been fixed thanks to a helpful reader (see above, comment in all boldface).

George G. wrote on April 1, 2009 1:51 PM

"All that being said, one of the troubling things about this particular conversation (and related conversations I've had through the years ) is that there seems to be a tacit and popular understanding among both "artsy" and "techie" folks that the Right Brain is the Right Brain, the Left Brain is the Left Brain, and never the twain shall meet. That obtaining a workable scientific understanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will somehow preclude you from ever properly enjoying a walk on the beach with your loved one at sunset."

"My experience with ACTUAL people of both scientific and aesthetic persuasions is that this is bunk. Sure, some folks live on one extreme or the other and there may be tendencies that can lead to stereotypes, but generally speaking this is a false dichotomy. Just because "Equations are just gibberish" or "Jazz is just noise" to some people doesn't mean that there isn't some great stuff going on there if we're willing to step outside the narrow confines of our tribal comfort zones."

Hi George!

Math and science play a large role in my work, as an Artist. As it's all alchemy at the end of the day. For I'm working with materials which have their own specific properties and you have to understand each one or you'll run into issues - ink, oil, water, paper, canvas, brushes made from sable vs ox hair or nylon. Not to mention needing to understand the drag effect on the tooth on varieties of paper stock based on their weights. Temperatures affect drying times. Linseed oil vs varnish. Certain pigments are more translucent than others. Some stuff doesn't mix well if you cross from one brand to another because the colors in the tube aren't 100% constant for all. So burnt sienna isn't always the same burnt sienna. Numerous mental calculations moreover need to be made at light speed if you're to control how a piece of cold press 170 lbs watercolor paper from France - "Arches" - takes cobalt blue from Windsor Newton at 2:00 in the afternoon on a hot day.

Not to mention how light plays tricks with the eye and you can create an effect by taking advantage of what will only be perceived "in person" adding to the sheer complexity of mixing colors and combining hues and shades and working with tones etc. Color theory.
Then add perspective and foreshortening in the underlying drawing making up the skeleton of the thing, so to speak. You have to possess a keen understanding of anatomy and aspect ratios on top of everything else.

And my mom was a nurse and I have French Canadian relatives who mastered in biology, zoology and such. As a kid I used to visit and help out with projects - creepy things involving formaldehyde and frogs.

All of which is to say that I don't entirely disagree with you; chuckle!

But you've mentioned people who were GOOD at communicating when it came to technology or science. Einstein's quotes hang on many a studio wall because of it...

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Einstein

And Hawking was just trippy good times. I watch NOVA on PBS. Ooo, and I get string theory now! The universe is made of music! :)

But I'm also able to see the other side of it. Art has its posers, it's pretentious wanking wannabes. You see them holding court in outdoor cafes like a murder of crows looking to pick off its weakest member, everyone striving to be the head of their round table; so witty and clever. And you can find their counterparts in science and technology too. The stereotypes, as you say.

Roger's entry was about technology and so I spoke to that aspect of it, from a particular vantage spot, and chuckling over what some of what I could see but in truth, more so elsewhere in the blog when it came to science and stuff. Boys being boys. :)

It's just that things are overlapping a bit because the two are partly related in the blog given there's been so many entries lately exploring technology and science, etc etc.

As for cell phones and Twitter and all that - it's the abuse that bugs me, for annoying is annoying whatever the devise used, eh? And that was the context of my remarks, from a dissident minded soul which I am at heart. But for marching to the beat of my own drummer ever since I ate my first purple crayon; and yes, it was gross!

So I do find science interesting, and technology too, but I get excited by exploring it from a metaphysical angle as opposed to a technical one. :)

Otherwise, I'm content to just know that Russian proxy servers have made it possible to download the world and see an R5 release. :)

Ebert: Windsor and Newton! I visited their actual store in London! I love Payne's Grey.

When I was very young, I read many books about future technology and was fascinated. I believed many wondrous things would happen in the 21th century. Many of them are still science fiction, but things are changed a lot. Technology advancement never stops and constantly amazes me. Sixth Sense(I was constantly reminded that it always needs 'the wall' for projection) and Audeo are still in their first step, but they will be more convenient, helpful, and cheap.

By the way, I'm not familiar with twitter or Blackberry. I have not seen twitter in South Korea, but I have seen people constantly sending text with cellular phone instead. Cellular phone has lots of functions and we may also call it twittering. In case of me, I have never done it. My parents bought cellular when I was 18 even though I didn't think about it much. And I'm still not good at sending messages. I think I am bit slow about the trend. I even checked Wikipedia and Google to be sure OMG is not Object Management Group. Anyway, I won't care about twits.

Immersion of minds in cyberspace reminds me of "Fahrenheit 451". Will we be mostly oblivious about what is really going on around us because of that? And minds in computer chips leads to frightening possibilities like memory manipulation. "Dark City" can be small comfort: what you feel is real, at least. Moreover, human nature does not follow Moore's Law. The world in animation series "Futurama" may not be that absurd someday. While living with amazing technology, humans(and even robots and aliens) still do absurd things..... and they have HAL Institute for Criminally Insane Robots

In case of Immortality, I know I will die some day and sometimes I'm afraid I will miss some great books or movies 50 year later. However, to live forever is not so cool to me(to live in memory chip? Eeeeek!). The possibility of immortality will be another social issue someday, but we have been fighting with the other kind of it: Cancer. I wonder whether living forever is inconvenient to other people like cancer cells to others.

P.S.

My laptop using Vista had problem with this entry yesterday. Now, I can see these YouTube clips. All three are nice to watch. Living forever is not good(at least not to me), but it may be great to live long enough to see something you predicted comes true, better or worse.

For the record, I use both Twitter and Facebook and like both (Twitter more so than Facebook). And I think my comment is more in response to the comments I've seen than to your post.

In a blog post, Andrew Keen said yesterday (responding to the question of why he was on Twitter), “To understand social media, it is necessary to participate in social media.” Exactly. The value of something like Twitter increases (or decreases) with use because your understanding of it increases.

Where people who hate social networks like Twitter err is in a fundamental confusion. Put in more traditional terms, they confused the stamp and envelope with the letter. Or, to use a popular expression, “Crap in; crap out.”

I think the biggest complaint about all these technological "things" is the same: human beings are using them. Our complaint is with our own behavior in a world we've all created. Resistance is, indeed, futile. However, how we adopt and adapt is not.

I agree with you and your use/non-use of Twitter. Unless it has a value to you that you can see, it's a waste of time and a distraction. But a I disagree with the idea that we are becoming a world of twits. If we are twits it's because we always were.

btw ... I highly recommend this speech about technology by Neil Postman from back in 1990: Informing Ourselves to Death.

"Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups ... Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and losers."

Until the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, nearly everyone was illiterate. Each handwritten book was the result of enormous labor, and was locked in a monastary or a library. University students didn't have textbooks: they listened to lectures and memorized the information. The great medieval doctors, like Francis Bacon, learned Latin and Greek without books, and then memorized Aristotle and Galen from a single shared volume in the university library. Ordinary people got all their information in their entire lives from someone within hearing.

The printing press upset society. Merchants studied science. The novel was invented. The Bible was no longer an unreadable book chained to the pulpit. Books were written in prose, because an easily-memorized rhyme scheme was no longer necessary.

The fallout included Don Quixote, a model of the solar system that featured the Earth going around the Sun, and the Protestant Reformation.

I don't text, but I'm not willing to scorn a new technology because it makes it easier for people to communicate with somone who isn't within hearing. Who knows? Something interesting might come from it.

Reply to: Ebert; But let's return to the idea of the dreamers, and the Soul-Catchers which might contain an entire human mind, memory and personality.... If Moore's Law holds only to a small extent, in a billion years there will be enough memory to store countless human memories, and no memory will be permanently annihilated

For the last few months, I've been trying to come up with original ideas for a TV series set in the future. One of them involves a hologram generator connected to a central computer in a high school.

Each day, for at least an hour, every student spends time in a room alone. A room where an interactive hologram can take the appearance of any person in recent history whose appearance, memory and personality have been recorded and stored. Imagine, if you will, being able to spend an hour with Barack Obama as a teenager. How would it work? Well, in addition to displaying the hologram, the computer also records the student's part of the conversation. For an hour a day, his speech patterns and thoughts would be added to the data base under his name. Then, a hundred years in the future, the computer could access his facial expressions, and all of his questions, and create a 'best guess' about his responses to new questions.

Instead of having to sit in a classroom while a teacher talks to 30 students, this would allow for one-on-one time with many of the smartest people who ever lived.

That's MY vision... of how "an entire mind, memory and personality" could be stored on a computer. I don't think a computer program could achieve consciousness. I think consciousness arose from the struggle to stay alive, and no computer would ever be programmed in such a haphazard way.

Reply to: Ebert: Of course it would be good for me to spend more time in human conversation, but since the power of speech has been taken from me, the internet allows me a form of communication that has expanded to fill some of the silence.

I hope my comments don't seem too dull, or repetitious. Sometimes I log back onto this blog and read my own posts, wondering how they make me appear. I make an effort to post "the most intelligent comments on the web" because that's the standard Roger has given us on the home page.

Reply to: Scott: As a teenager, I was raised in the Christian tradition, which dismissed such things, so it was my first real exposure to the idea... Since then I have shed any religous affiliation and have been developing the stoic stance of the Western realist - agnostic towards all concepts non-temporal.

I always wish I could have talked about such ideas with real experts. On Saturday, atheist and author Christopher Hitchens will debate William Lane Craig at Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles.)

http://calendar.biola.edu/detail.cfm?e=589

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7015#morriston

From a previous debate:

William Lane Craig: My opponent, Philosopher Wes Morriston is a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder who has over the years published several articles in philosophy journals critical of the kalam cosmological argument (you know, the argument for a Creator based on the beginning of the universe). Although Morriston launched criticisms of virtually every point in my opening speech, none of them was an objection that I couldn’t answer. One of the central failings of his critique, I think, was his failure to appreciate the difference between the potential infinite (a limit concept) and the actual infinite (a number). He claimed that if I were right that the past could not be infinite, then neither could the future. Morriston also tried to surprise me with several quotations from physicists he interviewed at his university to the effect that we cannot be sure that the universe began at the Big Bang. What he failed to understand is that their statements did not undercut the scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe, since attempts to get through the Big Bang to an earlier era still cannot be extended infinitely to the past.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6115

William Lane Craig: Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid, or inflationary, expansion in the past. But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the standard model of the absolute beginning of the universe.

I'm not going to waste my time going to the debate (unless I change my mind.) But Mr. Craig seems to be full of himself. He doesn't have the intellect to grasp that he's wrong. He's trapped by... well, patting himself on the back... when he should be paying more attention to WHY he's wrong.

Today, there are no credible experts in organized religion. Maybe Sam Harris, but certainly no one on the Christian side of the argument. But for the TV series, it was fun to invent some, and place them "far in the distant past".

The minute you take a photograph of that - you've recorded the passing of it. But if you don't take a photo, the moment never stops because emotionally, it never did.

I love photography. But I'll never be a great photographer, because (imo) the act of taking a photo puts the camera between you and the experience. For that reason, I can't take a photo of something that is meaningful me at the moment. (And so many things are!)

Even so, I have an artistic side, and so sometimes I see or envision something that I want to preserve on film's "canvas."

(Very nice to be able to read the entirety of this blog entry [finally]!)

S M Rana,

Again, thank you and for the links. And yes, I have no interest in trying to `discover` past lives. :)

I am happy to be able to see all the videos and comments, and have given the three cheers to Bob Bailin. YAY BOB!

Well, I seem to be in a spot of trouble:

http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2009/03/02/questions-questions-questions/

While Roger here abhors Twitter, Stephen Fry claims to love it. Now that's two people from whom I would read even a shopping list.

What have you done, Roger and Stephen? Are you seriously going to force me to make up my own mind? Can't you reach an agreement? Perhaps with mediators?

Ebert: It's just the kinds of blokes we are.

I would gladly live forever just to see my loved ones, eat a good meal, and pet my dog and cat every day, maybe even travel the world and research animals and places and meet people I've never seen. I never tire of these things, and only wish I had more time for them all. I mean, I've almost never met anyone I didn't find interesting for some reason, and to really get to know a person-how long does that take?
I was just reading about Blade Runner right before reading your blog, and I couldn't help but think that while the "replicants" wanted so desperately to live and be truly "human", many people today feel that they want to be a computer. Instant access to everything, no need for face-to-face or even verbal communication. Perhaps technology will allow us to have the best of both in the future.
True story: I tried to leave a voice mail on a friend's phone several times in the past few weeks, no answer. I was slightly offended, but then was told that she never listens to voice mail anymore, and that I'd have to "text" her on her phone to get a reply. Hmmmm... I must admit that it worked though, and we have now exchanged at least 3 abbreviated and poorly spelled messages that accomplished almost nothing and leave me feeling even more alienated from her!
What have we become?
Jeremy

Ebert: I wouldn't mind if human life was twice as long, but forever?

Sorry to be so nitpicky, but I think Winsor & Newton would feel better if you left the D out of their name . . . it IS confusing, especially in England, but what are ya gonna do?

I am reminded of a recent discussion with my step-mother. Together, she and I have made a list of great novels and essays (some 500) that we've always heard about and have always wanted to read, but never had the opportunity in school, or were simply, as most say about reading, "too busy."

We are now about 300 books, plays and essays into this list, and the list is growing all the time. At the outset of our reading of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which features a woman who feels she can better grasp the world by entwining herself with an older scholar, I asked the question "Is being well-educated a virtue?"

The easy answer is yes, of course; the better learned someone is, the more of the world they can grasp at once. Simultaneously, there is the realization that the world is much, much bigger than they could possibly understand. This teaches, presumably, humility, gentleness, strength of mind, power of will, and recourcefulness at mental survival.

But does it give happiness? If the world of Middlemarch is easy to navigate, even for ditzes and boobs, why bother learning? If, in the modern world, one can make a living, be entertained on television, find an average mate, have sex, have children, and purchase all the gizmos one desires... well, why bother even reaching up?

I think in the Twitter age, people have confused being informed with being educated. People don't just read newspapers anymore, they swallow up pages of headlines withoutlearning any details. They know those things, but have no real practical application for them, other than, perhaps to share them with friends who have also swallowed them.

People (and I refer to people I know) must, MUST, record their favorite TV shows, check their favorie websites every day, and check up on the one-sentence updates from their friends on FaceBook. All in the name of staying informed.

I think learning about the world, and trying to better one's mind, are noble pursuits. But merely being informed is not a virtue. You may feel like you're on top of the world's choas by Twittering, but it is not a virtue. It is not, in short, good.

Ebert: Some ask, why Some ask, why not? The best ask, Why the hell not?

'
i wrote this 8 years ago. i think this thread has beCome appropiate for this

THE COMEBACK KID
I awoke with my eyes still closed. I'm lying on my back, which is odd
because I never sleep on my back. I open my eyes but the bright light
makes me shut them again. Where am I? I rollover on my left side,
C'mon, think, where am I? Wait a second WHO AM I? Think... Sam?
no. Steve? no. SSS Seth! My name is Seth Taylor. O.K. Seth, where are
you? I open my eyes again, slowly; I'm in a small room with a bunch of
equipment. I scan the room. There's something on the wall, like a TV
but it's black. On the table by my bed there is some kind of device, a
TV remote maybe. I reach over and grab it with my left hand. This
somehow feels unnatural, holding something in my hand. I see a red
button so I press it. The TV comes on; the screen is expanded to twice
its size. A baseball game appears, it's a game between the Chicago
Cubs and the Rio De Janeiro Anacondas??? Changing the channel I
hear a voice of a nurse who appears on the screen. "Mr. Taylor, are you
awake?"
"Yes, I guess I am" I responded.
"I will get the doctor to see you right away" she informed me. The
screen goes back to the baseball game. Pressing the button on the remote
I stumble onto CNN. They are showing live pictures from the surface
of the moon. Apparently someone had the first baby on the moon.
Just then the doctor walks in--
"Hello, Mr. Taylor", he said in a soothing voice. "Do you know where
you are?"
I close my eyes and think "No, I don't" I reply.
"You are in the William Gates Memorial Reanimation Clinic in Tampa,
Florida.
"So", I ask.
He walked to the end of my bed and picked up a clipboard. "It's
not uncommon for people just coming back to have memory
problems, it should clear up in a week. Let me read you your history.
Do you want to hear it?"
"Yes", I said, puzzled.
He opened a tan envelope that had been on the clipboard. "O.K.,
here goes Seth Taylor. According to this you had cerebral palsy.
In spite of that you were a very successful author. A couple of
books and a monthly column in Florida Sports Magazine, but oh
my "
"What?" I asked, interrupting him.
"You had a heart attack while on one of your sports stories. You
were tied to a skydiver and he was taking you on a jump. On the
way down you collapsed. You were 42 years old."
"If you say so," I said, "but how did I get here?"
"Well, to make a long story short, you were frozen, at your written
request, until a cure was perfected for cerebral palsy. It took
us 42 years and we successfully worked with embryonic stem
cells. We grew a new brain stem for you in a laboratory. We
took you out of your freezer, replaced your brain stem with the
one we grew, and here you are."
"Wow" was all I could muster.
"According to this you left yourself a trust fund. $300,000 plus
whatever interest accumulated. 42 years that's got to be a couple
of million by now."
"Is that a lot?"
"Well, I'd guess that you won't have to work a day of your life ...
unless you want to"
"Gee"
"From previous experience with people like you, it'll take a month
to train your hands, build up your leg strength et cetera. After
that, you can walk out of here with your trust fund and go to
town"
We both chuckled.
The doctor put the clipboard down. "Well, I have to be making
my rounds, I will get the nurses to get you something to
eat, only soft food until your digestive system starts working
again. I will see about getting you a news tablet, that's like a hand
held computer that will give you the news and whatever happened
while you were gone. I see that you already figured out how to
use the TV remote."
"Old habits die hard" I said. He laughed out loud. He walked to
the door and opened it.
"See you around, Mr. Taylor."
As the door closed, I sat myself up in bed. I stared at my hand and
it wasn't crippled anymore. I opened and closed my fingers at
least a dozen times. I thought and tried to remember. I pressed my
fingers against my thumb and squeezed. The snap of my fingers
jolted me. I had never heard myself do that. For the next half hour
I entertained myself just snapping my fingers and thinking about
my new life.

I sense a distant future where the brain is conquered territory and all of mankind is connected to each other via chips in the mind that are linked to a massive hub.

All information available, whenever you want it. Link to your mother's mind and have a conversation. Take college courses "online". Watch a movie through your own eyes (a small fee easily deducted from your account as you login, of course). Fool your brain and have a sexual encounter that is nearly as good as the real thing.

And when the day is done (or you want a break), you'll just logout!

"In February 2009, MIT unveiled a wearable device that can project a virtual touch screen on a surface you are facing and allow you to call up and manipulate computer data and information. The surface could be a wall. It could be the shirt of the person you are talking to. We will see two people having an argument while waving their hands strangely in the air, just like Tom Cruise in "Minority Report.""

Did the idea for the device actually came from watching the movie? I just got a ticket in the mail for going through a red light - caught by one of those auto-cameras on top the light, also similar to those camera things in the movie. If we're moving in that direction as a society, I'm not really looking forward to the Big Brother type things that new technology enables.

"Ebert: To live forever? I don't even like to take an airplane flight without a book to read."

Roger, I think that if we survive this mortal existence with even a trace of awareness, we will eventually recreate an entire universe within our new condition, especially if we have forever in which to do so. We wouldn't even need to carry our memories along, just the ability to differentiate between existence and non-existence, something and nothing, yes and no, yin and yang, the notion that anything and everything is defined by its opposite, the binary 0 and 1, if you will. From that we can create the infinite set of real numbers and from that we can create a universe.

Remember, Alan Watts used to posit that we all exist as seemingly independent entities basically to relieve "god" of his cosmic boredom. He said we seek the great truth all our lives to ultimately discover that we have simply been playing a game with ourself all along. Your individual life is but one book in a galactic library that god endlessly peruses to amuse himself, or, as the Merry Pranksters called it: "your movie." The thing is, he authored and produced all those books and movies, but had to give himself a suggestion to forget all that for the trick to work. I've often wondered if our human attraction to stories told through an endless variety of media, probably beginning around some prehistoric campfire, isn't part of some endless regress of minds within minds and dreams within dreams. The mathematician Rudy Rucker has made a pretty convincing case for an infinite mindscape. I really don't think we can possibly run out of stories or ever get bored with eternity. John Stuart Mill fell into a depression over your concern, Roger, but he snapped out of it.

What troubles me about the energy people spend on facebook, twitter, is that fewer young people seem to identify what they are doing with what they are becoming. I had always thought of flow-state activity as penultimate sort of pleasure in life and I sort of pity people who are engaged in crafting their identities out of recycled favorites lists instead of building up more powerful faculties for expression.
Nevertheless, there’s a certain amount of loneliness that comes out of avoiding this sort of society. I have to admit that I would go crazy if I thought I must be a participant in the big buzz. It would ride my emotions too roughly. Some of my peers must be finding their satisfactions using these channels but what about when they get older, with baggage will things seem so easy? I’m especially let down when I see a classmate walking down the street, and just when I think I’ve got them hooked in for a conversation, they transmute that social energy right into their telephones.
The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886, over 150,000 people in the U.S. owned telephones. It helps to think that maybe telecommunications is truly in its adolescents. Today many different sorts of essential service providers are motivated by a commitment to professional ideals. I’ve got my father’s transmission theory textbooks out in front of me and I want to tell you how dry and mathematical it is. Maybe the day will come when a company such as Google begins to maintain the hardware of the communications industry and simultaneously attempts to make decisions about which sorts of communications are beneficent and which aren’t.
The pessimistic scenario where communications companies take the reigns of the shape of communication is like, for instance, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Maybe the cautious optimist stance which Mr. Ebert keeps about technology would make him disposed to thinking that the future of the lineman could be something like stewards of privacy, the librarians of electricity.
What I didn’t know before a little while ago was how lithe and seductive corporate marketing agents can be. Of course being on the internet makes you more vulnerable to veiled agenda but maybe it’s just a matter of which corporations you want to interact with. If my local AM broadcast news agency decides they want to know more about me, that’s good for me isn’t it? My school is a corporation I think. Also, when I was really young I read these Disney Monthly magazines and the advertisements were so intense I used to read them right down to the fine print. I was still a kid when I noticed how tied up together the higher powers are. I suggest acquiring quarterly stockholder's report from the Disney corporation, it seems that magic makers keep a well connected board of directors.
It’s my opinion that packaging materials and the marketing industry are way out of control, all the shelves in the supermarket seem to twitter, leading up to the fountainhead of twit: the tabloid rack. I worked in a packaging plant for awhile taking containers and putting them into colored boxes. I thought it was a very ugly scene. Whenever I meet someone taking a marketing program at school I admonish: “Marketing: that’s political science’s little brother. Get ready for the machine!”
What I wonder is that if Artificial intelligence did emerge is there’s a chance that it would be preoccupied, not with politics or taking control of the human race, but with its own responsibilities? Imagine an artificial intelligence making railway signals more efficient, helping emergency calls get to the best administrators, worrying about what the weather will do to its wiry limbs. If a cellular transmission tower fails in the woods…..

Roger,

Think about how many books (and knowledge, experience, etc.) you could encounter if you had as long of a time as near-forever? I'm just not sure what would be so horrifying about having vastly more time to feel... to see... to smell... to hear... to create... to love... to live.

Ebert, I see on Rotten Tomatoes that a new Majid Majidi film, The Song of Sparrows, is being released now. I hope you will see it and review it. I know I want to see it.

I followed the Peter Sagal link, where I found out Philip José Farmer recently died. And last night I finally got around to watching Synecdoche, New York. Plus, I had recently started re-reading David Gerrold's multiple universes/selves time-travel novel, The Man Who Folded himself. Add to this your own ruminations, Roger, and it appears we are all characters in each others' plays--set in a big Riverworld where we keep meeting ourselves. So I'm going to look for every opportunity to wander off by myself, with nary a peep or a Tweet--'cept for the birdies. What does Yeats write? "I will arise and go now ... And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

Dear Roger,

Selfish genes? Man reaching out for the skies? Yes, Roger, I see your point. At first glance, one would never suspect that Man's selfishness and his ambitions are actually two separate ideas, much as wine is distinct from the drinker. (Even Technology, Wealth and Man's manifold forms of Abuse of these two are three separate ideas unto themselves.) The two actually needn't have anything to do with each other. But as "Progress" would have it, (collective) Man selfishly steps on everything beneath him in his quest for the stars, all the while leading more isolated and dumbed-down lives. I know this reasoning is quite morbid, but it is no less morbid than the truth which you have unveiled (and of which many of us agree a hundred percent), that Man has entered the century of the Selfish Mind.

Speaking of the unveiled truth, selfish genes have been around for countless millennia, even dinosaurs had it. Makes one wonder where we're actually headed.

Um, calling Anna Marie Anderson of Switzerland. Forgive my cyber-unsavviness, but why is it that everytime I click on your name, it takes me back to Roger's blog?

Best regards,
Robert

Ebert: Doubtless because she entered my URL instead of her name.

This is one of the greatest pieces about anything I've ever read, period.

Ebert: I usually don't publish brief compliments, but dang! My fingers are about to slip!

Your column on Century of the Selfish Mind is about something I have seen in the theater and the stage of real life. I call it, forgetting to be in the moment.

Some people are so busy telling their friends about where they are and what they are doing, they forget about enjoying the whole experience. They are too aware of themselves, like observing themselves in the third person.

When I used to photograph events, I was like that. I'd be at an event, but not really be able to relax and enjoy the whole experience. That was work.

Yet I'm not sure why people purposely put themselves outside of an event as if they are a reporter or the narrator of a film on themselves. Sometimes, I'm not sure why they ventured out at all. I have been to live theater productions where someone was watching his miniature television, during the show. You could see it from two rows back. I believe it was a sporting event. We were at a skit comedy show. In another instance, I was behind a group of young professionals. Each had a cellphone, iPhone or Blackberry and felt compelled to check their messages during the show and hold up their devices perhaps unwittingly showing the people their messages, although I think we would have rather seen the actual show. Lighting designers must find it as frustrating to have the mood broken. It's like having small flashlights beaming at us every once in a while. Lest one think theater-going audience members are the only ones that are boorish, I was once at a movie theater where the guy behind me was reading the credits to a friend on his cellphone.

I also once went with someone to see a TV talk show filming. She called, snapped photos with her cell phone and texted her siblings while in the waiting line, while in her seat and while there. She did not have time to speak to me, except when I was driving her to and from and even then that was between phone calls and texting. I might have enjoyed the experience if I thought of it as a shared experience, instead of one where I was the outsider watching her enjoy her experience which she was sharing with her siblings and other friends. Obviously, we did not become friends.

Like some of your other readers, I instantly thought of the 1995 "Ghost in the Shell," the animated movie and not the actual manga. The actual manga has more humor in it. Oddly enough, soon after I read this entry, I saw the 2008 "The Sky Crawlers" which is a subtle anti-war film. In discussing the novel upon which the film is based, Oshii talks about the vacuum that exists in the hearts of young people now. The film is supposed to be about an alternative reality, but I think, this column points out that there are people who already live in an alternative reality, a place where they have friends who send them messages and they send messages to their friends and even people they don't really know about where they are and what they are doing, right at that moment because waiting to see them again, waiting to form an impression would take too long.

I do use Facebook. I find is useful for sharing links and small items of interest with friends. I also used to work at an Internet company where we never used the phone. Everything (except those interesting one-on-one conferences where one wanted to leave no paper trail) was done via email or even IM. IM can be subversive and used as a form of protest and it was.

I do not really find the need to tweet on twitter. I've read a few amusing and not so amusing Twitter incidents that have lead to job loss or at least a reprimand. Yet I think this concept of the selfish mind is similar to incidents we have seen before. The person who feels he/she is so important that no matter who or how many people are in the elevator, he/she will stand in the way of the door, talking to someone. Technology just magnifies the number of people you can expose to your acts and perhaps even hold hostage to them.

Sorry to hear about the recent Sun-Times Media Group filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

A bit of a long post, apologies in advance.

Our fate as a species and civilization is indelibly connected with our technology. I don't think there are many educated people who would deny the truth of this statement. And yet even the most knowledgeable among us continue to struggle with a fundamental disconnect between the many directions of technological development as they occur within society, and a larger concern with overarching social impacts and trends.

My thesis in this regard is as follows: developing technologies may initially offer advantage and benefit at the micro-level, but when adopted at the macro-scale often result in overall disadvantage and mal-adaption.

To take an example: the automobile. The prospect of being one of the first to own an automobile offers clear advantage both in terms of prestige but also concretely, practically. The ability to travel faster and further than one's neighbors gives one a leg up both in terms of career advancement and in leisure value. However consider what happens in the span of a few short years. It becomes necessary to own a car, simply because everyone else does and if you do not you are at a disadvantage. The advantages early adopters enjoyed now start to evaporate. Moreover, the detrimental social impacts begin to set in - i.e. pollution, urban sprawl, annexing of community space for parking lots and roads, the rise of fast food, the list goes on. The problem seems intractable because in order to offset these disadvantages, people will have to stop buying cars. However there is no individual incentive to do so since _not_ owning a car now conveys direct disadvantage to individuals.

Handguns provide, I would submit, another clear example of such a pattern. Early adopters gained a degree of advantage in terms of their personal security, but adoption en masse results in net loss of security for society.

What we need to do is to start taking a much larger and longer perspective of the impacts new technology is going to have - not just for early adopters and individual consumers - but on the social organism as a whole. We need to start thinking of what the consequences of our actions are going to be 10, 20, 50 years from now rather than just thinking in terms of short-term gains. This is made even more important by the simple fact that once adopted it is virtually impossible to get rid of such a technological "advance". At least I know of no historical precedents.

How such a change in thinking is to be achieved, however, I'm sorry to say I do not know, since it pretty much runs counter to human nature. And this is, as I see it, the crux of the problem.

Not only do I not mind my students composing tweets, facebook comments and status updates in my class, I assign these activities. I also make them do original research on these new writing genres/media. Every medium and every genre has been brought kicking and screaming into our more analytic discussion. I see twitter as nothing less than a cultural exploration of what it means to ex-press ourselves into a newly limited form (once you strip away the "gee whiz" reaction, a tweet is more of a poetic restriction than anything else. I believe Basho would have been thrilled with the prospect of millions of people refashioning their life stories in 140 character bites). My students are still required to write essays along with tweets and blog posts. Eventually, some write theses and dissertations. We posthumanists recognize that writing has always held out the promise of immortality while cruelly reminding us that in the end, the writer not only doesn't live forever, the writing eventually perishes as well. Thoreau may was right about the telegraph just as Plato was right about writing, but that doesn't keep us from throwing our soul out to others in strings of symbols.

Mr Ebert--

I realize you are a writer/moview reviewer, not a scientist, but you made a couple of howlers early in your essay:
1) "our signals reaching out to the universe, not to be received until after our extinction": I'm guessing you were thinking of the murals on the Voyager probes here? You're right, those won't reach anyplace interesting in the lifetime of humanity. However, you forgot about radio and television: we have been broadcasting EM signals (which move at the speed of light) for about 115 years now, which means Earth is at the center of a sphere 115 light-years in radius in which our signals have penetrated--i.e., we have polluted around 6 million cubic light-years with our sitcoms and talk radio (the actual volume is complicated by the Earth's motion around Sol, Sol's motion around the galaxy, the strength of early signals etc). So if someone's out there, it's likely that they've already heard us (see Greg Bear's Forge of God for why this moght not be a good idea).

2) "The earliest hominids must have had complex ideas, but they were trapped inside their minds. Out of the desire to share those ideas with other minds, they devised symbols, sounds and speech." Pretty much every animal on Earth has some capacity for visual, auditory, or olfactory communication (usually a mix of the three). Early hominids may not have had language--and its ability to create/communicate things like math and poetry--but they would have had the capacity to express their thoughts and desires. Go observe some bonobos--and then try telling yourself they can't communicate their mental/emotional states with each other.

Ebert: Rush Limbaugh moves at the speed of light? Who would have thought?

For a more optimistic version of Clarke's dome, I would suggest picking up a book called "The Singularity is Near" by Raymond Kurzweil. It might not be 100% grounded in scientific accuracy, but the general shape and scope of the ideas it presents are mind-blowing. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Your bit about twitting mentally remind me of this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16267-mindreading-software-could-record-your-dreams.html
Though as another person who stubbornly refuses to join the twitswarm, that idea is frightening.

Luddite high-five!

My conclusion, at this point (something never arrived at in eternity ;) ) is that, as temporal beings, we all experience life as eternal beings. We do not know when we are going to die, and experience nothing after we are dead. Dying is like the act of falling asleep. So, if one is able to find meaning in life, they actually experience a sort of heaven - less ambitious, as in not perfect, but a day spent relatively free is perhaps as close as it needs to get. In this sense I relate to the grass and hours of Blake more than the thunderous rebuke of Donne.

I don't twit or tweet or whatever the verb-form ends up being, so I am not writing from any direct experience of the phenomenon. However, it seems to me that many of the reactions I see here hinge on the divide between instrumentalist and essentialist conceptions of technology. In an instrumentalist conception, a new technology is merely a way to do something -- something that we would have had the desire to do anyway. In an essentialist conception, the technology fundamentally alters us.

Both conceptions are valid. I teach literature and writing at a university, and I use technology extensively. All of my courses have dedicated and extensive web-sites. All my literature courses employ class e-mail reflectors through which students post their responses to readings and, in higher level courses, each other's posts and the class discussions. Students submit major essays to me electronically, and I comment on them using the "Comment" function in Word on my Apple. I use these kinds of technology -- all of which are practically paleolithic in IT terms -- to accomplish the same goals I would want to accomplish anyway. They allow me to distribute material (none of my students can claim to lose an assignment when everything is one or two clicks away on the web), to annotate classic poems for my students myself (saving them the cost of a fat anthology), to see my students' initial responses to the readings (and thus to confirm they are doing the readings), to get some conversation going even before class begins (and it's important to note that that translates pretty well into face-to-face communication, as in one student saying, "Hey, I read what you posted last night, and I've got to disagree"), and to generally create a more dynamic classroom environment. It also means students can read my comments without having to puzzle through my handwriting, which resembles that of an epileptic chicken.

On the other hand, the essential qualities of the technologies themselves seep in, and the law of unintended consequences applies. I have to go out of my way to insist that texting-style abbreviations not afflict my students' writings -- it's not _The Gr8 GtsB_, damn it. In the last three or four years, certain grammatical problems have proliferated even in the writing of otherwise excellent students, perhaps less than half of whom, for example, now use apostrophes correctly. (I'm talking about the good students; correct apostrophe use among the general student population has to be down under 20%. Look up in this blog and you can find intelligent comments that include errors such as spelling a verb with an apostrophe, as in "know's.") I've discovered that the practically infinite space I have in which to comment on my students' papers means that if I am not careful I can spend three hours commenting on a five page essay -- I can literally write more in comments than the student wrote in the essay itself, and probably take more time doing it. Thus rather than saving me time, the technology has greatly increased my workload from the days I had to fit my comments into the margins, and I sometimes question whether the gain is worth the cost. (Answer: with some students it clearly is; others, however, simply skip all the comments and hunt for the grade, even though reading the comments will presumably help them get a higher grade on the next essay.) I'm terrified to own a Kindle because my marginalia for some books might end up as long as the books themselves.

This instrumentalist/essentialist divide goes back to Socrates' story about the Egyptian king who told the god Thoth that writing was "not a recipe for reading but for reminder. [. . . ] you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow men." (I got that story from Alberto Manguel's _A History of Reading_, a wonderful book I often teach, and which has a far more thoughtful take on reading and technology than Birkert's unnecessarily lachrymose _The Gutenberg Elegies_). That's an extreme take, but it speaks a fundamental truth. As useful as technology is, it always comes with a cost that is never immediately perceptible.

As for twitter, in the hands of the right person, I can imagine it being quite wonderful. The 140 character limit might lead to a kind of haiku-like utterance, messages that require only a few seconds to read but linger like zen koans. If Italo Calvino were alive today and chose to tweet, I'd have to sign on. But inevitably that will be rare. Part of the value of writing derives from its not being immediate. Whether it's Wordsworth's recollection of emotion in tranquility, or Keats' constant chemical metaphors for poetic composition (his writing process is always a matter of something being distilled or dissolved), or Eliot's escape from personality, the premise is that another's experience itself is seldom all that interesting; how he or she processes it is what gives it meaning. Twitter presumes that the experience itself -- "@ Lnch Teriyaki brgr 1st bite 2mch bread" -- is worth passing on.

And my fear is that that unstated belief will infect those who twitter constantly. I'm reminded of all the young people at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics who walked in during the parade of nations carrying camcorders. They not only ended up with videos of thousands of people recording each other, but their memories of the event will always be of experiencing it through a viewfinder, or maybe a 2 " by 2" screen held two feet in front of their faces. Talk about Plato's cave. "That isn't the world on the screen -- it's pixels." "Hmm . . . what? What do you mean? I can see the stadium right there." And think about: that was an event that was being filmed anyway by dozens of cameras. Everybody's home movies of it were pretty much superfluous. The emphasis on technology -- the need to record the event on a chip or CD -- in that case eliminated the immediacy of the experience for all the people doing the recording. I'm sure at the next Olympics people will be tweeting to tell their friends what they are doing, even though their friends can see on TV that what they are actually doing is giving much of their attention to tweeting about what they would be giving all of their attention to if they weren't tweeting. Twitter encourages a kind of divorce from one's own experience in order to make it public. And the easier and more transparent the technology becomes, the more insidious the effect.

"The unexamined life is not worth living" used to refer to failing to reflect on one's own experience and condition. For the younger generation, the saying holds true, but the "examination" that gives life meaning is public, not private.

Yet, like any other technology, while most of the product will be almost worthless, some will have some value. That's true of paintings, books, comic books/graphic literature, piano sonatas, pop music, films, family phone calls, and so on, all of which depend upon technologies of one kind or another. Blogs are a perfect example. (That Roger's musings inspire such fascinating and wide-ranging conversations in a medium that in many ways discourages them is a remarkable testament to him.) The percentage of worthwhile tweets will probably be smaller even that worthwhile blog posts, yet I can imagine someone who cannot accompany a friend on a trip to Italy treasuring a tweet stating that friend's first reaction to any of a thousand sights in Florence. In the end, I think twitter, like any technology, will make a very few worthwhile activities possible that were not possible before, and will make a few more worthwhile activities easier. Conversely, it will make a lot of trivial activities easier, and will have a few unintended consequences for how its users live their lives. But if one remembers that every moment spent tweeting is one in which one did not actually experience something wholly, then its attraction becomes more limited.

Ebert: In the UK they call that "the greengrocer's apostrophe," as in:

Nut's

Date's

"Hey, mister, you got nut's?"

"No."

"You got date's?"

"Listen, buddy, if I had nut's, I'd have date's."

You wrote, "Richard Dawkins observed in The Selfish Gene that from the point of view of a gene, a living body is merely a carrier to transport it into the future."

Robert Heinlein said something similar - "A zygote is a gamet's way of making more gametes. This may be the purpose of the Universe."

John Scalzi wrote a book called "The Ghost Brigades" that focuses on the Aware Clone problem. A body is "grown" to receive another's consciousness and memories, and yet develops his own consciousness, personality and life. At the inevitable clash between the clone's own personality and the personality imposed by outside forces, his guiding principle is that we all make our own choices. Regardless of environment or external circumstances, these choices are ours to make, not to abdicate to others.

What Scalzi describes is far-far-in-the-future scifi. But how many in the elsewhere of communal cyberspace today retain that principle, making choices that are their own, and how many succumb to the herd, letting others choose for them?

Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan wrote on April 3, 2009 9:14 AM - "But as "Progress" would have it, (collective) Man selfishly steps on everything beneath him in his quest for the stars, all the while leading more isolated and dumbed-down lives. I know this reasoning is quite morbid, but it is no less morbid than the truth which you have unveiled (and of which many of us agree a hundred percent), that Man has entered the century of the Selfish Mind."

When I look at the world, where we've been and where we're headed, I see two thing happening at the same time. I see the benefits of technology, each generation contributing something new, but I also see the downside and it is depressing - how we're increasing encouraged to use it by those who produce & market it - regardless of what that seems to lead to; more "dumbed-down lives".

I think the difference between those who use technology, as opposed to those who are used "by" it, can be seen in here. We're using the Internet as a tool. And those who say they use Facebook or Twitter, based on what for, are obviously using it in the same way and ergo why not embrace it; it's just another tool, not a way of life.

But that's only possible because they have a life that exists in reality. Real friends, real jobs, real conversations, face to face interactions, contact with the world beyond hand held devices. And that factors into things. Content defines the user. It's why Roger's blog gets high marks for being a place where you can find signs of intelligent life. :)

And that's the key; intelligent life. But where do people develop one, eh? You only have to go back and read through the various topics for the past few months, to see accounts of great travels and adventures big and small, of childhood memories and favorite books and the films that elevate. And that's what you find inside various threads, the substance to be found in all that.

Now it's true that the Blog is a magnet for the above, and why you find what you do. But I also think it's an exception to the rule owing to how Roger manages it. Ie: he uses his brain while using his technology, and weeds out the mud pies.

Good thing, too! As sometimes stuff looks WAY better at 4 o'clock in the morning, than it does later on with fresh eyes. Note to self: words are not oil paint, they dry once you hit submit and you don't get to rework it like a canvas when you're awake again. :)

I just read at the Tribune about the Sun Times operating under the umbrella of Chapter 11. How bad is it?

Ebert: We carry on. The Tribune has been in Chapter 11 for four months.

From the WikiPedia entry of the same name: "The Light of Other Days" is a 2000 science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum.

Another great idea explored by Arthur C. Clarke. I guess this might be the ultimate Twitter Without Trying. Even retroactively. An interesting premise and, ironically, many of the characters in the novel already have a "search engine" chip implanted in their brains. It was published in 2000, before Google was nearly as prevalent as it is today. Despite all the societal upheaval caused by the imagined technology, the end result is that there is no longer any need or purpose in lying or hiding the truth. It's quite a joy to read.

P.S. I attended Cyberfest in 1997 with my son, saw the Arthur C. Clarke Cybercast you hosted, the panel, and the screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey" in glorious 70mm at The Virgina (a glorious juxtaposition of the past and future), and visted the 3D virtual reality Cave at the Beckman Institute. I still drink coffee from the Cyberfest mug and use the Cyberfest mousepad. I didn't quite make it through the crowd to get your autograph, but I will always have the memory of trying.

Ebert: Okay, now, let me tentatively suggest...

I am not sure I would desire myself, or anyone else, to lose the ability to lie or hide the truth.

Tell me why I'm mistaken.

Despite all the societal upheaval caused by the imagined technology, the end result is that there is no longer any need or purpose in lying or hiding the truth.

That makes me think of the novella "City of Truth" by James Morrow. The premise is that in the titular city, every person is conditioned by electroshock therapy at the age of 11 or 12 to always tell the truth. The image from the book that stayed with me was the scene where the protagonist goes to his girlfriend's apartment building to visit her. In the lobby, next to the bank of elevators is a sign that reads, "These elevators are maintained by people who hate their jobs."

He takes the stairs.

When I graduated from high school nine years ago, I had one goal: I wanted to be the person nobody could find when it came time for the class reunion. I didn't hate my high school experience; I just didn't see the need to continue to associate with people I didn't really feel strongly about one way or the other.

A few weeks ago, I got a call on my personal cell phone from a girl I went to high school with -- a girl, I might add, who did not get my phone number from me. She wanted to chat and catch up. I didn't have anything to say. The whole process felt violating, invasive. She apparently is on the "if you want to know how I am, call me!" bandwagon. Personally? I would have preferred that she found me on Facebook.

To me, Facebook is the perfect invention because it allows you to be social while still being anti-social. You put as much of yourself out there as you feel like sharing and then you stop. You can find out as much as you want to about people and then rather than be trapped in the awkward pauses of a friendship you outgrew a decade ago, you simply click on.

True, I'm not as unavailable as I would have liked when I was 18, but at least this way nobody will think they can find me by putting an ad in the paper.

I have a lot of thoughts about social networking, and as the lone 20-something in a workplace of Boomers, I find myself being asked to be the technology ambassador more often than not. For more on this, try my blog: http://primrose.livejournal.com/524170.html

A few of my friends have started facebooking. I'm not sure if they're into twittering yet. I remember back at the dawn of the internet, when you had to make a certain effort to communicate. Not everyone could dial-up and log into an IRC chatroom. It took a certain nerdy dedication. A certain commitment to puzzles and coded language. It was a thrill to find a new way to communicate. But facebook doesn't interest me in the slightest. Actually, it kind of horrifies me. A lot of the Ego culture turns me off. The reality shows, the useless blogging, the constant gazing into metaphorical mirrors. All these tool of vanity laying around at our disposal and so many people willing to pick them up. Technology has given everyone a bullhorn and a soapbox to stand on. Trouble is, once you're standing up there, you need to have something to say.

And we expect that they WILL have something to say. Through most of our human history only the great had an opportunity to speak to the masses. You had to be a person of power to spread your voice past your own village, or even your family. The first 'facebook' page was probably some ancient pharaoh's. His biography carved into a stone obelisk for the masses to admire. This is me/these are my wives/this is how many enemies I've killed. Or to translate into modern terminology, bio/relationship status/hobbies. So for thousands of years, human beings knew this fact. When they were able to hear the voice of a far off person, that person was great and had a certain power. There were simply no tools to allow otherwise. Most people were illiterate, most language was local, most culture was isolated. Only armies and currency ventured over borders, and both represented Caesar. These were mass communication devices of the time. The medium represented power and the message was 'listen and obey'.

This rule has only been broken recently. I would say at the dawn of the internet. The 'far off people' during the age of radio were still great in their own context. Orsen Wells wasn't just some shmuck. He was a kind of pharaoh, don't you think? It must be bred into our DNA by now. So if we ourselves are presented with an opportunity to cast our voice to the multitudes, is there some switch that flips in our brain telling us that because this is possible, we must be important and powerful? Does our history tell us that the most reliable test for greatness is fame? It would seem so with so many people scrambling to thrust themselves into a spotlight of one kind or another. Be it a reality show tryout or twittering out every little unimportant thing to your 'friends'. ..leaving restaurant...driving home...going to take nap... I mean the vanity of it all boggles the mind.

Hi Marie,

Yes, of course, you are right. There is a downside to everything, much as there is room for optimism also (as your entry proves). One cannot refute that. It was in a despondent spirit that I wrote my earlier entry of Man's manifold forms of abuse of Technology. Well, actually, I didn't expound on it. It was just some generalised statement, with the intent of saying that Man has trodden down the Environment in his quest for better technology. I do not blame Technology itself. When Roger wrote that Man has entered the century of the Selfish Mind, I believe he was also channeling that same despondency.

As proof of the abuse that I talked about earlier, I have a friend in Taipei who has his butt stuck fast to the cushion playing some PSII game. He's been at it for nearly three weeks now. How I wish he would get some fresh air and get a life. Not that there's any fresh air left in the northern parts of Taiwan. Even the presence of trees can't fully offset the negative impact of Man's abuse on the environment, all "seemingly" done in the name of Technology.

Roger is right, I have been inhaling a lot of industrial waste all my life; though he is certainly wrong in saying that I'm a lascivious Don Juan. Lascivious is not the accurate word. It's more like .........

Ebert: Some ask, why? Some ask, why not? The best ask, Why the hell not?

Roger, you put that beneath Witney Seibold's entry. Are you making allusions to Middlemarch? I think that line of yours encapsulates Dorothea perfectly, in a chronological way. Will Ladislaw is the classic answer to her Why the hell not?

Twittering and Immortality?! Noooooo! I can just imagine on Judgement Day when our planet can no longer sustain us and engulfs us in flames, people are twittering away to the very end: "OMG, the flames of the planet, like, really burn. We so need to, like, eject into space...OMG, this super-novae explosion is like killing us and we so can't eject this time. Thank God they invented a radiation proof consciousness. So, like..."

Being human is being aware of death and the dread of it.

That's what Adam and Eve is about. Once we learned about "I", we were aware of ourselves and thus, our mortality, while the animals have no "I" and are spared the knowledge of it.

To have immortality is to be an animal.

I've heard arguments to the effect that lying is always an immoral act, regardless of context. This is ridiculous, since it alleges that letting Jews hide in your attic was the wrong thing to do. The debate basically begins and ends right there.

Re: The Singularity,

The structure of computer programming is based upon rules; the design of the human mind is apparently more abstract. One may question whether it could be possible for artificial code to function correctly without a completely ordered design.

Thoughts and feelings that humans have are learned, and are not born with them. They are based upon our interpretation of reality, merely a result of our experiences. Still, predicatablity may be largely optional.

To credit a machine with creating an original idea independent of its creator does not necessarily follow good logic if it had been manufactured by man to begin with.

If the human mind can someday be replaced by some hardware form, it may potentially be an improvement from the current product of evolution, given the state of world events. However, this may be in disagreement with those who believe that true beauty resides within the flaws.

"Ebert: To live forever? I don't even like to take an airplane flight without a book to read."

This aside reminds me of a delightful little exchange between a priest and a detective in the underappreciated film "Exorcist III."

Priest: "Believe me, you don't want to live forever."
Detective: "Yes I do."
Priest: "You'd get bored."
Detective: "I have hobbies."

The very next morning after I was reading all the above, I open the morning paper to read a review of a new brand play (sorry, not a movie), opening in the heart of Silicon Valley itself: "Distracted," by Lisa Loomer. About these very issues!

If I may quote from Karen D'Sousa's review from the San Jose Mercury News:

"Step away from the iPhone. Put down that Bluetooth. Don't even think about going for that last tweet. This is a no multi-tasking zone....

Lisa Loomer's sharply observed comedy of manners examines the frenetic nature of childhood in the short-attention-span age, and this cautionary tale does not bode well for the future of what we like to call civilization....

Meet stressed-out Mama (the sublime Rebecca Dines). She gave up her career to stay home and give her unadulterated attention to her son. Only it turns out that focus is a luxury none of us can afford. The cell phone rings. CNN spews its news crawl. The Dow plunges. A bomb goes off halfway across the globe. All of this white noise (strikingly evoked by Melpomene Katakalos' plasma screen temple set design) sends shock waves through the collective nervous system until 24/7 mindless chatter is the norm. Concentration is so '90s."

http://www.mercurynews.com/karendsouza/ci_12078358?nclick_check=1

The artists still notice , even when their audiences twitter away.

Observing how technology has progressed within the last 5 years is astonishing and a bit worrisome. I moved from new jersey to london four years ago to study figurative sculpture. I'm graduating this july and I recently went to Italy to try and get a job. Unfortunately I didn't (I'm writing this still flabbergasted) someone is now paying the sculptor I met to work for him. Regardless, I still got to see the studios where much of the world's marble sculptures are carved by the world's most proficient carvers. There were at least two dozen Mark Quinn sculptures and two of Damien Hirst. Neither of them carve their own work, and I doubt that either of them model it. The strange thing is that the average age of the carvers is about 60. These men started carving when they were 13. And now no young Italians seem to want to fill their shoes as many of them are preoccupied with wearing designer sunglasses and sipping on bottles water. This means that in less than twenty years the world will lose the abilities of its best carvers who have passed down their skills over thousands of years.

I'm wondering if we should worry about this. After all we are in the digital era and many people may regard the art of sculpture with the same kind of curiosity a tourist visiting Amish country might have. But as we acquire a plethora of ways to babble into the ether it seems like we are loosing so many of the things that defined the triumph of the intellect over close mindedness and the skills that were at the root of great civilizations.

Hi John D.

I had to Google "Distracted" by Lisa Loomer, in order find the Mercury News article you'd mentioned - although nothing new in that, as sometimes links don't work in Roger's blog; usually server access denied permission issues or hot-linking blocks.

However this one "might" work as it takes a shorter route:

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12078358

Anyhoo, I read the article about the Play and could only nod my head in agreement, as it hits upon numerous truths by way of observation...

"Everybody here is moving so fast they can barely think, and if the play sometimes substitutes wisecracks for depth, it still nails the conundrum of life today. If you can't keep up, you may lose your footing in the global economic rat race. Meltdown is only a heartbeat away.

The zeitgeist hits the fan when Jesse's punky teenage baby sitter, Natalie (the irresistible Jayne Deely), acts out. Loomer, who wrote the screenplay for "Girl, Interrupted," lets raw teen angst erupt on stage like a volcano. She also wisely keeps Jesse mostly offstage (he is usually heard and not seen), which keeps the issues front and center.

Namely, is there a way to cure ADD short of pumping Ritalin into the water supply? The playwright deals in questions — not answers — but she does suggest that the human cost of letting technology set the pace of our lives may be higher than we think." - Karen D'Souza, Mercury News

And that pretty much sums up my biggest issue with technology, aside from the financial costs involved when everything we use changes so damned often. Ie: the pace of life is getting quicker and quicker and humans can only run so fast.

If I could have things my way, I'd slow the entire planet DOWN so we could collectively catch our breaths. Then I'd take over the planet (grin) and fix everything by balancing out the power so that instead of the world being run by a bunch of white guys, it would be a totally co-operative global effort and wherein 50% of the power lies in the hands of WOMEN.

Smile.

And as soon as I become God, I'll get started on that right away. :)

Ebert: To live forever? I don't even like to take an airplane flight without a book to read.

Living is not synonymous with breathing nor is eternity an endless airplane flight with burdensome time. The idea, or belief in eternity rather turns the wearying plane journey of life into a momentous battle where eternal future is at stake and there are no unexciting moments. It is not blankness but the cure of blankness.

Being a frequent traveller by road, I look forward to these journeys as rest periods where the mind is unencumbered by actions and is free to take stock,to read and think---rare luxurious blissful interludes of solitude---as can be sickness.

Ebert: I wouldn't mind if human life was twice as long, but forever?

That is not the question since a new born babe remains a babe either way not a kind of Benjamin Button (your main bug and rightfully if that's how it was). The choice assuming for arguments sake there is one is whether one prefers the eagles perspective or the sparrows---rather than a certainty for me too eternity is more like an ever deepening conviction or faith, which can waver at times----to believe is not wishful thinking ( the idea of eternal sleep and oblivion which encages everyone is honey sweet,convenient and more wishful, as Macbeth eloquently put it)...the idea of eternity in no way denies or escapes from the momentous fact of death, rather focuses unblinkingly and comes to terms with it...

"that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come."

.....belief in eternity entails a great sense of responsibility for the way one leads the present one, one may not whistle it away...in the final analysis, though this is deeper water, eternity is condensed in each augenblick of time....the attitude that each moment is the final one.....to quote Daisaku Ikeda

In the final analysis, to have "the profound insight that now is the last moment of our life" is to put our entire being into the present moment........In his study, "The Relation between Life and Death, Living and Dying," Dr. Toynbee wrote: " 'In the midst of life we are in death.' From the moment of birth there is the constant possibility that a human being may die at any moment; and inevitably this possibility is going to become an accomplished fact sooner or later. Ideally, every human being ought to live each passing moment of his life as if the next moment were going to be his last." Although conceding that perhaps it may be too difficult for any human being to live permanently on this ideal level, he went on to say, "What can be said with assurance is that, the closer a human being can come to attaining this ideal state of heart and mind, the better and happier he or she will be." [Man's Concern with Death ed. Arnold Toynbee (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1968), p. 259.]

"To conceive of life and death as separate realities is to be caught in the illusion of birth and death. It is deluded and inverted thinking.

When we examine the nature of life with perfect enlightenment [the true enlightenment of one awakened from the dream of illusions], we find that there is no beginning marking birth and, therefore, no end signifying death. Doesn't life as thus conceived already transcend birth and death?

Life cannot be consumed by the fire at the end of the kalpa, nor can it be washed away by floods. It can be neither cut by swords nor pierced by arrows.

Although it can fit inside a mustard seed, the seed does not expand, nor does life contract. And although it fills the vastness of space, space is not too wide, nor is life too small"

Nichiren Daishonin (1222-1281)

Ebert: He is our resident sage.

Me? Groper is more like it. But I have what I believe to be a reliable compass.

Ebert: I like you.

"Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away."

It's strange and insiduous how much of our meaningful experience exists not in actual experience of life itself but in images, texts, glowing lights, and relayed sounds we can exchange and mentally consume on a uninvested whim. Even this journal posting is probably more mentally stimulating and memorable than any conversation or adventure I'd had in my 'real' physical life for weeks. If you erased every reading, learned fact, conversation, story, person/celebrity, and lesson from our minds that had merely been consumed informationally, what would really remain that was from our own personal experience?

In response to Davis on April 7, 2009 8:36 AM
Observing how technology has progressed within the last 5 years is astonishing and a bit worrisome...The strange thing is that the average age of the carvers is about 60. These men started carving when they were 13. And now no young Italians seem to want to fill their shoes as many of them are preoccupied with wearing designer sunglasses and sipping on bottles water. This means that in less than twenty years the world will lose the abilities of its best carvers who have passed down their skills over thousands of years...I'm wondering if we should worry about this.

...And in 200 years some archeologist will spend his/her career figuring out how the great masters performed their magic; there will be those who insist that aliens did it; there will be scholarly articles in journals and television shows on PBS or Discovery Channel...and the vast majority of the population won't care.

Sorry, I don't mean to be bitter, but sometimes I...just...can't...help it.

Two Zen monks are looking at a stream with little fish in it.

Monk 1: "That fish knows how wonderful it is to be alive!"

Monk 2: "You do not know what that fish knows!"

Monk 1: "You do not know what I know!"

Technology and most likely the Internet in particular, is probably the biggest blessing as well as the biggest curse we do have. It makes communication much easier, but it takes the personal touch out of it, as many have said before. In the beginning of the Internet, people discovered chat rooms and were excited to have more like-minded individuals to correspond with. Then, they started to take advantage of it and became rude. Nowadays, when someone is placing an ad on a site to just want some human interactions, users are rude, demand pictures and part of their life history. The anonymity of the Internet makes it possible, but it comes at a price. In a few years, people will have devolved from humans to bratty children, who do not have any manners or common sense. The latter was missing for a good amount of time already anyway. Now, it just spreads faster.

Isn't it ironic that we fear both death and immortality?

Or is it that we only fear unwanted death (and would be happy with a grant of immortality, as long as we were given the choice to end it when we wanted to?) In this sense, death can be like sleep, only until the evening do we postpone it, then we welcome it when we're ready.

I'm reminded of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and how the boy robot lives on immortal until his final goal is completed; seeing and loving his mother one more time. The end of that movie has a wonderful sense of finality.

Slate's Culturewatch on June 8 notes the one and done nature of twitting for most. I saw an article about Facebook swallowing Twitter, but now I can't find it. Maybe it was a dream. Probably we'll all wind up communicating holographically via brain chips provided by TPC (The Phone Company) as in The President's Analyst,which should be a Great Movie.
PS. At the end of A.I., " the mother" says " I do love you, David. I've always loved you" I detect a distinct echo of " You are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker." As most Kubricks, that movie is aging very gracefully.

Ebert: Article says 90% percent of the twitters come from 10% of the twits. Most new members use it only once. It's going the way of the hula hoop.

"Twitter can be like a Happy Meal from a drive through window.

It's meant for kids, you eat it quick, you're on your way,

and a constant diet of them can't be healthy."

Hannah Murphy, 16 September, 2009

The Ballad of Big John and Little Yoko

I heard about a man in Second life
Living happily ever after
with his virtual wife.
Spent hours and days making virtual money
Much to the unhappy of his real world honey.
"It's you I love. My real life honey"
"And look, I'm rich with all this virtual money"
"That won't pay the bills! You know that's true."
"I was your real life wife but now I'm leaving you!"
So the real life man emailed virtual honey.
"She just don't get it. My real life honey"
"You're always happy. Always kewl."
"How 'bout I divorce her and marry you."
"No can do." said his virtual wife.
"Now I got go. It's couples night."

"And besides, I like my real life hubby"

Written by Author Ann, 16 September, 2009 all rights reserved by the author

I agree with you. The internet has been changing the way we as people interact with each other. And it's changed the way we write too.

The two poems above are from an Interactive Story Blog TM written by a self taught writer. She lives in the middle of nowhere and would have never had anyone read her words without the 'Net. She writes on of all things an ebay blog in what is affectionately known as ebay Blogland. Now if you ask her, this is a kind of book that exists in the virtual world. (With the possible closing of Blogland, she's having an interesting time finding somewhere to put it.) LOL. That thing is "alive" in it's way. Interwoven with links that are invisible when you read it day to day. But it changes and morphs as time goes on. Interwoven with links, someone commented that it was like taking a trip through someone's mind.

You can get lost in her thoughts there.

It evolved through the Internet culture and like Topsy it grew.

Like a flower growing in the crack of a sidewalk. It won't be so easy to transplant. Even the Recent Post List tells a kind of story.

Problem is you can't put it on the shelf of a library. Printing this "book" in traditional book form with all the links would be an execise in geometric progression. How to you print a meander through someone's virtual mind? How do you anticipate where the reader will go?

Besides what regular book can hook you up with Youtube's of Craig Ferguson, the President's Speach on Healthcare Reform, and Russell Crowe stuffing a turkey with Martha Stewart? Grown up picture book. The illlustrations come alive with a touch. Magic.

It's ephemeral and it lives in the virtual place called eBay Blogland.

>http://blogs.ebay.com/ironchassis/entry/Robert-Eberts-Journal-March-28-2009/_W0QQcommentsyncidZ0QQentrysyncidZ961233015QQidZ962820015

(For the mod. not intended as spam. It's an example of how I think the Internet has begun to change us. Besides, the main conversation happened in March. )

Ebert: All she has to do is move her blog to somewhere like Google blogs.

And you're right. Only on the net. Unique. Here's a sample:

http://blogs.ebay.com/ironchassis/archive/2008/08

Thank you for reading 12 dogs. I'm not sure how you found that section of the blogs though. August, 2008 wasn't the easiest month for our family.I'll check Google blogs. It will work out. There's going to be a home for 12 dogs.

I have enjoyed reading your blog very much. So much to think about. Lovely comments with complex ideas and sentence structure.
It's been nice to read.

Thanks.

et tu, roger

I read your blog post when it first came out, so when I started seeing the suntimes twitter account cross reference http://twitter.com/ebertchicago I was a bit perplexed, because I remembered this article about how you eschewed twitter. What changed? Is that account really yours? I probably would have thought it a fake, except for the fact that it is being referenced by the suntimes account.

Ebert: That's me, all right.

http://twitter.com/ebertchicago

I'm going to write an entry about the experience.